Myth of the Fortunate Fall into Paradise Lost From this descent / The ascending Celestial Virtues, will appear / More glorious. . . that from no fall. (ii. 14-16)1 These are Satan's words to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. Satan claims that their fall from Heaven will seem like a "lucky fall", meaning that their new rise to power will actually be "more glorious" than if they had remained in Heaven the whole time. Can we, as fallen humans, make Satan's words our own, even if it is not our work but God's that causes our “resurrection”? or, if we claim a “lucky fall,” have we been tricked by Satan into rejoicing in our fallen state? While it is common among deluded critics to claim that Paradise Lost presents the Fall as lucky, in reality the Fall is much less fortunate than these critics assume. Millicent Bell is among the deceived, but she begins with a vital point that is too easy to misread. forgotten. What does the story make explicit about the Fall? "Bare history makes no secret of it. It was an endless disaster."2 From the beginning of the epic we learn that the Fall "brought death to the world and all our misfortune" (i. 3). It "brought into this world a world of trouble,/Sin and its shadow, death, and misery/The foreboding of death" (ix. 11-13). We learn that Eve, after leaving Adam to go her own way in Eden (just before the Fall) "from that hour in Paradise/never found sweet repast, nor wholesome rest" (ix. 406-07). Eve's fall is a great calamity to the world (ix. 782-84); so is that of Adam, completing the original sin (ix. 1003). The couple's first reactions to sin include disgust, shame, lust, and contempt for the earth (ix. 1010ff.). Satan's trouble is also "perpetual" (ii. 861) and "eternal" (iv... middle of paper... that Paradise is where she and Adam are together, so that an Eden without Adam would be no Eden at all Paradise (xii. 615-17).15. Bell (878-79) states that Milton could not have understood Raphael's words about education and spiritual elevation without linking them to the harshness of error and suffering I disagree, Bell's general point remains: as a fallen human being, the life of righteous suffering is the only good life for which Milton could have had true sympathy. On the other hand, in the context of the epic, Frank Kermode and Barbara Lewalski recognize that in Paradise Lost we still know nothing about this inner paradise with which to compare it to Eden (we only have Michael's word): "The paradise of Milton's poetry is the lost one, the only true paradise, there we are confused... if we believe the opposite" (Kermode, "Adam Unparadised", Elledge 603-04; cf. Lewalski 270).