The Value of What We Owe God

Abstract

There is a widely-conceived notion amongst Christian communities that people owe it to God to be virtuous and good. John Milton’s Paradise Lost – an elaborated re-telling of the biblical beginning of the human race – gives a glimpse of what God expects from mankind through his condemnation of Adam and Eve’s first sin. Yet in his examination of this first sin, Milton distorts the ignorant state in which it was committed. This topic of ignorance is elaborated upon by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he argues that vices committed out of ignorance ought not be treated as severely as those committed with full knowledge of right and wrong. In what follows, I will use Aristotle’s definition of vice committed in a state of ignorance to appraise Milton’s judgment of humanity’s first sin, in order to examine what humans owe God and how it is valued.