A man's reach should exceed his grasp.

Appall?

I've heard said that a woman's always does . . . but is that not an insult?

Maybe, maybe not. The decision depends on one's re-reading:

1. A woman's reach exceeds her grasp.

2. A woman's reach exceeds his grasp.

Arguably, number one is insulting, but number two is not.

Arguably, both are insulting.

Arguably, neither is insulting.

Homework: Think!

Firing from the lip!

The Goddess Juno

I wrote a blogpost back in 2010 suggesting that Eve was being depicted as serpent-like, and that post received this odd comment yesterday from a woman calling herself "Aquarian Ideals" (AI) who took issue with what she thought I'd said:

Yes clearly Eve is the "Hero" though not in Milton's Poem. I am not sure what you actually read to come up with that rather bold assertation. Milton went so far as to roofie Eve when the Arch Angel was bestowing all the wisdom of past and present on Adam because obviously that bitch couldn't be trusted. In fact, from the moment that they "fell" all culpability fell onto Eves shoulders despite being a mutual fault.

I didn't know what the commentator was referring to (serpent = "Hero"?) until I realized she was confusing me with an anonymous commentator who'd said that "everyone knows Eve is a hero." Anyway, AI appears to have a chip on her shoulder about history, for she tells me:

You are supposedly a history/politics buff, bully for you. Me too. I have taken the same plank of classes you have only I went one step further and got my English Degree as well because politics as of late seems to be a fools errand.

I very much doubt that this commentator has "taken the same plank of classes" that I've taken. But just to set the record straight on my specific degrees, I have a BA in British and American literature, an MA in history of science, and a PhD in history proper, but that's not good enough for a person who despite finishing her English degree cannot write a proper subjunctive sentence:

If you were such a History buff, perhaps you knew (sic "would know") that Milton had woman issues, not marrying until his mid to late 30's and when he did he married a teenager. He carried an over idealized idea of marriage so it lasted a whopping six months. Eventually they reconciled after years and years but my points the same, he was an interesting mess of weirdo who thought marriage was the perfect institution until reality slapped him in the face. This reality is rather spelled out into Paridise Lost. He vilifies Eve much like he vilified his wife for years. History is an interesting thing, it's all there for you to find, you don’t need to try to read into long winded over glorified text to get into the inferiority complexes of it all.

I have to say . . . I don't much cotton to haughty advice from someone maybe twenty years my junior, especially if that youngster can't distinguish between what I've written and what a commentator has written. If AI's 'advice' had been less arrogantly proffered, I might have responded here with more courtesy, but I won't let anyone talk down to me.

A Simple Tapestry . . .

God Accuses Adam and Eve after the Fall (ca. 1648)
(Click Image to Enlarge)
Pieter Coecke van Aelst
(August 14, 1502 - December 6, 1550)
Photo by Bruce White

New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art is displaying a beautiful exhibition titled "Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry" (October 8, 2014 - January 11, 2015). I especially like this scene depicting Adam clothed with a natural thong of what looks like a vine - but ought to be fig leaves - accusing Eve of the tresspass. God, by contrast, is clothed in a glowing red robe - and the serpent is clothed in its own red, white, and blue skin! In the distance - representing the future, but not the distant future - God clothes the two fallen humans with animal skins. I wonder what sort of animal (not the serpent, obviously, though that would have been appropriate), and why is God robed in red - has he been trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored? Most amazing of all, this image isn't painted, but woven!

Milton's serpent, incidently, is also colorful in PL 9.499-501:

. . . his Head
Crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes;
With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold

Different colors, of course, but this leads me to wonder about traditions concerning the serpent's coloring . . .

Anyway, go and see this exhibition for yourself.

Milton's Paradise Lost: Adam and Eve Should Have Known Better!

Eve and the Serpent
You'd think she'd have suspected . . .
By hawanja

I previously said that with respect to Adam and Eve's awareness of the foe's aims, the alert reader should consider PL 9.351-356, in which Adam elucidates faculty psychology further:

But God left free the Will, for what obeyes
Reason, is free, and Reason he made right
But bid her well beware, and still erect,
Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd
She dictate false, and misinforme the Will
To do what God expresly hath forbid . . .

On the Milton List I noted an implication of what God had forbidden, for God had forbidden only one thing, eating from the tree of knowledge:

Given that Adam said (9.356), "To do what God expresly hath forbid," Adam and Eve would seem to have an inkling that the foe would somehow try to get them to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, for what else could Adam be referring to? And what else could Eve have understood him to be referring to? Yet, Eve seems not to remember this . . .

I was challenged on my statement that Eve had forgotten the command, but I actually meant something a bit different, as I clarified:

[P]erhaps I wasn't clear. I meant that Adam's warning about doing what God had expressly forbidden implies that Adam knows - and that Eve should realize - that the foe they face will use the tree of knowledge in some way to try to mislead them, yet they also seem simultaneously not to know this, since otherwise they would speak more directly about avoiding the tree.

I also think that if Eve was expecting the foe to use the tree, she should have recognized that she had met the foe as soon as the serpent led her to the Tree of Knowledge.

Why didn't she?

Virginia Woolf and the Eve of Mankind . . .

Virginia Woolf

Roger Fry

Wikipedia

I've borrowed from the Milton Reading Room the following lines from Book 4 in which Eve awakens to discover two skies:

That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awak't, and found my self repos'd [ 450 ]
Under a shade of flours, much wondring where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread
Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov'd [ 455 ]
Pure as th' expanse of Heav'n; I thither went
With unexperienc't thought, and laid me downe
On the green bank, to look into the cleer
Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie.
As I bent down to look, just opposite, [ 460 ]
A Shape within the watry gleam appeard
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleas'd I soon returnd,
Pleas'd it returnd as soon with answering looks
Of sympathie and love; there I had fixt [ 465 ]
Mine eyes till now, and pin'd with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warnd me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow staies [ 470 ]
Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee
Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy
Inseparablie thine, to him shalt beare
Multitudes like thy self, and thence be call'd
Mother of human Race: what could I doe, [ 475 ]
But follow strait, invisibly thus led?
Till I espi'd thee, fair indeed and tall,
Under a Platan, yet methought less faire,
Less winning soft, less amiablie milde,
Then that smooth watry image; back I turnd, [ 480 ]
Thou following cryd'st aloud, Return faire Eve,
Whom fli'st thou? whom thou fli'st, of him thou art,
His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, neerest my heart
Substantial Life, to have thee by my side [ 485 ]
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half: with that thy gentle hand
Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelld by manly grace [ 490 ]
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.

The Milton List was discussing this passage, in which Milton offers Adam as an object of adoration for Eve, and one scholar pointed out that Virginia Woolf alludes to this passage in her essay "A Room of One's Own":

My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night . . . . A solicitor's letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. (page 45)

Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky. (page 48)

In other words, instead of a husband to support her, she could rely on her aunt's money and substitute this guy -- I mean the sky! -- for a gentleman she'd have had to marry if she'd had no money.

I wonder if Woolf noticed the pun . . . even perhaps intended it?

Quino's Fall from Eden

Eden

by

Quino

Yesterday, Dario Rivarossa posted the link to this political cartoon by Joaquín Salvador Lavado, better known as Quino, and provided the following details:

The Original Sin seen by the great Argentine comic artist Quino. From a mid-1980s book I just happened to reread.

But Dario neglected to specify the book, so I cannot provide proper and fitting attribution. I must therefore plagiarize . . . until such time as Dario posts a redeeming comment to get me off the hook. No, I'm not identifying myself with that serpent on the pole (which I assume is no visual pun on John 3:14 and Numbers 21:4-9; cf. Genesis 3:1-24) Anyway, would that Dario could likewise unhook Adam and Eve, who have gotten themselves into a tight spot, one with significant sociopolitical repercussions, I'd wager, "for the wages of sin is death"! Or so says Paul in Romans 6:23. By the way, I've never liked this verb "is" in this verse from the King James Version of the Bible, for it seems to 'sin' against grammar. Did the KJV translation committee think that "wages" is singular? Or that such wages do not apply to their grammatical sin? Or were they simply insincere? Quite a singular reading of a plural ending, in any case!

Anyway, the Adam and Eve story gets returned to again and again, subjected to hermeneutic reinterpretations, both before and after Paul, even by me here, if one is interested in finding out . . .

Fallenness in a Darwinian World?

St. Augustine

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

(Wikipedia)

The painting above dates to 1480 and is said to depict St. Augustine at prayer, though his eyes are open. They are, however, directed upward, as though contemplating spiritual realities. This saint, however, also observed earthly realities, such as the radical evil of human beings, which he thought due to the enslavement of the human will by our sinful nature, which he argued was biologically inherited from Adam and Eve, who had fallen from innocence into evil by their violation of God's command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

My cyberfriend Bill Vallicella has been blogging on human evil, as I noted in a recent blog entry of my own -- "Fallenness as the Human Condition" -- on an article about "original sin" in the journal First Things:

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

I emailed Bill to let him know of my implicit 'hat tip' to him, and in noting an intriguing argument presented in the First Things article, I posed a query:

I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .

Bill has since responded to my query with another blog post, titled "Original Sin in a Darwinian World." I cannot do justice to his argument by a summary, so I urge interested readers to go directly to his own post, but I can indicate some of his argument as it relates to my query.

Bill rejects Augustine's view that guilt is inherited, so he absolves us of any guilt due to inheritance, what he calls "originated original sin" (following Kant), basing his view on our moral intuition that we are only morally culpable for actions or inactions over which we have control, i.e., libertarian freedom. In place of Augustine's view, Bill offers what he calls "originating original sin" (again following Kant), by which he means that the fact of our evil actions or inactions can be understood as due to our fallenness -- and Bill cites Kant explicitly on this point -- "as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." This distinction is presented in more detail in Bill's post on Kant's distinction "between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum)."

Bill also rejects a literal reading of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, for he takes seriously the evidence for evolution. Hence his response to my query radically reinterprets the meaning of the Biblical account, and he follows Kant in this:

Man enjoys dual citzenship. As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter. In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions. But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free. Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'

Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent. It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited: there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is not inherited] is true. But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time. It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.

How is the predisposition imputable? It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice. And so there is originating original sin. Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is imputable] is true.

If I understand Bill, then our fallenness, which follows from original sin, is to be understood as a state into which we have fallen due to an originating original sin that each one of us commits by acting (or 'inacting') wrongly at some first time in our lives, an action (or inaction) over which we had free control.

If I have understood Bill correctly, this seems to leave open a question that still requires an answer: Why do we, in our original innocence and freedom, choose evil? Admittedly, the same question can also be posed about the traditional story of Adam and Eve.

The Fall Had Its Price . . .

Apple Juice

(Image from Bar Code Revolution)

I stumbled across this form of artistic license just this morning by way of LinkedIn, which indirectly linked me to an article from two years ago by Cliff Kuang for Fast Company titled "In Japan, Even the Barcodes Are Well Designed" (November 9, 2009), which in turn linked to a gallery of aesthetically rendered barcode images, from which I've borrowed the 'apple' above.

As we see, Eve ought to have checked the price before she plucked that cherry-red, virginal 'apple', for as Milton shows in a subtle bait-and-switch, the price is too high for an ambiguous fruit becoming a fuzzy peach that "downy smiled" -- or, as I re-imagine, turning to the more acrid juice of Apfesinensaft through that original apple's sin-sap.

Although . . . we might recall a poem that I wrote nearly three years ago in which that bite into the apple results mostly in a sour wine:

Paradise Gainsaid

There is a garden in thy grace
Where trees of lively knowledge grow,
An earthy paradise to face
The harvest fruits of all our woe.
Here apples ferment, by and by,
Till tears of Apfelwein we cry,

If cry we must, when eyes disclose
That occidental sun aglow
Decline toward that which never shows
Its face though faced with that flambeaux.
Yet face it must we, by the bye,
Till tears of Apfelwein we cry.

Yet in this earthy garden still,
How statue-like I see thee stand
To counter time that comes to kill
All thou attempt with eye or hand,
From sacred apples' last good-bye
Till tears of Apfelwein we cry.

You thus see how things never turn out quite as they seem, for "Þe forme to þe fynisment foldez ful selden -- or as I once punned in a similar vein, "Wir bringen alles zusammen . . . um," which sounds initially as though it would mean "We bring everything together" but ends up meaning "We kill everything together."

Thus we find bitter truth in the reminder that "The beginning and the end accord hardly ever . . ."

R. A. Shoaf on Milton and Puns

R. A. Shoaf on Milton as Poet

(Image from Amazon)

R. A. Shoaf, author of Milton, Poet of Duality: A Study of Semiosis in the Poetry and the Prose, provides some interesting ideas on what it is "about a pun that makes it a figure for the effects of the Fall" in Paradise Lost (page 61). He suggests that "Geoffrey Hartman offers a helpful clue," namely:

You can define a pun as two meanings competing for the same phonemic space or as one sound bringing forth semantic twins, but, however you look at it, it's a crowded situation. Either there is too much sound for the sense or too much sense for the sound.

Shoaf quotes this on page 61, citing Hartman's article "The Voice of the Shuttle" (Beyond Formalism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, page 347). Shoaf then argues that "[a] pun . . . is a moment of confusion, and confusion is the prime effect of the Fall" (page 61). He quotes Milton's Christian Doctrine: on the meaning of death as punishment for the first sin:

This death consists, first, in the loss or at least the extensive darkening of that right reason, whose function it was to discern the chief good, and which was as it were, the life of the understanding. [CD I.12, YE 6:395] (Shoaf, page 61)

Confusion therefore immediately results after partaking of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Shoaf has already analyzed this confusion earlier in his article, showing the effect of the Fall upon Adam:

After Eve has sacrificed Adam, "fondly overcome with female charm" (PL 9.999), to her own desire and he has eaten of the fruit, he begins "to dalliance [to] move [her]":

'Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste,
And elegant, of sapience no small part,
Since to each meaning savour we apply,
And palate call judicious.' [PL 9.1016-20]

Much is readied in the word dalliance, of course: we know that what follows will be frivolous, not severe, and we also know that frivolity at this is tasteless. Adam's dalliance is a frivolous pun on sapience, which, however, for all its frivolity from his of view, from ours sounds heavy with the Fall itself -- it is the d(e)-alliance of the Fall (cf. PL 2.819 for the same pun) -- especially if, as readers of Milton, we remember Comus tempting the Lady just before her brothers rescue her: "'Be wise, and taste . . .'" (C 812) -- of course, ifi the Lady tastes (sapio, -ere), she is not wise (sapient). In the word sapience, Adam has confused the sense "taste" and the sense "wisdom" or "judiciousness," to each of which "savour we apply," where the sense "knowledge" (savoir) is replete, beyond Adam's knowing, with the crime he and Eve have just committed. The word sapience is now evidence of the Fall. (Shoaf, Milton, Poet of Duality, pages 60-61)

Shoaf argues that Eve ought to have used her right reason to recognize Satan's puns, distinguish their duality, and resist, but she is deceived by Satan's wordplay, "[a]nd then, convinced by this contradiction in terms, she eats the apple; and with this act, Milton will write, she 'knew not eating death' (PL 9.792), where the four words are syntactically what the pun is semantically -- the confusion of senses (she did not know she was eating death; she did not know [sense: 'connaître'] death who eats [cf. PL 10.597,609]). (Shoaf, Milton, Poet of Duality, page 70)

Thus have we returned to where I left off in my analysis of "knew not eating death." I believe that I can make use of Shoaf's analysis to show how this line in Milton's Paradise Lost incorporates a confusion of languages that parallels the confusion of meanings in puns.

More later . . .

Milton's Serpentine Demons Eating 'Apples of Sodom'

Apples of Sodom

They don't look so 'apple-tizing' . . .

(Image from Wikipedia)

My cyber-friend and fellow Milton scholar Carter Kaplan suggested that I cite the passage in Paradise Lost 10 where the demons in Hell are forcibly made to assume serpentine form and eat the ashy Apples of Sodom:

Jeffery, at some point are you going to turn this discussion upon the horrific descriptions in Book X of devils hungering and eating ash, and so on?

I half-demurred:

Maybe not, since I'm focusing on Eve's 'mistake' . . . but perhaps I'll take another look, now that you mention it.

What the Hell (so to speak), let's take a look at the crucial passage (PL 10.547-572), which comes hard after the demons' transformation ("thir change"):

. . . There stood [547]
A Grove hard by, sprung up with this thir change,
His will who reigns above, to aggravate
Thir penance, laden with Fruit like that [ 550 ]
Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
Us'd by the Tempter: on that prospect strange
Thir earnest eyes they fix'd, imagining
For one forbidden Tree a multitude
Now ris'n, to work them furder woe or shame; [ 555 ]
Yet parcht with scalding thurst and hunger fierce,
Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,
But on they rould in heaps, and up the Trees
Climbing, sat thicker then the snakie locks
That curld Megæra: greedily they pluck'd [ 560 ]
The Frutage fair to sight, like that which grew
Neer that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam'd;
This more delusive, not the touch, but taste
Deceav'd; they fondly thinking to allay
Thir appetite with gust, instead of Fruit [ 565 ]
Chewd bitter Ashes, which th' offended taste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayd,
Hunger and thirst constraining, drugd as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writh'd thir jaws
With soot and cinders fill'd; so oft they fell [ 570 ]
Into the same illusion, not as Man
Whom they triumph'd once lapst. (PL 10.547-572)

In refering to "Frutage fair to sight, like that which grew / Neer that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam'd," Milton is thinking of the so-called "Apples of Sodom," mentioned in Josephus:

The country of Sodom . . . was of old a most happy land, both for the fruits it bore and the riches of its cities, although it be now all burnt up. It is related how, for the impiety of its inhabitants, it was burnt by lightning; in consequence of which there are still the remainders of that divine fire, and the traces [or shadows] of the five cities are still to be seen, as well as the ashes growing in their fruits; which fruits have a color as if they were fit to be eaten, but if you pluck them with your hands, they dissolve into smoke and ashes. (Flavius Josephus, The Wars Of The Jews, translated by William Whiston, Baltimore: Armstrong and Plaskitt, 1835; Book IV, Chapter 8, Section 4; page 517a)

I failed to locate the original Greek text of Josephus online, but perhaps some knowledgeable reader can do so. Anyway, this connection to Josephus is well known (though perhaps not Milton's only source). See, for example, Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (Cambridge University Press, 2005), both text and footnote. Neither Josephus nor Milton, however, calls the fruit by the name "Apples of Sodom." I wonder who first did. They are also known as "Dead Sea Apples" or "Apples of Asphaltus," and the scientific name is Solanum sodomæum (or Solanum sodomaeum). According to Wikipedia, "Apple of Sodom . . . [is] a name derived from the Hebrew Tapuah Sdom" (תַּפּוּחַ סְדוֹם), but I wonder if perhaps the Hebrew name derives from English or some other language since tapuah is postbiblical Hebrew, if I recall correctly.

More to my interest in today's post, however, one could argue that the demons -- in their serpentine form -- are imitative of Eve, and quite explicitly so, for the passage in Paradise Lost speaks of them being tempted in a grove "laden with Fruit like that / Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve / Us'd by the Tempter: on that prospect strange / Thir earnest eyes they fix'd, imagining / For one forbidden Tree a multitude / Now ris'n" (PL 10.550-555). They pluck it greedily, apparently as Eve plucked the forbidden fruit, and seem to attempt to gorge themselves on it as Eve did.

But I don't see much for my purposes here, for the parallels are rather general, albeit worth noting.

Sebastian Franck: "All Mankind, doe Eate Death"

The Golden Ark

Sebastian Franck

Augsberg 1538

(Image from Noah's Ark)

Readers will perhaps recall earlier investigations of Sebastian Franck, also known as Augustinus Eleutherius. I had developed an interest in this German reformer because of a book of his that was translated into English in the early 1600s with the intriguing title, The Forbidden Fruit: Or a Treatise of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, of which Adam at the First, and as yet All Mankind, doe Eate Death (listed in A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain. Including the Works of Foreigners Written in, or Translated into the English Language, Volume 2, by Samuel Halkett and John Laing, 1883, 2006).

I have since located the original German title from 1538, the same year that saw published Die Guldin Arch (The Golden Ark), which has nothing to do with my point today, but it makes a fine image. Anyway, here's that German title to The Forbidden Fruit:

Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boeses, davon Adam den Tod hat gegessen, und noch heute alle Menschen den Tod essen, was der sei, und wie er noch heute jedermann wie Adam verboten sei (Sebastian Franck, Augspurg: Durch Phillip _, 1538)

As previously admitted, I don't know if John Milton was familiar with Franck's book. If I recall, Milton didn't read German, so if he did know Franck's ideas, he would likely have learned of them from the English translation, but familiarity might not breed content. We need to look more closely. The Milton scholar William Poole, in Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge University Press, 2005), explains Franck's ideas on devouring the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge:

It was Franck's The Forbidden Fruit, . . . under the supposed authorship of 'Augustinus Eleutherius', which was to be the most influential of his writings in English circles. A translation appeared in 1640, marked 'Amsterdam', and a distinct text was printed in London two years later. John Everard's own manuscript translation had already been in some circulation. (Everard got into considerable trouble for his translations, and was made to read out a list of retractions on his knees before William Laud in late 1639.) Notably, Franck's work appears in the library catalogues of both George Fox (who lists a lost 1650 edition produced by Calvert) and, later, the Quaker bibliophile Benjamin Furley, and Franck has accordingly been proposed as an influence on early Quakerism. Certainly, in 1676 the Quaker Hilary Prach was writing from London to a German Quaker friend that he had himself just finished a translation of Franck on the forbidden tree into English, 'because it agreed with our position'.

For Franck, the narrative of creation and fall is both literal and allegorical, 'as the thing was done outwardly, so the same . . . happened inwardly in the heart of Adam; 'the exterior world, and whatsoever outwardly is to be seene or is done, is onely an accident and a certaine signifying figure of the true and interior nature.' Literal and allegorical modes fuse . . . . Franck . . . stays close to what he sees as the literal signification of the text. Thus, of the forbidden tree, 'who should eate thereof, their eyes should be opened to view themselves, and they be made Gods, and so know both Good and Evill'. The interior meaning of this verse applies, as Augustine might have agreed, to 'nothing else but our owne will and knowledge'. Commenting on the incluxion of good as well as evil in the name of the forbidden tree, Franck infers that the prelapsarians were ignorant of both: 'they walk[ed] in innocencie . . . ignorant both of Good and Evill'. This state, rather than being something quite out of our grasp, is one we should labor to regain, and Franck associates this with 'unlearning': 'We must therefore learne to forget, and unlearne whatsoever Adam knew, or doth know, wils, loves, &c.' (pages 60-61)

Milton's views on the Fall would appear to differ from Franck's. I can't see the polymath Milton calling for unlearning what we know. Milton looks not backward, but ahead. Nevertheless, he might have been struck by the wording of Franck's title, specifically the words (den Tod essen) translated as "Eate Death," though the concept was not absent from Milton's literary environment even without Franck, as we have previously seen.

Anyway, for those interested, there are more books to read on Franck:

Hermann Bischof, Sebastian Franck und deutsche Geschichtschreibung: ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte vorzüglich des XVI. Jh (Riecker, 1857)

Yvonne Dellsperger, Lebendige Historien und Erfahrungen: Studien zu Sebastian Francks "Chronica Zeitbuoch vnnd Geschichtbibell" (1531/1536) (Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH &, 2006)

Here's one on Franck's ideas, by the man himself:

Sebastian Franck, Paradoxa, edited by Siegfried Wollgast (Akademie Verlag, 1995)

There is also more to know about Herr Franck, but not for me. I've already gone further with him than is even useful for my project on the meaning of Paradise Lost 9.792, "And knew not eating death."

Gordon Campbell on Milton's Grecism: "And knew not eating death"

Sederi Yearbook for 1993

(Spanish and Portuguese Society

for

English Renaissance Studies)

I've previously noted Gordon Campbell's views on Milton's Grecism, but that was from an unpublished conference paper. Yesterday, however, I located a published paper by Campbell, "Milton and the Languages of the Renaissance" (Sederi 4, 1993, edited by Teresa Guerra Bosch, pages 11-21), that has some words on the same issue:

[An] effect of [Milton's] multilingualism that I should like to consider is the case of words and phrases in one language that can only be understood by reference to another. One of the most fertile examples of such phrases occurs in Book IX of Paradise Lost (792), at the moment when Eve eats the apple:

Greedily she engorged without constraint (sic.)
And knew not eating death.

Milton is imitating a Greek construction in which the verb "to know" is followed by a nominative participle without repitition of the subject. At one level, then, the line means "not knowing that she was eating death". The purpose of the Hellenism is of course to introduce a Latinism, mors edax, death that devours. The same thing happens in Samson Agonistes (840): "knowing, as needs I must, by thee betrayed", which means both "knowing that I was betrayed by thee" and "knowing myself to be betrayed". (Campbell, "Milton and the Languages," page 19)

I might have to email Professor Campbell to obtain clarification on the point about Samson Agonistes, for I don't quite catch his meaning, and I'd like to understand this since two apparent instances of the same type of Grecism would strengthen the likelihood that Milton really was borrowing from Greek grammar. Readers more perspicacious than I can also offer clarification.

As for the "mors edax, death that devours," I've previously looked into much this very same morbid issue.

Oppian of Corycus, Halieutica 2.106: "They knew not hastening their death"

Pseudo-Oppianos, Kynegetica

(Poem on Hunting)

Cod. gr. 479, fol. 59 r

(Image from Art for Everyone)

The above image is from an 11th-century illuminated Byzantine manuscript of Kynegetica, by Pseudo-Oppianos, not from Halieutica, by Oppian of Corycus, who lived during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (121-180), but since I find the color blue lovely in this image and since Oppian's poem is about fishing, I decided to go with this anyway. According to the Art for Everyone website, the image shows "[t]hree fishers fishing with . . . nets at night," adding that "a lamp is used to attract the fish."

I was looking for something on Oppian of Corycus because his poem on the art of fishing, or Halieutica, makes use of the Greek nominative participle after a verb of knowing, as I discovered from re-checking the note to Book 9.792 ("And knew not eating death") in Alastair Fowler's 1998 annotated edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost:

Oppian, Halieutica ii 106, σπεύδοντες ὄλεθρον, 'knew not hastening their death.' (Fowler, Paradise Lost, Second Edition, London and New York: Longman, 1998, page 516)

Fowler doesn't say how he found that Oppian had used this participle, but I believe that I've located his source:

The Poetical Works of John Milton: With Notes of Various Authors, by Henry John Todd (London: Law and Gilbert, 1809)

The first printing was 1801, but I have no access to that issue. Anyway, here's what Mr. Todd has to say on page 79 about Paradise Lost 9.792, "And knew not eating death":

It is a Greek phrase, used often by the Latins too. Oppian, Halieut. ii. 106.

---------- οὐδ᾽ ἐνόησαν ἑὸν σπεύδοντες ὄλεθρον.

They knew not hastening their death. Eating the fruit which brought death, was eating death, as being virtually contained in it.

Richardson

I presume that "Richardson" refers to "Mr. R. Richardson, of Clare-Hall, Cambridge," whom Todd calls "the earliest vindicator of Milton from the invidious charges of Lauder." The "Mr. R. Richardson" would be Richard Richardson, the "Lauder" would be William Lauder, and the "invidious charges" would be Lauder's accusation that Milton had plagiarized, as I learn from Dawn Shawcross ("Richardson against Lauder's allegations (1747)," John Milton: 1732-1801, Routledge, 1996).

Concerning the Greek offered above, for those who wish a closer look at the diacritical marks, the line in Mr. Todd's text can be enlarged. And for those whose Greek is better than my own, here's a link to a Greek edition of Halieutica (just click and then scroll down to ii. 106). Perhaps someone with the requisite Greek skills can explain the context to this clause, "They knew not hastening their death" (οὐδ᾽ ἐνόησαν ἑὸν σπεύδοντες ὄλεθρον). Whose death? What hastened it?

As readers may recall, I'm looking into Milton's reason for using the awkward expression in PL 9.792, "And knew not eating death," and the search is taking me many places.

"Nor did they not perceave the evil plight"

Adam and Eve (1510)

Jan Gossart

(Image from Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The painting above is of a fallen Adam and Eve, newly cognizant of their sinful state, though today's blog heading borrows a line that refers to the fallen angels, newly aware of their fallenness, but what I really want to return to is a situation involving Eve's lack of cognizance in the line "And knew not eating Death," a line that I've been looking into recently and that I'll get to again further down in today's entry. But first things first. In Paradise Lost 1.314-336, John Milton describes Satan, awakened in Hell, calling out to awaken his fallen companions:

He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep
Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates, [ 315 ]
Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once yours, now lost,
If such astonishment as this can sieze
Eternal spirits; or have ye chos'n this place
After the toyl of Battel to repose
Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find [ 320 ]
To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav'n?
Or in this abject posture have ye sworn
To adore the Conquerour? who now beholds
Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood
With scatter'd Arms and Ensigns, till anon [ 325 ]
His swift pursuers from Heav'n Gates discern
Th' advantage, and descending tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.
Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n. [ 330 ]
They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung
Upon the wing, as when men wont to watch
On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread,
Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake.
Nor did they not perceave the evil plight [ 335 ]
In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel;

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, December, 2010.]

In his book on John Milton's Paradise Lost, the game-changing Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish offers a fruitful, if well-known and hotly disputed analysis of the fallen angels awakening in Hell to the drawing power of Satan's admirable rhetoric that we've just heard above:

Any admiration one might have for Satan's rhetoric as a piece of strategy is submerged in the terrible irony of 'Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n' (330). What is meant to be the climactic moment in a nicely calculated call to action becomes in effect the most damning of self-revelations, no less damning because it is unconscious. Of course the fallen angels do awake and do rise, 'abasht'. but Milton will not allow Satan even a small success. His forces are only half awake ('ere well awake'):

Nor did they not perceive the evil plight
In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel.
(335-6)

The double negative is unexpected, and for an instant the sense of the line remains unresolved. Do they or don't they perceive? Actually, they do and they don't and by forcing the hesitation Milton leads the reader to understand how the alternatives he hovers between are equally true. They do perceive the fire, the pain, the gloom, but they are blind to the moral meaning of their situation, that is to their evil plight. (Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, Second Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, page 99)

The hesitation, the hovering between alternatives, is occasioned by the unexpected double negative, a slightly awkward moment to one's pace in the reading of the text as the hell-bound angels perceive their fall from grace, or so Fish has taught me to see, for he twice in his analysis of Milton's epic calls attention to Milton's use of awkwardness, on page 33, where Fish notes the reader's struggle with "an awkward, backward-moving perspective" to understand the poem's opening lines, and on page 130, where Fish notes the placing of words "too conspicuously awkward to be accidental . . . . [but which] are there to create problems or puzzles which the reader feels obliged to solve." Thus does the awkwardness in Paradise Lost 9.791-792 -- an awkwardness often attributed to Milton's use of a Greek grammatical paradigm, the nominative participle that follows verbs of perception or knowing -- take on added significance as the reader reads the following lines and pauses, precariously off-balance, wrong-footed by the un-English grammar and the consequent ambiguity between two possible readings:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length . . .

The awkward clause "And knew not eating Death" thus reads without grace, thereby signifying the fall from grace into sin as death enters Eve and her world.

Though not yet knowing, all too soon, she and Adam will grow cognizant of what they will both have eaten . . .

John Milton: Half in Love with "eating Death"?

Satan Tempts Milton?

Illustration by Edward Sorel

Watch out for Satan's Teutonic Faust!

(Image from The New Yorker)

In looking for information about John Milton's famous line on Eve's fall from innocence, "And knew not eating Death" (Paradise Lost 9.792) I came upon a reference to a presentation in 2007 at a Princeton University Conference on Renaissance Hellenism. The paper was titled "'And knew not eating death': Milton's Greek" and was presented by the Milton scholar Gordon Campbell, of the University of Leicester, in England.

I contacted Professor Campbell, who graciously sent me a copy of his unpublished paper, which has the following pertinent and quite helpful paragraph on the expression:

In Book 9 of Paradise Lost Eve eats the apple, and the narrator says 'Greedily she engorged without restraint,/ And knew not eating death'. If you try it in English, it might mean 'she was unaware while she ate death' or even 'she knew, not eating [imminent] death', neither of which is entirely convincing. If, however, you listen for Latin echoes, then mors edax emerges. That makes sense, but the Latinate sense of 'she knew not death that devours' is complemented by a Greek sense, because the phrase imitates a Greek construction in which the verb 'to know' is followed by a participle (in the nominative) without repetition of subject; in this syntax, it means 'and knew not that she was eating death'. This, I think is the primary meaning, and it is enriched by the secondary sense, which is Latin. Greek syntax flowed through Milton's veins.

The Latin "mors edax," of course, means "death devours," emphasizing Death's' action in devouring Eve ("eating" = "Death was eating"), a sense of death that we've recently learned quite well on this blog. The Greek influence turns the meaning to Eve's action in devouring Death ("eating" = "she was eating"), which Professor Campbell takes to express "the primary meaning," albeit "enriched by the secondary sense, which is Latin." He doesn't explicitly state why he takes the Greek to be primary here, but I think that he finds it so because it makes sense of the syntax, i.e., "the verb 'to know' is followed by a participle (in the nominative) without repetition of subject" ("eating" = "she was eating"). I'll need to reflect on this point some more, as well as upon possible English meanings that one could read into Milton's line without recourse to Latin or Greek, for I'm not sure that Professor Campbell two readings -- "she was unaware while she ate death" and "she knew, not eating [imminent] death" -- are the only ones. But such questions just make the line "And knew not eating Death" all the more fascinating for those readers intent on being among Milton's "fit audience . . . though few" (PL 8.31), a non-Calvinist, secular state of election achieved through hard work.

By the way, I've used Milton's capitalized "Death" because I take it to be the original and think that the majuscule better captures the personified character of Death in Paradise Lost than the minuscule, but I suppose that I need to check this point by seeing if Milton originally capitalized this fatal, fateful term.

Anyway, the expression remains awkward in English, despite the Greek explication, so Milton's' use of it remains to be explained.

The Tenth International Milton Symposium: August 22-26, 2011

Image from IMS10

I don't recall that I've mentioned this before, but I submitted a proposal back in early September to present a paper at the Tenth International Milton Symposium (IMS10), to be held in Tokyo from August 22-26, 2011. As things should happen to turn out, my proposal has been accepted. A recent email confirms:

Thank you for your proposal for a paper to be read at the tenth International Milton Symposium, which has now been considered by members of the Programme Committee. I am pleased to inform you that it has been accepted for inclusion in the programme. Apologies for the slightly tardy response to your submission. See you in Tokyo!

I didn't notice any tardiness on their part (I was the one who applied late), but time flies by quickly for me, so fast that another email appeared only a few days later, offering two links:

Please review your names and paper titles now posted on the IMS10 web site here . . . . Also please view the list of plenary speakers for the conference here. We will have the titles for the plenary talks posted soon.

If you've clicked on the "names and paper titles," you'll have seen mine:

Milton's 'Awkward' Grecism: "know" with Nominative Participle - Horace Jeffery Hodges, Ewha Womans University, Seoul

Some Gypsy Scholar readers might recall that I was looking into this very issue within the past few months (also here). Now that the proposal has been accepted, I reckon I'll have to look into the issue a little bit more.

The last time I posted on this, I was led astray by the erring, errant, arrant, slytherin, pre-Adamitic serpent . . .

Dante's Geryon and a 'Serpentine' Adam?

Geryon

Gustave Doré

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a couple of recent posts, I've suggested that not just Eve, but Adam himself is somewhat 'Serpentine' in Paradise Lost. The first post was on September 27, 2010:

Milton also portrays Adam as serpentine. Early in the passage where Eve is being tempted by Satan, she is told by the 'Serpent':

Amid the Tree now got, where plenty hung
Tempting so nigh, to pluck and eat my fill [ 595 ]
I spar'd not, for such pleasure till that hour
At Feed or Fountain never had I found. (PL 9.594-597)

(Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, September, 2010.)

Now in fact, the 'Serpent' possessed by Satan never did take even a single bite from the Tree of Knowledge, but note the Devil's claim: "I spar'd not" to "eat my fill." As with the verbal parallel between the 'Serpent' being "sated at length" and Eve being "satiate at length," a verbal parallel links "eat my fill" with Adam in his own temptation scene, specifically, when he is described as eating:

. . . Adam took no thought,
Eating his fill . . . (PL 9.1004-1005)

(Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, September, 2010.)

Adam is thus precisely as 'serpentine' as Eve, for this verbal parallel from PL 9.595 comes just in advance of the verbal parallel to Eve in PL 9.598. Milton is implicating both Adam and Eve as Satanic in the same foreshadowing passage of PL 9.594-601, for the Fall has parallel effects upon both of them, as the second eating of the fruit 'iterates' the first (cf. PL 9.1005-1006) and thereby 'completes' the original, deadly sin (cf. PL 9.1003-1004).

The second post was from October 2, 2010, a commentary on an article by Christopher Eagle:

Professor Eagle's point is that Satan had first learned to misuse language by exploiting a 'fallen' disjunction between appearance and reality, that Satan had then used the Serpent to mislead Eve through this disjunction, and that a Satanic Adam is now acting like the 'Serpent' in his verbal abuse of Eve by means of this disjunction. The result is that words now "assume this covering-over of their proper and primary signification . . . , not only by meaning figuratively, but by meaning obscurely."

As noted there in that latter post, I shall need to think about this argument. Here's a thought to consider: we ought to distinguish between becoming 'Serpentine' and becoming 'Satanic', at least in principle, though the two can coincide. More on that some other time.

Fellow Miltonist Dario Rivarossa read the remarks on Eagle's article and suggested that I look at the figure of Geryon in Dante's Inferno 17.1-18 for a possible source of Adam as 'Serpentine', so I've checked it out:

"Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza,
'Behold the beast with pointed tail, that leaps

che passa i monti e rompe i muri e l'armi!
past mountains, shatters walls and weapons!

Ecco colei che tutto 'l mondo appuzza!"
Behold the one whose stench afflicts the world!'

Sì cominciò lo mio duca a parlarmi;
was how my guide began.

accennolle che venisse a proda,
Then he signaled to the beast to come ashore

vicino al fin d'i passeggiati marmi.
close to the border of our stony pathway.

E quella sozza imagine di froda
And that foul effigy of fraud came forward,

sen venne, e arrivò la testa e 'l busto,
beached its head and chest

ma 'n su la riva non trasse la coda.
but did not draw its tail up on the bank.

La faccia sua era faccia d'uom giusto,
It had the features of a righteous man,

tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle,
benevolent in countenance,

e d'un serpente tutto l'altro fusto;
but all the rest of it was serpent.

due branche avea pilose insin l'ascelle;
It had forepaws, hairy to the armpits,

lo dosso e 'l petto e ambedue le coste
and back and chest and both its flanks

dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle.
were painted and inscribed with rings and curlicues.

Con più color, sommesse e sovraposte
So many vivid colors Turk or Tartar never wove

non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi,
in warp and woof or in embroidery on top,

né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte.
nor were such colors patterned on Arachne's loom.

The Italian text is from Divina Commedia edited by Giorgio Petrocchi and published by Mondadori (Milan, Italy, 1966-67), which I've borrowoed from the Princeton Dante Project, which supplies the English as well.

Is this a source for Milton's hints of a 'Serpentine' Adam? The emphasis upon "fraud" would fit the misuse of language noted by Eagle, and Geryon is certainly serpent-like. There are similarities as well to Milton's depiction of "Sin," for which Milton drew on the depiction of "Error" in Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene, though both "Sin" and "Error" are both feminine in these depictions. At any rate, I don't find clear dependence of a 'Serpentine' Adam, so I leave it as a mere possibility.

Back to grading . . .

Christopher Eagle: Adam as 'Serpentine'?

Adam and Eve, 1509-11

Raphael

Fresco, 120 x 105 cm

Stanza della Segnatura

Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican

(Image from Web Gallery of Art)

Today's serpentine teaser is from Christopher Eagle's article, "'Thou Serpent That Name Best': On Adamic Language and Obscurity in Paradise Lost," from Milton Quarterly (Vol. 41, No. 3, 2007, 183-194), which argues that Adam is assimilated to the Serpent by his misuse of language, an abusive use of words which arises from a "disjunction between the inward reality and the outward shape of things" after the fall:

[W]e should . . . point out that Adam's rhetoric in the confrontation with Eve bears out [a] lapse of accurate signification . . . . In the world's first domestic squabble, we find a cuckolded Adam making the metaphoric connection of Eve to Satan:

Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name best
Befits thee with him leagu'd, thyself as false,
And hateful; nothing wants, but that thy shape,
Like his, and color Serpentine may show
Thy inward fraud, to warn all Creatures from thee
Henceforth; lest that too heav'nly form, pretended
To hellish falsehood, snare them. (10.867-73)

In what many critics consider to be Adam's weakest moment as a character, we have already noted the progressive weakening of his nomination [i.e., his skill in naming things]. In the lines that follow, Adam tropes [i.e., makes a figure of speech about] Eve's serpentine deceitfulness as the disparity between her inward and outward shape, evidently contrasted with what he hopes is his everpresent wholeness. The glaring irony here, of course, is that Adam's likening of Eve to the Serpent is a figurative act (metaphor), itself an equally "serpentine" use of language. Because the possibility of figurativeness depends upon a disjunction from the literal, a disjunction between the inward reality and the outward shape of things, Adam's words would seem not to be ontologically possible before the Fall, because such a split between being and appearing would not yet have taken place.[10] For this reason, it is often said that in Paradise Lost, "with the Fall of man, language falls too" (Ricks 109). Like Eve's outward shape, words now pretend, in the "proper and primary signification" of the word, meaning they stretch in front as a covering. They assume this covering-over of their proper and primary signification (the linguistic fig leaf, so to speak), not only by meaning figuratively, but by meaning obscurely . . . . (pages 189-190)

Here are some endnotes for the excerpt:

[10] Umberto Eco, "On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language," The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979, 90-104.

Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style, Oxford: Clarendon, 1963

Professor Eagle's point is that Satan had first learned to misuse language by exploiting a 'fallen' disjunction between appearance and reality, that Satan had then used the Serpent to mislead Eve through this disjunction, and that a Satanic Adam is now acting like the 'Serpent' in his verbal abuse of Eve by means of this disjunction. The result is that words now "assume this covering-over of their proper and primary signification . . . , not only by meaning figuratively, but by meaning obscurely."

I'll need to consider this argument carefully, though it's similar to an argument that I once made in a paper, but I'll have to read Professor Eagle's entire article first and check some prelapsarian passages in Paradise Lost. I say this because I have come to see matters as a bit more complex. The figurative use of language surely precedes the fall, though the deceptive use of language to obscure truth is, of course, postlapsarian, but is Adam misusing words to obscure inward reality in the passage above from Paradise Lost? If there is now a postlapsarian disjunction between appearance and reality, then Adam is correct in calling Eve "thou Serpent," for she has inwardly become one -- meaning that she has become Satanic, somewhat as the Serpent, albeit inadvertently, became inwardly Satanic when the Devil possessed it, the better to tempt Eve.

The dramatic irony of Adam's words is that he himself has also become 'Serpentine', as we have already seen in previous posts, but his accusation that Eve is a "Serpent" is correct. Both Adam and Eve are now 'Serpentine'.

As I said, however, I'll need to read the entire article, and I will do so, just as soon as I get through a big batch of student writing that I have to check for its own 'Serpentine' misuse of language.

Sarah R. Morrison on Eve and the "Accommodating Serpent"

Studies

in

English Literature

(Image from Project Muse SEL Website)

I'm still looking around the scholarly literature for material on Eve's similarity to the Serpent in Milton's epic poem, so I'm posting today an excerpt from Sarah R. Morrison's article of last year, "The Accommodating Serpent and God's Grace in Paradise Lost" (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 49, Number 1, Winter 2009, pp. 173-195).

Here's the excerpt, which questions the putative similarity between the two:

Much has been made of Eve's "affinities with the serpent," as well as with the "Snakie Sorceress" Sin (2.724) and Satan, all of which connections mutually reinforce one another.[16] King-Kok Cheung recognizes that Milton exploits "the traditional association between the serpent and Eve" and "persistently intertwines the two in his poem,"[17] and critics have argued variously that Eve is strongly tainted or relatively uncontaminated by these associations. The tendency has been to stress the connections between Eve and the satanic -- and phallicized -- Serpent rather than those between Eve and the naturalistic -- and feminized -- Serpent. Wolfgang E. H. Rudat argues that the movement of the Serpent and the descriptive language in the temptation scene in Paradise Lost mimic that of much "Elizabethan and seventeenth-century" erotic poetry and reinforce the identification of Satan with the male sexual member and human sexuality.[18] Cheung follows Rudat in insisting on the Serpent's phallicism throughout.[19] But because the Serpent (albeit traditionally a phallic symbol and most obviously treated as such in the temptation scene) has previously been feminized, the contrast between the phallic imagery in the temptation scene -- with the Serpent, as described by [Niel] Forsyth, "sexily upright and appealing as he undulates toward Eve (erect at IX 501)"[20] -- and other descriptions of the Serpent's form and movement that emphasize its graceful curves and coiling could thus equally be taken as an indicator that the dark force operating here is at a considerable remove from the natures of both Eve and the Serpent. It is even possible to see the image of the Serpent as rehabilitated in some degree by its association with Eve. When Adam addresses Eve as "thou Serpent" (10.867), [John] Leonard charges him with "a misnaming of her nature."[21] It is important to note that Adam is here mistaking the naturalistic Serpent's nature as well. Adam's use of the label "Serpent" to defame Eve reveals his divide at this moment from nature and nature's God as well as from his spouse. (page 177)

Here are the endnotes for the above citations, should anyone want to check further:

[16] King-Kok Cheung, "Beauty and the Beast: A Sinuous Reflection of Milton's Eve," Milton Studies 23 (1987): 197–214, 197.

[17] Cheung, p. 197. In terms of iconographic tradition, the serpent in the Garden has been variously depicted as "a natural-looking snake wound around the trunk of a tree," "a winged monster something like a dragon," and a creature "where the top part is a woman and the lower part is a snake," with each artistic choice having theological implications (Sydney Higgins, "Playing the Serpent: Devil, Virgin, or Mythical Beast?," European Medieval Drama 2 [1998]: Papers from the Second International Conference on European Medieval Drama, Camerino, 4–6 July 1997, ed. Higgins, with the European Medieval Drama Council [Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1998], pp. 207–14, 207). See Nora C. Flores for an account of the belief that the serpent who seduced Eve was a "dracontopede, or virgin-faced dragon," an idea Flores traces to "Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica in the last half of the twelfth century," which Comestor in turn attributes to Saint Bede, the Venerable ("'Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae': Antifeminism in the Iconography of the Woman-Headed Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Literature," in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Flores [New York and London: Routledge, 1996; 2000], pp. 167–95, 168, 167).

[18] Wolfgang E. H. Rudat, "'Back to the Thicket Slunk': Another Look at Milton's Serpent," American Notes & Queries 22, 1–2 (September–October 1983): 7–9, 8.

[19] See Cheung, especially pp. 205–6. That the Serpent as it suggests concupiscence is clearly a phallic symbol poses some difficulties, as Eve or Woman might then appear to fall victim to male sexuality -- which, of course, runs counter to the more standard view that Woman’s carnality caused Man's fall. Rudat, however, argues elsewhere that "Milton endows Eve with the Circean power to transform Satan into a phallic serpent," which again puts the onus on Eve ("'Thy Beauty's Heav'nly Ray': Milton's Satan and the Circean Eve," Milton Quarterly 19,1 [March 1985]: 17–9, 18).

[20] Neil Forsyth, "At the Sign of the Dove and Serpent," Milton Quarterly 34, 2 (May 2000): 57–65, 58.

[21] John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 230.

This excerpt and its citations make the paper also look interesting, but as with yesterday's article by Sandra M. Gilbert, I've not yet had time to read it. I would for now simply note this from the excerpt, and take mild exception to the inference drawn:

[B]ecause the Serpent . . . has previously been feminized, the contrast between the phallic imagery in the temptation scene . . . and other descriptions of the Serpent's form and movement that emphasize its graceful curves and coiling could thus equally be taken as an indicator that the dark force operating here is at a considerable remove from the natures of both Eve and the Serpent.

I would say, rather, that the Serpent's masculine phallic imagery and the graceful feminine curves suggest that both Adam and Eve are implicated in the 'demon-possessed' Serpent's Satanic nature when they fall into their first sin, which fits with one of the points made in my blog entry of several days ago.

More later . . .

Sandra M. Gilbert on Satan and the Serpentine Eve

Sandra M. Gilbert

Poet and Scholar

(Image from Sandra M. Gilbert Website)

I'm still looking into ways in which John Milton depicts the fallen Eve as 'serpentine' in Paradise Lost. I'm not the only one who's ever thought about this, as yesterday's blog entry demonstrated. Today, I want to excerpt a passage by the feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert, from her article of 1978, "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," in which she argues that Milton assimilates Eve to Satan:

[E]ven the briefest reflection on Paradise Lost should remind us that, despite Eve's apparent passivity and domesticity, Milton himself seems deliberately to have sketched so many parallels between her and Satan that it is hard at times for the unwary reader to distinguish the sinfulness of one from that of the other. As Stanley Fish has pointed out, for instance, Eve's temptation speech to Adam in Book IX is "a tissue of Satanic echoes," with its central argument, "Look on me. / Do not believe," an exact duplicate of the antireligious empiricism embedded in Satan's earlier temptation speech to her. Moreover, where Adam falls out of uxorious "fondness," out of a self-sacrificing love for Eve, which, at least to the modern reader, seems quite noble, Milton's Eve falls for exactly the same reason that Satan does: because she wants to be "as Gods" and because, like him, she is secretly dissatisfied with her place, secretly preoccupied with questions of "equality." After his fall, Satan makes a pseudo-libertarian speech to his fellow angels in which he asks, "Who can in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live by right / His equals, if in power and splendor less, / In freedom equal?" (V.794-97). After her fall, Eve considers the possibility of keeping the fruit to herself "so to add what wants / In Female Sex, the more to draw [Adam's] Love, / And render me more equal" (IX.821-23).

Again, just as Milton's Satan -- despite his pretensions to equality with the divine -- dwindles from an angel into a dreadful (though subtle) serpent, so Eve is gradually reduced from an angelic being to a monstrous and serpentine creature, listening sadly as Adam thunders, "Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name best/ Befits thee with him leagu'd, thyself as false / And hateful; nothing wants, but that thy shape, / Like his, and colour Serpentine may show / Thy inward fraud" (X.867-71). (Sandra M. Gilbert, "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 93, No. 3 (May, 1978), page 372B)

I excerpted this passage from Gilbert's article after skimming the entire text, but I don't have time to deal with it fully this morning, and I'd first like to read the entire article carefully before commenting -- other than to observe that this looks interesting. Gilbert has noted various parallels in Paradise Lost between the falling and fallen Eve and the falling and fallen Satan, particularly in their reason for rebellion and their manner of tempting others.

More tomorrow, perhaps, but don't forget meantime that Adam is also partly assimilated to the serpentine Satan, as we have already seen in the fact that both are depicted as eating their fill.