y their minds but feelings. Thus since Eve is not capable of reasoning or fighting the serpent and her feelings she is on the brink of Falling.Eve falls because she forgot her place in the Great Chain of Being (the idea that everything is arranged in a hierarchy of being, level in the world, with God as the top). When she confronted the serpent, she should have gone straight to Adam, as the order of things declares. Yet she denied authority and asked the serpent, where grows the tree, from hence how far? (618). Eve decided to solve the problem herself rather than go to Adam, like she should have done. This decision leads her into another mistake: her attempt at reason. When confronted with the tree and fruit, she attempts to reason her why through the situation, yet she simply fails horribly. Of this fair fruit, our doom is, we shall die. How dies the serpent?...This intellectual fruit, for beasts reserved? (763-768). Eve tries to determine the solution through faulty logic. She determines that the fruit is only for beasts, or that she will not die, among other things. She does not think that the serpent did not die because it never ate the fruit, nor is it a normal serpent. But the finale of her fall comes when after eating the fruit she proclaims, And render me more equal, and perhaps a thing not undesirable, sometime superior: for inferior who is free? (823-825). The final moment of her fall comes when she believes she can be equal to, or superior to Adam and maybe God. She becomes proud of her new state of perceived godhood; she will be greater than her station. She has fallen but Adam has not, at least not yet.In Paradise Lost, Book IX, Adam does fall, as he does in the bible. Yet in Paradise Lost Adam falls because of a moment of misguided love and devotion for Eve. Adam, when hearing when she did asks himself, How can I live without thee, how forego thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined Mine never shall b...
