Abel to Cut Down ¹

Dicendum et quae sint duris agrestibus arma, quis sine nec potuere seri nec surgere messes. [I must tell, too, of the hardy farmers' weapons, without which the crops could be neither sown nor raised.] (Virgil, Georgics 1.160-61) How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks? (Sirach 38.25) The arms2 of the hardy farmer—Virgil's category of the plough, cart, hammer, and hoe—are constitutive extensions of the farmer. A farmer cannot be a farmer without these tools, which is to say that a farmer could not farm without farming instruments. Even a sower of the most modest herb garden could hardly expect growth without tools of some sort. The only plot of land tended by farmers without tools in the Christian tradition was Eden, and yet the tending of Eden itself would be unrecognizable to the Virgilian farmer, as neither Adam nor Eve could transform the land, which, per Milton, “with wanton growth derides / Tending to wild” (PL 9.211-12). Though Eve leaves Adam on the morning of the Fall with “Gard'ning Tools as Art yet rude, / Guiltless of fire had form'd, or Angels brought” (9.391-92), her “Tools” are neither fusile inventions nor a medium between being and being-in-the-world. In the prelapsarian state tools are vestiges of the idyll, not the objective mediators of work. Eve's “tools” relate to the arms of Virgil's farmer in much the same way money in the city of Ur relates to money in nineteenth-century London. Outside of Eden tools originate the work defined by their form, not as accoutrement of the edict in Genesis to “dress and keep” the garden (Gen. 2.15). In contrast to Eve's “tools,” the archetypal tool in the postlapsarian state of being forms the boundaries of what work is possible, and, thus, of what work is comprehensible. This material structuring of action in turn shapes the way in which the worker comes into being as such. Moving from storehouse of potential to medium of enactment, the tool forms the worker as it delimits the potential of work. The invention of the plough creates the act of tilling as a novel employment, which is to say there is no tilling without some type of plow and no conception of tilling per se prior to the plow. As the potential uses of tools continue to unfold after their initial invention, these new potential uses further shape modes of work and thereby condition workers to act in ways external to their previous imaginations, producing new modes of thought and ways of being in the process. The new conditions of labor imposed by technological development are not inherently a boon or a curse to workers, but these conditions do not originate from the human will. This is to say that the desire to rework a grassland to produce, say, food, does not in any way necessitate a desire to cut the roots of the meadow's present foliage with blades that overturn the earth itself. The plow occasions such desire.3 Or, to put it another way still, technology holds within it an imperative for new ways of comprehending and existing within the world. This article considers the imperative of technology through John Milton's Paradise Lost alongside his pedagogical treatise Of Education and his university Prolusions as sites where Milton articulates an instrumental pedagogy, i.e., an educational theory concerned with practical instruction and its moral consequences. In these texts written throughout his life, Milton considers how one might manage new contraptions and how one might prevent oneself from becoming subject to (or, subjectified by) them by way of proper education. Through attention to the deployment of the Book of Genesis and Lucretius's De Rerum Natura as paired accounts for the invention of tools in Milton's later thought, this article will demonstrate that a particular quality of materialism in Paradise Lost emerges from a tension between the potential wickedness of technology outside of Eden and its necessity for postlapsarian life, a problem itself echoed in the tension between the cosmologies of Genesis and De Rerum Natura. The literary historian David Quint has read Lucretius's philosophical poem as lying “beneath the surface” (63) of Paradise Lost and occasioning its foundational contest between a “Christian cosmology and the godless cosmology of Lucretius” (80).4 Expanding on this relation, William Poole understands Books 4 and 5 of De Rerum Natura in particular as points of intertextual tension in Paradise Lost's monogenetic theory of human and angel creation: “the major difference,” Poole notes, “between the Lucretian creation and that of the Bible is that in the former, not just the first man but all the first people spring directly from the ground, separately” (193). This article follows similar lines of inquiry to investigate not the genesis of the world or of humanity (both of which are resigned to either God or the inhuman chance of atoms) but of tools specifically by attending to their invention in Paradise Lost, Raphael's instruction of Adam, and Milton's own pedagogical theories regarding instruments and utility. Rather than focusing primarily on the revelation of forbidden knowledge endemic to the Fall, this article attends to Milton's understanding of the postlapsarian process of coming to knowledge via the material conditions (and thus conditioning) of the world. the liquid Ore he [Tubalcain] drain'd Into fit moulds prepar'd; from which he form'd First his own Tools; then, what might else be wrought Fusile or grav'n in metal. (570-73) There are several avenues this article might have taken to conceptualize instrumentality, being, and morality in Milton's Paradise Lost, and my choice to regularly use the awkwardly hyphenated “being-in-the-world” bears the trace of one potential interlocutor, Martin Heidegger and his famous piece “The Question Concerning Technology.” However, while Heidegger's conception of techne developed in “The Question Concerning Technology” and his lectures on Aristotelian philosophy capture the ways in which technology expands beyond anything akin to a human telos while still serving as the medium through which the world comes to be known, Arendt's Human Condition more usefully aligns with Milton's own understanding of technology and its imperatives as something that can be tempered vis-à-vis proper pedagogy. I will leave it to the reader to return to Heidegger and Arendt to discover for themselves whose approach best captures the nature of technology in the world itself, but for understanding Milton's thought, I find Arendt a more generative interlocutor. Arendt's redeployment of the vita activa disrupts an inherited hierarchy between it and the vita contemplativa—the contemplative life, aligned with otium (leisure time) and skhole (freedom from political activity). “Traditionally,” Arendt notes, “the term vita activa receives its meaning from the vita contemplativa; its very restricted dignity is bestowed upon it because it serves the needs and wants of contemplation in a living body” (16) As a result of its scholastic preeminence, the vita contemplativa tends to blur “the distinctions and articulations within the vita activa” (17), namely those necessary disruptions brought about by the living body's active experience of being-in-the-world. Labor, work, and action are mistaken for one another when understood primarily as “that which disrupts contemplation.” Each of the constitutive categories (i.e., labor, work, and action) of the vita activa corresponds to a basic human condition. The activity of labor corresponds to the biological reproduction of the body and is conditioned by “life itself,” whereas the activity of work corresponds to the production of the artificial “world of things” and is conditioned by “worldliness.” Arendt distinguishes the activities of labor and work from action, a fundamentally political activity, by attending to the material bases of labor and work that are absent from action: “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” (7; emphasis mine). Arendt then further distinguishes labor from work through attention to the lived categories of the animal laborans and homo faber. If a human labored alone, that laborer would exist within the realm of the animal laborans: “in the most literal sense” of a laboring animal (22). Understood as the activity of the animal laborans, labor functions within the domain of animality since its only purpose is to sustain “mere life,” i.e., base biological existence, life by its technical definition. In contrast, homo faber, human as maker, is endemic to work rather than labor and is when humans are most godlike (or, at least, productive) in their interactions with the world. Since work is the activity of the vita activa that forms and is formed by worldliness, the products of homo faber are concerned with the creation and reformation of worldly materials. These created objects necessarily condition the sense of utility per the technological imperative most influentially posited by Cicero in his De Officiis: Cum igitur aliqua species utilitatis Obiecta est Commoveri Necesse est [when, therefore, some useful form is presented, it necessarily moves us] (8.35).5 Homo faber, in so far as he is nothing but a fabricator and thinks in no terms but those of means and ends which arise directly out of his work activity, is just as incapable of understanding meaning as the animal laborans is incapable of understanding instrumentality. (155) In Paradise Lost Milton imagines a transitory space between the pre- and postlapsarian human condition, and so imagines the invention of humanity's coming into being-in-the-world. In Adam's final vision of the world to come, still foreign to him though proleptic, he sees his descendants experience a world of labor and work as of yet unknown to both him and Eve.7 Since he witnesses the invention of postlapsarian labor, Adam also witnesses the invention of tools and therefore the advent of instrumentality, providing Milton a chance to articulate his anxieties as to the moral and spiritual limitations imposed upon humans by their own inventions, both material and structural. While the first vignette of Adam's vision is that of Cain slaughtering Abel and thus the introduction of death as embodied experience, what Adam initially sees as his curtain-like eyes open upon the stage of fratricide is “a field / Part arable and tilth, whereon were Sheaves / New reapt, the other part sheep-walks and folds” (PL 11.429-31). Sometime later he will the Cain and the but first Adam the by instruments unknown to the land to have a plough must have for a to tools must have more than In the of his the John both the plough and within his on “the several of Tools and to this of category of the both the tools of the and the of the in to shape and from the a in is just as much a tool as a plough the since both as instruments in of useful ends As Cain and Abel are workers from their in Eden whose experience of the conditions their conception of land just as Cain and on tools conditions would be not to Eden and though the of the garden must be to the of tended by Adam and The of the land on the that it than it does on the by which it is is a category defined by the of production rather than by its While in the itself, Adam has not yet any of the tools by which Cain the knowledge of the of the tools through their on the land, as an the type of by a Adam only understands the land by absent While the first tool he sees outside of Eden is the itself, the first tool he sees outside of Eden is the Cain uses to him into the with a / out (PL Genesis itself no of a or of any to the and the of the to when were in the that Cain Abel his and (Gen. As Milton the itself than the of Genesis and the of how Cain was to Abel in “the with a at the is as as it is The an of his from the upon the of Milton could have Genesis and to the or he could have Cain a or a with which to such as or a sense as a for Cain specifically since it is from that Abel his Though beyond the in Paradise Lost, it is not to Cain a from or from a the as his Abel might a or in of the while the of Adam and Eve have brought death into the it was an from that Though Eve the on the of the Fall with tools as though were or or in her (PL the of the and her tools no to Eve of these vestiges prior to the that will Eve with whose are from the Milton her within a where and her tools are a that into the far more instrumental to labor embodied by Cain and Cain and labor and the postlapsarian of laboring to Eve's in but are not of and where fire on or in to the of the some or by the liquid Ore he drain'd Into fit moulds prepar'd; from which he form'd First his own Tools; then, what might else be wrought Fusile or grav'n in metal. (PL et et et men the of the with the of and and and for when some were all that was and way to Cain and his tools the potential for when to death and in a postlapsarian tools are necessary for and cannot be from their from Eden, Adam and Eve first into the condition of the animal laborans, while their descendants into the condition of the homo faber, their own tools and so fundamentally the world The postlapsarian then a world formed and through instrumentality. the meaning of as both a and a for tools are an of the postlapsarian condition, then to be as as so that might be into and the from being to Milton, this attending to the and thereby the proper use of tools via proper education. Cain and his descendants instruction and were therefore for the of by John has that Raphael's that from and to but “the by which the created is to and in and in humans of as the way by which one how to the vis-à-vis and in the material that one be in their coming to proper knowledge of the world because proper knowledge is only through the medium of be in the postlapsarian state and knowledge by to with the of Eve serving as the of to Even the material world in its the for its in the Milton's theory of cannot in the domain of but must into a pedagogical the of fire in the of Book to be of a or for the of the as David Quint has more than the of invention In his on Milton to and the of tools by his the of proper In this humans might both the of the animal laborans and homo faber by what he to be active Milton's theory of in his Lucretian but it to shape in his on his at and his as a in the “The then of is to the of first by to God Milton's with its The in and a particular that the upon the cannot what has not just as one cannot return to a one has the is or one to what had then something new has into being from the a is the of a per for not just a for but a of (17), and thus the of all world through the of to the experience of as both to and within a which is and that which is to be and God that which is what was what will what will be what of is not necessarily a but is a for the political necessity of and understanding or does it to the of Adam and no of Eden, Milton's the action upon as from a to a and so a for first / (PL The then of is to by God but as cannot in this body itself but on God cannot be directly known, only by those things that can be and are and must upon “the i.e., itself In the of it would be to continue with Milton the attending to Milton the There are within Milton's where one more and to the than in his these and as only to be out of most Milton's and the reader has to these after his later a quality when akin to an with the of or the of the Milton's experience so that as though these a that cannot but a into the Milton a vignette of an in an to find some from the of his university he to much yet of and that he is than with his in such as these by a that would a is the experience of philosophy to such of that themselves to be when in there is nothing for to on and contemplation it to be and the subject of Milton his sense of useful and in more to than more than a Of is Milton's final scholastic philosophy that at the of The as might Milton about to do this at the and that since he has to this he use it as an to what he is in how it by the material conditions in that on Milton the necessity of the vita contemplativa in the of can be as a of which does not into both that life and life on This life is to be in contemplation Milton distinguishes the and the “the “the as to the of contemplation and However, Milton from contemplation on life by the roots of contemplation as the of life understood through in and condition the for must first how to be within a and in the of useful the vita for in with Milton more on the and considers educational that both a and In the of of Milton the final the of skhole by the as the of are to out of what is or have of something and more the of Milton's at he that proper life and, contemplation with the of which are to to use of the world. has the subject with the of it does not when and in what first into the of their as the other by or the of their from the and the liquid from their or it from some other The inquiry into these and similar those into the of nature rather than are more to the of can read at their than to farmers are that are of no to them in their work or in the of their The educational Milton to within the of and things as were the category of things one Arendt's regarding the advent of the or the of with the endemic to a category of things with the purpose of them this In Of Education Milton that things are those things that one to and modes of Milton's are all to in of and themselves and therefore the with and those would themselves no from the then, must those that would to and action, and that cannot be put to If one can an might then one can an to be further how Milton these categories of proper and to contest the condition of later in his I will by Adam's more his return to Paradise Lost from Milton's educational what does Paradise Lost its and how does the poem these the has read Paradise Lost as a that its and its The poem is itself an its to read in a as the is both objective and yet on the of its instruments Milton's desire to use the material of the world in to the beyond the (i.e., the beyond the as as his from this Milton's sense of the as a for The with its of and with the vita is the by which and be as of work. on the other is the of to the vita and tradition are the of scholastic and so these of the arise from The is to be from Paradise of the subject of and the to the of instruments and as Paradise Lost can be understood as a type of tool to investigate creation the emphasis how the poem the nature of into the material world is to the of the poem itself. If Paradise Lost is a that can both the and the then it would be best to turn and with the of the Book of Paradise Lost with Adam for the of the creation and of the between the and the of Raphael's this was neither material nor contemplation could have either the of life or the of these things is a to Adam because this him in Adam is the of knowledge he to to him the that the material and, in the by which the Adam that the nature of his is with Raphael's of both as occasions to understands Adam's in the same way a understands a into a or I for / as the Book of God this is a that cannot in the way Adam initially While it is that not has knowledge of the of nor can the of the is not the to how the which is to say, that some things are more both unknown and the of and the in Of where a of of is itself a activity that be one is to oneself to God and a is to prevent that would to in a life of to his ways from human from so that / If it might in things / no (PL Book is one of the more of Paradise via Milton of the of revelation through the with the of the of the is to is the itself. In a of the that not with the of providing potential but to that thus these or is to God and and knowledge that God has is to knowledge for its own and so to knowledge as to be per of the and be to the but what is what be the of something when has it is to to the of human with and the or is to and of her is no or by experience not to at of things and but to which in life, the what is is or in things that most and still to from this A and of things at the material conditions of the world neither nor disrupts the structuring of materials. is the of one is not from the condition of by to The world is not as as it is Milton's to subject oneself to the of homo faber is to be and and to neither state of oneself from such by way of a practical that both the for life and the of God through contemplation that from material both of what one does as as what one to In the act of of and one is to act in the world. The process of and to material conditions to the human condition for the human While it is not to the type of activity that a tool will into being it is to the instrumental imperative by either the of or by what is to be or in the first