Getting What You Wish For: A Reading of the Fall
It takes two, Adam and Eve, to fall in book 9 of Paradise Lost, just as it takes both of them to reconcile with each other and accept the gift of God’s grace in book 10. Eve falls deceived by the wiles of Satan, failing the test she sets for herself to confront and withstand temptation as a lone individual. Adam knowingly falls with Eve, an act that combines marital love, human solidarity, and Adam’s fear of repeating his earlier loneliness before Eve’s creation: “To live again in these wild woods forlorn” (9.910). Adam’s choice—the choice of death—aligns him with the second Adam, the Son, who will die for and in the place of humanity, and might seem to place Adam on a higher ground, heroic and moral, than his wife, “much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve” (9.404). Milton provides a version of the Genesis story that accords with 1 Timothy 2:14: “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” Paul glosses the divine judgment of Genesis 3:16—“thy desire shall be subiect to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”—and notoriously uses the deceived and transgressing Eve to subordinate not only wives to husbands but women to male authority, and to ordain their silence. “Deceived,” a word used sparingly in Paradise Lost in any case, reappears in the second of its only two uses in book 9 at the moment when Adam falls, an explicit echo of the Pauline passage: “he scrupled not to eat / Against his better knowledge, not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm” (9.997–99). One may begin to suspect a pun, especially in light of the privative “dis-” words that open the book “distrust, disloyal, disobedience, distance, distaste” (9.6–9): by falling alongside his wife, Adam was not “dis-Eve-d.”1
Earlier in the poem, however, Milton’s God gives the 1 Timothy passage a striking twist. He explains in book 3 the difference between the fallen angels, who fell on their own and are beyond redemption, and the case of Adam and Eve and their human descendants.
The first sort by their own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceived
By the other first: man therefore shall find grace,
The other none:
(3.129–32)
No scriptural foundation underlies this enunciation of the theological escape clause of Paradise Lost. Because “man” falls through the deceit of Satan, humanity can be redeemed through the Son and, as God goes on to say, his mercy will outshine even his glory. But in this corporate “man,” it was Eve, not Adam, whom Satan deceived, as the opening of the poem declares: “he it was, whose guile / Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived / The mother of mankind” (1.34–36). Adam’s decision to transgress together with Eve may fit into a category all its own, but in this light his knowing what he is doing aligns him as much with the devil as with the Son: “To Satan only like both crime and doom” (10.841), Adam himself comments on his condition after the Fall in book 10. Thus, in his fall, Adam can appear both less and more culpable than Eve. Milton both works with 1 Timothy and works changes upon it when he allots blame for the first sin, as well as credit for God’s grace, between the first husband and wife. In doing so, he qualifies Paul’s foundational misogyny. To fall deceived may not, the word of the apostle notwithstanding, have been the worst thing. It is to the nature of Eve’s fall, in fact, that human beings owe their chance to be saved.2
Eve’s and Adam’s respective falls, and the way that they are assigned the gender attributes of the first woman and man, each correspond to deeply held, if sometimes opposed, wishes that Milton entertained throughout his writing career.3 To put them in bald terms, the first wish imagines a solitary, virtually self-sufficient human being undefiled by worldly temptation and approved in faith by God, an individual described in feminized, largely passive terms—the Lady in Comus, the Jesus of Paradise Regained—who holds out against a seducer. It is a wish, too, uneasily intertwined with the poet’s hope for fame: fame is an individual and individualizing attainment. The second wish is gregarious and sociable, envisioning the individual interacting with others in relationships of human love and with a fallen world more generally, and it is characterized as masculine—aggressively so in the Samson of Samson Agonistes. In Paradise Lost, these dual wishes are built into the actions of the first couple from the beginning. Eve first awakes into being beside a pool of Narcissus; Adam asks his Creator for a partner and, however gently, seizes Eve when she turns back toward her watery image.
These wishes are also spelled out by Paradise Lost in contrasting terms of human sufficiency and deficiency. Milton’s God pronounces that he has created human individuals “Sufficient to have stood” (3.99) and that, even after the Fall, divine grace will provide them “What may suffice” (3.189) for regeneration; Adam tells Eve as she goes off on her own in book 9 that God has “Nothing imperfect or deficient left” in them (9.345). Yet one book earlier Adam recalls telling God: “Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee / Is no deficience found; not so is man” (8.415–16). Adam’s sense of a lack in his lone self—“In unity defective” (8.425)—makes him request from his “absolute” (8.421) Creator a “like” to “solace his defects” (8.418–19).4 The countervailing ideas that human beings are spiritually self-sufficient in relation to God and socially dependent on one another—it is “not good for man to be alone” (8.445)—generate the problems and drama of the epic. They correspond to the double imperatives of Milton’s Protestant Christianity, the obligation of the human individual to establish a personal faith in God and the demand that humans love one another in the relation of charity and in the community of a church, however invisible or mystical that church may be. So the first part of Areopagitica would foster “the growth and compleating of one vertuous person” (CPW 2:528), while its second half projects a super Church in which “all the Lords people are become Prophets” (CPW 2:556), held together by Paul’s “unity of Spirit” and “bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3) (CPW 2:565). The two wishes are already in tension in Milton’s poetry in the vatic solitude of the Penseroso and the sociability of the Allegro, in the individual fame the speaker of Lycidas seeks from the witness of Jove and the solemn troops and sweet societies envisioned for the dead Lycidas that replace their earlier pastoral fellowship, the bright college years at Cambridge.
The studies of William Kerrigan have identified these wishes as psychic drives in a classical Freudian narrative that describes the overcoming of the younger Milton’s quest for chaste purity and denial of death by his entrance into adult sexuality and marriage, and his acceptance of (the Father’s law that decrees) his mortality.5 So, already predicting this narrative, “wisest Fate” or Father says “no” to the fantasies of a purity now and forever, of time running backward away from death, in Milton’s first great poem, the Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. This was indeed the story of Milton’s life, a story he told over and over again in his poetry. His poetic career itself divided between the 1645 Poems, largely the product of his period of chaste “retirement” and study in the 1630s, and the 1667 Paradise Lost and 1671 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, the long works that followed his almost twenty years of public engagement as pamphleteer in the 1640s and as Commonwealth bureaucrat in the 1650s, and in the wake of his first two marriages. The succession of life stages did not cancel out Milton’s first wish by the second, but, by a conservation or layering of inner life, kept them both in play, and they are still present and in competition in the 1671 volume that followed his great epic. Both Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes plot out retrospective versions of Milton’s life story that led to the great action of his life: the writing of Paradise Lost. But the Jesus of the brief epic lives out this story as Milton had originally, ideally projected it in the first wish of individual perfection; Samson in the tragedy lives it out as the life that Milton had actually led in accord with the second: marriage and disappointment, political engagement and defeat, blindness.6
The following discussion reads the double fall in Paradise Lost inside this larger Miltonic career—we shall see how book 9 echoes Milton’s earlier writings and is echoed in turn by the 1671 poems: the chapter contains an excursus on Paradise Regained. Eve’s fall stages and, of necessity, criticizes the first wish of spiritual self-sufficiency and quest for recognition; Adam’s fall does the same for the second of human love and codependency. They each seem to tip, to one side or the other, the equilibrium that Paradise Lost explores between the vertical relationship of proving oneself in the sight of God and the collateral relationship of love and community, between going it alone and going it together. Each wish maps out a sphere for the exercise of human freedom and will that is initially divinely sanctioned—to make a trial of oneself, to choose a loving relationship with another. In each case disobedience would make that sphere autonomous from God. But, at the same time, these wishes lend heroic dignity to the tragedy of the Fall: their respective impulses—to affirm faith, to share charity—are good and already proto-Christian, and thus can still be understood as expressions of prelapsarian innocence, up to the very point of the Fall.7 And they will be vindicated after the Fall, when human beings, particularly in the affective realms of marriage and love, appear, in fact, to have gained an increased Christian liberty and independence: they have outgrown the divine tutelage in Eden for whose loss the poem simultaneously mourns. In the formal resolution of the epic, Adam and Eve appear to have exchanged the two wishes, he now to obey the only God, she now to stay at his side; it implies a new sense of the relationship between male and female roles. How the poem makes us feel about this realignment is another question. Eve gets the last word in Paradise Lost.
The Seduction of Eve
Masculinist though he may be, Milton invests a large part of himself in the character of Eve. Her temptation and fall in book 9 recapitulates Milton’s earlier dramatizations of individuals tested by the world and its evils and confirmed in their spiritual purity by divine approbation. Her feelings hurt by what she takes to be Adam’s questioning of her ability to resist the temptation of Satan—“Less attributed to her faith sincere” (9.320)—Eve, according to the prose argument of book 9, was “the rather desirous to make trial of her strength.”8 We may be reminded of the Lady of Comus who asks Providence to “square my trial / To my proportioned strength” (328–29). Eve could be a reader of Comus, Areopagitica, and Lycidas, when she justifies facing their enemy on her own.
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defense, wherever met,
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?
But harm precedes not sin: only our foe
Tempting affronts us with his foul esteem
Of our integrity: his foul esteem
Sticks no dishonour on our front, but turns
Foul on himself; then wherefore shunned or feared
By us? Who rather double honour gain
From his surmise proved false, find peace within,
Favour from heaven, our witness from the event.
And what is faith, love, virtue unassayed
Alone, without exterior help sustained?
Let us not then suspect our happy state
Left so imperfect by the maker wise,
As not secure to single or combined;
Frail is our happiness, if this be so,
And Eden were no Eden thus exposed.
(9.322–41)
Eve is right to assert that God has created Adam and Eve “Sufficient to have stood”: yes, Adam admits even as he cautions her, God left nothing “deficient” in his creation. Eve underestimates, however, the “hap” or contingency in Adam’s and her happiness, for they are also “free to fall” (3.99). It is in the name of individual freedom that she asks what is the good of her faith, love, and virtue if it is “unassayed / Alone.” Critics have discussed how Eve echoes Milton’s call for the reading of uncensored, even evil books in Areopagitica, the testing of virtue by its opposite:9
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercised & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That vertue, therefore which is but a youngling in contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excrementall whiteness; Which was the reason why our sage and serious Poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bowr of earthly blisse, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. (CPW 2:515–16)
Virtue has no use unless it is tested, Eve asserts, and emphasizes the test’s solitary nature: “Single,” “Alone,” each adjective emphasized by enjambment and placement at the beginning of the verse, the first additionally by metrical inversion. Faith, Milton’s Protestantism insists, has to be established by each individual believer.10 Adam and Eve have just heard, moreover, from Raphael the story of Abdiel, who resisted the temptation of Satan and the pressure of his peers, “Though single” (5.903; cf. 6.30), his only care “To stand approved in sight of God” (6.36). So Eve similarly aspires.11
In the famous Areopagitica passage cited above, “virtue” is already gendered, as are most personifications in Latin, as feminine. Her cloistering, which in Eve’s words are the “narrow circuit” that turns the enclosed garden of Eden into a fortress-prison, suggests the nunnery that protects young women (a “youngling”) from sexual knowledge. Milton depicts Satan’s temptation of Eve as a kind of erotic seduction, in terms that echo Comus’s attempts to make the Lady drink his cup of concupiscence: “you are but young yet” (Comus 754), he tells her, suggesting both that she grow up in sophistication and that youth itself will run out: seize the day. Milton thinks of pure faith and virtue as a kind of spiritual chastity that not only depends on the typology of Hosea, where an apostasizing Israel is figured as God’s wife whoring after strange gods, but on Milton’s own cultivation of physical chastity with its accompanying fantasy of bodily inviolability and transformation into undying soul—“Till all be made immortal” (Comus 462)—that the Elder Brother describes in Comus. Such abstinence, Milton acknowledged in his sixth prolusion at Cambridge, had earned him the epithet of “the Lady” (domina), the “lady of Christ’s College” according to John Aubrey. It is a femininity he does not entirely reject in the prolusion—the similarly clean-living Virgil had been dubbed a maiden (parthenias) during his student days in Naples.12 The college nickname only connects Milton more closely with the Lady of Comus and the female type that she establishes for lonely virtue put to the test.
The cloistering of virtue in Areopagitica also evokes the protective walls and courtyards of the university, of Milton’s Cambridge. In this light, and in the context of other passages in Areopagitica that compare believers reliant on others to children still under the discipline of their schoolteachers, there may indeed be something peculiar about the “error” attributed to Milton here of forgetting that Spenser’s Palmer is not present with Guyon during the latter’s visit to and temptation in the cave of Mammon (Faerie Queene [FQ] 2.7; the Palmer is present with Guyon in the Bower of Blisse in 2.12). However it may be feminized as the passive virtue of just saying no, this youngling virtue needs to graduate, to escape (or internalize) its tutors, to leave its confinement and confront the world in order to know just what it is turning down; and it needs to do so by itself. Guyon is able to resist, “Alone, without exterior help sustained,” Mammon’s invitation for him to eat the golden fruit of Proserpina’s garden and sit on its enchanted silver stool, a version of the chair that kept Theseus seated forever in Virgil’s underworld (Aen. 6.617–18)—although he will need to be rescued by divine grace and a guardian angel, by the returning Palmer and Arthur, at the beginning of the following canto. The fruit of this Spenserian garden—apparently the fruit that Proserpina herself ate and that brought death into the world in pagan myth—already suggests a similarity to the forbidden fruit of Eden, and the episode of the cave of Mammon lies at the basis of Milton’s scenes of temptation in both Paradise Lost and Comus, where the Lady has in fact sat down into immobility while she continues to refuse Comus’s cup and similarly needs heavenly rescue through the Attendant Spirit and Sabrina. The last words that Comus speaks to the Lady, “Be wise and, taste” are echoed in Satan’s last words to Eve in book 9: “Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste” (PL 9.732).
These last words of Satan, “Goddess humane,” echo his first words to Eve, and culminate a second evocation and imitation of the same book 2 of the Faerie Queene, mediated, in this case too, by a previous imitation of that Spenserian episode in Comus. Satan begins with flattery and already suggests that Eve is made for better things.
Wonder not, sovereign mistress, if perhaps
Thou canst, who art sole wonder, must less arm
Thy looks, the heaven of mildness, with disdain …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fairest resemblance of thy maker fair,
Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine
By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore
With ravishment beheld, there best beheld
Where universally admired; but here
In this enclosure wild, these beasts among,
Beholders rude, and shallow to discern
Half what in thee is fair, one man except,
Who sees thee? (And what is one?) Who shouldst be seen
A goddess among gods, adored and served
By angels numberless, thy daily train.
(9.532–34; 9.538–48)
What is a beautiful girl like you doing in a place like this? The provincial “enclosure wild” that Satan describes reminds us of Eve’s own feeling of being confined in the “narrow circuit” of Eden, and behind it the cloister that confines the inexperienced virtue in Areopagitica. In spite of his assertion that all living things already gaze with wonder on her, “The cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” as Milton’s speaker commented of a beauty in her hidden rural tower in L’Allegro (80), Satan suggests that Eve should be seen by a better class of beings, like one of the city and court ladies at the end of that early poem, whose “bright eyes / Rain influence” (121–22) on their knights and barons. These ladies of L’Allegro, as the metaphors suggest, are stars—“cynosure” refers to the fixed North Star and celestial center of attention. Eve, Satan proposes, should be taken to a heavenly Hollywood from her small-town drugstore counter in Eden and turned into a star or goddess at a truly universal studio. She could leave behind her rube of a husband—one man—who, the serpent insinuates, doesn’t appreciate the half of her any more than the beasts do: Satan the snake’s over-the-top flattery already suggests as much. The facetiousness and updating of my critical description matches the tone of the passage and of its models: the encounter of the roué with the innocent to whom he promises a higher life and social standing, Milton knows, is a hackneyed, repeated story. He takes it back to the beginning of history at the Fall itself.
Behind Satan’s first words are the first words that Comus addresses to the Lady who has lost her way in the woods:
Hail foreign wonder
Whom certain these rough shades did never breed
Unless the goddess that in rural shrine
Dwell’st here with Pan or Sylvan …
(Comus 264–67)
The Lady, like Eve, is a wonder, and in this case Comus is right: the aristocrat Alice Egerton who plays her doesn’t belong out in the countryside. But neither is she a goddess. O dea certe!, says Aeneas to his mother Venus in the first book of the Aeneid (Aen. 1.328), a real goddess of love in ironic disguise as a follower of chaste Artemis. The Virgilian episode inverts the flattery of Odysseus to the young, virginal Nausikaa, whom the Greek trickster compares to Artemis in book 6 of the Odyssey (6.149–52). Homer’s narrator also compares Nausikaa to Artemis in an extended simile (6.102–9) that Milton has just imitated when he compares Eve, at her departing from Adam, to “a wood-nymph light / Oread or dryad, or of Delia’s train, / … but Delia’s self / In gait surpassed and goddess-like deport” (9.386–89), to a follower of Artemis or Artemis herself. It is one thing for Homeric and Miltonic narrators to liken Nausikaa or Eve to goddesses, another for the wily Odysseus and Satan to tell them that they are goddesses indeed.
The roots of Milton’s scene return to the beginnings of epic—once again, it’s an old story—but his primary literary source is a more proximate, degraded parody: the approach of the lowborn, impostor knight Braggadocchio and his equally spurious squire Trompart to Belphoebe in the third canto of book 2 of the Faerie Queene. Belphoebe is the Faerie Queene’s human figure of the virgin Queen Elizabeth, and she is attired appropriately in the buskins of Artemis (2.3.27), to whom she is subsequently compared with the same Odyssey 6 simile (2.3.31): the “Phoebe” in her name already identifies her with the chaste goddess. “O Goddesse (for such I thee take to bee),” says Trompart to Belphoebe as he now introduces her to Braggadocchio, whose first reaction at her coming was to run away and hide. Braggadocchio now tries out his own pitch to Belphoebe.
But what are thou, O Lady, which doest raunge
In this wilde forest, where no pleasure is,
And doest not it for ioyous court exchaunge,
Emongst thine equall peres, where happy blis
And all delight does raigne, much more then this?
There thou maist loue, and dearely loued be,
And swim in pleasure, which thou here doest mis;
There maist thou be seene, and best maist see:
The wood is fit for beasts, the court is fitt for thee.
(FQ 2.3.39)
Comus takes up the same argument later in the masque; he tells the Lady
Beauty is Nature’s brag, and must be shown
In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities
Where most may wonder at the workmanship;
It is for homely features to keep home,
They had their name thence.
(Comus 744–48)
The seducer returns to the rhetoric of wonder, the response to the Lady’s beauty, which, as “Nature’s brag,” offers a tip-off to the speech’s Spenserian model. Both passages lie behind Satan’s enjoining Eve to get out more and be seen. Satan and Comus are both aligned with Spenser’s posturing miles gloriosus and his attempt to convince Belphoebe/Elizabeth to leave her rural haunts and come to an erotically licentious court—to the “marshalled feast” (9.37) that the invocation of book 9 has just rejected, the “courts and palaces” (1.497) of book 1 where the lustful Belial reigns, and, most pointedly, the “court amours” that book 4 directly opposes to the homely marriage of Adam and Eve in Eden.
court amours
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenade, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted by disdain.
(4.767–70)
The court is the place to be seen, Braggadocchio and Comus insist, and the “occhio” in the former’s name helps make the point. It is the home of superficial, rather than true, nobility and virtue, and therefore a fitting milieu for Spenser’s cowardly faux knight.
Court society is both itself theatrical and the place of eroticized theatrical performances—the Hollywood analogy is apt enough. Comus addresses a Lady who is in fact being shown off in the courtly masque in which she is participating, and to that extent seems already to have won much of his point. Satan invites Eve to enter such a society of publicity as its queen and goddess—Satan will shortly address her as “Empress” (9.568; 9.626), “Sovereign of creatures, universal dame” (9.612), “Queen of this universe” (9.684)—where she will be “adored and served / By angels numberless, thy daily train.” Milton ironically inverts his Spenserian model that tells of a queen who in real life as Elizabeth I was already surrounded by the kind of splendid court that the Faerie Queene has satirized in the court of Lucifera in book 1 (FQ 1.4) and will satirize again four cantos later in its bourgeois replication around Mammon’s daughter, Philotime (2.7)—a queen who nonetheless allegorically, that is, spiritually, resides in the lonely woods and cultivates her chastity.13 Satan, to the contrary, tempts the sylvan Eve to aspire to royalty, transferring to her his own monarchical ambition: here, too, desire for worldly monarchy motivates a Fall. Spenser’s Belphoebe appears to be about to disparage the goings-on “In Princes court,” when Braggadocchio cuts short their colloquy by attempting to embrace her.
Spenser’s episode not only adapts Homeric-Virgilian precedents but also the medieval subgenre of the pastourelle, where a knight meets and engages a country girl in a dialogue that ends, alternatively, with her acquiescence to his sexual invitation, her rejection and repulse of his advances, often with a witty deflation, or with the knight’s raping her by force.14 Milton read a condensed example of the last version in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, which opens when one of King Arthur’s knights “saugh a mayde walkinge him biforn, / Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed, / By verray force he rafte hire maydenheed,” and thence must be educated in the true meaning of nobility (“gentillesse”) and not to disdain poverty—as Milton comments in two different entries in his commonplace book (CPW 1:472, 1:416). Milton has in fact framed the scene of the temptation with a modernized version of the pastourelle in the simile that describes Satan’s first view of Eve in her flowery plat.
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight.
(9.445–54)
Spenser’s Braggadocchio was already an impostor knight, a degraded courtier, and here the chivalry that is dead—both historically and in the character of Satan—is cast out of the genre, in favor of a Londoner’s typical outing into the countryside. The story is updated for the modern bourgeois, for whom the city with its crowds and stench may be a living hell and the suburbs an Eden.15 The pastourelle’s class-inflected mix of sexual suspense and danger remains, but now it has become the story—itself to be worn-out in succeeding centuries—of the city slicker and the farmer’s daughter. After comparing Eve to Delia-Artemis, Milton’s narrator seems to correct himself: “Though not as she with bow and quiver armed / But with such gardening tools as art yet rude, / Guiltless of fire had formed” (9.390–92), and there is some pathos in Eve’s being an unarmed rustic as she goes to be found by Satan. Spenser’s Belphoebe had warded off Braggadocchio with her huntress’s spear and fled into the woods, leaving her suitor-rapist to complain: “that Ladie should agayne / Depart to woods vntoucht, and leaue so proud disdayne” (FQ 2.3.43.8–9). “Best quitted with disdain”: but Eve will succumb to Satan’s assault on her spiritual purity—“much less arm / Thy looks, the heaven of mildness, with disdain,” the serpent pleads with courtly accent—that makes Eve, wedded matron though she may be, virginal like the country maid in the simile.
Satan’s inviting Eve to appear before a heavenly audience ironically reworks, and thereby criticizes, Eve’s own terms in the Separation Scene: it suggests how the wish to prove one’s faith and “To stand approved in sight of God” like the loyal Abdiel can turn too easily into a narcissistic quest for approval. To be seen by all eyes is an invitation to worldly fame, and a substitution for that celestial recognition earlier accorded Abdiel:
They led him high applauded, and present
Before the seat supreme; from whence a voice
From midst a golden cloud thus mild was heard.
Servant of God, well done …
(6.26–29)
The acclamation of Abdiel recalls the exaltation of the Son (5.596–615), and it defines the aspiration to divine recognition and applause of John Milton, for whom Abdiel is a fairly transparent biographical stand-in. The phrase “Servant of God, well done” derives from Matthew 25:21, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” the response of the master to his servant in the parable of the talents, a text that Milton explicitly invokes in his prose and his famous Sonnet 16 on his blindness, where he is bent on offering his true account to his maker, only to be reminded that he need do nothing more than stand and wait.16 The Jesus of Paradise Regained (PR) takes up the issue, invoking the example of Job:
This is true glory and renown, when God,
Looking on the earth, with approbation marks
The just man, and divulges him through heaven
To all his angels, who with true applause
Recount his praises; thus he did to Job,
When to extend his fame through heaven and earth,
As thou to thy reproach may’st well remember,
He asked thee, Hast thou seen my servant Job?
Famous he was in heaven, on earth less known;
Where glory is false glory.
(PR 3.60–69)
More heavenly applause: accorded here to the man “who dares be singularly good” (PR 3.57), like the single Abdiel, and whom God in return singles out for praise. Jesus distinguishes this true heavenly glory from the worldly fame that Satan is tempting him to attain, but the distinction, we shall see below, is unstable: Job may be less famous on earth than in heaven, but his fame has been extended in heaven and on earth, nonetheless.
Milton had already explored in his writings prior to Paradise Lost this uneasy relationship of God’s approbation and fame in the eyes of men, specifically the fame that Milton hoped for his own poetry. Eve’s declaration of her spiritual ambition and desire for divine recognition in the Separation Scene hearkens back not only to Areopagitica but to Lycidas as well. Adam tells Eve that he is trying to avoid Satan’s affronting or dishonoring her by the act of temptation, and adds that he is made stronger when she is looking on.
Why should not thou like sense within thee feel
When I am present, and thy trial choose
With me, best witness of thy virtue tried.
(9.315–17)
We should do this together, Adam argues, but Eve claims a still better witness than her husband, and argues that the devil’s assault provides them with a spiritual opportunity:
Who rather double honour gain
From his surmise proved false, find peace within,
Favour from heaven, our witness from the event.
(9.332–34)
Like a very good student of the kind that John Milton undoubtedly was, Eve wants to be tested, and she chooses God as her witness and as the giver of his extra credit—redoubled honor and favor. So Phoebus assured the speaker of Lycidas that God, the “perfect witness,” was looking on and prepared to reward him.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.
(Lycidas 78–84)
The words of Phoebus correct the pastoral speaker’s anxious worry that he might suffer an early death like that of Lycidas before he could fulfill his poetic career; the young Milton had been preparing for this career and its attendant fame—“That last infirmity of noble mind” (71)—by his studies at his father’s house at Horton (“the homely slighted shepherd’s trade”), and his erotic self-denial: no Amaryllis or Neaera for him.
Phoebus also corrects the tradition of pastoral elegy in which Milton is writing, where the apotheosis of the dead shepherd is a figure for the earthly fame that the poem itself is conferring on him.17 Fame is reidentified as the apocalyptic (“pronounces lastly”) judgment of salvation that will place the speaker along with Lycidas, in the Christian afterlife, and we might presume that the deeds such Protestant fame rewards are acts of faith above good works. But alongside this orthodox sense there lingers the idea that the perfect witness of heaven extends to literary judgment as well, that God would acknowledge the poetic works that the speaker would have written should he, like Lycidas, not live to accomplish them. “Servant of God, well done”: your use of your talent is rewarded. Each individual receives a quota of divine recognition for specific deeds that may be qualitatively different, but nonetheless hard to distinguish from worldly fame, leaving a residue in the elegy that is similar to the double placement of Lycidas, not only in heaven among the solemn troops and sweet societies of heavenly saints but also as “genius of the shore,” still exerting a personal presence on earth.
Just how far Milton’s imagination could confuse the rewards of virtue in the Christian heaven with the personal fame won by poetry appears in the striking ending of his Latin poem, Mansus (1639), addressed to the Neapolitan patron Giovanni Battista Manso whom Milton had met in Italy. Mansus is in dialogue with both Lycidas, published a year earlier, and with Milton’s second great pastoral elegy, Epitaphium Damonis, composed in Latin later in 1639 to mourn the death of his great friend Charles Diodati. In Mansus the awarding of heavenly approval described in Lycidas has been transferred from God to Milton himself. He imagines himself, following a career as an epic poet singing the deeds of King Arthur and—after a distinguished earthly funeral—in his heavenly home.
Tum quoque, si qua fides, si praemia certa bonorum,
Ipse ego caelicolum semotus in aethera divum,
Quo labor et mens pura vehunt, atque ignea virtus
Secreti haec aliqua mundi de parte videbo
(Quantum fata sinunt) et tota mente serenum
Ridens purpureo suffundar lumine vultus
Et simul aethereo plaudam mihi laetus Olympo.
(Mansus 94–100)
[Then, too, if there is such a thing as faith, and assured rewards for the good, I myself, far away in the ethereal realm of the heaven-dwelling gods, conveyed thither by labor and a pure mind and fiery virtue, will from some part of that secret world look down (as much as the Fates allow) on these things on earth, and smiling with my whole mind, my face suffused with a rosy light, I will happily applaud myself on heavenly Olympus.]
So Mansus concludes. It is an odd passage, possibly more revealing than the poet is ready to admit. Unlike Lycidas and Damon-Diodati, who partake in the sweet societies and, in the latter’s case, festive orgies of heaven, Milton imagines himself in some place in heaven that is set apart (semotus) and solitary (secreti). In this literally splendid isolation, he will be his own best witness. God hardly enters the picture. The pure eyes of the all-judging Jove of Lycidas are replaced by the poet’s own pure mind and fiery virtue, which seem to raise him on his own to heaven. It is such burning virtue (ardens … virtus), which, the sibyl announces to Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid, raises a very few, those loved by just Jupiter, out of the realm of the underworld to the heavens (Aen. 6.129–31), here too, a classical, euhemerist figure for the fame that will survive death. Milton’s self-apotheosis blurs fame and things down on earth (haec) with celestial beatitude. Such confusion may result from the strict classical vocabulary of the Mansus, the common ground that Milton found to write to his Catholic addressee—though the play on the Virgilian tag si qua fides (Aen. 3.434, 6.459) and labor nonetheless allow him to present a version of Christian faith and works. But the passage also invokes the optimism and spiritual agency that ends Comus, “Love Virtue, she alone is free, / She can teach ye how to climb / Higher than the sphery chime” (1017–19), and is only partly qualified by the subjunctive acknowledgment of grace that follows: “Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her.”18 In the Mansus, this virtue looks upon and applauds itself. Milton seems aware here that God’s apocalyptic witness and reward of fame imagined by Lycidas—or the rewards of Abdiel and Job later depicted in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, “high applauded” in heaven and attested by divine proclamation—are not available in this world, equally aware that the substitute for such longed-for divine recognition is inevitably a form of self-approval: perhaps not so unlike the “answering looks / Of sympathy and love” (4.464–65) that please Eve from her reflection in the pool.19
It is Satan who redescribes Eve’s similarly high spiritual ambition and thereby discloses the element of human autonomy and self-regard that the Mansus suggests may have been potentially present all along in Milton’s semi-Pelagian wish for a spiritual purity able to withstand temptation (and to write great poetry). The serpent transforms Eve’s seeking to assay her virtue and be approved and witnessed by God into a more general, heroic quest—God should, Satan perversely argues, “praise / Rather your dauntless virtue” (9.693–94)—to become the (divinized) object of a universal regard: “Thee all living things gaze on.” So the models behind Satan, Spenser’s Braggadocchio and Milton’s own Comus, had respectively promised Belphoebe and the Lady. The word “gaze” clusters six times in the scene of Eve’s temptation. The serpent, who has first approached Eve, “as in gaze admiring,” and who expresses his desire to “gaze / Insatiate” (9.535–36), “to come / And gaze” (9.610–11) on her, claims to transfer this gaze to her from the tree of the forbidden fruit itself—“I nearer drew to gaze” (9.578)—a tree that is feminized by its breastlike “fair apples” (9.581; 9.585) and as the “Mother of science” (9.680), and which is already in the Genesis account “pleasant to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6). The pattern is deliberate: Milton has used it before in the corresponding scene of the dream that Satan has sent to Eve in book 5, where Eve is first told that all of heaven’s eyes “gaze” on her (5.47), and then sees an angelic figure standing before the forbidden fruit: “on that tree he also gazed” (5.57). It now becomes Eve’s turn in book 9: “Fixed on the fruit she gazed, which to behold / Might tempt alone” (9.735–36); she looks upon a tree that has somehow in Satan’s terms become a double or mirror of herself. Eve is tempted not only to return to the narcissism of the pool of book 4, but also to a further regression to a mother whom she has never had, figured now in the tree and earlier in the womblike cave (4.454) from which that pool issued.20 A similar identification is suggested by means of verbal quibble, when, after eating the fruit, Eve speaks inwardly to herself and addresses the tree at the same time: “Thus to herself she pleasingly began. / O sovereign, virtuous, precious of all trees” (9.794–95). By the end of the scene, she has bowed down to the tree as a substitute for God (9.835–37), an anticipation of Canaanite tree worship (Deut. 12:2; Hosea 4:13; Ezek. 6:13), and like all idolatry, a worship of, or confusion with, the idol-making self. Satan’s terms suggest how the individual’s testing of his or her faith in God, central to the poet’s Protestantism, can devolve into a form of pride, a self-idolatry that here, as elsewhere in Paradise Lost, the blind poet describes as a particularly visual condition, of seeing and wishing to being seen.
Adam’s increasingly exasperated recriminations of Eve in books 9 and 10 after the Fall spell out the moral. “Let none, henceforth seek needless cause to approve / The faith they owe” (9.1140–41). In retrospect, Adam asserts, Eve’s desire to test her faith was a form of overreaching, an unnecessary spiritual ambition and overconfidence that led to her fall. So, in his next exchange, he accuses Eve of having wished “to find / Matter of glorious trial” (9.1176–77): Adam had earlier warned her that “trial will come unsought” (9.366). Ambition to prove her faith has now become a quest for the glory that God might confer on her, and it becomes difficult to distinguish from the pride that Adam will go on reductively to ascribe to Eve in his misogynistic outburst in book 10.
And wandering vanity, when least was safe,
Rejected my forewarning, and disdained
Not to be trusted, longing to be seen
Though by the devil himself …
(10.874–78)
It was Eve’s hurt pride in the first place, Adam asserts, that triggered her arguments, with their echo of Areopagitica, to exercise her lonely virtue, and one can see where that got the both of them. A particularly feminine vanity was the real motive of her desire for divine recognition: not content to have Adam be her witness, she claimed God as her witness, but any onlooker, in fact, would do. You would have thrown yourself at the devil, this outraged husband says. The immediate irony is that Adam has not yet come to the realization (10.1033–35) that the serpent was, in fact, the devil. But Adam is also wrong to ascribe these motives to Eve before her temptation and fall, and he belies the very progression and gradual transformation that has been implied in his mounting indictment of her. He is making her out to be fallen before the Fall, as if Eve had already been infected by Satan’s persuasion before her encounter with him, before, that is, Satan has turned Eve’s (and Milton’s) wish to exercise an individual virtue and faith “sufficient to have stood” into Godless self-sufficiency, her (and Milton’s) longing for God’s approbation into vainglory, and, finally, into self-regard.
This account cannot adequately explain Eve’s fall, whose causes Milton keeps many and irreducible. Her soliloquy before she eats the forbidden fruit does not indicate how much force Satan’s temptation to promote her to be queen of heaven and the cynosure of all eyes may have had with her; he has succeeded in making her feel her “want” (9.755) in her present condition of incomplete knowledge, to distrust God, and to debate her freedom. Only after she eats do Satan’s arguments come flooding back: “nor was godhead from her thought” (9.790). At that point the divine witness that Eve had earlier sought has ironically changed for her into the “continual watch” of “Our great forbidder,” which she seeks to avoid, together “with all his spies” (9.814–15): after the Fall, both Adam and Eve will know that they are naked and wish to hide from God and each other. The quest for fame has turned into the discovery of shame. Nonetheless, the process of temptation the poem depicts, and that Adam’s accusations of his wife progressively rechart, indicates how deeply Eve’s fall is implicated in a larger, repeated Miltonic scenario of individual virtue triumphant over temptation and rewarded by divine approval. Eve fails where Abdiel in Paradise Lost, where earlier in Milton’s writings the Lady of Comus and the personified Virtue of Areopagitica, where later the Jesus of Paradise Regained and his model Job succeed; and, for all that, her fall retains something of their heroism, of purity that knows itself only through trial and, in her case, knows itself all too well in its own loss.
When Adam accuses Eve of having sought “matter of glorious trial,” he echoes her own words, “O glorious trial of exceeding love” (9.961), with which Eve had admired—and egged on—his own decision to fall beside her, an act that contained its own heroism. The phrase also echoes the Son’s words, “Matter to me of glory” (5.738), with which he characterizes Satan’s rebellion as the occasion for his own glorification: “thou always seek’st / To glorify thy Son, I always thee,” he declares to the Father in the corresponding passage in book 6 (724–25), after the Father has “on his Son with rays direct / Shone full” (6.719–20), the poem’s highest depiction of divine recognition.21 The Son, the divine hero of Paradise Lost, will reappear as the human hero Jesus of Paradise Regained, resisting allurements by Satan that, as the next section of this chapter will discuss, resemble the temptation of Eve rather than the choice of Adam in the earlier epic. In so doing, this Jesus carries out Milton’s wish, which had gone so wrong in Eve’s case—the wish that virtue and purity be sufficient to withstand trial and earn God’s approval. Jesus, the ideal man/God, might seem to be the exception that proves the rule that Eve’s failure, and the original sin that had resulted from it, have imposed on humanity. But in the Miltonic imagination and career, the opposite—that Eve is the exception who reaffirms the rightness of the wish—may be closer to the mark.
The Second Adam as Second Eve
In Paradise Regained, the act of divine approval and recognition begins the action of the poem. At the baptizing of Jesus by John the Baptist at the Jordan, the skies open, the likeness of a dove appeared—“what’er it meant” (1.83), Satan later wryly comments about the Holy Spirit, which Milton himself did not accept as a person of the Trinity—“while the Father’s voice / From heaven pronounced him his beloved Son” (PR 1.32–33). The scene is repeatedly, almost obsessively recalled over the course of Paradise Regained by Satan to the demonic council (1.81–85), by Jesus himself in his meditations (1.280–86), by Satan again to Jesus (1.327–30), where Satan significantly already links it to “fame” (1.334), by the bereft disciples (2.50–52) and Mary (2.83–85), and by Satan still again near the poem’s end (4.510–13). Similarly, the first chronological action of Paradise Lost is the exaltation of the Son, and in both poems the preapproved Son of God must live up to his advanced billing, and in both cases the conclusion is foregone. In Paradise Regained, the divine Father’s plan to “exercise” Jesus in the wilderness (1.156)—like the Milton of Areopagitica, he cannot praise a virtue that is unexercised—is seconded by the human mother Mary, who urges her son to let his thoughts “soar / To what highth sacred virtue and true worth / Can raise them” (1.230–32). She sees to it that Jesus’s thoughts and ambition are nothing less than Messianic, to “sit on David’s throne” (1.240), a kingdom without end.
Satan aims in Paradise Regained, as he had with Eve in Paradise Lost, to turn such high aspirations into self-serving ones: above all, to substitute the quest of worldly fame and glory for Jesus’s self-sacrificing mission—or, even more insidiously, to reveal fame and glory to be the real motives of that mission. Jesus may be the new Adam and new Israel in the typological scheme of Milton’s brief epic, but it is the temptation of Eve in the predecessor poem that Satan’s persuasion repeatedly imitates and quite explicitly invokes.22
An example of how Jesus is associated with Eve rather than with Adam is the banquet temptation in book 2 that, with the corresponding Athens temptation and storm scene in book 4, are Milton’s primary additions to his gospel sources. The temptation begins, in fact, with Belial urging the devils to “Set women in his eye” (2.153), as if Jesus were indeed the new Adam and subject to the uxoriousness that contributed to Adam’s falling beside Eve and that Belial goes on to typify in Solomon bowing before the gods of his wives (2.169–71). Satan rejects the idea out of hand, and argues that Jesus is made of sterner stuff, unlike the sensualist Belial himself.
Have we not seen, or by relation heard,
In courts and regal chambers how thou lurk’st
In wood or grove by mossy fountain-side,
In valley or green meadow to waylay
Some beauty rare, Calisto, Clymene,
Daphne, or Semele, Antiopa,
Or Amymone, Syrinx, many more
Too long, then lay’st thy scapes on names adored,
Apollo, Neptune, Jupiter, or Pan,
Satyr, or Faun, or Sylvan?
(PR 2.182–91)
The passage changes the demonic menace from women set before Jesus’s eyes to a threat to women as objects of potential rape. Here are pagan, demonic versions of the very virgin birth that produced the Son of God, discussed by Mary herself only a hundred verses earlier, a series of offspring of rape passed off as children of gods who are themselves as much bestial hybrids (satyr, faun, sylvan) as deities—Jupiter disguised himself as a satyr to pursue Antiopa; Pan fits somewhere in between as his position at the end of the verse and the ambiguity of “or” suggest. Belial’s haunt in the courts and regal chambers—so he is also described in Paradise Lost: “In courts and palaces he also reigns / And in luxurious cities” (PL 1.497–98)—seems to lend these encounters something of the shape of the pastourelle that Milton invokes for Satan’s approach to Eve, and when Satan approaches Jesus at the banquet, “As one in city, or court, or palace bred” (PR 2.300), we hear an echo of that passage, “As one who long in populous city pent” (PL 9.445). Jesus is placed in the feminized position of Eve before a seductive seducer, like the Lady of Comus in her courtly masque.
The banquet temptation takes the form of such a masque. Satan has told Belial that a woman would fail to move the severely virtuous Jesus, even should she
As sitting queen adored on beauty’s throne
Descend with all her winning charms begirt
To enamour, as the zone of Venus once
Wrought that effect on Jove, so fables tell.
(PR 2.212–15)
Here again, the initial idea is that Jesus will not be fondly overcome with female charms as a second Adam. The model of Jupiter’s and Juno’s sexual dalliance in Iliad 14, during which Juno wore the irresistible girdle (“zone”) she has borrowed from Venus, had been twice invoked to describe the lovemaking of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, both in their sanctified marriage bed before the Fall in book 4 (697–702) and in their lascivious coupling after the Fall in book 9 (1029–42).23 The chaste Jesus will not repeat Adam’s sexual love for his wife, holy or unholy. But the image suggests a throned figure descending at a masque, and it seems to cue Satan into action. He gathers a troupe of fellow spirit-actors “To be at hand, and at his beck appear, / If cause were to unfold some active scene / Of various persons each to know his part” (PR 2.238–40). Satan puts on another version of the masque presented at Ludlow Castle in the ensuing banquet in a “woody scene” (2.294) that is pointedly “Not rustic as before” (2.299), but urbane and courtly, and the final vanishing of the banqueting table (2.401–403) smacks not only of The Tempest (3.3.183), but of the magical scene changes of the court masque to which Shakespeare’s play is itself indebted. Satan/Milton has recourse to the same models that had formed the backdrop of the temptation of Eve in Paradise Lost. The devil invokes the attempted seduction of the Lady in Comus, and behind it, of Spenser’s Mammon episode; the banquet will be immediately followed by Satan’s Mammon-like offer to Jesus of the riches of the world: “Get riches first, get wealth and treasures heap” (2.427; cf. FQ 2.7.9–66). Comus’s command, “Nay lady sit” (658) to the Lady already seated in an enchanted chair—which itself recalls Mammon’s urging Guyon, “Why takest not of that same fruite of gold, / Ne sittest downe on that same siluer stoole” (FQ 2.7.63.7–8)—is repeated three times by Satan in Paradise Regained to Jesus: “only deign to sit and eat” (2.336), “What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?” (2.368) “Sit down and eat” (2.377). The seated immobility of the Lady in Comus is the common aim and imagistic thread of all of Satan’s temptations in Paradise Regained, to turn “David’s throne” into a paralyzing earthly end in itself, whether it be “beauty’s throne,” a seat at the banqueting table, “the seats of mightiest monarchs” (3.262), the “two thrones” (4.85) of Parthia and Rome, or “Moses’ chair” (4.219) in the learning temptation of Athens. (The sightless, incapacitated Milton would have found himself sitting for long stretches, nearly in the position of the Lady: the “sedentary numbness” that the blind Samson fears will be his fate in Samson Agonistes.)24 Jesus’s ability figuratively to stand—“stoodst” (4.420)—and sit—“thou / Satst” (4.425)—simultaneously in the storm scene of book 4 anticipates his even more difficult test to stand on the pinnacle of the temple at the book’s end: to be active in apparent passivity.
“Alas how simple, to these cates compared, / Was that crude apple that diverted Eve!” (2.348–49), the narrator comments. To note the reappearance of the Comus/Mammon motifs that link the banquet temptation to the temptation of Eve in Paradise Lost may belabor a point that Paradise Regained itself spells out. The brief epic continues explicitly to link Jesus with Eve after Satan’s failure to interest Jesus in the throne of Parthia, the first of the temptations of the kingdoms:
the persuasive rhetoric
That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,
So little here, nay lost; but Eve was Eve,
This far his over-match …
(PR 4.4–7)
Jesus himself evokes the parallel after Rome has been added to the offer and Satan calls on Jesus to fall down and worship him, “this attempt bolder than that on Eve / And more blasphemous” (4.180–81). That Satan is repeating himself and restaging his earlier temptation of Eve does explain how the masquelike banquet is connected to the ensuing temptation of the kingdoms. In the first Satan brings city, court, and palace into the wilderness; in the second he brings Jesus, in turn, to them. As he had asked of the beautiful Eve in her “wild enclosure,” Satan asks the talented Jesus what he is doing in the desert.
These godlike virtues wherefore does thou hide?
Affecting private life, or more obscure
In savage wilderness, wherefore deprive
All earth her wonder at thy acts, thyself
The fame and glory …?
(PR 3.21–25)
Eve, Satan had told her in Paradise Lost, was the sole wonder of the world—“Wonder not, sovereign mistress, if perhaps / Thou canst, who art sole wonder”—and now he similarly urges Jesus to get out of the wilderness and be wondered at. The devil offers Jesus the same temptation to earthly fame—to be seen and admired by other creatures instead of being approved in the sight of God—that he had dangled before Eve; so in the later temptation of classical learning in Athens, he will enjoin Jesus to “Be famous then / By wisdom” (PR 4.221–22).
The place for such fame, Satan had suggested to Eve, Comus to the Lady, and Spenser’s Braggadocchio to Belphoebe, is a royal court. With the temptation of the kingdoms, Satan offers a similar visit to the court to Jesus, but under the guise of an educational field trip. Jesus will apparently go to see rather than be seen, as the mountaintop perspective and the mentions of telescope (4.42) and microscope (4.57) insist.
The world thou hast not seen, much less her glory,
Empires and monarchs, and their radiant courts,
Best school of best experience, quickest in sight
In all things that to greatest actions lead.
The wisest, unexperienced, will be ever
Timorous and loth, with novice modesty,
(As he who seeking asses found a kingdom)
Irresolute, unhardy, unadventurous:
But I will bring thee where thou soon shalt quit
Those rudiments, and see before thine eyes
The monarchies of the earth, their pomp and state,
Sufficient introduction to inform
Thee, of thyself so apt, in regal arts,
And regal mysteries; that thou may’st know
How best their opposition to withstand.
(PR 3.236–50)
Satan presents the kingdoms temptation as a course in worldliness for the raw beginner Jesus. With his “novice modesty,” Satan suggests, Jesus is like the personified Virtue of Areopagitica, cloistered and ignorant of the world. God’s plan for Jesus was “To exercise him in the wilderness” (1.156) as a new Israel repeating the Exodus wandering. Satan’s strategy is to get Jesus out of the wilderness into a false, worldly Promised Land: the vision of the kingdoms is a kind of Pisgah view. Without Satan’s “introduction,” which both suggests admission to a royal court that would make the devil his sponsor and an introductory course of study that picks up the idea that such courts are a kind of school (and so links the temptation of the kingdoms to the ensuing temptation of learning in Athens), Jesus will never venture out of his remote, politically and culturally insignificant Palestine. He will be “Timorous and loth,” a phrase that recalls the “Timorous and slothful” Belial of book 2 of Paradise Lost (2.117), terms that echo in turn, as we noted in chapter 2, the reproaches—“Timorous,” “slothful”—that Milton imagines for himself had he not engaged in religious controversy in The Reason of Church Government, had he not contributed “those few talents which God at present had lent me” (CPW 1:804–5).25 Satan presents another version of his appeal to zeal—urging Jesus to get moving and show his stuff—that Jesus has just rejected (PR 3.171–202), and at the end of the speech he cunningly echoes the arguments of Areopagitica that Virtue must know in order to withstand her adversary. The guileful double meaning lies in Satan’s suggestion that Jesus might learn how to resist the kings of the world by becoming such a king himself. He shows him the opposing monarchies of Parthia and Rome and asks him to choose one or the other; these are the “Means” to David’s throne that Jesus goes on to reject (4.152). By the end of the mountain temptations, the disgusted Satan is willing to return Jesus to the wilderness: “What dost thou in this world?” (4.372).
The likenesses of the temptations to the temptation of Eve continue. The Athens temptation is to knowledge: the groves of academe, with their “studious walks and shades” (4.243), recall “the shade / High roofed and walks beneath” (2.292–93) of the earlier banquet temptation, and both recall the tree of knowledge and forbidden fruit in Eden. The temple temptation is to godhead itself. Jesus overcomes them in Eve’s place, and in the wake of Jesus’s angry response, “Get thee behind me” (4.193) to the offer of the kingdoms, the frightened Satan tries to absolve his own part as tempter:
The trial hath endamaged thee no way
Rather more honour left and more esteem;
Me naught advantaged, missing what I aimed.
(PR 4.206–8)
The devil’s conclusion echoes what the overconfident Eve had predicted for herself, answering Adam’s objection that the very act of being tempted would dishonor her, in the Separation Scene in book 9.26
only our foe
Tempting affronts us with his foul esteem
Of our integrity: his foul esteem
Sticks no dishonour on our front, but turns
Foul on himself; then wherefore shunned or feared
By us? Who rather double honour gain
From his surmise proved false, find peace within,
Favour from heaven, our witness from the event.
And what is faith, love, virtue unassayed
Alone, without exterior help sustained?
(PL 9.327–36)
Jesus, Satan tells him, has only gained honor and esteem from the trials he has undergone. Such honor and esteem won by the individual may still contain an element of vainglory: I have helped to make you famous, the devil insinuates even as he exculpates himself. Satan had diverted Eve’s spiritual ambition, the honor and favor she sought from God’s witness, into a self-seeking, worldly desire for recognition. Jesus has avoided this trap, dismissing earthly fame: “Yet if for fame and glory aught be done … / The deed becomes unpraised, the man at least, / And loses, though but verbal his reward” (PR 3.100–104).
But Jesus and his poet-creator at the same time find a special dispensation that might resolve the either/or of finding approval in the eyes of God and fame in the mouths of men: a way to have one’s forbidden fruit and not to eat it too.
Yet so much bounty is in God, such grace,
That who advance his glory, not their own,
Them he himself to glory will advance.
(PR 3.142–44)
The individual who acts selflessly for the glory of God will be granted glory in turn.27 So Eve had correctly believed that God would acknowledge her spiritual victory, a double honor—had she succeeded. Insofar as this glory cited by Jesus apparently includes a divinely sanctioned fame on earth, it seems more Miltonic than Christian, an attempt to reconcile the contradictory impulses for divine and human recognition that risk confusion in Milton’s poetry and whose confusion prompted Eve’s fall. Jesus’s words rework famous passages in the Gospel of John.28 Jesus has just a few lines earlier disowned personal glory, “I seek not mine, but his / Who sent me” (PR 3.106–7), echoing his future sayings in John 8:50 and John 7:18, and his prayer in John’s account of the Last Supper “I have glorified thee on earth … And now glorifie me, thou Father, with thine owne self, with the glory which I had with thee before the worlde was” (17:4–5; Geneva Bible), a passage we have seen the Son echo to the Father during the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost: “thou always seeks’t / To glorifie thy Son, I always thee” (6.724–25). Milton’s hopes for a return on the glorification of God also rest on the much-cited passage of 1 Samuel 2:30: “for them that honour me, I wil honour” (Geneva). For the Calvinist editors of the Geneva Bible, the Samuel passage seemed to grant liberty to the individual will and elicited a nervous gloss and qualification: “God’s promises are onely effectual to suche as he giveth constancie vnto, to feare and obey him.” In On Christian Doctrine, Milton cites the 1 Samuel passage to confirm the contrary, that “men have freedom of action” (CPW 6:155). The Geneva gloss makes clear, however, that the honor in question is salvation itself, and the constancy that God provides is the “perseverance,” the binding, irresistible grace that will see the believer through to a new glorious life in heaven. So, too, the Johannine Jesus seemingly aspires to a heavenly glory that is not only outside but prior to the world. But Milton wants more, and Jesus’s opposition of unworldly and worldly glory is disrupted by his evocation once again of the exemplary good man, Job, whom God allowed Satan to tempt in order “to extend his fame through heaven and earth” (3.65), especially on earth, where he was “less known” (3.68):
I mention still
Him whom thy wrongs with saintly patience borne,
Made famous in a land and times obscure,
Who names not now with honour patient Job?
(PR 3.92–95)
Job won applause among the angels (3.63), but now he enjoys earthly fame and honor as well, the hero of his own book of the Bible. Milton attributes this honor from God as a gift of grace, an Arminian prevenient grace that requires individual virtue to cooperate with it in order to earn the ultimate reward in heaven, but also, as something less doctrinally normative, a terrestrial bonus of renown for being “singularly good” (3.57). Like Eve, Jesus also thinks of virtue alone, without exterior help. At the very end of Paradise Regained, such help finally comes as the angels lift Jesus from the uneasy station he has maintained on top of the temple pinnacle—“Or if Virtue feeble were / Heaven itself would stoop to her,” in the words of Comus—feast him, and honor his divinity with hymns: “Hail, Son of the Most High” (4.633). The poem’s initial act of divine recognition at the baptism of Jesus exponentially amplifies at its end, as the gratification that has been deferred through its course now gets full rein. Such glorification is not exclusively heavenly. The angels’ song looks back to the hymn in book 8 of the Aeneid to Hercules, another divine son raised to divinity—“salue, uera Iouis proles, decus addite diuis” (Aen. 8.301)—with whom Christ was conventionally paralleled and to whom, battling with the earthborn Antaeus, Jesus has just been compared in simile (4.563–68).29 The angels are making Jesus a new object of earthly cult, superseding pagan altars and oracles. From his Palestinian backwater, Jesus has become, until the advent of the Beatles, the most famous man on earth. So, too, his model Job: “Made famous in a land and times obscure; / Who names not now with honour patient Job?” And so, John Milton, writing in far-off, obscure England and in “our native language” (4.333) of modern rather than classical times, has glorified God in Paradise Lost and expects his own glorious reward as Christian and epic poet. One wish is fulfilled, and then some.
Adam’s Choice: “One flesh”
James Nohrnberg has correlated the temptations of Paradise Regained to Milton’s biography: anti-Roman Parthia to his writings on church reform in the 1640s, bureaucratic Rome to his work as Latin secretary and on affairs of state during the Protectorate, learned Athens to his classical scholarship and literary ambition. From the retrospect of Paradise Regained, all of these worldly engagements contained temptations that might have—but did not ultimately—distract Milton-Jesus from his true mission: the writing of Paradise Lost. The great epic is Milton’s version of the secret that Jesus has withheld and then revealed on the temple pinnacle to Satan, “smitten with amazement” (4.562) at the end of Paradise Regained, just as it is Milton’s version of the trial of strength that Samson displays, “As with amaze shall strike all who behold” (1645), at the conclusion of Samson Agonistes. Both of the 1671 poems are in some sense about how Paradise Lost came into being in spite of the contingencies of Milton’s life. The contingencies overcome in Samson Agonistes are different in kind: inimical marriage, political defeat and captivity, the affliction of blindness. As he sets out on his mission to deliver humanity, the virginal Jesus of Paradise Regained abstains from worldly impurity to the point of appearing uncharitable. He refuses when Satan first asks him, in an addition to the accounts of the temptation in Matthew (4:2) and Luke (5:3), to change stones into bread not only for his own hunger but also for the poor: “So shalt thou save thyself and us relieve / With food, whereof we wretched seldom taste” (1.344–45). Similarly, he refuses to rescue the ten lost tribes of Israel (3.414–32) or to restore Roman republicanism (4.131–45), both figures for the fallen English Commonwealth. But Samson would deliver both himself and Israel, and to do so he must engage with the world. The virtue of Jesus still remains partly in the cloister and wilderness. Samson, “Against his vow of strictest purity” (319), gets married.
In Paradise Lost Adam asks God to make him a wife. As opposed to the Miltonic wish or imperative to be approved “single” by God, which Abdiel fulfills (6.30) and to which Eve aspires (9.339), Adam argues with his Creator that the “single imperfection” of the human being is the basis for marriage: so he recalls to Raphael in book 8.
But man by number is to manifest
His single imperfection, and beget
Like of his like, his image multiplied,
In unity defective, which requires
Collateral love, and dearest amity.
Thou in thy secrecy although alone,
Best with thyself accompanied, seek’st not
Social communication, yet so pleased,
Canst raise thy creature to what highth thou wilt
Of union or communion, deified;
I by conversing cannot these erect
From prone, nor in their ways complacence find.
(8.422–33)
“In unity defective”: the other side of the aspiration to spiritual self-sufficiency is a sense of human incompleteness and Adam’s desire for a “like” to “solace his defects” (8.419), the wish for “Social communication” and conversation that Adam cannot find with the prone animals. The ensuing creation of Eve from Adam’s side seems to be a punning literalization of the “Collateral love and dearest amity” that is required of a human species that will reproduce itself. A similar literalization inheres in the marriage formula of Genesis 2:23–24, “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” that Eve recalls Adam paraphrasing at their first meeting:
Whom fly’st thou? Whom thou fly’st, of him thou art,
His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart
Substantial life, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my soul I seek thee …
(4.482–87)
Adam is the first and only husband whose wife is literally made of his own flesh, but he already expands the idea by asking Eve to return to his side in collateral love and as an “individual solace.” The adjective “individual” denotes the indivisibility of their relationship, but the phrase equally suggests, according to more modern usage already present in Milton’s writing, that Eve is to be a solace just for Adam as an individual and that she is herself an individual, separate being, a part of his soul that is also apart from him.30 Adam subsequently repeats the terms of this passage that add “heart” and “soul” to the Genesis formula in his recollection of the meeting to Raphael, “And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul” (8.499). After Eve falls, the force of his love causes Adam to stay by her side: he restates the formula at the end of his internal monologue, in which he resolves to fall with Eve, and again at the end of his vocal declaration of his choice to her.
yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
(9.912–16)
Our state cannot be severed, we are one,
One flesh; to lose thee were to lose my self.
(9.958–59)
“Not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm” (9.998–99), remarks the censorious narrator.31 Adam has left “soul” out of these inner and outward speeches. Given his admission to Raphael one book earlier of the “Commotion strange” that Eve arouses in him, critics have suggested that Adam may be taking the figure of “one flesh” too literally and carnally; Milton complicates his hero’s motives.32 But Eve quickly supplies the missing terms in her response “And gladly of our union hear thee speak, / One heart, one soul in both” (9.966–67). In his silent soliloquy, moreover, Adam has himself stated that he cannot live without Eve’s “sweet converse and love so dearly joined / To live again in these wild woods forlorn” (9.909–10), and thus restated both Milton’s assertion in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that “in Gods intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage” (CPW 2:246) and his own assertion of that idea in his half-abashed reply to Raphael that he loves Eve above all for “her words and actions mixed with love / And sweet compliance” (8.602–3)—the repetition of “sweet,” we shall see below, is part of a larger pattern.
“One flesh” is a figure—rather than a literal state—both in Paradise Lost and in Milton’s other writings for human marriage that both participates in and is itself a figure for an expanding body of love and community, of which Raphael, the “sociable spirit” (5.221) is himself an embodiment, the spirit of sociability. From its first enunciation in the narrator’s praise—“Hail wedded love”—marriage is both the model and the foundation that first makes known “Relations dear, and all the charities / Of father, son, and brother” (4.756–57). In the exchange in which Adam asks God for a mate, cited shortly above, marriage is a human equivalent of—if also, importantly, an alternative to—the “union or communion” (8.431) to which God can raise his creatures: in effect it is an equivalent of the very conversation that Adam is having with God at that moment and of the very conversation with Raphael in which he now reports it. It is the equivalent, too, of the communion that he, Eve, and Raphael share over their luncheon, or love feast, in Eden.
In the divorce tract Tetrachordon, Milton recalls Paul’s own application in Ephesians 5:30–32 of the “one flesh” of human marriage to Christ’s love for the Church, which is his body and which is similarly one in its unity.
Why did Moses then set down thir uniting into one flesh? And I again ask, why the Gospel so oft repeats the eating of our Saviours flesh, the drinking of his blood? That wee are one body with him, the members of his body, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone. Ephes. 5 (CPW 2:606; emphasis in original)
We are one body in marriage, Milton argues, in much the same way that we are with Christ in his Church, particularly in the communion that is symbolized by the Lord’s Supper, a sacrament, he asserts in De Doctrina Christiana (1.28), that does not require a minister to perform it, nor is necessary to salvation (6:552–60). He implies here that a too literal reading of marriage as the indissoluble union of two bodies (a physical impossibility, too) would be the equivalent of a literal, that is, Catholic reading of the Lord’s Supper as a real uniting with the physical body of Christ: both marriage and communion with God are spiritual unions that have no meaning without “love and peace” (2:606), and the first is the token for the second. So, conversely in book 1, chapter 24 of De Doctrina Christiana, titled “Of Union and Communion with Christ and His Members, also of the Mystic or Invisible Church” (De Unione et communione cum Christo eiusque membris, ubi de ecclesia mystica sive invisibili), Milton notes that “Christ’s love for this invisible and immaculate church of his is figured by the love of husband for wife” (CPW 6:500; Works 16:64; Amor Christi in hanc suam ecclesiam invisibilem et immaculatam illustrator simili amore conjugali). His Adam says as much in Paradise Lost about this larger union or communion with God when he requests a wife from his Creator. When Adam subsequently tells Raphael about the “Union of mind, or in us both one soul” (8.604) that characterizes his marriage with Eve, he echoes Paul’s injunction in Philippians 2:2 to the members of the Church, a scriptural verse that Milton included and translated in his discussion of Christian charity in book 1, chapter 11 of De Doctrina Christiana: “that you may be of the same mind, having the same charity, unanimous and of one opinion” (CPW 6:749)—“ut eodem sitis affectu, eandem charitatem habentes, unanimes, et unum sentientes” (Works 17:270). Milton asserts in his treatise that charity makes the members of Christ, as far as possible, of one mind or soul—“qua fideles ut membra Christi … quantum fieri potest unanimes plane sunt” (Works 17:270). Adam and Eve are said to be “unanimous,” in one of the three moments where the word appears in Paradise Lost, in their nightly prayer of thanksgiving to God—“This said unanimous” (4.736)—just before they turn to lovemaking in their nuptial bed, the seal of a marital union of mind that mirrors, and will turn out to depend upon, their shared devotion to their Creator.
The middle books, 4–8, of Paradise Lost depict the marriage of Adam and Eve as one version of communion within a church that expands to take in both humans and angels. Milton connects marital union to the cohesion of a larger community, not only through the Pauline metaphor of Ephesians 5 but through the terms of the Odyssey, which provides the primary epic model of these books: the epic banquet with its inset storytelling. When Adam describes to Raphael the happiness of companionate wedded life that goes beyond sexual happiness,
Union of mind, or in us both one soul;
Harmony to behold in wedded pair
More grateful than harmonious sound to the ear
(8.604–6)
he echoes not only Paul writing on charity and the being of one mind (auto phronete … hen phronountes) in the church in Philippians 2:2—what Milton translates into Latin with unanimes—but the words of Homer’s Odysseus talking about marriage itself. In book 6 of the Odyssey, its hero tells Nausikaa that the best of things is marital concord: “may the gods grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement [homophrosyne] / in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast / than when two people, a man and his wife, keep a harmonious [homophroneonte] / household” (Odys. 6.181–84). The Greek original is best translated as “unanimity” and “unanimous,” the like-mindedness and one soul that Milton’s Adam ascribes to his marriage with Eve.33 In the edition of Homer that we know Milton consulted, the Renaissance translator Jean de Sponde rendered it as concordia in Latin, which Milton picks up in “harmony”; in his index, however, Sponde refers to the passage: “Coniuges sint unanimes et concordes” (Spouses should be of one mind and in concord).34
Three books later, Odysseus opens book 9 of the Odyssey by telling Nausikaa’s father, King Alcinous, that the best or fairest of things is something else: the gathering together to banquet and to listen to the stories of a singer, when a resulting “festivity [“euphrosyne”; translated by Sponde as “laetitia” or “joy”] holds sway among all the populace” (Odys. 9.6). Odysseus will now himself occupy the role of singer and storyteller for the next four books of the Odyssey: the hero and the poet Homer are complimenting themselves in advance on the pleasure their poetry will provide Alcinous and the Phaeacians inside and the reader outside the poem. The two Homeric passages are probably meant to parallel each other and to contrast the domestic “homophrosyne” between Odysseus and Penelope that awaits Odysseus in Ithaca with the public, communal “euphrosyne” that he finds in Phaeacia and which the suitors have meanwhile violated at home—the hero’s task is to restore and bring the two together.
It is clear that Milton read the passages this way: he had written L’Allegro, devoted to the personification of the latter sociable mirth or joy, “In heaven yclept Euphrosyne” (L’Allegro 12). When invoking Odysseus’s ideal of “homophrosyne” to describe the first marriage of Adam and Eve, he would have connected the two Greek words and the mental states they describe. And he draws his own parallel in Paradise Lost between wedded concord and the experience of conviviality and listening to poetry. When Adam says that marital harmony is even better than “harmonious sound to the ear,” he refers back to the earlier compliment he has paid in book 8 to Raphael’s storytelling. The angel has occupied the same position at the meal Adam and Eve have been hosting as that of the storytelling guest Odysseus in the Odyssey and of Virgil’s storytelling Aeneas in the analogous scene of banqueting in Dido’s Carthage in the Aeneid: the reference in book 5 to the fruit that Eve brings to the table, which could be found on “the Punic coast [i.e., the Carthage of the Aeneid], or where / Alcinous reigned” (5.340–41), are tip-offs to the epic models of this convivial scene.
Raphael’s words have been such, Adam says, that
while I sit with thee, I seem in heaven,
And sweeter thy discourse is to my ear
Than fruits of palm-tree pleasantest to thirst
And hunger both, from labour, at the hour
Of sweet repast; they satiate, and soon fill,
Though pleasant, but thy words with grace divine
Imbued, bring to their sweetness no satiety.
(8.210–16)
The angel has narrated the War in Heaven and the Creation, the epic and cosmogonic subject matters, respectively, of Alcinous’s bard Demodocus (Odys. 8.62–82) and Dido’s bard Iopas (Aen. 1.740–44): here, as in Milton’s epic models, the convivial repast is the occasion for the production of poems-within-the-poem.35 Adam praises the angel’s words, which have transported him to the very heaven they describe, a tribute to Raphael’s powers as a poet and to his “likening spiritual to corporeal forms” (5.573), a tribute that Milton, like Homer in the Odyssey, pays here to his own verse.36 The words of the angel singer have been even sweeter than the repast that has brought them together. Eating together becomes the figure for the higher experience that accompanies it, the experience of learning produced through what Milton claims in Of Education is the best form of teaching: poetry.37 Adam gives to Raphael, in turn, an account of his own creation and of the creation of Eve. Shared food, shared stories: a form of communion between man and angel. Milton thus uses the epic frame of the Odyssey, with its juxtaposition of the “homophrosyne” of wedded love and the “euphrosyne” of the communal feast to spell out the Pauline analogy between marriage and the charitable community of the church. The epic banquet becomes a Christian feast of love.
“Sweeter … sweet … sweetness”: the harmony of his marriage, Adam says, outdoes the harmony of Raphael’s words; the angel singer’s words rival and outdo the sweet Edenic meal that has just been served to him: the “dulcet creams” that Eve has pressed from “sweet kernels” (5.346–47), gathered from a garden of fragrances—myrrh, cassia, nard—that Raphael has found to be “a wilderness of sweets” (5.294). Marriage is itself sweet: the narrator has hailed wedded love as the “Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets” (4.760) and Adam will later recall to Raphael the moment when he first saw Eve in his dream: “which from that time infused / Sweetness into my heart” (8.474–75). Adam’s first speech in the poem in book 4 ends with the word “sweet”: their work as gardeners in Eden is delightful, he tells Eve: “Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet” (4.439). Eve picks up this cue in her love song to Adam later in the book (4.641–56), which perfectly reciprocates by declaring that for all the beauties and sweetness of the day and night in Eden, none of them “without thee is sweet” (4.656). Together the two passages in book 8 name the three components of Milton’s Paradise: marital love, storytelling, conviviality—sex, poetry, and food: who could ask for anything more? The three are analogized and compared with one another in books 4–8 of Paradise Lost as forms of union and harmony, and they share the common quality and denominator of being sweet: “communion sweet” (5.637) as Raphael describes the festive joy of the angels in heaven in book 5.
Milton changed the 1667 reading “refection sweet” in book 5 to “communion sweet” and added verse 638, which describes how the angels “Quaff immortality and joy,” in the revised version of Paradise Lost in 1674. He did so to spell out the parallel in book 5 between the feast and “sweet repast” (5.630) of the angels, replete with “song and dance” (5.619) and “harmony divine” (5.625), that Raphael recounts having taken place in heaven after God’s announcement of the anointment of the Son and the luncheon of sweets that Raphael has consumed with his human hosts to whom he addresses his narration. Both are original versions of communion, versions before, and without the necessity of, the Son’s sacrifice that institutes the later Lord’s Supper. The biblical model of hospitality that Milton superimposes on the model of the epic banquet is the visit of the three angels to Abraham and Sarah at Mamre in Genesis 18: patristic interpretation saw eucharistic overtones in the meal shared by divinity and humans, and early Christian art portrayed the bread that Sarah bakes at the hearth for the occasion as a type for that later communion: the bread of the angels (panis angelicus).38 Adam appreciates Raphael’s condescending to eat “Food not of angels, yet accepted so” (5.465). In his speeches about the unity of God’s creation as a universal food chain in which the “grosser feeds the purer” (5.404–33, 5.416) and as “one first matter all” (5.469–505, 5.472), Raphael suggests a larger communion, drawing creature toward Creator, built into the cosmos and into the physical act of eating itself.39 Raphael’s own dining with Adam and Eve could token, in turn, a future when human beings would rise to eat the angels’ food and find it “no inconvenient diet” (5.495). Through a digestive alchemy that would, in the narrator’s loaded word, “transubstantiate” (5.438) nutritional matter into a more “sublimed” form (5.483), “perhaps”—Raphael is careful to qualify to his human hosts—“Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit / Improved by tract of time” (496–98). The monism of the passage differentiates it from Milton’s earlier fantasy of the virginal body turned “by degrees to the soul’s essence / Till all be made immortal” in Comus (461–62), but it is much the same fantasy—the time “when men / With angels may participate” (5.493–94). The mellifluous dews and pearly grains that, Raphael informs us earlier, cover the floor of heaven each morning (5.429–30), and that constitute the angels’ diet, are based on the manna that God sent the Israelites during their wanderings in the wilderness; manna, too, as Milton notes in De Doctrina Christiana, was “Under the law the type of the Lord’s Supper” (CPW 6:554), the bread of communion: some earlier form of communion was already shared between man and angel in Milton’s Eden.
Milton offers a further etiology of this “angels’ food” (5.633) that draws these analogies still tighter to the communion of Christ’s postlapsarian Church. He depicts the “communion sweet” that the angels enjoy at their heavenly feast as a new gift to them mediated by the Son of God and future Christ. When God honors and anoints the Son, he declares to the angelic host:
your head I him appoint;
And by my self have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in heaven, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great viceregent reign abide
United as one individual soul
Forever happy: him who disobeys
(5.606–12)
God makes the Son the head of the angels, just as the Son will later head his earthly church. In doing so, Abdiel will argue against Satan at the end of book 5, God has sought “to exalt / Our happy state under one head more near / United” (5.829–31). The quibble in Abdiel’s words unites the angels nearer, both to God, a kind of promotion of angelic nature, and to one another. By means of the Son who condescends to be one of their ranks—“One of our number thus reduced” (5.843)—as he will later lower himself to take on human nature, Abdiel argues, God has initiated them into a more perfect union, the union that disobedience breaks. The corporate “individual soul” takes the place in God’s words for the Pauline figure of the unified body, a nod to angelic nature that is more soul than body. The “immortality and joy” that the angels subsequently quaff (5.637–38) in communion is still more perfect than those earlier occasions Raphael remembers in book 6 when the angels “were wont to meet / So oft in festivals of joy and love / Unanimous” (6.93–95). Such angelic union is also characterized in book 11 as “fellowships of joy” (11.80) and God, in Raphael’s recounting of the Creation, promises a similar “joy and union, without end” (7.161) to human beings raised by merit and long obedience to heaven. “Joy” is the repeated term here, and it corresponds to the “Euphrosyne”/ “laetitia” of L’Allegro that the speaker of Il Penseroso begins by disparaging (“Hence vain deluding Joys”). But Milton combines the convivial “euphrosyne” of the angels with “homophrosyne,” the state of being one soul—“one individual soul,” “Unanimous”—the condition that Paul defines as the essence of charity. This condition is coextensive with, or deeply analogous to, the “Union of mind, or in us both one soul” that Adam ascribes to his marriage with Eve; the “individual solace” he pronounced at their first meeting and wedlock finds its echo in the angels’ “individual soul.” Marital union is the counterpart, not only to a church on earth but to the community of the angels newly improved by the Son: husband and wife, angel and angel share an analogous happiness.
Abdiel’s figure of the angels “under one head more near / United” is subsequently literalized during the War in Heaven in book 6 when Michael rallies the troops of the good angels behind the oncoming Son: “Under their head embodied all in one” (6.779). Book 6 is framed by two moments on either end, first when Abdiel, having separated himself by dissent from Satan and his followers on Satan’s falsely named Mountain of the Congregation,40 is incorporated into God’s host—“gladly then he mixed / Among those friendly powers” (6.21–22)—and by the Son’s excommunication and driving out of the rebel angels: “Then shall thy saints unmixed, and from the impure / Far separate, circling thy holy mount / Unfeigned hallelujahs to thee sing, / Hymns of high praise, and I among them chief” (742–45). In loving God through and with his Son, the angels come together as one pure body, and later, Raphael’s description of angelic lovemaking picks up the same language: “Total they mix, union of pure with pure / Desiring” (8.627–28). Such angelic intimacy and union make it difficult to say which is a figure for which—the marital body for the communal one or the larger social communion for the unity of marriage.
“Not vastly disproportionall”
Paradise Lost elaborately develops in books 4–8 the analogy between human marriage and a larger charitable community among creatures. Nonetheless, the likeness does not close into an identity between the two.41 Nor will the plot of the poem have it so: Raphael inserts “perhaps” into his prospect of human beings trading in their human bodies “to turn all to spirit” (5.496–97) because he already knows that the Fall will take place. This is the nature, Milton observes, of analogy, which he terms “proportion” (proportio) in The Art of Logic (1.21)—“Similarity is called proportion, in Greek usually analogia; and similarly things are called proportional, in Greek, analoga”—and then cites the scholastic formula that Montaigne had also famously invoked: “nothing similar is identical, the similar thing does not run on four feet, every similarity limps” (CPW 8.284–85; Works 11.192).
God sanctioned marriage in the first place, after listening and approving the arguments of Adam, as a specifically human relationship that substitutes for the “union or communion deified” to which God can raise his creatures, however homologous the two loving unions may be. By the same analogy, the unions created by love within marriage and in other forms of human charity remain incomplete. “Total they mix,” Raphael remarks of the angels’ lovemaking, but their union of angelic bodies, “As flesh to mix with flesh” (8.629), is physically impossible for human beings, as Milton remarks in Tetrachordon where he insists that the “one flesh” of marriage must be interpreted as the “likenes [and] … fitness of mind and disposition, which may breed the Spirit of concord, and union between them” (CPW 2:605). Milton’s imagination also and equally balks at total spiritual union, “soul with soul” (8.629) with others, even if such union is the goal toward which human charity strives, whether in marital or communal form. When he defines the unanimity created by charity in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton twice uses the qualifying phrase, “quantum fieri potest”—“as far as possible”—to leave open a space of individual difference and, hence, freedom. In place of total mixture, this space or gap in marriage, and in the larger Christian community, is both bridged and preserved by “proportion.”
When Adam tells Raphael of the “Union of mind” he shares with Eve, which is a “Harmony of mind to behold in wedded pair / More grateful than harmonious sound to the ear,” he picks up the extended conceit of a stringed instrument with which he laid down the conditions of marital love earlier in book 8 in his dialogue with God.42
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Given and received; but in disparity
The one intense, the other still remiss
Cannot well suit with either …
(8.383–88)
Adam primarily argues that the proper “human consort” (8.392)—he continues the musical punning—is another human being, not a brute beast that lacks “rational delight” (8.391) and is too low on the ladder of being as a loosely strung (“remiss”) string is too low to be brought into musical “proportion” with a highly strung (“intense”) one. But Adam also sets out the terms—“in proportion due”—for the give and take of marriage between partners who are both like and other: “Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self” (8.450), God proclaims of the mate he makes for the first man. Ronald Levao detects an echo of Aristotle’s definition in the Nicomachean Ethics (8.13; 1162b) of the “proportion” (analogon) that obtains in the friendship between social superiors and inferiors: “the better should be loved more than he loves” (8.7; 1158b), but mutual love evens out their inequality.43 Milton, we have seen, describes a “proportiond equalitie” prevailing in the free republican Commonwealth of The Readie and Easie Way (CPW 7:424), the political equivalent of such friendship. Adam may suggest a similar fitness between the two human sexes of Paradise Lost, unequal but in proportion with each other as they are not with lower animal species. Levao, however, argues that, beyond “an equivocation, present throughout the poem and Milton’s culture at large, between egalitarian and hierarchical gender relations,” Adam’s sense of proportion valorizes the autonomy and difference, as well as the likeness and suitability of mind, between husband and wife.44 One must have differently tuned strings to produce harmony: it is not a question of staying on the same wavelength. The opposite is the grounds for divorce described in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, “when the minde hangs off in an unclosing disproportion” (CPW 2:246). The marriage of true minds in Paradise Lost seeks to close together their differences without closing them up, an individual solace.
The proportionality that applies to human marriage applies as well to Milton’s vision of the Christian community of charity—the Church—of which it is a figure. In Areopagitica, written and published between The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon, and in a large part a defense of his publishing these heterodox works, Milton reimagines—in the figures of the ingathering of the broken body of Truth and the building of Solomon’s temple—the Pauline metaphors of the Church as the members of the body of Christ (Rom. 12:4–5; 1 Cor. 12:12–30; Eph. 4:3–16) and as the new temple: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21). Paul joins these two metaphors in his injunction that the spiritual gifts of its individual members, what he calls “prophecies,” should “edify” (oikodomeo) the Church, both body (Eph. 4:12) and building, “God’s building,” whose foundation, Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 3:9–10, he has himself laid down, “as skillful master builder.” Milton had already mixed Pauline metaphors in The Reason of Church Government (1.2), where the carefully measured “materiall Temple” and its future rebuilding foretold by Ezekiel are types for the spiritual “line and level” that God will apply to the soul of man, “the sooner to edifie and accomplish that immortall stature of Christs body which is his Church, in all her glorious lineaments and proportions” (CPW 1:757–58).45 Here, too, “proportion” is the key term: Paul had enjoined the faithful in Romans 12:6, “let us prophecie according to the proportion of faith,” where “proportion” translates the Greek analogian. So the gloss to 1 Corinthians 12 in the Geneva Bible describes Paul urging that those who offer their prophecies should make the “end proportionable to the beginning.” Even as he calls upon the different members of the Church to love one another in unity, Paul seeks, through this appeal to likeness, to rein in prophecy under church discipline, as he would curb the act of speaking in tongues and women speaking at all in 1 Corinthians 14:26–40, and to ensure doctrinal uniformity (i.e., uniformity to Paul’s doctrine).
Milton writes against the spirit of Paul’s admonitions. The figures of the corporate Church in Areopagitica insist on difference-in-likeness and on the freedom it postulates. The body hewn into a thousand pieces of Truth, personified as feminine, “homogeneal, and proportionall” (CPW 2:551), is Milton’s revised version of Paul’s true Church—a mystical body larger than and not to be identified with any specific confessional or state church—which is to be brought into final form only at “her Masters second comming; he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of lovelines and perfection” (CPW 2:549; see Eph. 4:16; we might note the quibble in “loveliness”). Jesus has never seemed so much the son of Joseph the Joiner and carpenter by profession, and here he also—through the gender-inverting comparison of this joining the members of Truth to Isis gathering up the limbs of her spouse Osiris—becomes a marriage partner to his church, answering to “the voice of thy Bride,” which called out to him three years earlier at the end of Milton’s prose hymn in the 1641 Animadversions (CPW 1:707).
Milton continues to describe the piecing together of this invisible Church as carpentry in the figure of the building of Solomon’s temple with its cutting and hewing, a defense of so-called schisms and an objection against the idea of complete ecclesial unity.
And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. (CPW 2:555)
The members of God’s building join together without erasing the differences—of religious opinion—among them. These are “not vastly disproportionall” just as the body of Truth is “proportionall.”46 Milton describes the process of fitting together the body and the temple through Paul’s “proportion of faith”—by likeness and analogy—as “To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it” (CPW 2:551). The double negative in the formulation “not vastly disproportionall,” however, allows for the leeway and freedom necessary to build a church capacious enough for a time when “all the Lord’s people are become Prophets” (CPW 2:556).47 The individuality of prophecy, belonging to “those whom God hath fitted for the speciall use of these times with eminent and ample gifts, and those perhaps neither among the Priests” (CPW 2:567)—namely, the layman John Milton, prophet of divorce—requires its integration, through the dissemination of print, into a larger body, a super, invisible Church that can contain difference and nonconformity: the pieces of the house of God are not all of one form. Otherwise, this Church could not be reformed. The ongoing nature of its building —“the reforming of Reformation it self” (CPW 2:553)—in turn demands new forms of doctrine and personal revelation. Truths will never be closed up entirely, and contiguity rather than continuity is the condition of the unity of the Church in this world, the condition that warrants the religious toleration and freedom of expression for which Areopagitica argues. Milton invokes Pauline charity—“the unity of Spirit” and “the bond of peace” (CPW 2:565; Eph. 4:3)—over Pauline conformity. The proportion or similitude of charity is not to be collapsed into identity; instead, dissimilitude can be brotherly. Like the verse of Paradise Lost, it need not rhyme.
Changing Places
These ideas of analogical proportion, similitude that is not identity, surround Adam’s fall. He falls in the name of a loving human relationship that is proportional, based on an incomplete likeness, between husband and wife—and that thus is free. So marriage, “one flesh,” is proportional to—both a special instance of and a privileged figure for—an expanded charity, itself proportional and free, among the different members of a corporate human community. It is through marriage that other relations and charities first were known. In the case of Adam and Eve, the only human beings on earth at the time, these are one and the same thing. These human relationships are, in turn, proportional to, distinct from, and (imperfectly) continuous with communion with the angels (the meal with Raphael), and, most important, with “union or communion” with God. Adam’s decision to die with Eve appears to be the choice of one loving union over another, of a part instead of the analogous whole—and an assertion of human freedom. To say so is to repeat the observation that Adam’s fall is a version of charity that anticipates the Son’s sacrificial willingness to die for his future fellow humans (who are his typological bride), already announced in the poem in book 3: “Dwells in all heaven charity so dear?” the Father has asked (3.216)—it is only one of two places where the word “charity” in the singular appears in Paradise Lost. The parallel renders Adam’s charity heroic, “more heroic” (9.14) than his epic predecessors listed at the opening of book 9 to offer grounds for comparison.48 But the Son’s “immortal love / To mortal men” is itself secondary to and dependent on the “Filial obedience” that shines above it in the Son’s heavenly aspect (3.267–69): charity and obedience are aligned in his sacrifice of himself while they are opposed in Adam’s fall.
The immediate effects of Adam’s disobedient charity—an oxymoron—are ironic. By falling with Eve, Adam, like Satan and the other fallen angels, “breaks union” (5.612) with God. By eating the forbidden fruit together, they leave the communion of God’s creatures: “No more of talk where God or angel guest / With man, as with his friend, familiar used / To sit indulgent, and with him partake / Rural repast …,” the narrator remarks at the opening of book 9, announcing not only the change to tragic subject matter in the book, but also the end, “no more,” of the Edenic closeness shared among human beings, angels, God, and creation. As God declares in book 11, human beings are ejected from that cosmic unity that knows “no unharmonious mixture foul” (11.51)—as was the case at the end of the War in Heaven, the impure separate from the pure with whom harmonious union is now impossible. Henceforth they will eat “mortal food” (11.54), an “inconvenient diet” that will not let them convene with angels. The marital union of Adam and Eve itself dissolves, after the initial intoxication of sin, into mutual accusation and potentially endless discord by the last lines of the book: “And of their vain contest appeared no end” (9.1189). Their marriage of minds had been founded, more perhaps than Adam realized, on their shared love and obedience to God, “unanimous” in their common prayer. The Son’s charity reopens the channel between humans and divinity that Adam’s charity had broken off, and, in doing so, also reopens the possibility of human love.
Adam’s charity is heroic and tragic, the opening of book 9 announces: he is an Achilles, knowingly hastening his own death (“Certain my resolution is to die” [9.907]); Odysseus giving up the substitution of Calypso and immortality (“Should God create another Eve” [9.911]), in order to return to Penelope; an anti-Aeneas (“Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill / Ran through his veins and all his joints relaxed” [9.890–91]) who will not leave a Creusa or Dido behind.49 But this proem, less dismissive than its tone suggests, notes that such epic heroism later in human history is itself tragic, the inheritance of the world of death and divine wrath—“Neptun’s ire or Juno’s” (9.18)—into which Adam and Eve plunged humanity, a classical heroic world without the Son’s saving charity, where heroism itself takes the form of Achilles’s wrath rather than Adam’s love. Again, the effect is ironic: book 9 closes and comes around to where it started with Adam’s discovering anger—“first incensed” (9.1162)—in his heated rebuke to Eve. Something similar had happened in John Milton’s own first marriage.
Charity nonetheless begins at home in Paradise Lost, and by its final lines, the reconstituted marriage of Adam and Eve seems very much like the epic’s goal. Like Eve’s wish for individual spiritual trial and divine approval, Adam’s wish for human love and companionship both causes the Fall and seems to be the right choice for men and women after it: the characters may disastrously fail, but Milton’s two wishes remain intact and vindicated. For, as Adam’s case suggests, charity must begin somewhere. We know where charity will end: the eschatological goal of Christian history when, the Son tells the Father in book 6, “in the end / Thou shalt be all in all, and I in thee / For ever, and in me all whom thou lovest” (6.731–33; cf. 3.341). This all-encompassing and difficult-to-picture oneness on the far side of death is the outer reach and limit to which Milton’s mysticism and ideas of corporate love are ultimately directed, perhaps what might have been, as Raphael’s musings ventured, had the Fall not taken place. But it suggests all too much togetherness for the human here and now, both before and after the Fall, where for Milton, as we have just seen, a proportional charity strives to overcome and acknowledges the finally unclosable differences between loving individuals.50 The ideal of human marriage in Paradise Lost posits a middle ground between Milton’s two wishes that seem unassimilable in the career of Abdiel in the poem: the angel’s being singled out for his service to God, his being “mixed” into the larger, promiscuous community of servants. The suiting to each other of two separate human beings and minds preserves the individual distinction and resists the potential narcissism of the first of these wishes; it preserves the altruistic love and resists the potential absorption of identity of the second. History may end—and the human individual’s own history may end—in an all (or nothing), but Paradise Lost ends with Adam and Eve starting out, hand in hand again as they had first entered the poem (12.648; 4.321). Their marriage is what survives of Eden. For it to do so, however, the first man and woman must take up each other’s—and Milton’s—wishes.
A thought experiment suggests how closely these wishes have been attached to the characters and genders of Adam and Eve. Suppose that their positions had been reversed. Had Adam been the one tempted, he might, so aware of his human deficiency and so in love with Eve, have been less susceptible to Satan’s flattery and promise of fame in a larger world; he would not have been without Eve by his side as his best witness, and would have gained strength from the shame of doing wrong in her sight; the more intellectual of the two, he might have reasoned against the devil’s arguments. Had Eve been the one to confront a fallen Adam, she, persuaded of her spiritual sufficiency, might have turned away from him, as she did when they first met by the reflecting pool, and preferred to be acknowledged by the witness of God. Neither would have fallen, had they played each other’s part. After the Fall, this is what they will do.
Adam feels that he has it all worked out after listening to Michael’s narrative of human history and the promise of its end.
Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,
Merciful over all his works, with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak
Subverting world strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek;
(12.561–69)
Adam has readjusted the balance between obedience and love along the model of the Son in heaven. He now places obedience first: it is best and followed by love. The love in question, however, is directed to the same God Adam obeys and on whom Adam will uniquely depend—no more codependency with his wife. Adam expresses the ambitions to spiritual heroism that had belonged to Eve before their fall, ambitions now corrected (and disguised) along the lines of Christ and Abdiel as patience and heroic martyrdom. Eve had argued that God would be “our witness from the event.” Now Adam chooses to think of God looking on and present beside him, while he, in turn will “observe”—both to discern and to serve—what God has already foreseen for him. This vertical relationship between individual and deity—Milton’s first wish—seems, in fact, to leave little room for the collateral love between humans that is his second.
Accordingly, Michael, after extravagantly praising Adam for his doctrine—“thou hast attained the sum / Of wisdom” (12.575–76)—tacks on an addendum.
only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.
(12.581–87)
Adam might be taken aback and wonder what it takes to win in God’s system: love for his fellow human being is what got him into trouble in the first place. And, in fact, Michael appears to invert the order and the priorities of that other heavenly mediator Raphael, who left the unfallen Adam in book 8, urging him to “Be strong, live happy, and love, but first of all / Him whom to love is to obey” (8.633–34). Adam thinks he has gotten it straight: obedience, named last, nonetheless comes first and appears to be the highest form of love. But now Michael, invoking the word “Charity” in the singular for its only reappearance in the poem since God asked it of the Son in book 3, tells him that this love is “the soul” of an ambiguous “all the rest”: whether of all the things added to Adam’s newfound knowledge or of these and of that knowledge itself. In this rewriting of 2 Peter 1:5–7, where brotherly kindness and love similarly come at the end of a series of theological virtues, Milton insists on their rising order of importance. It is not a traditional Protestant scheme in which works (“deeds”) are an addition to the faith that alone justifies salvation (see 12.408–10), since both faith and works are add-ons to Adam’s pledge of obedience. Rather, Michael guarantees Adam that he can—and must—have it all: charity, experienced most fully in the restored marriage of Adam and Eve, is the sine qua non condition of that happier paradise within which Adam and his descendants will find available in fallen history.51 Michael’s speech concludes with the promise that Adam and Eve will live “in one faith unanimous though sad” (12.603), bringing back this word, too, and its promise of marital harmony, from before the Fall.
Michael’s injunction and the structure of the end of book 12, which now turns from Adam and Michael to Eve for the final speech of the epic, fit the paradoxical concept of the supplement described by Jacques Derrida: what is presented as an addition to a completed structure both questions the latter’s completeness and becomes indispensable to it, a necessary addition.52 So the charity that supplements Adam’s knowledge of the primacy of obedience becomes its fulfillment. In fact, this is what will happen to the Son’s own charity, which in heaven shone less in him than did his obedience. A reversal will take place, Michael has narrated earlier in book 12, when the Son comes to the earth to save humanity.
The law of God exact he shall fulfil
Both by obedience and by love, though love
Alone fulfil the law;
(12.402–4)
Milton’s application of Romans 13:10 moralizes Christ’s sacrifice as the supersession of the Law, which, as Michael goes on to say, is itself nailed to the cross and annulled (12.415–19), and it suggests the limitations, both spiritual and historical, of obedience. It lends to Michael’s addition of charity the quality of a new dispensation. With its “one easy prohibition” (4.433), the Eden that Adam and Eve outgrow may now be looked back upon as a period under the Law: Christ will fulfill “that which thou didst want, / Obedience to the law of God” (12.395–96), Michael tells Adam. It is succeeded by a new Christian liberty: love and do what you will.53
Eve’s final speech may feel tacked on, a little scene granted to a character who is created second and comes second to her husband.54 Its fourteen lines, it has been pointed out, suggest a sonnet, a lyric coda voiced by the female heroine to the epic of the male hero.55 These are calculated effects of the speech, but Milton has carefully designed it not only to be an addition at the poem’s end but to correspond to an earlier passage near the beginning of book 11. Together they frame books 11 and 12, which, we want to remember, were originally one final book 10 in the original 1667 Paradise Lost. Back in book 11, Adam, assured that their prayers have found favor with God, hails Eve as the “Mother of all Mankind, / Mother of all things living, since by thee / Man is to live and all things live for man” (11.159–61). Eve replies that she is “Ill worthy” (11.164) of the title, and acknowledges the infinite grace of God and the favor of Adam, “next favourable thou, / Who highly thus to entitle me vouchsafest” (11.169–70). Chastened by experience, she also pledges “never from thy side henceforth to stray” (11.176)—a stark revision of her complaint during their quarrel after the Fall in book 9, “Was I to have never parted from thy side? / As good have grown there still a lifeless rib” (9.1153–54)—and a token of the reconciliation that the couple has meanwhile effected in book 10. Collateral love indeed. Now, toward the close of book 12, in the last words spoken in the poem, she reechoes their earlier exchange.
but now lead on;
In me is no delay; with thee to go,
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me
Art all things under heaven, all places thou,
Who for my willful crime art banished hence.
This further consolation yet secure
I carry hence; though all by me is lost,
Such favour I unworthy am vouchsafed,
By me the promised seed shall all restore.
(12.614–23)
With its recollection of the pledge to Naomi—“whither thou goest, I will go” (Ruth 1:16)—by Ruth, “of whome the Lord Iesus did vouchsafe to come,” as the Geneva Bible puts it, Eve now accepts her own role as the first and, in her case, knowing ancestress of Christ, mother of mankind and of one greater man in particular.56 She declares her readiness to go with Adam into the new Promised Land. The sentiments also recall Eve’s love song in book 4 where none of the delights of Eden were sweet to her without the company of Adam. Now Adam is “all places” to her, and their marriage itself her Eden or paradise within. The exchange of the two characters’ roles is nowhere more telling than in Eve’s reaffirmation of her place by Adam’s side: now she is the codependent partner in their relationship. But Paradise Lost suggests that from here on love in marriage and community may be the best thing human beings can seek for themselves.
This reassignment of roles and of Miltonic wishes to the two characters and to their respective sexes—individual heroism to Adam, loving partnership to Eve—brings the ending of Paradise Lost closer to norms of patriarchy and to a gendered division of public, active (masculine) and private, affective (feminine) spheres. In retrospect, the epic even allows us to think that the Fall was caused by their original misalignment, that Milton has redeemed his wish for individual trial and approval by transferring it from his female heroine Eve—and behind Eve from the Lady of Comus—to the male hero Adam; Paradise Regained awaits, and however Lady-like or like the Lady of Christ’s College its Christ may be, he is still a he. Feminist criticism has rightly taught us to be suspicious.
But the ending of the poem does more than set gender roles and hierarchy straight: it rearranges its own priorities. If Milton, in his first wish, identified with Eve before the Fall, he continues, in his second, to identify with Eve in an emancipated Christian future. And this second wish now seems to count for more. Eve’s sonnetlike supplement to the poem, like Michael’s answer to Adam with which it corresponds, suggests that marriage and the community of charity for which Eve has now become the spokeswoman effectively supersede standing approved in the sight of God.57 Milton still wants it both ways: the blind poet’s composing Paradise Lost might be included among the “things deemed weak” posited by Adam, whose accomplishment constitutes a new heroism and personal witness. But the poem itself, which Kerrigan has argued became possible biographically through Milton’s own marriage and acceptance of adult sexuality, places its emotional and narrative goal in marital love. Like Adam and Eve in its final lines, Paradise Lost comes down to earth, and the weight of feeling of the poem shifts from the reconciliation and renewed obedience of humans to a now distanced, alienated deity to their reconciliation with one another. They leave the Eden that was made for them to the one that they must make for themselves, and the new realm of human autonomy that is specially instanced in their marriage feels like Christian freedom. Eve may come second, but, in so doing, she has the last words of a poem that declares that the last shall be first.
Appendix: A Note on the Separation Scene
Adam’s momentous “Go” speech (9.343–75), where he appears to give the persuasive final argument against Eve’s going off by herself, only then to turn around and grant her permission to do so, imitates a speech of Goffredo in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (5.3–5), particularly as Milton would have known it in the Edward Fairfax translation, as well as in the Italian original. The commander of the crusade outlines good reasons why the knights in the group of “adventurers” (aventurieri), loosely under his authority, should not go off with the pagan enchantress Armida, who has presented a phony damsel-in-distress story, and meanwhile seduces them with her beauty and flirtation. He then accedes to their request to send out ten champions from the crusader host. Here are the two passages, first Adam:
trial will come unsought.
Wouldst thou approve thy constancy, approve
First thy obedience: the other who can know,
Not seeing thee attempted, who attest?
But if thou think, trial unsought may find
Us both securer than thus warned thou seem’st,
Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;
Go in thy native innocence.
(PL 9.366–73)
then Goffredo in the Fairfax translation:
“In following her it may betide you ill;
Refrain therefore, and change this forward thought
For death unsent for, danger comes unsought.
“But if to shun these perils, sought so far,
May seem disgraceful to the place you hold;
If grave advice and prudent counsel are
Esteemed detractors from your courage bold;
Then know, I none against his will debar;
Nor what I granted erst I now withhold;
But be mine empire, as it ought of right,
Sweet, easy, pleasant, meek and light.
“Go then or tarry, each as likes him best,
Free power I grant you on this enterprise.”
(Jerusalem Delivered 5.3.6–8 to 5.5.1–2)
Goffredo’s indulgence is the first cause of all the ensuing problems that block the taking of Jerusalem until the end of Tasso’s epic: hero after hero goes AWOL. The rest of the Gerusalemme liberata, as its very first stanza spells out, involves Goffredo’s reduction of his errant fellow knights back under his command and beneath the holy auspices of the crusade.
The parallel colors Milton’s Eve as a reckless knight-errant, desirous as she is to make trial of her strength, and one easily susceptible to seductive wiles—of which Satan has no shortage. It complicates the recollection in her words (9.335–36) of Areopagitica and its chivalric figure of the “warfaring Christian,” like Spenser’s Sir Guyon (CPW 2:515–16). It may lend an added pointedness to Adam’s addressing his wife as “adventurous Eve” (9.921), when she returns to him after eating the forbidden fruit. The parallel also could suggest that Adam, as Eve will later claim, was too weak a husband and commander-in-chief: “why didst not thou the head / Command me absolutely not to go, / Going into such danger as thou saidst?” (9.1155–57). Adam replies, however, that “I warned thee, I admonished thee, foretold / The danger … beyond this had been force / And force upon free will hath here no place” (9.1171–74).
Both Tasso and Milton explore the irresolvable dilemmas of authority and freedom. The comparison brings out Tasso’s relative authoritarianism and Milton’s commitment to liberty, however great the cost.