In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when the serpent set out through the Garden of Eden to find Adam and Eve, he could hardly believe his good fortune when he found Eve on her own, ‘veiled in a cloud of fragrance where she stood’. He could only half see her ‘so thick the roses blushing round about her glowed’. She was stooping to support flowers with such tender stalks that their heads were drooping, mindless of the fact that she herself was the ‘fairest unsupported flower’.

Here Milton describes the great impact that this first sight in the flesh of Eve has on the serpent:

Thus now, Eve, nymph-like, was suddenly there before him:
- - - in her looks sums all delight.
- - - her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air - - -

This powerful vision can become all the more dramatic if one bears in mind that the poet is a Puritan living in the England of the seventeenth century when original sin was more important to the evaluation of human existence than even the words and actions of kings.

This initial reaction of the serpent to this vision of loveliness, both angelic and sensuously human, momentarily moves him away from evil as ‘her every air of gesture or least action overawed his malice’, so that, briefly abstracted from his own evil, he remained ‘stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge’. But that state quickly passed as ‘the hot hell that always in him burns - - - soon ended his delight’.

Now there is an instructive development. It is not a simple matter of the serpent being briefly beguiled by sheer human female beauty and virginal innocence and then pulling himself together to remember his primary role. It is more than that. That hot Hell now tortured him more as he contemplated this beauty and innocence ‘not for him ordained’ and this awareness that he could never share in or possess them brought forth again his fierce hatred and desire to do mischief. First he berates the foolish thoughts and ‘sweet compulsion’ that had temporally transported him into a state of apparent grace, where for a moment he forgot that hate and not love had brought him there. Reminding himself that all other joy than that achieved in destroying is lost to him, he returns to his main plan. ‘She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods’ he must now defile. ‘The way which to her ruin now I tend’.

This is a dreadful development, and will remain so down through our times unless we can find other meanings for it. Here in one of the greatest archetypical stories in our civilization we come face to face with the concept that there are individuals, and perhaps an impulse within many of us, and that there may even be powers within us or the universe whose reaction to virginal beauty is to want to defile it and perhaps ruin it.

It appears elsewhere both before and after Milton. In what may be the first extant story of the impact of a beautiful and very young virginal girl on a man, the eyes of God himself shone out at Dante through those of nine year old Beatrice. Almost 500 years after Beatrice, in 1787, our world received the first published account of what today we would call ‘child pornography’. Here, in the words of the author, is the child as the perfect model for the coming depravity, as she is a twelve year old girl. ‘Her features had delicacy, timidity, and the most admirable modesty. For she had a virginal air, great blue eyes, gentle with concern, a clear dazzling complexion, a small slender body, a voice of touching softness, ivory teeth, and beautiful fair hair. These were the subtle charms - - -, whose innocent grace and delicious features were so delicate and ethereal that they would escape the very brush which would depict them.”

Who was this delicate creature, and was she introduced thus for us to celebrate her? Alas no, she is Justine as presented to us by the Marquis de Sade, and what is most shocking about these words is that as we picture this innocent, trembling virginal creature, we know that the author has created her for us thus, so that we may participate in her ravishment and defilement, and even in her humiliation and torture. So, we appear to have gone from the adoration and celebration of the earthly angel through Dante to her rape and debasement through de Sade. Shockingly, as with Milton’s account of the serpent’s reaction to Eve, the very innocence and virtue fuel the lusts that also desire to ravish and destroy her. Here in these two, Beatrice and Justine, we have the formula for the child pornography moral panic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We are afraid to look at Beatrice lest we see her through the eyes of de Sade. Worse still, no matter how much we cloak her in our moral burqa, visions of what our human imagination can do to her persist, so we scream out in hatred at the monster that threatens our ideal. But, because of the persistent moral panic about her, and our obsession about hiding and protecting her – indeed denying her very essence, that monster is now firmly within all of us.

But more of Milton first. After the shock of hearing that Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, Adam quickly realises that he is faced with a decision whether to abandon his foolish sinful partner and stay with God in the Garden of Eden, or renounce all that the garden could mean for him and join with her in the great sin. With little hesitation, as Milton performs an astonishing feat for a Puritan by repeating and dramatizing what was possibly the greatest act of romantic love in our history, Adam takes the apple and eats it.

Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and nature gave a second groan,
Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin

But immediately for the sinners, it was as if they had become intoxicated, and they swam and frolicked, the new ‘divinity within them breeding wings’. Then they stopped and eyed each other anew and for the first time became inflamed with carnal desire. ‘He on Eve began to cast lascivious eyes, she him as wantonly repaid; in lust they burn’. Adam now praised the tree for causing her beauty to enflame him as never before. His intentions were well understood ‘of Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.’ Erotic beauty had entered the world. He led her to a shady bank where they made passionate love, presumably their first sexual coupling. Then exhausted, they slept.

Upon awakening, all was changed again. They viewed each other’s bodies and ‘innocence that as a veil had shadowed them from knowing ill was gone’. Milton now compared Adam with the future Samson, shorn of his strength, rising from the harlot of Dalilah. Now Adam and Eve were ‘destitute and bare of all their virtue: silent - - - confounded long they sat, as strucken mute’ until Adam began to bewail the great misfortunes that she had brought down upon them, leaving them naked thus, of honour void, of innocence, of faith, of purity. Here the poet moves to a great new theme. Adam says that in their faces they can now see the signs of ‘foul concupiscence - - - whence evil store’. And ‘even shame, the last of the evils’. Indeed he may have said the first and last of the evils as the actual line is

‘Even shame, the last of the evils; of the first
Be sure then. - - - ’

The importance of this remark about shame in the context of what has gone before will be taken up again later in this book, but suffice it to say for now that three hundred years later in the 20th century affect psychology had established that shame resulted not so much from a realization of sin or guilt but from the removal of a state of happiness.

Adam now asked how he could ever again behold her beauty as before and wished for the solitude of a savage living ‘in some glade obscured, where highest wood impenetrable to star or sunlight spread their umbrage broad’. He cried out for the pines and cedars with innumerable boughs to hide him, but being a practical man he then launched upon an idea to devise a scheme to counter the new problem of their shame, to find what best may for the present serve to hide ‘the parts of each from other that seem most to shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seem’. They found broad leaves and sewed them into garments. As they worked thus ‘to hide their guilt and dreaded shame’, Milton makes a sad and profound outcry:

“O how unlike to that first naked glory.”

That cry echoes and re-echoes down through our times as we appear to have truly lost that first naked glory.

BACK