“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669the delightful Edenic garden. God created the garden and its inhabitants, he does
not discover it and conquer them. The angelic military guard in Eden is not to
control the inhabitants but to ward off external force. God forbids Adam and Eve
one tree but allows them free use of all else. He does not need or want any of
Eden’s products, nor does he require the inhabitants to labor for him; they need to
do so to control the garden’s prolific growth and to take responsibility for their
world. God does not intend to settle any of the heavenly host in Eden, but wants
the inhabitants to increase, multiply, and spread through all the earth, cultivating it
for their own uses. And at length he intends to bring Adam and Eve and their
descendants to a still better place, Heaven.^126
By contrast, Satan is represented as an explorer bent on conquest and coloniza-
tion. He sets out courageously, like the sailors in the Lusiads, to sail through an
uncharted sea (Chaos), enduring as yet unknown dangers and difficulties. He dis-
covers the site of a future colony, the Paradise of Fools, to be peopled chiefly by
Catholics. He discovers the paradise of Eden and intends, after conquering Adam
and Eve and Eden, to settle the fallen angels there. He practices fraud on Eve and
causes her to lose her rightful domain. Upon first seeing Adam and Eve, he makes
clear in soliloquy that he means to use Eden and its inhabitants for his own pur-
poses, that his excursion is about empire-building as well as revenge. He also plans
to transport these “natives” and their offspring back to his own country, Hell:
League with you I seek,
And mutual amitie so strait, so close,
That I with you must dwell, or you with me
Henceforth;...
Hell shall unfold
To entertain you two, her widest Gates,
And send forth all her Kings. (4.375–88)He justifies his enterprise by “public reason just, / Honour and Empire with re-
venge enlarg’d” – characterized by the narrator as “necessitie, /The Tyrants plea”
(4.389–94). After the Fall, Satan’s followers eagerly await the return of “their great
adventurer from the search / Of Forrein Worlds” (10.440–1). Such associations do
not mean that Milton thought exploration and colonization in the Americas neces-
sarily Satanic, though he does make Satan the ancestor of Spaniards who will lay
waste the New World.^127 And, as with Satan’s degradation of various versions of
heroism, his explorations illustrate how susceptible the imperial enterprise is to evil
purposes.
Milton’s treatment of this theme is also complicated by language and assumptions
that bode ill for the future. As Balachandra Rajan points out, some similes and
descriptive passages in the poem associate Satan with India, imaging it as a place of
barbaric luxuries and despotism ripe for colonization.^128 As for the English conquest
and colonization of Ireland, nothing in Paradise Lost suggests that Milton has changed