Milton’s Paradise Lost, as read by Waddington, is a comprehensive mapping of God’s Providences, as well as both an exfoliation of and an enquiry into their dispensation. Sometimes cheeky in its volleys with Christopher Hill and the New Milton Criticism, Looking into Providences is unabashedly “an exercise in historical interpretation” (6) that, if of the old school, in its rigor, cogency, and blazes of insight, represents that school at its very best. Waddington’s title echoing Cromwell’s admonition, “My dear friend, let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat” (10), is an early signal of how reader-friendly this book is; of how cordial, even courtly, Waddington is as host at so satisfying an intellectual feast.

In chapters 1 and 2, Waddington charts the changing course of Protestant theology in England as its moves from Calvinism to Arminianism (Gary D. Hamilton is a better guide, Waddington thinks, than Stephen M. Fallon). Moreover, in a swerve away from John T. Shawcross, Waddington embraces Paradise Lost as “an Arminian poem” (20). Furthermore, while Charles I and Cromwell, Andrew Marvell and John Milton are all Arminians with respect to Providence, Milton’s own resistance to “interpreting the ‘hidden wayes’ and ‘unsearchable Mysteries’ of providence” (39) was probably reinforced by conversations with Marvell, with both Marvell and Milton viewing Providence less as a series of vindications and humiliations than as a rigorous process of questioning and choice.

With this proposition in mind, Waddington’s readers may want to bracket for interrogation the assertion that Christ, nailed to the cross, “epitomizes the entire providential action of bringing good out of evil” (67); that the ransom theory of atonement is in any conclusive sense the capstone to Milton’s argument that God’s ways are just and justifiable to man. If (as Milton implies) Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are the twin halves of a single epic vision, then the latter poem, completing the argument of the former one, was notable to its first readers for eschewing the Crucifixion story in a poem that would seem to premise it.

Milton’s relentlessly consistent Arminianism, the role deception plays in his poem’s providential design, Satan as “a natural Machiavel” (93) and (more broadly) Milton’s Machiavellianism, Hugo Grotius’s influence on Milton, the poet’s Christocentric vision, the Son’s role as chief “incarnation of divine providence” in Paradise Lost — all these topics are richly illuminated by Waddington. Yet none is so spectacularly so as his claim, perhaps too narrowly restricted, that Eve is “the hero of Book 10” (127).

The force of Waddington’s criticism is cumulative, and nowhere does it achieve greater luminosity than in his final chapters, beginning with chapter 5, where Waddington prompts his readers to comprehend the Edenic books of Paradise Lost through the prism of the Book of Tobit and where, “in Milton’s rewriting of the Tobit story, Eve is ‘the heroic character’” (148). Interpretive disputes may arise, particularly in chapters 6 and 7, not over Waddington’s exaltation of Eve but over his crediting of Adam with more comprehension than is within his grasp, a possibility that Waddington himself may allow in his concession that “Milton marks the limits of Adam’s own horizon” (183), with disputes then arising not over whether, but over when and where, such limitations are manifested. In his grasp of the larger significance of the last books of Paradise Lost Waddington remains peerless. Books 11 and 12 are as much a tutorial for Adam as they are for this poem’s readers; they are as pointedly about Adam’s conversion and regeneration as they are about the reader’s own; and they emblazon the providential design of history even as they now find their moorings in the Book of Revelation, which was seen in Milton’s time as scripture’s fullest mapping of God’s Providence, its ultimate demonstration of what the Book of Genesis brought into question.

Hands down the most beautiful Milton book of recent years, Looking into Providences also provides the best justification for Milton’s coupling of Genesis and Revelation in his epic: it’s all about Providence.