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License Agreement on scientific materials use.
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From John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”: intellectual and artistic reinterpretations of theodicy
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Anna Dmitrievna Biserova
Moscow City University
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Submitted:
June 29, 2026
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Abstract.
The study aims to identify the intellectual and artistic transformations of theodicy in the English literary tradition from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”. The paper analyzes the key stages of a literary dialogue in which the concepts of evil, free will, and divine providence are successively rethought in accordance with the philosophical and aesthetic benchmarks of different eras: from Milton’s apologetic model, through Romantic reassessment (W. Blake, G. G. Byron, P. B. Shelley) and Victorian secularization (A. Tennyson, T. Hardy, G. Eliot, M. Corelli), to the Christian apologetics of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and, finally, the systematic anti-theodicy of P. Pullman. Special attention is paid to the formation of an artistic anti-theodicy, in which the divine plan ceases to be an object of apology and becomes part of a poetic reflection on the limits of justice and responsibility. The scientific novelty of the study lies in proposing a holistic five-stage diachronic model of the evolution of theodicean discourse in English literature from Milton to Pullman, a model previously unexplored in Russian literary scholarship. The images of God and Satan are examined as antinomic cultural constructs embodying the relationship between power and doubt, submission and protest. Philip Pullman’s trilogy is, for the first time, characterized as the culmination of a four-century-long inversion line that programmatically polemicizes with the Miltonic project. The study establishes that the transformation of the theodicy theme reflects profound cultural shifts, demonstrating a movement from classical theological perceptions to secular forms of conceptualizing ethical issues.
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Key words and phrases:
теодицея
Джон Мильтон
Филип Пулман
антитеодицея
свобода воли
theodicy
John Milton
Philip Pullman
anti-theodicy
free will
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