“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669ished the serpent; if he would keep her from such elevation he is not just, “Not just,
not God, not feard then, nor obeyd” (9.701). Eve is not required to match Satan in
slippery argument: she need only hold on to her initial clear understanding that this
command is outside the purview of nature and reason and that it was given to
humans, not serpents. But Milton’s antinomianism requires that Eve’s obedience
not be merely legalistic: while she cannot know that Satan has fabricated the ser-
pent’s experience, she could (as Abdiel did) construe the implications of the divine
law in the light of her own previous experience of God’s ways, notably the joy and
sweetness of her life in Eden and with Adam.
Milton has Adam and Eve face another interpretative problem in their attempts
to read the Book of Nature, foregrounding the challenge the new astronomy was
offering to the supposed divine revelation of the Ptolemaic system in the Book of
Genesis (4.657–88, 8.13–38). Adam’s faulty reasoning about the workings of the
cosmos throws up intellectual difficulties which, he declares to Raphael, “onely thy
solution can resolve” (8.14). Relying on sense impressions, Adam supposes that the
universe is designed on Ptolemaic principles and wonders why God and Nature
arranged it so wastefully, with “such disproportions” and superfluous motions.
Raphael, however, refuses to resolve this matter on his angelic authority, but in-
stead invents a genre for scientific discourse: he offers a prototype of Galileo’s Dia-
logue of the Two Chief World Systems – Ptolemaic & Copernican,^137 setting forth what is
ostensibly an even-handed argument on both sides. Raphael thereby removes sci-
entific inquiry from the province of divine revelation and places it squarely in the
realm of human speculation. The cosmos of Milton’s poem also leaves the cosmol-
ogy ambiguous, with descriptions that defy precise categorization.
The angel’s “benevolent and facil” opening words to Adam – “To ask or search
I blame thee not, for Heav’n / Is as the Book of God before thee set, / Wherein to
read his wondrous Works” (8.65–8) – explicitly sanction scientific speculation about
the cosmos. But he sets aside certain other questions as beyond the ken of man or
angel – presumably, God’s ways with other worlds and other creatures in the uni-
verse (8.167–70). As Raphael shifts from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican argument, he
suggests that the cosmic system one credits depends on one’s vantage point. To
Adam on earth the universe seems Ptolemaic and irrational; to angels who move
among the planets it evidently seems Copernican, for Raphael offers a series of
provocative suggestions that introduce Adam to advanced scientific speculations
beyond his wildest imaginings: that the sun might be the stationary center to the
world, that the seemingly steadfast earth might move “Insensibly three different
Motions”; that the spots on the moon might be atmospheric clouds producing food
for possible moondwellers; that the universe may hold unnumbered galaxies of
unimagined immensity (8.122–58). Raphael’s method is calculated to help Adam
and his descendants discover the attitudes which should govern interpretations of
the Book of Nature: distrust of naive sense impressions, awareness that human
concerns need not be the focus and end of the entire cosmos, and recognition that