There are two Falls from two eternal, seemingly perfect worlds in Paradise Lost : the Satanic hordes from Heaven ; Adam and Eve from Eden. Since Milton is not of the heavenly choir, his mooted 'pastoral lament for a lost Golden World' must be for Eden. His purpose is to 'justify the ways of God to man', and the conclusion of God's programme is that The world shall burn, and from her ashes,/ New heaven and earth, wherein the just shall dwell, in an ambience of golden days, fruitful of golden deeds (III,334-7). This is the definitive Golden World [ definitive in terms of Paradise Lost : theoretically God could thereafter have untold number of creations in mind which would embellish that state of perfection ]. It is not lost, but anticipated, and Eden with its prospective eternity for humans pales before the prospect of co-eternity with God and his angels.
It cannot be denied, however, that Milton's imaginative reconstruction of Eden from the bare bones in the Book of Genesis is feelingly portrayed. The poet has a stock of Arcadias from Theocritus outwards on which to draw to create his pastoral of happiness. The poet and man has imaginative genius. The man has fellow-feeling for Adam and Eve, and has the contemporary world as inspiration. The fallen man has guilt, and is causally linked to the Fall. It is for this reason that the fallen poet allies himself schematically with the fallen Satan, and moves with Satan from Stygian lake to Pandemonium, through Hell-gates and across Chaos to enter the innocence of Eden when evil entered there.
The fact is that for Milton's purpose---progression towards golden days...golden deeds---pure pastoral, a world devoted to pleasure and virtuous idleness, will not serve. He needs disruptive action, and Satan is the agent. Without him, Heaven would be eternally Heaven : nothing would follow or fall. He introduces carnal desire and incest into Heaven (II,765-7). He envies the Son of God's regal position there. He foments insurrection. There is evil in Heaven (V,871) and with the subsequent defeat of the Satanic horde, evil is shepherded (VI,856-8) out of Heaven, and the Son established as Pastor, Good Shepherd.
I would accept God's position on free will (III,115ff.) if it were not pre-empted by a divine omnificence which here mercilessly decrees eternal damnation in Hell for one transgression, i.e. one exercise of free will. Be that as it may, the thematic consequence is that the Satanic horde are now without Hope. In Pandemonium, Moloch advocates more warfare against God (II,43ff.), but in the main a general defeatism underlies the strident shows. Without hope of regaining the 'lost Golden World' of Heaven, the disruptive tendency is involuted, and the result is a malevolent will to destruction of whatever of God's creations they can get away with. Beelzebub and Satan steer attention towards God's new toy (II,378). The debate-scenario points up the fact that the fallen angels still exercise free will, but in such a painful, woeful ambience their decision is more the manifestation of irrational despair.
By the same token, Sin and Death, guarding the Hell-gates, are in despair and abjection---for that mortal dint/ Save he who reigns above, none can resist (II,813-4). They too have lost the Heavenly golden world, and Satan subverts them from their custodial task by proffering Eden as substitute Arcadia---the place where thou and Death/ Shall dwell at ease (II,840-1)---and fitted to their appetites---there ye shall be fed and filled/ Immeasurably---with an ambrosia of human flesh. As we shall see frequently later, paradise is in the appetite of the hungry, and its lack is the spur. By this sequential accumulation of the destructive will about to invade Eden, Milton is endeavouring to mitigate the blame to be attached to Adam and Eve in their Fall. Here (II,871-2) culpability is hung on Sin, a Satanic Eve.
Chaos is next to be tempted by Satan. His demesne of havoc and spoil and ruin has been greatly reduced by God's creation of Hell, Heaven and Earth. An earth destroyed and restored to him is the bait : hope engenders a more desirable chaos for Chaos, an amplified demesne, golden or gilded according to his lights. The Chaos episode serves the other function of underlining the immense labour Satan must expend to reach Eden there to foster his evil intent. The point, as I see it, of the interdicted tree in Eden is to say that outside of God, who is goodness (III,158+165), goodness for created beings is a thing to be earned, not simply plucked at an instant. The Satanic hordes hope to pluck Eden at an instant, with Satan's labours, but not theirs. Chaos shows a similar indisposition to labour, and disposition to sloughing off on Satan : Satan is the sweating dupe of the slothful.
In Hell we have Satan the reluctant recidivist--Farewell, happy fields (I,249-50)--and Satan of the vaunted unconquerable will (I,106). Now, in proximity to Eden, God's new creation, we hear again the pastoral lament for the lost Heaven. But the will is reduced to regret, a conscience-stricken, confessional tone (IV,25ff.). He is putatively the instrument of Hope for the Satanic horde, but in proximity to innocence, a little self-appraisal compels the eschewal of hope. Satan enters the delicious paradise as a self-purified vessel of evil : The hell within, for within him hell/ He brings, and round about him (IV, 20-1).
In Eden Satan finds a natural paradise which outstrips all other mythical gardens (IV,268-85), but finds too an internal paradise born of virtuous love--Imparadised in one another's arms/ The happier Eden (IV,506-7). The comparative epithet is Satan's, but Eve (IV,635-6) corroborates this intensifier. In this set-up Eve is the evident Donna Mobile, for she earlier found her reflection more beautiful than the sight of her spouse--again 'golden worlds are in the appetite of the hungry'.
From here on I found the role of God dubious : a puppeteer stringing out the test of the blessed pair's obedience while Raphael the emissary and pedagogue tries to repair the cognitive breach. Satan has been 'as one of us' and knows good and evil intuitively. Adam--Raphael informs him--has discursive reasoning, yet Raphael gives a lecture treating of knowledge within bounds, with Adam only once (VIII,379) being argumentative. Of course, Adam is intended to deduce, from the account of Satan's disobedience and fall, to his own case. But 'forewarned is forearmed' is hardly apt in a contest between a high power and master artificer, and newly burgeoning rational man, and his pupil, woman.
While Adam's internal paradise is being made more resplendent with knowledge, Eve's internal paradise is being expanded to contain the empyrean where divinity moves. With Adam it is a protracted labour of thought, in order to live/ The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts/ To interrupt the sweet of life (VIII,182-4). With Eve the effort is momentary : a plucking, from which ye shall die perhaps, by putting off/ Human, to put on gods (IX,713-4). This 'lesser half' may, through eating the fruit, be superior---for inferior who is free ? (IX,824-5)---to Adam ! With the Fall, Adam and Eve's mutual internal paradise--esteem, caring, loving, naked innocence--becomes lust, remorse, shame, disillusionment and quarrelling :a personal hell.
Sin and Death take up residence on Earth. Because it fits the divine, retributive plan, they of the Satanic horde are guaranteed their 'golden world' in perpetuity--until the golden days..golden deeds, when they will rejoin Satan and those judged unjust in eternally closed Hell . The Son of God, who has already shepherded the Satanic sheep from Heaven, and has further attached himself to mankind's destiny by proffering himself as means to pay the rigid satisfaction, to atone for mankind's sins and Fall, is now sent down to judge the fallen human sheep. Thereby he is linked with the total continuum of fallen man. The verdict is the loss of Eden's natural paradise, to add to their internal loss.
For all that Raphael has endeavoured to relate---By likening spiritual to corporeal forms (V,573)--- events in Heaven, especially the detail of War and subsequent Fall, he has not communicated the experience of human death. Death is the terrifying mystery which brings Adam and Eve back to a matrimonial unity-in-adversity. They even contemplate suicide, not as promissory of or accessing a 'golden' future world, but as something which, reasonably, must be better than the present. Their greater woe---greater by the ratio of the entirety of generation as against initial pair---is that their descendants will be legatees of death through their own present Fall. Greatest of all is that original sin unmitigated will attach, through the generations. They have stolen paradise from their progeny, at the snatch of some apples.
Despite the fact that at the Pastor's intercession God reaffirms his providence now and throughout man's historical continuum of prevenient grace (XI,3), he unbendingly decrees the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden without remorse (XI,105), though Michael, in virtue of their present tears and future patient obedience, is not to pronounce their doom rigorously. One has the sense that these divine deliberations are being spun out to make the fallen pair stew in their woe--rather as God lets two 'heavenly' days pass before he intervenes in the War of Heaven, as if he were testing the loyalty of his heavenly troops.
At this point, Adam and Eve are utterly without hope, as the Satanic horde were in Hell, no 'golden world' back or forward. The Son of God has already committed to a mortal intercession on man's behalf . God knows it. Michael knows it. Yet Michael gives Adam a chronological history lesson, leaving the part about Christ's redemption of man to emerge in proper narrative place. The reason for the delayed news must be that fallen man is beginning to experience life in sequential time, but, given Adam's sense of hopelessness, it still reads as austere, unsympathetic pedagogy. Another reason may be that it is as punishment : he's being made to live through what he has done before hope can dawn.
The history lesson is slanted to underline the magnitude of original sin's consequences, measured in harrowingly personal terms to Adam---for these are all his progeny---in stark contrast to the handful of 'saints' translated : the hell Adam has experienced since the Fall was Paradise to this. Christ and his redemption-by-blood becomes the climactic pivotal point. Hope is restored to Adam, and to the generations who will live after Christ, solely by Christ's redeeming grace (XII,402ff.). With Adam having had my fill of knowledge (XII,588-9), he and Eve are led to the mysterious plain (XII,640), and that knowledge is what mitigates the sorrow---Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon (XII,645)---of their solitary going hence. Eden had witnessed a mutual internal paradise through love, which was shattered by the Fall. Adversity had a restorative function, and love won back, though a fallen love. It is knowledge, confirming hope for their posterity, which forms a new internal paradise. It is with this that they emerge from the natural Paradise, chastened but not dreadful, hand in hand . God's definitive Paradise lies ahead in golden days...golden deeds, and Paradise Lost is ultimately a pristine song of praise of a golden world to come.
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