The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us

by Stephen Greenblatt

Like Ball, Milton reached his radical position by thinking hard about Adam and Eve in Paradise: No man who knows aught can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God Himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures born to command and not to obey. God’s words in Genesis to the first humans—“Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”—were for Milton a political statement, a declaration of innate, unfettered freedom. Humans lived in this freedom until “from the root of Adam’s transgression, falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury and jointly to defend themselves.” Political arrangements then are social contracts, nothing more. If the ruler violates his part of the contract, the subjects are under no further obligation to obey. As John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a century later, fully understood, these claims were revolutionary. For Milton they followed naturally from his reading of Genesis, a reading that led to the stance he had taken in attacking the bishops: “We have the same human privilege that all men have ever had since Adam, being born free.” In the wake of his unhappy marriage, he drew out the implications of this stance. Marriage, as the creation of Eve proved, was ...