Adamic
Language, Gender, and Naming in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
When dealing with Adamic Language in
Paradise Lost there are many
arguments as to what Adam’s conception of language was, and more importantly
how he acquired his language. Of particular interest is Adam’s naming of the
animals. The whole concept of Adamic Language revolves around the fact that his
names were the right ones, in other words they were perfect and each name fit
with each creature. This paper will analyze various strands of Adamic Language
and make the case that Adam’s language was preordained to him by God even
before his creation or that his language was heavenly inspire and not merely
approved after the fact.
Christopher
Eagle’s essay “‘Thou Serpent That Name Best’: On Adamic Language and Obscurity
in Paradise Lost” (2007) focuses on
the Milton Controversy and how each camp (the Satanist and anti-Satanist) dealt
with the Milton’s syntax and obscure language. Some blamed Milton’s language
for being too self-aware and grandiose by calling attention to itself instead
of what the language is signifying (Eagle 183). This is what Eagle describes as
obscurity in Milton’s language, the density in syntax and richness in style
which F.R. Leavis saw as Milton having “a feeling for words rather than a
capacity for feeling through words” (Eagle 183). What critics of both camps
over the centuries tend to agree upon is on a shared quest for the perfect language, “a language in which
word corresponds to thing adequately and with clarity, with the specificity of
a proper name, or the irrefutability of a logical syllogism” (Eagle 183). Eagle
goes on to state that this preoccupation by Milton scholars of both camps was
“rooted in the Biblical terms of a lost Adamic language and the possibility of
its retrieval” (183). Eagle uses the obscurity of Milton’s language as a tool
in order to interpret Adam’s prelapsarian language.
Eagle mentions Genesis 2.19 in which
God grants Adam the power to name as the moment understood to Milton and his
contemporaries as “the scriptural basis for an understanding of language in a
prelapsarian state” (184). This Adamic language was perfect in every sense
including accuracy and clarity (Eagle 184). And Milton himself agreed in Tetrachordon that Adam must of have
perfect knowledge of the animals which he named, a case that he also makes in Christian Doctrine[1],
which Eagle mentions. But here is where Eagle tends to disagree with Milton, or
at least acknowledges that there may be other ways of interpreting the
perfection of Adamic Language:
However,
if we resist allowing Milton’s remarks in Tetrachordon to close the
discussion too quickly, we find that Paradise Lost, much like Genesis
2.19, does not definitively endorse the assertion that the rightness of Adam’s
names is predicated on his a priori knowledge. Again, as Eco points out, the primary
ambiguity of the claim stems from whether Adam (human though as yet unfallen),
should be said to have named rightly (de veritas), or only by
right (de ordinatio), or more playfully, as he pleases (ad
placitum). In Platonic terms, the question is whether Milton’s Adam is a
Cratylist knower of essences, imbued with a priori knowledge, or a Hermogenist
name-maker, imbued with authority over consensus. (186)
What
Eagle is pointing towards in the above lines is whether Adam had foreknowledge
of the animals’ nature instilled by him through God in order to name the
animals, or if with God’s divine approval he picked the names of the animals.
In other words, are the names perfect because they correspond with each animal
intrinsically, or are they perfect merely because God gave Adam the power to
name? If the first case is true, and Adam has a priori knowledge of the
animals, then his names are perfect by divine intervention. If, on the other hand,
the second case is true then his names are perfect by divine approval. The first
makes Adam seem like a god naming them “as they passed” (8.352) because he has
intrinsic knowledge of them. The second instance makes him seem less like a god
and more human prone to misnaming but still having God’s approval. In other
words he has knowledge of the animals because he names them (or as he is naming
them): “I named them, as they passed, and understood / Their nature, with such
knowledge God endued / My sudden apprehension” (8.352-354). He names them first
and then he understands their nature.
I tend to agree with Stanley Fish
and other critics in taking the first stance of Adam’s naming-knowing, that is
to say he had a priori knowledge of the animals. He had intrinsic knowledge of
them animals instilled by him through God, and his naming merely expounded the
knowledge that he already possessed. As Raphael is retracing the story of the
creation and naming of the animals he proclaims to Adam: “And thou their
natures know’st, and gav’st them names” (7.493). Raphael proclaims that Adam
did not name the animals in some random fashion, but rather that he had some
knowledge of “their natures”. His ability to name is a gift from Milton’s God,
and so is his knowledge of nature. The concept of Adamic Language is grounded
on the assertion that “Adam’s knowledge (of the animals) is infused by him
directly by God” (Fish 104), as Stanley
Fish argues in Surprised by Sin, a
stance that several critics agree and comment on.
One
of those critics is John Leonard who agrees with Fish in his essay “Language
and Knowledge in Paradise Lost” when he argues that the “effortlessness of
Adam’s naming (‘sudden apprehension’) testifies to the completeness of his
understanding” (131). Leonard is pointing to the a crucial scene in Book 8 in
which Adam is recounting how he came to name the animals: “I named them, as
they passed, and understood / Their nature, with such knowledge God endued / My
sudden apprehension” (8.352-354). When Adam states that he understood the
animals’ nature he is pointing towards the knowledge that everything is good,
based upon the fact that everything in Paradise is made in God’s image
including Adam. Adam’s ability to name, or rather the names he gives the
animals, is natural and divinely inspired. In other words, Adam had possessed a
“perfect wisdom which was his birthright in Paradise” (Leonard 133) and this
was the sole factor behind “Adam’s ability to call things by their proper
names” (Leonard 133).
Adam’s
ability to name things is given to him by God the moment he is created. When
Adam awoke for the first time in Eden he immediately starting naming things and
knew this knowledge was good:
But who I was, or where,
or from what cause,
Knew not; to speak I
tried, and forthwith spake,
My tongue obeyed and
readily could name
Whate’er I saw.
(8.270-273)
It
is of interest to note that Adam had the ability to name things as soon as he
could speak. Milton in the above passage implies that the first things Adam
spoke were names, in other words his arrival at language happened through
naming. Milton in a passage from Christian Doctrine suggests that Adam’s
ability and knowledge of naming was granted to him as a result of his creation,
and not in some extemporaneous, spur-of-the-moment way: “Since man was formed
in the image of God, he must have been endowed with natural wisdom, holiness
and righteousness. . .Moreover he could not have given the names to the animals
in that extempore way, without very great intelligence” (1208-09). God could
not create Adam without this innate ability to name, and since Adam was created
in his image his ability to name had to be perfect and congruent. If Adam was
created in God’s image then he had to be perfect which means that his language
and naming had to be perfect as well. His naming is a by-product of his
holiness. But of course Adam fell and with it he forfeited his perfection which
places his prelapsarian language in an interesting place.
It seems that Adam in a prelapsarian
state had true knowledge of nature and the goodness behind it. Adam’s names
given to the animals is a permanent reminder of the perfection and goodness of
Paradise to the fallen Adam. Milton’s God entrusted Adam with naming the
animals (“I bring them to receive/ From thee their names” 8.343-344) and it’s
clear that there could be no mistake in Adam’s naming: “Adam’s superior
knowledge, and the names he gives the animals are thought to be exact,
corresponding in each case to the essence of the species. Adam’s knowledge is
infused by him directly by God, and the names he imposes, like God’s, are
accurate, intensively, and extensively” (Fish 104). Adam’s language is perfect
and this perfection is a by-product of his holiness and godly image. Fish above
might be implying that Adam himself was like a god or was the God in
Paradise even though Adam did not create
the animals he does have an intimate knowledge of them, and this intimate
knowledge is not based on experience but rather is a byproduct of his
prelapsarian state. His naming not only brings him knowledge of the animals,
but also knowledge of himself: “To name creatures in Paradise was to know their
essences. . .Adam’s names brings him self-knowledge and knowledge about the
animals” (Leonard 131). It might be argued that the knowledge that naming
brings him is that everything around him
is good, including himself. This knowledge will cause much despair and anger in
Adam later on after the Fall.
After Milton’s God creates Paradise
he acknowledges the intricate goodness behind it: “Here finished he, and all
that he had made / Viewed, and behold all was entirely good” 7.548-549). This
goodness is not added unto nature after it is created, but rather it is
natural. The basic essence of nature is that it is good and everything in it
including Adam is good as well. So how does man fall if Paradise and Adam are
good? The only way the serpent succeeds in fooling Eve is through language, but
it is not the same language that God grants Adam. When Adam first acquires
language Adam narrates that “to speak I tried, and forthwith spake, / My tongue
obeyed” (8.270-271). Adam’s tongue is obeying his need for language, and his
language is a gift from God (so his language is holy/Godly). His tongue seems
to be inspired by God. On the other hand, when the Serpent seeks language “with
serpent tongue/ Organic, or impulse of vocal air” (9.529-530). Organic means relating
to a living entity or “belonging or inherent in a living being” (OED). So, is
the serpent tongue a distinct and different living entity than the serpent’s
body? Is there a distinction? The figurative language behind “impulse of vocal
air” is impressive, but what does it mean? So it is clear that the serpent’s
tongue is not inspired by God, so where does the serpent get the power to talk
man’s language? It seems that both Adam’s and the Serpent’s tongue are their
own entities, but Adam’s tongue obeys him whereas the Serpent’s tongue is
acting upon an impulse. As Leonard points out “Satan finds words for his
temptation, but it is not certain that he finds a tongue to speak them”
(Leonard 140), by tongue he seems to be pointing towards language which belonged
only to man.
The serpent succeeds in fooling Eve
and causes the Fall of Man by using the most basic application of human
language, which is the ability to argue. Adam already knew, based on his own
naming experience, that “language is knowledge” (Leonard 141), and in Adam’s
case it was the knowledge that his names and nature were good. The Serpent uses
this knowledge of good in order to instill the knowledge of evil into Eve’s
mind. Interestingly, after the Fall when Eve tries to console Adam he replies
angrily: “Out of my sight / thou Serpent, that name best / Befits thee with him
leagued, thyself as false / And hateful” (10.867-869). Adam compares Eve to the
serpent, to Satan himself, and by doing so blames Eve completely for the Fall.
Although he later repents and tries to take complete blame for the Fall it is
Eve who volunteers herself for punishment by uttering her famous line “Me me
only just object of this ire” (10.936). In this speech in Book 10 she takes
full blame for the Fall, and by doing so makes a case for her own voice and
equality in their partnership. Leah Whittington in her essay “Vergil’s Nisus
and the Language of Self-Sacrifice in Paradise
Lost (2010) argues that Eve’s speech “initiates a conversation in which the
seeds of dialogue, sown by her penitence, begin to germinate” (605), by
offering to sacrifice herself for both of them Eve is taking full
responsibility for the world around her even though it was originally meant for
Adam, but a closer look at Eve’s language reveals an inclination towards
sympathy and care for the world around her.
Crucial to Eve’s understanding of
language and Adam’s knowledge-by-naming argument is Eve’s naming. In order to
fully grasp the perfection of Adamic Language we must look at Eve’s naming of
the flowers and how her naming relates Adam’s a priori knowledge. Kristen Poole
in her article “Naming, Paradise Lost,
and the Gendered Discourse of Perfect Language Schemes” (2008) makes the case
that “the early modern discourse about perfect language [. . .] is simply
androcentric” (538). Poole is pointing to the seventeenth century search among
scholars for the language of Adam as naturally gendered biased: “The
androcentrism of this search for this search for perfect language is [. . .] inured
to the masculine bias inherent in “Adamic” [. . .] seemingly privileging the
voice of Adam over that of Eve” (538). Even
this paper on Adamic Language unintentionally privileges Adam over Eve. In
other words, there is a gendered binary that arises whenever we talk about
Adamic Language simply because by focusing on the language of Adam we are
completely ignoring the language of Eve. The gender binary is there, we just
chose to ignore or unintentionally not acknowledge it. But in order to fully
grasp the knowledge behind Adamic Language our interpretations must be informed
by Eve’s language as well.
Milton was aware of the gender
binary inherent in the discussion of perfect language and he illustrated this
by giving a participatory role in Edenic Language (the language of Eden) and
giving her the power to name the flowers. Milton “deviated from the story of
Genesis, in which Adam alone conferred names upon the animals” (Poole 539) in
order to provide a comparison or rather “competing linguistic models” (Poole
539) of the original language of Eden and even nature. By inserting Eve in the
process of naming Milton is swaying us away from the arguments of intrinsic
knowledge in Adamic Language and is instead introducing us to the gendered
discourse inherent in such arguments. In other words, before we can make an
argument for Adam’s a priori knowledge of the animals first we must acknowledge
that Adam’s language is part of a binary (a binary whose other side gets
overwhelmingly ignored).
Poole takes an interesting view of
Adamic Language, one which closely relates to Fish’s argument of Adam’s a
priori knowledge and my own argument of Adam having intrinsic knowledge of the
animals:
Adam’s
naming is not the imposition of his own set of signifiers; his naming is more
aptly considered as his reading of a
language that is already a part of nature [. . .] the natural world was created
with divine “signatures” already imprinted upon it. The “Spirit of every
[Beast] was figured in them”: names are not separate entities from the animals.
Rather [. . .] the relationship of word and thing, signifier and signified is
organic, integrated, whole. Names are an expression of creation’s “Essence”;
the names are part of creation, and were visible to Adam. Words and the Word
are one. (543)
Poole
seems to be saying that he names that Adam imposed on the animals are right and
perfect because the those were the names that nature (God) infused in them.
Adam was merely a messenger pronouncing the names that he were already there.
Raphael tends to agree with this assessment: “Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was
pleased, / And find thee knowing not of beasts alone, / Which thou hast rightly
named, but of thyself” (8.437-439). He has “rightly named” them not because
Heaven agrees with the names he has chosen, but because they are perfect in
every way and correspond with each animal’s nature since “Adam’s knowledge is
infused by him directly by God” (Fish 104).
If Adam’s naming is somehow a source
of knowledge form God, then what of Eve’s naming? Where does her inspiration
come from? Unfortunately, Eve does not a scene (like Adam) in the poem when she
names the flowers. Her naming is merely an utterance, and everybody in the poem
seems to about it besides herself. In Book XI, after the anger Michael informs
Adam that they must “[no] longer in this Paradise to dwell” (XI.259), Eve
overhears this and after lamenting over her exit from Paradise she recites:
O
flow’rs,
That
never will in other climate grow,
My
early visitation, and my last
At
ev’n, which I bred up with tender hand
From
the first op’ning bud, and gave ye names
Who now shall rear ye to the sun (XI. 273-277)
This
is the only proof the poem provides of Eve’s naming. Unlike Adam’s naming which
is alluded to in several passages, Eve’s naming is merely glanced over in one
of the last books of the poem. In Adam’s naming scene that animals come to him
and he names them as they pass, but Eve names the flowers as they are born (or
grown). In a sense she helps create them or nurture them into being: “I bred up
with tender hand” (XI.276). Her naming is more personal and the names seem to
be of her own creation, and maybe not divinely inspired. By breeding them into
existence and “rear[ing]” (XI.277) them she seems to have intimate knowledge of
each flower and appropriately names them. So her knowledge is intrinsic, like
Adam’s, but it comes from a natural place. Her knowledge to name stems from
motherhood (from breeding) and nature, and not directly from the Heavens.
It’s clear form the passage above
that Eve’s language (insofar as naming is concerned) arises from a different place (mainly nature)
than Adam’s, and further examination of her character reveals that her
connection to nature and the world around her is etched in her psyche from her
creation. Kristen Poole interestingly points out that the “merging of Eve and
her environment is consistent with the poem’s portrayal of her relationship to
the natural world” (555), by this is specifically pointing towards the scene
when Eve first awakes and sees her reflection in the lake. Poole uses Eve’s
inability to recognize her own reflection as evidence that Eve identifies
herself as belonging to the environment and fully integrate in it and not as a
separate entity (Poole 556). She seems to have no dominion over her environment
(like Adam) and instead sees her world as a part of herself (or herself as a
part of the world) and not the owner of it. This seems to contradict God’s
instruction to Adam: “This Paradise I give thee, count it thine / To till and
keep” (8.319-320). Do these instructions relate to Eve as well? Or is Adam as a
male the sole protector and owner of Paradise? Eve in sense a does “till and
keep” (8.319-320) the environment around her but in a different way than Adam.
Works Cited
Danielson,
Dennis Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Second ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.
Eagle,
Christopher. ""Thou Serpent That Name Best": On Adamic Language
and Obscurity in Paradise Lost." Milton
Quarterly 41.3 (2007): 183-94. Print.
Fish,
Stanley Eugene. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Second
ed. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard UP, 1998. Print.
Milton,
John. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. Ed.
William Kerrigan, John Peter Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon. New York: Modern
Library, 2007. Print.
Poole, Kristen. "Naming, Paradise Lost, and the
Gendered Discourse of Perfect Language Schemes." English Literary
Renaissance 38.3 (2008): 535-59. Print.
Whittington, Leah. "Vergil’s Nisus and the
Language of Self-Sacrifice in Paradise Lost." Modern Philology 107.4
(2010): 588-606. Print.
[1] “Since
man was formed in the image of God, he must have been endowed with natural
wisdom, holiness and righteousness. . .Moreover he could not have given the
names to the animals in that extempore way, without very great intelligence” (Milton
1208-09).
