The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

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by Stephen Greenblatt


  Milton struck back. Had his critics, he asked, actually bothered to read The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and take in its arguments? God could have created a male companion for Adam—a thousand of them, if He had chosen to do so—“yet for all this, till Eve was given him, God reckoned him to be alone.” That was not only or even primarily because of sexual intercourse; it was because “there is a peculiar comfort in the married state beside the genial bed which no other society affords.”

  Normally so effortlessly eloquent, Milton struggled to describe what this comfort—which he had not himself yet experienced—must be like. It had to be deeply satisfying, since God intended Adam, as Milton put it, “to spend so many secret years in an empty world with one woman.” But if it was not sex—if it was something “beside the genial bed”—then what exactly was it? It was, he wrote somewhat awkwardly, “a kind of ravishment and erring fondness in the entertainment of wedded leisures.” That was the closest he could come.

  Milton had no comparable difficulty finding words to describe his critics: “idiot,” “brain-worm,” “arrant pettifogger,” “odious fool,” “gourmand,” “barbarian,” “cockbrained solicitor,” “presumptuous lozel,” “mongrel,” “brazen ass.” But the enemies did not slink away under this torrent of abuse. A complaint against The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was lodged with a Parliamentary committee empaneled to investigate the unlicensed publication of immoral and irreligious works. Milton felt himself in the maddening position of a liberator who is spurned by the very people he is attempting to free.

  Milton characteristically refused to accept defeat. Ferreting through theological tomes to find supporting arguments, he continued to write and publish tracts, ranging in tone from the scholarly to the furious, that advocated divorce. The feverish effort came at a cost, or so it seemed to Milton. For it was at this time that he began to experience digestive problems that plagued him through the rest of his life and to notice a still more serious problem: “Even in the morning, if I began as usual to read, I noticed that my eyes felt immediate pain deep within and turned from reading, though later refreshed after moderate bodily exercise; as often as I looked at a lamp, a sort of rainbow seemed to obscure it.” He did not know then, of course, that the deterioration of his vision, whatever its actual cause, would lead in a few years to total blindness, but he must have felt that he was paying a very high price for his labors.

  In 1644 he published Areopagitica, one of the most eloquent and influential defenses of a free press ever written. Milton had long been against censorship. Now in responses to demands that his book be burned by the common hangman, he wrote: “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book,” for “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” How did his opponents imagine that the truth would ever emerge, if not through the public clash of competing ideas? Did they think that humans were mere puppets, designed—as in the shows that the seventeenth century called “motions”—only to mouth lines ventriloquized for them by the authorities? “Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues!” Milton declared; “When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions.” Whatever else he was or might become, Milton was not going to be an artificial Adam, a puppet spouting someone else’s words and accepting laws that he was convinced were unjust. Were we not created by God to be free?

  Three years had passed since the disastrous honeymoon in the summer of 1642, and Milton had not, so far as we know, heard a word from Mary. But history—the same history that had turned London and Oxford into enemy camps—now intervened in the marital stalemate. The tides of war turned. The Royalist victory that had seemed almost in reach at the time when Mary returned to her family at Forest Hill shimmered and vanished, like a mirage. By the spring of 1645, Parliament was in the ascendant. Under siege, Royalist Oxford began to run out of provisions, and King Charles decided to lead his troops in person against the massed enemy forces in the north. The Royalist soldiers felt buoyed by the king’s presence; many of the wealthier officers’ wives and mistresses rode out in their carriages to witness the expected triumph. But on a foggy mid-June morning in 1645, at the Battle of Naseby, the Parliament’s New Model Army, under the command of Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, crushed the king’s forces in what proved to be the decisive battle of the Civil War.

  When the news of the disaster reached Oxfordshire, the Powells, facing ruin, knew that they had to act quickly, but how? Their eldest daughter was married, at least in name, to an important figure on the Parliamentary side, but she had deserted him. And Milton, who had made no secret of his miserable loneliness in the company of a wife he had come to hate—“a living soul bound to a dead corpse”—could hardly be expected now to welcome her back. The strategy the Powells hit upon depended on the cooperation of Milton’s cousins, William and Hester Blackborough, who lived near him in London and must have been eager to effect a reconciliation. One summer day, very shortly after the Royalist defeat, Milton stopped by, as he apparently did regularly, to visit his relatives. A door opened, as Milton’s nephew relates, “and on a sudden he was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more.” The scene was carefully, even brilliantly stage-managed. Mary fell to her knees in submission before the husband she had abandoned and begged for his pardon.

  Milton, who believed fiercely in the “freedom to choose,” could have freely chosen to turn away. But he did not. He took up his repentant bride and led her home. This time the marriage endured. The children whom Milton tutored still no doubt wept under his rod, and the house must still have seemed gloomy to the twenty-year-old Mary. But she could no longer even think about running off to her family’s lively manor house in the country. Forest Hill, occupied by Parliamentary troops, was finished, and with it the expansive social world in which she had been raised.

  The £1,000 dowry, always a will-o-the-wisp, was now out of the question. Mary’s family, rendered homeless by the Parliamentary victory, obtained permission to come to London. Where were they going to live? Where indeed? The whole crowd of them—Richard Powell and his wife Anne, along with young George, Archdale, William, the two Elizabeths, and perhaps even others of their innumerable brood—moved in with their daughter and with the son-in-law they had hated.

  By autumn Mary was pregnant, and on July 29, 1646, the Miltons’ first child, a daughter, was born. In a Latin letter written on April 20, 1647, to his Italian friend Carlo Dati, Milton reveals at least something of what he must have felt about his new living arrangements. “Those who are closely bound to me by the mere fact of proximity,” he writes, “although they have nothing else to commend themselves to me are with me daily, they deafen me with their noise and, I swear, torment me as often as they please.”

  And Mary? Had she actually come to regret the separation and blame herself or her interfering mother for it? Of her feelings after she returned to the marriage, we know nothing. In October 1648, she gave birth to a second daughter (christened Mary); in March 1651 she gave birth to a son (christened John); by the summer’s end she was pregnant again—four pregnancies in six and a half years.

  The end of the marriage came about not through divorce but through the means that the marriage ceremony itself imagined: “till death us depart.” On May 2, 1652, Mary Milton brought her fourth child into the world, but a few days later, at age twenty-seven, she was dead. “My daughter Deborah was born the 2nd of May being Sunday somewhat before 3 of the clock in the morning, 1652,” Milton wrote in his Bible, and then continued, with startling vagueness, “my wife her mother died about 3 days after.”

  Though Mary left no record of her inner life—no diary or letters of hers have survived—there is an astonishing attempt to imagine what she might have thought and felt. This imagining is, in
its way, moving, but also entirely indirect and unreliable, for it is Milton’s own. In his divorce tracts Milton, hurt and angry, could not allow himself to reflect at all on what his unhappy bride must have been experiencing, and, as far as we can tell, he did not seem to interest himself in the precise state of her feelings after her return. But years later he tried to record what her voice might have sounded like, had he been able to hear it. Even then, he did not, from our perspective, give it full and robust presence, and he may, for all we know, have been hopelessly wrong. Yet it was remarkable for Milton to hear anything at all, other than the echo chamber of his own unhappiness. Imagining himself as Adam, he called the woman whose voice he conjured up Eve.

  10

  The Politics of Paradise

  In 1381, preaching to impoverished English peasants, the priest John Ball pointed out that when humans began life in the fallen world there were no pampered nobles lording over oppressed serfs. To grow his crops the first man had to dig in the earth himself; to make clothing the first woman had to spin her own wool. Ball used a revolutionary slogan that quickly became famous: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” In case his listeners didn’t get it, he spelled out the meaning of his incendiary little rhyme: “From the beginning all men were created equal by nature.” Rebels torched court records, opened jails, and killed officials of the crown.

  When the insurgency was crushed, the instigator was treated to the grisly end specially reserved for traitors: his head was stuck on a pike on London Bridge, and his body was hacked into four pieces which were sent as a warning to four different towns. Though Ball’s fate marked the end of the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt, his slogan was not forgotten, and his death did not kill off radical readings of Adam and Eve. Those readings always lurked in the story—both in the untrammeled freedom of Paradise and in the manual labor of Adam and Eve after the Fall—and were available to anyone in search of ways to justify and legitimate social protest.

  In periods of political and social unrest, time has a strange way of buckling, with the present seeming to collapse into the past or the past bursting its containment and inhabiting the present. It was not only biblical figures who suddenly became contemporaries. In the wake of the Renaissance in Italy, it was often the classical, pagan past that surged up. In fourteenth-century Rome a tavern-keeper’s illegitimate son, Cola di Rienzo, had himself crowned tribune and called for the unification of Italy and a new Roman empire. Leaders of the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century were depicted wearing togas. German followers of the Russian Revolution imagined themselves as the direct heirs of the Roman slave rebellion led by Spartacus. But in the overheated religious climate of seventeenth-century England, a culture of ardent Bible readers, it was above all the story of Adam and Eve that seemed eerily close.

  It was so close to some, or so at least it was rumored, that they met in secret, men and women together, took their clothes off, and worshiped God as Adam and Eve would have worshiped him in Paradise. Whether these people—known as Adamites—actually existed is not clear, but even as a fantasy in the minds of alarmed defenders of orthodoxy, the rumor reveals the perceived potency of the Genesis story. Conservative authorities, nervous about excessive religious enthusiasm, made efforts to fix the events in the Garden securely in the remotest antiquity. The scholarly James Ussher, a politically moderate Anglican bishop, pored over the historical records, carefully counted the generations inferred by all the biblical “begats,” and calculated that the world was created on the night preceding October 23, 4004 BCE. He added that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday, November 10. Those dates put the primordial events in their place.

  But many of Ussher’s contemporaries agreed rather with the physician and natural scientist Sir Thomas Browne when he declared that “the man without a navel still lives in me.” Historical distance was meaningless; Adam, in his proneness to temptation, stirred and breathed within Browne himself. Even those who adhered to the notion that the Fall occurred as a specific event long, long ago often insisted, with the preacher John Everard, that “We must bring these histories home to ourselves: otherwise what does it mean to me that there was Sinai and Zion, Hagar and Sarah?”

  Bringing the histories home was not only a matter of taking personal responsibility for sinfulness; it could also mean recovering a sense of lost innocence. Near the end of the seventeenth century, the founder of the Quakers, George Fox—repeatedly jailed for religious dissent—testified that through his faith he was lifted back in spirit into Paradise: “All things were new, and all the Creation gave another Smell unto me than before.” “I came up into the state of Adam,” explained Fox, “which he was in before he fell.” For some of Fox’s contemporaries this perfect innocence had never been lost; it was the possession of all humans in the simple experience of childhood. Augustine’s gloomy insistence that all children, even newborn infants, were already corrupt and sinful by nature was a lie. “I was an Adam there,” wrote the poet Thomas Traherne, recalling his earliest years; “A little Adam in a sphere/Of Joys.”

  The deep truth, all of these seventeenth-century searchers believed, could be found in Genesis. Milton never ceased to search there. Sketching in his notebook the idea of a tragic drama on the fall of Adam and Eve, he briefly hoped that this would be the great work of art that had been secretly gestating within him. But the play refused to get written. He continued to believe that God had given him the talent to make something that would endure in human memory, as the works of Homer and Virgil had endured, and yet that talent in him seemed to lie buried. He worried that he was belated, that the crucial moment of opportunity had eluded his grasp, that his time was running out and still the creative achievement was not happening.

  As he reached his fortieth birthday in December 1648, it must have been clear even to him, propped up though he was by an enormously robust ego, that he was nowhere close to writing the masterpiece of which he dreamed. He could tell himself, with utmost justification, that there were other things to think about. The country, which settled into an uneasy truce in 1646, had less than two years later lurched once again into civil war. This time, after a second round of sieges, destruction, and bloodletting, the triumphant New Model Army was not inclined to negotiate a compromise settlement. In an unprecedented move, the king was tried on charges of high treason and convicted, with fifty-nine judges signing the death warrant.

  On January 30, 1649, Charles I mounted a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace. After making a speech that only those standing near him could hear, he said a prayer, put his head down on the block, and signaled his readiness. The hooded executioner—his identity, carefully concealed, remains unknown—severed the head from the trunk in a single stroke. One eyewitness, a Puritan minister and hence no friend to the king, reported that at the instant when the blow was given, there was “a dismal universal groan among the thousands of people that were in sight of it,” a sound such “as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.” England had embarked on a radically new course toward an unknown destination.

  A prudent person would have elected at this moment to lie low, but John Milton was anything but prudent. He had already made himself notorious for the vehemence of his attacks on the bishops and, still more, for his championing of divorce. Now he went much further. On February 13, 1649, only two weeks after the execution of Charles I, he published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. With this long polemical pamphlet, Milton, who had had no responsibility for the regicide, was in effect stepping forward and publicly signing the death warrant. Kings always pretend that they are God’s elect, he wrote, but in fact the “divine right of kings” is a lie, just as it is a lie to claim that the king’s subjects are born to obey his commands. In terms that recall John Ball and strikingly anticipate the American Declaration of Independence, Milton formulated what he took to be the essential principle: “All men naturally were bor
n free.”

  Like Ball, Milton reached his radical position by thinking hard about Adam and Eve in Paradise:

  No man who knows aught can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God Himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures born to command and not to obey.

  God’s words in Genesis to the first humans—“Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”—were for Milton a political statement, a declaration of innate, unfettered freedom. Humans lived in this freedom until “from the root of Adam’s transgression, falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury and jointly to defend themselves.” Political arrangements then are social contracts, nothing more. If the ruler violates his part of the contract, the subjects are under no further obligation to obey.

  As John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a century later, fully understood, these claims were revolutionary. For Milton they followed naturally from his reading of Genesis, a reading that led to the stance he had taken in attacking the bishops: “We have the same human privilege that all men have ever had since Adam, being born free.” In the wake of his unhappy marriage, he drew out the implications of this stance. Marriage, as the creation of Eve proved, was about the pursuit of happiness, not about unbreakable bonds. “He who marries,” he wrote in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, “intends as little to conspire his own ruin, as he that swears allegiance.” He made the political analogy explicit: “As a whole people is in proportion to an ill government, so is one man to an ill marriage.” The unfolding events of the Civil War gave the words Milton penned in 1643 a weird prophetic force: in 1649 the people of England demanded a divorce, and when the king refused to grant one, they did what needed to be done in order to recover the freedom and happiness that was their birthright from the first humans.

 

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