The story of Adam and Eve's fall from grace has fascinated me for a long time. It is the foundational story behind the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, wherein the first ancestors of the human race were expelled from the garden of God after a serpent tempted them into eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The story has been retold countless times in many forms, most famously by the 17th century English poet John Milton in his epic, Paradise Lost.
The story of Adam and Eve forms only the latter half of Milton's poem. The first half is dedicated to Satan's reign in hell following his defeat in the War In Heaven. Milton's characterisation of Satan is radical and nuanced, presenting him not as a simplistic embodiment of evil but the first example of what we today call the anti-hero. Milton's Satan is charismatic, tormented and iconoclastic. He refuses to be subjugated into worshipping God and as a consequence of his rebellion, is cast into Hell, where he vows to corrupt mankind, God's most favoured creation. So powerful and alluring was Milton's depiction of Satan that William Blake, one of the Romantic poets for whom Paradise Lost was a key inspiration, famously described Milton as being 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'.
Contrary to Biblical writing of the time - and often since - Milton did not present the concepts of good and evil as straightforward antonyms. Through Satan, he interrogates how they overlap and the ways in which evil can present itself as good in order to lead supposedly moral agents to destructive acts. Despite this, Milton is clear that good and evil exist: over the course of the poem, Satan's articulacy and charisma fade away, revealing the bitterness and self-deception beneath the surface as he connives to corrupt humankind in revenge for them being granted the divine favour he lost.
Satan's most oft-quoted line, 'it is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven', is a lie he tells to convince others and himself that his actions were in service of a greater good, despite being motivated in reality by greed and selfishness. In Milton's lesser known - and much shorter - follow-up, Paradise Regained, Milton casts Jesus as a parallel to Paradise Lost's Satan. Where Satan's story is one of a great fall, from grace to hatred and, for readers, from powerful rebel to pathetic, resentful serpent, Jesus' story is one of ascent: a suffering man - like Satan, the depiction of Jesus is irrevocably human - who casts aside temptation to achieve spiritual salvation.
Blake and the other Romantics who worshipped Milton, like Wordsworth and Hardy, saw the character's moral dimension differently. Blake greatly admired the revolutionary movements in France and America and viewed Milton's Satan as the embodiment of its potential for spiritual and physical freedom from the shackles of institutions like the church and the monarchy. Though Blake was a pacifist, in this he was something of an accidental precursor to the likes of Frantz Fanon, the black Marxist revolutionary of the 1957 Algerian War, whose treatise, The Damned Of The Earth, considered the necessity of violence as a way for colonised people to free themselves from the mental prison of subjugation.
If we adopt Paradise Lost's Satan as symbolic of the revolutionary spirit, it is interesting to note how both Blake and Milton's interpretations of the character came to pass. Milton's presentation of Satan as a figure who weaves seductive lies of emancipation to disguise his true, evil nature mirrors how the French Revolution rapidly transformed from a movement for democratic freedom into an even bloodier form of tyranny. In this analogy, Satan aligns with the anti-Revolutionary views of Edmund Burke. In the American Revolution, Blake's more optimistic view of revolution came to pass, laying the foundations of a country which, for all its faults, would grow into a bastion of freedom, aspiration and prosperity.
That complexity, where opposing interpretations of the nature of the same character can both be true, brings me back to Adam and Eve. Despite the seeming simplicity of its message when taken at face value (don't disobey the rules!), the story has for me always been a far richer moral tapestry, depicting the ways in which good and evils represent vital threads weaving freedom, faith and humanity together.
Many of the values we hold most precious in Western society are, in a straight reading of the story, Satanic and self-destructive. The serpent convinces Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which shatters their blissful ignorance by giving them self-consciousness and awareness of the existence of evil in the world. For their curiosity and acquisition of forbidden knowledge, they are cast out of paradise but set free in the real world.
This reading allows two sets of motivations - that of Satan/the serpent, and of Adam and Eve - but overlooks a third: that of God. While God's design may be fundamentally unknowable, it never hurts (let's hope) to speculate. God is the creator of all things and omniscient. He created paradise, Adam and Eve, the trees and the angels, including Satan. He also knows what will become of them and of all who come after. It follows, then, that in creating Satan and the trees of knowledge, God created the instigator and the means for Adam and Eve to disobey in the full knowledge they would do so.
Was this a test, to see if His creations were pure enough to ignore temptation? Did God give humanity the capacity to act independently of his instruction as a way of verifying the purity of their devotion? This interpretation seems incompatible with His divine omniscience: to know the answer to a test beforehand means it was never a test at all. If God's knowledge is more multi-dimensional, knowing the outcome of all possible decisions without his creations being specifically designed to choose any single one, but all ultimately ending up at the same point - the events of Revelation - there seems to be a specificity to His design, encouraging one course of events even if not necessarily enforcing it.
These questions often form part of what is referred to as The Problem Of Evil. For me, reconciling the existence of God with the existence of 'evil' represents no problem at all. The Adam and Eve story is not about a fall, but a spiritual awakening into awareness of the duality and consubstantiality of 'good' and 'bad' in the fabric of existence. In literal terms, God intended Adam and Eve to meet the serpent, eat from the fruit and free themselves. By understanding suffering, they later ascended through Jesus into a new kind of freedom, both self-aware and within God's grace, rising above Satan, whose own fall only deepened his spite and sense of unjust persecution.
If God created and knows everything, He created the 'bad' as well as the 'good'. If humans were created in His image, we are creators too, but unlike our Creator, unshackled from the burdens of absolutism and all-knowledge. God's existence is pure by nature of His totality, immortal and unchanging. He is perfect, but in his perfection, unfree. If it is the ambition of any parent to give their children a better life than they had, God graced us with the one thing He could never know: the liberation of uncertainty, ambiguity, growth and potential.
The moral characteristics that Blake and Milton attributed to Satan were correctly interpreted but misapplied. Satan, symbolising the revolutionary defiance of authority, is not a moral force in and of himself, but rather a means by which we are freed to forge our own futures. As individuals and as a human race, we are as flawed as we are beautiful, as capricious as we are constant and as kind as we are cruel. In the most divine of existential contradictions, our imperfections are what make us perfect.
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