Patriarchs and Profits
Chapter 14 - John Milton
by Dirk Anderson
John Milton (1608–1674) was an English poet, widely regarded as one of the greatest figures in English literature. He was best known for his epic masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667), dictated entirely after he had gone completely blind. Milton dramatically expanded the Genesis narrative of the Fall of Man, Satan's rebellion, and Edenic life into a grand, highly vivid theological drama.
Parallels to Milton
In 1858, SDA pioneer J. N. Andrews supplied Ellen White with a copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost.1 The official account insists she set it unread on a high shelf. Yet the architecture of Milton's epic — not its prose, but its distinctive dramatic narrative and structure — runs through the chapters of Patriarchs and Prophets that have no basis in Genesis: the war in heaven, the temptation, and the council of redemption. These are scenes Scripture does not narrate. Milton staged them. She copied them.
1. The Rebellion in Heaven
Genesis says nothing about why Satan fell. Isaiah and Ezekiel speak of pride, but neither gives a trigger. Milton supplied one: the exaltation of the Son. That extra-biblical mechanism — the Son proclaimed, Satan consumed with envy, a secret campaign of insinuation, and the rhetoric of liberty against divine “tyranny” — is the spine of White's account.
| John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 52 | Patriarchs and Prophets, ch. 13 |
|---|---|
| “This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son… your head I him appoint”… [and Satan,] “fraught with envy against the Son of God, that day / Honoured by his great Father… could not bear / Through pride that sight, and thought himself impaired.” | “coveting the glory with which the infinite Father had invested His Son, this prince of angels aspired to power that was the prerogative of Christ alone… ‘Why should Christ have the supremacy? Why is He honored above Lucifer?’” |
| “Natives and sons of Heaven possessed before / By none; and if not equal all, yet free, / Equally free; for orders and degrees / Jar not with liberty, but well consist. / Who can in reason then, or right, assume / Monarchy over such as live by right / His equals?” | “[Lucifer urged] that angels needed no such restraint… it was his object to secure freedom for all. But now even the liberty which they had hitherto enjoyed was at an end; for an absolute Ruler had been appointed them.” |
In both accounts the same sequence unfolds: the Son is exalted; Lucifer, unable to bear it, is filled with envy; he works in secret to spread disaffection; and he frames God's government as a new tyranny and himself as the champion of angelic liberty. Not one link of that chain is in the biblical text. Milton imagined it and White turned it into inspiration.
2. The Temptation and the Fall
Milton's Book 9 turned the bare Genesis account of the serpent into a psychological drama, and its distinctive inventions reappear in White's telling: Satan tormented by the sight of Eden's happiness, his deliberate choice of the serpent as his disguise, Eve encountered alone, and Adam eating not in deception but knowingly, out of love for his wife.
| John Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 4–94 | Patriarchs and Prophets, ch. 35 |
|---|---|
| Satan's torment at their joy: “Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two… Imparadised in one another's arms… while I to Hell am thrust.” | Satan beheld the holy pair “and envied the happiness” of their sinless estate. |
| The serpent chosen as vehicle: the serpent, “fittest imp of fraud,” in whom “his dark suggestions hide / From sharpest sight.” | “Satan chose to employ as his medium the serpent — a disguise well adapted for his purpose of deception.” |
| Adam falls knowingly, for love: “he scrupled not to eat, / Against his better knowledge; not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm.” | “Adam… was not deceived… [but] resolved to share her fate; if she must die, he would die with her.” |
The bare fact that “Adam was not deceived” is Scripture (1 Timothy 2:14). But the drama around it — Satan's inner hell at the sight of their bliss, the calculated selection of the serpent, and above all Adam's deliberate choice to perish beside the wife he loved — is Milton's dramatization, and White reproduces it.
3. The Council of Redemption
This is the strongest parallel of all, because it is not a single idea but a four-beat scene reproduced in order. In Milton's Book 3, God asks who will pay the price for fallen man; heaven falls silent; no created being can answer; the Son alone offers Himself; and heaven erupts in jubilant song. White's redemption council follows the identical sequence.
| John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 36 | Patriarchs and Prophets, ch. 47 |
|---|---|
| Heaven falls silent: “He asked, but all the heavenly quire stood mute, / And silence was in Heaven: on Man's behalf / Patron or intercessour none appeared.” | “Angels ceased their songs of praise.” The angels “offered to become a sacrifice for man. But an angel's life could not pay the debt; only He who created man had power to redeem him.” |
| The Son alone offers Himself: “Behold me then: me for him, life for life / I offer… I shall rise victorious, and subdue / My vanquisher… Death his death's wound shall then receive.” | “Christ assured the angels that by His death He would ransom many, and would destroy him who had the power of death. He would recover the kingdom which man had lost.” |
| Heaven erupts in joy: “Heaven rung / With jubilee, and loud Hosannas filled / The eternal regions… sweet / The Angels… with a shout / Loud as from numbers without number.” | “Then joy, inexpressible joy, filled heaven… ‘the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.’” |
Silence; the insufficiency of every lesser being; the Son alone stepping forward to offer Himself; then heaven bursting into song. Genesis contains none of this. This staged, four-part theatric scene — imagined by Milton — plays out beat for beat in Patriarchs and Prophets.
These are only a few of the strongest examples. The parallels run deeper than three scenes. Scene after scene, the same distinctive inventions surface in Patriarchs and Prophets.
Further Parallels
Beyond the three staged scenes above, the same pattern of distinctive, non-biblical invention recurs throughout the opening chapters of Patriarchs and Prophets. None of the following is drawn from Genesis; each appears in Milton's epic and again in Patriarchs and Prophets.
| Extra-biblical element | Paradise Lost | Patriarchs and Prophets |
|---|---|---|
| The heavenly council summoned. God assembles the entire angelic host specifically to proclaim the Son's status — the setting Scripture never describes. | “Th' empyreal host / Of Angels by imperial summons called, / Innumerable before the Almighty's throne / Forthwith, from all the ends of Heaven, appeared… Hear, all ye Angels.” (Bk. 5)8 | “The King of the universe summoned the heavenly hosts before Him, that in their presence He might set forth the true position of His Son... About the throne gathered the holy angels, a vast, unnumbered throng...”9 |
| Loyal angels reason with the rebels. Before the open break, faithful angels appeal to the disaffected to reconsider. | Abdiel, “than whom none with more zeal adored / The Deity,” withstands Satan: “O alienate from God… cease this impious rage, / And tempt not these.” (Bk. 5)10 | “Angels that were loyal and true sought to reconcile him to the will of his Creator… [and] labored to counteract the influence of Satan.”11 |
| Pride forbids repentance. The rebel nearly relents, but is held back from returning by pride and shame — the same psychological block in both. | “O then at last relent: is there no place / Left for repentance…? / None left but by submission; and that word / Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame.” (Bk. 4)12 | “He nearly reached the decision to return, but pride forbade him. It was too great a sacrifice… to confess that he had been in error.”13 |
| The serpent flatters Eve for her beauty. The tempter opens not with the fruit but with worship of Eve's beauty. | “Sovran Mistress… sole wonder… A Goddess among Gods, adored and served / By Angels numberless… Empress of this fair world, resplendent Eve!” (Bk. 9)14 | "But the serpent continued, in a musical voice, with subtle praise of her surpassing loveliness..."15 |
The pattern is unmistakable. Wherever Genesis falls silent — the war in heaven, the psychology of the temptation, the council where redemption was pledged — and the sober commentaries have nothing to offer, it is Milton's epic that fills the gap, beat for beat, invention for invention. These are not the shared commonalities of Christian doctrine. They are the specific imaginative choices of a seventeenth-century poet, reappearing two centuries later in a book its author insisted was “not the product of any human mind.” The blind poet dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters. It appears he dictated a good deal of Patriarchs and Prophets as well.
References and Notes
- Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White: Messenger to the Remnant, 16.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 5, lines 603–611, 790–797.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 35–37.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4, lines 505–508; Book 9, lines 89–99, 998–999.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 53–56.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 3, lines 217–222, 236–252, 345–349.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 63–65.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 5, lines 583–600.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 36.
- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 5, lines 805–848 (Abdiel).
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 38.
- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4, lines 79–82.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 39.
- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9, lines 532–548.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 53.