These are Satan's words to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. Satan claims that their fall from Heaven will seem like a "fortunate fall," in that their new rise to power will actually be "more glorious" than if they had stayed in Heaven all the while. Can we, as fallen humans, possibly make Satan's words our own, even if it is not our own work but God's that causes our "rising"; or, if we do claim a "fortunate fall," have we been beguiled by Satan to rejoice in our fallen state? While it is common among beguiled critics to claim that Paradise Lost presents the Fall as fortunate, in fact the Fall is much less fortunate than these critics presume.

Millicent Bell is among the beguiled, but he starts off with a vital point that is too easily forgotten. What does the narrative make explicit about the Fall? "The bare story makes no mystery of it. It was infinite disaster."² From the beginning of the epic we learn that the Fall "Brought death into the world, and all our woe" (i. 3). It "brought into this world a world of woe,/Sin and her shadow Death, and misery/Death's harbinger" (ix. 11-13). We learn that Eve, after leaving Adam to go her own way in Eden (just before the Fall) "never from that hour in Paradise/Found'st either sweet repast, or sound repose" (ix. 406-07). Eve's Fall is a great calamity for the world (ix. 782-84); so is Adam's, completing the original sin (ix. 1003). The couple's early reactions to their sin include disgust, shame, lust, and scorn for the earth (ix. 1010 ff.). The woe of Satan, too, is "perpetual" (ii. 861) and "eternal" (iv. 70). If the Fall is to be classified as fortunate, there is quite a litany of troubles to reconcile.

Worse, as time passes, the scale shall dip farther downward before it can ascend. Sin will reign among men because of the Fall (xii. 285-86). No man or woman shall ever be as good or as fair as Adam and Eve (though this is not necessarily a result of the Fall; iv. 323-24). Michael tells Adam, "Since thy original lapse, true liberty/Is lost." Liberty (with political overtones here) is lost because liberty is tied to "right reason" and depends on reason to moderate the passions. But now that sin is in the world, the passions often eclipse reason. The passions forever after will "to servitude reduce/Man till then free" (xii. 83-90). Worst of all, the Fall is most fortunate, throughout the entire history of the world, until the final triumph, not for mankind but for Sin and Death, and most of the time for the demons as well (x. 270 ff.). "Thou hast achieved our liberty" (x. 368), Satan's progeny say as they thank him for orchestrating the Fall. What good can there be amongst so much evil?

In fact, God makes a point of sending Raphael to Adam and Eve for the express purpose of encouraging obedience and warning against the Fall. Raphael is armed with compelling evidence, too; he explains the results of disobedience for Satan and the fallen angels. Thus mankind should "fear to transgress" (vi. 906-12; vii. 44-45).

What trips up the critics is not that the Fall is evil, however, but that out of such an evil God can bring forth good (i. 163, vii. 188, vii. 616-17, xii. 470-71). In the case of man, God brings glory to Himself by showing mercy rather than justice in the face of beguiled disobedience. In the case of Satan and the demons, God brings glory to Himself by meting out an appropriate justice. God says that "in mercy and justice both,/ . . . so shall my glory excel,/but mercy first and last shall brightest shine" (iii. 132-34). Furthermore, God will convert all of Satan's evil schemes into an ultimately good result. Thus the Fall is "fortunate" in the same way that Satan's fall is "fortunate," just to a different degree. In fact the Son, as God does, discusses the two falls together (iii. 144-62). The most we can say is that grace and mercy for man is a fortunate result of the Fall only in the same way that justice for Satan is a fortunate result of his own fall. Thus Bell notes blithely that "the theory of the fortunate fall has been applied to Satan's fall" as well (p. 882). It seems as though Satan has been whispering in some people's ears; do we really want such a bedfellow? It is more likely that our respective falls are equally unfortunate, rather than equally fortunate.

Since the war in Heaven brings forth good too, by the same standard we must call this terrible event fortunate, even though the disobedience itself is so obviously anathema. The good here, again, is that God brings glory to Himself through the Son on the third day of the battle. He tells the Son:

What is ordained is not the war, the disobedience, or Satan's pride, but the delay in winning the war. The delay proves to the obedient angels that they are not strong enough to quell the rebellion unaided; the Son is a vital part of their existence (vi. 701-09).

All of this is not to hide from the fact that a great deal of good, surpassing any human hope (or at least surpassing Adam's hope), results from God's actions after the Fall. Rather than hide from these goods, I take issue with the necessity of the Fall for bringing them about. God appropriates the Fall as a vehicle for the Son to show His immanent merit and love (iii. 309). Even more, God tells the Son, "because in thee/Love hath abounded more than glory abounds,/There thy humiliation shall exalt/With thee thy manhood also to this throne" (iii. 312-14). In other words, after the Son takes on human form and dies, the Son's resurrection will bring humanness to the throne of God.³ Nevertheless it is not clear that the Fall was required for these good results to occur. It is quite reasonable to assume that the Son had no shortage of other ways to show His immanent merit and love to mankind.⁴

God also appropriates the Fall for other good ends on behalf of man. For man, the result of grace after the fall is "that he may know how frail/His fall'n condition is, and to me owe/All his deliv'rance, and to none but me" (iii. 180-82). God through the Son has "implanted grace in man," which brings "fruits of more pleasing savor . . . than those . . . ere fall'n/From innocence" (xi. 23-30). Of course spiritual fruits are more savory than physical ones, especially to God, but the physical fruits also stand for all the good that would have come out of man's obedience in the garden. Let us agree that the fruits of Eden are surpassed by the spiritual fruits that come from grace. But would we be tasting yet more savory fruits without the Fall, not necessarily brought by man's innocent obedience in Eden or by God's grace after the Fall, but over time by, for example, love and instruction from God?

Another way to ask this question is to ask, if the falls of men and angels are so horrible, what would existence have been like without the falls? God is careful to emphasize that Satan, as well as man, was made "just and right,/Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall" (iii. 98-99). What would human existence be like if man had stood and not fallen? In comparison to the future we never are to have, our present state, as wonderful as it is, as great as the human virtues can be and as great as God's grace can be, can hardly seem fortunate.

To determine what our existence would have been if we indeed had stood, we must begin with an understanding the purposes for our existence in the first place. Though the philosophers may never understand man's purpose, God is rather clear about it in Paradise Lost. From God's point of view, man has several related purposes. First, man was made for God's glory (iii. 163). Were man to show "true allegiance, constant faith or love" (iii. 104), God would find "pleasure . . . from such obedience" (iii. 107). In this vein, Adam thinks "the more/To magnify his works, the more we know" (vii. 96-97)⁵--he is right, says Raphael, though there is a limit to ultimate knowledge for both man and angel (vii. 120-24), and therefore a limit of the extent to which God's glory can come out of other beings' knowledge of Him.

For this knowledge to have force before the Fall, it seems that man will have to know good without knowing evil. God does imply that such knowledge is possible (xi. 88-89). Indeed, before the Fall, Adam often seems to be able to identify things that are good. The fact is obvious in Eve's case in Genesis 3:6--Eve sees that the tree is good for food, pleasing to look at, and desirable, all before she actually pulls the apple off the tree. This interpretation gives a new meaning to the relation of the Tree of Knowledge to the good: some goods are known in themselves, without eating of the tree, while others can only be known through knowing evil. If this is the case--and intuitively it is the truer picture of the nature of things⁶--then the theory of the necessity of the Fall for mankind becomes even less likely.⁷

 Another part of man's purpose, God says, is to fill up the space in Heaven left by the fallen angels (vii. 151 ff.). Man cannot simply take the place of angels, however, without rising to their spiritual level. How are we to rise to the level of the angels or beyond?⁸ When Raphael visits Adam, Raphael shows how man (without the Fall) might realize such a transformation; the "time may come when men/With angels may participate" (v. 493-94).⁹ Over time, with obedience to God, "from these corporal nutriments perhaps/Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit" (v. 496-97). This proposition makes sense to Adam, for he agrees: "By steps we may ascend to God" (v. 512).¹⁰ Also, Raphael tells Adam to love Eve for her reason rather than to love her in carnal desire of her beauty: love of the rational "is the scale/By which to heav'nly love thou may'st ascend" (viii. 587-92). Adam repeats this assertion (viii. 612-13). Raphael does not disabuse Adam of either of these notions, as Michael disabuses Adam of erroneous interpretations in Book xii, so it is safe to assume that man really did have a chance to rise to the level of the angels or beyond.¹¹

Paradise Lost is suggesting, then, that if man had stood and not fallen, we likely would have risen to the level of the angels or beyond. A critic might challenge that this state is just a stepping stone towards the peace, reconcilement, and "joy entire" that God promises at the end of time anyway (iii. 263-65). My answer, however, would be to assert that that this joy would have come sooner without the Fall. God speaks about restoration (iii. 289) and renewed life (iii. 294). In the future, hell will be sealed forever; "Then heav'n and earth renewed shall be made pure/To sanctity that shall receive no stain" (x. 638-39; see also xii. 549-51). But restoration and renewal are only important when something has been lost in the first place. Without the Fall, we would have ascended "by degrees of merit," "under long obedience" (vii. 157, 159),

This was God's purpose for earth--not restoration and renewal, but sheer and simple transformation.

On the one hand, we can see the whole of human history as a great success on God's part; the Son will successfully "save/A world from utter loss" (iii. 307-08). Then, "after all [our] tribulations long [we will]/See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,/with joy and love triumphing, and fair truth" (iii. 336-38). All people with God's grace, says the Son to the Father, shall have "better life . . . where with me/All my redeemed may dwell in joy and bliss,/Made one with me as I with thee am one" (xi. 42-44). "God shall be all in all" (iii. 341; see also vi. 731-33). But on the other hand, how much sooner would all this good have come, if God had not had to deal with the constant struggle against sin, which ever fights the works of goodness? God, outside of time, "shall be all in all" sooner or later, and cannot be hurt by man's folly, but mankind after the Fall must suffer until the very end of history.

In this sense the Fall and its consequences are, for the righteous, primarily a temporal blip, a period in which the world's woes must be tolerated and alleviated through virtuous activity and obedience to God in the face of all obstacles. For the unrepentant, such as Satan or the determined unbeliever, the Fall is in fact fatal. Nevertheless Adam realizes that the fall will not be thoroughly unfortunate, for even in hell God's creation will continue to exist; why would God destroy His creation, however disobedient, which He loves (ix. 938-950)? Even Satan has been given the power to repent.

While Adam is correct at this extreme, he later tries out the other, indefensible extreme in his conversation with Michael toward the end of the epic. Michael says (as we have seen above) that the son will annul the doom of death which mankind deserves, and then at the end of time, will go even farther for those redeemed, to waft them gently "to immortal life" (xii. 427-35). God will receive "His faithful . . . into bliss,/Whether in heav'n or earth, for then the earth/Shall all be paradise, far happier place/Than this of Eden, and far happier days" (xii. 462-65). To this, Adam says,

Actually, Adam should both repent and rejoice. This is one of the two proof-texts brought out in favor of the theory of the fortunate fall. It is clear that Milton has alluded to Paul here,¹² and Adam's words are very close to the line of thinking that Paul rejects in Romans 6 (but it is interesting that Milton stops short of giving Paul's critical answer to Adam's question).¹³ Paul has just finished explaining, in parallel with Michael's speech in Paradise Lost, how the grace of God through the Son brings eternal life to man, despite the sin of Adam (Romans 5). Paul then writes: "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! . . . Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! . . . For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:1-2, 15, 23). Grace is a result of sin, says Paul, but in no way a justification for sinning--and this applies to the original sin as much as to any other.

The final proof-text brought out by the beguiled fallen comes from even closer to the end of the epic, when Michael tells Adam,

                                          Add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far." (xii. 582-87)

Here it is argued that the Fall, because of new evil, opens the door for new virtues. This argument is, again, similar to the one Paul rejects in Romans 6. Even though those virtues are good, even though they may never have arisen without evil, the evil itself is not to be commended or called fortunate or even useful. Rather, the evils are prolonging the period before ultimate redemption. To me a better reading is to treat charity as a good that makes the best of a bad situation.

It is also argued that Michael is asserting that the inward, spiritual paradise of moral virtue is better than the physical Paradise which is Eden. I agree--spiritual pleasure certainly seems better than physical pleasure. But again I say, what more savory fruits have we given up, in order to find solace in the struggles of being merely human, seldom or never (until the end of days) to rise above ourselves like Enoch or Noah, but usually to live as something rather less, though somewhat smarter, than our Edenic selves? As an aside, it is also unclear that the "Paradise" they are to be happier leaving is really the prelapsarian Eden and not the postlapsarian Eden. In other words, to make the kind of rhetorical move we often see in Paradise Lost, the "Paradise" they are leaving may no longer be a Paradise at all, in which case to leave it gladly is not so surprising.¹⁴

Whatever is true about the Fall, Adam is supposed to take his knowledge of the consequences with both joy and fear, "pious sorrow," knowing that the results in human terms at least are to be both "prosperous" and "adverse: so shalt thou lead/Safest thy life, and best prepared endure/thy mortal passage when it comes" (xi. 361-66).¹⁵ In other words, practically speaking, "Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv'st/Live well" (xi. 552-53). The fact is that we did fall. The future that God wanted for us, in the short term, is lost, even if the long-term goal of God's being "all in all" is not. We live in a fallen world, and we must find, produce, and eat the best fruits we can find in the only present world that we have.

1. Quotations are from Scott Elledge, ed., Paradise Lost, second edn. (NY: Norton, 1993).

2. Millicent Bell, "The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost," PMLA 68 (1953), 863-83; here p. 878.

3. This concept is problematic, because if (in the Renaissance scheme) the higher orders of existence already include the lower orders within themselves, does the Son not already possess humanness before the Incarnation? Northrop Frye gives a good account of the Renaissance scheme in relation to Paradise Lost in The Return of Eden (Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto, 1965), 39-40, 43, in which he explains that God is in essence "form without matter."

4. It is already clear that the Son has a mission in Heaven separate from the Son's specific act of redemption of man's sin, so it cannot be argued that the Son exists only for the Incarnation, at least in Paradise Lost.

5. See also Barbara Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton U. , 1985), 174.

6. Frye offers a good third alternative: "The freedom the gospel brings is a good but not a moral good: it is . . . not the oppositve of evil so much as a greater power of fighting it" (87).

7. This interpretation is possibly what Paradise Lost calls for, but it is not one that Milton's Christian Doctrine would support. See M. M. Mahood, "Milton's Heroes," in Alan Rudrum, ed., Milton: Modern Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1968), 262-63.

8. Man begins only "little inferior" to the angels, says Satan (iv. 362). Frye notes that "the evolution would have been physical in process" or actually un-physical, as the body turns to spirit (43).

9. God has told the angels about the Son's redeeming of man, so actually Raphael already knows that God's original plan for mankind is not going to be realized.

10. After the Fall, Eve thinks that knowledge rather than obedience is the way to grow "up to godhead," she tells Adam (ix. 877). While Adam correctly identified a main purpose of his existence--that knowledge is for the purpose of glorifying God--Eve incorrectly sees knowledge itself as part of the spiritual lifting up.

11. God's goal for the angels, too, says Abdiel, is a raising up. God is "bent rather to exalt/Our happy state" (v. 829-30). The point of the Son is not just to be Messiah (for man as well as angels; v. 664, vi. 43) but also, perhaps primarily, to make the angels "more illustrious," because as the angels serve the Son, they themselves increase in honor (v. 842-45).

12. Elledge notes the direct allusion of line 478 to Romans 5:20.

13. Milton left out Romans 6 probably for the same reason that critics fail to refer to it in their notes. Milton himself was tempted, more than tempted, to accept the myth of the fortunate fall. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall," ELH 4 (1937), 161-179.

14. Eve makes the same rhetorical move when she says that Paradise is where she and Adam are together, so that an Eden without Adam would be no Paradise at all (xii. 615-17).

15. Bell (878-79) asserts that Milton could not have understood Raphael's words about education and spiritual uplift without tying them to the harshness of error and suffering; though I disagree, Bell's general point stands: as a fallen human the life of righteous suffering is the only good one that Milton could have had true sympathy for. On the other hand, in the context of the epic, Frank Kermode and Barbara Lewalski recognize that in Paradise Lost we yet know nothing of this inner paradise with which to compare it to Eden (we have only Michael's word): "The paradise of Milton's poem is the lost, the only true paradise, we confuse ourselves . . . if we believe otherwise" (Kermode, "Adam Unparadised," Elledge 603-04; cf. Lewalski 270).