Give Me Liberty or Give Me a Piece of Fruit The Liberty or Lack Thereof of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost
Give Me Liberty or Give Me a Piece of Fruit?The Liberty (or Lack Thereof) of Adam and EveGive me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. -Milton, Areopagitica, 1644 If we are to take any one moral from Milton's Paradise Lost, it might very well be that human beings must always be obedient to God. However, the term obedience implies the ability to make a choice. After all, if men are not free to decide to be obedient, then it is really not obedience at all but the only natural state that mankind can achieve. In order to support the moral that all sentient beings must be obedient to God, then we must accept that God created all sentient beings with free will. God says, "I form'd them free, and free they must remain, till they enthrall themselves" (III.123). Freedom has only one condition in the paradise of Eden-to be obedient to God's will. Adam and Eve were instructed not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Except for this single prohibition, they were indeed free. Or where they? In the Garden, the archangel Raphael explains to Adam that man might someday purify their bodies into spirit, meaning that humans might
However, to state positively that Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost are completely free or whether they are automatically programmed to be obedient is nearly impossible. God most certainly gave mankind the ability to act freely. So, what was God's purpose for not intervening to save his precious creations? This leads directly to the issue of predestination. God was aware that if he gave Adam and Eve the supposed gift of a "free will", their eventual fall from grace was certain. However, in the end she cannot bear the notion of her dying and Adam taking a second Eve. When Eve woke for the first time, shortly after being formed from Adam, she finds Adam asleep and then wanders to a body of water. They are essentially one being-Adam perceives no choice but to die with her. Bibliography BibliographyMilton, J. God granted them the ability to decide, but then stacked the decked against them. He creates Eve in a role subservient to Adam, thereby causing the circumstances that might have led to Eve consuming the forbidden fruit in an effort to become Adam's equal. Being inferior in physical ability and subservient to Adam as he is to God, an argument could be made that Eve willfully chose to be tempted by the snake so that she could gain an advantage over Adam. And if those were not bad enough, he allows Satan into the Garden, having full knowledge of what Satan would accomplish. Therefore, they serve necessity-not God.
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