X. Milton and St. Augustine
Maysterful mod and highe pryde,
I hete thee, arn heterly hated here.
PEARL, 401.
Milton’s version of the Fall story is substantially that of St. Augustine, which is that of the Church as a whole. By studying this version we shall learn what the story meant in general to Milton and to his contemporaries and shall thus be the more likely to avoid various false emphases to which modern readers are liable. The doctrines are as follows.
1. God created all things without exception good, and because they are good, ‘No Nature (i.e. no positive reality) is bad and the word Bad denotes merely privation of good,’ (De Civ. Dei, XI, 21, 22). Hence Milton’s God says of Adam, ‘I made him just and right’ and adds ‘such I created all th’ Etherial Powers’ (P.L. III, 98). Hence the angel says ‘One Almighty is from whom All things proceed . . . If not depraved from good, created all Such (i.e. good) to perfection’ (V, 469).
2. What we call bad things are good things perverted (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 11). This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God (ibid. XIV, 11), and wishes to exist ‘on its own’ (esse in semet ipso, XIV, 13). This is the sin of Pride. The first creature who ever committed it was Satan ‘the proud angel who turned from God to himself, not wishing to be a subject, but to rejoice like a tyrant in having subjects of his own’ (XIV, 11). Milton’s Satan exactly conforms to this description. His prime concern is with his own dignity; he revolted because he ‘thought himself impaired’ (P.L. V, 665). He attempts to maintain that he exists ‘on his own’ in the sense of not having been created by God, ‘self-begot, self-raised by his own quickening power’ (V, 860). He is a ‘great Sultan’ (I, 348) and ‘monarch’ (II, 467), a blend of oriental despot and Machiavellian prince (IV, 393).
3. From this doctrine of good and evil it follows (a) That good can exist without evil, as in Milton’s Heaven and Paradise, but not evil without good (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 11). (b) That good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miserable when it adheres to itself (ibid. XII, 1). These two corollaries explain all those passages in Milton, often misunderstood, where the excellence of Satan’s Nature is insisted on, in contrast to, and aggravation of, the perversion of his will. If no good (that is, no being) at all remained to be perverted, Satan would cease to exist; that is why we are told that ‘his form had yet not lost All her original brightness’ and still appeared as ‘glory obscur’d’ (P.L. I, 591).
4. Though God has made all creatures good He foreknows that some will voluntarily make themselves bad (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 11) and also foreknows the good use which He will then make of their badness (ibid.). For as He shows His benevolence in creating good Natures, He shows His justice in exploiting evil wills. (Sicut naturarum bonarum optimus creator, ita voluntatum malarum justissimus ordinator, XI, 17.) All this is repeatedly shown at work in the poem. God sees Satan coming to pervert man; ‘and shall pervert’, He observes (III, 92). He knows that Sin and Death ‘impute folly’ to Him for allowing them so easily to enter the universe, but Sin and Death do not know that God ‘called and drew them thither, His hell-hounds to lick up the draff and filth’ (X, 620 et seq.). Sin, in pitiable ignorance, had mistaken this Divine ‘calling’ for ‘sympathie or som connatural force’ between herself and Satan (X, 246). The same doctrine is enforced in Book I when Satan lifts his head from the burning lake by ‘high permission of all-ruling Heaven’ (I, 212). As the angels point out, whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention (VII, 613). At the end of the poem Adam is astonished at the power ‘that all this good of evil shall produce’ (XII, 470). This is the exact reverse of the programme Satan had envisaged in Book I, when he hoped, if God attempted any good through him, to ‘pervert that end’ (164); instead he is allowed to do all the evil he wants and finds that he has produced good. Those who will not be God’s sons become His tools.
5. If there had been no Fall, the human race after multiplying to its full numbers would have been promoted to angelic status (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 10). Milton agrees. God says men are to inhabit earth, not Heaven, ’till by degrees of merit rais’d They open to themselves at length the way’ (P.L. VII, 157). The angel hints to Adam that ‘time may come’ when terrestrial bodies will ‘turn all to spirit’ and ‘wing’d ascend’ (V, 493 et seq.).
6. Satan attacked Eve rather than Adam because he knew she was less intelligent and more credulous (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 11). So Milton’s Satan is pleased to find ‘the woman, opportune to all attempts’ separated from the man ‘whose higher intellectual more he shuns’ (P.L. IX, 483).
7. Adam was not deceived. He did not believe what his wife said to him to be true, but yielded because of the social bond (socialis necessitudo) between them (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 11). Milton, with a very slightly increased emphasis on the erotic, at the expense of the affectional, element in Adam’s motive, almost paraphrases this—‘Against his better knowledge, not deceav’d But fondly overcome with Femal charm’ (P.L. IX, 998). But we must not exaggerate the difference. Augustine’s ab unico noluit consortio dirimi is closely echoed in the Miltonic Adam’s ‘How can I live without thee, how forgoe Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d’ (ibid. 908). The sudden transition whereby the Garden of Eden, never hitherto seen in the poem save as our heart’s desire, becomes ‘these wilde Woods forlorn’ is perhaps the finest expression of apprehended parting in any poem.
8. The Fall consisted in Disobedience. All idea of a magic apple has fallen out of sight. The apple was ‘not bad nor harmful except in so far as it was forbidden’ and the only point of forbidding it was to instil obedience, ‘which virtue in a rational creature (the emphasis is on creature; that which though rational, is merely a creature, not self-existent being) is, as it were, the mother and guardian of all virtues’ (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 12). This is exactly the Miltonic view. The idea that the apple has any intrinsic importance is put into the mouths of bad characters. In Eve’s dream it is a ‘fruit divine’, ‘fit for Gods’ and ‘able to make gods of Men’ (V, 67 et seq.). Satan assumes that knowledge is magically contained in the apple and will pass to the eater whether those who have forbidden the eating wish or no (IX, 721 et seq.). Good characters speak quite differently. For them the apple is ‘sole pledge of his obedience’ (III, 95), the ‘sign of our obedience’ (IV, 428), the subject of a single and just command (V, 551), ‘My sole command’ (viii, 329). The view that if the apple has no intrinsic magic then the breach of the prohibition becomes a small matter—in other words that the Miltonic God is making a great pother about nothing—is expressed only by Satan. ‘Him by fraud I have seduc’d From his Creator, and the more to increase Your wonder, with an Apple; he thereat Offended, worth your laughter, hath giv’n up Both his beloved Man and all his World’ (x, 485). St. Augustine considers the disobedience heinous precisely because obedience was so easy (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 12).
9. But while the Fall consisted in Disobedience it resulted, like Satan’s, from Pride (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 13). Hence Satan approaches Eve through her Pride: first by flattery of her beauty (P.L. IX, 532–48) which ‘should be seen . . . ador’d and served by Angels’ and secondly (this is more important) by urging her selfhood to direct revolt against the fact of being subject to God at all. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘was this forbid? Why but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers?’ (IX, 703). This is the direct appeal to the finite creature’s desire to be ‘on its own’, esse in semet ipso. At the moment of eating ‘nor was god-head from her thought’ (IX, 790).
10. Since the Fall consisted in man’s Disobedience to his superior, it was punished by man’s loss of Authority over his inferiors; that is, chiefly, over his passions and his physical organism (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 15). Man has called for anarchy: God lets him have it. Thus in Milton God says that man’s powers are ‘lapsed’, ‘forfeit’, and ‘enthralled’ (P.L. III, 176). In Book IX we are told that after the Fall understanding ceased to rule and the will did not listen to understanding, both being subjected to usurping appetite (IX, 1127 et seq.). When Reason is disobeyed ‘upstart Passions catch the government’ (XII, 88).
11. This Disobedience of man’s organism to man is specially evident in sexuality as sexuality now is but would not have been but for the Fall (XIV, 16–19). What St. Augustine means here is, in itself, so clear and yet so open to misunderstanding if not given in full, that we must not pass it over. He means that the sexual organs are not under direct control from the will at all. You can clench your fist without being angry and you can be angry without clenching your fist; the modification of the hand preparatory to fighting is controlled directly by the will and only indirectly, when at all, by the Passions. But the corresponding modification of the sexual organs can neither be produced nor dismissed by mere volition. This is why Milton places a scene of sexual indulgence immediately after the Fall (IX, 1017–45). He doubtless intended a contrast between this and the pictures of unfallen sexual activity in IV and VII (500–20). But he has made the unfallen already so voluptuous and kept the fallen still so poetical that the contrast is not so sharp as it ought to have been.
It is my hope that this short analysis will prevent the reader from ever raising certain questions which have, in my opinion, led critics into blind alleys. We need not ask ‘What is the Apple?’ It is an apple. It is not an allegory. It is an apple, just as Desdemona’s handkerchief is a handkerchief. Everything hangs on it, but in itself it is of no importance. We can also dismiss that question which has so much agitated some great critics. ‘What is the Fall?’ The Fall is simply and solely Disobedience—doing what you have been told not to do: and it results from Pride—from being too big for your boots, forgetting your place, thinking that you are God. This is what St. Augustine thinks and what (to the best of my knowledge) the Church has always taught; this Milton states in the very first line of the first Book, this all his characters reiterate and vary from every possible point of view throughout the poem as if it were the subject of a fugue. Eve’s arguments in favour of eating the Apple are, in themselves, reasonable enough; the answer to them consists simply in the reminder ‘You mustn’t. You were told not to.’ ‘The great moral which reigns in Milton,’ said Addison, ‘is the most universal and most useful that can be imagined, that Obedience to the will of God makes men happy and that Disobedience makes them miserable.’ Dr. Tillyard amazes me by calling this a ‘rather vague explanation’ (Milton, p. 258). Dull, if you will, or platitudinous, or harsh, or jejune: but how vague? Has it not rather the desolating clarity and concreteness of certain classic utterances we remember from the morning of our own lives; ‘Bend over’—‘Go to bed’—‘Write out I must do as I am told a hundred times’—‘Do not speak with your mouth full.’ How are we to account for the fact that great modern scholars have missed what is so dazzlingly simple? I think we must suppose that the real nature of the Fall and the real moral of the poem involve an idea so uninteresting or so intensely disagreeable to them that they have been under a sort of psychological necessity of passing it over and hushing it up. Milton, they feel, must have meant something more than that! And here once again, the doctrine of the unchanging human heart comes into play. If there is no God, then Milton’s poem, as interpreted by Addison, has no obvious relation to real life. It is therefore necessary to sweep away the main thing Milton was writing about as a mere historical accident and to fix on quite marginal or subsidiary aspects of his work as the real core. For there can be no serious doubt that Milton meant just what Addison said: neither more, nor less, nor other than that. If you can’t be interested in that, you can’t be interested in Paradise Lost.
And how are we to be interested in that? In two ways, I think. That decreasing number of readers to whom poetry is a passion without afterthought, must just accept Milton’s doctrine of obedience as they accept the inexplicable prohibitions in Lohengrin, Cinderella, or Cupid and Psyche. It is, after all, the commonest of themes; even Peter Rabbit came to grief because he would go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. The more common sort of readers must go a longer way round. They must try by an effort of historical imagination to evoke that whole hierarchical conception of the universe to which Milton’s poem belongs, and to exercise themselves in feeling as if they believed it; they must give up the ‘unchanging human heart’ and try instead to live through some of its real changes. To this idea of Hierarchy which deserves a book, I will now devote a chapter.