The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  To many revolutionaries at this decisive moment, Adam and Eve seemed like key allies. Shortly after the king’s execution, a man named Gerrard Winstanley called his followers together. A tailor from the north of England who had gone bankrupt in the economic turmoil brought on by the war, Winstanley had hit close to rock bottom: to stay alive, he had become a cowherd. But he had not despaired. He reflected obsessively on the original man and woman in Eden, on why society had taken such a disastrous turn after the Fall, and on how it would be possible to reverse the damage.

  On April 1, 1649, Winstanley led a small group of like-minded men and women to dig and plant crops on St. George’s Hill in Surrey, about twenty miles from London. They were Adam and Eve, their leader said, and together they would re-create the Garden of Eden. They were careful not to appropriate anyone else’s property; the land they cultivated was common, the time-honored possession of the entire community. But local landowners immediately understood the radicalism of their symbolic action. The “Diggers”—as members of the commune were called—were mounting a challenge to private ownership and to a whole class structure that concentrated wealth, land, status, and power in the hands of a tiny elite group, while consigning the rest of the population to powerlessness and penury. The warped system, enforced by violence, allowed the privileged few to fence off as their own possession what God intended for everyone.

  The Fall was not, Winstanley told his followers, an event that occurred in the archaic past; it is something that is constantly happening here and now, whenever a person, drunk with self-love, becomes greedy and begins to tyrannize over others for the sake of accumulating wealth. “When a man falls, let him not blame a man that died 6000 years ago, but blame himself.” Private property is the fatal fruit.

  Paradise, Winstanley wrote, is not something that only our distant progenitors knew briefly and then lost forever. It is the life that each of us has already experienced when we were young:

  Look upon a child that is new born, or till he grows up to some few years: he is innocent, harmless, humble, patient, gentle, easy to be entreated, not envious. And this is Adam.

  The preachers who tell us that in this life we can never regain innocence are lying. We not only possess it as children but we can also recover it as adults, provided we do away with our possessiveness and our possessions: “There shall be no more buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the earth is the Lord’s.” The whole social hierarchy that has grown up alongside our acquisitiveness and greed must be dismantled. There will be no more masters and servants, no gentlefolk and commoners. Men will no longer lord it over women. All will be equal. On St. George’s Hill, the Diggers set out to prove that this vision was not an idle dream; it was a life that could be realized here and now.

  The local landlords complained, but the authorities sent by the New Model Army at first saw nothing threatening in a group of nonviolent visionaries who merely wanted to plant crops on common lands. When the army refused to act, the property-owners took matters into their own hands. They were not going to allow a radical commune to attempt to establish a class-free paradise in their neighborhood. Surrey was no place for a new Adam and Eve. In 1650 armed thugs were hired to beat up the settlers, destroy their crops, and burn down their huts. Though Winstanley’s impassioned tracts—The New Law of Righteousness, The Fire in the Bush, The Law of Freedom—continued to circulate, his social experiment was over.

  Politically radical though he was and steadfastly opposed to censorship, Milton was never sympathetic to the likes of Winstanley. The sects that sprung up all over England in the 1640s and ’50s—Diggers, Familists, Muggletonians, Quakers, Ranters—were, he wrote, “but winds and flaws to try the floating vessel of our faith.” The great project at hand was the redemption not of this or that small group of visionary purists but of the nation as a whole. Milton had no intention of shivering in a hut after planting cabbages all day or of taking communion in the nude with a gaggle of wild-eyed would-be Adams and Eves.

  At the very time that the landlords’ enforcers were driving the Diggers off St. George’s Hill, Milton had accepted the position of Secretary of Foreign Languages for the newly formed Republican Council of State. He had been offered the position, which paid a handsome £288 per year, only a month after he published his pamphlet defending the execution of the king. He had moved then from the margins, as the notorious advocate of no-fault divorce, to a place near the center of power. He was the principal champion in Europe of the English Commonwealth, the learned, indefatigable defender of king-killing and Parliamentary rule.

  Milton’s charge was to respond at length to the many attacks, from the shocked defenders of monarchy across the Continent, on what the English revolutionaries had dared to do. The arguments were no more polite in Latin—the language in which the debates were conducted—than they were in English, but Milton had always been able to give as much as he got. The problem was that his dream of literary immortality seemed further away than ever and, more ominously, his eyesight was steadily deteriorating. The rainbow that had plagued his vision when he was writing the divorce tracts gave way to worse symptoms: a mist seemed to hover in his forehead and temples; objects on which he tried to focus floated and refused to stay still; intense lights flashed before his closed eyes. He tried every medical therapy he could find, but nothing helped except rest, and there was no time for rest.

  By 1652, at age forty-four, he was completely blind. His enemies said that the affliction was divine punishment for his collaboration in the regicide, but he observed wryly that by the same logic you would have to conclude that God had brought about the regicide in order to punish the king’s crimes. It was more reasonable to think that his blindness came from natural causes exacerbated by his tireless labors. For all that, Milton did not abandon his post as Secretary of Foreign Languages. The Council still needed him and, renewing his appointment, provided assistants to read the documents to him, fetch books, and take dictation. Endowed with a formidable memory, he trained himself to follow complex arguments, to compose, revise, and translate in his head, and to dictate the results. The training turned out to be crucially important in the future, when he finally came to write the great poem he believed was within him.

  At the same time that he was serving the state, Milton was busy in his domestic life. He needed to adjust in innumerable ways to his loss of vision. There were investments to attend to, legal squabbles, friends to visit or to receive at his house. Managing his household must have been an exceedingly complex task, even with ample resources. The death of Mary in 1652 left him a blind widower with three small daughters, the eldest of whom was only six. He somehow got through the next four years with the help of servants and perhaps with help (despite the animosity between them) from Mary’s mother. Then, in his forty-eighth year, he married Katherine Woodcock, twenty years his junior. A year later she gave birth to a daughter, Milton’s fourth, but the family had almost no time to settle into its new configuration. Only four months later, Katherine was dead—“of a consumption,” according to the notation in Milton’s Bible—and her baby lived for only another month.

  In 1658, following a urinary tract infection, the fifty-nine-year-old Oliver Cromwell suddenly died of septicemia. He was succeeded by his son Richard, but the conflicting forces that his tough, wily father had managed to hold together began to turn viciously on one another. The Republic collapsed into irreconcilable factions, and there was a surge of popular support for a return to the way things had once been. The dead king’s son was invited to reclaim the kingdom that was rightfully his—that had been his all along, it was said—and on May 29, 1660, his thirtieth birthday, Charles II entered London, to the ringing of bells and the ecstatic cheering of his loving subjects.

  Milton should not have been caught unawares by this turn of events, but he evidently was, at least to the extent that he failed to conceal or secure for himself and for his daughters all of
the money he had saved—the very large sum of almost £2,000—from his salary as Secretary. That and other wealth tainted by his service to the Commonwealth would be confiscated, he realized too late, just as the Republicans had earlier confiscated the property of prominent Royalists.

  But that was perhaps the least of Milton’s problems. The Restoration, he knew, would be christened with blood. As the royal authorities named those whom it held principally responsible for the regicide and its aftermath, Milton’s enemies were calling loudly for the arrest and execution of the blind traitor. The traditional sentence for those convicted of treason was to be “hanged by the neck, and being alive cut down, and your privy members to be cut off, and your bowels to be taken out of your belly and there burned, you being alive.” To avoid this fate, some of his Republican associates escaped to Holland or other places where they might receive protection, but the blind Milton, who would easily have been spotted by watchers stationed at all the ports, did not attempt to flee the country. Instead, he went into hiding at a friend’s house in London. The identity of the friend has never been discovered, but whoever it was took a serious risk.

  The immediate and most obvious targets for Royalist justice were the fifty-nine judges who had presided over the trial of Charles I and others closely associated with his execution in 1649. Some of these had already died; others fled. (Among those who managed to elude capture were three signatories to the death warrant who made it all the way to New Haven, Connecticut, and are now commemorated in street names: Dixwell, Whalley, and Goffe.) Ten, less agile or fortunate, were duly arrested, tried, and executed. But these hideous deaths were not enough to settle accounts either for the ax blow that had killed the king or for the eleven subsequent years of Republican rule.

  The newly crowned son of the royal martyr was affable, tolerant, and more interested in sexual conquest than in revenge. But the reckoning was not over. Eager to demonstrate their loyalty, the Commons and the Privy Council assembled a further shortlist of those it deemed worthy of punishment, whether execution or life imprisonment. Milton was a prime candidate for inclusion. He had, after all, found in the story of Adam and Eve the principal justification for the killing of the king: “All men naturally were born free.” But though his name was mentioned, it was left off the final list, almost certainly because of the effective intervention of influential friends both in Parliament and at court. When the king subsequently signed an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion to pardon all others who had served the toppled regime, Milton was safe.

  Though he emerged from hiding and returned home, he remained in seclusion. According to one of his earliest biographers, Milton “was in perpetual terror of being assassinated.” Many people wished him dead, but whether he had grounds for his fear is not clear. His public life, in any case, was over. A royal proclamation was issued calling for anyone who possessed copies of his “wicked and traitorous works” to deliver them to the authorities, who would see to it that they were burned by the public hangman.

  Milton was reunited with his three daughters, aged fourteen, twelve, and eight. The blind father needed help. Though he had lost much of his wealth, he was still a man of means, and servants continued to do many of the basic household tasks. But the able assistants that he once had, in his office as Secretary, who fetched him books and read to him, were gone. His life’s blood was reading, and now, thrown back on himself, he craved more than ever access to his precious books. When some loyal friends paid him visits, he could recruit them to read, and he hired a young Quaker who had some Latin to come daily to his house. But the young man was periodically arrested—it was illegal to be a Quaker—and his help, in any case, was not enough. Milton began to demand that the girls read to him, often in languages that they did not know. He taught them how to recognize and sound out the Greek, Hebrew, and other characters, but he who had so deeply concerned himself with the education of children did not bother to teach his own daughters how to understand what they were reading. When visitors to his house remarked on the strangeness of his daughters’ reading so many languages without comprehension, their father would remark jokingly that “one tongue is enough for a woman.” It was evidently regarded as a witty reply.

  In 1663, five years after the death of his second wife, Milton married again, this time to Elizabeth Minshull—Betty, he called her—a yeoman’s daughter thirty years younger than he. At this point relations with his teenaged daughters, in particular with his eldest daughter Mary, had almost completely broken down. When Mary was told of her father’s approaching marriage, she replied that it “was no news to hear of his wedding; but if she could hear of his death, that was something.” The family all continued to live together under one roof for six years, but there is no sign that relations ever improved.

  His political hopes lay in ruins; his grinding labor and eloquent writing over more than twenty years were for nothing; his exultant enemies laughingly burned his books; most of his wealth was gone; many of his friends were dead or in hiding; his daughters, whom he had alternately neglected and bullied, hated him; he was unable to wield a pen, let alone read a book; blindness and fear of assassins kept him cooped up. All was lost—and yet: his inner world had vastly, incalculably expanded. Each night or in the early hours of the morning, if we can believe him, he had in this inner world of his a female visitor.

  Milton called his nightly visitor Urania. The name was pagan, the ancient Muse of astronomy, but in Latin its literal meaning is “heavenly one,” and she was for Milton the mysterious force within him that was enabling him at long last to write the great epic poem that he had dreamed all his life that he was destined to write. His prior attempts to write such a work had gone nowhere. He was able to show friends some scattered verses, but nothing more. Shakespeare had died at fifty-two, having already retired to Stratford and given up his active career as a professional writer. What could the ruined Milton, who turned fifty-two in the year that Charles II returned to England, expect to accomplish at this late stage of his life? Yet suddenly here it was, through the virtually miraculous assistance of a being he called his “celestial patroness.”

  I think we must take Milton’s claim of celestial visitation, however strange it sounds, seriously. The Muse would come to him, as he put it, “unimplored.” With her protection he would descend into the underworld; he would soar into “the Heaven of Heavens”; above all, as if he still could see, he would wander by shady grove or sunny hill or along the sacred brook that bubbled up by the holy sites of Jerusalem. And he would emerge from these reveries filled with a peculiar music that he had never been able to sound, that had never before been sounded by anyone.

  He settled upon a routine. He would awaken at four in the morning (at five in the winter) and lie in bed for half an hour, listening to someone read to him, preferably from the Hebrew Bible. Then for an hour or two he would sit quietly in contemplation. By seven he was ready. An amanuensis would arrive, and Milton would begin to dictate the verses that he had composed in his head—that had come to him from on high or welled up inside him. If the amanuensis was late, the blind poet would begin to complain, as if he were in pain from what he was forced to hold back: “I want to be milked.”

  It would emerge from him in a rush: he could dictate as many as forty lines of verbally dense, syntactically complex, unrhymed iambic pentameter verse. He would have the lines read back to him, and then, sitting in an easy chair with his leg swung over one of the arms, he would begin to adjust and cut and tighten, often reducing the forty lines to twenty. The whole morning was spent this way.

  And then it was over for the day. Fearing his belatedness and anxious to bring to fruition what he had finally begun—“long choosing and beginning late” (9:26), as he put it—Milton felt keenly the pressure of time and must have been eager to press on. But he knew that he could not force more lines to come. He had to wait for another night, another unbidden visitation. After lunch he paced in his small garden for three to four hours at a time, or if the w
eather would not permit him to be outdoors, he would sit on a swing he had devised, pulling himself back and forth. In the evening, he played music, received a few visitors, listened to poetry. By nine o’clock he was in bed, courting sleep and the return of the Muse.

  For long months, extending into years, these returns continued, as if by miracle. The mornings would bring forth more verses, more occasions to be “milked.” The task was to keep going, to dodge the assassin’s knife that he feared was hanging over him, and, more realistically, to avoid infection from the bubonic plague that periodically ravaged London’s population.

  By the summer of 1665 he had a draft—over 10,000 lines—of a stupendous poem to show his young Quaker assistant. What had seemed impossible had actually happened. Published in 1667 and then again, in revised form, in 1674, Paradise Lost was the bid for poetic immortality that Milton had confessed dreaming about in his youthful letter to his best friend. He had actually succeeded in rivaling Homer and Virgil. He had ascended the peak that Shakespeare had climbed. He had written one of the world’s greatest poems.

  11

  Becoming Real

  A creative achievement of this magnitude, as Milton’s own talk of nightly visitations from the Muse suggests, is almost impossible to account for rationally. But the one piece of it that makes perfect sense is that the poem had to be about Adam and Eve. Those figures had haunted every facet of Milton’s experience, from his expectation of marital bliss to his plea for divorce, from his educational schemes to his understanding of Jesus, from his political radicalism to his understanding of why the revolution had failed. The story in Genesis was for him the key to unlocking the meaning of virtually everything: anthropology, psychology, ethics, politics, faith. And like Augustine, who shared this obsession, Milton brought to the story his whole life.