This passage comes from right after Adam and Eve have bitten into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and have been judged by the Son and cast out of Eden. The world is beginning to change as Sin and Death penetrate the once-perfect world.
Beast now with beast gan war, and fowl with fowl,
And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving,
Devour'd each other; nor stood much in awe
Of man, but fled him, or with count'nance grim
Glared on him passing: these were from without
The glowing miseries, which Adam saw
Already in part, though hid in gloomiest shade,
To sorrow abandoned, but worse felt within,
And in a troubled ssea of passion tossed...
- Paradise Lost Book 10, lines 710-719
I am not a religious person, but I find Milton's view of paradise and the current world interesting. In Paradise (or Eden) Adam and Eve collected food from nature and ate only what grew from the earth, which was plentiful. Man communed with beast, and animals looked on Man's glory and found it comforting, enjoyable, a vision of God's love and ability to create beauty. Even the animals get along with one another, eating from nature's bounty instead of hunting weaker species. This is Paradise, this is God's vision, and it is beautiful.
But Man disobeys God and the world is suddenly imperfect. This passage is disturbing to me. Man's sin does not only affect mankind, but it causes the animals to lose sight of Paradise as well. This eerily reflects Man's impact on nature today. Eating fast food cheeseburgers, clogging our own arteries, wasting airable land with mat production--it's one thing to do these things, to commit these sins, and ruin our own perfection, but it is infinitely worse that we do these things and the animals suffer for it as well. In Paradise, man befriended animals of all kinds (the Serpent was not avoided by Eve, but greeted as if it was a neighbor). Today, we capture them, we breed them, we torture them, we kill them, and then we eat them. We do not do this out of survival. We do it out of the lust of our own bellies. We do it because it makes us money and feeds our greed. We teach ourselves to become distant from the compassion and mercy and sympathy that are innate within an individual and tell ourselves that animals are not worthy of those emotions. No wonder the animals of this new world glare when they see man, or run away in fear.
At the end of this passage, Adam sees the animals' reactions to him and he breaks down. Adam sees the scorn of the animals and the violence within them and launches into a 124-lined lament about the loss of Paradise. It's heart-wrenching to put yourself into Adam's place: to have such peace and companionship with the animal world, to have the earth supply you with a wealth of food without planting or farming the land yourself, and then to know that your single action is the reason that animals hate to look upon you and your food must be wrenched from the earth with your own hands--what could be more heartbreaking?
I'm not religious and there is no religion to which I currently prescribe myself. However, I love Milton's view of Paradise. The companionship with animals and plentiful food available from nature in Eden is also touched upon in the Bible. We've all heard someone use the bible to defend meat-eating. Whatever rules the Bible lays out as to what one can and cannot eat come after The Fall, when manking is already sinful. This seems backwards to me, though. If we want to be closer to God, shouldn't we strive to acheive a life similiar to the one enjoyed the the Garden of Eden, the place and time in which Man and God were closest? If Paradise is perfection and everyone was an herbivore, can we not then conclude (based on religious texts) that not eating animals would bring us closer to perection, closer to paradise, and therefore closer to God?
It's certainly sompething to think about in my opinion. Let me know what you think.
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