Paradise, ever?

"Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained
From this delightful fruit, nor known till now
True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be
In things to us forbidden, it might be wished,
For this one tree had been forbidden ten.
But come, so well refreshed, now let us play,
As meet is, after such delicious fare;
For never did thy beauty since the day
I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned
With all perfections, so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now
Than ever, bounty of this virtuous tree."
John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book IX). 

For the next few posts, I want to try and focus a little bit on texts that straddle the Renaissance/Enlightenment boundary and try to trace the coming of a new consciousness and and retelling of older narratives in its light. This passage is from Book IX of Paradise Lost: Adam, in Eve's wake, has finished eating his share of the forbidden fruit and now for the first time is experiencing something for which he has no name. This is where Milton tells his version of a question that has remained unanswered for so many lifetimes: what did Adam feel for Eve before he felt lust? In this case, what is he feeling at this exact moment when Eve's beauty inflames his senses and disarms his experience? Though the Doré image accompanying the text is from a few moments later, I am deeply interested in this too short moment that is the bountiful pleasure of sin. In these seconds, these moments before knowledge is forced upon Adam and Eve, what we see is innocence intact and the body altered. If Adam and Eve never know what it is they are experiencing then is lust, lust? Is Eve the Original Sinner or does a cohabitation of the figures of God and Satan give birth to Original Sin?

I want to answer these questions through the idea of a subject's unwavering gaze shifting from his maker to another. In other words, when Adam obeys Eve and takes the fruit, and then more literally undergoes a change in the way he sees her, he has essentially shifted his loyalties from both God and Satan, and transferred them to the figure of Eve. It's ironic that Eve gets the title of "daughter of God," but Adam is not the Son. It is Christ who will be crowned Son, and who will pronounce the Almighty's judgment. The crucial players of Heaven, the son and the daughter, stand at opposite ends.

But I digress. To come back to the questions at hand-- I think the answer may have several layers: Adam and Eve are not the same. Adam gazes upon God, while Eve's gaze is free, to go to Adam, God, the serpent, the fruit. Adam's changed focus also implies a change in God's position at the top of the foodchain, even if in a temporary way. It is in the seconds where loyalty shifts, where capital becomes competitive, where the subject is enticed by a kinder master, that the divine must generate what the goddess cannot. Sin. The temporarily disturbed supremacy is intact again, and the daughter, the goddess of a second, is sent off to her husband's home. Milton's Trinity, then, is barely harmonious-- Father, Daughter and the Unholy Gaze.

Reigning in Hell

"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime
Said the lost Archangel, this the seat
That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovereign, can dispose and bid
What shall be right; furtherest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells! Hail horrors! hail,
Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,
receive thy new possessor! one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
A mind in its own place and in itself
can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
(Paradise Lost, Book 1-- John Milton)

To continue the English trend, here is Milton's Satan right before he utters his famous mantra, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." The above excerpt is one of the many views we get into Satan's mind-- in the case of this particular one, it is a view into the mind of a fallen angel as he finds a new space in which to exist. While Satan's moral outlook, his approach towards the supremacy as established by God, and his quest to be more than just a being has been discussed enough times, I want to use this post to briefly examine what it means to establish another space, and whether Hell is truly a place that can exist free of Heaven.
Satan very clearly hesitates upon arriving in this new geography-- one that clearly lacks the elements that we now use to define God--light being the foremost among them. Where he is now is lightless and therefore God-less. Yet, it is the space where all who dwell shall be equal, and share equally in what is "infernal" and "joyless." At the same time, this new Hell is given a changeability that depends not upon its maker but upon its occupier. Whosoever happens to be in Hell can imagine it as a Heaven in itself-- for Satan's Heaven is a changing place, it is also a place that is inconstant for it is Heaven at the very same moment that it is Hell.
While Dante, Homer, and Virgil have all given their Underworlds a powerful sense of nationality by their use of geography and identity-- Milton's Satan comes of as the ruler of a homeless people with no particular promised land in mind. Hell is where God isn't. It is a place that can be Heavenly if seen that way. It questions what constant is-- is it the God who refuses to share his divinity with one of his creation, or is it a Satanic mind so persistent that it impoverishes the body in order for its desires to be satisfied? In other words, does Hell really exist outside of the mind? To take this notion a little further-- does being in Hell mean having only one's mind as a supreme figure, as solace, as a friend, a space, a family?

What Satan wants, then, is to define himself against God-- he really wants to become an "other." Perhaps one could argue that the very figure of the divine insists on others, yet the divine can also be read as being the anti-other or the embracer. If we stick with the latter, then Satan is possibly trying to achieve the impossible: define himself and his kingdom against a figure that constantly absorbs and grows and thus resists the possibility of having an other to itself.