Christ’s Awakening To Divinity

 I’ve always found it interesting to think about what Christ thought of himself as he grew up. To what extent was he aware of his divinely appointed mission? What did he know about his heritage and what did he not know? How did he feel as a youth growing up, did he feel more mature, different than everyone around him? So many interested questions that we have little to no knowledge about from Biblical Accounts. We have accounts of Apostles writing about the divinity of Christ but nothing written by Christ himself about his life or mission. In our own Mormon literature, Jesus the Christ offers some insight into some of these possibilities but beyond that we don’t have much.

The first chapter Paradise Regained offers an interesting perspective on some of these questions in a narrative written from the perspective of Christ. I think Milton did a fantastic job at diving into these questions and creating a persona that I could see as a very possible reality for what the young Jesus may have thought.

It's Time: Milton's Manipulation of Time in Paradise Lost

In class, we talked about how Milton bends time and takes things out of chronological order, but he does more than that with time in Paradise Lost. I noticed in particular with the meeting of the fallen angels. He mentions devils such as Moloch, or Beelzebub and then proceeds to mention a lot of their deeds and how they have affected men and such. However, while these things according to chronology haven’t happened yet, they are referred to as the past. An example is when one of the demons, Moloch is described by his actions toward men: "the wisest heart / of Solomon he led by fraud to build / his temple right against the temple of God" (400-02). Here, Moloch's actions are described in the past tense, even though they haven't happened yet in the narrative. This is done for several other devils and fallen angels. It's an interesting paradox that I decided to research more.