Edenic Freedoms

Celebrating the “freedom” of prelapsarian Adam and Eve,¹ Paradise Lost exploits the polysemous ambiguities in the term and concept of “freedom.” In his attempt to provide a psychologically plausible, emotionally compelling, and theodicy-satisfying version of his biblical narrative, Milton adapts various ethical, theological, legal, political, and poetic ways of characterizing freedom and its value from both classical and Christian traditions. Disparate visions of freedom contribute to the joys, tensions, and tragedy in Milton’s representation of Edenic life. I distinguish four major kinds of Edenic freedom: (1) voluntary motion; (2) divinely permitted choices; (3) best or correct rational choices; and (4) the choice to obey or disobey God. The first three kinds of freedom embody distinct conceptions of Edenic blessedness only partially harmonized. The free choice of obedience or disobedience, the crucial kind of freedom for the epic’s narrative arc, is not only the most difficult to reconcile with other conceptions of freedom in Paradise Lost, it is also deeply paradoxical because of obedience’s connection to fear of punishment. I conclude by showing how the tension between freedom and fear in Miltonic obedience troubles his central notion of the Fall as a free choice.

I. Adam’s Voluntary Motion

Let me contextualize Paradise Lost’s representations of voluntariness and choice by juxtaposing Milton’s discussions of choice in Ars logicae (1672) and of unfallen Adam and Eve in De doctrina Christiana.² While Milton’s Ars logicae borrows heavily from Petrus Ramus’s 1572 Dialecticae and George Downame’s 1601 Ramist commentary, Milton deviates from these works to express his philosophical and theological views.³ Adding to his sources’ contrasts between natura and consilium as efficient causes, chapter 5 argues that unlike animals, who act solely by “nature,” uncoerced humans can act either by internal “natural necessity” (necessitas naturae) or “freely” (libere) with consilium.⁴ Consilium renders Aristotle’s central ethical term in his Nicomachean Ethics, proairesis, which can be translated as “choice,” “decision,” “deliberate choice,” or “rational choice.”⁵ Downame identifies consilium with proairesis, and consilium is the most common rendering of proairesis in Renaissance Aristotle translations and the Aristotle commentaries studied at Milton’s Cambridge.⁶ The Nicomachean Ethics argues that proairesis, which results from deliberation (3.2.17, 3.3.19, 5.8.5), is an efficient cause of human action (6.2.4), concerns actions up to us to do or not (3.5.2–3), and is constitutive of virtue, which is a habit involving choice (2.4.3, 2.6.15).⁷ Early modern commentaries interpret (and distort) Aristotle with patristic and Scholastic concepts. Though Aristotle never directly connects proairesis to his (political) conception of freedom, eleutheria, commentators treat proairesis as a manifestation of “free choice” (liberum arbitrium) conceived as what Scholastics term libertas indifferens, the liberty to perform an act or not.⁸ Milton likewise claims that God created humans and angels as rational beings able “freely” (libere) to do “this or that by choice” (hoc vel illud pro arbitrio) with the “power … of doing or not doing” (potestas … agendi vel non agendi) (CM 11:40–42).

Aristotle treats proairesis as a distinctively rational subset of to hekousion or voluntariness, arguing that animals and children behave voluntarily but only adult humans act through rational choice (NE 3.2.2–4). Milton’s contrast between acting by “natural necessity” and freely with consilium identifies Aristotle’s merely voluntary with natural necessity. His association of “appetite” (appetitus) with “nature” (CM 11:38) underscores the difference between humans, who can reason about their appetites to make free choices, and appetite-impelled animals.

Milton’s Ars logicae is broadly consistent with his anti-Calvinist, Arminian commitment in both De doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost to human freedom as the ability to choose between alternative possibilities.⁹ Yet there are tensions. Following Augustine’s City of God, De doctrina argues that God’s prohibition turned a tree otherwise neither good nor bad into a test of human obedience.¹⁰ Without the prohibition, unfallen humankind, virtuous “by nature” (naturâ), “natural inclination” (naturali … ductu), and “voluntarily” (sponte), could not be tested (DDC 358–59). Milton’s...