2008 - Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC)

R e s e a r c h P a p e r
themselves, and God. As Nicholson writes, this man and wife were
“prototypes of what Man might have been” (239). However, this state
of perfection is not maintained. In the scene of Eve’s temptation, the
reader is given a painful example of free will gone terribly wrong.
Satan, in his continued rebellion against God, chooses to tempt Eve.
Eve, exercising her own free will, chooses to disobey the only rule of
Eden, and Adam, her husband and protector, decides to follow Eve
in her sin. By eating the fruit, man sins against God and moves from
the ideal to the ignoble.
One of the points of poignant contrast between pre- and post
lapsarian conditions is the changed relationship between Adam
and Eve. On the eve of the fall, Adam and Eve enjoyed a blissful,
romantic night together. Now, on the day of the fall, Adam and Eve
find each other drawn to one another with a lustful desire. Nicholson
comments, “The scene that follows is at the opposite pole from the
earlier nuptial bower and the hymn to wedded love” (289). After
committing this lust-driven sexual act, they feel ashamed and seek to
conceal their nakedness. Then follows man and woman’s first quarrel
(289). The former happiness of Eden has been marred by a result of
man’s use of free will. Now the reader may despair along with the
fallen couple, are the lives of man and wife marred irreparably
Even before the hour of mankind’s greatest need, Christ, the
Son of God, had already exercised His own free will in deciding to
become mankind’s redeemer. In book III, God foretells man’s fall,
and Christ, the, Son willingly decides to die for mankind. He tells His
Father, “Behold me then, me for him [fallen man], life for life / I offer,
on me let thine anger fall” (Milton, III. 236-237). Now that man has
been ruined by his own abuse of free will, it falls to Christ to redeem
what has been destroyed. The critic, Stanley Fish, writes that Christ
is “the embodiment of everything that is truly valuable,” and Christ’s
very existence influences every aspect of the poem (430-431).
Therefore, following Fish’s line of reason, one can assume that
Christ’s offer of redemption is the climax of the free will paradox.
Here, Christ, the good Creator, is told of the ravages that will be
wrought by mankind’s ill use of free will, and yet He gladly exercises
His own free will in order to rescue the condemned creatures.
According to Scott Elledge, the importance of Christ’s choice
cannot be underestimated. He writes that Christ’s sacrifice is “the
final justification” of God’s ways. Man, through the use of his own
free will, has been expelled from Paradise; however, man will not
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