While it might be difficult to understand how the God portrayed in John Milton's Paradise Lost could be considered good and generous when his primary act in the story is to exile Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, there are still several ways to tease out an understanding of benevolence from his actions, if one is dedicated to doing so. For instance, God created the Earth, which can be characterized as an act of love and of generosity. Milton's God has many rules and expects people to obey them, but many people consider this fair because God also makes these rules clearly known. It can also be argued that, even though it resulted in Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden, free will is a gift in itself.

How is God the good and generous character in Paradise Lost?

It must be said, right at the outset, that God's goodness and generosity don't exactly leap out from every page of Paradise Lost. Whether consciously or not, Milton presents the Almighty in such a way as to invite comparisons with a stern, unbending tyrant who knowingly allows Satan to bring evil into his creation. Successive generations of literary critics have put forward the notion of God as the bad guy in the poem, and as a much less interesting and vital character than Satan.

To a large extent, this is because Milton's portrayal of God is very much indebted to the Old Testament tradition, which emphasizes God's wrath rather than his love. Nevertheless, Milton shows us a number of divine actions in the poem which, in their own unique way, could be interpreted as evincing signs of love and generosity.

For one thing, God's creation of Paradise is itself an act of love. Adam and Eve spend each day surrounded by the bountiful joys of nature, free from care, worry, and most importantly of all, the threat of death. What loving father could do more for his children?

Though God, as a transcendent law-giver, can certainly come across as quite a remote, forbidding figure, he doesn't demand much of Adam and Eve. All he requires of them is that they refrain from eating of the Tree of Knowledge. It is difficult to square such an eminently reasonable request with the vision of a cloud-dwelling tyrant bequeathed to us by a particular strain of literary criticism.

On the contrary, Milton's God seems the exact opposite of a divine control-freak. He has given Adam and Eve the gift of free will, and how they choose to use that gift is entirely up to them. Of course, they will abuse that gift by their fateful act of disobedience. But the initial granting of free will by God can be seen as nothing more than an outpouring of divine love and generosity.

Even when Adam and Eve defy God by eating of the Tree of Knowledge, God does not smite them down by a lightning bolt, as one would expect of a tyrant-king. Instead, he expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, thus giving them a chance to make something of their lives. It's hardly an ideal outcome for our original ancestors, but they can have no complaints about such relatively lenient treatment, given their disobedience of God.

God's ultimate act of love and generosity in Paradise Lost is to send his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, down to earth to save humankind and to defeat the power of death introduced into the world by Satan. This is what has been called, in relation to the poem, the Fortunate Fall—man's first disobedience, though undoubtedly wrong in itself, had the fortunate consequence of bringing about the coming of Jesus Christ. In other words, had Adam and Eve not sinned, there wouldn't have been a need for Jesus.

Furthermore, Adam's vision of Christ's sacrifice on the cross assures him that there is still hope for humankind, despite his and Eve's disobedience. And this in itself, we might reasonably infer, is a further sign of God's inexhaustible love and generosity.