On Miltonian Evil
By Kevin (Kaicheng) Yu
The power of Miltonian evil – the disobedience of God, or fall, caused by individual free will – lies in its clarity when incorporating the libertarian perspective on free will with Christian morality. Milton’s argument offers a possible solution for the classical problem of evil, which addresses the theological confusion about the coexistence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God and the prevalence of evil, making it very persuasive. However, logical inconsistencies do exist in his account of evil, especially when it concerns the issue of divine power. In this paper, we will reconstruct Milton’s argument and address its advantages, before systematically offering criticisms to some of his ideas.
The necessity of free will in judging whether one has committed an evil act, or to fall, is made clear when Raphael justifies God’s decision by claiming "God made thee perfect, not immutable/ … Ordained thy will by nature free/ … For how can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve"(5.524-534). It is clear, then, that one can only be held accountable for its actions when it has another option not to do the said act. Thus the Libertarian universal law of Milton can be illustrated as such:
Axiom (1): An individual falls if and only if it freely chooses to fall. An individual is said to freely choose to fall if and only if it is free not to fall, i.e., has another option rather than falling.
The Christian moral basis of Miltonian evil can be attributed to God’s repeating demand of obedience. Both Satan and humans become evil by disobeying God’s order, with the former even taking a further step to rebellion. Hence the second axiom:
Axiom (2): An individual is said to be fallen if and only if it disobeys God’s order.
Another useful axiom would be God’s power set(by Christian definition):
Axiom (3): God has prescience, omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence.
When the divine authority of the Son is first declared, Lucifer succumbs to his jealousy and freely chooses to rebel against an omnibenevolent God and hence becoming evil. ‘Evil be thou my good'(4.111) – when his passionate soliloquy thunders at the gate of Eden, Satan’s free will completely triumphs over his original obedience(a quality possessed by every angel), perpetuating his downfall. However, no matter the outcome, the positive portrayal of Satan in the first several books develops sympathy for him among the readers, and some may wonder if he does have a choice. The straightforward description of Satan giving in to his jealousy(5.657-66) seems to suggest that:
Argument (1): Satan freely chooses to fall. Therefore, Satan is free not to fall.
However, God’s prescience indicates that he knows that Satan is doomed to fall if he gives the speech elevating the Son. He even directly addresses this in his ominous warning against the rebels(5.611-15). When God already knows that there will be rebellion and fall, how is Satan free “not to fall”? An opposition is thus developed:
Opposition (1): God has prescience and omnipotence. He can foresee the future. He is sure that Satan is to fall before he has fallen. Hence, Satan’s fall is pre-determined and he is not free not to fall(has to fall).
The brilliance of Milton is that he tackles this refutation successfully by refining the concept of prescience. "If I foreknew, foreknowledge did not influence their fault"(3.117-18). Milton's defense for God differentiates two commonly-mixed up concepts – pre-determination and prescience. As God is a being outside the space-time continuity of Milton's earth who can see the entire timeline of the universe at the same time(3.78), his foreknowledge is irrelevant to the decision itself – he's merely an audience of a videotape who can jump back and forth anytime he wants. The choices themselves, however, are eventually to be made by the agents, as they are "authors to themselves in all"(3.122). Hence the defense:
Argument (2): Prescience is not equivalent to pre-determination. God can foresee the outcome of an action, but it’s not determined, because it has to be determined by the agent’s own free will. Therefore, Satan’s fall is not pre-determined. He freely chooses to fall. Therefore, he is free not to fall.
So far Milton has done a marvelous job dealing with the moral issues related to Satan. But his fallacy comes with the most prominent protagonists of Paradise Lost: the humans. Milton speaks of “man’s disobedience”(1.1) in the very beginning of the poem. Naturally, it appears that the fall of humans appears in the same fashion as that of Satan's, because they voluntarily consume the forbidden fruit without any compulsion. A similar argument is made:
Argument (3): Humans freely choose to fall. Therefore, they are free not to fall.
However, the repudiation of this argument is more complicated than that of the last.
Satan blatantly deceives humans about the tree of knowledge by using a fancy concoction of words as well as a distortion of the truth, which motivates the ignorant human to trespass God’s orders. Should they be held accountable for their actions then? They are denied their freedom to be aware of the truth, hence don't have intact free wills while making their decisions. A refutation can be developed against the charges towards the ancestors of humans:
Axiom (4): An individual has the freedom to choose only if it has the freedom of knowing the truth when making the choice.
Opposition (3): Humans are deceived by Satan. They are denied the freedom of knowing the truth when making their decision about whether to eat the apple. Hence, humans do not freely choose to fall.
Once again Milton is proven of his genius when he defends the decisions of God: the prohibition against tasting the apple is clear and direct, and thus Adam and Eve "knew, and ought to have still remembered / The high injunction not to taste that fruit"(10.12-13). God doesn’t just require obedience from his subjects, as Axiom (2) states, but unquestioning obedience. The fruit in itself is meaningless, as it’s only an embodiment of the divine command. No matter how beneficial eating the fruit may seem, the real decision lies between whether to obey God or not. Even though Adam and Eve are not free to decide whether to eat the apple when they’re deceived with information concerning the apple, they are free to decide whether to obey God’s order, which remains clear. His defense can thus be rendered as such(combined with Axiom (2)):
Argument (3*): God has given a divine command. God demands unquestioning obedience. Though humans are not free when they decide whether to eat the apple, they’re free when they decide whether to obey God’s commands. They freely choose disobedience. Therefore, they freely choose to fall. Therefore, they are free not to fall.
Milton’s arguments seem impeccable at this point, but he is yet to face his biggest challenge. Casting aside the bewildering prescience and pre-determination, God still has two of the strongest weapons within his pocket: omniscience and omnipotence, with the former emphasizing God’s abilities of knowing what is happening in the present instead of the future, as prescience suggests. God must have noticed Satan’s evil shenanigans when he’s lurking ominously around the gate of Eden in the form of a cloud, and he could have stopped him at once, saving the humans from an evil plot. Instead, he does nothing. This is fundamentally different than the fall of Satan in that it has nothing to do with the future but only the present – and the only agents involved are God and Satan. What makes this even more troubling is that God seems very certain that Satan shall succeed in his plan as "man will hearken to his glozing lies / And easily transgress the sole command"(3.117-18).
The best defense Milton can come up for this is that such a fall of man is a “fortunate fall” – a concept evidential in Adam’s being discerned "with such joy" after learning the incarnation of Messiah on Earth(12.372). Through the sacrifice and resurrection of the Son, God does bring good out of evil. But is it worth the costs? All the pains and miseries endured by humans throughout the ages could have been avoided. As an omnibenevolent being who tries to maximize the goodness in the world, it seems a rather consequentialist method for God just to achieve a state in which man is “happier, had it sufficed him to have known / Good by itself, and not evil at all” (11.88-89), neglecting the needless sufferings along the way. This entire defense can be summed up in the following argument:
Argument (4): Greater good is brought out of the fall. Thus, the fall is overall beneficial for humans. Therefore, the fall is justified.
A very unsettling underlying message that this argument seems to suggest is that God deliberately let the fall happen(while having the ability to stop it) or even directly contrive fall because it’s the only way for humans to achieve the aforementioned “happier” state. Argument (4) can be reorganized in such a way that:
Argument (4*): Greater good is brought out of the fall. Since God doesn’t have another option of bringing humans to a happier state other than allowing the fall to happen, the fall is justified. Therefore, his action of directly contriving it, by not stopping it while he can, is justified.
In this case, Satan is but a pawn for God to achieve this goal, and all the additional casualties are not within his consideration. This description of a consequentialist God seems to be directly contradictory to the implications of Argument (2) when it suggests that this sequence of events is pre-determined(planned by God). Slightly altering Argument (2) for the specification of the case of humans we have:
Argument (2*): God can foresee what happens in the future without being able to alternate its outcome because that action has to be performed by the agent in the future according to free will. Therefore, God cannot stop humans’ fall as they freely choose to fall when they have a choice to remain good.
Hence the one problem that Milton cannot properly address:
Opposition (4): Argument (4*) is contradictory to Argument (2*). God either can stop the fall or not. Therefore, only one of them can be sound.
We can further analyze these arguments by studying different cases. If Argument (4*) is sound, then several further oppositions can be raised. Among which the most lethal is its contradiction to Axiom (3) in that God’s omnipotence, in this case, seems to have a limit. God cannot achieve the so-called "happier" state of humans without inflicting a significant amount of evil. If God is capable of doing so without causing such damages, then he is not omnibenevolent, because he chooses otherwise.
Opposition (5): Assuming that Argument (4*) is sound, then God is either a) not omnipotent, or b) not omnibenevolent, both of which contradict Axiom (3).
On the other hand, if Argument (2*) is sound, then Milton cannot offer a satisfactory explanation for God’s inaction towards Satan’s evil plots. The only possible excuse is that God doesn’t notice such a trivial conspiracy, which is contradictory to his omniscience. Hence a contradiction with Axiom(3) again:
Opposition (6): Assuming that Argument (2*) is sound, God is not omniscient, which contradicts Axiom(3).
Therefore we have proved that Milton’s account of the relationship between evil(fall), free will and divine power is self-contradictory.
Is there truly no other ways for Milton to resolve such a contradiction, though? We provide several possible solutions here, all of which, however, are intrinsically incoherent with Milton’s beliefs. First, he can embrace determinism instead of libertarianism, which renders the discussion around free will useless and directly addresses the existence of evil by claiming it’s pre-determined. Second, he can reject his Christian ideals and accept the fact that the idea of a being with omnipotence and omniscience are problematic. Finally, he can resort to the crueler and more savage Old Testament version of God and admit that God is not omnibenevolent and full of love.