(William Poole) Milton and The Idea of The Fall

This page intentionally left blank
MI LTON AND THE I DEA OF THE FALL

In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton produced the most magnicent
poetic account ever written of the biblical Fall of man. In this
wide-ranging study, William Poole presents a comprehensive analy-
sis of the origin, evolution and contemporary discussion of the Fall,
and the way seventeenth-century authors, particularly Milton, repre-
sented it. Poole rst examines the range and depth of early-modern
thought on the subject, then explains and evaluates the basis of the
idea and the intellectual and theological controversies it inspired
from early Christian times to Miltons own century. The second
part of the book delves deeper into the development of Miltons own
thought on the Fall, from the earliest of his poems, through his
prose, to his mature epic. Poole distinguishes clearly for the rst time
the range and complexity of contemporary debates on the Fall
of man, and offers many new insights into the originality and
sophistication of Miltons work.
WILLIAM POOLE is a Tutorial Fellow in English at New College,
Oxford. He is the editor of Francis Lodwicks A Country Not Named
(2005) and co-director of the AHRB research project Free-thinking
and language-planning in late seventeenth-century England.
MI LTON AND THE I DEA
OF THE FALL
WI LLI AM POOLE
New College, Oxford
caxniioci uxiviisir\ iiiss
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cn: :iu, UK
First published in print format
isnx-:, ,;-c-,::-;o,-o
isnx-:, ,;-c-,::-::,:,-,
W. Poole 2005
2005
Information on this title: www.cambridg e.org /9780521847636
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
isnx-:c c-,::-::,:,-;
isnx-:c c-,::-;o,-x
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of uiis
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
hardback
eBook (EBL)
eBook (EBL)
hardback
Know the fall is being created, for when we were not
created, and uncome forth, we were as he is, that is in
perfection.
Thomas Tany
Contents
Acknowledgements page viii
Note on the text x
List of abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Part I Fallen culture
1 The Fall 9
2 Augustinianism 21
3 The quarrel over original sin, 1649 1660 40
4 The heterodox Fall 58
5 Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters 83
6 The Fall in practice 96
Part I I Milton
7 Towards Paradise Lost 125
8 Paradise Lost I : the causality of primal wickedness 146
9 Paradise Lost I I : God, Eden and man 158
10 Paradise Lost I I I : creation and education 168
11 Paradise Lost I V: Fall and expulsion 182
Conclusion 195
Notes 200
Index 234
vii
Acknowledgements
This book is built on the ashes of a doctoral thesis (Oxford University,
2001), and both were written in New College, Oxford; Linacre College,
Oxford; and nally Downing College, Cambridge, to the Master and
Fellows of which I owe so much. They elected me to a research fellowship
young, and have tolerated me with wit and the occasional sigh. Norman
Powell Williams classic 1924 Bampton lectures, published in 1927 as The
Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, shaped my understanding of
the theological background to the issues this book addresses, and his work
remains one of powerful clarity. J. M. Evans Paradise Lost and the Genesis
Tradition (1968) transmitted Williams work, and the long history of
Fall speculation, to Miltonists. A. D. Nuttalls The Alternative Trinity:
Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake (1998) I rst heard as
undergraduate lectures. I know that this book opposes the assumption
of Dennis Danielsons ne Miltons Good God (1982) that you can make
sense of the Fall to which it is nonetheless grateful. Various other
books are complementary to this one, notably J. M. Turners One Flesh
(1987), John Leonards Naming in Paradise (1990), Jim Bennett and
Scott Mandelbrotes museum catalogue The Garden, the Ark, the Tower,
the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early-Modern Europe
(1998) and Philip C. Almonds Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century
Thought (1999).
I next thank my close circle of friends, who know who they are. I also
thank my pupils at Downing College it is to your type of audience this
book is primarily addressed. Valued assistance has also been offered
by Matthew Armstrong, Rhodri Lewis, Richard Serjeantson, Marcus
Tomalin, Jake Wadham and Jack Wakeeld. Sophie Read cheerfully axed
one third of the penultimate draft to meet the exigencies of this series.
The two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press produced
exemplary reports and opposing courses of revision, and my thanks to Ray
Ryan, Maartje Scheltens and Robert Whitelock at the Press for their time.
viii
My undergraduate tutors, like distant radio galaxies, still exert a pull : they
may have nothing to do with the surface of this book, but Mark Grifth
and Craig Raine had a hand in making its maker. John Carey, my
doctoral supervisor, oversaw a swift thesis with the lightest of hands.
Finally, A. D. Nuttall rst inspired my interest in the Fall and just about
everything else.
I dedicate this, my rst book, to my family, and to the memory of my
father D. E. Poole (19452001): nunc est bibendum.
Acknowledgements ix
Note on the text
Texts originally in languages other than English have been cited in
translation, or supplied in both original and translation if pertinent. All
translations are my own, unless indicated. In the case of classical texts, I
have relied heavily on the Loeb editions. Early-modern manuscript
sources, like printed sources, are cited unmodernised, although I have
italicised expansions.
x
Abbreviations
CG Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei [City of God], ed. and
trans. G. E. McCracken et al., 7 vols. (London: Heinemann,
195772)
CPW John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. Wolfe et al.,
8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 195882)
CRW Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the
17th Century (London: Junction Books, 1983)
E Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion in Confessions and Enchir-
idion, trans. A. C. Outler (London: SCMP, 1955)
JFHS Journal of the Friends Historical Society
LC Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram [Literal Commen-
tary on Genesis] in La Gene `se au sens litte ral, trans. with
introduction and notes by P. Agaesse and A. Solignac, 2 vols.
(Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1972)
MLQ Modern Language Quarterly
N&Q Notes and Queries
OED The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. John Simpson and
Edmund Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989)
PL John Milton, Paradise Lost : A Poem in Twelve Books, 2nd edn
revised by the author (London: printed by Samuel Simmons,
1674)
xi
Introduction
[I]f I have spoken any thing, or shall hereafter speake in this Pamphlet
vnaduisedly, illiterately, without good order or methode; acknowledge (I
beseeche thee) the generall punishment of whole mankinde, which more
especially discouers it selfe in my weaknesse, the confusion of tongues. I am
confounded, I am confounded, poore silly wretch that I am, I am confounded,
and my minde is distracted, my tongue is confounded, and my whole nature
corrupted . . .
1
This slightly disingenuous apology for bad prose was written in
1616 by the future bishop of Gloucester and crypto-Catholic, Godfrey
Goodman, some way into his stout quarto on the effects of original sin,
The Fall of Man; or, the Corruption of Nature. Goodman here pauses in
his general narration of woe to lament his own inarticulacy, tracing this
rst to the confusion of tongues that took place at Babel, but, behind
that, with his whole nature corrupted, to the Fall of man itself, the
primal transgression of Adam and Eve in Eden as recorded in Genesis 23.
Goodman thus adds to his catalogue of human ills not merely the
conviction that mans linguistic capacity has become crippled his ability
to describe accurately, and then subsequently to report such descriptions
to others but also the corruption of his very physical and moral fabric.
Indeed, Goodmans tract, as its full title indicates, extended the effects of
the Fall from the microcosm of man to the macrocosm of his environ-
ment the Fall has altered external reality itself.
I forget my selfe, I forget my selfe, for, speaking of mans corruption, I am so far
entangled, that I cannot easily release my selfe; being corrupted as wel as others,
me thinkes whatsoeuer I see, whatsoeuer I heare, all things seeme to sound
corruption.
2
Not only perception (my minde) and description (my tongue), but also
the objects of such perception and description had become ineluctably
compromised.
1
Goodman, though, offered a narrative of continual decline, something
that the Fall had inaugurated but not concluded: this rst great shock had
been followed by a series of aftershocks from the confusio linguarum and
the Flood down to the present age. Had not of recent years the telescope
revealed blemishes in the moon, and had not the rst new star appeared in
the supposedly changeless heavens back in 1572? Worse, are there not now
more females than males engendered?
3
Others held the theologically neater position that the original Fall was
bad enough, and no further decline was necessary. Henry Vaughan, in his
poem Corruption, for instance, wrote of Adams crime: He drew the
Curse upon the world, and Crakt / The whole frame with his Fall.
4
John
Milton said something similar in At a solemn musick, in which, under
his musical metaphor, he implicates all creatures in not only the effects
but also the cause of the Fall :
. . . till disproportiond sin
Jarrd against natures chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayd
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In rst obedience, and their state of good.
5
This was a neater position because it conformed to St Pauls contrast
between the Fall of the rst and the Atonement of the second Adam: For
as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians
15:22). And without the rst Adam, what need of a second?
Not everyone in the seventeenth century, though, was happy about
narratives of decline, whether catastrophic or continual, and Goodman
was answered by the Oxonian George Hakewill in 1627 with his Apologie
of the Power and Providence of God.
6
Hakewill replaced Goodmans
pessimistic narrative with a more lenient, optimistic vision. The world,
he said, was not in decline, and undue scepticism concerning mans access
to external reality was likewise exaggerated. Modern poets, Hakewill
declared, are as good as their ancient counterparts, and the reason why
change in the heavens has only recently become visible is because ner
instrumentation has been developed, not because change is something
new.
7
Hakewill thus restricted the consequences of the Fall to the purely
human realm, locking original sin into the moral core of the individual,
but out of mans other faculties, and out of the external world. In doing
so, he was following Francis Bacon, who had opened his Of the Procience
2 Milton and the Idea of the Fall
and Advancement of Learning (1605) with a brusque rejection of the zeale
and jealosie of [those] Diuines who taxed seekers after natural knowledge
with admonishments of the Fall of man, and of the vanity of human
knowledge.
8
The Fall, replied Bacon, affected only mans moral rectitude:
it did not alter his sensory acuity or the things his senses observed. Bacon
thought this a point important enough to repeat, opening the Instauratio
magna (1620) with the same afrmation.
9
It is not hard to see how men
such as Bacon or Hakewill found it necessary to contest the point of view
represented by Goodman. How could the new science feel condent
about the processes it sought to observe if both these processes and their
observers were irreversibly damaged?
Bacons sentiment was much repeated throughout the century. The
educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius visited England in the winter
of 16412, at which time his inuential pamphlet A Reformation of Schooles
was published. He too employed Bacons distinction, equating serpen-
tine knowledge with the wrangling of the schools, and taking issue with
the strategy of blaming the impossibility of reformation in educational
method on original sin, [a]s if the feare of the Lord ought not to be an
antidote against that corruption, which God hath so often pronounced to
be both the beginning, and the end of wisdome.
10
In 1665 Robert Hooke
prefaced his Micrographia, the rst and amboyant classic of microscopy,
with the slightly dangerous sentiment :
And as at rst, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so
we, their posterity, may be in part restord by the same way, not only by beholding
and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge . . .
11
. . . that were never yet forbidden, he hurriedly adds.
Bacon and Hakewill represent attempts to restrict but not to deny
original sin. As the century progressed, however, increasingly radical
voices were heard, especially throughout the revolutionary decades. These
denials were usually phrased in evangelical rather than epistemological
terms, but one of the arguments of this book will be that such radical
voices are not to be found simply in the obvious places the pamphlets of
the political radicals, the Ranters, Diggers, Seekers, Quakers, Behmenists,
Muggletonians and their colourful ilk. Indeed, these third culture rad-
icals actually developed complicated and on occasion mutually incompat-
ible theories about the Fall, and a later chapter will sort out some of these
strands. More importantly, radical speculation on the Genesis narrative
often emanated from socially conservative, even on occasion high-church,
quarters. Throughout the 1650s, another future bishop, Jeremy Taylor,
Introduction 3
launched a punishing campaign against the doctrine of original sin, much
to the horror of his fellow exiled Anglicans and much to the glee of his
Presbyterian adversaries. One of them, Nathaniel Stephens, wrote a book
pointing out that there was not much difference between what Taylor was
saying and the opinions of the radical Baptist and Agitator Robert
Everard.
After the Restoration, scepticism concerning the traditional under-
standing of the Fall persisted. The ecstatic texts of Thomas Traherne,
for instance, read curiously like some passages in the Quaker George Foxs
Journal. Who wrote these lines?
I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed
up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state
of Adam, which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me, and it
was showed to me how all things had their names given them according to their
nature and their virtue.
12
Blunter voices were also raised from high in the aristocracy. As Rochester
lay dying in 1680, he told Gilbert Burnet that original sin did not exist
and that the rst three Chapters of Genesis . . . could not be true, unless
they were Parables.
13
Also in these decades various gures in the early
Royal Society developed geological and palaeontological theories that at
best marginalised the events in Eden, and, in the case of Hooke, hinted at
the extreme antiquity of the Earth, thereby casting doubt on the scope
and accuracy of the Mosaic narrative of creation. Hooke and his friends
were also reading the notorious Prae-Adamitae (1655) of the Calvinist
heretic Isaac La Peyre`re, which hypothesised on biblical grounds that
men had existed for countless aeons before Adam, and that the Bible
only told of a specically Jewish creation. As Hooke wrote in his journal
in late 1675, To Martins and Garaways club: Ludowick, Hill, Aubery,
Wild. Discoursd about Universal Character, about preadamits and of
Creation.
14
The major project of this book is to investigate some of the discussions
canvassed above, particularly with reference to the writings of John
Milton, whose Paradise Lost is easily the most famous exploration of the
causes and consequences of the matter in Eden. In order to understand
the various disputes over the Fall, we need to know where these ideas
came from and how they operated in contemporary English theology and
literature. Goodmans pessimism reects the inheritance from late scho-
lastic reactionaries, and afterwards from the early Reformers, of a pre-
dominantly Augustinian theology. It was Augustine who had systematised
ideas on the Fall and original sin in the patristic period, and who,
following his disputes with Pelagius, bequeathed his harsh exegesis of
Genesis 23 to Western theology. Although, after Anselm, Augustines
ideas were somewhat softened, and further so when combined with an
Aristotelian anthropology, the early Reformers reinstated the father, and
the Calvinism which underpinned the theological dimension of the
English Reformation continued this emphasis. Consequently, the ninth
and tenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Of original or birth sin and Of
free will, are more in keeping with, say, Goodman than with Hakewill,
and these articles remained (and remain) unrevised.
Nevertheless, the Augustinianism of most sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century theologies, particularly Protestant but also Catholic, found no
real answers to certain problems Augustine himself had left unresolved.
Augustines central assumption had been that a perfect God ought to
create perfectly, leaving the glaring logical difculty that perfect beings
should not then have behaved as Genesis 23 appeared to record. August-
ine had in fact pointed this problem out, concluding in the De Genesi ad
litteram that God had not made man entirely sufcient to have stood. But
the reason for this momentous decision remained occluded and, at this
juncture, Augustine counselled that the pious should avoid further dis-
cussion. Narrative poets like Milton who disobeyed this advice were going
to have to discover and develop strategies to overcome or at least to
disguise the inherited problems.
It would be simplistic, however, to see the endorsed narrative of the
period as one only of the universal decline of belief in the Fall and original
sin. Many, if not most, groups maintained such beliefs, and after initial
rejection some (for instance the Quakers after the Restoration) even
redeveloped them.
15
Again, La Peyre`re the pre-Adamite, having wrecked
the traditional reading of Genesis 13, nevertheless found he could not
dispense with the theological importance of the rst Adam and his Fall,
and so was forced to create the device of retroimputation of original sin
backwards in time from Adam to the ancient pre-Adamite races, an idea
Marin Mersenne for one found hard to digest.
16
Indeed, original sin is a very difcult concept for any Christian to
dismantle, as a proper demolition job leaves Christ with not all that much
to do, and many, seeing that danger, turned back. As was afrmed in the
academic disputations for 1624 in Cambridge University, the incarnation
of Christ presupposes the Fall of man into sin.
17
Christs connection to
the Fall is graphically enforced by a Latin pattern-poem recorded by
Abraham Fraunce in 1588:
Introduction 5
Qu an di tri mul pa
os guis rus sti cedine uit
H san mi Chri dul la
Resolving the middle into the top and then into the bottom lines
produces the sentiment Those whom the ill-omened serpent struck with
his dire stroke / Are those whom the marvellous blood of Christ washed
with its sweetness.
18
Nevertheless, the seventeenth century did witness a
combination of critiques of the Genesis narrative and the doctrines raised
upon it that rendered Augustinian-derived understandings of the matter
in Eden increasingly problematic: the patristic scholarship of Taylor, for
instance, privileging the Eastern Church fathers for anti-Augustinian
purposes; the declarations of Hobbes, Spinoza and La Peyre`re concerning
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and their subsequent adoption
by Pe`re Richard Simon;
19
the growing conviction in some minds that the
fossil record was both of organic and very ancient origin. Such critiques
could be ignored, but they could not be undone.
part 1
Fallen culture
chapter 1
The Fall
In early-modern England, you could not escape the Fall. It was political :
if man was fallen and wayward, how should he be governed? Was the
original state of Adam as, supposedly, head and ruler of his family,
holding, by Right of Father-hood, Royal Authority over [his] children,
intrinsic justication for a patriarchalist monarchy? Was the desire of
Liberty . . . the First Cause of the Fall of Adam ?
1
Or, asked Republicans
of Patriarchalists, was Adam, created in the image of God, originally
free, and in possession of political liberty, and does this apply to his
progeny too? In 1649 Milton certainly said so: No man who knows
ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free,
being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege
above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey: and that they
livd so.
2
The Fall also had class implications: in a famous sermon preached late
in 1662, Robert South declared that it was as difcult for us now to
imagine the height of unfallen Adams intellect as it is for a Peasant bred
in the obscurities of a cottage, to fancy in his mind the unseen splendour
of a Court.
3
By contrast, Defoe later claimed that the most noble
Descendants of Adams Family, and in whom the Primogeniture
remained, were really Mechanicks .
4
Of course, Eves role as temptress secured for her daughters particular
opprobrium. As Abraham Cowley lamented:
Nay with the worst of Heathen dotage We
(Vain Men!) the Monster Woman Deie;
Finde Stars, and tye our Fates there in a Face,
And Paradice in them by whom we lost it, place.
5
Not stopping at feminine inferiority because of the Fall, most commen-
tators located such inferiority even in the state of innocence, occasionally
somewhat inadvertently, as when John Salkeld protested that Eve before
9
the Fall wasnt frightened of snakes though by nature timorous and
fearfull. Alexander Ross repeated a commonplace when he said that
Eve didnt mind being treated as inferior to Adam before the Fall : only
fallen women, presumably, resent being dominated.
6
Most trenchant was
John Knox, who insisted on feminine subjection because God by the
order of his creation hath spoiled woman of authoritie and dominion.
7
In
many discussions of the Fall, including Paradise Lost, circularity thus
ensues, where Eve is stated to be inferior to Adam before the Fall, and
is then told afterwards that this is one of her punishments, a possible cause
of the Fall thereby redened as an effect (PL 4.2959, 10.1956). The way
out of this problem, theologically, was to claim that womens inferiority is
double, deriving from both nature and sin: One of them onely was
deriued from this sinne, the other was the prerogatiue of creation.
8
Lack of any political and legal rights for women, again, was all because
of Eve. Reecting on the curse delivered to Eve in Genesis 3:16, one
lawyer explained:
See here the reason . . . that Women have no voyse in Parliament, They make no
Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood
either married or to be married and their desires or [sic] subject to their husband,
I know no remedy though some women can shift it well enough. The common
law here shaketh hands with divinity.
9
Not all women took this kind of attitude lying down. Aemilia Lanyer, for
one, devoted a section of her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to a defence of
Eve, arguing that Adam was more to blame for the Fall than Eve, who was
in her inexperience simply good.
10
Eden and what happened in it were not, however, completely shut
away in the past. The place Eden itself, though supposedly lost, intruded
on the early-modern reader as a literal, mappable location. The Geneva
Bible (1560) included such a map, deriving from the French text of
Calvins Commentary on Genesis (1553). By this point, emblematic maps
in which Eden was depicted as the centre of the Universe, with Adam,
Eve, tree and serpent observed by God looking down from the heavenly
spheres, were giving way to geographical maps. In these, emblematic
elements had been replaced by something similar to modern cartograph-
ical practice, in which a rough scale map of ancient Mesopotamia was
drawn, insinuating similarity to other geographical maps.
11
Though it might be locatable in this way, one could hardly deny that
Eden itself had disappeared, presumably as a consequence of the Flood.
But the ideal lived on, not just as a metaphor for delight, idleness,
solitariness, even death, as in Shirleys summer room, / Which may, so
oft as I repose / Present my arbour and my tomb.
12
Increasingly, and
reciprocal to the Protestant afrmation that Adam and Eve worked hard
in Eden, agricultural reform in early-modern England adopted corres-
ponding terminology, often in combination with an at rst incongruous,
rather technical vocabulary of articiall help[s]. Thus John Beale, future
FRS and current cider enthusiast, in 1657:
We do commonly devise a shadowy walk from our Gardens through our
Orchards (which is the richest, sweetest, and most embellisht grove) into our
Coppice-woods or Timber-woods. Thus we approach the resemblance of
Paradise, which God with his own perfect hand had appropriated for the delight
of his innocent Masterpiece. If a gap lyes in the way between our Orchard and
our Coppice, we ll up the vacancy with the articiall help of a hop-yard.
13
Gardening provided man with a zone that could remind him of his lot
before the Fall, and the many manuals for agricultural and horticultural
improvement combined recollection of Eden with often Messianic
expectations of salvation to come, just as biblical commentaries celebrated
the perennial pleasures and duties of gardening:
As [Adams] charge was both to dresse the garden, in planting and nourishing of
trees: in which kind of husbandrie many euen now do take a delight, and hold it
rather to be a recreation, then any wearines vnto them: as also to keepe it from
the spoile of the beasts . . . Adam was not to liue idely in Paradise, much lesse
should we spend our daies in doing of nothing.
14
Nevertheless, standing in a garden also gave opportunity for reection, as
to Ralph Austen, author of one of the most popular horticultural manuals
of the century, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees. For Austen, tending to fruit trees
allowed opportunity for lamentation and self-abasement.
15
Beales correspondent John Evelyn was one of the most enthusiastic
gardeners of the age. In the difcult days just before the Restoration,
Evelyn proposed to withdraw from the confusions of society, and found a
utopian group who would cultivate their garden: a society, he said, of
the Paradisi Cultores, persons of antient simplicity, paradisean and hortu-
lan saints . . . by whome we might hope to redeeme the tyme that has bin
lost.
16
Unfallen Eden was supposed to be a changeless environment;
Evelyn employed evergreens in his horticultural designs.
17
His fragmen-
tary Elysium Britannicum pointedly echoed Bacons line on God almighty
rst planting a garden, and elsewhere in the work Evelyn wrote with
a grammatically enforced parallelism between pre- and postlapsarian
opportunities: It was then indeede that the Protoplast onely remained
The Fall 11
happy, whilst he continued in this Paradise of God; and, truely, as no
man can be very miserable that is master of a Garden here; So no man will
ever be happy, who is not sure of a Garden hereafter.
18
In the opening
words of Evelyns Kalendarium hortense, the parallelism (with carefully
limiting brackets) is explicit:
As Paradise (though of Gods own Planting) was no longer Paradise then the Man
was put into it, to dress it and to keep it; so, nor will our Gardens (as neer as we
can contrive them to the resemblance of that blessed Abode) remain long in their
perfection, unless they are also continually cultivated.
19
At the other end of the political scale, the haberdasher and one-time
army Agitator Roger Crab decided, in about 1652, to give away all he
owned and take up the life of a hermit in his garden, where he ate
nothing but Roots, and the fruits of the Earth, and . . . fair Water, as
the press reported.
20
There he turned east, and had a vision of paradise:
Reader, this is to let the[e] understand, when I was in my Earthly
Garden, a digging with my Spade, with my face to the East side of
the Garden, I saw into the Paradise of God from whence my Father
Adam was cast forth . . .
21
Such partial re-enactments of paradisal behaviour appeared in many
different places. Augustines autobiographical Confessiones had instigated
this trend with the fathers anecdote about his youthful sins, including
stealing fruit from someone elses pear tree, merely because we would doe
that which was not lawfull. Likewise, in his partially imitative autobiog-
raphy, Richard Baxter recalled how to concur with naughty Boys that
gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other mens Orchards, and stoln their
Fruit, when I had enough at home (Baxter later recounts how he was
abused in the streets of Kidderminster for preaching infant damnation as
a consequence of the Fall).
22
Cowley, in his remarkable ode on the Royal
Society, celebrated Bacon, in an inversion of the traditional ethical
signatures of the Eden narrative, as a marauding orchard-robber:
With the plain magique of tru Reasons Light,
He chacd out of our sight,
Nor sufferd Living Men to be misled
By the vain shadows of the Dead:
To Graves, from whence it rose, the conquerd Phantome ed;
He broke that Monstrous God which stood
In midst of thOrchard, and the whole did claim,
Which with a useless Sith of Wood,
And something else not worth a name,
(Both vast for shew, yet neither t
Or to defend, or to Beget;
Ridiculous and senceless Terrors!) made
Children and superstitious Men afraid.
The Orchards open now, and free;
Bacon has broke that Scar-crow Deitie;
Come, enter, all that will,
Behold the ripned Fruit, come gather now your Fill.
23
Less salubrious gures than Bacon were again reported as copying, in
various ways, Adam and his conduct. From 1641 the Adamites reappeared
heretics from the patristic era who had had isolated revivals over the
centuries on the continent. These were restaged in Long-Parliament
London in a string of part heresiographic, part pornographic accounts,
often accompanied by lurid woodcuts of naked gatherings. As one
London Adamite says, I am the Sonne of Adam, who begot me in his
innocencie: I follow his steps before he fell : that is, I am an Adamite.
24
Although these pamphlets were clearly spurious, some early Quakers
notoriously paraded naked as a sign, often just for prophetic force, but
occasionally with explicit Edenic reference. One Quaker couple toured
the north under the names of Adam and Eve.
25
Sudden stripping also
happened in sensitive places: in 1652 one female Quaker started stripping
off during a sermon given by Peter Sterry, an event which attracted a good
deal of coverage.
26
When the popular presses turned their attention to the
Ranter phenomenon from 1649, they recycled various of the Adamite
woodcuts, with minor alterations. Thus the Adamite speech-bubble
Downe lust becomes Behold these are Ranters.
27
John Robins, a fanatic who sprang into prominence in 16512 and who,
according to the press, said That he was God Almighty, apparently also
stated that he was the third Adam, one better than Christ. His opponent
John Reeve claimed that Robins disciples ate only apples and water, and
that some thereby died. Robins, never shy of self-publicity, had also said
that he was the rst Adam in state, and that Christ was a weak and
imperfect Saviour, and afraid to dy, but [Robins] was not afraid to dy.
28
Another spurious anecdote about certain Quakers was related by
William Kaye and then popularised by the stationer and heresiographer
Thomas Underhill. Kaye had visited these Quakers in jail where he heard
that their Conscience telling them that they were to destroy original sin,
[they] did therefore, in obedience to the lights thats in them . . . sacrise
or kill their own mother.
29
This shades into the territory of the joke, and
in a related vein the mischievous Republican Henry Neville, in his series
of pamphlets depicting female parliaments, had the assembled ladies
The Fall 13
panicking that the end of the world was nigh in April 1647, because Adam
and Eve were seen both in one person, and whereas Eue was once taken
out of Adam, Adam was now seen strut[t]ing out of Eue. Later on in the
century, Neville was to write an internationally successful hoax, The Isle of
Pines (1668), in which a sophisticated critique of patriarchalism was
undertaken via a rewrite of the Genesis narrative, set on a distant desert
island. Despite or arguably because of its clear structural afnity with
Genesis, it was taken by some as fact: shortly after publication Louis
XIVs secretary Henri Justel wrote to Henry Oldenburg, one of the
Royal Societys two secretaries, to conrm that The Isle of Pines was real,
and with his recommendations about how its inhabitants should be
treated, living as they did untroubled by lawyers, quacks and theologians.
Oldenburg had to disabuse him; Justel was not pleased.
30
This selection of anecdotes introduces us to the variety and extent of
talk about the matter in Eden and its consequences. Next, though, we
need to understand the theological underpinning that created this envir-
onment in which the Fall and original sin were so important. This will
involve phrasing the problem in early-modern terms, and then, in the
next chapter, exploring its theological origins in patristic thought,
following its course in outline up to the age of Milton. First, then, we
need to understand the concept and the problems of the Fall, and what
kinds of decisions can be taken about these problems.
Western monotheistic Christianity or any other monotheistic reli-
gion that holds God to be both benevolent and omniscient has a basic
problem: in Boethius well-known formulation, si quidem deus est, unde
mala? bona vere unde, si non est ? [if ] there be a God, from whence
proceed so many euils? and if there be no God, from whence commeth
any good?
31
It is the rst of these questions that necessitates the device of
the Fall, a story to explain why evil and the God of love coexist. In
Aristotelian thought the propensity of man to err was discussed simply in
terms of inherent weaknesses: kakia (vice), acrasia (unrestraint) and
theriotes (bestiality) are properties of man, and not, moreover, properties
that require theological justication.
32
In Judaeo-Christian terms, however,
justication was sought, and in narrative form: the question was now
phrased in terms of historical happenings, and not explained as a timeless
property of man. Presuming God to be an unchanging good, and
accepting the real existence of evil in the world, such evil had to have
been caused by man, and caused, so readers conditioned by the primarily
historical genres of the Old Testament naturally assumed, by a specic
man or men at a specic time.
One early attempt to identify a plausible Fall story in the early Old
Testament latched onto the account in Genesis 6:2 . . . the sons of God
saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of
all which they chose, causing hybrid offspring. At least two early-modern
English readers reinterpreted this section of the Old Testament as imply-
ing the existence of two genetically distinct strands of humanity, an
Adamite and a pre-Adamite branch: that the Sons of Adam of the second
Creation, saw the Daughters of the Men of the rst Creation that they
were fair, and married them.
33
Such an interpretation, of course, was rare,
and the use of Genesis 6 itself as a Fall narrative had been rejected in the
Jewish literature of the immediately pre-Christian centuries in favour of
the now familiar tale of Adam and Eve, naked in Eden.
34
The point is that
neither Genesis 6 nor Genesis 23 was designed to house an aetiology for
universal sinfulness; and attempts to found such a doctrine on either
section of Genesis are posterior, and hence likely to encounter certain
problems of t.
Concentration on Genesis 23, though, in equating the problem of evil
with the creation and subsequent behaviour of the two rst people, had
one stark problem and one stark advantage. The advantage was that the
problem of evil was thus more obviously concentrated on purely human
agents, without the problematic inuence of marauding angels, although
the role of the serpent, subsequently interpreted as Satan, qualies this
advantage. It also cleared the stage: Genesis 23 is much more explicit
about what two humans did and said than Genesis 6 with its vague
daughters of men. Again, the Flood following Genesis 6 was supposed
to have wiped out the monstrous brood of the humanangelic marriages,
hence eradicating that recension of original sin, and so Genesis 6 fails to
solve the problem of whence current original sin derives. The disadvan-
tage of privileging Genesis 3 was that it associated questions concerning
the origin of evil with questions concerning the status of creation itself.
Making creation and Fall contiguous makes one wonder whether man
was made fallible, and if so, why?
So, if we accept the axioms of an omniscient and benevolent God and
the fact of a fall of some kind in Eden, we have a number of choices we
must make concerning our estimation of the status of unfallen man: and
almost all early-modern discussions are conditioned by where they locate
themselves in relation to this choice. Either we imagine that Adam and
Eve were created perfect, or we imagine that they were created imperfect.
If we choose the former version, we will be likely to regard the Fall as a
plunge from heights to depths, a catastrophe severing the realm of
The Fall 15
perfection from the realm of the fallen, a cosmic disaster. If we stress the
latter, we will take a more lenient view of the matter in Eden, saying that
man maybe is not so different after the Fall from what he was before it;
that man was made to fall, and that, trusting in the inscrutable wisdom of
God, we ought not to worry about it too much.
35
We may even take
Genesis literally and celebrate a paradoxical promotion, for does not God
admit at Genesis 3:22, Behold, the man is become as one of us to know
good and evil ? Perhaps the forbidden fruit did contain real wisdom. And
with this suspicion that the Fall may be no such thing, a third way of
thinking is generated out of the second, a tendency to query what this god
was doing making prohibitions at all, if our gain was for our good. We
may even nd ourselves regarding this botching demiurge of vain prohib-
itions as a jealous tyrant, though that is of course an almost impossible
admission in this period.
So from the two initial options spring three tendencies, which appear
mutually exclusive. The rst two agree that God is good but disagree
about the perfection of his creation. The second and third versions
identify creation as imperfect but make opposing estimations of the moral
status of the creator. The third position exists as the shadowy antithesis to
the rst but in Christian literature for obvious reasons its inuence is felt
as a threat rather than as a positive thesis. The rst position, historically, is
associated with the Western Church and its Latin fathers, particularly
Augustine (354430). Later, after a period of the modication of Augus-
tinianism, certain reactionary movements in late scholasticism, especially
Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) and the schola Augustiniana moderna,
reinstated the fathers original gloom. Gregorys admirers, with respect
to his patristic commitment, called him the Doctor authenticus ; his
opponents called him the Tortor infantium, the torturer of children,
reecting his Augustinian insistence that unbaptised babies, tainted as
they are with original sin, go to hell.
36
Next, with the advent of the
Reformation, the Augustinian understanding of the Fall assumed theo-
logical centrality, especially in the Calvinist inection so inuential in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
The second tendency, less ambitious in its initial estimation of and thus
more lenient in judgement on the rst man and woman, was developed in
the Eastern Church by the Greek fathers, most inuentially in the
writings of Irenaeus (c. 140c. 200), who in his maturity came west to
become the bishop of Lyons. Although this version of the Fall became the
heterodoxy in Augustinian Europe, its logical force persisted, and indeed
certain German Spirituals, particularly Sebastian Franck, resurrected the
Irenaean interpretation as part of their anti-Lutheran theologies. This
tradition had an important inuence in England in the radical decades,
as we shall see. Other important carriers were Socinians, who, in seeking
to limit the status of Christ, limited the extent of the Fall and the initial
grandeur of man. Consequently, they made Adam a rude unwritten
Blanck or an idiot, as South and Milton respectively complained.
37
As
Socinus said, Whatever Divines dispute about Original Sin, it is all of it
clearly to be reckond as the mere invention and forgery of humane wit ;
original sin was a Jewish Fable, and brought into the Church from
Antichrist.
38
Stephen Nye, the Socinian controversialist and rst English
historian of the sect, wrote that to say that God imputes sin to us and then
damns us for it is to draw the just Character of an Almighty Devil. For if
the Devil had Supream Power, what worse could he do[?]
39
One need not be a conscious heretic to slip into thinking about newly
made Adam in child-like terms, however. The characterist John Earle in
his Micro-cosmography (1628), for instance, wrote that A Childe . . . Is a
Man in a small Letter, yet the best Copie of Adam before hee tasted of
Eue or the Apple . . . His Soule is yet a white paper vnscribled with
obseruations of the world, wherewith it becomes a blurrd Note-booke.
40
Francis Osborne, an old atheistical courtier who wrote an Oxford
student best-seller, Advice to a Son, also essayed A Contemplation on
Adams Fall. This idiosyncratic piece sought to excuse Adam and Eve or
at least lessen their culpability in various ways. Adam was no better
furnished with Knowledge than an Infant in his Primitive Innocencie, said
Osborne, which is why he desired more. Osborne also suggested that
Adams naming of the beasts constituted a prophecy of the Fall, as his
etymologies were suitable to the sinful Use [which] was after to be made
of them. Eve is less to blame than Adam because while she did try to shift
some responsibility onto the serpent, at least after the Fall she didnt have
the cheek to remind God, as Adam did, just who was responsible for
having created such fallible beings.
41
Others simply rejected the Fall altogether. William Rabisha, the mys-
terious soldier-preacher-cook, wrote that Adam was in his own nature
one and the same for ever; for he was made of the earth earthly.
42
More
socially conservative gures like Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Traherne
went back directly to Greek patristics, part of the general resurgence of
interest in the Greek fathers as a complement to the Augustinianism of
the schools.
The nal, highly subversive reaction to the narrative of the Fall to call
God bad is almost invisible in the early-modern period, but any
The Fall 17
educated person would recognise it as a tenet of the patristic heresy of
Gnosticism. Most Gnostic writings remained undiscovered in the
seventeenth century, but Gnostic beliefs had been recorded and refuted
principally by Irenaeus and Epiphanius, although material was also avail-
able from Tertullian, Augustine, Philastrius of Brescia and Theodoret of
Cyrus.
Accounts of the Gnostics also ltered through vernacular Church
histories. One Civil War yellow-press heresiographer, for instance, man-
aged to list a bewildering number of impossible Cavalier sects supposed
to be stalking the streets of 1640s London: joining Jesuits and Arminians,
there were Adamites, Minanders, Ebionites, Corinthuses, Nicholitains,
Marcions, Encraticae, Valentinians thirty-three groups altogether. Many
of these sects were (mis)named after Gnostic sects, and the anonymous
writer has simply lifted most of the names from Patrick Simsons Historie
of the Church, the third book of which listed with thumb-nail biographies
the principal heretics from Simon Magus to the Pope.
43
An important
semi-Gnostic text was translated and published by John Everard in 1649
the Corpus hermeticum. Isaac Casaubons now celebrated philological
demolition of its supposed antiquity comprised merely an incidental few
pages of his 1614 De rebus sacris, and so Everard could still announce
untroubled over three decades later that the Corpus hermeticum was
written some hundreds of yeers before Moses his time.
44
The Corpus hermeticum contained a disturbing kind of Fall narrative, a
cataclysm in the primal heaven itself:
But after a little while, there was a darkness made in part, coming down
obliquely, fearful and hideous, which seemed unto me to be changed into a
certain moyst nature, unspeakably troubled, which yielded a smoke as from re;
and from whence proceeded a voyce unutterable, and very mournful, but
inarticulate, insomuch that it seemed to have come from the Light.
45
Two years later, Thomas Totney, writing under the prophetic name of
Theauraujohn Tany, pushed back the Fall to the point of creation itself :
Know the fall is being created, for when we were not created, and
uncome forth, we were as he is, that is in perfection.
46
This Gnostic
tradition, then, was visible in seventeenth-century England, although as
with the Irenaean tendency it exerted inuence not so much as a wit-
nessed belief as a set of possible thoughts, both preserved and occurring in
often quite different milieux.
These tendencies were not nearly as distinct as they might seem. The
connection between the Irenaean and Gnostic models was pointed out by
orthodox theologians. Thus the Utrecht theologian Saldenus, commenting
on the supposed properties of the forbidden tree, wrote:
It is said to be of the species tree, which sufces, but it is also said to be a tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. By which appellation in no sense is there placed
any efcacy or power in the tree itself for engendering or multiplying wisdom,
such as many of the ancient writers supposed and as the Socinians would have it
today. Upon which error, doubtless, was the madness of the Ophites [a Gnostic
sect] founded, who once held in veneration the serpent-seducer above all others
because of its deeds, by which men were led to taste of the tree, and thereby to
gain knowledge of good and evil, which before they did not have. No indeed,
they went further, and put the serpent in place of Christ, or what is even worse,
blasphemed that Christ was actually changed into it.
47
But the dominant tradition, with its stark logic of perfect God, perfect
creation, itself had some necessary kinship with its subversive counter-
parts, a kinship driven by the difculty of constructing a convincing
narrative out of the Augustinian position. If man was created perfect, he
would not fall. Because he did, elements of imperfection, whether phrased
in metaphysical terms of the inherent instability of matter or in psycho-
sexual terms of Adam unable to resist Eve, had to be admitted. Narrative
explorations of the event of the Fall almost always noticed this problem.
The Quaker Isaac Penington the Younger adopted the metaphysical tack:
Nothing can act above its nature. Adam when he fell, shewed the
weakness of his nature, The Prince of this World came and found some-
what in him to fasten upon. Frailty is a property of the esh. Weakness is
proper to the earthly image, as strength to the heavenly.
48
The problem with the narrative attack on the conventional understand-
ing of the Fall was simply that it failed as theodicy. Dogma could not really
explain easily how man got from one side of the Fall to the other, but its
principles were secure: God remained good, axiomatically so. The objec-
tion that some frailty was needed was designed to explain how man got
from one side to the other, but it was obviously awed in terms of
explaining why rather than how this had taken place. As Stephens retorted
to Everard, scepticism concerning the original splendour of Adam to my
understanding doth cast a blurre upon the Creator himselfe.
49
So a certain
clandestine reciprocity between these models is needed in practice, as what
the one lacks, the other supplies. And if the conventional tendency re-
quired, at some point, elements of the second, it therefore might nd itself
closer on occasion to the third, Gnostic, tendency, than it had imagined.
This is partly a question of genre. The Reformed understanding of the
Fall and of original sin was dogmatic, and dogmatically disseminated. The
The Fall 19
paradigm is the catechism, designed to be repeated by children until it is
mechanically known and perhaps mechanically believed. It has no need of
narrative sophistication. Edward Eltons popular A Forme of Catechizing,
typical of such texts, managed the process of the Fall in three questions and
answers.
50
Catechisms, understandably, emphasised effects, not causes:
The woman deceiued by the deuill, perswaded the man to taste the forbidden
fruite, which thing made them both forthwith subiect to death. And that
heauenly image according to which he was rst created, being defaced, in place
of wisdome, strength, holinesse, truth and righteousnesse, the iewelles wherewith
God had adorned him, there succeded the most horrible plages, blindnesse,
weaknesse, vaine lying, and unrighteousness, in which euils and miseries he also
wrapped and ouerwhelmed his issue and all his posteritie.
51
Despite the impeccable orthodoxy of such statements, many of the
constituent components were not deducible from Genesis, which does
not state that the serpent is the devil, fails to explain why Adam and Eve
do not die upon eating the fruit, has nothing to say about the effects of the
transgression on Adams posterity, and does not specify its causal role in
terms of subsequent diseases and sins. Indeed, as we saw, God says in
Genesis 3:22 not that blindnesse was the result of the Fall but that Adam
and Eves eyes were opened, and they had become as gods themselves.
In response to this troubling statement, orthodox commentators, in a
moment of pure doctrinal imperative, glossed this verse as spoken ironic-
ally. Gregory of Rimini thought it proof that God could lie.
52
Luther said
that it was a sarcasm and bitter derision ; vernacular commentators
followed suit: vttered ironice, by way of derision ; a bitter mock. The
Geneva Bible marginalium is derision. In this way, God becomes the
rst person to joke in the Bible, and it is a grisly joke.
53
On the other hand, it is not as simple as saying that catechism
represents one extreme, and epic, say, the other: credal versus experi-
mental forms, to adapt familiar terms from a different argument in this
period.
54
Rather, writing about the Fall traverses the spectrum between
such extremes, and single texts can include diverse hues. Miltons Paradise
Lost, for instance, contains sections of more dogmatic material, and then
sections where such dogma is tried out.
If these three tendencies, then, have certain interdependences, it is
nonetheless true that the Augustinian strand was dominant in seven-
teenth-century England, though under increasing pressure. First, then,
the history and structure of the Augustinian Fall must be delineated, and
its inherent tensions revealed.
chapter 2
Augustinianism
AUGUSTI NE
Let us admit, wrote Voltaire on original sin, that Saint Augustine was
the rst to authorise this strange idea, worthy of the ery and romantic
head of a debauched and repentant African, Manichaean and Christian,
indulgent and persecuted, who spent his life contradicting himself.
1
Augustine also incurred the wit of Gibbon, who brilliantly described
the Western Churchs adoption of the fathers teachings as conducted
with public applause and secret reluctance.
2
Such enlightened scorn was not the dominant tone of the age. The rst
full English translation of the City of God appeared in 1610 with the
inuential annotations of Juan Luis Vives (14921540), featuring on its
title page a picture of the Sun dispersing its rays with the motto SIC
AVGVSTINVS DISSIPABIT Thus will Augustine spread abroad. The
continental Reformation itself had been intellectually established on the
re-editing of Augustine, particularly the later Augustine. As Luther wrote
in May 1517, Our theology and St Augustine are progressing well . . .
Aristotle is gradually falling from his throne.
3
In 1506 Amerbach pub-
lished his landmark eleven-volume edition of Augustine at Basel, where
Erasmus, who had earlier persuaded Vives to write his commentary on the
City of God, produced his own edition of the father in 15289. The other
major edition of Augustine prior to the celebrated Maurist edition of
16791700 was the one prepared by the Louvain theologians and printed
at Antwerp in 15767.
English vernacular consciousness of Augustine was well-served, though
it is notable that publication of translations of Augustine somewhat
petered out as the seventeenth century progressed. Various sermons and
tracts appeared throughout the sixteenth century, particularly during the
reforming years of Edwards reign, but the major works only appeared in
the rst half of the seventeenth century. We have seen that the City of God
21
was published in 1610; the Enchiridion had appeared three years previ-
ously, and the Confessions were translated rst by the Roman Catholic Sir
Tobie Matthew in 1620 and published at Saint Omer, prompting William
Watts 1631 Protestant effort, with the marginall notes of a former Popish
translation, answered, as its title page advertised. The early moderns,
though, possessed no complete printed translations of either The Trinity,
or, of more relevance here, the mature Literal Commentary on Genesis, but
access to Latin editions of these and other works was not problematic, and
Augustines later thought on the Fall could easily be extracted from the
middle books of the City of God. Reformed teaching was in any case
largely based upon Augustinian sources, and the brand of Calvinism
that reached England in the sixteenth century, particularly through the
mediation of Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr and Theodore Beza, had a
recognisably Augustinian attitude to the Fall.
In keeping with his own intellectual biography, Augustines ideas on
the Fall were not static, but evolved over his prolic career. Pelagius, for
instance, could even quote the young Augustine against the old Augustine
on the freedom of the will.
4
For our purposes, the sites of most import-
ance occur in the Literal Commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram,
hereafter LC; composed 40114), and the central books of the City of God
(De civitate Dei, hereafter CG; these books composed 41720), later
distilled in the Enchiridion (hereafter E; composed 4212).
5
The late
anti-Pelagian works necessarily engage with Genesis, and Augustine also
left various earlier commentaries, nished and unnished, on Genesis.
Augustines mature thought was shaped by controversy, with specic
reference to the British monk Pelagius, and various other Pelagian or
semi-Pelagian theologians, notably Julian of Aeclanum. Pelagius had a
reputation for asceticism though Jerome did say that he was stuffed with
Scottish porridge and in early fth-century Rome he popularised the
notion that man was able of his own free will to perfect himself. This,
though, required Pelagius to reject the Fall, or at least its consequences,
which he enthusiastically did. Commenting on the crucial verse Romans
5:12 . . .as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and
so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned Pelagius insisted
that Adams Fall applied to his posterity merely as an example or pattern.
Hereditary transmission of original sin and the guilt associated with
it were mere doctrinal ctions.
6
This was the position against which
Augustine had to dene his views on the origin and effects of sin.
There were various prior exegeses of Genesis, often allegorically tinged,
on which Augustine could draw. We mentioned in the last chapter the
Greek tradition represented in the West by Irenaeus, who wrote of Adam
in innocence: man was a child, not yet having his understanding per-
fected; wherefore he was easily led astray by the deceiver.
7
But in the
West the greatest inuences on Augustine were Tertullian, the African
jurist-turned-Christian apologist, and the so-called Ambrosiaster, com-
mentator on Paul. Tertullian and Ambrosiaster both emphasised the
literal truth of the events of Genesis 23, and the ensuing depravity of
man, which must therefore be transmitted from parent to child as a
seminal toxin. Ambrosiaster, commenting on Romans 5:12, which ends,
in the Authorised Versions translation of the Greek construction, . . . for
that all have sinned, used instead the Old Latin Bible, which read in quo
omnes peccaverunt, in whom [i.e. Adam] all have sinned (my italics).
This reading, also preserved in the Vulgate, is nevertheless a mistrans-
lation of the Greek eph from epi, inasmuch, because. What had been a
statement connecting death and sin in a causally ambiguous fashion
became the statement that all had sinned in Adam, the fulcrum text for
those who wished to argue for the biological transmission of original sin
(traducianism), or for the seminal presence of all mankind in Adams
loins. This did not mean, however, that pointing out the error disposed of
the doctrine, as ethical convictions are based on deeper foundations than
chance mistranslations.
8
Augustine, for instance, would later argue for the
seminal identity of all mankind in Adam on the reasoning that while
Adam was made from the dust, which is something different from esh,
all his progeny were made from esh, and therefore all creation was in
Adam (CG 13.3).
Augustines own ideas follow closely the writings of Tertullian and
Ambrosiaster. He insisted that Genesis 23 must be understood as literally
having happened, though amenable to allegorical readings, of which
Augustine produced at least two, the early Allegorical Commentary on
Genesis and the last books of the Confessions. But the literal truth had to
be preserved, especially as, for Augustine, in order for the prophetic,
typological elements of the Old Testament to be instances of Gods design
in history, they had to be located within a fabric of entirely real happen-
ings. In this way, paradoxically, Augustine promoted all Old Testament
narrative to the level of fact while simultaneously subordinating it to the
gural structures for which such facts serve as material.
9
Augustines emphasis on the literal truth of Genesis also reects his
rejection of moments in his earlier writings in which he had speculated
about the Fall in terms of a Plotinian fall-into-esh.
10
Again following
Tertullian and Ambrosiaster, Augustine stressed the disaster of the Fall
Augustinianism 23
and all humanitys implication in it. His mature thinking, though, is a
complex of various movements, and although his understanding of the
Fall is bleak, he did not, pace Voltaire, simply invent the doctrine, nor is
the texture of his argumentation merely dogmatic. Indeed, Augustine
deliberately thinks his way through some dangerous areas using a
mixture of narrative and dogmatic approaches, and the result is a kind
of laboratory of thought-in-process rather than a credal digest.
Augustines Adam and Eve are mature, tranquil gures, untroubled by
any adverse mental or physical motions. Adam, had the occasion arisen,
would have masterfully controlled his erections, and he and Eve would
have coupled lustlessly (Augustine then closes off this line of thought by
asserting that they fell before they had consummated their marriage; CD
14.26).
11
Because God brought the beasts to Adam for him to name, so
Augustine told Julian, Adam must have been possessed of the greatest of
intelligence.
12
Before the Fall the rst humans suffered from no emotional
disturbance or perturbatio, and there was no depressing gloom at all, no
unreal gaiety to trouble their steady thoughts (CD 14.10, 26). In such
stasis did they live, in an environment that nonetheless seemed to have
been designed for temptation, with its forbidden and unforbidden trees.
Importantly, this vision of prelapsarian tranquillity was to underpin a
widespread discussion on the origin and governance of emotional disturb-
ance the early-modern theory of the passions. The current mental
turmoil suffered by all men was traced explicitly to the Fall, and dened
in opposition to the state of affairs that had obtained before this calamity
for mental equilibrium. As J. F. Senault wrote, deriving his authority
from Augustine, In this happy estate the soul commanded with mildness,
the body obeyed with delight, and whatsoever object presented it self,
these two parties did alwaies agree.
13
Another writer on the passions
pointed out that had Adam not fallen all his posterity would possess
equal ability to apprehend the mysteries of Nature, and the phenomenon
of relative intelligence would not be.
14
Such uncompromising elevation of Adam and Eve led Norman Powell
Williams to present Augustine as the extreme manifestation of the ten-
dency to exalt Adam and Eve in their rst creation. But, as J. M. Evans
suggested, Augustines thought is slightly more nuanced.
15
Even despite
the logical impossibility of ultimate exaltation Adam and Eve would
then be indistinguishable from God and no creation would have taken
place Augustine is careful to stress the conditional nature of Adam
and Eves prelapsarian state. First, they were not created constitutionally
free from death but only conditionally so (CD 13.1). This distinction
Augustine dened in the Literal Commentary and the Enchiridion as the
difference between the angelic state of non posse mori, not being able to
die, and the unfallen human posse non mori, able not to die (LC 6.25.36, E
28.105). They can will good, but they can also will evil (E 28.105). In this
way, they are suspended in a position halfway between the angels and the
beasts:
For he [God] created mans nature to be midway, so to speak, between the angels
and the beasts in such a way that, if he should remain in subjection to his creator
as his true Lord and with dutiful obedience keep his commandment, he was to
pass into the company of the angels, obtaining with no intervening death a
blissful immortality that has no limit; but if he should make proud and
disobedient use of his free will and go counter to the Lord his God, he was to live
like a beast, at the mercy of death, and enthralled by lust and doomed to eternal
punishment after death. (CG 12.22)
This was a classic, much repeated sentiment, but Augustine perhaps
derived it from the Eastern father Theophilus, the second-century bishop
of Antioch, who had used the same distinction in his own early discussion
of the Fall. Theophilus puts the problem in a nutshell : [f]or if God had
made him [Adam] immortal from the beginning, he would have made
him God. Again, if he had made him mortal, it would seem that God
was responsible for his death. So God created him in an intermediate
state.
16
The ambiguity of this middling man model, though, is obvious when
one compares Theophilus idea of middling with that of Augustine:
Theophilus quite explicitly says that Adam was forbidden the fruit of
knowledge because he was a child and so not yet ready for it, whereas
Augustine emphasised Adams maturity.
17
The tendency of the Augustin-
ian usage to slip towards the Theophilan is seen in the seventeenth
century in phrases such as Raphaels to Adam in Miltons Paradise Lost
that God made thee perfet, not immutable (PL 5.524), a direct quotation
from at least William Perkins; and the whole matter was laconically
summarised by the Calvinist commentator Zacharias Ursinus, who noted
the equivocation and ambiguitie in the word Perfect.
18
Augustine, then, develops a qualied position in which mere perfection
is shaded into something more conditional. In the Literal Commentary he
adds, I do not think that a man would have deserved great praise if he had
been able to live a good life for the simple reason that nobody tempted
him to live a bad one (LC 11.4.6). Nevertheless he does not qualify the
consequences of the Fall. We all fell in Adam, and even though we did
not yet have individually created and apportioned shapes in which to live
Augustinianism 25
as individuals; what already existed was the seminal substance from which
we were to be generated (CG 13.14). This makes us guilty: whatever
should spring from their stock was also to be held liable to the same
penalty (CG 13.3). We are lucky God hasnt damned the whole lot of us as
a result, and he would have been perfectly just to do so (E 25.99).
So much for Augustines understanding of man before and after the
Fall ; how, then, does man get across the Fall ? In the Literal Commentary,
Augustine had proposed two types of knowing evil : through knowledge of
good, and through experience (LC 8.14.31). Adam and Eve unfallen
possessed the former, and fallen, the latter. For the Augustine of this
work, evil can be known innocently by contemplating and avoiding the
inverse of good. It is noteworthy that this argument does not appear in the
corresponding discussion in the City of God. There, as we saw, innocence
relies on not feeling perturbatio. This is, however, a different approach to
evil from that adopted in the Literal Commentary, where the mental
barrier between pre- and postlapsarian states is akin to the difference
between a doctor knowing a disease and a patient contracting it. The
contemplative knowledge of evil is supplanted in the City of God by a kind
of insulation from knowledge of evil. Granted, the ideas of knowledge per
prudentiam boni and a lack of perturbatio are not strictly incompatible,
but the emphasis has shifted. In the City of God the unfallen mind is both
a more static and a more implicitly frail original, with fewer testing
experiences allowed near it. While Augustine asserts the tranquillity of
unfallen man, he also makes unfallen man more distant and unratiocina-
tive, dened as innocent primarily by his lack of perturbation rather than
by his doctorly knowledge of the ills one must avoid.
Hence the old narrative problem is exacerbated: how can Eve desire a
fruit unlawfully without feeling perturbation? How can Adam assent to
Eve? There must have been a fall, perhaps some falls, before the Fall. The
per prudentiam boni/per experientiam distinction had the advantage of
giving a clearly delineated Fall. At the point at which one becomes the
other, the apple is taken. But recourse to perturbatio is at once more
psychologically persuasive and less denite, replacing a vertical line separ-
ating two states with a zone of indeterminacy. The public act is now
preceded by the private transgression.
Augustine meets this problem, and in 14.1113 of the City of God he
accepts the consequence that the hard typological, single Fall must be
replaced with a more protracted phenomenon: in Adams transgression
the evil act was preceded by an evil will. Voluntas has to come before
opus : the evil act could not have been arrived at if an evil will had not
gone before (14.13). Otherwise the Fall would be mere puppetry. Yet the
bifurcation of the old Fall produces two different kinds of fall : a public,
easily locatable fall, and a secret, occluded fall.
At this point in the argument of the City of God Augustine could have
introduced into his discussion of the causation of the Fall the character of
Satan in the serpent, as the agent or at least external (procatarctic, in the
terms of early-modern logic) cause of the rst, shadowy fall of the human
mind.
19
Yet Augustine chooses not to do this, accepting that a tempter
needs temptable subjects. Thus, Eve had already experienced the rst
fall when the serpent approached her, and likewise Adam when Eve
approached him:
Now this rst falling away is voluntary [spontaneus], for if the will had remained
steadfast in love of the higher unchangeable good that provided it with re to
love, it would not have been diverted from this love to follow its own pleasure.
Nor would the will in consequence have grown so dark and cold as to allow
either the rst woman to believe that the serpent had spoken the truth or the rst
man to place his wifes will before Gods injunction. (14.13)
Augustine then repeats this remarkable conclusion: the evil act was
committed only by those who were already evil. This rst evil happened
in occulto: in secret they began to be evil, and this enabled them to fall
into open disobedience (14.13).
What is the relation between these two falls? Augustine now betrays
slight unease:
In short, the fall that takes place in secret preceded the fall that takes place in full
view, but the former fall is not to be regarded as such. For who considers
exaltation a fall, though there is already present in it the lapse whereby the Most
High is deserted? On the other hand, who could fail to see that there is a fall
when a manifest and unquestionable transgression of some command takes
place? (14.13)
Nevertheless it is hard to see why from Gods omniscient point of view
the second of these falls is any more signicant than the rst. If God had
to decide on one, surely the fall of the will would be a better choice than
the apple-taking? Although Augustine feels the need to reafrm the
physical transgression, he has by this point dissolved the typological
outlines with which he had started, and replaced them with an indeter-
minate expanse, stretched between a visible terminus ad quem and an
invisible, potentially recursive terminus a quo. Did Adam and Eve fall
together? How soon after creation did they fall ? Were their wills un-
troubled at any point excepting the instant of their creation? What would
Augustinianism 27
have happened if their wills fell but they thought better of taking the
apple? Could they fall off from grace and then repair themselves? These
are the kinds of questions for which Augustine does not provide answers,
although other generic contexts will render them insistent.
Instead Augustine seeks to curtail discussion of such issues, and he
employs a number of different devices to this end. Although he empha-
sises that it is the act of turning, not the object to which one turns, that is
bad the lapse is not to what is bad, the lapse is bad (12.7) he can also
on occasion attempt to reunite turning and the object turned to, the
private and the public fall. Meditating on Matthew 7:1718 (Even so
every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth
forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a
corrupt tree bring forth good fruit), Augustine encourages us to see the
evil will of the fall in occulto as itself the fruit. It is a complex manoeuvre,
but, following the logic of the thought, the apple thus becomes a meton-
ymy for itself being taken: the will itself, or man himself in so far as he
was possessed of an evil will, was the evil tree, as it were, that bore the evil
fruit that those works represented (14.11). If this were to be illustrated
graphically, a hand is reaching for a fruit, which fruit is itself a hand
reaching for another fruit, which in turn repeats the action, and so on. But
contact is never made. Augustines attempt to equate the will with its
object by means of visual metaphor evasively freezes the causality of
paradise into a tableau of incompletion.
This is because Augustine cannot admit a positive will to transgress as
that would grant evil a positive existence, and on Augustines Neoplatonic
understanding evil is not a thing at all ; it is the absence of good, literally no-
thing: For evil has in itself no substance; rather the loss of what is good has
received the name evil (11.9). Such a model has the advantage that it
overcomes the objections of the Gnostics or the Manichees, who held that
there were two positive principles at work in the world, one good and the
other evil, and that matter was the realm of the evil principle (11.13, 22). As
Augustine says, good can exist on its own God but evil cannot (12.3). To
interpret evil as a real thing is simply a linguistic move in Augustines
metaphors, it is like trying to see darkness or to hear silence (12.7).
The privative theory of evil is open to the criticism that in Aristotelian
terms it provides no efcient cause for evil, and Augustine deals with this
problem in his discussion of Lucifer. Aristotle, in the third chapter of the
second book of the Physics, had enumerated the four causes that exhaust
causality: formal, material, efcient and nal (an apple is made to the
form of an apple, out of vegetable substance, by the tree from which it
derives, for people to eat). In Augustinian terms, formal and material
categories do not apply to sin, and the nal cause must always be for the
greater glory of God; as Augustine says, at the very moment when God
created the devil, although in his own goodness he created him good, he
had already through his own foreknowledge prepared a way to use him
even after he became bad (11.17).
Augustine is left with the efcient cause of the evil will which
Augustine then rejects. His reasoning is noteworthy. Augustine, discuss-
ing the rst sin, admits that an evil will must be the efcient cause of an
evil deed, and as we saw he will later use this decision to bifurcate the next
fall, the Fall in Eden. But when one asks for the efcient cause of the evil
will, no answer is found, because nothing is the efcient cause of an evil
will (12.6). Indeed, as he titles his subsequent chapter, an efcient cause
of an evil will must not be sought [non esse quaerendam]. He continues:
No one then should look for an efcient cause of an evil will, for the
cause is not one of efciency but deciency even as the evil will is not
an effect but a defect (12.7). Augustine derives from the tangible notions
of a defect or the act of defecting (defectio, decere) the intangible
decient (deciens) cause, a notion resting on its aural similarity to the
efcient cause.
20
But in Aristotelian terms there is no antonym of
the efcient cause, nor any accompanying antonyms of the other three.
There are four, not eight causes. Attempts to construct others based on
the verbal possibility of antonym are mere puns. And lest it be argued that
Augustine is embarking upon a subtle critique of Aristotelian causality
from a Neoplatonic standpoint, his nal words in this paragraph arrest
cogitation: Hence let no one seek from me to know what I know that I
do not know, except it be in order to learn how not to know what we
should know cannot be known. Earlier, in the Literal Commentary, he
had imposed a similar ban on the question of why God didnt make man
just a little bit more sufcient to have stood: Obviously he is able. So why
didnt he? Because he didnt want to. And why he didnt want to is
his business. For we ought not to know more than it is proper to know
(LC 11.10.13).
21
Furthermore, Augustines account of the creation of the angels raised
the problem that the angels who fell seem not to have possessed the same
extent of wisdom as the angels who stood: who can clearly determine to
what extent they partook of that wisdom before they had sinned? (LC
11.11). This comes dangerously close to admitting that the angels-to-fall
were created with that propensity, and at least one inuential modern
theologian, arguing for a rehabilitation of the Irenaean understanding of
Augustinianism 29
creation, has judged Augustines theodicy to founder on exactly this
problem.
22
Again, R. F. Brown, in his powerful and negative critique of
Augustine on evil, notes that the unfallen angels appear to have been
created with that assurance, and therefore literally determined not to sin.
Real freedom is only possessed by the angels-to-fall.
23
Two chapters later,
despite surrounding protests to the contrary, Augustine nally admits:
So we must conclude either that the angels were unequal in rank or,
if they were actually once equal, it was after the fall of the sinning angels
that the others acquired certain knowledge of their own everlasting
felicity (11.13).
The Augustinian Fall, then, is a complicated and indeed somewhat
mysterious thing. As the father wrote of original sin itself, nothing is
more important to proclaim; nothing is more hidden from the under-
standing.
24
He inherited, rened, authorised and transmitted a set of
decisions about the angelic and human falls more inuential than any
other comparable set indeed, he effectively blocked the possibility of
organised opposition in the West for many centuries, and dissent almost
always took the form of modication rather than rejection. But August-
ines actual writings on the whole matter, as we have seen, are often
experimental, willing to explore narrative techniques of making sense of
the opening chapters of the Bible, and this experimentalism both enlivens
Augustines writing and destabilises its doctrinal output. Augustine re-
placed one human fall with at least two, one happening in the mind, one
in public. He admitted that man might have been made better. He stated
that too much thinking was not good. He was not above using pun as a
rhetorical tool. Perhaps the angels had not all possessed the same mental
surety before the Fall, he wonders. Augustinianism, then, is a very much
more fraught business than its credal digests let on: All seemd well
pleasd, all seemd, but were not all (PL 5.617).
ANSELM TO ARMI NI ANI SM
Such was the inheritance of the continental Reformers, although after a
long succession of adjustments usually concerned to lessen the force of
Augustines doctrinal base. Anselm, under the guise of obedience to the
father, considerably softened the fathers teachings, holding the fallen
appetite morally neutral unless acted upon; children, moreover, suffer
merely from a deprivation of original justice rather than themselves being
depraved, the hallmark distinction between Augustinian and most scho-
lastic models of original sin.
25
For Augustine, original sin was both
ineradicable and incriminatory; later thinkers preferred to suppress the
second attribute, while not quarrelling with the rst. After Anselm, on the
continent the Chartrain School displaced Genesis with Timaeus, offering
allegorised readings of creation shorn of any obvious fall at all.
Such allegorism was ousted by the Magister sententiarum, Peter
Lombard, the twelfth-century theologian whose Sententiae was adopted
as the host text for subsequent medieval commentary. Lombard and his
colleagues and immediate predecessors developed subtle discussions of the
Fall and its causes, ventilating the timing of external versus internal
temptation, whether Adam sinned more than Eve or not, and whether
the psychogenesis of sin can be abstracted into stages. Lombard himself
helpfully distinguished between suggestio and consensus, temptation and
capitulation, arguing that only the latter constituted sin.
26
Yet the Anselmic revision persisted. Thomist teaching portrayed the
original righteousness of Adam as a donum supernaturale, a gift added to
Adams nature qua human nature, something of which one could be
deprived, like other dona, but not an intrinsic quality the loss of which
causes depravity. Aquinas was quite clear that Adam did not possess
knowledge of all things, and placed him half way between what the
present state of knowledge is, and what is the knowledge of the fatherland
[i.e. heaven], where God is seen in his essence. Adam, like other humans,
would grow into a state of knowledge rather than having it all given to
him at once. The trees of Eden did not actually contain the things their
names suggested.
27
Duns Scotus went as far as to say that Adam had to be
tempted, and that concupiscence was not part of original sin, but natural
to man, all men. Likewise Gabriel Biel considered man to be ab initio
potentially rebellious. As Heiko Oberman summarises, the differences
between the deciencies of Adams nature before and after the possession
of original justice is certainly not a qualitative but a quantitative one: the
difculties have increased, the struggles intensied.
28
The moral thrust of
Augustinian anthropology, with its material and mental plunges from
heights to depths, had been replaced by a more conservative model of gifts
and subtractions. The predominantly Aristotelian anthropology of the
schoolmen was, as it were, uninected: Aristotle provides no ready
categories for pre-, postlapsarian and resurrected man. Rather, the
quasi-mystical notions of original sin and original righteousness inherited
from Augustine were reclothed as additions to or subtractions from a
given, implicitly static nature.
This was likewise the inheritance of the Council of Trent, which
decided that concupiscence was in itself no sin but merely the fomes
Augustinianism 31
peccati or tinder of sin. Again, the Tridentine decrees did not mention
Adams supposed mental powers before the Fall. Counter-Reformation
teaching on the Fall and original sin, then, had partially dismantled the
Augustinianism on which it was still recognisably based, and many of
Augustines loaded categories, such as original righteousness, original sin,
depravity, concupiscence and so forth, had been emptied out. A mid-
seventeenth-century heresiographer perceived the difference between
Catholics and Protestants on original sin as follows: [T]he difference
between them and us standeth not in the abolishment of it, but in the
manner and measure of the abolishment of it.
29
This had ecclesiological ramications: Protestant anti-Calvinist writers
in England also argued that too great an emphasis on original sin put in
question the efcacy of baptism, which such writers were anxious to
defend. It was not solely a Catholic complaint therefore, and this sacra-
mental thrust, in Tyackes phrase, would come to characterise English
Arminianism. As early as the 1590s, Richard Dutch Thompson of Clare
College, Cambridge, who knew Arminius personally, was arguing in a
work only published posthumously that the universal efcacy of baptism
negated absolute predestination.
30
In the later scholastic period, however, there were reactionaries who
contributed a great deal towards the reintroduction of a more austere
Augustinianism, and as such provided the headwaters of the Reforma-
tion, in Obermans phrase.
31
The via antiqua of Aquinas age, which had
held that the created order of the Universe was effectively the only way it
could have been, came under attack by the so-called via moderna as
insufciently awed by Gods potentia absoluta to do as he pleased. The
via moderna contrastingly insisted that the Universe was less a rational
than a volitional construct; God made a covenant and will not break it,
yet this promise leaves the world a more anxious place than Thomas had
known . . . Christ had said that his church was built on a rock, but later
medieval theology seemed to expose it as a scaffold of possibilities.
32
The schola Augustiniana moderna shared this interest in reafrming
Gods absolute power but regarded the certainty that God will not
break his pactum or soteriological pact with man as semi-Pelagian. What
is the point of stressing Gods power if he is then disallowed from
exercising it? The schola Augustiniana moderna in contrast rejected the
implication that although God could choose not to reward good works he
will never take up this option, and instead reinstated a strongly pessimis-
tic view of original sin, with the Fall being identied as a watershed in the
economy of salvation ; a strong emphasis on the priority of God in
justication, linked to a doctrine of special grace ; and a radical doctrine
of absolute double predestination. These retrenchments were buttressed
by Augustines anti-Pelagian writings.
33
The magisterial reformers continued the trend of the schola Augustini-
ana moderna, though precise links are unclear. Luther in his Lectures on
Genesis unhesitatingly afrmed Adams initial splendour, even ascribing
to Adam and Eve perfect knowledge of astronomy.
34
Adam also con-
trolled the animals: he could command a lion with a single word. This
ability Luther derived from Adams naming of the beasts: solely because
of the excellence of his nature, he views all the animals and thus arrives at
such a knowledge of their nature that he can give each one a suitable name
that harmonises with its nature.
35
This was further than Augustine had
gone: the father had used Pythagoras observation that the rst giver of
names was the wisest of men, but had not mentioned any attendant
physical powers. Adam as mage, however, would become an important
symbol in the hermetic tradition.
36
Luther, however, also acknowledges Augustines statement on man
created inter angelos bestiasque: Man is a living being compounded of
the nature of the brute and of the angels. In the same section, he
comments upon innocence in tones that recall ideas on the childishness
and naivety of the rst people: I call it the innocence of a child because
Adam was, so to speak, in a middle position and yet could be deceived by
Satan and fall into disasters, as he did. The danger of a fall will not exist in
that perfect innocence which will be found in the future and spiritual
life.
37
Now, far from man being the great astronomer, he is a gure in his
childhood glory.
38
Calvin too mirrored these hybrid tendencies, though in his commen-
tary on Genesis, translated into English in 1578, he was less afrming of
Adams supposed magical abilities.
39
Calvin emphasises mans creaturely
station under the yoke of God ; man does not require any great intelli-
gence in order to subsist in his given moral and intellectual stratum with
ambitionless humility. This restriction of Adamic cognition is particularly
jolting in the Institutes, where Calvin can move from heady tones [T]he
nimblenesse of the minde of man which veweth the heauen and earth &
secretes of nature, and comprehending all ages in vnderstanding and
memorie, digesteth euery thyng in order and gathereth thynges to come
by thinges past, doth playnly shewe that there lyeth hydden in man a
certayne thing seuerall from the body to pessimism: From hence
cometh it that all the Philosophers wer so blynded, for that in a ruine
they sought for an vpright buildyng, and for strong ioyntes in an
Augustinianism 33
vnioynted ouerthrowe.
40
Calvin, like Luther, united the straying ideas of
man as created upright and man as bending down in the now familiar
trope of pendency: Adam therefore might haue stande [sic] if he wold,
because he fell not but by his owne wil. But because his will was pliable to
either side, and there was not geuen hym constancie to continue, therefore
he so easily fel.
41
This spare account, Eve nowhere in sight, provided the
template for subsequent English discussions, many of which we have
encountered in the form of catechisms or summae. English theologians
such as William Perkins and William Ames produced best-selling
manuals, adding to continental tracts by Wollebius, Polanus, Pareus,
Ursinus, even Curcellaeus and Arminius.
42
Although within academic theology there was a good deal of strife in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries about whether God had
formulated his absolute decrees of predestination before the creation or
after the Fall (Supra- versus Sublapsarianism), no one, at least in the
academe, disagreed about the basic importance of the event itself.
43
As the
ninth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 ran:
Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly
talk, but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is
engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original
righteousness, and is of his own nature enclined to evil, so that the esh lusteth
always contrary to the spirit, and therefore in every person born into this world,
it deserveth Gods wrath and damnation.
44
The original Forty-Two Articles of 1553, upon which the Thirty-Nine
were based, had inserted et hodie Anabaptistae repetunt which also the
Anabaptists do now a daies renue after the mention of the Pelagians,
demonstrating the context of doctrinal controversy in which the articles
were drawn up. Most other confessions, including the Augsburg, Gene-
van, Heidelberg and Scottish, contain similar passages. The inuence of
the catechism has been mentioned; as Glanvill complained in another
context but with a telling metaphor, We seldom examine our Receptions,
more then children their Cathechisms ; For Implicit faith is a vertue, where
Orthodoxie is the object.
45
The decient cause as the explanation for this
state of affairs also lived on. As Sir William Leighton wrote from the
debtors prison:
Iniurious Adam in thy selfe accurst,
cease to complaine of God & natures thrall :
Since he that made man good, left him at rst,
a power to stand, and yet a will to fall.
fetch not thy fault, from heauens determination
but blame thy mind to weake & insufcient:
Sinne is no being but a meere priuation,
and hath no cause efcient, but decient.
46
And nally, the intellectual superiority of Adam and Eve before the
Fall was also afrmed late into the period. As South put it, An Aristotle
was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of
Paradise.
47
Not all inuences upon conceptions of Adam and Eve were aural or
textual : visual art too insinuated a version of the Eden narrative that did
not so much gloss over as escape from certain of the causal issues Genesis
raises. The tall, often bearded Adam with his sexually mature wife gaze
out of countless windows, tapestries and paintings of the period, frozen in
various postures, assiduously gardening, or talking with the serpent.
Books, too, employed illustrations: a ne example is the Theatrum vitae
humanae of Jean-Jacques Boissard, with engravings by the celebrated
Theodore de Bry. Boissards Theatrum moves through Mundi creatio to
Lapsus diaboli, then to Hominis creatio and lapsus Adami, all headed by de
Brys nely etched illustrations.
48
Indeed, Adam and Eve are often portrayed in all the signicant stages
of their Edenic life in the same frame. In one Medici tapestry, for
instance, there are three Eves and two Adams; in Cranachs Paradise,
there are ve Eves and six Adams, all stages of innocence and guilt
crowding into one canvas.
49
In de Brys Creatio hominis plate, Adam
and Eve in their various postures are shadowed around Eden by God as
a cloud with the Tetragrammaton in it.
50
In this way, visual representa-
tions of Adam and Eve could insist upon their maturity, and their proper
as well as improper occupations, while at the same time giving the viewer
the quasi-divine role of seeing it all happen at once.
However, this vision was derived from a theology that had used the
maturity of creation to emphasise our distance from that maturity, some-
times even the impossibility of comprehending unfallen man. This aspect
visual art often neglected, though one notable exception is the ne
Burgesse plate, after Medina, in Tonsons 1688 edition of Paradise Lost,
accompanying the book of the Fall. Like the Medici and Cranach multi-
plications, various duplicate Adams and Eves recede into the distance. By
far the most imposing presence, though, is Satan, darkly inked, thrusting
into the foreground. The viewer cannot get to Adam and Eve in inno-
cence without Satan impinging, a visual situation that parallels the
epistemological difculty of thinking about sinless environments.
Augustinianism 35
The location of pieces involving Adam and Eve could also be ex-
tremely pointed. We noted the connection between the issues of original
sin and baptism and the desire of anti-Calvinists to stress the efcacy of
the latter for washing away the former. The most imposing afrmation
of this position must be Grinling Gibbons 1685 marble font in the
Wren church of St James, Piccadilly. The baptismal font is carved as
the tree of knowledge itself, with Adam and Eve anking its base. Water
poured in the top of the hollowed tree washes off the stain originally
caused by the gures further down. Incidentally, William Blake was
baptised in it.
51
Nevertheless, there were some changes in the theological climate, and
before leaving Augustinianism it is necessary to track the various signs of
change from the Elizabethan to the Caroline period. In the universities,
the debates held at the Cambridge Commencement and the Oxford
exercises at the Comitia and Vesperies act as a theological barometer for
such changes, reecting mainly Calvinist commitment but with some
later indications of Arminian usurpation.
52
In 1597, Richard Field held
that the doctrine of predestination once handed down by Augustine and
in our own time by Calvin is the same and is in no way contrary to
Catholic truth and upright faith. He followed this with the provocative
statement: The orthodox fathers who once held the will to be free and
those today who hold it to be bound mean the same thing, a statement
almost all of the popular systematic manuals contained.
53
Such Calvinist
reafrmation may in part have been prompted by the scandal in
Cambridge the previous year over the Frenchman Peter Baro, Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity, who had been involved in theological
quarrels since 1581, and William Barrett, a chaplain at Gonville and Caius.
Barrett preached against Calvinist determinism in 1595, and as a result was
summoned before Convocation and told to recant. Through his com-
plaint to Archbishop Whitgift, he became the unwitting cause of the
Lambeth Articles of 1595, which, against Barrett, reafrmed determin-
ism.
54
Baro himself was in especial trouble in 1596 for his proto-Arminian
views, and was eventually hounded out of the university.
55
His Summa
trium de praedestinatione sententiarum, published posthumously in 1613,
distinguished between two views on predestination held by Augustine at
different times, and a third position claimed for Augustine by Calvin and
Beza, but possibly not authentically Augustinian. Here one can see the
polemic strategy of separating supposed versions of Augustinianism
from the writings of the father himself, as a prelude to discrediting
Calvinism as not as patristically grounded as it claimed.
56
Oxford had earlier had similar troubles over Antonio del Corro, a
Spaniard accused of meddling with predestinarian issues. Certainly, in
his 1581 version of Pauls letter to the Romans, recast as a dialogue between
a Discipulus and a Praeceptor, Corro glossed the crucial verses on the rst
and the second Adam in a non-Calvinist fashion. Romans 5:12 appears in
subtly different garb from what we earlier encountered: For as through
one man sin came into the world, and through sin death; and thus death
came over all men, from whom [ex quo] all have sinned.
57
The grammar
is as problematic as the in quo reading of the Vulgate, but the implication
of the parallelism is clear: that people sin from Adam, not in him, a
position that is indeed akin to saying that original sin does stand in the
following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk. Corro also said that
Christs sacrice is indeed universal and sufcient, but such is the fault of
unbelieving men that efciency cannot at all correspond to sufciency.
58
Unsurprisingly, this book was not printed in Oxford, where, as Wood
said of Corro, his person could never be well relishd. His publisher
also sold the famous Danish Lutheran and supporter of free will Niels
Hemmingsen on Ephesians.
59
The in quo reading, however, had already
been quietly challenged by Erasmus: his celebrated Paraphrases simply
read inso muche as all men synned, and cautioned that the rst and
second Adam are not to be rigidly compared.
60
In general, though, the theses debated between the students and the
doctors maintained an even keel. In 1617, as it had been earlier in 1597, the
habit of treating original sin as merely a lack of something rather than a
real disease is trounced: Original sin is not simply a privation of original
righteousness, but is a positive quantity. The next year similar ideas were
still in the air, Thomas Marler answering yes to Did Adam possess
original righteousness before the fall ? ; he also agreed that Adams Fall
was both necessary and contingent in different respects. In 1622 concu-
piscence still remains in the regenerate, original sin is a positive entity,
free will is extinguished for Adams posterity, and we are unable of our
own will to turn to God.
Cambridge, traditionally Calvinist earlier and to a greater degree than
Oxford, despite the Baro affair mentioned, carries a similar record. In 1612
we are assured Divine Prescience was not the cause of mans Fall ; the
next year it is still the case that Fallen man is subject to divine predestin-
ation. But in 1629 Edward Quarles of Pembroke said that all baptised
infants are without doubt justied, which got him into some trouble, and
in 1632 the thesis afrmed was exactly the opposite: traces of sin remain
in the regenerated, even after baptism. Tellingly, the Root-and-Branch
Augustinianism 37
petitioners of 1640 complained, as an example of the faint-heartedness of
ministers, of their neglecting to preach of original sin remaining after
baptism.
61
The generally Calvinist climate of the universities was changing, how-
ever. The declaration of Charles I in November 1628, ordering that all
further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in
Gods promises, nominally banned predestinarian disputes in the univer-
sities, but effectively accompanied a rising tolerance for Arminianism.
62
Bastingius, the favoured Oxford textbook, received his last printing there
in 1614, and Ursinus, his Cambridge counterpart, in 1601.
A salient indication of the way things were moving is provided at
Oxford by a publication of Giles Widdowes, sometime fellow of Oriel
and rector of St Martins church. In 1630 he published at Oxford, at his
own expense, his hectoring sermon against Puritans which he titled The
Schysmatical Puritan. It was republished the following year. Widdowes,
who was an ally of William Laud, then in his ascendancy, listed ten types
of schismatic Puritan. But this list, as well as containing Familists and
Anabaptists, sects uncontroversially controversial, included Perfectists,
Sermonists and Presuming Predestinatists, supposed schismatics who held
what were clearly Calvinist tenets and indeed were simply various of
Widdowes fellow academics dressed up as Separatists which they were
not. That Widdowes was able to lump academic Calvinists together with
Puritans and Schismatics, even if for polemic purposes, is an indication
of how different things were from the 1590s, when anti-Calvinism was the
hand that rocked the boat. For the rst time, Calvinist and Anabaptist
were seen alike as enemies of the Church, and Widdowes category of
anti-Disciplinarians, whose purenes is aboue the Kings Supremacy, is
particularly offensive, suggesting as it does that those who think the elect
cannot fall from grace are treasonable. These are again associated with
Geneva-Presbyters .
The implications this has for how original sin was viewed can be seen in
Widdowes rebuttal of Anabaptist tenets: The Anabaptist is he, whose
purenes is a supposed birth without originall sinne. And yet our bodies are
parts of Adams nature, that did sinne. And no man was borne without
sinne, Christ only excepted. His tenet is, that infants must not be baptized.
Widdowes continued refutation, though, has other prey in sight:
[I]t is without question, that Gods Supremacy may pardon or punish pro absoluto
beneplacito, only as he will, seeing tis the prerogatiue of supremacy, he being
supreme Iudg. But he cannot be iust in decree, if he so reprobates, but for sinne
foreseene. For the law was not, that any should die in Adam, if he had not eaten
of the forbidden fruit: and therefore this lawin prevision transgressed is the meritorious
efcient of reprobation.
63
Widdowes terminology is hard, deliberately so, but his basic revision is
obvious. He effectively rehearses the scholastic Via modernas position:
God can do precisely what he likes, but wont. This is because he is just.
Therefore he judges, even to damnation, those whom he knows will sin.
We only die in Adam because he happened to sin and God foresaw that
he would. But judgement according to sinne foreseene was exactly the
kind of presumption upon Gods Eternal Decrees of absolute predestin-
ation to election and to reprobation, based upon his mere pleasure, that
the Reformers, and before them the schola Augustiniana moderna, had
reviled. Importantly, it was also the position the Lambeth Palace articles
of 1595 and the Synod of Dort in 161819 had anathematised. As the
Dortist articles open, Forasmuch as all men haue sinned in Adam, and are
become guiltie of the curse, and eternall death, God had done wrong vnto
no man, if it had pleased him to leaue all mankind in sin, and vnder the
curse, and to condemne them for sinne. Election is not vpon foresight of
faith, and the obedience of faith, holinesse, or any other good quality.
64
Widdowes revision of this position is not the last instance of neoscho-
lasticism we will see, a neoscholasticism which in no sense dispenses with
the Fall and original sin, but which does signicantly rewrite the meaning
of such ideas, away from the mainstream of reformed commentary.
Augustinianism 39
chapter 3
The quarrel over original sin, 16491660
Throughout the middle years of the seventeenth century original sin was
contested as it had never been contested in England before, and many of
the disagreements turned on ne details. Thus the rather vague wording
of the ninth of the Thirty-Nine Articles on man being very far gone from
original righteousness was a phrase that could admit of myriad readings,
from a superlative understanding of very far (wholy deled in all
faculties, as the Westminster Assembly had it) to virtual excision (some
degree, as their opponent William Parker revised).
1
In this chapter, in
particular, the tendency of theological terminology to wordplay and
logical contortion will prove central.
A good initial example is provided by the commentator who essayed to
prove that Calvinists were really unwitting Pelagians. As Thomas Pierce,
the unpopular President of Magdalen College, Oxford, argued, Pelagians
deny original sin. But Calvinists say that Christ died only for the elect.
Now, Christ, according to Paul, died for all those dead in Adam. But if
these for whom Christ died were only the comparatively small number of
the elect, then only a minority died in Adam. Therefore the majority
never suffered from original sin.
2
It seems improbable that Pierce believed
this: what he was doing was pointing out the kind of logical trickery such
types of argumentation permitted. John Gaule complained:
[A]ll the errors which have been about Original Sin, have risen chiey through
want of a perfect Denition, or compleat Description of it, some (and they not the
least Hereticks) have contended against all denition; others have been so various
in dening, and so incompleat in describing, that they have administered but
matter unto more contention.
3
The subject now is the long quarrel that raged throughout the rst
decade of the second half of the seventeenth century, a quarrel specically
concerning original sin. It is important for three reasons. First, it repre-
sents the most protracted, publicised and openly debated argument on
40
original sin in the period, spanning public debate, private manuscript and
printed book. Second it centres around the illustrious gure of Jeremy
Taylor, academic, future bishop and a man to whom the martyred king
had given his wrist-watch. Taylors reasoning was based on intense
patristic scholarship, particularly of the Eastern fathers, and despite
the protests of his fellow beleaguered Anglicans Taylor did not give
ground. Finally, the dispute is important because in 1658 the Presbyterian
Nathaniel Stephens published a book in which he pointed out the
parallels between the interpretations of the Fall of Robert Everard the
Leveller, Agitator and Baptist, and Jeremy Taylor himself. This realisation
is much more important than the actual substance of Stephens book.
What he saw was the far political left and the far political right producing
strikingly similar theology. When the at map of politics was pasted onto
a globe, the extremes, from a theological point of view, met.
In 1649, Robert Everard, a captain in the parliamentary army, pub-
lished his examination of the Genesis narrative and the doctrines drawn
from it, The Creation and Fall of Adam Reviewed. At this point, it seems,
Everard was active in Leicestershire and the northern counties where he
spread Baptist doctrine; the Newcastle clergy were complaining in 1652
that Everard had preached sundry times in the hearing of many hundreds
against Original sin in man. His way of life, Nathaniel Stephens said,
was itinerary from place to place, and this probably explains why
Stephens later complained that Everards attacks on original sin were
spread farre and neare. Richard Baxter remembered him as a busie
preaching Sectary (in appearance) [who] . . . disputed for Anabaptistry,
and against Original Sin (whom Mr. Stephens hath wrote against . . .).
Back in 1647, he spoke out in the earliest hours of the Putney debates as
Agent of Cromwells regiment, telling the assembly, you are resolved
every one to purchase our inheritances which have been lost.
4
Everard
was confused in his own time with William Everard, the founder Digger:
the army man suffereth in his reputation, by the misapprehension of
divers, who take him to be that Everard that is reported to be deeply
affected with the Ranting Principle. But Robert did later say of himself
that over these years he had run through almost (if not altogether) all the
Severall Professions of Christianity then appearing in this Kingdome.
5
Stephens, the Presbyterian curate of Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire,
had long been keen on attempting to reason with sectaries. He is the
priest Stephens from the early pages of Foxs Journal ; Fox evidently awed
as well as troubled him.
6
Later, in his celebrated A Plain and Easie
Calculation of the Name, Mark, and Number of the Name of the Beast,
The quarrel over original sin, 16491660 41
incorporated by Matthew Poole into his Synopsis criticorum, Stephens also
engaged the Digger spokesman Gerard Winstanley in debate, one of the
very few to do so.
7
In 1650, then, having had experience of men like Fox
for some years, Stephens visited nearby Earl Shilton, where the Masters
of Division have played their principall game, in order to dispute with
the separatists there. Returning later in the year for a set dispute, his
opponents failed to show, and so Stephens left a written statement for
them to ponder. He was answered by two letters, the latter written by
Everard himself and subsequently published in 1650 as Baby Baptism
Routed. Unfortunately this work, described by two Coventry ministers
as sheets of Satyrical invectives, is lost, but Stephens excerpts copiously
from it.
8
In 1651 Stephens produced his own Precept in support of infant
baptism, and in this year too the Thirty Baptist Congregations published
their joint confession, which Stephens was later to associate doctrinally
with both Everard and Taylor; many of the signatory congregations were
also from Leicestershire. So too appeared William Parkers The Late
Assemblies Confession of Faith Examined, an attack on the Westminster
Confession containing a long section on original sin, another concern for
Stephens in the Vindiciae. In 1652 Everard reprinted The Creation and
Fall, and also produced his Natures Vindication. The sole extant copy of
The Creation and Fall in this edition is bound with both Natures Vindi-
cation and the Thirty Congregations confession, with a common title
page.
9
Stephens Precept itself aroused opposition in the form of the
Coryphaeus of the anabaptists, John Tombes, who wrote his Antipaedo-
baptism (1652) in reply.
10
(These two controversialists, in passing, had
once been students together at Magdalen Hall.) Everard, after engaging in
some controversy about the laying on of hands in the mid 1650s, turned
Catholic at the Restoration, publishing a defence of his apostasy which
received a great deal of attention at the time, eliciting various printed
replies. Henry Oldenburg wrote to Robert Boyle about the sad case of this
Anabaptist . . . turned Papist.
11
Leaving the Baptist side of the debate for a while, elsewhere trouble was
brewing. Jeremy Taylor had already achieved some notoriety thanks to his
Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647), a plea for an ethical rather
than a theological, dogmatic approach to Christianity, but one which
deployed some dangerous tools. In particular, Taylor argued from textual
grounds for the rejection of the absolute authority of scripture. It was
objected by some, notably the Calvinist John Reading, that this was to
arm sceptics and sectaries, not to defend Christianity. At least the rst part
of this accusation was absolutely accurate: Anthony Wood noted that the
Quaker Samuel Fisher, in a public debate with Reading in 1650, had
derived his sceptical views on textual authority from Taylors tract of three
years previously, which had given too great a seeming advantage to
fanaticism and enthusiasm, and it was this that drove Reading to write
explicitly against Taylor. The infamous Clement Writer credited Taylor
in his Fides divina of 1657, a notable example of a non-learned textual
sceptic deriving authority from a learned source of utterly differing
political allegiance.
12
Taylor had mentioned original sin in passing in the Liberty of Proph-
esying as one of the three notions, along with angels and the immaculate
conception, which together only exhaust forty lines of solid sense, despite
the multitudes of unwarranted books such subjects had elicited.
13
But his
real attack on original sin commenced near the middle of the next decade.
Taylor was beginning to spread his thoughts on the matter by early 1655,
as a letter from Evelyn demonstrates. Concerning Taylors view, as Evelyn
wrote back to Taylor, [I] do not doubt but it shall in tyme gaine upon all
those exceptions, which I know you are not ignorant appeare against it.
Tis a great deale of courage, and a great deale of perill, but to attempt the
assault of an errour so inveterate.
14
Taylor circulated his views among the Anglican clergy, who were not
impressed. As Henry Hammond, himself far from enthusiastic for the
Calvinistic understanding of the matter, wrote to Gilbert Sheldon in
September 1655, D
r
Tayl
rs
book is matter of much discours, & in y
t
point of Orig: Sinn disliked by every one, but by none more then the 2
[persons to] whom tis addrest.
15
On 26 October 1655, the exiled bishop of
Salisbury Brian Duppa wrote at length to Richard Baylie, President of St
Johns College, Oxford, adding his concerns over the manuscript of
Taylors Unum necessarium already in press:
I was very much troubled w
th
in my self, as soon as I saw what he droue at . . . I
found this fell not casually from him, but was a studied error . . . I wished him to
consider whom he offended, and whom he gratied in this, or whom he left, and
Whom he adhaered to . . . the choice he hath, is not great, for ether it must be to
y
e
old Pelagians, or to the new brood that hath sprung out of there Ashes,
whether Socinians or Anabaptists, or any other of newer denominations.
16
In captivity at Chepstow, Taylor corresponded on the matter with John
Warner, bishop of Rochester, and busied himself writing what is now the
seventh chapter of Unum necessarium, A Further explication of the
doctrine of Original Sin, printed separately and then included in subse-
quent editions with the epistle to Warner still attached. So, despite all
Taylors careful canvassing of his opinion, and despite the strongly
negative response, he went ahead and published the Unum necessarium
in 1655, and the Further explication the following year. The following
year, too, appeared the Deus justicatus, a more accessible version of the
offending portion of the larger work. This was the doing of Taylors
literary agent, the prominent Royalist bookseller Richard Royston, who
initially published the Deus justicatus without Taylors consent, some-
thing Royston was of course perfectly entitled to do.
17
A second edition
appeared in the same year, with the TaylorWarner correspondence
attached.
Duppas I wished him to consider whom he offended, and whom he
gratied in this is a political as well as a theological warning in their
current situation, the deposed clergy ought to be sticking together and not
causing trouble for each other. It was, Duppa added, an Vnwary blow
upon his poor desolate Mother the Church, more wounding than any
external persecution the Church had received.
18
In this way Taylors
attack was particularly signicant, because it implicated his fellow clergy
in exactly the kinds of dubious speculation they wished to avoid. They
were all too sensitive to this; Duppas letter was occasioned by his anger
that Taylor had attached Duppas name to his book. The ejected Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Robert Sanderson, asked the keeper of
Bodleys library and fellow of Queens, Thomas Barlow, to undertake a
refutation; while on the other side, John Owen the Independent and
intruded Dean of Christ Church composed a work against Taylor, no
longer extant.
19
Sheldon wrote directly to Taylor rebuking him and urging him to
recant. Taylor deantly refused, replying that some friend of mine has
been blowing y
e
Coals. Either Taylor was correct, or he was not: if the
former, so much the better; if the latter, someone ought to explain why.
20
Taylor was obviously pushing his colleagues too hard, although they tried
to keep the controversy behind closed doors. Sanderson advised Barlow to
steer clear of the question of the transmission of original sin, as the
wisdome of God hath thought t to set it without the reach of our
reason. He lamented that Taylor, amidst the Distractions of these
Times, could be so peremptory and pertinacious of his Errors. But
throughout their correspondence, Sanderson repeatedly advised Barlow
only to write an expository tract on the matter and not to attack Taylor
directly.
21
Likewise, Herbert Thorndikes huge Epilogue to the Tragedy of
the Church of England of 1659 contained a section on the late novelty in
the Church of England about Originall sinne, in which he tried to repair
some of the damage made by that excellent doctor, whom he tactfully
never names.
22
The following year Henry More, who cannot have been
unsympathetic to Taylor, as the Cambridge Platonists did not have much
room for original sin either, wrote to Taylor that the Presbyterians
called him a Sosinian, that yo denied Originall sinne, that you were an
Arminian, and so a hereticke in graine.
23
Such accusations were not mere slurs, either. Taylors interpretation of
Romans 7:19, the evil which I would not, that I do, as spoken by Paul
under the persona of a Jew, not a regenerate Christian, and Taylors
adjudication of the in quo crux against the in quo understanding, imitate
passages from Arminius and Grotius, and Episcopius respectively. As
Burnet later recalled of the latitude men, they read Episcopius much.
Had Taylor himself, despite his public recourse to the Greek patristics as
his authorities, been fetching his ideas from nearer, more heterodox
authors?
24
The answer, based on some advice of Taylors to an Irish friend in 1660
on what theological books to collect, is yes. Apart from recommending
many of his own works, he also listed Episcopius, whose whole works are
excellent and containe the whole body of orthodox religion. Heber,
Taylors nineteenth-century biographer, reprinted this letter and put his
nger on this very sentence as the origin and explanation of Taylors
doctrine of original sin.
25
Refutations poured from the press. Warners own objections were
made public by Taylor himself in his Answer to a Letter of 1656; John
Ford the Mayor of Bath weighed in the next year, as did John Gaule;
Stephens Vindiciae fundamenti appeared in 1658, along with Anthony
Burgess vast Treatise of Original Sin, and Henry Jeanes Second Part of the
Mixture of Scholasticall Divinity and his letters to and from Taylor
appeared in 1660.
26
Much as the exiled Anglicans had feared, Taylor,
like a second Julian, had provided a golden opportunity for their
opponents to demonstrate that the Anglicans did not adhere to the
orthodox articles of the Church.
27
The only real supporter was, as was noted, John Evelyn, though it is
tempting to join with Evelyn none other than the promoter of experi-
mental philosophy John Wilkins, who in his 1669 revisions to his popular
manual-cum-reading-list for preachers, Ecclesiastes (rst published in
1646) listed under the heading Original Sin two new authorities: Bp
Taylor: Tracts. Episcopius without listing any of their detractors.
28
Taylor was appreciative of Evelyns support, and wrote to him of his
book, [I] give God thanks that I have reason to believe that it is accepted
by God and by some good men. In 1655 Evelyn discussed astronomy,
conversion of the Jews, and original sin with the mathematician William
Oughtred. Said Oughtred, as Evelyn reported: Original Sin was not met
with in the Greek Fathers; yet he [Oughtred] believed the thing; this was
from some discourse upon Dr Taylors late booke which I had lent him.
29
Evelyn had better luck with a young Frenchman: I brought Mons
r
le
Franc a young French Sorbonne proselyte to converse with Dr Taylor;
they fell to dispute on original sin, in Latine, upon a booke newly
publishd by the Doctor, who was much satised with the young
man.
30
Evelyns support is in keeping with his paradisal attitude to
gardening discussed earlier, and a further insight into this milieu is
provided by the letters to Evelyn of John Beale. Beale was keen on Taylor
too, and he maintained in this private correspondence that if one were to
read all the ante-Nicene fathers in chronological order and reliable edi-
tions, Hee will hardly nd in them a Catholique concurrence in y
e
Athanasian expressions of y
e
Creede, or wth y
e
Westerne notion of
Originall sin, or of the state of soules departed, imediately. The bar of
catholicity is to be provided by Dr Taylors mitigation in his Infamous
Liberty of Prophesying. The way to make students serious admirers of
Christian antiquity, Beale remarkably adds, is to teach w
th
a dose of
Socinianisme. Beale likewise recommended which theologians he found
acceptable, and it is a roll-call of English Arminianism: Baro, Thomson,
Overall, Montagu, White and Andrewes, some of whom we have already
encountered. To these he added some Melanchthon and the safest of
Luther. Grotius, Hammond and Peter Martyr were then to be digested into
commonplaces and placed in the margins of Bibles.
31
Evelyn and Beale, though, kept this kind of thing quiet. It was Taylors
perverse need to publish to the world his divisiveness that so appalled his
co-religionists. It may also account for the fact that Taylor was eventually
promoted abroad, perhaps in the hope that he would be less trouble there.
So much, then, for the course of this quarrel ; what remains is to rehearse
some of its argumentation, particularly the connections between the
sectarian and the Taylorian positions.
It was Taylor who drove Stephens into print, but Stephens had some
years since prepared a response to Everard, the motor of the whole
dispute. Stephens basic complaint was that Everard outdid Pelagius.
32
For Everard, the Fall prompted neither physical nor mental change:
afterwards, Adam had his senses and retained his knowledge ; his body
had all the parts and lineaments thereof . Stephens also noted that Everard
stood so strongly upon a particular verse of Paul in 1 Corinthians, a verse
we will encounter repeatedly: The rst man is of the earth, earthy: the
second man is the Lord from heaven.
33
This verse suggested to many
radicals that the rst Adams initial condition had been less exalted than
mainstream exegesis insisted. As Stephens remembered of their public
debate, [Y]ou did urge me at Earle-Shilton in Leicestershire, Anno 1650,
Decem. 26. before a multitude of people to answer this question, what
place of Scripture have you to prove that Adam had the Spirit of God, or that
he was a spiritual man before the Fall. Original righteousness, so Everard
explained, had only consisted in mans dominion over the creatures.
Indeed, Adam in his rst estate had been a meer carnal man ; like a
burned child, able of himself to take heed of the re.
34
Having called into
question the fact of the Fall, Everard inevitably queried the idea of a
transmitted guilt: why might it not be said, When Adam beleeved, I
beleeved; when Adam repented, I repented?
35
This is what Stephens
reported of Everard, but Everards own text, if anything, goes further
than Stephens account. Everard described the righteousness of prelapsar-
ian Adam as merely Passive Righteousness ; at the Fall, Adam wickedly
improv[ed] his abilities. Anticipating Taylor, Everard also pointed out
that traducianism should allow us to inherit Adams virtues no less than
his sins, an observation he uses to discredit the whole notion of transmit-
ted sin, a doctrine that simply takes metaphor too seriously. Adam was
prone to sin before the Fall, as after. In a move he shared with the
mortalist Overton, Everard also stated that the animal kingdom remained
unfallen.
36
Nathaniel Stephens had reacted earlier to Everards theories. Although
Everards Baby Baptism Routed is lost, it clearly repeated the arguments of
The Creation and Fall, as Stephens response, A Precept, stresses the role of
baptism in washing away (some) original sin. Although Stephens insists
that the unbaptised are still saved by Gods Promise as opposed to those
saved by both Promise and Seal, he nevertheless regards the new-born
child as corrupt.
37
Stephens was defending the standard Presbyterian line
against an attack that not only denied the Fall, but almost inverted it: for
Everard, original sin was not transmitted and therefore did not exist;
furthermore, before the Fall, Adam was already prone to sin, a mere
carnal man, as opposed to the spiritual man, who is Christ. In this
period, too, Stephens had had his work cut out for him he had
undergone at least four public disputations, he had been written to at
least twice, and he had been harassed in print by Everard and Tombes.
Finally, as a cautionary note, the involvement of baptism in the debate
might make us suppose that rejection of baptism and rejection of original
sin are interdependent, as they prove to be in Everard. But actually most
Baptist confessions retained the notion: Everard is something of an
exception, with the Mennonite Waterland confession (15812) and John
Smyths Short Confession (1610) as lone predecessors, along with the early
Hutterite Account of Our Religion (1540) of Peter Riedemann.
38
After their associational meeting in Leicester in 1651, the Midland
General Baptists confession The Faith and Practise of Thirty Congregations,
Gathered According to the Primitive Pattern was produced by the prominent
Baptist publisher William Larner, or Larnar, who also published Everard.
As the LeicesterLincolnshire area represents the greatest concentration of
its signatories, it is not surprising that Stephens, a Leicestershire man, felt
compelled to act. Everard was clearly connected to the Baptist cause, but
was something of a maverick, and is not one of the confessions signatories,
although it has been argued that he helped write it.
39
The confession, indeed, is rather more theologically conservative than
Everards own tracts, accepting both predestination and original sin.
What is objectionable from a Presbyterian point of view is that the
confession extends Christs atonement to all who died in Adam, not just
to the Calvinist elect. The Thirty Congregations confession, therefore, is
not particularly noteworthy in its interpretation of the Fall. Its import-
ance largely derives from its pioneering nature it was the rst Baptist
confession to be signed by a substantial number of congregations.
40
The next year, however, Everard released his Natures Vindication, as
well as the second edition of The Creation and Fall. The full title of the
pamphlet renders explicit Everards stance: Natures Vindication; or A
Check to All Those Who Afrm Nature to Be Vile, Wicked, Corrupt, and
Sinful.
41
This gestures towards a central problem or rather conict in
early-modern terminology, the meaning of the word nature, and Ever-
ards pamphlet is a contribution to this debate. Nature, of course, could
carry a positive meaning, as we so readily assume. But as current nature
whether it be the nature of man himself, or the nature of his environment,
or both is fallen, nature could also be vile, wicked, corrupt and sinful.
This book opened with a discussion of Godfrey Goodmans The Fall of
Man; or, the Corruption of Nature, a work that argued strenuously for this
latter interpretation of the word. So Francis Cheynell, the anti-Socinian,
could write in 1643 of that cursed Atheisme which reigns in the heart of
every man by nature, and, a decade later, an anti-Quaker likewise of the
miserable estate of all men by Nature.
42
But, as Everard says, natural
affections are not sinful, vile, or corrupt. Some kind of fall took place, but
what this does to nature is ambiguous:
That our Father Adam sinned against God, by breaking his Law, is agreed . . . ;
which I do not only grant, but maintain, because the word of the Lord hath
spoken it. But to the latter cause of the Objection, where you say, So he corrupted
his Nature.
I answer, If by corruption of Nature you mean he did such an abuse to it, that
endeavoured to destroy or violate Nature, that do I freely grant to be a truth: for
such a corruption or violation, Nature is capable to partake of, and that through
or by mens oppressing or wresting it out of its proper ofce wherunto it was
assigned by the providence of God. Read 2 Cor. 2.17.
43
Despite Everards concession, it is clear by the word endeavoured that
he is replacing the notion of corruption completed and certain, with that
of corruption attempted and so possibly uncompleted or uncertain.
Crucially, Everard also deliberately mishears Nature for his Nature :
what had been a statement pertaining to mans nature is now applied to
all nature, and attacked as such. Everard thus exploits a common problem
in debates about the nature of nature: which nature is meant? Both
Cheynell and the anti-Quaker above used the ablative construction by
nature. But what does this mean? Is man corrupted by the fact of his
belonging to external nature, the fallen world around him, or is it a purely
internal, psychological nature that damages him? Later, Everards nature,
under a metaphor, has both wings and legs, something therefore both
human and supra- or extra-human: I do not hold that Natures wings
were clipt since the Fall, and so disabled to y up to such spiritual things;
or, that the legs of nature were so broken by the rst mans disobedience,
so that they could not carry men to Jesus Christ.
44
In this way Everard
attacks and destroys the negative conception of nature by maximising it
for him nature embraces all things, human and superhuman, internal
and external, and when it is understood in such all-encompassing terms, it
cannot at all be called vile and corrupt.
Stephens did not reply to Natures Vindication as yet, instead devoting
himself to writing his commentary on Revelation, A Plain and Easie
Calculation. Nevertheless in that work, as we noted, Stephens paused to
mention none other than Gerard Winstanley, demonstrating in passing
that Stephens had some personal contact with the Diggers, and may even
have known Winstanley himself.
45
Stephens actually cites page numbers
from Winstanleys New Law of Righteousness, as he does with Everard,
thus demonstrating very close textual attention. This is also important
because, as will be shown, Winstanleys New Law itself interpreted the
Fall as reversible, allegorising it out of historical existence, and even
proposing that there were men before Adam.
Winstanley is not mentioned again by Stephens, which is odd given
that Stephens could easily have dealt out some smart side-blows to
Winstanley in the course of his later Vindiciae. That he did not may
suggest that, for Stephens, Winstanley was beyond the pale. Everard and
Stephens were at least arguing about a real event and (two) real people,
and what they had done. Winstanley dismantled even that basic scaffold
of agreement, and perhaps Stephens simply shied away from such extreme
heresy, or couldnt be bothered to point out the obvious.
And so to Jeremy Taylors Unum necessarium, which appeared mid 1655
with a part-apologetic, part-deant preface to Duppa and Warner, the
same two exiled bishops who had initially been troubled by Taylors
chapter on original sin when they had seen it in manuscript. Taylor in
his offending chapter which Duppa called the colloquintida (bitter
apple) claims not to reject original sin, but his taste in theological
forebears is telling. Augustine himself is not popular, and both Gregory
of Rimini and Luther are described as having fallen into the worst of
S. Augustines opinion. Speaking of the AugustinePelagius dispute,
Taylor tartly remarks, error is no good confuter of error. And despite
Taylors protracted attempts to soothe worries over his treatment of the
Thirty-Nine Articles, he could not prevent himself from remarking that
the ninth article is nothing to the truth or falsehood of my doctrine as
Sanderson had bluntly said of Taylor and the Articles, there is as much
afnity, as between light and darkness.
46
Taylors position is remarkably close to that of Everard. He queries the
notion of original righteousness using the same scripture: the rst man is
of the Earth, earthy. The excellencies Adam possessed in Eden Taylor
refers to as gifts, things, that is, not intrinsic to human nature but
superadded to it. But, he cautions, because scripture is not explicit about
this issue we can only guess about these gifts, and are apt to guess wrongly.
The Fall, to use Taylors term, disrobed us a metaphor that conrms
Taylors basically scholastic estimation: that original righteousness is best
understood as being in receipt of a donum indebitum, a free gift of God.
Taylor even afrms that death at rst was the condition of man, as
Pelagius had said.
Taylor defends his extremely heterodox interpretation, crucially, by
recourse to narrative techniques of analysis. Rather than arguing solely
on a dogmatic level, Taylor prefers to rehearse the actual story at hand,
the process of the Fall, thinking about it in terms of plausibilities and
probabilities:
I do not know that any man thinks that if Adam had not sinned that sin, Cain
should have been wise as soon as his Navel had been cut. Neither can we guess at
what degree of knowledge Adam had before his fall. Certainly, if he had had so
great a knowledge, it is not likely he would so cheaply have sold himself and all
his hopes, out of a greedy appetite to get some knowledge. But concerning his
posterity; indeed it is true that a child cannot speak at rst, nor understand; and
if (as Plato said) all our knowledge is nothing but memory, it is no wonder a
child is born without knowledge. But so it is in the wisest men in the world; they
also when they see or hear a thing rst, think it strange, and could not know it
till they saw or heard it. Now this state of ignorance we derive from Adam, as we
do our Nature, which is a state of ignorance and all manner of imperfection; but
whether it was not imperfect, and apt to Fall into forbidden instances even before
his Fall, we may best guess at by the event; for if he had not had a rebellious
appetite, and an inclination to forbidden things, by what could he have been
tempted, and how could it have come to pass that he should sin?
47
[W]e may best guess at by the event Taylor here replaces doctrinal
imperative with a more experimental sensitivity to biblical text as em-
bodying narrative, and therefore open and favourable to, and indeed
demanding of, narrative-oriented analyses.
Two things here must be noted. First, Taylor is initially cautious and
respectful about what we can know for sure about the unfallen state as
before, he stresses that we cant even guess at the extent of prelapsarian
intellection. Second, Taylor does not keep this promise he soon moves
into a probabilistic discussion of what is and what is not a likely answer to
this problem, based on Adam and Eves posterior conduct. This leads him
to adopt what we saw was the Eastern patristic tendency of discussing
Adam and Eve as if they were children, inexperienced and ignorant.
This is in no sense completely alien to the Augustinianism earlier
examined. Augustine himself had admitted that an evil will must precede
an evil act, and so Adam and Eve must have sinned in secret before in the
open, unprompted by the devil. But what was desperately problematic for
Augustine, Taylor embraces, and not without a certain wit. Augustine had
identied the shadowy territory of the fall of the will, and then had
stepped back, hastily declaring that it was not to be regarded as such
(CD 14.13). Augustine courted the danger of recursion: decoupling the fall
of the mind from the public transgression bereft this mental fall of any
precise temporal origin, and so the advent of imperfection could be
pushed back ever nearer to the point of creation itself. For Augustine,
this is a necessary aw in his system; for Taylor, it is not necessarily a
problematic consequence. Taylor admitted that man was created mortal ;
he also states that man had a rebellious appetite, and an inclination to
forbidden things, it seems ab initio. Taylor even says that Concupiscence
. . . also is natural, but it was actual before the fall, it was in Adam, and
tempted him, which was what Duns Scotus had proposed.
48
Nevertheless, while Taylor and Augustine subscribe to quite different
doctrinal decisions, these decisions arise from and to an extent directed
the interpretation of the same eld of enquiry. At the doctrinal level,
what looks like an incompatible difference of kind is accompanied at the
level of narrative interpretation by a mere difference of degree.
In the second component of his great attack Taylor, again like Everard,
turns his attention to original sin itself, positing three ways in which it can
be said to be: [1. E]ither by a Physicall or Natural efciency of the sin it
self: or 2. Because we were all in the loyns of Adam, or 3. By the sentence
and decree of God.
49
Against this rst mechanism Taylor directs a string
of objections. If sin is efcacious of itself, then it must be that every sin of
Adam must spoile such a portion of his Nature that before he died, he
must be a very beast. Secondly, if this whole accumulative lump is then
transmitted to us, by this time we should not have been so wise as a ie,
nor so free and unconstraind as re. Next, sin transmitted thus by
physical causality can be no respecter of persons: it would wipe out
habitual righteousness too. Finally, such a model of original sin enforces
the conclusion that original sin does more harm than any actual sin, and
so we would suffer less for doing evil that we know of, then for doing that
which we knew nothing of .
50
Next, can we be said to have sinned in Adams loins, as Augustine
insisted? Tayor again demolishes this argument by taking very literally the
idea of transmitted ethical guilt. Not only would the guilt of original sin
be passed to us, but, there being no imaginable reason why the rst sin
should be propagated, and not the rest, all our forebears sins would ow
down through humanity, and so at birth Abel would have been wickeder
than Cain, and Seth wickeder than Abel, and so forth up to our sorry
selves. Moreover, this version of traducianism would apply to all kinds of
things: a lustful father would beget a lustful son, and a ne orator another
ne orator which latter example Taylor falsies by mentioning Ciceros
son Marcus, who was no good at public speaking.
51
Finally, it is possible that God has simply decreed original sin. But
what can this mean? He threatned death and inicted it. This left Adam
and all his posterity in the meer natural state; that is, in a state of
imperfection. So it cannot be said that original sin in the sense of a
debauching, guilt-imputing phenomenon was decreed by God. Thus falls
the conventional model of original sin.
52
Taylors attack was the most intelligent and eloquent of the period.
Indeed, Taylors quick and elegant pen was precisely the problem: as
Jeanes complained to Taylor of a mutual friend, who having your person
in too great an admiration, greedily swalloweth whatsoever falls from your
pen, though never so false and erroneous.
53
His subsequent addition of a
seventh chapter justifying the sixth on original sin also conrmed his
indebtedness to the Eastern fathers, whom Taylor marshals into an
extremely imposing squad. (This recalls Oughtreds concession, noted
above, that original sin was not met with in the Greek Fathers.) However,
the value of Taylors attack lies particularly in his identication of
certain weak points in the received (Presbyterian) doctrine, and his use
of certain strategies to expose those weaknesses. First, Taylor rubbishes the
older, qualitative way of thinking of original sin by treating it, rather
coyly, in a quantitative fashion. Although his position is deeply scholastic
in its conclusions, it departs from scholastic thinking in precisely this way:
by treating transmissive sin as one would treat any other transmitted
quantity, he exposes the bogus science on which the whole discussion of
original sin was based. Taylors quantitative approach to sin should thus
be seen as shrewd parody. Indeed, though Taylor does not quite see this,
quantitative transmission would conform to geometric models of expan-
sion, and the rate of expansion of original sin would accelerate accord-
ingly. He also attacks qualitative ways of thinking about such issues by
explicitly refusing to grant to original sin any special status setting it apart
from other ethical substances, as it were. If this ethical thing is transmit-
ted, why not other ethical things? Naturally it is all one, Taylor shrugs.
54
Secondly, having exposed the problems traducianist models face,
Taylor then dismisses the whole idea of traducianism, conrming our
sense that Taylors quantitative discussion was all along tinged with irony.
And out with traducianism goes the idea that something that should be
discussed in terms of the will can be talked about in material terms in
Taylors terms, the will is a moral as opposed to natural zone. It is
generally, now adayes especially, believed, that the soul is immediately
created, not generated ; the soul is from without, and is a Divine
substance.
55
Therefore one cannot talk about the soul and its status in
terms of transmission, because it is not a transmitted thing. Neither can
one talk about its properties in terms of material substances, because
cognition is not material. Taylor thereby imposes an anthropological
dualism onto his discussion of man and his sin. In so far as man has a
nature, it is one inherently weak and corrupt, and that is the realm of the
material. But insofar as man sins, that falls within the ambit of the
interior faculties, which are non-material. The great error of Western
theorising about original sin, Taylor implies, is to have conated these
two discussions. Taylor divorces them.
Finally, Taylors attack arises from his larger sense that Christs role as
atoning saviour must be situated within an economy that traces the origin
of sin to a rational choice made by individuals, and the receipt of salvation
again to a rational choice open to all individuals today. He writes continu-
ally as an experimental rst-person narrator: I sin like a Gentleman, not
like a Thief ; I suffer inrmities, but doe not doe like a Devil ; and though I
sin, yet I repent speedily, and when I sin again, I repent again, and my
spiritual state is like my natural, day and night succeed each other like a
never failing revolution.
56
Indeed, Taylor concluded the Deus justicatus
by pointing out that people just didnt really care about original sin, a
more important marker than any doctrinal nicety:
And why the Conscience shall be for ever at so much peace for this sin, that a
man shall never give one groan for his share of guilt in Adams sin, unlesse some
or other scares him with an impertinent proposition; why (I say) the Conscience
should not naturally be aficted for it, nor so much as naturally know it, I
confesse I cannot yet make any reasonable conjecture, save this onely, that it is
not properly a sin, but onely metonymicall and improperly.
57
Taylors arguments owed something to the continental Arminians, as
we have seen, and they also bear striking similarity to earlier remarks by
Samuel Hoard, whose controversial Gods Love to Mankind (1633) had
attacked double predestination, and with it the Dortist conception of
original sin some two decades before Taylor.
58
Hoards work was re-
printed in 1656, and the previous year it had been a target of William
Lyford, who in a miniature version of the whole TaylorStephens
Everard quarrel, bracketed Hoard with Thomas Collier and his The
Marrow of Christianity (1647). Collier had said that: Adam was made a
reasonable, wise, and understanding man; He was in a perfect, morall,
sinlesse condition; but if we could attain the perfection that was in Adam,
it would be no more than a morall and humane perfection; they that have
but the rst Adams wisdome, are still of the earth, earthly.
59
But Hoard
was the Earl of Warwicks chaplain; Collier was a Baptist minister.
Nevertheless it was Taylors eloquence, reputation and sheer persist-
ence that promoted him to an importance no comparable gure achieved.
Taylor, as we saw, won few friends. This was in part due to his political
situation: for his fellow Anglicans, this was exactly what they did not
need, and for the empowered Presbyterians, this was music to their
heresy-obsessed ears. Samuel Rutherford and John Reading had already
pounced on Taylors Liberty of Prophesying, so he should have known
better. Secondly, Taylor refused to retract: indeed, his letter to Sheldon
borders on the deant. His subsequent publications and his clash with
Jeanes ceded no ground, and as late as 1665 the Jesuit Edward Worseley
was reminding his readers that Taylor never recanted.
60
Taylor was
simply too embarrassing a gure to support. One later exception was
the Deist and suicide Charles Blount, an expert in the posthumous
conscription of, at best, grudging allies. His Oracles of Reason, a collection
of Deist documents, opened with a demolition of the literal interpretation
of the Genesis narrative more extreme than anything Taylor would have
countenanced. Blount primarily co-opted Thomas Burnets Archaeologiae
philosophicae (1692), but he listed as additional support Thomas Browne,
Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyre`re and Jeremy Taylor. Much later,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote more extensively on the Origen of our
Church than on any other writer of the time excepting Milton, and
returned again and again to this one still notorious transgression, Taylor
on original sin.
61
The aftermath of Taylors Unum necessarium and Deus justicatus need
not be discussed exhaustively. Nonetheless, a few of his opponents are
exemplary either for their intransigence or for their realisation of the
larger signicance of Taylors attack. Henry Jeanes was the most belliger-
ent of Taylors opponents, a man who had spent his Oxford time pecking
and hewing at his studies.
62
Jeanes, a Presbyterian academician and
scholastic, opened a heated correspondence with a friend over the book,
and eventually Taylor wrote directly to Jeanes, telling him to nd some-
thing better to do with his time. Jeanes clearly thought that trouncing the
golden pen of the Anglicans was a very good use of his time, and so
published their correspondence in 1660, doubtless to smear Taylor in the
year of his triumph and elevation to a bishopric. It is a nasty publication,
waspishly written on both sides, though with Jeanes denitely ending up
as the more odious of the pair.
Nathaniel Stephens waited until the end of this long quarrel before
associating all its major combatants. Each was awarded a section of the
Vindiciae, and the very subtitle of Vindiciae fundamenti of 1658 declares to
the world an odd association: Robert Everard, William Parker and Jeremy
Taylor are all lumped together as common adversaries of the (now
deposed) Presbyterian orthodoxy.
The actual substance of Stephens work is not, of course, particularly
original, but two elements deserve mention. First, Stephens too faces the
old problem of the mistranslation of Romans 5:12, and the troublesome
in quo crux. But, in an example of someone whose beliefs have supplanted
the evidence they were once based upon, Stephens repeats the problem
merely to dismiss it:
Secondly, say they, these words And death passed upon all men
$
$
#

%
, are thus to be rendred, in as much or so farre forth as all have sinned, page
78. Well, let the words be rendred, which way they will, the scope of the text, and
the connexive particle, for, do plainly show that they contain the reason of the
general passage of death upon every individual man. And therefore we must
necessarily and unavoidably come to the disobedience of the rst man, in whom,
as in the common root all have sinned.
63
But this last observation on the common root was based on precisely the
text redened by the reading in as much or so farre forth, rather than in
whom. Stephens, though, is past caring.
Second, Stephens, unlike Jeanes, is sensitive to the conditional nature
of Augustines original thought on the matter. Whereas Jeanes tramples
on the problem of the evil will This greedy appetite [which caused the
Fall] . . . was undenyably a great sinne, and therefore to say it could be in
him [Adam] before his fall, were a very grosse contradiction
64
Stephens
is aware that the traditional AugustinianCalvinist line had been to stress
mutability: man was made in a mutable and changeable condition, in
which he might stand or fall by his own election. Stephens later expands
this position in a cento of Augustinian passages:
First, for the true cause of the fall, we do afrme that our rst parents being
seduced by the temptation of Sathan, did voluntarily and freely eate the
forbidden fruit. Their own defective will was the immediate cause of their fall.
Second, God was pleased according to his wise and just Councel to permit the
fall, that thereby a doore might be opened to the sending of Christ for the more
full declaration of the glory of his grace in the salvation of man as fallen. Third,
for the power that Adam had to stand or fall, as on the one side we must
necessarily say that he was made in a state very good and free from all sinne: so
also it must needs be afrmed, that he was made in a mutable state, farre
different from the state of the blessed Saints and Angels conrmed in grace, and
farthest off from the immutability of the Creator himself. Fourth, if the question
be put, how farre did the Lord go in the fall of Adam? We must needs afrme
that he created the rst man in such a holy state that he might freely obey all his
commands: only he did not sustain him with that special and infallible grace to
preserve him from falling.
65
Again, Stephens says that man was created mortal, and if Adam had
not sinned, he should have been immortal by grace, an imitation of
Augustines non posse moriposse non mori distinction. Stephens also
admits, somewhat cagily, that the whole problem of original righteousness
turned on the precise nature of Adam and Eves intellects before the Fall.
When people spoke of exalted mental powers and the like, what did they
really mean? Was this to make Adam and Eve experts in the arts and
sciences? Or was theirs a mystical or theological intelligence? Stephens
realises that it was the assumption of the former type of intelligence that
was causing all the narrative problems. Hence Adams knowledge was not
so much that which is literal, hystorical, and textual, but . . . that which is
spiritual.
66
This, one may feel, is cheating a little, but it is a revealing
cheat as long as original righteousness was dened in some vague
spiritual sense, one need not face the problem of the divine philosophers
acting so unphilosophically.
Jeremy Taylor is the star of this chapter, but there was a Baptist in the
wilderness before him, the ery Robert Everard, and this demonstrates
both congruence between high Church controversy and separatist radic-
alism, and a contemporary awareness that this was so. But the precise
nature of this congruence remains problematic. Did Taylor read Everard?
When Everard wrote of original sin why might it not be said, When
Adam beleeved, I beleeved; when Adam repented, I repented? this was
the same thought Taylor would use ve or so years later when he too
asked why all ethical inclinations were not seminally transmitted.
67
But
Taylors argument seems too closely knit and integrated to require the
hypothesis of help from the Agitator and maverick Baptist, and Taylor
had been sceptical about original sin since at least the publication of The
Liberty of Prophesying in 1647. Rather, very different men were asking
similar questions of similar material, and were producing similar answers.
Moreover, they had a common enemy in sight. Tellingly, Stephens never
proposes that his opponents were in personal contact, only that they were
producing parallel theologies and that this was worrying enough. It is
perhaps more alarming to see such political extremes moving in sympa-
thetic motion, while the skeins of contact remain invisible.
chapter 4
The heterodox Fall
Caution has to be exercised concerning the nomenclature of the radical-
ism of the mid seventeenth century. Many religious writings we term
radical because they were written by gures well known for holding or
being sympathetic to politically radical ideas, and in this sense religious
and political radicalism inform one another. But, as the last chapter
demonstrated, political and theological radicalism are not simply or
inevitably twins, and, more subtly, some forms of radicalism can be
informed or at least paralleled by movements in high culture, and vice
versa. So we cannot reduce all radicalism to a kind of sui generis broth of
jostling ideas, just as it will not do to freeze orthodoxy into a rigid, inert
casing. As J. G. A. Pocock stresses, the relation between heterodoxy and
orthodoxy is dynamic, not simply oppositional ; this is also true for the
even more difcult relation between radicalism and heterodoxy.
1
Sec-
ondly, different radicals stemmed from different roots, and one of the
concerns of this chapter is to distinguish models of approaching Genesis
23 developed within the radical milieu. Muggletonians, for instance,
vocally disagreed with Quakers on this issue.
Next, much of the material concerning this milieu derives from hostile
accounts and heresiographies, and is thus unreliable, on occasion luridly so.
Nevertheless, the heresiographers have their own story too, and their need
to lay an interpretative grid on an initially bewildering array of phenomena
itself tells us much about how observers classied what they were seeing,
and what their fears were. Many, indeed most, early-modern heresiogra-
phers analysed sectarianism in terms of the categories provided by their
ancient predecessors, the patristic heresiographers, most popularly Epipha-
nius, Irenaeus and Augustine, and the radical reformation on the continent
provided an intermediary reference point. This device comforted the
righteous by roping them to a long tradition of godly struggle, but it also
inadvertently awarded the heretics under discussion a pedigree more
ancient than the heresiographers traditional rhetoric of novelty allowed.
58
Finally, the recording of heresy, or at least heterodoxy, is inevitably
connected with its spread. The Adamites were a case in point reinvented
in about 1641, they migrated from pamphlet to pamphlet until no-ones
views of 1640s sectarianism could be uninformed by their presence. This
presence was only textual unlike the various continental uprisings, no
1640s Adamite collectives have been traced but the suspicion, no matter
how genuinely held, was inuential.
2
Most heresiographies, particularly of the revolutionary decades, an-
nounced the newness of their subjects: novel opinions growne . . . of late
yeeres or sprang up in these latter times, as the title pages of two works
read. The tactic, of course, was not new. Lollards, for example, preached,
it was claimed, new doctrines and wicked.
3
But, paradoxically, most
heresiographers were also keen to say that the sectarian monsters of
Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline England had all been seen before,
and so there was nothing novel here. Stephen Denison, for instance, who
preached a turgid sermon in 1627 against Hetheringtonians and others,
inserted into the printed version along with some showy fonts and
illustrations a list of the eighty-eight heresies enumerated by Augustine
in his De haeresibus.
4
Similarly, the stationer Thomas Underhill in his
Hell Broke Loose (1660) dated Quakerism from the time of St Paul.
5
The
author of Little Non-Such (1645) complained that all the heresies
fomented at severall times, in former ages, and condemned by severall
Councels, are now extant, attended with as many more.
6
Most interest-
ingly of all, Ranters have long been associated with Gnostics, both at their
rst appearance, and by modern commentators such as Friedman, Smith
and Nuttall.
7
On the continent, Calvin had claimed that the French
Libertines probably, as they were so stupid, without knowing it were
merely reproducing a farrago of ideas familiar from Simon, Cerdon,
Marcion, the Gnostics, Valentinus, Apelles and the Manichaeans. Calvins
approach was to be very inuential in England, and it is crucial to note that
he treats a given heresy as a perennial, logical possibility, not solely a matter
of textual or oral debt.
8
So when the St Andrews academic and polemicist Samuel Rutherford
stated that many of the heresies of Spiritual Antichrist had spread to
England from the continent and particularly from Germany, paralleling
English antinomian texts with continental heresiographical accounts,
there is an element of conventionality to his statement. But it is also
one worth taking seriously, given the demonstrable interest of many
radicals, particularly the translator John Everard, in German mystics or
Spirituals such as John Tauler and Sebastian Franck. Over the middle
The heterodox Fall 59
decades of the century there appeared, in print as well as in manuscript,
works such as the medieval Theologia Germanica, translated by Giles
Randall in 1646 (which had previously walked up and down this City
in Manuscripts at deer rates); and Francks The Forbidden Fruit, the text
that will chiey concern us here.
9
The German Spirituals and Anabaptists had long doubted orthodox
accounts of original sin. The Hutterites also dismantled the notion,
and correspondingly produced no theology of Atonement.
10
Balthasar
Hubmaier, for instance, burned as an Anabaptist, wrote in his On Free
Will that man was composed of three natures: spirit, soul and body,
a distinction common to Platonism and Gnosticism. Hubmaier then
associated Adam with the soul and Eve with the esh, another old idea.
But, Hubmaier insisted, the spirit, the most important category of
the three, remained upright after the transgression, and this was enough
to query any overly pessimistic estimations of the Fall. Adam would
have preferred not to eat of the forbidden tree, Hubmaier said, but did
so against his own conscience, so as not to vex or anger his rib, his
esh, Eve. The Lutherans are grufy rebuffed: So now no one can
any longer complain about Adam and Eve, nor try to excuse or palliate
his sin by Adams Fall, since everything has been adequately restored.
The forbidden tree was named a tree of knowledge merely to remind
man that he had quite enough already. God forbade the fruit to encourage
man not to wish to learn and experience more than was necessary for
man.
11
Hubmaier, although his tripartite division of mans being was an
individual touch, was working in a tradition that typically emphasised
that the cause of the Fall was just as it was termed in the Bible: a desire for
more knowledge than was t, or for the wrong knowledge. Consequently
mans initial lot can hardly have been exalted, and man including man
today should cast off his desire for elevation. Such spiritual abasement
reverses the Fall. The Theologia Germanica had discussed Lucifers and
then Adams falls very much in these terms, exhorting the believer to do
otherwise, not just to lament current powerlessness.
12
Cornelius Agrippas
celebrated De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum atque artium declamatio
of 1530, translated into English in 1569 as Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie
of Artes and Sciences, methodically listed and rejected in 102 chapters every
art and science recognisable as such to Agrippa. He opens his work with
an admonitory comment on the Fall, and a recollection of the Gnostic
Ophites:
If at rst I shall admonishe you, that all Sciences be as well naught as good, and
that it bringeth to us, aboue the limite of Humanitie, none other blessing of the
Deitie, but that perchance, wich that auncient Serpent promised to our rste
parents, saiynge, Ye shalbe as Goddes, and shall know good and ill. He shall then
vaunte himselfe in this Serpente, whiche bosteth himselfe to haue knowledge, as
wee reade in deede that the Heretikes Ophiti did, whiche worshipped the
Serpents in their Sacrices, saying, That he hath brought the knowledge of Vertue
into Paradise.
13
Such cautions against intellectual curiosity were common; as Montaigne
said, In Man curiosity is an innate evil, dating from his origins: Chris-
tians know that particularly well. The original Fall occurred when Man
was anxious to increase his wisdom and knowledge: that path led head-
long to eternal damnation.
14
Agrippa, however, exemplies the difculty of inheriting on the one
hand the duty to afrm that unfallen Adam and Eve were created in ye
best degree, and on the other the desire to castigate intellectual aspiration.
Agrippas book ends on an uneasy combination of both strains, in which
Adam and Eve are created in possession of formes and knowledges, but
things are nonetheless reueled when they transgressed:
bicause God created al things very good, yt is to say in ye best degree, wherein
thei might abide: euen as he than [sic] hath created trees ful of fruites, so also
hath he created the soules as reasonable trees ful of formes and knowledges, but
thorow the sinne of the rst parent al things were reueled, & oblivion the mother
of ignoraunce stept in.
15
The distinction seems to be that the prelapsarian formes and knowledges
are internal things of the soul, whereas sin reueled other things, external
things of ignorance.
Sebastian Franck was inuenced by Agrippa, and also by the idea of
Christian folly, prominent in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, and
stemming from Pauls statements professing themselves to be wise, they
became fools, and, if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this
world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
16
Franck, a printer by
trade, was one of the most prominent of the sixteenth-century German
Spirituals, an anti-Lutheran, and hence favourable to an anti-Lutheran
exegesis of Genesis 23. He also despised slavish obedience to intellectual
authority. Foolish Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, said Franck
of the four doctors of the Latin Church, of whom not even one knew
the Lord, so help me God, nor was sent by God to teach. Rather, they
were all apostles of Antichrist.
17
Franck had also translated the classic
text of Christian folly, Erasmus Encomium moriae, and his Forbidden
Fruit, with its exhortations to unlearn, is steeped in such professedly
anti-intellectualist writings.
Francks Paradoxa (1534, many subsequent editions) was deeply in-
uenced by Tauler and by the Theologia Germanica, and treats Adam as
an attitude to be resisted rather than simply as a historical person; Adam,
he says, citing the Theologia Germanica, is our self-will, and as such is still
alive. But Adam can be rejected: Adams sin does not harm anyone,
unless it be taken in hand and put on ; Adams fall, the tree of know-
ledge, repentance; likewise, death, life, suffering, the resurrection of
Christ are each in its own way still in full swing, as well as all other stories
in the Bible.
18
It was Francks The Forbidden Fruit, though, under the supposed
authorship of Augustinus Eleutherius, which was to be the most in-
uential of his writings in English circles.
19
A translation appeared in 1640,
marked Amsterdam, and a distinct text was printed in London two years
later. John Everards own manuscript translation had already been in
some circulation.
20
(Everard got into considerable trouble for his transla-
tions, and was made to read out a list of retractions on his knees before
William Laud in late 1639.)
21
Notably, Francks work appears in the
library catalogues of both George Fox (who lists a lost 1650 edition
produced by Calvert) and, later, the Quaker bibliophile Benjamin Furley,
and Franck has accordingly been proposed as an inuence on early
Quakerism.
22
Certainly, in 1676 the Quaker Hilary Prach was writing
from London to a German Quaker friend that he had himself just nished
a translation of Franck on the forbidden tree into English, because it
agreed with our position.
23
For Franck, the narrative of creation and fall is both literal and
allegorical, as the thing was done outwardly, so the same . . . happened
inwardly in the heart of Adam ; the exterior world, and whatsoever
outwardly is to be seene or is done, is onely an accident and a certaine
signifying gure of the true and interior nature.
24
Literal and allegorical
modes fuse. This contrasts with the technique of the Digger spokesman
Gerard Winstanley who, in deference to his allegorical priorities, wrote
that there were ve rivers owing out of Eden rather than the biblical
four: one for each sense.
25
Franck, however, stays close to what he sees as
the literal signication of the text. Thus, of the forbidden tree, who
should eate thereof, their eyes should be opened to view themselves, and
they be made Gods, and so know both Good and Evill. The interior
meaning of this verse applies, as Augustine might have agreed, to nothing
else but our owne will and knowledge.
26
Commenting on the inclusion
of good as well as evil in the name of the forbidden tree, Franck infers that
the prelapsarians were ignorant of both: they walk[ed] in innocencie . . .
ignorant both of Good and Evill. This state, rather than being something
quite out of our grasp, is one we should labour to regain, and Franck
associates this with unlearning : We must therefore learne to forget, and
unlearne whatsoever Adam knew, or doth know, wils, loves, &c.
Those who wished to praise unfallen perfection had a logical problem:
man could not be that perfect without encroaching upon the higher order
of the angels, let alone God. Emphasising mans initial dejection had
fewer problems. Thus Franck counsels that we too must become little
Children and Fooles again, void of all knowledge. Our best state is
when we quite literally vegetate:
And man, like a Logge, is no better then dead; but while he doth nothing, knows
& desires nothing, but, keeping a holy Sabbath or rest; dyes wholly unto himself,
and being void of will or wit, resignes himselfe over unto God, and permits in
him to know and doe in him what, when, and how he will.
27
The Theologia Germanica, again one of Francks major sources for The
Forbidden Fruit, also stressed that the fall was not simply or even
importantly to do with taking apples, but with egocentrism. As Everard
translated the passage:
What other thing did the Divell, or what was his turning away, or fall ; but bec:
he arrogated vnto hims: that he might be somthing, & and somthing of hims: &
in his owne right. This arrogance to be I, to be mee, to be mee [sic], & to be
mine was his turning away & Fall. And y
e
same thing is yet done . . . It is wont to
be said that Ad. perished, or fell bec: he eate an Apple: But I say that hapened
bec: he arrogated somth: to hims:, & bec: of his I, to mee, mine, mee, & such
like.
28
This sentiment was put to particularly trenchant use in England as part of
John Websters 1654 attack on the traditional university curriculum: The
whole Scripture is given that man might be brought to the full, and
absolute negation of all his wit, reason, will, desires, strength, wisdome,
righteousness, and all humane glory and excellencies whatsoever, and that
selfhood might be totally annihilated.
29
Joseph Salmon too, in a pamphlet he wrote before his more notorious
A Rout, A Rout, also shows Franckean inuence. Adam, like a child, came
into the world not only naked but blind:
This was that Antichrist that appeared in, and to our rst Parents, and that which
they harlotryed with, from the Lord: God He created Adam blind and naked to
this end, that Adam might not see, but God for him; nor Adam might not know,
but what God knew in him, and for him; and so this Adam, though blind and
naked, yet cloathed with such divine Robes, as were althogether inconsistent to
eshly Adam; so here was God All, the Creature Nothing . . . And as Adam, in
the History; so all in the Mistery, commit dayly fornication with the Whore our
eshly wisdime; by eating of the Forbidden Tree; for this forbidden Tree is in us,
and we tast of it continually; and howerly suffer death for the same.
30
Henry Pinnell, the army chaplain and translator of the prominent aca-
demic Paracelsan Oswald Croll, also wrote of Adam in terms of rise-as-
fall : Did not Adam dye when he was risen, and ascended to the Meridian
of his created life? Adam was intrinsically restricted, and should have
remained thus: Adam had his root and rise but in and from the earth;
how then could his righteousnesse be heavenly or spirituall ? He was that
earthly Adam who hath (only) breath breathed (but) into his nostrils ; his
was but a terrene Paradise at best. Pinnell nds the orthodox conception
of prelapsarian perfection a danger to piety: When the shadow of the rst
Adams excellency is so bigge and long upon the earth, it is too cleare a
signe that the Day-starre is very low and little in the Horrison of mans
heart.
31
Pinnell then unfolds his catalogue of objections to the orthodox
model : if Adam were otherwise than initially imperfect, he could not have
fallen; if Adam had not in him the Principles and Seeds of sin, how could
he have transgressed and become a sinner? ; mortall at rst, he was of the
earth, earthly; his falling was more like that of a man who had nothing
running into debt than a man who was originally rich; crucially, even
God admits that his eyes were opened.
32
This can be likened to the
sentiments of another sometime army chaplain, William Erbury or
Erbery, who, as Wood reported, declare[d] himself for universal redemp-
tion, that no man was punished for Adams sin, that Christ dies for all,
that the guilt of Adams sin should be imputed to no man, &c.
33
Pinnell, like everyone who argues his way, faces grave problems of
theodicy. The Franckean reading of Genesis as the story of limited,
creaturely beings overpromoting themselves has great narrative persua-
sion, especially given the full name of the forbidden tree and Gods
seeming admission of its properties at Genesis 3:22. But such approaches
cannot explain why God would have created man in such a fallible
condition. Such objections are met rather brusquely by Pinnell : It was
the will of God . . . He is to give account to none but himself. He is above
all Gods, and may do what pleaseth Himselfe in heaven and earth. God,
if he so chose, could dash . . . in pieces . . . that earthen vessel of the rst
Adam and his created state, tted to ruin and destruction.
34
In this way
Pinnell shows the limits of the Franckean approach: it cannot furnish any
explanation as to why God chose to make Adam tted to ruin, resorting
instead to ideological imperative.
Perhaps the most interesting reader of Franck, however, is Isaac
Penington the Younger, prominent convert to Quakerism in 1658, and
spiritual mentor to the Quaker Thomas Ellwood, one of John Miltons
pupils. Penington, the son of the Alderman of that name, also associated
with Lady Anne Conway and Henry More and their circle, and was, with
Conway, socially one of the most highly placed of the early Quakers.
Henry More liked him: Theres none reades more like a down right good
man than he, he wrote to Lady Conway in 1675. Penington was also once
jailed for not taking off his hat to the Earl of Bridgwater, erstwhile Elder
Brother of Miltons Mask.
35
Penington is of particular interest because in his pre-Quaker days he
had some connection to the Ranters, and to the Muggletonians, as
Christopher Hill has discussed.
36
Certainly, Giles Calvert, who published
other Ranters, was Peningtons sole publisher from 164854, Peningtons
most interesting phase. Even after Penington started selling his copy
principally to Lodowick Lloyd, Calvert was still publishing the odd work
up until 1659. John Reeve, with Muggleton one of the Two Witnesses,
had signed a letter of 1654 to Penington, Yours with all the elect, but
Penington fell into controversy with Muggleton in the late 1660s, who
mockingly titled him with inverse snobbery, Squire Penington.
37
In A Looking-Glass for George Fox Muggleton produced one of the most
shrewd contemporary analyses of the early Quakers:
Here people may see what the Quakers Christ within them is, a meer allegory, a
spirit without a body, and their esh and bone of their bodies they count Christs
body, and so when their souls slip out of their bodies, and goes into God, as they
imagine, their bodies goes to the Earth, and so Christs body goes to the Earth,
and his spirit that is in them, goes into Gods vast spirit that taketh all things into
its self; And according to Squire Penningtons saying unto John Reeve, but it was
when he was upon the Ranting Principle, but since that he is turned Quaker; for
the Quakers principle is but the Ranters rened into a more civil kind of life.
For the Ranters were so grosly rude in their lives, that spoyled their high
language, and made people weary of them; but the Quakers that were upon the
Rant are the best able to maintain the Quakers principle of Christ within them,
than any other Quakers that were not upon the Rant, as William Smith, and
Squire Pennington, and others as I know.
38
Indeed, the idea that early Quakerism was close to Ranting was wide-
spread: Richard Baxter and Alexander Ross both said so, and Henry More
complained that Quakerism was tinctured with Familisme.
39
Penington,
who produced eleven tracts in his pre-Quaker period (from A Touch Stone
or Tryall of Faith (1648) to Expositions (1656)), certainly wrote like a
Ranter in his tellingly titled 1649 pamphlet Light or Darknesse:
And this is that which my Soul in its inmost part desireth, That the Tincture
both of good and evil, in all its varieties and expatiations, might be blotted out;
and things reduced into, and produced in their Originality, which comprehends
both good and evil in an absolute perfection. And then we shall see all things, no
more with one kinde of eye appearing to be evil, nor with another kinde of eye
appearing to be good, but as they are indeed in their inmost bottom, where alone
is true Knowledg, Peace, Rest, and Content, eternally to be found and
possessed.
40
Later in life, Penington remembered how in his youth, after a period of
Calvinist angst, he prayed for illumination and got too much:
But I soon felt, that this estate was too high and glorious for me, and I was not
able to abide in it, it so overcame my natural spirits: wherefore, blessing the
Name of the Lord for his great goodness to me, I prayed unto him to take that
from me which I was not able to bear, and to give me such a proportion of his
light and presence, as was sutable to my present state, and might t me for his
service. Whereupon this was presently removed from me, yet a favour remained
with me.
41
This remarkable passage corresponds to the time of his rst pamphleteer-
ing. His eighteenth-century Quaker biographer, Joseph Gurney Bevan,
described Light or Darknesse and Peningtons two following publications
as written in an unusual style and often expressed in terms at which even
the pious at this day would revolt, and which the wise would contemn.
42
Muggleton and Bevan, then, though working with opposing biases, both
clearly identied a wilder phase in Peningtons writing.
While this general observation works well at a distance, it does not
quite prepare one for the extreme disparity between chronologically
adjacent works. The Great and Sole Troubler of the Times Represented in
a Mapp of Miserie (1649) is a depressed, passive piece: man is mad, hates
God, and must simply wait for dissolution: the work ends wishing only
for the Reners re. In contrast, Light or Darknesse, published the
following year, in the tradition of Erasmus and Franck praises folly with
an energy foreign to the earlier work: But now, I have been so tossd and
tumbled, melted and new-moulded, that I am changed into that which I
thought it utterly impossible for me ever to be. I am grown at peace, if not
in love, with folly. I begin to prefer Folly at my very Heart above
Wisdom.
43
Light or Darknesse, indeed, evinces a Franckean pre-ethical, almost pre-
human bliss, recaptured through self-abasement. Penington wished good
and evil. . .blotted out : Destruction will make an end of their wicked-
ness, yea and it will make an end of your Righteousness also, and then ye
will become both one lump of Clay, without either Good or Evil.
Destruction will return men to an Edenic state, by bring[ing] forth it
self and everything again in its Primitive Glory.
44
Peningtons prelapsar-
ians are not philosophers but clods. We have fallen away from this state
the Creature [is] in its fallen, sunken estate and are rewarded with a God
of wrath. Indeed, in explicit opposition to how God appeared in Eden,
Penington has bold words for how he appears in 1650 England: as a severe
dreadful Iudg, as an Enemy to the Life, Being and Happiness of it; as
a Tormentor to it, as a Destroyer of it. But Penington also says that
this aspect is only one of Gods faces, and that we can nd, as well as
others, an Adamic state in our hearts, where God will appear kind and
bountiful.
45
However, even Adam-as-clay did not have full access to God. In
Severall Fresh Inward Openings, another pamphlet of 1650, Penington
cautioned that Adam unfallen only saw God through the vail : God
indeed shewed himself to Adam, as he appeared in the Creature, as he
shined through the vail ; but hid himself as he was in himself: so that
Adam could in no wise reach to the true Vision, but onely to such an
appearance as God pleased to dart forth of himself through the vail.
46
Finally, in the Divine Essays of 1654, as was noted in the rst chapter,
Penington admitted that Adam when he fell, shewed the weakness of his
nature, The Prince of this World came and found somewhat in him to
fasten upon. Frailty is a property of the esh.
47
So for Penington, prelapsarianism is desirable but also oddly vulnerable
and passive. In a direct quotation from Franck, as Smith has noted,
Penington advises us to vomit up the forbidden fruit, to become stupid
again: ignorance is better than knowledg. Man hath still eaten too much
of the tree of knowledg, and he must vomit up all this fruit again.
Compare Franck: it is behooveful that we be born anew, do vomit up
the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
48
Penington and the Franckeans, in conclusion, seek both to demolish any
sense of an absolute and impermeable barrier between unfallen and fallen
states of man, and to aid this project by emphasising mans constant
creaturely dependence on God. Consequently, they dispense with any idea
of mans initial grandeur, instead praising unfallen man as a log, a trunk, a
piece of clay, ignorant of both good and evil. We are exhorted to behave
thus. As such, theirs is a coherent theology of personal abasement, founded
on a set of assumptions about the Genesis narrative that directly contradicts
those of the magisterial reformers at every important point. What had been
an anti-Lutheran project in early-to-mid-sixteenth-century Germany
becomes an anti-Presbyterian one in mid-seventeenth-century England.
One similarity among the writers so far discussed is their readiness to
take seriously the idea that the forbidden tree was genuinely potent.
Francks writings, though, and those writings he inuenced, were openly
welcoming of allegorical interpretation, and although Franck says that he
does not deny that a literal Fall took place, his emphasis on the falls we
daily see taking place about us might make us wary of taking the
literalistic ramications of his exegesis too seriously. Even Augustine
had allowed that the castigation of desire for too much knowledge was
licit, as long as it relied on strictly allegorical exegesis of Genesis, and left
the literal sense intact:
And I know there are some who think the sin of those people consisted in having
anticipated too hurriedly the desire for knowledge of good and evil, and in
having wished to lay hold prematurely of what was more suitably preserved for
them for a later time . . . This, so long as they understand that tree not as a literal
tree with literal fruit, but only metaphorically so, can have a certain congruity
with upright faith and a probability of truth.
49
But given that the overwhelming understanding of the Genesis narrative
in the early-modern period was literalistic, some radical thinkers extended
this literalism to the forbidden tree itself, the last outpost of allegorism in
the otherwise non-allegorical territory of orthodox exegesis. As one of
Samuel Hartlibs correspondents commented in an undated letter:
I shall in the next place returne to my great greate granfather Adam & question
with my selfe what was the formall cause of his transgression & what or how it
was, corruption was wrought vpon his whole posterity, To which I answer that
whosoeuer he be that doth maintaine that barely the breaking of the comand,
without any inherent quality in the fruite to suplant him in his former condition
shall neuer make either sound Divine or able Phision.
50
This dangerous extension of a perfectly orthodox technique was one that
derived from medical theory, specically Paracelsan medicine; Hartlibs
correspondent was a medic, and Pinnell was a translator of Paracelsan
texts. As the inuential Flemish iatrochemist Jean-Baptiste van Helmont
wrote: Death proceeded not from the Will, or from sin; but from the
Apple.
51
This is exactly opposite to the Theologia Germanica above, which
had maintained that talk of real apples was idle.
One peculiarity of Paracelsan systems, though, is that they also tend to
emphasise the magnitude of Adams unfallen intellect, and this at once
distinguishes them from the Franckeans, and creates the potential narra-
tive problem that Adam would appear already to possess what the forbid-
den fruit nominally offers. Van Helmont overcame this difculty by
dening the knowledge of the apple as different in kind from mans
initial knowledge. He treats the apple as an aphrodisiac, thus equating
sexual knowledge with the Fall, a conclusion Augustine had gone to some
pains to refute: For it pleased the Lord of things to insert in the Apple, an
incentive of the Concupiscence of the Flesh, to wit, from which he was
able safely to abstain, by not eating the Apple, therefore diswaded from:
For otherwise, he had never at any moment been tempted by the Flesh of
his genital Members . . .
52
Augustine agreed that unfallen Adam never
suffered from unwonted erections, but he refused therefore to relegate all
sexual contact to the fallen world. God, Augustine said, had created man
with sexual organs, and declared his creation good. Therefore sex cannot
be inherently sinful. He had hedged somewhat by insisting that although
prelapsarian sex was theoretically licit, it never actually took place; van
Helmont dispenses with the distinction, and with it, any possible sexual
activity before the fall. In other words, Augustine abstracted concupis-
cence from intercourse; van Helmont did not.
53
If one neglected to distinguish carefully the type of knowledge Adam
had and the type the apple offered, problems could arise. This is best
witnessed in a manuscript translation of the Paracelsan Andreas Tentzel,
Of Spirituall mumy, located among the papers of the Cambridge medic
Dr Daniel Foote.
54
This curious treatise takes magic tree ideas to new
extremes. The starting point, once again, is acceptance of the godly power
of the forbidden tree. Tentzel rejects the orthodox solution to the Genesis
3:22 problem, with its gloss of Gods comments on mans promotion as
irony. The trinity does not trafc in wit: ye Person of ye Father testiinge
to ye other this very thinge, sayinge, Behould ye Man is Become as one of
us to know good & evill &c. Neither is this expression of ye holy Trinity
to be judged ironicall, as it may perhaps att ye rst sight seeme to some.
55
But the account then construes the matter in Eden in a fashion quite
removed from the other iatrochemists. The tree gained its power by way
of transplantation from ye Serpent ; And further its probable yt ye
Serpent had his den under yt tree or thereabouts; Which thinge God
knowinge did therfore forbidd Adam to use and eate ye fruit of it.
56
The
business of the treatise is to instruct how one might utilise this knowledge
(spirituall mumy) imparted from the serpent to the tree and any
serpent, it seems, will do. Tentzel even asserts that if one plants in earth
mixed with serpent semen, the resultant ora will act like modern smart
drugs. Better still,
for greater efcacy sake, chiey for ye heightening of witt, lett it [serpent
mumy] be transplanted into some certaine fruite belongeinge to ye braine,
sowinge viz: ye earth with ye extreame parts of ye roots of cherrie-tree: For then
ye fruite thereof will attract & convert into themselves (together with ye
nutriment by a way truly balsamicall and magneticall) ye mumiall spirite of ye
Serpent.
Tentzel then looks forward to a time when the tree of life can be used in a
similar fashion, and immortality achieved.
57
In one sense this is a preposterous document, because Tentzel ignores
the biblical backdrop of prohibition, fall and expulsion. Although
Tentzels text is not a piece of theology the theological objection is hard
to ignore: Tentzel instructs his reader to enact the Fall in a reconstructed
Edenic environment. Nowhere does he forbid. In the most obvious way,
this Paracelsan text demonstrates the structural fault less visible but no less
problematic in all the accounts that grant potency to the tree: if the Fall
was really upwards, then why did God try to prevent it?
The Franckeans had solved this problem by dening the knowledge as
genuinely on offer but undesirable; Tentzel trusted the text of Genesis
with its eye-opening conclusion, and thus risked inculpating God. Simi-
larly, Rosicrucian emblems often insinuated the exciting fall into wisdom:
Michael Maiers Atalanta fugiens, an early example of multimedia,
employing parallel illustrations, mottoes, prose commentaries and mu-
sical notation for accompanying Alchemical Fugues, contains several
suggestive plates, including one of a sage plucking an apple from a tree
enclosed in a chapel.
58
Perhaps the most sensitive extrapolation of the magic tree tradition is
provided by a rare work written by a rare man: William Rabisha and his
Adam Unvailed, and Seen with Open Face (1649). It was published in his
most productive year by the arch-radical printer of the revolutionary
decades, Giles Calvert, whose print-shop Thomas Hall called that forge
of the Devil.
59
In 1649 a parliamentary captain called William Rabysha
was awarded 100 by parliament for carrying the news from Ireland that
Wexford had been taken, and given both the prevalence of radical religion
in the army and the extreme rarity of the name (of Yorkshire origin) the
William Rabisha who produced Adam Unvailed and Capt. Wm Rabysha
are likely one and the same.
60
Rabisha signed his tract Yours in the
fellowship of the Spirit, and Minister of God according to the dispensa-
tion of grace given to him, though, and apart from his similarly idiosyn-
cratic A Paralel between Mr Loves Treason and the Many Thousands that
are Hanged for Theft (1651), a condemnation of capital punishment, he
produced no other comparable work. The complication is that William
Rabisha was also the author of a clamorously Royalist cookbook pub-
lished on the Restoration, in which Rabisha protested that he had been
abroad in exile throughout the revolution. But it was published by Calvert
again, an obvious ngerprint of prior radical association. It would seem
that all three Rabishas were one, and that Rabisha reinvented his past
when it became politically expedient.
61
What impact Rabisha had is very hard to say, as the scarcity of his book
is matched by a scarcity of reference to it, although it is listed in the
libraries of three men as colourful as Rabisha himself : Thomas Jeake the
provincial radical and bibliophile, Thomas Britton the coal-seller and
eclectic, and Francis Lodwick the language-planner and pre-Adamite.
Rabishas ideas are certainly compatible with what the last of these
three men wrote about the Fall.
62
Rabisha turns the Fall on its head. His title-page boldly promises
arguments in opposition to what ever hath been formerly declared by
most men. He opens by detailing the enemy position, the Principle
which I doe here oppose and deny to be a Truth, and his thesis is that the
common reading of the Fall makes no causal sense:
[T]hey contradict themselves, and give themselves the lie; in that they say Adam
was made in holiness and righteousness, and so continued till he ate the fruit
thereof; and yet to say, he sinned before he ate thereof, that is a plain
contradiction: and therefore the principle touching Adams holiness is not a
truth . . . their eating did not effect or produce their lusts and desires, but their
lusts and desires did effect their taking the fruit and eating thereof.
63
Rabisha thus detects that all Augustinian-based theories have to contain
within themselves the elements of their demise those problems earlier
investigated of the evil will and its origin. He attacks by name not
only high-church gures like Ussher on this point but also the Digger
Winstanley, on the grounds that Winstanley too had said that the Fall was
a demotion. Rabisha opposes this, once again, by echoing the Corinthians
text on the nature the earth[l]y man: the rst Adam was made of earth
earthly For he lost nothing by his eating of the forbidden fruit; he
having nothing to lose, neither wisdom, righteousness, knowledge, or
light inherent in himself; but contrarily, being meerly blinde, foolish,
ignorant, and empty of all those attributes. God was not speaking
ironically at Genesis 3:22, as the orthodox were forced into insisting.
God, for Rabisha, does not lie to himself, and the connective therefore
before the expulsion would make no sense if God were only joking
(Therefore the LORD God sent him forth . . .).
64
So far Rabisha and the Franckeans would agree. But Rabisha pushes
on: I say he gained all his naturall knowledge, light, righteousness,
wisedom, and the like, by vertue of his eating of the forbidden fruit. At
this point Franck would advise us to vomit up that knowledge as a bad
thing, but for Rabisha, the fruit deied man. In a statement Franck would
have deplored, man did become like God, Rabisha says, in kind if not in
degree: as a coal is like a whole world set on re, so was Adam like God in
the knowledge of good and evil. Man in his fallen state differs from God
only in that his ethical performance does not always match his ethical
understanding.
65
But that understanding, in a remarkable moment in
English religious writing, is divine.
Rabishas close reading of Winstanley let alone the connective par-
ticles of Genesis might encourage us to classify him as a literalist exegete.
But Rabisha then permits Genesis to dissolve back into allegory. We were
not in Adam; the trees were not materiall or naturall, and we only die
in Adam in an allegoricall sense. No matter how closely Rabisha has
watched words like therefore in the text, the narrative is just a type of
what we all go through.
66
It is a ne denouement: literalistic exegesis used
to refute the literal reading, and then itself dismissed.
The question remains for Rabisha, however, what God was doing
prohibiting the Fall. Rabisha takes refuge in the long perspective: God
suffered the Fall to convince man of sin; God, seeing that even this was not
enough, had to become incarnate. When this viewof gradual growth across
the ages is combined with gradual growth in Eden Adam, in a very strange
phrase, grew out of something we are only a step away from the type of
theodicy associated with Irenaeus, against that of Augustine, in which
human history is now seen as a process of development, not of forlorn
wandering. Rabisha was almost certainly unaware of any such scholarly
ancestry he does not seem a particularly bookish sort but his emphasis
on growth and potential, rather than damage and defect, is testimony to a
growing awareness that the Augustinian theodicy presupposed by almost
all early-modern religious writers was not the only option.
Rabisha did share one opinion with Winstanley an ultimate commit-
ment to the allegorical priority of scripture and Winstanley is the most
rigorously allegorical of the radical writers on Genesis. Winstanley was the
spokesman of the famed Digger community; as one contemporary news-
paper described them, The new fangled people that begin to dig on St
Georges Hill in Surrey, say, they are like Adam, they expect a generall
restauration of the Earth to its rst condition.
67
They assembled in April
1649 on St Georges Hill near Walton, Surrey, and moved four months
later to nearby Cobham. Initially under the leadership of William Everard
and Gerard Winstanley, the group soon achieved notoriety: sowing the
ground with Parsnips, Carrets and Beans, their number encrease every
day, it began with ve, and is now above fourty, but they say they will
shortly be above ve thousand. Within a year of the initial occupation
the community, crushed by local hostility and unyielding soil, had
dispersed.
68
Winstanley discussed the Fall in almost all his pamphlets. His rst
work, The Mysterie of God (1648), manifests immediately his allegorical
turn: Adam himself, or that living esh, mankinde, is a Garden which
God hath made for his own delight, to dwell, and walk in. Already the
Fall is reversible: Now the curse that was declared to Adam was tempor-
ary.
69
Allegory also internalises and thus marginalises the role of Eve and
the serpent, who are not discussed as separate things. It all takes place in
the mind, and there alone: the Serpent, my own invention ; the ground
of Adams fall, arises up rst in Adams heart, as fruit growing up from a
created Being. Again, God foresees the Fall because nature is unstable, all
these being created qualities.
70
In The New Law of Righteousness (1649)
Winstanley rejects in ringing public tones preacherly talk of original sin:
Therefore you Preachers, do not you tell the people any more, That a
man called Adam, that disobeyed about 6000 years ago, was the man that
lled every man with sin and lth, by eating an apple ; rather, Adams
innocency is the time of child-hood.
71
Winstanley too employs close textual scrutiny, rst to point out a
problem produced by literal reading, and then to use that problem to
reject the literal sense. The problem he points out is that the Bible itself
says that there were men before Adam:
Therefore let none speak so discontentedly against Adam, the rst man by
Creation, that they say lived on earth about 6000 years ago, as though he
brought in the misery upon all ; for the Scriptures seems to declare, that there
were men in the world before that time.
For when Cain had killed his brother Abel, which in one verse Moses seemes to
say, was the third man in the world, yet in a few verses following, writing of
Cains punishment, declares Cains own words, Thou hast set a mark upon me, and
every one that sees me, wil kil me: And yet by the story before, there were no more
men in the world, but his Father Adam and he, now Abel being dead. Gen. 4. 14.
Therefore certainly this Adam, or rst man that is spoken of, is he that is
within, as I have spoke of, which kils or surpresses Abel.
72
Winstanley also shows witty disrespect for academic polyglot exegesis
in his obviously fanciful etymologies that Adam is A-dam because he
does dam and stop up the streams of the waters of life and libertie ; and
that Eve is Ivie because she clings about the tree in covetousness.
73
By
Fire in the Bush (1650), Winstanleys allegorising is subtly reconstituting
the original text:
[F]lesh sees his folly, and growes very weary thereof; the patience of the spirit is
honoured by the esh. And that righteous Ruler (God), the Seed and tree of Life,
begins to walke in this coole of the day, with delight, in the middle of the garden
(Mans heart); the sweet breathings of that pure spirit is now entertained, and
falne Earth begins to see himselfe naked, and to acknowledge his nakednesse
before the spirit, and is ashamed.
74
In Genesis, the cool of the day is broken by the ominous approach of God
about to curse and expel his creatures; now, his approach heralds a return
to blessedness. To perceive ones nakedness is an anagnorisis, a sweetness
in shame perennially available:
Many men live in their innocencie longer than others, some are tempted sooner
than others, but all must be tempted, and tried by the evil one . . . This is the rst
estate of mankinde, or the living soule in his innocencie, and you need not looke
back six thousand yeares to nd it; for every single man and woman passes
through it.
75
Winstanley, though, does have his own theory of human origins: while
Genesis describes allegorically mans various spiritual states, it also docu-
ments the historical fortunes of the initial community, which came into
existence at some unspecied time. This community was not a couple in a
garden, but a larger group of workers, like the Diggers themselves.
Initially, people shared the workload, the stronger compensating for the
weaker. But one day, The stronger, or elder brother seeing the outward
objects before him, thereupon imagines and saith, why should I that do all
the worke, be such a servant to these that doe least worke, and be equall
with them?
76
Thereupon the elder brother tyrannises over the younger,
and that both was and is the Fall. Moreover, it is in no sense a birthright ;
this fall is one we all have the choice to embrace or reject. Winstanley,
in dismantling the apparatus of hereditary taints, also questions the very
idea of heredity. The same structure that guarantees the continual exist-
ence of original sin is that which allows a hereditary aristocracy. Disman-
tle one, and the other collapses too. Nor is it all the fault of the elder
brother: the younger is also culpable, as he lets go his hold in the Earth,
and submits himself to be a slave to his brother.
77
(Note that this cannot
comfortably be translated back into the terms of the Genesis narrative:
talk of a guilty apple as well as a guilty Adam would merely be
transferred epithet.)
The central principle of this fall, then, is individualism, self-promotion.
Here Winstanley intersects with the Franckeans in his distrust of imagin-
ation, lamenting But thou seest now, how Imagination, that Serpent,
hath deceived thee; o thou living soule, how art thou falne?
78
Imagin-
ation is that God, which generally every one worships and ownes; and in
the matter, they worship a lye, the Devill and meere nothing ; imaginary
Hypocrites, that worship they know not what, but as their fancie tells
them.
79
So Winstanleys fall is what were traditionally its effects. In The Law of
Freedom, his last work, When Mankinde began to buy and sell, then did
he fall from his Innocency; for they began to oppress and cozen one
another of their Creation Birth-right.
80
Indeed, as Winstanley accepts
that there were men before Adam, his fall cannot be primal. He writes of
ignorant and rude fancy, rudeness and ignorance, as if they were parts
of human nature; law is required because the spirit in Mankind is various
within it self .
81
Some people simply need controlling because that is
how they are. When he talks of Original Righteousness, in a temporal
inversion it is something now available, something we must hurry to
obtain.
82
Winstanleys advice, unsurprisingly, was not heeded, and the Digger
experiment failed. But meanwhile, Winstanleys writings had dismantled
not just what most orthodox people thought about the opening chapters
of the Bible, but what most of the radicals we have surveyed thought too.
Such allegorism was not uncommon; compare the reported sentiment of
the recanting Quaker John Toldervy:
That the Garden of Eden is the world, that the Trees thereof are all living beings.
That Paradice is in man. That man fell by harkning to the wicked, which was
the eshly mind, and that not the Woman properly, but the silliest and weakest
part was the Woman that tempted him. That Adam was the earthly nature
in man.
83
What makes Winstanley different is that behind his allegorical front he set
up an alternative narrative of political origins, based on an originary
communism, and this second project is ultimately much the more
signicant of the two.
This was going too far for almost all Winstanleys contemporaries. One
commentator simply reinstated the Fall, and then used it as a stick to beat
Winstanleys political assumptions: had they been of Adam, this jour-
nalist sneered, they had had Passions, and then of necessity Laws.
84
Another journalist linked them to the continental Adamites, insinuating
that the Diggers practised communism, which they did, and sexual
libertinism, which they did not.
85
The nal people to be discussed in this chapter are the ones that t even
less comfortably with what we have seen so far. Winstanley was not really
talking about what happened in a garden, but he used the language of the
garden story as a base from which to articulate his political vision. To an
extent, much of what he says is compatible with the Franckean fall, but
allegorised to stand for a quite different historical event. Again, much of
what the Paracelsans wrote was recognisably associated with the Franck-
ean paradigm they just disagreed about the nature and effect of the
forbidden fruit. Some versions of Genesis circulating in the revolutionary
decades, though, dismantled the Fall itself. On a European level, the most
notorious of all was the pre-Adamite hypothesis of La Peyre`re, which had
been circulating in France since the beginning of the 1640s.
86
It became
an international scandal when the famous Elzevier rm of Amsterdam
published the Prae-Adamitae in 1655.
87
The following year it appeared in an unsigned English translation, and
at that point pre-Adamism became available to those without the learned
languages. The impact of the initial Latin edition had been felt in 1655,
when Samuel Hartlib wrote in his diary, the Ephemerides, that one M.
Finck, or possibly a friend of Finck, knows also the name of the Author
of Prae-Adamitarum as j take it le Pere as j take it or Liperira a french-
man.
88
The English translation carried names of neither author, printer,
publisher, nor translator. The stationers Underhill and Webb petitioned
the council of state about the impending publication, identifying the
printer, but the request cannot have been all that effective, as many
copies survive. They neglected to name the translator, probably, if unex-
pectedly, David Whitford, gentleman, scholar, clergyman, and Royalist
soldier.
89
La Peyre`re held that there were two types of people: Jews, and every-
body else. All Jews derive and date from the time of Adam and Eve, two
special new creations unconnected to the rest of humanity alive at that
time. All others are pre-Adamites, whose great sinfulness had recently
prompted God to create a fresh pair that would generate the race chosen
to usher in salvation.
90
La Peyre`res hypothesis, despite the fact that people immediately said
he was a man for whom all religions are alike indifferent ; and in the
opinion of the most harsh observers, an impious man and an atheist, was
not sceptically motivated, and shows many similarities with Socinian
thought.
91
His larger religious philosophy, as Popkin has stressed, was
both philosemitic and Messianic, and his pre-Adamism was maintained
from, rather than against, the Bible. Men existed before Adam because
Paul said so. His system sought to redene the connection between the
process of sin to redemption, and the process of mortality to immortality.
Whereas previously these two processes were tied to the Fall, La Peyre`re
instead traced their association to the perishable matter out of which man
was formed, long before Adam.
The central exegetical hypothesis of La Peyre`res model is very simple,
and from it ow many of his conclusions. When Paul wrote that For
until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed where there
is no law (Romans 5:13), the law there referred to was not, as it is
commonly interpreted, the Law given to Moses, but the interdiction
given to Adam. But, if this is taken to be the case, then the phrase until
the law must imply that there was a pre-Adamic time, populated by
people to whom sin was not imputed. The actual emendation is not
imputed to was not imputed is made on textual grounds, the Greek, La
Peyre`re now says, having indeed been corrupted by the carelessness of the
Transcribers.
92
In La Peyre`res appended Systeme he stepped up this
thesis, denying the direct Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, which
was rather a heap of Copie confusedly taken, deriving from Moses
diaries.
93
Adam and Eve themselves are childish creations. Adam grew from
infancy and youth to mans estate ; Eve grew as a house grows, as trees
grow. Adam had to acquire knowledge by meditation, reasoning with
himself, by cultivation, and time. He didnt possess all language instant-
aneously but gradually compiled a dictionary.
94
La Peyre`res understand-
ing of original sin is accordingly idiosyncratic, original sin no longer
being strictly original, but only reigning from Adam to Jesus. This does
not mean that the men before Adam were sinless, merely that they were
not guilty of trespass against God . Later, however, it is proposed that
original sin is imputed backwards to these people.
95
La Peyre`res reworking of the Genesis narrative effectively reintroduces
the problem the narrative was supposed to explain: the origin of evil.
Mans corruption can no longer date from the Fall because, even if some
ethical blame can be imputed to pre-Adamites, the cause of their lack of
perfect rectitude can no longer be traced to an apple-fall yet to take place.
So La Peyre`re distinguishes between two types of sin. The rst is the
special category of original sin, a juridical category applicable only to
Jews. The second source stems from the nature of matter.
96
Adams sin is
double : A natural sin, naturally inherent in Adam, by the inrmity of
his nature, and that peccant matter whereof he was made: Legal, which
hapned and was imputed to Adam, by violation of the Law of God.
97
Matter is thus inherently corrupt: Warrs, Plagues, and Fevers, and
whatsoever else of this sort troubles and aficts mankind, are the conse-
quences of natural sin, which is the wickedness and imperfection of
Nature.
98
La Peyre`re thus obviously borders on metaphysical dualism, and he
may have derived this view from the Corpus hermeticum, which he cites
elsewhere in the book.
99
In terms similar to those of Penington, La
Peyre`re states that creation may initially have been good, but had little
chance of lasting. In the course of a single paragraph, his terminology
slides from a vocabulary of perfection to one of corruptible matter :
It is true, that men were created in the beginning perfect, right, and excellently
good, in as farr as men by force and vertue of their own creation could be created
perfect, right, and excellently good. But no man ought to be ignorant, that men
were created from the beginning of corruptible matter, which might easily be
turnd from perfect to imperfect, from right to wrong, from good to evil, which
the men which were rst created did evidence by a strong and approved example,
since the nature of their composition, and their own negligence carried them,
being upright made, so far aside.
100
As an ontological event, the Fall in Eden is thus rendered superuous.
The angels fell, according to La Peyre`re, from the corrupted creation ;
next, pre-Adamic men perishd in their own thoughts ; nally, the late,
minor drama of Eden takes place. Eden and the problem of evil become
disconnected, and the rst casualty of this disconnection is theodicy. La
Peyre`re, despite his high hopes that his system would heal religious dissent
and reunite the Jews with their pre-Adamic brethren, cannot avoid
metaphysical dualism, the problem Augustine himself had so long
laboured to solve, with only marginally more success.
La Peyre`res inuence in England is hard to assess, although he gained
one convert, the F. R. S. Francis Lodwick.
101
But the pre-Adamism of
the radical milieu is unlikely to derive from the Frenchman. Laurence
Clarkson, writing as a Muggletonian, recalled his Ranting days in 1650:
I neither believed that Adam was the rst Creature, but that there was a Creation
before him, which world I thought was eternal, judging that land of Nod where
Cain took his wife, was inhabited a long time before Cain, not considering that
Moses was the rst Writer of Scripture, and that we were to look no further than
what there was written.
102
The most interesting case is Thomas Tany. He, of all the early
moderns, was the closest to a Gnostic in the theological sense. The soul,
for Tany, is no created substance, for tis the divine breath of God ; at
death it returns to the fountain from whence it had its Original.
Creation itself is thus the Fall, and Adam is an allegory for the entirety
of the creation. Of course there were men before Adam. Man is Gods
descent or the outwork of God. God was little before the Fall, and the
Fall of man did raise God. Tany also considered the Bible both textually
corrupt and older than Moses. Universal history, as Tany writes in his
unmistakable style, is a cycle of departure and return: The letting down
of the creation was a declarative of Gods excellency: In evan sam sene
allah in sele mem, the taking up the life created into him, is the bringing
his wearied creative into perfection in himself : O avallo eternitas in sem
sadei mel tedet alli ne pekod olon.
103
At some point in these decades an anonymous pre-Adamite, too,
scrawled a few manuscript pages in support of the hypothesis, arguing
in Neoplatonic terms:
The Great God who is altogether Glorious and transcending in his Goddnes
being from eternity ever was communicative of this his goodnes, and that he
might communicate what he had to others he created Rational Beings which
were vessels capable in some measure to receive it and hence it is that men were
from everlasting. God who is a most necessary being and most necessarily
existing co[u]ld not be and but partly act. And so being a necessary Agent and a
good which is most communicative must most necessarily communicate[.] A
necessary good must necessarily communicate, which is Ground enough to raise
an argument to prove that this world with those Glorious beings that are in it
were from eternity.
104
But none of these men encountered La Peyre`res ideas directly, and
Clarkson, Tany and Winstanley wrote before the publication of the
Prae-Adamitae. La Peyre`res inuence was only felt later, and few would
openly dare to concur. Francis Lodwick and Charles Blount were rare
exceptions.
105
Finally, at the end of this rich roll-call of heterodoxy, we come to the
Muggletonians, whose theory of Genesis, as has rightly been observed,
was the core of the Muggletonian vision.
106
Muggletonians accept that
Adam was created in Gods image and placed in Eden. His spirit or
nature was of the very same life and nature as God was of; therefore it is
said, that God breathed into Adam the breath of Life, and he became a living
soul. This special relation to God gives Adam a nature superior to all
other created beings, including the angels. In this initial state he lived
capable to see, and to understand the spiritual forms of these two Trees ;
For while he stood in the state of innocency he was capable to behold the
face of God, and live.
107
But despite all these ne attributes, Adam is still
a creaturely being, and consequently imperfect. His soul was necessarily
mortal, and so Adam was never bound for heaven: Adam could have had
no other Heaven than this World, he being made of this Earth, he should
never have gone higher, to the Place where God is, the holy Angels, and
all spiritual Bodies are, there Adam should not have come.
108
Adam is
therefore in a pendent condition: Adam being made of the earth, though
his spirit was of the immortal seed, yet it was capable to fall from that state
of innocency wherein he was created.
109
So far, Muggletons version is by no means idiosyncratic. But his
interpretation of the two trees and of the seduction is where he parts
company with anything familiar. The trees, Muggleton insists, are people.
The tree of life is the very person of God himself , and is, in Muggleto-
nian theology, the same object as the person Christ. The tree of the
knowledge of good and evil is the serpent, also Satan. The trees speak.
One prohibits, one tempts.
110
Eve is seduced by the angel/tree/serpent,
and this has specic sexual application:
[I]t is clear that Cain was none of Adams son; for Adam was never counted a
wicked one by any that writ Scripture; so that Cains father was the devil, that is,
he was that Serpent Angel that deceived Eve, and Cain was the devil manifest in
esh . . . she was with childe by that Serpent Angel before Adam knew her.
111
In 1675 the Muggletonian John Saddington wrote a Muggletonian creed
that concisely expresses the ensuing doctrine of the two seeds:
XV. I do believe that the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil was that serpent
angel which GOD cast out of heaven down to this earth for his rebellion . . .
XVI I . I do believe that that outcast angel or serpent-tree of knowledge of good
and evil did enter into the womb of Eve, and dissolve his spiritual body into
seed, which seed died and quickened again in the womb of Eve.
XVI I I . I do believe that Eve brought forth her rst born the son of the devil, and
very devil himself.
XI X. I do believe that there is no other devil but man and woman; since the rst
devil, that serpent angel devil, became seed in the womb of Eve, and clothed
himself with esh and bone.
XX. I do believe that Cain was not the son of Adam, though he was the son of
Eve.
112
The Muggletonian model exemplies the difculty of generalising
about whether sectarians read allegorically or not. In one sense, Muggle-
tonians read very allegorically even the trees in Eden are not real trees at
all. But conversely, perhaps they are extreme literalists, preferring to
imagine the situation the text describes in verisimilistic terms, and then
to interpret the text accordingly. Hence, as apples on trees cant really do
the things seemingly accredited to them, the literal meaning behind the
text must be that the forbidden tree is a person and its apple is sex. It all
depends whether you think you are trying to make sense of a situation or a
text.
Ultimately, both levels inform one another. The Muggletonians start
with the conviction that Genesis 23 describes real happenings, and then
proceed to protect that conviction by appealing to their own ideas of what
is verisimilar, and what is not. From their point of view, they are dilating
what Moses left implicit, and that, of course, is neither an orthodox nor a
radical thing to do: it is the only thing to do.
To conclude, what if anything associates the procession of ideas can-
vassed in this chapter? Some, for instance those of Thomas Tany, have
departed from what early-modern people would term Christianity. But
certain motifs are pervasive. First and most importantly the majority of
the gures discussed place considerable emphasis on creatureliness and
materiality: man is inherently unstable, and matter is inherently corrupt.
This can stray close to metaphysical dualism, and some, like La Peyre`re,
cross the line. But often the emphasis is pietistic, and has an anti-
Augustinian logic: rather than a plunge from glorious heights to miserable
depths, man is created for, rather than in, perfection. This idea, as we have
seen, was also shared by gures as remote as Theophilus of Antioch,
Clement of Alexandria, Faustus Socinus and Jeremy Taylor.
The second motif is one to do with the problem of literal readings.
The literal reading of Genesis was actually based on a set of prior
ideological imperatives, and these on occasion clashed with the text.
The classic site is Genesis 3:22, Behold, the man is become as one of
us, to know good and evil, the text to which so many of the radicals
turned their eyes. Their view was that the forbidden tree was not a
placebo, because God himself says otherwise. This, of course, is a perfectly
orthodox technique of reading, but one dangerous because applied to a
verse that had traditionally been granted immunity from meaning what it
apparently says. This immunity was revoked by the radicals, returning us
to the etymology of the word radical : getting back to the root, stripping
away accretions. This did not produce uniformity, however: people then
differed about what the unironic Genesis 3:22 could mean.
The material of this chapter is radical to the extent that it differs
profoundly from what either an Anglican or a Presbyterian theologian
could tolerate. But this is not to say that their techniques of reading differ
in kind, and that is perhaps what is truly dangerous about such ap-
proaches. Again, precisely how far theological radicalism can be paralleled
to a political or social radicalism remains something about which it is
unhelpful to generalise. The last chapter demonstrated that, in the case of
the Taylor quarrel, even the high Church had its heretic.
This chapter has performed the converse operation. The late
Christopher Hill, who did more to popularise the radical milieu to
literary critics than anyone else, was wont to give the impression that all
radicals united together in a destructive and heady demolition of sin, hell,
original sin and other oppressive concepts.
113
From a distance, it can look
like that. However, what has been emphasised here is the variety of
theories in a milieu dominated by the familiar gures of army men,
sectarians, itinerant preachers and the like. Almost all these people were
indeed political radicals. But they also developed their own very complex
map of interlocking theologies, and, to adopt a distinction used in the
high Church, although certain concepts often proved unifying, they did
not produce uniformity. For van Helmont, the Fall was to do with sex;
for Winstanley, it was about the workplace. There were two types of men
in the world at the time of the Fall, said La Peyre`re; there were two types
of men as a product of the Fall, taught Muggleton. Man should be a clod,
said Franck; man is like God, replied Rabisha. God was little before the
fall , Tany revealed, and the fall of man did raise God.
chapter 5
Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters
Chapter 4 investigated the views of various heterodox gures by privileging
their own texts. But the problem of sources was also recognised, given that
many of our accounts of who said what, even in the decades that
witnessed the effective collapse of censorship, derive from hostile reports.
We mentioned the heresiographic habit of simultaneously calling heresy
new and old, and this is indicative of the conict of interests between two
different rhetorical attitudes to problems: either we have seen it before,
and so know what to do about it; or we have never seen it before, and so it
cant be all that important. This chapter revisits that conict, and extends
it into a discussion of some contemporary heresiographic accounts of
pseudo-Messiahs, and of the people called Ranters.
The conict is as old as the genre itself, which has always had an
ambiguous attitude to its own existence. Irenaeus, for instance, with
Epiphanius the principal patristic model for early-modern heresiography,
once related an anecdote about his old teacher, Polycarp, one of the
earliest observers of what he saw as heresy. Polycarps reaction to it, as
Irenaeus explained, was to run away: he would have cried out and
stopped his ears . . . And he would have ed from the very place where
he had been sitting or standing. Polycarp also related how in Ephesus
John the disciple had once seen Cerinthus the Gnostic in a public bath,
and had run away lest the bathhouse tumble over his head. Again, the
barbarian peoples who believe in Christ by tradition and not scripture,
Irenaeus rhapsodises, would simply ee from heretical talk, like Polycarp,
with their ngers in their ears.
Yet Irenaeus also records how Polycarp once faced up to Marcion, and
called him rstborn of Satan.
1
There are thus two choices in the face of
heresy: to run, or to stand ones ground. And although Irenaeus cites
Polycarp as a precedent for both presumably in order to justify his own
book, which meticulously explicates its targets the option of running
away clearly appealed as the more authentic or primitive reaction rather
83
than, say, to invite the heretic into sober discussion for the purposes of
recording his or her views for posterity. But that is exactly what a here-
siographer must do, and Irenaeus valorisation of the other, shunning role,
betrays his slight unease at the whole business of preserving and hence
communicating error. It is not heresy but heresiography, then, which
belongs to the later age of the world. Pristine, non-textual Christians,
after all, had had experience of error, and so the novelty is not actually
heresy itself but, surprisingly, this need to write it down.
These two approaches heresy is new and so unhistorical ; heresy is old
and so nothing special we havent seen and seen off before are tied up in
the generic overlap between the historiography of orthodoxy and hetero-
doxy. Eusebius plan for his Historia ecclesia, for instance, states as a
second task of his work The names and dates of those who through a
passion for innovation have wandered as far as possible from the truth.
2
Ephraim Pagitt, whose Heresiography (1645) was, with Thomas Edwards
Gangraena (1646), the most popular London heresy list, presented his
book as the natural counterpart to his earlier Christianography (1640), a
list of Christian churches throughout the world. Pious curiosity concern-
ing impious things, however, can hamper the job of extirpation: in 1598,
for instance, when various Socinian books were seized in the Low Coun-
tries and condemned to the ames, their nal combustion took some time
as the deputies, out of interest, had taken them home to read.
3
The problem is that refutations can end up inculcating the principles
they ostensibly refute, because the reader may decide that the position
under attack is actually the more powerful. Benjamin Franklin once said
that he converted to atheism after reading a hopelessly argued refutation
of it.
4
Indeed, this may be the secret design of the book in question.
Bernardino Ochinos Thirty Dialogues, published in 1563 when Ochino
was 76, contained two on the trinity which while nominally supporting it
furnish a full quiver of arguments against it, later taken on verbatim by
Socinians.
5
This was also true of his dialogues on polygamy and divorce,
published in English in 1657, signed only by the publisher, and with the
divorce dialogue guiltily hiding behind the titular Dialogue of Polygamy.
6
It is not unimportant that Ochino adopted dialogic form, in which
proposition and refutation emanate from the same pen.
Socinianism itself provides a neat example of the problem. When the
bishop of Lincoln Thomas Barlow died (Barlow was sometime librarian
of the Bodleian, and Sandersons correspondent about Jeremy Taylor), he
left his manuscripts to the care of his domestic chaplains, with instruc-
tions not to print. But an unauthorised edition did appear, containing a
list of anti-Socinian writings for the better instruction of young divines
(Barlow was famed for his reading-lists for young scholars). His chaplains
were furious, issuing the following complaint:
And his [Socinus] Opinions being so dangerous to the Foundation of
Christianity, it is somewhat unaccountable what necessity there was, to be
directed to Chapter, Page, and Section, where to nd them asserted to all the
advantage they are capable of: Especially if we consider, that Men are naturally
too inquisitive after forbidden Knowledge: The Experiment cost our rst Parents
very dear, and their Posterity have ever had such a fatal Curiosity to pry into the
Errors of former Ages, as never needs to be set on edge.
7
So heresiography can materialise into the place where its target once
was. Such a possibility becomes particularly obvious when surveying the
heresy lists that sprang up in early 1640s London. Titles include A
Discoverie of 29 Sects Here in London (1641), The Divisions of the Church
of England Crept in at XV Several Doores (1642), Religions Lotterie (1642)
and XXXI I I Religions . . . against the Parliament (1644). Such pamphlets,
never more than a few pages long, typically list on their title pages names
of sects, and then inside provide brief, titillating descriptions. But often
few, if any, of the named targets actually exist. For example, the title-page
list of XXXI I I Religions runs, in three numbered columns:
1. Cardinalls, 12. Chiliastes, 23. Theodotians,
2. French faction, 13. Clementines, 24. Samseis,
3. Spanish faction, 14. Simon Maguses, 25. Samosetens,
4. Adamites, 15. Achians, 26. Manacheams,
5. Prelaticall faction, 16. Minanders, 27. Appolinaries,
6. Jesuites, 17. Ebionites, 28. Donatists,
7. Malignants, 18. Corinthuses, 29. Selucians,
8. Priests, 19. Nicholitains, 30. Pelagians,
9. Arminians, 20. Marcions, 31. Abelardes,
10. Italian Faction, 21. Encraticae, 32. Peterenins,
11. Sheolomothites, 22. Valentinians, 33. Fraticellins.
Most of these divisions, no one need question, are anything but Sects,
Societies, and Factions of the Cavaliers, and the two trajectories of the
novel (French, Prelaticall, Spanish, Italian factions; Jesuites etc.)
and the ancient (Marcions, Pelagians etc.) again coexist. As was men-
tioned earlier, most of the more recondite sects are lifted straight from
Simsons Historie of the Church, and garbled slightly in the process.
This does not mean that heresiography, even at the yellow-press level,
tells us nothing about what was really going on: behind the fantastic
Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters 85
labels of the XXXI I I Religions stood real people, playfully obscured by pun:
Their Will is as rotten as old . . . they will begg to be Ushers there rather
then to leave it, obvious let-me-not-(quite)-mention gestures to Laud
and Ussher.
8
And although lists such as the XXXI I I Religions are only
indirectly informative about Long-Parliament London, other productions
took a blunter line. The Hell Broke Loose catalogue of 1647, for instance,
could function equally as a dissuasive and as a manual : the various errors
were accompanied by who said them, in what book and where.
9
More
academic works like Rutherfords Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist like-
wise combined an interest in ancient sects with some much more con-
temporary and immediate connections.
10
Rutherfords direct connection
to medieval German mysticism was, as has been demonstrated, sound.
Calvin, writing against the French Libertines, said that they thought:
regeneration is to return to that innocent state which Adam enjoyed
before he sinned. And in their view this innocent state sees neither white
nor black . . . Hence to mortify the old Adam means to cease having to
make judgments, as if one had knowledge of evil but like a child lets
himself be led by his natural sense.
11
Rutherford, in his work, explicitly
recalls Calvin on the Libertines, and what he records is indeed very similar
to ideas that were being carefully and thoughtfully discussed and read in
England at this time, and which he would have recognised: The state of
Innocencie was to know nothing good, or ill, more then children, and
Adams rst sinne is to know good and ill, and regeneration is to be stript
naked of the knowledge and sense of either sinne or righteousnesse.
12
The point, nally, is not that either a given heresiography is or is not
accurate, but that the transmission of unorthodox ideas is effected by both
the heretics and their paparazzi, as it were; and the snaps of the latter,
while they do not exactly capture the movements of the former, bear some
relation to them. Thus, in a peculiar fashion, heresiographers and heretics
are complicit, and their choices mutually illuminating.
This approach to heresiography can be developed by surveying one
particular idea close to the heart of this book: the notion of Atonement,
and how this is treated and transmitted in some heresiographical accounts
involving self-proclaimed Messiahs. Atonement the redemptive action
of Christ on the cross and original sin are reciprocally connected.
As John Knewstub complained of Henry Niclaes and his Family of
Love in 1579:
As this doctrine of H. N. warranteth us from any hurte by Adam his fall, except
wee shall be founde transgressours actually after his example, against the will and
commaundement of GOD: so it setteth foorth in the like maner Christe Jesus,
no otherwise to be an helper unto vs, then so farre foorth, as wee shall be by his
example of doctrine and life be led into the like obedience. And therefore as
Adam (in his opinion) hath nothing speciall in the falling away of man from
God: so Christe yeeldeth no priuate and peculiar helpe to his saluation.
13
It is striking, then, that one particular anecdote recurs in the literature,
a kind of distorted Imitatio Christi. In a work written against John
Robins, the interregnum fanatic whose disciples called him God, an
Oxford student called Alexander visited Robins and his disciples in the
New Prison at Clerkenwell. Alexander was reported to have associated
Robins doctrines with the like erroneous Opinion of the notorious
Elizabethan Messiah William Hacket:
In Queen Elizabeths Raign (said M. Alexander) . . . divers there were, that
accounted one Hacket to be their God; and amongst the rest one Ardingworth
took upon him to proclaim him Christ in Cheapside, where they were both
apprehended, and soon after Hacket receivd sentence to be hangd on a Gibbit
neer the Standard where he belcht forth these blasphemous words, O thou God of
Heaven, come down and save me, or else Ile rent thy Throne asunder; and so
miserably died.
14
Written at least two generations after the Hacket affair, Alexanders
account of Hackets death would seem spurious. This impression is
encouraged by the almost identical use of the same anecdote in a slightly
earlier pamphlet to describe a Ranter:
one W. Smith, amongst the rest, were [sic] lately apprehended at York, for
denying the Deity, Arian-like, and putting in execution several illegal practises
against the Parliament; for which, upon a fair tryal, he received sentence to be
hanged; and being brought to the place of execution, he uttered many blasphous
words upon the ladder, saying, Deliver me, O God, from the hands of these wicked
persecutors, or else Ile rest [sic] the Heavens, and pull thee out of thy Throne; and so
died in a very desparate and sad condition.
15
These two accounts are clearly not independent, and the Robins pamphlet
is indebted both in detail and phrase to the Smith account.
Hacket apparently did blaspheme God as he died. Behind both
interregnum accounts, the one of Smith and the other of Hacket
himself, lies the ofcial pamphlet on the Hacket affair produced by
Richard Cosin in 1592, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation. According
to Cosin, Hacket progressed through various roles, starting with John the
Baptist, before imitating Christ. He and his prophets also cursed oddly,
they cursed themselves to draw divine power in a manner proleptic of
the interregnum cursers, especially the destroying angels of the later
Messiah William Franklin, and the Muggletonians. Franklins fascinated
but hostile heresiographer, Humphrey Ellis, likens his subjects behaviour
to that of Hacket, despite Hackets historical distance, and so Hacket
was clearly remembered.
16
Hacket, on his way to the scaffold, approached one while crying
out Iehouah Messias, Iehouah Messias : another while crying out thus:
Looke, looke, how the heauens open wide, and the son of God commeth
downe to deliuer me.
17
On the scaffold he himself became the (highly
antagonistic) Son:
O God of heauen, mightie Iehovah, Alpha and Omega, Lord of Lordes, King of
Kings, and God euerlasting, that knowest me to be that true Iehovah, whome
thou hast sent: send some miracle out of a cloude to conuert these Indels, and
deliuer me from these mine enemies: If not, I will re the heauens, and teare thee
from thy throne with my handes.
His last words were Haue I this for my kingdom bestowed vpon thee? I
come to reuenge thee, and plague thee and so was turned off .
18
It is debatable how much of all this Hacket actually said. But why did
this anecdote feel right for application to the supposed later execution of
Smith? Is there a deeper point being made by the idea of a kind of
blaspheming Christ? First, the biblical text undergoing distortion is the
already problematic biblical cry of dereliction My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me? the moment when Christ on the cross quotes
the opening half-verse of the despairing Psalm 22.
19
Secondly, we note
that Smith is called an Arian, and Arians denied the consubstantiality of
Father and Son, and hence the orthodox trinity. In the Bible, the cry of
dereliction hints at a similar moment of division in the Godhead, when
Father and Son are momentarily at odds. In the Hacket and Smith
anecdotes, the victim actually upbraids God as an equal ; indeed, at the
point of death, superior divine power is claimed. An alternative divine
power structure is twice acted out: one in which the Son and the Father
are not the same being, but antagonists.
This is to adopt the phraseology of A. D. Nuttall, whose The Alterna-
tive Trinity seeks to trace such trinitarian fallings-out. In this connection,
Nuttall observes that Marlowes Dr Faustus, written almost exactly con-
temporaneously with the Hacket affair, also contains a similar play on the
cry of dereliction. In Faustus nal moments, he shouts, My God, my
God, look not so erce on me! Faustus had also earlier imitated Christ
with his Consummatum est: this bill is ended.
20
Nuttall comments:
in the strangest of all scriptural passages for orthodox Christians, Christ on the
cross cries out that he, who is God, has been forsaken by God. When, moments
before the end, Faustus, abandoned by the Creator, cries out My God, my God
we can scarcely avoid expecting the rest of the cry of dereliction, My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46), but instead we get, Look
not so erce on me! The cry of dereliction is overtaken and displaced in the
sentence by the conspiracy of heaven. It is as if, by a nal horror, the feared
absence of God proves less dreadful than his presence.
21
Nuttalls implicit conjecture is that the Calvinist superstructure of Mar-
lowes play threatens to twist into Gnosticism, where the creator of this
world is seen as evil. The sight of Faustus, a highly sinful Christ-gure,
cowering before a hitherto absent, now very present, angry God, does not
commend either character. Marlowes play has prepared us for this nal
impasse: the Prologue told us that the heavens had conspird Faustus
overthrow, and when Faust in a moment of repentance calls on the
trinity, the wrong one turns up: Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephastophilis.
22
Of course, it would be hard to say that the Smith anecdote functioned
with this kind of sophistication. But, especially if Marlowes play was
written after Hackets execution, the comparison is instructive. The
dating of Dr Faustus is controversial, but the 15923 conjecture followed
by Keefer in his edition would allow Marlowe space to reect on the
Hacket affair: Arthington and Copinger had declared Hackets divinity
on 16 July 1591, and Hacket was on the scaffold twelve days later.
Faustus is in abject terror before his avenging God; Hacket and Smith
are portrayed as blaspheming God at the last. The Hacket and Smith texts
accelerate the hint of division in the cry of dereliction into deicidal
hostility. Such an acceleration, to borrow an idea from a related discus-
sion, works as a protective inversion: an extreme position is identied
and vilied, and thereby, it is hoped, quarantined. This in turn reveals
the feared subtext a perceived threat to the axiom that God is just and
good.
23
That there was some dim awareness of this trajectory is suggested by
the many remembered incidences of the cry of dereliction in the period.
Indeed, the cry works as the counterpart to Genesis 3:22. In Genesis 3:22,
God says that man has become as God; in Matthew 27:46, the God-man
says that he has become not-God. The religious primes of God, Christ
and man, momentarily divide. One Cabalistic interpretation of Genesis
3:22, advanced by Thomas Vaughan, suggested that the man God was
identifying as one of us was none other than Christ himself : God was, as
it were, seeing through the rst Adam to the second behind him.
24
And
there was a typological converse. Thomas Bilson, bishop of Winchester,
reported as one of six patristic interpretations of the cry of dereliction that
he found sound the idea that Christ was at that moment speaking as
Adam, and so cancelling the curse.
25
Heresiographers were particularly sensitive to the uses and abuses of the
cry. Pagitt records one Collinson, a Quaker, who used this text to show
that Christ distrusted God. Mary Gadbury, the consort of the Messiah
William Franklin, reputedly cried out when in a painful vision: Elo, Elo,
My God, why hast thou forsaken me? And then the pain left her: After
which the Voyce spake again unto her as before, I will not so deal with thee
again, but as with a Lamb. Again, John Gilpin in his The Quakers Shaken
records that one Robert Collison afrmed, that Christ was as man, had his
failings, for he distrusted God (quoth he) upon the Crosse, when he cryed
out, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? As a prelude to his
quaking, George Fox discussed it in the mid 1640s with Nathaniel
Stephens. Earlier in the century in 1629 the preacher Peter Shaw, a
Cambridge graduate whose name had been linked to those of John Ever-
ard and John Pordage, had been called in front of the High Commission
for his suspect doctrine. Amongst other things, he had claimed that the
humane nature of Cht was reprobated by the divine, in the time of his
Agony, & the personall union then dissolved.
26
John Everard himself was
reputed to have restructured the role of the second person of the trinity: if
the list of theses prepared for him to recant can be trusted, he made the
rare and resonant statement that all the Creatures [i.e. the material world]
are but the second person in the Trinitye, & that there sufferings are as
satisfactory as Christs on y
e
Crosse.
27
Matthew 27:46 was a highly sensitive text, then, and one perhaps best
left alone by the God-fearing. A particularly noteworthy encounter occurs
in George Herberts poem The sacrice, where Herberts narrator,
speaking as Christ, arrives at the cry of dereliction. But, the human writer
nding himself unable to write down the difcult sentiment, it is simply
missed out, replaced instead with a long dash, a practice usually associated
not with biblical quotation, but with obscenity:
But, O my God, my God! why leavst thou me,
The sonne, in who thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God
Never was grief like mine.
28
Less well-known poets addressed the cry too. The Hamburg chaplain
William Loe, in the fourth of his Seauen dumpes on the words of Christ
on the cross, treated the cry as a taste for man of Gods dereliction, but did
not deny that Christ was also expressing genuine and personal emotions
of fear: That thou didst yell, & cry, & roare / In such great greefe, &
feare.
29
Samuel Speed, a stationer who was ruined by the Plague and the
Fire, ending up in the debtors prison, impersonated Christs voice
directly in his On Christs Death, concluding each stanza with My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Although the poem ends
on an assurance that God had not actually deserted Christ, the Sons ten
stanzas of objections occasionally veer into a certain incredulity, as when
Christ grumbles, If God can die, Nature may well be sick.
30
What these
examples share is their depiction of Christ in agony, not just the puppet of
some exegetical tastes, crying out as and for the Church, or as an
instruction, and no complaint, a mere reminder that our prayers will
not always be answered.
31
Christ really suffers and doubts.
32
Anecdotes of antagonistic Christ-gures, then, carry implications that
do not necessarily rely on their historical veracity, particularly as literary
analogues of the cry betray the same unease. Opponents of heresy were
seeing things, perhaps, but signicant things. Next, we extend the
enquiry into other observations people made about various of the extreme
radicals, particularly the people called Ranters, and the things such
Ranters themselves said.
G. H. is one of the anti-Ranter pamphleteers who explicitly connected
the Ranters to the Gnostics: these are but the Gnosticks of former Ages;
these are the same with those of old, whose description Epiphanius gives
us. Arthingworth the Ranter (whose name is interestingly confused by
G. H. with the similar name Arthington, Hackets prophet) is a cunning
Gnostick.
33
The author of The Ranters Religion, who either plagiarised or
was plagiarised by G. H., makes the same association: having quoted
Augustine against our new Gnosticks at this present and these Gnosticks,
or Ranters, he expatiates: These Ranters are but the Gnosticks of former
Ages brought backwards amongst us, these are but the same with those of
old, whose description Epiphanius gives us, who had only certaine Dic-
tates and Positions, and peremptorily afrmed, that let them live as they
listed, they were sure to be saved.
34
Faustus, we recall, lived as he listed
because he perhaps decided that he was sure to be damned; indeed, he
confesses My hearts so hardened I cannot repent. Likewise, the Ranter
who claimed herself pregnant with Christ refused to repent because her
heart was so hardened in wickedness, that she had no power to repent.
35
There is an antinomian way of reading these remarks: Calvin on this
issue stated that it was well said that God, not the human, doth blind,
harden and bow them from whom he taketh away the power to see, obey,
and do rightly.
36
It only takes a dark wit to use this idea as an excuse for,
rather than a judgement on, libertinism or reprobation. Of course,
scarcely a Calvinist would admit this, but the anti-Puritan and then
Laudian lobby of churchmen in the second and third decades of the
seventeenth century identied precisely this possibility, and used it to
attack mainstream Puritans. A university example is afforded by an
anonymous 1635 (student?) Cambridge product entitled Cuique suum,
Each to his own, a Latin verse dialogue between Philoxenus (The
hospitable one) and Catharus (The pure one).
Catharus bears all the hallmarks of the stereotypical supercilious saint,
claiming Philoxenus bread for himself because, as he informs Philoxenus,
you are not sanctied. Catharus justication is based on an antinomian
understanding of Calvinist restricted atonement : What Adam had
lost, Christ, whom Adam lost, restores to those whom nourishing faith
sets free. And I am Christs. So I can count all things part of my
personal property.
37
Philoxenus, Catharus says, is not of Christ, and so
he does not own his own property. As the title of the piece suggests, the
dialogue is a defence of private property, maintained against Catharus,
who has to be reminded that since the Fall, nothing can be held in
common.
38
Cuique suum thus associates its sententious saint with the
extremes of antinomianism, generated from a core Calvinist tenet, that
Christ did not die for all. This was a popular polemic move. As Lake and
Como put it,
Antinomianism, then, caught the godly in something of a bind. On the one hand
it was a reaction against the legalism and rigorism of mainstream Puritanism and
represented a direct challenge to the hold of godly preachers over their lay
followers. On the other, as we have seen, from the perspective of Laudian anti-
Puritans, antinomianism appeared to be merely the natural or logical outcome of
core Calvinist or Puritan doctrines and assumptions.
39
This idea of devious name-calling returns us to the issue of metaphys-
ical dualism, and the extreme reaction to the narrative of Genesis 23 of
inverting the conventional labels, and dening the God of prohibitions as
evil and the serpent as a liberating gure. This belief, held by various
Gnostic sects in antiquity, went hand-in-hand with the belief that the
material world, as the creation of the evil God, is itself evil and so to be
distinguished from a higher realm of purity. As the Fall narrative itself was
developed to trounce such dualism, any trace of its presence, real or
constructed, automatically queries ideas of the Fall.
Is it a tendency we can witness among the more extreme radicals of the
revolutionary decades? Many of the radicals, especially Muggleton, called
the God worshipped by other sects a devil, and Winstanley even talked
of the God Devil.
40
Tany said that the Fall was creation itself. A difcult
case is the vegetarian Roger Crab, who became a hermit to avoid the
esh-destroying Spirits and Angels, and who set out to conquer these
antagonistic angels, segregating himself from the world to lead a strange
reserved, and Hermeticall kinde of life :
my bodie and my soul being made up and governed by seven predominant
Spirits, stood at a distance, and was accursed from God by the fall and practice of
my forefathers, which brought me forth in the same likeness; so that the Serpents
soul which lived in me, which was made up of the seven Ruling-Spirits, must be
conquered and denied in their operation, and cast down under humility in this
body before the Spirit of Light, which is the Tree of Life, could be received for
my Spiritual Food; and the seven Spirits have predomination and assistance
from every son of Adam that knoweth good and evil ; and these seven spirits have
their Ruling Power in the soul of the World.
41
Crab also hated churches, that Spiritual Whore-House, the Idol-
Temple, and was an extreme ascetic to the extent of body-denial and
celibacy, but he could still talk of pure nature on several occasions.
42
Crab was anti-materialistic but not, as it were, anti-matter.
The idea in vernacular, non-learned milieux that the material world is
inherently corrupt may have been inuenced by the Corpus hermeticum,
which was circulating in John Everards translation in 1630s London,
though only published in 1649.
43
Sources, however, are not wanting:
Augustine himself had said that creation ex nihilo made matter unstable.
But the key dualist belief that the Creator is a secondary, partial, or even
bad deity is very rare indeed. An arresting specimen is the poem
Clarkson prefaces to his A Single Eye of 1650, narrated in the persona of
the hidden god on high, the one who controls both the god we normally
call God, and the devil :
Behold, the King of glory now is come
Treduce God, and Devil to their Doom;
For both of them are servants unto Me
That lives, and rules in perfect Majesty:
Though called God, yet that is not my Name,
True, I be both, though I am not the same:
Therefore a wonder am I to you all,
So that to tituld Gods ye pray and call.
Oh then my Creature, let me speak to thee;
Thy Worship, and thy God, shall dy truly.
44
It is difcult to decide what is more audacious: the sentiment itself, or
that Clarkson voiced it in rst-person terms. Similar rst-person voicing
was reported by the Quaker Richard Farnworth in his famous description
of Robert Wilkinson of Leicester:
He said he was both God and the Devil, and he said there was no God but him
and no Devil but him, and he said whom he blest was blest, and whom he cursd
was cursd, and he said he was a serpent, and so he is, and he said the Apostles
were lyers and deceivers, and I gave him a Bible to prove that, and he said the
Bible was a pack of lyes, and there was neither heaven nor hell but here, and yet
he was both in heaven and hell, and he had as lieve be in hell as in heaven, and he
said he was a serpent and a whoremaster, and before he said he was born of God,
and could not comit sin.
45
Fox also came across a group of people in jail in Coventry in 1649 who
said they were God. So Fox asked them if it would rain tomorrow; they
werent sure.
46
Abiezer Coppe, the most notorious of the Ranters (thanks
largely to Anthony Woods spurious biography), followed one of his
Amens with Not by the Devill, but (by God) its true, but shoulder-
noted God with the comment Thats a base thing, a dangerous pun on
base as fundamental, and base as plebeian or despicable.
47
The idea of God dying also appeared in the Post-script to Joseph
Salmons A Rout, A Rout :
I see the Lord, our spiritual Sampson, hath laid his hands of almighty power upon
(You) these Pillars of this woodden Fabrick, he will dis-joynt you, and shake you
all to pieces, and in you the whole edice of this swordlie Power shall be
annihilated: the Lord will die with it, in it (or rather out of it, and from it) and
in this death he will destroy more then you have done all your lives since.
48
Salmon also exemplies the desire to return to an undifferentiated state,
when we were all one: To ascend from variety into uniformity, is to
contract our scattered spirits into their original center and to nd our-
selves where we were, before we were.
49
Abiezer Coppe similarly saw
distinction, diversity, variety, and as clearly saw all swallowed up into
unity.
50
This was the impulse behind their gestures at dualism: behind
that dualism lay an undifferentiated One, higher than both God and
devil, whence we came and whither we will return, as a drop into the
Ocean.
51
The heresiographers were not wrong: the Fall is very frequently taken
apart by such writers. But once again, the accusation is almost more
important than the primary evidence. Looking through Coppes output,
for instance, one is struck by how little material relating to the matter in
Eden there is. In his recantation, Copps Return to the Wayes of Truth,
Genesis texts on Eden and the Fall are totally absent, and considering the
fact that Coppe manages to marshal up every other famous biblical text
on sin to assert that there is sin, his omission of any mention of the
foundation narrative of sinfulness is ominous. He also remembers how
When I was about 13 years old, sin began to lie at the door, a hint that sin
is not original, but enters the conscience at the time of puberty.
52
Like
other Ranters, Coppes writings are themselves fruit of the knowledge that
good and evil do not, at least for the initiate, occupy the relation to each
other commonly held. If mankind is inherently damaged, then this, for
Coppe, is soon to be healed: The Enmity, the Serpent, in all, which is
exceeding bad, shall be slain.
53
In A Fiery Flying Roll, Coppe mentions
the forbidden tree merely to show what the eating of it nowadays means:
But all you that eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evill, and
have not your Evill eye Pickt out, you call Good Evill, and Evill Good;
Light Darknesse, and Darknesse Light; Truth Blasphemy, and Blasphemy
Truth.
54
Of course, this is exactly what the Ranters were themselves
accused of doing. Ranters may not have been a sect in the ordinary
understanding of the term: they had no central spokesman, the writings
we commonly call Ranter writings contain different emphases, and much
of what we read about Ranters is of dubious reliability.
55
But there were
people who were called Ranters by their contemporaries, and whose
publications caused a furore and a Blasphemy Act. The heresiographers
were not making things up; they were making sense of things already
there, seen, if through a glass, darkly.
chapter 6
The Fall in practice
Hitherto, we have looked rather piecemeal at a variety of sources from
gardening manuals to Church fathers. Now we turn to some more
extended, mainly literary treatments of the story of the Fall of man
attempts to put theory into practice. It is when the spare, mysterious
verses of the opening chapters of Genesis are scrutinised with a view to
narrative extrapolation rather than doctrinal consistency that possible
differences between these two sorts of coherency are revealed. Hence
Jeremy Taylor points up the problem of the doctrinal commonplace by
applying causal examination: whether [Adams nature] was not imper-
fect, and apt to fall into forbidden instances even before his fall, we may
best guess at by the event.
1
Although Protestant exegesis had insisted on
the literal truth of the Old Testament, even Augustine had stated that
undoubtedly much had been left out of the Bible, lest prophecy descend
to the level of mere history.
2
But many then proceeded to imagine how
such gaps could be lled.
Such lling-in, though, was not always a comfortable job, and often
had to nd a suitable rhetorical front for its operations. Thus the curious
Sir Thomas Browne opened his Pseudodoxia epidemica (rst edition 1646)
with a promise to pass over (in rhetorical terms occupatio, or praeteritio) a
huge list of questions about Adam and Eve and their Fall a promise he
immediately and extensively broke.
3
Neither Browne nor Taylor, how-
ever, were working in explicitly narrative genres, an indication that the
narrative impulse is not generically restricted, but is simply the habit of
testing the links in the causal chain leading to an event, rather than
emphasising the results of that event. An instructive example of a non-
narrative genre nding itself inuenced by a narrative one is provided by
Matthew Pooles popular Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1683), a biblical
commentary that, like most of its kind, works by abstracting the Bible
into verses, and consequently dealing with each verse in isolation. But
when Poole gets to the temptation in Eden, under the inuence of a late
96
ingenious and learned Writer, he spins out the few words into a proper
conversation. His ingenious and learned Writer is clearly Milton:
The Serpent makes his address to the Woman with a short speech, and salutes
her as the Empress of the World, &c. She is not affrighted because there was as
yet no cause of fear, no sin, and therefore no danger, but wonders and enquires
what this meant, and whether he was not a bruit Creature, and how he came to
have speech, and understanding? The Serpent replies, that he was no better than
a bruit, and did indeed want both these gifts, but by eating of a certain fruit in
this Garden he got both. She asked what Fruit, and Tree that was? Which when
he shewed her, she replied, this no doubt, is an excellent fruit and likely to make
the eater of it wise; but God hath forbidden us this Fruit: To which the Serpent
replies, as it here follows in the Text. It is true, this discourse is not in the Text,
but it is confessed by Jewish, and other Expositors, that these words, Yea, hath
God said, &c. Are a short and abrupt sentence, and that they were but the close
of a foregoing discourse; which might well enough be this now mentioned, or
some other of a like nature.
4
Arnold Williams once described the hexameral commentary tradition
and the literary tradition as parallel ministrations ; here, the lines actually
cross.
5
This crossing can be referred to a deeper tension between how biblical
text is conceived as organised, and whether its various organisations are
secure. Works of commentary generally mirror the biblical form of
chapter and verse, but such divisions do not co-originate with the biblical
text itself.
6
Hebrew divisions were introduced to assist understanding of
the ow of thought, or for lectionary purposes; various differing Greek
systems followed, their differences depending on the genre of the book
being so divided. Thus one early system of dividing the gospels depended
on parallelisms between the four, rather than continuities within any one.
The modern, Latin divisions were probably introduced by Stephen
Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1228; and the whole,
systematised iconoclasm of chapter-and-verse division seriatim through-
out the whole Bible dates only from Robert Stephanus, who published a
Greek and Latin New Testament so divided in 1551, and then a whole
Latin Bible in 1555. The vastly inuential Geneva Bible (New Testament
1557; complete 1560) followed Stephanus divisions.
7
Thus the current corrugated surface of the Bible both distorts its
original underlay and acts like an internal commentary. The commentary
and the narrative are not dissociated ventures: the former affects the
rigorous ordering of the latter, which in turn supplies the defects or gaps
of the former. So in Pooles reconstruction of the conversation between
The Fall in practice 97
Eve and the serpent, the typically paratactic nature of the commentary
is eroded. The account accretes circumstantial or explanatory detail : Eve,
the silent question is answered, was not surprised at the talking snake
because, back then, fear and danger did not exist. The short and abrupt
Genesis is opened up by Pooles Milton. Nonetheless, working on a canvas
larger than Genesis 23 but smaller than Paradise Lost, Poole economises.
Miltons Eve is initially non-committal about the potency of the forbidden
tree, and so Satan has to renew his persuasions. Poole does not have space
for this, so his Eve conveniently does not pause for doubt.
Commentary can also provide a refuge from, rather than an engage-
ment with, narrative priorities. Thus the Elizabethan vernacular commen-
tator Gervase Babington complained of Eves tittle tattle too long and too
much with the Serpent, despite the fact that Eve replies to the serpent
once in the Bible, and no more. Rather, she should have ung away from
all such conference and perswasion.
8
Homiletic works too displayed at
best unease at too curious prying. Stephen Jay, an Oxfordshire rector of
scant publication, wrote a volume of prose reections on narratives of sin,
published as Ta Kannakou; or, the Tragedies of Sin Contemplated in 1689,
working through the tragedies of the angels, man, the Flood, Babel,
Sodom and so forth. Despite the possibilities of narrative expansion
inherent in his project, Jay did not like whys and wherefores. On the
second page of his narrative, for instance, discussing the cause of the fall of
the angels, Jay adduces their inherent mutability: But if already my
Plough make a Baulk in this Tragick Field, and my Pen blunders to
decipher this Serpents Root from whence sprung up the Monster, my
Reader may well remit it to me, when the great St. Austin throws it off
with a Non Deus sunt: They were not God.
9
Jay nevertheless manages to
follow up this remission with commentary-derived discussion of the
various motives that have been ascribed to the falling angels. The desire
to include coexists with the desire to exclude, in a manner typical of the
commentaries, where various theses are catalogued, all to be nally
rejected in favour of one or exceptionally two remainders.
As for the Fall in Eden, Jay simply misses it out. Unlike Poole, who
investigated the moment-by-moment process of Satan persuading Eve in
a vivid historic present, Jay shifts his tense into the past, and draws the
curtains of metaphor, imagining the tragedians of the prior fall now as
spectators to the next one: Tis no news to the Reader, that this execrable
Plot was crowned with its wishd-for Success, and how Pride played her
part in the Tragedy so much to the Life, that all the Pit of Hell paid her
the Honour of the Clap and the Hum.
10
A more complex example of evasion within a narrative structure is
provided by Order and Disorder, the hexameral work formerly attributed
to Sir Allen Apsley, though now to his sister Lucy Hutchinson, the
translator of Lucretius and biographer of her husband Colonel Hutch-
inson. In the 1730s, her descendant Julius Hutchinson remembered
how one of Eves soliloquies in Order and Disorder was writ by Mrs
Hutchinson on ye occasion of ye Coll : her Husbands being then a
prisoner in ye Tower: 1664, thus dating the initial composition of
Hutchinsons poem to the period immediately after the Restoration.
11
(Order and Disorder is actually only a short portion of Hutchinsons
versied work on the Old Testament, but it is the section that concerns
us here.) The elements that had recommended Hutchinsons earlier
translation of Lucretius are consciously excluded from this, her later work.
Order and Disorder was written, she states, to cleanse out all the rubbish,
our grave Tutors laid in when they taught us to study and admire their
inspired Poets and divine Philosophers. Her poem, in contrast to vain,
foolish, atheistical Poesie, will have nothing of fancy in it; no elevations
of stile, no charms of language. Unfortunately she succeeded: it is a dire
piece.
12
Hutchinson is concerned how properly to approach her subject. For
instance, she is extremely wary of allowing direct speech into her text.
Norbrook claims for Hutchinson a particular interest in female psych-
ology, adducing one of Eves soliloquies as evidence. However, as Adam
is awarded a companion soliloquy, Eves speech can hardly show particu-
lar interest. More importantly, both Julius Hutchinson and Norbrook are
not quite correct to call these speeches soliloquies, because they are
presented by Lucy Hutchinson as conjectural products, fallen approxima-
tions substituted by her, not the real thing. She is extremely cautious:
Methinks I hear sad Eve in some dark Vale / Her woful state, with such
sad plaints, bewail ; If these words Adams melting soul did move, / He
might reply with kind rebuking love.
13
When discussing the angelic fall, similarly to Jay, Hutchinson does not
want to pry: But circumstances that we cannot know / Of their rebellion
and their overthrow / We will not dare tinvent. The mundane Fall is
likewise in a hurry to happen:
And so within a bright scald serpent [Satan] lies,
Folded about a fair forbidden tree,
Watching a wishd for opportunitie,
Which Eve soon gave him, coming there alone
So to be rst and easier overthrown.
14
Hutchinsons use of the truncated So to be in its haste vaguely implies
purpose, as if Eve was complicit in her own Fall. But it would be difcult
to tell, as Hutchinson escorts her Eve from one side of the Fall to the
other without giving us access either to her thoughts or to her voice:
Eve quickly caught in the foul hunters net,
Believd that death was only a vain threat,
. . . With longing eyes looks on the lovely fruit,
First nicely plucks, then eats with full delight.
15
Far from Hutchinson apologising for Eves weakness, as did Aemilia
Lanyer, her Eve is conventional, and conventionally rebuked:
His [Satans] lies could never have prevaild on Eve
But that she wisht them truth, and did believe
A forgery that suited her desire,
Whose haughty heart was prone enough to aspire.
16
Adam unsurprisingly is celebrated as the noblest of creatures; again
unsurprisingly, the description drifts into a more equivocal estimation
of his stability:
Thus was the noblest creature the last made,
As he in whom the rest perfection had,
In whom both parts of the great world were joynd,
Earth in his members, Heaven in his mind;
Whose vast reach the whole Universe comprizd,
And saw it in himself epitomizd,
Yet not the Centre nor circumference can
Fill the more comprehensive soul of Man,
Whose life is but a progress of desire,
Which still enjoyd, doth something else require,
Unsatised with all it hath pursued
Until it rest in God, the Soveraign Good.
17
Nor is Hutchinson any more sensitive about the ontology of the Fall. She
describes Genesis 3:22 as spoken with holy ironie, showing her know-
ledge of the commentary tradition or the marginalium in the Geneva
Bible and her Adam and Eve fallen feel perturbations twice, an
Augustinian colour. Adam names Eve Isha upon creation, as in the
Hebrew text of the Bible (Genesis 2:23; Isha, Woman, because she was
taken out of Ish, Man), but as he also calls her Eve before the Fall, strictly
her fallen name, this is not a thought-through distinction.
18
Most disturbingly of all, Hutchinson energises her prelapsarian zone
with more disorder than it should have possessed. Even the prelapsarian
animals are Some more to love, some more to hate enclind ; ora show
off their loveliness As Courtiers do in their contentious pride ; even the
unfallen senses, like false spies both at the ears and eyes, / Conspire with
strangers for the souls surprise, / And let all life-perturbing passions in.
19
This slippage between fallen and unfallen things betokens Hutchin-
sons lack of intellectual control over her verse although, to be fair, the
mixing of fallen and unfallen elements in simile is a habit she probably
derived from Josuah Sylvester, whose hugely popular translations of the
hexameral epic of Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas, were pub-
lished in English in sections from the 1590s on. But her reluctance to be
original is itself an interesting phenomenon. Working from the experi-
ence of political defeat, and retracting her earlier profane translations, she
subdues herself to convention. Even when Eve and Adam have fallen, and
have become like us, Hutchinson still will not let herself get close,
supplying instead speeches carefully marked as conjecture, speeches that
may have nothing to do with what actually happened.
Three large-scale literary works, Hugo Grotius Adamus exul (1601),
Samuel Pordages Mundorum explicatio (1661) and John Drydens The
State of Innocence (1677), next occupy our attention. These three works are
all very different: one is a Neo-Latin drama, the next a Behmenist epic,
and the last an explicit rewrite of Miltons Paradise Lost. All three offer
narrative treatments of the Fall ; all three embody quite different ap-
proaches to the task.
Hugo Grotius published a volume of Neo-Latin poetry in 1601, entitled
Sacra, and consisting of miscellaneous sacred poems and the verse drama
Adamus exul. Born in 1583, Grotius can thus hardly have been eighteen
when he wrote this ve-act biblical tragedy. It was the only one of
Grotius three biblical plays not to receive early-modern translation into
English.
Adamus exul, despite its youthful origin and apparent mature rejection
it does not appear in Grotius collected poems is a tightly constructed
work of iambic trimeters in ve rather static acts, each crowned by a
chorus in mixed metre. In the rst act, Sathan, as prologue, delivers a
machinating soliloquy; in Act I I , Adamus and an Angelus enjoy a serene
chat in the garden, with a rather submissive Eva entering at the end; the
third act sees Sathan attempt and fail to pervert Adamus, who stands rm;
in the penultimate, Sathan tries Eva instead, who gives in, whereupon she
and Adamus lament; and nally, the three are visited by the Vox Dei, who
curses and banishes them, and fences some interesting objections from an
Eva who has at last found her own voice.
20
Grotius Adamus is not a very interesting character. He is rather
robotically intelligent when we rst encounter him in conversation with
the Angelus, correctly deducing that God must needs exist, be uncreated,
innite, omniscient and indeed triform, with Father, Son and Holy Ghost
creating the Universe ex nihilo. The Angelus is appreciative of this star
pupil, who, as Sathan has already commented, is heading for the sky:
trusting in God, already he holds to the path prepared to heaven. The
Angelus conrms this, saying that Adamus has the look of someone
whose aspect [vultus] aims at greater things. Sathan, though, also de-
scribes Adamus as shackled to virtue (mancipatus . . . virtutibus) and
talks of how for those inexperienced in evil, there is no shame. But
rudibus, inexperienced, carries the suggestion of ignorance, not moral
discrimination.
21
Nonetheless, Adamus does not remain a hollow-eyed philosopher. The
Angelus, explaining to Adamus in what way he differs from his surrounds,
identies his felicity as the capacity to feel both positive and negative
emotions: no pleasure [voluptas] delights the shrub, no sorrow [dolor]
torments it. But this is to award rather powerful emotions to Adamus:
voluptas and dolor are emotive words in Latin, approaching passion and
distress.
22
When, therefore, Sathan approaches Adamus in the central act, he is
greeted by a rather energetic response, not at all like the Adamus of the
previous act: Execrable, wicked traitor to God! Take your criminal hands
away from my pure body.
23
Sathan shrewdly replies that such a violent
initial response betokens one already accustomed to sin: What joy is
there in hating always in such a hostile manner? If you didnt know,
mental rage is sinful, and the unsleeping misery of the soul. Envy, sorrow,
grief, sadness, and fear these do not bother the fortunate.
24
Adamus
initial reaction shows that narrative interests can override dogmatics he
cannot just grin blankly at this odd new fellow, as many theologians
would have him do. But Sathans reply shows that this is still a problem,
and one he can exploit for his own purposes.
Sathan and Adamus continue to argue, and Sathan eventually has
to admit defeat. But one couplet in their exchange bears instructive
comparison with a moment in Miltons Paradise Regaind:
Sathan: Oblata ab aliquo quis recusat munera?
Adamus: Quemcunque non tam dona, quam donans juvat.
[Sathan: Whod refuse someones gifts?
Adamus: The person who cares not about the gifts, but the giver.]
25
This is echoed by Miltons Satan and Jesus in the wilderness:
Satan replyd.
Tell me, if Food were before thee set,
Wouldst thou not eat? Thereafter as I like
The giver, answerd Jesus.
26
The difference lies in the context. In Miltons poem, Jesus is no prelap-
sarian he knows good and evil and lives in a fallen world. Adamus is
altogether a different case he is a prelapsarian, and this type of answer
may be inappropriate for such a being. In any case, it is telling that when
Milton imitated this sentiment, he gave it to his second, not his rst
Adam.
Adamus, then, in his interaction with Sathan, is a little too energetic,
something Sathan quickly identies. He also approaches his foe not just
with haughty steps (superbis pedibus) but willingly (ultro), as if he is out
to prove himself: nor do I refuse the laws of war, he vaunts.
27
This
possible vacillation between the genial and the pugnacious had been
suggested earlier in the play, in a grammatically ambiguous movement:
In medio tamen
Utriusque positus, cum volet, ectet viam.
Quocunque vento ante poterit libera
Pelli uoluntas.
[Placed in the middle of two ways, where he wants to go, there will he bend
his way. By every wind that blows is his free will capable of being pushed. (lines
17780)]
Volition (volet, he wishes) is ousted quietly by passivity (pelli, to be
pushed). As in the Augustinian model, where the statement that man was
created in a middling state bred a certain doubleness within as well as
without the mind, so here. Nec quem in bivio dubium versat / Vitii labes
is this to be translated no sinful spot turns him [into being in a new]
wavering [state] between two paths, or should it be construed . . . him
[already capable of ] wavering ? The grammar is indecisive.
Adamus, though, is a far less interesting character than his wife, who is
dened all along in terms of her busy, even overbusy mental activity:
Willingly she wavers, all the time indulging herself, proudly hoping,
always after better things, wanting what she doesnt have. Eva herself
later admits that she is complicit with Sathan: That so nearly should I
dare to eat the forbidden fruit is the consequence both of his persistent
persuasion and my desire.
28
She starts out in Adamus exul as a prop in
her rst appearance in Act I I she gets a mere six-and-a-half lines of supine
verse. By her next appearance in Act I V, though, she has become a more
obviously loquacious, inquisitive person, opening with a question
Whats that animal . . . ? and closing her rst speech with curiosity
I wonder if it can speak?
29
At length, after the Fall, while Adamus cries
ineffectually, she is rational and calm, trying to talk Adamus out of his
despair. Even he is impressed at her new-found fortitude: Whence shines
so much virtue [virtus] out of so great troubles? And does she know, and
does she advise me well ? Adamus praise of Eva puts him in an openly
subservient position. After even more of her ne speech, he confesses for
you, my wife, what would I deny? At your command, Id slight God.
30
Here, Adamus uxoriousness, usually held to be a cause of the Fall, instead
becomes an effect a twist of the orthodox position, as if the young
Grotius found the standard device of placing such a sentiment immedi-
ately before the Fall too coarse a strategy. But his relocation also opposes
woman and God, construing them as opposing poles of power, and
thereby failing to provide Eva with a stable haven of being.
In another twist to the Augustinian position, Eva is also keenly aware
that will is prior to act. Sathan had earlier said Qui velle potuit, esse
coepit, He who has wished, begins to be. Eva, at the apparent moment
of the Fall, seems to have a physical reaction upon taking the fruit:
O dulce pomum, quam tua haec species meis
Arridet oculis . . .
Quid hoc quod artus horror incussit meos,
Et ima gelidus ossa perrupit tremor?
[O sweet fruit, how pretty you look to me . . . what is this horror racing through
my limbs, and this cold shiver piercing to the core of my bones?]
31
Now this, on a rst reading, looks very much like the Fall. Eva presum-
ably takes the apple, and then after an extra-textual bite, feels horror and
tremor, and not the new science promised. But we have been wrong-
footed: just a few lines later, we realise that she has not yet eaten: Placet
admovere poma, sed renuit manus / Parere, It seemed like a good thing
to take the apple, but the hand refused to obey.
32
The reader must revise
the initial impression, and reafrm that Eva is yet sinless. But this causal
warp, in which the two acts of sin sin-in-the-will and sin-in-the-world
are superimposed, is a sophisticated moment, momentarily joining and
then dividing the two types of Fall, suggesting that things that can be
theoretically so distinguished sometimes cannot be separated in action,
and indeed vice versa.
Eva then proceeds to capitalise on this sense of sin. Debating with
herself what she should do next, she decides that touching, plucking and
debating is bad enough, and so she might as well complete matters: This
he will say is bad enough, to have come so close. Most of my desire has
already been accomplished. I have touched the forbidden tree, I have
plucked the fruit, and, what hell say is worst of all, I have thought about
it carefully.
33
In this way, Eva uses the Augustinian creation of the fall-in-
the-will to persuade herself into the fall-in-the-world. Augustine had
distinguished these two states only in order to stress hurriedly that what
really mattered was the public transgression. Grotius Eva rejects the
distinction and, in a manner that would have horried Augustine, uses
the one to push herself into the other.
Eva after the Fall is furthermore a bracingly independent woman, albeit
a slightly accusatory one. When the Vox Dei asks her to explain herself,
she says: The serpent, made by your right hand, Creator, deceived
simplicity with cunning. And I, guiltless, whom my very sex makes
susceptible to tricks, was led astray, and raised the fruit to my mouth.
Evas argument is a barely disguised criticism, and reects a lesson well-
learned from Sathan earlier: if all things were created good, then there is
no sin to fear.
34
Indeed, Sathan is given a slightly Promethean role in the poem, which
further unbalances a clean sense of sin punished, speaking of his cor
profunda providum sapientia, a heart deep with wisdom of things to
come (Greek prometheia, foresight, forethought). His last great speech
before Eva falls is a good place on which to leave this text a highly
ambiguous hymn to intellectual aspiration. It is quite impossible to reject
utterly the intoxicating allure of his celebratory verse:
It is the passion of the soul to know, to understand things, good and bad: for evil
is not evil when it is known. It is the minds one felicity to unite all the different
aspects that shine in individual things, to see the world with the inner eye as one
to see these things engraved, along with their causes, upon the mind, of which
the greatest good is certain knowledge of truth, ignorance of how to be deceived.
For the universe lies open to the minds incisive discerning, and towards that end
does this strength of reasoning move, and, the more it discovers, the less it rests,
whose purpose is to search for that which lies beyond.
35
Grotius did not reprint his youthful work, and it cannot have been
nearly as accessible throughout the seventeenth century as his other two
Neo-Latin plays. It is difcult to be sure why this drama fared worse than
the others, but it is certainly true that Grotius developed and maintained a
highly ambiguous relation with the Genesis narrative. Adamus exul is
essentially an Augustinian work, with the usual narrative problems such
Augustinianism encounters. But, later in life, Grotius came to reject the
basic pattern of the orthodox Fall. Commenting on the name of the
forbidden tree in his celebrated Annotations, for instance, he writes:
Josephus called it a shrub that gave mental discernment. Man does not
intrinsically possess knowledge, but is not therefore miserable: as Euripi-
des says, Surely to know nothing at all is the best life.
36
Therefore his
annotation on Gods identication of mans intellectual promotion at the
Fall likewise accepts Gods words at face value, though he adds that this
knowledge did not, alas, make man all-powerful. This, it might be
remembered, is identical to what William Rabisha had said.
Grotius also refers us in his Annotations back to his equally celebrated
On the Law of War and Peace for his discussion of the primitive state. It is
something of a shock to nd out that the great Grotius there sounds
almost exactly like a Digger:
All things, as Justin speaks, were undivided & common to all, as if all had one
patrimony. Hence it was, that presently every man might take unto his uses what
he pleased, and spend what might be spent . . . Nor was it impossible for that
state to have continued, if either men had persisted in a certain great simplicity,
or had livd together in a certain mutual excellent charity. One of these, to wit,
Communion by reason of an exceeding simplicity, may be observed in some
people of America; who, through many Ages, without any incommodity, hath
persisted in that custome: The other, to wit, communion of Charity, the Essens
practised of old, and then the Christians, who were rst at Hierusalem, and now
also not a few that lead an ascetick life. The simplicity, wherein the rst parents
of mankind were created, was demonstrated by their nakedness. There was in
them rather an ignorance of vice, than the knowledge of virtue . . . But in this
simple and innocent way of life Men persisted not, but applied their minds to
various arts, whereof the Symbole was the tree of the knowledge of good and
evill, that is, of those things which may be used both well and ill.
37
Grotius then associates all crafts and arts with the Fall, a move as old as
the Enoch books: Thou seest what Azazel hath done, who hath taught all
unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were
(preserved) in heaven, which men were striving to learn . . . the whole
earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel : to
him ascribe all sin.
38
Grotius is not being explicitly allegorical in his
treatment of Adam and Eve because he does not deny that Adam and Eve
were real people. But he treats their story as a kind of gloss on general
political development, and even identies countries or collectives where
the political fall into property has not taken place. The switch from the
two in the garden of symbolic trees to the plural societies of men who can
choose either to live, or not to live, in community, shows that Grotius
could justly be accused of treating the Genesis narrative in a heterodox
spirit. That is exactly what happened. Tileman Andreas Rivinus, for
example, complained Hugo Grotius openly socinicises [socinizat] when
he says that the nudity in which the rst men were created argues for their
simplicity.
39
This is quite opposite to what Grotius had done in Adamus
exul, though the juvenile work already feels the pressures that would
eventually crack the Augustinian mould.
Samuel Pordage was not appreciated. Dryden called him lame Mephi-
bosheth the Wisards Son. When he sent the Earl of Rochester his hopeful
play Mariamne, Rochester returned it, with the couplet scrawled on the
manuscript: Poet whoere thou art, God damn Thee, / Go hand thyself, and
burn thy Mariamne.
40
Drydens claim that Pordages father was a wizard
would not have been seen as an exaggeration. Samuel (1633?91) was the
son of John Pordage (160781), the Behmenist astrologer and clergyman
to whom Elias Ashmole had gifted the rich Berkshire living of Bradeld.
At Bradeld he entertained a variety of gures, including Coppe and
Tany. William Everard the founder Digger was also there in 1649, himself
reputed to be a Conjurer. According to Baxters account Everard caused
quite a stir, amongst other things conjuring up and ghting with
dragons.
41
When ofcially interrogated, Pordage senior underplayed such
magical goings-on, but he did not deny supernatural activity in his
household, and later in life he associated with the Philadelphian Jane
Lead. His son was a client of the astrologer John Booker.
42
Pordages Mundorum explicatio, published in 1661, is signed merely
S. P. Armig. and is not at all like Pordage the youngers other extant
poetry.
43
It explicitly evangelises Behmenist systematics otherwise ignored
in Samuels work, telling in two parts the story of the creation and Fall of
man, and of the wanderings and apotheosis of a Pilgrim. Christopher
Hill in The Experience of Defeat remarked that reading this 13,000-odd-
lines-long poem is like reading Paradise Lost and The Pilgrims Progress
stuck back-to-back and translated into Behmenist jargon. This has
prompted the obvious inference that Pordage the elder had a hand in its
composition, and that he is the arcane other to whom the poem is
credited. There are enough contemporary references to Samuels author-
ship to secure his claim, and his fathers Behmenism reinforces this ascrip-
tion, while sharing it out to John too. Some kind of joint authorship,
then, is likely, and I will refer to the writer simply as Pordage.
The interest of Mundorum explicatio for students of Fall narratives is
that it tries to serve two different masters at once. Pordage has to get in the
Behmenist Fall, but also wants to make his poem look like the Genesis
narrative, so he appends to the initial Fall of Adam-in-his-mind the more
conventional, public Fall in Eden. This is a poem of two falls, therefore,
and this produces some odd consequences that highlight the distinctive
problems of both systems.
Pordages Behmenism envisages Adam on the model of Boehmes
massive Genesis commentary, the Mysterium magnum. Thus, Pordages
hermaphrodite Adam not only saw through all things, knew what all
things meant but could also y, dive and withstand re. God calls him, in
an admonitory context, a second Deity! . . . Thou art an Angel. But in
a doubleness typical to such thinkers Pordage, when he later comes to
the forbidden tree, also loads the forbidden fruit with the academic
disciplines: the knowledge of grammar, rhetoric, logic, optics, arithmetic,
music, physics, metaphysics, geometry, astronomy, geography, astrology,
surgery, magic, theology, poetry, chemistry, ethics, economics, philosophy
and politics. And these things are in themselves neither good nor bad.
Pordage also claims that Adam then immortal was imperishable; /
Corporeal, and yet unalterable. Nonetheless, Pordage also emphasises
pendency: the rst creation was so made / That it may stand, or be to hell
betrayd: / Or like an empty Vacuum, which is / Capable to be lld with
Wo, or Blisse.
44
Adam is thus a ying, re-defying Vacuum.
This makes the (rst) Fall an abrupt and rather puzzling event. God
tells Adam not to fall, and he immediately does:
God foresaw
The wo that he soon on himself would draw:
Therefore he thus forewarns him: New made Soul !
Work of my hands, in whom no pheces foul
Remain! A second Deity! O thou
For ay mayst live!
But as soon as God nishes his speech, ADAMS now left alone in
Paradise / Unto the mortal principle his eyes / He turns.
45
Here, Adam
simply falls that, in Behmenist jargon, is what is meant by his gazing on
the mortal principle as soon as God denes what he is. There is no
temptation. There is no gradual process. After this two-and-a-half-line
Fall, Adam becomes mortal, he possesses a smaller intellect, and
stumbling on a pool he sees himself anew:
Adams amazd, and in the Chrystal Glasse
Of Waters, he beholds his limbs, and Face,
He feels his hair, his nose, his teeth, his esh,
Then views, then feels, then views himself afresh.
46
This invites comparison with the celebrated passage in Paradise Lost when
Eve recounts how, moments after her creation, she stumbled over a liquid
lapse and fell in love with her own reection.
47
Both encounters imitate
Narcissus, the vain youth who was punished for his scorn of the nymph
Echo by being blinded to the real identity of his reection. The difference
between these two reworkings lies in the moment at which it is introduced
into the narrative. Miltons Eve is unfallen at the point of the comparison,
and the inclusion of the Narcissus motif thus sets up a troubling counter-
point: perhaps Eve does have more in common with Narcissus than she is
supposed to. Pordages Adam, on the other hand, has just fallen, but the
tone of his excited verse works in exactly the opposite direction from
Miltons echoic, rather soporic chimes.
Adams energy in Pordage is soon overtaken by drowsiness, however,
as Adam slips into the sleep of the fallen, and is then sundered in two:
the hermaphrodite becomes now Adam the male and Eve the female:
Man once was whole-man, but now broke alass! / Is but the half of
what at rst he was. This sundered being awakes as two, and incredibly
this rst Fall is then brushed to the side in order to make way for the
next one:
In Paradise as yet they were, for sin
Actually had not yet enterd in,
Nor was the vanity awakd, as yet,
Gods blessed Image in their souls was set,
Though much obscurd: In great felicity
And Joy they livd, not knowing vanity,
Nor Good, nor Evil ; Could they so have stood
They had been blessed, for their state was good.
Their pronity unto a farther Fall
God saw.
Adam has just fallen by transferring his attentions to earthly trash. He has
become mortal and has lost his physical prowess. He has swooned and
been split apart. And yet, we are to believe, sin had not Actually a play
on act, as if mental acts are somehow non-existent arrived, vanity had
not yet been awaked, and that both beings remained in (some kind of )
innocence, an innocence described as still pre-moral. Even God has
forgotten the last few pages: In Harmony / Thou art; nor is awakd Hels
property / As yet.
48
As before, the coming of God heralds disaster. Once more I thee
forwarn, he says, and so bans the forbidden tree. In this account,
therefore, even the institution of the public test of the forbidden tree
postdates the fall of the will that makes the public test able to be failed.
Perhaps this is serendipitous: God accepts that some kind of metaphysical
fall has taken place, and only requires his creations not to go any further.
In effect, he leaves their minds to them. As he says, Sinns not without
assent : Nor lyes it in / Bing tempted, but in yielding lyes the sin. This
was the opinion Grotius Eva had rejected, telling herself that God is only
interested in the will, and that having fallen, she might as well complete
the business publicly.
So the conventional Fall follows. Gods Image shrinks into a cloud,
and Theyave fading breath, / Bodies to sickness subject, and to Death.
But Adam drew his rst mortal breath, we were told, just after his rst
fall, that is some 400 lines previously! Once again, the interface between
the two falls has broken down.
49
Gods curse itself is interesting for a
further kind of doubleness:
He thundereth these words into their eares.
You guilty souls where are you? Have you thus
Transgrest? See now how you are like to us!
. . . Thus spake Gods Justice; then his Mercy brake
A deeper silence and him thus bespake.
Where art thou Adam? Is that Face of thine
Mufed in Clouds that was so like to mine?
Where art thou? lost! O sad!
50
As we saw, one effect of the Fall was that Gods Image shrinks into a
cloud. Here, God claims that from his vantage Adams face is now
becoming mufed in clouds. For a moment God seems to suffer with
and as his creation, the Fall propelling Adam out of his sight as much as
removing him from Adam.
To talk of this being as God, however, is too simple, as Pordage here
sunders God into two faculties that speak as parts of him, neither
representing his essence. Justice thunders; Mercy pities. Justice says
Where art thou . . . ? knowing full well where they are; Mercy seems
genuinely to have lost sight of the fallen couple. The voices differ not only
in ethical persuasion, but also in perception.
Thus the thin end of the wedge of dualism is inserted into the Godhead
itself, and then thickens, as the God who appears in Eden becomes a
steadily weaker gure in Pordages poem. At rst, he is the great creator.
But soon Pordages emphasis on a Behmenist duality starts to shift God
towards a position of half-power, an equal and opposite to that which
Satan serves. Satan is, typically, a fallen angel ; but rather than being a lone
apostate from the one divine realm, as he is initially styled, he comes to
resemble and serve an opposite God: the First Principle. (God, in this
terminology, is the ruler of the Second Principle.)
After the apple-fall Satan returns in triumph to Hell where He doth his
Kingdoms Princes convocate, / With the whole Host of Hell. There, he
vaunts to his assembly, using an ambiguous mixture of detestable and
commendable language comparable to that of Miltons arch-end:
You know aspiring Princes! You and I
Left Heavn for prying into the unity,
Because we scornd but for to be above
(For why should mighty Wrath give place to) Love?
We left those Orbs, and did them all despise,
And did this mighty kingdom colonize
Because we would be free; here we Command,
Are Kings.
. . . But that Usurper got the upper ground;
And under his our essence strictly bound,
So that he Lord was, ours a slave, and thus
He thought for aye, to Lord it over us.
O how I raged!
51
If this is satanic delusion, Pordage shares it, as Satans cosmogony is, from
a Behmenist point of view, accurate. Satan says that his state existed rst,
with its own ruler, and that God was the usurper, much as Jupiter
usurped to gain his position in the Greek theogonies. On this model,
the angelic fall was a non serviam to a new regime, and not a spontaneous
fall from universal goodness.
What complicates matters even further is that Pordage is keen to play
down the moral status of each of the opposing powers that resemble,
ultimately, supramoral forces. Next to Satans description of the angelic
fall quoted above, Pordage shoulder-notes: *(i.e.) The rst Princip. which
is not simply evil, but as it is in opposition to the good . Good, evil these
start to lose moral signicance and, accordingly, the ethical stature of
Satan brightens as that of God darkens. Pordage almost says one is as
good as the other.
This is all admissible because, as Satan himself points out, both these
opposing forces are controlled by an even higher power:
In ordering* them, there was an higher hand,
Which to conjunction did them both Command.
*The two Essences of the rst and second Principles.
52
Dualism, on this model, is deferred. The being whom we saw create the
world, talk to Adam in Eden, thunder at and pity the fallen pair, here
becomes a puppet of a more remote being. But this further being is never
really identied, though usually conated with the God who in the
poem seems to oscillate between being the secondary Principle of Love
and the higher, supramoral being. Here, for instance, God is clearly the
supramoral God:
. . . God from ternity
Did generate two Principles, which be
Contrary to each other. God alone
Cannot (but by these Principles) be known.
These generate he did ternally,
Both in, and by himself, a mysterie
Not to be comprehended. Neither tho
Is *God; yet hes the *Root from whence they ow.
*This is out of the Eternal nature, the unsearchable ens increatum, or nothing
abysse: But God is God only in the second Principle or Love.
*From this sight (tho not clearly comprehending it) the Ranters fell into that
erroneous notion that all things proceeding from God, aswell the evil as the
good, and that they servd him in all manner of wickednesse and sins, aswell as
uprightnesse and Love, seing he was the Author of all. Indeed they servd the
rst Principle, and unlesse they repent may therein serve to ternity.
53
This problem over whether God is more the good principle than the evil,
as well as its controller, is a Ranter discussion also, as Pordages defensive
and quite contradictory note to the verse suggests. Clarksons dualistic
poem, narrated in the voice of the higher God, has been cited; Clarkson
also wrote:
To this end, you shall nd in Scripture a two-fold Power, to wit, more powers
than one, yet notwithstanding there is no power but of God, and the Powers that
be, are ordained of God. From hence you may observe that the connexion hereof
runs in the plural, not Power, but Powers; a Power of darknesse, a Power of
light, a Power in the wicked, a Power in the Godly; yet you have held forth in
the same Scripture but one God.
54
Pordage may be hostile, but his own distinction appears to be strategic
more than sustainable; as one of Pordages later notes reads: *The justice,
anger, zeal, or wrath of God is not the same as the dark world, but yet
contrary to Love, and in it is the kingdom of Lucifer; for the wrath of God is
not evil of it self, but it is the Life, being or essence of the dark world, and
without which, there could be no Hell .
55
But it is very hard to work out
what all these categories mean. Is Lucifer, then, to be understood as not of
the dark world? If so, then he is the thundering God, and so consequently
the very being who said You guilty souls where are you? above, who in
Genesis is God himself.
Pordages poem, in conclusion, tells two stories. The rst is the familiar
one of Genesis 23, seen through the long glass of Christian theology. But
it is usurped by the other story of the poem, of a mighty cosmic struggle
between two atavistic opposites, themselves under the ambiguous control
of a higher, occluded being, sometimes resembling the good God,
sometimes resembling only his mysterious self. It is not therefore a
consistent work, but it possesses a certain massive power of its own, as
the conventional moral understanding of the Fall is peeled back to reveal
something quite alien.
To return to Dryden is something of a shock after the cosmic scale of
Pordage. But the contrast is apt: where Pordage expanded, Dryden
contracts. His State of Innocence, and Fall of Man, published in 1677 but
composed in a month in 1674, takes Miltons Paradise Lost as a base text,
and compresses it into forty-ve pages of heroic couplets in its original
quarto, preceded by half that number again of epistles and Nathaniel
Lees dedicatory poem, which would have made Milton tear his hair out.
Portraying Milton as having but rudely cast what you coud well dispose,
Lee placed Dryden in an alternative, Cowleyan tradition of Royalist,
rhyming epic:
On then O mightiest of the inspird men,
Monarch of Verse, new Theames employ thy Pen.
The troubles of Majestick CHARLES set down,
Not David vanquishd more to reach a Crown,
Praise him, as Cowly did that Hebrew King,
Thy Theams as great, do thou as greatly sing.
56
Drydens rewrite was not without Miltons permission, though the way in
which permission was granted was both mordant and melancholy:
Mr Dryden . . . went with MrWaller in Company to make a Visit to Mr Milton
and desire his Leave for putting his Paradise Lost into Rhime for the Stage. Well,
Mr Dryden, says Milton, it seems you have a mind to Tagg my Points, and you
have my Leave to tagg em, but some of em are so Awkward and Old Fashiond
that I think you had as good leave em as you found em.
57
Drydens opera proved very popular in its time, although it never
reached the stage, perhaps because of the difculty of portraying the
subject. There had been ten separate editions by the end of 1703, and
many manuscripts of the work are still extant, typically entitled The Fall of
Angells and Man in Innocence.
58
The opera later attracted theological
criticism from Charles Leslie the Non-Juror, who bracketed Dryden
and Milton together thus:
The gravity and seriousness with which this subject ought to be treated, has not
been regarded in the adventrous ight of Poets, who have dressd Angels in
Armour, and put Swords and Guns into their Hands, to form romantick Battels
in the Plains of Heaven, a scene of licentious fancy; but the Truth has been
greatly hurt thereby, and degraded at last even into a Play, which was designd to
have been acted upon the Stage: And tho once happily prevented, yet it has
passd the Press, and become the entertainment of prophane raillery.
59
I too will argue that Dryden, at least, can be said to be degrading the
gravity of his subject, handling his original in a way that suggests sceptical
intent.
Dryden was explicitly disposed towards supposedly deistic scepticism:
Being naturally inclind to Scepticism in Philosophy, I have no reason to
impose my Opinions, in a Subject which is above it, he writes of his
attitude to theology in the preface to Religio laici (1682). In the same
preface Dryden also pointed up a classic problem with original sin: what
about the virtuous heathen? [I]t seems unaccountable to me, why so
many Generations of the same Offspring, as preceeded our Saviour in the
Flesh, shoud be all invold in one common condemnation, and yet that
their Posterity shoud be Intitled to the hopes of Salvation.
60
Dryden
also had a sceptical attitude to reason, which parallels Grotius annota-
tion on Genesis discussed earlier; his Aureng-Zebe, for instance, declares
that Reasons nice taste does our delights destroy: / Brutes are more
blessd, who grossly feed on joy. In his Discourse Concerning the Originall
and Progress of Satire (1693), Dryden is in passing inadvertently revealing
of how he imagined the creation of man: Mankind, even the most
barbarous, have the seeds of poetry implanted in them . . . which Milton
observing, introduces Adam and Eve every morning adoring God in
hymns and prayers which clearly implies that Adam and Eve are to be
thought of as primitives.
61
He also wondered if the Native Americans
were not descended from Adam, and so untainted by his sin, as the word
guiltless in his poem suggests to the medic and Royal Society man
Walter Charleton. The context concerns Aristotles declining inuence:
Columbus was the rst that shook his Throne;
And found a Temprate in a Torrid Zone:
The fevrish aire fannd by a cooling breez,
The fruitful Vales set round with shady Trees;
And guiltless Men, that dancd away their time,
Fresh as their Groves, and Happy as their Clime.
62
Dryden does not openly adopt any of these pieces of scepticism in The
State of Innocence, but that he was well-disposed to such ideas goes some
way towards explaining how he could wreak such havoc with Miltons
text. This havoc stems from what might seem a counterintuitive decision,
but which was actually very shrewd. Dryden made his Adam too clever,
and it is this decision, rather than any obvious limitation of unfallen
Adams intellect, that ultimately causes all the problems in the intellectual
fabric of his text.
Man, as the fallen angels of the opening act inform us, is a Demy-
God, Of form Divine, yet less in excellence / Than we :
We see what is; to Man Truth must be brought
By Sence, and drawn by a long Chain of thought
By that faint light, to will and understand;
For made less knowing, hes at more command.
63
This conventional stuff, though, does not prepare one for Adam himself,
whose instant intellect bodies itself forth in terse, Cartesian idiom:
What am I? or from whence? For that I am
I know, because I think; but whence I came,
Or how this Frame of mine began to be,
What other Being can disclose to me? (I I .i.14)
He immediately apprehends the existence of God, and from this point on,
his verbal and intellectual energy is unstinting. Raphael promptly arrives
and laconically lets on that some have already fallen: man is to supply
The place of those who, falling, lost the Sky (I I .i.22).
Adam is straight on to the consequent possibility of his own fall : If
such could Fall from bliss . . . / What hopes have I, from Heavn remote
so far, / To keep those Laws, unknowing when I err? (I I .i.278). Raphael
tells him Right Reason will teach him the correct conduct but Adam is
not listening, having already left him behind as a new problem now
occurs to him: where is his mate? Raphael austerely tells him to leave
such matters to God, and Mean time, live happy, in thy self alone; / . . .
Knowledge and Innocence, are perfect Joy (I I .i.43, 46). But Adam is not
going to let Raphael off with this response, complaining that speech is a
useless tool if theres no-one to talk to. So Raphael then claims Thus far,
to try thee (I I .i.62), and condes to Adam that a decidedly inferior mate
and auditor, though one with other talents, is on her way:
An equal, yet thy subject, is designd,
For thy soft hours, and to unbend thy mind.
Thy stronger soul shall her weak reason sway;
And thou, through love, her beauty shall obey:
Thou shalt secure her helpless sex from harms;
And she thy cares shall sweeten, with her charms. (II.ii.649)
Milton too was quite open that Eve was not equal to Adam (PL 4.2969),
but he nevertheless granted his Eve a more obviously exalted role.
Drydens Eve, his Raphael predicts, will prove all too weak a vessel.
The crucial stage in Adams development is his notorious debate on
free will with Raphael and Gabriel in the fourth act. Raphael and Gabriel
pay a visit to Adam, monitored by some back-up angels, and have a
discussion about the nature and freedom of the will. Adam, though,
proves profoundly unimpressed with their reasoning, and they nd they
can only exhort him to obedience, and so abruptly y off. As a result
Adam says he feels worse than he did before their visit, his mind now
quite convinced that he cannot possess free will. There are various ways of
reading this complex scene, of which I will employ two exemplars.
At one extreme, one could argue that Adams determinism is supposed
to look philosophically false. Thus Bruce King has demonstrated that
while Adam produces Hobbesian arguments against free will, the angels
effectively overcome his sceptical determinism using Bishop Bramhalls
objections to Hobbes. King also notes that both positions assume
differing conceptions of original sin.
64
This neglects the obvious dramatic
problem: Drydens Adam is too dextrous in his argumentation to be
labelled the defeated. Actually, quite the opposite happens: the angels
have to retreat, leaving Adam standing his miserable ground.
The other extreme of reading this scene, therefore, is as a hands-down
victory for Adam. This position was developed by K. W. Gransden in his
witty 1976 essay Milton, Dryden, and the comedy of the Fall. Gran-
sdens principle is simple: Dryden was under no inhibitions [as Milton
was], and allowed into the argument all the logical weaknesses and
absurdities inherent in the doctrine of free will.
65
Gransden thus moves
from an observation that Adam wins his argument to a statement about
Drydens intention: Dryden made Adam win, because he is aware of the
comic, even absurd dimension of the Fall. On this model, Dryden was
not justifying the ways of God to men, but rendering them philosophic-
ally incoherent, as is tting for Gods ways.
This is a little extreme. Gransden nds the Fall philosophically dubi-
ous, but he awards his celebration of this comic fact to Dryden, even to
Milton on occasion, and this undervalues the seriousness of the fall of
man in the early-modern period. Rather, Adams debate with the two
angels is simply not coherent : Kings basic feeling that the angels ought to
be right is founded on a historically sound assumption; Gransdens
proposition that the dramatic outcome of the scene nevertheless makes
the angels come off rather badly is simultaneously correct, but we cannot
thus postulate a Dryden cheering on his Adam.
The angels lose their temper with Adam, criticising the fact that he is
arguing, rather than the arguments he uses: Such impious fancies, where
they entrance gain, / Make Heavn, all-pure, thy crimes to preordain
(I V.i.756). But this is a causally absurd couplet: Adam, it is suggested,
enforces his predestination. Adams nal, single line on the matter shows
that he remains unmoved: Better constraind to good, than free to ill
(104). Raphael can only say that reward and punishment would be
meaningless if Adam were right, which rather begs the question; he then
advises obedience, and hastily ies off with Gabriel, and so the teachers
ee the classroom:
Our task is done: obey; and, in that choice,
Thou shalt be blest, and Angels shall rejoyce.
[Raphael and Gabriel y up in the Cloud: the other Angels go off.
(I V.i.11112)
We dont however have to equate intention with effect; Drydens
Gabriel had formerly spoken perhaps the most intelligent line in the
scene: And who but man should judge of mans free state? (69). Gabriel
is suggesting, as most who argue about predestination end up doing, that
there is no way to step outside the illusion of freedom and assess its
veracity or otherwise. Free will and its simulacrum are experientially
inseparable things. For this reason neither Raphael nor Adam wins. This
Adam, though, especially to the non-pious reader, is an intellectually
more stimulating being than Miltons Adam, who is cleard of doubt
by Raphael. Absolutely the reverse happens to Drydens Adam: Hard
state of life! Since Heavn fore-knows my will, / Why am I not tyd up
from doing ill ? (11314).
Dryden must be commenting on Miltons theodicy. His break with the
Miltonic text presumably open in front of him is too pronounced for this
to be anything other than encoded criticism. Drydens Adam has philo-
sophically fallen, but here, in a perverse twist to the Augustinian will-Fall
in occulto, there is no occlusion whatsoever. Adam is anguished by his
intelligence, and tells us this. Two angels fail to convince Adam that he
has free will, something that had hitherto not bothered him much, but the
ne mind he has been given sees problems the angels do not or cannot
solve. The will-Fall, in Dryden, happens because of angelic contact. Such
a move would have been quite impossible for Milton, because it would
too obviously resemble a push, and that is why his Adam has to be
described as cleared of doubt. One is left wondering just what was the
task accomplished by the two problematising angels.
When Dryden comes to Eve, he pushes her in the opposite direction.
Drydens Eve is good evidence that he, like Hutchinson, leaned strongly
on the argument of Eves imperfection. Dryden takes this to misogynistic
lengths, producing an Eve who is fallen by nature, much as Grotius Eva
had complained. She is also created questioning, but, unlike Adam, she
conspicuously fails to deduce a divine power, and her syntactic current
leads her quickly into pride:
Tell me ye Hills and Dales, and thou fair Sun,
Who shinst above, what am I? whence begun?
Like my self, I see nothing . . .
. . . I my self am proud of me. (I I .iii.13, 8)
Her reection, she complains, is: Ah, fair, yet false; ah, Being, formd to
cheat, / By seeming kindness, mixt with deep deceit (I I .iii.267). This is
evidence of an inherent instability in Eve, and the telescoped syntax is not
fair: formd to cheat is too close to God formed me thus, and the latent
purposive status of the clause has its own irony, as cheat is exactly what
Eve will do. Initially unwilling to comply with Adams lordly droit de
seigneur, she decides to have sex with Adam because:
I well fore see, when er thy suit I grant,
That I my much-lovd Soveraignty shall want:
Or like my self some other may be made,
And her new Beauty may thy heart invade. (I I .iii.669)
So, although she fears that sex will diminish her power, she doesnt want a
more servile Eve-replacement to usurp her, and complies in a terrible
phrase: Thou more of pleasure mayst with me partake; / I, more of
pride, because thy bliss I make (I I I .i.2930).
Even this is not quite accurate, as Eve herself patently enjoys sex very
much indeed, as, with Lucifer in contortions of jealousy in the bushes,
wishing he too could blast Eve, she enthusiastically goes on to praise
Adams superb love-making (3946). Lucifer quite correctly divines that
Eve is the weaker she, and made my easier prey (I I I .iii.11), and accord-
ingly he whispers the vision in her ear. (Dryden, for the stage, objecties
this vision into a song between a woman habited like Eve and a tempting
angel.)
66
Eve then relates this dream off-stage to Adam, and Raphael,
descending with Gabriel to deliver their badly-executed lesson on free
will, warns Adam of the impending danger: thus warnd by us, beware; /
And guide her frailty, by thy timely care (I V.i.1516).
Everybody thinks Eve is especially fragile. Adam doesnt want her to
leave him when they are gardening, because thou art weak, but Eve
makes the sharper point: Is our perfection of so frail a make; / As evry
plot can undermine or shake? (I V.i.162, 1678). As in Milton, she uses
Adams earlier statements about unruly nature to forward her proposal to
garden separately, whereas she had initially not noticed the necessity of
garden maintenance: Without our care, behold thunlabourd Ground, /
Bounteous of Fruit (I I I .i.845, I V.i.1258, I I I .i.578).
Adam lets her go, still insisting on his superiority, yet admitting his
uxoriousness: More perfect I, and yet more powrful she (I V.i.198). Eve
overcame him by mere emotional blackmail Know that, evn present, I
am absent still (I V.i.182) appropriating what, in Milton, Adam had said
to Eve. Eve is certainly not stupid: she gets what had been Adams
arguments in the parent epic. Her imperfection, rather, lies in her
pride, but, in the act of telling the story, she becomes the more propul-
sive, persuasive intellect. Adams intelligence anguishes him; Eves
empowers her.
So Eve herself approaches the forbidden tree rather than being led to it
by Lucifer, who appears in angelic form, and consequently most of his
work has already taken place inside Eves mind:
Thus far, at least, with leave; nor can it be
A sin to look on this Celestial tree:
I would not more; to touch a crime may prove:
Touching is a remoter tast in love. (I V.ii.1821)
This Eve is very similar to Grotius Eva: both debate with themselves just
what constitutes the Fall, and locate the answer in the head, not the hand.
When Lucifer does tempt Drydens Eve to eat, she puts up some resist-
ance, based on principles of obedience. Nevertheless she weakens because
Lucifers contrivance that he was the serpent Eve witnessed, and is now
an impressive angel is indeed exactly what Eve has witnessed. The Fall,
cynically, takes place on a rhyme:
[Lucifer:] Hast; you lose time and Godhead by delay. [Plucking the Fruit.
Eve, looking about her. Tis done; Ill venture all and disobey. (I V.ii.1367)
After the Fall, Eves lexis takes a swerve for the decadent; could Miltons
Eve ever say I love the wretch ?
Take me not Heavn, too soon; twill be unkind
To leave the partner of my bed behind.
I love the wretch; but stay, shall I afford
Him part? Already hes too much my Lord. (V.i.58)
Adam is no match for her now: as she tells him triumphantly, We have
been cozend (V.i.39), and Adam, with his eyes wide open, quickly falls,
and all for love:
(Pity so rare a frame so frail was made)
Now cause of thy own ruin; and with thine,
(Ah, who can live without thee?) cause of mine.
. . . Imprudence was your fault, but love is mine. (V.i.4850, 70)
After the Fall, Adam and Eve quarrel. But, following Milton, while
Adam lacerates Eve, she offers to take the blame entirely upon herself:
On me, alone, let Heavns displeasure Fall : / You merit none, and I
deserve it all (I V.iv.1001). Does Eve learn the greater humanity? Not
quite: what she does learn, like Grotius Eva, is how to accuse a bad
workman:
Why seek you death? consider, ere you speak,
The laws were hard; the powr to keep em, weak.
Did we solicite Heavn to mould our clay?
From darkness, to produce us to the day?
. . . Since twas his choice, not ours, which placd us here;
The laws we did not chuse, why should we bear? (V.iv.11821, 245)
Scanning the rest of her lines in the opera, the only sign of repentance
comes, and that qualied, at the vision of heaven, where Eve decides she
can but half repent if things are indeed not so bad in the end (V.vi.235).
(Miltons Adam is dangerously only half abasht at Raphaels warnings
before the Fall (PL 8.595)). Of the human pair, it is Eve, not Adam, who
speaks last.
There is in conclusion something brilliantly out of control about
Drydens State of Innocence. The direct rewriting of a parent text,
Drydens reascriptions of various sentiments, his accelerations and spins,
are all judgements on that parent text and its intellectual structure.
Drydens opera is thus also a highly creative form of literary criticism.
Dryden may be under some generic constraints the characters in drama
have to speak, to give form to thoughts that in other genres can be
reported later, or by different people but such constraints serve merely
to reinforce his sceptical probings. The tighter time-frame of the stage also
encourages a certain bluntness of character, and a sharpness of direction.
Miltons forward-and-backward-looking syntax and his chronological
juxtapositions are replaced by an insistent present, as the balance of
human reason versus the assurance of the spirit is upset in favour of the
former, in all its troubled vigour.
67
Dryden revels in this sped-up environment, adopting rather than
rejecting the standard model that unfallen Adam was intellectually exalted
and his wife the weaker vessel. He then presses these principles until they
break up. Eve immediately vain, Adam arguing the angels out of Eden
this is a chillingly destructive revision, working with rather than against
the axioms it incriminates. We might decide to call this a form of pietistic
scepticism, and no doubt Dryden would thank us for it. He was, we could
say, merely pointing out that it is not for us to be able to explain the Fall,
and so there is nothing wrong with pointing out its absurdities when
considered from the viewpoint of reason. Perhaps, however, there is also
a darker purpose to Drydens revision of 1674. He was taking revenge in
the most sophisticated way open to him on a literary phenomenon he
envied but could do very little about, especially as that phenomenon, John
Milton, had just died.
part ii
Milton
chapter 7
Towards Paradise Lost
Miltons early schooling and exposure to the Church were rigorous.
Richard Stock, the minister of the local church All Hallows, catechised
at certaine times in the weeke dayes all the parish boys one day, and the
girls another. A zealous reformer, Stock preached twice every Sunday, and
liked citing Church fathers, particularly Augustine, to whom he refers
rather obsessively in his printed work.
1
The chapter Of the hatred of
God in his posthumous Stock of Divine Knowledge bad pun afrms a
strongly Calvinist emphasis upon restricted Atonement: God denies the
grace of election to most: there are but a few that have favour.
2
Miltons
private tutor Thomas Young taught him the classics and perhaps some
patristics; at St Pauls, John Colets statutes emphasised Christian learn-
ing, encouraging the study of such authors as Lactantius and Prudentius,
though how far such statutes were implemented is uncertain.
3
St Pauls, though, was under the headship of Alexander Gil, who
espoused a rationalistic Christianity, opening his Sacred Philosophie of
the Holy Scripture with an appeal to reason, The principall virtue of mans
soule. Gil did subordinate reason to faith, but not dichotomously so,
rather seeing faith under constant interrogation by reason:
[F]aith, opinion, and supposition, are of larger compasse, one than another, and
all of greater circuit than reason. Yet because imagination that lovely Dalilah is
ever serviceable to reason her Samson, though never faithfull ; and because there is
nothing in any of these three, which the imagination dares not be busie with;
therefore by the help of imagination, reason inquires into the workes of all these,
using thereto saying and gain-saying, likelyhood and unlikelyhood, and arguing
on every side, till it come to a conclusion, in which it will rest, at least for a time.
4
Gil also included in his Sacred Philosophie a number of chapters on the
creation and Fall of man, in which he expounded the orthodox position,
though with an emphasis on mans continuing, creative rationality.
5
Unlike Miltons subsequent treatment, Gil insisted that the Fall must
125
have taken place on the same day as creation. Adam was created in the
morning, slept at noon, awoke and married his Eve in the afternoon, and
fell at 3 p.m. This, in particular, was to avoid the problem of prelapsarian
conception. As Gil dryly remarked: Now, if Adam were created such as
hee was, aske any lusty young man how many nights hee would allow to
his beloved and most beautifull Bride in her virginity, and give so many to
Adam before he sinned.
6
At Pauls, Miltons youthful verse already
registers some interest in the symbols of the Fall. The fable Apologus
de rustico et hero, probably dating from Miltons sixteenth year, tells of
an apple tree bearing the sweetest apples, which the herus or landlord
attempts to transplant, but instead kills the tree of the rusticus or peasant.
Despite its practical rather than theological thrust, one cannot help seeing
career prolepsis in the closing lines: Possem Ego avaritiam froenare,
gulamque voracem: / Nunc periere mihi & foetus & ipsa parens : If
only I could have kept my avarice and my ruinous gluttony under
control : Now I have lost both the fruit and the tree.
7
The use of foetus
and parens in the nal line widens the application beyond simply apples
and trees and, in harness with the use of ex malo, from the apple tree, and
sapidissima poma, the tastiest fruits, earlier in the poem, carries theo-
logical overtones: as a result of the misuse of a different fruit tree, all
(human) foetus are indeed spoiled as a result of their rst parentes.
The closing idea of the Apologus persisted in Miltons mind: in his
twenties, when writing his Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester
(1631), he translated into English the sentiment of the earlier poem,
reversing the polarity of the metaphor, as the human now becomes a
piece of fruit:
But whether by mischance or blame
Atropos for Lucina came;
And with remorsles cruelty,
Spoild at once both fruit and tree . . .
8
Milton was not always gloomy about the Fall. The university poem
Naturam non pati senium (c. 1627) argues that the world is not decaying
at all ; it was established once and for all, and continues in that order until
the nal conagration:
Sic denique in aevum
Ibit cunctarum series iustissima rerum,
Donec amma orbem populabitur ultima, late
Circumplexa polos, et vasta culmina caeli ;
Ingentique rogo agrabit machina mundi.
9
[In fact, then, the process of the Universe will go on for ever, worked out with
scrupulous justice, until the last ames destroy the globe, enveloping the poles
and the summits of vast heaven, and the frame of the world blazes on one huge
funeral pyre.]
This argument, as Careys headnote to the poem suggests, can be con-
strued as taking sides in the GoodmanHakewill debate discussed in the
opening pages of this book. But if this is so, then Milton is taking
Hakewills side against Goodman, and therefore implicitly accepting that
the Fall had no cosmic ramications. It is not an opinion Milton main-
tained: in Paradise Lost, the whole cosmos is altered as part of the
punishment for sin.
One need not wait until 1667 for Milton to show signs that his
predominant poetic reactions assumed and debated the consequences of
some primordial lapse. The most nuanced example of the young Milton
thinking about the Fall is provided by At a solemn musick, or more
precisely by the various redraftings it underwent. At a solemn musick,
written after Arcades in perhaps 1633, survives in the Trinity manuscript
in a number of drafts: two heavily corrected versions, a separate rewrite of
lines 1728, and a nal fair copy. Lines 1724 in the printed version of
1645 read:
That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportiond sin
Jarrd against natures chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayd
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In rst obedience, and their state of good.
10
The nal section of the poem, in other words, Christianises the formerly
Judaic movement : now a Fall has to be taken into account. But this draft
caused Milton many problems, as his rewrites of the closing section
demonstrate. After line 18, the rst draft continued:
By leaving out those harsh chromatic jars
Of sin that all our music mars
And in our lives and in our song
The second draft changed chromatic to ill-sounding, and added the
adjective clamorous to sin. The separate draft of lines 1728 phrased
line 19 as As once we could, till disproportioned sin, writing the word
did above could. Unsure of which word to go for, Milton once again
Towards Paradise Lost 127
started with could in the nal draft, but this time, did is added in, and
could crossed out.
There is, however, an obvious direction to these emendations. Miltons
rst version did not immediately hark back to the Fall, initially following
the That we on Earth couplet with an ablative of what we can still do
now about sin: By leaving [it] out. Oddly, the second draft got rid of the
colourful word chromatic, just perhaps because it was too colourful :
chromaticism, in music the sharpening or attening to create notes that
do not belong to the diatonic scale, is usually seen as an enrichment, not
necessarily something undesirable. Ill-sounding, a dull replacement, at
least avoids that problem. The partial redraft and then the nal draft take
notice of the Fall, shifting the focus of the poem rmly into the past, but
now debating the question of agency: is our obedience something we
once could or merely did do? [C]ould is slightly ambiguous if
we once could, can we again? Or is the emphasis on once a reminder
that this is no longer possible? In any case the nal draft shuts down the
argument, stating merely that we did behave in such a way. The poem
ends on a hope that we may in the (near) future regain such a paradise: O
may we soon again renew that Song, though this hope is phrased as just
that a hope, not something to which we can lay claim without the aid of
God.
The redraftings record a steadily darkening sense of the effects of the
Fall. What in the rst draft was our present choice is replaced by the last
with Adams irrevocably preterite act. In this, Milton returned to the
sentiment of Josuah Sylvester, who, as John Carey notes in his edition,
wrote But Adam, being chief of all the strings, / Of this large Lute, ore-
retched, quickly brings / All out of tune. So while the conclusion of the
printed version expresses hope, and thus the poem may seem to end on an
optimistic note, the compositional genetics demonstrate that Milton
stepped up the emphasis on the initial Fall of man, in order more
thoroughly to Christianise his poem. Indeed, he even implies that this
initial fall from harmony was participated in by all creatures that it was
not just Adam and Eve who were to stand in rst obedience, but the
entire created realm.
Lycidas (1637) is a crucial poem in Miltons development of techniques
for suggesting the problem of writing in a lapsarian world. Although
Lycidas is nominally about a very real, very dead Anglo-Irishman, its
singer-swain is portrayed as an occupant of a mysterious, unlocated
environment. The poem even announces itself at the end to have been a
quite different thing from the event it witnessed. After we have read a text
of some 193 lines, we discover to our surprise that the original act the
poem sought to describe was a song (not a text) sung to Okes and rills
(not to real people like us) all day (rather than for ve minutes) by an
uncouth Swain. Uncouth, moreover, carries overtones of weirdness and
secrecy, a lexical history extending back into Middle and Old English, and
still active in Miltons many uses of the word.
11
The etymologist Stephen
Skinner glossed it as meaning deformed, frightful.
12
The entire speech,
we belatedly realise, ought strictly to have been enclosed in inverted
commas. Even the medium is difcult to ascertain: if the tender stops
of various Quills touched by the singer imply a wind instrument, then
how can the swain sing or speak with a pipe in his mouth? Quills also
hints at writing itself, and the warbling a word describing an action
somewhere between tuneless speech and wordless song is done with
eager thought, rather than, say, voice.
Looking back over Lycidas from the vantage of the nal octave, we
notice clues that the given text of the song is secondary, even slightly
uncertain. The metaphors are exaggeratedly mixed: But now my Oate
proceeds, / And listens to the Herald of the Sea. [M]outhes are Blind ;
completing a surreal chiasmus, enameld eyes therefore suck.
13
This is a
kind of accelerated pastoral diction, operating on a slightly different logic
from normal language.
14
Lycidas in this way can look like at least two rather different poems
depending on the end from which it is observed. The headnote in the 1645
Poems at once anchors the poem into a political reality and retrospectively
claims prophetic foresight for John Milton, the Author of the following
text: In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately
drownd in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by
occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height.
But from the other end of Lycidas, it is a more impersonal poem, a jostle
of different voices, all nally emanating from a lone, unknown swain, as
he pipes, ngers, sings, writes or simply thinks. Lycidas may be a political
poem, but it is simultaneously another poem about lack of access, and
about the articiality of pastoral. This is an old idea to be sure, but one
rendered especially urgent when a Christian view of history is superim-
posed upon pagan pastoralism when simple rusticity is not just desirable
but also unattainable.
Around 1640 Milton noted down in what is now the Trinity College
manuscript various ideas for possible tragedies, divided into three lists:
biblical, British and Scottish.
15
The longest of these lists is the rst,
ranging from the Fall to Christus patiens two subjects that had earlier
been treated in dramatic form by Hugo Grotius, whom Milton met in
Paris in about May 1638 at the outset of his European travels.
The biblical list comprises sixty-seven subjects, starting with two un-
titled and cancelled lists of characters, including Adam with the serpent
and Eve, so these two drafts clearly took the Fall as their subject. The
third entry, actually titled Paradise Lost, is a brief set of notes on a ve-
act play about the Fall. After that, the list departs from the story, starting
with Adam in Banishment. Milton wrote ex before in, and then
deleted it, and this may indicate that Milton started to write the Latin
equivalent of Adam in Banishment : Adamus exul, the title of Grotius
drama. Entries ve forwards scroll through sacred history from the ood
to various New Testament themes. One of the late titles is Christ bound,
which is next to Christ Crucid, and may therefore have represented
Christ on the cross, using the model of Prometheus Bound. This, though
only conjectural, bears comparison with the French historian Jacques-
Auguste de Thou, whose Parabata vinctus, sive triumphus Christi, tragdia
(Paris, 1595) used Prometheus Bound as a model for his poem on the Fall,
ex Aeschylo novata vel parodia.
16
The antepenultimate entry is titled
Adam unparadizd, and comprises a longish prose extrapo-
lation, concluding with the instruction compare this with the former
draught. Milton, therefore, dealt directly with the Fall a minimum of
four times in the drafts for biblical dramas, and at greater length than any
of his other possible subjects. By the Adam unparadizd draft, chrono-
logically out of sequence as it is, he had clearly started to realise which
project to back.
The four early accounts repay greater scrutiny. The rst, a list of
characters, includes Adam and Eve with the serpent, an indication that
not only was this projected tragedy to be about the Fall, but that it would
also depict the actual temptation and transgression, as Grotius had done.
By the second list a certain distancing is already in operation: now, rather
than starting the list with Michael, presumably introducing the tragedy as
Prologue, Milton crosses Michael out and replaces him with Moses.
Milton thus exchanges a direct depiction of the biblical action, starting
with an angel, with the indirection of introducing the original writer of
that action. Moses, despite his status as divinely inspired, is nonetheless a
human, who wrote long after these events were believed to have taken
place, and his presence reminds us that in a fallen world even biblical text
is mediated.
This hint of indirection or of the difculty of gaining unmediated
access to such fundamental biblical happenings is amplied in the
Paradise Lost draft, the rst explicitly to divide the material into acts.
The rst act opens, as the prior draft had decided, with Moses:
Moses [prologises] recounting how he assumd his true bodie, that it
corrupts not because of his [being] with god in the mount declares the like
of Enoch and Eliah, besides the purity of y
e
pl[ace] that certaine pure winds,
dues, and clouds praeserve it from corruption whence [ex]horts to the sight of
god, tells they cannot se Adam in the state of innocence by reason of thire sin.
(CPW, 8. 554)
It is difcult to resolve the syntax in places, but the crucial sentiment is the
closing one. It is possible that the they who cannot se Adam in the state
of innocence are the imputed audience, the ones being [ex]hort[ed].
Moses is therefore starting the play by telling the audience that any
prelapsarian acts as are reported to them are only that reports, not the
actions themselves. More radically, the they, on the principle of syntactic
thrift, may simply be Moses, Enoch and Eliah (Elijah) themselves, in
which case the lack of access is more fundamental : Moses himself cannot
quite see into Eden.
The Paradise Lost drafts most interesting trait, though, is an
omission. The proposed central act comprises Lucifer contriving
Adams ruine ; then, the Chorus feares for Adam and relates Lucifers
rebellion and fall. The next act immediately follows with Adam Eve
fallen : the Fall itself is not represented. Unlike Grotius Adamus exul
Milton chooses not to depict the process of temptation and lapse, so the
difcult problem of how Satan managed to convince Eve, and Eve Adam,
is avoided.
This motif is continued into the Adam unparadizd draft, where
Lucifers rebellion is also located before the action of the drama: when
Lucifer nally appears it is after his overthrow. Slightly later the second,
mundane Fall is again omitted: heer again may appear Lucifer relating,
& insulting in what he had don to the destruction of man. Man next &
Eve having by this time bin seduct by the serpent appears confusedly
coverd with leaves (CPW, 860). It could be argued that Milton was
thinking in terms of what could and could not be portrayed on a real
stage. But given Miltons (on balance) antipathy to the stage, and the
unactability of other subjects in the lists of possible tragedies the ood,
Christ crucied, and so forth Miltons emphasis on man visible only
when fallen is theologically driven. The clinching evidence is that this is
what Moses says it is in the Paradise Lost draft Adam is unseen not
because he is naked, but because we are sinful.
So up to the point when the Long Parliament was called and, returning
from his travels, Milton devoted his attention to polemical prose, his
thoughts on the Fall show a few denite trends. First, he regarded the Fall
as a principle of disharmony in all its various senses: we now sound
against natures chime. It is of great importance that we be seen in this
sense as existing against nature, because Milton will later appeal in his
divorce and political writings to nature as the standard that denes our
rights, rather than as a principle from which we have become disunied.
As John Carey brutally comments:
From the time of the divorce tracts on, nature plays an increasing part in his
arguments. It is against nature to make incompatible people cohabit: so if the
Bible does not say they may separate, it must be forced to. He appeals against all
law to the blameles nature of man, the guiltless instinct of nature. If another
writer used these phrases we might suppose that he had a high opinion of human
nature in general. With Milton, we know the contrary is true. In the same
pamphlet [Doctrine and Discipline], for instance, he can be found gloomily
seconding Genesis viii, 21 on the inevitable wickedness of the human heart, and
rhapsodising about the faultless proprieties of nature which no law, biblical or
otherwise, can be permitted to impair. Nature, for Milton, is a purely personal
convenience: a respectable front for what his own instincts demand.
17
The disharmony between man fallen and the unfallen world also prevents
us from talking about that initial harmony with absolute accuracy. This
problem of representation Milton explores in Lycidas without explicit
reference to the Fall itself, but the drafts for a possible drama on the Fall
of man show that he associated this problem with the matter in Eden,
even going as far as having Moses himself remind us of the problem, and
then missing out the calamitous event itself.
Miltons polemical prose next concerns us, although we must be
sensible that Miltons polemical agenda controlled everything he wrote
in this period, and that talk about the progression or development of
Miltons ideas cannot operate in isolation from these agenda.
18
Nonethe-
less, Miltons passing comments in his rst string of pamphlets, the anti-
prelatical tracts, conform to the patterns developed in his previous poetry
and projects. But a new element also appears: a political emphasis on
mans freedom, rooted in Adam. The second sentence of Of Prelatical
Episcopacy (1641) celebrates that we have the same humane priviledge,
that all men have ever had since Adam, being born free, to retaine this
Episcopacy, or to remove it.
19
In The Reason of Church Government (1642)
he also distinguishes between what is thought about the angelic and what
is known about the human Fall : For Lucifer before Adam was the rst
prelat Angel, and both he, as is commonly thought, and our forefather
Adam, as we all know, for aspiring above their orders, were miserably
degraded.
20
Original sin is also universal : the Modest Confuter is re-
buked in An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642) for behaving as if he only
were exempted out of the corrupt masse of Adam, borne without sinne
originall. Milton hangs onto the joke: the Confuter ascribes to himself,
that temper of his affections, which cannot any where be but in Paradise.
Would the Confuter be so erroneous as to be an Arminian and deny
originall sinne ?
21
Likewise, Of Reformation (1641), Miltons rst pamph-
let, had mentioned the originall Spot ; and his fourth, The Reason of
Church-Government (1641), the grosse distorted apprehension of decayd
mankinde.
22
At this stage, then, Milton has nothing unexpected to say
about the Fall, and his polemical slur that Arminians were sure to deny
original sin they did not shows well where his tastes then lay.
23
Miltons thought on the Fall becomes original only in 16434. This was
when he untied his pen from Smectymnuus and turned to the issues of
divorce, education and pre-publication censorship domestic or personal
liberty in his own retrospective classication in distinction from the
ecclesiastical liberty that he had treated in his work against the bishops.
24
Smec, indeed, were no longer friendly to Milton after the scandal
surrounding the publication of The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, and
they were to drift still further apart. Edmund Calamy, the ec of Smec-
tymnuus, was one of the signatories to a 1647 pamphlet that attacked
Milton as a heretic divorcer, and both he and William Spurstowe, the
uus of Smectymnuus, signed a petition in 1649 against the regicide,
exactly the kind of Presbyterian back-sliding Milton lambasted the same
year in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Back in 1644, when Milton
wrote in Areopagitica of the reforming of Reformation it self, he was
possibly quoting from Calamys famous 1641 fast sermon before the
Commons, Englands Looking-Glasse, which had likewise encouraged Par-
liament to reform the Reformation it self. But in 1644 Calamy had just
become a licenser of the press, exactly the ofce Milton was decrying in
Areopagitica, and so it is plausible that his quotation was also a dig.
25
It was The Doctrine & Discipline (1643, 2nd edn 1644), of course,
Miltons rst unmistakable deviation from the prevailing orthodoxies
of Calvinist Presbyterianism, which obliged Milton to engage directly
with biblical exegesis concerning the nature of man and woman in their
rst state, and what relation they had to contemporary man and
woman.
26
It also contains his rst argued attempt at theodicy, the chapter
added into the second edition on predestination.
27
Again, though, Milton had an end in sight he was going to defend
divorce, and that required him to back certain readings of biblical texts
that on their own can seem forced. For instance, Miltons interpretation
of Paul on burning as not lust but a rational burning, something Adam
felt too, appears solely context-driven, and not something we should
regard as a belief prior to and separable from the requirements of Miltons
divorce-driven exegesis. But, on the other hand, we cannot regard these
things as matters of purely personal convenience, as Carey claimed of
nature in Milton. Milton also desperately wanted the approbation of the
Assembly of Divines, and the distaste for sexuality he evinces is in part
driven by this need. The Adultery Act of 1650 did after all recommend
the death penalty for fornication.
28
Even so, Milton warmed to the
products of situational necessity. Paradise Lost has Adam behaving like
the burning Adam of The Doctrine and Discipline, feeling himself to be
incomplete without a partner and asking for her. If this idea was rst
developed as personal convenience, it became integrated into Miltons
larger understanding of creation and sexuality, and not merely a device of
persuasion.
The Doctrine and Discipline turns on one central doctrinal imperative:
that the Mosaic allowance of divorce cannot have been abrogated by
Christs words to the Pharisees in the gospel of Matthew, where he
seemingly forbids divorce on the grounds that Adam and Eve in marriage
became, as Genesis says, one esh.
29
On the one hand, Milton has a
powerful precedent in Christs promise that he would not destroy one jot
or one tittle of the Law (Matthew 5:18), and so there is a prima facie case
for upholding divorce. On the other hand, Christ emphatically argues
against divorce to the Pharisees in all three synoptic gospels. Miltons
recourse to the argument that Christ was in effect being ironic, mocking
the Pharisees, allows him to uphold Moses on divorce actually, to widen
the scope but leaves him with the issue of Adam and Eves one esh to
tidy up.
So Milton decides that one esh denoted not sex but, overridingly,
mental compatibility. This is at once the standard for future marriage,
and a state of perfection we cannot attain in this fallen world. In this way,
the Edenic couple has a double function in The Doctrine and Discipline.
The ideal of marriage Adam and Eve represent carries forward beyond the
Fall and operates now. But the realisation of that perfection is at best
uncertain, and divorce caters for those occasions in which human weak-
ness, whether through over-hasty union or genuine mistake, has led to a
disastrous marriage.
The Doctrine and Discipline therefore has one foot in and one foot out
of Eden. One of its movements is to emphasise Eden obscured from view
by original sin. Compared with this imperfect state, before the Fall . . .
man and woman were both perfect. Milton also criticises those who
fondly . . . think within our strength all that lost Paradise relates. Eden
is in this movement a vanishing-point Milton inveighs against those
who would y back to the primitive institution, and would have us re-
enter Paradise against the sword that guards it. Again, the reason for one
of Moses omissions in his Law has vanisht with Paradise. When Christ
rebukes the Pharisees with talk of one esh, then, he is countering one
extreme with another, but he cannot be abrogating the Mosaic allowance,
as that would presuppose that man can return to the condition in which
he lived before the Fall, an obvious impossibility.
30
To this extent, the Fall is a watershed. Milton also clothes the pamph-
let, especially in the second editions address to the Parliament and the
Assembly of Divines, with afrmations of current fallenness: the originall
blindnesse we are born in ; all the misery that hath bin since Adam. But
the other movement afrms the Edenic standard of marriage as still
operating, and to that degree there is contact with Eden, and man is
perhaps not quite so blind after all. In the opening paragraph of his
address, after having just mentioned originall blindnesse, Milton none-
theless signicantly revises this sentiment, decrying Custom for depress-
ing the high and Heaven-born spirit of Man, farre beneath the condition
wherein either God created him, or sin hath sunke him. Later, Milton
appeals to the freedom and eminence of mans creation.
31
Sin, therefore,
has not utterly depraved man. Compare what the Assembly itself decreed:
From this originall corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, dis-
abled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do
proceed all actual transgressions.
32
So paradise moves a little closer, though not now in perfection, as at
rst, yet still in proportion as things now are.
33
The corollary to this
assertion that the nature and dignity of marriage connects us to a prelap-
sarian though not indissoluble institution is that the rst marriage
itself is dynamised in a way that makes Adam and Eve energetic, sympa-
thetic gures. This turns on Miltons interpretation of Pauls notorious
injunction if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry
than to burn (1 Corinthians 7:9). Throughout his pamphlet, Milton had
sued for moral credibility, by insisting upon an absolute dualism between
marriage and lust. The one has nothing to do with the other. Marriage is
of like minds, not of unlike bodies. This allows Milton to idealise
marriage to such an extent that the dissolution of mentally unsatisfactory
unions becomes a moral duty. But what can he do about Paul, who
treated marriage virtually as legalised prostitution?
In a moment of pure ideological imperative Milton decides that Pauls
burning must apply to intellectual longing. So when God said that it was
not good that Adam be alone, he was effectively saying that prelapsarian
Adam burned for company. This is a far cry from the even-tempered
Adam of An Apology:
What is it then but that desire which God put into Adam in Paradise before he
knew the sin of incontinence; that desire which God saw that it was not good
that man should be left alone to burn in; the desire and longing to put off an
unkindly solitarines by uniting another body, but not without a t soule to his in
the cheerfull society of wedlock. Which if it were so needfull before the fall,
when man was much more perfect in himself, how much more is it needful
now . . . ?
34
This spawns a number of curious juxtapositions: burning . . . deeply
rooted even in the faultles innocence of nature ; that rational burning ;
an intelligible ame, not in Paradise to be resisted. Reversing the usual
coupling of original and sin, Milton instead talks of the originall and
sinles Penury or Lonelines in which Adam rst walked.
35
Never did
Milton sort less with the slightly later sentiment of one of his friend
Andrew Marvells nutty narrators: Two paradises twere in one / To live
in paradise alone.
36
Miltons burning Adam is a strange sight. It disturbed Miltons an-
onymous Answerer: We pray you seriously to retract this sentence, and
openly to confesse you were asleepe when you writ it. Milton, the
Answerer continues, makes Paul sound like an idiot if, employing an
unnecessary Adamic digression, all Paul is saying is be sure to talk to your
intended :
I Paul am a Batchelour, and I never met with any t and meet conversing soule,
to t my desire, to discourse and converse with me as I had when I was in Adam;
but I speake to you Virgins and Widowes, although it be thus with me, yet it
were good if you could remaine solitary without any t conversing soule to
discourse with you: but if you cannot live altogether alone all the dayes of your
life (however I shift for my self ) yet doe you marrie, viz. get some t conversing
soules, such an one as Adam thought of when he was alone in the Garden, and
no bodie created but he. For it is better for you seeing you cannot live alwaies
alone, to have some such t conversing soule, to drive away the time with, then
to pine away like a Dove in a Wildernesse, where there is none to beare her
company. This is the effect of your exposition of Paul, when he saith, it is better
to marry then to burn: the relating of which your exposition is enough to confute
it and make it lighter then vanitie it self.
37
But Miltons exegesis at once harmonises with his larger objective and
establishes a vision of sociability that was to become a core part of his
depiction of the prelapsarian life in the later epic. So for Milton in The
Doctrine and Discipline there are two natures. There is our originall
blindnesse, but there is also the faultles innocence of nature, a standard
to which we can appeal and under which, to an extent, we still operate. It
is this standard that licenses, not withholds, divorce.
The weakness of Miltons argument lies not in the fact of this ambigu-
ity but in the way Milton sorts it out. Pure nature is nature without sex;
fallen nature is concupiscence. As the De doctrina put it, Since the fall of
Adam, the relief of sexual desire has become a kind of secondary end [to
marriage], which means that it was not an end at all in the beginning.
38
The sanctication of marriage comes at the price of demonising sex,
particularly sex within a loveless marriage, depicted with harrowing, stony
intensity: to grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation.
39
Again, the Answerer lighted on this weakness: the corrupt heart of man,
he countered, simply requires controlling; some sort and measure of
troubles and discontent in mariage are inavoidable. Divorce was too
alarmist a solution, and the abuses to which it lay open and the social
disgrace the rejected partner would surely suffer rendered it inoperable
and antisocial. Milton, he laughed, might only accept a wife who can
speak Hebrew, Greek, Latine, & French, and dispute against the Canon
law as well as you, but normal people, he countered, know that marriage
is neither solely intellectual or solely sexual, but a bit of both.
40
By
Paradise Lost Milton had come to agree; if the Doctrine and Discipline
prepares for the epic in its conception of creation as completed by
woman, the epics estimation of what man wants to do with that woman,
and she with him, nds no precedent in the earlier work.
The Doctrine and Discipline was phenomenally unpopular, and Milton
was naive to think that the posture of moral austerity would win him a
fair hearing from the Assembly (although he was at least praised by the
Answerer for his ne language).
41
William Riley Parker called it the
greatest mistake Milton ever made.
42
Nevertheless his conception of
Genesis and paradisal marriage was more a development of a familiar
position than itself something radically new. Milton worked from
the rejection of the total depravity of man, and therefore forged a link
back to Eden. But he did not deny the calamitous consequences of the
Fall indeed, part of his argument required them, in order to promote
the ideal of marriage to such a height that divorce was required to
maintain its purity.
When Milton turned his thoughts to education, owing to his contact at
this time with Samuel Hartlib and his circle, he construed its purpose as
to repair the ruins of our rst parents by regaining to know God aright.
43
Although claims of the epistemological advantages educational reform
would bring were common all veiles may be plucked off from things
44
Miltons phrase is striking in its afrmation both of prelapsarian
grandeur and our ability to imitate it. In 1644, too, Milton published
his attack on pre-publication censorship, Areopagitica. Based on a fresh
notion of human potential yoked to human responsibility, Milton nds
himself bound to develop a theory of virtue that promotes contact with
evil :
Good and evill we know in the eld of this World grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involvd and interwoven with the
knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discernd,
that those confused seeds which were imposd on Psyche as an incessant labour to
cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out of the rinde
of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving
together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam
fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As
therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what
continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill ? He that can apprehend
and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and
yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring
Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloisterd vertue, unexercisd &
unbreathd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the
race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much
rather: that which puries us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That
vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and
knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a
blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse is but an excrementall whitenesse.
45
Miltons argument is a version of the felix culpa, because felicity and
culpability are both accepted as components of the Fall. But Miltons
argumentation is more bold than the mean of the felix culpa, in which
felicity and culpability stand in equilibrium. Here, Adam fell not into a
sorry state in which Christ O felix culpa quae talem ac tantum meruit
habere Redemptorem
46
blazes on the horizon, but fell from a state which
is gured as pre-ethical. Adam fell, but he fell into a state of ethical
cognition. Milton then adjusts that is to say, of knowing good by evill
but it is a slightly self-conscious revision of an initial metaphor in which
the twins of good and evil leap suddenly forth, neither of them hitherto
present, as if out of the apple itself.
This eeting location of ethical cognition after the Fall raises implicit
questions about the precise nature of the good before it, if Milton is so
celebratory of good-with-evil. It is a sentiment that dates back to one of
the opening entries in the commonplace book:
Why does God permit evil ? So that reasoning and virtue might be able to
correspond [ut ratio virtuti constare possit].
47
For the good is made known, is
made clear, and is exercised by evil. As Lactantius says, Book 5. c[hapter] 7, that
reason and intelligence may have the opportunity to exercise themselves by
choosing the things that are good, by eeing from the things that are evil. Lactan
de ira dei. c[hapter] 13. however much these things fail to satisfy [quamvis et haec
non satisfaciunt.].
48
The point of interest is that the nal words are Miltons own; a literal
translation might be however much/although these things do not give
security/sufciently demonstrate. This has been taken to mean some-
thing like this is ne as far as it goes.
49
But the force is less positive: the
sentiment is that this is insufcient, or at least incomplete.
50
Either way,
the commonplace book entry testies that in private Milton was not
nearly as blithe as his public prose suggests about the implications for
theodicy of conative virtue, the theory that virtue is only so because it
strives against obstacles.
That the consequences for the state of innocence of this muscular
postlapsarianism are thus ambiguous is heightened by two adjectives in
the above account, when virtue proper is contracted to its fugitive and
cloisterd simulacrum. The problem arises because Milton has previously
located the origin of the virtue he endorses as following the taking of the
apple, and the virtue he cannot praise therefore momentarily resembles
Edenic virtue, by implication cloistered and fugitive. And both adjectives
indeed hit home. Last chapter, we encountered the advice that Eves
confrontation with the serpent was tittle tattle too long and too much.
51
She should, in other words, have ed. Again, this was the most authentic
reaction to heresy in the eyes of the earliest heresiographers. Cloisterd,
too, with its popish ring, derives from Latin claustrum, usually in the
plural claustra, meaning gate or lock, and by extension, a conned place;
the substantive from the cognate verb claudo is clausum, an enclosure,
precisely what paradise is. Miltons Areopagitica is not a work of formal
theology, but this is what makes it an important document: it reveals
tensions in Miltons new understanding of the possibility and origin of
virtue that would not be allowed to speak out in a dogmatic context. In
the Tetrachordon of the same year, he had criticised the Socinians for
making Adam an idiot, or, in Robert Souths terms, a rude unwritten
Blanck.
52
But the model of virtue in Areopagitica could be accused of
insinuating similar conclusions: does not Milton state above that That
vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill . . .
is but a blank vertue ?
Milton does not let this problem remain unrevised in Areopagitica, the
rst pamphlet to register a change in his attitude towards Arminianism.
Whereas earlier he had simply bracketed Arminians with those who deny
original sin, he now allows Arminius himself, though not openly en-
dorsed, the epithets acute and distinct. He later extends the idea of moral
struggle back to before the taking of the apple, something implicitly at
odds with his earlier rhetoric of out of the rinde of one apple tasted :
[M]any there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to
transgresse, foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to
choose, for reason is but choosing; he had bin else a meer articiall Adam, such
an Adam as he is in the motions. We our selves esteem not of that obedience, or
love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a
provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the
right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence.
53
Though there is nothing immediately controversial about this sentiment,
it oscillates between pre- and postlapsarian description without any dis-
tinction between the two. Adam had before him a provoking object just
as we have passions within and pleasures around us, all for the purpose
of instructive temptation. If by this point in Areopagitica Eden-as-cloister
has been left behind, the new Eden is one that appears not to contain
beings particularly different from ourselves. Adam is not a calm philoso-
pher but a warfaring Christian, itching in front of a forbidden object and
a mysterious thou shalt not.
Milton left prose and the Fall alone for some years in the aftermath of
his attempts to secure domestic and civil liberty. But his vision of political
liberty, which he had rooted in Adamic origin and the dominion awarded
to Adam over all creatures, continued. In Tetrachordon, he had written
how prime Nature made us all equall, made us equall coheirs by common
right and dominion over all creatures.
54
This argument, deployed to
combat the patriarchalism of Filmer, which ratied subjection under a
monarch from the example of Adam, necessarily assumes an analogy
between Adams political rights and those of his progeny.
Filmer, though, denied that the Fall was an important moment of
discontinuity in political organisation, ratifying his current hierarchies by
recourse to prelapsarian power-structures. Milton too fetched his notion
of freedom from before the Fall, but he also allowed the Fall and its effects
a role. Both the analogy of man as free-in-Adam, and the recognition of
transgression, sound together in the trenchant anti-Filmerian sentiments
of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649):
No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were
born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by
privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey: and that
they livd so. Till from the root of Adams transgression, falling among themselves
to doe wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to
the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other
from mutual injury, and joyntly to defend themselves against any that gave
disturbance or opposition to such agreement.
55
In this way, political identity is, like marital identity in The Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce, half in and half out of Eden. It is our creation right
to be free and to command, but the root of Adams transgression forced
the initial community to agree on certain freedoms from as well as their
natural freedoms to, and thus arose joynt government.
As a digression before turning to the De doctrina, it is interesting to
note some correspondence Milton had in 1656. Henry Oldenburg, future
secretary of the Royal Society, tried to tempt Milton into discussion of
none other than La Peyre`re and his Prae-Adamitae.
56
As Oldenburg wrote
to Milton in mid 1656,
I believe that you have already read the reply that Maresius has made to the
defender of the pre-Adamites, to whom a certain Martini, a fellow-countryman
sent to Rome as agent of the Chinese mission, will shortly undertake a rejoinder.
For this man reports, in a preface to a book which he has published about the
Tartar war, that he has brought back with him very old books of Chinese history
and calendars leading with extraordinary accuracy from the very ood of Noah;
and thence he promises to reconcile Chinese chronology with that which our
sacred writings record, than which nothing could better protect the antiquity of
the Mosaic and Adamite epoch.
57
The books Oldenburg refers to other than La Peyre`re are Samuel
Desmarets Refutatio fabulae praeadamiticae (Groningen, 1656), Martino
Martinis De bello Tartarico in Sinis (Rome, 1654), and his yet-to-be-
written Sinicae historiae Decas prima (Munich, 1658), in which Martino
was notoriously to claim that China was populated before the Flood.
58
Milton, in his reply, refers to only one of the above. Rather, recalling
Oldenburgs earlier criticisms of impious scholars those who neverthe-
less continue to gather fuel for their re, seizing hastily all that is sacred
and profane for the purpose Milton countered:
Meanwhile you yourself rightly observe that there are too many there [Oxford]
who by their empty quibbling contaminate both the divine and the human . . .
But you know all that better yourself. The ancient Chinese calendar, from the
Flood on, which you say is promised by the Jesuit Martini, is doubtless eagerly
anticipated because of its novelty; but I do not see what authority or support it
could add to the Mosaic books.
59
This is pointed. Milton simply passes by La Peyre`re without mention.
Oldenburgs implicit assumption that biblical chronology needs protect-
ing is dismissed: ancient calendars are rather archly called novelties. But
Oldenburg does provide us with a crucial glimpse of one of the more
interesting pieces of Miltons private reading, Maresius refutation of La
Peyre`re. Milton wishes, however, to keep this private. He will not men-
tion La Peyre`re by name; alternative chronologies he brands simply as
superuous. If Oldenburg hoped he could draw out a conversation and
La Peyre`re and Miltons opponent Salmasius were acquainted
60
he was
not successful. By 1656, Milton was reluctant to publicise any theological
speculation, unsurprising considering the reaction to his divorce writings,
and the trouble caused when he dared to license a Latin text of the
Racovian Catechism.
We nally turn to the De doctrina Christiana, which because of its
manner of composition, its multi-scribed state, and its theological orien-
tation, is not likely to display full consistency with established Miltonic
works at each and every point.
61
If Milton worked by adding increasingly
unorthodox accretions to a base text derived from orthodox sources using
many different amanuenses, the resultant document will include many
different textual layers. And, of course, portions written out again in fair
copy will necessarily obscure their own textual genetics, which is the case
for all the chapters up to and including the fourteenth of Book I , covering
Miltons discussion of the Fall.
So with these caveats in mind, we approach the sections on the special
government of angels, and of man before and after the Fall. And these are
broadly congruent with Miltons previous thinking, in all its complexity.
Milton rst emphasises the importance of reason and choice for angels
as well as men. Following Augustine, reformed commentators usually
held that the good angels remained faithful because they couldnt, by
constitution, do otherwise God held them in grace. But Milton rejected
this because it removed the capacity of choice from the angels or at least
the capacity to choose the good. Paradoxically, that would make the
evil angels more free than the good angels, even though the only choice
on offer was to fall.
62
Milton, like other Protestant theologians, was also
keen to restrict the extent of angelic intellect, against certain Catholic
estimations: The good angels do not see into all Gods thoughts, as
the Papists pretend. They know by revelation only those things which
God sees t to show them, and they know other things by virtue of their
very high intelligence, but there are many things of which they are
ignorant.
63
For fallen angels, this intellect is a torment to them rather than a
consolation, so they utterly despair of their salvation. Thus the reective
devils of Paradise Lost, performing a task not dissimilar to that of their
poet, who reasond high / Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and
Fate, / Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute, / And found no end,
in wandring mazes lost.
64
Man is created in the image of God, with the whole law of nature . . .
so implanted and innate in him that he was in no need of command.
This, Milton adds, shows that anything said in paradise about marriage or
prohibitions belonged to positive right, commands superadded by God
and not intrinsically to do with right reason. This was because the law of
nature would have told Adam what to do without any such commands,
and so the commands cannot be contained within that law.
65
In this way
man differs from the angels, because for him a public test of obedience
was instituted that was quite arbitrary. Milton is insistent that this was
necessary because any non-arbitrary command man would have obeyed
naturally; for obedience to be tested, something in itself neither good nor
evil had to be employed.
66
Milton is rather brusque about what went wrong. Man sinned, which is
to say he broke the law, law understood both as innate law and as things
ordered. In other words, he transgressed against his reason and against
Gods command. Immediately, though, this formulation aligns two con-
cepts that Milton had taken pains to distinguish in the previous chapter,
where natural law and positive right were different laws, one natural, the
other arbitrary.
Milton recognises the distinction between desire and action, calling
them the subdivisions of sin. Sin entered the world at the instigation of
the devil, but also by mans inconstant (non immutabile) nature.
67
The
consequences of this sin were dire. The rst sin itself broke all law:
For what fault is there which man did not commit in committing this sin? He
was to be condemned both for trusting Satan and for not trusting God; he was
faithless, ungrateful, disobedient, greedy, uxorious; she, negligent of her
husbands welfare; both of them committed theft, robbery with violence,
murder against their children (i.e., the whole human race); each was sacrilegious
and deceitful, cunningly aspiring to divinity although thoroughly unworthy of
it, proud and arrogant.
68
If Milton had underplayed the consequences of this one act, the above
listing might not really matter too much. But Milton endorses the
punitive and legalistic consequences: all posterity sinned with Adam
and Eve, and are justly condemned as a result. This extends to children
because God sees how they will turn out sinners, like their parents.
And the sin we bear effects not just moral but physical deterioration,
a point on which Milton corrects some modern thinkers, obviously
Socinians.
69
On original sin itself Milton is slightly more individual. Citing Au-
gustine as the originator of the term, Milton comments that it is too
narrow a description, as Adam suffered from it only after the Fall, in
which case it postdated his origin and thus cannot in that sense be
original. It would be a mere terminological quibble if it did not reveal a
certain sensitivity to the question of origins. Milton is also careful to
distinguish original sin from guilt of that sin, the latter being the
imputation of that sin : Thus as soon as the fall occurred, our rst
parents became guilty, though there could have been no original sin in
them. Moreover all Adams descendants were included in the guilt,
though original sin had not yet been implanted in them. Finally, guilt
is taken away from the regenerate, but they still have original sin.
70
Milton considers the loss of original righteousness and the whole mind
as part of the punishment for original sin, but not that sin itself. Although
this idea of deprivation sounds a scholastic and, as Kelleys commentary
adds, an Arminian note, deprivation is nonetheless held alongside the
harsher idea of depravation, and so this cannot be interpreted as much of
a concession to the weaker understanding of original sin.
Milton, though, revises the Calvinist extremities of this position.
Although the consequences of the Fall are dire and universal, man is
not entirely debased as a result. Man suffers the loss or at least the
extensive darkening of that right reason, whose function it was to discern
the chief good, and which was, as it were, the life of the understanding.
The loss of divine favour results in the lessening of the majesty of the
human countenance, and the degradation of the mind . . . However, it
cannot be denied that some traces of the divine image still remain in us,
which are not wholly extinguished by this spiritual death.
71
It is unwise to put too much pressure on the De doctrina, as its current
state is neither that of a rst nor a nal draft, but Miltons understanding
of the Fall and of original sin clearly follows broadly Calvinist lines, with
Arminian qualications. Milton is interested in nding a balance between
the idea of a dire event with calamitous consequences, both physical and
mental, and the necessary survival of some contact, however comprom-
ised, with an initial state of perfection. The mind is degraded, but not
utterly so. This is the balance we have now seen in various Miltonic texts,
and it is the balance that underpins both the intellectual and the artistic
fabric of Paradise Lost.
chapter 8
Paradise Lost I : the causality of
primal wickedness
What is the relation of the text of Paradise Lost to the events it describes?
When Satan approaches paradise in the poem, he nds the way so knotty
and perplexed, that it Access denid (PL 4.137). What is our access to
Paradise Lost, and, in turn, its access to its subject? This is a crucial
question, and the appropriate one on which to open a discussion of the
epic, because the question of what type of information the epic texture
furnishes is at least as important as the information itself, which is often
thereby revealed to be rather compromised. In Lycidas, for instance, we
saw that the nal octave acted to disconnect the poem from any simplistic
congruence with the events it described. This created a mixture of
pastoralism and politics, both operating, but neither cohering to produce
merely a stale allegorism.
The octave of Lycidas also effects a temporal dislocation. The poem,
which from the front end looks as if it is taking place in the present both
in tense and in time (I com to pluck, and in the year 1637), becomes a
past activity in the octave: Thus sang the uncouth Swain, occupant not
of the England of the Personal Rule of Charles I, but of a mysterious,
distant eld, populated only by himself.
1
A similar dislocation happens in
Paradise Lost. The epic, like the monody, opens as a present performance,
Of Mans First Disobedience . . . Sing Heavnly Muse (PL 1.1, 6). The
immediacy of the rst invocation, full of present imperatives and
rst-person pronouns, invites the reader into close association: Sing,
Instruct(19), Illumin(23);
. . . what is low raise and support ;
That to the highth of this great-Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justie the wayes of God to men. (1.236)
But all of this is taken away later in the poem. In the invocation to book 9,
Milton shifts back into the past the moment of inspiration, and indeed
protests his passiveness in the creative process:
146
If answerable style I can obtaine
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes
Her nightly visitation unimplord,
And dictates to me slumbring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse. (9.204)
What had looked like an immediate process reveals itself as a transcript,
the secondary record of a sleepy urtext, whose moment of initial trans-
mission took place when Milton was not conscious. Access is not so much
denied as deferred, as Milton claims that the real inspiration was all
pillow-talk.
Later in the poem, after the Fall itself, Sin looks forward to the time
when I in Man residing through the Race, / His thoughts, his looks,
words, actions all infect (10.6078). But that time, from the point of view
of the reader, is now, and among the things that were successfully infected
were both thoughts and words, an infection that must extend to Paradise
Lost itself, both as it exists in the mind and on the page. How far does
Paradise Lost describe the things that were, are, and will be? How far is it
accommodated to the damaged thoughts and words of man? Even the
hope to justie the wayes of God to men can be read in two ways. Are we
to construe the line as exactly equivalent to And justie to men the ways
of God, all those ways? Or is it a more modest project: to justify the
ways of God inasmuch, and only inasmuch as they apply to, and can be
understood by, men? The text of the epic as we have it can be construed as
a fallen, imperfect thing, not to be subjected to the kind of exegetical
pressure the genuinely divine Bible can withstand. And it does also make
some bold claims, that Milton spent his time in bed with a celestial
patroness. There are subtle inscriptions of this divinity, of which perhaps
the most recondite, if it is to be believed, is the 10,565-line total of the
1674 text, which when translated into its equivalent in Hebrew (Hebrew
characters have numerical values too), gives yod (10), he (5), waw (6), he
(5), or YHWH, the tetragrammaton, the name of God.
2
The Miltonic
text dangerously veers between the compromised and the divine, and
John Toland remembered that Paradise Lost immediately had people
muttering of Heresy and Impiety.
3
This doubleness the human text
divine will be a constant presence throughout the following analysis.
Milton opens his epic on dire notes. [A]ll our woe stems from the
Fall, and that Fall had a cause, the serpent. No place for theologic-
chopping, the opening asserts both the importance and extent of the
Fall, and the priority of narrative considerations. The initium continues
in this vein:
Paradise Lost I : the causality of primal wickedness 147
Say rst, for Heavn hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say rst what cause
Movd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favourd of Heavn so highly, to Fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who rst seducd them to that foul revolt?
Th infernal Serpent; he it was . . .
This is then traced further back to Satans Pride, and further still, to his
sence of injurd merit (1.3, 2734, 36, 98).
Already, though, there are signs of anthropocentric interest rather than
concentration simply on Satanic proddings. Adam and Eve are described
as fall[ing] off / From thir Creator, a slightly different formulation
from, say, falling from their place immediately below the angels, as
if the Fall is any subtraction from deity. This eeting accommodation
of the Platonist or hermetic descent from deity, however, is quickly
overtaken by an intermediate agent, placed between heaven and Earth, as
the infernal Serpent, what time his Pride / Had cast him out from
Heavn, uncoils into fallen angel (367). Attention is shifted from man
to Satan.
Satan-as-cause becomes over the next books an agent of murky logic,
however, the grammatical forms in which his agency is expressed proving
causally deceptive:
Th infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceivd
The Mother of Mankind, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heavn,
. . . round he throws his baleful eyes
That witnessd huge afiction and dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate . . .
And high disdain, from sence of injurd merit,
That with the mightiest raisd me to contend. (1.347, 568, 989)
Satans negative emotions are detached from Satan: his Pride . . . cast
him ; afiction and dismay are Mixt with obdurate pride ; high disdain
. . . raisd me. Whether his eyes witness in the sense of evince or of
observe is uncertain. In Book 4 Satan again says that Pride and worse
Ambition threw me down ; he is one whom follie overthrew (4.40, 905).
And the vocabulary of stirring, mixing and raising reminds one of the
baker, not the logician a baker kneads together ingredients that all
constitute one product, but are certainly not thereby causes of each other.
Book 4 again employs reexive vocabulary to describe Satan and his
thought,
which nigh the birth
Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest,
And like a devillish Engine back recoiles
Upon himself ; horror and doubt distract
His troubld thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him . . . (4.1520)
This is as Michael had promised in the war in heaven: Satan and his
wicked crew would be cast down to hell, where they will mingle broils
(6.277). Altogether, the terminology so associated with Satan and Satanic
cognition is of a disorganised process of revolving (4.31). Linear ideas of
causation are thus replaced by a confused circularity and psychological
disintegration, as Satans self-hostile passions revolve around his head, but
seemingly at a slight distance from it.
This habit of abstracting the troublesome emotion and phrasing the
Fall in terms of a movement to that emotion is an Augustinian rhetorical
strategy, in which the Fall-in-the-will is privileged before the Fall-in-the-
world. This left open the problem of what caused this will-Fall, at least
partially solved by discussing that Fall in terms of a Fall to sin, or the evil
will : For when a will leaves something higher and turns to what is lower,
it becomes evil, not because that to which it turns is evil, but because this
act of turning is itself a wrong turn.
4
Milton discussed the distinction
between the intention and the act of evil in the De doctrina, citing Ovid in
support: Mars sees her; seeing desires her; desiring enjoys her. But this
distinction is soon compromised when Milton adds that an act can
consist in thoughts as well as actions, words and even actions omitted.
5
Once again, the Fall-in-the-will becomes more intangible and temporally
imprecise the more it is scrutinised. As Augustine had said, the Fall-in-
the-will takes place in occulto, and in that sense cannot be discussed in
normal causal terms at all. Its linguistic index is the trope of turning,
circularity, secrecy. Milton uses the term secret frequently: as Sin says to
Satan of the rst actions of sin, such joy thou tookst / With me in secret
(2.7656). Satan himself is a secret foe (4.7), who starts the heavenly
rebellion not with a crowd-rouser but by speaking in secret (5.672). I
perhaps am secret, Eve wonders after the Fall (9.811).
Seeing and hearing hell in Paradise Lost itself bears comparison with
Augustine on the cause of evil : Further, since the causes of such defec-
tions are not efcient but decient causes, to wish to trace them is as if
someone were to set his heart on seeing darkness or hearing silence.
6
Thus Miltons description of the lighting conditions of hell as No light,
but rather darkness visible (1.63) is a direct, reversed quotation from
Augustine. Acoustic phenomena in hell are likewise difcult to resolve:
loud metal blasts and soft wooden minors are juxtaposed (Sonorous
mettal blowing Martial sounds ; the Dorian mood / Of Flutes and soft
Recorders). The angels move in silence, but can utter A shout that tore
Hells Concave (1.540, 542, 5501, 561). Visual problems are also present in
the simile famous for troubling the censor:
7
As when the Sun new risn
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs. (1.5949)
The Sun Looks, despite the fact that it is Shorn of his Beams, blind,
sightless, like shorn Samson or blind Milton; and despite its eclipsed
situation, it sheds twilight.
8
Twilight is itself an ambiguous mixture of
light and not-light: it is the very time Lucifer chooses to begin his
whisperings in heaven (5.645).
A further piece of Augustinianism applied to devils and sin is the
important issue of selshness, and the prex self-. Augustine had dis-
cussed sin as a turning away from God and towards the self, an inherently
unstable thing to do, as the self is made from nothing. This selshness,
says Augustine, is pride itself :
The being that can be happy cannot draw happiness from himself, since he was
created out of nothing, but from him by whom he was created.
What is pride but a craving for perverse elevation? For it is perverse elevation to
forsake the ground in which the mind ought to be rooted, and to become and be,
in a sense, grounded in oneself.
9
This selshness was one of the constant targets of the tradition exemplied
by the Theologia Germanica, where Satans fall was because of an arrogance
to be I, to be mee, to be mee [sic], & to be mine was his turning away &
fall.
10
The difference between Augustine and the Theologia Germanica is
that what the former regarded as irreversible, the latter did not.
In Miltonic texts, therefore, the prex self- is to be noted carefully, and
it is almost invariably associated with a kind of causal short-circuiting,
and overwhelmingly with devils and devilry. Thus Satan promises the
devils that, self-Raisd, they can reconquer heaven; that they are self-
begot, self-raisd / By our own quickning power. To God, they are
Self-tempted, self-depravd, Self-lost (1.634, 5.8601, 3.130, 7.154). The
Elder Brother in A Mask had used similar language to describe the ultimate
end of evil, though he saw it as the nal desert of evil, its nature therefore
never really going away:
But evil on it self shall back recoyl,
And mix no more with goodness, when at last
Gatherd like scum, and setld to it self
It shall be in eternal restless change
Self-fed, and self-consumd.
11
Man, by contrast, is less harassed by the self- prex; indeed, it is a
positive thing in Paradise Lost that man, in distinction from the beasts, is
self-knowing, and it is a fault of Adam and Eve after their Fall that
neither [was] self-condemning (7.510, 9.1188). Indeed, Raphael tells
Adam that Oft times nothing prots more / Then self esteem, grounded
on just and right / Well managd (8.5713). Matthew Jordan, in light of
Raphaels advice, has recently commented on self-esteem in Milton:
The earliest citation in the OED is from Richard Baxters Sancta Sophia (1657),
where it is bracketed with other forms of spiritual pride: Independence, Self-
esteem, Self-judgment, and Self-will. But this is considerably predated by
Miltons use, in An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), of self-esteem to suggest
that his proper ethical regard for himself is a guarantee that he cannot but
conduct himself properly. Accused by his anonymous polemical opponent of
sexual incontinence, Milton rebuffs the charge by appeal to his self-esteem,
either of what I was or what I might be (CPW 1.890). Self-esteem functions
here not only as a supposed guarantee of sexual propriety but as a principle of
constancy throughout time, a point of unity from which earlier and later versions
of the self can be surveyed.
12
Thus a conict is set up between the human self-ishness celebrated by
Jordan as a piece of peculiarly Miltonic modernity, and the self-ishness
of the devils in Paradise Lost, whose self-esteem (esteem deriving from
the Latin aestimare, to appraise or value), is mental error, not at all a
principle of constancy, but a ction of autochthony.
But is the distinction between devilish selshness and mans self-esteem
secure? Man has to estimate himself correctly, and by means of himself:
he is not to be disturbed by external considerations in this valuation. This,
however, is what God identies as a satanic attribute:
The rst sort by thir own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-depravd: Man falls deceivd
By the other rst: Man therefore shall nd grace,
The other none. (3.12932)
God is being none too subtle a theologian: man was pushed, he says, and
that is less culpable than if it had been his own idea. This was precisely the
position Augustine had rejected in his discussion of the evil will : the secret
fall had to precede the public fall, and that rst fall was not inuenced by
Satan. The mind has to be tted to receive before reception itself. The
point was also made by the father of differential psychology, the Spaniard
Juan Huarte, in his discussion of how God, rather than Satan, infused
knowledge into Adam and Eve: [W]hen God formed Adam and Eve, it is
certaine that before he lled them with wisedome, he instrumentalized
their braine in such sort, that they might receiue it with ease, and serue as
a commodious instrument, therewith to be able to discourse, and to
forme reasons.
13
For Miltons God to decide that push excuses is in
effect to deny knowledge of the Fall-in-the-will ; or, alternatively, to deny
its existence.
The Son, in his response, is more subtle:
[S]hould Man
Thy creature late so lovd, thy youngest Son
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joyned
With his own folly? (3.1503)
On one level, the Son is tactfully revising the Fathers speech, reminding
him that some collusion was necessary fraud had to joyn with folly
but on another, he is eroding the soteriological distinction between fallen
angels and fallen men. If collusion is required, man was no longer simply
pushed any more than were the angels Satan whispered to, as he whispers
to Eve in Eden in the form of a toad. As Grotius Eva said of the
temptation, it was effected by both his persisted persuasion, and my
desire.
14
Gods deceivd man is furthermore very difcult to square with
Adam later in the poem: he scrupld not to eat / Against his better
knowledge, not deceavd, / But fondly overcome with Femal charm
(9.9979). Deception and undeception stand in stark opposition.
Circularity and its attempts to confound our causal questions inform
the opening books of Paradise Lost in more witty ways, too. The devils,
for instance, are like themselves (1.793), particularly unstable given that
they, like all the angelic ranks, are shape-shifters. So Beelzebub later
compliments his auditors for being, curiously, like to what ye are, and
when Satan is touched by Ithuriel, his form returns / Of force to its
own likeness (2.391, 4.81213). When Raphael ies down to paradise,
he takes the form of a phoenix, or at least to all the Fowles he seems so,
and when he nally lands, to his proper shape returns, as a six-winged
seraph (5.2712, 276). Likewise when Satan lands on the Sun he casts to
change his proper shape, turning into a rather camp young cherub
(3.634). But what is Satans proper shape? He is merely a perversion of
an angelic form, and one we see only as a bewildering procession of shapes
and sizes: dragon, serpent, angel severed and angel whole, stripling,
midget.
Ideas of normal generation are likewise frequently challenged by
notions of abortion, male pregnancy, uncreation: his womb, abortive
gulf , the wide womb of uncreated night, unessential night, the hell
hounds creeping back into the womb of Sin, Chaos as the Womb of
nature and perhaps her grave (1.673, 2.140, 439, 441, 657, 911). This kind
of language intersects with some sentiments voiced by Ranters. Abiezer
Coppe, for instance, long[ed] to be utterly undone . . . I am, or would be
nothing ; I was . . . sunke into nothing, into the bowels of the still
Eternity (my mothers wombe) out of which I came naked, and whereto I
returned naked ; And thou be plagued back again into thy mothers
womb, the womb of eternity. Penington likewise wrote of tumbling
. . . in the womb of eternity.
15
Other Ranterish ideas are ascribed to the devils. Satan hopes that
heaven and hell may prove merely mental states, and Belials prediction
that This horror will grow milde, this darkness light echoes the light-
and-darkness motif seen in the very titles of pamphlets like Light and
Darknesse, or A Single Eye, All Light, No Darkness, or The Light and Dark
Sides of God, works by Penington, Clarkson and Bauthumley respectively.
Mammon too declares cannot we his Light / Imitate when we please?
But Milton rebuts these fantasies with force: And with their darkness
durst affront his light (1.255, 2.220, 26970, 1.391). If the darkness/light
pairing links Milton to the Ranters, then, it is used by the former to
demonise the latter.
16
Another appropriation, in passing, is Miltons
description of chaotic atoms as unnumberd as the Sands / Of Barca or
Cyrenes torrid soil (2.9034), a clear if incongruous mime of Catullus on
the number of his kisses to Lesbia: quam magnus numerus Lybissae
harenae / lasarpeceris iacet Cyrenis, as great a number as the Libyan
sands, lying in silphiophorus Cyrene.
17
Mad Catullus kisses, presumably
serially delivered, are transformed into a non-linear, sexless ux of
confusion, like devilish causation.
Many of these terms have been headed by the prex un- : unessential,
uncreated, unnumberd, uncouth, and so forth. These return in the
death-ridden Book 10, where the realm of Chaos is unreal, Night and
Chaos unoriginal, Death an unhide-bound Corpse bent on making
men unimmortal (10.471, 477, 601, 611). Unoriginal, in particular, is
striking; the OED cites this as the rst use of the word, a term that
completely dees causality, that which lacks origin, a word ultimately
from the Latin deponent verb orior, I arise or I become visible.
18
The un-concepts of the poem, therefore, lack openness or denition, a
phenomenon also visited upon what should be a linear event, the proces-
sion of devils in Book 1. But the names of the rout are those yet to be given
to what is therefore strictly an anonymous gathering (1.802, 36175),
much as the names of the biblical gures of the visions of the nal two
books are by thir names . . . call[ed], though yet unnamd (12.140).
Milton, it may be argued, does offer one major concession for cause-
hunters the extended allegory of Sin and Death. But the bogus compli-
city of the allegory, where causes are literalised rather than infolded, ends
up as over-actualising the process into absurdity. As John Tanner has
observed, One would be hard-pressed to devise an allegory more inci-
sively Pelagian the gestation of Sin is entirely to do with Satans own
volition, he indeed being the only person who cannot say, with the
Augustinian, that sin is inherited. Allegorising and externalising sin at
this moment therefore mock its entirely selsh origin.
19
Samuel Johnson called the allegory of Sin and Death broken.
20
Johnsons problem was that he could not work out if the gures of Sin
and Death were real or not. Genuinely allegorical gures, he thought,
should not behave like real people: they can perhaps point the way to hell,
he concedes, but that they should physically obstruct, even offer combat
and, worst of all, end up constructing thoroughfares, is unacceptable. One
can take Johnsons point without sharing his judgement; as Sarah Morri-
son has well argued, Milton allows the occasional and startling intersec-
tion of the naturalistic plane and the allegorical as a kind of insurance
policy, because to do otherwise would be to appear to endorse parascrip-
tural elements of doubtful authority. Satan is the one character who
moves between these narrative planes in the poem, and this at once
prompts suspicions that the larger narrative may be contaminated [with
allegory] as well.
21
Over-real Sin and Death conrm their own articiality,
and some of it leaks into their surrounds, and potentially beyond.
An examination of Sin and Death conrms their uselessness as causal
markers. Sin is Voluminous, from Latin volumen, a coil or wreath, and
so her outward form represents exactly the problem her literalised self
pretends to solve. Death does not even have edges: If shape it might be
calld that shape had none ; a meager Shadow (2.652, 667, 10.264).
Abortive combat between Satan and Death is likened to clouds clashing,
objects that mix rather than bump not really objects at all (2.71417).
Despite the impression of quick birth given by her nal word sprung,
Sins account of her own generation is couched in delayed syntax, and
instead insinuates a slow, painful protuberance (7528). She both
despite and because of angelic androgyny looks exactly like Satan
(764), whereas Eves initial problem with Adam is that he is not as pretty
as her (4.47880). The offspring of Sin and Death go back into the womb,
and Death dares not harm Sin because he knows / His end with mine
involvd (2.8067). The whole encounter is riven with knots and circu-
larities, Augustines favourite metaphors for evil.
22
[D]im thine eyes,
and dizzie swumm / In darkness (7534) Satans eyes, of course, but
ours too.
The opening books of Paradise Lost, therefore, are layered. On the one
hand, the right religious noises of woe are made, and the Fall is as gloomy
as it ever was. But one concomitant of this gloom is that evil is so
astonishing that its origin is equally bewildering, and is rendered so. As
Augustine before him, Milton both asserts and conceals.
The zone of Chaos is particularly resistant to necessary questions: what
is it, and what relation does it have to God? That commentators have
argued so protractedly over the moral status of Chaos is indication
enough that its place in Miltons epistemology is unstable. In the De
doctrina, noting that the Hebrew verb bara, to create, form, make, does
not mean to create out of nothing an argument the secular lexicons
and even some Genesis commentaries supported Milton rejected the
idea that God made the world out of nothing:
Since, then, both the Holy Scriptures and reason itself suggest that all these
things were made not out of nothing but out of matter, matter must either have
always existed, independently of God, or else originated from God at some point
in time. That matter should have always existed independently of God is
inconceivable. In the rst place, it is only a passive principle, dependent upon
God and subservient to him; and, in the second place, there is no inherent force
or efcacy in time or eternity, any more than there is in the concept of number
. . . It is, I say, a demonstration of supreme power and goodness that he should
not shut up this heterogeneous and substantial virtue within himself, but should
disperse, propagate and extend it as far as, and in whatever way, he wills. For this
original matter was not an evil thing, nor to be thought of as worthless: it was
good, and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good. It was a substance, and
could only have been derived from the source of all substance. It was in a
confused and disordered state at rst, but afterwards God made it ordered and
beautiful.
23
This is not quite what Chaos looks like in Paradise Lost. It may have
been confused and disordered in the treatise, but it was still explicitly
good. In Paradise Lost, it is more ambiguous. John Rumrich has vigor-
ously argued that Chaos is morally positive, a physical correlate of the
metaphysical possibility of free will indeed, an aspect of God himself.
He also points out that Anarch (2.988), a word Milton appears to have
coined, means in its root without-beginning, a difcult thought in the
depths of a poem otherwise so magisterially ruled from above.
24
None-
theless, as John Leonard has countered, that thought can be retained
without Rumrichs major thesis that Chaos is a benign entity. God
himself says that he withholds his goodness from the zone of Chaos and
Night:
Boundless the Deep, because I am who ll
Innitude, nor vacuous the space.
Though I uncircumscribd my self retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not. (7.16872)
Though this may suggest that Chaos is morally neutral rather than hostile,
elsewhere in the poem Chaos is explicitly an enemy: Nature rst begins /
Her fardest verge, and Chaos to retire / As from her outmost works a
broken foe (2.10379).
More worrying still, it is Night, as Leonard remarks, and not Chaos,
who is the truly disturbing entity, The Womb of nature and perhaps her
Grave (2.911). Night, it is repeatedly suggested, existed before anything
else: she is eldest of things ; eternal Night ; eldest Night / And Chaos,
ancestors of Nature (2.962, 3.18, 2.8945).
25
Leonard summarises:
The natural inference is that Heaven and Night are coeternal. One might rescue
this scheme for orthodoxy by arguing, along Rumrichs lines, that the darkness is
somehow within God. Something must be conceded to this argument. God
clouds himself with the majesty of darkness (2.226), and even the Son is
Gloomy as Night when driving out the rebel angels (6.832). But Nights
darkness differs from Gods. God is Dark with excessive bright (3.380); Nights
darkness is unremitted and unremitting.
26
This does produce a difference between the De doctrina and the epic, as
Hunter is right to emphasise, though one need not therefore posit
separate authors.
27
Rather, at the epistemological outworks of Miltons
poem, such conceptual monsters are allowed brief incursions into the
otherwise orderly world of Paradise Lost, in recognition of the impossi-
bility of nally resolving certain divine mysteries, notably those associated
with the origin of evil. For instance, Milton introduces into the realm
of Chaos and Night the monster of chance: Satan would have
tumbled through the void to this very day had not by ill chance / The
strong rebuff of som tumultuous cloud / . . . hurried him / As many
miles aloft (2.9358). This acts as a nal, violent involving, a curvilinear
tangent so bent on directing the origin of evil away from creation that
it leaves behind a conceptual scar the idea that Satan might not have
made it to Earth because of the weather. Milton does try to tame some
of his monsters, as when Satan traverses a Universe of death, which
God by curse / Created evil for evil only good, he quickly revises
(2.6223). But not always. Some even make it to heaven, in particular
those suspicious characters Belial and Mammon. Belial was apparently
always lewd, and even before his fall Mammon hung around on the
heavenly street-corners, staring at the gold pavement, downward bent
(1.490, 679).
As a concluding remark to this section, it must be conceded that the
problem of dualism threatens in Paradise Lost because it is very hard for it
not to, and Milton cannot spend every other half-line in hell shunning on
the larboard dualist objections. Rather than ghting the problem at each
and every pass, on occasion Milton instead allows the monsters in, and
the cumulative force of their presence cannot be dismissed. At the
epistemological fringes of his poem, monism and dualism overlap. Dis-
concertingly, Chaos doesnt care about issues of good versus evil,
casually recalling instead an unfamiliar cosmogony: from the perspective
of Chaos, he saw hell created rst, then heaven, then Earth (2.10025).
Chaos mentions to Satan the tiny point he has recently seen come into
existence, and about which he appears to know very little, and certainly
nothing of its occupants. He is, of course, referring to the entire created
Universe. It is at these moments, and only at these moments, that
Miltons Universe eetingly resembles the dualistic cosmos of Samuel
Pordages Mundorum explicatio, with its absconded and atavistic deities.
chapter 9
Paradise Lost I I : God, Eden and man
Paradise Lost consistently inverts the order of the history it tells, giving us
the fallen before the unfallen, and so denying us access to the former
without the provision of the latter. When Eve, for instance, is created
from a rib dug out of Adams side, she inadvertently recapitulates the
construction of Pandaemonium, the devilish assembly, a terminologically
similar edice: Soon had his crew / Opnd into the Hill a spacious
wound / And digd out ribs of Gold (1.68890).
1
In a move we shall
see again, Milton thus connects a nominally evil creation with a nomin-
ally good one, but does not tell us what we are to make of that association.
God too sees and discusses the Fall before it happens, but rather than
defending this eventuality as a difcult battle lost, alas, and after much
struggle, he conrms what the devils had supposed all along, that man will
be easily overcome. The devils will plan to seek out mans weakness, and
blast the frail originals of the pendent world (2.357, 375, 1052). God
blithely admits all this, even repeating the ease with which man will fall :
For man will hearkn to his glozing lyes, / And easily transgress the sole
Command, / . . . what Hellish hate / So easily destroyd (3.934, 3001).
This is a Calvinist sentiment: the Reformer too had maintained that man
fell easily.
2
The Son joins in: frail Man, he agrees (404), and his Father
is sure that original sin is what both Augustine and the author of the De
doctrina had said it was, pursuing the authentic genocidal model : . . . so
will fall, / Hee and his faithless Progenie ; He with his whole posterity
must dye ; the whole Race lost ; in him perish all men ; His crime
makes guiltie all his Sons ; utter loss ; In them at once to ruin all
mankind (3.956, 209, 280, 287, 290, 308, 5.228).
Fallen Adam will miserably concur, and Michael will remind him that
the limping history of his nal vision is again all his own fault (10.73377,
81718, 11.4238). As we saw in Chapter 4, many though not all of
Miltons radical brethren would strongly object to this genocidal model,
as would Jeremy Taylor and a few of his friends. But everyone at the
158
Synod of Dort of 161819 would have concurred, Arminian and Calvinist
alike, and that is an indicator of Miltons reactionary anthropology, in
distinction from his unorthodox ideas on creation, marriage and the
trinity. In this aspect, he could not be less Socinian, a label otherwise
applicable to some of Miltons genuine unorthodoxies.
God too employs a certain circularity of phrasing when he comes to
discuss the origins of disobedience. Devilish reexivity is now used by the
deity to describe his gifts to man: ingrate, he had of mee / All he could
have (3.978). Milton was to use similar circular constructions for
humans in the later poems, too compare Paradise Regaind on Eve:
But Eve was Eve, and Samson Agonistes on Samsons death: Samson hath
quit himself / Like Samson.
3
For God, Adam and Eve are Authors to
themselves, a strongly Arminian phrase, and they themselves decreed /
Their own revolt, not I ; They themselves ordaind thir fall (3.122, 116
17, 128). They are their own jailors: they enthrall themselves (125), the
words they, them, -self , -selves hammered out. Miltons God sounds
as if he has been dealing with Drydens Adam, not his own, far more
docile version.
So man is free but also frail, though just how frail is locked away in
linguistic loops. Miltons Arminian insistence on free will is balanced
against his rather guarded estimation of mans ability, even unfallen mans
ability, to use this freedom wisely. Mans place not only below the angels
but at merely one point on a scale extending indenitely up and down-
wards is emphasised by the presence of those strange middle Spirits . . . /
Betwixt thAngelical and Human kinde (3.4612). Michael tells Adam
that the redeeming Son will possess more strength to foil / Thy enemie
(12.38990), rather like comforting a oored boxer with the news that a
more agile replacement has been sent for. Paradise Regaind repeats this
admission, where God smilingly pronounces his Son far abler to resist
temptation than Adam mark one was, who had been By fallacy sur-
prizd.
4
But the Adam of Paradise Lost was in no way simply tricked. The
God of Paradise Regaind oversimplies the events of four aeons earlier
but, as we saw, even the God of Paradise Lost had called man deceivd,
whereas the narrator in contradiction thought he was not deceavd
(3.130, 9.998).
God is free, too, but his freedom rests upon his eternity, and Milton
endeavours to depict God as not particularly sensitive to causality, being
himself unsubjected to it. God ips tense continually, and it is often
difcult to be sure who or what he is talking about, angels or men, as he
vaguely gestures towards The rst sort, the other (3.129, 131). God also
Paradise Lost I I : God, Eden and man 159
selectively quotes from Lycidas, once more I will renew / His lapsed
powers . . . yet once more he shall stand, the uid, open tones of Yet
once more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, and not the
converse strand in the earlier poem that had stressed closure and sever-
ance: to smite once, and smite no more .
5
While God is thus lent a certain
timelessness, it is not absolute in his voice, and he cannot quite shake
himself loose of Miltons defensiveness: whose fault? / Whose but his
own? (3.967). God, as Milton has to say, permits evil, but Milton
himself had been less comfortable about permission versus coercion when
discussing biblical situations involving people: But when we speak of
sinne, let us look againe upon the old reverend Eli; who in his heavie
punishment found no difference between the doing and permitting of
what he did not approve.
6
This makes instructive comparison with some of the most notorious
lines in the epic, and chronologically its very earliest moment, Gods
exaltation of the Son:
This day I have begot whom I declare
My onely Son, and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;
And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heavn, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great Vice-gerent Reign abide
United as one individual Soule
For ever happie: him who disobeyes
Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, Falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordaind without redemption, without end. (5.60315)
This was once received as unproblematic: in his rst edition Fowler
judged that These lines are among the most controversial in the poem;
and quite unnecessarily so.
7
Because in the De doctrina Milton at a few
points glossed begot as indicat[ing] only metaphorical generation, then
the passage must have seemed quite reasonable to the angels present, and
so man should not worry about it either.
8
Yet, as Forsyth dryly put it, Satan did not have the benet of Fowlers
note.
9
Had Milton wished to persuade us that he did not mean begot in
its obvious sense, he could have done so, and to place it next to This day
is wilfully misleading if what he really meant was (not actually) this day.
Gods prohibition is a bare decree: a gesture as Milton said of the decree
concerning the forbidden tree of power, not of reason.
10
But whereas
Milton thought that such a decree was licit in the case of Adam and Eve,
they having no other way to show obedience, this does not apply in the
angelic case, where their very being lies in obedient action (angeli, mes-
sengers).
11
Indeed the poem would need to be more obviously trinitarian
to dispel this problem; if God had managed something like You will
recall my ever-begotten Son, then one could much more freely condemn
the disobedience of whispering third.
This problem bothered early readers, too. In 1698, the nonjuror Charles
Leslie, whom we earlier met complaining about Dryden and Milton, also
deplored Miltons Groundless Supposition of the exaltation in heaven:
how could Milton dare to make the Angels Ignorant of the B. Trinity,
unless, of course, he was really an Arian? Milton, inexcusably, had made it
look as if the Son had not been their King, or had not been Begotten till
that Day.
12
If the grumpily virtuous nonjuror was suspicious, then Satans
worries, even if not thereby transformed into righteous scruples, can no
longer seem incredible.
A further contemporary reading of this scene survives in one of the
commonplace books of Abraham Hill, a founding Fellow of the Royal
Society, and its occasional Treasurer. Hill wrote of the exaltation: Milton
makes the cause of the Angels revolt to be when God declar[s] Christ to be
his son but it would have bin more poetical & more true that there revolt
was upon the incarnation of Christ declared to them & so the humane
nature prefered before the angelica[l] to their great discontent.
13
Hill
implicitly faults Milton for lending the promotion of the Son a somewhat
arbitrary, even tyrannic feel, whereas if he had mentioned the incarnation
then there would have been a reason for the exaltation, and any rebellion
could be objected to by recourse to that reason. For Hill, Miltons God
does not explain adequately to the angels the thinking behind his sudden,
authoritarian behaviour. Even Fowler in his second edition emended his
earlier stance, now admitting the passage as antitrinitarian.
14
William Empson was actually repeating the sentiment of at least two of
Miltons rst readers, then, and not being wilfully anachronistic as his
neo-Christian critics complained. Empson protested, If the son had
inherently held this position from before the creation of all angels, why
has it been ofcially withheld from him to this day? . . . to give no reason
at all for the exaltation makes it appear a challenge.
15
The verse For ever
happie: him who disobeyes is Paradise Lost in a nutshell, albeit a split
one; as Forsyth comments, it packs into one line round a powerful
caesura the whole duality of history, and even contradicts itself .
16
On
the publication of Paradise Lost, Andrew Marvell feared that Milton
would ruine the sacred Truths ; today one can still see why.
17
Nevertheless, Miltons decision to place the exaltation at that precise
point follows a certain tactical aesthetic. By announcing the Sons exalt-
ation without revealing its ultimate purpose, God gives some of the angels
a seeming reason to disobey. And those who disobey will do so unaware
that the very phenomenon they are resisting will itself ultimately repair
the mundane Fall that the fallen angels will then go on to engineer. This
sounds confusing, as it should, but the result is that the remedy of the Fall
is also its possible cause. By adjusting the tradition in which Satan refuses
to worship the rst Adam and applying it to the second, Milton himself
engineers a circularity at the heart of his poem, almost an act of pious
sabotage.
18
The problem, of course, is that the salvation hidden on the
back of the initial command is not actually on offer to any of its
immediate audience: either the angels will choose to stand, in which case
there is no need of salvation, or they will choose to fall, in which
case there is no remedy. The elegance of this nal infolding, therefore,
is only of use to Adam and his kind; no such joy That all this good of
evil shall produce (12.470) for the angels.
Eden itself acts as a further barrier between its occupants and readerly
access. Its unruly growth is always noted, something that distinguishes
this Eden from the early-modern gardens that strove to imitate what they
envisaged as paradise. John Beale, we saw in Chapter 1, approach[ed] the
resemblance of Paradise by the careful organisation of articial paths.
19
Miltons original garden behaves more like a vinous parishioner than a
static frieze; it mock[s] Adam and Eve, who must be cruel to be kind in
their reform[ing] zeal :
. . . we must be risn,
And at our pleasant labour, to reform
Yon ourie Arbors, yonder Allies green,
Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
That mock our scant manuring, and require
More hands then ours to lop thir wanton growth:
Those Blossoms also, and those dropping Gumms,
That lie bestrowne unsightly and unsmooth,
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease. (4.62432)
The epic voice in contrast employs a metallurgists verve when describing
Eden. Much mention of Saphire, Orient Pearl, sands of Gold, is made
for a greedless environment (4.2378, 240). Carey exaggerated the brittle-
ness of Eden, but with point, when he described how Adam and Eve
deport themselves gravely among its bric-a`-brac . . . The cash-values
which dictate the gold ornamentation of Heaven denaturalise Eden . . .
where owers harden to a rich inlay . . . more colourd than with stone /
Of costliest Emblem (4.7012). Even the apple-peel is gold. There is not
a real tree or ower in the place.
20
There are real trees and owers,
though, because they grow and need lopping; what is off-putting is that
the two types of description coexist the jewels and the jungle.
Yet the contents of Eden are kept at bay from the reader. Milton
employs long, half-formed strings of occupatio, a kinde of pretended
omitting or letting slip of that which indeed we elegantly note out in
the verie shewe of praetermission, as when we say; I let this passe; I passe
it ouer with silence.
21
So, famously, paradise is not a number of other
gardens:
Not that faire eld
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering ours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis
Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th inspird
Castalian Spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian Ile
Girt with the River Triton, where old Cham,
Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,
Hid Amalthea and her Florid Son
Young Bacchus from his Stepdame Rheas eye;
Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,
Mount Amara, though this by som supposd
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus head, enclosd with shining Rock,
A whole days journy high, but wide remote
From this Assyrian Garden, where the Fiend
Saw undelighted all delight. (4.26886)
But occupatio is designedly deceptive: Milton is mentioning all these
things. Gardens of rape, adultery and concealment scroll by our attention,
and can we simply say Eden is, as protested, none of these questionable
things; that, after all, is what the word not means ? Or are we inadvert-
ently drawn in? Tis his [Caesars] will, says Mark Antony in Julius
Caesar, Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read (I I I . ii. 130, 132) but
read it he does, and although it is clearly a fake it causes a riot.
Milton is similar in this respect. Not content with the briefer litotes
or afrmation by denial of the contrary, he pushes the momentary
indirections of Eden as not-Enna or not-that-grove, trading over enough
detail to activate our memories of these non-Edens, these un-innocent
gardens. Rather than simply dening something as the absence of its
opposite, Milton instead dwells upon the history of that opposite, and
that invites and then invades our attention. Meanwhile, Eden slips by,
unremarked.
22
The approach to paradise, then, is littered with decoys, and once one
is inside, its rhetorical garb articialises it: paradises biotechnical sights
are both plant and metal : vegetable Gold (4.220). Although Eden is
called a woodie Theatre, it is poorly designed for any other audience
than the airborne. After an ascent of the steep wilderness of Insuperable
highth (1359), one has to get past many ranks of trees footed by
overgrown thickets, and then over an even higher wall. Finally, on the
inside, even higher than the wall, another rank of trees stands (13749).
Geographically, this means that one standing on the wall of Eden even
then could not see inside. Satan bounds in easily, of course; the difculty
implied is ours.
Milton was not writing in a vacuum, however, and the difculty of the
approach to paradise is emphasised partially in contradistinction to a view
of nature represented by the Royalist poet John Denham in his famous
Coopers Hill, rst published in 1642. Denham too used the phrase Access
denid :
With such an easie, and unforcd Ascent
Windsor her gentle bosome doth present :
Where no stupendious Cliffe, no threatening heights
Access deny, no horrid steepe affrights.
23
Miltons version turns around Denhams nature, turning it from an
invitation into a threat:
As with a rural mound the champain head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairie sides
With thicket overgrown, grottesque and wilde,
Access denid. (4.3147)
He appropriates Denhams phrase for opposite application. The steep,
horrid wood in Denham is balanced out in concordia discors by a
clear stream; in Miltons description, the steepness is the point: unlike
Windsor, it is hard to access Eden. Denham is dealing with an available,
contemporary landscape; Milton with lost, distant Eden, and spatial
difculty here also implies ontological difculty.
Adam and Eve, as they approach us unfallen, are compromised by the
long and laborious debate we have already heard about what they will do,
and the consequences of those acts. Indeed, God not only declares them
frail but insists upon their freedom a little too trenchantly: their fall had
no less provd certain unforeknown (3.119). This freedom from predestin-
ation is therefore achieved at a high price: man will fall anyway, God says,
and that is certain, despite his traditional statement that they were
Sufcient to have stood, though free to fall (99). Can one say that
terminally ill patients, even if their doctors are as yet unaware of their
condition, are truly free to die?
Coupled to these doubts is an appeal to juvenility, the counter-
tradition to Augustinianism recurrent throughout this book. Satan is
likened to a vulture preying on Lambs or yeanling kids, and man is
the youngest Son of God (3.151, 434). Nevertheless, it is as tall, upright
adults that our rst parents rst appear, and they appear together. Milton,
in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, had argued that despite his
apparent physical diminishment man was mentally incomplete until
woman was created. God assents to this idea in the epic, telling Adam
[Thou] wilt taste / No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitarie (8.4012).
Despite Miltons endorsement of prelapsarian sex, taste is here a word
whose normal force is gastronomic, and hence reminiscent of the forbid-
den fruit. This causal association of sex with the Fall, although rejected
elsewhere by Milton, was common, as in the zeugma of John Earle,
writing of a child that he is like Adam before hee tasted of Eue, or the
Apple.
24
It was not just Milton who held that it was as a couple, and not
as single beings, that Adam and Eve embodied perfection; most inuen-
tially of all, the Geneva Bibles marginalium to Genesis 2:22 read: Signi-
fying, that mankinde was pert, when the woman was created, which
before was like an vnpert buylding.
In the Doctrine and Discipline two contrary movements were observed:
one connecting the fallen reader to Eden, and one distancing the reader
from it. Paradise is a guide, but also a locked door: we cannot re-enter
Paradise against the sword that guards it. Both these tendencies inform
the epics paradise and its occupants, and they coincide in words like
passing. With this word and its cognates Adam and Eve move by us in
both spatial and temporal senses: So passd they naked on, nor shund the
sight / Of God or Angel, for they thought no ill : / So hand in hand they
passd ; Thus talking hand in hand alone they passd / On to thir blissful
Bower (4.31921, 68990). The past/passed homonym has other reson-
ances: pass to the Latinate ear can recall passio or suffering, as it does
when Eve complains of bad dreams: Such night till this I never passd,
have dreamd / If dreamd, not as I oft am wont, of thee, / Works of day
passt (5.313). It also carries a host of other meanings to do with legality,
tests, impersonation and fraud, as in passing sentence, passing a test,
passing as someone, or passing something off as something else, ideas
all relevant to the prelapsarian test set but not, in the event, passed.
So Adam and Eve are rst seen passing by the narratorial gaze:
Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native Honour clad
In naked Majestie seemd Lords of all,
And worthie seemd, for in thir looks Divine
The image of their glorious Maker shon,
Truth, wisdome, Sanctitude severe and pure. (4.28893)
These beings speak, and have some knowledge of astronomy, ecology
and horticulture. Later we hear that, like the good angels in the war
in heaven, they feel no pain and cannot be wounded (9.486). In contrast
to the heavnly mindes of Adam and Eve, Satan feels perturbation ;
the term transfers across to the humans only after the Fall (4.118, 120,
10.113).
There is some counterpoint to this dominant theme. No reader can
pass questionless the repetition of seemd Lords of all, / And worthie
seemd ; compare All seemd well pleasd, all seemd, but were not all
(5.617). Again, Adam is more of a teenager than a sage when his dalliance
with Eve is described as youthful (4.338). Satan, for one, immediately
assumes that the arbor scientiae is, as its name suggests, not so called ab
eventu, from the event, an orthodoxy Milton afrmed in the De doctrina,
but a magic tree; consequently ignorance must be the prelapsarian state:
Can it be sin to know? / Can it be death? And do they onely stand / By
Ignorance, is that thir happie state . . . ? (51719).
25
Adam himself can use
words that are nonetheless semantic holes for him: So neer grows Death
to Life, what ere Death is, / Som dreadful thing no doubt (4.4256), and
the narrator is also quick to emphasise that thought will destroy this
paradise: and O yet happiest if ye seek / No happier state, and know to
know no more (7745).
One quite unchildlike thing Adam and Eve do in innocence is have
sex, something with which the Jewish tradition was happy, but the
Christian was not. Sex, it might be argued from the text, obviously
and uncomplicatedly happens. But the passage in question is surprisingly
coy:
into thir inmost bowre
Handed they went; and easd the putting off
These troublesom disguises which wee wear,
Strait side by side were laid, nor turnd I weene
Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites
Mysterious of connubial Love refusd:
Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk
Of puritie and place and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to som, leaves free to all. (4.73847)
Ween, as has recently been pointed out, is not a very condent word,
closer to suppose or suspect than know.
26
In an important inuence
on Miltonic semantics, the Spenserian lexicon, ween can carry rather
negative connotations, as for example Archimago, who weened well to
worke some vncouth wile.
27
It is also telling that ween, in this example,
occurs close to vncouth, a word we saw used in Lycidas with tinges of not
only the unknown, but the unknowable. This is also true of its six uses in
Paradise Lost.
28
The Miltonic narrator is not denying that Adam and Eve
had sex, but he is less certain about it than is often supposed.
Turning to other uses of ween in the Miltonic lexicon, it is striking
that they too are all unequivocally negative. It is the bad angels who
weend / That self same day by ght, or by surprize / To win the Mount
of God ; by force or fraud / Weening to prosper (6.868, 7945).
Ween, elsewhere in Paradise Lost, is what devils do, and they ween
incorrectly. The peculiarities go deeper. [N]or turnd is an example of
litotes, and although logically saying that someone didnt not do some-
thing is equivalent to saying that they did, rhetorically it has a quite
different effect, again one of lessening certainty. The meeting is passive:
Adam didnt not turn, and Eve didnt not refuse acts Mysterious.
Augustine had steeled himself to discuss prelapsarian sex, in often
harrowing detail the male seed could then be introduced into the wifes
uterus without damage to her maidenhead, even as now the menstrual
ow can issue from a maidens uterus without any such damage and
had then declared that, although theoretically licit, it never actually took
place.
29
Milton, conversely, is more positive than negative that sex did
happen, but his narrator averts his gaze, instead converting the admission
of prelapsarian sex into an excuse for a sermon Whatever Hypocrites
austerely talk.
chapter 1 0
Paradise Lost I I I : creation and education
Adam and Eve, we have discussed, resemble to an extent the tall philoso-
phers of the conventional Augustinian account. Problems arose, however,
when we tried to get close to Eden and its occupants, as a state of knowing
turned into a state of merely weening. A further complication is produced
by Miltons organisation of Paradise Lost as temporally non-linear: we
start in hell, fallen, and only later get back to earlier.
This problem is replicated by Adam and Eve themselves, because they
narrate the story of their own origin we do not actually see the moments
of their separate creations rst-hand. When we rst hear them speak they
are already ve days old, and even by that point they possess slightly
different linguistic personalities. Adams opening speech (4.41139) is
static: he talks of praise, ease and prohibition. Absent is any sense of
time, of things past and to come. Eve, in contrast, is quickly aware of
change, development and history. She recalls her rst moments of un-
experienct thought (457), and she continues by recounting her creation
and her actions immediately subsequent.
Eves creation, as she recalls it, is a uniquely childish affair, and it is at
this point more than at any other in Paradise Lost that Milton follows the
Greek patristic tradition, represented by Irenaeus: man was a child, not
yet having his understanding perfected.
1
Eve recounts her creation,
though, with an artistry she may not initially have possessed:
As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A Shape within the watry gleam appeered
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleasd I soon returnd,
Pleasd it returnd as soon with answering looks
Of sympathie and love; there I had xt
Mine eyes till now, and pind with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warnd me . . . (4.4607)
168
Commentators from Patrick Hume onwards have noted Miltons debt to
Ovid here, and, beyond that, Virgil and Ovid, as well as our Author,
borrowed from Theocritus .
2
Ovids Narcissus, like Eve, falls in love with
his own reection in a pool in the Metamorphoses.
3
Milton, however,
reworks Ovid: Eve, unlike Narcissus, leaves her pool, and does not violate
its surface. In Paradise Lost the disembodied voice of Echo, resisted,
becomes the disembodied voice of God, obeyed.
Milton also appears to have borrowed from the Moralised Ovid trad-
ition in his association of Narcissus with matters pertaining to the Fall.
Sandys, for example, in his 1642 translation of Ovid, comments: But a
fearfull example we haue of the danger of selfe-loue in the fall of the
Angells; who intermitting the beauticall vision, by reecting vpon
themselues, and admiration of their owne excellency, forgot their depen-
dance vpon their creator.
4
But Milton associates Narcissus with the
human and not the angelic Fall, and Eves conduct here unlike that of
Satan, who does mingle with his image, Sin is a fall averted.
Miltons association of Eve with Narcissus has further consequences,
chiey that Eve is, contrary to reformed dogmatics, lent by Milton a
naivety our rst parents supposedly never possessed. Luthers Adam was
intellectually brilliant, a talented astronomer. Narcissus, however, is
scarcely a reverend philosopher, and is also in an ambiguous state of
maturity. Sixteen in Ovid, he is described as able to be seen as a boy or
a young man.
5
Pausanias took this as a sign of the utter stupidity of the
tale that a man old enough to fall in love was incapable of distinguishing
a man from a mans reection. Hume, echoing Pausanias, judged that it
demonstrated Miltons superiority to Ovid. Sandys also borrowed this
complaint from Pausanias: Narcissus signies stupid, and a further
overtone is added to Miltons account when it is remembered that Narcis-
sus name is connected, via the Greek root for numbing, with the idea of
narcotics (Plutarch claimed such properties for the narcissus ower).
Narcissus is, then, quite the reverse of an outstanding philosopher.
6
Sandys also recollects Pausanias mention of a second tradition, that
of Narcissus identical twin sister, whose death Narcissus was really
mourning. The female Narcissus is as old as Pausanias, then, but there
is a medial and perhaps mediating text between Ovid and Milton,
unnoticed by editors, which might have suggested Miltons regendering:
the Mosella of Ausonius, which comprises the tenth book of his Opuscula.
7
There, himself rewriting Ovid, Ausonius describes boys playing with their
own reections in the river, but the simile he embeds is of a girl coming to
maturity:
Paradise Lost I I I : creation and education 169
The boys themselves delight in their own counterfeits, wondering at the illusive
forms which the river gives back. Thus, when hoping soon to display her braided
tresses (it is when the nurse has rst placed near her dear charge the wide-
gleaming glory of the searching mirror), delighted, the little maid enjoys the
uncomprehended game, thinking she gazes on the shape of a real girl : she
showers on the shining metal kisses not to be returned, or essays those rm-xed
hairpins, or puts her ngers to that brow, trying to draw out those curled locks;
even so, at sight of the reections that mock them, the lads aoat amuse
themselves with shapes which waver between false and true.
8
Ausonius provides a precedent in his embedded simile for Miltons femi-
nine application of the Narcissus idea, and his girl also provides a qualifying
commentary on Miltons Eve. Eve, in Milton, is created physically an
adult. But whether physical maturity is a certain index for mental maturity
is unspecied. In Ausonius the virguncula is involved in a process of
puberty: she is being introduced to the apparatus of cosmetic amelioration
for the rst time. As in Ovid, this process is linked to ideas of vanity and the
ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood. The girl is playing an
uncomprehended game, but one soon destined to become very much more
serious, as she grows to an age when looking into mirrors and preparing
ones appearance will take on sexual implications sexual implications
soon to be manifested (apparently) in Miltons parallel text as Adam leads
Eve off to the nuptial bower. The boys playing in the water become
associated with a regendered, implicitly sexualised commentary on the
future application of their actions, much as the whole passage in Ausonius
functions as a commentary on the mental growth of Miltons Eve.
At least one feminist critic has used this passage to cross the line into a
Gnostic reading of the creation by using the apparent imperfection of Eve
as a token of Gods malignancy. Eve warned away from her pool is
obviously compatible with both feminist suspicions of patriarchy and
Gnostic suspicions of divine tyranny. Thus Christine Froula reads Para-
dise Lost as a violent parable of gnosis punished. And this strain sounds
throughout:
The overt hierarchy of God over Adam and Adam over Eve which is the texts
argument is underlain (and undermined) by a more ancient perceived hierarchy
of Eve over Adam . . . In the power dynamics of Adams native scene, the self-
sufcient Eve and the compensatory God that Adam projects out of his fear are
the true rivals, as Christs jealous rebuke to Adam after the Fall conrms: Was
she thy God, that her thou didst obey . . . ?
9
Both Adam and Eve, however, usually operate on patriarchalist assump-
tions. Eve, talking to Adam of the pool scene some time after it had
happened, has, as Froula observes, already been subsumed into the
hierarchy she had initially resisted: she now judges her earlier actions
as wrong. Primary memory, which seems to be of a dynamic, under-
determined creation, lurching this way and that, is retrospectively erased
as Eve learns to accept the ethical principles of a patriarchalist world. But
this, as Froula says, cannot erase the readers memory that Eve was created
gazing down at herself, while Adam was created looking up to God. One
can sympathise with Froula for pushing her identication of Eves crushed
independence into a Gnostic appraisal of Milton, his God and his epic. It
is therefore unwise to champion Miltons feminism: Milton may have
had unshakeable precedent for asserting Eves inferiority, but he drives a
wedge between the protoplast and his wife: one erect, the other stumbling
down.
Adams creation is not related until Book 8, and this is because it
is Eve Milton needs to place squarely in the readerly path, she being the
rst to fall. If Adam were also to recount his creation in Book 4, Milton
would have had two choices: either to exclude any child-like resonances
from his narration; or to allow him a similarly problematic status to
Eve. But the former choice makes too obvious their differences, while the
latter does not make them obvious enough. So the accounts have to be
separated.
Nevertheless the creation of Adam is a markedly better job than that of
Eve, although again the reported nature of Adams creation distances us
from any certainty. Adam, his clay-raised body freshly steaming, unlike
Eve, Strait toward Heavn turned his wondring eyes (8.257). He also
starts speaking early, nineteen lines after his creation, unlike Eve who does
not appear to have spoken at all during her brief life without Adam, in
contrast to her blabbering Drydenic incarnation; in Paradise Lost, Adams
bride does not even say I will. Adams internality, however, is like the
Miltonic Eves, restricted during the rst moments of his creation. Exam-
ining the verbs applied to him, it is striking how externalised the freshly
created Adam is: turnd . . . gazd . . . raisd . . . sprung . . . stood . . . saw
. . . perusd . . . surveyd . . . went . . . ran . . . But who I was . . . knew
not (25771). The rst verb of ratiocination is negative: knew not as
immediate thought is displaced by a catalogue of athletic motion.
What is most peculiar about Adams narration of origins is not what
he recalls of himself, but what he recalls of Eve. Adam is explaining to
Raphael his version of his marriage, as Raphael had been off on a voyage
uncouth and obscure (8.230) that day, and hadnt been around to
watch:
On she came,
Led by her Heavnly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice, nor uninformd
Of nuptial Sanctitie and marriage Rites:
Grace was in all her steps, Heavn in her Eye,
In every gesture dignitie and love.
I overjoyd could not forbear aloud.
This turn hath made amends; thou hast fullld
Thy words, Creator bounteous and benigne,
Giver of all things faire, but fairest this
Of all thy gifts, nor enviest. I now see
Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self
Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man
Extracted; for this cause he shall forgoe
Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere;
And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule.
She heard me thus, and though divinely brought,
Yet Innocence and Virgin Modestie,
Her vertue and the conscience of her worth,
That would be wood, and not unsought be won,
Not obvious, not obtrusive, but retird,
The more desirable, or to say all,
Nature her self, though pure of sinful thought,
Wrought in her so, that seeing me, she turnd;
I followd her, she what was Honour knew,
And with obsequious Majestie approvd
My pleaded reason. To the Nuptial Bowre
I led her blushing like the Morn. (8.484511)
Adams syntax becomes rather choppy after he stops quoting the Bible
and starts to remember his courting. And in fact his account does not
agree with what Eve had told him and us in Book 4. Adam says that Eve
processed towards him meekly and only turned away from him because
she was playing the courting game. Adams speech includes a hymn of
praise, directed to God. But Eve remembers a different dynamic. She says
that Adam seemed like a bad idea at the time, not nearly as pretty as her,
and so she tried to run away. So Adam seizes her a word used after the
Fall, when Adam seizes Eve in order to have lustful sex (9.1037) and
informs her that she is his property. The Bone of my Bone speech as
reported by Eve resembles an order dressed as an identication of owner-
ship, and not a thanksgiving offered to God.
10
In Adams version there is
no suggestion of his anguished cry and his necessary pursuit, which in
Eves account resembled more the courting of the Epicurean state of
nature: And Venus joined in the woods the bodies of lovers; for either
[the woman] was inclined by mutual desire or captive to the mans violent
force and vehement lust, or there was a bribe acorns, arbute berries, or
ne pears.
11
In the terms of classical philosophy, Adam converts a wild
Epicurean encounter into Stoic respectability; the Church was to inherit
the ethical presuppositions of Stoicism.
12
But the slight awkwardness
of Adams explanation or to say all he stutters belies his seeming
urbanity.
Why this discrepancy exists is hard to decide. Adam may genuinely
have thought Eve was just pretending. He may be revealing the cognitive
limitations of his placid philosophising. He may be trying to save face in
front of Raphael, assuring him that its all going just ne in paradise. Or
Milton may have allowed the inconsistency to problematise further the
notion that any one account in Paradise Lost can represent transparently
what really happened. But if we want to point the nger, it is hard to
exculpate Adam: Eve related her earlier account to him; why does he
ignore it?
Adam and Eve are distinguished, then, by their very creations or
rather, by their memories of these events. The next distinction typically
mentioned is Eves dream, which does not have an Adamic counterpart.
Satan, towards the end of Book 4, attempts to corrupt The Organs of
her Fancie, and with them forge / Illusions as he list (4.8023). This,
however, is not unlike the Sons qualication of the Fathers initial
statement, that Satan will simply push man into the Fall though joyned /
With his own folly, the Son adds (3.153). Likewise Satan is collusive with
Eves faculties, though the degree of collusion remains uncertain.
To adopt an external control, Eves dream lies between what Thomas
Browne would have identied as demonicall dreames, externally visited
upon the sleeper, and one of the great road of naturall & animal dreames;
wherein the thoughts or actions of the day are acted over and ecchoed in
the night.
13
Eves dream indeed ponders waking moments, specically her
recent discussion with her husband about the prohibition. To that extent
her dream contains exactly what a naturall dream should contain, and so
most of it can be derived solely from her own mind. Adam opts for this
latter construction of events, as he has to, unaware of satanic intervention.
Yet the toad has contributed. What would Browne decide if you told him
that Eve both received a visitation and had just been talking about the
subject of her dream? Who owns the addition strange (5.115)?
The dream itself has been compared to one reported by one Miss T. P.
to Abiezer Coppe.
14
Her dream, though, has a quite different moral
structure:
I was in a place, where I saw all kinde of Beasts of the eld; wilde, and tame
together, and all kinde of creeping wormes, and all kinde of Fishes in a pleasant
river, where the water was exceeding cleere, not very deep but very pure . . .
And all these beasts, wormes and Fishes, living, and recreating themselves
together, and my selfe with them; yea, we had so free a correspondence together,
as I oft-times would take the wildest of them, and put them in my bosome,
especially . . . as the Snake, and Toade, &c. . . . At last I took one of the wildest,
as a Tiger, or such like, and brought it in my bosome away, from all the rest, and
put a Collar about him for mine owne, and when I had thus done it, it grew
wilde againe, and strove to get from me, and I had great trouble about it.
15
Eves dream, however, works on the opposite principle of abstention from
nature. The locus amoenus in Eves dream is a twilit version of the waking
paradise, and Eve, unlike T. P., already lives in paradise, and requires a
tempter to fall from that state. T. P.s dream is antinomian: total immer-
sion in and use of nature is what is celebrated, free from law or prohib-
ition, and any attempt to tame it results in alienation. For T. P., saying,
rather than disobeying the command Thou shalt not is the Fall. The
dreams are antithetical, and T. P.s reminds the later reader of William
Blakes Garden of Love:
I went to the Garden of Love.
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not, writ over the door:
So I turnd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet owers bore.
And I saw it was lled with graves,
And tomb-stones where owers should be,
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
16
But Miltons Eve can awake and feel glad that it was all just a dream
(5.923), and that the prohibition remains intact; for her, the fruit is
already collared, and abstracted from the rest of nature by the creator.
This, working on the logic of Miss T. P., would make God the original
transgressor. Nigel Smith suggests that the heady ight of Eves dream
is thus implied satire of contemporary antinomian writing, but, even
though she ultimately breaks the prohibition, Eve is never in any doubt
that it is such. The polar opposition of these two dreams once again shows
Miltons profound distance from the kind of thinking associated with
Ranters. For Milton the prohibition was allowable, because some test of
obedience needed to be added to the robotic rectitude Adam and Eve
would otherwise have possessed.
17
Does Eve actually break the prohibition in her dream? Like prelapsar-
ian sex, it is something often assumed to be more positively registered in
the text than it turns out to be. Eve approaches the tree of interdicted
Knowledge, and Satan too confesses the fruit to be Forbiddn (5.52, 69).
The moment, though, is hidden:
Even to my mouth of that same fruit held part
Which he had pluckt; the pleasant savourie smell
So quicknd appetite, that I, methought,
Could not but taste. Forthwith up to the Clouds
With him I ew. (837)
Satan presses the fruit onto Eves lips, Eves appetite colludes, she con-
fesses weakness . . . she ies upwards. But at no textual point do her teeth
meet the fruit; as in the fashion of the earlier dramatic drafts, the actual
transgression is missing, as if Eve asleep shuns the act of the Fall.
Like some reverse Icarus, it is then Eve who is abandoned by her satanic
guide, and she falls and wakes, rather than drowns.
18
It would be tidy if
Satan is imagined to have been dictating the dream up until the surge of
Eves appetite; at that moment Ithuriel causes the guide to leave Eve, and,
as Satan is springing up like gunpowder, Eve is experiencing the loss of
her ying partner. But this would still leave the apple-fall missing: Eve, at
this stage, is of uncertain innocence, yet there is, as it were, no convicting
evidence. The absence of the eating in the dream might argue resistance in
the face of temptation; or a new possibility it might make the point
that the actual bite is unimportant, desire being the real transgression. But
we cannot say which is the more secure interpretation.
It is perhaps as a counterbalance to these growing worries about the
frail originals, therefore, that Adam and Eve are conspicuously reafrmed
as still innocent in Book 5. So prayd they innocent, the narrator reminds
us; Adam is Accompanied . . . with his own compleat / Perfections ; and
as for Eve, no thought inrm / Alterd her cheek, as if they were both
standing particularly tall for the appearance of Raphael, the Healer, his
patients anxious to be given a clean bill of health (Raphael in Hebrew
comes from Rapha [he has healed] and El [a name for God], hence
God-has-healed) (209, 3523, 3845).
In contrast, the garden is behaving rather badly. As ever, it is over-
wild and needs attending to (21115), but now the volume of disorder is
turned up:
for Nature here
Wantond as in her prime, and plaid at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wilde above Rule or Art; enormous bliss. (2947)
Nature earlier had been wanton ; now nature usurps the word and verbs
it, Wantond carrying a certain stagger and clash next to Virgin. If
Adam and Eve are feeling better after a prayer, their surroundings are
creeping up behind them. The ecosystem of Eden is not balanced:
the Sun now shines down more warmth then Adam needs (302). As
Danielson has remarked, this is incompatible with the Augustinian model
examined earlier, where there was no laughter in Eden, no crying, and it
was never too hot or too cold. (Miltons couple, in contrast, do manage
one laugh, though not very convincingly, at an elephant, and Eve blushes
(4.3457, 8.511).)
19
Raphael will always suffer from a certain post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc-ism:
he told Adam (and it seems in the earshot of Eve: see 9.2767) all about
sin, they sinned, and so one caused the other.
20
Raphael has an unenviable
job, because God has told him that man will fall, and Raphael can scarcely
be comfortable with the kinds of stories he has to tell after lunch in
paradise. He is sent, so the Argument to Book 5 states, to render Man
inexcusable, a strongly Calvinist statement, and his recounting of dis-
obedience and warfare rather than, say, edifying psalm-singing, does not
inspire hope.
21
Adam himself admits to Raphael though what thou tellst /
Hath past in Heavn, som doubt within me move (5534). Raphaels long
narration does not explicitly argue out the free-will problem, preferring
instead the genre of history (8.67). Its metaphysical underlay, however,
was so obvious to a reader like Dryden that in The State of Innocence he
stripped away the history, and set Adam to argue explicitly with two
angels about free will.
The war in heaven is a theological necessity, because without it the
Tempter in Eden remains just a mysterious snake, and not the instrument
of a freshly-fallen devil. But it has always had an indistinct epistemological
status, and the scarcest of biblical support. Many tried not to mention it
at all ; we saw that Lucy Hutchinson, for instance, got rid in two-and-a-
half lines of a process Milton spun out to some 2,149 verses across three
books (5.5637.892): But circumstances that we cannot know / Of their
rebellion and their overthrow / We will not dare tinvent.
22
Milton does
dare to invent, although Raphael is sensitive to the problem of how to
explain such things to two innocents: I shall delineate so, / By likning
spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best (5.5724). Raph-
ael, however, is promising Adam and Eve not metaphor but simile
likening, as if the realms are close enough to be likened and do not
require the heavy-duty mechanics of metaphor, which superimposes
different, unlike things. And perhaps Raphaels original speech was suc-
cessful, because he, a nonlapsarian, was speaking to prelapsarians, states
seemingly at least contiguous. But this merely seems possible; the reader
holds only a paper report in a quite different setting.
Raphael continues: though what if Earth / Be but the shaddow of
Heavn, and things therein / Each to other like, more then on earth is
thought? (5.5746). Raphael, though, does not answer his question: are
they, or are they not?
23
The next time Raphael addresses the status of his
narration (so call / That Structure in the Dialect of men / Interpreted)
(5.7602) what had been simile now appears closer to metaphor, and
metaphor superimposes different, rather than likening similar, things.
Still further into the battle, both metaphor and simile are ousted in favour
of something unquantiable, something literally unspeakable:
They ended parle, and both addresst for ght
Unspeakable; for who, though with the tongue
Of Angels, can relate, or to what things
Liken on Earth conspicuous, that may lift
Human imagination to such highth
Of Godlike Power. (6.296301)
Raphael, it seems, grows less condent of communicative valence. Simile
is replaced by metaphor, and then by aporia. His rst rhetorical question,
though unanswered, sues for a yes : perhaps things on Earth are like
things in heaven. His nal question, who . . . can relate, conversely,
expects the answer, no-one. Later, Raphael admits Heavn is for thee too
high / To know what passes there (8.1723).
Furthermore, Raphael quotes Lucretius: likning spiritual to corporal
forms almost exactly translates a line from the following passage, a
passage with ramications for Raphaels larger task:
I will expound to you many consolations in words of wisdom; lest by some
chance bridled by superstition you think that Earth and Sun and sky, sea, stars
and Moon are of divine body and must abide forever; and should therefore
believe it right that, like the giants, all they should suffer punishment for a
monstrous crime, who with their reasoning shake the walls of the world, and
would quench the shining light of the Sun in heaven, tarnishing things immortal
with mortal speech [inmortalia mortali sermone notantes]; although these things are
so far distant from the power of divinity and unworthy to be found in the
number of the gods, that they should rather be thought to show forth in
themselves what that is, which has neither lively motion nor feeling.
24
Lucretius and Milton are in eschatological agreement: the world will end
in a conagration. But Lucretius is also pointing out, if to defend himself
against the charge, that some consider such literary attempts to be impious,
shaking the walls of the world and talking about things using the wrong
language. Such people liken the Lucretian attempt to the crime of the
giants who warred against heaven. In Christian typology, of course, these
are the fallen angels Raphael is recasting a line applied to people likened
to bad angels, and saying that is how he intends to proceed. Like Lucretius,
Raphael acknowledges the danger, and rebuts it, but unlike Lucretius he
can only do so by an appeal to authority: it is dispenct by God:
how last unfould
The secrets of another world, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal ? yet for thy good
This is dispenct. (5.56871)
[Y]et for thy good compare to render Man inexcusable. Raphael and
his Lucretian line, despite their apologies both plead that their projects
are, nally, licit evoke the wrong category of agents: the giants, or fallen
angels.
Regardless of how Adam and Eve evaluate Raphaels battle poetry, the
postlapsarian reader nds the text in hand occasionally surreal, even comic
in its course. Moloc (oddly, he drops his nal h after 1.417) is sliced in
two, and then runs away: Down clovn to the waste, with shatterd Armes
/ And uncouth paine ed bellowing (6.3612). As with the uncouth
swain of Lycidas, uncouth is again closer to unknowable than un-
known here, and can bear Skinners senses noted earlier of ugliness too.
Severed angels reassemble:
so sore
The griding sword with discontinuous wound
Passd through him, but th Ethereal substance closd
Not long divisible . . . (6.32831)
Armour is worn to imperil rather than to defend; it actually hinders the
escape of the angels buried under their mountains, as they have to leak out
of their creel-like boxes ere they could wind / Out of such a prison
(6.65960). Although the angels can shape-shift They Limb themselves,
and colour, shape or size / Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare
(6.3523) they never take the simple option of incarnating themselves as
weapons, nor do the fallen angels disguise themselves as unfallen angels.
There is a sense of arrested science-ction here, as if members of some
vastly superior alien culture were dutifully playing a game to rules they
could easily break. So when Raphael says Warr seemd a civil Game / To
this uproar (6.6678) he does not, from our point of view, convince; it is
conversely the heavenly calamity that looks like the real game. Samuel
Johnson had some related reaction to this book when he derisively styled
it the favourite with children clearly they had different children then.
25
Indeed, it is difcult to understand how the prelapsarian couple appre-
hend much of what Raphael says. When, for instance, Raphael describes
the waters of creation as Armies . . . (for of Armies thou hast heard)
(7.2956), the only armies Adam has heard of are the ones Raphael
himself described in the previous book. But they had been unlike what
the reader would recognise as such: airborne, immortal, only one-third
subject to pain. Johnson again noticed exactly this kind of problem:
commenting on the Son, who as a Heard / Of Goats or timerous ock
together throngd / Drove them [the apostates] before him (6.8568),
Raphael in a comparison, speaks of timorous deer [sic], before the deer
were yet timorous, and before Adam could understand the comparison.
Johnson further commented variously if dogmatically that Paradise Lost
could not teach manners, as none existed before the Fall ; that few passions
could be shown, for the same reasons; that the state of innocence was
impossible to represent accurately, because a state of innocence we can
only conceive, if indeed, in our present misery ; that to nd sentiments
for the state of innocence was very difcult; and something of anticipa-
tion perhaps is now and then discovered ; that the man and woman who
act and suffer are in a state which no other man or woman can ever
know ; and, nally, that we retire harassed from the poem.
26
Johnsons criticisms are not fair, because it is impossible for Milton to
meet them: Johnson assumes the ontological barrier of the Fall to be
absolute, and then blames Milton for not being able to do anything about
it. Although Johnson does not give Milton enough credit for his careful
uncertainties and indirections, incorporated to evade such objections, he
does put his nger on a major problem in the intellectual fabric of the
poem. He too, however, can slip into treating Adam and Eve as if they
were children, and not the mature philosophers who usually accompany
the idea of the Fall as an ontological barrier. Adams discourse of dreams,
he complains, seems not to be the speculation of a new-created being.
27
Raphaels most famous lesson, or lack of one, is his discussion on
astronomy. The discussion contrasting the old and new astronomy, and
its adaptation of the controversy of Alexander Ross (a Ptolemaic) and
John Wilkins (a Copernican) is well known.
28
More importantly, neither
system describes Miltons prelapsarian Universe, which is based, as Fowler
explains, on the coincidence of ecliptic and equatorial planes:
The universe of P[aradise] L[ost] is by contrast [to Copernican, Ptolemaic,
Tychonic
29
etc. systems] a visionary, perfected one. With striking originality,
Milton has constructed an entire ctive astronomy, based on a premise untrue
for the present world. His premise, that the ecliptic and equatorial planes
coincide, has not been true since the Fall. So he has to work out its implications
with ingenuity reminiscent of science ction (e.g., iii 55561; iv 20916, 354f; v
1825; x 328f ). Like Plato and Augustine, Milton believes creation is by number
and measure this grand book, the universe . . . is written in the language of
mathematics [Galileo]. The geometry of Miltons invented unfallen world is
elegantly simple and exhilaratingly easy to visualize. Its day and night are
always equal, its sun remains constantly in the same sign, and the positions of its
constellations are easily determined without astrolabe or planisphere. There are
no variations in solar declination, no equinoctial points, no precession, no
difference between sidereal, natural, and civil days. This lucid, rational world can
be seen as guring a simple innocence now lost. In consequence of the Fall, the
prelapsarian, Golden Age stasis changes to crooked movements: the sun begins
its oblique seasonal journey and the stars their precession. A Platonic Great Year,
a cycle of decay, sets in (v 583; x 651706).
30
When he was younger, Milton wrote in Naturam non pati senium that
the world had been instituted with a given structure that would endure
until the conagration. This, we noted, may have been Milton taking
sides in the GoodmanHakewill debate, in which case at that time he was
rmly in the Hakewill camp. By Paradise Lost Milton is in retrogression.
Now the world is not only worse than it once was, and tomorrow will be
worse than it is today, but the entire cosmic structure and the dizzyingly
complex mathematics required to model it are themselves expressions of
confusion, sin and decay. Men as different as Francis Bacon and Robert
Everard had attacked those who sought to extend the corruption caused
by the Fall out of mans moral sphere and into the external world. For
Milton, occasionally called a Baconian or a radical, the Fall not only
damaged our ability to describe, but it cracked the frame of the cosmos.
To this extent, no work embodies a more devastating, literally cata-
strophic vision of the Fall.
31
Earlier in Paradise Lost Milton had allowed a brief, heretical thought to
stray into the poem, as Satan passes other worlds:
Through the pure marble Air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable Starrs, that shon
Stars distant, but nigh hand seemd other Worlds,
Or other Worlds they seemd, or happy Iles,
Like those Hesperian Gardens famd of old,
Fortunate Fields, and Groves and ourie Vales,
Thrice happy Iles, but who dwelt happy there
He stayd not to enquire. (3.56471)
This picks up on an old problem discussed by Campanella in his Apologia
pro Galileo:
I pass without comment the opinion that Galileo has revived the heresy that
Christ must make atonement for the men who inhabit the stars and die there
again; just as formerly it was said that Christ must be crucied a second time in
the antipodes, if the men living there were to be saved as we have been saved.
If the inhabitants which may be in other stars are men, they did not originate
from Adam and are not infected by his sin. Nor do these inhabitants need
redemption, unless they have committed some other sin.
32
(Milton probably had his memory jogged by reading Wilkins on the new
planet, that is, the Moon; Wilkins cited and discussed Campanella on this
issue.)
33
The dangerous idea is that there may be beings not . . . infected
with Adams sinne, and that would have to limit the Fall to humankind.
But Milton is soon asserting the unique status of Eden; there are no
others: Hesperian Fables true, / If true, here only (4.2501). By the time
Eve has taken the apple there is no doubt that this is not just a minor,
human drama, but something with immediate cosmic consequences:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all
her Works gave signs of woe / That all was lost (9.7824). The roses on
Adams abortive garland have already faded before they hit the ground
(893). At Adams fall, Earth trembld from her entrails, as again / In
pangs, and Nature gave a second groan (10001). God later sends out a
cohort of angels to drag the heavenly bodies from their former courses:
Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse
The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the Suns Axle; they with labour pushd
Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun
Was bid turn Reines from thEquinoctial Rode. (10.66872)
Even at this moment, though, Milton is anxious to preserve some dis-
tance: Some say, he says, Som say . . .
chapter 1 1
Paradise Lost I V : Fall and expulsion
The Cosmos itself feels the Fall, but we now backtrack and return to its
human counterparts. The possibility of a fall is well prepared by the
beginning of Book 9, and when it does take place the heavens alter too.
It is also noteworthy that nature feels the Fall twice, once for each sex.
Milton therefore treats both the feminine and the masculine falls as
equally damaging, despite Gods habit of talking solely about man.
Henry Vaughan has been cited as accepting the cosmic crack theory of
the Fall, but he too imagined it as a masculine-driven cataclysm: He drew
the Curse upon the world, and Crakt / The whole frame with his fall,
echoing the commentators typological feel that Adams sin was the more
important of the two.
1
Adam and Eve are carefully inoculated with the formula yet sinless
before this event; the narratorial voice protests as it must that evil has
not yet entered in. Adam is yet sinless at 7.61, before the narration
of creation and the astronomy discussion, whereas Eve last receives this
tag at 9.659, as she opens her mouth to reply to the serpents question
about whether and why the tree is forbidden. This sinlessness is voiced
very late indeed in Eves case, as if to reafrm, against the narrative
movement, that sin is only, mysteriously present at and with the actual
taking itself.
The notion of mindlessness, in contrast to sinlessness, is introduced via
a play on the term vehemence, from the Latin vehementia, literally
away-from-mind, mindlessness. It is present in the Argument, where
Adam resolves through vehemence of love to perish with Eve. Adam had
earlier characterised his mental serenity to Raphael as nding In all things
else delight indeed, but such / As usd or not, works in the mind no
change, / Nor vehement desire (8.5246). Eve also suggests suicide at the
end of Book 10 with vehement despaire (10.1007). But Adam continues
his discussion of his emotions with Raphael by confessing that one thing
does rock his calm: his wife.
182
but here
Farr otherwise, transported I behold,
Transported touch; here passion rst I felt,
Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else
Superiour and unmovd, here onely weake
Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance.
Or Nature faild in mee, and left some part
Not proof enough such Object to sustain,
Or from my side subducting, took perhaps
More then enough; at least on her bestowd
Too much of Ornament, in outward shew
Elaborate, of inward less exact. (8.52839)
This is a terrible admission, as Raphael knows: Adam says, in addition to
tracing the origin of passion to his reactions to Eve, that he is not entirely
sure what goes on inside her mind (of inward less exact). In both The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and in the debate between Adam and
God in Paradise Lost, the creation of Eve is the crowning of nature. In the
divorce tract Milton underplayed the role of sex, calling Adams lack of
Eve a rational burning ; in the epic, he revised this opinion, but neverthe-
less made sure that his narrator, as we saw, remained tactically uncertain
about the sex act itself.
Adam here wrecks both tactics. Augustines Adam, had he wanted to,
would have appointed his passionless erections: those parts of the body
were not impelled by turbulent ardour but brought into play by a
voluntary exercise of capacity as the need arose.
2
Not Miltons Adam,
here onely weake. Grotius Adamus, again, only manifested such uxor-
iousness after the Fall with his even worse: for you, my wife, what would
I deny? At your command, Id slight God.
3
But at least Adamus was
fallen; Miltons Adam is scarcely less bold when he suggests that Nature
may have faild in mee, a locution that encompasses both external and
internal natures. And his conclusion, full of serpentine aspirants, seem-
ings, and pretensions to self-groundedness, is not all that different from
fallen Adamus:
so absolute she seems
And in her self compleat, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best. (8.54750)
Raphael opens his rebuttal by reafrming the guiltlessness of nature:
Accuse not Nature, she hath don her part (561). Adam is better than
Eve, Raphael reminds him, and if he manages her well she will to realities
Paradise Lost I V : Fall and expulsion 183
yield all her shows (575). But this is scarcely a more comforting alterna-
tive. Adam says that Eve excites him; Raphael says that she unmans him,
and that this is in some sense what she does naturally so she has to be
taught to subserve such shows to the manly reality. Raphael ends up
replicating the very problem he had tried to correct in Adam: is or is not
Eves effect on Adam as nature designs? For whatever reason Raphael only
half-convinces Adam, who replies to him half abasht (595), an admission
which compromises not only the content of his reply to Raphael but the
extent to which he can convincingly be called yet sinless ; he is not so
termed again.
This discussion with Raphael is crucial insofar as it makes Adams
potential waywardness a waking choice, something signicantly different
from Eves initial, wordless stumblings to her pool and her later, satanic-
ally inuenced dream. Adam, in contrast, talks quite openly, even with
levity, as if it made sense to talk of too much being taken from his side.
This is sensitive planning by Milton: on the one hand, he does lean
heavily on the relative imperfection of Eve, heavily enough to endorse her
downward-looking, mute creation in opposition to vocal, upright Adam.
But he also makes Adam bear his share of responsibility. He is the one
who enters the book of the Fall vocally wayward, as he was created vocally
on track. Eve remains both to Adam, and to the reader, in outward shew
/ Elaborate, of inward less exact, less elaborate therefore, both in the
sense of less produced or accomplished by labour, and, more interest-
ingly, less worked out in much detail ; highly nished.
4
Creation may
have been concluded with the appearance of Eve, but is she herself fully
nished?
Eve strays rst, a further indication that when Eves relative imper-
fection is translated into narrative terms, it most frequently results in a
more ratiocinative, argumentative being than her husband. It is she who
decides to depart from Adam in their gardening without any immediate
external prompting Satan has been absent from Eden for a week now
conrming that, as Augustine said, the decision to become evil has to
take place internally and before the temptation itself. Eves argument,
moreover, is familiar:
till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint, what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wilde. (9.20712)
This at once shows that Eve is still thinking ahead (till more hands), a
capacity visible in her very rst speech in the epic, and has also learned
one new tactic of persuasion the repetition of an interlocutors argu-
ments back to them (we call this attery). Adam himself had rst used the
wanton growth argument to get Eve out of bed and to work (4.62432);
here it is used to separate them, though there is not much difference
in content. Even the narrator agreed that paradise Wantond as in her
prime (5.295).
Adam discourses, but Eve argues, wresting control of their conversation
from him: Thou therefore now advise / Or hear (9.21213), she revises.
Adams subsequent doubt at her plan is met by the narrator with a
distancing simile: As one who loves, and some unkindness meets (271),
the As dissociating Eves reaction, though only half so, from real annoy-
ance. Eve then tells Adam that she eavesdropped on his long discourse
with Raphael, an admission that suggests both her mental curiosity and a
certain ability to skulk (9.2767).
This rapidly better-informed, argumentative being also uses words
absent from Adams lexicon. Adams doubt, she explains, plain inferrs
lack of trust in his wife (285). She uses the word inferrs again, immedi-
ately before the Fall (754). The only other being in the epic to use this
clever-sounding term is Raphael, twice, to Adam (7.116, 8.91); so Adam,
Raphaels intended audience, hears it and doesnt pick it up, while
Eve hanging back in her shadie nook (9.277) potentially did, and
remembered it.
Eves vehemence may be branded as mindless as she gardens unawares,
mindless the while, / Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour (4312);
again, at the Fall, she knew not eating Death (792), double syntax that
can also be read as not knowing while eating death. But this mindless-
ness is more a moral comment than a continuation of the kind of drowsy
unintellection she displayed in the moments following her creation. Eve
may be much deceavd, much failing, hapless Eve (404), but the move-
ment of her mind is exciting, as Satan had promised: Hence I will excite
their minds (4.522). [F]ailing, hapless is itself a phonetic warping away
from the purer falling, helpless ; a related instance is Marvells Insnard
with Flowrs, I fall on Grass, a distortion of the expected . . . fall from
grace.
5
Eve is not, to be sure, suddenly the grand philosopher. She expresses
ignorance of whatever thing Death be (9.695), much as Adam had in
Book 4 (4256). But she now possesses a mobility of thought and a depth
that is immediately attractive. She also speaks the language of magic trees
in her hope that dieted by thee [the apple] I grow mature / In knowledge
(9.8034). Such an idea, which we saw was held by writers inuenced by
Boehme and Paracelsus, is then accelerated into a Gnostic judgement on
God, who becomes Our great Forbidder, safe with all his Spies (815).
Soliloquy is also discovered by the falling Eve, just before taking the apple:
to her self she musd (744), and Adamtoo will soliloquise before his actual
transgression: First to himself he inward silence broke (895). Further-
more this gestures towards the internal quiescence the prelapsarians had
hitherto possessed and are now moving beyond.
Discourse in the earlier books had been public, uncombative and rather
slow-moving. During and after the Fall, however, speech gains new
movement and independence. Adams rst soliloquy is not a reasoned
debate with himself, but an imagined address to Eve; Eves rst speech to
Adam after her fall is quick, paratactic, elliptical. This Tree is not as we
are told, she blurts, not bothering, as she would have hitherto, to dene
which tree she is talking about (863). Has Eve perhaps discovered the use
of gesture in communication? Her speech bursts out, neglecting the
careful syntactic structuring of unfallen discourse, but nonetheless acti-
vated in a manner previously lacking, nors, ors, ands and buts
barnacling upon each other.
Adam too needs remarkably little convincing; his own resolution to fall
comes on a sudden swerve in the apparent direction of his thought:
som cursed fraud
Of Enemie hath beguild thee, yet unknown
And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die. (9047)
The word unknown is the last we see of the unknown, unknowable
Adam Adam in innocence. His fall is indeed not deceavd (998), but
this means that phrases such as cursed fraud no longer function in the
way they once did. When Adam named the beasts already pass[ing] by
him this betokened an understanding of Thir Nature : I namd them,
as they passd, and understood / Thir Nature, with such knowledg God
endud / My sudden apprehension (8.35254). In innocence this under-
standing would have been directive: understanding burning, for in-
stance, carries understanding of being burnt, and therefore directs one
to avoid touching any burning materials. This is no longer true of Adam
in his rst speech to fallen Eve, because he knows what cursed fraud is,
and that it has happened in paradise, but is no longer willing to act on this
knowledge. If Adam before the word unknown was himself somewhat
unknown, Adam after it is unknowable in a new and different sense he
is untrustworthy. When he takes the fruit he too mimics Eve and the
Paracelsans in his vain hope that the apple will indeed bestow a real,
chemical promotion (9357), an idea that is only partially negated by the
poem. After all Adam and Eve do feel drunk and lusty immediately after
their Fall, and suddenly fall asleep after sex (100844).
Now perturbation wreaks full havoc in paradise: Thir inward State of
Mind, calm Region once / And full of Peace, now tost and turbulent
(11256). [P]erturbation, the Augustinian perturbatio, is itself named at
10.113; this new human emotion is held in careful distinction from the
angels, whose concern at their failure in Eden nevertheless violated not
thir bliss (10.25). But perturbation also brings with it conversational
momentum and a new category of image, well explored in Miltons prose
and earlier poetry. This is based on the composites of a fallen world, the
winds, for instance, as Adam says with Lycidan diction, shattering the
graceful locks / Of these fair spreading Trees (10667). Eve is now this
fair defect (891).
As in Adamus exul, fallen Eve behaves much better than Adam does.
She offers to intercede and assume all the blame (10.91436). Adams
dismissal of her offer by means of the argument that, if prayers could help,
then Adam would make the same offer (9527), is tarnished by his
previous heaping of all the blame on Eve when their heavenly judge
descended, and his failure to pray alone or assume sole responsibility at
the close of the tenth book. Adams decision to fall nds Leonard and
Empson in partnership again: Adams death is not a sacrice at all.
As Empson remarks in Miltons God, Adam never says that he expects
his action to help [Eve]; he merely will not take the risk of living without
her.
6
And Adam is still blaming woman for sin much later in the poem:
But still I see the tenor of Mans woe / Holds on the same, from Woman
to begin (11.6323).
Science and the Fall are also explicitly linked. Adam now reveals
himself to possess keen inventiveness, projecting
how we his [the Suns] gatherd beams
Reected, may with matter sere foment,
Or by collision of two bodies grinde
The Air attrite to Fire. (10.10703)
The Fall is occasioning experimental advance rather than, as in the
Enoch/Promethean tradition, mechanical advance being the Fall. Indeed
an echo of the Enochian origin of the crafts and sciences is preserved by
Milton at 9.3912: But with such Gardning Tools as Art yet rude, /
Guiltless of re had formd, or Angels brought, the phrase Guiltless of
re recalling Prometheus in a context of trowel-bearing angels. If man is
guiltless of re, who was guilty? The answer, Prometheus, stands in
ethical opposition to the angels, who are revealed in passing to have been
supplying Adam and Eve all along with whatever gardening equipment
they could not make themselves. These angelic tools, being opposed (or
Angels brought) to the unsmelted products of Eden, may well be metal ;
Adam and Eve thus garden before the Fall with tools that in human
terms can only be fallen instruments. Momentarily, the evil angels ex-
trapolated by the Enoch tradition from Genesis 6, the gure of Prome-
theus warring on and punished by a tyrant god, and the good angels with
their trowels unfashionable in Eden, are superimposed.
When ejecting Adam and Eve from the garden, God explains that
the garden itself expels Adam and Eve as a natural reaction: Those
pure immortal Elements that know / No gross, no unharmoneous
mixture foule, / Eject him tainted now (11.502). But this is not so: Eden
itself has been decaying since Adams faded garland, and the animals
within are already glaring on Adam in a manner far from harmonious
(9.71014). There is no need for them to look for disorder further aeld
than their own garden, which indeed had always been tending to wilde
(9.212).
Finally, God employs troublesome vocabulary when he mentions
tter soil to which Adam and Eve must now be transplanted, a formula-
tion his Son repeats exactly to the fallen pair (11.968, 2602). But this
insinuates that paradise was always just a little too good for its
occupants. Even if it were correct, this would still approach the problem
discussed in Chapter 2, when Adam in scholastic thought was discussed
as having a pure nature to which the donum supernaturale of original
righteousness was added in Eden, but which could be retracted without
altering Adams nature qua human.
7
This distinction, rmly rejected by
the magisterial Reformers, inhabits language of veils or clothing, and
9.105462 rehearses this idea, with reference to Miltons last long poem
to be published:
innocence, that as a veile
Had shadowd them from knowing ill, was gon,
Just condence, and native righteousness
And honour from about them, naked left
To guiltie shame hee coverd, but his Robe
Uncoverd more, so rose the Danite strong
Herculean Samson from the Harlot-lap
Of Philistean Dalilah, and wakd
Shorn of his strength. (9.105462)
On the one hand, God says that man always had a tter soil than
paradise; on the other, even paradise was never a stable environment.
Was there ever a paradise to be lost?
The answer is still yes. Miltons entire conception of language and
writing is informed by the fact of the Fall. Classics of Milton criticism like
Ricks Miltons Grand Style and Leonards Naming in Paradise operate by
excavating the epistemological consequences of lapsarianism, registered in
wordplay and the problem of naming things aright. That Miltons text is
so richly amenable to such approaches suggests that Milton shared this
conviction. Again, his theological commitments, as evinced by the epic,
the De doctrina, and his preceding poetry and prose, demonstrate an
ongoing interest in and recognition of the difculties of writing about
such an event from the perspective of the wrong side of the divide. Even
in the earliest drafts for a drama on the idea of the Fall, Milton pointed up
the problem of explaining the Fall itself, indeed simply missing it out, and
in this he differed from his probable model, Grotius Adamus exul. His
nal result is a fraught, experimental piece, obsessively Arminian in its
constant emphasis on choice, even to the point of suggesting that God
could and can and might ordain / His dark materials to create more
Worlds (2.91516).
8
Where the Arminian and the Calvinist in Milton
agree, as Calvinist and Arminian agreed at the Synod of Dort, is in their
shared estimation of fallen man. This clouds his apprehension of truth-in-
itself, and so the causality of evil, as in the thought of Augustine, is
enshrouded in narrative circularities and rhetorical loops, and is no longer
capable of strict logical analysis.
9
The text of the epic itself insists variously
that it is divinely inspired, and that it is still a secondary thing, a report of
an earlier inspiration.
This approaches now and then what might be termed negative accom-
modation the understanding that not only are the ways of God when
translated into human language rewritten in terms that man can under-
stand, and so simplied down to his level, but that any such writing may
indeed falsify what really happens with God. This is not a consequence
Miltons epic narrator cares to admit openly, but his constant recourse to
the harassing negative Not that faire eld of Enna . . . Nor that Nyseian
Ile (4.268, 275) shows that he is rhetorically committed to obstructing
access: many other aspects of the epic, such as the deferral of inspiration
back into the night, and Raphaels unsure purchase on his own narration,
buttress this sense. This problem of accommodation goes back at least to
Hesiod, whose muses told him: We know how to tell many believable
lies, / But also, when we want to, how to speak the plain truth.
10
Miltons
narrators muse is not openly so janiform, but in his time the problem
persisted, and was addressed eloquently by Jacob Bauthumley in the
pamphlet that caused his tongue to be bored through with a hot iron.
As Bauthumley told his mysterious God:
I say thou art innite, but what that is I cannot tell, because I am nite. And
therefore I am led to believe, that whatsoever thy Scripture, or any man else
speaks of thee, it is but thy meer condescention to speak to us in the language of
men, and so we speak of thee to one another.
For this I know, that whatever the Scripture, or any man else speakes what
thou art, I know thou art not that, because no man can say what thou art.
11
Miltons epic nevertheless registers many subversive treatments of the Fall
available to him; biographically, it would have been almost impossible for
Milton not to have known the types of speculation circulating in interreg-
num London. But Milton grew ever more reluctant to name and shame
individual sects and their heresies, gradually developing instead a model of
heresy and orthodoxy as dynamically intertwined processes, necessary to
each other, an approach modern commentators are beginning to appreciate
and imitate.
12
And in fact almost all the radical questions asked of the Genesis
narrative are raised at points in Paradise Lost, however indirectly: issues
of metaphysical dualism, of obscured causality, of the mental and physical
status of Adam and Eve in creation, of prelapsarian sex, of autochthony,
of other worlds, of the freedom of the will, of the nature of the forbidden
tree, and so on. Nor is this simply to be seen as Milton engaging with the
heterodox texts spreading such ideas; narrative creates its own heresies,
and they permeate the entire poem, the propulsive principles that render
Adam and Eve and their world mobile. Narrative necessity parallels but is
not itself necessarily a conscious importation of heretical tenets from
external sources. But regardless of whether we decide to discuss such
tenets as of internal or external origin, or both, Milton is in general
very suspicious of all the types of thinking we earlier surveyed emanating
from the radical milieu. When the Franckian exhortation to return to a
prelapsarian lifelessness is voiced Adams How gladly would I . . . / . . .
be the Earth / Insensible (10.7757) it is rejected. Mortalism is only
found in the problematic mouth of Adam at 10.792. The notion that the
arbor scientiae was a genuinely potent tree is mooted by both Adam and
Eve immediately before the Fall, and is supposed to be felt as false. These
are ideas with clear indices in the speculations of Miltons time, and
Paradise Lost engages with but does not endorse them.
Miltons view of man, nally, xes some necessary degree of creaturely
limitation into the structure of his poem. He would have rejected, for
instance, the heady freedom of a Pico della Mirandola, whose God tells
Adam he can be what he chooses:
We have given to thee, Adam, no xed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift
peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as
thine own the seat, the form, the gifts that thou shalt desire . . . . Neither
heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou,
like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself ;
thou mayest sculpt thyself into what ever shape thou dost prefer.
13
Miltons God would never talk like this; it is the devils who would and do
entertain such notions of self-manufacture. Pico and Augustine, though
both Platonists, fundamentally diverge on this point, and Milton, also a
Platonist to some degree, sides rmly with the father. Man has his degree
a little below the angels. Earlier in his life, Milton could echo Picos
examine all writings, recognize every school with his studious heads
Read[ing] any books, trying all things in Areopagitica, but this is not
the voice of the older epic poet.
14
There are two lasting tensions in Miltons views on matter and sin. The
rst stems from Miltons belief in creation ex Deo and not ex nihilo.
Augustine had traced the waywardness of mans nature and the danger of
self-grounding to the problem of mans origin metaphysically ex nihilo
and materially ab limo, from clay. The swerve in the will to which man is
subject is therefore specically because his origin is utterly undivine.
Milton, however, favoured an emanationist scheme, in Paradise Lost as
in the de Doctrina:
one Almightie is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depravd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one rst matter all,
Indud with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more rend, more spiritous, and pure,
As neerer to him plact or neerer tending
Each in thir several active Sphears assignd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportiond to each kind. (5.46979)
If, for Milton, man materially originates from God, then the made from
dust excuse no longer has the kind of signicance it did in the orthodox
schema of creation ex nihilo: indeed, one could say that it now has the
opposite force. Yet the man of clay idea is increasingly appealed to as
the epic proceeds, especially after the Fall (4.416, 5.516, 7.525, 9.176,
10.7434, 748, 770, 1085, 11.199, 463, 529). It also means that the problem
of evil persists, because Augustinian phraseology is being applied in a
system working on different axioms.
The second problem is a consequence of the rst. Milton, as we have
seen, makes great currency of the ontological consequences of the Fall, an
equally incongruous belief for one elsewhere holding an emanatory
understanding of matter, where, following Raphael, there should be only
degrees of being, not fractures between them. But these two problems,
despite their particularly tensile situation in Milton, have informed the
Christian tradition at large since the patristic age: the Platonist inherit-
ance of Western philosophy has always had trouble with the notion of sin
as a real thing that blackens both the mind and the world. Milton merely
exacerbates this tension by tracing all matter back to God. Perhaps
Miltons mysterious Chaos and Ancient Night might provide, or indeed
be, the ghostly answers, though just out of grasp, shapeless and alien.
Finally the problem of whether the lower reality is a lesser degree of,
or a fracture from, the higher realm affects what kind of text we think
Paradise Lost is, and behind that, what kind of text the Bible itself
is. Paradise Lost is, of course, ction; something made: it is also, Milton
claims, divinely inspired; something given. A similar difculty obtains in
scripture. In the section Of God in the De doctrina, Milton insists both
that God is as he said he is in scripture, and that he is not really like that
at all :
It is safest for us to form an image of God in our minds which corresponds to his
representation and description of himself in the sacred writings. Admittedly, God
is always described or outlined not as he really is [in se est] but in such a way as will
make him conceivable to us. Nevertheless, we ought to form just such a mental
image of him as he, in bringing himself within the limits of our understanding,
wishes us to form. Indeed, he has brought himself down to our level expressly to
prevent our being carried beyond the reach of human comprehension, and outside
the written authority of scripture, into vague subtleties of explanation.
15
Miltons argument comprises two apparently incompatible levels. God,
Milton claims on the one hand, is indeed other, but we had best not talk
about this. On the other hand scripture gives us several instances of an
accommodated God who fears and grieves, but we had best not multiply
such examples beyond the walls of sacred writ.
16
Milton thus simultan-
eously endorses God as other but forbids further thought on this matter;
and endorses accommodated discourse, but forbids us to make any more
of it than already, problematically, exists. What he enables theoretically,
he disables practically; what he accepts practically, he bans theoretic-
ally. The metaphysician and the fundamentalist talk at odds out of the
same mouth.
This unpermitting doubleness inheres in Miltons use of the verb of
being: God, as he really is [in se est], is far beyond mans imagination, let
alone his understanding ; In short, God either is or is not really like he says
he is [aut in se talis est qualem se dicit esse, aut non est talis]. If he really is like
this [the fearing, grieving God], why should we think otherwise? If he is
not really like this, on what authority do we contradict God?
17
One in se
est describes the unaccommodated deity; the other the accommodated
version. Two quite distinct ontological states operate from one term.
Paradise Lost not only breaks but ransacks Miltons own injunction not
to dabble in non-biblical accommodation. But the result is something
that, like Miltons understanding of the ontology of scripture, is really
and is really not the case. Paradise Lost, divinely inspired, accommo-
dated, starts to query how secure divine scripture can be. Abiezer Coppe
had described his own writing as containing some things hard to be
understood, which they that are Unlearned, and unstable, wrest: as they
do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction.
18
Coppe is
quoting 2 Peter 3:16, but the idea of other Scriptures in this context
provokes the question: is Coppe saying that his own writing therefore
shares in scriptural status?
This problem of the permeability of scriptural and non-scriptural
texts was exposed by the Quaker apologist Robert Barclay in a long
passage that expresses with bold clarity the problems on the fringe of
Miltonic exegesis:
As to the Scripturs being a lled canon, I see no necessity of believing it. And, if
these men, that believe the Scripture to be the onely rule, will be consistent to
their own doctrin, they must needs be of my judgment: seeing it is simply
impossible to prove the canon by the Scripturs. For it can not be found in any
book of the Scriptur, that these books, and just these, and no other, are canonical,
as all are forced to acknowledg, how can they then evite this argument?
That, which cannot be proved by Scriptur, is no necessary article of faith: But
the canon of the Scriptur, to wit, that there are so many books precisely, neither
more nor less, cannot be proved by Scriptur:
Therefore, it is no necessary article of faith.
If they should alledg, that the admitting of any other books to be now written by
the same Spirit might inferr the admission of new doctrines,
I deny that consequence, for the principal or fundamental doctrines of the
Christian religion are contained in the tenth part of the Scriptur; but it will not
follow thence, that the rest are impertinent, or useless. If it should please God to
bring to us any of these books, which by the injury of time, are lost, which are
mentioned in the Scriptur, as, the Prophecy of Enoch; the Book of Nathan, &c., or
the third epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, I see no reason, why we might not
receive them, and place them with the rest. That, which displeaseth me, is, that
men should rst afrme, that the Scriptur is the onely and principal rule, and yet
make a great article of faith of that, which the Scriptur can give us no light in.
As for instance, how shall a Protestant prove, by Scriptur, to such as deny the
Epistle of James to be authentik, that it ought to be received?
First, if he should say, because it contradicts not the rest, (besides that there is no
mention of it in any of the rest) perhaps these men think it doth contradict Paul,
in relation to faith and works. But, if that should be granted, it would as wel
follow, that every writer, that contradicts not the Scriptur, should be put into the
canon. And by this means, these men fall into a greater absurdity, than they x
upon us; for thus they would equal every one the writings of their own sect with
the Scripturs, for I suppose they judg their own confession of faith doth not
contradict the Scripturs. Will it therefore follow that it should be bound up with
the Bible? And yet it seems impossible, according to their principles, to bring any
better argument, to prove the Epistle of James to be authentik.
19
Milton, in Paradise Lost, likewise creates something that looks upon
biblical text as parallel rather than unique scripture; and his own writing,
in exposing the sacred unveriability of the Bible, associates itself with
that eternally unfalsiable state.
20
This is the terminus of the inner light
theory underpinning the Reformation, and it is the terminus of Miltons
own writing. If the Bible is Gods property, so is Paradise Lost, though
God might do well to survey this particular asset with ambivalence.
Conclusion
John Rumrich, discussing Stanley Fishs inuential Surprised by Sin,
observed that Fishs Milton, who ensnares the reader only to correct,
was safe old Milton-the-Christian-Bard decanted into the new bottles
provided by reader response theory.
1
What had looked like Milton being
dangerous was merely Milton manipulating the reader. Rumrich con-
sidered this a bit of a cheat, and rightly so. This book has attempted to do
the opposite. The Milton presented here is again the dynamic, potentially
dangerous Milton, but located against a contemporary background of
countless other dynamic, potentially dangerous projects. In other words,
Fish, although apparently relying on contemporary readers of Genesis,
produced few contemporary readings of Genesis, and this seriously com-
promised his book.
I do hope that my contemporary readings provide at least drinkable
plonk. This book has stressed the structural, inherited problems Milton
faced, and this frees us from the limitations of reader response, which in
Fishs case was the construction of a robotically boring reader one, in
fact, who would probably not have bothered to read Paradise Lost at all.
Further, Milton and his ideas on the Fall are treated as yet another set of
reactions or tendencies, to be located in a larger network of philosophical,
theological and social possibilities. This is The Christian Tradition,
though absolutely not in the guise in which C. A. Patrides dressed it: as
a dull set of immobile dogmas, recognised by all, interesting to none. The
real tradition is full of sound and fury, both controlled by and controlling
its myriad users.
Finally, the content and argument of this book is that the reading of
Genesis 13 was one of the dening acts of early-modernity, as was
worrying about the problem of evil. To the former task the early-moderns
brought the latter concern, because, following the Christian tradition,
they thought that the metaphysical problem of evil was given narrative
expression and indeed narrative solution in the opening chapters of the
195
Bible. The solution, though, remained highly problematic, because the
verses in question supplied either not enough or the wrong information.
This, from the vantage of modern biblical criticism, has a simple explan-
ation: Genesis 23 was not constructed to solve the problem of evil. But
this was not an available option to most early-modern thinkers, who had
as yet little reason not to understand the Bible literally. Most notably, as
we saw, Genesis 3:22, where God appears to contradict his exegetes, was
therefore reclassied by most commentators as ironic, and hence the rst
joke in creation.
This book has also argued that the exegesis of Genesis 23 turns on one
of the missing pieces of information: how perfect was creation, and if it
was, what does that mean? We have seen a number of responses to this:
1. Man was created conditionally perfect: Sufcient to have stood,
though free to fall.
2. Man was created as a child; falling is all part of the learning process.
3. Our sinfulness has not only distorted our apprehensions, but it has
altered the nature of external reality. We have no access to the
Universe in its pristine state.
2
4. Our sinfulness has done nothing of the sort; even Adam would have
beneted from spectacles.
5. Do not discuss this issue.
The rst of these is the Augustinian line. It fell under increasing attack as
the period progressed, for a number of reasons. I have chosen a rather
cerebral tack in concentrating on certain logical problems within Augus-
tinianism, which usually end up forcing the enquirer to trudge backwards,
knock on the divine door, and receive no answer. Further reasons include
a renewed interest in Eastern patristic thought. Scientic methodologies
also often queried theological mechanisms for explaining the limitations of
human cognition, without denying those limitations. Again, Augustines
view of the Fall was closely connected to his ideas on predestination, the
inability of man to win grace for himself, and the damnation of the
majority of mankind. Unease at any of these components prompted
unease at them all. Thus, when challenging the principle man cannot
win grace (because his fall was so cataclysmic) the converse almost
inevitably took the form man can win grace (and so his fall was not
nearly as bad as you say).
The second statement is attractive from an anthropocentric point of
view, because it allows us to interpret the shape of sacred history as
imitating or imitated by the rhythms of the individual life: creation as a
child; maturation and fall into adolescence, with all its doubts and
worries; and nally adult reection. This fuelled not only the language
of various Civil War and Protectorate radicals, but also the writings of the
socially quiescent Thomas Traherne. This is a progressive position in the
sense that it looks to the future for nal explanations of present problems.
Creation is perfect in potential, not in act. On this understanding the
problem of evil is entirely misdirected; the question is to be answered, like
all questions, at a later date.
Nonetheless this did not impress most intellectuals. Perhaps the most
inuential example is Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire historique et cri-
tique, published from 1697 (see particularly the entries on Adam, Eve and
the Paulicians), exerted a ghastly pressure on the Edenic narrative, and
supplied it in turn with an equally ghastly set of defences. Bayle was
bleakly convinced that there was something inescapably exact about the
Augustinian translation of the metaphysical problem of evil into narrative
terms: God had to create man both perfect and mysteriously fallible, and
God had to know exactly what was going to happen. Bayle again and again
reduced so-called answers to the problem of evil to absurdity; contradic-
tion; or entailing modication of the original, Augustinian axioms.
3
The
conventional Calvinist account, conversely, was both irrefutable and ter-
rifying; as Calvin himself had confessed, It is a terrible decree, I graunt:
yet no man shalbe able to denie, but that God foreknew what end man
should haue, ere he created him, and therefore foreknew it bycause he had
so ordeyned by his decree.
4
With friends like Bayle, let alone Calvin,
Calvinism needed no enemies, and Bayles crushing and widely read union
of scepticism and deism arguably did more damage to the reputation of
Augustinian theodicy than any open attack it had ever faced.
The third reaction is the epistemological inection of the rst, as the
fourth is of the second. Those quite convinced that the Fall both was, and
was very terrible, could throw up their hands in pious perplexity when
argumentation failed, and use that very failure as proof that man must
be fallen, or the answers would all be obvious. This was also compatible
with saying that the external world suffered from the same problem.
Goodman, at the other end of this book, blamed his prose style on the
Fall. John Greene, a London feltmaker who wrote an experimental
pamphlet on Adam in 1643, watched his attempt to make sense of the
ways of God to men fall apart as he was writing, and was forced to
conclude not that God was unjust but that man had better retire from
the argument: Let us sit downe and say O! how unsearchable is his
wisedome, and his ways past nding out.
5
At this point, the third
Conclusion 197
reaction turns into the fth reaction, which was what Augustine had
counselled all along: so let no one seek from me to know what I know
that I do not know, except it be in order to learn how not to know what
we should know cannot be known.
6
Conversely, the view that the Fall was not so calamitous an event went
hand-in-hand with the estimation that the world is not in such a bad state,
and that telescopes and spectacles do have their advantages. This opti-
mism had its own problems, though, notably witnessed by the failure of
the various projects to construct a philosophical language in the later
seventeenth century, as just how philosophical such languages could ever
be fell under suspicion.
7
Corpuscular theories of matter, too, learned to be
silent on the ultimate nature of reality, distinguishing epistemology (what
we can know) from ontology (what actually is). Robert Boyle linked to
Adams fall the statement that competing mechanical models of matter
must remain at the level of hypothesis. Isaac Newton, nally, developed in
private an alchemical theory of matter reliant on nonmechanical causes;
and as his continental critics complained, his Principia mathematica
(1687) was innocent of any mechanical explanation of what gravity actu-
ally was.
8
The role of the Fall in later seventeenth-century science is for
another book, but the epistemological questions it posed remained, even
if and as the traditional biblical aetiology itself was challenged.
Nonetheless, arguments about the status of Gods creation were not to
be unshackled from the Genesis narrative for a long time after the age
of Milton, and Miltons poem continued to play a part in this debate.
An example is afforded by George IIs chaplain-in-ordinary, George
Shuckford, who appended to his Sacred and Profane History a dissertation
on The Creation and Fall of Man, in which he respectfully attacked
Miltons depiction of man in innocence: The representation he draws
is most delightfully poetical. But we can in no wise think considerately,
that Adam could as yet have thoughts like these upon the subject.
9
Eves
conversation with the serpent is an elegant ction, no more. Adam
simply cannot have been a very advanced being, because he behaves in
such a stupid fashion in Eden, disobeying and hiding. Nor did he name
the beasts in any magical or philosophical sense. Miltons ingenious
ction separates Eve from Adam for her fall ; again, this is not justied
by scripture.
10
This approach to Paradise Lost also informed Thomas Grays famous
Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College. There, Gray portrayed his
schoolchildren as mindless infants, whom thought will cause to fall. This
struck him as paradise:
Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense they have of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today;
. . . Yet ah! Why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly ies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
Tis folly to be wise.
11
The equation of innocence with childishness did not please all, and
theological objections continued into the nineteenth century. In the
fth edition of his work, for instance, Shuckfords opinions were trounced
by his nineteenth-century editor, James Creighton.
12
Accordingly,
Creighton appended a more acceptable exegesis of the matter by the
Hebraist Campegius Vitringa, thus binding two mutually exclusive ex-
planations in one volume.
13
Jeremy Taylors nineteenth-century editor
Reginald Heber applauded Taylors anti-Augustinianism; his reviser,
Charles Page Eden, chastised Hebers too sweeping censure of
Augustine.
14
The debate also continued in non-theological contexts. The question as
to whether mental perfection is best imagined as mental vacancy or as
hyperintelligence haunts the nal book of Swifts Gullivers Travels. The
Houyhnhnms resemble Edenic beasts, seemingly mentally perfect, their
wisdom an angelic intuitive rather than a discursive faculty, their minds
free of perturbation. But Houyhnhnm serenity has a touch of the lobot-
omy about it. Gullivers horses use sledges as if they had not got round to
inventing the wheel, let alone churches or microscopes; and despite their
celebrated reason, they cannot cope with the incursion of inferior,
civilised Gulliver, smart and subversive, the serpent who provokes the
rst debate and the rst real ratiocination ever to happen in this arrested
paradise. The Houyhnhnms, like Satan in his sole moment of peace in the
whole of Paradise Lost, are stupidly good.
15
Milton, however, spawned few theologically driven imitations, and it is
in that sense that Paradise Lost is both the culmination and the conclusion
of a tradition at least a millennium old. When Voltaire, for instance,
became interested in Milton, he found that the French could not under-
stand why an epic had been written upon the Subject of their Ballads.
16
Serious poetry was simply not written about such things.
Conclusion 199
Notes
I NTRODUCTI ON
1 Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man; or, the Corruption of Nature (London:
Richard Lee, 1616), p. 310.
2 Ibid., p. 214.
3 Ibid., pp. 23, 379.
4 Henry Vaughan, Silex scintillans (London: H. Blunden, 1650), p. 59.
5 John Milton, Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1645), p. 23.
6 See Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth-Century
Controversy over Disorder and Decay in the Universe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1949); Ronald W. Hepburn, George Hakewill : the virility of
nature, Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 13550.
7 George Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God (Oxford:
printed by John Licheld and William Turner, 1627), pp. 74, 236.
Subsequent editions (1630, 1635) were much expanded.
8 Francis Bacon, Of the Procience and Advancement of Learning (London:
Henrie Tomes, 1605), p. 3.
9 Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna (London: John Bill, 1620), p. 11.
10 Jan Amos Comenius, A Reformation of Schooles Designed in Two Excellent
Treatises (London: Michael Sparke Sr, 1642), p. 10.
11 Robert Hooke, Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute
Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: John Martin and James
Allestry, 1665), p. v.
12 George Fox, The Journal, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1952), p. 27; Patrick Grant, Original sin and the Fall of
man in Thomas Traherne, English Literary History 38 (1971): 4061.
13 Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable
John Earl of Rochester (London: Richard Chiswell, 1692), pp. 723.
14 William Poole, The Genesis narrative in the circle of Robert Hooke in
Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (eds.), Scripture and Scholarship in
Early-Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); H. W. Robinson and W.
Adams (eds.), The Diary of Robert Hooke M.A., M.D., F.R.S. 16721680
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), 18 December 1675.
200
15 Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity as the Same Is Held
Forth and Preached by the People Called in Scorn Quakers ([Aberdeen?]: s.n.,
1678), sgs. **3v[**4]r, pp. 6171.
16 Isaac La Peyre`re, Men before Adam (London: [Francis Leech], 1656), pp. 46
7; Marin Mersenne, Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, religieux minime,
ed. C. de Waard et al., 17 vols. (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 193288), vol. XV,
p. 98, letter to Andre Rivet of 15 February 1647.
17 See Chapter two below.
18 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: printed by Thomas
Orwin, 1588), sg. D8v.
19 Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp.
383431.
1 THE FALL
1 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha; or, the Natural Power of Kings (London: Walter
Davis, 1680), pp. 3, 12.
2 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London: printed by
Matthew Simmons, 1649), p. 8.
3 Robert South, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St Paul,
Novemb. 9, 1662 (London: Thomas Robinson, 1663), p. 12.
4 Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London: Rivington, 1728),
quoted in Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the
Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 139.
5 Abraham Cowley, Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1656), p. 29, On
the Death of Mr. Crashaw.
6 John Salkeld, A Treatise of Paradise (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1617), p.
123; Alexander Ross, The First Booke of Questions and Answers upon Genesis
(London: Francis Constable, 1620), p. 26.
7 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of
Women ([Geneva: printed by J. Poullain and A. Rebul], 1558), pp. 89.
8 Bodleian MS Rawl. D 1306, fol. 25r, and compare fol. 27r.
9 T[homas] E[dgar], The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (London: John
Grove, 1632), p. 8.
10 Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (London: Richard Bonian, 1611),
sg. D1r.
11 Catherine Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles 1500
1600: An Illustrated Catalogue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), pp. 224.
12 James Shirley, Poems &c. (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646), p. 70, The
Garden.
13 J[ohn] B[eale], Herefordshire Orchards (London: printed by Roger Daniel,
1657), p. 48; see further Nicholas von Maltzahn, The rst reception of
Paradise Lost (1667), Review of English Studies 47 (1996): 47999.
14 Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin (Cambridge: printed by John Legat,
1605), p. 33.
Notes to pages 511 201
15 Ralph Austen, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (Oxford: Thomas Robinson, 1657),
pp. 12, 30.
16 Thomas Browne, The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4
vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), vol. I V, p. 275; Graham Parry, John
Evelyn as hortulan saint in Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.),
Culture and Cultivation in Early-Modern England: Writing and the Land
(Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 13050.
17 David Jacques, John Evelyn and the idea of paradise, Landscape Design 124
(1978): 368.
18 John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, the Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 31, 33; Francis
Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London: Hanna Barret,
1625), p. 266.
19 John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, 2nd edn (London: John Martyn and
James Allestry, 1666), sg. B1r.
20 Mercurius fumigosus (London, 1655), no. 37, 714 February, in Andrew
Hopton (ed.), Roger Crab: The English Hermite and Dagons-Downfall
(London: Aporia Press, 1990), p. 4.
21 Roger Crab, Dagons-Downfall (London: s.n., 1657), p. 20.
22 Augustine, trans. Tobie Matthew, The Confessions of the Incomparable
Doctour S. Augustine ([St Omer: English College Press], 1620), p. 66;
Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson,
F. Lawrence and F. Dunton, 1696), pp. 2, 24.
23 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of
Natural Knowledge (London: John Martyn and James Allestry, 1667), sgs.
B1vB2r.
24 Obadiah Couchman, The Adamites Sermon (London: Francis Coules, 1641),
p. 3; David Cressy, The Adamites exposed in Travesties and Transgressions
in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.
25180.
25 Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the Northern Quakers
(London: H. R., 1653), pp. 2930; Kenneth L. Carroll, Early Quakers and
going naked as a sign, Quaker History 67 (1978): 6987, esp. pp. 767.
26 David Brown, The Naked Woman (London: E. Blackmore, 1652), sgs. C2v
C3r; Cloathing for the Naked Woman (London: Giles Calvert, 1652).
27 A Nest of Serpents Discovered; or, a Knot of Old Heretiques Revived, Called the
Adamites (London: s.n., 1641); The Ranters Religion (London: R. H., 1650).
28 A List of Some of the Grand Blasphemers and Blasphemies, which Was Given in
to the Committee for Religion (London: printed by Robert Ibbotson, 1654);
G. H., The Declaration of John Robins (London: printed by R. Wood, 1651)
in Andrew Hopton (ed.), The Declaration of John Robins and Other Writings
(London: Aporia Press, 1992), p. 21; Lodowick Muggleton, The Acts of the
Witnesses of the Spirit (London: s.n., 1699), p. 46 (originally in italics).
29 William Kaye, A Plain Answer to the 18 Queries of John Whitehead,
Commonly Called Quaker (London: N. E., 1654), p. 5; Thomas Underhill,
202 Notes to pages 1113
Hell Broke Loose; or, an History of the Quakers Both Old and New (London:
Simon Miller, 1660), pp. 367. This probably derived from [Edward Hill],
Vindiciae veritatis (London: Luke Fawne, 1648), p. 7.
30 [Henry Neville], The Parliament of Ladies (London: s.n., 1647), p. 13; Henry
Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. Rupert Hall and
Marie Boas Hall, 13 vols. (Madison and Milwaukee: University of
Wisconsin Press (vols. I I X); London: Mansell (vols. XXI ); London and
Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis (vols. XI I XI I I ), 196586), vol. I V, p. 563;
vol. V, p. 20.
31 Boethius, Five Bookes of Philosophicall Comfort (London: Mathew Lownes,
1609), f.p. 12v.
32 Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 7.1.1.
33 Charles Blount et al., The Oracles of Reason (London: s.n., 1693), p. 219;
British Library MS Sloane 1022/1115, fols. 15r16r.
34 N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London:
Longmans, 1927), pp. 2035, 114.
35 These two tendencies were rst distinguished by Williams, Ideas of the Fall,
who termed them maximal and minimal models respectively, terminology
which was picked up by J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) and Dennis Danielson, Miltons Good God
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
36 See Gordon Leff, Gregory of Rimini : Tradition and Innovation in Fourteenth
Century Thought (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); A. E.
McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1987).
Novemb. 9, 1662 (London: Thomas Robinson, 1663), p. 5; John Milton,
Tetrachordon (London: s.n., 1645), p. 15; CPW, vol. I I , p. 604.
38 John Edwards, The Socinian Creed; or, a Brief Account of the Professed Tenets
and Doctrines of the Foreign and English Socinians (London: J. Robinson,
1697), p. 77 (originally in italics). See generally H. John McLachlan,
Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1951).
39 Stephen Nye, The Trinitarian Scheme of Religion concerning Almighty God;
and Mankind Considered Both Before and After the (Pretended) Fall (London:
s.n., 1692), p. 11; Nye, A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called Also Socinians
([London]: s.n., 1687).
40 John Earle, Micro-cosmography; or, a Peece of the World Discovered (London:
Edward Blount, 1628), sg. B1rv.
41 Francis Osborne, The Works of Francis Osborn, 7th edn (London: R. D.,
1673), pp. 56173; Anthony a` Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 4
vols. (London: Rivington et al., 181320), vol. I , p. 707.
42 William Rabisha, Adam Unvailed, and Seen with Open Face (London: Giles
Calvert, 1649), p. 24.
43 XXXI I I Religions, Sects, Societies, and Factions, of the Cavaliers Now in Armes
against the Parliament (London: Andrew Coe, 1643); Patrick Simson, The
Historie of the Church, 3rd edn (London: John Bellamie, 1634), pp. 41345.
44 John Everard, The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus
(London: Thomas Brewster and Gregory Moule, 1649), sg. A2r.
45 Ibid., p. 14.
46 Thomas Tany, Theauraujohn His Theousori Apokolipikal ; or, Gods Light
Declared in Mysteries ([London]: s.n., 1651), p. 12. On Tany see Ariel
Hessayon, Gold tried in the re: the prophet Theaurau John Tany and
the Puritan revolution (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1996).
47 Guilielmus Saldenus, Otia theologica (Amsterdam: Henricum & viduam
Theodori Boom, 1684), pp. 5901.
48 Isaac Penington, Divine Essays ; or, Considerations about Several Things in
Religion (London: Giles Calvert, 1654), p. 65.
49 Nathaniel Stephens, Vindiciae fundamenti (London: Edmund Paxton,
1658), p. 14.
50 Edward Elton, A Forme of Catechizing, Set Down by Questions and Answers
(London: Ralph Mab, 1616), sgs. B2vB3r.
51 Alexander Nowell, A Catechisme; or, First Instruction and Learning of
Christian Religion (London: printed by John Daye, 1570), p. 27.
52 Quoted in Leff, Gregory of Rimini, p. 100.
53 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis in Luthers Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan
and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House,
19589), vol. I , p. 296; Willet, Hexapla, p. 53; John Diodati, Pious
Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London: Nicholas Fussell, 1643).
54 R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979), pp. 113; Peter Lake, Calvinism and the English
Church 15701635, Past and Present 114 (1987): 3276. The original
distinction described contrasting attitudes to predestination.
2 AUGUSTI NI ANI SM
1 Voltaire, Peche original in Dictionnaire philosophique, cited from The
Philosophical Dictionary, ed. and trans. Theodore Besterman (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1972).
2 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7
vols. (London: Methuen, 18961900), vol. I I I , p. 407.
3 Martin Luther, Luthers Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T.
Lehmann, 55 vols. (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 19589), vol.
XLVI I I , p. 42.
4 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), pp. 1412.
5 The best edition of De Genesi ad litteram is the French/Latin La Gene `se au
sens litte ral, trans. with introduction and notes by P. Agaesse and A.
Solignac, 2 vols. (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1972). LC, CG and E are
henceforth cited by book and chapter divisions.
6 Pelagius, Commentary on St Pauls Epistle to the Romans, trans. with
introduction and notes by Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993), pp. 1824, 924.
7 Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. J. Armitage
Robinson (London: SPCK, 1920), p. 82. This was only rediscovered, in an
Armenian version, in 1904.
8 M. Lamberigts, Augustine, Julian of Aeclanum, and E. Pagels Adam, Eve
and the Serpent, Augustiniana 39 (1989): 393435.
9 Susan E. Schreiner, Eve, the mother of history. Reaching for the reality of
history in Augustines later exegesis of Genesis in Gregory A. Robbins (ed.),
Genesis 13 in the History of Exegesis : Intrigue in the Garden (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen, 1988), pp. 13586, 1609.
10 R. J. OConnell, The Plotinian Fall of the soul in St Augustine, Traditio 19
(1963): 135.
11 In distinction from the Jewish tradition, which had emphasised the joy of sex
in Eden: N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London:
Longmans, 1927), pp. 448; Gary Anderson, Celibacy or consummation in
the Garden? Reections on early Jewish and Christian interpretations of the
Garden of Eden, Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989): 12148.
12 Augustine, Contra secundam Juliani responsionem (c. 42930), Patrologia
Latina vol. XLV, col. 1432.
13 J. F. Senault, trans. Henry, Earl of Monmouth, The Use of Passions (London:
J. L. and Humphrey Moseley, 1649), pp. 549, esp. p. 55; Adrian Johns, The
Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 397408, esp. p. 401.
14 Edward Reynoldes, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man
(London: Robert Bostock, 1640), pp. 6, 278.
15 J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968), pp. 934.
16 Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum, trans. R. M. Grant (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970), I I , pp. 24, 27.
17 Ibid., I I , p. 25.
18 William Perkins, A Golden Chaine; or, the Description of Theology (London:
Edward White, 1591), sg. C7v; Zacharias Ursinus, The Summe of Christian
Religion, trans. Henry Parry (Oxford, printed by Joseph Barnes, 1587), p. 124.
19 See CPW, vol. VI I I , pp. 2245 for a typical discussion.
20 Compare R. F. Brown, The rst evil will must be incomprehensible: a
critique of Augustine, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46
(1978): 31529; J. Patout Burns, Augustine on the origin and progress of
evil, Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (1988): 927; J. M. Rist, Augustine:
Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. 1048, 27880; and Scott MacDonald, Primal sin in G. B. Matthews
(ed.), The Augustinian Tradition (California: University of California Press,
1999), pp. 11039.
21 See also LC 11.6.8; E 5.17.
22 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1985).
23 Brown, Critique of Augustine, pp. 3201, citing CD 12.9.
24 Augustine, De moribus, 1.22.40, quoted in Gerald Bonner, Augustine of
Hippo (London: SCMP, 1963), p. 370, n. 5.
25 Anselm of Canterbury, Why God became man, esp. Chapters 1618, 22;
The virgin conception and original sin in E. R. Fairweather (ed.), A
Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham (London: SCMP, 1956), pp. 184
200.
26 Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), vol. I , pp.
37281.
27 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologicae, ed. Thomas Gilby, 61 vols. (London:
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 196480), vol. XI I I (1a.94102; 1a.94.14).
28 Williams, Ideas of the Fall, pp. 395446; Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of
Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), Man fallen and redeemed, pp. 120
45.
29 Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography; or, a Description of the Heretickes and
Sectaries Sprang Up in These Latter Times (London: William Lee, 1654), p.
130.
30 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists : The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590
1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 36, 52.
31 Heiko Oberman, Headwaters of the Reformation: Initia Lutheri initia
reformationis in The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and
Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1986), pp. 3983.
32 Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 43.
33 A. E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 109.
34 Luther, Works, vol. I , p. 66.
35 Ibid., pp. 64, 119.
36 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1971), pp. 271, 430; Thomas Vaughan [Eugenius Philalethes],
Magia Adamica (London: H. Blunden, 1650).
37 Luther, Works, vol. I , pp. 11112.
38 Ibid., p. 152.
39 John Calvin, A Commentarie of John Calvine, upon the First Booke of Moses
Called Genesis, trans. Thomas Tymme (London: John Harrison and George
Bishop, 1578), p. 62.
40 John Calvin, The Institution of the Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton
(London: printed by Reinolde Wolfe and Richarde Harrison, 1561), f.pp.
52r, 56r (1.15.2, 8).
41 Ibid., f.p. 56r (1.15.8).
42 Leon Howard, The Invention of Miltons Great Argument: a study of
the logic of Gods Ways to Men, Huntington Library Quarterly 9 (1945):
14973; John M. Steadman, Mans First Disobedience: the causal
structure of the Fall, Journal for the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 18097;
George Musacchio, Miltons Adam and Eve: Fallible Perfection (New York:
Peter Lang, 1991).
43 For an infamous discussion of the Supra-/Sublapsarian distinction, see
[Samuel Hoard], Gods Love to Mankind Manifested by Disproving his
Absolute Decree for their Damnation (s.l. : s.n., 1633), pp. 12, who then
rejected both alternatives.
44 The Book of Common Prayer (London: David Campbell [Everymans
Library], 1999), pp. 4501 (following means imitation; cf. By one Mans
Disobedience, that is, saith Pelagius, not as Austin has newly fancied, by Gods
Imputation, but by our Imitation of one Mans Disobedience, so many have
been made Sinners (Nye, Trinitarian Scheme, p. 13)).
45 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing; or, Condence in Opinions
(London: Henry Eversden, 1661), p. 129.
46 Sir William Leighton, The Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule
(London: R. Blower, 1613), p. 189.
Novemb. 9, 1662 (London: Thomas Robinson, 1663), p. 14.
48 J.-J. Boissard, Theatrum vitae humanae ([Metz]: Abraham Fabrus, [1596]),
pp. 1532.
49 Roland Frye, Miltons Imagery and the Visual Arts : Iconographic Tradition in
the Epic Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), plates 152,
163. Compare also plates 156, 160, 169.
50 Boissard, Theatrum, p. 23.
51 Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Grinling Gibbons (London: John Murray,
1989), plate 39; Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake (London:
Dent, 1942 [1863]), p. 4.
52 Peter Lake, Calvinism and the English Church 15701635, Past and Present
114 (1987): 3276; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 2986; Tyacke, Religious
controversy in Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford I V : The
Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 569619. Oxford
theses taken from Andrew Clark (ed.), Register of the University of Oxford
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), vol. I I , part I ; Cambridge theses from
British Library MS Harley 7038, fols. 30r69v. All theses cited by year
alone.
53 See Steadman, Causal structure, for examples.
54 See William Whitaker et al., Articuli Lambethiani (London: Robert
Beaumont, 1651), pp. 911 for the Latin text; translation, from H. C.
Porter, in Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, p. 31.
55 See Articulorum Lambethae exhibitorum historia, Articuli Lambethiani,
pp. 18; H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); M. H. Curtis, Oxford and
Cambridge in Transition 15581642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959),
Chapters 78; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 21833; Tyacke, Anti-
Calvinists, pp. 2736, 5860; British Library MS Harley 7038, fols. 49r, 53v.
For contemporary documentation, see Thomas Fuller, The history of the
University of Cambridge, appendix to The Church-History of Britain from
the Birth of Jesus Christ until the Year M. DC. XLVI I I (London: John Williams,
1655), pp. 1456, 1503.
56 Peter Baro, Summa trium de praedestinatione sententiarum (Amsterdam: Jan
Janson, 1613); English translation in James Arminius, The Works of
Arminius, trans. J. Nichols, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 182575), vol. I ,
pp. 92100.
57 Antonio del Corro, Epistola Beati Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos, e Graeco in
Latinum metaphrastikos versa, & in dialogi formam redacta (London:
Thomas Vautrollerius, 1581), pp. 24, 26, my italics.
58 Ibid., p. 26.
59 Anthony a` Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (London:
Livington et al., 181320), vol. I , p. 588. To be fair, Vautrollerius also
included Calvin and Beza on his list.
60 Desiderius Erasmus, The Seconde Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of
Erasmus upon the Newe Testament (London: printed by Edwarde
Whitchurch, 1549), f.p. xiirv.
61 S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution
16251660, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 138. The petition is
also reprinted in CPW, vol. I , pp. 97684.
62 Gardiner, Documents, p. 76.
63 Giles Widdowes, The Schysmatical Puritan (Oxford: printed for the author,
1630), sgs. B2rC3v; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. I I I , pp. 1789.
64 The Judgement of the Synod Holden at Dort (London: John Bill, 1619), sgs.
C2r, C3v. See also sg. F1r.
3 THE QUARREL OVER ORI GI NAL SI N, 1 6491 660
1 William Parker, Late Assembly of Divines Confession of Faith Examined
(London: s.n., 1651), pp. 92 (i.e. 62), 64.
2 Thomas Pierce, The Divine Philanthropie Defended against the Declamatory
Attempts of Certain Late-Printed Papers Intitld a Correptory Correction
(London: Richard Royston, 1657), p. 9.
3 John Gaule, Sapientia justicata; or, a Vindication of the Fifth Chapter of the
Romans (London: N. Paris and Tho. Dring, 1657), pp. 11516.
4 Robert Everard, An Antidote for the Newcastle Priests (London: printed for
the author, 1652), p. 5; Nathaniel Stephens, A Precept for the Baptisme of
Infants out of the New Testament (London: Edmund Paxton, Nathanaell
Webb and William Grantham, 1651), p. 6; Stephens, Vindiciae fundamenti
(London: Edmund Paston, 1658), p. 3.
5 John Mason, To the Impartial Reader, foreword to Everard, An Antidote;
Everard, An Epistle to the Several Congregations of the Non-conformists
(Paris : s.n., 1664), p. 2.
6 George Fox, The Journal, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1952), pp. 58, 4850, 18492.
7 Nathaniel Stephens, A Plain and Easie Calculation of the Name, Mark, and
Number of the Name of the Beast (London: Matth. Keynson and Hen.
Fletcher, 1656), pp. 2678.
8 Stephens, Precept, sg. A3r.
9 This volume is in the Angus Library in Regents Park College, Oxford. The
rst edition is also extant in a sole copy, in Canterbury Cathedral Library.
The 1649 edition was owned by John Webster, and it is even listed twice in a
1681 sale catalogue (Peter Elmer, The Library of Dr John Webster: The
Making of a Seventeenth-Century Radical (London: Wellcome Institute,
1986), p. 214; Edward Millington, Catalogus librorum in bibliothecis
selectissimis doctissimorum virorum (London: s.n., 1681), pp. [77][78]).
10 Anthony a` Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (London:
Rivington et al., 181320), vol. I I I , pp. 10627.
11 Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. Rupert
Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 13 vols. (Madison and Milwaukee: University of
Wisconsin Press (vols. I I X); London: Mansell (vols. XXI ); London and
Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis (vols. XI I XI I I ), 196586), vol. I I , p. 292.
12 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. I I I , p. 796; Clement Writer, Fides divina:
The Ground of Faith Asserted (London: printed for the author, 1657), p. 9;
Nicholas McDowell, The ghost in the marble: Anglican sources of radical
biblical criticism, 16411660 in Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (eds.),
Scripture and Scholarship in Early-Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005).
13 Jeremy Taylor, . The Liberty of Prophesying
(London: Richard Royston, 1647), p. 44.
14 John Evelyn, Memoirs, Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, ed.
William Bray, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colborn, 1819), vol. I I , p. 98, Evelyn
to Taylor, 9 Feb 1654 [sic; presumably o.s.]; Bray also prints Taylors letter
to Evelyn of 21 November 1655 (pp. 1001).
15 British Library MS Harley 6942, fol. 124rv, 14 September 1655, manuscript
frayed. Paul Elmen, Jeremy Taylor and the Fall of Man, MLQ 14 (1953):
139, quotes this letter from British Library MS Add. 4162, fol. 95r,
interestingly noting that by every one replaces of many, but neglects to
notice that this is a copy; the autograph (from which I quote) does not
corroborate this. On the Taylor affair, see principally Wood, Athenae
Oxonienses, vol. I I I , pp. 631, 732, 11489; Reginald Heber, Life in Jeremy
Taylor, The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber, rev. C. P. Eden, 10 vols.
(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 184752), vol. I , pp. xli
lviii ; E. S. de Beer, Jeremy Taylor in 1655, N&Q 170 (1936): 245; B. D.
Greenslade, Jeremy Taylor in 1655, N&Q 196 (1951): 130; C. J. Stranks, The
Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK, 1952), pp. 14261;
Elmen, Fall of Man, MLQ 14 (1953): 13948; H. R. McAdoo, The Spirit of
Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth
Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1965), pp. 7680; P. G.
Stanwood (ed.), Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
pp. xxiiixxv.
16 Bodleian MS Tanner 52, fols. 93r95r, quotation from fol. 94rv. Duppa
wrote Letter after Letter to Taylor reinforcing his disapprobation (fol.
101r).
17 Jeremy Taylor, Deus justicatus, 1st edn (London: Richard Royston, 1656),
sg. G3r.
18 Bodleian MS Tanner 52, fol. 94v.
19 Bodleian MS Rawl. D 1306, an anonymous and moderate attack on Taylor
and otherwise a promising candidate, is unlike Barlows usual methods. A
marginal note to the MS of Herbert Thorndikes Epilogue reads: Dr Owen
laboured a censure of Dr T.s book to the Countess of Devonshire,
suppressed by her (The Theological Works of Herbert Thorndike (Oxford:
John Henry Parker, 1849), vol. I I I , p. 390). Both works are thus currently
lost.
20 Bodleian MS Tanner 52, fols. 101r102r, dated 19 January 1655 [i.e. 1656].
21 Texts of the three letters, dated 28 September 1656, 2 April 1657 and 17
September 1657, appear in Robert Sanderson, The Works of Robert Sanderson,
D.D., ed. William Jacobson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1854), vol. VI , pp. 3819.
22 Herbert Thorndike, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England
(London: J. Martin, J. Allestry and T. Dicas, 1659), vol. I I , pp. 15162 (pp.
1536 repeated), esp. p. 159.
23 More to Taylor, 3 October 1660, in M. H. Nicholson (ed.), Conway Letters :
The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their
Friends 16421684, rev. Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.
167.
24 Richard Serjeantson, Conscientious innovation in some writings of
Jeremy Taylor (16131667), (unpublished M.Phil. diss., Cambridge,
1994), pp. 256.
25 Letter of 13 January 1660 to Mr Graham of Trinity College, Dublin. There
is a copy of this letter in the notebook of Anthony Topping, Cambridge
University Library Add. MS 711, fols. 2r5r.
26 Taylor, An Answer to a Letter Written by the R. R. the Ld Bp of Rochester
(London: Richard Royston, 1656); John Ford, An Essay of Original
Righteousness and Conveyed Sin (s.l. : printed permissu superiorum, 1657)
(compare also Ford, The Reasonableness of Personal Reformation, and the
Necessity of Conversion (London: Thomas Cockerill, 1691), p. 3); Gaule,
Sapientia justicata; Stephens, Vindiciae fundamenti ; Anthony Burgess, A
Treatise of Original Sin (London: s.n., 1658); Henry Jeanes, The Second Part
of the Mixture of Scholasticall Divinity . . . whereunto Are Annexed Several
Letters of the Same Author, and Dr Jeremy Taylor concerning Original Sin
(Oxford: Thomas Robinson, 1660).
27 Burgess, Treatise, sg. A4r.
28 John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1669), p. 173.
29 Taylor, Works, vol. I , p. xlvi ; John Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 362, entry for 28 August 1655.
30 Bray (ed.), Memoirs, vol. I , p. 290, entry for 6 May 1656.
31 British Library MS Add. 78312, sheets 28, 31 (unfoliated), dated by context to
1664.
32 Stephens, Vindiciae fundamenti, p. 3; see also Stephens, A Precept, p. 24.
33 Vindiciae fundamenti, pp. 80, 91; 1 Corinthians 15:47.
34 Ibid., pp. 5, 14, 121.
35 Ibid., p. 100.
36 Robert Everard, The Creation and Fall of Adam Reviewed, 2nd edn (London:
William Larner, 1652), pp. 1314, 74, 902, 129, 143, 158.
37 Stephens, A Precept, pp. 7, 23.
38 William L. Lumpkin (ed.), Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia: Judson
Press, 1959) contains the relevant confessions.
39 Though a Thomas Everard, listed just above one William Poole, is a
Lincolnshire signatory to the Thirty Congregations confession, possibly a
relative. On Everards possible authorship, see Alan Betteridge, Early
Baptists in Leicestershire and Rutland, Baptist Quarterly 25 (1974): 20411,
35478 (p. 370).
40 Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions, p. 173.
41 Robert Everard, Natures Vindication; or, A Check to All Those Who Afrm
Nature to Be Vile, Wicked, Corrupt, and Sinful (London: printed for the
author and sold by W. Larnar, 1652).
42 Francis Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (London:
Samuel Gellibrand, 1643), p. 47; [Francis Higginson], A Brief Relation of the
Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (London: H. R., 1653), p. 14.
43 Everard, Natures Vindication, pp. 6, 11.
44 Ibid., p. 40.
45 Stephens, Plain and Easie Calculation, p. 267.
46 Taylor, Unum necessarium (London: R. Royston, 1655), Further explica-
tion ; Sanderson, Works, vol. VI , p. 386.
47 Taylor, Unum necessarium, pp. 3734 (6.1.22).
48 Ibid., p. 374 (6.1.22).
49 Ibid., p. 383 (6.1.38).
50 Ibid., pp. 3834 (6.1.39).
51 Ibid., pp. 3846 (6.1.40).
52 Ibid., pp. 38691 (6.1.412).
53 Jeanes, Certaine Letters, p. 48.
54 Taylor, Unum necessarium, p. 383 (6.1.39).
55 Ibid., pp. 3856 (6.1.40).
56 Ibid., sg. B3v.
57 Taylor, Deus justicatus, pp. 1289.
58 [Samuel Hoard], Gods Love to Mankind Manifested by Disproving His
Absolute Decree for Their Damnation (s.l. : s.n., 1633), p. 54.
59 William Lyford, The Plain Mans Senses Exercised (London: Richard
Royston/ Oxford: Edward Forrest, 1655), pp. 22245, Errors about
Originall Sin, p. 233.
60 E[dward] W[orseley], Truth Will Out (London: s.n., 1665), sg. [A4]r.
61 Charles Blount et al., The Oracles of Reason (London: s.n., 1693), pp. 119;
R. F. Brinkley (ed.), Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1955), pp. 258316, quotation from p. 266.
62 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. I I I , p. 590.
63 Stephens, Vindiciae fundamenti, p. 150. Lyford, Plain Mans Senses Exercised,
pp. 2278, repeats exactly the same manoeuvre. Compare Websters
argumentation in John Webster, Academiarum examen (London: Giles
Calvert, 1653), pp. 301.
64 Jeanes, Second Part, p. 279.
65 Stephens, Vindiciae fundamenti, pp. 23, 60. Compare especially CG 12.12.
66 Ibid., p. 172.
67 Quoted by Stephens, ibid., p. 100.
4 THE HETERODOX FALL
1 J. G. A. Pocock, The denitions of orthodoxy in Roger Lund (ed.), The
Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 16601750
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3353.
2 DavidCressy, The Adamites exposed inTravesties andTransgressions inTudor
and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 25180.
3 Stephen Denison, The White Wolfe (London: Robert Milbourne, 1627), title
page; Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography; or, a Description of the Heretickes and
Sectories Sprang Up in These Latter Times (London: William Lee, 1654), title
page; De haeretico comburendo, 2 Hen 4 cap. 15, in Henry Bettenson and
Chris Maunder (eds.), Documents of the Christian Church, 3rd edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 198202 (p. 199).
4 Denison, The White Wolfe, pp. 910.
5 Thomas Underhill, Hell Broke Loose (London: Simon Miller, 1660), p. 2.
6 Little Non-Such (London: H. P., 1646), p. 2.
7 Jerome Friedman, Blasphemy, Immorality and Anarchy: The Ranters and the
English Revolution (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp. x, 21, 32,
115; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English
Radical Religion 16401660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 250;
A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton
and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 20018.
8 John Calvin, Against the Libertines in Treatises against the Anabaptists and
Libertines, trans. and ed. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Michigan: Grand Rapids,
1982), Chapters 1 and 3 (pp. 190, 1959).
9 Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist [1647] (London:
Andrew Crooke, 1648), passim; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, p. 108;
Theologia Germanica; or, Mysticall Divinity, 2nd edn, trans. Giles Randall
(London: John Sweeting, 1648), sg. A2v.
10 Robert Friedman, Peter Riedemann on original sin and the way of
redemption, Mennonite Quarterly 26 (1952): 21015 (p. 214).
11 Balthasar Hubmaier, On Free Will (1527) in G. R. Williams (ed.), Spiritual
and Anabaptist Writers (London: SCMP, 1957), pp. 120, 128, 131.
12 Theologia Germanica, pp. 47.
13 Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences,
trans. James Sanford (London: printed by Henry Wykes, 1569), f.p. 2r.
14 Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond in The Complete Essays,
trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 555.
15 Agrippa, Vanitie and Uncertaintie, f.p. 186r. See OED reveal, denition 1,
for the spelling reueled.
16 Romans 1:22; 1 Corinthians 3:18.
17 Quoted in A. E. McGrath, Reformation Thought, 1st edn (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988), p. 108.
18 Sebastian Franck, 280 Paradoxes or Wondrous Sayings, trans. and introduced
by E. J. Furcha (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen, 1986), pp. 191, 225, 274.
19 Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, pp. 11425, 12930, 145.
20 Cambridge University Library MS Dd.12.68, fols. 2r49r.
21 Bodleian MS Tanner 67, fols. 143r145r, An order of submission or
Retraction, for 10 October 1639.
22 John L. Nickalls, George Foxs library, JFHS 28 (1931): 221, esp. pp. 8, 18;
Henry J. Cadbury, George Foxs library: further identications, JFHS 29
(1932): 6271; Cadbury, George Foxs library again, JFHS 30 (1933): 919
(p. 12); Bibliotheca Furliana (Rotterdam, 1714), p. 145 (1642 edition).
23 Hilary Prach, letter of 9 October 1676 (o.s.), in Edward Bernstein, Letters of
Hilary Prach and John G. Matern, JFHS 16 (1919): 19 (p. 2).
24 Sebastian Franck, The Forbidden Fruit (London: Benjamin Allen, 1642), pp.
2, 4.
25 Gerard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush (1650) in Winstanley, The Works of
Gerard Winstanley, ed. G. H. Sabine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1941), p. 452.
26 Franck, Forbidden Fruit, pp. 1, 56.
27 Ibid., pp. 60, 24, 92 (in order of quotation).
28 Cambridge University Library MS Dd.12.68, fol. 55r.
29 Webster, Academiarum examen (London: Giles Calvert, 1653), p. 16.
30 Joseph Salmon, Anti-Christ in Man (London: Giles Calvert, [1647]), pp.
34.
31 Henry Pinnell, A Word of Prophesy, concerning the Parliament, Generall, and
the Army (London: George Whittington and Giles Calvert, 1648), sgs. A2v
A4r, p. 73.
32 Ibid., pp. 25, 267, 28, 31, 33.
33 William Erbury, The Great Mystery of Godliness (London: Robert
Milbourne, 1639), pp. 611; Anthony a` Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed.
Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (London: Rivington et al., 181320), vol. I I I , pp. 3602.
34 Pinnell, Word of Prophesy, pp. 40, 50.
35 More to Lady Conway, 9 November 1675, in M. H. Nicholson (ed.),
Conway Letters : The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry
More, and Their Friends 16421684, rev. Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992), p. 404.
36 Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 118
28; Andrew W. Brink, William Riley Parkers Milton and Friends, JFHS 52
(196871): 17091.
37 Hill, John Reeve and the origins of Muggletonianism in Christopher Hill,
Barry Reay and William Lamont, The World of the Muggletonians (London:
Temple Smith, 1983), pp. 64110, esp. pp. 956.
38 Lodowick Muggleton, A Looking-Glass for George Fox (London: s.n., 1668),
p. 46.
39 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson,
F. Lawrence and F. Dunton, 1696), vol. I , p. 77; Alexander Ross, Pansebeia,
6th edn (London: M. Gillyower and W. Freeman, 1696), p. 273; More
quoted by G. F. Nuttall, James Naylor: A Fresh Approach (London: Friends
Historical Society, 1954), p. 2, letter to Anne Conway of 1675.
40 Isaac Penington, Light or Darknesse (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), p. 3.
41 Isaac Penington, Observations on Some Passages of Lodowick Muggleton
(London: s.n., 1668), p. 24.
42 Joseph Gurney Bevan, Memoirs of the Life of Isaac Penington [1784]
(London: William Phillips, 1807), pp. 14950. See pp. 14564 for a survey of
Peningtons eleven pre-Quaker tracts.
43 Isaac Penington, The Great and Sole Troubler of the Times Represented in a
Mapp of Miserie (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), p. 23; Light or Darknesse, sg.
A2v.
44 Light or Darknesse, pp. 3, 10, 12.
45 Ibid., p. 24. Compare Franck, Forbidden Fruit, pp. 5567.
46 Isaac Penington, Severall Fresh Inward Openings (London: Giles Calvert,
1650), p. 19.
47 Isaac Penington, Divine Essays ; or, Considerations about Several Things in
Religion (London: Giles Calvert, 1654), p. 65.
48 Ibid., pp. 34; Franck, Forbidden Fruit, p. 10; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed,
p. 238.
49 LC 11.41.56.
50 The Hartlib Papers, ed. Patricia Barry et al., 2nd edn, 2 CD-ROMS
(Shefeld: UMI, 2002), 30/5/14A, repunctuated (undated, but signed TS
and sent from Wiltshire). For Phision read Phis[ic]ion.
51 Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, Oriatrike; or, Physick Rened (London:
Lodowick Loyd, 1662), p. 665.
52 Ibid., p. 664.
53 See Chapter 2 above.
54 British Library MS Sloane 3991, fols. 110f. Of Spirituall mumy & the tree of
knowledge of Good and evile ; identied by Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, p.
239.
55 Of Spirituall mumy, fol. 114rv.
56 Ibid., fol. 115rv.
57 Ibid., fols. 117rv, 119v.
58 Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (Frankfurt: de Bry, 1617), emblem 9.
59 Thomas Hall, Vindiciae literarum (London: Nathaniel Webb and William
Grantham, 1655), p. 215.
60 Calendar of State Papers Domestic for 30 October 1649.
61 William Rabisha, Adam Unvailed, and Seen with Open Face (London: Giles
Calvert, 1649); A Paralel between Mr Loves Treason and the Many Thousands
that are Hanged for Theft (London: Henry Hills, 1651); The Whole Body of
Cookery Dissected (London: Giles Calvert, 1661). Wings Gallery of Ghosts
lists a lost manual on brewing by Rabisha. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, p.
261, and Literature and Revolution in England, 16401660 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994), pp. 3345, discusses Adam Unvailed; an article for
the new DNB has been written by John Considine.
62 M. Hunter, G. Mandelbrote, N. Ovenden and N. Smith (eds.), A Radicals
Books : The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye (162390) (London:
Boydell and Brewer, 1999), pp. 1989; John Bullord, The Library of Mr Tho.
Britton, Smallcoal-Man (London: s.n., 1694), p. 7; British Library MS
Sloane 859, fol. 47r (Lodwicks library catalogue); Francis Lodwick, Certain
queries, British Library MS Sloane 2903, fols. 156r7v.
63 Rabisha, Adam Unvailed, pp. 1, 2930.
64 Ibid., pp. 2, 89. The earthy/ earthly difference in forms arises from
the Geneva Bibles preference for the latter, and the Authoriseds use of the
former.
65 Adam Unvailed, pp. 2, 7.
66 Ibid., pp. 46, 58, 61.
67 The Kingdoms Faithfull and Impartiall Scout (Thomason Tract E529 (22)).
68 See most recently Andrew Bradstock (ed.), Winstanley and the Diggers
(London: Frank Cass, 2000).
69 Gerard Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, Concerning the Whole Creation,
Mankinde, 1648 (this edn 1649), pp. 2, 8.
70 Ibid., pp. 10, 4, 2.
71 Winstanley, Works, pp. 176, 212.
72 Ibid., p. 210.
73 Ibid., pp. 202, 203. Cf. Coppe and Crabs etymologies : Nigel Smith (ed.),
A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London: Junction
Books, 1983; hereafter CRW ), pp. 69, 110; Roger Crab, Dagons-Downfall, in
Andrew Hopton (ed.), Roger Crab: The English Hermite and Dagons-
Downfall (London: Aporia Press, 1990), pp. 334.
74 Winstanley, Works, p. 460.
75 Ibid., pp. 4812.
76 Ibid., p. 489.
77 Ibid., p. 569.
78 Ibid., p. 460. See Genesis 8:21; Isaiah 14:12; Luke 1:51.
79 Winstanley, Works, pp. 4569.
80 Ibid., p. 511.
81 Ibid.. pp. 5267, 5356.
82 Ibid., p. 515.
83 Underhill, Hell Broke Loose, p. 42.
84 A Modest Narrative of Intelligence June 916th (London, 1649), p. 81, quoted
in Don Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (London: Nelson, 1941),
p. 318.
85 The Moderate Intelligencer (London, 1649), p. 2002 (Thomason Tract E552
(4)).
86 Elizabeth Quennehen, A propos des Pre adamites, La lettre clandestine 3
(1994): 1720; Un noveau manuscrit des Pre adamites, La lettre clandestine 4
(1995 ), available online at http :// lancelst.univ-paris12.fr/lc4-2 i.htm.
87 R. H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyre `re (15961676): His Life, Work and Inuence
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987).
88 Hartlib Papers, 29/5/42A (c. August 1655).
89 Calendar of State Papers Domestic for 24 October 1655; William Poole,
English Preadamism and an Anonymous English Preadamist, The
Seventeenth Century 19 (2004): 135.
90 Isaac La Peyre`re, Men before Adam (London: s.n., 1656), pp. 161.
91 La Peyre`re, Apologie de La Peyre `re (Paris: T. Joly, 1663), p. 2; Leo Strauss,
Spinozas Critique of Religion (New York: Schoken Books, 1965 [1930]),
pp. 6572.
92 La Peyre`re, Men before Adam, pp. 246.
93 La Peyre`re, A Theological Systeme, appended to Men before Adam, p. 208.
94 Ibid., pp. 1406, 2002.
95 Men before Adam, pp. 30, 4951.
96 Ibid., p. 57.
97 La Peyre`re, A Theological Systeme, p. 8.
98 Ibid., p. 7.
99 Ibid., pp. 156, 193.
100 Ibid., pp. 1920.
101 William Poole, The divine and the grammarian in the 17th-century universal
language movement, Historiographia linguistica 30 (2003): 273300.
102 Laurence Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found (London: printed for the author,
1660), pp. 223.
103 Thomas Tany, Theauraujohn His Theousori Apokolipikal ; or, Gods Light
Declared in Mysteries ([London]: s.n., 1651), pp. 3, 22, 18, 74, 44, in order of
citation.
104 British Library MS Sloane 1022/1115, fol. 15r, ed. Poole, English
Preadamism.
105 Charles Blount et al., The Oracles of Reason (London: s.n., 1693), pp. 8, 21819.
106 Kevin Lewis, The Appeal of Muggletonianism (Durham: University of
Durham, 1986), pp. 247.
107 Lodowick Muggleton, A True Interpretation of the Eleventh Chapter of the
Revelation of St John (London: printed for the author, 1662), pp. 1011.
108 Lodowick Muggleton, A Looking-Glass for George Fox (London: s.n., 1668),
p. 23.
109 Muggleton, True Interpretation, pp. 1011.
110 Ibid., pp. 1011.
111 Muggleton, A Looking-Glass, pp. 1213. This most likely derives from Jacob
Boehme: see Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1625.
112 John Saddington, The Articles of True Faith, quoted in E. P. Thompson,
Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 73.
113 The locus classicus is his chapter on Sin and hell in The World Turned Upside
Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1975), pp. 15183.
5 HERESI OGRAPHERS, MESSI AHS AND RANTERS
1 Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 3.3.4; 3.4.2 in Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1267; Irenaeus, Ad Florinum in Eusebius,
Historia ecclesia, 5.20, trans. G. A. Williamson as The History of the Church
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 1689.
2 Eusebius, History, 1.1.b (p. 1).
3 H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 21, n. 2.
4 George T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1965), p. 141, n. 4.
5 McLachlan, Socinianism, p. 7.
6 Bernardino Ochino, A Dialogue of Polygamy, Written Originally in Italian
(London: John Garfeild, 1657). The translation was rumoured to be by
Francis Osborne (Anthony a` Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss,
4 vols. (London: Livington et al., 181320), vol. I , p. 707).
7 Thomas Barlow, The Genuine Remains (London: John Dunton, 1693),
p. 77; [Henry Brougham], Reections to a Late Book, Entituled, The Genuine
Remains of Dr Tho. Barlow, Late Bishop of Lincoln. Falsly Pretended to be
Published from His Lordships Original Papers (London: Robert Clavell,
1694), p. 11.
8 XXXI I I Religions, Sects, Societies, and Functions, of the Cavaliers Now in Armes
against the Parliament (London: Andrew Coe, 1643), sg. A1v.
9 Hell Broke Loose; or, a Catalogue of the Many Spreading Errors, Heresies and
Blasphemies of These Times, for which We Are to Be Humbled (London:
Thomas Underhill, 1646 [i.e. 1647]).
10 Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist [1647] (London:
Andrew Crooke, 1648), p. 163.
11 John Calvin, Against the Libertines in Treatises against the Anabaptists and
Libertines, trans. and ed. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Michigan: Grand Rapids,
1982), p. 263.
12 Rutherford, Survey, p. 157.
13 John Knewstub, A Confutation of Monstrous and Horrible Heresies, Taught by
H. N., and Embraced by a Number, who Call Themselves the Familie of Love
(London: Richard Sergier, 1579), f.p. 15v.
14 G. H., The Declaration of John Robins (London: printed by R. Wood, 1651)
in Andrew Hopton (ed.), The Declaration of John Robins (London: Aporia
Press, 1992), pp. 201. Hacket also turns up as a Ranter precursor in The
Arraignment and Tryall with a Declaration of the Ranters (London: printed
by B. A., 1650), pp. 45.
15 The Ranters Recantation (London: G. H., 1650), p. 5.
16 See Humphrey Ellis, Pseudochristus (London: Luke Fawn, 1650), pp. 31, 54;
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1971), pp. 13240.
17 Richard Cosin, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation (London: the deputies
of Christopher Barker, 1592), p. 71.
18 Ibid., p. 71.
19 Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:1; the nal two gospels omit this
moment.
20 Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, ed. Michael Keefer (Ontario: Broadview,
1991), I I .i.174, V.ii.112.
21 A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton
and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 46.
22 Marlowe, Dr Faustus, Prologue 22, I I .iii.85 s.d.
23 The notion derives from J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters
and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
especially his remark that the Ranters functioned as the projection of an
image inverting all that true godliness should represent (pp. 1367).
24 Thomas Vaughan [Eugenius Philalethes], Magia Adamica (London: H.
Blunden, 1650), pp. 1920.
25 Thomas Bilson, The Full Redemption of Mankind by the Death and Bloud of
Christ Jesus (London: Walter Burre, 1599), p. 36 (see pp. 337 for the six
patristic interpretations).
26 Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography; or, a Description of the Heretickes and
Sectaries Sprang Up in These Latter Times (London: Wilhain Lee, 1654), p.
254; Ellis, Pseudochristus, p. 10; John Gilpin, The Quakers Shaken (London:
Simon Waterson, 1653), p. 2; George Fox, The Journal, ed. John L. Nickalls
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 5; Peter Lake and David
Como, Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: the
strange case of Peter Shaw and its contexts, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
40 (1999): 684715 (p. 706).
27 Bodleian MS Tanner 67, fol. 144r.
28 George Herbert, The Temple (Cambridge: Francis Green, 1633), p. 25.
29 William Loe, Songs of Sion ([Hamburg]: s.n., 1620), sg. [L8]v.
30 Samuel Speed, Prison-Pietie; or, Meditations Divine and Moral (London:
S. S., 1677), pp. 601. Speed is heavily inuenced by Herbert, whom he
imitates to the point of plagiarism (e.g. esp. pp. 72, 97).
31 Bilson, Full Redemption, pp. 34, 367, his rst and fth interpretations.
32 Debora Kuller Shuger, The death of Christ in The Renaissance Bible:
Scholarship, Sacrice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1998), pp. 10712.
33 G. H. [?], The Ranters Recantation and their Sermon (London: G. H., 1650),
p. 3.
34 The Ranters Religion (London: R. H., 1650), p. 4.
35 Marlowe, Dr Faustus, I I .iii.18; The Ranters Monster, Being a True Relation of
One Mary Adams [London: George Horton, 1652], reprinted in Davis, Fear,
Myth and History, p. 191. G. H. and George Horton may be the same man.
36 Calvin, The Institution of the Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton
(London: printed by Reinolde Wolfe and Richarde Harrison, 1561), 2.4.3.
37 Cuique suum: contra Cathari cantilenam (Cambridge: ex celeberri-
mae Academiae Typographeo, 1635), pp. 23.
38 Cuique suum, p. 4.
39 Lake and Como, Strange case of Peter Shaw, p. 699.
40 Thompson, Witness against the Beast, pp. 223.
41 Roger Crab, The English Hermite (1655) and Dagons-Downfall (1657) in
Andrew Hopton (ed.), Roger Crab: The English Hermite and Dagons-
Downfall (London: Aporia Press, 1990), pp. 14, 40.
42 Hopton, Roger Crab, pp. 30, 35, 18, 28.
43 Bodleian MS Tanner 67, fol. 144rv.
44 Laurence Clarkson, A Single Eye: All Light, No Darkness ; or, Light and
Darkness One (London: [Giles Calvert], [1650]), sg. [A1]v.
45 R[ichard] F[arnworth], The Ranters Principles & Deceits Discovered and
Declared Against (London: Giles Calvert, 1655), p. 19, quoted by A. L.
Morton, The World of the Ranters (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970),
p. 92.
46 Fox, Journal, p. 47.
47 Abiezer Coppe, A Second Fiery Flying Roule (London: s.n., 1650) in CRW,
p. 106.
48 Joseph Salmon, A Rout, A Rout (London: G[iles] C[alvert], 1649), pp.
2930.
49 Joseph Salmon, Heights in Depths (London: printed by Th. Newcomb, 1651)
in CRW, p. 207.
50 Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (London: s.n., 1649), sg. A3v.
51 Laurence Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found (London: printed for the author,
1660), p. 23.
52 Abiezer Coppe, Copps Return in CRW, p. 134.
53 Abiezer Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine (London: Giles
Calvert, 1649), p. 55.
54 Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, p. 8. See Isaiah 5:20, and Clarkson, Single Eye, p. 8.
55 See G. E. Aylmer, Did the Ranters exist?, Past and Present 117 (1987):
20819, for a review of this debate.
6 THE FALL I N PRACTI CE
1 Jeremy Taylor, Unum necessarium (London: R. Royston, 1655), pp. 3734.
2 CG 16.2.
3 Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica, 6th edn (London: Nath. Ekins,
1672 [1646]), pp. 34.
4 Matthew Poole, Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London: Thomas
Parkhurst, Dorman Newman, Jonathan Robinson, Bradbazon Ailmer,
Thomas Cockeril and Benjamin Alsop, 1683), s.v. Genesis 3:1; J. T.
Shawcross, Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 16241700 (Binghamton,
NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984), Secondary
bibliography, 948.
5 Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill : University of North
Carolina Press, 1948), p. 31.
6 This point was forcibly made by Locke in his Essay for the Understanding of
St Pauls Epistles by Consulting St Paul Himself (1707): see Don McKenzie,
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library, 1986),
pp. 467.
7 Walter F. Specht, Chapter and verse divisions in Bruce M. Metzger and
Michael D. Coogan (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 1057.
8 Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon
Everie Chapter of Genesis (London: Thomas Charde, 1592), f.p. 14v.
9 Stephen Jay, Ta Kannakou; or, the Tragedies of Sin Contemplated (London:
John Dunton, 1689), p. 2.
10 Ibid., p. 25 .
11 David Norbrook, A Devine Originall: Lucy Hutchinson and the
Womans Version, Times Literary Supplement (19 March 1999): pp. 1315.
12 [Lucy Hutchinson], Order and Disorder; or, the World Made and Undone,
Being Meditations upon the Creation and Fall (London: Henry Mortlock,
1679), sgs. *1v[*]2r. Norbrook has published an edition (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001) containing the rest of the poem.
13 Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, pp. 69, 70, my italics, other than Eve and
Adam.
14 Ibid., pp. 46 , 50 .
15 Ibid., p. 51.
16 Ibid., p. 58.
17 Ibid., p. 25.
18 Ibid. , p. 65.
19 Ibid., pp. 678.
20 Hugo Grotius, Sacra, in quibus Adamus exul, tragdia, aliorumque ejusdem
generis carminum cumulus (The Hague: Aelbrecht Hendricksz, 1601). Text
with a facing translation may be found in Watson Kirkconnell (ed.), The
Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature with
Translations of the Major Analogues (New York: Gordian Press, 1967), pp.
108221, 5837. See also J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis
Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 20716; Christian Gellinck,
Hugo Grotius (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), pp. 615.
21 Grotius, Adamus exul, lines 867, 176, 1378, 3434.
22 Ibid., line 634.
23 Ibid., lines 87880 .
24 Ibid., lines 8837.
26 John Milton, Paradise Regaind (London: John Starkey, 1671), lines 31922.
27 Grotius, Adamus exul, lines 842, 845, 9623.
28 Ibid., lines 1946, 12224.
29 Ibid., lines 1035, 1050 .
30 Ibid., lines 17546, 1816 17.
31 Ibid., lines 181, 124950, 12603.
33 Ibid., lines 1296 1300 .
34 Ibid., lines 1872 5.
35 Ibid., lines 117183.
36 Hugo Grotius, Opera omnia theologica (London: Moses Pitt, 1679),
annotation to Genesis 2:9.
37 Hugo Grotius, The Illustrious Hugo Grotius Of the Law of Warre and Peace,
2nd edn (London: William Lee, 1655), pp. 198201.
38 Book of Enoch 9:67, 10:89, in R. H. Charles (ed.), Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913),
vol. I I , pp. 193, 194.
39 Andreas Rivinus, Serpens iste antiquus seductor (Leipzig: Christoph Fleischer,
1686), p. 48.
40 John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, The Second Part, line 405 in his
Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1962); John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Works, ed. Harold Love (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 300.
41 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson,
F. Lawrence and F. Dunton, 1696), pp. 778.
42 John Pordage, Innocencie Appearing through the Dark Mists of Pretended
Guilt (London: Giles Calvert, 1655), pp. 9, 68; Desiree Hirst, The riddle of
John Pordage, Jacob Boehme Society Quarterly 6 (19534): 515; Christopher
Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 2246; Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1971), p. 376; Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (London: Faber,
1984), pp. 22742; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and
Literature in English Radical Religion 16401660 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), pp. 18990.
43 [John and] S[amuel] P[ordage], Mundorum explicatio; or, the Explanation
of an Hieroglyphical Figure (London: Lodowick Lloyd, 1661); modern
edition in the Renaissance Imagination series (New York: Garland, 1991).
British Library MS Sloane 1401 A is a defective manuscript of the work.
44 Pordage, Mundorum explicatio, pp. 57, 59, 60, 8990 (references are to the
page numbers of the 1661 edition).
45 Ibid., pp. 5960.
46 Ibid., p. 61.
47 PL 4.45376.
48 Mundorum explicatio, pp. 634.
49 Ibid., pp. 61, 71, 72.
50 Ibid., p. 72.
51 Ibid., pp. 76, 77.
52 Ibid. , p. 77.
53 Ibid., p. 108.
54 Laurence Clarkson, A Single Eye: All Light, No Darkness ; or, Light and
Darkness One (London: [Giles Calvert], [1650]), p. 5.
55 Pordage, Mundorum explicatio, p. 88.
56 John Dryden, The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man: An Opera (London:
Henry Herringman, 1677), sg. [A4]r, v.
57 G. Thorn-Drury, Some notes on Dryden, Review of English Studies 1
(1925): 7983, 18797, 32430 (pp. 801).
58 See Vinton A. Dearings commentary in his edition of the text for the
California Dryden, vol. XI I (Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 1994).
59 Charles Leslie, The History of Sin and Heresie (London: H. Hindmarsh,
1698), sg. A2rv; Shawcross, Bibliography, 1567.
60 Dryden, Religio laici ; or, a Laymans Faith (London: Jacob Tonson, 1682),
sg. a1r, v.
61 Dryden, Aureng-Zebe (London: Henry Herringman, 1676), p. 83; Essays, ed.
W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), vol. I I , p. 45, my italics.
62 Walter Charleton, Chorea gigantum; or, the Most Famous Antiquity of Great-
Britan, Vulgarly Called Stone-Heng, Standing on Salisbury Plain, Restored to
the Danes (London: Henry Herringman, 1663), sg. [b2]r.
63 Dryden, State of Innocence, I.i.1503. Act, scene and line numbers henceforth
cited in the text.
64 Bruce King, Drydens Major Plays (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and
Boyd, 1960 ), Chapter 6.
65 K. W. Gransden, Milton, Dryden, and the comedy of the Fall, Essays in
Criticism 26 (1976): 11633 (p. 129).
66 If Eve is habited this suggests a concession to the decency of the stage, and
is perhaps an indication that Drydens work was written with performance
in mind.
67 Hugh MacCallum, The State of Innocence: epic to opera, Milton Studies 31
(1994): 10931, esp. pp. 1289.
7 TOWARDS PARADI SE LOST
1 Thomas Gataker, Abrahams Decease: A Meditation on Genesis 25.8. (London:
Fulke Clifton, 1627), pp. 4, 11, 12.
2 Richard Stock, Of the hatred of God in A Stock of Divine Knowledge
(London: Philip Nevil, 1641), pp. 22435 (p. 225 (i.e. 226)).
3 Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton. Volume
One: The Institution to 1625 From the Beginnings through Grammar School
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), pp. 1363; Donald L. Clark,
Milton at St. Pauls School : A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance
Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), pp. 1001, 1256.
4 Alexander Gil, The Sacred Philosophie of the Holy Scripture (London: Joyce
Norton and Rich. Whitaker, 1635), sg. A1v; Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of
John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 8.
5 Gil, Sacred Philosophie, pp. 1078. See Chapters 1419 (pp. 10325) on
creation and Fall.
6 Gil, Sacred Philosophie, p. 113.
7 John Milton, Poemata, appended to Poems &c. (London: Thomas Dring,
1673), p. 44.
8 John Milton, Poems of Mr John Milton (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1645),
p. 24. The sentiment may also owe something to Spenser, Faerie Queene, I I I .
ii.31.
9 John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London:
Longmans, 1997), lines 659.
10 Milton, Poems, pp. 223.
11 See William Ingram and Kathleen M. Swaim, A Concordance to Miltons
English Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), s.v. uncouth.
12 Stephen Skinner, Etymologicon linguae Anglicanae (London: Thomas
Roycroft, 1671), s.v. Uncouth.
13 Milton, Poems, pp. 5765.
14 See Mark Womack, On the value of Lycidas, Studies in English Literature
15001900 37 (1997): 11936, esp. pp. 120, 128, 133.
15 The relevant portion of the manuscript is edited in CPW, vol. VI I I , pp. 539
85, from which all following citations derive.
16 Watson Kirkconnell (ed.), The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost
in World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues (New York:
Gordian Press, 1967), Descriptive Catalogue P-L 170.
17 John Carey, Milton (New York: Arco, 1970), pp. 678.
18 Thomas N. Corns, Miltons quest for respectability, Modern Language
Review 77 (1982): 76979.
19 John Milton, Of Prelatical Episcopacy (London: Thomas Underhill, 1641),
p. 1 (CPW, vol. I , p. 624).
20 John Milton, The Reason of Church-Government Urgd against Prelaty
(London: John Rothwell, 1641), p. 11 (CPW, vol. I , p. 762).
21 John Milton, An Apology against a Pamphlet (London: John Rothwell, 1642),
pp. 29, 34 (CPW, vol. I , pp. 909, 910, 917).
22 John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England
([London]: Thomas Underhill, 1641), pp. 45; Reason, p. 3 (CPW, vol. I ,
pp. 523, 750).
23 See Stephen Fallon, Miltons Arminianism and the authorship of De
doctrina christiana, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41 (1999): 103
27 (pp. 105, 109) for texts of the Remonstrant and contra-Remonstrant
articles. Total depravity, the subject of a third article, is the only point of
unproblematic agreement.
24 CPW, vol. I V, part I , p. 624.
25 William Poole, Milton and Calamy, N&Q 50 (2003): 1803.
26 Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 16401660
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 39.
27 John Milton, The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce . . . Now the Second Time
Revisd and Augmented (London: s.n., 1644), pp. 3440. All citations from
this, the second edition. Miltons phrase in this chapter, no decree
necessitating his [Adams] free will, may imply a shift in his thinking from
Supra- to Sublapsarianism.
28 Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: The Prose Works (New York: Twayne,
1998), pp. 401.
29 Miltons central texts are Genesis 2:23; Deuteronomy 24:1; Matthew 5:32;
Mark 10:212; Luke 16:18.
30 Milton, Doctrine & Discipline, pp. 49, 51, 54, 56, 64 (CPW, vol. I I , pp. 308,
311, 316, 319, 330). See also Ernst Sirlucks comments at CPW, vol. I I , p. 154.
31 Ibid., sg. A 2 r, sg. A3r, p. 75 (CPW, vol. I I , pp. 222, 223 , 347).
32 The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now by Authority of
Parliament Sitting at Westminster, Concerning a Confession of Faith (London:
The Company of Stationers, 1646), p. 13.
33 Milton, Doctrine & Discipline, p. 49 (CPW, vol. I I , p. 309).
34 Ibid., pp. 1112 (CPW, vol. I I , p. 251).
35 Ibid., pp. 1113 (CPW , vol. I I , pp. 2512 ).
36 Andrew Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems (London: Robert Boulter, 1681), p. 50,
The garden.
37 An Answer to a Book Intituled the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
(London: William Lee, 1644), pp. 312. Actually, Milton thought that Paul
was married (CPW, vol. I , p. 394).
38 CPW, vol. VI , p. 370.
39 Milton, Doctrine & Discipline, p. 14 (CPW, vol. I I , p. 258).
40 An Answer, pp. 8, 16.
41 Corns, John Milton: The Prose Works, pp. 456. Fine language is implied by
An Answer, p. 17.
42 W. R. Parker, Miltons Contemporary Reputation (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1940), p. 18 (that, at least, Milton chose to publish it in
English). See his appended List of printed allusions for its unpopularity.
43 John Milton, Of Education (s.l. : s.n., 1644), p. 2 (CPW, vol. I I , pp.
3667).
44 Jan Amos Comenius, A Reformation of Schooles Designed in Two Excellent
Treatises (London: Michael Sparke Sr, 1642), p. 22.
45 John Milton, Areopagitica (London: s.n., 1644), pp. 1213 (CPW, vol. I I ,
pp. 51416, adopting the emendation warfaring).
46 From the Catholic Exultet for Holy Saturday, sung by the deacon as the
paschal candle is lit.
47 Matters are further confused by the fact that early-modern editions of
Lactantius read virtutis (genitive) not virtuti (dative), e.g. Lactantius, Opera
(Antwerp: Joan. Graphel, 1532), p. 282.
48 My translation, adapted from CPW, vol. I , p. 363, my italics; this comment
dated 163940. The Latin text can be found in the Columbia edition of
Miltons works (New York: Columbia University Press, 19318), vol. XVI I I ,
p. 128.
49 Dennis Danielson, Miltons Good God (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), p. 176.
50 This interpretation of quamvis was rst promoted by Kathleen Hartwell,
Lactantius and Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929),
pp. 215.
51 Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon
Everie Chapter of Genesis (London: Thomas Charde, 1592), f.p. 14v.
52 John Milton, Tetrachordon (London: s.n., 1645), p. 15 (CPW, vol. I I ,
p. 604); Robert South, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Sermon
Preached at the Cathedral Church of St Paul, Novemb. 9, 1662 (London:
Thomas Robinson, 1663), p. 5.
53 Milton, Areopagitica, pp. 14, 17 (CPW, vol. I I , pp. 519, 527).
54 Milton, Tetrachordon, p. 56 (CPW, vol. I I , p. 661).
55 Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London: printed by Matthew
Simmons, 1649), p. 8 (CPW, vol. I I I , pp. 1989).
56 William Poole, Milton and science: a caveat, Milton Quarterly 38 (2004):
1834.
57 CPW, vol. VI I I , p. 491.
58 Martino Martini, Sinicae historiae Decas prima (Munich, 1658; this edn
Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1659), p. 21.
59 CPW, vol. VI I I , p. 492.
60 R. H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyre `re (15961676): His Life, Work and Inuence
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), pp. 1112. La Peyre`re drew on Salmasius De annis
climactericis, which had reported (though to reject) the possible predating of
creation by 30,000 years on the testimony of Chaldean and Egyptian
sources.
61 De doctrina resides in the National Archives, SP 9/61. All citations are from
CPW, vol. VI , in the translation of John Carey, and edited by Maurice Kelley.
Arguments against Miltons authorship have not gained wide acceptance, and
the whole notion of exclusive authorship is an inappropriate category when
dealing with this manuscript. See Corns, John Milton: The Prose Works,
pp. 13641, for a very brief summary. The debate at its best is seen between
two works: Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, David
Holmes and Fiona Tweedie, The provenance of De doctrina Christiana,
Milton Quarterly 31 (1997): 67117, and John Rumrich, The provenance of
De doctrina Christiana: a view of the present state of the controversy in
Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (eds.), Milton and the Grounds of
Contention (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2003). The crucial issue of
generic difference is discussed by Phillip Donnelly, The teloi of genre:
Paradise Lost and De doctrina Christiana, Milton Studies 39 (2000): 74100.
62 CPW, vol. VI , pp. 3445.
63 Ibid., pp. 3478.
64 Ibid., p. 349; PL 2 .55760 .
65 Ibid., p. 353 .
66 Ibid., pp. 3512 .
67 Ibid., pp. 3823, 388.
68 Ibid., pp. 3834, and see Kelleys note on the conventionality of this list.
69 Ibid., pp. 3848.
70 Ibid., p. 390.
71 Ibid., pp. 3946.
8 PARADI SE LOST I : THE CAUSALI TY OF PRI MAL
WI CKEDNESS
pp. 57, 65.
2 Eve Keller, Tetragrammic numbers: gematria and the line total of the 1674
Paradise Lost, Milton Quarterly 20 (1986): 235; see also the more
controversial P. J. Klemp, Now hid, now seen: an acrostic in Paradise
Lost , Milton Quarterly 11 (1977): 912.
3 Helen Darbishire, The Early Lives of Milton (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1932), p. 178.
4 CG 12.6.
5 CPW, vol. VI , pp. 388, 391.
6 CG 12.7.
7 So testied John Toland (Darbishire, Early Lives, p. 180).
8 See PL 9.1062, and Samson Agonistes, appended to John Milton, Paradise
Regaind (London: John Starkey, 1671), line 1024.
9 CG 12.1, 14.13.
10 Cambridge University Library MS Dd.12.68, fol. 55r.
11 Milton, Poems, p. 101.
12 Matthew Jordan, Milton and Modernity: Politics, Masculinity and Paradise
Lost (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 2.
13 Juan Huarte, Examen de ingenios ; or, the Examination of Mens Wits, trans.
Richard Carew (London: Richard Watkins, 1594), sg. [A7]r.
generis carminum cumulus (The Hague: Aelbrecht Hendricksz, 1601), line
1224.
15 Abiezer Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, of some Spiritual Wine (London: Giles
Calvert, 1649), p. 7; Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (London: s.n., 1649), sg. A2v;
Coppe, A Second Fiery Flying Roule (London: s.n., 1650), in CPW, p. 107;
Isaac Penington, Several Fresh Inward Openings (London: Giles Calvert,
1650), sgs. A3rv.
16 So Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber,
1977), p. 106.
17 Catullus, The Poems, parallel Latin/English, trans. Guy Lee (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), Carmen 7, 34. Milton points up the parallel by his
use of the adjective torrid, which picks up Iouis . . . aestuosi, torrid Jove,
line 5 of the same lyric.
18 Compare Neil Forsyth, Rebellion in Paradise Lost: impossible original,
Milton Quarterly 30 (1996): 15162 (p. 160, n.1).
19 John S. Tanner, Ricoeur and the etiology of evil in Paradise Lost , PMLA
103 (1988): 4556 (p. 48).
20 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1925 [1779
81]), vol. I , p. 109.
21 Sarah R. Morrison, When worlds collide: the central naturalistic narrative
and the allegorical dimension to Paradise Lost in Kristin A. Pruitt and
Charles W. Durham (eds.), Living Texts, Interpreting Milton (Selinsgrove:
Susquehanna University Press, 2000), pp. 17897 (pp. 17980).
22 G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), p. 4.
23 CPW, vol. VI , pp. 3058; George Newton Conklin, Biblical Criticism and
Heresy in Milton (New York: Kings Crown Press, 1949), pp. 6774.
24 John Rumrich, Milton Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), pp. 11846, esp. pp. 1406. Rumrich rehearses most previous criticism
on this issue.
25 John Leonard, Milton, Lucretius, and the void profound of unessential
night in Pruitt and Durham (eds.), Living Texts, pp. 198217. Rumrichs
reply is printed in the same volume, pp. 21827. Paradise Lost (1674) reads
brokd foe at 2.1039 (n/d adjacent in printers tray).
26 Leonard, Void profound, p. 213.
27 William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplord: Milton and the Authorship of De
doctrina Christiana. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), pp.
12134.
9 PARADI SE LOST I I : GOD, EDEN AND MAN
1996), p. 113.
3 John Milton, Paradise Regaind (London: John Starkey, 1671), p. 78 (3.6);
Samson Agonistes, appended to same volume, p. 98 (3.71011).
4 John Milton, Paradise Regaind, p. 9 (1.151, 155).
pp. 57, 62, my italics.
6 John Milton, The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce . . . Now the Second Time
Revisd and Augmented (London: s.n., 1644), p. 54 (CPW, vol. I I , p. 315). The
reference is to 1 Samuel : 3:1213.
7 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 1st edn (London: Longman,
1968), p. 295.
8 CPW, vol. VI , p. 206.
9 Neil Forsyth, Rebellion in Paradise Lost : impossible original, Milton
Quarterly 30 (1996): 15162 (p. 154).
10 CPW, vol. VI , p. 353.
11 Compare the subtle analysis of John Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New
Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1987),
pp. 14766. Rumrichs God is very clever, but still not very nice.
12 Charles Leslie, The History of Sin and Heresie (London: H. Hindmarsh,
1698), sg. A2v.
13 British Library MS Sloane 2894, fol. 70v; William Poole, Two early readers
of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill, Milton Quarterly 38 (2004):
7699, esp. pp. 8892.
14 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn (London:
Longman, 1998), p. 320.
15 Quoted by Fowler in his commentary (2nd edn, p. 320), in order to rebut
Empson.
16 Forsyth, Rebellion, p. 154.
17 Andrew Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems (London: Robert Boulter, 1681), p. 61.
18 Arnold Williams, The motivation of Satans rebellion in Paradise Lost,
Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 25368.
19 J[ohn] B[eale], Herefordshire Orchards (London: Printed by Roger Daniel,
1657), p. 48. See also Jeffrey S. Theis, The environmental ethics of Paradise
Lost: Miltons exegesis of Genesis iiii, Milton Studies 34 (1996): 6181.
20 John Carey, Milton (New York: Arco, 1970), pp. 1034.
21 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: Printed by Thomas
Orwin, 1588), sg. [A8rv].
22 Sylvesters Du Bartas, especially the section Eden, is likewise congested
with occupatio, and then nally announced to be An unknowne Cifer, and
deepe pit (line 709). See Josuah Sylvester, The Divine Weeks and Works of
Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas (London, 1592), ed. Susan Snyder,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
23 John Denham, Coopers Hill (London: Tho. Walkley, 1642), p. 4.
24 John Earle, Micro-cosmography; or, a Piece of the World Discovered (London:
Edward Blount, 1628), sg. B1r.
25 CPW, vol. VI , p. 352.
26 Kent. R. Lenhof, Nor turnd I weene: Paradise Lost and pre-lapsarian
sexuality, Milton Quarterly 34 (2000): 6783.
27 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London:
Longman, 1997), I I . i. 8.
28 Compare 2.407, 827, 5.98, 6.362, 8.230, 10.475.
29 CG 14.26.
1 0 PARADI SE LOST I I I : CREATI ON AND EDUCATI ON
1 Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostotic Preaching, trans. J. Armitage
Robinson (London: SPCK, 1920), p. 82.
2 Patrick Hume, The Poetical Works of Mr John Milton . . . Together with
Explanatory Notes (London: Jacob Tonson, 1695), p. 150.
3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.339510.
4 George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologizd, and Repre-
sented in Figures (Oxford: printed by John Licheld, 1632), p. 106.
5 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.352.
6 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9.31.78; Hume, Poetical Works, p. 150;
Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, pp. 1056.
7 Lycidas also may have the Mosella in mind, especially Mosella, 16985, a
description of satyrs, fauns and nymphs in the waves. Mosella, 176 names
Panope as Milton does at Lycidas, line 99; the capripedes Panas (172) may be
recalled by Miltons Fauns with clovn heel (34); and agrestes Satyros (170)
by Rough Satyrs (34).
8 Ausonius, Mosella, 22839.
9 Christine Froula, When Eve reads Milton: undoing the canonical
economy, Critical Inquiry 10 (19834): 32147 (pp. 329, 333).
10 Adams Woman is her Name, of Man / Extracted registers his
consciousness of the Hebrew derivation of wo-man from man. This
derivation, it has been wittily noted, allows a pun into the rst line of
Paradise Lost, owing to its prepositional opening: Of Mans First
Disobedience can be construed as Of-Mans First Disobedience, therefore
Womans First Disobedience. See Gregory Machacek, Of Mans First
Disobedience, Milton Quarterly 24 (1990): 111.
11 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 5.9625.
12 Louis E. Bredvold, The naturalism of Donne in relation to some
Renaissance traditions, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 22
(1923): 471502.
13 Thomas Browne, On dreams in The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 4756.
14 Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English
Radical Religion 16401660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.
824.
Calvert, 1649), p. 41. Smith informs me that T. P. is Thomasina Pendarves,
wife of the Fifth Monarchist John.
16 William Blake, The garden of love, Songs of Innocence and Experience in
The Complete Illuminated Books (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p.
86. The comparison is indebted to the general argument of A. D. Nuttall,
The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
17 CPW, vol. VI , p. 353.
18 Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8.183235.
19 Dennis Danielson, Miltons Good God (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), p. 181; John Carey, Milton (New York: Arco, 1970), p. 105; CG
14.26.
20 See, e.g., John Leonard on William Empson: Naming in Paradise: Milton
and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 82.
21 Compare John Calvin, The Institution of the Christian Religion, trans.
Thomas Norton (London: Printed by Peinolde Wolfe and Richarde
Harrison, 1561), 3.3.11.
22 [Lucy Hutchinson], Order and Disorder, or; the World Made and Undone
Being Meditations upon the Creation and Fall (London: Henry Mortlock,
1679), p. 46.
23 Neil Forsyth, Rebellion in Paradise Lost: impossible original, Milton
Quarterly 30 (1996): 15162.
24 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 5.11325, my italics.
25 Johnson, Lives of the Poets, vol. I , p. 128.
26 Ibid., pp. 11730 passim.
27 Ibid., p. 129.
28 Grant McColley, The RossWilkins controversy, Annals of Science 3 (1938):
15389; Adrian Johns, Prudence and pedantry in early modern cosmology:
the trade of Al Ross, History of Science 35 (1997): 2359.
29 Miltons failure to refer to the Tychonic system in which the planets circle
the sun, but the sun circles the earth, suggests that Milton was not abreast of
contemporary astronomy, despite the claims of many recent commentators:
see Francis R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (New
York: Octagon Books, 1968 [1937]), p. 284.
30 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn (London:
Longman, 1998), p. 35. It is important to note with Fowler that, at
9.646, Satan behaves as if the astronomy of the poem is fallen: darkened
poles and colures could not exist before the Fall.
31 Pace Catherine Gimelli Martin, What if the Sun Be Centre to the
World?: Miltons epistemology, cosmology, and paradise of fools
reconsidered, Modern Philology (2001): 23165.
32 Tommaso Campanella, Apologia pro Galileo (written 1616, published 1622),
trans. Grant McColley in Smith College Studies in History XXII, 34
(1937), pp. 8, 66; Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds : The Origins of the
Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982).
33 John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New World & Another Planet
(London: John Maynard, 1640), pp. 18990, citing Ephesians 1:10 for
biblical support.
1 1 PARADI SE LOST I V: FALL AND EXPULSI ON
1 Henry Vaughan, Silex scintillans (London: H. Blunder, 1650), p. 59.
2 CG 14.26.
generis carminum cumulus (The Hague: Aelbrecht Hendricksz, 1601), lines
181617.
4 First and second denitions of elaborate in the OED.
5 Andrew Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems (London: Robert Boulter, 1681), p. 50,
The garden.
6 John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and
Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 221.
7 See Fowlers note to PL 11. 98 which, however, does not mention that this is
a scholastic distinction Miltons larger theological outlook renders
problematic, particularly if the notion of creation ex Deo is employed:
Adams pura naturalia in that case would not be traceable to his origin from
nothing, as in Augustine.
8 John Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh,
PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1987), p. 151. This has now been realised by
Philip Pullman in his Miltonic trilogy, His Dark Materials (London:
Scholastic, 19952001).
9 Pace the otherwise important Aristotelian analyses of causation in Paradise
Lost of Leon Howard, The Invention of Miltons Great Argument:
a study of the logic of Gods Ways to Men, Huntington Library Quarterly
9 (1945): 14973; John M. Steadman, The causal structure of the Fall,
Journal for the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 18097, both standing behind
Fowlers statement that As for causation in our sense, Milton was never
preoccupied by it (Paradise Lost, 2nd edn, p. 37).
10 Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p.
61 (lines 289).
11 Jacob Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God (London: William
Learner, 1650), p. 2.
12 The three important sites in Milton are: Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce,
p. 30 (CPW, vol. I I , p. 278); A Treatise of Civil Power (London: Tho.
Newcomb, 1659), pp. 1718 (CPW, vol. VI I , p. 247); and Of True Religion
(London: s.n., 1673), pp. 58 (CPW, vol. VI I I , pp. 4217). See further David
Loewenstein, Milton among the religious radicals and sects: polemical
engagements and silences, Milton Studies 40 (2001): 22247.
13 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Indianapo-
lis: Hackett, 1998), pp. 45.
14 Ibid., p. 21; John Milton, Areopagitica (London: s.n., 1644), pp. 11, 31 (CPW,
vol. I I , pp. 511, 554).
15 CPW, vol. VI , pp. 1334; Latin text supplied from The Works of John Milton,
ed. F. A. Patterson et al., 20 vols. (New York: 19318), vol. XI V, p. 31.
16 CPW, vol. VI , p. 135. Miltons texts are Genesis 6:8, Judges 2:18, Numbers
23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29, Genesis 6:6, Judges 10:16, Ezekiel 31:17 and
Deuteronomy 32:27.
17 CPW, vol. VI , pp. 133, 136; Patterson, Works, vol. XI V, pp. 31, 37.
Calvert, 1649), p. 1.
19 Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity as the Same Is
Held Forth and Preached by the People Called in Scorn Quakers ([Aberdeen?]:
s.n., 1678), pp. 5960.
20 On the sacred status awarded to Paradise Lost after Miltons death, see
Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 53110.
CONCLUSI ON
1996), pp. 1023; see also my review of Fishs most recent mongering in The
Cambridge Quarterly 31 (2002): 25761.
2 The varieties of approach to this statement must wait for a later book. For
some preliminary remarks, see Peter Harrison, Original sin and the
problem of knowledge in early modern Europe, Journal for the History of
Ideas 63 (2002): 23959.
3 Elizabeth Labrousse, Bayle et linstrument critique (Paris: Editions Seghers,
1965), pp. 5863.
5 J[ohn?] G[reene], The First Man; or, a Short Discourse of Adams State
(London: Benjamin Allen, 1643), pp. 201.
6 CG 12.7.
7 David Cram, Universal language, specious arithmetic and the alphabet
of simple notions, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 4 (1994):
21333.
8 J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1982), pp. 325, 3842; B. J. T. Dobbs,
Newtons alchemy and his theory of matter, Isis 73 (1982): 51128.
9 George Shuckford, The Sacred and Profane History of the World, 5th edn, rev.
and corrected by James Creighton, 4 vols. (London: William Baynes, 1819),
vol. I V, p. 21.
10 Ibid., pp. 579, 139, 144.
11 The Poetical Works of Gray and Collins, ed. A. L. Poole (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1919), pp. 33, 35.
12 Shuckford, History, vol. I V, pp. 2578.
13 Ibid., pp. 25969.
14 Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber, rev. C. P. Eden, 10
vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 184752), vol. I ,
pp. xlvixlvii.
15 PL 9.465; see also A. D. Nuttall, Gulliver among the horses in The Stoic in
Love (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).
16 J. T. Shawcross, Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 1, p. 248.
Index
absolute power 32
Adam and Eve 246, 99
condition of 47
creation of 16873
Eves dream 1735
Eves imperfection 118, 119, 170, 184
Eves inferiority 116
intellects of 57, 69
marriage of 1348, 1713
mindlessness 182, 185
nature of 315
sinless 1824
in visual art 356
Adamites 13, 59
Adultery Act of 1650 , 134
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound 130, 187
agriculture 11
Agrippa, Cornelius, De vanitate et
incertitudine scientiarum atque
artium declamatio 601
allegory 723, 74, 75
ambition 148
Ambrosiaster 234
Ames, William 34
Anabaptists 34, 38, 60
angels 29, 1423, 1612
fallen 99, 143, 152, 162, 167, 178
and shape-shifting 152, 178
Anglicanism 55
Anselm 301
anthropology
Aristotelian 31
Augustinian 31
antinomianism 91
apple, the 689
Aquinas, Thomas 31
Arians 88
Aristotle 29
Physics 28
Arminianism 32, 46
Milton and 140, 144, 145, 159, 189
tolerance for 38
astronomy 180
Atonement 86, 92
Augustine 45, 19, 2130, 158, 167, 191
on Adam 183
Allegorical Commentary on Genesis 23
and the cause of evil 149, 152, 155
City of God 212, 267
Confessions 12, 22, 23
Enchiridion 21, 22, 25
fall-in-the-will 104, 105, 118, 149
fall-in-the-world 105, 149
on knowledge 68, 69
Literal Commentary on Genesis 22,
256, 29
On Heresies 59
on original sin 51, 567
and the self 1501
The Trinity 22
Augustinianism 6, 16, 20, 32, 196
Milton and 165
and the universities 36
Ausonius, Mosella 16970
Austen, Ralph, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees 11
Babington, Gervase 98
Bacon, Francis 180
Of the Procience and Advancement
of Learning 2
baptism 32, 36, 37, 478, 601
Baptists 48
confessions of 48
Barclay, Robert 193
Barlow, Thomas 44, 84
Baro, Peter 36
Summa trium de praedestinatione
sententiarum 36
Barrett, William 36
Bastingius 38
Bauthumley, Jacob 190
234
The Light and Dark Sides of God 153
Baxter, Richard 12, 41
Sancta Sophia 151
Bayle, Pierre, Dictionnaire historique et
critique 197
Baylie, Richard 43
Beale, John 46, 162
Behmenism 1079, 111
Belial 153, 157
Bevan, Joseph Gurney 66
biblical commentary 968, 100
Biel, Gabriel 31
Bilson, Thomas 90
Blake, William 174
Blount, Charles, Oracles of Reason 55
Boehme, Jakob, Mysterium magnum 108
Boissard, Jean-Jacques 35
Boyle, Robert 198
Browne, Sir Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 96
On dreams 173
Burgesse plate 35
Burnet, Thomas 45
Archaeologiae philosophicae 55
Calamy, Edmund 133
Englands Looking-Glasse 133
Calvert, Giles 65, 70, 71
Calvin, John 334, 91
on French Libertines 59, 86
Institutes 33
Calvinism 22, 56, 189, 197
and atonement 92
an enemy of the Church 38
Marlowe and 89
and original sin 40, 144, 145
and the universities 36
Cambridge University 36, 37
Campanella, Tommaso, Apologia pro
Galileo 181
Carey, John 128, 132, 162
catechism 20, 34
Catholicism 32
Catullus 153
censorship 133, 138
Chartrain School and Platos Timaeus 31
China 1412
Christian Tradition, the 195
chromaticism 1278
Church, the
Eastern 16
Western 16
Clarkson, Laurence 79, 112
A Single Eye, All Light, No
Darkness 93, 153
class 9
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 55
Colet, John 125
Collier, Thomas, The Marrow of
Christianity 54
Collinson, Robert 90
Comenius, Jan Amos, A Reformation
of Schooles 3
Conway, Lady Anne 65
Coppe, Abiezer 945, 153, 193
Copps Return to the Wayes of Truth 95
A Fiery Flying Roll 95
and Miss T. P.s dream 173
Corro, Antonio del 37
corruption
of external world 180
of humankind 181
see also GoodmanHakewill debate
Cosin, Richard, Conspiracie for Pretended
Reformation 87
Cowley, Abraham 12
Crab, Roger 12, 93
Cranach, Lucas, Paradise 35
creation 165, 1969
Creighton, James 199
cry of dereliction 8891
Cuique suum (Each to his Own) 92
de Bry, Theodore 35
Creatio hominis 35
de Thou, Jacques-Auguste, Parabata vinctus, sive
triumphus Christi, tragdia 130
Denham, John, Coopers Hill 164
Denison, Stephen 59
Desmarets, Samuel, Refutatio fabulae
praeadamiticae 141
determinism
see predestination
devils 143, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154
Diggers 49, 62, 73, 74, 75, 76
dislocation, temporal 1467
divorce 1338
dreams 1735
Dryden, John
Discourse Concerning the Originall and
Progress of Satire 1148
on original sin 114
and reason 114, 121
Religio laici 114
scepticism 114, 121
State of Innocence, and the Fall of Man 101,
1131, 176; Adam 115, 121; debate
on free will 1168; Eve 116, 11820,
121; as literary criticism 121; Lucifer 119;
will-fall 118
virtuous heathen 1145
Index 235
dualism 81, 92, 94, 110, 157
Duppa, Brian 43, 44, 50
Earle, John 165
Micro-cosmography 17
Eden 1014, 1624
Eden, Charles Page 199
education 3, 133, 138
Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena 84
egocentrism 63
Ellis, Humphrey 88
Elton, Edward, A Forme of Catechizing 20
Empson, William 161, 187
Enoch 187
Epiphanius 83
Erasmus, Desiderius, Paraphrases 37
Erbury, William 64
Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia ecclesia 84
Eve
see Adam and Eve
Evelyn, John 43, 46
Elysium Britannicum 11
Everard, John 62, 63
Corpus hermeticum 18, 78, 93
and German mystics 59
Everard, Robert 41, 42, 49, 57, 180
Baby Baptism Routed 42, 47
The Creation and Fall of Adam
Reviewed 41, 42, 47, 48
Natures Vindication 42, 48
Everard, William 73
evil 2630, 195
cause of 149
contact with 13840
origin of 78
problem of 1415
evil will 2629, 149, 152
see also Fall, the
Fall, the 15, 147, 1901
fall-in-the-will 104, 105, 109, 149, 152
fall-in-the-world 105, 149
two kinds of 2730, 104, 10810
Farnworth, Richard 94
feminism 170, 171
Field, Richard 36
Filmer, Robert 1401
Fish, Stanley, Surprised by Sin 195
Fisher, Samuel 43
folly 61, 66, 74
Fowler, Alastair 160, 161, 180
Fox, George 41, 94
Franck, Sebastian 613, 68
The Forbidden Fruit 60
inuence of 635
on knowledge 72
Paradoxa 62
Franckeans 67, 69, 70, 72
Franklin, William 88
free will 159, 165, 176
debate on 11618
French Libertines 59, 86
garden, the 1634, 176
gardening 1112
Gaule, John 40
generation 153
Genesis 13, responses to 1959
German Spirituals 59, 61, 86
Gibbons, Grinling 36
Gil, Alexander, Sacred Philosophie of the
Holy Scripture 1256
Gilpin, John, The Quakers Shaken 90
Glanvill, Joseph 34
Gnostic Ophites 60
Gnosticism 1819, 28, 59, 79, 89, 91, 92, 170
God 15860
exaltation of the Son 1602
and the self 1512
Goodman, Godfrey 197
The Fall of Man; or, the Corruption of
Nature 12, 48
GoodmanHakewill debate 127, 180
Gray, Thomas, Ode on a distant prospect
of Eton College 198
Greene, John 197
Grotius, Hugo 130
Adamus exul 1017; Adamus 1024, 183;
Eva 1035, 110, 152; Sathan 105; two
types of Fall 104
Annotations upon the Whole Bible 106
On the Law of War and Peace 106
Sacra 101
guilt 47, 144
Hacket, William 879
Hakewill, George
Apologie of the Power and Providence
of God 2
Hammond, Henry 43
Hartlib, Samuel 68, 138
Ephemerides 76
Heber, Reginald 45, 199
hell 14950
Hemmingsen, Niels 37
Herbert, George, The sacrice 90
heresies 8295, 1901
lists of 84, 856
236 Index
in Paradise Lost 180
heresiographers 8395
heresiography 5860
heretics 86
heterodoxy 589
Hetheringtonians 59
Hill, Abraham 161
Hill, Christopher 65, 82
The Experience of Defeat 107
Hoard, Samuel, Gods Love to Mankind 54
Hooke, Robert 4
Micrographia 3
Huarte, Juan 152
Hubmaier, Balthasar, On Free Will 60
Hume, Patrick 169
Hutchinson, Julius 99
Hutchinson, Lucy 176
Order and Disorder 99101;
Adam 100; Eve 99
Hutterites 60
ignorance 67, 166
Irenaeus 16, 18, 83, 168
Jay, Stephen, Ta Kannakou; or, the
Tragedies of Sin Contemplated 98
Jeanes, Henry 53, 55
Jews 768
Johnson, Samuel 154, 179
knowledge 67, 72
sexual 69
tree of 603, 6870, 106
La Peyre`re, Isaac 5
inuence of 789
on original sin 77
Prae-Adamitae 4, 768, 1412
Systema 77
Lanyer, Aemilia, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 10
Larner, William (William Larnar) 48
law 77, 1434
Lee, Nathaniel 113
Leighton, Sir William 34
Leonard, John 156, 187
Naming in Paradise 189
Leslie, Charles 114, 161
literalism 81
Little Non-Such 59
Loe, William, Seauen dumpes 90
Lollards 59
Lombard, Peter, Sententiae 31
Lucifer 28, 119
see also Satan
Lucretius 1778
Luther, Martin, Lectures on Genesis 33
Lutherans 60
Lyford, William 54
Maier, Michael, Atalanta fugiens 70
Mammon 153, 157
man 1435, 1589, 1657
fallen 152
fallibility of 64
freedom of 132 3; see also Fall, the;
free will
mutability of 56
unfallen status 15
Manichees 28
Maresius 142
Marler, Thomas 37
Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus 88
marriage 1348, 1713
Martini, Martino
De bello Tartarico in Sinis 141
Sinicae historiae decas prima 141
Marvell, Andrew 136, 162
materialism 923
matter 78, 155, 1912, 198
medical theory 68
Medici tapestry 35
Messiahs 8695
Midland General Baptists, The Faith and
Practise of Thirty Congregations,
Gathered According to the Primitive
Pattern 48
Milton, John 97, 121
Adam 183
An Apology against a Pamphlet 133, 136, 151
Areopagitica 133, 13840
De doctrina christiana 137, 1425, 149, 155, 156,
158, 160, 166, 192
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 1338,
1656, 183
on domestic and civil liberty 13240
drafts of tragedies on the Fall 12932, 189;
Adam unparadizd 130, 131; Adam
with the serpent 130; Paradise Lost
130, 131
Lycidas 1289, 132, 146, 160, 167
Naturam non pati senium 180
Paradise Lost 20, 25, 11314, 127, 134, 137;
Adam 117; allegory of Sin and
Death 1545; the Argument 182,
1835; Burgesse plate 35; Chaos and
Night 153, 154, 1556, 157; circularity of
152; devils of 143, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154;
and divine inspiration 1924; and
dualism 157; Eden 1624, 1889;
Eve 109, 116, 16871, 1735, 184;
Index 237
exaltation of the Son 1602; the Fall
1828; God 15860; heresies 180;
man 1589, 1657; monsters 157;
Raphaels narration 17680;
soliloquy 186; the Son 158, 159; speech
1867; the war in heaven 17680
Paradise Regaind 1023, 159
Poems 129
polemical prose 132
on political liberty 9, 1401
Of Prelatical Episcopacy 132
The Reason of Church-Government 132
Of Reformation 133
schooling and religion 125
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 133, 141
Tetrachordon 140
theory of virtue 13840
verse 1269; Apologus de Rustico et Hero
126; At a Solemn Musick 2, 1278;
Epitaph on the Marchioness of
Winchester 126; Naturam non
pati senium 126
Montaigne, Michel (Eyquem) de 61
More, Henry 45, 65
Muggleton 65, 66
A Looking-Glass for George Fox 65
Muggletonians 65, 79, 801, 88
creed of 80
mutability, of man 56
Narcissus 109, 16970
nature 49, 132, 137, 164
corruption of 1
and the Garden of Eden 176
guiltlessness of 183
negative accommodation 189
neoscholasticism 39
Neville, Henry, The Isle of Pines 13
Newton, Isaac, Principia mathematica 198
Nuttall, A. D., The Alternative Trinity 88
Oberman, Heiko 31
Ochino, Bernardino, Thirty Dialogues 84
Oldenburg, Henry 42, 1412
optimism 198
original righteousness 47, 50, 57, 75
original sin 5, 34, 36, 37, 133, 144, 158
and Calvinism 40
denition of 40
Dryden on 114
La Peyre`re on 77
and Pelagians 40
quarrel over 401; see also Everard, Robert;
Stephens, Nathaniel ; Taylor, Jeremy
transmission of 223, 44, 47, 52, 53
orthodoxy 58
Osborne, Francis, A Contemplation on
Adams Fall 17
Oughtred, William 46
Ovid 149
Metamorphoses Narcissus 169
Owen, John 44
Oxford University 36, 37, 38
Pagitt, Ephraim
Christianography 84
Heresiography 84
Paracelsan medicine 68
Paracelsans 69, 70, 76
Parker, William Riley 137
Parker, William, The Late Assemblies
Confession of Faith Examined 42
passions the 24
pastoralism 129
patriarchy 140, 1701
Patrides, C. A. 195
Pausanias 169
Pelagians 40
Pelagius 22
Penington, Isaac, the Younger 19, 658
Divine Essays 67
The Great and Sole Troubler of the Times
Represented in a Mapp of Miserie 66
Light or Darknesse 667, 153
Severall Fresh Inward Openings 67
perfection 63, 64, 165
Perkins, William 34
perturbation (perturbatio) 24, 26, 100, 187
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 191
Pierce, Thomas 40
Pinnell, Henry 645
Plato, Timaeus 31
Polycarp 83
Poole, Matthew, Annotations upon the
Holy Bible 96, 97
Pordage, John 107
Pordage, Samuel 10713
Christian theology 113
cosmic struggle 113
dualism of God 110
First and Second Principles 11113
hermaphrodite Adam 10810
Mariamne 107
Mundorum explicatio 101, 10713, 157
Satan 11113
two falls 10810
pre-Adamites 5, 15, 73, 75, 769, 141
predestination 34, 368, 116, 117, 165, 196
Presbyterianism 47, 48, 53, 55
pride 1489, 150
238 Index
primitives 106, 11415
prohibition, the 1735
Prometheus 130, 187
Protestantism 32
Puritanism 92
Quakerism 13, 59, 62, 656, 94
Quarles, Edward, of Pembroke 37
Rabisha, William 17
Adam Unvailed, and Seen with
Open Face 703
A Paralel between Mr Loves Treason and the
Many Thousands that Are Hanged for
Theft 71
radicalism 3, 58, 82, 158, 190
Ranters 13, 79, 87, 945, 112, 153
and Gnostics 59, 91
Penington and 65
reader response theory 195
Reading, John 42, 55
reason 114, 121, 1256, 1423, 144
Reeve, John 65
Ricks, Christopher R., Miltons Grand Style 189
Rivinus, Andreas 107
Robins, John 13, 87
Rochester, John Wilmot 2nd Earl of 4
Rosicrucian 70
Ross, Alexander 180
Royston, Richard 44
Rumrich, John 156
on Stanley Fish 195
Rutherford, Samuel 55
on heresies 59
Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist 86
Saddington, John 80
Saldenus 19
Salmasius 142
Salmon, Joseph, A Rout, A Rout 63, 94
Sanderson, Robert 44, 50
Sandys, George 169
Satan 157, 162, 165, 166, 173, 180
ambition 148
and the devils 151
and the Fall 1489, 152
fall of 150
and pride 1489
and shape-shifting 153
and Sin 149
schismatics 38
schola Augustiniana moderna 32
science 1878
Scotus, Duns 31
sectarianism 18, 589
self 1501
self-esteem 151
selshness 150, 151
serpent, the 147
see also Lucifer ; Satan
sex 69, 11819, 134, 165, 1667, 183
Sheldon, Gilbert 43, 44
Shuckford, George 199
Sacred and Profane History: The Creation
and Fall of Man 198
Simson, Patrick, Historie of the Church 18
sin 1434, 149, 150
and matter 1912
see also original sin
Skinner, Stephen 129
Smectymnuus 133
Smith, W. 879
Socinianism 17, 84, 140
Son, the 152, 158, 159
South, Robert 35, 140
Speed, Samuel 91
Spurstowe, William 133
Stephens, Nathaniel 4, 412, 468, 4950
on original righteousness 57
A Plain and Easie Calculation of the Name,
Mark, and Number of the Name of the
Beast 41, 49
Precept 42, 47
Vindiciae 42, 50, 557
Stock, Richard, Stock of Divine Knowledge 125
Swift, Jonathan, Gullivers Travels 199
Sylvester, Josuah 101, 128
T. P., Miss 1734
Tany, Thomas 18, 79
Taylor, Jeremy 3, 41, 505, 57, 96, 158, 199
Answer to a Letter 45
Deus justicatus 44, 54, 55
Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying
42, 55, 57
on original righteousness 50
on original sin 426, 525
and the process of the Fall 50
and textual authority 42
Unum necessarium 43, 50, 55
Tentzel, Andreas, Of Spirituall
mumy 6970
Tertullian 234
textual authority 42
Theologia Germanica 60, 62, 63, 150
Theophilus 25
Thompson, Richard Dutch 32
Thorndike, Herbert, Epilogue to the
Tragedy of the Church of England 44
Toland, John 147
Index 239
Toldervy, John 75
Tombes, John, Antipaedobaptism 42
Totney, Thomas (Theauraujohn Tany) 18, 79
traducianism 223, 44, 47, 52, 53
Traherne, Thomas 4, 197
tree of knowledge 603, 6870, 106
Underhill, Thomas, Hell Broke Loose 59
universities 369, 63
Ursinus 38
van Helmont, Jean-Baptiste 68
Vaughan, Henry 182
Corruption 2
Vaughan, Thomas 89
virtue 13840
visual art, Adam and Eve in 356
Vitringa, Campegius 199
Warner, John 43, 50
Webster, John 63
Widdowes, Giles, The Schysmatical
Puritan 389
Wilkins, John 180, 181
Ecclesiastes 45
Wilkinson, Robert, of Leicester 94
will, the
see evil will ; Fall, the; free will
will-Fall 118, 149
Winstanley, Gerard 42, 49, 62, 716
Fire in the Bush 74
on heredity 75
on human origins 74
The Law of Freedom 75
The Mysterie of God 73
The New Law of Righteousness 49, 73
women
inferiority 910
rights for 10
see also feminism
Wood, Anthony 42, 64
Writer, Clement, Fides divina 43
Young, Thomas 125
240 Index

(William Poole) Milton and The Idea of The Fall

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(William Poole) Milton and The Idea of The Fall

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This page intentionally left blank

MI LTON AND THE I DEA OF THE FALL

You might also like