"Satanic Tongues" in Paradise Lost?

Original Sin: Blinded by Idolatrous Love?

What did these two see in each other?

Illuminated Manuscript, Spain, circa 950-955 A.D.

El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo, Ms & II. 5 f° 18

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday's post considered Adam's idolatrous love for Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost, a devotion so vehement that Milton describes it as "uxorious" in his Christian Doctrine (John Carey, translator, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume 6, Maurice Kelley, editor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), page 383). Milton presents this love as having led Adam very far astray, as we already know.

Today's post picks up on my still-developing article immediately after the section posted yesterday:

If Adam is idolizing Eve, then he is guilty of idolatry, and from our investigation above, his actions would seem to constitute precisely that sort of religious error. Further to this point, as we have already seen, he characterizes Eve as "holy" and even calls her "divine":

O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all Gods works, Creature in whom excell'd
Whatever can to sight or thought be formd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! (PL 9.896-9)

Note how this putatively still unfallen, vocative address by Adam to Eve recalls Eve's own fallen, vocative, idolatrous address to the Tree of Knowledge:

O Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees
In Paradise, of operation blest
To Sapience . . . (PL 9.795-7)

She concludes her idolatrous address by literally worshipping the tree, or perhaps the power within:

So saying, from the Tree her step she turnd,
But first low Reverence don, as to the power
That dwelt within, whose presence had infus'd
Into the plant sciential sap, deriv'd
From Nectar, drink of Gods. (PL 9.834-838)

Her idolatry is thus paralleled by Adam's idolatry, his worship of Eve, and note that immediately following this passage in which Eve worships the tree comes the passage in which Adam weaves the garland for Eve as if he were a mere reaper honoring the revered "Harvest Queen."

Moreover, Adam's overpraise of Eve in his thoughts recalls the satanically possessed serpent's similar overpraise (cf. PL 9.615):

Fairest resemblance of thy Maker faire,
Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine
By gift, and thy Celestial Beautie adore
With ravishment beheld, there best beheld
Where universally admir'd; but here
In this enclosure wild, these Beasts among,
Beholders rude, and shallow to discerne
Half what in thee is fair, one man except,
Who sees thee? (and what is one?) who shouldst be seen
A Goddess among Gods, ador'd and serv'd
By Angels numberless, thy daily Train. (PL 9.538-548)

In unsuspectingly echoing the diabolical serpent's words, Adam effectively speaks with the serpent's tongue and thereby reveals his own already falling mind, for only seven lines down from calling Eve "holy" and "divine," Adam concludes that some enemy has ruined not only her but "mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee / Certain my resolution is to Die" (PL 9.906-7). Adam's mind falls still further as he soon begins to question whether breaking God's command was really wrong since the serpent had already touched the tree and eaten its fruit and further to question if death really will follow as the consequence.

Despite all of this mental conturbation -- if I may coin a Carrollean portmanteau word -- Adam is "not deceav'd" but is rationalizing "Against his better knowledge" (PL 9.998), allowing his reason to be led astray by his vehement, idolatrous love for Eve that expresses itself in a Satanic tongue . . . as Milton sees things, of course.