Against Temptation

As we are still making our way as a class through Book IX, I wish to highlight here something that I found profoundly interesting in Adam’s articulation of reasons why Eve should refrain from separating from his side. While reading for a presentation concerned with understanding virtue in Paradise Lost through and alongside of Areopagitica, I became aware of virtue’s problematic status in the epic poem. In other words, virtue has a complicated definition involving bits of seemingly incongruous elements as absolute freedom and rational restraint.

Virtue, for Milton, is produced by trial, but more intriguingly, it is something which can arise from consuming “evil” things. The notion of evil objects or knowledge is severely problematized however, for Milton ultimately conveys that the consumer, rather than the consumed, is responsible for the effects of exposure and ingestion. As such, whether something is good or evil, whether something is with or without virtue, can be known only after it has been “tasted.” It is only through trial, through confronting and consuming potentially corrupt material that the rational will is exercised and the taste refined. The process of virtue, of discerning and pursuing its flavors, is simply that: a process, made up of repeated falls.

As such, can one ever taint or lose their virtue? It’s unclear, particularly in a postlapsarian world. Before the fall in Paradise Lost, however, this question of corrupted virtue was apparently just as complicated. In defending his desire to keep her within sight, Adam proclaims that it is not Eve’s weakness that he mistrusts, but their foe and the process of being tried: “Not diffident of thee do I dissuade / They absence from my sight, but to avoid / Th’ attempt itself, intended by our foe” (293-295). I found this statement utterly reasonable up to its conclusion, wherein Adam tells us that trial should be avoided not because it leads to corruption, but because it is itself corrupt: “For he who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses / The tempted with dishonor foul, supposed / Not incorruptible of faith, not proof / Against temptation” (296-299). In other words, it appears that, for Adam, if one is tried, one’s virtue is already tarnished, and it is this corruption that attracts tempters.

More later today (I know, you can barely contain yourselves).