Paradise Lost 失乐园 Barnes & Noble Classics ISBN 9781593083649pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

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　　Paradise Lost, by John Milton, is part of the Barnes Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordableprices to the student and the general reader, including newscholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully craftedextras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes Noble Classics:
　　New introductions commissioned from today's top writers andscholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporaryhistorical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes andendnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems,books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired bythe work Comments by other famous authors Study questions tochallenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographiesfor further reading Indices Glossaries, when appropriateAlleditions are beautifully designed and are printed to superiorspecifications; some include illustrations of historical interest.Barnes Noble Classics pulls together a constellation ofinfluences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich eachreader's understanding of these enduring works.

Paradise Lost, by John Milton, is part of the Barnes &
Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable
prices to the student and the general reader, including new
scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted
extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes &
Noble Classics: 
　　New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and
scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary
historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and
endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems,
books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by
the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to
challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies
for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll
editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior
specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest.
Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of
influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each
reader's understanding of these enduring works. 
　　As a young student, John Milton fantasized about bringing the
poetic elocution of Homer and Virgil to the English language.
Milton realized this dream with his graceful, sonorous Paradise
Lost, now considered the most influential epic poem in English
literature. 
　　A retelling of the biblical story of mankind’s fall from grace,
Milton’s epic opens shortly after the dramatic expulsion of Satan
and his army of angels from Heaven. What follows is a cosmic battle
between good and evil that ranges across vast, splendid tracts of
time and space, from the wild abyss of Chaos and the fiery lake of
Hell to the Gate of Heaven and God’s newly created paradise, the
Garden of Eden. Controversy still swirls around Milton’s
magnificent and sympathetic characterization of Satan, a portrait
so compelling that many critics have maintained that he is the true
hero of the story. 
　　David Hawkes is Associate Professor of English at Lehigh
University. His books include Idols of the Marketplace (2001) and
Ideology (second edition, 2003), and he has contributed articles to
The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Journal of the
History of Ideas.

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目　　录

List of Engravings
The World of John Milton and Paradise Lost
Introduction by David Hawkes
Paradise Lost
Endnotes
Inspired by Paradise Lost
Comments & Questions
For Further Reading

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　　From David Hawkes’s Introduction to Paradise Lost
　　Milton believed that the kind of knowledge that can be attainedby the human mind was necessarily contingent, or limited. It waslimited by cultural and historical context: The ancient Greeks, forexample, had been culturally unable to arrive at monotheism. But itwas also inherently limited by its internal properties. The humanmind is designed, or has developed, in such a way as to live intime and space. To exist outside time and space, the human mindwould have to become something different than what it currently is.The same goes for such ideas as causality or extension; without thecapacity to think according to these categories it would be simplyimpossible to have any kind of recognizably human experience. We donot, therefore, experience the world as it really is, we experiencethe world as it appears to human beings. And we know that thisexperience is contingent upon—limited by—the inherent nature of thehuman mind.
　　It follows that the concepts we form of things, the way theyappear to us, do not correspond to the things in themselves. Thereare thus two kinds of truth: the truth “for us,” in what modernphilosophers call the world of “phenomena,” and the truth “initself,” in what is known as the world of “noumena.” In JohnKeats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example, the poet laments thathe can never experience the urn in its noumenal state, as it is initself. Keats comes to this realization by considering thedifference between the significance it possesses for him, as amodern Englishman, and the meanings it conveyed to its creator, anancient Greek. The “phenomenal” appearance of the urn has changed,although the urn “in itself” has not. In a sense the noumenal ismore true, because it is more absolute, than the phenomenal, butthe truth “in itself” is by definition beyond the grasp of humanthought. We are stuck with a consciousness that we know to beincomplete. This is philosophical terminology, but Milton expressesthe same ideas in quasi-mythological, religious terms. ParadiseLost hinges upon the fundamental, unbridgeable, qualitativedistinction between the world of earthly phenomena as experiencedby Adam and Eve (and also by the poem’s all-too-human narrator),and the world of spiritual noumena as it is represented to them(and us) through the intricate system of characters, figures, andimages that make up the Western mythological and religioustraditions.

From David Hawkes’s Introduction to Paradise Lost 
　　Milton believed that the kind of knowledge that can be attained
by the human mind was necessarily contingent, or limited. It was
limited by cultural and historical context: The ancient Greeks, for
example, had been culturally unable to arrive at monotheism. But it
was also inherently limited by its internal properties. The human
mind is designed, or has developed, in such a way as to live in
time and space. To exist outside time and space, the human mind
would have to become something different than what it currently is.
The same goes for such ideas as causality or extension; without the
capacity to think according to these categories it would be simply
impossible to have any kind of recognizably human experience. We do
not, therefore, experience the world as it really is, we experience
the world as it appears to human beings. And we know that this
experience is contingent upon—limited by—the inherent nature of the
human mind. 
　　It follows that the concepts we form of things, the way they
appear to us, do not correspond to the things in themselves. There
are thus two kinds of truth: the truth “for us,” in what modern
philosophers call the world of “phenomena,” and the truth “in
itself,” in what is known as the world of “noumena.” In John
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example, the poet laments that
he can never experience the urn in its noumenal state, as it is in
itself. Keats comes to this realization by considering the
difference between the significance it possesses for him, as a
modern Englishman, and the meanings it conveyed to its creator, an
ancient Greek. The “phenomenal” appearance of the urn has changed,
although the urn “in itself” has not. In a sense the noumenal is
more true, because it is more absolute, than the phenomenal, but
the truth “in itself” is by definition beyond the grasp of human
thought. We are stuck with a consciousness that we know to be
incomplete. This is philosophical terminology, but Milton expresses
the same ideas in quasi-mythological, religious terms. Paradise
Lost hinges upon the fundamental, unbridgeable, qualitative
distinction between the world of earthly phenomena as experienced
by Adam and Eve (and also by the poem’s all-too-human narrator),
and the world of spiritual noumena as it is represented to them
(and us) through the intricate system of characters, figures, and
images that make up the Western mythological and religious
traditions. 
　　Above all, Milton insists on the disparity in nature between the
Creator and His creation. Paradise Lost describes the alienation of
labor in a cosmic context; it tells of how the universe that God
made came to be alien to Him, and how it came to seem autonomous
and self-generating to its inhabitants. The disjunction between the
Maker and the made involves a contradiction between two different
kinds of value, of significance. It follows that any knowledge we
can have of God or His Providential designs must always be
“mediated,” translated into the contingent terms and concepts to
which the human mind has access. 
　　Almost half of Paradise Lost consists of stories told to Adam
and/or Eve through the voices of the archangels Raphael and
Michael. These characters incessantly remind their auditors that
they are attempting the impossible task of representing noumena in
terms of phenomena. Asked to describe the fall of Satan to the
human couple, Raphael falls into a quandry: “how shall I relate /
To human sense th’invisible exploits / Of warring spirits”
(5.564–566). He decides that he must tell his story in the form of
an extended metaphor, using images that Adam and Eve are equipped
to understand: “what surmounts the reach / Of human sense, I shall
delineate so, / By likening spiritual to corporal forms, / As may
express then best” (5.571–574). We are thus warned not to take the
action of the “war in Heaven” that the angel describes literally,
but to remain conscious that we are receiving figural
representations of spiritual (we might call them psychological or
philosophical) events. We can only understand those events if we
take account of the fact that they are mediated for us through
contingent human discourse: 
　　Immediate are the acts of God, more swift 
　　Than time or motion; but to human ears 
　　Cannot without process of speech be told, 
　　So told as earthly notion can receive (7.176–179). 
　　The action of Paradise Lost takes place, then, in many different
registers simultaneously. The ability to read a text as both
literal and symbolic, and also at infinite gradations between these
poles, came more naturally to educated people in Milton’s time than
it does to us, trained as they were in the intricate hermeneutics
of biblical exegesis. Furthermore, their facility with textual
interpretation was matched by a happy disregard for the boundaries
between what we regard as mutually exclusive intellectual fields.
Paradise Lost is certainly a work of theology, representing the
spiritual conflict between metaphysical beings, but this conflict
is also the determining factor in world history, as well as within
the human psyche. Although more than twenty characters address us
in the course of the poem, such figures also represent disputing
forces within Milton’s mind and, by implication, within the mind of
the reader.

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