Thank you very much for this. I can tell by how you write about this book that you are passionate about it.
It is fascinating that before his fallen state, Milton wrote Adam and the Angels dialogue in what seemed to me as a "lofty" speech. It's English, but I almost did not recognize it, as if it was over my head. Once Adam, in his fallen state, began to talk about death, I was like, "There's the language I understand." I feel Milton did this deliberately.
On another note, I appreciated how you treated Eve in this essay. I liked your interpretation. In my opinion, the most interesting part of this book is lines 783-795.
Yet one doubt
Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die,
Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of man
Which God inspired, cannot together perish
With this corporeal clod; then in the grave,
Or in some other dismal place, who knows
But I shall die a living death? O thought
Horrid, if true! yet why? it was but breath
Of Life that sinned; what dies but what had life
And sin? the body properly hath neither.
All of me then shall die: let this appease
The doubt, since human reach no further knows.
For though the Lord of all be infinite,
Is his wrauth also?
I think what is so appealing to me about this section is that it is so very human. He is in despair, and he has questions and wonders about death- I can empathize with that. Many of us have been there.
And then there is Eve. One of the most tender parts of her speech to me is when she suggested suicide in lines 1001-1006:
with our own hands his office on ourselves;
Why stand we longer shivering under fears,
That show no end but death, and have the power,
Of many ways to die the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy.
She sounds so strong, but I think she is terrified. To be at the place of wanting to attempt is a very vulnerable feeling. As a reader, Milton takes us on a journey to the bottom of her despair. It makes me want to give her a big hug.
Milton's imagination is undoubtedly fertile. The description of personified sin and death emerging from hell to conquer the earth is especially chilling. But in Genesis 3, after the consequences declared by God*, Adam's first response is to name Eve (before this, Eve is simply named Woman). In the Hebrew, the name Eve is Chavah (Eve is an Anglicized transliteration of the name), meaning life, because, Genesis 3:20 says, "she was the mother of all living". That is the Biblical Adam's first recorded response to the heavy consequences of sin, recognition that the woman God gave to him will bring all other humans into life.
But in Milton's version, Eve is already named, and his Adam and Eve discuss the possibility of choosing to die without offspring. They eventually decide against it in a weak and vacillating way, but Milton's portrayal is ultimately pessimistic, lacking the hope of the Biblical account. The reasoning portrayed in their discussion about whether to die without offspring reminds me of those who criticize refugees or those living in oppressive conditions for having children, saying things like "They should know better than to have children in that environment." But that is what humanity does, our hope forever outweighs our despair, or we would simply lie down and die after each disaster in which we find ourselves. In Genesis, Eve names her firstborn in the hope that he is the promised seed that should crush the serpent. He isn't of course, he becomes the first murderer, of his brother no less, but nevertheless that hope continues. Eve has her third named son, Seth, after she looses both Cain and Abel. She never lost hope, and she was right to not do so, for from Seth is traced the earthly ancestry of Jesus Christ.
*N.B. Arianism does not deny the Son could be called God in some sense, but rather says the Son was created, making the Son less than the Father: (https://hardonsj.org/arianism-denial-divinity-jesus/), which Milton indisputably says not only in PL, but also in other writings.
Holly, your link to what some say about the impoverished or suffering having children (or alternatively “needing” abortion) is a brilliant connection to the thought process Milton describes Adam and Eve having.
And now I’m thinking about how the poem would read if Eve had not been named earlier in the narrative! Fascinating.
I have always liked the ending of the Greek pagan version of Adam and Eve. After Pandora has opened the box and all the evil has escaped into the world, she finds a little winged creature remaining in the box. It is Hope. But the Genesis account is still greater and stranger, because it is Eve who is hope.
I’ve never noticed the significance of the precise point when Adam names Eve. That is really powerful. That hope and that life is part of the judgment too. It’s so good.
I was just thinking that now I see a parallel between the naming of Eve and the fact that it was the women following Jesus who are the first to bear witness to his Resurrection. It was Martha, and not his disciples to whom Jesus said, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. Throughout the Old Testament, women not only bear children but they repeatedly save God's people, from Jochebed hiding Moses to Jael's destruction of an enemy general to Abigail's intervention with David to Esther's request to Ahaseurus, and many more, several of them unnamed but valued nonetheless. Christians see the significance of Mary to Eve, but there is also significance in the women at the Tomb, and in Phoebe carrying Paul's letter to Rome, and in the women who hosted churches in their houses...
I love, love, love Alan Jacob’s comments - not that I don’t also love yours Karen - I surely do. Jacobs helps us understand the connection between poetry and truth - truth we need to personalize and inhabit. Milton understands human nature and he understands how this whole situation might have gone now that the two have eaten the fruit. He understands himself and his imagination enables him to project to us the truths that he is able to imagine. The scene in the Bible is fairly brief and stark - like our old black and white TV sets (mine was a 13 inch). Jacobs helps us see how Milton’s insights create the flaming colors of human reality. He takes a two dimension scene and turns it into three dimensions with sequels. I particularly love Satan’s come-uppance. Here he is standing on tippy toe, hands raised to receive the adulation of his minions and all he hears is a giant hissing sound as his arms and legs deflate and he slams to the ground on his belly and his exultation comes out only as a hiss. We have a tendency to view Satan as almost another god and like to transfer blame onto him - “the devil made me do it.” I also love the symbolism of the clothes - the animal skins - God the Son made for Adam and Eve. The Bible doesn’t say so but God must have killed two of the animals that he had created and called good. This is the consequence of evil - their death and Christ’s death. But as well, consider the symbolic meaning of a righteous God who had just been disobeyed having tender care for these two sinners. This care and this live will be replicated and expanded to enormous proportions over time. So much to think about.
I've been traveling this week, so I was listening to book 10 in the car. My attention was wandering a bit, but when this section was read, I was jolted back into the narrative. Then I had to rewind it a bit. 😀
I came across the book, What In Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost in E Shaver books in Savannah this week. Looks intriguing. Has anyone read it?
I manage to read two or three books at a time and another book I have been reading is “Hopeful Realism” by Covington, McGraw, and Watson. This book attempts to develop an approach to politics that is both biblical and suitable to the peculiar group of Christians we call evangelicals. (Am I losing some of you here?) They emphasize a characteristic of evangelicalism that comes to the fore from time to time as antithesis - the tendency to create a them vs. us world view. This happened in the 20s and 30s with the threat of Darwinian evolution and, I believe, it happened again in the 1980s and following with the culture war. So how does this tie into Milton? Adam and Eve both turned from God to self - Adam blaming Eve and Eve indulging in self pity and turning to Adam instead of God. (At least according to Milton.) So where does antithesis come in? God refused to see Adam and Eve as hopelessly on the other side of the fence. He could have condemned Eve to be barren and let the whole game play out to end the human race. God refused to see Adam and Eve as the antithesis of what he had created. Instead he showed them love - clothing them. He could have cursed them. God cursed the ground and the snake, why not curse these two humans also? Well, instead he gave them a way of remembering their sinful nature - Eve enduring pain in childbirth - but children would be born. Adam enduring pain and weariness in his world of work desperately trying to raise crops for food. God refused to create an antithesis when he had every right to. So what is the lesson for us evangelicals - at least according to Milton and really also according the Genesis?
Thank you very much for this. I can tell by how you write about this book that you are passionate about it.
It is fascinating that before his fallen state, Milton wrote Adam and the Angels dialogue in what seemed to me as a "lofty" speech. It's English, but I almost did not recognize it, as if it was over my head. Once Adam, in his fallen state, began to talk about death, I was like, "There's the language I understand." I feel Milton did this deliberately.
On another note, I appreciated how you treated Eve in this essay. I liked your interpretation. In my opinion, the most interesting part of this book is lines 783-795.
Yet one doubt
Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die,
Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of man
Which God inspired, cannot together perish
With this corporeal clod; then in the grave,
Or in some other dismal place, who knows
But I shall die a living death? O thought
Horrid, if true! yet why? it was but breath
Of Life that sinned; what dies but what had life
And sin? the body properly hath neither.
All of me then shall die: let this appease
The doubt, since human reach no further knows.
For though the Lord of all be infinite,
Is his wrauth also?
I think what is so appealing to me about this section is that it is so very human. He is in despair, and he has questions and wonders about death- I can empathize with that. Many of us have been there.
And then there is Eve. One of the most tender parts of her speech to me is when she suggested suicide in lines 1001-1006:
with our own hands his office on ourselves;
Why stand we longer shivering under fears,
That show no end but death, and have the power,
Of many ways to die the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy.
She sounds so strong, but I think she is terrified. To be at the place of wanting to attempt is a very vulnerable feeling. As a reader, Milton takes us on a journey to the bottom of her despair. It makes me want to give her a big hug.
Such an excellent point about the language, Mel!
Karen, I have come so far since my first Donne poem, haven't I? :-)
Yes, you have!!! 🤍
Milton's imagination is undoubtedly fertile. The description of personified sin and death emerging from hell to conquer the earth is especially chilling. But in Genesis 3, after the consequences declared by God*, Adam's first response is to name Eve (before this, Eve is simply named Woman). In the Hebrew, the name Eve is Chavah (Eve is an Anglicized transliteration of the name), meaning life, because, Genesis 3:20 says, "she was the mother of all living". That is the Biblical Adam's first recorded response to the heavy consequences of sin, recognition that the woman God gave to him will bring all other humans into life.
But in Milton's version, Eve is already named, and his Adam and Eve discuss the possibility of choosing to die without offspring. They eventually decide against it in a weak and vacillating way, but Milton's portrayal is ultimately pessimistic, lacking the hope of the Biblical account. The reasoning portrayed in their discussion about whether to die without offspring reminds me of those who criticize refugees or those living in oppressive conditions for having children, saying things like "They should know better than to have children in that environment." But that is what humanity does, our hope forever outweighs our despair, or we would simply lie down and die after each disaster in which we find ourselves. In Genesis, Eve names her firstborn in the hope that he is the promised seed that should crush the serpent. He isn't of course, he becomes the first murderer, of his brother no less, but nevertheless that hope continues. Eve has her third named son, Seth, after she looses both Cain and Abel. She never lost hope, and she was right to not do so, for from Seth is traced the earthly ancestry of Jesus Christ.
*N.B. Arianism does not deny the Son could be called God in some sense, but rather says the Son was created, making the Son less than the Father: (https://hardonsj.org/arianism-denial-divinity-jesus/), which Milton indisputably says not only in PL, but also in other writings.
Holly, your link to what some say about the impoverished or suffering having children (or alternatively “needing” abortion) is a brilliant connection to the thought process Milton describes Adam and Eve having.
And now I’m thinking about how the poem would read if Eve had not been named earlier in the narrative! Fascinating.
I have always liked the ending of the Greek pagan version of Adam and Eve. After Pandora has opened the box and all the evil has escaped into the world, she finds a little winged creature remaining in the box. It is Hope. But the Genesis account is still greater and stranger, because it is Eve who is hope.
I’ve never noticed the significance of the precise point when Adam names Eve. That is really powerful. That hope and that life is part of the judgment too. It’s so good.
I was just thinking that now I see a parallel between the naming of Eve and the fact that it was the women following Jesus who are the first to bear witness to his Resurrection. It was Martha, and not his disciples to whom Jesus said, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. Throughout the Old Testament, women not only bear children but they repeatedly save God's people, from Jochebed hiding Moses to Jael's destruction of an enemy general to Abigail's intervention with David to Esther's request to Ahaseurus, and many more, several of them unnamed but valued nonetheless. Christians see the significance of Mary to Eve, but there is also significance in the women at the Tomb, and in Phoebe carrying Paul's letter to Rome, and in the women who hosted churches in their houses...
👏👏👏
I love, love, love Alan Jacob’s comments - not that I don’t also love yours Karen - I surely do. Jacobs helps us understand the connection between poetry and truth - truth we need to personalize and inhabit. Milton understands human nature and he understands how this whole situation might have gone now that the two have eaten the fruit. He understands himself and his imagination enables him to project to us the truths that he is able to imagine. The scene in the Bible is fairly brief and stark - like our old black and white TV sets (mine was a 13 inch). Jacobs helps us see how Milton’s insights create the flaming colors of human reality. He takes a two dimension scene and turns it into three dimensions with sequels. I particularly love Satan’s come-uppance. Here he is standing on tippy toe, hands raised to receive the adulation of his minions and all he hears is a giant hissing sound as his arms and legs deflate and he slams to the ground on his belly and his exultation comes out only as a hiss. We have a tendency to view Satan as almost another god and like to transfer blame onto him - “the devil made me do it.” I also love the symbolism of the clothes - the animal skins - God the Son made for Adam and Eve. The Bible doesn’t say so but God must have killed two of the animals that he had created and called good. This is the consequence of evil - their death and Christ’s death. But as well, consider the symbolic meaning of a righteous God who had just been disobeyed having tender care for these two sinners. This care and this live will be replicated and expanded to enormous proportions over time. So much to think about.
Jack, I totally agree that Jacobs’ insights here are just stunning. It was such a gift to get him here! 😀
I've been traveling this week, so I was listening to book 10 in the car. My attention was wandering a bit, but when this section was read, I was jolted back into the narrative. Then I had to rewind it a bit. 😀
I love this.
I came across the book, What In Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost in E Shaver books in Savannah this week. Looks intriguing. Has anyone read it?
Miranda is reading it!
Awesome! I may have to look at her past comments. I figured some one here had probably said something about it.
Wow. So applicable to what we're living today, including the blame game in faith and in marriage.
Very applicable!
For a Zoom call, a Monday would be best and anything late afternoon or early evening Eastern time is great. I am in Colorado on Mountain Time ☺️
I manage to read two or three books at a time and another book I have been reading is “Hopeful Realism” by Covington, McGraw, and Watson. This book attempts to develop an approach to politics that is both biblical and suitable to the peculiar group of Christians we call evangelicals. (Am I losing some of you here?) They emphasize a characteristic of evangelicalism that comes to the fore from time to time as antithesis - the tendency to create a them vs. us world view. This happened in the 20s and 30s with the threat of Darwinian evolution and, I believe, it happened again in the 1980s and following with the culture war. So how does this tie into Milton? Adam and Eve both turned from God to self - Adam blaming Eve and Eve indulging in self pity and turning to Adam instead of God. (At least according to Milton.) So where does antithesis come in? God refused to see Adam and Eve as hopelessly on the other side of the fence. He could have condemned Eve to be barren and let the whole game play out to end the human race. God refused to see Adam and Eve as the antithesis of what he had created. Instead he showed them love - clothing them. He could have cursed them. God cursed the ground and the snake, why not curse these two humans also? Well, instead he gave them a way of remembering their sinful nature - Eve enduring pain in childbirth - but children would be born. Adam enduring pain and weariness in his world of work desperately trying to raise crops for food. God refused to create an antithesis when he had every right to. So what is the lesson for us evangelicals - at least according to Milton and really also according the Genesis?