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Free Will and Obedience in the Separation Scene of Paradise LostAuthor(s): Diane Kelsey McColleySource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 12, No. 1, The English Renaissance(Winter, 1972), pp. 103-120Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449976 .Accessed: 05/03/2014 16:55

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Free 'Will and Obedience in the Separation Scene of Paradise Lost

DIANE KELSEY McCOLLEY

The separation scene in Book IX of Paradise Lost is generally regarded as evidence that Milton portrays Eve as vain and willful and Adam as weak and uxorious before the Fall, implying that they are originally flawed and their failure inevitable, and thus blaming their Maker for sin and woe, a notion Milton consistently repudiates in both poetry and prose. Rather, the scene portrays potentially sufficient beings in the process of healthful growth, facing difficulties and learning the meaning of obedience to God's behests and imitation of God's ways: Adam in instructing Eve and preserving for her the dignity of choice, and Eve in responding creatively to her calling to help Adam both in caring for the Garden, which teaches the fruitfulness of a loving discipline, and in caring for the "happier Eden" of fruitful marriage. Eve's obedience to Adam and to "God in him" depends on her liberty, preserved here and lost in the Fall, and the health of their mutual love depends on their trust in God and their responsiveness to the whole creation. The separation scene dramatizes not merely weaknesses Satan will exploit but, more importantly, virtues he will pervert, but which will be restored to responsive men in the process of regeneration.

WHEN GOD THE FATHER, surveying "His own works and their works" in Book III of Paradise Lost, sees Satan about to alight on the rim of the new world, he foretells to the Son that man will be seduced from obedience "without least impulse or shadow of Fate," for

he had of mee All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

(III, 120, 98-99)

In announcing the Fall to the assembled angels in Book X, God reaffirms that man fell by choice,

no Decree of mine Concurring to necessitate his Fall, Or touch with lightest moment of impulse His free Will, to her own inclining left In eevn scale.

(X, 43-47)

It is upon the liberty which provides men the dignity of individual responsibility that Milton's drama of disobedience


104 FREE WILL AND OBEDIENCE

and restorationi depends; and the success of his effort to "justifie the wayes of God to men" therefore depends on the even scale of his characterization of Adam and Eve as "Suffi- cient to have stood, though free to fall." For if Adam and Eve are not sufficient as well as free, God will in effect have inclined the scale toward disobedience. Their responsibility for their conduct derives from their capacity to obey, which is the source of the dignity and freedom from which they fell "till one greater Man/ Restore us."

Yet a surprisingly persistent line of criticism holds that the Fall is an inevitable manifestation of weakness inherent in man: in particular Eve's vanity and Adam's intemperance, for which the chief evidence is Eve's persuading Adam to let her work apart from him, giving Satan his opportunity through what is interpreted as obstinate self-will on her part and inordinate affection on Adam's in violation of her subordination to him. Maurice Kelley finds that Milton has "so por- trayed Adam that his fall is a foregone and inevitable con- clusion";' E. M. W. Tillyard, concurring with A. S. A. Wal- dock, that "both are virtually fallen before the official temptation has begun" ;2 Millicent Bell that the Fall "is not the onset of sin" but "the beginning of self-discovery by creatures essentially human, which is to say imperfect in a hundred ways" ;3 B. E. Gross that what the Fall achieves is "the disso- lution of two ununitable halves, erroneously welded through the fallacy of self-love, into two separate and distinct beings, now unitable with each other and with 'the cosmic purpose' through love of God."4 George Williamson, while justly

IMaurice Kelley, This Great Argument (Princeton, 1941), p. 149, n. 21. 2E. M. W. Tillyard, Studies in Milton (London, 1951), p. 13. For an earlier essay which shows the dramatic emphasis on regeneration without mitigating the Fall, see A. E. Barker, "Structural Pattern in Paradise Lost,' Philological Quarterly, XXVIII (1949), 17-30. 3Millicent Bell, "The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost," PMLA, LXVIII (Sept. 1953), 874-875 et passim. H. V. S. Ogden discusses the position of Dr. Tillyard and Mrs. Bell from another point of view in "The Crisis of Paradise Lost Reconsidered," Philological Quarterly, XXXVI (1957), 1-19. See also the correspondence of Wayne Shumaker and Mrs. Bell in PMLA, LXX (Dec. 1955), 1185-1203, especially Pro- fessor Shumaker's comment that "it was proper for Adam, after ex- postulation, to allow his hierarchical inferior a measure of self- determination, as God permitted it to him and to the angels" (1186-87) and his discussion of the "quarrel" on pp. 1200-01. 4B. E. Gross, "Free Will and Free Love in Paradise Lost," Studies in English Literature, VII (Winter, 1967), 106 et passim.


DIANiE KELSEY McCOLLEY 105

emphasizing Adam's growth through education, finds that his "fundamental weakness is born out of the greatest human need, relief from solitude," and that "if there is no happiness without love, Adam's position between God and woman will become a tragic dilemma" ;5 and Fredson Bowers, seeing Eve's dream (V, 8-136) as the beginning of degeneration rather than a test promoting their education, finds that Adam "repudiate [s] his duty to protect Eve, and, breaking the hierarchical chain of being, allows her as a free agent to seek temptation because he cannot bring himself to enforce authority and reason on her disturbed passion and beauty.... in his role as protector Adam had no right to relieve himself from his responsibility to Eve by making her a free agent."6 Adam's respect for Eve's liberty, though imitating God's for his own, is then a first step in the Fall, in which Satan's only part has been a dream incongruous with their whole experience in Eden.

The desire to apply Milton's theme of regeneration and love to man as we know him is certainly just and right. But the psychological determininsm of these approaches perpetuates the old argumelnt that Milton's poetic intuitions were at war with his theological beliefs, and especially with the belief which for him is essential to that regeneration and love: that "God in his wisdom created men and angels reasonable beings, and therefore free agents" and that "the liberty of man must be considered entirely indepelndent of necessity," since if man were determined by his own nature to a particular line of conduct he would be "formed as it were with an inclination for sinning" (XIV, 83, 77) 7-a notion repugnant to Milton's vigorous belief that "man was made in the image of God, and had the whole law of nature so implanted and innate in him, that he needed no precept to enforce its observance," since the law of nature "is sufficient of itself to teach whatever is agreeable to right reason, that is to say, whatever is intrin- sically good" (XV, 115-117). Unless balanced by equal empha-

5George Williamson, "The Education of Adam," Modern Philology, LXI (1963), 103; for a discussion of Eve's vanity and Adam's intemperance see pp. 98ff. 'Fredson Bowers, "Adam, Eve, and the Fall in Paradise Lost," PMLA, LXXXIV (March, 1969), 266 and 271. 'Notations to prose works refer by volume and page to The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1931).



sis on their "'looks Divine" in which "The image of their glorious Maker shon" (IV, 291-292), the emphasis on the vulnerability of Adam and Eve gives the impression that man was formed "with an inclination for sinning," that he was not sufficient to have stood, and that Milton in accounting for all our woe has failed to justify the ways of God to men. Further, it subverts the positive value of the experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall as exemplary for the efforts of men "regenerated by God in his own image . . . for the service of God, and the performance of good works." For to Milton, the "renewal of the will can mean nothing, but a restoration to its former liberty" (XV, 367-371), and the scenes before the Fall are his opportunity to show that liberty in action.

Adam and Eve before the Fall are engaged in the process of growing by making responsible choices in a world of limit- less potentiality; as Irene Samuel says of the poem as a paidia, "nothing that can be the stuff of growth is alien to Eden."8 While he acknowledges the risk of error inherent in such consequential freedom of choice, it is the potential good- ness of man as affirmed in De Doctiina Christiana that Milton emphasizes in his characterization of Adam and Eve, rather than a natural depravity which would negate both their freedom and their responsibility. Arthur E. Barker has demon- strated that Milton's theme in both his poetry and his prose is not the duality of divine love and man's sinful nature but "the integration of the natural and the spiritual . . . and the perfecting of the first by the second with the increase not the loss of its peculiar glory."9 The exemplification of this process in the development of Adam and Eve through their experiences before the Fall is analogous to its operation in regenerate men: "Milton was never moved to revise his belief that the unwritten Law of God is that 'law of nature' given to the first man, of which remnants and a kind of reflection remain in all men's hearts, and which in the regenerate is

8Irene Samuel, "Paradise Lost," in Critical Approaches to Six Major English Works: BEOWULF through PARADISE LOST, ed. R. M. Lumian- sky and Herschel Baker (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 237-238. Professor Samuel's entire discussion of the poem as expressing Milton's "lifelong and consuming interest in man's full development . . . to which freedom is requisite" (p. 236) is relevant and invigorating. 9A. E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto, 1941), p. 8.


DIANE KELSEY McCOLLEY 107

day by day being renovated in the direction of its primitive (or prelapsarian) perfection." This law is "the basis of true liberty, and this in turn depends upon what Milton thinks of as demonstrable continuity of a providence which makes possible similar responsibilities and opportunities under every dispensation." It is because they are growing, responding individuals that Adam and Eve reveal weaknesses and are faced with difficulties; but

Milton's Creator does not punish his creatures for the limitations and even degrees of impercipience he has given them, even unfallen, to use instrumentally in the development of the potentialities they have as his image, only for willfully not so using them. . . Every prelapsarian human action in Paradise Lost is so far from foreboding the Fall that it stands in sharpest contrast with it, to underline the fact that the Fall is, as to right action, a parodic obliquity and anomaly.'0

Man's disobedience, then, was not the revelation of his nature but the violation of it: that is, the voluntary resigna- tion of his free will resulting in the loss of spontaneous love. The concept that regeneration is the poem's major theme fully accords with Milton's theological views, and since these views are based on a doctrine of free will, they can hardly narrow the meaning of the poem regarded as a metaphor for our common experience. The way in which Milton makes the experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall pertinent to our own is not by showing that they, like us, were congenitally enslaved by their own passions, but by showing that we, like them, have the opportunity either to enslave ourselves or to exercise our restored free will in response to God's providence. The remarkable quality of his characterization of Adam and Eve before the Fall is the unfailing tact with which he bal- ances, "without the lightest moment of impulse," their potential for disobedience, a concommitant of free will, with their developing capacity to respond creatively to God's providential love, and therefore their potential for the renewal of that growth in the process of regeneration.

Summing up man's responsibility to God's providence in

"Barker, "Structural and Doctrinal Pattern in Milton's Later Poems," in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W Watt (Toronto, 1964), pp. 172, 189, 190 et passim.



Areopagitica, Milton asks, "Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?" (IV, 319) The scenes before the Fall provide an account of the growth of Adam and Eve in understanding and exercising the responsibilities of free will, and in that love for one another which consciousness of divine love keeps free. Their context is a purposeful hierarchical order of creation culminating in the kingship of the Son, and an account of Satan's violation of that order by enslavement to his own "fixt mind" and his determination to seduce the newly created participants in it from their rightful place.1' The assumption that Adam and Eve are already "fallen" in these scenes is based largely on the idea that they have already dislocated the hierarchy, of which Eve's subordination is a part. But Milton's hierarchy does not in any way impose a "slavish approach to God's behests" (III, 3); it is a means of teaching and learning which promotes that sensitively balanced awareness of the whole harmony of creation and of one's own part in it which is the basis of creative liberty. Its purpose is the delegation- not, as Satan thinks, the limitation-of creative powers, of which God is the ultimate source. It provides a means by which created beings may be exalted by the interaction of grace and their own efforts, especially on behalf of beings "lower" on the scale-that is, less mature in growth toward the fullest exercise of their capacity to obey God which is "happiness entire" (VI,741)-and thus gives each rational being an opportunity to share the joy of being creative as well as created, responsible as well as responsive, generous as well as grateful. Each figure of authority in this order is, as the word "author" implies, a promoter of individual growth. Each has the responsibility of instructing, and thereby admit- ting to the fellowship of his own place in the scale, the rational beings subordinate to him, and his first concern toward this end is to preserve the freedom of will of his subordinate. This preservation and exaltation is seen in Raphael's relationship to Adam, in Adam's to Eve, and most perfectly in the Son's

"A hierarch is one who has stewardship of sacred things or authority in spiritual matters; authority comes from augere, to increase, with the suffix of agency. (See OED.) In Paradise Lost the hierarchy of authority is a means of promoting spiritual growth through teaching.



to the angels and, as both Creator and Messiah, to men: as the Creator whose regard for Adam's liberty and growth is compressed in the words "call'd by thee I come thy guide" (VIII, 298), and as the Messiah whose coming freed responsive men from the "peculiar powers"12 with which they were obsessed, and whose willing propitiation the Father says will "exalt/ With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne" (III, 313- 314).

Obedience to such authority is exemplified in the free, loving, and creative response of the Son, who in both the creation and the redemption of man acts generously in ways which, while in harmony with the will of the Father, are not dictated by it but are of his own choice. It is exemplified also by the obedient angels, whose combining of cooperation with individual initiative is seen during the war in heaven, when

led in fight, yet Leader seemed Each Warrior single as in Chief . . .

each on himself reli'd As onely in his arm the moment lay Of victorie.

(VI, 232-239) Raphael as Adam's teacher both exemplifies such creative

obedience and provides an explanation of it. All of these examples are analogies of the opportunity given to Adam and Eve in marriage.

The liberating order rejected by Satan and open to Adam and Eve gives each human and angelic being the dignity of responsibility, and the ultimate opportunity this arrange- ment provides is the opportunity for charity. Each individual not only receives divine love but has the opportunity to extend it; and love, like Evil, back redounds "as a flood on those/ From whom it sprung" (VII, 57-58). It is above all in their capacity to love freely that created beings are like God, and it is this capacity that Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden to develop through their relationship to nature and to each other. Man is created

self-knowing, and from thence Magnanimous to correspond with Heav'n, But grateful to acknowledge whence his good Descends (VII, 157-159)

"2"On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," Works, 1, 9.



and is given a new world to be responsible for, guided by his own reason as it apprehends natural processes and, as his enemy approaches, by Raphael's explanation of his opportunity and his danger. Organic nature, which grows at its own even pace and thrives on restraint, and the forbidden tree as the "pledge . . . and memorial of obedience" (XVIII, 115) both teach the lessons of fidelity and temperance which Satan violated and which require awareness of one's place in the serviceable order of creation and that balanced use of all one's gifts necessary to freedom of the will. Both offer each man the dignity of merit and hence the joy of voluntary love. The forbidden tree, as Eve explains to the serpent, has been provided by God as the "Sole Daughter of his voice; the rest we live! Law to ourselves, our Reason is our Law" (IX, 653- 654). Obedience, then, is primarily the spontaneous fulfillment of their own nature, and the tree confirms obedience by trial and keeps them mindful of both their Creator and their responsibility, their cause for gratitude, and their capacity for magnanimity. The awareness of their place in the order of creation which the lesson of temperance can infuse and its trial strengthen promotes a balanced growth free from any obsession, such as Satan's bondage to pride, wvhich would limit responsive love.

Milton shows the process of this growth in Adam and Eve before the Fall through their actions both as nature's stewards and as partners in marriage. Eve's relationship to Adam is analogous to that of the Son to the Father, a subordination explained by William B. Hunter'3 which, as Stella Revard has pointed out, endows the subordinate with freedom to act creatively rather than from necessity: "the Son has attained his oneness with God by choice (both his own and God's) and not by inoriginate identity. . . . The foundation of Mil- ton's Trinity is not identity of origin but unanimity of Heart -the bond of love."'4 Correspondingly, Eve's subordination to

3Williarm R Hunter, Jr., "Milton's Arianism Reconsidered," Harvard Theological Review. LII (1959). 9-35: reviewed by A. E. Barker in "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance," Studies in English Literature, 1 (1961), 154-155.

"Stella Revard. "The Dramatic Function of the Son in Paradise Lost: A Commentary on Milton's 'Trinitarianism,"' Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXVI (Jan. 1967), 51 and 58.



Adam, as long as they preserve their "sanctitude severe," permits human love to be given voluntarily and to grow. Adam's pre-eminence supports Eve's development of her own special gifts of openness and amiable mildness and permits him to exercise his "more attentive mind" (X, 1011) in preserving her freedom; man's authority in reasonable things leaves woman free to exercise her own powers in sensible things, and both are thus free to act according to their nature, his in ruling justly and hers in yielding creatively. But the working out of their mutual responsibilities is not simple, since being created in the divine image is not simple. Eve's yielding, though natural, is not necessary, for the purpose of the order of creation is voluntary love kept in harmony by loving "first of all Him whom to love is to obey" (VIII, 633-634).

That Eve's love for Adam is a voluntary and growing love is the point of her initial motion toward self-love; she must move from knowledge of herself to understanding of the nature and the needs of others. Thus, though at first she is attracted to her own reflection, she soon finds that Adam is worthier of her love than is an image which can never be embraced. The first step in her growth is a step outside of her self-absorption, signaled by the words

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.

(IV, 488-491)

This generous perception is Eve's own; she has not been told, nor does Adam tell her, that she is his subordinate. Her plea- sure and spontaneous gratitude are heard in her avowal to him that, while both owe thanks to God, her debt is greater "who enjoy/ So far the happier Lot, enjoying thee/ Preemi- nent by so much odds" (IV, 444-446).

Similarly, Eve's question about the stars (IV, 658), while it reveals an immature human-centeredness and perhaps self- consciousness, is also an expression of her womanly practi- cality and a further step toward a fuller awareness of the whole of creation as a purposeful order; and Adam's answer both increases her understanding of that order and gives him the opportunity to exercise his attentiveness in teaching. Eve's dream, while suggested to Satan by her potential for



vaxnity and a part of her trial by flattery, again broadens her awareness and gives Adam a chance to teach, and thereby learn something of the manifold potential of the human mind. If Eve had emerged from the trial with blank incomprehen- sion, as Dr. Tillyard implies she would have if she had not "really passed from a state of innocence to one of sin,"'15 one would doubt her capacity for imagination, which, while as Adam says it has its dangers when Reason sleeps, is also the most important of the "Faculties that serve! Reason as chief" (V, 101-102); it is the ability to form sense impressions into perceptions for reason to judge, and since it keeps alive our consciousness of what is not immediate and comprehensible, it is needed both for human compassion and for trust in divine providence.

Adam's admission to Raphael of his own potential for in- temperate affection and forgetfulness of his leadership is also an indication not only of Adam's infirmity but of his awareness of it and desire to master it. His account of his wonclering delight in Eve follows Raphael's explanation of obedience as voluntary love of God, with its emphasis on the need to keep the will free as Satan did not; and his wandering logic reflects his incomplete efforts to balance gratitude and responsibility. Raphael's rebuke and Adam's response to it are a step in his growth toward disciplined judgment and move him to compose his thoughts on that "unfeign'd/ Union of mind" which is "Harmonie to behold in wedded pair/ More grateful then harmonious sound to eare" (VIII, 603-606). Adam is learning to recognize Eve as a gifted individual and to value her liberty of will, which. along with its challenging liabilities, makes possible the dignity and joy of love freely given. The opportunity in marriage is the one which Mrs. Revard says is provided by the subordination of the Son: to achieve voluntary unanimity of heart.

By the time of the separation scene, then, the pattern of growth and the nature of authority have been established. In addition, we have the analogies of two previous portentous departures: that of Satan from Hell with the intention of destruction and that of the Son from Heaven with the intention of creation. Whether at the moment of temptation Eve is, as Milton says she is, "yet sinless" (IX, 659), and thus

'5Tillyard, p. 12.



free to make a responsible choice, depends on whether, like Satan, she departs with the fixed mind of obstinancy or, like the Son, with a generous and potentially productive purpose. We know from the event that her action is potentially de- structive; but if Milton's characterization is based on free will, she must have departed with sufficient openness of mind to make the choice freely; and that mildness and openness of her nature which makes her, as Adam says later, "unwarie, and too desirous ... of what thou knowest not" (X, 947-948), is also a source of her potential creativity and of her prompter repentance.

Eve suggests dividing their labors with the observation that "till more hands/ Aid us, the work under our labour grows,/ Luxurious by restraint" and that their absorption in each other leaves "our days work brought to little" (IX, 207-209, 224). The dialogue which follows dramatizes the problem of Eve's obedience to Adam and to "God in him" (IV, 299), obedience which throughout the poem depends on preserving liberty of will to respond to God's providential love.

Dr. Tillyard explains Eve's speech as a test of love: she really hopes that Adam "will retort that . . . he cannot bear to lose sight of her. . . . Adam, after the manner of men sleepy or not at their best, falls into the trap.""' Mrs. Bell, hearing in the dialogue overtones of marital disputes since the Fall, comments, "Provoked by barbs beneath her 'sweet au- stere composure' and 'accent sweet,' [Adam] finally does go more penetratingly into the dangers. . . , but it is really too late-Eve has managed to rouse in herself a small head of willful steam. And Adam, at the very climax of his most force- ful argument, suddenly collapses-perhaps, though Milton doesn't tell us so, it is the look on her face which is responsible."17 Mr. Gross, recalling Eve's earlier departure from Adam and Raphael so that Adam could recount their conversation to her as "sole auditress" and with "grateful digressions" (VIII, 51-55), feels that the earlier separation was tinged with a jealousy now confirmed by her testing of his desire for those digressions8-even though Milton had as- sured us during the same scene with Raphael that

"6Tillyard, p. 17. '7Bell, p. 869. "Gross, pp. 98-99.



in those hearts Love unlibidinous reigned, nor jealousie Was understood, the injur'd Lovers Hell.

(V, 448-450) Arnold Stein finds that Eve's "whim of efficiency," influ- enced by her dream, represents a return to her original state of self-love; he analyses her speech as a pretense of valuing work in itself which is really an externalization of self to make self-worship possible, and Adam's response as worship of his own image in her: it both violates order and is "the causal decision that already sponsors the act, but each of them is too pleasantly gripped by his hidden dream to dis- engage himself for unpleasant recognitions. . . . The eating of the apple is as good as done."19

Eve's desire to work alone and Adam's aquiescence may indicate an imbalance at that stage of their growth which may need to be compensated in order to preserve the perfect circle of their awareness; to use those of Milton's terms which Professor Stein stresses, she may be prodigal of magnanimity and he of gratitude. But to see the scene solely as evidence of self-love perversely symbolized is to overlook its concern with their growing awareness of their place in the order of creation and their responsibility to it.

Eve's speech indicates that she values not work in itself but those things in themselves which her great task-Master has given her to care for. Her attentiveness to this responsibility has been seen before, at the time of the departure which is the precedent for this one, when she

Rose, and went forth among her Fruits and Flours, To visit how they prosper'd, bud and bloom, Her Nurserie; they at her coming sprung And toucht by her fair tendance gladlier grew

(VIII, 44-47) and it re-echoes in her lament at loss of Eden, when she asks,

My early visitation and my last At Eev'n, which I bred up with tender hand From the first op'ning bud, and gave ye Names, Who now shall rear ye to the Sun, or ranke Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount?

(X, 275-279)

"9Arnold Stein, Answerable Style (Minneapolis, 1953), p. 102.



Her speech parallels Adam's concerning his own dominion: "I named them, as they pass'd and understood/ Thir Nature" (VIJI, 352-353). Eve is learning how organic things grow, and her responsibility and the compassion it can help to nour- ish is in part an apprenticeship for rearing children, when she, too, will need to know how to promote the free development of individual potential in those under her authority.

The creative effect of her caring is, in herself, a step out- ward from self-absorption toward a mature sensitivity to the harmonious order of creation and, in that part of the order subject to her care, the good husbandry of nature's bounty. Milton says in "Of Education" that "our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly coming over the visible and inferior creature" (IV, 277), a view confirmed by Adam's "In con- templation of created things/ By steps we may ascend to God" (V, 510). An early stage in that education with which we may strive "to repair the ruines of our first Parents by regaining to know God aright" is the reading of agricultural works which afford occasions "of inciting and inabling them here- after to improve the tillage of their Country, to recover the bad Soil, and to remedy the waste that is made of good" (IV, 282). God's first command to Adam, which is complemented by the later one to marry and increase and tempered by the negative command of the forbidden tree, is "This Paradise I give thee, count it thine/ To Till and keep, and of the Fruit to eate" (VIII, 319-320); and the positive command at the beginning of the process of regeneration is "to Till/ The Ground whence he was taken" (XI, 97-98).

Eve's awareness of this responsibility is also an awareness that what concerns her most, their growing love for one another, will remain harmonious in proportion to their responsiveness to the harmony of all creation. Her expression of it is a tactful reminder of that rule of temperance which all of nature and one tree in particular reveal as the promoter of fertility and the preserver of harmonious order, and an application of it to the command to increase through conjugal love. Because it prevents obsessions and resulting omissions, the rule of temperance is the basis of creative freedom; the flowers Eve chooses for their special attention are an acknowl-



edgement that such freedom is essential to enduring love. Each is a traditional symbol for a particular kind of love: roses and myrtle for divine and conjugal love, ivy and woodbine for fidelity in marriage or friendship. But they are also potentially ironic and cautionary emblems. Roses, soon to fall withering from Adam's slack hand as he resigns his freedom, are a favorite image of short-lived passion in carpe dtem and courtly love poetry, and as both Venus's flower and Mary's represent the choice between divisive luxuria and fruitful patience. Ivy and woodbine, unless directed where to climb, provide similes for opportunistic or tyrannously dependent attachments which kill "as the Ivy climbeth up by the Oak, and through time destroys the Tree it was supported by."20 The ease with which these symbols of charity become those of cupidity urges the perpetual choice, on which the health of mankind and of each individual depends, between love which obsesses and love which liberates. Eve's question about those looks and talks which "intervene" and "intermit" indicates her intuitive desire to help Adam temper that passion which can make him vulnerable and jeopardize the dignity and freedom of their love. Both her departures may be considered acts of patience by which love too can grow "luxurious by restraint."

Adam's response is a manifestation of his own growth and illustrates its process. He approves her desire "to studie house- hold good" (IX, 233), but moderates it to fit the encompassing good of human fellowship which it serves; and having in- structed her desire he goes on to approve it further on the grounds that good too can thrive on restraint: "Short retirement urges sweet return" (IX, 250). However-and here Adam's tact is shown by the choice of a word expressing both anxiety and uncertainty-"other doubt possesses me, least harm/ Befall thee sever'd from me" from that "malicious Foe" of whom they have been warned (IX, 251-253). Eve, after voicing what perhaps sounds like wounded vanity but is also a declaration of fidelity and love, provides the reason why Adam is uncertain and why he finally withholds the demand for obedience his authority would allow:

"0George Buchanan (1506-1582), The Chameleon, in Miscellanea Scotica (London, 1710, p. 99; quoted in OED, XII, 266.



If this be our condition, thus to dwell In narrow circuit straignt'nd by a Foe, Suttle or violent, we not endu'd Single with like defense, wherever met, How are we happie, still in fear of harm?

(IX, 323-327) The scene is a dramatization of the problem of free will analogous to that of Christian liberty in the Areopagitica.2' 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. Their problem, like that of the Commonwealth Milton tried to defend and guide, is that of preserving their integrity without losing their liberty: the free will upon which that integrity is based. Even though they are not yet reduced to knowing good by evil, they know that "reason is but choosing" (IV, 319), that without choice there is no opportunity for exercising free will, and that harmonious exercise of free will is the essence of obedience to God.

Milton's position in the toleration controversies of the 'forties is that the strength of the holy community is partly in its diversity: "there must be many . . . dissections made in the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built" (IV, 342); and in this debate Adam and Eve reveaJ their growing concern for one another as free and developing individuals with diverse talents to use. Adam's problem as Eve's superior is to protect her liberty, not by force but by education, both from the external enemy and from the internal imbalance of "peculiar powers" which that enemy will exploit. In doing so Adam, by recognizing the limits of his own authority, must also prevent "peculiar powers" from obsessing him and thus hindering his own freedom as well as hers. Milton says in Areopagitica, "The law must needs be frivolous

"Many critics have felt that Eve's use of arguments similar to those of Areopagitica is parodic, shallow, or inapplicable; see for example, J. S. Diekhoff, "Eve, the Devil, and Areopagitica," Modern Language Quarterly V (1944), 429-434. J. M. Evans, who very expertly demon- strates Milton's delicacy in solving the other exegetical problems posed by Genesis, finds Eve's case "superficially cogent" but actually symp- tomatic, in the words of St. Augustine, of "a certain proud self- presumption," and that "her moral defection took place when she decided to leave Adam." PARADISE LOST and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford, 1968), pp. 272-280.



which goes to restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good, and to evil" (IV, 320) ; and in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, according to Professor Barker, "It is not . . . upon disciplined virtue that the weight of his discussion falls; it falls rather oni the blamelessness of natural inclinations which may lead to mistakes but are not of themselves vicious, and it demands the freedom of their fulfillment that must necessarily be accorded if man's life is not to be a frustrated and ignoble bondage."22 If Eve's inclination is natural and not of itself vicious-and whatever critics may think of Milton's description of Eve as "yet sinless," the pertinent consideration here is that Adam thinks she is-and since from Adam's point of view that inclination is working uncertainly yet equally to good and evil, then it would be frivolous for him to impose restraint, and a violation of the balance of his own powers.

God continually holds open the opportunity for right responses, and for man to limit this opportunity is tyranny. It is true that Adam will later accuse Eve's "strange/ Desire of wandring" and she his "Too facil" permission (IX, 1135-36, 1158); but these over-simplified recriminations are fallen, retrospective views from the agony of evil conscience, and point up by contrast the greater sensitivity of their unfallen minds to the complexities of responsible liberty and to each other. It is true also that Michael reprimands Adam's accusa- tion of woman as the source of woe by accusing rather "Mans effeminate slackness" (XI, 633) ; but this slackness is not in allowing Eve the freedom which just authority is instituted to preserve, but in stooping to join her in sin rather than trusting divine providence and using his own unfallen virtue to free her from it.

Eve's final argument too partakes of the perfectly balanced potential for good and for ill which provides them opportunity for growth through choice: "And what is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid/ Alone, without exterior help sustain'd?" (IX, 335- 336) On the side working to evil, there is danger of pride in Eve's confidence, and of a complacent forgetfulness of the dynamic relationship between man's efforts and God's providence; and Adam rightly reminds her that while God "Noth-

22Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, p. 66.


DIANE KELSEY McC OLLEY 119

ing imperfect or deficient left/ Of all that he Created, much less Man," yet

within himself The danger lies, yet lies within his power: Against his will he can receave no harme. But God left free the Will, for what obeyes Reason, is free, and Reason he made right, But bid her well beware, and still erect, Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd She dictate false, and missinforme the Will To do what God expressly hath forbid.

(IX, 345-356) On the side working to good, Eve's argument, though in need of the qualification Adam provides, resembles Milton's declaration that "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd and unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary" (IV, 311); and Adam's reply is an argument not for censorship but for attentiveness in making responsible choices.

Adam then gives the advice on which the critical assumption of Eve's disobedience rests:

Seek not temptation then, which to avoide Were better, and most likelie if from mee Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought. Wouldst thou approve thy constancie, approve First thy obedience.

(IX, 364-367) But it is further evidence of his developing comprehension that he qualifies these suggestions at once, and for reasons his own words have brought to mind. If "trial will come unsought" one can approach it freely and with dignity, and Raphael's explanation is still fresh in his mind that obedience can take place only when the will is free. Their situation is analogous to that of Samson, who, when asked to perform at Dagon's feast, at first refuses on just such grounds of self- respect as Adam has suggested to Eve, until he realizes from "some rouzing motions in me" (SA, 1382) that opportunity for action offers greater scope for obedience than does being "strait'nd by a Foe." Eve, we know, is going to misuse her opportunity; but her willingness to face it is not of itself vicious.

The last conversation of Adam and Eve before the Fall is



an incomplete working out of their reciprocal responsibilities of freedom and authority: a process which might have con- tinued fruitfully had its pace been moderated "in strictest measure even"23 by reason "keeping strictest watch" (IX, 363) in the face of trial, which would have been "fortitude to highest victory" (XII, 570). Their capacity for pride and intemperance is balanced by their mutual concern that human love, like all love in the divinely appointed order, should remain generous-neither possessive nor fugitive nor straitened by a foe; and such love, as Raphael has explained, is the reason for free will and the purpose of creation. Although their separation gives Satan opportunity for action, the opportunity is still also theirs. The episode and the temptation to follow are potentially steps in their education and trials which exercise their understanding. Eve departs, though over- confidently, prepared and free to choose; and Adam, though with misgivings, sums up the delicate balance of their freedom and their responsibility:

But if thou think, trial unsought may finde Us both securer then thus warned thou seemst, Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more; Go in thy native innocence, relie On what thou hast of virtue, summon all, For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine.

(IX, 370-375) We know that Adam and Eve will not continue to do their

parts. The "two Gardening so wide" (IX, 203) will never return to "sweet repast, or sound repose" (IX, 407), and their failure has been adequately foreshadowed. But it is not a necessary failure, and if Milton's characterization portrays a potential for error which accords with our common experience of human frailty, it also shows the potential for free and loving responses in both prelapsarian and regenerate men. What the episode proves is not that Adam and Eve are congenitally weak but that they are developing individuals who are responsible for their actions because their wills are free; and this responsibility is necessary both to the justice of their chastening and to their capacity for regeneration.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

2"Sonnet VII.


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Issue Table of ContentsStudies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 12, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 1972), pp. 1-222Volume InformationFront MatterParody and Its Implications in Sydney's Defense of Poesie [pp. 1-19]Spenser's "Many Faire Pourtraicts, and Many a Faire Feate" [pp. 21-32]Sexual Discovery and Renaissance Morality in Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" [pp. 33-54]Dobsons Drie Bobbes: A Significant Contribution to the Development of Prose Fiction [pp. 55-70]George Turbervile's Epigrams from the Greek Anthology: A Case-Study of "Englishing" [pp. 71-84]"To Stand Inquiring Right": The Casuistry of Donne's "Satyre III" [pp. 85-101]Free Will and Obedience in the Separation Scene of Paradise Lost [pp. 103-120]Asmodeus and the Fishy Fume: Paradise Lost, IV, 153-171 [pp. 121-128]The Art of the Maze in Book IX of Paradise Lost [pp. 129-140]Regeneration and Typology: Samson Agonistes and Its Relation to De Doctrina Christiana, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained [pp. 141-156]"Leud Priapians" and Renaissance Pornography [pp. 157-172]George Herbert's "The Sonne": In Defense of the English Language [pp. 173-182]Recent Studies in the English Renaissance [pp. 183-222]

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