SOURCE: Turner, James Grantham. “Love Made in the First Age: Edenic Sexuality in Paradise Lost and Its Analogues.” In One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton, pp. 230-309. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1987.

[In this excerpt, Turner examines Milton's depiction of sexuality before the Fall, observing that Milton appears to envision an innocent eroticism and equal partnership not entirely in keeping with the later admonitions of Raphael and Christ.]

2. PASSION AND SUBORDINATION

Milton's vision of pre-lapsarian sexuality, like the landscape of Paradise where it unfolds, is distinguished from all others by its capacity for ‘growth and compleating’. Our sense of Milton's erotic universe grows throughout the central books of Paradise Lost, not only by accumulation of detail, but by an increasing awareness of complexity; each successive episode involves confrontation with a new form of erotic sensibility (Satan, Raphael) or a new aspect of the self revealed by passion, and the horizons of innocence expand to include the problematic. The discovery of redeemed sensuousness is part of a taxing enquiry into the ‘prime institution’ of Paradisal marriage, into the nature of human sexuality and its relation to the divine—the most important task for fallen humanity, condemned to sift like Psyche through the mingled grains of good and evil.¹ But the same struggle for truth—to foster rather than to recover their righteous pleasures—confronts the first couple. Understanding their sexual love, and discovering how to preserve it in a Paradise that must be shared with Satan, is therefore a central action of the poem, for the characters as much as for the readers.

The effect of continual discovery is generated by the narrative design itself, which builds up a texture of overlapping viewpoints, and thus subjects the passion of Adam and Eve to a refined scrutiny that anticipates the epistolary novel. Even the first description of the couple, a dramatic and didactic tableau vivant of Genesis 1 and 2, is framed by the presence of Satan, fluctuating between love, desire, and envy, straining to discover details that he can put to evil use: the obvious ideological function of lines such as ‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’ and ‘Not equal, as their sex not equal seemd’ is undermined when we reflect that the only observer, the only subject to whom these qualities ‘seemed’ a product of ‘their sex’, is Satan himself. Indeed, the subjective impression of the couple receives an emphasis unusual even in Milton—‘seemed’ is repeated three times in the sentence introducing them, each time as a main verb—and the Satanic association of the word is increased by the remark that, since the fall, true sexual purity has been replaced by ‘mere shows of seeming pure’ (IV. 290-9, 316). The possibility of competing models of sexual identity, stirring even within this ostensibly monolithic description, is increased shortly afterwards when Eve recounts the first crisis of her life, the scene by the lake; she is forced to decide between two ‘images’ of erotic love, one ‘watery’ and narcissistic, the other substantial and reciprocal. As we have seen, the sexual bond emerges from this episode as a profounder and more complex phenomenon than was suggested in the original separation and limitation of functions (‘For contemplation hee and valour formd, / For softness shee and sweet attractive grace’): both male and female are led by intense desire, both feel incomplete without a partner, and both devote their contemplative and active powers to realizing this drive. This sense of the reciprocity of the lovers and the interpenetration of intelligence, energy, and eroticism, absent from any other version of the Eden-myth, is confirmed in the dream-episode—where the problem is solved with exemplary lucidity and deepening affection—and in the successive events of Raphael's visit, including Adam's own account of his encounter with Eve and the ‘commotion strange’ of sexual passion.

[II]

The long scene with Raphael (Books V-VIII) serves not only to feed audience and characters with necessary information, but to provide a social encounter in which the paradoxical attractiveness and innocence of unfallen sexuality can be tested, and its problems illuminated both in practice and in conversation. Milton is quite aware that the presence of an observer could impose a strain on his sexual idyll, and he is not afraid to evoke these tensions in order to shape them to his poetic purpose. The first evening's ‘dalliance’ is defined by contrast with the response of Satan, who grows more verminous the closer he edges to Eve; now she is approached by an unfallen archangel. In both cases the supernatural visitor is considered as an erotic subject, capable of a reaction that Milton characterizes as specifically male. (Female sensuousness is not ignored by Milton, as we have seen, but he renders it more indirectly.) The male reader's self-scrutiny, sometimes explicitly directed by the author, forms a counterpoint to the unfolding narrative of erotic discovery. Raphael's visit thus continues the complicated drama of Book IV, in which the triangular situation of Adam, Eve, and the newcomer is itself observed by the epic audience, which must include not only the solitary youth but also, given Milton's insistence on godly marriage as the highest form of human life, the couple reading together.

The confrontation of woman and angel involved a special hermeneutic problem—one that was all the deeper because it concerned primeval sexuality and the origin of evil. In some Hebrew scriptures, we have seen in chapter 1, the original fall occurs when the angels (‘Sons of God’) make love to the daughters of men and beget giants on them; a fragment of this story survives in Genesis 6:1-2, where it seems to provide the motive for exterminating the entire human race apart from Noah's family. The ingenuity of commentators was greatly taxed by this stupendous episode; most of them (though Donne is an exception) followed Augustine in wrongly interpreting ‘Sons of God’ as the elect, the godly part of the human race—though like Augustine they also asserted that devils could and often did copulate with wicked women.² But St. Paul, in a passage that greatly influenced Milton's depiction of Eve, might suggest that angels are meant: ‘if a woman have long hair’, he explains in 1 Corinthians 11:15, ‘it is a glory to her, for her hair is given her for a covering,’ and she needs to be covered—with a veil or similar sign of subjection if her own hair is cut—‘because of the angels’.

Milton was quite uncertain about the meaning of this passage in Genesis 6, and the efforts of modern scholars to reduce him to orthodoxy are unsatisfactory. In Paradise Lost XI. 580-636 the seduction of the Sons of God, in their standard Augustinian meaning, provides an important episode in which Michael teaches Adam the need for sexual temperance. But in De Doctrina Milton quotes Genesis 6:1 approvingly, as an example of sound moral judgement in love. In the Limbo of Paradise Lost Book III the offspring of those ‘ill-joyn'd Sons and Daughters’ appear closely associated with births ‘abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixt’ and with ‘middle Spirits … Betwixt th'Angelical and Human Kind’, though the connection may be intended as a delusion. But in Paradise Regain'd Milton assumes quite unequivocally that the unholy couplings of Genesis 6 were in fact done by the supernatural Belial and his ‘lusty crew’, who then falsely named the perpetrators ‘Sons of God’; since the character of evil, in Milton's universe, is a perversion of the good, then a purer version of such propensities must exist in all angels. Milton tells us explicitly that angels enjoy diffuse sexual intercourse among themselves, and that they can take on either sex and ‘limb themselves’ for their encounters with other beings. ‘Sons of God’ is thus a term which could refer to upright men, or to fallen angels, or to the highest spiritual beings—indeed, one of Satan's chief purposes in Paradise Regain'd is to find out which of these meanings applies to Christ, for ‘Sons of God both Angels are and Men’, and the phrase ‘bears no single sence’.³

There are hints of this multiple signification at several points in Paradise Lost. The first description of the happy pair, in which Eve's ‘wanton’ hair, arranged ‘as a vail down to the slender waist … implied subjection,’ concludes by linking their unveiled nakedness with the angels: ‘So pass'd they naked on, nor shund the sight / Of God or Angel, for they thought no ill’ (IV. 319-20). And when Raphael first meets Eve in all her splendour, lovelier than Venus displaying herself to Paris, a similar point is made: ‘no vail / Shee needed, Vertue-proof’ (V. 383-4). The primary stress, of course, is on the inner purity of the naked Eve (Adam's nudity passes without comment in the second example), but both descriptions evoke the possibility of a ‘thought infirm’ or susceptible response. Milton is apparently fascinated by the paradox of the veil that hides and reveals at once, simultaneously enhancing innocence and desirability. He found this piquant effect in a favourite episode of The Faerie Queene, where it is used by the wicked nymphs to inflame Sir Guyon; here it is reappropriated for innocence.⁴ Just as Eve here is decked and undecked (‘Undeckt, save with her self’), so she is somehow veiled and not veiled—veiled for the fallen but virtuous Sons of God who read the poem and appreciate the metaphorical allusion to what St. Paul would have to make literal, but unveiled for the angels who meet her in the flesh.

We are likely to wonder, as Adam does, what Raphael feels during this visit. The parallel with Venus on Mount Ida announces this as another scene of judgement, but the identity of the judge remains elusive. Is it the reader, the voyeur of three naked beings, or Adam, whose choice of Eve will soon set off an epic catastrophe worse than the Trojan war, or is it the newly-arrived Raphael himself? Even if we are unaware of the sexual capacity of the ‘Sons of God’, Milton has several times reminded us of the erotic associations of this archangel. Raphael is a seraph, whose natures were particularly suited to Love; he is selected for the visit because of his special interest in marital success (his later help to Tobit, already evoked when Satan first meets the scents of Paradise, is emphasized again at V. 221-3); and his arrival in Eden is heralded by an astonishing burst of sensuous imagery, a ‘pouring forth’ of ‘enormous bliss’ in the landscape (V. 296-7). He arrives, on the stroke of noon, just as ‘the mounted Sun / Shot down direct his fervid Raies to warm / Earths inmost womb’ (V. 300-2). Raphael's entrance is thus charged with sexual energy, and he leaves, with a noble exhortation to happiness and love, after a glowing response to Adam's frank curiosity about angelic Eros. And we have seen that at the midpoint of the conversation, when Eve leaves to go gardening, ‘all Eyes’—which must include Raphael's—are struck with ‘Darts of desire … to wish her still in sight’.

The characters in this naked déjeuner sur l'herbe are not waxwork figures of innocence, then, but powerful breathing beings who may inspire sensuous empathy and curiosity, as well as shame and tension at the contrast between their state and our own. Though the female reader is not necessarily excluded from this scene, which presents Eve as a creative and self-motivated artist as well as a passive object of desire—imaginative readers can in any case participate in the experience of the opposite gender vicariously, if not uncritically—Milton is here absorbed by an erotic response normally associated with the male: the frenzy caused by the submission of a beautiful woman. At one point this becomes quite explicit. The occasion is another of Milton's revisions of Spenser's Bower of Bliss, in which a moment of erotic sorcery is transplanted to Paradise with its sensuous root-structure intact. Whereas in Spenser it was the bathing nymphs who blush and display their nakedness, and ‘Excesse’ who offers the gentlemen an enchanted cup, now

                                                                                                                        at Table Eve
Ministered naked, and their flowing cups
With pleasant liquors crown'd: O innocence
Deserving Paradise! if ever, then,
Then had the Sons of God excuse t'have been
Enamour'd at the sight; but in those hearts
Love unlibidinous reign'd, nor jealousie
Was understood, the injurd Lovers Hell.

(V. 443-50)

The emotional vehemence of this extraordinary passage does not exempt us from interpretative struggle. We are not allowed to fall back on the simple opposition of heavenly love to fallen lust, nor to rely on simple definitions of ‘enamour'd’ and ‘Sons of God’. At first it seems that Love-unlibidinous and being-enamoured are mutually exclusive and morally polarized terms. We then recall, however, that Adam only a few hours earlier had ‘hung over [Eve] enamour'd’ (V. 13): it is possible of course that we assent to the murmuring voice that calls Adam foppish, uxorious, and already fallen, thus accusing either God or Milton of incompetence; but as regenerate readers we should have rescued the word from these associations and restored it to the state of innocence. (Augustine, we saw in chapter 2, believed that even words as tainted as libido and concupiscentia could be redeemed.) Since Adam can be innocent, ‘unlibidinous’, and ‘enamour'd’ at the same time, we are forced to replace our static dichotomy with a more complex dialectic.

The allusion to the ‘Sons of God’ is similarly multivalent and compressed. In the immediate context the phrase apparently refers to angelic as well as human susceptibility. The plural ‘those hearts’ shows that Milton is thinking of feelings shared by more than one admirer, and ‘jealousie’ is therefore applied first to both witnesses: Milton evokes, even as he denies it, a scenario like that of Amphitryon. We must assume in Raphael a loving but innocent desire for Eve, compared explicitly to the imprudent angels of Genesis 6, and implicitly to the jealousy and ‘fierce desire’ of Satan, the demonic copulator and Courtly Amorist—the sarcastic allusion to ‘the injured Lover's Hell’ encompasses both these roles. In the larger context, which includes the sober lesson of Book XI, ‘Sons of God’ refers to the upright man in a fallen world, the tribe of the author himself and the masculine part of his fit audience. In this quasi-confessional moment, Milton seems to be saying that Eve's ‘sweet attractive grace’ could have filled the highest beings, as well as the ordinary homme moyen sensuel, with a rush of amorous feeling, and that at the high points of his description such lunacy might be excused.⁵

In powerful outbursts of yearning such as this, Milton suffuses the Genesis-story with more personal, Proustian dreams of vanished happiness and an ideal mistress—a process already begun in the prose, but now given fuller voice. His tributes to an imagined Eve derive their special urgency from emotive repetition: her ‘Subjection’ (a fetish in the divorce tracts as well as here) is ‘by her yielded, by him best receivd, / Yielded with coy submission …’; her food (increasingly important to Milton himself in successive marriages) is designed to bring ‘Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change’. The climactic moment when Eve serves as cupbearer or Ganymede, and the Sons of God are excused their passion, again produces a critically placed repetition, overflowing the line-ending and drowning out the conditional phrase: ‘if ever, then, / Then …’ At these peaks of excitement we see a naîve, transparent Milton, not the manipulator of fallen responses but the agent of unexamined passions. His presentation of Eve, a kind of surrogate courtship, is thus as personal as the invocations that tell of his blindness and misfortune, or the sonnet on his dead wife, or the private speculation that the desire of the Sons of God might have been entirely good.⁶ As in his reckless divorce tracts, Milton bares his own emotion in order to revitalize the Paradise myth for the Sons of God among his own people. Here he seems to speak from a position of uneasy intimacy, both privileged and abashed; he is not quite a stranger in Paradise, and not quite a member of the innocent party, but he offers himself as the leader of the intruding group and the orchestrator of their tensions.

[III]

The latent confessional impulse in Milton's relation of Edenic sexuality becomes explicit in Adam's conversation with Raphael (VIII. 251-630). Adam follows Eve's lead in reconstructing the pleasures and discoveries of his first waking hours: she first told of the triumph of love over heistancy in their first meeting, crowned with immediate consummation; now Adam retells the same moment in similar terms, first diffident, then rising to a rapturous display of nuptial imagery. He then proceeds, with astonishing boldness, to tell Raphael how it feels to make love to Eve:

                                                                                                                        [I] must confess to find
In all things else delight indeed, but such
As us'd or not, works in the mind no change,
Nor vehement desire, these delicacies
I mean of Taste, Sight, Smell, Herbs, Fruits, and Flowrs,
Walks, and the melodie of Birds; but here
Farr otherwise, transported I behold,
Transported touch. Here passion first I felt,
Commotion strange.

(VIII. 523-31)

Adam's critical analysis and defence of his own passion comes at the climax of the most idyllic part of Paradise Lost; it is the intimate core to which the conversation with Raphael gradually moves. In his conversations with Eve Adam would ‘solve high dispute / With conjugal Caresses’ (VIII. 55-6); but now the same caresses generate high dispute, and reveal problems of their own. Eros and female subordination turn out to be doubly problematic, moreover: not only must Adam struggle with the same dialectic of emotion as the reader, but the ‘solutions’ of the poem do not quite match the complexity of its awareness of human sexuality, and do not quite reconcile the original contradictions of Genesis, now hatched by Milton's powerful imagination.

In all other enjoyments Adam describes himself as ‘superior and unmov'd’; he means that he is distinct from and more advanced than the object that provides the delight, and that he is not ‘moved’ in his whole being, or ‘transported’ to a different realm of existence. This is quite in keeping with the dominion over the environment granted to mankind in Genesis 1. But in the presence of his fellow-human his very mind is changed, and he cannot separate his sensuous delight from his admiration for Eve's specifically human qualities—not just her beauty, but her dignity, intelligence, and completeness (VIII. 531-59). It is important to recall at this point that the text of Genesis says nothing whatever about male superiority or rule over the female, until the latter is imposed as a punishment after the fall. And the exegetical tradition, though it repeatedly violated the Scripture by assigning male dominance to the state of nature, was not unanimous; as we have seen in chapter 3, Chrysostom insisted that Eve was not subordinated until her punishment, as did several English radicals, and the Lutheran Enarrationes describe primal equality in great detail—though they contradict themselves in different parts of the text. Milton was working with a divided heritage, and this is reflected in Adam's attempt to understand his love for Eve.

Adam begins, like any apprentice in the mysteries of Eros, by trying an inadequate dichotomy. Intellectually he ‘understands’ her to be what the divorce tracts say she is—an ‘inferiour’, inwardly less gifted and outwardly less like God than he is, a being made ‘occasionally’ as an afterthought; but in the penumbra of love he experiences her as intelligent, dignified, and ‘absolute’, ‘in herself compleat’, a being ‘intended first’, an autonomous and fully human counterpart to himself (VIII. 540-55). This latter vision, though it alarms the suprematist in Raphael and Milton, fits perfectly well with the ‘fit help’ promised in Genesis. Nor does Adam quite call her a superior. But he does lavish superlatives on her that balance ambiguously between egalitarian tribute and slavish gallantry. He forces a gap between what Eve ought to be and what she seems to be, between how he feels and what he knows he should be thinking; he then widens it by carelessly using a vocabulary of extreme moral turpitude, and digs it deeper with alarming explanations that seem to accuse God more than himself. He even toys with the idea that God had deliberately weakened him when He extracted Eve from his side, a notion that any Christian should find blasphemous—though Donne, as we saw in chapter 3, used it to adorn a wedding-sermon.

By creating an Adam who is conscious of being ‘weak / Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance’ (VIII. 532-3), Milton again focuses on a problem that had unwittingly compromised other versions of Genesis. In Loredano as well as in Milton Adam finds in Eve ‘the summe of all his desires’, but when Loredano attempts to praise God's handiwork in Eve, and pay tribute to her beauty and glory, he falls into a distinctively worldly and fallen attitude, a kind of gallant humanism with misogynistic undertones:

Women have derived from heaven so sweet a Tyranny into their faces, that the denying them the subjection of all hearts is an effect rather of stupidity than of prudence. He that can resist the inchantments of a feminine beauty, either is no man, or is indued with qualities superiour to those of a Man.

Loredano effectively antedates the fall, accuses God of entrapment, and ‘pleads Adam's excuse’. His condemnation of the fall is softened by a similar indulgence.⁷ At these moments the author's attitude is indistinguishable from the flippancy of Adam's own reply to God's accusation: ‘“Who can resist the power of beauty? … He that can withstand the importunate solicitude of the fairest piece (cosa) that ever came out of thy hands, either knows not how to Love or deserves not to be Beloved.”’ The fierce condemnation that Loredano showers on this speech of Adam's has very little moral authority, since he has already practically endorsed it in his own descriptions of Eve. In Milton a similar surrender to gallantry is ‘placed’ dramatically, checked by Raphael's frown, and scrutinized by Adam himself: he is not ‘stupified’ by his amorous experiences, but stimulated to keener self-analysis. Nevertheless, this process of discrimination—in Adam himself and in the reader—is achieved with difficulty, and the episode remains precariously poised on the edge of simplistic moralism and authorial confusion.

Adam's description of his passion presents us with a very mingled grain. Adam pours out his feelings in a torrent of praise for Eve, an overflow of the cup of earthly blessings; he ends, not by formulating a question about a problem, but by returning to the angelic radiance of his beloved. Nevertheless, what began as an indulgent ‘confession’ between friends soon takes on the tone of a real confession—confess, weak, Nature faild in mee, too much of Ornament, degraded, folly.⁸ The vocabulary seems so wildly incompatible with the state of innocence, and so remote from the conversations we have actually witnessed between Adam and Eve, that we labour to apply the special mode of reading that we have already practised with ‘dalliance’, ‘attractive grace’, ‘liquid lapse of falling streams’, ‘wanton’, and ‘enamoured’. We rescue passion and commotion from their Satanic associations by recalling that in Areopagitica ‘passions’ are the God-given seeds of virtue and ‘commotions’ are the marks of divine healing—and even ‘vehemence’ exists in a heroic Christ-like form.⁹

Other parts of Adam's confession resist improvement, however. His blame of ‘Nature’ for not making him more superior seems unduly fallen, especially when we notice that, even earlier in his narration, he had equated ‘Nature’ with the possibility of sinful thoughts in Eve. He seems to have been deluded into crude anthropomorphism when he says that Eve's ‘outward’ form is less in the image of God than his; not even Satan made this observation.¹⁰ The terms ‘degraded’ and ‘folly’ seem themselves to degrade his partner even when he purports to exalt her. Both possible meanings of ‘[not] intended first’ are dubious: we can agree that Eve is not planned as a ruler over him (as she was in van Helmont), but it is a gross presumption to declare that she was an afterthought, a being ‘made / Occasionally’ rather than intended from the first. The effect of these multiple doubts is to throw Adam's whole conceptual model into greater disarray than perhaps his author intended.

Does this mean that Raphael's reply is wholly correct? The archangel rebukes some of Adam's assumptions, but he endorses others. He is properly severe on Adam's blame of ‘Nature’, identical to the pusillanimous excuse he will offer when confronted with his crime. He agrees enthusiastically with Adam's disparagements of Eve, however, and proclaims her worthy of honour but ‘less excellent’ and of less ultimate value; he would certainly disagree with the critic who explains Eve's position as subordination without devaluation.¹¹ And he condemns ‘Passion’ with something of the austere anti-sexuality of the divorce tracts; love-making is no more than ‘the sense of touch whereby mankind / Is propagated’, and far from being of supreme value must be considered something given also to ‘Cattel and each Beast’. (In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, we recall, ‘God does not principally take care for such cattell.’) Passion, in Raphael's view, is entirely incompatible with Love, which here as in the earlier prose is conceived as a Platonic ascent:

In loving thou dost well, in passion not,
Wherein true Love consists not; love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat
In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale,
By which the heav'nly Love thou maist ascend.

(VIII. 588-92)

Adam must not remain ‘sunk in carnal pleasure’, which could have been provided by mating him with one of the beasts.

Adam's response to this rebuke is complex and divided: he is only ‘half abasht’, and he is stimulated to a more thorough and discriminating defence of erotic desire. A gulf thus opens between man and angel, and it is by no means certain who has the ‘true authority’. Raphael expresses Milton's deeply held beliefs, of course: ‘Passion’ in the fallen world must be kept under because it is always ready to spring at the higher faculties and tear them down; as another impeccably orthodox speaker later puts it, once Reason is ‘obscur'd or not obeyd’, ‘inordinate desires / And upstart Passions’ snatch the government and reduce man to servitude—his previous condition, interestingly enough, having been equality (XII. 86-90). But Milton was just as serious about his vitalistic and experiential ethics, in which virtue is constituted by struggle with excess, and in which passions are implanted by God even in unfallen man, and must be ‘known’ to the full—‘he had bin else a meer artificiall Adam’. He was serious, too, in his worship of pre-lapsarian Wedded Love. Aquinas had speculated that passiones animae could have existed in perfect harmony with reason, and that erotic feeling would have been all the more intense; Milton ‘hatched’ this hypothetical state, and gave it moral credibility by making conflict essential to the ‘growth and compleating’ of innocence. Adam's reply to Raphael draws on all these Miltonic beliefs.

He justifies himself to Raphael by drawing on the same sensationalist psychology that he used to explain Eve's dream:

                                                                                                    I to thee disclose
What inward thence I feel, not therefore foild,
Who meet with various objects, from the sense
Variously representing; yet still free
Approve the best.

(VIII. 607-11)

Approval will still be granted, he assures Raphael, on subordinationist criteria: passion will be kept below reason and woman below man. But then he challenges the archangel's estimation of sexual desire, and so redeems some of the rhapsodic ‘Passion’ that had inspired his high valuation of Eve and thus caused the frowning interruption. He replies to Raphael's charge with a sense of mild superiority derived from the experience of married love:

Neither her out-side formd so fair, not aught
In procreation common to all kinds
(Though higher of the genial Bed by far,
And with mysterious reverence I deem)
So much delights me as those graceful acts,
Those thousand decencies that daily flow
From all her words and actions mixt with Love.

(VIII. 596-602)

Human eroticism is both ‘higher’ and more complex than the archangel realizes. Adam is right, then, to end this extraordinarily probing conversation by asking his preceptor about angelic sexuality, just as he had asked him about angelic eating at the very beginning. His goal is to discover whether heavenly love (which Raphael can describe at first hand) is indeed joined in a Platonic ‘scale’ to the highest sexual love between man and woman, and if so, whether this vertical dimension provides an adequate model for understanding his own feelings.

Milton knew from Matthew 22:30 that there is no marriage in heaven, and he seems to have agreed with Donne that angels do not and perhaps cannot know the mind of man; both the Chorus in ‘Adam Unparadiz'd’ and Satan in Paradise Lost display a curiosity to know more about the new creature. Angelic apprehension, like that of the pastoral swain, is intense but one-dimensional. Raphael is by no means an infallible guide: he has already vacillated on the important question of ‘accommodation’, and Book VII has already established that his knowledge is limited to the ‘Priestly’ part of Genesis, to the biological rather than the human aspect of creation. He there expressed the opinion that Milton denounced as ‘crabbed’ and ‘rustic’ in the divorce tracts: ‘Male he created thee, but thy consort / Female for Race.’¹² Raphael's responses to Adam show us that angelic sexuality is like the angelic mind.

Milton's angels are not inaccessibly different from humans, but are another form of ‘one first matter’, more spirituous because nearer to God; they have the same digestive needs and the same sexual emotion, though they are not limited by specific organs:

Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs:
Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.

(V. 469-90, VIII. 622-9)

These higher physical delights, reminiscent of the climactic aerial mingling that Shakespeare's Cleopatra only attains at her death, do indeed form a continuous scale with human sexuality. But it is not a simple or homogenous scale: each level of being has its own specific experiences, not necessarily less or worse than those above. Angels enjoy a distillate of human eroticism, but without its density and rootedness; their texture is ‘liquid’ rather than palpable and multifarious (VI. 348-52). They can ‘limb themselves’, but in love-making they evidently choose not to experience the constraint of limbs, which means they also forego the touch of breasts meeting through a veil of hair. They do not suffer ‘exclusive barrs’, but neither do they enjoy the exclusivity or ‘sole propriety’ that enriches the private love-making of Adam and Eve. They have Eros, but they do not have marriage. Angels—and earnest young men trying to gain a place at the Wedding-feast of the Lamb by keeping their virginity until their mid-thirties—are as it were Platonists by nature, but mature humans need a more complicated model. Unlike Raphael and Satan, Adam can be ‘enamoured’ and ‘unlibidinous’ at the same time; he glimpses the possibility that in a ‘right temper’ passion and love might be interfused rather than kept rigidly apart.

Adam is therefore not ‘cleared’ after this discussion of sexuality, as he was ‘cleared’ after his questions about astronomy, and as ‘all was cleared’ after Eve's dream. He is left suspended between two paradigms of the loving relationship, an embattled hierarchy of Reason and Passion, man and woman, and a vision of equality-in-difference. Raphael of course castigates Adam for yielding his very identity to a creature of less value:

                                                                                                    weigh with her thy self;
Then value: Oft times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well manag'd; of that skill the more thou know'st
The more she will acknowledge thee her Head,
And to realities yeild all her shows.

(VIII. 570-5)

Raphael's cynical condemnation is particularly appalling because, in equating Eve with ‘shows’, he declares her intrinsically fallen: when we first encountered her nakedness and sexual purity, Milton had explicitly contrasted it with ‘sin-bred’ hypocrisy—‘shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure’; now he seems to agree with the archangel. But the poem itself allows us to challenge this authority. In the same narration, just before the nuptial dithyramb that leads to Raphael's interruption, we learn that Adam's most fervent desire is for an equal—a desire so deeply rooted in his being that it gives him the astonishing ability to argue down the Almighty within minutes of his creation; and his most rapturous eloquence is reserved for those moments (truly Paradisal to a non-hierarchic mind) where feeling and thought are harmonized and fused in sexual fulfilment with an ‘absolute’ human counterpart. Adam is divided between shame and pride at these feelings. A strict Augustinian would probably call Adam's hierarchic determination caritas or ‘good love’, and dismiss his ecstatic and egalitarian passion as evil libido; but it is difficult to dismiss an experience conveyed with such transfiguring poetic power. Adam is only ‘half abasht’ by Raphael's rebuke because Raphael's model of Love is only half true.

The choice between ecstatic-egalitarian and patriarchal relationships is not simply a choice between good and evil, or between reason and passion; whatever Milton the ideologue would say, the poem itself presents both as moral systems based on self-knowledge and responsibility, and both appear to have been sanctioned by higher beings. Up to this point in the poem, in fact, Adam's experience has mostly encouraged him to think that God intends a fundamental equality and reciprocity between the sexes. At their first appearance, of course, the author's voice tells us that they ‘seemed’ to Satan ‘not equal’, because of their ‘sex’. In its immediate context the phrase relates, rather loosely, to the image of God or ‘true authority’ that Satan senses in both man and woman, and in the larger context of the idyllic books, transformed by the semantics of Paradise, it comes to mean ‘not identical’ rather than essentially and ontologically different in value; as Adam observes, Eve is ‘manlike but different sex’—a difference not necessarily marked by hierarchy.¹³ Much of the accumulated experience of the poem supports the ‘True Leveller’ reading of Genesis: ‘Man had Domination given him over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes, but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over other’; ‘every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself.’¹⁴ Milton's Eve is not ‘perfect’ in the sense of self-sufficient, of course, any more than Adam is; but compared with every other version she is an autonomous and well-rounded character, with specific counterparts to Adam's mental and physical skills, happily able to out-argue him in matters that concern her own sphere of expertise; even Raphael tells Adam that she ‘sees when thou art seen least wise’. Nor can female inferiority be deduced from the ‘beasts, birds and fishes’ over whom the human couple jointly rule. The vegetable kingdom displays some conventional emblems of female weakness, like the vine and the elm, but otherwise the physical environment is remarkably free of lessons in subordination: male dominance within the animal species is mentioned neither in Adam's first survey of the beasts in Book VIII, nor in the ample descriptions of Book IV, nor in the explicitly didactic Creation-story of Book VII—virtually the only creature to be given a symbolic application is the ant, ‘Pattern of just equalitie perhaps’.¹⁵ Most importantly of all, neither Eve nor Adam says a word about subordination or inferiority when they describe the most sacred moment of their lives, when God spoke directly to them and presented them with their mate.

Eve does, of course, provide one striking exception to this relatively egalitarian conception; she begins each of her speeches to Adam with a formal statement of the narrow Pauline interpretation of woman's role. Between her introduction in Book IV when Milton announces her ‘submission’, and Raphael's interruption in Book VIII, she herself is the only subordinationist voice in the poem. At times she even seems to embroider on her secondary role, attributing God-like features to Adam, and thus deepening the idolatry to which her author unwittingly condemned her from the first (‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’). Though Adam is taller and better at systematic reasoning, he is not ‘Praeeminent by so much odds’ that he must remain lonely, and he is not the ‘Author’ of Eve at all, unless the paper is the author of the book. If her formula of submission (‘Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains’) really does express the ideal, then we must condemn her when she corrects Adam's opinions about food-storage, and we must regard her as hopelessly corrupt when she argues for separate gardening, even though Milton insists she is ‘yet sinless’. If God ‘ordained’ her obedience and inferiority, then He did so in a scene that neither Scripture nor Milton has recorded. ‘Ordain’ is a solemn word, referring to an eternal law decreed explicitly by God. The ‘voice’ that leads Eve to her husband (sometimes assumed to be God, sometimes a ‘genial angel’) is significantly devoid of gender, and defines marriage in terms of partnership and motherhood; and when Adam retells this scene, borrowing from conversations with Eve, he mentions only nuptial sanctity and marriage ‘rites’—though the voice combines several roles later assigned to father, priest, and mother, it does not dictate obedience.¹⁶ When Raphael refers to the creation of ‘female for race’ he says nothing about subordination. And when Adam feels the ‘intelligible flame’ and demands a consort—the central moment from which grew Milton's entire conception of marriage both in the divorce tracts and in the epic—the relationship imagined by man and approved by God is described in egalitarian terms.

Adam's primal yearning is for an ‘equal’ partner. The reader may suspect either a divine trick or an authorial blunder here, remembering that Satan and Milton had conspired to pronounce Adam and Eve ‘not equal’. The earlier declaration had been proved by the separation of male and female qualities, but in the intervening books this definition receded into the shadows, as contemplation and softness, valour and attractive grace, blend in what Heale had called ‘a strange kinde of Metamorphosis’. Now the concept of equality is established with greater clarity:

Among unequals what societie
Can sort, what harmonie or true delight?

(VIII. 383-4)

Adam imagines a relationship not of bland identity but of reciprocity, an equal degree of creative tension, ‘fellowship’, and ‘complacence’—which means not simply an ‘object or source of pleasure’ but a delight in the awareness of the other's pleasure.¹⁷ In Genesis, moreover, it is God who pronounces it ‘not good for man to be alone’, but in Paradise Lost it is Adam himself who realizes this lack and imagines an equal partner, arguing down God's attempts to talk him out of it. The craving for partnership is so ‘deeply graven’, and so energetically maintained throughout the long wrestling-match with God, that it seems to define his whole being; he is unfinished without Eve. In the practice of dramatization, though not in his explicit ideological statements, Milton approaches the erotic ontogeny of Karl Barth (ch. 1 n. 2 above), assuming that humanity only exists in the relation of man to woman and woman to man. The notion that Eve is ‘occasional’, which implies that Adam's loneliness is an inessential mood, can barely stand beside this powerfully imagined vision.

When God congratulates Adam for passing this test, He too equates the urge for equal partnership with the essential discovery of self:

Thus farr to try thee, Adam, I was pleas'd,
And find thee knowing not of Beasts alone,
Which thou hast rightly nam'd, but of thy self,
Expressing well the spirit within thee free.

(VIII. 437-40)

He then promises to create precisely what Adam has imagined: ‘Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish exactly to thy hearts desire’ (VIII. 450-1). Female subordination and inferiority are never mentioned in this episode, astonishingly enough. Milton here, however locally, remains true to the original text, to the Lutheran vision of primal freedom for both sexes, and to the love of equality proclaimed in his own political writings (though not in his domestic treatises) and upheld by the archangel Michael in his teaching of Adam.

Proper self-knowledge, then, involves the discovery of the human capacity for egalitarian love, instituted in Paradise. But Raphael assumes, with fallen culture, that the principal business of married life is to obtain acknowledgements of superiority from the wife, and he in turn recommends the proper kind of self-knowledge to achieve this. And Christ, justly rebuking Adam's oily self-exoneration and transference of blame to Eve after the fall, asks

Was shee thy God, that her thou didst obey
Before his voice, or was shee made thy guide,
Superior, or but equal, that to her
Thou did'st resigne thy Manhood, and the Place
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee,
And for thee?

‘Had'st thou known thy self aright’, the judgement continues, Adam would have known that Eve's gifts were those of a subordinate, meant ‘to attract thy Love, not thy Subjection’ (X. 145-56). Adam has now forfeited the right, and temporarily the ability, to give an honest and courageous answer; but he could have replied, not in exoneration of his sin but in simple truth, that Eve was properly his ‘guide’ at times, that she was not his ‘superior’, but that God Himself had ‘ordained’ her as an equal, and had praised his self-knowledge when he demanded one. The ambiguous phrase ‘or but equal’ could set off a similar train of thought in the reader.

I am not suggesting that Milton intended to criticize or subvert the judgement of Raphael, Christ, and the divorce tracts; he undoubtedly believed that Eve's inferiority was so self-evident that she herself could spell it out. But his poem sees when he is seen least wise. Pre-subordination is a given, an axiom, an ‘ideological imperative’ that exists independently of evidence; but the act of expanding Eden into an almost novelistic universe brings it into the empirical sphere, and generates contrary evidence. Milton has succeeded in bringing to life, in the praxis of his art, two quite different models of the politics of love: one is drawn from the experience of being in love with an equal, and the mutual surrender of ‘due benevolence’, the other from the hierarchical arrangement of the universe, and the craving for male supremacy. His treatment of Genesis stands out from all others because his imagination responds generously to both of these, to the ecstatic egalitarian love of ‘one flesh’ as well as to the patriarchal love of superior and inferior; he has hatched the contradictions in the text and the tradition that elsewhere lie dormant. As Christ later points out, this brings ‘Love’ and ‘Subjection’ into potential conflict.

Adam's reply to Raphael attempts to solve the dichotomy his ‘confession’ has brought to light, by concentrating on the point where Love and Subjection touch. The ‘words and actions’ that make him enamoured of Eve are not just mixed with love, but ‘mixt with Love / And sweet compliance’. Adam thus underlines those over-excited moments in the poem when desire is kindled by the acknowledgement of dominance, and encourages a distorting simplification of his marriage. As far as we can tell, the first couple lie ‘side by side’ when they make love, and in the morning Adam ‘hangs over’ his sleeping beloved more like Venus than Mars. But at other times he does assume a more dominant posture, sitting at the door of his bower while the ‘mounted Sun’ shoots his rays into the womb of the earth and Eve prepares lunch, or talking with his guest while Eve hangs back like a servant. (Milton cannot make up his mind whether Eve could hear Raphael's narrative at all.)¹⁸ These patriarchal attitudes do not sum up the range of amorous emotion in the poem, however, and Adam's reply does not resolve the contradictions between the different modes of love it bodies forth. Indeed, his own impulse to ‘say all’, in this conversation with Raphael, has forced us to be aware of these discrepancies: we recall, for example, that at one of the most intense moments in Book IV, when Satan boils over with jealousy and desire, Milton has Adam ‘Smile with superior Love’ at Eve's ‘meek surrender’; but we also remember Adam's confession to Raphael, that in the surges of love—precisely at moments like these—he has no feeling of superiority.

This irresolvable doubleness at the heart of Milton's apprehension of wedded love—a contradiction that lies dormant in Genesis and the Pauline tradition—may be traced even in the lines that first introduce the ideal couple. Let us recall again that Genesis gives the ‘male and female’ joint dominion over all the lower species (in chapter 1), but says nothing about masculine rule until it is imposed as a punishment after the fall. Milton deliberately evokes the former text when he introduces Adam and Eve as ‘lords of all’—indeed, the whole account of sexual difference is offered as an explanation of their joint worthiness to rule over Paradise. Syntactically, Eve's ‘softness’ is as much a form of ‘true authority’, a manifestation of the image of God, as is Adam's ‘valour’. His features and hair-arrangement ‘declared / Absolute rule’ and hers ‘impli'd / Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway’ (IV. 300-8): the parallelism of syntax and allusion tells us that man and woman exercise their dominion in different ways, that Eve rules gently over her animals and Adam sternly—though we may also hear a courtly compliment to her sway over Adam here. Milton's actual meaning is then achieved by a violent swivelling. The subject of ‘requir'd’ turns out to be Adam, in defiance of all grammar, and ‘Subjection’ suddenly becomes the sexual and domestic surrender of Eve to him—‘Yeilded’ of course, ‘with coy submission, modest pride, / And sweet reluctant amorous delay’ (IV. 309-11). Rhetorical slipperiness is not confined to Satan; despite Milton's praise of Paradisal ‘simplicity’ (IV. 318), his version of innocence has its sleights and contortions too. The exultant repetition, swelling epithets and languorous rhythm of these disturbingly beautiful lines may be interpreted, not just as an expression of Milton's ideal of pre-lapsarian love (intensified by his own slightly perverse sensibility), but as an attempt to cloud and soften the divergence between the text of Genesis and the tradition of exegesis—to solve high dispute with conjugal caresses.

Notes

1. Prose II. 528, 587, 514. The image of the grains is one of several incompatible models of good and evil in Areopagitica; M sometimes assumes a dialectic interchange between good and evil, sometimes a simple ‘mingling’ of essentially distinct and immutable essences.

2. Cf. ch. 1 n. 17 above; Kirkconnell, pp. 486, 507-9; Augustine, CG III. 5 and XIV. 23, De Trinitate.XII. vii. 10; Luther, II. 10-11; Donne, Sermons, VIII. 107; Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill, 1948), pp. 117, 152.

3. Prose VI. 720 (Col. edn. XVII. 203) and cf. I. 552; PL III. 461-3, VI. 352; PR II. 178-81, IV. 197 and 517. For scholarly opinion, see notes on these passages in Fowler (which contradict the identification of ‘Sons of God’ with angels at V. 446-50) and A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, IV, ed. Walter MacKellar (New York, 1975), p. 117.

4. FQ II. xii. 63-8, esp. 64; several details of M's erotic Eden are borrowed from, and hence rebuild, Spenser's Bower of Bliss. For some fruitful speculations on the relation of M to Spenser, and of both poets to their female patronesses mortal and celestial, cf. Quilligan, ch. 4, ‘The Gender of the Reader and the Problem of Sexuality’ [in Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983)].

5. Lindenbaum (p. 287) [Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance (Athens University of Georgia Press, 1984)] treats this episode perceptively.

6. PL IV. 309-10, V. 336, 446-7; M included specific culinary demands in his third marriage-contract. Cf. ch. 2 n. 106 above for another connection between sexual yielding and abundant food.

7. ‘What cannot women do in an amorous soule? What fortitude will not she conquer, what constancy will not she subdue, what Will will she not pervert, what impossibility will not she effect? He that, loving, is able to resist the violences of Woman, is either a God or hath the power of a God’ [Loredano Life of Adam (Amsterdam, 1494)], (pp. 42-3); cf. pp. 21, 34-5. For a similar combination of gallantry and moralization, see Francesco Pona, L'Adamo (Verona, 1654), and William Davenant, Gondibert VI. 64.

8. PL VIII. 523-59, and cf. IX. 2 ‘as with his Friend’. Just as M's Paradise can contain blushing without shame and wantonness without lust, so it can have confession without sin.

9. Prose II. 527, 566; among the frequent praises of ‘vehemence’ in the prose of the 1640s, cf. I. 663, 874, 878, and in the divorce tracts II. 282, 301, 644, 664.

10. PL VIII. 506, 543-6; cf. Satan's early observation: ‘so lively shines / In them divine resemblance, and such grace / The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured’ (IV. 363-5, my emphasis). M did perhaps assume that God had the appearance of a human male: certainly He always appears to Adam as a male, as does Raphael (whence Adam could deduce in his fallen anger that Heaven is peopled with ‘Spirits Masculine’, X. 890). But Adam's (and M's) uncertainty about how God appeared to Eve before she met Adam (n. 60 below), and the fact that God communicates directly to Eve while His messenger is instructing Adam in Books XI-XII, could suggest that God's manly looks are put on only for Adam, according to the principle of accommodation (i.e. we must conceive ‘Him’ the way ‘He’ chooses to communicate ‘Himself’ to us; Prose VI. 133-6). Cf. William Kerrigan, ‘The Fearful Accommodations of John Donne’, ELR IV (1974), esp. 340-6.

11. PL VIII. 561-6; McColley, ch. 2 and passim. McColley argues that Adam and Eve should model their relationship on that of the divine Father and Son, learning submission-in-equality, obedience to a consubstantial being, and sacrificial love: but God deliberately stimulates Adam's sense of the dissimilarity of God and man in this area (in the testing-scene before the creation of Eve); and sacrificial love, supposing Adam had been told of it, would have encouraged his fall even more.

12. Donne, Sermons, X. 58, 82 (I owe this point to Arthur Barker); Fowler, introd.; PL III. 662-76, VII. 529-30; ch. 3 passim and 6. 2. iii above. Raphael's oft-quoted doctrine of accommodation (V. 564-74), which relies on the dualism of spirit and body and the ineffability of their connection, is undermined immediately by his own uncertainty (V. 574-6), and contradicted by the monism of his explanations of digestion (V. 404-500) and wounding (VI. 330-53). Several critics recognize that the archangel may not be a simple mouthpiece when the conversation turns to sexuality, e.g Lindenbaum, pp. 294-5 (a perceptive discussion), Aers and Hodge [Literature, Language, and Society in England, 1580-1680 (Dublin: Gilland MacMilton, 1981], pp. 144-8 (God deliberately gives Raphael an inadequate ideology in order to test Adam once again), and J. B. Broadbent (Raphael and Adam are both infuriatingly limited, but this only proves the fundamental seriousness of M's treatment of sexuality; Some Graver Subject (1960), pp. 244-6).

13. IV. 291-6, VIII. 471; the loose grammatical relationship of ‘not equal’ to the preceding lines can be seen by contrast with the sentence from Tetrachordon that M apparently echoes: woman shares the man's ‘empire’ over the universe, ‘though not equally, yet largely’ (ch. 6 n. 44 above).

14. The True Levellers Standard Advanced (ch. 3 n. 21 above), also quot. (as a ‘Leveller’ belief, though it is in fact a Digger pamphlet) in McColley, p. 50.

15. PL V. 321-5, VIII. 578, VII. 487. Raphael's comment on Eve may also have a less flattering meaning: ‘she notices your lapses.’

16. PL IV. 445-8, 635-6; cf. IV. 467-76, IV. 712 and Fowler's note, VIII. 484-7.

17. Fowler, note on VIII. 433; Nathanael Hardy, ch. 6 n. 41 above. McColley argues that, though Adam asks for an equal, he actually gets something else (p. 87, and cf. IX. 823); if so, this would bring M's God closer to the trickster of the original fable. It may be objected that M is using the sense recorded in OED ‘equal’ A.3 (fit in quantity, degree, or quality), but this meaning is only found in the construction with to.

18. PL VIII. 602-3; IV. 741; V. 13 (cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I. 31-40), 299-302 (cf. Gen. 18:1). Eve sat ‘retired in sight’ during the conversation (in which Raphael addresses Adam alone, referring to Eve as an absent third person, ‘thy consort’), and leaves when she sees an abstruse look on Adam's face; later she claims that her entire knowledge of the Satanic threat comes from what Adam has retold her and from what she overheard, hiding behind a bush on her way back from gardening, of the closing stages of the talk on sexuality (VII. 529, VIII. 41, IX. 275-8). But at VII. 50-4 M says that Adam ‘with his consorted Eve / The story heard attentive’, and refers to the astonishment the war in Heaven provoked in ‘their thought’ (my emphasis).

Abbreviations and Frequently Cited Authors

Note: Patristic treatises and well-known literary texts will be cited by abbreviated title and numbered subdivisions, e.g. book, chapter, and paragraph, or canto and stanza. In the notes, the place of publication has been omitted if it is, or includes, London. I have silently modernized spelling and punctuation when the original would distract or mislead the reader unprofitably, and I have revised twentieth-century translations where necessary, though I retain their page numbering for convenience.

CG St Augustine, The City of God, tr. based on that of Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, 1972).

Donne Poems are cited by title and line from the standard Clarendon Press edns.; Sermons from the edn. by Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953-62).

Fowler See M.

FQ Spenser, The Faerie Queene.

Kirkconnell Watson Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature, with Translations of the Major Analogues (Toronto, 1952).

Luther Unless otherwise indicated, refs. will be to vol. and p. of Lectures on Genesis, Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, I-VII (St. Louis, 1958-) checked against In Primum Librum Mose Enarrationes (1544), ed. G. Koffmane and O. Reichert, in Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, 1883-), XLII (1911).

McColley Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana, 1983).

M Milton. Prose is cited from the Yale edn., The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, 1953-82), with the Latin text further located in the Columbia edn., Works, ed. F. A. Patterson et al. (New York, 1931-8). ‘Carey’ and ‘Fowler’ refer to the notes in Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Longmans Annotated English Poets (1968).

PL Paradise Lost.

Prose See M.