Results of the Fall//Brooke Bradley

The most intriguing aspect of how John Milton writes the fall of man is the consequences of it. The main themes of the fall that I noticed are blame and shame, no rhyme intended. When God confronts Adam and Eve in the garden, He finds them hiding behind a bush. They are afraid of God and they are embarrassed because of their physical nakedness. It is so interesting to me that their need to cover their bodies is a direct result of their fall. This is a clear implication that before sin entered the world, there was nothing to be ashamed of when it came to our physical bodies. This is also biblical, not only part of Milton’s narrative. The second theme that is seen after the fall is blame. There is a clear chain of blame. God confronts Adam and Eve and makes it clear that he blames them for their own fall. When these accusations come, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent or Satan. According to this narrative, blame seems to be a result of sin entering the world. A symptom of sin is that people do not want to accept responsibility for it, and therefore, they misplace blame onto others.

Comments

  1. Brooke BradleySeptember 27, 2021 at 7:21 PM

    I commented on Abigale Bell's post and Emma Landry's post.

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  2. Raygan BosterSeptember 27, 2021 at 10:10 PM

    I love how you pointed out the concept of not wanting to accept responsibility for our actions. I know now, even for me, that my number one instinct when in trouble, is to blame shift as much as possible, just as Adam and Eve did. But an interesting thing I see is, I believe that Satan does it as well. He says many times that he is doing this because he can't be happy and enjoy Paradise or because he wants to get back at God. He never says that he is ruining the beauty of this world because he has an inflated ego. - Raygan Boster

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  3. Braylan StringfellowSeptember 28, 2021 at 8:44 AM

    You pointed something out to me that embarrassment was not a thing until sin came into the world. It makes sense now that I am thinking about it. Adam and Eve had nothing to be embarrassed about. They would just live their lives how they wanted within God’s commands and everything was fine. But once they made the stupid choice of disobeying God, that’s when they started feeling embarrassment. It’s true today; we usually don’t feel embarrassed about something until we did something stupid.

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