Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

IN HIS particular effort to justify the ways of God to man, Milton knows full well that it is not sufficient merely to demonstrate the proper origin of evil, though a satisfactory treatment of the subject that has so exercised some of the best minds throughout Christian history is itself no mean or easy accomplishment. In order to magnify the seriousness of the Fall and its terrible consequences, Milton, like most Christian apologists since Ambrose, realizes the value of emphasizing the original perfection of the first couple. Though Milton chooses to use the theme of the Fortunate Fall later in his epic as one of his apologetic devices, the argument by Lovejoy and others that felix culpa has been elevated to a cardinal operative principle in the poem is less than convincing.¹ As one critic has remarked, “It is one thing to say that Adam is, as a result of the Atonement, better off than he was in Paradise, but something altogether different to suggest that he is better off than he would have been if he had stayed obedient.”² Part of Milton’s strategy, therefore, must be a persuasive presentation of how genuinely attractive life can be and what promises it holds before Adam and Eve commit their fatal transgression.

The success of the poet’s self-appointed task thus turns on his understanding and portrayal of primal perfection. This consideration in turn imposes certain restrictions on what Milton can do with his subject. He cannot, for example, make use of what N. P. Williams has called “the minimal interpretation” of the Fall advocated by a number of patristic writers—including Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria—and regard the first couple as childlike, imperfect creatures and their offense as a sort of péché d’enfant.³ Nor would he be able to subscribe to a modern view that the first chapters of Genesis are a story about “the perfect form of manhood waiting for the introjection of personality,”⁴ since Milton has little doubt about the historicity and genuine humanity of Adam and Eve. Although they are the head of the race and are expected to embody certain universal traits of humankind, Adam and Eve are no abstract archetypes. The Fall does not “humanize” them, as another interpretation would have it. It is by no means “the liberation of man from the beneficent determinism of Jehovah, and the birth—accompanied, indeed, by the throes of sin and suffering—of his capacity for true ‘liberty.’”⁵

To provide the proper and most effective doctrinal underpinning for his depiction of the first couple and their noble condition Milton has no better or more convenient means than the scriptural declaration that man was made in the image of God, an assertion that has served as the foundation of countless treatises on human excellence and dignity by Christian theologians and humanists alike through the centuries.⁶ It is only natural that this theme is prominently heard the moment the first couple come into view in the poem:⁷

It is well known that the complex of ideas with which Milton explicates the meaning of the imago closely parallels opinions he has expressed elsewhere in his prose works, particularly the Tetrachordon (1645), one of the four divorce tracts, which contains his lengthiest comment on the subject. Those opinions in turn echo various motifs developed throughout an extensive tradition of the theology of the image. There is the Christian appropriation of Ovid’s emphasis on the human erecta statura, and there is the affirmation of the dominium terrae, the lordship over nature and other creatures, as part of the original endowment linked with the image. Following the essential drift of Reformed theology, Milton rejects the distinction between “image” and “likeness” (Heb. tselem and demuth; Sept. eikona kai homoioosin; Vulg. imaginem et similitudinem). In scholastic theology, the former word since Irenaeus has come to signify the anima rationalis in man’s nature, while the latter refers to the donum superadditum supernaturale that is lost with the fall of man. In this view, Adam’s fall is in effect a fall from a state of supernature to nature, and the sense of original sin may be said to be weakened, since Adam’s apostasy is viewed as a defectus from super-nature rather than a depravatio of his essential human nature. Milton, however, describes the imago dei in the Tetrachordon as “Wisdom, Purity, Justice, and rule over all creatures,”⁸ and in De Doctrina Christiana as “natural wisdom, holiness, and righteousness.”⁹ Although the poet firmly subscribes to Pauline notions of long standing in Christian theology (1 Cor. 11:7–8) by arguing that “the woman is not primarily and immediately the image of God, but in reference to the man,”¹⁰ he is also in accord with the Reformed view that the woman is in all respects the equal of man insofar as the image is understood in terms of original righteousness.¹¹

In addition to these traditional elements in his conception of the image, Milton, I would like to argue, brings his own distinctive contribution. It is significant that in the poetic passage quoted above, the noble character of the imago is said to be placed “in true filial freedom.” In introducing this characteristic and all-important word, freedom, Milton alerts us to the direction the poetic enactment of the meaning of the image will take.¹² According to the poet, Adam is created “sufficient to have stood though free to fall” (3.99). Primal freedom of unfallen man thus must mean first of all the freedom to obey, the posse non peccare of Augustine, for it is only on this basis that Milton can argue that Adam’s sin is not only a sin against God, but one also against his own better self.

The power of contrary choice, however, does not wholly define the significance of “true filial freedom.” From Milton’s own prolonged ruminations on the meaning of marriage no doubt has come the passionate insistence on man’s liberty and its expression as the capacity for “fellowship” (Milton’s word) with other personal beings, human or divine. Freedom in this sense means the freedom for another, to use contemporary theological language, and it is dramatized in the poetic action as Adam and Eve’s growing sense of their selfhood and their propensity for the “divinehuman encounter.” Such a treatment of the imago, as I hope to show, reflects both Milton’s development of traditional image theology, which to a great extent stresses the intellectual prowess of man, and the poet’s anticipation—to an extraordinary degree—of certain strands of modern Protestant thought.

C. S. Lewis said that Adam and Eve “were never young, never immature or undeveloped. They were created full-grown and perfect.”¹³ But the truth of the matter is that Adam’s maturity is unlike that of any other full-grown human being. He is unique because his entrance into the world is abrupt and sudden, a result of the divine fiat of creation. When Adam recalls and recounts his first moment of consciousness to the angel Raphael (8.253–260), his words reveal that the kind of maturity he possesses is one that allows the full use of his senses and intellect, but not one that comes from the experience of living. He is a man who has been created in time but he is completely devoid of any sense of the self as a participant in time and history (“For Man to tell how human Life began / Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?”). He acquires that sense of the self only when he begins a series of experiences in life, moving “from the spontaneous instinctual into the conscious.”¹⁴ And much of the beauty and drama in Adam’s narrative consists precisely in its enacting for us that process of self-realization.

The Genesis account of creation does not tell of Adam’s behavior when he was newly created. The first chapters give but the barest information on the psychology of the human couple. They are totally inadequate when it comes to the question naturally asked by any reader: why did Adam and Eve respond to temptation and fall into sin if they had been created in the image of God and, presumably, were perfect, and why did the period of Edenic innocence seem to be so brief in the biblical record? Saint Augustine, for one, thought that the first couple stood for only six hours!¹⁵

In order to answer these questions, Milton realizes that the transition from innocence to culpability in the human protagonists must be properly motivated and carefully prepared for in the epic action. He must show us not only the external agent of evil in the figure of Satan, but also the internal disposition of Adam and Eve that would help explain, if not completely in a satisfactory manner, at least in great part why they would fall. Adam’s conversation with Raphael in books 5–8, which by its sheer length creates the illusion of time passing, functions to soften the transitoriness of Paradise. In the words of George Williamson, the epic action thus has to be “suspended both for the education of Adam and for the preparation of the audience. While the didactic purpose is being served, dramatic tension is developed by our growing insight into Adam and Eve.”¹⁶ In that very process Adam and Eve are also shown to be exploiting those faculties with which they were originally endowed in creation—including memory, will, and intellect—and which have long been regarded as the elements that make up the image of God in man.

In the recollection set down in book 8, Adam’s developing selfhood is progressively made more apparent, from his first awareness and experimentation with his physical attributes, through the discovery of voice and speech, to the deliberate exercise of his rational faculties (“On a green shadie Bank profuse of Flours / Pensive I sate mee down”). Concurrent with this development comes the more profound questioning of his own existence (“who I was, or from what cause, / Knew not”), which, as the late Charles Coffin observed, “signifies Adam’s sense of the mystery of his being, wherein the moment of the awakening of the self is crossed by a feeling of its limitation. Here is the self’s complex awareness that being implies the Other than itself as a condition of existence and that its complete identity somehow requires at least the acknowledgement of the fact.”¹⁷

It is in such questioning, too, that Adam’s sensus divinitatis begins to grow, for the survey of nature and of his own person brings to himself both the sense of his limitation and illumination. Adam very quickly perceives that he is not self-generated, but he further infers, and correctly, the cause of his own origin (“Not of myself; by some great Maker then, / In goodness and in power preeminent”). In language that deliberately paraphrases Rom. 1:19–20,¹⁸ the locus classicus of Christian natural theology, the recitation of Adam dwells upon “his sense of connection with the Deity even before it is confirmed by revelation.”¹⁹

That connection, moreover, is not confined to the realm of the intellect, for it involves Adam’s entire person. With a specific allusion to Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill (Acts 17:28), Adam’s entreaty to Nature shows how his whole being seems to have been impelled toward an encounter with the divine (“Tell me, how may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live, / And feel that I am happier than I know”). It is only appropriate, therefore, that God, who came to Adam first indirectly as a “shape Divine” in his dream and then directly as a “presence,” should calm the inquietum cor of the human creature by revealing himself as “Whom thou soughtest.”

Adam’s meeting with the deity, furthermore, arouses “the awareness of his separate existence, felt as the loneliness of ‘unity defective,’ which prompts his desire for Eve.”²⁰ In the biblical account, God is the one who makes the decisive observation: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Gen. 2:18). Milton’s epic rendering of this episode, however, puts the emphasis squarely on Adam’s consciousness of his solitary existence (“In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?”). Though Adam does not yet know what a woman or marriage is, his protest to God identifies his basic need:

The importance of this utterance of Adam lies not merely in the fact that it echoes vividly Milton’s own ideal on marriage; much more significantly, it sharpens his debate with the deity concerning the meaning of self-fulfillment, which is directly germane to Milton’s formulation of the doctrine of the image. That formulation carries with it an implied but forceful critique of such prior conceptions of the imago in Christian theology as Augustine’s and Aquinas’s, which emphasize Adam’s intellectual powers. In response to Adam’s complaint of solitude, God first advises him to seek solace among the animal kingdom (“With these / Find pastime, and beare rule; thy Realm is large”). Though Milton avoids portraying Adam as a full-blown philosopher of nature endowed with extravagant learning and wisdom, as many seventeenth-century writers did,²¹ the first man in the epic is still referred to as a “better Archimedes,” one who has been suddenly “endu’d” with large knowledge of the “Nature,” “wayes,” and even “language” of the creaturely world.

When Adam rejects the companionship of animals on the ground that reciprocity is impossible among unequals, God tests him further by inviting him to reflect on the solitary “State” of his Creator. Would not the deity be the being most miserable if Adam’s logic holds? The divine provocation, of course, elicits the most passionate response from his creature:

Although the reference to propagation may leave the poet open to the charge of anachronism since the first man has yet to be given the order to “be fruitful and multiply,” albeit that command may also have been implied in God’s announcement of his gift (“all the Earth / To thee and to thy Race I give; as Lords / Possess it”), Adam’s words make clear the crucial difference between the life of divine self-sufficiency and his own. They underscore the paradox central to the Christian affirmation that man who bears the image of God must also live by the realization that he is not like God.

If Adam’s delineation of the divine nature at this point reveals demonstrable affinity with Aristotelian notions of simplicity and unity, the description of his own existence indicates also a distinct departure, on the part of Milton himself, from traditional ideas about the image. In Augustine’s De trinitate, for example, the vindication of God’s triune character is based on the fundamental premise that God is self-conscious mind, which in its very act of self-contemplation understands itself to be the object of that contemplation. Thence comes the asseveration that there are three modes of a single mind—the perceiving subject, the subject perceived as its own object, and the act of this perception—each distinct from the other, but each also constitutive of the one self-conscious spirit. Man is said to be an “inadequate image” (impari imagine) of heavenly things (supernis), but nonetheless his interior life can be shown to be a direct analogue to this divine reality.²² It is on such a basis that Augustine seeks to argue (De trinitate 9–15) for a kind of trinity structured in the human person—first in the inner reality of mind, the knowledge wherewith it knows itself, and the love wherewith it loves both itself and its own knowledge (mens, notitia sui, amor sui), and further in the mind of man as the faculties of memory, understanding, and will (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas).

It should be noted, however, that this correspondence of the human person with the divine is established strictly on mind as a self-sufficient entity. Just as God in his eternity and solitude possesses within his own essence all the means and conditions of self-consciousness and, therefore, delights in his self-contemplation, so also the human subject attains its most conspicuous semblance of the divine when it reflects on the phenomenon that it both knows and loves itself. To be sure, Augustine goes on to say (De trinitate 14.12.15) that “this trinity of the mind, then, is not properly called the image of God because the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself, but only because it can also remember, understand, and love Him by whom the mind was made,”²³ but the repeated assertions on the need for the mind to be under divine regulation in no way diminish the importance and priority of its being the unique locus of the image. Precisely because the mind embodies within itself the necessary structures to mirror the divine plenitude, Augustine sees little necessity in considering any aspects of human existence other than the solitary being of man as the bearer of that image. His effort, in fact, (12.7.10) to harmonize Gen. 1:17 with the Pauline declaration in 1 Cor. 11:7–19 also betrays his bias: both woman and man can be regarded as the image of God insofar as they are considered to be the one substance of the human mind, but man alone is also the image fully and completely (plena atque integra), whereas woman in her capacity as man’s helper is not.²⁴ So central is mind to Augustine’s thinking that when he discusses regeneration later (14.16.22), he can say that mind is where the image of God is (ubi est imago Dei, id est mente).

Milton, of course, does not disparage the rational faculties of the human mind, but some of his reservations about the doctrine of the Trinity may have led him to consider a different way of drawing the analogy between the human and the divine. “Loneliness,” writes Milton in the Tetrachordon, “is the first thing which God’s eye named not good,”²⁵ and Adam’s oxymoronic self-definition (unitie defective) echoes both the poet’s emphasis and the scriptural record of the deity’s pronouncement. Adam’s acknowledgment of his need for “Collateral love” similarly asserts that the affective life of the solitary self does not suffice. His is indeed a bold speech because it is an implicit critique of creation’s imperfection by the most pointed differentiation between the sociality of his nature and the aseity of God. God’s reply—

It shows in the first place that Adam, by an appropriate use of his freedom, has passed successfully a test of reason and obedience that God has set for him. Recognition of this removes the mistaken notion that Adam later confronts his temptation completely untried and unprepared. Calvin has said that “God provided man’s soul with a mind, by which to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong; and with the light of reason as guide, to distinguish what should be followed from what should be avoided…. To this he joined the will, under whose control is choice. Man in his first condition excelled in these preeminent endowments, so that his reason, understanding, prudence, and judgment not only sufficed for the direction of his earthly life, but by them men mounted up even to God and eternal bliss.”²⁶ Milton’s portrayal of Adam may be said to parallel Calvin’s thought in that Adam is shown to be more than capable of using his freedom to “judge of fit and meet.”

Second, God’s reply accentuates the importance of man’s having the right knowledge of God and of the self (perhaps another Miltonic echo of the dialectic of twofold knowledge that runs through Calvin’s Institutes). Adam’s triumph at this point also provides an ironic commentary on his later failure, for when he falls into sin with Eve, the judgment of the Son of God is that Adam has not known himself aright (10.156). Third, God’s answer once more illustrates how divine foreknowledge does not abrogate human freedom. God may have already known that “it is not good for Man to be alone,” but Adam still has the responsibility to ascertain that he has the need for a “human consort” before he is rewarded with Eve. In the words of God, moreover, comes the revelation that God’s image and man’s “free spirit” are in fact synonymous. It is in the exercise of his freedom, elsewhere characterized by the poet as identical with reason (3.108, 9.352), that man most resembles his Creator.

The kind of freedom that Adam enjoys does not exist in a solipsistic manner, for it finds its fullest expression only in relation to another personal being. Only another creature made in the image of God can provide the “fellowship” suitable for Adam, for only that kind of creature can fulfill the divine promise:²⁷

The implications of this dialogue between Adam and his maker are both astonishing and far-reaching, for it can be said that Milton here is on the verge of agreement with that position in modern Protestant theology that holds that solitary man does not exhaust the meaning of the imago dei. It is man in community, specifically in the form of the duality of the sexes, that genuine humanity can be realized and fulfilled. Already in his book of 1933, Schöpfung und Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his theological interpretation of the Genesis story has rejected the analogy of being as an adequate way of conceiving human similitude to the divine. “In man,” says Bonhoeffer, “God creates his image on earth. This means that man is like the Creator in that he is free.” But “because freedom is not a quality which can be revealed” except in a “relationship between two persons,” the created freedom of man comes to expression only in

Building on this insight of Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, in his massive dogmatics, further elaborates on this point. He, too, rejects the Thomistic analogia entis and the emphasis on the moral and intellectual attributes of man as a proper description of how the creature resembles the creator. Rather, he seizes on the sentence “He created them male and female” in his exegesis of Gen. 1:27 to show that this is precisely what “Godlikeness” is supposed to mean. Man in God’s image is first of all male and female, for in this relationship true confrontation and reciprocity take place as in the divine life. From this most fundamental relation also arises man’s other relation to his human neighbors in general. In his discussion of Gen. 2:18–25, the so-called second account of creation, Barth writes so much as if he were paraphrasing a part of book 8 of Paradise Lost that a lengthy quotation cannot be resisted:

The foregoing comparison of Barth with Milton is intended not so much to suggest that the Swiss theologian has been influenced by Paradise Lost or that Milton should be read as a theologian of twentieth-century neoorthodoxy, as to elucidate the relative originality in the poet’s theology and art. In spite of the amazing similarity of their thought and even of their language at certain points, the two men also differ quite markedly on the exegesis of Gen. 1:27. Putting all the emphasis on the personal pronoun “him” in this verse as referring only to Adam and reinforcing his interpretation with an appeal to 1 Cor. 11, Milton takes the imago in man as “that indelible character of priority,”³¹ and this assertion of male headship and greater likeness to the divine is repeated in the epic both by the narrator (4.295–299) and by Adam himself (8.540–545). It is equally apparent, however, that Adamic headship or priority in the conjugal order for Milton is never to be construed as a license for the subjugation of the wife. Indeed, one of the remarkable features in the Miltonic depiction of Edenic life is precisely the extent to which the poet, in his invention of episodes, will go beyond his immediate biblical sources to demonstrate to his reader that the difference in original endowments no more implies the inequality of the sexes than the established hierarchy of creation will perforce lead to the violation of individuality and dignity.

“Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (4.299) is Milton’s paraphrase of part of Paul’s discussion of the image in the New Testament.³² But the subordination of Eve to Adam in the epic, as criticism has increasingly pointed out,³³ is freely and lovingly given from the first moment when she consents to his solicitation (4.488–490). Before her actual encounter with Adam, she was told—presumably by the deity—that she was Adam’s image (4.472), but she was neither commanded nor coerced into submission by that revelation. Her first reported conversation with Adam (4.439ff.) shows her awareness that she had been formed for him and from him, but this recognition in no way undercuts the fact that her yielding is a free, responsible act of self-giving. That she was created ex substantia homini and her voluntary response to Adam, in fact, have led some critics to see in her act an analogue to the Son’s subordination to the Father.³⁴

Whatever the poet’s intentions may have been on that point, it seems clear that Milton is eager to show us the development of Eve’s selfhood no less than that of Adam’s. Our perception of this poetic design may in turn alter our understanding of those peculiar episodes related to the prelapsarian Eve. The pool passage associated with her creation (4.449ff.) has long been regarded as an account of her nascent vanity and narcissism. To balance such a view that sees in her inclination only a dangerous harbinger of tragic things to come must be our realization that the poet is interested first of all in emphasizing certain crucial but complementary differences between male and female: Eve’s less precise consciousness of her identity (“What I was?” in contrast with Adam’s “Who I was?”), her greater affinity with sensible things and impressions, and her symbolic association with water and earth as opposed to Adam’s with sun and sky (4.450–459).³⁵ The most important point about this episode, however, is that she, like Adam, must acquire the knowledge that her existence is incomplete without the presence of another self, though that process of her learning is characteristically different. Whereas Adam arrives at his conclusion by means of articulate conceptualization and rigorous debate, Eve discovers the fascination and frustration of her solitary being (“pin’d with vain desire”) through mute play with her watery image. She has to be told to distinguish between the self and not-self and led out of this confusion, yet even her encounter with Adam, planned and directed by God, is reported not without one of Milton’s more subtle ironies. Having just been assured that she will meet the person whose image she is and whom she will enjoy, she is panicked into flight by the sudden sight of someone “less faire, / Less winning soft, less amiablie milde” than her own reflection. Not merely a deliverance from self-absorption or a fulfillment of her longing to be connected with another self, her union with Adam is in truth the beginning of their education in the meaning of difference in likeness, of oneness despite diversity, in the marital life of man and woman. Her words to Adam—“thy gentle hand / Siesd mine, I yielded, and from that time see / How beauty is excelled by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair”—betoken more than a generous compliment; they signal her movement away from instinctual reactions to surface, sense impressions and the formation of judgments based on reason and assimilated experience. This is Eve’s way of affirming what she finds “higher” in his society, what is for her “Attractive, human, rational,” and it is an all-important lesson that Adam has also been charged to learn in the course of the epic (8.561–594).

The meeting of Adam and Eve, which is God’s answer to the problem of their creaturely solitude, thus eventuates in the establishment of a relationship of love in freedom. The maintenance of that relationship, of course, depends on their proper regard for things temporal and spiritual, on their reason and passion “rightly tempered,” and on choices freely made but in accord with obedience and love.

When we first encounter Adam and Eve in book 4, their attractive physique, in the lyrical celebration of which (299–340) the poet skillfully combines the themes of image theology with certain strands of the iconographic tradition, acts as the symbol and seal of human life in Paradise.³⁶ An even more engaging aspect is the vision of their love, which reflects their purity and innocence, the unsullied image of God that even Satan recognizes (4.363–365) and which forms the most poignant contrast to the fallen visitor. Though there is no lack of a measure of rationality in hell (2.497), freedom and love are what satanic existence wholly wants. Much as his entrance into Paradise is an intrusion, so Satan’s envious insinuation of eventual demonic alliance with the human (“League with you I seek, / And mutual amitie so streight, so close, / That I with you must dwell, or you with me”) is also a parody of the insouciant intimacy between Adam and Eve. Theirs is a life of unconstrained reverence for their maker, of “choice / Unlimited of manifold delights” in nature, of spontaneous gratitude for and enjoyment of each other’s presence, and of a joyous sexuality. Though private and “sequester’d,” their lovemaking, not at all surreptitious or furtive, rebukes the “secret” and incestuous relation between Satan and Sin (2.766). As the prelapsarian Eve gladly acknowledges Adam’s authority (4.439–443), a point enjoying common agreement among the biblical expositors, so Adam is shown to lend his wife the needed advice and support in both the episodes of her question about the stars (4.657–658) and of her dream (5.8ff.).

Consistent with the poet’s design to dramatize the growth and development of the human couple, the star episode dwells on their freedom to exercise their intellect as well as on the potential danger of such freedom. It is true that Eve’s query concerning the stars (“wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes”) may, as Barbara Lewalski has remarked, involve “certain faulty assumptions—that not only the earth but the entire cosmos was made for man, and that it was made somewhat inexpertly.”³⁷ Yet it must be remembered that Eve’s speculation in itself is no more culpable than Adam’s far more excessive rhapsodization of her beauty and his protest against her overendowment by Nature (8.538–540). What these incidents remind us is that their developing intellects are not self-sufficient; both husband and wife stand in need of guidance and correction. In the episode of Eve’s dream, the modern reader may be particularly dissatisfied with the faulty psychology that underlies Adam’s explanation of guilt and responsibility (5.95–128), but Adam does succeed in comforting his wife, thereby lending poignant justification to Eve’s ardent tribute earlier: “With thee conversing I forget all time, / All seasons and thir change, all please alike” (4.639–640). His success in turn adds pathos to the moving Miltonic metaphor later, when Eve leaves her husband’s side just when his presence is most needed.

The special bond of intimacy that unites Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian existence also creates a problem when the time comes for the poet to present their temptation and fall. The Genesis account tells of the encounter of the woman with the serpent, but it gives no indication whether Adam is present during the temptation or, if he is present, why he does not come to the help of his wife. The most likely inference one can make is that Eve is alone when she meets her tempter. Milton thus has the task of transforming this inference into an event in the poetic action, an event so motivated that it will ensure dramatic probability without at the same time calling into question either the providence of God or the innocence of the human protagonists.

To Satan, who suddenly finds Eve by herself, the meeting seems a piece of pure luck (9.479–482). Consistent with the demonic view of the world that persistently denies God’s providence, Satan believes “in a universe of no pattern, a random world.”³⁸ But this is not true on the divine or the human level of the poem. In God’s view, the whole incident of Eve’s separation from Adam is foreseen, of course, but not foreordained. On the human level, the couple who have lived and worked together hitherto but who are separated at the critical hour cannot be allowed to undergo such a change by accident or coercion. The episode, therefore, must be developed by Milton again in terms of human freedom, of the decisions Adam and Eve must make as they live in Eden. In the very exercise of their freedom, Adam and Eve will demonstrate how they may incur the risk of freedom’s misuse.

Eve’s choice of leaving Adam to work separately to tend the garden is well motivated, for it is based on an established fact: the profusion and prodigality of its vegetation. Her proposal for a division of labor has its justification, which is immediately acknowledged by Adam (9.205–235), yet his counterproposal for caution and her staying also suggests how well he has learned from Raphael. His speculation on the possible tactic of Satan (“Whether his first design to be withdraw / Our fealtie from God, or to disturb / Conjugal love”) similarly discloses his awareness of the basic relations that must govern their lives and their vulnerability. Eve’s reply and the manner of her reply, reported via the synaeceosis “sweet austere,” at once makes apparent her tendency to reason incorrectly, a tendency also shown to us previously in the poem. Frustrated by Adam’s words, she proceeds to distort their meaning. Adam’s plea at the conclusion of his speech (9.256–269) is based on an appeal to the husband’s legitimate protective role. Eve, however, draws the unnecessarily nasty implication and reproaches Adam for not trusting her and for doubting her “firm Faith and Love.” Adam’s subsequent explanation shows remarkable patience and genuine love. Instead of pointing out to her that although she is free “from sin and blame entire,” she is still the weaker of the two of them (a point of which Raphael emphatically reminds Adam in 6.908–909), Adam continues to stress their need for mutual dependence and support in the event of a satanic onslaught (9.309–317), which is unlikely to come if they remain together. Unpersuaded, Eve brings out the argument: “What is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid / Alone, without exterior help sustained?” (335–336).

Because her words bear startling resemblance to some of Milton’s own polemics against “a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed,” many critics share the opinion of Hanford that “Eve has much of the best of the argument” here.³⁹ The problem with such an interpretation is that it fails to distinguish between the prelapsarian world of Eden and the fallen one of Areopagitica. In the latter, “the knowledge of good and evil [is] as two twins cleaving together,” and Adam’s fall makes necessary the trial of purification for all his heirs, but this sort of ordeal is hardly applicable to the first human couple. Moreover, Eve’s eagerness to win the argument has caused her to commit a reckless error (not unlike Adam’s earlier version for which he was chided by an angel in 8.568) by equating Adam’s presence as an “outside,” an “exterior help.” This is to miss entirely the import of Adam’s words (“I, from the influence of thy looks receave / Access in every Vertue, in thy sight / More wise, more watchful stronger”) and to deny the deepest meaning of their union. Bowing to Eve’s insistence, Adam at last gives his grudging consent (“Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more”). It will not do to argue, as some critics have done, that Adam at this juncture should have exerted his authority to the fullest and compelled Eve to remain, for that would have been obedience acquired through coercion, a complete repudiation of the principle of virtuous action that Milton himself has sought to affirm and defend from Comus to Samson Agonistes.⁴⁰

If the Miltonic conception of the imago entails distinctive treatment of certain aspects of prelapsarian life, this is no less true of the episodes on the couple’s fall and restoration. The Genesis account concentrates so vividly on the experience and reaction of Eve during the temptation that it has become the favored text of many biblical commentators for the construction of elaborate spiritual psychology. Adam’s transgression, on the other hand, is reported in the most matter-of-fact manner: “she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Gen. 3:6). To account for Adam’s action, Milton relies on well-established precedent in the exegesis of 1 Tim. 2:14 and ascribes to Adam’s motive the “social love to his wife”:⁴¹ Adam will fall “against his better knowledge, not deceav’d, / But fondly overcome with Femal charm” (9.998–999).

Yet this particular emphasis on Adam’s “uxoriousness” is no blind following of tradition, for Milton must wrestle again with the problem of motivation. Just as an alert reader may object to the prior revolt in Heaven by asking how it was that so many angels, made presumably wiser and more perfect than man, could be swayed so easily by satanic rhetoric (5.660ff.), so we might ask what plausible inducement could explain the readiness of Adam’s consent. Milton cannot permit his Adam to stand there for one whole day, as he does in the Caedmonian Genesis,⁴² while Eve pleads for him to eat the fruit, for if Adam’s fall were solely attributed to the force and persistence of Eve’s persuasion, his supposedly superior intellect would be rendered unintelligible. Nor can Adam be allowed to join Eve so speedily as if he were doing that out of sheer instinct, for that would jeopardize the perfection of creation. To steer his course midway between these two dilemmas, Milton gives Adam an unspecified length of time for reflection after he has received the shocking news from Eve (9.894). When he gives voice to the content of his reflection (895ff.), however, he reveals that he has already come to a definite decision: “for with thee / Certain my resolution is to die.”

That decision is based on none other than the problem that Eve’s creation was supposed to solve, namely, his solitude. Adam’s decision is momentous, for in the last analysis, his choice to die with Eve constitutes his very act of crossing the boundary between innocence and sin. Because he cannot bear the thought of losing Eve, the possibility of which already transforms Eden into “these wilde Woods forlorne” for him, Adam chooses Eve instead of obedience to God. That choice is, in fact, an act of tragic self-affirmation (“to lose thee were to lose myself”), arising out of the most fundamental need of his being as the bearer of God’s image. Seen in the theological context of the poem, however, it is also an act of self-assertion that leads to final self-destruction.

The fatal error of Adam, as Milton’s poetry is careful to make clear, consists in thinking his situation to be “remediless”—that not even God’s omnipotence can recall or undo the past (926–927). God has solved his problem of solitude once before. Though the present situation is far more serious, is there warrant for Adam to doubt that divine assistance is available or possible? Adam’s words and “calme mood,” however, already reflect a resignation and despair that, far from exemplifying Christian virtue, take on a semblance of the satanic tendency to “arm th’ obdured brest / With stubborn patience as with triple steel” (2.568–569). To preserve his banishment from want, Adam denies the freedom of God.

Once the Fall has occurred, many theologians have speculated on whether the imago dei remains in the human person—and if so, how much and in what capacity—or whether it has been wholly obliterated. Milton is unambiguous on this question. “Some remnants of the divine image still exist in us,” he declares in De Doctrina Christiana (1.12), “not wholly extinguished by this spiritual death. This is evident … from the wisdom and holiness of many of the heathen, manifested both in words and deeds.”⁴³ But his responsibility in Paradise Lost cannot stop with the vision of how the vestigial image of God is further “debas’t” by the history of a sinful humanity as a consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve (11.500ff.). To complete his poetic theodicy, Milton must show how the salvific process to bring good out of evil is again set in motion. That is the deepest meaning of Adam’s reconciliation to Eve, another incident not found in the source of his poem.

Because the theme of redemption must now be brought to the fore, book 10 of the poem understandably expands on the motifs already introduced in book 3 and makes prominent the ministry of the Son of God. It is significant, however, that the work of the judge and savior seems to have little immediate efficacy in moving Adam and Eve beyond their misery, the “vain contest” in mutual recrimination that threatens to destroy entirely their relation. Even the proclamation of the protevangelium (10.180–181) and the merciful provision of covering for their nakedness, which Milton at once translates by typological interpretation to be the imputed righteousness of the Son (220–233), cannot mitigate the severity of the sentence and the cruel change in nature (651–719). Overwhelmed by his present plight and the fearful prospects of the future, Adam in his long despairing soliloquy (720–844) indicates that his faith in God’s providence is all but lost.

For Adam and implicitly for the reader, too, the question of God’s justice and wisdom is once more placed under the harshest scrutiny. Adam cannot understand the purpose of his own creation or why he had to face temptation. Knowing intellectually what the penalty of sin is, he cannot comprehend why he is still living and “mockt with death.” Above all, he cannot perceive why there should be a historical process, since mankind will proceed from him “corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved.” His “vigorous self-examination” convicts him of his guilt (“first and last / On mee, mee onely, as the source and spring / Of all corruption”), but of the “Abyss” into which his conscience has driven him he can see no way out, “from deep to deeper plung’d.”

Clearly, if Adam is to leave his own hell on earth, someone other than he must provide the assistance, and that assistance must come in the form of both emotional comfort and intellectual enlightenment. This is first provided by the turning of Eve, and in her turning, she moves Adam to reconciliation with her and eventually, with God. Though her initial attempt to console her spouse is met by stinging sarcasm and savage accusation, Eve’s reply to Adam’s venom is one of the most memorable passages in all of Milton’s poetry. Beginning with the tender plea “Forsake me not thus, Adam,” it proceeds through the confession of sorrow and contrition and rises to the passionate outcry at the end:

One need not resolve entirely the question of whether the symploce on “me” in this speech of Eve directly echoes the Son’s voluntary offer to suffer for man (3.236–238) or merely parodies the egoism of Satan (9.687–688) or Adam (10.736–740)⁴⁴ to perceive in her declaration not merely the words of proper subjection but the will to genuine self-giving. While Adam lies on the ground enmeshed in his own misery, it is Eve who first approaches him; her action, more concretely felt than the divine or angelic examples that Adam heard in narration, thus mirrors that divine initiative that seeks the lost and afflicted, just as her words express that spirit of self-sacrifice that, according to the Christ of John 15:13, no other love can surpass. Up to the moment of his conversation with Eve, Adam has never even had the thought of praying to God for forgiveness or for assistance. Accused by Adam as the “serpent,” the origin of evil in beautiful disguise, and the destroyer of human love,⁴⁵ Eve now overcomes his estrangement from her and from God by breaking the hard shell of his self-centeredness.

When we recall the specific words of Milton on the remnants of the imago in fallen humanity (“the will is clearly not altogether inefficient in respect of good works, or at any rate of good endeavors; at least after the grace of God has called us”),⁴⁶ it is tempting to attribute this action of Eve to some kind of divine prompting, some “means” that the Son has declared grace would find (3.227) in the divine pity for man. The astonishing thing to be noted here, however, is that Eve’s action precedes the descent of prevenient grace (11.3). It is as if Milton is saying that the love that brings about such a powerful reversal has no other immediate source than the mystery of the human depth.

However we may wish to interpret “this odd event,” this “occurrence both unexpected and altogether out of character,”⁴⁷ what it establishes unmistakably is that Eve has moved beyond the role of temptress to become the true heroine of the Christian epic. Human reconciliation, to be sure, does not bring about instantaneous deliverance from the couple’s fallen state. Eve’s second speech (10.967–1006) reveals more erroneous reasoning when she attempts to placate her husband’s fear for their progeny by recommending either abstinence or suicide. Even with her “recovering heart” (10.966), she is shown to be susceptible to “vehement despaire” (1007).⁴⁸ Nonetheless, it is undeniable that just as her words of self-sacrifice move him to “Commiseration” and dispel his “anger” (10.939–946), so even her faulty proposals jolt “To better hopes his more attentive mind” (10.1012).

In his ugliest moment of hatred, Adam has parodied the sentiments of Augustine⁴⁹ by questioning out loud why God did not create all “Spirits Masculine” and why he did “not fill the World at once / With Men as Angels without Feminine” (10.890–894). By enabling her husband to take the first step toward penitence, which makes possible that process by which “the inward man is regenerated by God after his own image,”⁵⁰ Eve has fulfilled her most important responsibility as helpmeet and thereby justifies the wisdom and goodness of her original creation.

6. The literature on the topic is enormous. For standard historical surveys, see the following: A. Strucker, Die Gottebenbildlichkeit des Menschen in der urchristlichen Literatur der ersten zwei Jahrhunderte (Aschendorf, Ger.: Münster-en-W., 1913); Jacob Jervell, Imago Dei: Gen. 1, 26f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulinischen Briefen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960); Stephan Otto, Die Funktion des Bildbegriffes in der Theologie des 12. Jahrhunderts, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und der Theologie des Mittelalters, vol. 40, no. 1 (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlags Buchhandlung, 1963); Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1967); Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); David Cairns, The Image of God in Man, rev. ed. (London: Collins, 1973).

11. So Martin Luther wrote in his Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5: “Although Eve was a most extraordinary creature—similar to Adam so far as the image of God is concerned, that is in justice, wisdom, and happiness—she was nevertheless a woman…. Thus even today, the woman is the partaker of the future life” (trans. George V. Schick, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan [St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1972], pp. 68–69). Calvin is even more emphatic in his assertion of the created equality of woman as the bearer of the imago. In his commentary on 1 Cor. 11:7–10, Calvin writes: “For both sexes were created according to the image of God (ad imaginem dei), and Paul urges women, as much as men to be re-formed according to the image. But when he is speaking about image here, he is referring to the conjugal order (ad ordinem coniugalem)…. The straightforward solution is this, that Paul is not dealing here with innocence and holiness, which women can have just as well as men, but about the preeminence which God has given to the man, so that he might be superior to the woman” (The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, trans. John W. Fraser, in Calvin’s Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1960], p. 232). In his Commentary on Genesis, however, Calvin has this to say: “But this difficultie also must be considered, why Paul denieth a woman to be the image of God: whereas Moses giveth this honour generally to both kindes. The solution is briefe: because Paul there toucheth the state onely by way of dispensation. Therefore he refraineth the image of God to rule on government, whereby the man hath superioritie over the woman: and verily it signifieth no other thing, but that man hath the excellencie in the degree of honor” (A Commentary of M. John Calvine on The Book of Genesis and The Book of Joshua, trans. Thomas Tymme [London: Harison & Bishop, 1578], p. 45). This opinion is repeated in Institutes 1.15.4.

24. “Quomodo ergo per Apostolum audivimus virum esse imaginem Dei, unde caput velare prohibetur, mulierem autem non, et ideo ipsa hoc facere jubetur? nisi, credo, illud quod jam dixi, cum de natura humanae mentis agerem, mulierem cum viro esse imaginem Dei, ut una imago sit tota illa substantia: cum autem ad adjutorium distribuitur, quod ad eam ipsam solam attinet, imago Dei est, tam plena atque integra, quam in unum conjuncta muliere.” Aquinas, in his formulation of the doctrine, also stresses the intellectual aspect of the imago, which then serves as a decisive means in ordering the hierarchy of angels, men, and women: “Proprie enim et principaliter imago intellectualem naturam consequitur; unde oportet quod ubi intellectualis natura perfectius invenitur, etiam ibi sit imago expressior, et sic cum natura intellectualis multo sit dignior in Angelis quam in homine … oportet quod in Angelis sit expressior Dei imago quam in anima, et in Angelis superioribus quam in inferioribus, et in viro quam in muliere” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentum in quattuor libros sententiarum 16.1.3, in Opera omnia [Parma, 1852], 6:526) (see also S.T. 93, 1–7). It should be remembered, of course, that in the history of image theology, there is another tradition (led by Bernard) that places greater emphasis on the freedom of the human will (see, for example, Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C. Downes [New York: Scribner’s, 1936], pp. 211–213).

29. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. and trans. T. F. Torrance, G. W. Bromily et al. (Edinburgh: Clark, 1936–1962), 3.1.292. Among modern critics of Milton, Arapara Ghevarghese George is one who has also noted the affinity of Miltonic theology with Barthian thought. George, however, centers his discussion on Milton’s view of marriage, paying little attention to the crucial lines of poetry on the imago itself (Milton and the Nature of Man: A Descriptive Study of “Paradise Lost” in Terms of the Concept of Man as the Image of God [New York: Asia Publishing, 1974], pp. 65–74). Barth’s view has been criticized by Cairns on the ground that “the distinction between male and female is not something peculiar to mankind. And if it be argued that it is not this distinction which Barth has in mind, but our whole responsible existence as man in relation to woman, then we may surely still object that it is the personal element in this situation and not the sexual which is distinctive, though admittedly the two elements are singularly fused” (Image of God, p. 181). This point is well taken, as Barth himself readily concedes, that “the differentiation and relationship between the I and the Thou in the divine being, in the sphere of the Elohim, are not identical with the differentiation and relationship between male and female. That it takes this form in man, corresponding to the bisexuality of animals too, belongs to the creatureliness of man rather than the divine likeness” (3.1.196). But Cairns’s criticism and Barth’s concession are both made in fidelity to Christian theism, which holds that the deity ultimately transcends sexual distinctions. For the modern biblical critic concerned only with the historical form in which the text is found, that theological affirmation may presume upon a kind of “purity” not present in the biblical tale of creation. Commenting on Gen. 1:26, G. W. Ahlström writes: “Elohim is not soliloquizing here: he is addressing the assembly of the gods. Additional support for this view is forthcoming from v. 27, where Elohim is said to create [man] in accordance with the image of the gods, i.e. an idol…. This latter Elohim may well be understood as a normal plural form, cf. 3.5, for in the following verse we read how Elohim created mankind: male and female. Man is thus created in the same forms as those represented in the assembly of the gods: there were to be found both the male and female principles, and both are thus expressed in the creation of mankind” (Aspects of Syncretism in Israelite Religion, Horae Soederblominanae 5 [Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1963], p. 50).

33. The best recent study on Eve that I know of is Diane Kelsey McColley’s “‘Daughter of God and Man’: The Callings of Eve in Paradise Lost” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1974). See also McColley, “Free Will”; Diane Kelsey McColley, “‘Daughter of God and Man’: The Subordination of Milton’s Eve,” in Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker, ed. Patricia Brückmann (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1978), pp. 196–208; Stella P. Revard, “Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 88 (1973): 69–78.

39. James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 4th ed. (1920; repr., New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), p. 211; see also E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), p. 259. The most succinct counterargument is provided by John S. Diekhoff, “Eve, the Devil and Areopagitica,” Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 429–434. McColley’s point that “from the moment Satan has entered the garden and they have been made aware of him, Eve and Adam are a kind of holy community in a world containing active evil” (“Free Will,” p. 117) is not altogether persuasive because neither the first couple nor creation are yet in a fallen state.

44. On the character of Eve and the remaining of her action in this episode, critical opinions are divided. For positive assessments, see B. Rajan, “Paradise Lost” and the XVIIth-Century Reader (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947), pp. 116–117; M. M. Pecheux, “The Concept of the Second Eve in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 35 (1960): 360; Mary Radzinowicz, “Eve and Dalila: Renovation and the Hardening of the Heart,” in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas 1600–1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 172; Joseph H. Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), chap. 7. For negative opinions, see Jun Harada, “The Mechanism of Human Reconciliation in Paradise Lost,” Philological Quarterly 50 (1971): 543–552; Catherine F. Seigel, “Reconciliation in Book X of Paradise Lost,” Modern Language Review 68 (1963): 260–263.