38 The New York ReviewImproving Paradise
Catherine Nicholson
Domestic Georgic:
Labors of Preservation
from Rabelais to Milton
by Katie Kadue.
University of Chicago Press,
227 pp., $95.00; $27.95 (paper)Coming To :
Consciousness and Natality
in Early Modern England
by Timothy M. Harrison.
University of Chicago Press,
337 pp., $95.00; $30.00 (paper)Poet of Revolution :
The Making of John Milton
by Nicholas McDowell.
Princeton University Press,
485 pp., $35.00Making Darkness Light:
A Life of John Milton
by Joe Moshenska.
Basic Books, 456 pp., $35.00Of the many liberties John Milton took
in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic
poem on Adam and Eve’s expulsion
from Eden, the most delightful and
underrated are his efforts to imagine
daily life in Paradise before the Fall.
Compared to the risks he takes else-
where in the poem—recasting the devil
as its charismatic antihero, scripting
conversations between God the Father
and his only begotten Son, staging war
in heaven, describing angelic sex, and
playing fast and loose with the logic
of allusion so as to make himself the
founding author of the entire Western
literary tradition—the domestic details
of prelapsarian existence can appear
merely charming, inventive flourishes
on the scenic backdrop to the grand
conflicts between good and evil. In the
long, relatively uneventful middle of
the poem, after Satan has hatched his
demonic plot but before he’s worked
out the crucial business with the snake,
Adam and Eve occupy themselves with
an array of activities: talking, eating
and drinking, strolling and stargazing,
sleeping, dreaming, bickering and flirt-
ing, playing with the animals, tending
the roses, socializing with angels, and
passing whole days in the unexpectedly
interesting business of innocence.
For innocence was interesting; this is
a central plank in Milton’s campaign to
“justify the ways of God to men,” and
a significant innovation on his biblical
source material. In the opening chap-
ters of the book of Genesis, the eating
of the forbidden fruit is more or less
the first thing we see Adam and Eve
do. (Adam, it’s true, also names the
animals, but that’s before Eve arrives
on the scene.) All the Bible says of the
pair’s life together before the Fall is,
as the 1611 King James Version puts
it, that “they were both naked... and
were not ashamed.” Life in the scrip-
tural Paradise is defined by negation—
no clothing, no shame—which makes
the immediate effects of the Fall seem
at least somewhat advantageous: “The
eyes of them both were opened, and they
knew that they were naked, and they
sewed figge leaues together, and made
themselues aprons.”
That homely detail, the stitching of
the fig- leaf aprons, marks the birth ofguilt and shame, but—in the Bible, at
least—it also marks the birth of re-
sourcefulness, wit, craft, creativity, sci-
entific invention, self- ornamentation,
and all the rest of human culture. Not
so in Paradise Lost. At the end of book
9, Milton’s new- fallen couple also sew
aprons out of fig leaves, but the poet
makes sure we know that they do so
badly, “with what skill they had.”The sting of the aside is the implied
contrast with what’s come before, in the
poem’s leisurely middle books. For as
we trail the as yet innocent Adam and
Eve about the garden in books 4 to 9,
we witness all manner of skill: the first
man and woman make dinner, small
talk, jokes, scientific inquiries, culinary
experiments, and philosophical argu-
ments; they pray; they even make love.
And they do it all, the poet insists, better
than it’s been done since. Better, too, in
some cases, than they themselves had
done it before. The most fascinating and
theologically knotty aspect of Milton’s
unfallen world is that it allows innocence
to coexist with improvement: Adam and
Eve are made perfect—“sufficient to
have stood, though free to fall,” in God’s
preemptively defensive construction—
but they are not thereby denied the
pleasures of learning and growth, with-
out which, Milton seems to believe,
Paradise would be no paradise at all.A wonderfully concrete example of
this self- development occurs in book
5, when Adam glimpses the angel Ra-
phael approaching and urges Eve to
prepare a feast: “But go with speed, /
And what thy stores contain, bring
forth and pour/Abundance, fit to honor
and receive / Our heavenly stranger.”
Eve readily assents, but reminds her
husband, with a touch of fond conde-
scension, that life in a world without
winter, want, or decay makes food stor-
age optional:Adam, earth’s hallowed mold,
Of God inspired, small store will
serve where store
All seasons ripe for use hangs on
the stalk,
Save what by frugal storing
firmness gains
To n ou rish, and superfluous
moist consumes.As Katie Kadue points out in Do-
mestic Georgic: Labors of Pre ser va tion
from Rabelais to Milton, a wonderful
book on early modern writers and the
kitchen arts, Eve’s independent forays
into drying and preserving the fruits
of Eden yield a counterintuitive un-
derstanding of perfection itself, not
as a fixed state from which one must
not swerve but as a dynamic process
of trial, innocent error, and gradual
improvement.In Eve’s realization that, as Kadue
writes, some things “become firmer,
and thus more properly themselves,
when they are preserved, so that they
are improved only insofar as they are
saved,” there may be the germ of the
paradoxical Christian doctrine of the
felix culpa, or happy fall, which urges
that salvation in Christ is more fortu-
nate and more blessed—happier in
both senses—than the continuation of
unfallen existence would have been.
It’s a claim Milton embraces at the end
of his poem, when the angel Michael
tells Adam that through prayer, peni-
tence, virtue, and God’s grace, he and
his offspring may come to possess “a
paradise within thee, happier far.” But
there is also in Eve’s domestic labors
a hint of how things might have been
otherwise—how human knowledge,
thinking, and experience, as well as
the human diet, might have gained
in richness and savor over unfallen
time.The idea that Eden was a place of
discovery from the start is also the mo-
tivating insight of Timothy M. Harri-
son’s Coming To: Consciousness and
Natality in Early Modern England.
Before Milton’s time, Harrison ar-
gues, “consciousness” was a moral fac-
ulty, interchangeable with what God
in book 3 of Paradise Lost calls “my
umpire conscience,” “place[d] within”
fallen humanity “as a guide.” But in
works like René Descartes’s Meditatio-
nes (1641) and Principia philosophiae
(1644), the Latin conscientia took on
new meaning, suggesting, as Harrison
writes, “whatever was present to mind.”
For Descartes, this sense of mental
presence—of oneself as a “thinking
thing”—becomes the ground of episte-
mological confidence; what one thinks
may be right or wrong, but the feel-
ing of thinking itself is impervious to
doubt: cogito, ergo sum.
It’s a deliberately reductive formula,
but as Harrison points out, it puts a
new premium on self- awareness: “If
any thought is to count as thought, it
must be accompanied by conscious-
ness.” And as Descartes’s interlocu-
tors quickly realized, that requirement
made a brief but crucial expanse of
human existence, from the infusion
of the soul in utero to birth, at once
foundational and wholly inaccessible
to philosophy. It’s for this reason, Har-
rison argues, that seventeenth- century
philosophy needed poetry: to confect
persuasive accounts of what it feels like
to become a human being. And that, as
much as any theological effort to justify
the ways of God to men, is what he sees
as the work of Paradise Lost.
Once again, the unfallen Adam and
Eve play the starring roles. Eve’s re-
counting to Adam of her earliest mem-
ories in book 4 and Adam’s recounting
of his to Raphael in book 8 form a nar-
rative diptych of what Eve suggestively
calls “unexperienced thought”—think-
ing in its purest and most primal form.
Predictably, the two stories diverge
on gendered lines: the newly created
Adam promptly begins reasoning his
way toward the necessary existence of
God:John Milton; etching by William Strang, 1896New York Public LibraryNicholson 38 40 .indd 38 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 31 PM