Original Sin in Milton’s Paradise Lost
From the first few lines in the epic, it is understood that the subject of Milton’s book is “man’s disobedience and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac’t,” it’s contrast to the similar yet contrary Fall of Satan, the prime deception of man on his behalf, and the unblemished mercy of God towards Adam and Eve, the first of his favorite creatures (5). Milton, by humanizing the characters in the Bible, both angelic and human, and giving them each a sense of personality and innate nature, brings a certain understanding to the story and a carving of events that allows the reader to associate with the dilemmas inside each one; and these personas, each following a distinct path, portray the message of the epic by placing the story of the Fall of man within the larger context of Satan’s rebellion in Heaven and the Son’s ultimate sacrifice. In book V, Raphael, the messenger angel sent to converse with Adam about the importance of obedience and the consequences for evading it, proves this theory: “and some are fall’n,” he says, “to disobedience fall’n, and so from Heav’n to deepest Hell; O fall from what high state of bliss into what woe!” (127) Milton achieves his message to mankind through both God and Raphael, who also reminds Adam that “it profit thee to have heard by terrible Example the reward of disobedience; firm they might have stood, yet fell” (163). By contrasting the Fall of Satan and the Fall of man within relevant contexts, Milton balances their reactions to their respective Falls by showing the differences between creatures who are both good and evil and what they choose to do with those virtues.
While Adam and Eve are the first humans to disobey God, Satan is the first of all creation to repel God’s word and invoke a personal revenge on Him through a series of disobediences. These two important acts of insubordination and their roots-the pride of Satan and the weakness of man’s reason-give Milton much room to play with their personalities and give them incentive for their actions. Satan, whose incentive is nothing more than to rebel against the doctrine that all in Heaven should praise the Son, is filled with such envy and jealousy towards God’s offspring that his pride convinces him to undertake a full rebellion against His word and attack on His principles. We find through Raphael’s warning to Adam that Satan’s motives are completely wicked, stemming from “a foeâÂ?¦who intend[ed] to erect his Throne equal to ours,” and that his grandeur is full of contemptuous evil and misplaced pride (133). Though it is apparent that Satan wavers in his plan with a flood of pain and aching feelings of loss of grace upon reaching Eden’s gates, his decision to continue to disobey God after his Fall into Hell ensures his placement there for eternity and his physical embodiment of evil. Man’s Fall, on the other hand, stems from a provoked and devious deception towards Eve on Satan’s behalf-and though Adam and Eve, as well, disobey God, their disobedience stems from a quite different provocation than that of Lucifer’s. Their nature is essentially a good, decent one, simply tricked into disobedience by an evil power: from the beginning, Adam and Eve’s desire to please God keeps them from becoming tempted, and even after Eve’s wicked dream, Adam says that because Eve is upset, it “gives [him] hope that what in sleep [she] didst abhor to dream, waking [she] never wilt consent to do” (116). Paradise Lost, in many ways, represents a deviation of two paths of morale, with Satan choosing the wicked spiral of sin and degradation into evil, and Adam and Eve begging for mercy and a second chance at redemption.
One of Satan’s character attributes is his ability to convince others of his authority in the face of his own pride, from his original legion of follower angels and their weakness to be molded and shaped, to Uriel and his innocence, and to Eve and her vanity. As readers know that Satan’s Fall occurred primarily because of his arrogant pride and refusal to bow down to the Son of God, it is also interesting to note that he unfailingly succeeds at tricking his rebel group into obeying his demands, and that it is this incurring irrationality that leads to revenge, hate, and corruption. This deceitful ability to trick, however, is what ultimately leads Satan to his corruption of mankind, as is seen through his whispering to Eve and his tempts towards her excessive vanity. He first tricks himself into believing that by not submitting to God’s will, he has the opportunity to crown himself a throne and become mighty in the face of competition. In deceiving himself this way, however, Satan has also doomed one-third of God’s angelic population, using them to battle a war they have little hope of winning so as to preserve his self-righteous pride and extreme vanity. His blindness to the truth, coupled with his proud acts of disobedience towards his superior, present an interesting moral lesson: Milton makes it positively clear that noncompliance to God directly leads to blindness and false pretenses with a repulsive eternity in Hell.
Man’s Fall is due partly as the result of a series of causes and effects after the Fall of Satan and his crew of rebel angels, and it is partially for that reason that God’s mercy towards their pleas for redemption comes logically. Milton, in his attempt to prove God’s rationale for the successive events of the universe and mankind’s place within it, presents Adam and Eve as the father and mother of a replacement population for the fallen angels, complete with peace, grace, and love, an untainted Paradise, and a proud, happy relationship with God. Each morning they tend God’s fields and pray, “lowly they bow adoring,” and “want[ing] they to praise Thir Maker,” which gives them a certain sense of duty, piety, and purity, three things completely void from Satan’s sense of morale (117). This new creature, God proclaims, will earn their way into glory by moderating his passions, keeping rationality above impulse, obeying His doctrine, and praising His name; He knows, however, from the first moment he speaks with his Son, that Man “shall pervert; Man will heark’n to his glozing lies, and easily transgress the sole Command” because he has been made “just and right, sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (63). Satan’s anger and need for revenge make Man an easy target, as the species is fresh, with not much experience in dealing with the passions that come with emotions, and because Man has been granted free will over his decisions. Unfortunately, though, Adam and Eve’s free will and human ability to be persuaded falls in their path and ultimately corrupts them, beginning with Eve’s desire to become a goddess and Adam’s need to be with his earthly love.
The problem of knowledge and the lust for power that comes from gaining it is an attribute of mankind that has always presented discrepancies of epic proportion, especially when humans choose a path they know is against their code of righteousness. This is evident from the moment that Adam inquires about the nature of the universe, as his hunger for knowledge escalates and provides certain foreshadowing that will feed his temptation to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Book VII presents a curious Adam who becomes increasingly more aggressive in his search to understand the universe and his place within it, and similarly, Book IX presents a tempted Eve who becomes increasingly more inquisitive and curious with the flattering serpent and ideas of grandeur and godliness. The ability of the developed human mind to reason and search for understanding, though often viewed as a positive and prevailing force that separates them from the outer realm of the animal world, can also be viewed as a negative prescription for temptation: Eve, who finally relents to the persistent flattery of her beauty-with expressions such as “Eve, empress of this fair World”-finds herself seduced by a serpent who speaks, and her desire to know has her asking the serpent questions such as “language of Man pronounc’t by Tongue of Brute, and human sense exprest?” (217). Her inquisitive nature, along with her vanity, leads her to continue marveling the creature’s ability to communicate with her and give her sweet compliments. Though she knows that “God hath said, Ye shall not eat Thereof, nor shall ye touch [the Tree of Knowledge], lest ye die,” Satan, disguised as the serpent, convinces her that God merely wished to “keep ye low and ignorant” (221-222). So it is at the mercy of her vain nature and her increasing passion for godliness that she decides to taste the Fruit; but in doing so, she curses her future as well as Adam’s.
Adam, on the other hand, finds himself enjoying the sensation of the Fruit for a slightly different reason: though he, too, obeys God’s will and stays far from the Tree of Knowledge, he loves his earthly possession more than he does God, and this attachment to earthly goods is what finally lures him to taste the Tree of Knowledge. Upon finding Eve with the apple, he drops his gift for her, a wreath of roses, and remains “astonis’t and Blank, while horror chill ran through his veins,” signifying his awareness that Eve had disobeyed God and therefore sealed their Fallen state (226). Eve, his object of adoration and lifetime companion, has eaten the Fruit and so he, after imagining his loneliness and existence without her, joins her in their Fall. His weakness stems from his recognition that if Eve were punished without him, his life would be pure but unhappy-and coming to this realization immediately prevents him from obeying God. His sin stems not from a desire to gain the knowledge elusively offered from the Tree of Knowledge but instead from his overwhelming need to have companionship and share his fate with someone else. In a passionate lament, he tells Eve, his “Flesh of Flesh, Bone of [his] Bone thou art, from thy State mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe,” and indulges in the sacred Fruit.
Though Satan’s Fall is a direct result of his deadly combination of pride, rebellion, evil, and sin, Adam and Eve’s Fall is often referred to as a Fortunate one, suggesting that their fate was ordained through God’s plan and allowed them to achieve a pure love with Him and a true sense of redemption and salvation. Their disobedience provided God with the unique opportunity to express his mercy in the face of their betrayal towards his word; and although he does indeed punish them-with eventual death, pain in childbirth, and trouble with the soil-he also allows them to redeem themselves through prayer and choose a righteous path towards salvation on their way to reuniting with their Maker. And unlike Satan, whose degenerated reason and wounded pride solidifies his eternal embodiment of evil, Adam and Eve recognize their dreadful mistake and beg their Father for forgiveness and mercy. Milton, through Paradise Lost, expresses God’s ultimate plan for humankind through this series of events and forked paths that Man is eternally presented with, and achieves his desire, to attempt and succeed in something never before accomplished. By using the Bible as a background and his own personal philosophy as a means to achieving his epic story, he places an ancient concept in the form of a tale, a human history connected forever to both Heavenly and Hellish powers.
