Was Man Sufficient to Stand?

          
The Argument

Milton’s primary purpose in writing Paradise Lost was to justify the ways of God to man. Specifically, he intended to convince readers that man was sufficient to withstand Satan’s temptation but fell of his own free will. My question is whether he accomplished his goal.

* * *

I am disturbed by three dilemmas regarding God’s pronouncement that he made man sufficient to have stood against his tempter. First, God claimed to have made man with “true liberty . . . which always with right reason dwells” (Milton XII.83) on the pledge of obedience—-obedience to an arbitrary prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. To withhold an explanation for this prohibition seems like a setup to me. Second, he put Adam and Eve in an idyllic garden without challenges—-except the prohibition of eating from one tree. And, that is an aspect of Eden that is repugnant to me—-making a gift of happiness and joy. For, to my fallen mind, happiness and joy are things that are only possible when earned through dint of hard work. The absence of a worthy challenge would have any human being spoiling for a fall (I grant that having been a fallen creature from the start, I may not truly understand the mindset of an unfallen human). Third, if God had made man sufficient to stand, the very act of falling would suggest the premise is faulty—-that man was not sufficient to stand. How is this explained?

Sufficient to Stand ?— Umpire Conscience

The Argument

Regarding my first concern from above, I have several issues about justifying God. First, while I agree that conscience is present, I feel strongly that Adam and Eve needed reasons given for not eating from the prohibited tree—since Milton claims that conscience is related to true reason according to spiritual doctrine. Next, since Adam and Eve knew nothing about evil, their very innocence made them particularly susceptible to temptation. Finally, the only models for standing firm against temptation in Paradise Lost are the good angels, particularly the parable-like story of Abdiel, but the angels could be presumed to have greater spiritual intuition than humans, as Raphael pointed out to Adam. These three reasons for finding Adam and Eve insufficient to stand—rooted in an insufficient grasp of right reason—will be more closely examined below.
First, to help myself understand Milton’s belief that man’s reason and conscience was sufficient to have saved man, I referred to Christian Doctrine. Though authorship of this document is not without question, it is often cited as a Milton work—one written about the time of his writing of Paradise Lost, which would lend weight to the probability that his theological holdings, which evolved over his lifetime, were similar to those found in epic. I find evidence in “Chapter II, Of God,” to be helpful in settling the sufficiency in Milton’s mind based on God-given conscience.. In this chapter, Milton holds that God has:
left so many signs of himself in the human mind, . . . that no sane
person can fail to realise that He exists. . . . . [for example] the phenomena
of Conscience, or right reason
(On Christianity)

In Paradise Lost, God the Father, when foretelling the fall of man to his Son in Book III, promises to provide man with “a guide”:

Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will,
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me . . . . .
. . I will place within them as a guide
My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well used they shall attain,
And the end persisting, safe arrive
(III, 173-4 and 194-7)

This rings true for me. Conscience does seem to be present no matter how vigorously one seeks to lock it behind a door—and is there whenever one is ready to open the door. It seems to be related to intuition—that function that Raphael claimed for reasoning angels as superior to the discursive reasoning that humans usually use. It was also convincingly described by C.S. Lewis as that idea we all have that we “ought to behave in a certain way” (Lewis 8). And, Milton, again in Christian Doctrine, pointed to evidence of conscience saying that without it “no one would try to be virtuous . . .[except that] he felt ashamed” (Christian Doctrine). It is this sense of right and wrong that we all sense within. So, I believe in a conscience. But, could Adam and Eve really have been expected to use conscience—based on right reason— without knowing the reasons behind the prohibition? Was this conscience sufficient for Adam and Eve to withstand the temptation of Satan? If the correlation between reason and conscience is so important, I think that—almost by definition—a lack of explaining the reason for prohibition means there was not sufficiency to have stood against temptation.
Another thought: In light of the absence of evil in the garden, until Satan arrived with it, I find difficulty in imagining how Adam and Eve could have developed the ability to use conscience. In my own life, conscience and fortitude and virtues of all manner require practice. I realize that as a fallen being, I may not relate perfectly to Adam and Eve’s special fitness to use all of God’s tools—including right reason—but since Milton charged himself with justifying God to a fallen audience, it is to people like me that he had to make his case. But, I am not able to understand how conscience could have been sufficient on first use. And Milton himself has particularly emphasized the importance of patience (Sonnet 19 exposition above) which would imply growth over time. This adds weight to a need for experience.
The one example of successful triumph over temptation provided by Milton was Abdiel’s repudiation of Satan ahead of the war in heaven. And, while I sense a stout alignment of Abdiel’s right reason and spirituality, he had the advantage of additional refinement—by Raphael’s reasoning. So, it is not a convincing justification of God’s support of Adam and Eve.
For these reasons, I just cannot see that Milton justified God’s ways to man—for me— based on his provision of conscience. I do think Milton himself was at peace with the justification, though I would love to ask him sometime, in some future chapter of life, just how he reconciled Adam and Eve’s lack of a chance to develop patience ahead of facing down temptation in the form of Satan, the great deceiver.

Sufficient to Stand ? — The Good Life

Reaching deeply from my own experience, I have a second thought regarding sufficiency of Adam and Eve to have stood firm in the face of temptation. It regards their sense of Joy. This may seem an odd bulwark against evil, but I think it is one of the most potent. If the great underlying pattern of sin in Paradise Lost is rooted in immodest pride—Satan’s for envy of the Son’s glorification, Eve’s for chafing that “inferior who is free?” (IX-825)—joy in one’s God-given gifts is the remedy. I have observed a few rare beings over my life who enjoy what they are doing with such childlike pleasure that social ranking is unimportant to them; they seem immune to the temptation of immodest pride. The people who care about ranking and hierarchies seem to have an emptiness to fill, emptiness that they seek to fill outside themselves—like the vaunting Satan of Book I. And, they often fill the emptiness by pursuing those temptations of life that Michael worked so hard to warn Adam about—like those men who came after Adam, the ones who sought “renown on earth” (Milton XI.698). So, maybe the real question should be whether Adam and Eve were happy enough in their God-given gifts? And, the answer is clearly no! Eve did feel inferior. I have trouble understanding how either Adam and Eve could have developed the peace and joy that comes only after testing themselves and finding themselves spiritually joyful. It is a challenge that they didn’t have an opportunity to engage—since there was no evil to fight and no fit challenge beyond pruning bushes to give them a reason for modest pride. And, on some level, Milton must have sensed this also—as he did in Sonnet 19 when he found peace in Patience, that might still the “murmur” of disquiet. Patience implies time to learn from experience. The sense I have of Eden is that God did not require development of patience. He gave Adam and Eve the gift of peace—much as if parents gave a child the gift of an unearned college diploma—without challenging the child to spend long hours in the library seeking knowledge, or late nights fighting to understand something abstruse, or to develop discipline to negotiate tight deadlines. Such a gift could not possibly match the gift of earning the diploma by the sweat of one’s brow. For this reason, I do not feel that Milton justified God’s ways to me

Sufficient to Stand ? — Logic

My third concern regarding sufficiency to stand is rooted in logic. The very evidence of falling suggests that Adam and Eve were not created sufficient—by definition! I think Adam, too, may have had the same question when he receives warning from Raphael:

What meant that caution joined, ‘If ye be found
Obedient’? Can we want obedience then
To him, or possibly his love desert
Who formed us from the dust, and place us here . .
(V, 513-16)

Adam seems to have a sense of entitlement or cluelessness, which has certainly been fed by an indulgent gift of Eden. So, I am not surprised that he cannot fathom falling. Again, Christian Doctrine provides some insight into Milton’s thinking on this matter. It discusses exactly this second dilemma of an imperfect (insufficient) man created by a perfect God. He poses the same question I had: “How can something corruptible result from something incorruptible?” (Christian Doctrine VII). He answers that the the matter or form does not sin, it is the person possessing the form that sins (Christian Doctrine):

It is not the matter nor the form which sins. When matter
or form has gone out from God and become the property of another,
what is there to prevent its being infected and pollute, since it is
now in a mutable state, by the calculations of the devil or of man . .
(“Christian Doctrine” VII)

My response to this is that it makes sense, especially in light of the importance of man having freedom of will—even to pollute himself. And Raphael clarifies this for Adam, answering both our questions:

. . . Son of heaven and earth,
Attend: that thou art happy, owe to Gad;
That thou continu’st such, owe to thyself,
That is, to thy obedience; therein stand.
. . .
God made thee perfect, not immutable;
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power, ordained thy will
By nature free . . .
(V, 519-27)

During the war in heaven, the narrator makes this same process clear when describing Satan and his legions as made of pure material, that became fouled by sin:

. . . though Spirits of purest light, 
 Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown.
(Milton VI.660-1)

God the Father also explains this before sending Michael to escort Adam and Eve out of paradise:

. . . dissolution wrought by sin, that first
Distempered all things, and of incorrupt
Corrupted. (Milton XI.55-7)

And, when Michael shows Adam the various forms of death, Adam is shocked, then wonders aloud why man is not “from such deformities free, and for his Maker’s image sake exempt?” (Milton XI.513-4). Michael reminds Adam that the fault lies with man:

“Their Maker’s image,” answered Michael, “then
Forsook them, when themselves they vilified
To serve ungoverned appetite, and took
His image whom they served, a brutish vice,
Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve.
Therefore so abject is their punishment,
Disfiguring not God’s likeness, but their own,
Or if his likeness by themselves defaced
While they pervert pure nature’s healthful rules
To loathsome sickness, worthily, since they
God’s image did not reverence in themselves.”
(XI, 515-26)

Clearly, a healthy God would not permit Himself to be fouled. He made a gift to man, but after a gift is given, it is the property of that other—especially when that other has free will. Along this same line, Scott Elledge is quoted in my Norton edition of Paradise Lost: “It would have been illogical to make man free to choose and at the same time not free to make wrong choices” (Milton 468). Still, I do understand Adam sense of entitlement, as I said above, which might not divine a disconnect between the gift given and his duty to it.
I believe that Milton did comfortably justify man’s sufficiency to stand—for his purposes. For my own purposes, he did not. Of my three original concerns regarding Milton’s justification of God to man, only the strictly logical concern that by falling God failed to meet his standard of sufficiency, is one that I now reject. The other two—failure to provide rational explanations for the prohibition of eating from the

one tree and lack of a learning curve for development of conscience and recognition of temptation—are still damning weaknesses in Adam and Eve’s fitness to stand, for me. God-given reason is a sham without explanation for the prohibition to reason with. And, any tools leading to maturity, growth, and wisdom are used clumsily at first. So, Adam and Eve’s proficiency with tools of freedom and rational thought—even as unfallen beings—would probably have been clumsy on first use. The wiles of Satan would be more than a match for beginners using the untested tools of faith and reason. Milton seems to recognize this, as well, so that there is an inherent contradiction afoot in his garden, for Satan fools Uriel into disclosing the location of earth when:

. . . the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through heaven and earth:
And oft though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom’s gate, and to simplicity
Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill
Where no evil seems: which now for once beguiled
Uriel, though regent of the sun, and held
The sharpest-sighted Spirit of all in heaven
(Milton III.681-91)

If even the sharpest-eyed angel is not quick to recognize evil, how could Adam and Eve have been expected to recognize it upon their first introduction. This, of course, is my opinion as a fallen creature. But, though Milton was probably happy with his defense of God, I am not. But, I still loved his epic and can accept and absorb the cracks in Eden’s foundation.