An 11-minute read.
John Milton, an Englishman who seems to have been given more than his fair share of brains, completed Paradise Lost in 1667. The blank verse poem is twelve books long and unbelievably dense. Even Milton’s contemporaries could not understand it; when the second edition was published in 1674, Milton had to include summaries at the beginning of each book explaining what exactly was going on. The poem tells the story of the first few chapters of Genesis, beginning with Satan’s fall from Heaven and detailing his second foolish attempt to overthrow God by causing God’s brand new humans to sin. A few questions can help us better understand what is happening in Milton’s poem: What was Satan’s ultimate goal in rebelling against God, and how did he fail? How was Adam and Eve’s sin similar to Satan’s? Was Adam and Eve’s sin actually the sin of pride, or was it something else? Did Satan, and Adam and Eve, realize the true result of their pride?
It is important to begin with an understanding of the great chain of being. In Milton’s day, people believed there was a strict natural hierarchy in the universe. God was at the top of the chain, with nothing superior to him. Then came angels, then humans, then beasts, then plants, then minerals. So according to the chain, humans were inferior to angels but superior to beasts. If anyone tried to move up in hierarchy, this was the sin of pride: wanting to be above your level, wanting to be more than what God created you as. Pride was considered the worst sin.
Paradise Lost begins with the result of an act of pride. Satan used to be the brightest angel in Heaven, outshining all the others like the sun outshines the stars in the sky during the day: “Cloth’d with transcendent brightness didst out-shine / Myriads though bright” (1.86-7). He had a high angel status, but he was not content with his place in the great chain of being. Satan was, instead, “Stird up with Envy and Revenge” (1.35). He decided that he wanted to take God’s place at the the top of the chain, hoping “To set himself in Glory above his Peers, / He trusted to have equal’d the most High, / If he oppos’d” (1.39-41). The only way for him to take God’s place was to fight God and win. Satan was tricky as a slimy snake-oil salesman and carried out the fight part perfectly, but found the win more difficult. God cannot be beaten; that is an inherent part of his God-ness. As a result of Satan’s pride, he was “cast out from Heav’n, with all his Host / Of Rebel Angels” (1.37-8). This is where Paradise Lost begins, in medias res (after a short invocation of the muse and introduction of the poem’s themes). Satan and his angel minions have been lying on a lake of fire for nine days (1.50), bound by chains that are harder than diamonds (1.48). They are “confounded though immortal” (1.53)–mixed up and in mental, emotional, and physical pain, yet unable to die.
So instead of being up in Heaven with God, Satan is languishing in Hell–as far from God as one could be. In trying to rise up the great chain of being, he found himself sent lower, and one way we see this is in Satan’s thinking. In Milton’s day, it was believed that angels’ special quality was their Intellect, and it is clear at the beginning of the poem that Satan’s mind is cracked and he can no longer think clearly–or perhaps no longer wishes to think clearly, as he tells many lies. In book one, he paints himself as a hero. He argues that “force hath made supream / Above his equals” (1.248-9), implying that angels were equal to God until God defeated them. Milton’s contemporaries would recognize this as a lie; angels and God never were on the same level in the chain of being. Satan also calls the battle “dubious” (1.104), and says it shook God’s throne (1.105), both of which seem outlandish. There was not a moment in the battle where Satan actually posed a danger to God. We get a hint that Satan may understand this in lines 120-2, where he says, “We may with more successful hope resolve / To wage by force or guile eternal Warr / Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe.” The fact he refers to the war as eternal implies that victory is doubtful. But he looks to take pride in his defeat, saying that his strength and guile are so great none other than an Almighty God could have defeated him (1.144-6).
After his fall, Satan immediately plots revenge. He notices that God has just created a world, and on it God has placed “some new Race call’d Man” (2.348). They are perfect, and obey all the rules God set for them, so naturally Satan decides to “Seduce them to our Party, that thir God / May prove thir foe, and with repenting hand / Abolish his own works” (2.368-70). What better way to attack God than force God to destroy his own creation? Satan says, “This would surpass / Common revenge” (2.370-1). So Satan flies to Earth, to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve live together in mostly blissful harmony.
In the Garden of Eden, there is a tree–called the Tree of Knowledge–that God had commanded Adam and Eve to not eat from. Satan saw this as an opportunity. As he still had the powers of a spiritual being, he possessed a big beautiful serpent (9.500-10), slinks to where Eve is tending roses by herself, and begins talking her into eating from the forbidden Tree. When Eve asks how the Serpent can speak, Satan tells her that he used to be an ordinary serpent, but he happened to pass by the Tree during lunchtime and ate some of its apples and suddenly experienced a “Strange alteration in me, to degree / Of Reason in my inward Powers, and Speech / Wanted not long, though to this shape retain’d” (9.598-601). He says he became a human in mind and soul, though not in form–in other words, he moved up the great chain of being. If this were true, it would be amazing.
At this point in the story, Eve starts to ask questions. She knows that God commanded her to not eat from the tree; she tells Satan, “of the Fruit of this fair Tree amidst / The Garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eate / Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, least ye die” (9.661-3). Even for this Satan presents a good argument, suggesting that God told Eve to not eat the fruit of the Tree because,
he knows that in the day
Ye Eate thereof, your Eyes that seem so cleere,
Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then
Op’nd and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods. (9.705-8)
The oily Serpent adds several other arguments to this, and eventually Eve is persuaded. She gorges herself on the fruit of the Tree (9.791), thinking it is the best fruit she has ever tasted. However, it is just a normal apple and everything magical about it is only in her head. Milton uses phrases like “as seemed” (9.787) and “fancied so” (9.789) to emphasize this. Eve starts to act drunk, and worships the tree, an immediate sign that her thinking has become cracked like Satan’s. She also wonders if anyone saw her, commenting, “perhaps I am secret; Heav’n is high” (9.811), maybe God couldn’t see all the way down to Earth, or was distracted at the moment she ate the apple, forgetting the fact the omniscient God obviously saw.
Eve then brings Adam his lunch–a big bough of forbidden apples. Adam is shocked and dismayed, acting as if he was struck by lightning, but quickly decides to eat the fruit, saying, “my resolution is to Die; / How can I live without thee” (9.907-8). He eats, and together Adam and Eve “swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel / Divinitie within them breeding wings” (9.1009-10). But in reality, they do not turn into angels. Instead, they both fall lower on the great chain of being, farther from God, as Satan did. Their love becomes an animalistic lust (9.1015), their pleasure and delight loses its innocence, their sensuality usurps reason (9.1129-30). Another aspect of the great chain of being commonly accepted in Milton’s day was that reason was higher, and thus better, than emotion. But Adam and Eve’s reason has disappeared. Milton writes, “they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, / And of thir vain contest appeer’d no end” (9.1187-9). They argue and blame and throughout the rest of the poem are generally unhappy.
It would make sense for one to wonder at this point if Satan and Adam and Eve realized the true result of their pride. In book one of the poem, Satan strengthens his resolve to wage his war against God by asserting that worshipping God is horrible. He says that bowing to God, and admitting defeat, would be “an ignominy and shame beneath / This downfall” (1.115-6). Satan seems to believe that submitting to God would be worse than burning in Hell forever. But in book four, Satan admits that he is cursed and miserable (4.71-3), stuck in Hell forever, for he carries Hell within him wherever he goes (4.75). He says, “O then at last relent: is there no place / Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left? / None left but by submission” (4.79-81). He wonders, if he repented, could he be pardoned? He admits that serving in Heaven is much better than reigning in Hell, because in Hell he falls lower and lower even though his demon horde adores him (4.89-91). But he quickly digresses from these thoughts, and calls for “Evil be thou my Good” (4.110), returning to his plan for revenge on his Creator. While it appears he may be capable of realizing the true consequences of his actions, he chooses not to. And after Adam and Eve spend half of book nine wondering when they are going to sprout wings and turn into angels, they focus first on hiding their shame and blaming each other for their mistakes. They lament their sin and their punishment (10.845), and long for death (10.854, 1001), but they have lost their reasoning and their arguments prove they cannot understand what has happened.
But was Adam and Eve’s sin truly pride, or was it something else? When Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apples, he played upon her vanity, calling her “Empress” (9.626), “Queen of this Universe” (9.684), “Goddess humane” (9.732)–all things she is not, but perhaps wishes to be. Her vanity is one of the first things we see about her in the poem; when she tells the story of her first waking moments, she says she saw her reflection in a nearby lake, and though startled at first, “pleas’d I soon returnd, / Pleas’d it returnd as soon with answering looks / Of sympathie and love” (4.463-5). Similar to Narcissus in the Greek myth, Eve was in danger of falling in love with herself. So when Satan tells her that she is so beautiful that she should be worshipped by angels (9.548), he works his way into her heart, and she is less concerned that this huge snake is standing upright and talking to her. And one of the things that is clear about Adam throughout Paradise Lost is that he loves his wife too much. In book eight, while conversing with an angel named Raphael, Adam says, “All higher knowledge in her presence falls / Degraded” (8.551-2), meaning Eve’s great beauty leads him to choose her over wisdom if he has to decide between the two. So Eve was vain, and Adam was uxorious. Satan played upon Eve’s high opinion of herself, and Adam chose Eve over God because he was madly in love with her. Perhaps Milton included these things to show that sin is complicated. It’s difficult to point to one thing and say, that is the problem. However, in the end Eve ate the apple because she wanted to be an angel, and Adam still chose to try to change his place in the hierarchy of the universe. And those acts are the sin of pride–the sin of trying to move up the great chain of being.
So in Paradise Lost, Milton reinforces the idea that every person, thing, and being should be content in the place God has put them. In attempting to rise up the great chain of being, Satan–and then Adam and Eve–all fell lower. In seeking to gain glory, they lost it, and became worse than they were before.
Ellen Sheehy 