Raphael is soft to Michael's hardness, Raphael is amiable to Michael's firmness. Michael, on the other hand, traditionally a militant angel, comes in with full military regalia, as well as a squadron of angels behind him, to tell Adam the story as well as evict he and Eve from the Garden. He is a soft, kindly angel who serves as a warning friend to Adam. Raphael is a friend coming over for dinner. The contrast between the two histories starts with the messengers who are narrating them. Raphael story, and Adam's remembrances, will parallel with Michael's narration of the history of man after the Fall starting in book XI. Man is designed to work his way to an angelic state by keeping correct, rational order to his passions, as discussed in Book IV. Theologically, Raphael is giving God's reason for creating man, and man's universe, in the first place: in order to repopulate heaven. Here, Milton uses the order and, in some cases, word for word description used in the first and second chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible. With a direct Biblical allusion, Raphael relates the story of creation. God then creates darkness and light, the universe, earth and ocean, and plants and animals (in the same order as the Genesis story of the Hebrew Bible) in seven days. Not wanting Satan to claim even that victory, God decides to populate heaven with a creature who, given free will, would earn their way into his glory. Raphael tells him that after Satan's fall, God saw that heaven had lost half its population. Adam asks Raphael about how he, man, came to be, how the earth was created, and why?
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