Blogpost #10

            This passage serves to illustrate the paradox surrounding choice and pre-determined fate. Obviously, free will plays a major role in the Fall of Man story, what with Adam and Eve disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. According to most understandings of the creation and fall of man, God endows humans with free will in order to give value to faith. After all, if human faith and loyalty to God were not by choice, what would be their significance? By most interpretations, the presence of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden is a physical manifestation of the free will granted by God.

            However, this excerpt would largely suggest that the extent to which free will is truly allowed within Paradise (especially in those initial moments of life) is pretty limited. Eve awakens to life “wondering where/And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.” She sees her reflection in the pool of water, and is so intrigued that she considers never leaving. Free will, had it truly existed in Eden, would have permitted Eve to do as she pleased, in this case gaze upon her reflection interminably. Pangs of hunger or burgeoning curiosity (both on her own part) might have also led her to go elsewhere and learn more of the world. Instead though, it is the voice of God that must direct her elsewhere. Essentially, he sets the parameters of her existence when he declares, “and I will bring thee where no shadow stays/ The coming, and they soft embraces, he/Whose image thou art; him thou shalt enjoy/Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear/Multitudes like thyself, and thence be called/Mother of human race.” God plays God (literally) in assigning Eve her role in the world, essentially undermining the notion that humans are freethinking, free-acting entities.

            It could even be said that a truly free Garden of Eden might have allowed Eve to pursue other things in life than bearing children to Adam. Perhaps that reading ventures too far in to the realm of third-wave feminism, but it is nonetheless an appropriate reflection on the fact that Eve is not truly free to decide her fate in Paradise.