This chapter establishes that Augustine held that the sins of Christians were venial sins and that these sins were always committed through weakness or ignorance, with the result that Christians remained virtuous while they committed these sins. In contrast, the sins of non-Christians were always damnable sins and these were committed through pride. Through a study of Augustine’s account of the theft of the pears, and of Adam and Eve’s Fall, this chapter shows that Augustine thought that sinning through pride could take two different forms, and that this supported his view that anti-social, other-harming actions (like theft or murder) were not inevitable in the earthly city.

This chapter explores structural differences between the 1667 ten-book edition and the revised twelve-book version of 1674, not only to continue a reconsideration of Eve, but to revive attention to the implications of the formal properties of the revision, and to argue that this reformation formally embodies the narrative’s claims about how to adjust to modernity. The drama created by the final, reconfigured two books highlights how Adam and Eve and their relationship change and grow during the poem. At the end, the poem’s profound linguistic tensions are instantiated by Eve, while Adam’s reaction and the narrator’s description emphasize the pleasures of pluralistic readings. In short, the reformation of Paradise Lost rebalances the poem, by countering the scale of the consequences from the War in Heaven with a proportional rearrangement of the invocations. Its twelve-book shape mitigates against loss and creates a space to emphasize the continued growth of the two human characters, particularly Adam. Perhaps most importantly, the new, concluding pair of books provide a space of non-domination in which Eve can emerge and be recognized as the poet she is.

In the tensions between sight and sound, between the horizontal and the vertical, and between the narrative and the order of its telling, Paradise Lost hosts an expansive plurality to which each reader potentially contributes. What Milton’s epic offers to reading is central to the poem’s relationship to the experience of modernity. With a 1668 printing of the first, 10-book edition, Paradise Lost initiates a pattern for Milton’s late poems: prose prefaces in which Milton highlights how the poem is organized, and thus presumably ways the poems should be read. The story told in Paradise Lost seems to be simple in its familiarity: Satan rebels against God, comes to Earth, tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then she offers the fruit to Adam, who also partakes, after which God sentences both of them to different curses, and banishes them out of Eden. In Milton’s telling, though, the story is at first ten then ultimately twelve books (and roughly 10,000 lines) long, and layered with opposed possibilities, often in the same sentences and lines. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Chapter 6 considers The City of God books XIII and XIV, which complete Augustine’s inquiry into the origins of the two cities, one marked by humility and obedience, the other by pride and rebellion, and the metaphysics of pride and humility. Augustine’s defense of humility in this pair of books aims to reveal humility as fertile soil for abundant life, while pride pollutes the ground and withers life at its root.

This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.

In this chapter, the author considers Lapsarian Theodicy, according to which the originating cause of natural evil, including the suffering of animals in nature, was a cosmic Fall set in motion when the first human disobeyed God. He argues that, besides being antiquated by Darwinian science, this traditional explanation of animal suffering fails on four analytical-theologicalgrounds. For it entails (1) an implausible original fragility of the created world, (2) extreme moral impropriety on God’s part, (3) an implausible account of motivation to do evil in paradisiacal circumstances,and (4) an overvaluing of human freedom. Furthermore, the author argues that Lapsarian Theodicy is not supported unambiguously by the story of Adam and Eve in Eden, as commonly assumed. He concludes that theists are best advised to search for non-lapsarian alternatives, as the majority of participants in the controversy are doing.

In this chapter we turn to Bodin’s political, moral, and legal analysis of the conjugal relationship. Bodin thought that the conjugal relationship was the most important of the three governmental relationships in the household. The gender relationship in marriage determined the roots and the nature of sovereignty. The conjugal relationship was central to understanding Bodin’s notion of power, and especially the power of the sovereign. It linked Bodin’s arguments about the relationship of family and commonwealth, which we have discussed earlier, directly to his notion of absolute sovereignty. But, for his theory to be congruent, Bodin needed a wife who was always subjected to her husband, and we shall see that he had to attack the tradition we have studied earlier, thereby considerably bending Roman legal argument and inventing a tradition of female subjection. We will see that contemporaries picked up on this, and we will study a forceful response to Bodin by Antonio Montecatini.

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.