“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best,...Authority and Reason on her waite,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally, and to consummate all,
Greatness of mind, and nobleness thir seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard Angelic plac’t. (8.546–59)Though Raphael rightly rebukes Adam for such potentially dangerous sentiments,
Milton allows Adam to qualify the angel’s apparently rigid Neoplatonism from the
perspective of his (and our) experience of something beyond Raphael’s ken, the
“mysterious reverence” due the marriage bed and marriage itself, an institution
angels do not have (8.598–9). Adam also scores a point, and shows that he under-
stands the implications of monism, as he leads Raphael to acknowledge that happi-
ness for angels as for humans involves some version of sexual love. After Eve’s Fall,
Adam’s instant decision to fall with her arises from his desperate fear of returning to
his lonely life before her creation:
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart. (9.908–13)Milton’s most brilliant analysis of human psychology occurs in a scene without
precedent in other literary versions of the Genesis story: the dispute which occa-
sioned Adam and Eve’s separation (9.205–386). In that dialogue, as Adam and Eve
enmesh themselves in ever greater misunderstandings, the reader feels on his or her
pulses the truth of this archetypal version of all those familiar scenes in which lovers
or friends, by no one’s design, exacerbate slight disagreements into great divides,
leading to unwise decisions and dire results. Eve advances her well-meaning but
misguided proposal for temporary separation to meet a genuine problem: the ten-
dency of the garden to “wanton growth.” Adam reminds her of the enemy who, if
they met him together, “each / To other speedie aid might lend at need” (9.259–
60). He might have won his point had he stopped there, but he talks on, uninten-
tionally affronting Eve with a pompous platitude emphasizing the wife’s need of
her husband’s guardianship. Eve, hurt by the implication that she would easily be
seduced, responds “as one who loves, and some unkindness meets” (9.271), throw-
ing Adam off balance. Logic deserts him, leading him to assert that the temptation
itself would bring dishonor, and Eve picks up on his error. She enjoys having the
better of the argument for the moment as she insists, quite rightly, that both must