Dryden's adaptation of the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy in The State of Innocence: tragic innocence and the threat of free will

This study is an examination of John Dryden's treatment of the idea of free will in his opera, The State of Innocence. Beginning with an analysis of Dryden's debt to the Hobbes-Bramhall debate over determinism and free will, the discussion focuses next on his incorporation of some of the conventions of heroic drama. Principal among these is his juxtaposition of two concepts of will. One type refers to the passions or appetites, and the other signifies the rational faculty of choice. The conflict between these two notions figures prominently in Dryden's heroic drama, often in terms of love and duty. But only in The State of Innocence is the dichotomy treated as such, through the use of the single term, "free will," to signify both ideas. The point maintained in this essay is that Dryden means to hint that, judging by the Cartesian principle, the moral capacity for choice is as potent as the appetite. Yet choosing good is also as formidable a task as restraining the appetite. A wrong choice, like an uncontrolled appetite, may incur dire consequences, particularly when the context is theological and postulates only righteousness or Sin. For this reason, Dryden's Adam finds that liberty of choice ironically poses as great a threat as uncontrolled appetite.

Adam is aware of the threat when he laments his hard state of life, and Dryden inserts intimations of the postlapsarian threat of freedom in many of the statements of his other characters. . Moreover, because the power of free choice is as great as the force of passion, operating, unhampered even by God's power or fate, Adam senses the presumptuousness of professing it. With a Christian spirit which seems to come naturally to him, he upholds his humility and mistakenly resists the doctrinal libertarianism of the angels. To subscribe to a doctrine, which exalts human potential, would seem to invite the type of pride which felled Lucifer. Instead, Adam asserts a deterministic libertinism based on a belief in human moral paralysis. . Yet in so doing he commits the error of selecting his belief rationally, rather than dogmatically through angelic revelation. The lapse is inadvertant and purely a manifestation of a state of innocence which is not simply endemic to Eden but to human nature in general, as it exists, for example, in those of Dryden's dramatic heroes who are unconstrained by religion or society. Such a state of innocence as Dryden depicts in his opera in fact implies intrinsic virtue rooted in nature. Yet in resisting revelation Adam tragically brings sin upon himself, since, as Dryden suggests, the natural will even before the Fall should have been subdued by the doctrinal will.