It is a common argument that what separates human beings from animals is our ability to reason. This is a concept that Milton mentions multiple times throughout his epic poem Paradise Lost in reference to the characters of Adam and Eve. Their free will is what is supposed to enable them to make the conscious decision to worship God, but their ignorance and lack of experience is what ultimately leads to their downfall. In Areopagitica, Milton argues that one must know evil to know good, and this rhetoric is supported by Comus, another work by Milton, when it is contrasted with the temptation scene in Paradise Lost. My argument is that despite God giving Adam and Eve “free will,” without giving them knowledge of what is good and what is evil, he sets them up to fail when their faith is tested by Satan.
In Book III, God explains to the Son why he made Adam and Eve “free.” He claims that without free will, Adam and Eve would be mindless followers. He says:
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,
Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,
Not mee. (107-111)
For God, there would be no satisfaction in forcing his creations to worship him. Instead he gives them “Will and Reason” so they have the susceptibility to temptation and sin and their resistance would be a testament of their faith. However, the fact that the one limit God puts upon Adam and Eve is to not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, exposes a tinge of selfishness. By keeping Eve and Adam innocent of evil, he ultimately makes them ignorant. His plan to have more than mindless followers backfires as the limits of his creations’ “free will” align with the concept of blind faith. Adam and Eve must blindly trust, with little explanation, the rulings of God. And while, in God’s eyes, this would be a testament of true faith, it is really more like an blind ultimatum. This selfishness on the part of God can also be seen in the wording of the above quote. It is interesting that Milton would use the word “pleasure” in the first line in reference to the satisfaction God gets from Adam and Eve’s obedience. Milton most likely intends the definition closest to “delight or gratification” but one cannot ignore the the other meanings behind the word. Do Adam and Eve exist simply for God’s pleasure, for God’s entertainment or enjoyment? If this is true, then their lack of knowledge could be a way for God to keep the pair under stricter control.
In the speech Areopagitica, Milton argues against censorship of texts and defends the right of free speech and expression. One aspect of his argument is that people cannot distinguish good from evil without first being exposed to evil. Even though this argument is applied to the freedom to choose what one reads, it can also apply directly to the moment of Eve’s temptation in Book IX:
As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. (728)
When Eve is confronted by Satan in the form of the serpent, she falls for his guile and eats an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Book III, God tells the son, “I made him just and right / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (III, 98-99). However, If God had given Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil as innate knowledge beginning at their creation, Eve could have had the ability to see through the lies and made the right moral decision. As Milton explains in the quote above, to be a true “warfaring Christian,” one must have the necessary weapons to combat evil, with its “baits and seeming pleasures.” A great example that displays this theory in action is Milton’s masque, Comus.
In Comus, the Lady is taken captive by the god Comus and he attempts to persuade her to drink from his cup. To drink from the cup would literally turn her into a being of carnal desire but would metaphorically be a rejection of her faith and of God. This temptation scene almost parallels the temptation scene in Book IX, especially how Comus, like Satan, uses Milton’s notable rhetoric to persuade the Lady. His last speech even ends with “Be wise, and taste” (814), as Satan’s last words to Eve are “reach then, and freely taste” (732). However, the most significant difference between the the two scenes is that the one in Comus is a conversation, where the one in Paradise Lost is a one-sided lure. The Lady in Comus is presumably a descendant of Eve and Adam, meaning she is bestowed with the virtue and knowledge of evil that Adam and Eve gain after the Fall, described by Michael in Book XI. As Jeanie Grant Moore says in her article “The Two Faces of Eve: Temptation scenes in Comus and Paradise Lost,” the Lady is able to use her “fallen” knowledge in order to respond to Comus’ guile and to see through his well disguised lies:
The failure of Eve in her unfallen state and the success of the Lady in a fallen world suggest that the difference between them lies not in their virtue, but in the paradox that only through the fall could Eve attain that which would have saved her: the knowledge of good and evil. (2)
As explained in Book XI by Michael, after the Fall, Eve and Adam will eventually gain virtues in exposure to the evil they have released into the world. Why weren’t they given these virtues before the Fall? Maybe God thought they would never encounter sin or evil in their seemingly perfect world. However, Satan’s rebellion and his expulsion from Heaven happens before God created man. God knew that Satan would attempt revenge yet he makes Paradise penetrable by outside forces and does not arm his newest creations with the “weapons” necessary to combat evil. This brings me back to my original argument. Why would God give Adam and Eve the freedom to make decisions but withhold the knowledge necessary to make well-reasoned decisions, when that knowledge is what could have ultimately prevented the fall? It is perhaps to preserve their “Paradise.”
In his essay “ The Crisis of Paradise Lost Reconsidered,” H.V.S. Ogden argues against a theory that Eve and Adam were “perfect” before the fall and examines what is meant when they are described as sinless and innocent. He argues that Adam and Eve’s sinless nature does not equate perfection but rather that “they are liable to temptation and although their wills may be attracted to what the temptation offers, they are innocent and upright, sinless and pure, until their conscious minds yield and they commit the act of disobedience” (310). However, the “Paradise” in the story is not only the physical location that Adam and Eve occupy. Just as Hell is both a location and a state of mind for Satan, as is Paradise for Adam and Eve. God has withheld the knowledge of evil because once one has that knowledge, one can no longer be wholly innocent and pure. Paradise would not be a paradise if one knew of evil. So when Milton refers to Adam and Eve as sinless, it is not because they have yet to commit any sin, it is because they are without even the knowledge of sin. However, this concept is problematic because without the awareness of evil, Adam and Eve cannot be active participants in their faith. Eve and Adam are innocent and sinless, but innocence does not equal virtuous. Just as Satan is stunned “Stupidly good” (IX, 465) by Eve’s appearance, Adam and Eve are unable to make meaningful moral decisions without the knowledge of the presence of evil. As Milton says in Areopagitica:
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy (739).
God gives Adam and Eve the ability to reason, most likely to prevent the quote above from happening, but ultimately his plan backfires. It is most likely that Adam and Eve did believe in God and his existence, but their only proof was through their own existence and the claims of God’s angels and the Son. This degree of separation, especially on the part of Eve who is absent for two important speeches from Raphael and Michael, could have caused a skepticism that factored into the Fall. Does God really exist? Does this punishment, death, really exist? Eve could not have sensed Satan’s lies and deceit as the Lady in Comus does with no previous exposure to sin.
Although Paradise Lost is considered by many critics as one of the great epic poems alongside Dante, Virgil, and Homer, it is, at its most basic, a retelling of an already established myth. As Milton says at the beginning of the poem, his purpose is to “justify the ways of God to men” (I, 26), and in a way he does give us a sort of behind the scenes look at the original Genesis story of the creation of man. However, to say he justifies God’s actions is complicated because there are many ways in which God seems unjust or even cruel. My main example of this is the punishment of Adam and Eve for their actions even though there are steps God could have taken to prevent their condemnation. We must keep in mind that Milton was a Puritan and this divine punishment, to him, would have seemed justified. As the narration says at the beginning of Book X, Adam and Eve were “manifold in sin, [thus] deserv’d to fall” (16). However, there is little to no justification for the cursing of the serpent. As I stated in the opening of this essay, God explicitly juxtaposes man and beast by claiming beast is without reason and lives through instinct. If that is true, why would the Son curse an animal who could not choose to reject or accept Satan but was forced to participate in his evil plan. Just as God punishes the serpent for something out of its control, it feels as though he does the same to Adam and Eve. Even though God claims that man is superior to beast, he punishes them just the same. God says Adam and Eve were “Self-tempted, self-deprav’d” (III, 130) and takes no responsibility for any of his potential mistakes. This reading of a selfish, senseless God is surely not what Milton intended to communicate, but it is one that cannot be ignored with all of the factors leading up to man’s ultimate fall from Paradise.
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