Addison’s commentary would be more true to Milton’s spirit had he given his amusement more free play, for the episode has at least as much comedy as majesty, propriety, and dignity. We should remember that in the invocation to Book IX, Milton proclaims he "now must change / Those notes to tragic," implying that what preceeded was anything but tragic. The phrase "Venial discourse unblamed" (IX,5) indicates wariness about mixing sacred and profane, tragic and comic modes; Milton realizes that his readers may well be less ‘many-minded’ than he. Book VIII is not less but more sublime precisely because Milton incorporates so many elements "amusing to the imagination" in ways which complicate and enrich our perceptions. Like Shakespeare, who mingles clowns and kings, Milton blends tragedy and comedy, to gentle the sublime and redeem the ridiculous.

   Book VIII exploits the comedy latent in the situation of a man telling the very happy story of how he met and wed his wife. Adam’s words and deeds reenact, or perhaps establish, what Susan K. Langer defines as the essential comic rhythm: "the primitive joyful challenge, the self-preservation and self assertion . . . that pure sense of life which is the underlying feeling of comedy." Langer also reminds us of the pertinent etymology (surely evident to the author of A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle) of our word comedy: "Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth, eternal life." We need not be pagans to recognize with Northrop Frye that comedy often has sexual rhythms: "what normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that . . . some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will." Adam’s narrative is not violated by describing it as a miniature romantic comedy, celebrating the pure sense of life and moving inexorably toward sexual union. Book VIII is thus comic in both the casual and generic senses. By "amusing" Addison meant simply "engaging the mind or attention in a pleasing way" (OED)-- that is, exciting mirth. The episode also contains structural elements which Langer and Frye might define as formally or generically comic.

   A prerequisite for enjoying the comedy is appreciating Adam the narrator’s perspective. (Conversely, failure to share Adam’s prelapsarian bliss, as I will later elaborate, may preclude amusement). At this point in the story, Adam could not be happier; he gladly accepts Raphael’s injunction to "be lowly wise" (173) and to "Dream not of other worlds" (175). Why should he bother to dream when his wishes have all come true? He clearly relishes the opportunity to convey his joy in concrete detail. Adam has apparently discovered that a wife can hear even a husband's best stories only so many times. In Raphael he has a fit audience: receptive and uninformed, for the affable Arch-angel, "as befel" (229), was "Bound on a voyage" the day of Adam’s creation.

   Adam’s opening lines express the raconteur’s momentary self-consciousness: "For man to tell how human life began / Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?" (250-251). He senses some difficulty in matching the great story told by his guest and thus he echoes Raphael’s introduction to the war in Heaven: "Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate . . . " (V, 564). Instead of cosmic grandeur, Adam delivers "My story," the home epic --and is quickly caught up in the delight and awe he felt and feels. Adam’s first insight, "new waked from soundest sleep" (253), reflects just these feelings: he springs upward, turning his eyes first toward heaven, then around him. His gaze "straight toward Heav’n" (257) suggests divine aspiration and humble attribution of his creation to a power beyond himself, while his inspection "about me round" indicates simple curiosity and human ‘rootedness.’ These dual connotations characterize the hero as nobly larger-than-life and recognizably all-too-human. What Addison and others have praised is the former at the expense of the latter; about Adam's humanity they are apprehensive, because Adam’s nobility is precariously fragile.

   But the narrator of "My story" feels vital, bouyant, and not at all reluctant to portray himself as a comic figure: bewildered, amazed, winning, and -- best of all -- triumphant. New-born Adam is a fearless innocent, wandering blissfully through an Eden, reflecting God’s providential bounty, where "all things smiled" (265). He is perplexed, but not agonized, by questions later heroes will find tormenting: "But who I was, or where, or from what cause, / Knew not" (270-271). Like Milton in Book III, and in a very different spirit from Satan in Book IV, Adam addresses the source of light: " 'Thou sun,’ said I, ‘fair light, / And thou enlightened earth, so fresh and gay . . .’ " (273-274). In perfect harmony with God and nature, Adam rejoices "that I am happier than I know" (282) before "This happy light" (285). So dominant is his mood of comic insouciance that Adam even falls asleep "untroubled" by the possibility, which occurs to him, that he might dissolve into his former state!

   Part of our pleasure, and Adam’s retrospective delight, is a shared conviction that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. In a sense, all comedy is like faith in that it dramatizes immediate incongruities and discovers ultimate unities. So close is Adam’s communion with God that he is delivered -- inexplicably, miraculously -- to the garden of bliss, transported like a beloved child by a doting parent: "...by the hand he took me raised . . . as in air / Smooth sliding" (300-302). Throughout the episode, Adam the narrator revels in that reassuring divine grasp and smile. For this bewildered new creature has a wonderful destiny before him, as God suggests in addressing him honorifically as "First Man . . . First Father" (297-298). Adam is born in the world of comic romance, a green garden where normal laws of nature are suspended and dreams come true: "I waked, and found / Before mine eyes all real" (309-310). Adam’s response is "Rejoicing, but with awe" (314).

   In this paradise, says God, Adam may eat "freely with glad heart" (322), except of course from the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruit he must shun to taste, lest "this happy state / Shall lose" (331-332). Here, for the only time, God interrupts the allegro rhythm: "Sternly he pronounced / The rigid interdiction . . . " (333-334). Yet no sooner does God stress this dreadful admonition than "his clear aspect / And gracious purpose thus renew’d" (336-337). Nor does unfallen Adam relating the warning have any particular reason to dwell upon a danger he knows he has a power to avoid. He makes plain that God’s warning has registered and that he feels free to obey Him, whatever Milton’s critics might feel for Adam.

   From this point on, the scene could scarcely be more as we like it. God is graciously condescending, as Addison remarked, and wholeheartedly playful, radiating risible delight. So responsive seems his Maker that Adam presumes upon their acquaintance to point out a certain lack in His creation: "I found not what methought I wanted still" (355). It would require a heart of stone not to be touched, charmed, and amused by Adam’s yearning. For Adam the narrator, and we his descendants, all rejoice in the knowledge of what God has provided. Adam senses vaguely what he is missing, but he could scarcely imagine what he is getting, when he laments "In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone . . . " (364-365).

   God receives Adam’s plaint "As with a smile more brightened" (368). Teasingly, like a parent postponing the opening of Christmas presents, God replies that Adam has no reason to feel lonely. Don’t all the various living creatures "come and play before thee?" (372), he asks, pretending that he had already provided enough entertainment. Undaunted, Adam perseveres -- and his fervid, gratuitous expenditure of energy is another source of comic pleasure. Not that I don’t appreciate the birds and the fish, he testifies, but I lack an equal, and thus "harmony or true delight" (384). Given Milton’s reputation as a misogynist (Johnson, no feminist, faulted Milton's "Turkish contempt" for females), it is worth specifying that Adam does not want a toy, a concubine, or a cleaning lady: "Of fellowship I speak / . . . to participate / All rational delight" (389-391).

   As in the archetypal comic situation, "the obstacles to the hero’s desire . . . form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution." Throughout this debate, Milton plays upon our realization that Adam will receive the rational delight he needs and the sexual delight he doesn’t even know he wants. From our fallen perspective, we are invited to view sex before the fall, so full of joy and wonder, so free of pain and guilt. Even more exhilarating than liberation from these human constrictions, we are invited to share the amusement of God, smiling from on high, "not displeased" (398). The words happiness, pleasure, and rejoyce reverberate throughout the exchange. God is having fun prolonging the suspense by enacting the role of the Almighty blocking force. The incongruity of God thus sporting with Adam in a sacred epic is temporarily unsettling but eventually gratifying. At the same time, Adam must have seen his "adversary" as infinitely formidable. This blocking force, after all, had not yet even created the fairest of his daughters Eve, and is demonstrably more potent than Squire Western or Mr. Woodhouse.

   And so God continues the game of mock-debate whose happy ending He has foreordained. Why, God asks in mimicry of petulance, should man have a mate when He is alone from all eternity? This gives Adam a chance to discover how ardor enhances persuasive capacities. He adeptly flatters his maker, urges him to continue making, and observes that "Thou in thyself are perfect, and in thee / Is no deficience found . . . " (415-416). Man needs a helpmeet to "solace his defects," he says, in a rather ingenious and compelling argument; like Odysseus, Adam is a resourceful comic hero. Milton underscores the essentially sacramental nature of "union and communion"; perfect union is the ideal communion between man and woman, and between mankind, nature, and God. But just below the surface of Adam’s innocent propriety is the vital rhythm of sexual urgency -- although Adam, still chaste, could not literally know what propagation means, in arguing that man "Shouldst propagate and beget / Like of his like" (423-424).

   Finally God admits that he has not been speaking with his customary lucidity but with divine irony: he said one thing but meant another, all with tongue-in-cheek: "Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleas’d . . . " (437). Adam was correct in this "celestial colloquy sublime" to have spoken boldly and "freedom used / Permissive" (434-435). He has the double (and rare!) pleasure of asserting himself against an authority and winning favor. For God agrees, indeed knew all along, that it is "not good for Man to be alone" (445) and reiterates that their debate was "for trial only" (447). With barely contained fanfare he promises, "What next I bring shall please thee, be assured . . . " (449). Having passed both Rhetoric and Theology with high honors, intuiting God’s plan, Adam will now be rewarded with "Thy wish, exactly to thy heart’s desire" (452), which sounds as much like fairy-tale magic as divine creation. No sooner does Adam hear this exciting promise than -- in a virtual prat fall -- he falls asleep! He says he was "strained" by debating God but the narrator describes it like post-coital exhaustion: "Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair / Of sleep" (457-458). The extraction of Adam’s rib, which might have been terrifying, is painless and pleasant: the rib, "with cordial spirits warm," suggests the vital, heartfelt link created between husband and wife.

   God has created a creature "So lovely fair, / That what seem’d fair in all the world, seem’d now / Mean . . . " (471-473). Adam’s "amorous delight" is expressed in the kind of line for which we worship Milton: Eve, says Adam, "infus’d / Sweetness into my heart unfelt before . . . " (474-475). No sooner does Eve appear, however, than she retires -- teaching Adam the meaning of true loneliness, understandable only when he has felt upon his pulses the possibility of union. His "amorous delight" is properly sensual. One glance and he is prepared to abjure "other pleasures all." In its blend of the familiar and the majestic, Eve’s withdrawal elaborates the ‘many-minded’ design of Book VIII. First, by following the formula for so many comic romances (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl), it enhances Adam’s and our sexual anticipation. Since we know that consummation is imminent, we can enjoy that "pure sense of life" without fretting that it might be frustrated. Second, Eve’s withdrawal and subsequent return endows the scene with a ritual formality and elevation: "Grace was in all her steps, heav’n in her eye." For Milton’s God, the sacred meanings and sensual pleasures of matrimony were inseparable. He instructs Eve in a crash course on huswifery, from which she emerges "nor uninformed / Of nuptial sanctity and Marriage Rites" (486-487). Adam remembers his astonished ecstasy: "I overjoyed could not forbear aloud" (490). He addresses his Maker rather informally, as though forgiving God for playing cat-and-mouse with him: "This turn hath made amends; Thou hast fulfilled / Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign . . . " (491-493). The ensuing scriptural phrases Adam utters carry both sacred and carnal suggestions: "Flesh of my flesh . . . to his wife adhere; / And they shall be one flesh . . . " We may be amused to hear Adam echo Genesis anachronistically in foreswearing "Father and mother" (498), since only our first parents were spared that perennial domestic conflict.

   In the consummation scene, Milton boldly confronts a very vexing issue in a manner which has disturbed some readers. As the context has promised all along, he dramatizes sex in Eden as pleasure, fulfilling the bridegroom’s desires, but rejecting Augustinian theology. Augustine, like any sensible person, seems to have been of two minds about prelapsarian sex. He entitles a chapter in The City of God, "That we are to believe that in Paradise our first parents begat offspring without blushing," and envisions "the marital act, not goaded on by the heat and prickings of voluptuous desires, but rather in peace of soul and with integrity of body." But a few sentences later he indicates that he was speaking hypothetically, for such shameless union "was not experienced even by those who might have experienced it -- I mean our first parents (for sin and its merited banishment from Paradise anticipated this passionless generation on their part) . . . " This latter assertion Milton utterly repudiates, for Paradise Lost presents eminently human impulses without tarnishing their aura of sacred majesty. It is this dual imperative, I believe, which accounts for Eve’s otherwise inexplicable self-consciousness. For though it is before the Fall, before "apparent guilt / And shame" (X, 112-113) about sexuality and nakedness, Eve is the epitome of "virgin modesty," and must be "woo’d" to nuptial rites, not merely invited to copulate, or (Cleopatra-like) prone to initiate proceedings. Still, Adam and Eve, having only themselves to please, declined protracted courtship. As C. S. Lewis remarks, "in the first half hour of her existence she understood the purport of Adam’s suit." We readers may bring guilt; Eve brings propriety.

   So Eve, without much ado but "with obsequious Majesty approv’d / My pleaded reason." A fallen reader may be forgiven the suspicion that her majesty and his reason were not the attributes most cherished by the lovers at that moment. To our universal "delight indeed" (524), Adam leads Eve "blushing like the morn" (511) to the nuptial bower. With that gorgeous image, Milton associates wedded love, sexual passion, "the pure sense of life," the natural order, and divine providence. It is all that Adam claims: "the sum of earthly bliss" (522). Adam’s beautiful epithalamion stresses the unity of these impressions, in the tradition of marriage songs: "the earth / Gave sign of gratulation . . . " (513-514). Adam’s song is frankly sexual: "transport’d I behold, / Transported touch; here passion first I felt, / Commotion strange" (529-531).

   At this juncture of his narrative, Adam becomes too much "transported," wondering if his intense response to Eve’s beauty signifies some error in creation. He knows well enough their relative positions in the hierarchy of creation, yet facing such loveliness "All higher knowledge . . . falls / Degraded" (551-552). We cannot fail to realize that this is wrong, as Adam concedes; just as surely we know exactly how Adam feels, or we should. Consequently, a part of us infallibly endorses Raphael’s critical reaction to Adam’s dangerous transport. But Raphael’s speech is not nearly so clear-cut as some of Milton’s most distinguished critics have tended to make it: a "gentle rebuke" (Addison) which conveys "the Miltonic doctrine" (Woodhouse) and thus "makes the issues plain" (Summers). Douglas Bush goes so far as to insist that "those who sympathize with Satan will here sympathize with Adam and resent the frowning angel’s rebuke." Christian humanism with a vengeance!

   One may resent the frowning angel’s rebuke, or at least question his tone, and yet not be a member of the devil’s party. Northrop Frye, no Satanist, aptly characterizes Raphael here as "insensitively coarse" and "too anxious to correct." Surely that part of us which empathizes with Adam’s adoration, so infused with sweetness in his heart unfelt before, resists and resents Raphael’s heavy-handed priggishness. "What transports thee so," he asks, throwing Adam’s word back at him, "An outside?" It is true that Adam is on the verge of "subjection" and that Raphael must emphatically convey the danger; his potential infirmity, "wisdom...discount’nanced" (ll .552-553), is perilous. It is also true that his elaboration seems calculated to embarrass Adam: "But if the sense of touch whereby mankind / Is propagated seem such dear delight / Beyond all other, think the same voutsafed / To cattle and each beast . . . " (579-582).

   With this sally, the angel is far too harsh, especially in his gratuitous and nasty conclusion: stick to reason, "Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause / Among the Beasts not mate for thee was found" (593-594). This is a barely decent variation on a downright offensive Iagoism. (A little Zoology might have tempered Raphael’s outrage: humans are rare among all the species in their instinct to copulate regardless of the phase of the reproductive cycle). Our natural human sympathies, unless earlier estranged by Adam’s frank sexuality, must surely remain with Adam, who is in an awkward position: halfwrong, certainly, and vigorously challenged by a guest whose affable conviviality had encouraged his manly candor. Adam’s response is a text-book illustration of Freud’s conception of comedy: in self-defense he makes a counter-attack, civilized and (I almost said "devilishly") effective. He clarifies but does not exactly repudiate his position. Although "half-abashed," Adam maintains admirable presence of mind, verifying the persistence of that right reason whose loss Raphael lamented. Of course I feel "mysterious reverence" (599), not just carnal desire. I didn’t realize I needed to spell this out to an angel, but if so, let me make clear what I most value: "Union of mind, or in us both one soul: / Harmony to behold in wedded pair" (604-605).

   Because Raphael has been true to his nature and thus inhumanly highminded, he is also (in Bergson’s mundane but pertinent terms) an example of mechanical "inelasticity." For this brief moment, Milton is not on the side of the angels; we should be pleased to see Adam turn the tables on Raphael, not because the Angel’s doctrine is incorrect, but because his tone is egregiously inappropriate. One might imagine the Son of God teaching Adam more tenderly and efficaciously. After rectifying Raphael’s misprision concerning Adam’s priorities here below, Adam puckishly and ingenuously inquires how Angels "thir love / Express" (615-616)? Here Milton, behind Adam, enjoys a moment of learned wit by spoofing scholastic theory. For example, Thomas Aquinas, considering the integrity of bodies in the resurrection, takes up the question of "Whether the hair and nails will rise again in the human body?"

   It seems that even Angels, not just our first parents, are susceptible to human feelings of embarrassment, self-consciousness, and sensual arousal: Raphael responds to Adam’s query "with a smile that glow’d / Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue" (619-620), and hastily ends their colloquy. Although Bishop Newton observed that "the conversation was now become of such a nature that it was proper to put an end to it," I believe that Raphael’s blush, like Eve’s, dramatizes not the shame of lust but an Augustinian "right action" which "seeks to be known, but yet dreads being seen." Finally, though, even Raphael qualifies his own censure and finds all this amusing; so does Milton, and so may we, without fear of reprimand. Raphael’s reply reaffirms his affability and the dominant tone of the episode, which is the pert and nimble spirit of mirth: "Let it suffice thee that thou know’st / Us happy, and without love no happiness. / Whatever pure thou in body enjoy’stt / we enjoy (620-623; my emphasis).

   Milton’s interest in this topic must have been keen, for he need never have raised the issue. In so doing, Milton is being the "humanist, uniting man to heaven, judiciously exalting the life of God’s earth." The critic I here cite, Robert West, stresses (like Addison) the "dignity" of Milton’s purpose. To this I would add that amusement is another means of achieving Milton’s humanist purpose: to make all the epic characters commanding but engaging. Thus Raphael’s explanation, conveying glad tidings, reconciles angel and man in more than one sense, restoring conviviality and uniting man to heaven. Raphael’s celebrated description of angelic love, "Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace" (626), might well leave Adam even more exalted with the "commotion strange" of human love: angelic lovemaking sounds rather too rarified, like two gases coalescing. And it leaves the reader better-instructed well-pleased with Milton’s human comedy.

   Northrop Frye comments in his brief glance at this episode that "the prevailing assumption has been that all this represents unconscious humor on the part of a humorless poet, and this assumption is quite wrong." There are numerous, and some interesting, reasons why so few critics have enjoyed Milton’s human comedy in Book VIII. To paraphrase Samuel Butler’s wry query about Homer: is it possible that eminent Milton scholars have found so much seriousness in the more humorous parts of Paradise Lost because they brought it there? To the solemn all things are solemn. Some critics may have wished to protect Milton from a supposed lapse, or to disguise their own embarrassment -- as though they read the story like Eve, "blushing like the morn." C. S. Lewis states that Milton’s love passages "are not consistent with what he himself believes about the world before the fall." To Lewis's way of thinking, at least before he was "surprised by Joy," Book VIII demonstrates the unsurmountable problem Milton encountered of dramatizing the prelapsarian state in the "altered style" of fallen man. Because language since the fall is inherently ambiguous, meanings are more charged with possibility than they were in pristine innocence. Hence we post-lapsarian perceivers bring to the scene our fallen vision, like Satan leering at Adam and Eve in Book IV, and thus provide the "human comedy" we profess to discover.

   Since Stanley Fish’s brilliant analysis Surprised by Sin, readers may have been discouraged from recognizing comedy for another reason. We have become acutely attentive to the ways echoes, allusions, and foreshadowings ought to warn us, and so much self-consciousness is fool-proof antidote to spontaneous delight. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? I believe this line of argument is less applicable to Book VIII, where Milton permits Adam abundant freedoms -- even comic license -- precisely because he is innocent in Eden. If we forget Adam’s situation and perspective, harmless, even felicitous details in Book VIII appear unduly ominous. Adam’s vision of Eve’s nobility "About her, as a guard angelic placed" (559) may thrust us forward to Michael with his flaming sword banning return to Eden. Eve’s withdrawal for divine instruction may foreshadow her fatal withdrawal in Book IX. Adam’s scriptural admonition to "Forgo Father . . . and to his wife adhere" (497-498) might point toward his decision to forgo his heavenly Father and follow Eve into sin. To the contemporary fit reader, trained to be wary, even Adam’s apparently innocuous opening to "My story" could be foreboding: "For man to tell how human life began / Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?" (250-251). Does this not allude to Satan’s mocking taunts to Abdiel, in the story just recounted by Raphael, wherein Satan had refused to praise or even acknowledge his Maker: "Who saw / When this creation was? Remember’st thou / Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?" (V, 856-858). Adam’s words might then signal his capacity for sin. Or, for readers such as Kerry C. and John K., Adam's language will carry a tragic echo of Aeneas, about to begin his sad story to Dido: "Infandum, regina . . . "

   Such ironic pointers seem to me plausible but strained, because in the context of Book VIII the distinctions and not the parallels are paramount. Adam speaks not as a defiant spirit or dazed survivor but as a proud bridegroom; his tale is not infandum, unspeakable, but bursting with exuberance: "I over-joyed could not forbear aloud" -- and telling the story he relives the gusto. His perspective is crucial. Milton lets Adam narrate precisely because Adam knows only the happy past and present but not the disastrous future; our responses should follow his responses, without superimposing our knowledge of all our woe, with loss of Eden. Santayana’s description of nature is apposite to Adam’s story: "lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."

   Milton relies upon and shapes our fallen perceptions in Book VIII both to give pleasure and to inculcate doctrine. He underscores the disparity between the ideal and the actual, between Edenic and fallen states; the difference between sexual relations in Books VIII and IX could not be more lucid, poignant, and painful. The comedy humanizes Adam and Eve, and assures our sympathy and affection. Johnson errs in asserting that Adam and Eve are "in a state which no other man or woman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged, beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has therefore little natural curiosity or sympathy." Were this true, Paradise Lost would be too long indeed. Illustrating a theological precept, Adam and Eve also command our sympathy. Adam’s story in Book VIII is one of several places where he appears irresistibly human, with all the "commotion strange" that entails. Similarly, Book VIII "humanizes" the figure of God. In Book II, God delivers sternly Jehovah-like wrath, only to be gentled and conciliated in "debate" with the Son; in Book VIII, He repeats his rigorous warnings, but His character is softened by affectionate banter with Adam; His doctrine is not dissipated but his tone is softened.

   Given these significant effects, it is important to recognize that Milton’s human comedy transcends the dictionary definition of comic as "opposite of tragical, elevated, or dignified" (OED). Only a rigid insistence, altogether contrary to the classical tradition, that epic should be the unmitigated sublime, would ignore the educative value of comedy. Homer, as I mentioned earlier, ends Book I of the Iliad with divine squabble and Vulcan’s cosmic pratfall, accompanied by Olympian laughter; and Hera’s seduction of Zeus in Book XIV is a masterpiece of domestic comedy. Certainly Milton imagines comedy as part of the divine scheme: the words happy and smile resound through Heaven and Eden. Paradise Lost is also Felix Culpa. For comedy, like faith, envisions life as full of inconsistencies, incongruities, and disparities, but ultimately affirms a higher harmony, order, and unity. In both innocence and redemption, Milton’s Adam knows what we all should learn, that "smiles from Reason flow" (IX, 239). Meredith was right when he commented that true comedy awakens thoughtful laughter.