MILTON QUARTERLY 245 Raphael and the Challenge of Evangelical Education Margaret Olofson Thickstun I “Let all things be done unto edifying.” 1 Cor. 14.26 This essay discusses Raphael’s ministry in Eden in the context of Puritan educational practice, Milton’s own educational method, and my ex- perience as an educator and a parent. I have spent the past fifteen years teaching Paradise Lost at small liberal arts colleges: first Mount Holyoke, then Fordham, and now for a decade at Ham- ilton. The experience of teaching in these comm- unities has provoked the discovery that I work with an “age-group”—nineteen year-olds, to be exact. That discovery has forced me to consider the way I should teach the poem to them; it has also influenced what in the poem attracts my attention. When Adam stands before the Son at the opening of Book 10, he attempts to excuse himself by the very logic that my students use: “it was her fault”; “I couldn’t help myself”; “you should have stopped me.” I teach Paradise Lost to college sophomores because the poem addres- ses directly the issues of self-determination and personal responsibility that they face in their lives: peer pressure, sexual desire, the pursuit of plea- sure, the choice of career. In light of what one critic calls “Milton’s persistent emphasis on per- sonal accountability” (Haskin 32), his epic seems peculiarly suited to contemporary educational needs. Paradise Lost is also a poem peopled with educators and their students: Raphael and, later, Michael teach Adam; Adam teaches Eve; Uriel, Abdiel, and Michael each in his own way attempts to educate the fallen angels. This is a poem about the education of its main characters and at the same time dedicated to the education of its readers. Before turning my attention to Raphael, I would like to explore generally both the peda- gogical activity within the poem and the peda- gogical activity that the poem facilitates, if the educator chooses to participate in its pedagogical project. Milton is an educator; I am an educator; we share the same philosophy of education: that the end of education is moral adulthood and the means to that end is the exercise of moral choice. Most practitioners of higher education today would not articulate the mission of their insti- tutions as “to repair the ruin of our first parents”; we no longer offer students a seminar in moral philosophy with the college president as their capstone experience. Although most colleges’ articulations of mission and curricular goals include ethical awareness in their lists, the imple- mentation of this goal is vexed. In fact, William G. Perry, a Harvard psychologist and house master whose work in some ways prompted this discussion, defines the university’s job in terms that might suggest we conspire in the contin- uation of moral ruin: