On reason, faith, and freedom in Paradise Lost

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2007 by William Walker

Over the last thirty-five years, Stanley Fish has provided one of the most comprehensive and influential treatments of how, in Paradise Lost, Milton understands and dramatizes the human freedoms to believe and to act. This treatment, I wish to suggest, fails to acknowledge properly the way in which Milton, in this poem and elsewhere, grounds these freedoms in reason and the way this understanding of freedom, reason, and faith conforms with rationalist as opposed to voluntarist theological tradition. That Milton grounds the freedom to believe in reason, I will further argue, does not mean that, in requiring that man have faith in him, Milton's God is requiring him to do something he is not free to do. For Milton's God does not ask of his creatures endowed with reason that they believe in him independently of that faculty.

In Surprised by Sin (1967), Fish presents his views on these issues most forcefully in his reading of Milton's representation of the Fall in book 9 of Paradise Lost. Though Fish acknowledges that the poem asserts that God gave Adam and Eve reason, and that this faculty is one of the things that distinguishes them from the animals, he claims that it also very clearly establishes that reason "is irrelevant to any decision concerning the forbidden fruit." (1) Eve herself, according to Fish, affirms this fact when in response to Satan's temptations she claims,

  But of this Tree we may not taste nor touch;
  God so commanded, and left that Command
  Sole Daughter of his voice; the rest, we live
  Law to ourselves, our Reason is our Law. (2)

Eve here states her correct understanding that, in the words of Fish, "in this instance alone, reason is not her law" (Sin, p. 254). The reason God issues to Adam and Eve "a command beyond reason" is that he requires of them a belief in him that is what Fish calls an "act of faith" (Sin, pp. 243, 245). This act of faith, which Fish also refers to as a "leap of faith," is the result of an exertion of free will that is in no way answerable to reason or experience: "the arbitrariness of God's command ... its unreasonableness, is necessary if compliance is to be regarded as an affirmation of loyalty springing from an act of the will" (Sin, pp. 242, 270). The reader must remember that God requires Adam and Eve "to perform an act of the will, signifying faith, not understanding, and that lapses in logic do not affect her sufficiency" (Sin, p. 254). Fish here says little about the content of that faith out of which Adam and Eve are then freely to obey the command beyond reason, but he implies that this faith is a freely willed belief in an omnipotent and beneficent deity who is always to be obeyed. Describing the reason and faith of Adam and Eve in this way. Fish argues, Milton conforms with his assertion in On Christian Doctrine that "'the seat of faith is not in the understanding, but in the will'" (qtd. in Sin, p. 254).

Fish thus sees Adam and Eve in Paradise having and exercising the freedom to believe things about God and the freedom to act on that belief. They are free to believe that God is a beneficent and omnipotent deity who is always to be obeyed and free to believe that he is an envious oppressor, obedience to whom results in unhappiness and self-debasement. And they are free to act in accordance with these beliefs about God. Neither these freedoms nor their exercise are to be grounded in reason; they are to be grounded solely in the will. By issuing them a command for which there seems to be no reason--indeed against which there may seem to be all kinds of reasons--God requires Adam and Eve to display their freedom to believe, their faith, by freely obeying that command. Fish thus understands Adam and Eve's disobedience of God not as a failure of reason but as a failure of that faith he understands as a product of free will: "the error of substituting the law of reason and the evidence of things seen for the law of God is repeated by the reader if he regards Eve's failure as a failure of reason and declines to judge her in accordance with the terms of God's decree" (Sin, p. 254). Confronted with her own reasoning, which seemed to conflict with the divine command and her belief in a good God, Eve should have abandoned her reason and chosen to have acted out of faith, a freely willed belief that would have been entirely independent of the dictates of reason at that point in time. Avoiding the error of thinking that "she might not have fallen, had she been a better logician," Fish thus insists on "the reality of the Fall as a failure of will, free and spontaneous" (Sin, pp. 255, 256).

Though Fish observes that it is only in connection with the easy prohibition that reason has no jurisdiction, he ends up claiming that this is in fact the case for all rational agents in all questions concerning God and his word at all times. Speaking of God's command to Adam and Eve, he claims that "the more unreasonable seems the command, the more obvious it should be that its rationale lies in its source. This holds true also for fallen man who must affirm his faith in the same way, independently of reason" (Sin, p. 243). Fish here indicates that not just Adam and Eve before the Fall but all fallen humans (who of course were not issued with the command not to eat) enjoy at least some of the freedoms Adam and Eve enjoyed in Paradise: they enjoy the freedom to believe things about God and the freedom to act on and indeed "prove" that belief. Like the faith of Adam and Eve, the faith of all fallen human beings is essentially the product of an act of free will that is properly independent of reason, as is the act of proving that belief (Fish does not always distinguish between freely believing and freely proving belief as he might). That Fish wishes to generalize in this way--that he wishes to claim that, according to this poem, religious faith in general for all human beings and angels, both unfallen and fallen, is a matter of exercising an inner freedom independently of reason--is further clear from the manner in which he cites several seventeenth-century Protestant theologians in support of his argument. These theologians discuss human faith in general and wish to see, to use the title of Richard Baxter's work on the subject, "The arrogancy of Reason against Divine Revelations repressed" (qtd. in Sin, p. 241).