A quick missive. I immediately went to Bonhoeffer's "Creation and the Fall" in order to see how this Christian thinker dealt with the issue of Eve. The gist is that Eve is taken from Adam and then given back to him. Adam's fall will become complete as soon as Eve takes the fruit; but Eve's fall is also brought to completion with Adam's rebellion.
Now here's the thing. Adam and Eve are freely given to one another out of God's compassion. (Milton's non-Trinitarian theology would have blinded him from this, and, as the guest from earlier pointed out, solitude is considered a beautiful thing for the independent thinking Milton.) In any case, neither Adam nor Eve work or want for one another; they are simply given one another because God says it is not good to be alone (this is the first time God declares something to not be good that we know of). The Fall begins when human beings believe they must take. And, reunion is only restored when human beings can once again receive a gift from God which will make them whole.
The late Tim Keller noted that the difference between a contract and a covenant is that the former occurs when the two parties enter into an agreement based on what what they can get from the other; while a covenant occurs when one or both of the parties is focused on what they can give to the other. As Bonhoeffer states, "The theological question is not a question about the origin of evil but one about the actual overcoming of evil on the cross; it seeks the real forgiveness of guilt and the reconciliation of the fallen world." The point of the Christian faith isn't an insight we glean or a work we perform; but a gift we receive.
This is such an interesting insight: "Adam's fall will become complete as soon as Eve takes the fruit; but Eve's fall is also brought to completion with Adam's rebellion." I think I like that and it sheds new light on the fall itself and Adam and Eve's (and all of humankind's thereafter) relations.
And the gift of grace at the heart of Christianity is, as your examples illustrate, reflective of all the other gifts along the way. Such a good connection.
Philip, thank you for sharing these insights both from Bonhoeffer and from Keller. Keller’s comparison of a contract versus a covenant is very helpful here.
There are so many things worth mentioning in Book 9! Here's Satan on entering the serpent:
"O foul descent! That I who erst contended with Gods... am now constrained into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime" (163-5). And then: "But what will not ambition and revenge descend to? Who aspires must down as low as high he soared, obnoxious first or last to basest things." (168-171)
How often do we see this played out, where naked ambition makes people descend into the depths of slimy corruption in pursuit of whatever drives them: money, power, fame, sex.
I was also taken by this very modern-sounding line from Eve, after eating the fruit and becoming "enlightened," who calls God "our great Forbidder" in line 815. And isn't that how God has been portrayed these days? He is a Killjoy. He suffocates us with his rules. He robs us of our freedom to be our best selves! Milton is prescient.
Charlie, it was so so hard to cover this book in one post! I was "tempted" (heh) to break it into two. But I knew you, my readers, would add much, more, than I could. There was much about Satan's parts that fascinated me. And I also underlined and starred that false name that Eve gave God. There is so much ill power in wrongly naming anything, but most especially God.
It all happens so fast! Eve's musing on the serpent's argument for eating the fruit takes, by my count, a mere 35 lines or so. For some reason I expected it to take longer. Yet perhaps it needs to be short, because, though it is central, it's very tricky. Eve is, in theory, sinless until she actually eats. Yes, the serpent flatters her, but she is not portrayed as being moved to overt pride by this; how could she be?
Her innocence is not stupid, though I see how she could be read as such. It's natural to attribute a fault either to malice or stupidity, and she lacks the former until that first bite passes her lips. But her reasoning is, if anything, more beautiful and convincing than that of the serpent: "Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not." She has a point; the freedom to be good is pretty important. Perhaps the flaw here is simply that she's not being as good as she says she is.
After her fall she becomes, I suspect, easier to write. Now her motivations can be complex. Now she can consider the idea of being better than Adam. Now she can love Adam, and yet fear to lose him, and so determine that he should be lost with her.
I do think Milton is shielding Adam, somewhat, at Eve's expense. The initial conversation, when they are discussing whether Eve should go off on her own, is tricky to understand from Eve's perspective. I feel like her indignance at not being trusted with the possibility of temptation would not make sense in an ordinary person unless there was some difficult history there, which there cannot be, because they're both unfallen. By having Adam warn her, Milton seems to me to be setting Adam up to be as much in the right as possible.
I was, however, rather moved (as Eve was) by Adam's swift decision, made from love, to join Eve in whatever fate awaited her.
Yes! This is a point Lewis makes as well. He says that by moving so quickly as Eve works through this in her mind "the reader is involved in same illusion as Eve herself." I think Milton works this effectively, and too, as you mention, Adam's swift, love-based decision to join Eve in the fall.
I can see Satan tapping into a latent pride she didn't know she had, but it's hard not to see sin already there in the conversation between Eve and Adam before they part. I agree her indignation doesn't smack of total innocence.
It seems to me that Satan appeals to Eve’s vanity and pride to entice her to eat the fruit. But how can that be, pre-fall? Also, there seems to be some indication of sinful motives in Eve wanting to go off on her own away from Adam. Also, pre-fall. I suppose it is impossible for a fallen human to even imagine an unfallen state.
I agree, Katy. I think the best understanding of Milton's thinking is found in Areopagitica where he talks about virtue being the choice of good in the face of evil, which is different from innocence. He doesn't seem to portray Adam and Eve as "innocent" but rather capable (as God says throughout the work) of obeying through free will.
Throughout this work I have been tiptoeing around particular issue that I've noticed. Lutheranism places a very strong emphasis on Gods sovereignty in salvation, while Anglicanism while also believing in Gods sovereignty, allows for more of a cooperative role for humans in the salvation process. This Anglican view seems to not be unique to many other denominations in the Isles. It also seems to have been carried over the Atlantic and spread through the churches of America.
Though Milton is not an orthodox Christian, he does locate the fall as being an issue with individualistic free will, where the Fall is a logical failure and the problems cascade from that faulty choice. When I was growing up this way of thinking dominated the American church. This was probably why it was so tempting for youth groups to be populated with moral lectures and why so many Christian living tracts appear to be self-help books with a few proof texts and Jesus fig leaf to merit being sold in the Christian book section. The overemphasis on a human-manufactured sanctification has calmed, what Lutheran theologians dub, "the old Adam," the part of our fallen human creature that believes we are justified by our merit.
I mentioned Bonhoeffer's work "Creation and the Fall" earlier, but the Bonhoeffer book that totally changed my entire world and is possibly more responsible for my faith is his work simply entitled "Ethics." I encountered this book in high school as I was perusing the Christian theology section of my local Borders Bookstore. It is admittedly very hard to find mainstream Christian books by Lutheran authors, so I was intrigued. I was not ready for what I would find within those pages. In the opening section, entitled "Love and the Decay of the World," Bonhoeffer gets at the real problem of the fall. This passage emphasizes that the knowledge of good and evil represents a fundamental departure from humanity's original state of unity with God. Initially, human knowledge was centered solely on God, with all other understanding flowing from this divine origin. The acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil, symbolized by the eating of the forbidden fruit, signifies a shift where humans see themselves as the source (or origin) of morality, separate from God.
His main argument rests on the fact that the fruit is not called, "the fruit of good and evil," but "the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." The Hebrew here is important. It is the word "da'at," which means "to perceive." We move past this word and glance over it, but it is the crux of the passage. Bonhoeffer has this to say, "Man now knows good and evil. This does not mean that he has acquired new knowledge in addition to what he knew before, but the knowledge of good and evil signifies the complete reversal of man's knowledge, which hitherto had been solely knowledge of God as his origin. In knowing good and evil he knows what only the origin, God Himself, can know and ought to know."
In other words, man has not been transmogrified into a Snidely Whiplash who is suddenly aware he can tie Nell to the train tracks. Instead, humanity has lost the relationship with God and now we have placed ourselves into the fog of unbelief over good and evil. It as if one were to put a toddler in as a judge in a court of law. Of course the toddler can speak and make utterances; but this same person is not equipped to grasp the nuance of the issues at hand. It is only by grace that world moves forward at all therefore, and not by our reason.
The other important thing the Bonhoeffer is stressing is that "the fall" is a relational catastrophe instead of an intellectual one. Of course the intellect does follow the relational falling away from God, but it is not the cause of the fall. Our broken relationship with God yields broken relationships with other people since we knew everything and everyone by our relationship with God.
In this way, the Lutheran would call into question the human desire for freedom apart from God and one another. Solitude is important to be sure, but no one of the prelapsarian world would become aggrieved by such an illusion of autonomy. This autonomy is a stolen one and it is a trick of the mind to locate it within the intellect or obedience instead of covenantal relationship which we have as creature to the Creator. Again Bonhoeffer observes:
Instead of knowing himself solely in the reality of being chosen and loved by God, he must now know himself in the possibility of choosing and of being the origin of good and evil. He has become like God, but against God. Herein lies the serpent's deceit. Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God. They are good and evil of man's own choosing, in opposition to the eternal election of God. In becoming like God man has become a god against God.
Milton, imagines God's sovereignty as an "otherness of title," as a king or monarch is other than us. The trappings and glory are what make Him deserving of His otherness. Bonhoeffer states that God's sovereignty is an "otherness of kind" where the quality of God's core being is not in His glory but in His Covenantal love for His creation ... even if that Creation is fallen. This moves away from the Neo-Platonic ideal of a God who the fallen man with an imagined sanitized intellect can worship; but leads us to see the scandal of God: the God enthroned upon the cross.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve are led astray not by their desire to learn some secret knowledge; but by their desire to judge good and evil through themselves as false origins. In today's conspiracy-saturated landscape, the old Adam and Eve are enticed by so-called secret knowledge not because they wish to see beyond the horizon but because they are covetous to have something which is not their's to have. Eve plucked the fruit to steal the otherness of God and Adam joined right along with her because the new titillation of humanity apart from God was a novelty. The mending of the relationship with God will be the mending of Creation.
This is so insightful and helpful, Philip. I think your concluding point about how exactly Adam and Eve are led astray—their desire to judge as God judges—is really important. And I think your insight about the American church stressing morality and “self-help” so much having its basis in a particular theology is very keen. It certainly has done that and not to particularly helpful ends.
I think the choice Milton made to choose sex to depict their fallen state is a good one. We read how both Adam and the Angel innocently admired Eve’s beauty, and Milton depicted sex before the fall as a thing of beauty. However, after the temptation, Adam lusts after Eve and burns with desire. His gaze is not fixed on her beauty but on what they could get from one another.
On a different note, I had a new thought about God came to my mind while reading this.
In lines 685-690 we see the fated temptation as in the Bible:
Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die:
How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you Life
To Knowledge, By the Threatner? look on mee,
Mee who have touch'd and tasted, yet both live,
And life more perfet have attaind then Fate.
Meant mee, by ventring higher then my Lot.
A thought came to me of how this temptation is the antithesis of the path Jesus preached that would lead us to him.
Jesus never highlighted knowledge as the path to him, but of the last being first and said his kingdom is like little children coming to him with eagerness and delight. Paul said that God uses the foolish things to confound the wise, and even Solomon says in Eccl.. 1:13-14 "I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Satan's temptation holds no truth or weight of course. Human existence does not rely on knowledge but depends on the good Father who cares for us so well.
It’s interesting to think about what other aspect of Adam and Eve’s relationship might have reflected the difference between pre- and post-fallenness. None so well as this, I think.
I love your insight about the role knowledge does not play in our relationship with Jesus and what he does for us. Or rather, that it is only knowing him that matters.
This is far from a profound comment, but since we're talking about misogyny, I have my own grievance to air in this section. I found Adam particularly annoying when he answers Eve's request to work separately in lines beginning with 227.
Sole Eve, Associate sole, to me beyond
Compare above all living Creatures deare,
Well hast thou motion'd, well thy thoughts imployd
How we might best fulfill the work which here
God hath assign'd us, nor of me shalt pass
Unprais'd: for nothing lovelier can be found
In Woman, then to studie houshold good,
And good workes in her Husband to promote.
Really? Nothing lovelier than studying the good of the household and promoting Adam's good works? This seemed to me very much like patting her on the head and saying, "You always keep the house so clean, honey. Such an excellent use of your time." Bah.
I would love a zoom meeting! I’ll grab a coffee and set my alarm. I’m might even just wear my pyjamas if Professor Swallow Prior isn’t too shocked .
I find it deeply moving that Adam , who has been distinctly irritating , becomes heroic after the fall , when he promises to stay with Eve no matter what ,in one of the most beautiful passages in the book .
Thanks for this week's post, Karen. I would note that C.S. Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost (which you recommended!) notes that Milton's thesis on the Fall—that Eve was by herself when Satan tempted her successfully, and that Adam joined her in eating the apple because he did not want to parted from her, and for no other reason—echoes what St. Augustine says in The City of God.
Whether Augustine and Milton give the most persuasive reading of this is a great question. But I find some of Milton's lines for Adam on this point to be some of the most beautiful in the whole poem (even if, as you say in your note 2, they are emotional hyperbole):
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly join'd,
To live again in thew wild Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my hear; no no, I feel
The link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy Stae
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe. (907–916)
However I with thee have fixt my Lot,
Certain to undergo like doom; if Death
Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The Bond of Nature draw me to my own,
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our State cannot be sever'd, we are one,
One Flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself. (952–959)
One last thought. There is a stray line in Book 8 that hit me, and that makes more sense now. It's when Raphael counsels Adam "that with honor thou may'st love / Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise." I have certainly found that to be true! And so I sympathize with Adam, in the Augustinian thesis Milton gives us in Book 9.
Thanks for pointing out that connection Lewis makes with Augustine. I guess what Milton really adds to the story is that it was Eve's idea. And again, reading biographically (which I'm generally not fond of doing), Milton's wife separated from him early on (although returned eventually), so this may be the anxiety he carries. But it also makes sense for her to be willing to separate given the reason Milton gives Adam to join her in the fall--his unwillingness to be separated from her. It is moving. Truly.
Great eye to see the connection between the earlier line in Book 8 to these events. The work is chock full of these, I'm sure, and it takes a great mind to weave those connections throughout--and a great mind to find them!
Very very cool , particularly when compared with Simon Haisells substack book club on the Wolf Hall trilogy, which by bad luck ended with us all reading the final chapter , when poor Thomas Cromwell was beheaded , on Christmas Day ( he admits himself that was not the cheeriest choice)
My father's 1941 annotated edition has a note on line 1182ff, which is the very bitter:
'Thus it shall befall He who to worth in women overtrusting Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook And left to herself, if evil thence ensue, She first his weak indulgence accuse.'
The note says:
"Perhaps the most completely personal lines in the poem. Probably exactly the same situation confronted Milton in his relations with his first wife after her return to him.
It is ironic, with such a negative view of women, that Milton married three times - his first and second wives both died in childbirth. Furthermore, his third wife and his daughters assisted him with his writing when he went blind. I wonder which one was tasked with writing those bitter lines.
Quite a poor annotation on the editor's part -- I am not sure it's sound to ascribe the fallen Adam's perspective to Milton! Especially since the lines *immediately* following distance the narrator from both sinners:
"Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning."
And for what it's worth, it is highly unlikely M's daughters served as amanuenses for PL. If he started composing the epic as most think in 1658, Anne (who was disabled) would have been 12, Mary 10, and Deborah (for whom we have the best evidence as an amanuensis later) only 6.
In Book 10 Adam's crass misogyny expands into misanthropy; he's not speaking for the author but as a (pretty accurate, to my view!) depiction of the way that men find ways to blame women. I find especially hilarious Adam's description of Eve as "a Rib / Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, / More to the part sinister from me drawn," showing that he's now also a bad reader and bad natural scientist (10.884-86).
Since the first ten books of PL were first published in 1667, wouldn't it be probable that Book 9 was written some years after 1658? In that era in England, twelve was the age children were apprenticed into service, so it wouldn't necessarily be surprising if a 12 or even a 10 year old acted as amanuensis. Fletcher notes in his introduction: "The contemporary biographers state that Milton had taught these daughters to read to him in several different languages, and probably write for him, although they did not understand what they read."
I don't doubt that even great Miltonists like Fletcher can make poor annotations. The immediate context for me renders it implausible to think Milton is nodding along with Adam only to suggest he has a log in his eye the very next line. (Folks are welcome to disagree.) If we're going to read biography into poetry, the Book 3 and Book 7 invocations (dealing with blindness, uncertainty, danger) are far more plausibly authorial, so even then Fletcher's opinion seems off-base.
PL wasn't written in order, and the current scholarship holds that it was mostly composed from 1658-1663. Anne—a woman, and thus not privy to the same education that boys would receive starting age 5 or 6 to begin apprenticeship after grammar school—was unfortunately barely able to sign her name. Her disability included speech impediments so she did not read aloud to Milton. Mary and Deborah did read to Milton (sometimes in contemporary languages they did not understand), and John Aubrey says that the youngest, Deborah, at some point served as amanuensis. But Milton's nephew and student Edward Philips records (as with other contemporary accounts) that Milton was instead at the mercy of former students and whoever happened to be visiting him. The old legend of Milton's daughters taking down PL is a provocative, but fictional, image—one unfortunately immortalized in Henry Fuseli's painting.
If you're interested in a more contemporary account, Barbara Lewalski's The Life of John Milton (rev. ed., Blackwell, 2003), 406-9 discusses precisely this.
Yes, Fletcher notes Milton's daughters were poorly educated as was usual for the time. Milton teaching his daughters to pronounce but not understand the languages they read is not a positive domestic image, even for his era, as in the preceding Elizabethan era, it was becoming customary for girls to be educated in modern languages. It was his daughter Deborah who quoted Milton as saying, "One tongue is enough for a woman."
Yes, I find the reading thing very distasteful, especially if it was personally motivated! Deborah was not poorly educated; evidence is she wrote with relative ease, and according to biographers she could "recite from memory the opening verses of Homer, Isaiah, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Euripides" (Lewalski 407). A lot of scholars think M must have tried to teach them to write (even if just for selfish reasons), with varying levels of success.
Unfortunately Deborah and her daughter had a poor relationship with Milton, probably in connection with their relative poverty after his wealth was seized upon the Restoration. Then, a paltry inheritance was administered to them by his widow. (While he was alive, in 1662, the daughters stole several of their blind father's books and sold them without his knowledge.) What Deborah and her daughter Elizabeth say about M has been treated with suspicion by biographers, in part because of this sour relationship. Elizabeth claimed that Milton didn't teach his daughters to write because he thought it "unnecessary for a woman". But we know of course that her mother did write, so the whole thing is very messy.
It is hard to imagine what the thoughts of one in an unfallen state would be. I wasn't satisfied with Milton's take here, but my own guesses can be no more certain. Eve's desire to work separately from Adam made me smile. It all sounded like he was getting on her nerves and she needed some space...but could unfallen Eve have experienced that, or chosen her words to say anything but what she truly thought? And then she seems slightly affronted that Adam thinks that she would need protection. Is that not pride? Is pride only sin when it is from a disobedient heart, and her's wasnt yet? Perhaps I misdefine unfallen as incapable of sin, when it can't mean that. Satan's pride began in heaven. It seems to me that Eve was deceived by the serpent who told her God was withholding something good. Milton has her toying with that thought a bit ahead of time. Adam's motives in scripture are never revealed. He just disobeyed.
A long note in the Riverside edition observes that Eve's desire to work alone would have been in sync with Puritan notions of household economy -- it might have just been smart to work apart and get a little more done.
Like you, I have more trouble with the animosity between the two that clearly develops during that conversation before they part ways.
I do think it is revealing (even touching) that Milton imagines Adam moved by love to eat the fruit.
I'm behind, but whenever I am, I drop in to your most recent post to read your book note, and unrelated comments. I say a resounding, "yes" on a celebratory Zoom. I'll return with my thoughts on book nine later in the week. :-)
CL Lewis "ever squemish about sex..." in the footnote??!! How is this established beyond this assertion? Always thought he was pretty good on the subject as a bachelor most of his life. That Hideous Strength ends with a couple newly converted off to have sex after their marriage is repaired.
Jim, as I was typing that sly footnote, I was actually thinking it needed more support! I cannot remember where and when years ago I got that impression about Lewis from his work. It's just one I've carried with me for a long time and it was reinforced upon reading that particular critique of PL.
Years ago, I read part of a book written about the author's marriage that included correspondence with C.S. Lewis. The title escapes me. The author and his wife had decided to not have children. After his wife's untimely death, the author mentions their decision to remain childless to Lewis. Lewis replied that the author's wife would have been inherently damaged by that decision. From that letter and the obvious connection between marital intercourse and reproduction in 'That Hideous Strength', I would say that Lewis believed women were created to have children and found their ultimate fulfillment in that role, and that failure to fulfill that role lead to women suffering inner wounds.
I'm not sure. Perhaps - I have wondered why Narnia's Enemy is always female, when in Scripture, the Adversary is always spoken of in the masculine - which reminds me of a quip by Canadian author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, in the Green Gables series novel, Anne's House of Dreams:
'"It was Eve ate the apple, Miss Cornelia."
"'Twas a he-creature tempted her," retorted Miss Cornelia triumphantly.'
Montgomery's genius is in those secondary characters like Miss Cordelia. I grew up in a rural farming area and my father is from Nova Scotia, so I grew up knowing people who resembled Montgomery's secondary characters.
In Roberts essay on Jane in Hideous Strength she lifts a quote from correspondence where Lewis says the message is about calling (someone releasing a book on that?:). Jane was a mediorce scholar and was called to reconciliation in her marriage and bear the next Pendragon. He said the calling could have been something else. I don't think Lewis thought women should be relegated only to childbearing. He interacted well with female scholars. He re-wrote portions of Miracles after philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe criticized his language on natural law. That said, we do have an anti-child culture with the advent of the sexual revolution. Children are a purpose of marriage along with comfort and companionship. Our postliberal culture has advanced the separation between sex and childbearing quite well.
From the letter I remember in 'A Severe Mercy', I would say Lewis thought married women should bear children - I cannot quote the letter, but I remember the impression of his convictions being very forcible on the subject. In Lewis's era, women in academia were usually unmarried and even expected to remain unmarried, something Lewis's contemporary, Dorothy L. Sayers, comments on in her novel Gaudy Night.
Great reference. I just read an essay by Susannah Black Roberts on "The Problem of Jane" in That Hideous Strength. It begins with quotes from authors JK Rowling and Philip Pullman concluding Lewis had a problem with women's sexuality. Roberts concludes they misinterpret. It's a great essay. Roberts concludes it's about what Susan and Jane are called to and other things are getting in the way. https://davenantinstitute.org/life-on-the-silent-planet. Here's the book of essays.
A quick missive. I immediately went to Bonhoeffer's "Creation and the Fall" in order to see how this Christian thinker dealt with the issue of Eve. The gist is that Eve is taken from Adam and then given back to him. Adam's fall will become complete as soon as Eve takes the fruit; but Eve's fall is also brought to completion with Adam's rebellion.
Now here's the thing. Adam and Eve are freely given to one another out of God's compassion. (Milton's non-Trinitarian theology would have blinded him from this, and, as the guest from earlier pointed out, solitude is considered a beautiful thing for the independent thinking Milton.) In any case, neither Adam nor Eve work or want for one another; they are simply given one another because God says it is not good to be alone (this is the first time God declares something to not be good that we know of). The Fall begins when human beings believe they must take. And, reunion is only restored when human beings can once again receive a gift from God which will make them whole.
The late Tim Keller noted that the difference between a contract and a covenant is that the former occurs when the two parties enter into an agreement based on what what they can get from the other; while a covenant occurs when one or both of the parties is focused on what they can give to the other. As Bonhoeffer states, "The theological question is not a question about the origin of evil but one about the actual overcoming of evil on the cross; it seeks the real forgiveness of guilt and the reconciliation of the fallen world." The point of the Christian faith isn't an insight we glean or a work we perform; but a gift we receive.
This is such an interesting insight: "Adam's fall will become complete as soon as Eve takes the fruit; but Eve's fall is also brought to completion with Adam's rebellion." I think I like that and it sheds new light on the fall itself and Adam and Eve's (and all of humankind's thereafter) relations.
And the gift of grace at the heart of Christianity is, as your examples illustrate, reflective of all the other gifts along the way. Such a good connection.
Philip, thank you for sharing these insights both from Bonhoeffer and from Keller. Keller’s comparison of a contract versus a covenant is very helpful here.
There are so many things worth mentioning in Book 9! Here's Satan on entering the serpent:
"O foul descent! That I who erst contended with Gods... am now constrained into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime" (163-5). And then: "But what will not ambition and revenge descend to? Who aspires must down as low as high he soared, obnoxious first or last to basest things." (168-171)
How often do we see this played out, where naked ambition makes people descend into the depths of slimy corruption in pursuit of whatever drives them: money, power, fame, sex.
I was also taken by this very modern-sounding line from Eve, after eating the fruit and becoming "enlightened," who calls God "our great Forbidder" in line 815. And isn't that how God has been portrayed these days? He is a Killjoy. He suffocates us with his rules. He robs us of our freedom to be our best selves! Milton is prescient.
Charlie, it was so so hard to cover this book in one post! I was "tempted" (heh) to break it into two. But I knew you, my readers, would add much, more, than I could. There was much about Satan's parts that fascinated me. And I also underlined and starred that false name that Eve gave God. There is so much ill power in wrongly naming anything, but most especially God.
It all happens so fast! Eve's musing on the serpent's argument for eating the fruit takes, by my count, a mere 35 lines or so. For some reason I expected it to take longer. Yet perhaps it needs to be short, because, though it is central, it's very tricky. Eve is, in theory, sinless until she actually eats. Yes, the serpent flatters her, but she is not portrayed as being moved to overt pride by this; how could she be?
Her innocence is not stupid, though I see how she could be read as such. It's natural to attribute a fault either to malice or stupidity, and she lacks the former until that first bite passes her lips. But her reasoning is, if anything, more beautiful and convincing than that of the serpent: "Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not." She has a point; the freedom to be good is pretty important. Perhaps the flaw here is simply that she's not being as good as she says she is.
After her fall she becomes, I suspect, easier to write. Now her motivations can be complex. Now she can consider the idea of being better than Adam. Now she can love Adam, and yet fear to lose him, and so determine that he should be lost with her.
I do think Milton is shielding Adam, somewhat, at Eve's expense. The initial conversation, when they are discussing whether Eve should go off on her own, is tricky to understand from Eve's perspective. I feel like her indignance at not being trusted with the possibility of temptation would not make sense in an ordinary person unless there was some difficult history there, which there cannot be, because they're both unfallen. By having Adam warn her, Milton seems to me to be setting Adam up to be as much in the right as possible.
I was, however, rather moved (as Eve was) by Adam's swift decision, made from love, to join Eve in whatever fate awaited her.
Yes! This is a point Lewis makes as well. He says that by moving so quickly as Eve works through this in her mind "the reader is involved in same illusion as Eve herself." I think Milton works this effectively, and too, as you mention, Adam's swift, love-based decision to join Eve in the fall.
I can see Satan tapping into a latent pride she didn't know she had, but it's hard not to see sin already there in the conversation between Eve and Adam before they part. I agree her indignation doesn't smack of total innocence.
It seems to me that Satan appeals to Eve’s vanity and pride to entice her to eat the fruit. But how can that be, pre-fall? Also, there seems to be some indication of sinful motives in Eve wanting to go off on her own away from Adam. Also, pre-fall. I suppose it is impossible for a fallen human to even imagine an unfallen state.
I agree, Katy. I think the best understanding of Milton's thinking is found in Areopagitica where he talks about virtue being the choice of good in the face of evil, which is different from innocence. He doesn't seem to portray Adam and Eve as "innocent" but rather capable (as God says throughout the work) of obeying through free will.
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit strait'nd by a Foe,
Suttle or violent, we not endu'd
Single with like defence, wherever met,
How are we happie, still in fear of harm?
Throughout this work I have been tiptoeing around particular issue that I've noticed. Lutheranism places a very strong emphasis on Gods sovereignty in salvation, while Anglicanism while also believing in Gods sovereignty, allows for more of a cooperative role for humans in the salvation process. This Anglican view seems to not be unique to many other denominations in the Isles. It also seems to have been carried over the Atlantic and spread through the churches of America.
Though Milton is not an orthodox Christian, he does locate the fall as being an issue with individualistic free will, where the Fall is a logical failure and the problems cascade from that faulty choice. When I was growing up this way of thinking dominated the American church. This was probably why it was so tempting for youth groups to be populated with moral lectures and why so many Christian living tracts appear to be self-help books with a few proof texts and Jesus fig leaf to merit being sold in the Christian book section. The overemphasis on a human-manufactured sanctification has calmed, what Lutheran theologians dub, "the old Adam," the part of our fallen human creature that believes we are justified by our merit.
I mentioned Bonhoeffer's work "Creation and the Fall" earlier, but the Bonhoeffer book that totally changed my entire world and is possibly more responsible for my faith is his work simply entitled "Ethics." I encountered this book in high school as I was perusing the Christian theology section of my local Borders Bookstore. It is admittedly very hard to find mainstream Christian books by Lutheran authors, so I was intrigued. I was not ready for what I would find within those pages. In the opening section, entitled "Love and the Decay of the World," Bonhoeffer gets at the real problem of the fall. This passage emphasizes that the knowledge of good and evil represents a fundamental departure from humanity's original state of unity with God. Initially, human knowledge was centered solely on God, with all other understanding flowing from this divine origin. The acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil, symbolized by the eating of the forbidden fruit, signifies a shift where humans see themselves as the source (or origin) of morality, separate from God.
His main argument rests on the fact that the fruit is not called, "the fruit of good and evil," but "the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." The Hebrew here is important. It is the word "da'at," which means "to perceive." We move past this word and glance over it, but it is the crux of the passage. Bonhoeffer has this to say, "Man now knows good and evil. This does not mean that he has acquired new knowledge in addition to what he knew before, but the knowledge of good and evil signifies the complete reversal of man's knowledge, which hitherto had been solely knowledge of God as his origin. In knowing good and evil he knows what only the origin, God Himself, can know and ought to know."
In other words, man has not been transmogrified into a Snidely Whiplash who is suddenly aware he can tie Nell to the train tracks. Instead, humanity has lost the relationship with God and now we have placed ourselves into the fog of unbelief over good and evil. It as if one were to put a toddler in as a judge in a court of law. Of course the toddler can speak and make utterances; but this same person is not equipped to grasp the nuance of the issues at hand. It is only by grace that world moves forward at all therefore, and not by our reason.
The other important thing the Bonhoeffer is stressing is that "the fall" is a relational catastrophe instead of an intellectual one. Of course the intellect does follow the relational falling away from God, but it is not the cause of the fall. Our broken relationship with God yields broken relationships with other people since we knew everything and everyone by our relationship with God.
In this way, the Lutheran would call into question the human desire for freedom apart from God and one another. Solitude is important to be sure, but no one of the prelapsarian world would become aggrieved by such an illusion of autonomy. This autonomy is a stolen one and it is a trick of the mind to locate it within the intellect or obedience instead of covenantal relationship which we have as creature to the Creator. Again Bonhoeffer observes:
Instead of knowing himself solely in the reality of being chosen and loved by God, he must now know himself in the possibility of choosing and of being the origin of good and evil. He has become like God, but against God. Herein lies the serpent's deceit. Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God. They are good and evil of man's own choosing, in opposition to the eternal election of God. In becoming like God man has become a god against God.
Milton, imagines God's sovereignty as an "otherness of title," as a king or monarch is other than us. The trappings and glory are what make Him deserving of His otherness. Bonhoeffer states that God's sovereignty is an "otherness of kind" where the quality of God's core being is not in His glory but in His Covenantal love for His creation ... even if that Creation is fallen. This moves away from the Neo-Platonic ideal of a God who the fallen man with an imagined sanitized intellect can worship; but leads us to see the scandal of God: the God enthroned upon the cross.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve are led astray not by their desire to learn some secret knowledge; but by their desire to judge good and evil through themselves as false origins. In today's conspiracy-saturated landscape, the old Adam and Eve are enticed by so-called secret knowledge not because they wish to see beyond the horizon but because they are covetous to have something which is not their's to have. Eve plucked the fruit to steal the otherness of God and Adam joined right along with her because the new titillation of humanity apart from God was a novelty. The mending of the relationship with God will be the mending of Creation.
This is so insightful and helpful, Philip. I think your concluding point about how exactly Adam and Eve are led astray—their desire to judge as God judges—is really important. And I think your insight about the American church stressing morality and “self-help” so much having its basis in a particular theology is very keen. It certainly has done that and not to particularly helpful ends.
I think the choice Milton made to choose sex to depict their fallen state is a good one. We read how both Adam and the Angel innocently admired Eve’s beauty, and Milton depicted sex before the fall as a thing of beauty. However, after the temptation, Adam lusts after Eve and burns with desire. His gaze is not fixed on her beauty but on what they could get from one another.
On a different note, I had a new thought about God came to my mind while reading this.
In lines 685-690 we see the fated temptation as in the Bible:
Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die:
How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you Life
To Knowledge, By the Threatner? look on mee,
Mee who have touch'd and tasted, yet both live,
And life more perfet have attaind then Fate.
Meant mee, by ventring higher then my Lot.
A thought came to me of how this temptation is the antithesis of the path Jesus preached that would lead us to him.
Jesus never highlighted knowledge as the path to him, but of the last being first and said his kingdom is like little children coming to him with eagerness and delight. Paul said that God uses the foolish things to confound the wise, and even Solomon says in Eccl.. 1:13-14 "I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Satan's temptation holds no truth or weight of course. Human existence does not rely on knowledge but depends on the good Father who cares for us so well.
It’s interesting to think about what other aspect of Adam and Eve’s relationship might have reflected the difference between pre- and post-fallenness. None so well as this, I think.
I love your insight about the role knowledge does not play in our relationship with Jesus and what he does for us. Or rather, that it is only knowing him that matters.
This is far from a profound comment, but since we're talking about misogyny, I have my own grievance to air in this section. I found Adam particularly annoying when he answers Eve's request to work separately in lines beginning with 227.
Sole Eve, Associate sole, to me beyond
Compare above all living Creatures deare,
Well hast thou motion'd, well thy thoughts imployd
How we might best fulfill the work which here
God hath assign'd us, nor of me shalt pass
Unprais'd: for nothing lovelier can be found
In Woman, then to studie houshold good,
And good workes in her Husband to promote.
Really? Nothing lovelier than studying the good of the household and promoting Adam's good works? This seemed to me very much like patting her on the head and saying, "You always keep the house so clean, honey. Such an excellent use of your time." Bah.
Yup, if he’s that annoying before the fall just imagine what he’s like after,
And he when is with the angel the most important theological question he has to ask is ‘so how do angels have sex?’ I prefer that serpent ..
Ha!
😂
Cringe worthy.
I would love a zoom meeting! I’ll grab a coffee and set my alarm. I’m might even just wear my pyjamas if Professor Swallow Prior isn’t too shocked .
I find it deeply moving that Adam , who has been distinctly irritating , becomes heroic after the fall , when he promises to stay with Eve no matter what ,in one of the most beautiful passages in the book .
I would not be shocked but delighted at your presence!
Thank you for pointing us to the beauty of that passage. It is indeed.
Thanks for this week's post, Karen. I would note that C.S. Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost (which you recommended!) notes that Milton's thesis on the Fall—that Eve was by herself when Satan tempted her successfully, and that Adam joined her in eating the apple because he did not want to parted from her, and for no other reason—echoes what St. Augustine says in The City of God.
Whether Augustine and Milton give the most persuasive reading of this is a great question. But I find some of Milton's lines for Adam on this point to be some of the most beautiful in the whole poem (even if, as you say in your note 2, they are emotional hyperbole):
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly join'd,
To live again in thew wild Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my hear; no no, I feel
The link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy Stae
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe. (907–916)
However I with thee have fixt my Lot,
Certain to undergo like doom; if Death
Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The Bond of Nature draw me to my own,
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our State cannot be sever'd, we are one,
One Flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself. (952–959)
One last thought. There is a stray line in Book 8 that hit me, and that makes more sense now. It's when Raphael counsels Adam "that with honor thou may'st love / Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise." I have certainly found that to be true! And so I sympathize with Adam, in the Augustinian thesis Milton gives us in Book 9.
Thanks for pointing out that connection Lewis makes with Augustine. I guess what Milton really adds to the story is that it was Eve's idea. And again, reading biographically (which I'm generally not fond of doing), Milton's wife separated from him early on (although returned eventually), so this may be the anxiety he carries. But it also makes sense for her to be willing to separate given the reason Milton gives Adam to join her in the fall--his unwillingness to be separated from her. It is moving. Truly.
Great eye to see the connection between the earlier line in Book 8 to these events. The work is chock full of these, I'm sure, and it takes a great mind to weave those connections throughout--and a great mind to find them!
Too kind! But one more thought. I suspect you did not plan it, but you had us reading Book 9 on the Fall during the first week of Lent. Appropriate!
Oh my! 😅
I absolutely did not plan it! But that is pretty cool. 😎
Very very cool , particularly when compared with Simon Haisells substack book club on the Wolf Hall trilogy, which by bad luck ended with us all reading the final chapter , when poor Thomas Cromwell was beheaded , on Christmas Day ( he admits himself that was not the cheeriest choice)
Yes, yes to a Zoom call! 🙏🏻
🤜🏼
My father's 1941 annotated edition has a note on line 1182ff, which is the very bitter:
'Thus it shall befall He who to worth in women overtrusting Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook And left to herself, if evil thence ensue, She first his weak indulgence accuse.'
The note says:
"Perhaps the most completely personal lines in the poem. Probably exactly the same situation confronted Milton in his relations with his first wife after her return to him.
It is ironic, with such a negative view of women, that Milton married three times - his first and second wives both died in childbirth. Furthermore, his third wife and his daughters assisted him with his writing when he went blind. I wonder which one was tasked with writing those bitter lines.
Quite a poor annotation on the editor's part -- I am not sure it's sound to ascribe the fallen Adam's perspective to Milton! Especially since the lines *immediately* following distance the narrator from both sinners:
"Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning."
And for what it's worth, it is highly unlikely M's daughters served as amanuenses for PL. If he started composing the epic as most think in 1658, Anne (who was disabled) would have been 12, Mary 10, and Deborah (for whom we have the best evidence as an amanuensis later) only 6.
In Book 10 Adam's crass misogyny expands into misanthropy; he's not speaking for the author but as a (pretty accurate, to my view!) depiction of the way that men find ways to blame women. I find especially hilarious Adam's description of Eve as "a Rib / Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, / More to the part sinister from me drawn," showing that he's now also a bad reader and bad natural scientist (10.884-86).
The annotations were made by a Harris Francis Fletcher, of the University of Illinois. His bio of the UofI website says he was renowned for his work on John Milton: https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=creators/creator&id=1059
Since the first ten books of PL were first published in 1667, wouldn't it be probable that Book 9 was written some years after 1658? In that era in England, twelve was the age children were apprenticed into service, so it wouldn't necessarily be surprising if a 12 or even a 10 year old acted as amanuensis. Fletcher notes in his introduction: "The contemporary biographers state that Milton had taught these daughters to read to him in several different languages, and probably write for him, although they did not understand what they read."
I don't doubt that even great Miltonists like Fletcher can make poor annotations. The immediate context for me renders it implausible to think Milton is nodding along with Adam only to suggest he has a log in his eye the very next line. (Folks are welcome to disagree.) If we're going to read biography into poetry, the Book 3 and Book 7 invocations (dealing with blindness, uncertainty, danger) are far more plausibly authorial, so even then Fletcher's opinion seems off-base.
PL wasn't written in order, and the current scholarship holds that it was mostly composed from 1658-1663. Anne—a woman, and thus not privy to the same education that boys would receive starting age 5 or 6 to begin apprenticeship after grammar school—was unfortunately barely able to sign her name. Her disability included speech impediments so she did not read aloud to Milton. Mary and Deborah did read to Milton (sometimes in contemporary languages they did not understand), and John Aubrey says that the youngest, Deborah, at some point served as amanuensis. But Milton's nephew and student Edward Philips records (as with other contemporary accounts) that Milton was instead at the mercy of former students and whoever happened to be visiting him. The old legend of Milton's daughters taking down PL is a provocative, but fictional, image—one unfortunately immortalized in Henry Fuseli's painting.
If you're interested in a more contemporary account, Barbara Lewalski's The Life of John Milton (rev. ed., Blackwell, 2003), 406-9 discusses precisely this.
Yes, Fletcher notes Milton's daughters were poorly educated as was usual for the time. Milton teaching his daughters to pronounce but not understand the languages they read is not a positive domestic image, even for his era, as in the preceding Elizabethan era, it was becoming customary for girls to be educated in modern languages. It was his daughter Deborah who quoted Milton as saying, "One tongue is enough for a woman."
Yes, I find the reading thing very distasteful, especially if it was personally motivated! Deborah was not poorly educated; evidence is she wrote with relative ease, and according to biographers she could "recite from memory the opening verses of Homer, Isaiah, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Euripides" (Lewalski 407). A lot of scholars think M must have tried to teach them to write (even if just for selfish reasons), with varying levels of success.
Unfortunately Deborah and her daughter had a poor relationship with Milton, probably in connection with their relative poverty after his wealth was seized upon the Restoration. Then, a paltry inheritance was administered to them by his widow. (While he was alive, in 1662, the daughters stole several of their blind father's books and sold them without his knowledge.) What Deborah and her daughter Elizabeth say about M has been treated with suspicion by biographers, in part because of this sour relationship. Elizabeth claimed that Milton didn't teach his daughters to write because he thought it "unnecessary for a woman". But we know of course that her mother did write, so the whole thing is very messy.
Thank you for offering so many fascinating elements of the family’s life here.
It is hard to imagine what the thoughts of one in an unfallen state would be. I wasn't satisfied with Milton's take here, but my own guesses can be no more certain. Eve's desire to work separately from Adam made me smile. It all sounded like he was getting on her nerves and she needed some space...but could unfallen Eve have experienced that, or chosen her words to say anything but what she truly thought? And then she seems slightly affronted that Adam thinks that she would need protection. Is that not pride? Is pride only sin when it is from a disobedient heart, and her's wasnt yet? Perhaps I misdefine unfallen as incapable of sin, when it can't mean that. Satan's pride began in heaven. It seems to me that Eve was deceived by the serpent who told her God was withholding something good. Milton has her toying with that thought a bit ahead of time. Adam's motives in scripture are never revealed. He just disobeyed.
I like your humorous take, Kevie. :)
A long note in the Riverside edition observes that Eve's desire to work alone would have been in sync with Puritan notions of household economy -- it might have just been smart to work apart and get a little more done.
Like you, I have more trouble with the animosity between the two that clearly develops during that conversation before they part ways.
I do think it is revealing (even touching) that Milton imagines Adam moved by love to eat the fruit.
I'm behind, but whenever I am, I drop in to your most recent post to read your book note, and unrelated comments. I say a resounding, "yes" on a celebratory Zoom. I'll return with my thoughts on book nine later in the week. :-)
Yay!
CL Lewis "ever squemish about sex..." in the footnote??!! How is this established beyond this assertion? Always thought he was pretty good on the subject as a bachelor most of his life. That Hideous Strength ends with a couple newly converted off to have sex after their marriage is repaired.
Jim, as I was typing that sly footnote, I was actually thinking it needed more support! I cannot remember where and when years ago I got that impression about Lewis from his work. It's just one I've carried with me for a long time and it was reinforced upon reading that particular critique of PL.
JK Rowling and conventional wisdom!
I don’t understand this reply.
I'm a boomer who shouldn't be on social media. A terrible joke referring to what I wrote below. So bad it is not worth explaining.
😂
Years ago, I read part of a book written about the author's marriage that included correspondence with C.S. Lewis. The title escapes me. The author and his wife had decided to not have children. After his wife's untimely death, the author mentions their decision to remain childless to Lewis. Lewis replied that the author's wife would have been inherently damaged by that decision. From that letter and the obvious connection between marital intercourse and reproduction in 'That Hideous Strength', I would say that Lewis believed women were created to have children and found their ultimate fulfillment in that role, and that failure to fulfill that role lead to women suffering inner wounds.
Was it A Severe Mercy?
Yes, it was! My second sibling had the book, but hadn't kept it and both of us were trying to remember the title.
Would that belief explain why all the villains in Narnia are beautiful, but frightening, single women?
I'm not sure. Perhaps - I have wondered why Narnia's Enemy is always female, when in Scripture, the Adversary is always spoken of in the masculine - which reminds me of a quip by Canadian author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, in the Green Gables series novel, Anne's House of Dreams:
'"It was Eve ate the apple, Miss Cornelia."
"'Twas a he-creature tempted her," retorted Miss Cornelia triumphantly.'
Miss Cornelia! I love her. I just re-read Anne's House of Dreams a few weeks ago - my comfort reading.
That’s what is so clever. The story is grown up and really quite dark but somehow L M Montgomery makes it comfort reading
I totally love Miss Cornelia - I think she is my favourite character in the whole series
Montgomery's genius is in those secondary characters like Miss Cordelia. I grew up in a rural farming area and my father is from Nova Scotia, so I grew up knowing people who resembled Montgomery's secondary characters.
I wish I did! I would love to know people like that . I think Anne’s house of dreams is both my favourite and absolutely not a children’s book .
In Roberts essay on Jane in Hideous Strength she lifts a quote from correspondence where Lewis says the message is about calling (someone releasing a book on that?:). Jane was a mediorce scholar and was called to reconciliation in her marriage and bear the next Pendragon. He said the calling could have been something else. I don't think Lewis thought women should be relegated only to childbearing. He interacted well with female scholars. He re-wrote portions of Miracles after philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe criticized his language on natural law. That said, we do have an anti-child culture with the advent of the sexual revolution. Children are a purpose of marriage along with comfort and companionship. Our postliberal culture has advanced the separation between sex and childbearing quite well.
From the letter I remember in 'A Severe Mercy', I would say Lewis thought married women should bear children - I cannot quote the letter, but I remember the impression of his convictions being very forcible on the subject. In Lewis's era, women in academia were usually unmarried and even expected to remain unmarried, something Lewis's contemporary, Dorothy L. Sayers, comments on in her novel Gaudy Night.
Yes, Lewis was a traditionalist and I'd agree he probably thought married women should bear children if they were able.
I haven’t read the book, Holly, but fun fact: the author was a local professor here. Before my time.
I didn't read it cover to cover. It was a very strange, rather creepy book. That isn't just my impression, my sibling thought so too.
I think for me it is what happens to Susan Pevensey that is so disconcerting. She cannot enter Narnia when she discovers lipstick and boys
Great reference. I just read an essay by Susannah Black Roberts on "The Problem of Jane" in That Hideous Strength. It begins with quotes from authors JK Rowling and Philip Pullman concluding Lewis had a problem with women's sexuality. Roberts concludes they misinterpret. It's a great essay. Roberts concludes it's about what Susan and Jane are called to and other things are getting in the way. https://davenantinstitute.org/life-on-the-silent-planet. Here's the book of essays.
!!!