The freedom dilemma: Milton's (and Adam's) inability to reconcile reason and authority

Abstract

Much scholarship on the separation scene in Paradise Lost focuses on whether or not Adam could have acted differently to prevent Eve from working alone. The separation scene, however, is impossible to resolve. Through this scene, Milton traces the origin of his own struggle to reconcile the principles of political freedom. In Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, Milton faces the reality that his own principles cannot be reconciled. The separation scene places Adam in a similar situation, as he struggles to reconcile Raphael's conflicting advice regarding following God's will. Milton's and Adam's failures raise questions regarding the possibility of human freedom.

The separation scene in Book 9 of Paradise Lost is a pivotal moment in Milton's epic poem. Since the separation scene is not in the Bible, but is rather Milton's own creation, it is crucial to understanding Milton's depiction of Adam, Eve, and the Fall. The separation scene is not the Fall, but the reader will come to the poem knowing where this scene will lead. Both Adam and Eve, once they have fallen, look back on the separation scene rather than the actual eating of the fruit as the key event that caused them to fall. Adam blames Eve for not listening to him in the separation scene: ‘Would thou hadst hearkened to my words, and stayed/With me, as I besought thee’, ¹ Eve responds by blaming Adam for not exercising more authority over her during the separation scene: ‘Being as I am, why didst not thou the head/Command me absolutely not to go’ (9.1155-6). Although both Adam and Eve are in a fallen state, which has caused them to turn on each other, their focus on the separation scene highlights the importance of this moment; the separation scene puts Adam and Eve on the path to falling.

The consequences of the separation scene raise a question: could Adam have done anything to stop Eve from working separately? Critics are divided over this question. Dennis Danielson insists that Adam should have commanded Eve not to work separately, as a command does not violate Eve's freedom, but it likely would have stopped her. ² Joan Bennett views Adam as incorrectly giving Eve absolute freedom, that is, the freedom to do what she wants, while violating true freedom, that is, making the right choice. ³ Benjamin Myers argues that Adam had to let Eve leave, as Eve is simply exercising her freedom in a prelapsarian world. ⁴ Joshua Scodel, comparatively, objects to debates centred on Adam's husbandly duties and sees Adam as mistakenly encouraging Eve's reason's potential to err. ⁵ Interpretations that excuse or blame Adam miss the point. Milton deliberately created an impossible situation for Adam because he himself had faced a similar impossibility. Adam's difficulty in the separation scene parallels a challenge regarding political freedom that Milton articulated in his prose. With the separation scene, Milton fills Adam with the same frustrations that he felt when he tried to adapt his own definition of political freedom to the circumstances of 1660.

Throughout his political prose, Milton ties political freedom to both popular sovereignty and the establishment of a commonwealth. As a defender of the English Commonwealth, Milton attempts to reconcile the political philosophy that he articulates in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which stresses popular sovereignty, with the commonwealth regimes that he served, which had little popular support. He does so by empowering entities like parliament and the army with the spirit of popular sovereignty. This strategy, however, was no longer viable in 1660, as neither parliament nor the army was willing to resist the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. In his final prose tract before the Restoration, Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, Milton confronts an unwinnable situation in which popular sovereignty, no matter how he defines it, will not produce a free commonwealth. He cannot come up with a way to make the people of England free.

Milton recreates this struggle in Paradise Lost. Gordon Teskey views Milton's portrayal of the Fall in Paradise Lost as the poet's effort to interpret the origin of the failure of the English Revolution. The English Revolution failed, in Milton's eyes, because of sin, so it was necessary to look back to the origin of sin to understand a recent historical event. ⁶ The separation scene traces a different origin: the origin of the inability to combine what for Milton are the principles of freedom. Many critics have focused on Michael's depiction of human history, particularly the Nimrod episode, to illustrate the poem's relation to Milton's political theory. David Norbrook argues that Adam's disapproval of Nimrod's kingship reveals that he is ‘instinctively republican’, connecting his thought to Milton's own. ⁷ Mary Nyquist also highlights the political significance of the Nimrod passage, tying it to early modern antityrannical discourse (opposition to the disenfranchisement of free-born men), of which Milton's commonwealth prose writings were also a part. ⁸ The separation scene, however, better reflects the dilemma regarding freedom with which Milton grappled in his prose. Brief Notes expresses Milton's frustration with bringing political freedom to England, and Paradise Lost places the origin of that frustration in the separation scene. Like Milton, Adam finds himself trying to reconcile irreconcilable principles in a moment of significant consequence for freedom. Failure on the part of Adam puts all of humanity at risk of being enthralled to sin (which is exactly what ends up happening). In the separation scene, Milton replays his own dilemma regarding the freedom of England and projects it onto an event that influences the freedom of all human history. By doing so, he depicts the origin humanity's inability to bring together two conflicting principles that are required for freedom and undermines his previous commitment to rational debate.

With the regicide and abolition of monarchy in 1649, England entered a period of experimentation in government. As the Secretary of Foreign Tongues for the English Commonwealth, Milton was tasked with defending the new regime, primarily to a European audience. Milton's tracts from the Interregnum served the purpose of his political masters, but they also articulate an interpretation of political liberty to which Milton remained loyal after he ceased to be a civil servant. In his polemic prose, Milton defends the English Commonwealth by insisting that the English people can only be free if they embrace popular sovereignty and commonwealths. By 1660, however, the circumstances were such that Milton had to struggle to explain how his own principles of liberty were even possible, let alone desirable. Initially, Milton could outline his version of liberty without worrying about its practical application. Milton put forth his theory of government in 1649 in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which outlines the origins of government and anchors political freedom in the people's right to hold governments accountable. The power of governors, in Milton's framework, ‘is only derivative, transferr’d and committed to them in trust from the people … in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally’. ⁹ He even argues that the people could ‘retaine him or depose him [their ruler] though no Tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best’. ¹⁰ Here, the people seemingly are empowered to change their governors on a whim. Milton's position opens the door for frequent alterations in government, provided that they have popular support. Milton's belief in popular sovereignty did not render him a supporter of democracy or an extension of the franchise. Nicholas McDowell, Diane Purkiss, and Mary Nyquist have noted the religious, gender, national, and racial limits of Miltonic liberty. ¹¹ Although far from a modern democrat, Milton did believe that a limited segment of the population had the right to both select and change the government.

Political liberty is, for Milton, more than just popular sovereignty, it also involves the creation of a commonwealth. The people (or rather, those to whom Milton granted the right to participate in the political process) have the right to choose their governors, but if they hope to remain in a state of freedom, they must select leaders who support a commonwealth rather than a monarchy. Milton is rarely specific about the precise structure of a commonwealth, but a free commonwealth could not have a monarch who restricts popular sovereignty. As Thomas Corns points out, Milton, in Eikonoklastes, defends regicide, not republicanism. Milton never advocates for a republican government along classical lines, but he expresses republican values as he demystifies kingship. ¹² To undermine the king's position, Milton frames the Civil War as a conflict between one man and the entire nation, stressing the absurdity of subordinating the entire nation to a single person. If a commonwealth depends on ‘the gift and favour of a single person’, Milton believes that ‘it cannot be thought sufficient of it self, and by consequence no Common-wealth, nor free’. ¹³ In the context of seventeenth-century England, reducing the entire nation to the will of one man referred to the king's negative voice, which enabled the king to block any legislation passed by parliament. Milton refers to the ‘Law-giving power’ of parliament as the ‘Foundation of our freedom’. ¹⁴ Since the whole nation is, for Milton, ‘virtually’ in parliament, if the king uses his negative voice to prevent parliament from passing laws, he restricts the freedom of the entire country. ¹⁵ Therefore, political freedom requires a commonwealth and is not possible under an absolute monarch.

Popular sovereignty and a commonwealth are the two components of Miltonic political freedom; however, had there been an election in the late 1640s, the traditional English electorate would have returned a parliament that would have likely continued to negotiate with the king rather than pursue his execution. Even those who had supported parliament during the Civil War began to fear the social disorder that could accompany the regicide. ¹⁶ In late 1648, according to Jonathan Scott, Presbyterian MPs, who were crucial in beginning the war against the king, voted to accept the king's latest offer in an attempt ‘to stitch back together the tattered remnants of the old constitution’ before the radical elements in the army took control. ¹⁷ The reality was that the regicide had been achieved by the army and a minority of committed MPs who survived Pride's Purge. This fact troubled Milton, as his principles of liberty (accountability through popular sovereignty) would have prevented the outcome of liberty (a free commonwealth). Scholars are divided over the extent of Milton's frustration with the English people in this period. David Norbrook insists that we should not take Milton's negative comments about the English people at face value, as these comments serve the rhetorical purpose of shocking Milton's readers so that they would abandon the royalist cause. ¹⁸ Paul Hammond, comparatively, detects a ‘doubleness’ in Milton's depiction of the people, as the people rallied against idols, but ultimately preferred slavery to liberty. ¹⁹ Milton unquestionably wants to believe in the English people's ability to create and maintain his version of a free commonwealth, but the political realities rendered such a belief impossible.

After 1649, Milton's political prose attempts to reconcile popular sovereignty with the creation and maintenance of an unpopular commonwealth in England. Milton could not abandon either his belief in popular sovereignty or his commitment to a commonwealth; both aspects were necessary for political freedom. Consequently, he develops new arguments to claim that the English Commonwealth reflects the principles of popular sovereignty and is, therefore, free. Since the English people were attached to the old monarchical government, Milton turns to parliament and the army to create a commonwealth. These institutions represent, and eventually become, the interests of the people in Milton's commonwealth prose. Although this empowerment of institutions has an authoritarian tone, it secures Milton's desired result while maintaining the semblance (or perhaps illusion) of popular sovereignty.

Parliament was an obvious means of combining the creation of a commonwealth with popular sovereignty, as it had a tradition of representing popular interests. The parliament that abolished the monarchy and created the commonwealth, however, was not a traditional English parliament, but rather one that had been purged of all but its most radical members. When discussing parliament, Milton, in Defensio pro populo Anglicano, insists that only those MPs who are in favor of a commonwealth (that is, those who survived the purge) held the authority of parliament. The majority of MPs, who opposed the regicide, had no right to enslave the nation, even though their numbers were greater than the MPs who pursued freedom: ‘If a majority in Parliament prefer enslavement and putting the commonwealth up for sale, is it not right for a minority to prevent it if they can and preserve freedom?’ ²⁰ A parliament that had been gutted by soldiers in an unprecedented way becomes the embodiment of popular sovereignty. Milton is aware that his defence of the English Commonwealth reduces the number of people who actually participate in the political process. Such a system seems to violate the terms of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, but Milton insists that the spirit of popular sovereignty remains, just in a more practical form. With the purged MPs stripped of their parliamentary status, Milton frames the Rump Parliament as the true representation of the people: ‘for why should I not say that the act of the better, the sound part of the Parliament, in which resides the real power of the people, was the act of the people?’ ²¹ Milton attempts to transform what is in effect an oligarchic regime into a popular government to link political realities of the 1650s to the philosophy of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Milton's parliamentary power reaches its full expression in Defensio secunda pro populo Anglicano, when Milton claims: ‘with this power [from the electorate] they [the MPs] are themselves now the people’. ²² Milton acknowledges that the MPs derive their power from the people, but after that initial investment of power, parliament transforms into the people, not simply their representatives. The actions of the people no longer need to be performed by the actual English people to fulfil the popular sovereignty requirement of political liberty. An institution that held ‘the real power of the people’ was sufficient.

Parliament was not the only institution to which Milton turned to create and defend the English Commonwealth. He was also willing to equate the army with the people in order to justify the actions that helped to create the commonwealth. In the late 1640s and 1650s, the army became politically active and began to play a significant role in political events, including the purging of moderate MPs in 1648. Rather than view the army as violating parliamentary privilege, Milton praises it as the source of liberty: ‘our troops were wiser than our legislators, and saved the commonwealth by arms when others had nearly destroyed it by their votes’. ²³ ‘Arms’ become a more effective means of securing liberty than legislation. Milton goes so far as to equate the army with the people. In response to Salmasius’ question ‘who “drove out the nobles from Parliament? The People?”’ Milton insists, ‘yes, the people’ because the soldiers were ‘not foreigners but citizens, forming a great part of the people, and they act by the consent and by the will of most of the rest’. ²⁴ Not only parliament, but also the army, which could not claim to have ever been elected, could express the popular sovereignty that was necessary for political freedom.

Throughout the 1650s, Milton's method of allowing parliament and the army to stand in for the people so that he could claim that the English Commonwealth was based on popular sovereignty worked. By 1660, however, neither parliament nor the army were willing or capable of creating the type of commonwealth that Milton desired, leading to an expression of frustration in his final prose tract before the Restoration, Brief Notes. At the time of Brief Notes’ publication, mid-April 1660, the elections for a new parliament were over. Even if Milton did not know the exact results, he likely had a sense that the convention parliament, as it became known, would vote to restore the Stuarts. Prior to the election in 1660, the government had barred royalists from standing for election; this provision, however, was ignored throughout the country, resulting in the election of at least sixty-one MPs who were either wartime royalists or the sons of royalists. ²⁵ In April 1660, Milton faced his worst nightmare as a group approximating the traditional English electorate had just elected a parliament that would end the English Commonwealth and, thus, act contrary to his interpretation of liberty. Throughout his commonwealth prose, Milton found ways to use institutions to curtail the will of the electorate while insisting that the regimes in power reflected the principle of popular sovereignty. Faced with a true expression of popular sovereignty, Milton, in Brief Notes, still refuses to abandon his earlier position from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: ‘This choice of Government is so essential to thir [the people's] freedom, that longer then they have it, they are not free’. ²⁶ The elections in April 1660, however, meant that Milton could no longer turn to parliament to compel the English people to accept his version of a commonwealth and liberty.

The most significant development in the months leading up to Brief Notes occurred in the army, which rendered it useless for Milton's purpose of maintaining a commonwealth. Many officers in the army anticipated that the elections in April 1660 would produce a pro-Stuart parliament and that a Stuart Restoration would result in the break-up of the army. This knowledge caused anxiety among the officers and some rumblings of resistance. To quell any rebellion, General George Monck and other commanders decided to apply a loyalty test to the whole army. Every army officer had to take an engagement to accept whatever settlement the new parliament proposed. Copies of the engagement were given to units around London, presented to Monck on April 9, and then sent out to regiments in the provinces. ²⁷ The army did make one final attempt to stop the Restoration. On April 10, Major-General John Lambert, whom Monck had imprisoned, escaped from the tower, and after a few days in London headed to the Midlands to stir up a rebellion. The uprising was a dismal failure and was crushed on April 22. ²⁸ With the collapse of Lambert's attempted rebellion, the army no longer stood in the way of a Stuart restoration.

By April 1660, the sources of authority to which Milton previously had turned to help England meet his definition of political freedom, parliament and the army, lacked the will to enforce a free commonwealth. Consequently, Milton had to face the reality of the theory he outlined in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates without any means to control it. Grudgingly, Milton, in Brief Notes, accepts that the English people can choose to return to monarchy and slavery: ‘if we will needs condemn our selves to be of the latter [men not worthy of freedom], despairing of our own vertue, industrie and the number of our able men, conscious of our own unworthiness to be governed better, sadly betake us to our befitting thraldom’. ²⁹ Having established the principle of popular sovereignty on philosophical grounds and repeatedly tied it to political liberty, Milton refuses to abandon it. At the same time, Milton's philosophy of liberty is, in 1660, destroying the practical application of liberty by restoring the Stuarts. Brief Notes represents the full expression of the tension in Miltonic political freedom. Milton accepts that England cannot have both popular sovereignty and a commonwealth in 1660. The two have become mutually exclusive, but the two are also necessary for political freedom. Milton's inability to reconcile the two central tenets of political liberty signals his realization that such political liberty is impossible in England.

While Brief Notes reflects Milton's frustration with an actual political dilemma in England, Paradise Lost portrays the first moment of such frustration in the mythical world of Eden. At the origin of this dilemma, the consequences affect not only one nation, but all of humanity. Adam and Eve are initially able to follow the principles to which God has directed them, but the separation scene disrupts their previous ability, causing them to confront the same impossibility as Milton. Like Milton's struggle in England, Adam and Eve's challenge relates to freedom. Both Adam and Eve are free in Eden, but that freedom manifests itself differently in each of them. Adam's freedom is tied to his use of reason. Milton, in both Paradise Lost and Areopagitica, connects reason with choice. God, in Book III, proclaims that ‘reason is also choice’, echoing Areopagitica's assertion that ‘reason is but choosing’ (3.108). ³⁰ Reason is the ability to access and make choices. God endows all his creations with reason and although he ensures that reason is not bound to ‘necessity’, he hopes that angels and people will use their reason to choose to serve him (3.108-11). The ultimate purpose of reason is to understand one's choices so that one can make choices that align with God's will, although the use of reason does not guarantee a good choice, as reason can be deceived. Perhaps the clearest example of Adam using his reason to make a choice is his request to God for a companion. Initially, God expresses resistance to Adam's request, noting that he has no companion and is still happy. This resistance requires Adam to put forward a justification for a companion beyond his personal ‘delight’ (8.391). It is not enough that Adam wants a companion, he must understand and articulate the importance of a companion. Adam's response to God stresses his own imperfection without a companion:

But man by number is to manifest

His single imperfection, and beget

Like of his like, his image multiplied,

In unity defective, which requires

Collateral love, and dearest amity (8.422-6).

The creation of a companion was, of course, part of God's plan all along. God ‘Knew it not good for man to be alone’ and challenged Adam ‘for trial only’ ‘To see how’ he could ‘judge of fit and meet’ (8.445, 447, 448). By resisting Adam's initial request, God enables Adam to utilize his reason, determine for himself the benefits of companionship, and then make an active choice. Thus, Adam's use of reason expands his understanding of himself.

While Adam is free to use his reason to make choices, Eve's initial freedom in Eden, as Milton depicts it, depends on Adam's authority. Adam and Eve represent the first family and in Milton's prelapsarian world, there is no separation between the household and commonwealth. Eden, as Laura Knoppers notes, is a hybrid space that is both domestic and political. ³¹ Milton shows Eve exercising free choice in some areas, such as choosing which ingredients to include in the meal for Raphael and Adam, but she generally entrusts Adam with her liberty, in much the same way as Milton desires the English people to entrust parliament with their liberty (5.332-7). There have been considerable scholarly efforts to elevate the status of Eve and her role in Eden. Diane McColley and Susanne Woods both argue that Eve's subordination to Adam does not signal her inferiority. Rather, she is both free and subject to Adam's rule, as her decision to obey Adam is an active choice. ³² Knoppers goes even further, viewing Adam and Eve as joint rulers of Eden. ³³ Knoppers seeks to reconcile the governance of Eden with Milton's republicanism, but, as we have seen, Milton could conceive of dominating institutions (like parliament and the army) operating within a free commonwealth. McColley and Woods provide a better reading of Eve's status, as they interpret her subordination to Adam as not compromising her freedom. When Eve is introduced in Book 4, she is content with being submissive to Adam. Eve refers to Adam as ‘My author and disposer’ and proclaims whatever Adam ‘bidd'st/Unargued I obey’ (4.635, 635-6). For Milton, Eve's willingness to ‘obey’ Adam ‘Unargued’ is not a sign that she is captive to Adam's will, but that she is free through her husband, just as the people of England are free through parliament. She trusts Adam to handle all her decisions, for ‘to know no more [than to obey one's husband] / Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise’ (4.637-8). As McColley points out, Adam and Eve have different gifts, and Adam's ability to govern preserves Eve's freedom so she can develop her own talents. ³⁴ For Eve, liberty consists of submitting to her husband who has the necessary skills to manage her choices for her.

Initially, Adam and Eve are experiencing their freedom as God intended, but Raphael's visit to Eden disrupts Adam's ability to do so. Most scholarship centres on Raphael's criticism of passion, but the angel's advice also contains principles that, in Book 9, render loyalty to God more difficult. ³⁵ Raphael, after hearing Adam proclaim his passion for Eve, instructs Adam to do two things: understand his own superiority to Eve, and practice rational love, not lustful passion. If Adam ‘weigh[s]’ himself against Eve and has sufficient ‘self-esteem’, he will assume his rightful position in the marriage and Eve ‘will acknowledge thee [Adam] her head’ (8.570, 571, 574). Adam's happiness becomes bound up in the traditional gender hierarchy. Raphael continues by separating love from passion. Love, as defined by Raphael, is connected to reason: ‘love refines / The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat / In reason, and is judicious’ (8.589-91). Since love incorporates ‘reason’ and ‘judicious’ choice, it is the opposite of ‘carnal pleasure’, which Raphael associates with passion (8.593). Raphael's closing warning to Adam—'take heed lest passion sway / Thy judgement to do aught, which else free will / Would not admit’ (8.635-7)—becomes a call to rely on reason rather than passion when making choices. Adam's future choices should be based on reason, as reason is consistent with his ‘free will’.

The separation scene complicates Raphael's message because in it, Eve uses reason to argue for working apart from Adam. Raphael's advice to Adam never takes into account the possibility that Eve will make use of her own rational capacity (much like Milton never considered the possibility that the English people would freely choose to restore the Stuarts) and in doing so, will develop alternatives to Adam's plans. If reason is the process of evaluating choices in order to make a choice that aligns with God's will, Eve is using her reason in the separation scene. Eve cannot imagine that God did not endow them with a sufficient ‘defense’ against their foe, as that would render them ‘imperfect’, their happiness ‘Frail’, and their ability to make free choices impossible (9.322-41). Eve essentially reaffirms God's assertion in Book III that she and Adam are ‘Sufficient to have stood’ (3.99). By echoing God's earlier statements, Eve is using her reason to understand God. To further highlight the rationality of Eve's position, Milton fills her speeches with the values of his own prose. In Miltonic fashion, Eve asserts that working separately will render her faith stronger: ‘what is faith, love, virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?’ (9.335-6). Eve wants to be separate from her husband in the moment of temptation so that she can prove her ability to follow God's will, ‘without exterior help’. For McColley, Eve's arguments are consistent with Milton's own stance in Areopagitica, in which he encourages people to confront temptation rather than hide from it. ³⁶ For Milton in Areopagitica, virtue was only meaningful if it faced the temptations of vice and then resisted them: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary’. ³⁷ Confronting temptation allows a Christian ‘to exercise his owne leading capacity’, just as Eve wishes to do. ³⁸ Although Milton wrote Areopagitica for an audience of fallen readers who, being the descendants of Adam and Eve, knew both good and evil, he still links the arguments of Areopagitica to prelapsarian humanity. One of the examples that Milton provides in Areopagitica is Adam in an unfallen state: ‘God therefore left him [Adam] free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence’. ³⁹ The process of being exposed to a ‘provoking object’ to build virtue dates back, according to Milton, to the Garden of Eden before humanity knew sin and evil. By having Eve articulate the principles of Areopagitica, Milton endows her arguments with his own reason.

Eve's use of reason presents a dilemma for Adam. If Adam is to obey reason, as Raphael stated, he must submit to Eve's rationality. Such action, however, violates the other principle articulated by Raphael, that Adam must express his superiority over Eve. Feisal Mohamed argues that Raphael's directions to Adam are ‘consistent’ and stresses Adam's failings to fully grasp the significance of Raphael's lesson. ⁴⁰ Within the confines of Raphael's discourse with Adam, the instructions are consistent, but in the context of the separation scene, Raphael's guidelines are inconsistent. All of Raphael's advice regarding Adam's relationship with Eve is not part of the directions that God issued to Raphael in Book 5. God only instructed Raphael to inform Adam that Satan was targeting Eve and him and he was on his own to maintain his goodness. Raphael goes beyond God's directive and presents Adam with two pieces of advice that seem consistent and are meant to help Adam, but they end up putting him in an impossible position because he assumes that only Adam is capable of rational decision-making. If Raphael's assumption was correct, Adam could both follow reason and maintain his position of authority over Eve, but the separation scene reveals that Raphael's assumption regarding Eve is incorrect. As mentioned above, Eve initially acknowledges the traditional gender hierarchy, but John Rogers has shown that this hierarchy, in Paradise Lost, is built on a contradiction. Eden is portrayed as an equal society with all inhabitants free, but Adam's superiority over Eve is established by an arbitrary divine decree that has nothing to do with Eve's nature. ⁴¹ Rogers interprets this contradiction as part of Milton's effort ‘to justify the fact of the fall in a perfect world’, but it also sets up the challenge of the separation scene. ⁴² Since Eve's inferior status is not tied to her nature, it is only a matter of time before she begins to use her reason to make her own decisions. By simply repeating God's decree and saying nothing of Eve's natural capacity for reason, Raphael fails to anticipate a situation like the separation scene and, consequently, fails to prepare Adam for it.

Initially, Adam, in the separation scene, objects to Eve's request and presents his position within the framework of patriarchal authority: ‘The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks, / Safest and seemliest by her husband stays, / Who guards her, or with her the worst endures’ (9.267-9). Here, Adam is, as Raphael recommended, valuing himself more highly than Eve. The fact that Adam also allows the debate with Eve to progress shows that he is also trying to adhere to Raphael's advice regarding reason, specifically discursive reason. Confronting a resistant Eve armed with reason, Adam debates Eve, attempting to persuade her to stay with him. According to Richard Strier, the freedom to make correct choices based on rational debate is not a major component of prelapsarian Eden because Adam and Eve choose good instinctively. ⁴³ Strier's assessment is true for Adam and Eve's early choices, where Adam does all the reasoning and Eve follows his lead, but by the time of the separation scene, Adam, due to Raphael's conflicting advice, is not sure what the right choice is and must rely on rational debate. The poem also explicitly links human reason to debate. When Raphael first meets Adam, he notes that discursive reason is the type of reason most often used by humanity, while angels primarily utilize intuitive reason (5.487-9). Mohamed interprets Raphael's comments on reason as an attempt to awaken in Adam the ‘highest part of himself—his small share of intuitive knowledge of God's love’. ⁴⁴ If Raphael's intention is to inspire Adam's kernel of intuitive reason, he is not explicit about it. He never states that intuitive reason is more effective at determining God's will than discursive reason or even advises Adam which type of reason to rely on in crucial moments.

Discursive reason is prominent Milton's prose. In Areopagitica, Milton argues that discursive reason is key for discovering the truth. He promotes tolerating a range of churches because he is confident that if all ideas contend equally, truth will triumph: ‘though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth … who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in free and open encounter’. ⁴⁵ Milton's prose tracts are written with a sense that the truth of Milton's arguments will triumph if they are allowed to circulate and be discussed, but the frustration of Brief Notes reveals that he came to realize that discursive reason alone could not persuade the English of the benefits of a commonwealth. The militaristic regimes of the 1650s had prevented the English electorate from using their reason to even consider the possibility of returning to a monarchy. Once the army was no longer ensuring that England remained a commonwealth, the only thing preventing a Stuart restoration and, in Milton's mind, a loss of freedom, were Milton's arguments, which proved insufficient, just as Adam's arguments for working together did. Both Milton and Adam are committed to reconciling the principles of freedom through discursive reason, and both fail to maintain freedom.

Adam's inability to persuade Eve through their debate forces him to pick one side of Raphael's advice. No longer able to be both a patriarch and rational, Adam sides with reason, noting ‘for what obeys / Reason, is free’ (9.351-2). If Eve is using her reason to decide to work separately, then it is a free choice, even if Adam disapproves. Adam's willingness to allow Eve to obey her own reason marks a dramatic shift from Eve's earlier position of obeying Adam without question: ‘Unargued I obey; so God ordains’ (4.636). Obedience, for Eve, is initially a divine decree to which she adheres without any thought. By following those decrees, she was free through Adam. Now, she obeys reason rather than Adam and experiences freedom by exercising her reason. Adam, in the separation scene, notes that Eve is doing what she ‘think[s]’ is right, suggesting that he sees her plan of working separately as being the product of her reason (9.370). She is not acting on pure emotion, and neither is he for that matter. In Book 8, Adam claims that he is unable to think rationally in the presence of Eve: ‘All higher knowledge in her presence falls / Degraded, wisdom in discourse with her/Looses discount’nanced, and like folly shows’ (8.551-3). Adam's conversation with Eve in the separation scene, however, shows no sign that he has lost his reason. Adam does not give in to Eve out of passion; he has a rational debate with her and, ultimately, accepts the value of her arguments. Raphael's chief concern at the end of in Book 8 is Adam's passion for Eve, and the rational debate in the separation scene suggests that Adam has taken Raphael's advice regarding controlling passion to heart. The line in which Adam gives his consent for Eve to leave his side (‘Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more’ [9.372]) reveals that compelling her stay would not be in accordance with her reason and would act against her freedom. The only way that she can ‘obey reason’ and be free is if he lets her go.

Yet, Adam does not let Eve leave without a warning: ‘reason not impossibly may meet / Some specious object by the foe suborned, / And fall into deception unware’ (9.360-2). If Eve reaffirms God's claim that they are ‘sufficient to have stood’, Adam's response is the second part of God's statement, that they are also ‘free to fall’ (3.99). Adam's chief concern in the separation scene is the possibility of Eve misusing her reason and making a poor choice. He knows that God has endowed Eve with reason, but he also knows that it is possible that ‘Some specious object’ might lead her reason astray. Despite his concerns over the potential failure of Eve's reason, Adam still lets her go because reason is connected to freedom. Any choice that is made by using one's reason is free, but not necessarily good. Adam concludes his speech by acknowledging Eve's new freedom, but also expressing some frustration (as Milton did in 1660), seemingly aware of the consequences of Eve's freedom. The abrupt ‘Go’ that starts line 372 conveys Adam's frustration at his inability to reconcile his power over his wife (which guarantees a positive outcome) with rational free choice (which carries some risk but allows Eve to exercise reason). Just as Milton accepts the choice of the English people to restore the monarchy, Adam accepts the choice of Eve to work alone, even though both Milton and Adam believe that these choices will (or in the case of Adam, may) have negative consequences.

The separation scene allows Milton not only to locate the origin of his own challenge in 1660, but also to shake his readers’ confidence in their ability to maintain freedom. Focusing on Adam's actual Fall, David Urban argues that Adam's transgression is not sincere (meaning not theologically pure) because he ‘values his emotional link to Eve more than God's command’. ⁴⁶ Urban is correct about Adam's decision to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but in the separation scene, Adam is as sincere as he can be, yet he still makes a decision with negative consequences. Much of Milton's prose assumes that Christians, when not subject to coercion, are capable of interpreting and following God's will. A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes defines religion as ‘that full perswasion whereby we are assur’d that our beleef and practise, as far as we are able to apprehend and probably make appeer, is according to the will of God & his Holy Spirit within us’. ⁴⁷ If Raphael's advice is meant to convey the will of God, then Adam's actions in the separation scene adhere to the will of God as he is ‘able to apprehend and probably make appeer’. Adam does his best in a difficult situation, but the result, the separation of Adam and Eve, still leads to an unfavourable ending. Before he even eats from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam is failing because he cannot determine which choice is in accordance with God's will, and if he fails to follow God's will, he is at risk of being enthralled to sin. One's best efforts to comprehend the will of God are not sufficient. In the separation scene, Adam's attempt to use his reason to make a good choice not only fails, it was never going to succeed.

For both Milton in 1660 and Adam in the separation scene, freedom rests on two principles that should support each other, but have, in Milton's and Adam's circumstances, become mutually exclusive. In England, Milton could no longer argue that popular sovereignty (or some version of it) could produce a commonwealth. In Eden, Adam could not claim sovereignty over Eve and obey reason. Both Milton and Adam tried to resolve their predicament through rational debate with the people of England and Eve, but both men failed to reach a satisfactory result. Milton's representation of the separation scene renders his difficulty in 1660 not an isolated incident, but rather part of an ongoing struggle to bring together irreconcilable values in the name of freedom that has its origin in Eden. The debate between Adam and Eve becomes a debate between the Milton of Brief Notes and the Milton of Areopagitica. Through Adam and Eve's debate, Milton interrogates his own principles of rational free choice and discursive reason, but he raises the stakes far beyond those of his political writings. The significance of the separation scene to human history allows Adam's dilemma in Paradise Lost to have a much greater impact than Milton's in Brief Notes. Knowing the consequences of Adam and Eve working separately, the readers of Paradise Lost desperately hope that Adam will find a solution, but they know that such a solution does not exist. An unsettling shadow hangs over the separation scene, as even in a prelapsarian state, Adam's reason is unable to solve the problem of freedom.