Bringing to the story his whole life did not mean that he turned the characters into personifications of his contemporaries—Mary Powell as Eve, Cromwell as Satan, himself as Adam, and so forth. But it did mean that everything that mattered most to him—his travels as a young man, his intense reading of the classics and of Shakespeare, his sexual longings, the disastrous honeymoon with Mary, the loneliness expressed in the divorce tracts, his theological broodings, the Civil War, the council meetings he attended as Cromwell’s Secretary, the bitter experience of defeat, all of it—found its way into the poem.
Everything mattered for the most fundamental of reasons. Every one of us, he believed, is the literal heir to the central figures, Adam and Eve. They were as real as we are, and their destiny directly affected our own.
Milton was sure of that, for he shared Augustine’s conviction that the literal truth of Jesus Christ was bound up with the literal truth of Adam and Eve. The Savior’s actual blood canceled the debt incurred for all of us by the actual transgression of the actual first humans. Milton was well versed in the spiritual levels of scriptural interpretation that, alongside the literal sense, medieval theologians like Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096–1141), St. Bonaventure (1221–74), and St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74) had painstakingly elaborated. He knew that the historical figures and events described in the Bible formed only one part of a much larger set of meanings posited by what was called the “four-fold method” of reading. He was steeped in scriptural typology, teasing out the allegorical links between the events in the Old Testament and the life of the Savior. He was gifted at deriving moral guidance for the present from the traces of the sacred past. And he brooded constantly on the beatific vision to which a reader skilled in anagogical interpretation could climb. (The term “anagogy” is related to the Greek for “upward ascent.”)
Milton knew then that it was possible to extract from the Old Testament’s story of Adam and Eve and the New Testament’s story of Jesus and Mary a rich and elaborate set of symbolic associations, ethical lessons, and spiritual intimations. But he was convinced that everything had to spring from and return to the literal truth of the Bible’s words. In the absence of that truth, Milton’s Christian faith and all the positions he had taken on the basis of that faith would be robbed of their meaning. If the Garden and its first inhabitants were merely allegorical fables, then the whole interlocking structure of sacred stories would slide into myths no more reliable than the pagan fables of Prometheus and Pandora.
Fortunately, his faith assured him, Moses had in Genesis provided infallible written testimony that Adam and Eve were real people. Milton undertook to make good on this reality. But how to do it? And why should he be able to do it more successfully than Augustine, who had left his book The Literal Meaning of Genesis unfinished after fifteen years of struggling to complete it? The answer, Milton understood, lay not only in himself—in those talents that he was confident God had bestowed upon him—but also in the great good fortune of his timing. On the face of it, that timing would appear to have been a disaster: his dreams for his nation had been shattered, and his career lay in ruins. But, properly understood, it was providential.
He had arrived as a poet in the wake of the greatest revolution in artistic representation since the ancient world. The Renaissance had altered all the rules. Painters like Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca had developed linear perspective: the figures in their paintings were situated in a geometrical, mathematically calculated space. Their depicted size and their relation to one another no longer depended on their spiritual or social importance, as they had in medieval art, but on exactly where in that space they were standing. Using devices like foreshortening and a shared vanishing point in a single, unified scene, artists were able to achieve an unprecedented illusion of life.
But it was not only technical innovation that had changed everything; it was also the release of titanic creative energies. Milton was now blind, but he had spent more than a year in Italy, and what he had seen and felt then remained etched in his consciousness. He left no record of these encounters, but he must have encountered some works by Mantegna, Titian, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael. Above all, as anyone who has ever read Milton inevitably wonders, would there not have been a day in which someone—perhaps his friend Lucas Holstein, the Vatican librarian—took the poet into the heart of the Vatican and showed him Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel? Perhaps Milton’s staunchly Protestant sensibility would initially have been shocked by the sight; the dazzling, kaleidoscopic colors might at first have struck him, as the interior of St. Peter’s struck George Eliot’s heroine in Middlemarch, like “a disease of the retina.” But it is impossible not to imagine the future author of Paradise Lost raising his eyes, still unclouded by the disease that eventually blinded him, and gazing up in wonder at the stupendous vision on the ceiling. Surrounded by angelic putti, the majestic white-haired God with the flowing beard, his left arm around a beautiful naked woman (presumably Eve, yet unborn) reaches out with his powerful right arm and extends his index finger to touch the slack finger of Adam. That touch, we instantly grasp, will animate the first human, still lying prone on the ground, and will bring his magnificent body to its feet. We are viewing the origin of our species, the moment that all human life—and hence the very possibility of our own existence—began.
Michelangelo’s unforgettable scene is part of a still more capacious vision, a tremendous sequence of scenes from Genesis that chronicles both the creation of the universe and the eventual tragic alienation of humans from their Creator. The whole scheme then ties together, in the way sanctified by Christian tradition, the Old Testament and the New, leading up to the grand spectacle of the Last Judgment frescoed on the altar wall. Michelangelo’s contemporaries were in awe of what they called his terribilità. A single artist of immense skill, visionary intensity, and almost infinite ambition had managed to capture everything in one vast work. It was as if he had not merely represented or imitated God’s own creative power but had actually appropriated that power for himself.
Milton had his own literary version of Michelangelo’s terribilità. Steeped in the culture of Renaissance humanism, with its dream of recovering the glory of the ancient past, he was determined to give Adam and Eve the compelling presence that Homer had given Hector and that Virgil had given Aeneas. The opening chapters of Genesis, he recognized, lacked the thrilling struggle of the Trojan War or the historical specificity of the founding of Rome. But he was certain that the origin story narrated in such brief form was far more important and, rightly understood, at once more heroic and more poignant than either the Greek or Latin masterpieces. The question was how to expand the sublime but terse biblical narrative in order to give it the sustained grandeur of the pagan epics.
The Christian tradition had long engaged in this process of expansion. Developing the ancient midrashic speculations that some of the angels had objected to the creation of the first humans and envied the qualities that God conferred upon them, Ambrose, Augustine, and their contemporaries began to posit behind the serpent’s temptation of Eve a backstory: the rebellion of Satan and his legions. By the Middle Ages these speculations had been elaborated into an account of a full-scale war in heaven, with Satan leading a third of the angels in a reckless, mad, doomed uprising against God and then, in defeat, plotting to harm God’s creatures, the first man and woman.
Milton seized upon this legend as an opportunity to emulate and even outdo the great battle scenes in the classical epics. Paradise Lost includes extravagant accounts of heavenly warfare, complete with flashing swords, the flinging of whole mountains, and even the diabolic invention of gunpowder. But the poet who once posted a sonnet on his door pleading for mild treatment from any passing soldier could not conjure up the grim, unforgiving urgency of Homer and Virgil’s warriors. And there was an insurmountable problem: angels, good and bad, may have the wind knocked out of them by the impact of a mountain, but being ma
de of immortal substance, they soon recover. Still worse, since God’s power is infinite and absolute, the outcome is in no doubt at all. Milton himself recognized that he could not expect his readers to take entirely seriously his attempt to confer on the biblical narrative the martial power and the tension of epic. When God urges his son to help him prepare a defense against the approaching enemy army, the son instantly recognizes that his father is making a joke. God has no need for help.
What Milton could bring effectively to the depiction of the rebellion in heaven derived from his years as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, listening intently to the deliberations of the Council of State. Probably no great epic poet—certainly not Dante and not even Virgil—has ever had such sustained, daily, and intimate access to the halls where powerful, ambitious men attempt to assert their political will. In Paradise Lost this privileged access probably helps to account for the astonishing air of conviction carried by the council scenes in hell in which Moloch, Belial, Mammon, and Beelzebub debate the best policy for the devils to pursue.
Milton undertook to turn the literal into the real not as the great visual artists had done, through line and color and form, but rather through incantatory rhythm, rhetoric, metaphor, and the rich sounds of his native tongue. There were very few Renaissance precedents for bringing the story of Adam and Eve to life in a work of vernacular literature. Artists felt free to depict the Garden of Eden in any way that they chose, but writers had to tread more carefully. It was difficult and possibly dangerous to take too many liberties with the words of sacred Scripture. But in his poetry as in his politics, Milton was exceptionally bold. And he knew exactly where he could turn for literary inspiration. In addition to the Greek and Latin poets that the Renaissance had cultivated anew, he had native resources near at hand upon which to draw.
He could find in his own world, close enough almost to touch, an astonishing embodiment of the literary power for which he longed. Shakespeare’s First Folio, which celebrated the great playwright, in Ben Jonson’s words, as “not of an age but for all time,” was published when Milton was fifteen years old. The second edition in 1632 included a new poem in praise of Shakespeare: “Thou in our wonder and astonishment,” it proclaims, “Hast built thyself a lasting monument.” The anonymous author of those words was the young John Milton: it was his first published poem in English.
In order to invent a compelling Satan, Milton carefully studied how Shakespeare had done it. The depiction of Macbeth’s murderous ambition and despair provided a psychological and rhetorical template for the Prince of Darkness, and Milton added notes he took from Richard III and from Iago. He was almost too brilliant a student, for the result was a character so vivid that he threatened to take over the poem, particularly in its early books. In the later books Milton chose deliberately to diminish Satan in order to make room for the characters who were at the center of his lifelong obsession, Adam and Eve.
But Adam and Eve posed a challenge much greater than any that bedeviled his depiction of heaven or hell. There were almost no precedents, literary or otherwise, for the sustained depiction of a marriage. Shakespeare had almost nothing to offer Milton, nor did Homer or Virgil, Dante or Petrarch. Marriage figured in their works, when it figured at all, as a goal to be pursued or as a simple fact, not as a sustained partnership of intimate companions. A significant exception in Shakespeare was the marriage of the Macbeths, but that would hardly serve as a model for an Edenic couple. Milton believed deeply that at the center of marriage was intimate conversation between husband and wife, but to imagine and depict such intimacy was largely uncharted territory, not for him alone but for all of the literary culture in which he had steeped himself.
If in his voluminous reading he had come across the twelfth-century French play Le Jeu d’Adam, Milton would have encountered Adam and Eve as amusing rustics. (Their dialogue is in the manner of “Who was that snake you was talking to, missus?”) Or if he had ventured into still more popular French literature, he might have found Adam and Eve depicted in the coarse comic tales known as the fabliaux. God created Eve—goes a typical one called “The Cunt That Was Made by a Spade”—from a hard bone in Adam’s side in order to show husbands that they should beat their wives regularly, preferably three or four times a day. The first woman was an attractive-enough creature, but God had carelessly left her incomplete by omitting her genitals. Assigned to finish the job, the Devil looked over all the available tools—“hammers, adzes,/chisel, mattocks, sharpened axes, cutting tools with double blades,/pruning hooks” and the like—and settled on a spade, for he knew that “with the sharp edge of the spade/a great, deep crevice could be made/in scarcely any time at all.” After he made the gash, by pushing in the spade right up to the handle, the Devil finished up by farting on the woman’s tongue. That is why, the tale concludes, all women have to chatter constantly.
Such wild, violently misogynistic materials were abundant in the literary archive that Milton inherited—they lurk under the surface at many times and in many cultures—but he wanted no part of them. He could easily see that they were a vulgar betrayal of the Bible’s vision of the human pair. Yet what was left for him? What would perfect innocence actually resemble? How could he show convincingly what the first—the ideal—marriage was? What did the first humans look like? Did they eat like animals or did they prepare and serve meals? How did they spend their days? What did they talk about? Did they have sex? Did they dream at night, and, if so, did they ever, in their state of perfect happiness, have nightmares? Were they occasionally bored or annoyed or anxious in Paradise? Did they sometimes disagree with each other? And how did a relationship that promised perfect happiness go so catastrophically wrong?
For a start, Milton conjured up things he had seen when he still had the use of his eyes. He remembered landscapes he had loved, particularly in Tuscany, and these he merged with descriptions that he culled from the innumerable books he had himself read or that his assistants read to him. The garden that God—“the sovereign Planter”—made for the first humans was not, Milton was certain, one of those formal constructions then in vogue, with clipped hedges artfully arranged in elaborate geometrical patterns. It tended, if anything, to be overgrown, a richly verdant, well-watered plot of land situated at the top of a steep wilderness and encircled with immensely high trees. It must have been full of flowers, chosen not only for the exquisite variety of their colors but also for their rich fragrance. (Milton remembered sailors’ reports of delicious odors wafted to their ships by prevailing winds from the coast of Arabia.) And though it was enclosed, it offered enchanting prospects of the kind the blind Milton could still see in his mind’s eye, long vistas out over forests and rivers and distant plains. Paradise, as he imagined it, was something like a magnificent country estate: “A happy rural seat of various view” (4:248).
As for the lord and lady of this estate, Milton drew on paintings and prints of Adam and Eve that he must have stared at intensely both during his travels in Italy and again when he returned home. The images that stayed with him were not figures bent over in abjection and sadness. They were rather the naked pair, splendid in their dignity, vitality, and independence, of High Renaissance art. The first man and woman, he wrote, were “Godlike erect, with native honor clad” (4:289). Adam had a large forehead; his hair, parted at the front, hung clustering down, but not beneath his broad shoulders. Eve’s golden hair was much longer; in wanton ringlets it reached all the way to her slender waist. Neither of them concealed “those mysterious parts” that humans now hide in guilty shame, for they yet knew neither guilt nor shame.
Milton did not want to depict Adam and Eve through a kind of mystical haze or delicately hidden from view by strategically placed fig leaves. He wanted to see them—and to have his readers see them—in all the vigor of robust youth. There was nothing ethereal about them. Deeply in love, Milton thought, they must have walked hand in hand through their delicious garden, stopping often to chat and kiss and indulge in “youthful
dalliance” (4:338). When hungry, they sat down on a soft bank by a stream and ate the fruit that grew abundantly around them. “The savory pulp they chew,” as the poem pictures the scene, “and in the rind/Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream” (4:335–36).
Milton was in part going out of his way to make a theological point. Adam and Eve were not allegorical emblems; they were flesh-and-blood people, better than we are, to be sure, but not different in kind and not philosophical abstractions. Even the angels, he proposed, should be understood in human terms, for our material nature does not cut us off from higher forms of life. Thus when the poem depicts a friendly visit to Eden by the angel Raphael, sent by God to warn Adam and Eve about Satan, it imagines the heavenly guest sitting down with the humans for a meal and eating not “in a mist, the common gloss/Of theologians, but with keen dispatch/Of real hunger” (5:435–37). Spiritual beings are made of matter, just as humans are. Milton went still further. He insisted that, if angels actually ate real food, then they must also, like humans, have digested it and eliminated whatever “redounded.” But, he added, with a sidelong glance at his own lifelong digestive problems, at least angels did not suffer from any gastric discomfort: “what redounds, transpires/Through Spirits with ease.”
But it was not only bodily existence that Milton had to represent vividly in order to ground in reality the literal truth of the first humans. That was the easy part, thanks to the Renaissance art that helped to shape his vision. It was their inner lives and the substance of their relationship that posed the far greater challenge. The most difficult question was how to make Adam and Eve’s marriage come alive. If Shakespeare could not help him here, still less could Augustine or Luther or Calvin. Milton’s years of public service, writing angry polemics and educational treatises and diplomatic correspondence, were of no use. He found the way forward in his most private experiences, in his passionate friendship with Charles Diodati, in the fantasies he cherished during the long years he struggled to preserve his chastity, and above all in the feelings aroused in him around the time of his first marriage and disastrous honeymoon. Only by tapping into these recesses, courageously and relentlessly, did he begin to discover what he needed. As a poet, he aspired to make his creation real—that was, he knew, not only Augustine’s theological imperative but also the secret of the greatest literature. And he succeeded. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve took on a more intense life—the life both of fully realized individuals and of a married couple—than they had ever possessed in the thousands of years since they were first conceived.