The fate of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost is at once divinely foreknown and historically contingent. As “authors to themselves,” they write their own life histories with the actions they freely chose to take, and without interference from the Father's foreknowledge of the as yet unwritten chapters. Why should Milton choose the metaphor of authorship to represent the freedom within providence enjoyed by the first parents? It shall be my contention that we may take this metaphoric association of authoring and acting within time very seriously, drawing out its implications until they form a modus operandi for the reading of Paradise Lost.

The word “author” is used variously to refer to authority, creator, and writer in the late seventeenth century. The different meanings accruing to it are all related through its Latin antecedents: auctor (writer, progenitor), derived from auctus (magnified), the past participal of augere (to increase). When Milton has God, the Father, say that Adam and Eve are “authors to themselves,” he clearly means that they have authority over their own destinies. But the form that this authority takes is the ability to determine the narrative of their lives by judging and choosing.