John Milton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians, and the Incompetence of God That the God presented in the Bible, and proposed by the churches for the belief of Europe, is morally ugly, was not so unheard-of a proposition in Seventeenth-Century England as many in this century would have us believe. In his discussion of reprobation, John Calvin asks rhetorically "is God not unjust to play so cruelly with his creatures?" (1) Notice that it is the word unjust that Calvin questions, but not the rest (Dieu ne sera-il pas donc injuste de se jouer ainsi cruellement...? Se jouer might better be translated "amuse himself.") Lawyer that he is, Calvin can tolerate a cruel God but not one who violates abstract principles of justice. Milton too calls reprobation "ungrateful and odious."(2) Calvin also said of his own doctrine concerning the reprobation of babes, decretum quidem horribile fateor, "It is a horrible decree— I admit it." In French he called it ce decret qui nous doit espouvanter, this decree which should terrify us. (3) William Twisse, 1578-1646, the prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly to which Milton addressed his divorce tracts, concluded his definition of God’s freedom by saying " there is a further freedom and soveraignty of God, over his creatures, in doing evill unto them."(4) John Bunyan, fearing himself reprobate, and approaching this bullying God in prayer, encountered the cold jeering typical of bullies:
I should think that God did mock at these my prayers, saying, and that in the audience of the holy angels, This poor simple Wretch doth hanker after me, as if I had nothing to do with my mercy, but to bestow it on such as he: alas poor fool! how art thou deceived, it is not for such as thee to have favour with the Highest. (5)
Gilbert Burnet , Pleading with Calvinists and Arminians to moderate their attacks on each other’s God (one side jeering at ineffectiveness, the other cruelty), writes:
Another very indecent way of managing these Points, is, That both sides do too often speak very boldly of God. Some petulant Wits, in order to the representing the Contrary Opinion as Absurd and Ridiculous, have brought in God, representing him with indecent Expressions, as acting or decreeing according to their Hypothesis, in a manner that is not only unbecoming, but that borders upon Blasphemy... every thing relating to this, that is put in a burlesque Air, is intolerable. (6)
William Perkins, the great antagonist of Arminius, twice compared God to a butcher; and not in a travesty of Arminius’s God, but to render due praise to his own, whom he thought to justify by his vivid comparison (below, pp. 000-000).
A passage of Paradise Lost, hitherto apparently ignored by the commentators, shows that in their brief acquaintance, God has so impressed Adam with His cruelty that he despises Him.
Eve, repentant, comes to Adam, confesses that the eating of the fruit is all her fault, and, since the penalty is death, volunteers to take it for the two of them. Adam says he would make the same offer himself if he thought God would listen to pleas, but is sure He never will. Besides,
EThis day's death denounc't, if aught I see,
Will prove no sudden, but a slow-pac't evil,
A long day's dying to augment our pain,
And to our Seed (O hapless Seed!) derived (X.962-65).
If God kills us today, we have no children and that will be that. But if I know God ("if aught I see") He won't settle for the death of two mortals; He will demand the torture of millions, drawn out "to augment our pain." Adam's dreadful guess is confirmed, XI. 477-511.
We need not be surprised, therefore, much less seek ways to accuse ourselves and excuse the God of Paradise Lost, when he makes his grand entrance in the style of a poltroon and a bully.
His first words are a thundering lie:
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our adversary , whom no bounds
Prescrib’d, no bars of hell, nor all the chains
Heapt on him there, nor yet the main abyss
Wide interrupt can hold...(III. 80-84)
The thousands of angels listening must know that this is preposterous.That their omnipotent chief, whose powers have recently been displayed to them in the War in Heaven, could be unable to build a prison strong enough to hold Satan, is absurd on the face of it; this is God’s old game of teasing them with pretended weakness (I.641). Earlier, Milton, employing an authorial voice that tells no lies, has informed us that God himself arranged Satan’s escape from hell to set in motion a chain of causation including the eating of the forbidden fruit and the infecting of humanity with original sin, and terminating in the incarnation of Christ and the last judgment, an outcome so splendid that the reader is supposed to believe, and Adam actually does believe, that the whole universe is better off for it than it would have been had the fruit been left uneaten (I. 210-220; XII. 469-478). God has a plan that cannot succeed unless Satan goes to the earth and seduces the human pair; but the angels must not know this, and it becomes necessary to bluster out a false story making the whole thing seem an accident and putting the blame on Satan.
God then announces that Adam and Eve shall succumb, and going very much on the defensive, he insists again and again that this is no one’s fault but their own; their free will is the cause, and his foreseeing their offense at this particular moment of time, (after the creation, but nine days before the fall itself) does not necessitate it. Calvin had ruled that God foresees only what he decrees, so it is necessary for this God (a melange of many theological systems, as we shall see) to insist that he foresees some things without decreeing them (III.118), and among these things is the eating of the fruit. In passing God denies, with a curious phrase, that the fall is "immutably foreseen"(III. 121). The implication is that some things are mutably foreseen, others immutably; that is, God is ready to see some things defeat his expectations; and among these is the eating of the fruit. In other words, mutable foresight need not really foresee, and God was ready to let Adam and Eve live happy in the garden forever, in spite of the lengths to which he had gone to ruin them. When Seventeenth Century theology had smuggled freedom into the world past God’s omnipotence, there remained his omniscience; for his creatures to be free, he had to have less-than-perfect knowledge or foreknowledge of what they were about to do. The Jesuits and Arminians, Europe’s twin pariahs of free will, were accused by William Twisse of maintaining scientia media, middle knowledge, i.e. knowledge somewhere between omniscience and ignorance, so that events might not be necessitated by God’s certainty that they would come to pass. (7) The relation between God’s foresight, which may or may not be "absolute," and his creatures’ freedom is the debating topic that leaves the devils hopelessly confused at II. 560-561. Milton’s mutable foresight is evidently scientia media under another name. Here, if ever, God the Father turns a school divine. (8)Doubtless God’s "and shall pervert" (III.92) represents the instant of mutable foresight turning to immutable; up to now God had only a hunch that Adam and Eve would transgress, but now he is quite sure. Milton disparaged Scotus and Aquinas in Areopagitica, but by 1667 protestant theology had produced hairsplitting as minute as anything in either, and it only serves to emphasize the meanness of God. The angels can pity Adam and Eve (X.23-25) but God can only deploy philosophical arguments to place the blame on them and remove it from himself.
Yet he wallows in self-pity:
...ingrate, he had of me
All he could have...
Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere
Of true allegience, constant Faith or Love...
...what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid?
(III. 97-107)
When the son has pleaded with the father, the latter doles out a strange tripartite salvation to fallen man, with the elite group unconditionally elect (as in Calvin, III.183-4), the second-class group having to labor all their lives in hope of heaven but with the threat of hell (as in Arminius: 185-97), and the losers not achieving even that (also as in Arminius: 198-202). It is as if God gave some people free passes to heaven while requiring the rest to buy a ticket, and the peremptory tone of 183-4 does not help God’s case.
Then he sentences Adam and Eve to death along with all their children.This is biblical; Jehovah ordered the slaughter of the children in Jericho (Joshua 6:21) and the children of Achon (Joshua 7:24-25), and exhorted his people to crush the Babylonian babies to death (Psalm 137:9). But, really, must this penchant of Jehovah for butchering babies be put into his speech on grace, forming the end of his favorable response to his son’s pleas for mercy? His attention span seems to be as long when he focusses on various kinds of aggression including murder as it is short when he tries to listen to his compassionate son.
The son then offers himself as a sacrifice to recompense the father for the moral deficit incurred by the latter’s rescue of the conditionally and unconditionally elect, and in so doing releases him from an emotional state that had visibly contorted his face with rage (III. 406-407).The sequence of events is significant: first God decreed the salvation of the unconditionally elect, who were thus saved before there was anything to save them from (III.171-72). Then he foresees the eating of the forbidden fruit, and then the crucifixion is agreed on as the remedy for this.
These time-relations are metaphors for logical relations of ends and means; "priority in Gods decrees consists only in purposing one thing for another." (9) From Boethius on it had always been understood that God dwells outside time and that everything that to us occurs sequentially, to him appears in a nunc-stans or eternal Now. Sir Thomas Browne says that the elect are already in Abraham’s bosom and the reprobates in the flame (10).So when Milton says that God decreed the salvation of the elect by means of "my eternal purpose" (III.172), implying that there had never been a time when it had yet to be determined, and then afterwards made the world, the meaning is that the world has for its purpose the salvation of the elect, as an axe is wielded to fell a tree.
So the sequence of events in Book III is symbolic, but even so it is disturbing. After the son has made the universe as perfect as he can make it (VII.557) , and it has subsisted a very short time (thirteen days in Carey and Fowler’s chronology) (11) it suddenly aborts in so shocking a manner that the son has to plead with the father not to damn every single human, or perhaps annihilate the whole cosmos from the earth out to the fixed stars, as alternatives to tolerating the shambles it is soon to become ( III.161-3. The angels are familiar with their masters’ sudden fits of berserk rage, VIII.235-236). After this disaster, and as a remedy for it, the two agree on the crucifixion, the last judgment, the promotion of the son to his father’s throne, his mild reign over the angels without terrorizing them (there being no further need to do so after the events of the last six thousand years) and the father’s transformation into a neoplatonic God who will "dissolve into the landscape" as William Empson unforgettably puts it (12).Instead of displaying his omniscience and omnipotence, this God makes almost all of his important decisions in response to circumstances beyond his control. He huddles up the murder of his son in response to a news bulletin. Lest it be thought I am the first to object to this, let me recall the words of the supralapsarian Calvinist, William Twisse, who found it absurd that "Christ should be brought into the world, as it were, ens per accidens, a thing by accident, upon occasion of the fall."(13) This God is not only a bully, he seems to be an incompetent.
The future history of the universe being now set forth, the angels adore God with ceremony and song; how much sincerity there is in their adoration we later learn at IV.958-960.
Shelley was right: this is no accident. It is counter-intuitive to imagine that Milton tried to present an attractive or admirable God and failed. To see why he presented this one, let us examine more systematically these decrees, predestining the crucifixion, expelling Satan from heaven, choosing the elect, et cetera, and the various schemes subordinating them one to another that vexed the century with controversies and wars.
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Charles II (of Spain; emphatically not to be confused with his English namesake) bedded down every night with his confessor and two friars, an elaborate countermeasure to a haunting fear of many papists: that after a well-lived life of virtue, membership in the true church and participation in the sacraments, he would suddenly neglect to confess a mortal sin, would become ill in the night, and would slip off the path of salvation into eternal torture. As anxious papists lived in fear of such last-minute accidents, heedless papists lived in hope of last-minute reprieves, suddenly snatching them from the devil’s jaws and translating them to heaven. Another Charles II (of England) depended, during his last hour on earth, on the grace-under-pressure of his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, who had arranged for a Roman Catholic priest to be smuggled past a phalanx of protestants into his room.The subjection of papists to these fears and hopes provoked the disdain of protestants. If God, they reasoned, has really made the decision to save or damn a man, it cannot possibly be defeated by such a trivial and grotesque combination of bad luck, bad timing, and the vagaries of the human will.
So Calvin in 1536, reviving a doctrine set forth in Sts Paul and Augustine and controversial ever since, declared that God in the act of creating the human race, divided it into two groups, the elect and the reprobate.This division was particular (Peter was elected as Peter, not as one of the faithful) and unconditional (Peter had faith because he was elected, not the other way around).Thus among those who believed themselves elect, all doubt that they might in some way end in hell was completely removed. A Calvinist slogan ran Numerus electorum nec augeri nec minui potest, "The number of the elect can be neither increased nor reduced."The moral effect of this doctrine seems to have varied with the type of human being who accepted it. In a Milton, it brings the magnificent courage and determined confidence of the sonnets on his blindness. In others, the assurance of election produced the complacence of Holy Willie in Burns’s poem, offering faint apologies to God for fornicating with a girl named Meg, but speculating at the same time that God wills these misadventures. The grace which God is supposed to send to prevent such things in his elect is irresistible, so perhaps the fornication is intended to generate in Willie the virtue of humility. Whatever happens, Willie cannot burn in hell for his partiality to Meg.
And, predestination is double; that is, in the same ordinal place among his decrees as election—prior to all other decrees—God sends the reprobates to hell. Here an all-important question arises: is reprobation as unconditional as election? Is there no instant of time or subtle condition of preexistence during which or in which God intended to make something better than creatures deserving hell? Did he hate them from the start?
Here Calvin wavers. When he first mentions double predestination, it seems clear that reprobation is as unconditional as election: "For he [God] does not create all human beings in the same condition, but ordains some to eternal life, the others to eternal damnation." (14) But when he goes on the defensive against the persons who may consider this cruel playing, in the passage quoted above (pp.000-000), he speaks as if God does not make the reprobates wicked, but finds them so. The caviller asks: " Why has God predestined some to damnation, who have not deserved it, given the fact that they did not even exist?" Calvin answers: "Because we are all corrupted and contaminated in vices, it cannot be but that God hates us... If they are all taken out of a corrupt mass (priz d’une masse corrompue) it is no marvel if they are subject to damnation."(15) If these creatures are contaminated with vice when God damns them, his decree doing so must come after, or be logically consequent on, the eating of the fruit. For once the master logician has committed an inconsistency. God either made the reprobates wicked, or he found them so; he cannot have done both.The decree of reprobation is either, as Twisse put it, purposed for the eating of the fruit, or the reverse is true, but both cannot be true. Much subtle theology was to flow from this crack in the majestic structure of the Institutes. The doctors grouped themselves (to name the groups in ascending order of the initiative they gave man against God) under the names of supralapsarianism; sublapsarianism, with its subjoined concept of preterition; Arminianism, and moderate Calvinism.
The supralapsarians stoutly held that God made the reprobates to be punished eternally after a life of total depravity on earth, and that the eating of the fruit occurred as a result, not a cause, of this decree. "Wee say that Adams fall came to passe, God not onely foreknowing, but also willing and decreeing it."(16) Hence God appeared as a person of some insincerity, threatening the human pair with death if they ate the fruit, while arranging for them to do so. Indeed, the insincerities the Calvinists had to impute to God to make the Bible a coherent document were endless: he imposed the ten commandments and the whole code of Leviticus on the Jews, solely in order to humiliate them by their inability to obey; he repeatedly invited all men to obtain salvation in Christ while secretly willing that only the elect should do so.
The decision to send the reprobates to hell presupposed their infection with original sin which in turn required the eating of the fruit, so Adam and Eve could not be left free to be disappointingly obedient. Nor is any human being free, from the creation to the last judgment; all are carrying out God’s decrees. Finally, reprobation is unconditional; the depravity of the reprobates results from but does not cause the decree, which is a divine whim.
The supralapsarian doctrine was defended with desperate arguments. William Perkins likened God’s reprobation of men to the activities in a slaughterhouse: "He decreed also... that men should live by the slaughter of beasts; and yet God is not therefore cruell against them: and surely God is no more bound unto man, then unto the very brute beasts." (17) Fond of the analogy, Perkins employed it twice: "[I]n the daily killing and slaughtering of beasts [men] will not be counted vniust, neither indeed are we: and yet in comparison of God we are not so much woorth, as a flie is in respect of us."(18) So in place of "the Lord is my shepherd" we have "the Lord is our butcher."
Milton’s God’s nervous insistence that Adam and Eve were free is transparently a reaction against supralapsarianism.
This brings us to the sublapsarians, who rearrange the order and series of God’s decrees to avoid the horror of God making creatures only to damn them. The sublapsarians suppose God’s decrees to be in response to the eating of the fruit, which thus becomes the deed of a pair of free agents, the only free humans in history, formed to be sinless in a perfect world, had they only put their free will to its right use. All human deeds subsequent to the eating of the fruit are predestined as among the supralapsarians. The decree of election now raises the elect out of a corrupt mass, rendered such by original sin, and the decree of reprobation leaves the rest in it. Calvin, as we have seen, had used the phrase "corrupt mass," and thanks to it, election becomes a kindly act, in the nature of a rescue rather than a whim; reprobation becomes more innocuous, merely the leaving of a great many beings to their fate. Consequently, ex corrupta massa becomes a sublapsarian slogan. Sublapsarianism became the prevailing form of Calvinism and was affirmed by the Synod of Dort, the assembly that condemned Arminianism in the Netherlands (1618-19). Hence Twisse, a supralapsarian, makes bold to place"Election... before the world... and not in massa corrupta with the late venerable Synod."(19)
But sublapsarianism makes God’s huge plan depend on a contingency. All Calvinists, like all Christians, continued to regard the death and resurrection of Christ, and his second coming, as predestined from all eternity. The usual proof-text was I Peter 1:20, which calls Christ one "Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world." This was an embarrassing topic for the Arminians, who claimed that all sins are committed freely, and thus might or might not take place. Their adversaries pointed out that murdering Christ was a sin. Hence on Arminian principles the death of Christ became, as we have already seen his incarnation become, an ens per accidens (above, pp. 000-000).Arminius lamely saved the free will of Christ’s murderers by saying that God predestined his son to a sinful death, but nothing more specific. Twisse retorted: how can God produce the genus, but only afterwards the species? Did God first determine that Christ should die a violent death—then a violent death by the hand of justice—et cetera? Lastly he destroyed Arminius with a single sentence: "nothing can be produced but in particular."(20)
The sublapsarian God can be compared to a man who plans a journey, determining precisely the time and place of arrival, while leaving the time and place of departure up in the air. Or to a man who plans a wedding, setting the date, hiring the minister, ordering a cake, at a time when the bride and groom have not yet decided to get married and may well decide not to.
The supralapsarian God is certainly almighty, but strangely cruel. In order that the corruption of the human race may not occur without or against his will, he creates it himself. The sublapsarian God is better-intentioned, but strangely inept: "his Goodness should seem to be more extended than his power," wrote Bishop Burnet. (21) A Seventeenth-Century Calvinist must choose between a God whose cruelty had to be explained away, and one whose ineptitude had to be explained away, and it may speak well for the Synod of Dort, the Westminster Assembly, and Milton that they chose the latter.
To attenuate even more the horror of the reprobates’ fate, and enable them in some sense to deserve it, Francois du Jon or Junius devised the idea of praeteritio, preterition, or passing-over. God, when he raises the elect out of the corrupt mass, does not damn the reprobates; he only passes them over, omitting to elect them. After this non-deed has left them in their corruption, and the latter has brought on their actual sins, the decree of reprobation finally disposes of them, but not before; not till Cain has killed Abel, not till Esau has sold his birthright to Jacob, is either damned. Bishop Burnet says the supralapsarians found preterition "an act unworthy of God, as if he forgot them." (22)
Arminianism frees the reprobates from their deterministic prison. It simply states that both election and reprobation are conditional, that is, that God utters both decrees in response to his foreseeing of faith in the Gospel in the elect, and lifelong contempt for it in the reprobate. Existentialists must applaud this return to the idea of human freedom; but the Calvinists of both kinds, supra- and sublapsarian, recoiled from the idea that a person with saving faith could lose it, apostatize both totally and finally, and end in hell. A Calvinist slogan said that God could not first love and then hate the same person. Arminius’s freedom, for these believers, was the freedom to damn oneself. No less shocking was the damage done to God’s omnipotence or, as the Calvinists called it, his absolute sovereignty. Even if no one in history was free except Adam, Eve, and Satan, that was bad enough; it meant that God could not be sure the crucifixion of his son would take place, but must wait on Adam and Eve’s decision. But if Arminius was right, God became virtually a flunky: he must abide billions of decisions before arriving at a membership list for his heavenly kingdom, and each decision was in its nature humiliating:
...if God did reiect men, because hee foresaw they would reiect him, reprobation should not depend upon God, but upon men themselues. And this is all one, as if a man should say, that God foresaw that some would chuse him, and others refuse him.(23)
Milton found Arminius to be "acute and distinct" but "perverted." (24) The Arminian controversy triggered a civil war in the Netherlands, then stoked the fires of another in England, when Archbishop Laud and other Anglican prelates were suspected of being Arminians, and an angry parliament threatened them with the death penalty for this offense.
The moderate Calvinists are known to me only by a note in Jonathan Richardson’s commentary on Paradise Lost, 1734, and an epigram by Robert Herrick, the latter following:
Predestination is the Cause alone
Of many standing, but of fall to none. (25)
The Richardson note follows:
Some have maintained what they call Reprobation together with [Election]... the Other Notion of Predestination is, that Some are Elected Peculiarly, the Rest May be Saved Complying with the Conditions; This is the Doctrine of Milton. and ‘tis the Opinion of the Moderate Calvinists. (26)
Peculium is private property, hence peculiar in PL III.183 and in Richardson’s note signifies that the grace cannot be taken away, unlike Arminius’s grace which can be forfeited.
Keep unconditional predestination, and you plunge people into the kind of despair John Bunyan suffered when, believing himself reprobate, he went walking in the fields around Elstow, envying the dogs and toads that need not expect eternal torture as he did. Abolish unconditional predestination, and you abolish that unconditional election that gave many, including Milton, their "adoptive and cheerefull boldness."(27) So, as it is said that the United States has socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, this "moderate Calvinism" offers Calvinism to the elect and Arminianism to the passed-over.The elect have cause for supreme confidence, but the passed-over need not despair. This is the system set forth in PL III.183-4, 185-97, 198-202.
The last refinement of post-Calvinist theology that must be noted is a period of time in every conditional reprobate’s life called the "day of grace."
All Protestants were glad to be rid of last-minute changes of heart, winning or losing salvation on the brink of death. But Arminianism seemed to bring these last-minute changes back. Hence it was supposed that God, offering grace that would result in saving faith if accepted, ended the offer at a certain point in time, the period before which was called the day of grace. If a human refused grace till the end of this period his condition thereafter was that of a reprobate in true Calvinism. God’s plan had need of reprobates: Jesus, for example, could not be crucified if Judas did not betray him; Moses could not cause ten plagues if Pharoah’s heart was not hardened. Hence Milton did well to provide his moderate Calvinism with an ample supply of reprobates, notwithstanding its libertarianism. Milton’s God is careful to say that these humans are excluded from mercy (III.202). Apart from PL III. 198, the phrase "day of grace," though not in the Bible, occurs in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding :
"After this, that other doubt did come with strength upon me, But how if the day of grace be past and gone? how if you have over-stood the time of mercy?"(28)
Milton expresses the concept of the day of grace as follows: "grace that the sinner despises to his dying day or seeks too late, after the predetermined period of grace has gone past (gratia aut semper spreta aut sero nimis...petita, cum iam tempus definitum gratiae praeteriit.)" (29) If Arminius’s God is a flunky, this God who determines the day of grace is more like a bill-collector. First he perceives that a certain person lacks saving faith, then he delimits by a set number of days, hours and minutes the predetermined period of grace for this person, then he carefully waits till the end of it before dooming him to hell. Bunyan fancied that God, to determine the day of grace, broke down the population by city and country districts, and that all the people capable of being elected in the Bedford area had already been elected. (30) Thus he seemed to have missed salvation like a sold-out concert. The original concept of divine decrees unresponsive to the activities or decisions of humans had by this time evaporated in delirious nonsense.
In this labyrinth of predestinarian and libertarian schemes Milton clearly took the following path: because of his disdain for "a meer artificiall Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions,"(31) he was induced somewhat illogically to hold that the decrees, apart from the decree of unconditional election, were sublapsarian. This is seen in the De Doctrina Christiana where he defines predestination as the decree by which God "had mercy on the human race, although it was going to fall of its own accord," (32) implying clearly enough that the fall caused the decree and not the other way around. Again, in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton describes unfallen man with"no decree necessitating his free will, but subsequent, though not in time yet in order, to causes which were in his own power," and in An Apology Against a Pamphlet he fancies a perfect man, "exempted out of the corrupt masse of Adam, borne without sinne originall, and living without actuall." (33) The decree necessitating Adam’s freewill, subsequent to causes in his power, is clearly the sublapsarian idea reduced to a succinct formula.In the phrase "the corrupt masse" we recognize the corrupta massa of the sublapsarians and finally the masse corrompue of Calvin himself.Because of the importance to Milton of the idea that salvation cannot be taken away from a person, he clung to unconditional election. Because of the monstrous unfairness of unconditional reprobation, he disposed of the remainder of humanity by supposing them to be elected and reprobated conditionally. And lastly, to avoid the anomaly of the deathbed repentance, which he held in contempt (PL III. 478-80), he imposed on conditionally reprobated people the deadline of the day of grace.Such were the ways of God which his poem sought to justify to men. Given these propositions, what follows for our reading of the poem?
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To begin with, we have an answer to the puzzle proposed at the outset: why God behaves like such a bully. It must be a kind of divine role-playing, deliberately made unworthy of God’s concealed essence, in order to provide Satan, Adam and Eve with a motive for rebelling against him, since God’s eternal plan requires these rebellions and the three are free agents. The supralapsarian God could and did both command that Adam and Eve should abstain from the fruit, and decree that they should eat it. Far more uncomfortable is the situation of the sublapsarian God. He must play on their emotions, somehow making them want to rebel. I can see only one way to do this: he must act like a bully. The angels, indeed, are aware that he engages in such role-playing from time to time (II.263-268).
This perspective on the poem will supply us with new readings of many difficult passages. The long description of Eve’s wanton ringlets, IV.305-311, has prompted Professor Stanley Fish to ask "Why then does Milton introduce Eve in a garment woven of adjectives traditionally associated with the scarlet woman of so many sermons and moral harangues?"(34) He argues that the lust is not in Eden but in the reader, whom Milton is reminding of his fallen state. But, as before, God cannot decree the revolt of the human pair but must seduce them into it; hence he cannot omit the essential ingredient of any seduction—lust.
Then there is Raphael’s mission to the earth, so innocent in the eyes of Adam and Eve, in reality so sinister. Seemingly a rescue mission, its intent is to catch the human pair in a legal trap so that they cannot escape the consequences of their sin. As Paul Phelps-Morand says, Adam and Eve are "sufficiently warned that their guilt may be convincing, but insufficiently warned to have any chance of putting up a resistance."(35) When we grant, however, that the eating of the fruit could not be decreed, it is clear that once it is an accomplished fact, it must be clinched as quickly as possible. As we have seen, God was, until quite recently, unsure his scheme would work, and he acts with the alacrity one would expect when it does.
Another crux is Raphael’s obtuse reply (VIII.560-594) to Adam’s poem (VIII. 521-559) about his love for Eve. The angel accuses the mortal of bestial lust (VIII.594) , a fantastically ignorant remark that seems to be explained by a strong hint that the angels cannot understand love for a female because they are all homosexual (VIII. 622-29). C.S. Lewis believes that Adam’s duty, when he sees that Eve has eaten the fruit, is to chastise her and intercede for her with God. (36) Given the sublapsarian scheme, such behavior would either seriously or completely abort the planned and desired fall of man. Raphael’s rebuke does much to forestall this intercession. Adam is veritably bludgeoned with the message that he cannot expect any understanding of his feelings for Eve from God or God's underlings—a message God had hinted strongly (VIII. 369-75; 399- 411). In his meditation when he realizes she has eaten the fruit, Adam does not even consider the possibility that God will spare her (IX. 900-901) or the possibility that intercession might do any good. In Adam’s judgment, the characteristic of God that might result in a reprieve is not compassion for Eve or himself, but vanity (IX.947-51).
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If we grant that the ways of God which Milton wrote his poem to justify are the ways of sublapsarianism, we shall have to conclude that Sir Walter Raleigh was to some extent right after all and that Paradise Lost is a monument to dead ideas. (37) Interest in the controversy had sunk so low by the late Nineteenth Century that Philip Schaff in his History of the Christian Church called the distinction between supra- and sublapsarianism nearly worthless (38); and Ambrose Bierce’s skit about the fistfight between the Supralapsarian and the Infra(=Sub-) lapsarian, in The Devil’s Dictionary, s.v. "Infralapsarian," is merrily to the point.
This will be called reductive, but there are advantages. Many readers of Paradise Lost are troubled by the inappropriateness of their responses, given their expectation that the epic will convey a Christian message. These readers find Satan in Books I-II magnificent; they find God in Book III loathsome; they sympathize with Eve as she reaches for the fruit, beset as she is with forces angelic, demonic and divine tricking her into the fatal act; when Adam decides to die with Eve rather than live without her, these readers find his decision as fitting as those of Romeo and Antony. Professor Stanley Fish insists in his book Surprised by Sin that such readers must regard their response as a trap cleverly laid by Milton, from which they must escape by repentance, ending by becoming better Christians and feeling sincerely that Satan is egotistical, God dignified, Eve frivolous and Adam besotted. But with my hypothesis we can place the blame squarely where it belongs—on God.
Notes
(1) Institution de la Religion Chrestienne, ed. Jacques Pannier; Societe
d’Edition Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1961, Vol. III, p.74.
(2) The Works of John Milton, N.Y. ; Columbia U. P., 1933, XIV, 99.
(3) Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Eerdmans Pub. Co., Grand
Rapids, Mich., n.d., VIII, 559.
(4) A Treatise of Mr. Cottons, Clearing Certain Doubts Concerning
Predestination, London: printed by J.D. for Andrew Crook, 1646, p. 34.
(5) Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock, London:
Oxford U.P. , 1966, pp. 36-37.
(6) An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England,
London: printed by R. Roberts for Richard Chiswell, 1699, p.166.
(7) A Treatise of Mr. Cottons, p.69.
(8) Alexander Pope, Epistle to Augustus, line 102.
(9) A Treatise of Mr. Cottons, p. 31.
(10) Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, U. of Chicago Press, n.p., 1964, I, 20.
(11) John Carey and Alastair Fowler, The Poems of John Milton, London:
Longmans, 1968, p. 444.
(12) Milton’s God, Chatto and Windus, London, 1961:pp. 132-33.
- A Treatise of Mr. Cottons, p.1.
(14) Institution, III, 62.
(15) III.73-74.
(16) William Perkins, Workes, London: printed by John Legatt, 1635,
II, 613, col.2.
(17) Vol. I, p.110, col.1.
(18) Workes, II, 611, col. 2.
(19) A Treatise of Mr. Cottons, p.39.
- Page 250.
(21) An Exposition, p. 153.
(22) Page 158.
(23) Perkins, Workes, II, 610, col.2.
(24) Areopagitica, in Works, IV, 313.
(25) Robert Herrick, Poetical Works, ed. L.C. Martin, Clarendon Press,
Oxford: 1956, p. 389.
(26) J. Richardson, Father and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on
Milton’s Paradise Lost, London: James Knapton et al., 1734, p. 104.
(27) Milton, Works, III, i, 3.
(28) Ed. Roger Sharrock, London: Oxford U.P., 1962, p. 24.
(29) Works, N.Y.: Columbia U. P., 1933, XIV, 154.
(30) Grace Abounding p.24.
(31) Works, IV, 319.
(32) VI, 168.
(33) III, i, p. 322.
(34) Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, St. Martin’s Press, New
York, 1967, p. 92.
(35) "...suffisament prevenu pour paraitre coupable, insuffisament prevenu
pour avoir quelque chance de resister."—De Comus a Satan, Paris, no
imprint, 1939: pp. 138-39.
(36) Quoted in Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin, London: Macmillan, 1967, p.
269. Professor Fish thinks Adam should ask for more time.
(37) Milton, London: Edward Arnold and Co., n.d., p.88.