The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  In his conversation with the angel Raphael, Milton’s Adam recalls the moment when God brought all of the animals before him, two by two. Adam duly gave the animals names—the poem discreetly avoids indicating how long the parade must have taken—but he found himself unaccountably missing something, though he was not sure exactly what it was. He turned to the divine figure standing next to him and asked, “In solitude/What happiness”? God smiled and asked what he meant by solitude: had the human not just been introduced to every species in the entire world? Some of these species, God added, are capable of reason, and Adam could find pastime with them. Adam persisted. All of the animals, even the best of them, were far below him. The fellowship he sought must be mutual; any attempt at conversation would otherwise soon prove tedious. He needed a mate, an equal. “Among unequals,” he asked God, “what society/Can sort, what harmony or true delight?” (8:383–84).

  The divine response was a strange one. What do you think of me? God asked Adam; I am alone for all eternity and without equal. All creatures I converse with are infinitely—literally infinitely—below me, not to mention the fact that they have all been made by me. “Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed/Of happiness, or not?” (8:404–5). This is an uncomfortable question to be asked by anyone, let alone by God, and it is not surprising that the human’s answer was diplomatic to the point of incomprehensibility. But in the midst of his extravagant compliments and evasions, Adam did manage to observe that, while he would not venture to speak for God, he could attest to his own desire to have a conversation with another human and not with one of the lower animals. Moreover, he added that God, being perfect, has no need to propagate, but that he, the human, knew that he was somehow deficient.

  Why the first man had this feeling of deficiency is not entirely clear. Genesis did not provide any guidance, so that Milton had to reach back to his own experience, to whatever it was that drove him in that fateful July of 1642 to end his solitary existence and take a wife. Adam must have been painfully aware, Milton thought, of what he called his “single imperfection,” that is, the imperfection of being single.

  At this point in the conversation God said something else that Adam must have found disquieting. He told Adam that he had only been testing him, to see if he would be willing to settle for any of the beasts brought before him. There is nothing in the Bible about a test. “It is not good that the man should be alone,” God in Genesis says; “I will make him an help meet for him.” The words clearly bothered Milton, as they had bothered many generations of commentators. Could it be that God only now noticed something that He had left out? How could an omnipotent God have made a mistake? Was it possible, as Rabbi Eleazar had suggested in the Talmud, that Adam actually tried sex with all of the animals before the creation of the woman? Milton, who had learned Hebrew, had pored over the rabbinical commentaries, but he found this idea too extreme. Better to imagine, he thought, that God, wanting to observe the human’s powers of discrimination, had the animals brought before Adam to see if he would settle for one or another of them as a conversational partner. By holding out for a human interlocutor, Adam had passed the test, God declared, adding that he already knew before Adam spoke that it was not good for a human to be alone.

  It was just as well that the test was over at this point, Adam tells Raphael, for the strain of conversing with God was so great that the human—“dazed and spent” (8:455)—was ready to collapse. Collapse he did, but then, as if in a trance, he was able to see himself lying on the ground and to watch while God stooped down, opened his left side and removed a rib, with “life-blood streaming fresh.” The rabbis similarly considered the possibility that Adam could have witnessed the fashioning of the woman from his own bone, but they imagined that if he did so he would have been so disgusted by what he saw that God would have had to destroy the creature and start again. Milton, who may have had this midrashic comment in mind, insisted that for Adam the sight was only thrilling. Her looks, Adam recalls, “infused/Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before” (8:475).

  Others before Milton had at least implied the arousal of such feelings in Adam. In Hebrew, as he knew, the Genesis verses suggest them in a poem that repeats again and again the feminine pronoun zo’t: “This one,” “this one,” “this one.”

  This one at last, bone of my bones

  and flesh of my flesh,

  This one shall be called Woman,

  for from man was this one taken. (2:23, Alter trans.)

  In Hieronymus Bosch’s famously strange painting known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, Adam stares up at the newly created, nubile Eve with a look of rapt wonder. To convey such wonder, Milton could draw upon the great flowering of love poetry in the English Renaissance—“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” asked Christopher Marlowe—and he seems to have drawn as well upon his own first experience of love’s sweetness. The Adam of Paradise Lost, the man who emerged in the poet’s nightly dreams, articulates his feelings with extraordinary intensity and eloquence.

  Awakening from his vision, Adam found that in comparison with Eve everything else in the world—and he was, after all, in Paradise—suddenly looked shabby. When he went off to seek her, he was certain that if he could not find her he would forever deplore her loss. God invisibly drew her to him, and though she initially turned away, she came to accept his suit and allowed herself to be led blushing to the “nuptial bower.” There Adam experienced for the first time what he calls “the sum of earthly bliss.”

  Milton knew perfectly well that Catholic intellectuals had long speculated that in Paradise sexual intercourse was designed only to produce offspring and thus to be undertaken with a kind of cool detachment. He had read Augustine’s claim that the act, performed without arousal or excitement, would have been entirely unremarkable and public. Paradise Lost imagines a kind of eyewitness testimony that this whole theological tradition was a lie. “Whatever hypocrites austerely talk/Of purity and place and innocence” (4:744–45), Milton insisted, Adam and Eve in Paradise had spectacularly good sex, and they had it in private. Their bower was enclosed, and it was theirs alone: no other creature, “Beast, bird, insect, or worm” (4:704), dared enter. Eve decked the nuptial bed with flowers and sweet-smelling herbs, and there they enjoyed exclusive possession of each other’s body—the only form of private property, the poem remarks, in a world where everything else was held in common.

  But how could boundless love and passionate mutual possession be compatible with hierarchical order—the man on top—that Milton thought was essential to marriage? Milton knew what such an order would have to feel and sound like. Adam tells Eve that the garden is getting overgrown and that they should wake up early the next morning to prune the branches. Eve responds in the compliant, adoring fashion that the newlywed Milton must have expected from the woman he married:

  what thou bidst

  Unargu’d I obey; so God ordains,

  God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more

  Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise. (4:635–38)

  The perfect wife in all things submits cheerfully to her husband’s will.

  Eve has not, as the French fabliau proposed, been tamed or beaten into this submissive posture. In Milton’s view, and that of many of his contemporaries, in Paradise the woman’s submission would have come naturally. “Should the wife have been subject to the man in that state of innocence?” asked the seventeenth-century Puritan Alexander Ross. “Yes,” he replied, answering his own question, “but this subjection of the wife should not have been unwilling, bitter, troublesome, as it fell out afterward by sin.” In God’s design Adam and Eve were both magnificent specimens of humanity, but they were by no means equal. “For contemplation he and valor formed,/For softness she and sweet attractive grace,” Milton wrote, adding in a line that has become notorious for its complacent, self-congratulatory sexism, “He for God only, she for God in him” (4:297–99).

  The surprise is not that Milton subscribed to t
his widely shared picture, but that he recognized in it a fundamental and unresolvable problem. That problem was not, as he conceived it, the unwillingness of the woman to submit; his is not a story about Lilith. Rather, there is something disruptive in the very experience of bliss, disruptive for men at least as much as for women.

  Adam tries to explain the problem to Raphael. I understand, he tells the angel, that she is the inferior one. I know that, though we have both been made in the image of God, I resemble God more exactly than she does. I grasp that I am meant to be and to remain on top. But when I approach her loveliness, he confesses, the official account no longer seems true. “So absolute she seems/And in herself complete” (8:547–48) that, if anything, it is she who seems the superior human being.

  The angel’s response—he contracts his brow and tells Adam to have more self-esteem—is not helpful. (Such responses never are.) How could an angel understand what a human feels who is deeply in love? Raphael warns Adam not to overvalue mere sexual pleasure, a pleasure, he says scornfully, that is vouchsafed to cattle and every other beast. Adam replies with dignity that it is not only what happens in bed, though he regards that with far greater reverence than Raphael’s remark suggests, that accounts for the feelings he has tried to describe. Rather, he says, it is “those graceful acts,/Those thousand decencies” that bespeak a perfect union—“in us both one soul”—that so delight him in Eve. His love, the intimate physical and spiritual communion with his wife, cancels out the sense of superiority to which he knows that as a male he is meant to cling. Instead, he feels an overwhelming bond: “in us both one soul” (8:604).

  There is in Adam’s words an implicit refusal of the official line or at least a polite but firm suggestion that the angel and his heavenly cohort have a very imperfect grasp of human experience. Indeed, Milton’s first human allows himself to wonder, given the angel’s obtuseness, just what angelic sexual experience is like. “Love not the Heavenly spirits,” he asks Raphael, “and how their love/Express they, by looks only?” Raphael does something extraordinary, at least for an angel: he blushes. “Let it suffice thee,” he reassures Adam, “that thou know’st/Us happy, and without love no happiness” (8:620–21). Like a parent who does not know when he has said enough, he goes on to try to be explicit and technical—something about angels having no membranes or “exclusive bars.” Then, catching himself up and remarking how late in the afternoon it is, he flies back to heaven.

  In his conversation with the angel, and even in his earlier conversation with God, Adam manifests a kind of stubborn human independence that would be completely shocking if one did not remember the Milton who was expelled from Cambridge by his enraged tutor, or who refused the easy career path in the church that had been laid out before him, or who rose up against the king and his bishops, or who was determined to work out his own personal theology. The Adam who took living form in Milton’s imagination was precisely not someone who would simply accept the doctrine that had been handed down from on high. But in this case—the superiority in principle of the male over the female—Milton himself did not doubt that the conventional doctrine was true. The trouble was that this truth could not be reconciled with what it actually felt like to love someone. “Among unequals,” Adam had asked God, “what harmony or true delight?” (8:583–84).

  Eve is the answer to Adam’s longing. But, though she is fashioned from the very stuff of which he is made and is in this sense his equal, she is not entirely the same. At the moment that she awoke into consciousness, she did not gaze up at the sky, as Adam did, in search of a creator. Instead, she made her way to a nearby lake and peered at her reflection in the clear, smooth water. It was only when a mysterious voice drew her away and when Adam gently seized her by the hand that she reluctantly abandoned the pleasing image of herself.

  It is possible, of course, to interpret this moment of narcissism as a defect in Eve; centuries of misogynistic sermonizing made some such point. But Milton did not necessarily draw this conclusion. Instead, he imagined that the woman seemed less haunted than the man by a sense of innate imperfection, less needy. And it is out of this perception of difference that the poem generates its understanding of the disaster.

  We have no idea what actually happened in those weeks in the summer of 1642—more than a quarter of a century earlier—when Milton came back to London with his young bride, when they briefly lived together, and when she left him. It is very unlikely that the experience was the direct model for the Adam and Eve who emerged in the poet’s imagination. But perhaps Milton had at least come to recognize that there was a painful tension between conventional expectations and actual feelings. In Paradise Lost, the tension is transmuted into something rich and strange. The hierarchy—“He for God only, she for God in him”—begins to crumble under the weight of the husband’s overwhelming recognition of his wife’s beauty, kindness, and, above all, autonomy.

  Eve’s autonomy comes to the test on the morning after the angel’s visitation, when the pair awakens to begin the day’s tasks in the garden. The tasks are meant to be pleasant, the poem insists, but the work is real, not merely symbolic, and Eve echoes Adam’s observation that it is getting out of hand. What they accomplish in the day—“Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind” (9:210)—is undone by the night’s growth. Until “more hands/Aid us,” she says, they are only falling further behind. She proposes an experiment, a new idea that she has come up with to address the problem that they have both recognized: “Let us divide our labors,” she suggests, so that they lose less time in idle conversation.

  Adam initially gives a “mild answer.” Her proposal for the division of labor, he tells his wife, is praiseworthy—“for nothing lovelier can be found/In woman than to study household good”—but it is misguided, for this, after all, is Paradise, and work is not meant to be drudgery. For a brief moment he shifts ground: if perhaps what Eve is really saying is that she has been finding their conversation tiresome, he would be willing to let her go off briefly by herself, “For solitude sometimes is best society” (9:249). And then, not waiting for an answer and not leaving well enough alone, he makes the mistake of telling her that, with Satan possibly lurking about, she should not in any case leave his side.

  Replying with “sweet austere composure,” Eve gives voice to hurt feelings. That you should doubt my firmness, she tells Adam, “I expected not to hear.” Poor “domestic Adam,” as Milton calls him, tries to appease her. He only meant to suggest, he says, that they should face together any threat from Satan. But the damage is not so easily undone. Eve still speaks with “accent sweet,” but this time she asks bluntly: “If this be our condition,” she begins, “how are we happy”? We must have been created with sufficient moral strength—her word is “integrity”—to enable us to resist temptation, whether in company or alone. Let us not imagine, she says, that the Creator made us so “imperfect” as to require us constantly to cling to each other for defense: “Frail is our happiness, if this be so,/And Eden were no Eden, thus exposed” (9:340–41).

  We know, of course, that all of this is heading for disaster, but it is difficult to refute Eve’s argument, since we also know that Satan’s threat is not a temporary one. Were they never going to part, even for a few hours? And, after all, her confidence in her own integrity mirrors Adam’s admiring sense that she seems “in herself complete.” Unhappy and exasperated, Adam bursts out, “O woman.” As if called upon to defend the whole order of things, he declares that there is “Nothing imperfect or deficient” in anything God created. His defensiveness seems a bit strange, since this is precisely Eve’s point, until we recall that he had earlier expressed to God his own feeling that by himself he was both imperfect and deficient. But now, in acknowledging that Eve cannot in principle lack the firmness she would need to resist temptation, Adam has backed himself into a corner. “God left free the will,” he says, and in saying so, he has to permit Eve to leave his side. “Go,” he says, “for thy stay, not free, absents thee mor
e.” “With thy permission then” (9:378), replies Eve, withdrawing her hand from his and going off on her own.

  Anyone who has had an argument with a spouse—which is to say anyone who has ever lived with someone intimately for a significant length of time—will recognize how brilliantly Milton captures a peculiar seesaw of love, anger, hurt feelings, attempts at appeasement, insincere compliments, passive aggression, frustration, submission, independence, and longing. And the genius of this invention is all the more remarkable, given the fact that Milton needs to persuade the reader that this squabbling husband and wife are in Eden and still unfallen. This is what a domestic quarrel in Paradise sounds like.

  The elaborate backstory—the war in heaven and Satan’s malicious enmity toward the humans that God had created—helped to make sense of the mysterious role in Genesis of the serpent. But Milton could not accept the notion that the first humans were simply tricked by Satan into disobeying, the victims of a celestial plot. Adam and Eve must be intelligent, well-informed, forewarned. They must be free, and they must be innocent. But if they are both free and innocent, then there must be something disturbing in innocence and threatening in freedom.