This paradox led Milton to invent, among other things, a plausible temptation scenario; that is, he had to explain why God allowed Eve to be tempted by the serpent. The question remains, however, why Milton came up with the specific account he proposes. Does any canonical text literally connect the Serpent in Eden with Satan? Does this rendition justify Calvinist ideology? Or does it represent Milton’s personal theological conclusions?
To answer these questions, let us look first to Paradise Lost itself. Milton depicted the Temptation by the Serpent and the Fall of Man quite elaborately. The scene begins near the start of Book IX, when Satan, “who late fled before the threats / Of Gabriel out of Eden,” “fearless returned” (392). He slips underground via the Tigris, entering the Garden, and then he “sought / Where to lie hid” (393). Milton then wrote that Satan “found / The serpent subtlest beast of all the field” (393). Initially overcome with disgust for the snake, Satan eventually steels himself to turn into a “black mist low creeping” and enter the snake “in at his mouth” (396). Why does Satan need to hide, though?
According to Milton, Adam and Eve knew about Satan before he arrived in the Garden. God sent Raphael to warn Adam about Satan, “lest wilfully transgressing [Adam] pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned” (317). So, even though Adam and Eve did not know exactly what Satan looked like, they knew they should avoid him after hearing about his failed rebellion against God (318-33). Therefore, Satan searched the garden to disguise his “dark intent” (395) where it would not draw attention to itself . Satan deems the serpent “fittest imp of fraud, in whom to enter” because of the snake’s “wit and native subtlety,” which if “in other beasts observed” would cause an onlooker to sense the “diabolic pow’r / Active within” (393). Still, this raises another question: Why did Satan want to ruin Adam and Eve if he hates God?
In Milton’s eyes, Satan abhors Man because God raised Man up from the dust to king of the Earth, just as God raised up Christ from among the angels as superior. When Raphael recounts the story of the War in Heaven, he suggests that Satan’s reason for rebellion lies in God’s decree, “I have begot whom I declare / My only Son…your head I him appoint. . .to him shall bow / All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord” (326). Satan questions the justice of him and his fellow angels “eclipsed under the name / Of King anointed” (330). Satan feels that now God has raised up Man, “whom us the more to spite his Maker raised / From dust” (395). Satan decides “spite then with spite is best repaid” (395). Satan failed to overcome God and Christ in the War in Heaven, which landed him in Hell. Satan acknowledges that he aims, “Since higher I fall short, on him who next / Provokes my envy, this new favorite / Of Heav’n, this man of clay” (395). Satan has a vendetta against God, not Adam and Eve; he subverts them not out of personal malice (he is struck dumb by their beauty when he firsts sees them), but out of his escalating hatred of God (292).
Entering a snake, however, does not complete the task. Satan, inside the serpent, waits near the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam and Eve. Just as Satan wishes he “might find / Eve separate” (402), Eve strolls over near “the enemy of Mankind” (404) by the Tree. Once he catches her eye, Satan speaks to Eve “with serpent tongue. . .his fraudulent temptation thus begun” (405); just as “in at [the serpent’s] mouth / The Devil entered” (396), so does he project his corruption out of its mouth.
The subsequent facts that Satan successfully tempted Eve, and that, in turn, Adam was “fondly overcome with female charm” (418), complete the Temptation Narrative. Of course, Milton did not invent this entire story; he read about the basic plot in the Bible. So, to see what Milton built Paradise Lost on, the best place to look is Milton’s contemporary Bible, the Geneva Bible.
The Geneva Bible’s translation of the Serpent’s Temptation lasts a mere six verses: the “subtle” serpent says to the woman (not yet named Eve), “Yea, hath God in deed said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden[1]?” (Gen. 3:1). The woman replies that she eats of all the trees in the garden (3:2), except that tree “which is in the middle of the garden, [for] God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (3:3). The serpent replies to the woman, “Ye shall not die at all, But God doth know, that when ye shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, & ye shall be gods, knowing good and evil” (3:4-5). Her response to the serpent’s beguiling comprises the rest of the episode: “So the woman (seeing that the tree was good for meat, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, & a tree to be desired to get knowledge) took of the fruit and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat” (3:6). Considering strictly these verses, Milton’s supposition that the serpent somehow correlates with Satan appears doctrinally unfounded.
The problem, however, becomes complicated by the glosses. The Geneva Bible includes footnotes that explain certain crucial words or phrases, allowing readers to better understand the Bible the way Calvinists wanted them to understand it[2]. The annotation on the first mention of the serpent states, “As Satan can change him self into an Angel of light, so did he abuse the wisdom of the serpent to deceive man.” When the serpent first speaks, the gloss remarks, “God suffered Satan to make the serpent his instrument and to speak in him.” Considering this information, Milton actually held quite close to his Holy Scripture, albeit an editorialized version.
These glosses, logic would dictate, must have some doctrinal background; the Protestants scrupulously pored over their Bibles, and would certainly question anything that contradicted Biblical fact. In Milton and the Book of Revelation, Austin C. Dobbins listed specific Biblical books which provided a context for the book of Genesis. So, while Genesis 3:1-6 describes the serpent’s temptation of man and woman, Dobbins points out that Revelation 12:6-17 provided a context for the Genesis passage (62). In this passage, “the great dragon, that old serpent, called the devil and Satan” (12:9) stood before a “woman clothed with the sun” (12:1), waiting for her to give birth. This Biblical text literally confirms that Satan was a serpent. However, the woman described in the passage, who “fled into wilderness” (12:6), does not seem to be Eve; this woman “brought forth a man child, which should rule all nations with a rod of iron” (12:5). The gloss for this passage asserts this child “is Jesus Christ the first born among many brethren,” making the woman the Virgin Mary. Based on this passage and its glosses, the Devil may have been a serpent, but there’s no direct statement that he was the serpent who tempted Eve.
Also, like the glosses, Revelation itself was written long after Genesis, and therefore could offer further information and interpretation of the earlier text without necessarily describing the original meaning of Genesis. Say someone wrote a story about a child hitting their dog and being punished. Years later, a young nation attacks a faithful ally and receives an international rebuke. Next, someone writes a background story for the original tale, describing the child as “born with a crown” or “a sceptered god,” and claiming that the original story applies to the real world drama because a second story added relating information post facto. The second story could not be credibly cited as proof that the first story in anyway foretold the political events.
Similarly, logic does not support the supposition that the glosses or Revelation accurately describe the events in Genesis (or, for that matter, that Genesis itself, written years after its events, tells the precise truth). However, Christians accept these Biblical books on the faith that the authors were Divinely inspired; any denial of the books as a breed of truth undermines the entire faith, and therefore lacks argumentative clout here. To alleviate any tensions based on “fact versus faith,” let us treat Genesis and Revelation as “stories,” allegories or fables with meaning, not strictly literal documentations of history. This stance would, for example, make the Biblical account of the talking serpent much more believable to the reader; in fables, it is no strange feat for animals to speak, and ultimately the moral overrides any problematic nuances of character.
Accepting these Biblical texts as truthful on some level, we reach our next link in the chain: discerning where Milton separates from the Bible. I will not examine every place Milton inserts his own words; such an exercise would prove both tedious and relatively useless compared to the effort involved. Suffice it to say that nearly every shred of dialogue and narration in Paradise Lost comes either partially from the Bible and partially from Milton, or entirely from Milton’s head. The points of concern here, then, are simply where the ideas in the dialogue and narration clearly diverge from Biblical precedent.
Take, for example, Satan’s efforts to enter the Garden. Since the book of Genesis does not call the serpent by any other name but “serpent,” there’s no explanation as to how he got there; it is simply assumed that when God created “that which creepeth,” He placed every “beast of the earth” (Gen. 1:24), including serpents, in Eden.
Milton, on the other hand, needs to explain how Satan managed to enter the Garden without the Cherubim catching him. Milton also has to explain that God knew Satan was going to enter the Garden, but that He allowed him to so Man could exercise his free will (317). The absence of an explanation in Genesis does not contradict Milton’s statements, or necessarily support the idea that any explanation is needed; it logically follows that since God oversaw the whole world and controlled every detail of its creation (Gen 1:1-31), he tacitly condoned (or perhaps even ordered) the serpent’s temptation.
Consequently, Satan infecting the serpent has no mention in Genesis for the same reason. But the fact remains that Milton attributes Satan’s motivations (and thus the serpent’s) to marring “What he Almighty styled” (394). This concept, if pronounced in Genesis, would undermine both God’s omnipotence and perfect Goodness, as if he silently permitted the temptation to occur. Milton exonerates God by giving Him both the awareness of the impending temptation, and also the willful restraint of power in light of what He knows.
By absolving God of indifference, ignorance, and impotence, Milton creates a new problem: Why does God warn Man when He knows Man is going to Fall anyway? He knows His intervention will prove fruitless. Would God do something He knows will have no influence? Is it that important to His conscience to remind Man about his obligations moments before the Fall occurs, the Fall He sees coming? In the end, what difference lies in God letting the temptation happen, and God wanting it to happen? Since God knows all, He certainly saw the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden; the fact that Genesis omits His acknowledgment creates a very different perception of God than Milton’s portrayal. Several times, Milton’s God foresees that Satan will “by some false guile pervert” Man (264). God acts as if He cannot contain Satan, “whom no bounds / Prescribed, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains / Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss / Wide interrupt can hold” (264). Furthermore, God feels no responsibility for either Satan’s indomitable will or Man’s inherent weakness to “glozing lies” (264); God made Man “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (264). The fact that His ruler of the Earth fell so quickly, and so far, does not strike God as a design flaw; how could it, if God makes no mistakes?
These questions point back to the original aim of Paradise Lost: to justify God’s ways to men. Milton wanted to show that Man fell freely, and that God could do nothing to change that. God saw the Fall coming, but he did not make the Fall happen. Had God done nothing to warn Adam and Eve, one could argue that God doesn’t have foresight, or that he didn’t care enough to help; Milton insisted that God would have tried to intervene, but He simply cannot violate His promise: Man has Free Will, for good or for ill. Milton asserted that God’s “foreknowledge had no influence on their fault” (265).
While this stance falls mostly within the boundaries of Biblically prescribed truth, it undermines the crucial Calvinistic tenet of predestination. Milton’s God says that Mankind cannot “justly accuse / Their Maker, or their making, or their fate, / As if predestination overruled / Their will” (265). In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin explicitly states
Predestination we call the eternal decree of God, by which He hath determined in Himself what He would have to become of every individual of mankind. For they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others. (Brians)
Predestination occurred in the seminal Protestant philosophies, most famously in Calvin’s works. Milton clearly departs from Calvinistic doctrine in his own “De Doctrina Christiana.” In this pamphlet, Milton supports “infralapsarianism” over Calvin’s “supralapsarianism” (Bryson). Michael Bryson explains Calvin’s philosophy in this way:
In order to glorify himself by manifesting both his mercy and his justice, God decreed that some rational creatures would be saved and some would be condemned; these creatures, however, did not yet exist as anything other than possibilities in God’s mind. God decreed the creation of these rational creatures, and then decreed permission for their fall. Out of this now-fallen mankind, God ordained the justification of some to be saved, and the reprobation, or damnation, of others to be condemned.
Milton’s beliefs, as expressed in Paradise Lost, do not line up with Calvin’s. Infralapsarianism supposes that God wished to manifest His goodness in Man, so He blessed him and gave him free will. The Lord “foresaw in what direction free will would lead mankind, but God did not interfere, and thus permitted the fall” (Bryson). Once mankind fell, God implemented ” the predestination of some to salvation and others to damnation” (Bryson). Milton very clearly presents this view with God’s own words in Paradise Lost. Milton’s God confirms Man’s free will, permitting the Fall because of it.
While the Fall may make some sense now, one still must wonder what Milton, or the Bible, gains by having the Serpent be Satan. Another way to ask that question is, if the Serpent wasn’t Satan, what was it? Even though the Bible does not expressly connect Satan and the Serpent, it makes a great deal of sense to make such a connection. The only solid argument I can make against Satan’s presence in the Garden is the fact that the Hebrew Scriptures did not share the concept of Satan found in Christian texts. The Israelites believed all Good and all Evil came directly from God; how else could He be omnipotent? The idea that evil comes from somewhere other than God compromises his control of the universe, and verges on blasphemy.
In the Book of Job, Job’s wife tells him to “blaspheme God” (Job 2:9) for covering him with boils; Job, the model of Jewish faith, replies, “shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive evil?” (2:10). The Geneva Bible says that God sent Satan to test Job, but the idea of Satan in the Hebrew Scriptures does not coincide with the Christian understanding of Satan. In Hebrew, “ha-satan” means “The Accuser”; according to NRSV Bible, “the article with the word Satan indicates that an office is involved” (751)–––that is, some angel fulfills this function for God, but the word describes the office, not any of the various angels that could fill it. For instance, we have a President, but a number of men have filled that office, all of which were called “President.” Additionally, this Satan is “in the Lord’s imperial service” (751); God Himself sent this Satan to test Job, unlike Milton’s conception of Satan working contrary to God’s Will. So, even if we assume the Genesis writer meant for Satan to be Serpent, Satan would have tempted Eve under God’s orders.
Calvin rejected this possibility in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin claims that God’s “inability to do evil arises from His infinite goodness” (Brians). Calvin assumed that Satan must be the cause of evil; how does this affirm God’s omnipotence? It cannot be said that God is both all-powerful and also not the sole cause of evil. As Regina Schwartz notes, “an omnipotent God has no real enemy, yet the notion of redemption involves the defeat of just such an enemy” (33). This argument can be diluted by the idea that there is no evil, merely what people construe as evil based on our limited understanding of God’s larger scheme.
Still, if Man is wrong in assuming there is evil, or at least some destructive force, in the world, why do we suffer? I don’t mean this solely in a karmic, desire vs. selflessness way, but in the simple matter of physical pain. No amount of belief or logic can anaesthetize my nerves–––it hurts to be burned, to be cut, to be bruised. Why do I hunger? Why do I thirst? Why was I ever given a body that needs things, things that pain me in their absence? Suffering does hurt; only the most severe dissociation, by way of mental illness or pharmaceuticals, can negate that suffering.
Nothing in the Bible, or in Milton, excuses, for instance, the pain women suffer during childbirth. All the Bible and Milton say is that “ye will suffer death” for eating the fruit; the added penalties of hard labor, pain in childbirth, enmity between man and snake (or perhaps animals in general)–––all these penalties affect not merely the transgressors, but their heirs to sin, in perpetuity throughout time. This is, in my limited and mortal estimation, grossly unjust. And yet, if I have learned no other thing in life, it is that simply because some idea is not appealing, does not make it false.
These types of inequalities that people see in theological texts are precisely what motivated Milton to “justify the ways of God to man.” No doubt Milton himself questioned the Biblical account of the Temptation and Fall, especially the bareness of the story. Whereas the Bible shows Eve reacting normally to a talking serpent, Milton provides Eve with a different reaction, as well as an explanation for the snake’s unusual ability to speak. When Eve expresses her surprise at language of man “pronounced / By tongue of brute” (406), Satan cleverly explains that he “tasted those fair apples” of the Forbidden Tree, so that he gained a “capacious mind” that enabled him to speak (407). What goes unwritten in the Bible, Milton states explicitly, generating brilliantly logical explanations for Biblically ambiguous moments.
Still, depicting Satan as a great serpent differs, however slightly, from having Satan briefly enter a snake’s body. Why would Milton depart from the Bible on this particular point, staying close but making a seemingly negligible alteration?
To resolve this quandary, one must eliminate the false premise of Satan’s snake-imbruting as an isolated incident in Paradise Lost, or even the culmination of a series of degradations. True, Satan does continually fall further and further into disgrace throughout the poem, but his final incarnation does not occur during his triumph over Adam and Eve; to have Satan achieve some victory during his disgrace and escape the confines of the serpent would allow him some pride.
Satan fell from Heaven to Hell–––a devastating fall by any estimation, but drawn into sharper comparisons by the fact that Satan was Lucifer, the bearer of light, the brightest of all the angels. When he is cast into Hell, he loses some of his divine glow, but he remains an impressive figure; he could hardly rally Pandemonium if he instantly became the most wretched demon for his most blasphemous acts. Milton slowly degrades Satan throughout the poem, and his stint inside the serpent is only one of the later steps on the way down to his inglorious nadir.
For instance, shortly after Satan lands in Hell, he addresses Beelzebub with shock: “If thou beest he; but Oh how fallen!” (208). Satan recognizes his comrade, but immediately notices his less splendorous appearance. This compels Satan to look at himself, and conclude he too is “changed in outward luster” (208). Milton uses a dazzling epic simile to describe Satan’s fading brilliance; he
Stood like a tower; his form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds. (224)
So, like the normally blinding sun can be gazed at through a mist, the luster of Satan now appears more bearable to witness than his former awe-inspiring glory.
In addition to figurative descriptions of Satan’s waning intensity, Milton also relates Satan with some unflattering creatures as the poem progresses. Satan dwindles from a Leviathan (211) to a large mythological vulture (272), to a wolf (286), to a cormorant (287), and even a lion and a tiger (293); he appears “squat like a toad” when he corrupts Eve’s dream (304). When Satan enters Eden to undo mankind, he arrives merely as a mist, hardly an impressive entrance for one so previously powerful. His “foul descent” into the serpent actually appalls him; his awareness of his own repugnant “ambition and revenge,” and his subsequent dismissal of that disgust for the sake of his vengeance (395), reveal Satan’s continuing fall post bellum. At first, all this shape-changing strikes one as impressive; did Milton mean for Satan to maintain such a useful and deceptive power?
During the mid-17th century, the idea of “The Great Chain of Being” was addressed in the philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes (Suber). Essentially, the Great Chain of Being proposes that all things, except the absolute bottom of the chain, possess some amount of perfection; God made them, so there must be something perfect, or true, in them (Suber). The theory models all of existence as a hierarchy, with God at the top, and descending down the list are the decreasing levels of perfection (Suber), from angels to man to horse to slug. Satan’s systematic degradation throughout Paradise Lost works logically within this paradigm; his devolution from angel to snake requires the erosion of layers of perfection, until he eventually embodies God’s exact polar opposite, utter imperfection.
So, enter the brutal irony of Milton: Satan, recently extracted from the “bestial slime” (395) of the snake, returns to Hell to gloat about his victory against God’s crowning creation. He tells all of Pandemonium about his trickery and the consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and waits to glory in the rousing cheers of his fellow outcasts (435-6). Instead, he hears a “dismal universal hiss” (436); he wonders about the insulting reaction, but only briefly––––Satan looks down to find himself transforming into a “Huge Python” (437), the king snake amongst a new wretched nation of slithering demons. Satan finally becomes the Serpent, against his will, a mockery of his deception of Eve. Satan is ultimately debased: he is the trapped forever as a giant serpent in the pits of Hell. In the end, Milton does agree with Biblical precedent, he simply provided an elaborate back-story to explain Lucifer’s serpentine form.
In fact, Satan’s “inserpenting” possesses such literary force, as metaphor, as irony, as a grand unifying theme, that it sounds fictional. The highest of angels falls to the depths of Hell, and furthermore, he contacts the highest on Earth only as the lowest of creatures. Even if the Bible never remotely claimed that Satan spoke through the Serpent, Milton’s assertion that he did deserves credit based solely on its literary brilliance. It makes perfect sense within Paradise Lost: Satan demonstrates both the personality and motivation requisite for wanting to tempt Man; he has the powers to do so; God knows about it and permits it; and human history itself, with all its avoidable sin and death, seems logically confirmed by the Fall. Milton does have to create situations and dialogue to express ideas the Bible only implies, but he doesn’t truly stray that far from the text with his ideas.
Yet, one still may wonder why Milton would include the fall of Satan with the Fall of Man. Was it simply necessary background to set up the Temptation and Fall? Or is there secondary motivation? The Bible tells the stories of each Fall at opposite ends of the book; did Milton put them together just to make the poem more interesting?
In one sense, the involvement of Satan’s story with the Fall of Man provides further support for Milton’s justification of God’s ways to man. Though it may seem harsh that Adam and Eve, and all mankind thereafter, fell because of disobedience, the apparent inequity of our shared fate is mitigated by the comparison to Satan’s fall. Our Temptation Narrative shows not the control God has over us–––“he made us do it!”––––but rather his generosity; Satan’s fall contrasts with our fall by showing what happens when those who are not free disobey God. Our free will is a gift, and God’s intractability regarding that gift displays his kindness, not his stubbornness; his love, not his contempt.
So much can be said about the conditions of the Original Sin, questions that have always been asked, and they cannot be resolved due to the simple fact that faith resists strict rationalization; people believe the overall meaning of a faith, and if that overall meaning (or interpretation of the meaning) satisfies, the minutiae of word choice–––especially in translations–––and situational particulars do not provide adequate dissuasion from that faith. Yes, it goes against the grain of every empirical mind, but our minds are not strictly data-driven; we are moved by what we feel overall about an idea, an event, a person: how many people give up a friend because of one mistake? And giving up your entire, established understanding of essential reality is no small task; furthermore, it is not the aim of this paper to evoke such a revolution.
Milton did not wish to set Christianity in stone either. He felt that scriptures could be corrupted, and the true guide for one’s faith came from within, from the scripture of the Holy Spirit in one’s soul (Walker 204). The entire force of this, or any theological argument, rests on one’s belief in the premises, on one’s “inner scriptures” agreeing with expressed ideas. To paraphrase Lincoln, whether this notion, or any notion, can long endure, rests not on the actuality of the serpent being Satan, but people accepting as truth that something at least symbolically like it occurred. Milton did embellish the Biblical account of the Temptation, but the spirit of the work stays true to the spirit of the Bible.
Works Cited
Brians, Paul. “John Calvin: Free Will and Predestination from Institutes of the Christian Religion (1537).” Reading About the World. 18 Dec 1998. http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader /world_civ_reader_2/calvin.html. (May 5, 2002).
Bryson, Michael. “De Doctrina Christiana.” Milton Web. http://www.brysons.net/miltonweb/index.html. (May 5, 2002).
Dobbins, Austin C. Milton and the Book of Revelation: The Heavenly Cycle. Tusacaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1975.
Fresch, Cheryl H. “‘Cain rose up against Abel’: murder, mystery, and paradise lost.” Christianity and Literature 51.2 (2002): 191-209.
The Geneva Bible, a facsimile of the 1560 edition. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969.
Milton, John. The Poems of John Milton. James Holly Hanford, ed. New York: Ronald, 1953.
Rogers, John. “Milton and the Mysterious Terms of History.” ELH 57.2 (1990): 281-305.
Schwartz, Regina M. Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost. New York: Cambridge U P, 1988.
Suber, Peter. “The Great Chain of Being.” The Great Chain of Being. 1997. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/re/chain.htm. (Nov. 4, 2002).
Walker, William. “Milton’s dualistic theory of religious toleration in A Treatise of Power, Of Christian Doctrine, and Paradise Lost.” Modern Philology 99.2 (2001): 201-31.
[1] For the sake of easier reading, I have modernized the spelling of the 1560 version of the Geneva Bible. Most of the alterations involved the usual interchanging of “u” and “v”, replacing “ƒ” with “s”, eliminating the obsolete terminal “e”, and the like. Certain linguistic conventions, such as the use of “hath” and “doth”, were kept to preserve some of the traditionally Biblical style.
[2] The Geneva Bible, the preferred Bible of the Puritans and therefore Milton, was translated into English from the original Hebrew and Greek Biblical texts; it was the first English version of the Bible to do so. The glosses were written by such Early Protestants as John Knox, Miles Coverdale, William Whittingham, and even John Calvin himself. Based on this last fact, I think it fair to assume a Calvinist slant to the text.