ABSTRACT
In a paper titled, ‘Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall’, 1 Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy designated the thought expressed in lines 473–8 of Book XII of Paradise Lost, the paradox of the fortunate fall. It will be recalled that in this passage Adam has just been told by the Archangel Michael what his future will be and how man’s fate is to be decided, and this prophecy of the Second Coming and of the Final Judgment so overwhelms him that he exclaims: O Goodness Infinite, Goodness immense That all this good of evil shall produce And evil turn to a good… Full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent men now of sin By me done or occasioned, or rejoice Much more that much more good thereof shall spring— To God more glory, more good will to men From God—and over wrath grace shall abound. Such a view of the fall may well be termed a paradox because, while on the one hand, the fall of man was indeed the occasion of the most bitter sorrow—‘sin by me done’, yet on the other hand, without it, the subsequent history of man would be without meaning and purpose, the Incarnation and the Redemption could not take place—‘more good thereof shall spring’, and man could not look forward to the ultimate goal of creation, the Second Coming and the Final Judgment, when Christ shall reward his faithful and receive them into bliss—‘over wrath grace shall abound’, events of such cosmic transcendence, that, though they are projected into the future, they alone make possible the conception of a universe as understandable, just, and good: ‘thus good of evil shall produce, and evil turn to good.’ For only under this divine plan can the good which Paul would do, be achieved, and the evil which he would not, be undone. Thus the fall of man is felt to be simultaneously harrowing and ecstatic, for at the very moment when man is thrown into the deepest despair, at that moment, and at that moment alone, he is made aware of the possibility of realizing the greatest good, and in this way, and only in this way, does good come out of evil. This idea, which comes from the innermost core of Milton’s conviction that to be truly man, one must be capable of choice, and more, must be capable of bearing the burden of that choice, this idea, the progression from ignorance through experience to light, which at first glance seems so obvious a logical contradiction because it appears to contravene our own bitter experience of the irrationality and injustice of the world, transcends that experience in a leap which hurtles over the evidence of our senses to the creation of an intelligible pattern of human destiny capable of being held with the most profound conviction. Such a leap seems always to be made by those who, finding the notion of a universe as indifferent to man repugnant to them (and even Lucretius, though he rejected the Gods, could not bear to think of a meaningless universe), wrench experience into shape by forming a universe in which man enjoys, though at a bitter price, a transcendent rapport with himself, with nature, and with God. For Professor Lovejoy’s purposes, it was enough for him to demonstrate how traditional and orthodox the paradox of the fortunate fall was by citing pertinent passages from Ambrose, Leo I, Gregory the Great, Augustine, the Easter Even hymn, the Exultet, The Vision of Piers the Plowman, Wyclif, Pererius, St. Francis de Sales, Du Bartas, and Giles Fletcher, and it was from the Easter Even hymn that he derived the classic expression of the idea as well as its name: ‘O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem!’
