Lucretian Subversion: The Serpent's Speech and Eve's Wonder in Milton's Paradise Lost, Study notes of Reasoning

Download Lucretian Subversion: The Serpent's Speech and Eve's Wonder in Milton's Paradise Lost and more Study notes Reasoning in PDF only on Docsity! Lucretian Subversion: Animal Speech and Misplaced Wonder in Paradise Lost 9.549–66 So glozed the tempter, and his proem turned; Into the heart of Eve his words made way, Though at the voice much marvelling; at length Not unamazed she thus in answer spake. What may this mean? Language of man pronounced By tongue of brute, and human sense expressed? The first at least of these I thought denied To beasts, whom God on their creation-day Created mute to all articulate sound; The latter I demur, for in their looks Much reason, and in their actions oft appears. Thee, serpent, subtlest beast of all the field I knew, but not with human voice endued; Redouble then this miracle, and say, How cam’st thou speakable of mute, and how To me so friendly grown above the rest Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight? Say, for such wonder claims attention due. (PL 9.549–66)1 The language used by the Satanic serpent in his encounter with Eve in Book 9 of Paradise Lost is key to Eve’s subsequent temptation and eventual Fall. The first danger of the temptation scene, as John Leonard has argued, lies in her being drawn into a debate about the nature of the serpent’s speech: “[T]he serpent speaks specifically about his speaking and attributes this supposedly new power to some as yet unspecified fruit” (141). He not only provides Eve with an account of how he came to possess the human gift of language, but also outlines how he came to possess the cognitive faculties that underlie it (PL 9.598–601). In what follows, I argue that the scene functions as a counter-didactic experience for Eve, specifically in its allusive reworking of a passage on the origins of language in the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius’ didactic poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ (De Rerum Natura, henceforth DRN). The key to the success of Eve’s temptation in Book 9 is the way the exchange employs and subverts elements of this Lucretian account of language in DRN 5, announcing the confusion of Eve’s cognitive faculties, and building the language of misplaced wonder which subverts the didactic message of Lucretius’ poem. The paradox of Milton’s engagement in his Christian epic with the materialist and (from a seventeenth-century perspective) effectively atheist Lucretius has been considered in a number of studies in recent years, including Lewalski, Fallon, and Hardie. Scholars have drawn attention to the way in which Milton’s epic shares significant features with Lucretius’ philosophical treatise, perhaps most strikingly, in Raphael’s account of angelic materiality, and in a common didactic aim shared by both epic poems.2 One of the hitherto neglected areas of Lucretius’ didactic message which Milton engages with is his account of the origins of language (DRN 5.1028–90). There the Lucretian didactic poet provides his addressee, Memmius, with an account of the origins of human language, which he treats by analogy with the development of animal sounds. In depicting Eve’s surprise at the physical capacity of the serpent to speak – which she had previously thought to belong to the domain of humans – Milton’s Eve appears to subvert the Lucretian teaching about human and animal speech as proceeding from a common origin. At the same time, she erroneously attributes the quality of reasoning to beasts (specifically, the serpent), which, she admits, “in their looks […] and in their actions” display “much reason” (PL 9.558–9). If this is an instance of Milton’s engagement with the Epicurean poet Lucretius, it can be read against the background of a wider culture of the Epicurean revival of the 1650s.3 Milton would thus depict Eve’s elevation of animal reasoning as leading to a deeper rejection of her previous reasoning powers. The language of wonder, moreover, which colours Eve’s reaction to the speaking serpent, could serve as a further subversion of the Lucretian didactic message in DRN, enacting rather than avoiding the warning against attributing supernatural causes to natural phenomena. In Eve’s case, the language of wonder manifests her idolising first of the serpent and then of the fruit. In succumbing to wonder, Milton’s Eve thereby dramatizes the Epicurean warning which lies at the heart of DRN and its didactic aim to dispel misplaced wonder in humans. One of the main mid-seventeenth century proponents of animal language on philosophical grounds was Pierre Gassendi, who attacked Descartes’ (Aristotelian) position which denied the ability of animals to possess reasoning powers. Gassendi’s emphasis on language as the expression of sensation, which Thomas Hobbes had also proposed (Gassendi, Syntagma Philosophicum II, 521–2, and Hobbes, De homine, II, 88 (10.1): see Serjeantson, 435), shares a vital feature with the Lucretian account of language: in Book 5 of DRN, the didactic narrator discusses the origins of human speech through an analogy with animal sounds to express sensation: postremo quid in hac mirabile tantoperest re, si genus humanum, cui vox et lingua vigeret, pro vario sensu varia res voce notaret? cum pecudes mutae, cum denique saecla ferarum dissimilis soleant voces variasque ciere,