The Genesis of Duality in Milton's Paradise Lost

Gene Callahan

Department of Philosophy

London School of Economics

Introduction

'Does one make a present,' she asked, 'of an object that contains, to one's knowledge, a flaw?'

'Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The good faith,' the man smiled, 'is always there.'

'And leave the person to whom one gives the thing to discover it?'

'He wouldn't discover it--if you're speaking of a gentleman... He might know--and he might try. But he wouldn't find.'

'Not even if he should have to say to me, "The Golden Bowl is broken"?'

He was still silent; after which he had his strangest smile. 'Ah, if anyone should want to smash it--!'

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, p. 106

A text can speak to its recipients of many things, including some not

intended by its author. The Freudian slip is a paradigm of a text that says

something to the receiver that the author never intended: when the slightly

drunk gentleman at a cocktail party informs a female guest that she is

"looking her breast tonight," while glancing toward her cleavage, she is

certainly entitled to read more into the text than the author intended.

Again, if someone asserts that they no longer beat their children, they may

have had no intention of telling their audience that they formerly did so.

So it is with works of literature. While the intentions of the author may be

fully communicated, the text may also speak to the reader of things the

author never imagined, or even of things that would dismay the author if he

knew that his work was being thus interpreted. This paper will approach the

subject of the Fall of Man in Paradise Lost, analyzing the signs which mark

this event, from perspectives which might have surprised Milton, and attempt

to see if, thus probed, they will yield further insight into the human

condition in its pre- and post-lapsarian state.

I. On the Nature of Signs

Yet doubt not but in valley and in plain

God is as here, and will be found alike

Present, and of his presence many a sign

Still following thee, still compassing thee round

With goodness and paternal love, his face

Express, and of his steps the track divine

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 11.349-54

Umberto Eco (1984), citing the classical definition of a sign, aliquid stat

pro aliquo, points out that the relationship by which the sign stands for the

signified can be of various forms. This paper will most concern itself with

the "sign [that] is a manifest indication from which inferences can be made

about something latent" (Eco, 1984:15). Examples are footprints as sign of a

person's passage, or lipstick on a man's collar as a sign of his having been

with a woman. Linguistic signs may also take part in this relationship, as in

the above example of a Freudian slip, where the man's actual utterance is a

manifest indication of his latent sexual interest in the woman.

In Paradise Lost, Milton, retelling the story of Genesis, posits a number of

characters, places and objects: God, Satan, Heaven, Hell, Eden, Adam, Eve,

two trees of great interest, and a sweet fruit with a bitter aftertaste,

amongst others. To what extent is it justifiable to view these literary

entities as signs of something else? And to what degree are we justified in

interpreting them differently than Milton would have?

Milton certainly felt he was writing factual truth in Paradise Lost. Isabel

MacCaffery, in Paradise Lost as Myth, claims Milton would have "insisted . .

. on the validity of its [Paradise Lost] literal 'appearances' as he

presented them" (1959:21). But she also points out that "Milton... would

have laid stress on the 'spiritual' significance of his story . . ." (ibid.),

and further comments on his "insistence... on seeing the external world

permeated with value and meaning" (ibid., p. 147). The latter would hold

especially true for events mentioned in the Old Testament, as Milton was the

inheritor of a long tradition of interpreting these stories as allegoria in

factis, having a dual existence both as literal historical events and as

messages sent to humanity by God (Eco 1990:11-17). Further, O'Keefe comments

on how

The imagery of sound and music in Milton's poem possesses ethical

nuances when depicting places, characters, and situations; thus Chaos, hell,

Satan, the battle in heaven, Adam and Eve immediately after the Fall...

are characterized by discord, while heaven, Eden before the Fall, the Son,

heaven... are typified by metaphoric harmony. (1982:313)

But while Milton, as inheritor of the medieval tradition of exegesis, would

have believed his text to speak on several levels (allegorical, spiritual,

literal), he would also have believed it to have been univocal in its import,

in that all of these levels spoke with one message (Eco 1990). For instance,

MacCaffery comments on how his use of "place stands not only for spatial

location, but includes... position in a scale social, metaphysical, or

religious" (1959:68). These uses always dovetail into one meaning--as in the

rebellious angels fall into Hell.

Modern readers, influenced by three hundred years of scientific discovery

since Milton, find it much more difficult than Milton did to take these

stories literally. But if they are not literally true, then their claim

to univocallity is greatly weakened, for this claim relied on the notion that

these events were, so to speak, God's handwriting in the world, of which He

had revealed the proper interpretation. Will these signs, these characters and

places, then yield new meanings to an audience approaching them from a fresh

perspective? Eco gives hope that this may be so:

If a myth is a tale, then it is a text, and this text--as Bachofen said--is the exegesis of a symbol.... A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored to their context... To recognize this principle does not mean to support the "repressive" idea that a text has a unique meaning, guaranteed by some interpretive authority. It means, on the contrary, that any act of interpretation is a dialectic between openness and form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure. (1990:20-21)

This paper will proceed in the spirit of this dialectic.

II. God and Satan: Self and Shadow

The Twofold Truth and the Conjunctive Appetites of Oppositional Orexes.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 305

Two dominant figures in Paradise Lost are those of God and Satan. Aside from

being characters in a poem, and (possibly real) spiritual entities, what else

are these figures signs of? Certainly their depictions are signs of state of

mind of the depictor, and, as John Milton's thought can be taken as a lofty

summit standing out in a major strain of Christian theology, the Pauline

tradition (O'Keefe 1982), then they are also signs whose interpretation may

shed light on a stage in the development of the Western mind. To take these

signs as such does not imply that they are "merely" psychological, or that

they correspond to no metaphysical entities. As Jung puts it in Aion:

There is no question [in a psychological interpretation] of any intrusion into the sphere of metaphysics, i.e., of faith. The images of God and Christ [and, he would agree, of Satan] which man's religious fantasy projects cannot avoid being anthropomorphic and are admitted to be so; hence they are capable of psychological interpretation like any other symbol. (57)

Milton begins Paradise Lost with his famous program to "justifie the wayes of

God to men" (i. 26). It will be demonstrated that the need for this program

is the result of a particular conception of the Divine, and that both are

initimately tied to the figure of Satan as drawn in the poem.

A crucial problem for Christian in the Middle Ages and up through the time of

Milton was that of evil (Danielson 1982). Danielson, quoting Lactantius

quoting Epicurus, states the problem in one of its "oldest and most famous

formulations... :"

God... either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious... if... neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble... if He is both willing and able, which is alone suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them? (Ibid., p. 2-3)

This problem led directly to the formulation of the principle of privatio

boni, which held that "Evil therefore is nothing but privation of good" (Jung

1958:47), or, as Shoaf has it:

... good and evil, Milton implies, are an experiential confusion... and, in one sense anyway, an illusion. This is basically the Augustinian sense in which evil is considered to be a corruption or deficiency of the good. (1985:36)

Both Shoaf and Danielson go to great length to show that Milton has solved

Epicurus' problem through his creative use of this doctrine, illustrating

"that God is omnipotent, [and] that he is wholly good, [despite the fact] . .

. that evil exists in the world" (Danielson 1982:7). Although they use

different arguments to achieve this program, the attempt "remains a

euphemistic petitio principii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser

good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things.

[With Shoaf arguing primarily the former and Danielson the latter.] The false

conclusion necessarily follows from the premise 'Deus=Summum Bonum,' since it

is unthinkable that the perfect good could ever have created evil" (Jung

1958:49).

For instance, Danielson "solves" the "problem" of evil (and feels that Milton

did so as well) by pushing it back into the Chaos that was at the beginning.

By differentiating between the creation of Heaven and earth, which are

"bounded," and the earlier "boundless" Chaos (1982:46-47), he hopes to prove

that "God is good, and so is the stuff he makes" (ibid., p. 41). He contends

that "just as Milton needed the doctrine of creatio ex deo in order to

establish that the 'original matter... was good, and... contained the

seeds of all subsequent good' [CD, p. 308], so, in order that he might do

justice to the fact of <evil>, he needed to retain an infinite Chaos even

after the world was created" (ibid., p. 48). However, Danielson cannot decide

whether Chaos is God's responsibility or not. He says that "To allow the

seeds of good to grow and bear fruit beyond himself, God had first to make a

'beyond'" (ibid., p. 48). On the other hand, "in the preactual abyss of Chaos

there are evil possibilities as well" (ibid., p. 49). Of course, if God

created these "evil possibilities," then He is as responsible for evil as if

he had created evil itself, for surely, being omniscient, he knew that these

evil possibilities would be actualized. Moreover, Milton himself does not

view Chaos as a merely neutral force. In Paradise Lost, when Satan meets the

"Anarch old" who rules Chaos, he is told

... I know thee, stranger, who thou art,

That mighty leading Angel, who of late

Made head against Heav'ns King, though overthrown...

If that way [earth] be your walk, you have not farr;

So much the neerer danger; go and speed;

Havock and spoil and ruin are my gain.

(2.990-1009)

Danielson, while not desiring to deny God's omnipotence, agrees with Milton

when he says, in Christian Doctrine, that "In God a certain immutable

internal necessity to do good, independent of all outside influence, can be

consistent with absolute freedom of action" (1982:37). Danielson says of

God's omnipotence: "It must not be taken to mean power without any limits of

any sort whatsoever," citing specifically "The limitation imposed by the

principle of noncontradiction . . ." (ibid., p. 26). Now a limited

omnipotence would seem, tautologically, to be no sort of omnipotence at all,

and these "limitations" lead one to wonder who or what <prior> to God imposed

these limits. If God made the rules, He could make them whatever He wanted,

including the possibility that He could create round squares or even primes;

if He didn't, He hardly qualifies as God.

The source of this type of reasoning is made evident by an earlier statement

in Milton's Good God: "... I believe that there is a God who is omnipotent

and wholly good . . ." (9). Here is the petitio principii--Danielson begins

with the conclusion of his argument as his premise, which means that <any>

chain of reasoning, including the "need" for extra stages of Creation and the

concept of limited omnipotence, will lead him to the conclusion he has

already made. Likewise in Shoaf, one finds, nearly side by side, a statement

that no one could impair God, and, in support of the same argument, a quote

from Paradise Lost claiming that mankind was "created 'to repair his [God's]

numbers... impaired [by Satan's seduction of "well nigh half / The angelic

name"]'" (1985:16--insertions are Shoaf's).

Jung, in Aion, points out the fundamental problems with positions like those

espoused by Shoaf and Danielson, which they (probably correctly) attribute to

Milton as well.

The reason for this, as already indicated, is the doctrine of Summum Bonum... the hybris of the speculative intellect had already emboldened the ancients [see Epicurus above] to propound a definition of God that more or less obliged him to be the Summum Bonum. A Protestant theologian even had the audacity to assert that 'God <can> only be good'! Yahweh could certainly have taught him a thing or two in this respect, if he himself is unable to see his intellectual trespass against God's freedom and omnipotence (43).

Similarly, Thomas Merton, criticizes this attitude, which makes God into an

object to which certain fixed properties (like being completely good) can be

attributed:

But when God becomes object, he sooner or later 'dies,' because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object... contains so many internal contradictions [some of which we have just seen] that it [the concept] becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by an act of sheer will. For a long time man continued to be capable of this willfullness... [but now many] have let go of the 'God-object' which their fathers and grandfathers still hoped to manipulate for their own ends. (1968:23)

And from the other side of the world, comes the warning that "No matter what

god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief

will be based more or less on a self-centered idea" (Suzuki 1970:116).

It is no coincidence that the location to which Danielson pushes off the

source of evil is Chaos, described in Paradise Lost as

Illimitable Ocean without bound,

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and higth,

And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal Anarchie... (2.892-896)

a fair description of the night world of the unconscious mind, from which,

Jung contends, rises the shadow. When the ego identifies with a limited

portion of its totality (a God who can only be good), "the dark side of

things" appears in the form of a "Luciferian opponent" (1958:38-39): Satan,

whom Milton terms "the Enemie" (4.304), and "the Adversary of God and Man"

(2.629). Psychology "knows that equivalent opposites are necessary conditions

inherent in the act of cognition... [and that] it is not exactly probable

that anything so intrinsically bound up with the act of cognition should be

at the same time a property of the object. It is far easier to suppose that

it is primarily our consciousness which names and evaluates the differences

between things, and perhaps even creates differences where no differences are

discernible" (Jung 1958:50-51).

Their is ample evidence of the interdependence of the doctrine of God as the

Summum Bonum and the role of Satan in Paradise Lost. God is described as

"Heaven's all-powerful King" (2.851), and "Heav'ns high Arbitrator" (2.359),

who "Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heav'n" (1.124). He is in a contest

with Chaos, whose ruler Satan asks "if some other place / From your Dominion

won, th' Ethereal King / Possesses lately" (2.977-979), who complains back to

Satan that God has been encroaching so on his "Frontiers" that he has "little

left to defend" (2.998-1000). (This is precisely the role of the ego in

relation to the unconscious mind--to "encroach on its frontiers" by bringing

more psychic material to consciousness.) The "Towrs of Heav'n are fill'd /

With Armed watch, that render all access / Impregnable" (2.129-131). As Jung

states, if the self "shows no inclination whatever to recognize... [its]

projections... [then] one encounters projections, one does not make them .

. . The effect... is to isolate the subject from the environment"

(1958:8). The self encounters an archetypal force seemingly committed to "th'

unconquerable Will, / And the study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage

never to submit or yield" (Paradise Lost 1.105-108), bringing to the task "A

mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time" (ibid., 1.253). Milton rightly

recognizes that the shadow will never submit, and "Stand in his presence

humble, and receive / Strict Laws impos'd, to celebrate his Throne / With

warbl'd Hymns, and... Forc't Halleuiahs" (ibid., 1.240-243). The ego

cannot "over Hell extend / His Empire, and with Iron Scepter rule... as .

. . in Heav'n" (ibid., 2.326-328).

As Merton pointed out, God as an object is unworkable, but many of the

contradictions that arise from viewing the battles of Paradise Lost as

between an omnipotent, omniscient God and his "Adversary" evaporate before a

psychological reading of the same material. Satan wonders whether "Though

Heav'n be shut, / And Heav'ns high Arbitrator sit secure... this place may

lye expos'd / To the utmost border of his Kingdom . . ." (ibid., 2.358-362),

and hopes that "... with neighbouring Arms / And opportune excursion we may

chance / Re-enter Heav'n . . ." (ibid., 2.395-397). If it was just Satan who

viewed the matter in this light it might be written off to his own

foolishness, but, in fact, Heaven has a similar feeling that its borders and

plans are threatened. Raphael tells Adam of travelling "toward the Gates of

Hell; / Squar'd in full Legion (such command we had) / To see that none

thence issued forth a spie, / Or enemie, while God was in his work" (ibid.,

8.232-236). Uriel reports to Gabriel, while both keep watch over Paradise:

Gabriel, to thee thy cours by Lot hath giv'n

Charge and strict watch to this happie place

No evil thing approach or enter in;

This day at the higth of Noon came to my Sphear

A Spirit, zealous, as he seem'd, to know

More of th' Almighties works, and chiefly Man

Gods latest Image... (ibid., 4.561-567)

If an omnipotent and omniscient God has sent these angels to ensure that "no

evil thing approach or enter in," then He is playing games with them, for

surely He was aware of the approach of the most evil thing possible, and did

nothing to alert them to the fact. But interpreted psychologically, this

passage quite coherent reads that the ego feels the need to be on guard

against the forces of the unconscious, but that unconscious elements bypass

its defenses regardless.

But the continuation of this state of siege is only necessary from the point

of view of ego, or, as St. Paul would have it, sarx, which "in a larger sense

denotes the hostility of the human self to the divine absolute" (O'Keefe,

1982:28-29). It is the result of ego's attempt to maintain itself as

"all-powerful King." It can be seen that:

The interdependence of opposites... suggests that the the stands we take are rather illusory. How can we choose existence over non-existence, when each presupposes the other both logically and 'existentially'? Again, the 'truth' that illusion is illusory is founded on the 'illusion' that the truth is true. Though we may assert one value as ultimate, it seems that even an 'ultimate' value is the outcome of another choice.

In the 'order' of separately defined 'objects' established by measurement and distance, it makes sense to give one side of an opposition preference over another: to establish 'true' or 'false', 'beautiful' or 'ugly', 'higher' or 'lower'. But these distinctions are 'self-evident' only in being based on the evidence presented to a self. They depend on the values and interests of the self that knows. (Tulku, 1987:323)

III. Eden: The Realm of the Gods

'A crack?--in the gold--?'

'It isn't gold.' With which, somewhat strangely, Maggie smiled. 'That's the point.'

'What is it then?'

'It's glass--and cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that.'

'A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack.'

'If you mean by my idea the knowledge that has come to me . . .'

--Henry James, The Golden Bowl, p. 420

Adam and Eve begin life dwelling in Paradise, in "Uninterrupted joy, unrivald

love / In blissful solitude... " (Paradise Lost, 3.68-69). Yet this

Paradise "contains several surprises which are not minor and are not played

down" (Lewalski, 1971:87). The analysis of this "exegesis of a symbol" will

proceed employing the concept of "the realm of the gods," one of the

classifications of Buddhist psychology, classifications Chogyam Trungpa terms

"primarily emotional attitudes toward ourselves and our surroundings,

emotional attitudes colored and reinforced by conceptual explanations and

rationalizations" (1988:24). Trungpa says of the realm of the gods that ". .

. quite possibly we might believe this to be the permanent achievement of

enlightenment or union with God. At that moment everything we see appears to be beautiful, loving... because we have achieved oneness with ego. This is

the absolute, ultimate achievement of bewilderment . . ." (ibid., p. 26).

The first surprise in the Garden is the matter of the its over-luxuriant

growth. Adam and Eve are constantly engaged in landscaping chores, yet their

daily work they cannot keep pace with the Garden's fecundity. Lewalski points

out that

... even in the idyll of Book IV Adam observes that they can only barely cope on a day to day basis with the immense task of maintaining the Garden in a condition of ordered beauty, and indeed that it is a times marred by overgrown paths and 'unsightly' blossoms strewn about... Later, Eve makes the same point:... 'what we by day / Lop overgrown, or prop, or bind, / One night or two with wanton growth derides / Tending to wild' (IX,207-212)" (1971:91-92)

She goes on to conclude that

The implication of the analogy we have been tracing is that Adam and

Eve, like the Garden, have natures capable of a prodigious growth of good things, but which require constant pruning to remove excessive or unsightly growth, constant correction of overreaching tendencies, constant propping of possible weaknesses... (Ibid., p. 94)

Compare this need for constant attention to the Garden's state with Trungpa:

The fundamental occupation of the god realm is mental fixation, a meditative absorption of sorts, which is based upon ego... the meditator maintains himself by dwelling upon something. The particular topic of meditation, no matter how seemingly profound, is experienced as a solid body rather than as transparent. This practice of meditation begins with a tremendous amount of... 'self-development.' Actually the aim... is not so much to create the solidity of a place to dwell as it is to create the self-consciousness of the dweller" (1988:24-25).

Lewalski's second surprise "is its [the Garden's] perilous exposure despite

numerous safeguards" (1971:96). She continues:

... the Garden's physical protections are formidable... But Satan nevertheless 'At one slight bound high overleap'd all bound / Of Hill or highest Wall' (IV, 181-182). Also, the Garden is protected by angelic guards who seem to be curiously ineffective. Uriel... directs the disguised Satan to the earth. The militant Gabriel guards the gate of Paradise and about him exercise the "Youth of Heaven"... but they do not prevent Satan's first entry--or his second--into the garden... This perilous exposure of Eden in the midst of apparent security is the emblem of a moral reality which Milton sees as perpetual... (Ibid.)

Again, compare with Trungpa:

So the realm of the gods is not particularly painful, in itself. The pain comes from the eventual disillusionment. You think you have achieved a continually blissful state... you are dwelling on that. But suddenly something shakes you and you realize that what you have achieved is not going to last forever. (1988:27)

Eve has already begun feeling this pain when she complains to Adam "Frail is

our happiness, if this be so, / And Eden were no Eden thus expos'd" (Paradise

Lost, 9.340-341). The "something" that "suddenly shakes" Adam and Eve is, of

course, Satan. It is interesting to note that Satan's first appearance in the

Garden is as a cormorant perched on the Tree of Life in Book IV, and that in

Book IX he rises as a mist from the fountain close by that same tree. Life

itself will not allow this state to continue: Satan finally comes to Eve in

the form of a serpent, which, as Ken Wilber has it, "refers... to <all>

the lowest levels... of the Great Chain [of Being] (matter, vegetable, and

lower animal-bodily life)... All of this is simply collapsed, for

convenience,... and referred to collectively as the 'Uroboros,' the

serpent of nature . . ." (1983:22-23). And he goes on: "Whatever else we may

say, the serpent was there in Eden" (ibid., p. 23). The ego, whatever form of

defenses it raises, cannot ultimately protect itself from the basis of its

own existence, the physical world.

After the Fall, Adam and Eve "... in mutual accusation spent / The

fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, / And of their vain contest

appeer'd no end" (Paradise Lost, 9.1187-1189). Later Eve, contemplating

suicide, says of herself that she has been "Found so erroneous, thence by

just event / Found so unfortunate; nevertheless, /... vile as I am... "

(ibid., 10.969-971). As Trungpa says:

A sudden violence arises, the feeling that you have been cheated, that you cannot stay in this realm of the gods forever... You condemn yourself or the person who put you in the god realm or what brought you out of it... This [entire process] is called samsara, which literally means 'continual circle,' 'whirlpool,' the ocean of confusion which spins around again and again and again, without end. (1988:27)

IV. The Forbidden Sign

Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had ever received from her. 'Nothing--in spite of everything -- will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening . .

. We know nothing on earth--!' It was an undertaking he must sign.

So he wrote, as it were, his name. 'We know nothing on earth.' It was like the soldiers watchword at night.

'We're as innocent,' she went on in the same way, 'as babes.'

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, p. 297

We come now to "... the Tree / Of prohibition, root of all our woe"

(Paradise Lost, 9.644-645), and "The only sign of our obedience left" (ibid.,

4.428), in which hangs the forbidden fruit. As Shoaf points out, "The apple

too is a sign" (1985:31). But it is a sign of a curious sort. Eco, reaching

the conclusion of his analysis of the concept of signs, says "A sign is not

only something which stands for something else; it is also something that can

and must be interpreted" (1984:46). The apple, however, must <not> be

interpreted. It "... is a mysterious provocation" (Toliver, 1971:55), there

for another reason--to block interpretation:

Mediation is the issue. Before the Fall, there was a limit, marked by

a medium (the apple); this medium, obeying the structure of mediation,

interrupted that which it mediated--death (the knowledge of good and evil) .

. . But when Adam fell and transgressed [interpreted] the sign, he

obliterated the medium which had blocked, or interrupted, death... Before

the Fall, mediation, a 'veil,' had 'shadowed' Adam and Eve 'from knowing

ill.' (Shoaf, 1985:33-34).

When God brings the animals before Adam for naming, God "... 'endues' him

with a knowledge of their natures . . ." (Lewalski, 1971:100). These signs

act not as blocks to Adam's knowledge of the animals, but merely as pointers

to the mental segmentation of their signifieds into classes. But with the

apple arises a new sort of sign--one that hides its signified from us.

Eco contends that to "... interpret a sign means to define the portion of

the continuum which serves as its vehicle in its relationship with other

portions of the continuum... It means to define a portion through the use

of other portions . . ." (1984:44). As Milton says, "Our Death the Tree of

Knowledge grew fast by, / Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill"

(Paradise Lost, 4.221-222). But of course, without the knowledge of which

part of the continuum evil refers to it is impossible to know which half good

demarcates. Knowing only good leaves one in the position of the Electric Monk

in the novel by Douglas Adams (1987), who, fervently believing everything to

be a uniform shade of pink, was not able to see anything at all.

Adam and Eve's tasting of the fruit is their act of interpreting of the sign.

Eco tells us that "... the sign always <opens up> something new" (1984:44).

In discussing humanity's early "vegetation traditions", Bill Moyers and

Joseph Campbell conclude that, in them, "MOYERS:... death is life, and

life is death, and that the two are in accord?... CAMPBELL: That you have

to balance between death and life--they are two aspects of the same thing,

which is being, becoming" (1988:107-108). But after the Fall, death, always

latently present, is differentiated and made manifest as something apart from

life.

At the moment there is a sign whose import is too terrible to be interpreted,

the Fall has already occurred. Signs begin to mediate for their signifieds

rather than pointing to them. Human lives become conceptualized, as concepts

multiply in order to explain the paradoxes of other concepts: "For one

forbidden Tree a multitude / Now ris'n" (Paradise Lost, 10.554-555). Concepts

now stand between experience and reality, and rigid mental structures, such

as the ego, arise:

It is a succession of confusions that create ego. The process of ego actually consists of a flicker of confusion, a flicker of aggression, a flicker of grasping... So we build up an idea, a preconception, that self and other are solid and continuous. And once we have this idea, we manipulate our thoughts to confirm it, and are afraid of any contrary evidence. It is this fear of exposure, this denial of impermanence that imprisons us. It is only by acknowledging impermanence that there is a chance to die and the space to be reborn... (Trungpa, 1988:13)

V. And They Were Led to the Eastern Gate...

They were avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real, and they fell, again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together the same refuge.

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, p. 420

So Adam and Eve leave the Garden, and

They, looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late their happie seat,

Wav'd over by that flaming brand, the Gate

With dreadful faces throng'd and fierie Armes:

(Paradise Lost, 12.642-644)

Joseph Campbell elucidation of this symbolism is apt:

When Yahweh threw man out of the Garden, he put two cherubim at the gate, with a flaming sword between. Now, when you approach a Buddhist shrine, with the Buddha seated under the tree of immortal life, you will find at the gate two guardians--those are the cherubim, and you're going between them to the tree of immortal life... The cherubim at the gate--who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you'll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed--fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you're approaching a garden like that, and those two figures are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego as a function of a larger, eternal totality... you won't be afraid of those two figures, and you will go on through.

We're kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life. (1988:107)

MacCaffery shows that for Milton the

Deity is the Creator above all; the aptest epithet for the devil is the Destroyer. The contrast between the powers of life and the forces of death controls much of the language of the poem... Hell is 'a universe of death... Where all life dies, death lives' (ii.622-24). This view... held that life itself is a good. (1959:147-148)

This is the post-lapsarian world, where death is an evil to be feared and

life a good to be desired. Humanity's early myths possessed "fluid

boundaries," but they have been "fixed by a stiffening process" (ibid., p.

209). Language itself, as Shoaf points out, is fallen (1985:101). "We ask

our questions, then strain to hear the answer in the echo of our own voice"

(Tulku, 1987:228).

Conclusion

My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 627

Michael Fixler demonstrates strong correspondences between the Apocalypse and Paradise Lost. "Kermode," he says, "suggests that the Apocalypse is

essentially a paradigmatic model of the basic form of the imaginative

encounter with death" (1971:133), and so, therefore, is Paradise Lost. When

the mind rejects death, we enter the world of duality. For Shoaf, this entire

world has become "a means to another world" (1985:41). Man's "past, his

having-been, because significant, will survive his present agony and deliver

him to the future of the remembrance of others" (ibid., p. 42). Compare this

with Trungpa on presenting the self: "Self and objects... both arise

through a historical conditioning that makes the past the source of what is

real" (1987:176).

But from other perspectives these concerns of the dual mind may seem less

pressing.

Negative negativity refers to the philosophies and rationales we use to justify avoiding our own pain. We would like to pretend that these "evil" and "foul-smelling" aspects of our world are not really there, or that they should not be there, or even that they <should> be there... [it is] a way of trying to pretend that things are what we would like them to be nstead of what they are... [But] Basic negativity is very revealing, sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of its intelligence. (Trungpa, 1988:73-74).

In this paper, the characters, situations, and locales of Paradise Lost have

been treated as signs of the nature of the dual or fallen mind, that

believes in the ultimate reality its judgments and the divisions it has

created in the continuum. But there are other ways to view things than to

constantly judge them. The non-discriminating mind,

If it seems to judge and distinguish, it does so only to point beyond judgment to the pure void. It does not settle down in its judgment as final. It does not erect its judgment into a structure to be defended against all comers.

Here we can fruitfully reflect on the deep meaning of Jesus' saying:

"Judge not, and you will not be judged."... Cultural... forms are

there no doubt. There is no such thing as getting along without them...

But eventually there comes a time when like Moses we see the thornbush of

cultural and religious forms is suddenly on fire and we are summoned to

approach it without shoes... (Merton, 1968:6-7)

Trungpa warns us that "... [not evaluating] does not mean that... [the

one who doesn't evaluate] cannot differentiate day from night or breakfast

from lunch. It does not mean he becomes vague or woolly minded" (1973:176).

As Suzuki, quoting Dogen-zenji, puts it "Although everything has Buddha

nature, we love flowers, and we do not care for weeds" (1970:119).

To take this point of view on Paradise Lost does not diminish from Milton's

eminence as a writer and thinker. One of the great minds of his age, he

painted a masterpiece in which the terrain of his age's thought is

exquisitely mapped. But the work of interpretation goes on. As Umberto Eco

says,

The sign as the locus (constantly interrogated) for the semiosic process constitutes... the instrument through which the subject [the ego] is continuously made and unmade... Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis. And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress... The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from the previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think.

Bibliography

All quotations from Milton are from The Complete Poetry of John

Milton, edited by John T. Shawcross (Doubleday Anchor Books:

Garden City, New York, revised edition 1971). The quotations

from James Joyce are from Finnegans Wake (Penguin Books, New

York, reprinted 1984). The quotations from Henry James are from

The Golden Bowl (Penguin Books, New York, reprinted 1982).

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