“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669have been created “sufficient” to stand alone against temptation and that tempta-
tion itself can be no dishonor. But she goes on to cast herself as a Romance heroine
eager to exhibit heroic self-sufficiency and to gain honor in victorious single com-
bat with the enemy: “And what is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid / Alone, without
exterior help sustaind?” (9.335–6). She here goes beyond Areopagitica’s warfaring
Christian who “sallies out and sees her adversary,” and echoes, faintly, the Satanic
claim to absolute autonomy. She is right to insist that both are sufficient to stand,
but quite wrong to infer that “exterior help,” divine or human, should therefore be
shunned, or that reasonable precautions in the presence of danger violate Edenic
happiness. She thinks the goods of autonomy and interdependence are in conflict,
but it is precisely the challenge of this first couple to hold them in balance.
Adam’s fervent reply speaks both to the logical and the psychological issues in-
volved: explaining how reason may be deceived and lead the will to sin, he ends
with an eloquent testimony to the mutual aid the couple continually give each
other, and a reminder that temptation will inevitably come unsought, affording Eve
an opportunity to win the praise she seeks. Had he stopped here, with this strong
argument offering Eve a clear choice, she would almost certainly have given way (if
a bit reluctantly), announcing herself convinced by his arguments and comforted by
his loving sentiments. But Adam, still off balance and still attributing overmuch
wisdom to Eve, talks on and gives away his case:
But if thou think, trial unsought may finde
Us both securer then thus warnd thou seemst,
Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;
Go in thy native innocence, relie
On what thou hast of vertue, summon all,
For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine. (9.370–5)Besides offering Eve a better rationale for going than any she has thought of, Adam
unwittingly intensifies the psychological pressure on her by his repeated impera-
tives – “Go... go... rely... do” – making it much more difficult for her to stay
without seeming to back down ignominiously. It was not Adam’s place in prelapsarian
Eden to command Eve to stay and thereby control her free choice in the moral
sphere; but neither was it his place to help her choose such a dangerous course of
action by giving over his proper leadership role. Neither has sinned in this debate
because there has been no deliberate choice of evil. Eve has not disobeyed and
Adam has tried to act for the best, so the theological imperatives of the biblical story
and of Milton’s Arminianism are preserved: Adam and Eve remain innocent until
they consciously decide to eat the fruit. But as their imperfectly controlled emo-
tions sabotage their dialogic exchange and their misunderstandings result in physi-
cal separation, we experience the mounting sense of inevitability proper to tragedy.
In the Fall sequence and its aftermath, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that