Book 4, lines 80-122

[Previous: lines 59-79]

John narrates. He is explaining to Pilate how God made the world.

“Primus natus homo hinc, terris quem maximus auctor,       [80]
et liquidis latè dominum praefecerat undis,
quò mox pro superis excussis astra teneret,
desertasque domos ipse, et genus omne suorum;
omnigenûmque uni subiecit secla animantum,
squamigerûm pecudes, et pennis picta volantum                   [85]
corpora, montivagumque simul genus omne ferarum.
Tantum floriferis dominum cùm imponeret arvis,
arboris unius fœtu illum parcere iussit.
At vetito captus mali infelicis amore,
Conjugis hortatu, quam fraude illexerat anguis,                    [90]
immemor heu! superi violavit fœdera regis.
Vix avido arreptum pomum fœdaverat ore,
Cùm pater imbripotens iam fulva è nube tonare
desuper auditus, saevasque indicere pœnas
iratus; quas ille olim, quas omnis ab illo                                [95]
progenies lueret lucis ventura sub auras.
Continuò ingenti cœlo sunt addita claustra,
impia tum primùm proles exorta repentè;
et subitò tellus scelere est imbuta nefando:
emersit fraus, emersit malesuada libido.                                [100]
Hinc durus generi humano labor additus, hinc fons
curarum, et tristis patefacta est ianua leti,
morbique, et dolor, atque fames, et turpis egestas;
cùm genus humanum curis sine degere posset,
plurimaque in terris vivendo vincere secla.                            [105]
ex illo sine more homines, sine lege per agros
degebant: tantùm placabant sanguine fuso
cœlicolûm regem, bonus ut gregibusque sibique
afforet, atque satis vim cœli averteret arvis,
indociles, rerum ignari, ac rationis inanes.                             [110]
Isque fere status annorum bis millibus orbi
constiterat: iam iamque magis Pater optimus iras
oblitus veteres paulum mitescere cœpit.
Nondum homini tamen aethereum patesecit Olympum;
sed, genus humanum fingens acuensque monendo,                [115]
et leges dedit, et ritus moremque sacrorum;
instituitque genus nostrum, discriminis ergò
lege jubens testa circum praecidere acuta
exiguam, unde viri sumus, omni in corpore partem.
Tum vatum implevit venientis pectora veri,                           [120]
qui populis laetum canerent demum affore tempus,
ianua aperta piis cœli cùm sponte pateret.”

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“Then the first man was made, to rule the earth                   [80]
and have dominion over the liquid oceans,
to replace those cast-out angels—one day!—
inhabiting their homes, he and all his race.
To him were made subject all the animals
all scaly fish and the bright-feathered birds,                         [85]
and all wild beasts that roam the mountain wastes.
Giving him dominion over the flowery fields,
God commanded one fruit, only, be spared.
But overcome with love for the forbidden apple
he yielded to his wife, deceived by the snake,                      [90]
heedless, alas! he broke his highest vows.

Scarcely had his avid mouth defiled the fruit
than the stormlord Father thundered from a cloud
above, a cruel din: imposing penalties
angrily punishing him and all of his                                      [95]
descendants ever to see the light above.
From that moment the gates of heaven were closed.
For the first time wicked men arose and filled
the whole world with their nefarious crimes:
deceit and the desire that counsels evil.                               [100]
So hard labour was given to man, source
of cares, and the sorrowful doors of death
were opened, and pain, and hunger, and poverty—
though all of humanity could have lived
without trouble, happy for endless centuries.                      [105]
As it was, men lived lawless in the fields,
thinking only to placate with spilled blood
heaven’s king, hoping he’d look kindly on them
and their flocks, averting divine wrath, an
indocile, ignorant, empty-witted folk.                                 [110]
This was the world for full two thousand years
until the Supreme Father’s anger began
to ease, and little by little he relented.
Though he had not yet opened Olympus to men
he did sharpen their souls with his teaching,                       [115]
giving us laws and rites for sacred usage;
and arranging that our race mark its difference
by cutting-off with a sharp blade a small
part of our bodies, uniting us as a people.
Then he filled the hearts of the prophets with truth:           [120]
they sang of a joyful time approaching, when
the doors of heaven would be opened to the devout.”

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The Fall of Man is dealt with by Vida with a similar briskness to the fall of Satan in the preceding lines. With precipitous haste man is created, given dominion over the earth, tempted by the serpent and eats the apple (line 89 mālum, line 92 pomum). Vida then gives us a snapshot of the next several thousand years.

Milton owes something to this brief passage, of course; although there are significant differences too, and not just of length. Although obviously: of length. Vida, a dozen lines. Milton, a dozen lengthy books.

For one thing, Milton adds-in Eve to his story: where Vida identifies Adam as the transgressor, Milton has this (rather dodgy, gender-politics-wise) wrinkle that only Eve succumbed to temptation, and Adam nobly agreed to join her in sin because he loved her:

She gave him of that fair enticing Fruit
With liberal hand: he scrupl'd not to eat
Against his better knowledge, not deceav'd,
But fondly overcome with Femal charm.
Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan,
Skie lowr'd, and muttering Thunder, som sad drops
Wept at compleating of the mortal Sin
Original; while Adam took no thought,
Eating his fill. [Paradise Lost 9:996-1005]

The thunder-cloud dropping rain on the transgressors (in rage in Vida, in sorrow in Milton) is one commonality between the two epics, I think. Milton's thunderstorm (Vida's pater imbripotens) is the first such meteorological manifestation in Eden; prior this moment there had only been gentle rains.

I have to say: I've been thinking a lot about Milton as I work through this translation of the Christiad, for the obvious reason that it has become clear to me that the latter influenced the former to a much greater degree than criticism, generally, has admitted; and for the less obvious reason that re-reading Paradise Lost has really brought home to me how very good Milton's epic is, actually. But it's also brought out a particular, and glaring (it seems to me), problem with Milton's larger conception; one that criticism, so far as I'm aware, simply doesn't discuss.

Bear with me, and I'll tell you what I mean.

My starting point was looking around, in a more or less desultory manner, for some big monograph that lays out Milton's indebtedness to Vida. There isn’t one. It’s not that it’s been entirely ignored (in 1645's ‘The Passion’ Milton specifically praises Vida, says his poetry “trumps” everyone else’s, so his indebtedness isn’t something he tried to hide). Some scholars have nibbled at the edge of this topic, especially where Milton’s Latin poetry is concerned, but I found myself thinking: what’s needed is a big, proper study that explores all the ways Paradise Lost is an Englishing of the Christiad. I could write one, I suppose. The thing is I am no Miltonist, so writing such a thing would entail ratcheting myself up into an approximation of one, which means reading librariesful of books and articles about Milton, and that’s a wearying prospect to contemplate, really.

Instead of writing such a book, I went back to William Empson, a critic I rate highly. Milton’s God (1961) is, I think, a really interesting book. I mean, the whole “yah boo Christians, Milton’s God is Joe Stalin” stuff is certainly there, but is actually the least interesting bit of the whole. One thing that Empson does is pay Milton the compliment of taking his text on the terms it offers: you’re justifying the ways of God to man, are you? Well let’s look at that, you and I; we’re both civilised and reasonable men after all. There’s something refreshing about the foresquareness of that, I feel . It works because Empson’s critical intelligence was so sinuous and ingenious, and so attentive to the particularities of the text. More interesting than his “God’s a torturer!” argument is his simple proposition: this book makes God a character in its story, and that means we must read him as a character, as we would any other literary character. In effect Milton is saying ‘the way to justify God’s ways to man is to write him as a character’. More specifically: Milton tries two ways of justifying God to his readers, a negative and a positive way. The negative way is to show us what life is like without God, if we abandon God—Satan—and the positive way is to have God and Christ directly tell us what they’re about.

So I have been re-reading through the poem again. Paradise Lost is not a text I teach, but I know it pretty well I’d say, so re-reading it is reacquainting myself with it, no alarms, no surprises, very good, enjoying it. Then, sitting in my garden in the sunshine as I started Book 3. I got to this bit:

For man will heark'n to his glozing lyes,
And easily transgress the sole Command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: So will fall,
Hee and his faithless Progenie: whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all th' Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who faild;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love?

I had a sudden revelation. Not the ‘obviously I gave my creations free will; there’s no margin for me in being praised by automata’ bit—that point makes sense, and is clear enough. What hadn’t occurred to me before is this: Milton’s God has been through all this before. He made creatures with free will, and some of them chose to remain true to him and some to rebel (as He knew they would). Let’s say he made a million angels with free will and 500,000 joined Satan in rebellion—or say he made a million angels and only 100,000 rebelled, or 900,000 rebelled ... your gut instinct on what those numbers are liable to be will say something about your assumptions about our propensity for going off the rails, I think. Milton thinks that a third of created angels sided with Satan [PL 5:710] but he doesn't specify how many angels there were to begin with. We can be sure that God made a lot, and some rebelled, and some didn’t. Which is exactly what you’d expect—even if you don’t have perfect foreknowledge, as God does.

Then God has another go. He makes a new kind of creature and endows it with free will. But he only makes one. I’ll be honest, reading that passage I just quoted, and noting the specific parallel he makes—as I created Adam, such I created all the Ethereal Powers, free will is just how the creation of Etherial Powers goes, buster—made me slap my hand to my forehead, Grommit-style. Because when you set those two things alongside one another as comparable decisions it leads you inevitably to this thought: what if God had created half a million Adams and half a million Eves? Some would have fallen, but others would not. What would such a world look like? The fallen ones would be banished from Eden of course, but the virtuous humans could remain paradised—and Christ would not have had to be crucified. After all, Christ doesn’t offer to sacrifice himself so as to redeem the fallen angels, does he? (Asking that question, which has also never occurred to me before, opens a whole other can of worms I think).

Now: this may strike you as a pettifogging point. And, of course, Milton couldn’t write a poem in which God creates a million Adams, because he’s constrained by the book of Genesis, which he considered true. This, he would say to me, if I went back in time and asked him, is just how things were: God created just the one Adam, such that his fall doomed all Adam’s descendants. God moves in mysterious ways, and so on. But the Empsonian point is that, by introducing God into his poem and having him justify himself in this way, Milton gives us space to ask: but why?

We might say: humans are different to angels in that they marry and are given in marriage; so in a manner of speaking God is creating millions (today indeed billions) of Adams and Eves. It’s just that, instead of doing it all at once as he did (one presumes) with the angels, he’s doing it over time. Fair enough. But then why permit Satan to enter Eden before those millions had been begotten? Hold off Satan until Adam and Eve have populated the Edenic earth and then let him in; or else

                                           create
A million Adams and as many Eves
With one swift stride of His vivifick power

… either scenario would have satisfied the specific justification of lines 103-4, quoted above (‘Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere/Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love?’) The only imputation I can draw from this is that God knows a million Adams tempted will leave a residuum of half a million (or 900,000, or 100,000, or whatever—but some) Adams true to him—and he doesn’t want that. We could say, Milton’s God doesn’t need humans like he needs angels, and so is happy to lose them all in a way he wasn’t happy where his angels were concerned. Or perhaps that he needs humans as much as he needs angels, but needs them in a radically different way, in which case the question becomes: what do fallen humans ‘give’ him (as it were) that fallen angels don’t?

Am I just being stupid, here? Honestly, this thought has taken hold of me and won’t let go, and now it’s bending Milton's whole poem around its lines of force in my head. (By stupid I mean: is this just a loony idea in and of itself? But I also mean: is this notion—that God made a million angels but only one Adam—some trivial Theology 101 point that’s been long ago disposed of by proper thinkers, but I’m too ignorant of the literature to know? I don't know).

It seems to me that one of the things Genesis is doing is answering the question: where does it come from, all the wrong we see around us? And the Jewish answer to that is: the wrongness is not a new thing, it goes all the way back. It came into the world right at the beginning of things. I get that—I mean, I get it as a kakology, as a way of talking about the nature of things: wickedness is something you inherited from your father and he from his, and so on all the way back, turtles, as it were, all the way up. But I think Milton is saying something else, something about the nature of individuality. Because Paradise Lost isn’t saying ‘evil is there from the beginning’—in this poem it’s not there from the beginning: Adam and Eve are free and unfallen for two thirds of this lengthy poem, and Milton not only takes care to delineate what their unfallen life is like, he also sets-out the long backstory from before Adam and Eve. So something else is going on, I think.

Creating a million angels with free will is, I suppose I'm saying, a numbers game: a spread bet, a matter of calculable probabilities rather than chance. But creating one Adam, with free will, and giving Satan direct access to him is more like a game of Russian Roulette. It’s all or nothing, everyone is saved or everyone is damned, in one exhilarating-terrifying moment.

So this is where I am at the moment. The point of writing a “Milton and Vida” books would not be the listing of all the places where Milton took Vida’s Latin and Englished it, just for the sake of the list (a very dull prospect). The point would be to argue something like this: Empson sees Paradise Lost as Milton struggling, to unintended, or only half-intended, creatively brilliant ends, with his desire to justify an unjustifiable God. I don’t think that’s right. What I mean is: I don’t think Milton saw God as unjustifiable, so I don’t think the poem’s struggle—which is manifestly part of the texture of Pradise Lost—is that. There’s more mileage in those historicist readings that say: what Milton is struggling with is not God but the working of authority as such. He has lived through, and indeed been an important part of, the movement to depose ‘bad’ royal authority and replace it with ‘good’ Parliamentary authority. But how different are those two things, in retrospect? How to tell them apart? Describe things from the monarch’s and the rebel’s p.o.v., but do so in such a way that the rebel assumes ‘bad’ monarchicism and the true authority becomes pride’s purge. This though puts the two terms in a complicated relationship, only too amenable to misreading (God = King, Devil = Cromwell and so on).

And in fact what I’d suggest is that Milton’s ‘authority’ problematic is less to do with English politics of the 1640s and more with the larger dynamic of Catholicism and Protestantism. Say Milton loves Vida, but Vida is a Catholic bishop and his poem is intensely Catholic pretty much in every line; so the question becomes, how to transmit what is inspiring about the Christiad into English without also importing Catholicism? Easy enough to make sure that your characters utter only reformed doctrine, but much harder to ensure that your readers don’t fall in love with the idea of high church richness, confuse the continuities of this story of origins and consequences with apostolic succession as such, transmit the quality of Vida-ness along with all the specific quotations—all that. But perhaps this shift is actually what Milton's poem is in some sense ‘about’? Protestantism is still a matter of church hierarchies and congregations of people of course, just like Catholicism, but Protestantism is more importantly about an individual relationship with God, unmediated by a priest, about a solitariness, an all-or-nothing responsibility for your own soul without the paraphernalia of pardons and confession and exterior forgiveness. It’s much more a Russian-roulette than a spread bet sort of situation. This is ridiculously over-general I know, but I’m sketching a context: arguing that Milton is less interested in the quasi-Catholic older order of god-worship, all those thrones and dominions and principalities and powers, because he’s much more interested in this new order: humanity, Protestantism. Adam is alone to embody something important about what it means to be a Protestant.

Ah well. Maybe this is over-fanciful. I'll have to think about it some more. You don't need me to tell you what the image is at the head of the post, now, do you. It's the fall as depicted in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.

[Next: lines 123-145]