Before the Fall

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17 November

Myth, legend, symbol or allegory, we will generally be familiar with The Garden of Eden and what happens there.

Interesting enough, and, for some, the origins of a theology of original sin, but that begs a bigger question:


What was the nature of Adam and Eve before any of it happened?


My starting-point for asking (although there is almost certainly, as part of the theology of sin, a whole doctrine of our unfallen state) is that few, Pallas Athene and maybe Benjamin Button apart, come into existence as fully formed adults - their nakedness adverts to a state before clothes or fig-leaves, but also to the fact that (whether or not they have had sex) they did not come into being as a result of sex.

There are those who like to ask how incest was unavoidable, if their offspring were to procreate, but a better question is who they were, what they knew, and how they viewed their world. Was who they were - as well as what they knew - changed in the instant of eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Snow White (the pole to The Wicked Queen) only needs one bite of the Queen's poisoned apple; Neo just takes the red pill to see the mirror ripple and his arm silver; Alice follows the instructions (in the same Wonderland that Neo's pill keeps him in) and grows and shrinks. But a few examples of how a moment's ingestion makes a world of difference...

What would it be like not to know good and evil? We think of children (some of us think of the overturned legal principle of Doli incapax), we think of angels, and, though we were once children (and some feel closer to that than others do), and cannot imagine much more than the appearance of angels (except when Frank Capra and Luc Besson do it for us), none of this seems like the possibly timeless state that our pair was in.

Maybe Milton helps us 'flesh out' that notion of a state of being before culpability, or maybe our guiltiness, our sense of responsibility, failure and despair shuts out that possibility of actively identifying or imagining anything other than this - at best, maybe, the anthropologists of old, talking about tribes in a state of nature, wanted to read into them some sort of innocence or unknowingness that was never there...


I do not know, but I think, reminded as I am of Paradise Lost yet again, I shall go back to John Milton, and try to read a book on each day of Christmas.



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Vagueness possible

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26 October

I have known the phrase Darkness visible back to at least first reading, if not before, Paradise Lost, and the link is usually said to be partly with Milton's blindness, as he totally lost his sight in 1652, when John Aubrey says that he had yet to start the work by dictation (although others see that parts must have been written earlier than Aubrey's approximate date of commencing of 1658).

I remember it in Book IV, but that is where Satan gets about things, and it is in Book I that we have the substantive lines (which lead to a recollected Hell in that later Book*)


At once, as far as angels ken, he views
The dismal situation, waste and wild.
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace, flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible.


One Christmas, when there had been a broadcast that year of a reading of the entire work for some Milton multi-centenary (or other anniversary), I had intended to re-read PL on each of the Twelve Days, but it came to nothing. However, maybe finding myself back there now, as the psychology of Satan that the quotation below exemplifies seems very complex, is a good time for a visit...

Plus, also, I was reminded of the phrase, which I knew from Milton, when hearing announced a work yesterday evening of our friend Thomas Adès, in which he has reworked Dowland's song for solo piano (which, I am sure, that it needed), and given it the title Darkness Visible :


In darkness let me dwell; the ground shall sorrow be,
The roof despair, to bar all cheerful light from me;
The walls of marble black, that moist'ned still shall weep;
My music, hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep.
Thus, wedded to my woes, and bedded in my tomb,
O let me dying live, till death doth come, till death doth come.


Whether giving the piano arrangement that title, and the connotations that it has, is suitable remains for others to decide (but are we to imagine Satan himself as the voice of the submerged song, or the complainant figuring that he is content in damnation?) :


End-notes

* In these lines


Horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts; for within him hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place.


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