The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  181 “when the minds are fitly disposed”: Two letters, both in Greek, survive from Diodati to Milton, and both dwell on conversation. “So much do I desire your company,” Diodati writes in one of them, “that in my longing I dream of and all but prophecy fair weather and calm, and everything golden for tomorrow, so that we may enjoy our fill of philosophical and learned conversation.” “I have no complaint with my present way of life with this one exception,” he writes in the other surviving letter, “that I lack some noble soul skilled in conversation” (The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, p. 767).

  182 “to grind in the mill”: Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Divorce Tracts of John Milton, p.118.

  182 “two carcasses”: Ibid., p. 77. On the hate that Milton experienced in marriage, instead of conversation, see, p. 49; cf. p. 115.

  183 ridicule and outrage: Some of the harshest attacks came from quarters where Milton might have expected to find allies, among the Presbyterians and Independent preachers who were themselves sworn enemies of the bishops. In a sermon, one such preacher, Herbert Palmer, warned members of Parliament that “a wicked book is abroad and uncensored, though deserving to be burnt.” Another attacked Milton as the author of “a tractate of divorce in which the bonds are let loose to inordinate lust” (The Divorce Tracts of John Milton, pp. 52, 78). See Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, pp. 165–67. So much for his fantasy (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, p. 42) of being celebrated as one of the public benefactors of humankind.

  183 “blasphemy against Christ himself”: An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in Milton, The Divorce Tracts of John Milton, p. 430.

  183 “except she can speak Hebrew”: Milton should have taken the time, his critics observed, to acquaint himself in advance with the woman he decided to marry. If he is now unhappy with her conversational abilities, he can go out and find a more suitable person to talk to, even another woman, “provided he meddles not with her body” (434). But he cannot dissolve his marriage and take another wife, for the social consequences of this behavior, writ large, would be disastrous: “Who sees not, how many thousands of lustful and libidinous men would be parting from their wives every week and marrying others: and upon this, who should keep the children of these divorces which sometimes they would leave in their wives’ bellies?” (quoted in Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, p. 166). Think about those abandoned wives and infants, opponents of divorce warned, forced to turn to the parish for alms.

  184 “comfort in the married state”: Tetrachordon, in The Divorce Tracks of John Milton, p. 255.

  184 “brazen ass”: All terms of abuse in the Colesterion.

  184 a liberator who is spurned: “I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs,” he wrote in an unpublished sonnet. And, of course, it was not just “the age” in general that was weighted down, like an animal prevented from straying, by its clogs; it was Milton himself who could not recover his freedom. The owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs had trapped him.

  185 “a sort of rainbow”: Letter to Leonard Philaris, dated September 28, 1654, quoted in Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, p. 181.

  185 against censorship: See The Reason of Church Government in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol.1, p. 784: “If to bring a numb and chill stupidity of soul, an unactive blindness of mind, upon the people by their leaden doctrine, or no doctrine at all … be to keep away schism, they [the clerical censors] keep schism away indeed… . With as good a plea might the dead-palsy boast to a man, ’tis I that free you from stitches and pains.” “The censure of the church,” Milton concluded, should “be quite divested and disintail’d of all jurisdiction whatsoever.”

  185 “as kill a good book”: Areopagitica, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, p. 930.

  185 laws that he was convinced were unjust: It was not only a matter of his public stance: Milton was determined not to bury his hopes for personal happiness. He made plans to move to a new, much larger house—where he would bring his father, now in his early eighties—and to take on new students. According to his nephew, he began to spend evenings in the company of a married woman of “great wit and ingenuity,” Lady Margaret Lee, to whom he wrote a sonnet of praise. The point is not that Milton had an adulterous affair; given his moral high-mindedness, that seems highly unlikely. Rather, he seems to have set out to prove to himself that he could find with the right woman the “delectableness of converse” that his polemical enemies said could only be found in the company of another man. Moreover, his nephew wrote, Milton actually proposed marriage at this time to “a very handsome and witty gentlewoman” who was, however, “averse” to his proposal. Small wonder that she was averse: Milton may have told himself (and her) that he was free simply to declare himself to be divorced, but the rest of the world would have regarded his remarriage as bigamy.

  186 the decisive battle of the Civil War: Rage that must have been building up during the many months of attack and counterattack boiled over. Royalist troops who blundered into the hands of the victors were slaughtered. The captured wives and mistresses bought their freedom by parting with their money and jewels—the pillage was reckoned to equal £100,000 in gold—but more than a hundred poor whores and serving-women in the king’s camp were hacked to death. (Cf. C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s War: 1641–1647, pp. 427–28.)

  187 He took up his repentant bride: His nephew, who was fifteen years old at the time, provides an account that he acknowledges is only conjecture: “He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to Reconciliation than to perseverance in Anger and Revenge; and partly the strong intercession of Friends on both sides, soon brought him to an Act of Oblivion, and a firm League of Peace for the future” (Edward Phillips, in Hughes, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, p. 1032).

  187 her interfering mother: Milton’s early anonymous biographer reports that Mary later accused her mother of inciting her to her “forwardness” (William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2: 864).

  188 “till death us depart”: This is the phrase used in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. It was revised in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer to “till death us do part.” See Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662.

  188 “about 3 days after”: Parker, 2: 1009. Jotting down the precise date and time of a birth was conventional—probably a holdover, even in those who may not have believed in astrology, of the notations needed to make the correct divinations—but would not ordinary human ties have led a grieving husband to record the actual date when his wife passed away? One of Milton’s most learned and admiring modern biographers wished to believe that Milton had, in the moment that Mary knelt down before him, realized that he still loved her (Parker, Milton: A Biography, 1: 299). It seems to me highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Perhaps in that case Milton’s vagueness was not a sign of estrangement. Perhaps precision simply did not seem important either for the dead, whose earthly story was over, or for the living, who must now move on. Shortly after Mary’s death followed the death of their fifteen-month-old son John, and in his Bible entry Milton was once again vague on the details: “And my son about six weeks after his mother” (Parker, 2: 1014).

  Chapter 10: The Politics of Paradise

  189 his incendiary little rhyme: “… servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.” Ball’s reputed words were noted by his aristocratic enemy, Thomas Walsingham. Cf. Albert Friedman, “ ‘When Adam Delved …’: Contexts, of an Historic Proverb,” in Benson, The Learned and the Lewd, pp. 213–30. Also Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. As it circulated more widel
y, Ball’s reminder of the nature of the first humans was not always and necessarily a call to revolt; it could simply be a call to humility. Owst quotes the Dominican Bromyard:

  All are descended from the same first parents, and all come of the same mud. For, if God had fashioned nobles from gold, and the ignoble from mud, then the former would have cause for pride… . True glory does not depend upon the origin or beginning from which anything proceeds, but upon its own condition. (quoted in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, p. 292)

  191 “We must bring these histories home”: Robert Everard, The Creation and Fall of Adam Reviewed. I am grateful to Dr. Stephen Hequembourg for this and the reference to George Fox.

  191 the founder of the Quakers: The Journal of George Fox.

  191 “A little Adam in a sphere/Of Joys”: Thomas Traherne, “Innocence,” in Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgiving, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 2: 18. Cf. Centuries 3:1: “Adam in Paradice had not more sweet and Curious Apprehensions of the World, then I when I was a child” (1: 110).

  193 “being born free”: Of Prelatical Episcopacy, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 1: 625.

  195 Private property is the fatal fruit: “The Apple that the first man eats, is not a single fruit called an Apple, or such like fruit; but it is the objects of the Creation” (Gerrard Winstanley, New Law of Righteousness, in The Works of Gerrard Winstanley).

  195 “And this is Adam”: Winstanley, Fire in the Bush, in Works, p. 220. For the wide range of visions of Adam in this period, see Julia Ipgrave, Adam in Seventeenth Century Political Writing in England and New England, and Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England.

  195 “the whole earth shall be a common treasury”: Winstanley, New Law of Righteousness, in Works, p. 184. This “communist” interpretation of Eden, with its roots in John Ball’s radicalism, was vigorously disputed in seventeenth-century England by a conservative interpretation that saw in Adam the first patriarch, landowner, and ruler. See Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha” and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Garland, 1984): “This lordship which Adam by creation had over the whole world, and by right descending from him, the Patriarchs did enjoy, was as large and ample as the absolutest dominion of any monarch which hath been since the creation” (p. 58).

  196 “the floating vessel of our faith”: The Reason of Church Government in Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, p. 662.

  199 But these hideous deaths were not enough: The object of greatest loathing, Oliver Cromwell, had signed the death warrant and had served as the principal pillar of the Commonwealth that followed, but his death in 1658 put certain limits on the retribution the Royalists could take. Nonetheless, they did what they could: exhuming Cromwell’s corpse from its grave in Westminster Abbey, where it had been moldering for more than two years, they dragged it face-down on a sled through the streets of London, along with the decaying corpses of John Bradshaw, who had served as president of the court that tried the king, and Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law and a general in the Parliamentary army. On the anniversary of the king’s execution, the three dead men were hauled up onto a scaffold and hanged by the neck. At nightfall the remains—now dead twice over—were beheaded and thrown into an unmarked pit. Their heads were stuck on spikes in Westminster Hall, where the king had been tried, and remained there for years as a grisly warning.

  199 influential friends: The principal friend is thought to be Milton’s former assistant, the poet Andrew Marvell, who was serving in Parliament as the member from Hull. The poet and playwright William Davenant also claimed a hand in protecting Milton. Years before, when the Royalist Davenant was accused of treason and imprisoned in the Tower, Milton, then in power, intervened and helped save Davenant’s life.

  199 “perpetual terror of being assassinated”: Reported by Jonathan Richardson, in Parker, Milton: A Biography, 1: 577.

  Chapter 11: Becoming Real

  208 Satan leading a third of the angels: Among the many accounts of the development of this backstory, see Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and, more recently, Dallas G. Denery II, The Devil Wins.

  213 whatever “redounded”: “Redounds” here refers to food that cannot be assimilated but must pass through the system and be excreted. Apart from his insistence on how sweet the Garden smelled, Milton did not directly speculate on this result, but Luther did: “non fuit foetor in excrementis,” he wrote; that is, excrement in Eden did not stink (cited in Kurt Flasch, Eva e Adamo: Metamorfosi di un mito, p. 111, n. 27). Luther, who spoke of “my beloved Genesis,” worked on commentaries and interpretations of it for much of his life. See Theo M. M. A. C. Bell, “Humanity Is a Microcosm: Adam and Eve in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (1535–45),” in Out of Paradise: Eve and Adam and Their Interpreters, ed. Bob Becking and Susanne Hennecke (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).

  215 Adam actually tried sex with all of the animals: Yebamoth 63a. Part of the Mishnah (compiled in the first and second centuries ce), Yebamoth, a tractate of family law, takes off from a commentary on Deuteronomy 23:5 and 7–9.

  216 “This one”: Genesis 2:23, from The Five Books of Moses, trans. Robert Alter. The translation captures, better than the King James, the emphasis on “this one.”

  218 “but this subjection of the wife”: Alexander Ross, An Exposition on the Fourteen First Chapters of Genesis, by Way of Question and Answer, p. 26.

  220 peered at her reflection:

  As I bent down to look, just opposite,

  A shape within the wat’ry gleam appeared

  Bending to look on me, I started back,

  It started back, but pleased I soon returned,

  Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks

  Of sympathy and love. (4:460–65)

  226 Had Milton’s own heart actually relented: There is at least one sign—though still an ambiguous one—that Milton may have worked through the bitterness and reached a renewed and deeper emotional bond. Perhaps the most moving lyric he ever wrote was a sonnet about a dream in which he thought he saw his dead wife—“his late espousèd saint”—returned to him from the grave (John Milton, “Sonnet XXIII,” in Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, p. 170):

  And such, as yet once more I trust to have

  Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,

  Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:

  Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,

  Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined

  So clear, as in no face with more delight.

  But O as to embrace me she inclined,

  I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

  It was long assumed that the “late espousèd saint” was the poet’s second wife Katherine, but in the mid-twentieth century, Milton’s great biographer, William Riley Parker, argued that the wife in question must have been Mary. Milton was already blind when he married Katherine, Parker noted, and he could therefore not have hoped “once more” to have full sight of her in heaven. It was Mary on whose face he had once looked with so much delight. This argument is a slender reed on which to construct a confident account of renewed love.

  Chapter 12: Men Before Adam

  232 without any other people around: In his Proeme to A Theological System (London, 1655), La Peyrère rehearses the “natural suspition” that the world did not begin with Adam. This suspicion springs from the more ancient accounts of other peoples. Also, he says, it sprung up in him already as a child, “when I heard or read the History of Genesis Where Cain goes forth, where he kills his brother when they were in the field; doing it warily, like a thief, least it should be discovered by any: Where he flies where he fears punishment for the death of his Brother: Lastly, where he marries a wife far from his Ancestors, and builds a City.”

  233 circle of daring philosophers: The group inc
luded such intellectual giants as Blaise Pascal, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes.

  233 in his diary entry: “Ellos andan todos desnudos como su madre los parió; y también las mugeres.” The “Diario” of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, pp. 64–65.

  233 had degenerated into their bestial state: Cf. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952).

  235 “But I am much more convinced”: Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 78–79.

  235 the four great rivers that surged up: Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise, pp. 156–57.

  235 Columbus’s conviction: “Not the Elysian Fields, like the pagans,” he wrote, “but the earthy Paradise, as Catholic, was located there” (no los Campos Elíseos, como los gentiles, sino, como católico, el paraiso terrenal). Las Casas, Historia de las Indias II: 50, in Santa Arias, “Bartolomé de las Casas’s Sacred Place of History,” in Arias et al., Mapping Colonial Spanish America, p. 127.

  236 “without malice or guile”: Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, p. 9. “I have time and again met Spanish laymen who have been so struck by the natural goodness that shines through these people that they frequently can be heard to exclaim: ‘These would be the most blessed people on earth if only they were given the chance to convert to Christianity’ ” (pp. 10–11).

  236 close to the truth: Cf. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, Essays in Population History.