psychology of temptation in Perelandra and Paradise Lost: What Lewis learned from Milton, The

Milton highlights these linguistic dilemmas implicit in Genesis by greatly multiplying the number both of the fallen realities brought to the attention of unfallen Adam and Eve and of the voices which warn them. Milton's Adam and Eve hear not only about death but about a rebellious angel's pride and envy and hate; about a war in heaven; and about their own potential to disobey. And their garden is full of warning voices of God and angel. All this knowledge, however, remains somehow distant and alien to unfallen mankind. Abstract knowledge of evil remains qualified by Adam and Eve's existential ignorance of its reality.

Adam's aside, "whate're death is," speaks volumes. The aside reminds us, as readers, that unfallen beings may wield words of woe which they do not fully grasp. A Milton critic illustrates Adam's predicament as follows:

To understand the full impact of what God has imposed upon Adam, we might render the situation in the following terms: "Do not touch the tip of your left ear with your right forefinger, or else you will squibbledydib." Our response, like Adam's; would appropriately be, "what'ere squibbledydib is, I Some dreadful thing no doubt:' (Lieb 242)

Kierkegaard similarly observes that the word "die" in the prohibition does not have concrete meaning for Adam, but merely imparts a "notion of the terrifying" (45), and that the same holds true for "evil," which is anticipated in the name of the forbidden fruit. Unfallen Adam and Eve thus must employ a lexicon that they cannot fully fathom. To be sure, they can speak of death and of a tree whose name figures forth the knowledge of good and evil. Yet, "[f]rom the fact that Adam was able to talk [about death and evil], it does not follow in a deeper sense that he was able to understand what was said" (Kierkegaard 45). The full significance of these realities are not available to Adam and Eve until after they fall.

Lewis, too, is fascinated by the problem of how an innocent being apprehends the alien reality of evil. Indeed, this is a major motif in Perelandra, much more so than in Paradise Lost. The Green Lady is constantly puzzled by words which refer to concepts outside of her experience. Indeed, one of the charms of the trilogy is watching Ransom, who like Lewis has a gift for metaphor, translate the fallen condition into language that unfallen beings on Mars and Venus can understand. My favorite metaphors are "bent" to describe evil and "old" to describe how the Lady feels every time she gains new understanding.

Ransom must constantly respond to language questions from the Lady such as these: "What is `peace'?"(57). "What is home? What is alone? (65)..And "What is dead?" (67). After Ransom explains death, the woman says, "I wonder . . . if you were sent here to teach us death" (67). Each new word that Ransom explains widens her world and makes the Lady older.

It also, ironically, readies her for temptation. As soon as Weston (or the Unman) arrives on Perelandra, he exploits the Lady's growing knowledge to fix her mind on the alien possibility of transgression. Weston hammers on strange new words, filling them with halfapprehended content: "some meaning for the words Death and Sorrow-though what kind of meaning Ransom could not even guesswas apparently being created in her [the Lady's] mind by mere repetition" ( 125). Thus, like Milton's Adam and Eve, the Green Lady comes both to know and yet not fully understand fallen realities. These realities portend strange possibilities, which suffuse Lewis' paradise, like Milton's Eden, with anxiety and seem to move the protagonists ever closer to the brink. As the narrator observes when Ransom skins his knee, "This led him to try to explain to her what was meant by pain, which only made her more anxious to try the experiment" (80).