A mighty narrative problem: how do you tell the story of unfallen humanity?
By the nature of our sin distorted vision, we cannot imagine aright what it is like to be unfallen. We can try, of course, and some utopian literature, such as More’s Utopia or Voltaire’s El Dorado or Lewis’ Perelandra, get at it with varying degrees of success. The unavoidable problem, though, is that, according to the various mainstream Christian theologies, human beings now live with distorted imaginations, bent wills, errant loves, and muddied intellects. We cannot literally imagine Eden since our imaginations can see only through a glass darkly. But we urgently feel the need to imagine the unimaginable.
An example: it is nearly impossible for an adult to imagine the naked body of a member of the opposite sex in a purely unfallen way. Too many immediate distortions of our being get in the way from perfect control of the will. No matter how hard we might try artistically, we cannot imagine a naked man or woman with total purity. It is out of our control, due to sin (Sin, not sins). Yet we feel the pull toward purity, so various artistic attempts throughout time try to render this dignity of unfallen human nature in its primal beauty, but we never quite get it. Greek Classical statuary, for instance, idealizes human form beyond mere prurience. William Blake’s strange, beautiful forms also re-conceptualize the human body as sublimely beautiful.
 |
| Blake's Perfection of Form |
And John Milton tried. Boy, did he try.
He tried to imagine the unfallen condition, a part of which would be lack of shame since nothing shameful has yet occurred, and not just with nekkid bods. He tried hard to configure a sense of unfallen sublimity through language, image, metaphor, syntax, allusion, and plot. And with some success, at least as near as one can in our fragmented, alienated condition. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, we see Adam and Eve resting and eating--without gluttony, without waste, in perfect harmony of appetite and love (and vegan!):
Under a tuft of shade that on a green
Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side
They sat them down, and after no more toil
Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd
To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease
More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite
More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell,
Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes
Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline
On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours:
The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde
Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream;
Compliant nature feeds them. The couple harvest their meal from willing plants. The creek water is just right. Milton probably did not think they actually talked in Miltonic verse, but the use of elaborate, ballet-like syntax points to perfect equipoise.
(Eve to Adam:)
“O thou for whom
And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh,
And without whom am to no end, my Guide
And Head, what thou hast said is just and right. “
She could have just said, “Yes, dear.” But the copiousness of rhetoric is both elegant and playful, a suitable literary ploy for showing (lost) human perfection.
But not just this. Milton tries to capture how the circumambient realm of nature is oriented toward the king and queen of creation. Animals goof off for husband and wife in an Edenic, prelapsarian icanhazcheeseburger way. How does one imagine original innocence? Milton has the animals playing with one another instead of fleeing, competing with, or killing each other. Now, this might not literally have been the case, but my point is that we, on the other side of the break, alienated from nature as well as from God and each other, create metaphors of harmony, unity, peace, joy, and love through such means as extrapolating from how our cats and dogs and parrots play with us. This unity among animals for the service of joy is one way to imagine the now unimaginable.
Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles
Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems
Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League,
Alone as they. About them frisking playd
All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase
In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den;
Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw
Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards
Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant
To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd
His Lithe Proboscis . . .
Of course Milton fails, because we can no longer see what we no longer are. All art must fail. But we can reach for it. We are driven to use art to regain something of what was lost. We earnestly imagine men and women loving each other with perfect equity and without lust. We imagine a fructifying nature where we belong, with no mosquitoes or indigestion. We can imagine playing with cats and dogs and elephants in an equilibrium of rightly measured honor (e.g., Narnia), whereas now we are often merely pathetic in our attempts to put clothing on our animals and in talking to them like children, treating real live humans around us with lesser dignity.
All art fails. All art must fail. This is part of the sadness of great beauty made by humans. And yet the failure of beautiful art can serve as a sign of redemption. We can imagine elephants being silly to entertain their beloved human companions in paradise and this imagined friendship, sometimes intermittently embodied in life today, gives us a picture of what we were, at play in the fields of the Lord.
 |
| Adam and Eve laugh at his lithe proboscis. He laughs with them. |
(I have been waiting forever to use the word “circumambient.”)