Mortality

Mortality is the fallen human condition of being subject to bodily decay, suffering, and death. Pronounced after Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, it replaces the lost gift of immortality with a finite life whose ending is a return to the ground. Yet the poem does not present mortality as simple annihilation: through the Son of God’s intercession, death becomes a permitted remedy, and mortal life becomes the testing ground from which faithful humanity may rise into renewed life.

Origin in Judgment

Mortality enters the human story as the direct consequence of Adam’s disobedience. Because Adam listened to Eve and ate from the tree that God had expressly forbidden, the ground is cursed for his sake. It will yield thorns and thistles without invitation, and he will eat the herb of the field in the sweat of his face. The sentence reaches its final statement in the reminder that Adam was taken from the ground: he is dust, and to dust he must return. Mortality therefore joins physical labor, environmental resistance, and bodily dissolution in one causal order. The body that was formed from the earth is destined to be received back into it.

The judgment is not confined to Adam’s private fate. Eve is sentenced to intensified sorrow in conception and childbirth, and her relation to her husband is placed under his rule. Adam’s sentence, however, gives mortality its broadest human meaning: every descendant inherits a world in which nourishment must be wrested from resistant soil and life is bounded by an appointed return. The condition is inherited not as an isolated penalty but as the historical form of human existence after the Fall.

Mortality as Remedy and Interval

The Son of God is described as both Judge and Saviour. Although death is denounced on the day of transgression, its immediate stroke is removed far into the future. God then clothes the naked pair, covering not only their bodies with skins but their inward shame with a robe of righteousness. This act does not cancel the sentence, but it prevents judgment from becoming mere abandonment. Mortality remains, yet mercy begins to shape its purpose.

The Son of God later explains that Adam was created with two gifts, happiness and immortality. Once immortality was lost, it would have served only to make misery endless. Death therefore becomes a final remedy rather than an additional cruelty. After a life tried in sharp tribulation and refined by faith and faithful works, death can surrender the person to a second life awakened in the renovation of the just, when Heaven and Earth are renewed. Mortality is consequently paradoxical: it is the mark of corruption, but also the limit that keeps corruption from being eternal.

Adam and Eve cannot remain in the Garden of Eden because the pure immortal elements reject what has become tainted, as a body expels a gross distemper. Their expulsion also prevents Adam from reaching the Tree of Life and eating so as to live forever in a fallen state. Mortality thus protects the moral structure of the story. Endless life under the conditions of sin would perpetuate woe; finite life leaves open the possibility of repentance, purification, and restoration.

Forms of Death and Human Suffering

Adam first encounters death through the murder of Abel. In the vision shown by Michael, a reaper and a shepherd approach an altar with offerings. Heaven accepts Abel’s firstlings, while Cain’s offering is rejected because it is insincere. Enraged by envy, Cain strikes his brother with a stone, beating out his life. Abel falls in dust and gore, and Adam recognizes in the scene the first visible shape of death among his descendants. Mortality is shown here not only as a natural end but as a condition intensified by violence, envy, and moral corruption.

Michael makes clear that death has many forms and that many roads lead to its dark cave. Some die by violent blows; others by fire, flood, famine, or intemperance in food and drink. Disease follows as a monstrous company: spasms, torture, heart-sick agony, convulsions, epilepsy, catarrh, intestinal stone, ulcers, colic, dropsy, asthma, and joint-racking rheums. In the lazar-house Adam sees the sick tossed from couch to couch while despair tends them and Death delays his dart, even though the afflicted invoke death as their chief good and final hope. The scene turns mortality into a social and bodily spectacle, making the abstract sentence of returning to dust visible as pain, deformity, dependence, and exhausted desire for release.

Adam responds by grieving for mankind and questioning why life should be given if it is to be wrested away through such suffering. He wonders whether the divine image in humanity should not exempt human beings from deformity and disease. Michael answers that people deface their own likeness when they abandon the rules of healthy nature to serve uncontrolled appetite. The poem therefore links mortality’s painful forms to a moral account of bodily excess, while also presenting Adam’s tears as an awakening compassion before the future misery of his race.

Temperance, Aging, and Acceptance

Michael distinguishes violent or diseased death from a slower death governed by temperance. If a person observes the rule of not too much, seeking proper nourishment rather than gluttonous delight, life may continue for many years until the body falls like ripe fruit into its mother’s lap. This is old age, a mature death that is gathered rather than harshly plucked. The image gives mortality a gentler rhythm: death remains unavoidable, but its manner may be shaped by disciplined living.

Old age nevertheless demands its own relinquishments. Youth, strength, and beauty wither; the senses grow dull; pleasure must be surrendered; and the hopeful, cheerful air of youth gives way to a cold and dry melancholy that weighs down the spirit and consumes the balm of life. Mortality is therefore not limited to the final instant of death. It unfolds as a long alteration of the person, in which the body and its capacities become visibly temporary.

Adam initially declares that he will neither flee death nor seek to prolong life, preferring release from the burdensome charge of living on until the appointed day. Michael corrects both extremes: Adam should neither love life nor hate it, but live well for whatever length Heaven permits. Mortality thus becomes an ethical discipline rather than an object of either worship or despair. The proper response is not denial, panic, or premature rejection of life, but responsible existence under a limit that cannot be removed.

Redemption and the Prospect Beyond Death

The Son of God’s future work changes the ultimate meaning of mortality. He will fulfill the Law of God through obedience and love, endure the punishment owed to Adam and his descendants by coming in the Flesh, and suffer a reproachful life and cursed death on the Cross. His death will pay humanity’s ransom, while his obedience, imputed to those who believe, will provide the basis of their salvation rather than their own legal works.

The Son of God will not remain under death’s power. He will rise from the grave before the third dawning light, and his resurrection will show that death cannot permanently possess the Redeemer. His act will annul the doom of those who embrace his redemption by faith joined to works, defeating Sin and Death, the two principal powers of the fallen order. For the redeemed, physical death becomes death like sleep: a gentle passage toward immortal life rather than an everlasting loss.

After resurrection, the Son of God will appear to his disciples, commission them to teach all nations, and establish a salvation extended not only to the descendants of Abraham but to the sons of Abraham’s faith throughout the world. He will then ascend into Heaven, later returning in glory to judge the living and the dead. The faithful will be received into bliss, and the renewed Earth will become Paradise. Mortality therefore remains the decisive condition of the present world, but it is no longer the final horizon. It is the consequence of the Fall, the boundary that prevents fallen immortality, and the passage through which judgment, faith, redemption, and renewed creation become possible.