JOHN MILTON AND THE MYTH OF ADAM AND EVE

Jerry Harkins

Paradise Lost is – or so I and many others believe – the greatest poem in the English language.  But it is something more:  an unprecedented, even shocking fulfillment of Augustine’s injunction to interpret Genesis literally.

                                                                                           –Stephen Greenblatt[1]

No, it is not.  Okay, Paradise Lost is certainly shocking and certainly a re-hash of Augustine’s dour views of God, the universe and humankind.  But it is by no means the greatest poem in the English language and would not be even if there were such a thing which there is not.  You might have a favorite poem.  You might have a poem you admire more than any other.  Personally, I admire the Odyssey more than the Iliad although I enjoy them both.  On the other hand, I admire the Aeneid but do not particularly like it.  And, of course, there is the adage that vox populi vox Dei.  The community of readers gets to have a consensus opinion and may be forgiven if it mistakes most memorable for greatest.  But there is no such thing as the “greatest entertainer who ever lived” (pace Michael Jackson) or the “greatest song of all time” (pace Bob Dylan) or the “greatest military blunder of all time” (pace Winston Churchill).  There is not even the greatest sub-atomic particle in the universe although the recently confirmed God Particle is a strong candidate (pace Peter Higgs).  I’m not trying to be coy here.  It’s just that I think “greatest” implies some empirical standard beyond “me and a bunch of other people believe.” An objective criterion, however, cannot be met by a class of phenomena as complex and ethereal as poetry or any other kind of art.  I freely admit that, in the case of Paradise Lost, as bad it is, you can’t dismiss it out-of-hand simply because it is a difficult, convoluted poem about an ignorant, absurd theological ideology by an admittedly well-educated but narcissistic and churlish popinjay.

What!  Milton?  John Milton? The immortal genius of whom William Wordsworth wrote, “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue / That Shakespeare spoke: the faith and morals hold / Which Milton held.”  I’m reasonably sure Wordsworth never read much of Milton. [2, 3]  But Stephen Greenblatt has.  Dr. Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, a pioneer of the New Historicism approach to literary studies, [4] and arguably the most delightful scholarly writer working today.  The reader immediately recognizes that he has derived great pleasure from his researching and writing and that he knows how to pass on his enthusiasms.  He is the author of the most absorbing book I have read since The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.  That was 35 years ago. [5]  But the important point is that this essay is not a review of his new book dealing with Adam and Eve.  Given the subject,  he had to confront Paradise Lost.  I just wish he had dismissed it as the trash it is.

We need to get a few things straight before we tackle Paradise Lost and the Book of Genesis.  First, John Milton’s poem is a grab bag of interpretations of our origin myth yoked together to support an extreme fundamentalist  theology.  Greenblatt recognizes both the myth as a myth and the fact that Milton swallowed it literally.  What he does not seem to realize is that believing it constituted intellectual malpractice, coming as it did 34 years after the heresy trial of Galileo and eight years after Nicholas Steno began to explicate the true age of the earth. European intellectuals had long thought that Genesis was metaphoric at best.  Among the skeptics was Lucretius who was the subject of another of Greenblatt’s books.  De rerum natura had been rediscovered in 1417 and was common currency among educated people 250 years later when Milton published his poem.  What Greenblatt fails to do is call Milton out for being a gullible and ignorant theologian as well as a loutish misogynist.  

Second, we are dealing with a flaw in an otherwise excellent book.  Like most of Greenblatt’s books, this one promotes several controversial ideas. He irritates me several times by dismissing Darwinian evolution as merely our modern origin story.  But being a Socratic gadfly  – going against the grain of the conventional wisdom –  is pretty much the function of the public intellectual and it plays a vital role in preventing cultural stagnation.  Greenblatt is nevertheless guilty of the most common form of error in biblical exegesis, the failure to give due consideration to the most direct and explicit meanings of words, sentences and passages. Translators and interpreters should bear in mind the rule known in science as Occam’s Razor:  the simplest possible explanation should be accepted until it is no longer consistent with what we know to be true.  This is not as easy as it seems because language evolves and it is not always possible to know what an ancient reader, writer or listener understood by a given locution.  For example, in Genesis 1:29-30, God tells Adam and Eve:

“I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground — everything that has the breath of life in it — I give every green plant for food.”

Taken literally this suggests a divine commandment that all animals be vegetarians but does “seed-bearing” exclude mushrooms?  Of course mushrooms are not green either.  Was God merely speaking of their diet in Eden?  Was Eden a forerunner of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom where, “The wolf shall live with the lamb…the calf and the lion and the fatling together?”  As even a seventeenth century grandee would have known, a “fatling” is a young animal being prepared for the slaughter to feed him and his friends.  Words mean different things at different times. What, for example, was Shakespeare thinking when he wrote about “cool” courtesans in King Lear or a “cool” rut-time in The Merry Wives of Windsor?

Milton was a misogynist, not an unusual bias in his time or any other.  Worse, though, he accepted misogyny as something ordained by God and therefore beyond criticism.  In Book 4, Lines 295-311, “the greatest poem in the English language” describes Adam and Eve as follows:

Whence true autority in men; though both [ 295 ]
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd;
For contemplation hee and valour formd,
For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him:
His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar'd [ 300 ]
Absolute rule; and Hyacinthin Locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustring, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
Shee as a vail down to the slender waste
Her unadorned golden tresses wore [ 305 ]
Disheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receivd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, [ 310 ]
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.

With a slightly updated orthography this could, of course, have been a description of the conventional wisdom at any time between Genesis and #MeToo.  It is not difficult to read misogyny into Genesis or the Bible generally.  It is not that Milton was wrong to do it.  He was wrong because he ignored Genesis 1:27:  “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them.”  But what is worse is that he should not have allowed himself to be a purveyor of conventional wisdom.  Not only did he promote himself as a public intellectual, he was a true if not always wise revolutionary in religion and politics but a pig in the way he treated women including his wives and daughters.  He defended his view of women by reference to their descent from Eve as described in Genesis.  According to Greenblatt, Adam knew Eve was his equal and struggled to love her.  I don’t know how Greenblatt knows this.  He claims it’s because Adam is quoted as saying, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.”  The full quote in a modern translation is, “This one at last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, / This one shall be called Woman for from man was this one taken.” [6] Maybe Greenblatt is relying on Pope John Paul II who butchered these words in his 1995 “Letter to Women.”  He said they reflect an “enormous richness.” “…[T]he first man at the sight of the woman who had been created are words of admiration and enchantment, words which fill the whole history of man on earth.”  Really? Not she is.  This one. And Adam was talking to God not to Eve. There is no record in the canonical Bible that Adam ever said a single word to Eve. [7] There is no hint he found her attractive. In fact, as long as they were in Eden, that is, through the first three chapters of Genesis, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he ever experienced sexual attraction. Yet this is the story endorsed by Milton and not denounced by Greenblatt.

In addition to being a card-carrying misogynist, Milton was an apologist for slavery.  Again this was not unusual for his time and place but what is despicable is the way in which he twists the Bible to justify it.  According to Genesis 9:20-27, slavery was invented by Noah to punish one of his sons, Ham, in the aftermath of the flood.  Ham’s offense was coming upon his father naked, drunk and asleep and not averting his eyes.  The penalty of slavery was invoked not against Ham but against his son Canaan and Canaan’s descendants.  Milton, once again with a debt to Saint Augustine, claimed in Paradise Lost that Ham’s failure was his inability to follow the dictates of reason and that God himself approved Noah’s punishment. There is nothing in the biblical text to support either conclusion but both became part of the preferred theological justification of one of history’s greatest evils.  But, as usual, the clever Mr. Milton gave the matter a lot of thought and came up with a sufficiently convoluted explanation of a crazy myth.

There are several ways to read the Bible if you are a Christian.  We are dealing with two of them, two themes that, it can be argued, permeate it:  the chronic wrath of God promoted by the likes of St. Augustine, John Calvin and Jimmy Swaggart, and God-is-love as developed mainly by John the Evangelist and preached by the British monk Pelagius and others.  These are pretty much opposite understandings of the text and both can be easily supported. One’s choice in the matter, therefore, reveals more about the reader’s psyche than about the theology of the Bible.

It is easy to read the God of Genesis as an inept creator and a raging sociopath who regularly engages in a bracing bout of genocide brought on by disobedience.  As he tells Moses in Exodus (34:6-7), “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”  Well, to all generations even to the end of time. When he concludes the human race is beset by wickedness without specifying what kind of wickedness, he says, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created — and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground —for I regret that I have made them.”  He proceeds to do just that, leaving only the family of poor, mad Noah. It does not work.  Somehow, wickedness persists.

Teasing out the God of Love requires a slightly more subtle reading.   John (3:16) tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  But this hardly counts.  Having your son crucified is not compelling evidence of love for that son.  As Jesus said with what was close to his dying breath, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew: 27:46)  Still, there is no doubt that Jesus did preach the centrality of love, a theme ending with the remarkable claim that, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

In between Genesis and 1 John, it is possible to trace an evolutionary path beginning perhaps with the fascinating story of Job. God says, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”  He then proceeds to destroy him to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  There is no admission of wrongdoing, no apology but he does seem to hear his victim’s denials of guilt which is a lot more than he did to Abraham’s plea to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find one good man there.  He continues to the end to mock Job’s inadequacies.  “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”  “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?  Can you loosen Orion’s belt?”  “Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?”  And on and on.  You’ve heard this rhetoric since third grade:  my schlong is bigger than your schlong. [8]  But in the end, he relents and restores Job’s wealth.  By the time you reach the apocryphal Book of Tobit, God or his ambassador Raphael is acting as a nurturing marriage broker.  Two hundred years later, Jesus is proclaiming love as the greatest commandment and Paul is saying it is the greatest of virtues.

A God of love would be an attractive foundation for a system of morality.  Think of Julien of Norwich’s vision that God invented sin or evil to show us his forgiveness and infinite love.  Poor Milton would have none of this.  He was a sourpuss who enjoyed whining about his lot in life.  In his famous meditation “On His Blindness” he claims, contrary to all the biblical evidence, that God is independent of his creation:

Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d

I fondly ask;  But patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best

Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State

Is kingly.

The idea of a God who needs for nothing is unique to the Abrahamic tradition and deeply unsettling.  Of course God needs his creation, else why bother?  But that is precisely what gives away the absurdity of the myth.  God is said to have known all things before he began to create.  Why would a rational God deliberately create a word he knew was doomed to failure?  The traditional answer is he gave Adam and Eve free will but that begs the question. Adam and Eve were hardly free in any meaningful sense if their disobedience was the cause of evil entering the world.

I have long known that the Bible is an anthology.  It represents the evolving opinions of the Jewish culture about leading the moral life.  This seems obvious, the first thing any adult reader should realize. But, we in the west have set ourselves the impossible task of interpreting it as a whole as though it had been devised by a single intelligence.  I understand this.  Personally, I want to see it through the lens of love and so I do so.  The institutional church sees it as an affirmation of its power on earth and so it reads just that in Jesus’ commission to Peter, in Matthew 16:19.  “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  John Milton saw the Bible as the inerrant foundation of Puritan doctrine which sought to “purify” Anglican doctrine by exposing and expunging its remaining “popish” elements. The Puritans stressed five theological ideas:  the total depravity of the human race which resulted from the “original sin” of Adam and Eve;  the predestination of the few to heaven and the many to hell;  the atonement of Jesus which was limited to the elect;  irresistible grace which forced the elect to lead righteous lives;  and, the perseverance of the saints in a sinful environment.  There is a wealth of illogic in all this.  If grace is irresistible, for example, how does Milton dare embrace the doctrine of “free will?”  If Milton purported to believe that Adam and/or Eve “sinned” he would be intellectually compelled to explain how they knew disobedience was evil before they ate the apple that made them like gods knowing the difference between good and evil.

The story of Adam and Eve is a fiction.  Even as myth, it simply does not mean a lot.  It may be, as Greenblatt suggests, that it evolved as a Hebrew response to the Babylonian Captivity.  But today, the Bible would be better off if Genesis was scrapped and the story of western religion began with Exodus.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are from the 2011 edition of The New International Version published in the United States by Zondervan of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

1.  Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, W.W. Norton and Company. 2017, p. 163.

2.  You may be delighted to learn that the Oxford University Press has now released Volumes II, III, VI and VIII of its projected 11-volume Complete Works of John Milton.  Volume III, consisting of the shorter poems in English, Latin and Greek was originally withdrawn due to unspecified errors but is now available once again.  OUP never revealed the nature of those errors or who made them and it never refunded the $250 price.

3.  Wordsworth was a staunch Anglican unlikely to have approved of Milton’s radical Puritanism or to have read any of his theology.  Like Milton, he did have a fondness for excessive verbiage.  His inaptly named Prelude is 2,521 lines long. It was meant to introduce a much longer poem but he only completed one more section of 8,093 lines.  Prelude is the poem that elicited the famous first line in a review by the Scotch critic, Sir Francis Jeffry, “This will never do.”  The poem praising Milton’s faith and morals is the sonnet “We Must Be Free or Die” first published in 1803.  It is thought to be an argument against the repeal of the infamous anti-Irish Penal Laws of 1695.

4.  The New Historicism has attracted unfavorable attention from no less an academic superstar than Harold Bloom who complained that it reduces literature to a footnote of history.  I hate to tell such a distinguished litterateur that, given the global state of literacy, literature is a footnote of history.

5.  My favorite book of the last 35 years is Greenblatt’s The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).  It is the story of how an early Fifteenth Century book dealer re-discovered Lucretius’ First Century BCE poem De rerum natura which became the catalyst of the Renaissance and the Modern Era.

6.  Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses, W.W. Norton and Company, 2004, p. 22. 

7.  There are several non-canonical books (pseudepigrapha) of Adam and Eve and some of them include extensive but basically pedestrian conversations between them.  The Book of Jubilees, also known as Lesser Genesis, follows Genesis closely in discussing Adam and Eve.

8.  “Schlong” derives from the Old High German word for snake. Do you think that’s just a coincidence? I’m not sure what would be revealed if God loosened the belt of Orion which consists of three stars of the second magnitude:  Mintaka, Alnilam and Ainitak.  It might be embarrassing.