Immortality

Immortality is the divinely bestowed condition of unending life, and its history organizes the poem’s movement from creation through the Fall toward redemption. Given to humanity together with happiness, it is lost when Adam and Eve violate the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; yet it is not abandoned as a possibility. The Son of God offers himself as the ransom for human death, rises beyond the grave, and promises a restored life in which the redeemed may enter Heaven or inhabit an Earth renewed into a greater Paradise.

Definition and First Gift

Immortality belongs initially to the created order as one of the “two fair gifts” bestowed on humanity: Happiness and Immortality. The Father presents this condition as a genuine possession of human beings in their original state, but also as one whose meaning depends upon its conjunction with happiness. Once happiness is lost, immortality would no longer be blessing alone; preserved without restoration, it would merely perpetuate woe. Death therefore appears not simply as destruction but as a remedy prepared after the Fall, allowing mortal life to pass through trial before a second life is granted.

The creation of Adam establishes the human capacity for living existence through divine formation and breath. God forms Adam from the dust of the ground, breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and makes him a living soul in the divine image. Adam and Eve are then blessed with the command to be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth, subdue it, and exercise dominion over its living creatures. Their original life is thus both embodied and purposeful: immortality is connected to humanity’s place within creation, its rational stature, and its duty to acknowledge the God from whom its good descends.

The condition is also guarded by a limit. The Tree of Life stands in the Garden of Eden as a sign and pledge of immortality, while the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil stands beside it under prohibition. Adam and Eve may freely eat the pleasant fruits of the Garden, but eating from the forbidden tree carries the penalty of death. The command makes immortality inseparable from obedience: life is abundant, yet it is not autonomous, and the creature cannot convert a divine gift into self-authorized godhead.

Loss Through Disobedience

The Fall changes immortality from an immediate human possession into a threatened and contested condition. When Eve reports that the forbidden fruit has opened her eyes and produced new hopes and joys, Adam reasons that the Serpent’s apparent survival and elevation make the threat of death seem uncertain. He fears that God, having dignified humanity as the chief of created works, might not truly abolish it, lest the adversary triumph over a creation that could be undone. His reasoning turns the promised consequence into an object of speculation and treats continued existence as evidence that the command may not have been absolute.

Adam nevertheless chooses to share Eve’s fate. He declares that their state cannot be separated, because they are one flesh, and that losing her would be losing himself. His decision gives the loss of immortality an intensely relational form: death enters not only as a legal penalty but as the consequence of a bond that he elects to preserve through shared guilt. Eve, interpreting his choice as an exalted proof of love, urges him to taste the fruit as she has done. Their mutual act transforms the original state of life into the fallen condition in which mortality, sin, and the knowledge of evil become inseparable.

Afterward, continued access to the Tree of Life would create a new danger. The Father judges that fallen humanity must not reach out, eat, and live forever while retaining the corruption introduced by disobedience. Adam is therefore expelled from the Garden of Eden, and the mortal condition becomes part of the divine ordering of postlapsarian existence. Immortality is withheld not because life has ceased to matter, but because endless life in a corrupted state would eternize alienation rather than heal it.

Death, Payment, and Redemption

The possibility of restored immortality emerges from the logic of substitution. The Father declares that humanity cannot escape death unless another being, both able and willing, pays the rigid satisfaction required by justice: death for death. The heavenly choir offers no patron or intercessor, and the silence of Heaven makes the human predicament absolute. No fallen human being possesses an adequate offering, because a person already indebted and undone by sin cannot provide atonement for himself.

The Son of God breaks that silence by offering life for human life. He agrees to leave the Father’s bosom and the glory next to him, to become accounted as man, and finally to die for humanity. His immortality is not imagined as exemption from death’s reach; rather, he possesses life in himself and willingly yields what can die, trusting that the Father will not abandon his unspotted soul to corruption. Death may hold the mortal portion for a time, but it cannot permanently possess the Son of God or turn his sacrifice into defeat.

This exchange gives immortality a specifically redemptive form. The Son of God’s death pays the human debt, while his resurrection reverses the apparent victory of Death. The grave does not retain him; he rises victorious, subdues the power that claimed to vanquish him, and leaves Death wounded and stripped of its sting. The result is not a cancellation of mortality by human effort, but a passage through death made effective by divine love, obedience, and mediation.

The Promised Second Life

Michael explains that the redemption of humanity will not occur through a simple duel in which the Son of God destroys Satan by a physical blow. The decisive victory comes through the Son of God’s obedience to the Law of God, his loving fulfillment of its demand, and his endurance of the death owed to Adam and Adam’s descendants. By coming in the flesh, living a reproachful life, suffering a cursed death, and being nailed to the Cross by his own nation, he bears the penalty of transgression while proclaiming life to those who believe in his redemption.

The Cross becomes the place where the powers opposing human life are themselves fixed and defeated. The Law that stands against humanity and the sins of all mankind are represented as crucified with the redeemer, no longer able to injure those who rightly trust in his satisfaction. His death therefore does more than substitute one life for another: it breaks the combined force of Sin and Death and turns the death intended as doom into a passage toward immortal life, compared to sleep and a gentle wafting into renewed existence.

Resurrection confirms that the payment has been accepted. The Son of God rises before the third dawning light, fresh as dawn, with the ransom paid and the sentence of death annulled for those who embrace its benefit through faith accompanied by works. He remains on Earth only for appointed appearances to his disciples, who are charged to teach all nations, baptize believers as a sign of washing from guilt into pure life, and extend salvation beyond the descendants of Abraham by blood to the descendants of Abraham through faith.

Final Restoration and Meaning

Immortality reaches its fullest scope in the promise that the Son of God will ascend into Heaven, triumph over his enemies, and resume his seat at the Father’s right hand. From there he will return when the dissolution of the world is ripe, judge the living and the dead, condemn the unfaithful, and receive the faithful into bliss. The redeemed may be received into Heaven or Earth, because the Earth itself will then become Paradise, happier than the original Garden of Eden and associated with happier days.

The poem therefore distinguishes three forms of relation to endless life. In the original condition, immortality is a gift joined to innocence and happiness. After disobedience, immortality would become a perpetuation of misery and is therefore interrupted by death. Through the Son of God’s Incarnation, obedience, death, and resurrection, it becomes a promised second life, available through grace, faith, and transformed allegiance rather than through the unaided exercise of human will.

This structure gives immortality a moral and theological economy. Humanity loses it by seeking knowledge and elevation outside obedience, while the Son of God restores it by accepting limitation, flesh, suffering, and death. The state that Adam and Eve attempt to secure through the forbidden fruit is recovered only through a self-emptying sacrifice that makes divine life available to the fallen. Immortality thus signifies not endless survival at any cost, but life reconciled to God, cleansed of sin, and finally situated within a renewed creation where death no longer possesses the power to define existence.