John Milton and the Happier Eve

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of John Milton's birth (December 6, 2008), I had planned reread Paradise Lost. I'm only just getting around to it, but I figure it's been 400 years already, so what's a few extra months?

This is actually my fourth time reading through this masterpiece of English poetry, so I'm surprised I hadn't really noticed it before. Maybe I did, but it never hit me the way it did this time: John Milton holds that Eve must have been happier in paradise than Adam. And why? Because (his Eve argues), she has the far superior Adam to enjoy, while Adam has no comparable "Adam" of his own.

In her opening speech to Adam, she says (Book IV, 444-447):

We to [God] indeed all praises owe,
And daily thanks, I chiefly, who enjoy
So far the happier lot, enjoying thee
Preeminent by so much odds, while thou [Adam]
Like consort to thyself canst nowhere find.

Unbelievable.

And, really, heart-wrenching.

Because he's done here what the Genesis story refuses to do. Milton's Adam can find no "like consort" for himself, even in Eve, though Genesis insists that the woman is precisely that: the man's "like consort" (which may be as good a translation of the Hebrew for "help meet" as any I've heard). Milton's "superior" Adam is ultimately alone, even in the company of Eve, though Genesis insists that the loneliness of superiority was the not good problem that the male-female relation had solved. Milton was a first rate poet, but, I think, a third rate theologian.

Of course, no one reads Milton anymore, but this idea-- that the primary role of the woman is to compliment the man-- is a tree with deep roots, and it still tempts the church now and then with its bitter fruit. I've talked to men, and women, who still have its juice on their lips.

But besides celebrating Milton's 400th birthday, I've been thinking a lot lately about gender identity and the Bible. Previously I suggested that the first point in any theology of gender must be the divine address and the human response that includes our selves as man or woman. After meeting Milton's lonely, superior Adam and his sad, happier Eve, I want to add a second. Theologically, I think, our gender is also defined by our open embrace of the otherness of corresponding gender.

Unlike Milton's adam then, a biblical man will embrace the otherness of the eve as full "flesh of his flesh," the like consort whose otherness truly solves the problem of his aloneness, without appealing to that otherness as a claim to lonely superiority. And unlike Milton's Eve, a biblical woman will likewise embrace the otherness of the adam, without appealing to that otherness as a claim to blissful inferiority.

Perhaps in such an embrace, men and women will discover the equality, mutuality and interdependence that Christ, the Living Word of God, holds out to his lonely, confused brothers and sisters in the Genesis story.