“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669the angels do not yet know why the Son is thus elevated and what his elevation
may mean for themselves and their society. That question is at the heart of the tense
debate between Satan and Abdiel before Satan’s assembled cohort, who have not
yet formally committed themselves to rebellion. Milton stages this scene, without
precedent in any other treatment of the War in Heaven, so that the issues are
spelled out and the angels’ choice can be made knowledgeably and freely. Behind
Satan’s republican language is his envy-driven assumption that glory in heaven is a
zero-sum game, that the Son’s elevation must bring with it the angels’ demotion,
and most notably his own. Abdiel counters by appealing to the angels’ historical
experience of God’s goodness to them:
Yet by experience taught we know how good,
And of our good, and of our dignitie
How provident he is, how farr from thought
To make us less, bent rather to exalt
Our happie state under one Head more neer
United...
nor by his Reign obscur’d,
But more illustrious made, since he the Head
One of our number thus reduc’t becomes. (5.826–43)Responding to Abdiel’s description of the Son’s unique status as God’s agent in
creating the angels and all else, Satan makes his own appeal to experience: “who
saw / When this creation was? remember’st thou / Thy making.” He concludes
that since they don’t remember they must be “self-begot, self-rais’d / By our own
quick’ning power” (5.856–61). Abdiel then gives over the argument, recognizing
that empiricism in an area to which experience cannot possibly speak – recollection
of one’s own moment of origin – has led Satan to illogic and monomania.
In prelapsarian Eden the divine decree requiring interpretation is God’s prohibi-
tion on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Again Milton stages a scene
setting up the conditions for free choice: Eve precisely recapitulates the terms and
meaning of the prohibition when Satan first leads her to the tree, demonstrating
that she need not be deceived, that she is “sufficient to have stood.” She knows the
decree is a direct command of God – “Sole Daughter of his voice” – and as such,
distinct from the Law of Reason that governs all other prelapsarian behavior: “the
rest, we live, / Law to ourselves, our Reason is our Law” (9.651–4). Milton’s
version of the Genesis story is unique in having Satan ground his temptation on a
false narrative in which the serpent he inhabits supposedly explains that he gained
reason and speech by eating apples from the forbidden tree, and concludes that, by
analogy, Eve might expect from the same act a proportional rise in the scale of
being. He invites her to interpret the prohibition on the tree as injury, a withhold-
ing from humans of the knowledge signified by the tree’s name. If God is just and
means Eve well he will not punish her desire for advancement, as he has not pun-