Milton and the Idea of the Fall

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MILTON AND THE IDEA OF THE FALL In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton produced the most magnificent poetic account ever written of the biblical Fall of man. In this wide-ranging study, William Poole presents a comprehensive analysis of the origin, evolution and contemporary discussion of the Fall, and the way seventeenth-century authors, particularly Milton, represented it. Poole first 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 Milton’s own century. The second part of the book delves deeper into the development of Milton’s own thought on the Fall, from the earliest of his poems, through his prose, to his mature epic. Poole distinguishes clearly for the first time the range and complexity of contemporary debates on the Fall of man, and offers many new insights into the originality and sophistication of Milton’s work. is a Tutorial Fellow in English at New College, Oxford. He is the editor of Francis Lodwick’s A Country Not Named (2005) and co-director of the AHRB research project ‘Free-thinking and language-planning in late seventeenth-century England’.

WILLIAM POOLE

MILTON AND THE IDEA OF THE FALL WILLIAM POOLE New College, Oxford

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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 Note on the text List of abbreviations

page viii x xi 1

Introduction 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

II

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

III:

creation and education

168

11

IV:

Fall and expulsion

182

Paradise Lost

Conclusion

195

Notes Index

200 234 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 finally 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. Nuttall’s The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake (1998) I first heard as undergraduate lectures. I know that this book opposes the assumption of Dennis Danielson’s fine Milton’s 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. Turner’s One Flesh (1987), John Leonard’s Naming in Paradise (1990), Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote’s museum catalogue The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early-Modern Europe (1998) and Philip C. Almond’s 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 Wakefield. 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

Acknowledgements ix 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 Griffith 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 first inspired my interest in the Fall and just about everything else. I dedicate this, my first book, to my family, and to the memory of my father D. E. Poole (1945–2001): nunc est bibendum.

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 CPW CRW E JFHS LC

MLQ N&Q OED PL

Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei [City of God], ed. and trans. G. E. McCracken et al., 7 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1957–72) John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–82) Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London: Junction Books, 1983) Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion in Confessions and Enchiridion, trans. A. C. Outler (London: SCMP, 1955) Journal of the Friends Historical Society Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram [Literal Commentary on Genesis] in La Gene`se au sens litte´ral, trans. with introduction and notes by P. Agae¨sse and A. Solignac, 2 vols. (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1972) Modern Language Quarterly Notes and Queries The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) 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 first 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 2–3. Goodman thus adds to his catalogue of human ills not merely the conviction that man’s 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, Goodman’s tract, as its full title indicates, extended the effects of the Fall from the microcosm of man to the macrocosm of his environment – 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

2

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

Goodman, though, offered a narrative of continual decline, something that the Fall had inaugurated but not concluded: this first 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 first 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 Adam’s 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 disproportion’d sin Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience, and their state of good.5

This was a neater position because it conformed to St Paul’s contrast between the Fall of the first 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 first 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 Goodman’s pessimistic narrative with a more lenient, optimistic vision. The world, he said, was not in decline, and undue scepticism concerning man’s 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 finer 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 man’s other faculties, and out of the external world. In doing so, he was following Francis Bacon, who had opened his Of the Proficience

Introduction 3 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 man’s 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 affirmation.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 confident about the processes it sought to observe if both these processes and their observers were irreversibly damaged? Bacon’s sentiment was much repeated throughout the century. The educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius visited England in the winter of 1641–2, at which time his influential pamphlet A Reformation of Schooles was published. He too employed Bacon’s distinction, equating ‘serpentine’ 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 first and flamboyant classic of microscopy, with the slightly dangerous sentiment: And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their posterity, may be in part restor’d 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’ radicals actually developed complicated and on occasion mutually incompatible 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,

4

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

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 understanding of the Fall persisted. The ecstatic texts of Thomas Traherne, for instance, read curiously like some passages in the Quaker George Fox’s 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 first three Chapters of Genesis . . . could not be true, unless they were Parables’.13 Also in these decades various figures 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 specifically 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. Goodman’s pessimism reflects the inheritance from late scholastic reactionaries, and afterwards from the early Reformers, of a predominantly Augustinian theology. It was Augustine who had systematised

Introduction 5 ideas on the Fall and original sin in the patristic period, and who, following his disputes with Pelagius, bequeathed his harsh exegesis of Genesis 2–3 to Western theology. Although, after Anselm, Augustine’s 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 seventeenthcentury theologies, particularly Protestant but also Catholic, found no real answers to certain problems Augustine himself had left unresolved. Augustine’s central assumption had been that a perfect God ought to create perfectly, leaving the glaring logical difficulty that perfect beings should not then have behaved as Genesis 2–3 appeared to record. Augustine had in fact pointed this problem out, concluding in the De Genesi ad litteram that God had not made man entirely sufficient to have stood. But the reason for this momentous decision remained occluded and, at this juncture, Augustine counselled that the pious should avoid further discussion. 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 1–3, nevertheless found he could not dispense with the theological importance of the first 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 difficult 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 affirmed in the academic disputations for 1624 in Cambridge University, ‘the incarnation of Christ presupposes the Fall of man into sin’.17 Christ’s connection to the Fall is graphically enforced by a Latin pattern-poem recorded by Abraham Fraunce in 1588:

6

Milton and the Idea of the Fall 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 justification 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 liv’d so.’2 The Fall also had class implications: in a famous sermon preached late in 1662, Robert South declared that it was as difficult for us now to imagine the height of unfallen Adam’s 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 Adam’s Family, and in whom the Primogeniture remained, were really Mechanicks’.4 Of course, Eve’s 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 Deifie; 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 commentators located such inferiority even in the state of innocence, occasionally somewhat inadvertently, as when John Salkeld protested that Eve before 9

10

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

the Fall wasn’t frightened of snakes ‘though by nature timorous and fearfull’. Alexander Ross repeated a commonplace when he said that Eve didn’t 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 redefined as an effect (PL 4.295–9, 10.195–6). The way out of this problem, theologically, was to claim that women’s 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. Reflecting 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 Calvin’s 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 cartographical 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,

The Fall 11 solitariness, even death, as in Shirley’s ‘summer room, / Which may, so oft as I repose / Present my arbour and my tomb’.12 Increasingly, and reciprocal to the Protestant affirmation that Adam and Eve worked hard in Eden, agricultural reform in early-modern England adopted corresponding terminology, often in combination with an at first incongruous, rather technical vocabulary of ‘artificiall 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 fill up the vacancy with the artificiall 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 [Adam’s] 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 reflection, 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 Beale’s correspondent John Evelyn was one of the most enthusiastic gardeners of the age. In the difficult 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 hortulan 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 fragmentary Elysium Britannicum pointedly echoed Bacon’s line on God almighty first 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

12

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

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 Evelyn’s 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. Augustine’s autobiographical Confessiones had instigated this trend with the father’s anecdote about his youthful sins, including stealing fruit from someone else’s pear tree, merely ‘because we would doe that which was not lawfull’. Likewise, in his partially imitative autobiography, Richard Baxter recalled how ‘to concur with naughty Boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men’s 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 chac’d out of our sight, Nor suffer’d Living Men to be misled By the vain shadows of the Dead: To Graves, from whence it rose, the conquer’d Phantome fled; He broke that Monstrous God which stood In midst of th’Orchard, 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 fit

The Fall

13

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 rip’ned Fruit, come gather now your Fill.23

Less salubrious figures 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 1651–2 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 first 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 . . . sacrifise 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

14

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

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 affinity with Genesis, it was taken by some as fact: shortly after publication Louis XIV’s secretary Henri Justel wrote to Henry Oldenburg, one of the Royal Society’s two secretaries, to confirm 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 environment 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 religion 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 first 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 justification.32 In Judaeo-Christian terms, however, justification 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 specific man or men at a specific time.

The Fall 15 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 implying 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 first 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 2–3 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 fit. Concentration on Genesis 2–3, though, in equating the problem of evil with the creation and subsequent behaviour of the two first 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 influence of marauding angels, although the role of the serpent, subsequently interpreted as Satan, qualifies this advantage. It also cleared the stage: Genesis 2–3 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 human–angelic marriages, hence eradicating that recension of original sin, and so Genesis 6 fails to solve the problem of whence current original sin derives. The disadvantage 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

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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 find ourselves regarding this botching demiurge of vain prohibitions 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 first 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 first but in Christian literature for obvious reasons its influence is felt as a threat rather than as a positive thesis. The first position, historically, is associated with the Western Church and its Latin fathers, particularly Augustine (354–430). Later, after a period of the modification of Augustinianism, certain reactionary movements in late scholasticism, especially Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) and the schola Augustiniana moderna, reinstated the father’s original gloom. Gregory’s admirers, with respect to his patristic commitment, called him the Doctor authenticus; his opponents called him the Tortor infantium, the torturer of children, reflecting 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 theological centrality, especially in the Calvinist inflection so influential in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The second tendency, less ambitious in its initial estimation of and thus more lenient in judgement on the first man and woman, was developed in the Eastern Church by the Greek fathers, most influentially in the writings of Irenaeus (c. 140–c. 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

The Fall 17 Irenaean interpretation as part of their anti-Lutheran theologies. This tradition had an important influence 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 reckon’d 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 first 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 blurr’d 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 Adam’s 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 didn’t 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 mysterious 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 figures 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 final, highly subversive reaction to the narrative of the Fall – to call God bad – is almost invisible in the early-modern period, but any

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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 available from Tertullian, Augustine, Philastrius of Brescia and Theodoret of Cyrus. Accounts of the Gnostics also filtered through vernacular Church histories. One Civil War yellow-press heresiographer, for instance, managed 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 Simson’s 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 Casaubon’s 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 fire; 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 influence not so much as a witnessed 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

The Fall 19 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 suffices, 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 efficacy 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 counterparts, a kinship driven by the difficulty 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 psychosexual 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 somewhat in him to fasten upon. Frailty is a property of the flesh. Weakness is proper to the earthly image, as strength to the heavenly.’48 The problem with the narrative attack on the conventional understanding 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 objection that some frailty was needed was designed to explain how man got from one side to the other, but it was obviously flawed 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 required, at some point, elements of the second, it therefore might find 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

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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 Elton’s 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 first 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 Adam’s 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 Eve’s 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 ironically. 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 first 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 ‘experimental’ 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. Milton’s 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 seventeenth-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

AUGUSTINE

‘Let us admit’, wrote Voltaire on original sin, ‘that Saint Augustine was the first to authorise this strange idea, worthy of the fiery 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 Church’s adoption of the father’s teachings as conducted ‘with public applause and secret reluctance’.2 Such enlightened scorn was not the dominant tone of the age. The first full English translation of the City of God appeared in 1610 with the influential annotations of Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), 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 published 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 1528–9. The other major edition of Augustine prior to the celebrated Maurist edition of 1679–1700 was the one prepared by the Louvain theologians and printed at Antwerp in 1576–7. 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 Edward’s reign, but the major works only appeared in the first half of the seventeenth century. We have seen that the City of God 21

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was published in 1610; the Enchiridion had appeared three years previously, and the Confessions were translated first 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 Augustine’s 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, Augustine’s ideas on the Fall were not static, but evolved over his prolific 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 importance occur in the Literal Commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram, hereafter LC; composed 401–14), and the central books of the City of God (De civitate Dei, hereafter CG; these books composed 417–20), later distilled in the Enchiridion (hereafter E; composed 421–2).5 The late anti-Pelagian works necessarily engage with Genesis, and Augustine also left various earlier commentaries, finished and unfinished, on Genesis. Augustine’s mature thought was shaped by controversy, with specific 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 fifth-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 Adam’s 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 fictions.6 This was the position against which Augustine had to define 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

Augustinianism 23 Greek tradition represented in the West by Irenaeus, who wrote of Adam in innocence: ‘man was a child, not yet having his understanding perfected; wherefore he was easily led astray by the deceiver’.7 But in the West the greatest influences on Augustine were Tertullian, the African jurist-turned-Christian apologist, and the so-called Ambrosiaster, commentator on Paul. Tertullian and Ambrosiaster both emphasised the literal truth of the events of Genesis 2–3, 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 Version’s 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 mistranslation 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 Adam’s 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 flesh, all his progeny were made from flesh, and therefore all creation was in Adam (CG 13.3). Augustine’s own ideas follow closely the writings of Tertullian and Ambrosiaster. He insisted that Genesis 2–3 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 God’s design in history, they had to be located within a fabric of entirely real happenings. In this way, paradoxically, Augustine promoted all Old Testament narrative to the level of fact while simultaneously subordinating it to the figural structures for which such facts serve as material.9 Augustine’s emphasis on the literal truth of Genesis also reflects his rejection of moments in his earlier writings in which he had speculated about the Fall in terms of a Plotinian fall-into-flesh.10 Again following Tertullian and Ambrosiaster, Augustine stressed the disaster of the Fall

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and all humanity’s 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. Augustine’s Adam and Eve are mature, tranquil figures, 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 first 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 disturbance – the early-modern theory of the ‘passions’. The current mental turmoil suffered by all men was traced explicitly to the Fall, and defined 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 tendency to exalt Adam and Eve in their first creation. But, as J. M. Evans suggested, Augustine’s 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 Eve’s prelapsarian state. First, they were not created constitutionally free from death but only conditionally so (CD 13.1). This distinction

Augustinianism 25 Augustine defined 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 man’s 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 Adam’s maturity.17 The tendency of the Augustinian usage to slip towards the Theophilan is seen in the seventeenth century in phrases such as Raphael’s to Adam in Milton’s 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 qualified 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

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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 hasn’t 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 Augustine’s 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 unratiocinative, defined 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 definite, replacing a vertical line separating two states with a zone of indeterminacy. The public act is now preceded by the private transgression. Augustine meets this problem, and in 14.11–13 of the City of God he accepts the consequence that the hard typological, single Fall must be replaced with a more protracted phenomenon: ‘in Adam’s 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

Augustinianism 27 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 first, 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 first fall when the serpent approached her, and likewise Adam when Eve approached him: Now this first falling away is voluntary [spontaneus], for if the will had remained steadfast in love of the higher unchangeable good that provided it with fire 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 first woman to believe that the serpent had spoken the truth or the first man to place his wife’s will before God’s injunction. (14.13)

Augustine then repeats this remarkable conclusion: ‘the evil act was committed only by those who were already evil’. This first 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 God’s omniscient point of view the second of these falls is any more significant than the first. 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 reaffirm the physical transgression, he has by this point dissolved the typological outlines with which he had started, and replaced them with an indeterminate 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 untroubled at any point excepting the instant of their creation? What would

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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 emphasises 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 7:17–18 (‘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 metonymy 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. Augustine’s 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 Augustine’s Neoplatonic understanding evil is not a thing at all; it is the absence of good, literally nothing: ‘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 Augustine’s 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 efficient 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, efficient and final (an apple is made to the form of an apple, out of vegetable substance, by the tree from which it

Augustinianism 29 derives, for people to eat). In Augustinian terms, formal and material categories do not apply to sin, and the final 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 efficient cause of the evil will – which Augustine then rejects. His reasoning is noteworthy. Augustine, discussing the first sin, admits that an evil will must be the efficient 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 efficient cause of the evil will, no answer is found, because ‘nothing is the efficient cause of an evil will’ (12.6). Indeed, as he titles his subsequent chapter, ‘an efficient cause of an evil will must not be sought [non esse quaerendam]’. He continues: ‘No one then should look for an efficient cause of an evil will, for the cause is not one of efficiency but deficiency 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, deficere) the intangible ‘deficient’ (deficiens) cause, a notion resting on its aural similarity to the efficient cause.20 But in Aristotelian terms there is no antonym of the efficient 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 final 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 didn’t make man just a little bit more sufficient to have stood: ‘Obviously he is able. So why didn’t he? Because he didn’t want to. And why he didn’t want to is his business. For we ought not to know more than it is proper to know’ (LC 11.10.13).21 Furthermore, Augustine’s 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 influential modern theologian, arguing for a rehabilitation of the Irenaean understanding of

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creation, has judged Augustine’s 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 finally 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 understanding’.24 He inherited, refined, authorised and transmitted a set of decisions about the angelic and human falls more influential 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 modification rather than rejection. But Augustine’s 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 Augustine’s writing and destabilises its doctrinal output. Augustine replaced 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 pleas’d, all seem’d, but were not all’ (PL 5.617). ANSELM TO ARMINIANISM

Such was the inheritance of the continental Reformers, although after a long succession of adjustments usually concerned to lessen the force of Augustine’s doctrinal base. Anselm, under the guise of obedience to the father, considerably softened the father’s 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 scholastic models of original sin.25 For Augustine, original sin was both

Augustinianism 31 ineradicable and incriminatory; later thinkers preferred to suppress the second attribute, while not quarrelling with the first. 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 Adam’s 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 deficiencies of Adam’s nature before and after the possession of original justice is certainly not a qualitative but a quantitative one: the difficulties have increased, the struggles intensified’.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, uninflected: 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

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peccati or ‘tinder of sin’. Again, the Tridentine decrees did not mention Adam’s 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 Augustine’s loaded categories, such as original righteousness, original sin, depravity, concupiscence and so forth, had been emptied out. A midseventeenth-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 ramifications: Protestant anti-Calvinist writers in England also argued that too great an emphasis on original sin put in question the efficacy of baptism, which such writers were anxious to defend. It was not solely a Catholic complaint therefore, and this ‘sacramental thrust’, in Tyacke’s 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 efficacy 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 Reformation’, in Oberman’s 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 insufficiently awed by God’s 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 reaffirming God’s 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 God’s 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 pessimistic view of original sin, with the Fall being identified as a watershed in the economy of salvation’; a ‘strong emphasis on the priority of God in

Augustinianism 33 justification, linked to a doctrine of special grace’; and a ‘radical doctrine of absolute double predestination’. These retrenchments were buttressed by Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings.33 The magisterial reformers continued the trend of the schola Augustiniana moderna, though precise links are unclear. Luther in his Lectures on Genesis unhesitatingly affirmed Adam’s initial splendour, even ascribing to Adam and Eve perfect knowledge of astronomy.34 Adam also controlled the animals: he could ‘command a lion with a single word’. This ability Luther derived from Adam’s 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 first 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 Augustine’s 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 first 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 figure in his ‘childhood glory’.38 Calvin too mirrored these hybrid tendencies, though in his commentary on Genesis, translated into English in 1578, he was less affirming of Adam’s supposed magical abilities.39 Calvin emphasises man’s creaturely station under ‘the yoke of God’; man does not require any great intelligence 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

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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 flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit, and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s 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, Genevan, Heidelberg and Scottish, contain similar passages. The influence 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 deficient 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 first, a power to stand, and yet a will to fall.

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fetch not thy fault, from heauens determination but blame thy mind to weake & insufficient: Sinne is no being but a meere priuation, and hath no cause efficient, but deficient.46

And finally, the intellectual superiority of Adam and Eve before the Fall was also affirmed 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 influences 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 fine example is the Theatrum vitae humanae of Jean-Jacques Boissard, with engravings by the celebrated Theodore de Bry. Boissard’s Theatrum moves through Mundi creatio to Lapsus diaboli, then to Hominis creatio and lapsus Adami, all headed by de Bry’s finely etched illustrations.48 Indeed, Adam and Eve are often portrayed in all the significant stages of their Edenic life in the same frame. In one Medici tapestry, for instance, there are three Eves and two Adams; in Cranach’s Paradise, there are five Eves and six Adams, all stages of innocence and guilt crowding into one canvas.49 In de Bry’s 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 representations 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, sometimes even the impossibility of comprehending unfallen man. This aspect visual art often neglected, though one notable exception is the fine Burgesse plate, after Medina, in Tonson’s 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, accompanying the book of the Fall. Like the Medici and Cranach multiplications, 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 innocence without Satan impinging, a visual situation that parallels the epistemological difficulty of thinking about sinless environments.

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The location of pieces involving Adam and Eve could also be extremely pointed. We noted the connection between the issues of original sin and baptism and the desire of anti-Calvinists to stress the efficacy of the latter for washing away the former. The most imposing affirmation 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 flanking its base. Water poured in the top of the hollowed tree washes off the stain originally caused by the figures 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, reflecting 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 reaffirmation 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 complaint to Archbishop Whitgift, he became the unwitting cause of the Lambeth Articles of 1595, which, against Barrett, reaffirmed determinism.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

Augustinianism 37 Oxford had earlier had similar troubles over Antonio del Corro, a Spaniard accused of meddling with predestinarian issues. Certainly, in his 1581 version of Paul’s letter to the Romans, recast as a dialogue between a Discipulus and a Praeceptor, Corro glossed the crucial verses on the first 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 Christ’s sacrifice ‘is indeed universal and sufficient, but such is the fault of unbelieving men that efficiency cannot at all correspond to sufficiency’.58 Unsurprisingly, this book was not printed in Oxford, where, as Wood said of Corro, ‘his person could never be well relish’d’. 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 first 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 Adam’s Fall was both necessary and contingent ‘in different respects’. In 1622 concupiscence still remains in the regenerate, original sin is a positive entity, free will is extinguished for Adam’s 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 man’s Fall’; the next year it is still the case that ‘Fallen man is subject to divine predestination.’ But in 1629 Edward Quarles of Pembroke said that ‘all baptised infants are without doubt justified’, which got him into some trouble, and in 1632 the thesis affirmed was exactly the opposite: ‘traces of sin remain in the regenerated, even after baptism’. Tellingly, the Root-and-Branch

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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, however. The declaration of Charles I in November 1628, ordering that ‘all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises’, nominally banned predestinarian disputes in the universities, 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 Martin’s 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 first 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

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of the forbidden fruit: and therefore this law in prevision transgressed is the meritorious efficient of reprobation.63

Widdowes’ terminology is hard, deliberately so, but his basic revision is obvious. He effectively rehearses the scholastic Via moderna’s position: God can do precisely what he likes, but won’t. 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 God’s Eternal Decrees of absolute predestination 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 1618–19 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 neoscholasticism we will see, a neoscholasticism which in no sense dispenses with the Fall and original sin, but which does significantly rewrite the meaning of such ideas, away from the mainstream of reformed commentary.

chapter 3

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660

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 fine 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 defiled 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 chiefly through want of a perfect Definition, or compleat Description of it, some (and they not the least Hereticks) have contended against all definition; others have been so various in defining, 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 first decade of the second half of the seventeenth century, a quarrel specifically concerning original sin. It is important for three reasons. First, it represents the most protracted, publicised and openly debated argument on 40

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 41 original sin in the period, spanning public debate, private manuscript and printed book. Second it centres around the illustrious figure of Jeremy Taylor, academic, future bishop and a man to whom the martyred king had given his wrist-watch. Taylor’s 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 flat 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, published 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 Everard’s 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 Cromwell’s 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 Fox’s 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,

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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 Parker’s 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 Vindication 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 Antipaedobaptism (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 first part of this accusation was absolutely accurate: Anthony Wood noted that the

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 43 Quaker Samuel Fisher, in a public debate with Reading in 1650, had derived his sceptical views on textual authority from Taylor’s 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 Prophesying 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 Taylor’s 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, ‘Dr Taylrs book is matter of much discours, & in yt 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 John’s College, Oxford, adding his concerns over the manuscript of Taylor’s Unum necessarium already in press: I was very much troubled wthin 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 gratified in this, or whom he left, and Whom he adhaered to . . . the choice he hath, is not great, for ether it must be to ye 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 subsequent editions with the epistle to Warner still attached. So, despite all

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Taylor’s 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 justificatus, a more accessible version of the offending portion of the larger work. This was the doing of Taylor’s literary agent, the prominent Royalist bookseller Richard Royston, who initially published the Deus justificatus without Taylor’s consent, something Royston was of course perfectly entitled to do.17 A second edition appeared in the same year, with the Taylor–Warner correspondence attached. Duppa’s ‘I wished him to consider whom he offended, and whom he gratified 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 Taylor’s attack was particularly significant, because it implicated his fellow clergy in exactly the kinds of dubious speculation they wished to avoid. They were all too sensitive to this; Duppa’s letter was occasioned by his anger that Taylor had attached Duppa’s name to his book. The ejected Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Robert Sanderson, asked the keeper of Bodley’s library and fellow of Queen’s, 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 defiantly refused, replying that ‘some friend of mine has been blowing ye 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 fit 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 Thorndike’s 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

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 45 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. Taylor’s 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 Taylor’s 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 Taylor’s 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, Taylor’s nineteenth-century biographer, reprinted this letter and put his finger on this very sentence as the origin and explanation of Taylor’s doctrine of original sin.25 Refutations poured from the press. Warner’s 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 experimental philosophy John Wilkins, who in his 1669 revisions to his popular manual-cum-reading-list for preachers, Ecclesiastes (first 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 Evelyn’s support, and wrote to him of his book, ‘[I] give God thanks that I have reason to believe that it is accepted

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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 Monsr 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 publish’d by the Doctor, who was much satisfied with the young man.’30 Evelyn’s 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 editions, ‘Hee will hardly find in them a Catholique concurrence in ye Athanasian expressions of ye Creede, or wth ye 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 ‘wth 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 Taylor’s 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

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 47 we will encounter repeatedly: ‘The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.’33 This verse suggested to many radicals that the first Adam’s 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 man’s dominion over the creatures. Indeed, Adam in his first estate had been ‘a meer carnal man’; ‘like a burned child, able of himself to take heed of the fire’.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 Everard’s own text, if anything, goes further than Stephens’ account. Everard described the righteousness of prelapsarian 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 Adam’s virtues no less than his sins, an observation he uses to discredit the whole notion of transmitted 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 Everard’s theories. Although Everard’s 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 God’s ‘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

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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 (1581–2) and John Smyth’s 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 Leicester–Lincolnshire 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 confession’s signatories, although it has been argued that he helped write it.39 The confession, indeed, is rather more theologically conservative than Everard’s own tracts, accepting both predestination and original sin. What is objectionable from a Presbyterian point of view is that the confession extends Christ’s 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 importance largely derives from its pioneering nature – it was the first 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 Everard’s stance: Natures Vindication; or A Check to All Those Who Affirm Nature to Be Vile, Wicked, Corrupt, and Sinful.41 This gestures towards a central problem or rather conflict in early-modern terminology, the meaning of the word ‘nature’, and Everard’s 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 Goodman’s 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:

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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 office wherunto it was assigned by the providence of God. Read 2 Cor. 2.17.43

Despite Everard’s 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 man’s 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, Everard’s 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 fly up to such spiritual things; or, that the legs of nature were so broken by the first man’s 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 Winstanley’s New Law of Righteousness, as he does with Everard, thus demonstrating very close textual attention. This is also important because, as will be shown, Winstanley’s New Law itself interpreted the Fall as reversible, allegorising it out of historical existence, and even proposing that there were men before Adam.

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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 couldn’t be bothered to point out the obvious. And so to Jeremy Taylor’s Unum necessarium, which appeared mid 1655 with a part-apologetic, part-defiant preface to Duppa and Warner, the same two exiled bishops who had initially been troubled by Taylor’s 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. Augustine’s opinion’. Speaking of the Augustine–Pelagius dispute, Taylor tartly remarks, ‘error is no good confuter of error’. And despite Taylor’s 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 affinity, as between light and darkness’.46 Taylor’s position is remarkably close to that of Everard. He queries the notion of original righteousness using the same scripture: the first 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 Taylor’s term, ‘disrobed’ us – a metaphor that confirms Taylor’s basically scholastic estimation: that original righteousness is best understood as being in receipt of a donum indebitum, a free gift of God. Taylor even affirms that death ‘at first 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:

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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 first, 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 first, 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 embodying 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 can’t 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 Eve’s 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 identified 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 flaw in his system; for Taylor, it is not necessarily a problematic consequence. Taylor admitted that man was created mortal;

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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 field 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 efficiency 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 first mechanism Taylor directs a string of objections. If sin is efficacious 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 flie, nor so free and unconstrain’d as fire’. 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 Adam’s 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 first sin should be propagated, and not the rest’, all our forebears’ sins would flow 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 fine orator another fine orator – which latter example Taylor falsifies by mentioning Cicero’s 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 inflicted 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

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 53 debauching, guilt-imputing phenomenon was decreed by God. Thus falls the conventional model of original sin.52 Taylor’s attack was the most intelligent and eloquent of the period. Indeed, Taylor’s ‘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 confirmed his indebtedness to the Eastern fathers, whom Taylor marshals into an extremely imposing squad. (This recalls Oughtred’s concession, noted above, that original sin ‘was not met with in the Greek Fathers’.) However, the value of Taylor’s attack lies particularly in his identification 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. Taylor’s 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 expansion, and the rate of expansion of original sin would accelerate accordingly. 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 transmitted, 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, confirming our sense that Taylor’s 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 Taylor’s 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

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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 conflated these two discussions. Taylor divorces them. Finally, Taylor’s attack arises from his larger sense that Christ’s 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 continually as an experimental first-person narrator: ‘I sin like a Gentleman, not like a Thief; I suffer infirmities, 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 justificatus by pointing out that people just didn’t 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 afflicted 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

Taylor’s 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 Hoard’s work was reprinted in 1656, and the previous year it had been a target of William Lyford, who in a miniature version of the whole Taylor–Stephens– 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 first Adams wisdome, are still of the earth, earthly.’59 But Hoard was the Earl of Warwick’s chaplain; Collier was a Baptist minister. Nevertheless it was Taylor’s eloquence, reputation and sheer persistence that promoted him to an importance no comparable figure achieved. Taylor, as we saw, won few friends. This was in part due to his political

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 55 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 Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying, so he should have known better. Secondly, Taylor refused to retract: indeed, his letter to Sheldon borders on the defiant. 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 figure 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 Burnet’s 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 Taylor’s Unum necessarium and Deus justificatus need not be discussed exhaustively. Nonetheless, a few of his opponents are exemplary either for their intransigence or for their realisation of the larger significance of Taylor’s attack. Henry Jeanes was the most belligerent of Taylor’s 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 find something 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 definitely 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.

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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 ε$ φ$ ω# πα´ ντες η% μαρτον, 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 first 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 redefined 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 Augustine’s 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 Augustinian–Calvinist 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 affirme that our first 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 affirmed, that he was made in a mutable state, farre different from the state of the blessed Saints and Angels confirmed 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 affirme that he created the first 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

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 57 Again, Stephens says that ‘man was created mortal, and if Adam had not sinned, he should have been immortal by grace’, an imitation of Augustine’s non posse mori–posse non mori distinction. Stephens also admits, somewhat cagily, that the whole problem of original righteousness turned on the precise nature of Adam and Eve’s 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 Adam’s 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 defined 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 fiery Robert Everard, and this demonstrates both congruence between high Church controversy and separatist radicalism, 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 five or so years later when he too asked why all ethical inclinations were not seminally transmitted.67 But Taylor’s 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 sympathetic motion, while the skeins of contact remain invisible.

chapter 4

The heterodox Fall

Caution has to be exercised concerning the nomenclature of the ‘radicalism’ of the mid seventeenth century. Many religious writings we term ‘radical’ because they were written by figures 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 difficult relation between radicalism and heterodoxy.1 Secondly, different radicals stemmed from different roots, and one of the concerns of this chapter is to distinguish models of approaching Genesis 2–3 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 classified what they were seeing, and what their fears were. Many, indeed most, early-modern heresiographers analysed sectarianism in terms of the categories provided by their ancient predecessors, the patristic heresiographers, most popularly Epiphanius, 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 heresiographer’s traditional rhetoric of ‘novelty’ allowed. 58

The heterodox Fall 59 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-one’s 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 influential.2 Most heresiographies, particularly of the revolutionary decades, announced 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 interestingly of all, Ranters have long been associated with Gnostics, both at their first 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. Calvin’s approach was to be very influential 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

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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 Franck’s The Forbidden Fruit, the text that will chiefly 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 flesh, 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 flesh, Eve’. The Lutherans are gruffly rebuffed: ‘So now no one can any longer complain about Adam and Eve, nor try to excuse or palliate his sin by Adam’s 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 man’s 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 fit, or for the wrong knowledge. Consequently man’s 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 Lucifer’s and then Adam’s falls very much in these terms, exhorting the believer to do otherwise, not just to lament current powerlessness.12 Cornelius Agrippa’s 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:

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If at first 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 firste 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 Sacrifices, 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: Christians know that particularly well. The original Fall occurred when Man was anxious to increase his wisdom and knowledge: that path led headlong to eternal damnation.’14 Agrippa, however, exemplifies the difficulty of inheriting on the one hand the duty to affirm that unfallen Adam and Eve were created ‘in ye best degree’, and on the other the desire to castigate intellectual aspiration. Agrippa’s 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 first 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 influenced by Agrippa, and also by the idea of Christian folly, prominent in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, and stemming from Paul’s 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 2–3. 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

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text of Christian folly, Erasmus’ Encomium moriae, and his Forbidden Fruit, with its exhortations to ‘unlearn’, is steeped in such professedly anti-intellectualist writings. Franck’s Paradoxa (1534, many subsequent editions) was deeply influenced 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: ‘Adam’s sin does not harm anyone, unless it be taken in hand and put on’; ‘Adam’s fall, the tree of knowledge, 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 Franck’s The Forbidden Fruit, though, under the supposed authorship of ‘Augustinus Eleutherius’, which was to be the most influential 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 Everard’s own manuscript translation had already been in some circulation.20 (Everard got into considerable trouble for his translations, and was made to read out a list of retractions on his knees before William Laud in late 1639.)21 Notably, Franck’s 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 influence 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 finished 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 figure 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 five rivers flowing out of Eden rather than the biblical four: one for each sense.25 Franck, however, stays close to what he sees as the literal signification 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

The heterodox Fall 63 26 else but our owne will and knowledge’. 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 man’s 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 Franck’s 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 ye 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 Webster’s 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 influence. Adam, like a child, came into the world not only naked but blind: This was that Antichrist that appeared in, and to our first Parents, and that which they harlotryed with, from the Lord: God He created Adam blind and naked to

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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 fleshly 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 fleshly 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 academic Paracelsan Oswald Croll, also wrote of Adam in terms of rise-asfall: ‘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 finds the orthodox conception of prelapsarian perfection a danger to piety: ‘When the shadow of the first 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 first’, 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 redemption, that no man was punished for Adam’s sin, that Christ dies for all, that the guilt of Adam’s 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 persuasion, especially given the full name of the forbidden tree and God’s 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 first Adam and his created state, fitted to ruin and destruction’.34 In this way

The heterodox Fall 65 Pinnell shows the limits of the Franckean approach: it cannot furnish any explanation as to why God chose to make Adam ‘fitted 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 Milton’s 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: ‘There’s 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 Milton’s 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 Penington’s sole publisher from 1648–54, Penington’s 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 flesh 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 Pennington’s 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 refined 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 widespread: Richard Baxter and Alexander Ross both said so, and Henry More

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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 fit 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 first pamphleteering. His eighteenth-century Quaker biographer, Joseph Gurney Bevan, described Light or Darknesse and Penington’s 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 identified a wilder phase in Penington’s 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 Refiners fire’. 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 toss’d 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

The heterodox Fall 67 Light or Darknesse, indeed, evinces a Franckean pre-ethical, almost prehuman bliss, recaptured through self-abasement. Penington wished ‘good and evil. . .blotted out’: ‘Destruction will make an end of their wickedness, 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 Penington’s prelapsarians 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 God’s faces, and that we can find, 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 first 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 flesh.’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 man’s constant creaturely dependence on God. Consequently, they dispense with any idea of man’s 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

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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. Franck’s writings, though, and those writings he influenced, 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 ramifications 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 Hartlib’s 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, specifically Paracelsan medicine; Hartlib’s correspondent was a medic, and Pinnell was a translator of Paracelsan texts. As the influential 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.

The heterodox Fall 69 One peculiarity of Paracelsan systems, though, is that they also tend to emphasise the magnitude of Adam’s unfallen intellect, and this at once distinguishes them from the Franckeans, and creates the potential narrative problem that Adam would appear already to possess what the forbidden fruit nominally offers. Van Helmont overcame this difficulty by defining the knowledge of the apple as different in kind from man’s 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 concupiscence 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 God’s comments on man’s promotion as irony. The trinity does not traffic in wit: ‘ye Person of ye Father testifiinge 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 first 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 it’s 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

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(‘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 flora will act like modern ‘smart drugs’. Better still, for greater efficacy sake, chiefly 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 Tentzel’s 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 defining the knowledge as genuinely on offer but undesirable; Tentzel trusted the text of Genesis with its eye-opening conclusion, and thus risked inculpating God. Similarly, Rosicrucian emblems often insinuated the exciting fall into wisdom: Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, an early example of multimedia, employing parallel illustrations, mottoes, prose commentaries and musical 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’

The heterodox Fall 71 60 are likely one and the same. Rabisha signed his tract ‘Yours in the fellowship of the Spirit, and Minister of God according to the dispensation of grace given to him’, though, and apart from his similarly idiosyncratic A Paralel between Mr Love’s 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 published 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 fingerprint 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. Rabisha’s 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 Adam’s 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 figures 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 first 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

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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 deified 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 fire, 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. Rabisha’s close reading of Winstanley – let alone the connective particles 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 fine 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 view of 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.

The heterodox Fall 73 Rabisha did share one opinion with Winstanley – an ultimate commitment 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 newspaper 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 first condition.’67 They assembled in April 1649 on St George’s 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 five, and is now above fourty, but they say they will shortly be above five 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 first work, The Mysterie of God (1648), manifests immediately his allegorical turn: ‘Adam himself, or that living flesh, 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 temporary.’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 first 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 filled every man with sin and filth, by eating an apple’; rather, ‘Adams innocency is the time of child-hood’.71 Winstanley too employs close textual scrutiny, first 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 first 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.

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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 first 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), Winstanley’s 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 flesh. 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 one’s 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 first estate of mankinde, or the living soule in his innocencie, and you need not looke back six thousand yeares to find 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 man’s various spiritual states, it also documents the historical fortunes of the initial community, which came into existence at some unspecified 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’;

The heterodox Fall 75 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 existence of original sin is that which allows a hereditary aristocracy. Dismantle 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 ‘imagination’, lamenting ‘But thou seest now, how Imagination, that Serpent, hath deceived thee; o thou living soule, how art thou falne?’78 ‘Imagination 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 Winstanley’s 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 Winstanley’s advice, unsurprisingly, was not heeded, and the Digger experiment failed. But meanwhile, Winstanley’s 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 fleshly 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

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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 significant of the two. This was going too far for almost all Winstanley’s contemporaries. One commentator simply reinstated the Fall, and then used it as a stick to beat Winstanley’s political assumptions: ‘had they been of Adam’, this journalist 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 final people to be discussed in this chapter are the ones that fit 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 Franckean 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 firm 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, ‘know’s also the name of the Author of Prae-Adamitarum as j take it le Pere as j take it or Liperira a frenchman’.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 unexpectedly, David Whitford, gentleman, scholar, clergyman, and Royalist soldier.89 La Peyre`re held that there were two types of people: Jews, and everybody else. All Jews derive and date from the time of Adam and Eve, two

The heterodox Fall 77 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`re’s 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 redefine 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`re’s model is very simple, and from it flow 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`re’s 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 man’s 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 didn’t possess all language instantaneously but gradually compiled a dictionary.94 La Peyre`re’s understanding 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

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La Peyre`re’s reworking of the Genesis narrative effectively reintroduces the problem the narrative was supposed to explain: the origin of evil. Man’s 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 first is the special category of original sin, a juridical category applicable only to Jews. The second source stems from the nature of matter.96 Adam’s sin is ‘double’: ‘A natural sin, naturally inherent in Adam, by the infirmity 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 afflicts mankind, are the consequences 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 turn’d from perfect to imperfect, from right to wrong, from good to evil, which the men which were first 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 superfluous. The angels fell, according to La Peyre`re, from ‘the corrupted creation’; next, pre-Adamic men ‘perish’d in their own thoughts’; finally, the late, minor drama of Eden takes place. Eden and the problem of evil become disconnected, and the first 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`re’s influence in England is hard to assess, although he gained one convert, the F. R. S. Francis Lodwick.101 But the pre-Adamism of

The heterodox Fall 79 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 first 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 first 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 God’s 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`re’s ideas directly, and Clarkson, Tany and Winstanley wrote before the publication of the Prae-Adamitae. La Peyre`re’s influence was only felt later, and few would openly dare to concur. Francis Lodwick and Charles Blount were rare exceptions.105

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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 God’s 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 fine 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, Muggleton’s 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 Muggletonian 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 specific 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 flesh . . . 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: X V . 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 . . . X V I 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.

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XVIII.

I do believe that Eve brought forth her first born the son of the devil, and very devil himself.

X I X . I do believe that there is no other devil but man and woman; since the first devil, that serpent angel devil, became seed in the womb of Eve, and clothed himself with flesh 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 exemplifies the difficulty of generalising about whether sectarians read allegorically or not. In one sense, Muggletonians 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 can’t 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 2–3 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 canvassed 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 figures 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 antiAugustinian 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 figures 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

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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 approaches. 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 figures 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 figures 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 conflict 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 can’t be all that important. This chapter revisits that conflict, and extends it into a discussion of some contemporary heresiographic accounts of pseudo-Messiahs, and of the people called Ranters. The conflict 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. Polycarp’s reaction to it, as Irenaeus explained, was to run away: ‘he would have cried out and stopped his ears . . . And he would have fled 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 flee from heretical talk, like Polycarp, with their fingers in their ears. Yet Irenaeus also records how Polycarp once faced up to Marcion, and called him ‘firstborn of Satan’.1 There are thus two choices in the face of heresy: to run, or to stand one’s 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

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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 heresiographer 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 haven’t seen and seen off before – are tied up in the generic overlap between the historiography of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. 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 concerning impious things, however, can hamper the job of extirpation: in 1598, for instance, when various Socinian books were seized in the Low Countries and condemned to the flames, their final 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 Ochino’s 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 Sanderson’s correspondent about Jeremy Taylor), he left his manuscripts to the care of his domestic chaplains, with instructions not to print. But an unauthorised edition did appear, containing a

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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 find 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 first 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 X V Several Doores (1642), Religions Lotterie (1642) and X X X I 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 X X X I I I Religions runs, in three numbered columns: 1. Cardinalls, 2. French faction, 3. Spanish faction, 4. Adamites, 5. Prelaticall faction, 6. Jesuites, 7. Malignants, 8. Priests, 9. Arminians, 10. Italian Faction, 11. Sheolomothites,

12. Chiliastes, 13. Clementines, 14. Simon Maguses, 15. Achians, 16. Minanders, 17. Ebionites, 18. Corinthuses, 19. Nicholitains, 20. Marcions, 21. Encraticae, 22. Valentinians,

23. Theodotians, 24. Samseis, 25. Samosetens, 26. Manacheams, 27. Appolinaries, 28. Donatists, 29. Selucians, 30. Pelagians, 31. Abelardes, 32. Peterenins, 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 mentioned earlier, most of the more recondite sects are lifted straight from Simson’s 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

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labels of the X X X I 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 X X X I 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 Rutherford’s Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist likewise combined an interest in ancient sects with some much more contemporary and immediate connections.10 Rutherford’s 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 first 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, finally, 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

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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 receiv’d sentence to be hang’d 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 I’le rent thy Throne asunder; and so miserably died.14

Written at least two generations after the Hacket affair, Alexander’s account of Hacket’s 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 official 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

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the interregnum cursers, especially the ‘destroying angels’ of the later Messiah William Franklin, and the Muggletonians. Franklin’s fascinated but hostile heresiographer, Humphrey Ellis, likens his subject’s behaviour to that of Hacket, despite Hacket’s 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 Infidels, and deliuer me from these mine enemies: If not, I will fire 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 Alternative Trinity seeks to trace such trinitarian fallings-out. In this connection, Nuttall observes that Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, written almost exactly contemporaneously with the Hacket affair, also contains a similar play on the cry of dereliction. In Faustus’ final moments, he shouts, ‘My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!’ Faustus had also earlier imitated Christ with his ‘Consummatum est: this bill is ended.’ 20 Nuttall comments:

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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 fierce on me!’ The cry of dereliction is overtaken and displaced in the sentence by the conspiracy of heaven. It is as if, by a final horror, the feared absence of God proves less dreadful than his presence.21

Nuttall’s implicit conjecture is that the Calvinist superstructure of Marlowe’s play threatens to twist into Gnosticism, where the creator of this world is seen as evil. The sight of Faustus, a highly sinful Christ-figure, cowering before a hitherto absent, now very present, angry God, does not commend either character. Marlowe’s play has prepared us for this final impasse: the Prologue told us that the heavens had ‘conspir’d’ 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 Marlowe’s play was written after Hacket’s execution, the comparison is instructive. The dating of Dr Faustus is controversial, but the 1592–3 conjecture followed by Keefer in his edition would allow Marlowe space to reflect on the Hacket affair: Arthington and Copinger had declared Hacket’s 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 discussion, works as a protective inversion: an extreme position is identified and vilified, 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 first Adam to the second behind him.24 And

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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 affirmed, 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 Everard 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 ye 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 Herbert’s poem ‘The sacrifice’, where Herbert’s narrator, speaking as Christ, arrives at the cry of dereliction. But, the human writer finding himself unable to write down the difficult 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 leav’st 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

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on the cross, treated the cry as a taste for man of God’s 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 Christ’s voice directly in his ‘On Christ’s 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 Son’s 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-figures, 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 significant 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, Hacket’s 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 Dictates and Positions, and peremptorily affirmed, 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 heart’s 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,

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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 identified 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 sanctified’. Catharus’ justification 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 Christ’s. 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 antiPuritans, 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 metaphysical dualism, and the extreme reaction to the narrative of Genesis 2–3 of inverting the conventional labels, and defining the God of prohibitions as evil and the serpent as a liberating figure. 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.

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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 difficult case is the vegetarian Roger Crab, who became a hermit to avoid the ‘flesh-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 IdolTemple’, 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 influenced by the Corpus hermeticum, which was circulating in John Everard’s 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 T’reduce 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 titul’d Gods ye pray and call. Oh then my Creature, let me speak to thee; Thy Worship, and thy God, shall dy truly.44

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It is difficult to decide what is more audacious: the sentiment itself, or that Clarkson voiced it in first-person terms. Similar first-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 weren’t sure.46 Abiezer Coppe, the most notorious of the Ranters (thanks largely to Anthony Wood’s spurious biography), followed one of his ‘Amen’s with ‘Not by the Devill, but (by God) it’s true’, but shouldernoted ‘God’ with the comment ‘That’s 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 Salmon’s 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 edifice 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 exemplifies 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 find ourselves 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 Coppe’s output, for instance, one is struck by how little material relating to the matter in

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Eden there is. In his ‘recantation’, Copp’s 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, Coppe’s 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 [Adam’s nature] was not imperfect, 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 filled. Such ‘filling-in’, though, was not always a comfortable job, and often had to find a suitable rhetorical front for its operations. Thus the curious Sir Thomas Browne opened his Pseudodoxia epidemica (first 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, however, 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 nonnarrative genre finding itself influenced by a narrative one is provided by Matthew Poole’s 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 influence of ‘a late 96

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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 flow 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 throughout 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 influential 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 Poole’s reconstruction of the conversation between

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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 Poole’s Milton. Nonetheless, working on a canvas larger than Genesis 2–3 but smaller than Paradise Lost, Poole economises. Milton’s 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 engagement with, narrative priorities. Thus the Elizabethan vernacular commentator Gervase Babington complained of Eve’s ‘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 ‘flung 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 reflections 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 Serpent’s 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 finally 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 wish’d-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

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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 Hutchinson. In the 1730s, her descendant Julius Hutchinson remembered how one of Eve’s 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 Hutchinson’s poem to the period immediately after the Restoration.11 (Order and Disorder is actually only a short portion of Hutchinson’s versified work on the Old Testament, but it is the section that concerns us here.) The elements that had recommended Hutchinson’s 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 psychology’, adducing one of Eve’s soliloquies as evidence. However, as Adam is awarded a companion soliloquy, Eve’s speech can hardly show particular 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 approximations 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 t’invent.’ The mundane Fall is likewise in a hurry to happen: And so within a bright scal’d serpent [Satan] lies, Folded about a fair forbidden tree, Watching a wish’d for opportunitie, Which Eve soon gave him, coming there alone So to be first and easier overthrown.14

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Hutchinson’s 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 difficult 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, Believ’d 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 Eve’s weakness, as did Aemilia Lanyer, her Eve is conventional, and conventionally rebuked: His [Satan’s] lies could never have prevail’d 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 joyn’d, Earth in his members, Heaven in his mind; Whose vast reach the whole Universe compriz’d, And saw it in himself epitomiz’d, Yet not the Centre nor circumference can Fill the more comprehensive soul of Man, Whose life is but a progress of desire, Which still enjoy’d, doth something else require, Unsatisfied 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 knowledge 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

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animals are ‘Some more to love, some more to hate enclin’d’; flora 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 Hutchinson’s 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 published in English in sections from the 1590s on. But her reluctance to be original is itself an interesting phenomenon. Working from the experience 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 Pordage’s Mundorum explicatio (1661) and John Dryden’s 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 Milton’s Paradise Lost. All three offer narrative treatments of the Fall; all three embody quite different approaches 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 five-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 five rather static acts, each crowned by a chorus in mixed metre. In the first 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 firm; in the penultimate, Sathan tries Eva instead, who gives in, whereupon she and Adamus lament; and finally, 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

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Grotius’ Adamus is not a very interesting character. He is rather robotically intelligent when we first encounter him in conversation with the Angelus, correctly deducing that God must needs exist, be uncreated, infinite, 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 confirms this, saying that Adamus has the look of someone ‘whose aspect [vultus] aims at greater things’. Sathan, though, also describes 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, identifies 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 didn’t 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 Sathan’s 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 Milton’s Paradise Regain’d: Sathan: Oblata ab aliquo quis recusat munera? Adamus: Quemcunque non tam dona, quam donans juvat. [Sathan: Who’d refuse someone’s gifts? Adamus: The person who cares not about the gifts, but the giver.]25

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This is echoed by Milton’s Satan and Jesus in the wilderness: Satan reply’d. Tell me, if Food were before thee set, Would’st thou not eat? Thereafter as I like The giver, answer’d Jesus.26

The difference lies in the context. In Milton’s poem, Jesus is no prelapsarian – 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 first Adam. Adamus, then, in his interaction with Sathan, is a little too energetic, something Sathan quickly identifies. 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, flectet viam. Quocunque vento flante 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 177–80)]

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 defined 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 doesn’t 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

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her first 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 – ‘What’s that animal . . .?’ – and closing her first 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 fine speech, he confesses ‘for you, my wife, what would I deny? At your command, I’d 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 immediately 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 first reading, looks very much like the Fall. Eva presumably takes the apple, and then after an extra-textual bite, feels horror and tremor, and not the new science promised. But we have been wrongfooted: 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 reaffirm 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.

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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 he’ll say is worst of all, I have thought about it carefully.’ 33 In this way, Eva uses the Augustinian creation of the fall-inthe-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 horrified 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.’ Eva’s argument is a barely disguised criticism, and reflects a lesson welllearned 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 mind’s 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 mind’s 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 difficult 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

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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 Euripides says, Surely to know nothing at all is the best life.’ 36 Therefore his annotation on God’s identification of man’s intellectual promotion at the Fall likewise accepts God’s 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 find 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 liv’d 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 first at Hierusalem, and now also not a few that lead an ascetick life. The simplicity, wherein the first 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 identifies countries or collectives where the political fall into property has not taken place. The switch from the

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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 first 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 Mephibosheth the Wisard’s Son’. When he sent the Earl of Rochester his hopeful play Mariamne, Rochester returned it, with the couplet scrawled on the manuscript: ‘Poet whoe’re thou art, God damn Thee, / Go hand thyself, and burn thy Mariamne.’ 40 Dryden’s claim that Pordage’s father was a wizard would not have been seen as an exaggeration. Samuel (1633–?91) was the son of John Pordage (1607–81), the Behmenist astrologer and clergyman to whom Elias Ashmole had gifted the rich Berkshire living of Bradfield. At Bradfield he entertained a variety of figures, including Coppe and Tany. William Everard the founder Digger was also there in 1649, himself ‘reputed to be a Conjurer’. According to Baxter’s account Everard caused quite a stir, amongst other things conjuring up and fighting with dragons.41 When officially 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 Pordage’s Mundorum explicatio, published in 1661, is signed merely ‘S. P. Armig’. and is not at all like Pordage the younger’s other extant poetry.43 It explicitly evangelises Behmenist systematics otherwise ignored in Samuel’s 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-oddlines-long poem is like reading Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s 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 Samuel’s authorship to secure his claim, and his father’s Behmenism reinforces this ascription, 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’.

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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. Pordage’s Behmenism envisages Adam on the model of Boehme’s massive Genesis commentary, the Mysterium magnum. Thus, Pordage’s hermaphrodite Adam not only ‘saw through all things, knew what all things meant’ but could also fly, dive and withstand fire. 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 first creation was ‘so made / That it may stand, or be to hell betray’d: / Or like an empty Vacuum, which is / Capable to be fill’d with Wo, or Blisse’.44 Adam is thus a flying, fire-defying ‘Vacuum’. This makes the (first) 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 finishes his speech, ‘ADAM ’S 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 defines 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:

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Adam’s amaz’d, and in the Chrystal Glasse Of Waters, he beholds his limbs, and Face, He feels his hair, his nose, his teeth, his flesh, 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 reflection.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 reflection. The difference between these two reworkings lies in the moment at which it is introduced into the narrative. Milton’s Eve is unfallen at the point of the comparison, and the inclusion of the Narcissus motif thus sets up a troubling counterpoint: perhaps Eve does have more in common with Narcissus than she is supposed to. Pordage’s Adam, on the other hand, has just fallen, but the tone of his excited verse works in exactly the opposite direction from Milton’s echoic, rather soporific chimes. Adam’s 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 first he was.’ This sundered being awakes as two, and – incredibly – this first 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 enter’d in, Nor was the vanity awak’d, as yet, God’s blessed Image in their souls was set, Though much obscur’d: In great felicity And Joy they liv’d, 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

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forgotten the last few pages: ‘In Harmony / Thou art; nor is awak’d Hel’s 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, ‘Sinn’s not without assent: Nor lyes it in / B’ing 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 ‘They’ave fading breath, / Bodies to sickness subject, and to Death.’ But Adam drew his first ‘mortal breath’, we were told, just after his first fall, that is some 400 lines previously! Once again, the interface between the two falls has broken down.49 God’s 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 God’s Justice; then his Mercy brake A deeper silence and him thus bespake. Where art thou Adam? Is that Face of thine Muffled 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 Adam’s face is now becoming muffled 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

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steadily weaker figure in Pordage’s poem. At first, he is the great creator. But soon Pordage’s 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 Kingdom’s 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 Milton’s arch-fiend: You know aspiring Princes! You and I Left Heav’n for prying into the unity, Because we scorn’d 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 Satan’s cosmogony is, from a Behmenist point of view, accurate. Satan says that his state existed first, 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 Satan’s description of the angelic fall quoted above, Pordage shoulder-notes: ‘*(i.e.) The first Princip. which is not simply evil, but as it is in opposition to the good ’. ‘Good’, ‘evil’ – these start to lose moral significance 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:

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*The two Essences of the first 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 identified, though usually conflated 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 Æternity Did generate two Principles, which be Contrary to each other. God alone Cannot (but by these Principles) be known. These generate he did Æternally, Both in, and by himself, a mysterie Not to be comprehended. Neither tho Is *God; yet he’s the *Root from whence they flow. *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 serv’d him in all manner of wickednesse and sins, aswell as uprightnesse and Love, seing he was the Author of all. Indeed they serv’d the first Principle, and unlesse they repent may therein serve to Æternity.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 Pordage’s defensive and quite contradictory note to the verse suggests. Clarkson’s dualistic poem, narrated in the voice of the higher God, has been cited; Clarkson also wrote: To this end, you shall find 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 Pordage’s later notes reads: ‘*The justice, anger, zeal, or wrath of God is not the same as the dark world, but yet

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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. Pordage’s poem, in conclusion, tells two stories. The first is the familiar one of Genesis 2–3, 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 Milton’s Paradise Lost as a base text, and compresses it into forty-five pages of heroic couplets in its original quarto, preceded by half that number again of epistles and Nathaniel Lee’s dedicatory poem, which would have made Milton tear his hair out. Portraying Milton as having but ‘rudely cast what you cou’d well dispose’, Lee placed Dryden in an alternative, Cowleyan tradition of Royalist, rhyming epic: On then O mightiest of the inspir’d men, Monarch of Verse, new Theames employ thy Pen. The troubles of Majestick CHARLES set down, Not David vanquish’d more to reach a Crown, Praise him, as Cowly did that Hebrew King, Thy Theam’s as great, do thou as greatly sing.56

Dryden’s rewrite was not without Milton’s 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 Fashion’d that I think you had as good leave ’em as you found ’em.57

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Dryden’s ‘opera’ proved very popular in its time, although it never reached the stage, perhaps because of the difficulty 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 flight of Poets, who have dress’d 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 design’d to have been acted upon the Stage: And tho’ once happily prevented, yet it has pass’d 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 fideistic scepticism: ‘Being naturally inclin’d 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, shou’d be all invol’d in one common condemnation, and yet that their Posterity shou’d be Intitled to the hopes of Salvation.’ 60 Dryden also had a sceptical attitude to ‘reason’, which parallels Grotius’ annotation on Genesis discussed earlier; his Aureng-Zebe, for instance, declares that ‘Reason’s nice taste does our delights destroy: / Brutes are more bless’d, 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 Aristotle’s declining influence:

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Columbus was the first that shook his Throne; And found a Temp’rate in a Torrid Zone: The fevrish aire fann’d by a cooling breez, The fruitful Vales set round with shady Trees; And guiltless Men, that danc’d 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 Milton’s 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 Adam’s 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 DemyGod’, ‘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, he’s 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.1–4)

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 Heav’n remote so far, / To keep those Laws, unknowing when I err?’ (I I .i.27–8). 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

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useless tool if there’s no-one to talk to. So Raphael then claims ‘Thus far, to try thee’ (I I .i.62), and confides to Adam that a decidedly inferior mate and auditor, though one with other talents, is on her way: An equal, yet thy subject, is design’d, 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.64–9)

Milton too was quite open that Eve was not equal to Adam (PL 4.296–9), but he nevertheless granted his Eve a more obviously exalted role. Dryden’s Eve, his Raphael predicts, will prove all too weak a vessel. The crucial stage in Adam’s 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 find they can only exhort him to obedience, and so abruptly fly 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 Adam’s 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 Bramhall’s objections to Hobbes. King also notes that both positions assume differing conceptions of original sin.64 This neglects the obvious dramatic problem: Dryden’s 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’. Gransden’s 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 Dryden’s intention: Dryden made Adam win, because he is aware of the

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comic, even absurd dimension of the Fall. On this model, Dryden was not justifying the ways of God to men, but rendering them philosophically incoherent, as is fitting for God’s ways. This is a little extreme. Gransden finds the Fall philosophically dubious, 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, Adam’s debate with the two angels is simply not coherent: King’s basic feeling that the angels ought to be right is founded on a historically sound assumption; Gransden’s 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 Heav’n, all-pure, thy crimes to preordain’ (I V .i.75–6). But this is a causally absurd couplet: Adam, it is suggested, enforces his predestination. Adam’s final, single line on the matter shows that he remains unmoved: ‘Better constrain’d 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 flies off with Gabriel, and so the teachers flee the classroom: Our task is done: obey; and, in that choice, Thou shalt be blest, and Angels shall rejoyce. [Raphael and Gabriel fly up in the Cloud: the other Angels go off. (I V .i.111–12)

We don’t however have to equate intention with effect; Dryden’s Gabriel had formerly spoken perhaps the most intelligent line in the scene: ‘And who but man should judge of man’s 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 Milton’s Adam, who is ‘clear’d of doubt’ by Raphael. Absolutely the reverse happens to Dryden’s Adam: ‘Hard state of life! Since Heav’n fore-knows my will, / Why am I not ty’d up from doing ill?’ (113–14).

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Dryden must be commenting on Milton’s 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. Dryden’s Adam has philosophically 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 fine 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. Dryden’s Eve is good evidence that he, like Hutchinson, leaned strongly on the argument of Eve’s 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 shin’st above, what am I? whence begun? Like my self, I see nothing . . . . . . I my self am proud of me. (I I .iii.1–3, 8)

Her reflection, she complains, is: ‘Ah, fair, yet false; ah, Being, form’d to cheat, / By seeming kindness, mixt with deep deceit’ (I I .iii.26–7). This is evidence of an inherent instability in Eve, and the telescoped syntax is not fair: ‘form’d 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 Adam’s lordly droit de seigneur, she decides to have sex with Adam because: I well fore see, when e’r thy suit I grant, That I my much-lov’d Soveraignty shall want: Or like my self some other may be made, And her new Beauty may thy heart invade. (I I .iii.66–9)

So, although she fears that sex will diminish her power, she doesn’t want a more servile Eve-replacement to usurp her, and complies in a terrible phrase: ‘Thou more of pleasure may’st with me partake; / I, more of pride, because thy bliss I make’ (I I I .i.29–30).

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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 Adam’s superb love-making (39–46). Lucifer quite correctly divines that Eve is the ‘weaker she, and made my easier prey’ (I I I .iii.11), and accordingly he whispers the vision in her ear. (Dryden, for the stage, objectifies 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 warn’d by us, beware; / And guide her frailty, by thy timely care’ (I V .i.15–16). Everybody thinks Eve is especially fragile. Adam doesn’t 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 evr’y plot can undermine or shake?’ (I V .i.162, 167–8). As in Milton, she uses Adam’s 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 th’unlabour’d Ground, / Bounteous of Fruit’ (I I I .i.84–5, I V .i.125–8, I I I .i.57–8). Adam lets her go, still insisting on his superiority, yet admitting his uxoriousness: ‘More perfect I, and yet more pow’rful she’ (I V .i.198). Eve overcame him by mere emotional blackmail – ‘Know that, ev’n 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 Adam’s arguments in the parent epic. Her ‘imperfection’, rather, lies in her pride, but, in the act of telling the story, she becomes the more propulsive, persuasive intellect. Adam’s intelligence anguishes him; Eve’s 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 Eve’s 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.18–21)

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 Dryden’s Eve to eat, she puts up some resistance, based on principles of obedience. Nevertheless she weakens because

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Lucifer’s 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; I’ll venture all and disobey. (I V .ii.136–7)

After the Fall, Eve’s lexis takes a swerve for the decadent; could Milton’s Eve ever say ‘I love the wretch’? Take me not Heav’n, 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 he’s too much my Lord. (V .i.5–8)

Adam is no match for her now: as she tells him triumphantly, ‘We have been cozen’d’ (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.48–50, 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 Heav’n’s displeasure Fall: / You merit none, and I deserve it all’ (I V .iv.100–1). 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 pow’r to keep ’em, weak. Did we solicite Heav’n to mould our clay? From darkness, to produce us to the day? . . . Since ’twas his choice, not ours, which plac’d us here; The laws we did not chuse, why should we bear? (V .iv.118–21, 24–5)

Scanning the rest of her lines in the opera, the only sign of repentance comes, and that qualified, 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). (Milton’s Adam is dangerously only ‘half abash’t’ at Raphael’s 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 Dryden’s State of Innocence. The direct rewriting of a parent text,

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Dryden’s reascriptions of various sentiments, his accelerations and spins, are all judgements on that parent text and its intellectual structure. Dryden’s 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. Milton’s 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 Dryden’s 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.

p a r t ii

Milton

chapter 7

Towards ‘Paradise Lost’

Milton’s 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 – affirms a strongly Calvinist emphasis upon restricted Atonement: God ‘denies the grace of election to most: there are but a few that have favour’.2 Milton’s private tutor Thomas Young taught him the classics and perhaps some patristics; at St Paul’s, John Colet’s statutes emphasised Christian learning, encouraging the study of such authors as Lactantius and Prudentius, though how far such statutes were implemented is uncertain.3 St Paul’s, 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 man’s continuing, creative rationality.5 Unlike Milton’s subsequent treatment, Gil insisted that the Fall must 125

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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 Paul’s, Milton’s youthful verse already registers some interest in the symbols of the Fall. The fable ‘Apologus de rustico et hero’, probably dating from Milton’s 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 final 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 theological overtones: as a result of the misuse of a different fruit tree, all (human) foetus are indeed spoiled as a result of their first parentes. The closing idea of the ‘Apologus’ persisted in Milton’s 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, Spoil’d 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 final conflagration: Sic denique in aevum Ibit cunctarum series iustissima rerum, Donec flamma orbem populabitur ultima, late Circumplexa polos, et vasta culmina caeli; Ingentique rogo flagrabit machina mundi.9

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[In fact, then, the process of the Universe will go on for ever, worked out with scrupulous justice, until the last flames 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 Carey’s headnote to the poem suggests, can be construed as taking sides in the Goodman–Hakewill debate discussed in the opening pages of this book. But if this is so, then Milton is taking Hakewill’s side against Goodman, and therefore implicitly accepting that the Fall had no cosmic ramifications. It is not an opinion Milton maintained: 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 17–28, and a final fair copy. Lines 17–24 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 disproportion’d sin Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience, and their state of good.10

The final 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 first 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 17–28 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

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started with ‘could’ in the final draft, but this time, ‘did’ is added in, and ‘could’ crossed out. There is, however, an obvious direction to these emendations. Milton’s first 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 flattening 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 final draft take notice of the Fall, shifting the focus of the poem firmly 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 final 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 first draft was our present choice is replaced by the last with Adam’s 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, o’reretched, 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 ‘first obedience’, but the entire created realm. Lycidas (1637) is a crucial poem in Milton’s 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

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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 five 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 Milton’s 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 difficult 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 final 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 drown’d 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 finally emanating from a lone, unknown swain, as he pipes, fingers, sings, writes or simply thinks. Lycidas may be a political poem, but it is simultaneously another poem about lack of access, and about the artificiality of pastoral. This is an old idea to be sure, but one rendered especially urgent when a Christian view of history is superimposed 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 first, ranging from the Fall to ‘Christus patiens’ – two subjects that had earlier

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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 untitled 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 fiveact 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 five forwards scroll through sacred history from the flood to various New Testament themes. One of the late titles is ‘Christ bound’, which is next to ‘Christ Crucifi’d’, 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 JacquesAuguste de Thou, whose Parabata vinctus, sive triumphus Christi, tragœdia (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 unparadiz’d’, and comprises a longish prose extrapolation, 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 unparadiz’d’ draft, chronologically out of sequence as it is, he had clearly started to realise which project to back. The four early accounts repay greater scrutiny. The first, 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 difficulty of gaining unmediated access to such fundamental biblical happenings is amplified in the

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‘Paradise Lost’ draft, the first explicitly to divide the material into acts. The first act opens, as the prior draft had decided, with Moses: Moses προλογίζει [‘prologises’] recounting how he assum’d 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 ye 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 difficult 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’ draft’s 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 difficult problem of how Satan managed to convince Eve, and Eve Adam, is avoided. This motif is continued into the ‘Adam unparadiz’d’ draft, where Lucifer’s rebellion is also located before the action of the drama: when Lucifer finally 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 seduc’t by the serpent appears confusedly cover’d 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 Milton’s (on balance) antipathy to the stage, and the unactability of other subjects in the lists of possible tragedies – the flood, Christ crucified, and so forth – Milton’s 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.

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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 definite 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 defines our rights, rather than as a principle from which we have become disunified. 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. Milton’s polemical prose next concerns us, although we must be sensible that Milton’s polemical agenda controlled everything he wrote in this period, and that talk about the ‘progression’ or ‘development’ of Milton’s ideas cannot operate in isolation from these agenda.18 Nonetheless, Milton’s passing comments in his first string of pamphlets, the antiprelatical tracts, conform to the patterns developed in his previous poetry and projects. But a new element also appears: a political emphasis on man’s 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 first

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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 rebuked 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), Milton’s first pamphlet, had mentioned the ‘originall Spot’; and his fourth, The Reason of Church-Government (1641), ‘the grosse distorted apprehension of decay’d 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 Milton’s thought on the Fall becomes original only in 1643–4. 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 classification – 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 ‘Smectymnuus’, 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 Calamy’s famous 1641 fast sermon before the Commons, Englands Looking-Glasse, which had likewise encouraged Parliament ‘to reform the Reformation it self’. But in 1644 Calamy had just become a licenser of the press, exactly the office 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, Milton’s ‘first 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 first state, and what relation they had to contemporary man and woman.26 It also contains his first argued attempt at theodicy, the chapter added into the second edition on predestination.27

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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, Milton’s 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 Milton’s 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 first developed as personal convenience, it became integrated into Milton’s 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 Christ’s 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 flesh.29 On the one hand, Milton has a powerful precedent in Christ’s 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. Milton’s 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 Eve’s one flesh to tidy up. So Milton decides that ‘one flesh’ 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 weakness, whether through over-hasty union or genuine mistake, has led to a disastrous marriage.

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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 ‘fly back to the primitive institution, and would have us reenter 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 flesh, 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 pamphlet, especially in the second edition’s address to the Parliament and the Assembly of Divines, with affirmations of current fallenness: ‘the originall blindnesse we are born in’; ‘all the misery that hath bin since Adam’. But the other movement affirms 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 nonetheless significantly revises this sentiment, decrying Custom for ‘depressing 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, disabled, 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 first, 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 prelapsarian – though not indissoluble – institution is that the first marriage itself is dynamised in a way that makes Adam and Eve energetic, sympathetic figures. This turns on Milton’s interpretation of Paul’s 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

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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 Paul’s 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 fit 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 flame, 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 first walked.35 Never did Milton sort less with the slightly later sentiment of one of his friend Andrew Marvell’s nutty narrators: ‘Two paradises ’twere in one / To live in paradise alone.’ 36 Milton’s burning Adam is a strange sight. It disturbed Milton’s anonymous 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 fit and meet conversing soule, to fit 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 fit 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 fit 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 fit 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

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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 Milton’s 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 Milton’s argument lies not in the fact of this ambiguity 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 sanctification 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 epic’s estimation of what man wants to do with that woman, and she with him, finds 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 ‘fine 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

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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 first 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 – Milton’s phrase is striking in its affirmation 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 finds himself bound to develop a theory of virtue that promotes contact with evil: Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d 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 cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, 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 purifies 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

Milton’s argument is a version of the felix culpa, because felicity and culpability are both accepted as components of the Fall. But Milton’s 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 Redemptorem46 – blazes on the horizon, but fell from a state which is figured as pre-ethical. Adam ‘fell’, but he ‘fell into’ a state of ethical

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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 fleeting 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 fleeing 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 final words are Milton’s own; a literal translation might be ‘however much/although these things do not give security/sufficiently demonstrate’. This has been taken to mean something like ‘this is fine as far as it goes’.49 But the force is less positive: the sentiment is that this is insufficient, or at least incomplete.50 Either way, the commonplace book entry testifies 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 cloister’d’ 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 Eve’s confrontation with the serpent was ‘tittle tattle too long and too much’.51 She should, in other words, have fled. Again, this was the most authentic reaction to heresy in the eyes of the earliest heresiographers. ‘Cloister’d’, too, with its popish ring, derives from Latin claustrum, usually in the plural claustra, meaning gate or lock, and by extension, a confined place; the substantive from the cognate verb claudo is clausum, an enclosure, precisely what paradise is. Milton’s Areopagitica is not a work of formal theology, but this is what makes it an important document: it reveals

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tensions in Milton’s 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 South’s 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 first 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 endorsed, 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 artificiall 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 distinction 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 philosopher 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 ratified subjection under a monarch from the example of Adam, necessarily assumes an analogy between Adam’s political rights and those of his progeny.

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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 liv’d 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 flood 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 Martini’s De bello Tartarico in Sinis (Rome, 1654), and his yet-to-bewritten Sinicae historiae Decas prima (Munich, 1658), in which Martino was notoriously to claim that China was populated before the Flood.58

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Milton, in his reply, refers to only one of the above. Rather, recalling Oldenburg’s earlier criticisms of impious scholars – those who ‘nevertheless continue to gather fuel for their fire, 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. Oldenburg’s implicit assumption that biblical chronology needs protecting 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 Milton’s private reading, Maresius’ refutation of La Peyre`re. Milton wishes, however, to keep this private. He will not mention La Peyre`re by name; alternative chronologies he brands simply as superfluous. If Oldenburg hoped he could draw out a conversation – and La Peyre`re and Milton’s opponent Salmasius were acquainted60 – 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 finally turn to the De doctrina Christiana, which because of its manner of composition, its multi-scribed state, and its theological orientation, 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 Milton’s 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 Milton’s previous thinking, in all its complexity. Milton first 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 couldn’t, by

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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 God’s thoughts, as the Papists pretend. They know by revelation only those things which God sees fit 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 reflective devils of Paradise Lost, performing a task not dissimilar to that of their poet, who ‘reason’d 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 God’s command. Immediately, though, this formulation aligns two concepts 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 man’s inconstant (non immutabile) nature.67 The consequences of this sin were dire. The first sin itself broke all law:

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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 husband’s 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 Augustine 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 first parents became guilty, though there could have been no original sin in them. Moreover all Adam’s 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 Kelley’s 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

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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 first nor a final draft, but Milton’s understanding of the Fall and of original sin clearly follows broadly Calvinist lines, with Arminian qualifications. Milton is interested in finding a balance between the idea of a dire event with calamitous consequences, both physical and mental, and the necessary survival of some contact, however compromised, 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 finds the way so knotty and perplexed, that it ‘Access deni’d’ (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 final 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 field, 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 Heav’nly Muse’ (PL 1.1, 6). The immediacy of the first invocation, full of present imperatives and first-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 justifie the wayes of God to men. (1.23–6)

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

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If answerable style I can obtaine Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes Her nightly visitation unimplor’d, And dictates to me slumbring, or inspires Easie my unpremeditated Verse. (9.20–4)

What had looked like an immediate process reveals itself as a transcript, the secondary record of a sleepy urtext, whose moment of initial transmission 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’ (10.607–8). 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 ‘justifie the wayes of God to men’ can be read in two ways. Are we to construe the line as exactly equivalent to ‘And justifie 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 theologicchopping, the opening asserts both the importance and extent of the Fall, and the priority of narrative considerations. The initium continues in this vein:

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Milton and the Idea of the Fall Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause Mov’d our Grand Parents in that happy State, Favour’d of Heav’n so highly, to Fall off From thir Creator, and transgress his Will For one restraint, Lords of the World besides? Who first seduc’d them to that foul revolt? Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was . . .

This is then traced further back to Satan’s ‘Pride’, and further still, to his ‘sence of injur’d merit’ (1.3, 27–34, 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 fleeting 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 Heav’n’, uncoils into fallen angel (36–7). 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, deceiv’d The Mother of Mankind, what time his Pride Had cast him out from Heav’n, . . . round he throws his baleful eyes That witness’d huge affliction and dismay Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate . . . And high disdain, from sence of injur’d merit, That with the mightiest rais’d me to contend. (1.34–7, 56–8, 98–9)

Satan’s negative emotions are detached from Satan: ‘his Pride . . . cast him’; ‘affliction and dismay’ are ‘Mixt with obdurate pride’; ‘high disdain . . . rais’d 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.

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Book 4 again employs reflexive 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 troubl’d thoughts, and from the bottom stirr The Hell within him . . . (4.15–20)

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 Satan’s 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-theworld. 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-inthe-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 first actions of sin, ‘such joy thou took’st / With me in secret’ (2.765–6). 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 defections are not efficient but deficient causes, to wish to trace them is as if

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someone were to set his heart on seeing darkness or hearing silence.’ 6 Thus Milton’s 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 difficult 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, 550–1, 561). Visual problems are also present in the simile famous for troubling the censor:7 As when the Sun new ris’n 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. (1.594–9)

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 selfishness, and the prefix ‘self-’. Augustine had discussed 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 selfishness, 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 selfishness was one of the constant targets of the tradition exemplified by the Theologia Germanica, where Satan’s 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 prefix ‘self-’ is to be noted carefully, and it is almost invariably associated with a kind of causal short-circuiting,

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and overwhelmingly with devils and devilry. Thus Satan promises the devils that, ‘self-Rais’d’, they can reconquer heaven; that they are ‘selfbegot, self-rais’d / By our own quick’ning power’. To God, they are ‘Self-tempted, self-deprav’d’, ‘Self-lost’ (1.634, 5.860–1, 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 final 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 Gather’d like scum, and setl’d to it self It shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed, and self-consum’d.11

Man, by contrast, is less harassed by the ‘self-’ prefix; 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 profits more / Then self esteem, grounded on just and right / Well manag’d’ (8.571–3). Matthew Jordan, in light of Raphael’s advice, has recently commented on ‘self-esteem’ in Milton: The earliest citation in the OED is from Richard Baxter’s Sancta Sophia (1657), where it is bracketed with other forms of spiritual pride: ‘Independence, Selfesteem, Self-judgment, and Self-will’. But this is considerably predated by Milton’s 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 conflict 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 fiction of autochthony. But is the distinction between devilish selfishness and man’s 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 identifies as a satanic attribute:

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Milton and the Idea of the Fall The first sort by thir own suggestion fell, Self-tempted, self-deprav’d: Man falls deceiv’d By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace, The other none. (3.129–32)

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 first fall was not influenced by Satan. The mind has to be fitted 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 filled 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 Milton’s 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 lov’d, thy youngest Son Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joyned With his own folly? (3.150–3)

On one level, the Son is tactfully revising the Father’s 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 God’s ‘deceiv’d’ man is furthermore very difficult to square with Adam later in the poem: ‘he scrupl’d not to eat / Against his better knowledge, not deceav’d, / But fondly overcome with Femal charm’ (9.997–9). 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

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when Satan is touched by Ithuriel, his form ‘returns / Of force to its own likeness’ (2.391, 4.812–13). When Raphael flies down to paradise, he takes the form of a phoenix, or at least ‘to all the Fowles he seems’ so, and when he finally lands, ‘to his proper shape returns’, as a six-winged seraph (5.271–2, 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 Satan’s ‘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 Belial’s prediction that ‘This horror will grow milde, this darkness light’ echoes the lightand-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, 269–70, 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 Milton’s description of chaotic atoms as ‘unnumber’d as the Sands / Of Barca or Cyrene’s torrid soil’ (2.903–4), a clear if incongruous mime of Catullus on the number of his kisses to Lesbia: ‘quam magnus numerus Lybissae harenae / lasarpeficeris 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 flux of confusion, like devilish causation.

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Many of these terms have been headed by the prefix ‘un-’: ‘unessential’, ‘uncreated’, ‘unnumber’d’, ‘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 first use of the word, a term that completely defies 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 definition, a phenomenon also visited upon what should be a linear event, the procession 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 (1.80–2, 361–75), much as the names of the biblical figures of the visions of the final two books are ‘by thir names . . . call[ed], though yet unnam’d’ (12.140). Milton, it may be argued, does offer one major concession for causehunters – the extended allegory of Sin and Death. But the bogus complicity 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 incisively Pelagian’ – the gestation of Sin is entirely to do with Satan’s 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 selfish origin.19 Samuel Johnson called the allegory of Sin and Death ‘broken’.20 Johnson’s problem was that he could not work out if the figures of Sin and Death were real or not. Genuinely allegorical figures, 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 Johnson’s point without sharing his judgement; as Sarah Morrison has well argued, Milton allows the ‘occasional and startling intersection of the naturalistic plane and the allegorical’ as a kind of insurance policy, ‘because to do otherwise would be to appear to endorse parascriptural 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 confirm their own artificiality, and some of it leaks into their surrounds, and potentially beyond. An examination of Sin and Death confirms their uselessness as causal markers. Sin is ‘Voluminous’, from Latin volumen, a coil or wreath, and

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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 call’d 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 (2.714–17). Despite the impression of quick birth given by her final word ‘sprung’, Sin’s account of her own generation is couched in delayed syntax, and instead insinuates a slow, painful protuberance (752–8). She – both despite and because of angelic androgyny – looks exactly like Satan (764), whereas Eve’s initial problem with Adam is that he is not as pretty as her (4.478–80). 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’ (2.806–7). The whole encounter is riven with knots and circularities, Augustine’s favourite metaphors for evil.22 ‘[D]im thine eyes, and dizzie swumm / In darkness’ (753–4) – Satan’s 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 Milton’s 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 first 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 efficacy 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

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could only have been derived from the source of all substance. It was in a confused and disordered state at first, 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 vigorously 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 difficult thought in the depths of a poem otherwise so magisterially ruled from above.24 Nonetheless, as John Leonard has countered, that thought can be retained without Rumrich’s 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 fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I uncircumscrib’d my self retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not. (7.168–72)

Though this may suggest that Chaos is morally neutral rather than hostile, elsewhere in the poem Chaos is explicitly an enemy: ‘Nature first begins / Her fardest verge, and Chaos to retire / As from her outmost works a broken foe’ (2.1037–9). 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, 2.894–5).25 Leonard summarises: The natural inference is that Heaven and Night are coeternal. One might rescue this scheme for orthodoxy by arguing, along Rumrich’s 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 Night’s darkness differs from God’s. God is ‘Dark with excessive bright’ (3.380); Night’s 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 Milton’s

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poem, such conceptual monsters are allowed brief incursions into the otherwise orderly world of Paradise Lost, in recognition of the impossibility of finally 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’ (2.935–8). This acts as a final, 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 (2.622–3). 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 fighting 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. Disconcertingly, Chaos doesn’t care about issues of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, casually recalling instead an unfamiliar cosmogony: from the perspective of Chaos, he saw hell created first, then heaven, then Earth (2.1002–5). 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 Milton’s Universe fleetingly resembles the dualistic cosmos of Samuel Pordage’s Mundorum explicatio, with its absconded and atavistic deities.

chapter 9

‘Paradise Lost’

II :

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 Adam’s side, she inadvertently recapitulates the construction of Pandaemonium, the devilish assembly, a terminologically similar edifice: ‘Soon had his crew / Op’nd into the Hill a spacious wound / And dig’d out ribs of Gold’ (1.688–90).1 In a move we shall see again, Milton thus connects a nominally evil creation with a nominally 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 difficult battle lost, alas, and after much struggle, he confirms what the devils had supposed all along, that man will be easily overcome. The devils will plan to seek out man’s 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 heark’n to his glozing lyes, / And easily transgress the sole Command, / . . . what Hellish hate / So easily destroy’d’ (3.93–4, 300–1). 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’ (3.95–6, 209, 280, 287, 290, 308, 5.228). Fallen Adam will miserably concur, and Michael will remind him that the limping history of his final vision is again all his own fault (10.733–77, 817–18, 11.423–8). As we saw in Chapter 4, many – though not all – of Milton’s radical brethren would strongly object to this genocidal model, as would Jeremy Taylor and a few of his friends. But everyone at the 158

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Synod of Dort of 1618–19 would have concurred, Arminian and Calvinist alike, and that is an indicator of Milton’s 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 Milton’s genuine unorthodoxies. God too employs a certain circularity of phrasing when he comes to discuss the origins of disobedience. Devilish reflexivity is now used by the deity to describe his gifts to man: ‘ingrate, he had of mee / All he could have’ (3.97–8). Milton was to use similar circular constructions for humans in the later poems, too – compare Paradise Regain’d on Eve: ‘But Eve was Eve’, and Samson Agonistes on Samson’s 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 ordain’d thir fall’ (3.122, 116– 17, 128). They are their own jailors: ‘they enthrall themselves’ (125), the words ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘-self ’, ‘-selves’ hammered out. Milton’s God sounds as if he has been dealing with Dryden’s 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. Milton’s Arminian insistence on free will is balanced against his rather guarded estimation of man’s ability, even unfallen man’s ability, to use this freedom wisely. Man’s place not only below the angels but at merely one point on a scale extending indefinitely up and downwards is emphasised by the presence of those strange ‘middle Spirits . . . / Betwixt th’Angelical and Human kinde’ (3.461–2). Michael tells Adam that the redeeming Son will possess ‘more strength to foil / Thy enemie’ (12.389–90), rather like comforting a floored boxer with the news that a more agile replacement has been sent for. Paradise Regain’d repeats this admission, where God smilingly pronounces his Son ‘far abler to resist’ temptation than Adam mark one was, who had been ‘By fallacy surpriz’d’.4 But the Adam of Paradise Lost was in no way simply tricked. The God of Paradise Regain’d oversimplifies the events of four aeons earlier – but, as we saw, even the God of Paradise Lost had called man ‘deceiv’d’, whereas the narrator in contradiction thought he was ‘not deceav’d’ (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 flips tense continually, and it is often difficult to be sure who or what he is talking about, angels or men, as he vaguely gestures towards ‘The first sort’, ‘the other’ (3.129, 131). God also

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selectively quotes from Lycidas, ‘once more I will renew / His lapsed powers . . . yet once more he shall stand’, the fluid, 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 severance: ‘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 Milton’s defensiveness: ‘whose fault? / Whose but his own?’ (3.96–7). 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, God’s 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 Heav’n, 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. (5.603–15)

This was once received as unproblematic: in his first 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 benefit of Fowler’s 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’. God’s prohibition is a bare decree: a gesture – as Milton said of the decree

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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, ‘messengers’).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 Milton’s ‘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 Satan’s 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, Milton’s 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 Milton’s first 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 officially 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

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the publication of Paradise Lost, Andrew Marvell feared that Milton would ‘ruine’ the ‘sacred Truths’; today one can still see why.17 Nevertheless, Milton’s decision to place the exaltation at that precise point follows a certain tactical aesthetic. By announcing the Son’s exaltation 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 first 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 final 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 ‘artificial’ paths.19 Milton’s 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 ris’n, And at our pleasant labour, to reform Yon flourie 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. (4.624–32)

The epic voice in contrast employs a metallurgist’s verve when describing Eden. Much mention of ‘Saphire’, ‘Orient Pearl’, ‘sands of Gold’, is made for a greedless environment (4.237–8, 240). Carey exaggerated the brittleness of Eden, but with point, when he described how Adam and Eve

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‘deport themselves gravely among its bric-a`-brac . . . The cash-values which dictate the gold ornamentation of Heaven denaturalise Eden . . . where flowers harden to a “rich inlay . . . more colour’d than with stone / Of costliest Emblem” (4.701–2). Even the apple-peel is gold. There is not a real tree or flower in the place.’ 20 There are real trees and flowers, 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 field Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours 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’ inspir’d 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 Rhea’s eye; Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard, Mount Amara, though this by som suppos’d 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. (4.268–86)

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 inadvertently drawn in? ‘’Tis his [Caesar’s] 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 affirmation by denial of the contrary, he pushes the momentary

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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 defining 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 artificialises it: paradise’s 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’ (135–9), 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 (137–49). Geographically, this means that one standing on the wall of Eden even then could not see inside. Satan bounds in easily, of course; the difficulty implied is ours. Milton was not writing in a vacuum, however, and the difficulty 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, first published in 1642. Denham too used the phrase ‘Access deni’d’: With such an easie, and unforc’d Ascent Windsor her gentle bosome doth present: Where no stupendious Cliffe, no threatening heights Access deny, no horrid steepe affrights.23

Milton’s version turns around Denham’s 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 deni’d. (4.314–7)

He appropriates Denham’s phrase for opposite application. The steep, horrid wood in Denham is balanced out in concordia discors by a clear stream; in Milton’s 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 difficulty here also implies ontological difficulty.

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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 prov’d certain unforeknown’ (3.119). This freedom from predestination is therefore achieved at a high price: man will fall anyway, God says, and that is certain, despite his traditional statement that they were ‘Sufficient 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 countertradition 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 first parents first 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’ (8.401–2). Despite Milton’s endorsement of prelapsarian sex, ‘taste’ is here a word whose normal force is gastronomic, and hence reminiscent of the forbidden 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 influentially of all, the Geneva Bible’s marginalium to Genesis 2:22 read: ‘Signifying, that mankinde was perfit, when the woman was created, which before was like an vnperfit 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 epic’s 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 pass’d / On to thir blissful Bower’ (4.319–21, 689–90). The past/passed homonym has other resonances: ‘pass’ to the Latinate ear can recall passio or suffering, as it does

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when Eve complains of bad dreams: ‘Such night till this I never pass’d, have dream’d / If dream’d, not as I oft am wont, of thee, / Works of day pass’t’ (5.31–3). 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 first 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. (4.288–93)

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 ‘heav’nly 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 pleas’d, all seem’d, 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 affirmed 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 . . . ?’ (517–19).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’ (4.425–6), 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’ (774–5). 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:

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into thir inmost bowre Handed they went; and eas’d 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 refus’d: 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. (4.738–47)

‘Ween’, as has recently been pointed out, is not a very confident word, closer to ‘suppose’ or ‘suspect’ than ‘know’.26 In an important influence 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 fight, or by surprize / To win the Mount of God’; ‘by force or fraud / Weening to prosper’ (6.86–8, 794–5). ‘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 didn’t not do something is equivalent to saying that they did, rhetorically it has a quite different effect, again one of lessening certainty. The meeting is passive: Adam didn’t not turn, and Eve didn’t 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 wife’s uterus without damage to her maidenhead, even as now the menstrual flow can issue from a maiden’s 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 10

‘Paradise Lost’

III :

creation and education

Adam and Eve, we have discussed, resemble to an extent the tall philosophers 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 Milton’s 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 first-hand. When we first hear them speak they are already five days old, and even by that point they possess slightly different linguistic personalities. Adam’s opening speech (4.411–39) 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 first moments of ‘unexperienc’t thought’ (457), and she continues by recounting her creation and her actions immediately subsequent. Eve’s 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 pleas’d I soon returnd, Pleas’d it returnd as soon with answering looks Of sympathie and love; there I had fixt Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warnd me . . . (4.460–7)

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Commentators from Patrick Hume onwards have noted Milton’s debt to Ovid here, and, beyond that, ‘Virgil and Ovid, as well as our Author, borrowed from Theocritus’.2 Ovid’s Narcissus, like Eve, falls in love with his own reflection 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 voic