“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669Milton’s epic turns into an Eviad, casting Eve rather than Adam in the role of
central protagonist.^145 The biblical story of course requires that she be the object of
the serpent’s temptation, but Milton’s poem goes much further. Eve initiates the
marital dispute, she engages in a lengthy and highly dramatic dialogue with Satan
embodied in the serpent, and she analyzes her motives and emotions in probing
soliloquies before eating the fruit and before offering it to Adam. After the Fall she
accepts God’s judgment humbly, while Adam, dismayed to find his grand gesture
of falling with Eve unappreciated by her, blames both Eve and the God who gave
her to him. Eve responds first to “prevenient grace,” and so first breaks out of the
seemingly endless cycle of accusations and recriminations, becoming the human
means to lead Adam back from the paralysis of despair to love, repentance, and
reconciliation, first with his wife and then with God. In her lament/petition to
Adam, Eve echoes the Son’s offer in the Council in Heaven to take on himself
God’s wrath for Adam’s sin – “Behold mee then, mee for him... / On mee let
thine anger fall” (3.236–7) – as she proposes to invite God to wreak all his anger on
her: “On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, / Mee mee onely just object of his
ire” (10.932–6). While she cannot play the Son’s redemptive role, she does become
the first human to reach toward the new standard of epic heroism (9.31–2).
Milton designed the last segment of his poem around the issue of postlapsarian
education, for Adam, Eve, and the reader. At this juncture Adam and Eve have to
learn how to read biblical history (which to them is prophecy), and specifically,
how to interpret the protoevangelium or messianic promise of redemption signified
by the metaphorical curse on the serpent: that the seed of the woman will bruise his
head. For Adam, its meaning is progressively clarified by a revelation of future times
from his own age to the Apocalypse, presented by the archangel Michael in a series
of visionary pageants (Book XI) and narratives (Book XII). Adam has to learn to
interpret what he sees and hears by a process, much more strenuous than with
Raphael, of faulty formulation, improper response, and correction. He also learns
by vicarious experience, identifying so closely with his progeny that he seems al-
most to live their history with them: he is enraged by the wickedness of Cain,
laments the terrors of pestilence and death in a lazar house, weeps for the destruc-
tion of the world by the flood, rejoices in the steadfast faith of Abraham, Moses, and
the other righteous, and waxes ecstatic over the eventual triumph of Christ with his
saints. Under Michael’s correction he learns to read history emblematically, as a
series of episodes displaying again and again the proliferation of evils his sin has
unleashed upon the world. He also learns to read it typologically, as a movement
“From shadowie Types to Truth” (12.303) in which the meaning of the messianic
promises becomes ever clearer, so that at last, despite sin and death and all our woe,
he can proclaim the goodness of God’s ways to man: “O goodness infinite, good-
ness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good”
(12.469–71). Michael then offers him further consolation in the far-off prospect of
the Last Judgment and the Millennium, placing less emphasis on heavenly bliss than