dialectical jibberjabber

“Ever wonder if life would be better if Eve hadn’t eaten the fruit? Yeah, maybe…for all two of us, surrounded by about five billion snakes…” (Matt Rotman)

I think the relationship between Eve and Satan generally reflects the inevitable dialectic of the material reality within which we live. God is the only thing that does not entail the operation of its binary. In creating the Son, God actuated the principle dialectic of good vs. evil when the rebellious angels fell and Satan became the binary of the Son. The creation of Adam also entailed a binary in the creation of Eve. I think the direct aspect of the relationship between Satan and Eve that speaks to a relative degree of similarity between the two rests in the obvious fact that they both fell, but more succinctly: they were both destined to fall to create the world in which we now live (I argue that it’s impossible to conceive of a pre-fall world, and that, as such, Milton, although devoutly religious, would realize that Satan is, in part, our author ‘as we know it to be’ and that conjectural musings to the contrary amount to blaspheming: (it does seem that the angels are pragmatic enough to make this distinction) “Nor love thy life nor hate but what thou liv’st live well…” Michael (XI: 553-554). It’s no coincidence that Satan calls Eve “Mother of Science” (IX: 680), and without the temptation of Lucifer there would be nothing but Paradise. So: if Eve conflates Satan and herself with the fruit perhaps she’s referring to the fact that they, in tandem, created the world as Milton came to know it (as did we all) and that it can’t be all bad cause, after all, we get a shot at Heaven in the end if we play our cards right. The whole thing reeks of some terrestrial automotive proving ground and Heaven as the showroom floor…
I think it’s useful to identify the former, however simplistic, view as the basis for dialectical inquiry and binaries and antonyms and ying and yang and Newton’s Third Law of Motion and whatever else ye may have ye. But I will admit that the relationship between Satan and Eve is much more complicated that this and would probably require a book to get it all down. There’s the point about Free Will and the pair embodying what seems to be God’s decree that Free-Will (though engineered by Him; the paradoxes in theology are too much) is good and necessitates the fall. Although NOT a thing God enjoyed doing, he gave them Free-Will: “What Pleasure I form such obedience paid when will and reason (and reason is also a choice) useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled, made passive both, had served necessity, not Me?” God (III: 107-111). This seems to be a major point as demonstrated by Eve in IX: 653-654: “The rest we live law to ourselves: our reason is our law.” The notion of reason being the higher faculty serves Satan well when we he tempts Eve: “Knowing both good and evil as they know” (IX: 709). And again we see reason: “Fixed on the fruit she gazed which to behold might tempt alone and in her ears the sound yet wrung of his persuasive words impregned with reason (to her seeming) and truth”; here ‘seeming’ is the key word as it appears the higher faculty of reason has been tainted by deception. And what does Eve do after the fruit? She considers deception as her best course of action. This is not a faculty booned her by Satan, this is inherent and given voice to by the fruit.
As for the scapegoating and revenge thing I’ll go back to the earlier quote about “seeming” for (after really digging my hands into Hamlet) I believe that revenge and scapegoating are just two sides of the same coin of skewed and misappropriated perceptions within the point of view of screwy ideologies about nobility and honor. I really dig the whole “Jesus Christ Superstar” idea of God setting up Judas on purpose in order to get done what needed to be done. From the point of view of scapegoat, I think that Satan was also a patsy in the same manner as Judas. In Milton, everyone that fell was meant to fall by the hand of a God who needed some entertainment (apparently). There are other ways, of course, with which to swim these waters… but I can’t go on forever.