Essay on Myth of the Fortunate Fall in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Myth of the Fortunate F altogether in enlightenment Lost From this agate line / Celestial Virtues rising, leave alone appear / More glorious . . . than from no fall. (ii. 14-16)1These are Satans words to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. Satan adduces that their fall from heaven will seem like a fortunate fall, in that their new rise to power will actually be more glorious than if they had stayed in Heaven all the while. Can we, as fallen humans, possibly make Satans words our own, even if it is not our own work but Gods that causes our rising or, if we do claim a fortunate fall, have we been beguiled by Satan to rejoice in our fallen state? While it is common among beguiled critics to claim that Paradise Lost presents the Fall as fortunate, in fact the Fall is much less fortunate than these critics presume. Millicent Bell is among the beguiled, but he starts off with a springy point that is too easily forgotten. What does the narrative make explicit about the Fall? The ba re story makes no mystery of it. It was infinite disaster.2 From the etymon of the epic we learn that the Fall Brought death into the world, and all our woe (i. 3). It brought into this world a world of woe,/Sin and her shadow Death, and misery/Deaths harbinger (ix. 11-13). We learn that Eve, later leaving Adam to go her own way in Eden (just before the Fall) never from that hour in Paradise/Foundst either sweet repast, or sound repose (ix. 406-07). Eves Fall is a great calamity for the world (ix. 782-84) so is Adams, completing the original sin (ix. 1003). The couples early reactions to their sin include disgust, shame, lust, and resist for the earth (ix. 1010 ff.). The woe of Satan, too, is perpetual (ii. 861) and eternal (iv... ...s that Paradise is where she and Adam are together, so that an Eden without Adam would be no Paradise at all (xii. 615-17). 15. Bell (878-79) asserts that Milton could not have understood Raphaels words about education and spiritual uplift without t ying them to the harshness of error and suffering though I disagree, Bells general point stands as a fallen human the life of righteous suffering is the only good one that Milton could have had true agreement for. On the other hand, in the context of the epic, Frank Kermode and Barbara Lewalski recognize that in Paradise Lost we yet know nothing of this inner paradise with which to match it to Eden (we have only Michaels word) The paradise of Miltons poem is the lost, the only true paradise, we confuse ourselves . . . if we believe otherwise (Kermode, Adam Unparadised, Elledge 603-04 cf. Lewalski 270).