John Milton’s Paradise Lost stands as an unmatched Christian epic. It demands much of its reader, and even an expert literary mind like C.S. Lewis’s can feel challenged. In his Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis has remarked that the central difficulty of Paradise Lost is “not verbal, but imaginative.” This paper addresses the kinds of knowledge and imaginative capacity required to read this monumental work, as it considers how classical education can provide the necessary formation for any good reader of Paradise Lost.