[Eve] pluck'd, she eat" (Milton IX.781-782). Both St. Augustine and Milton zone in on these two key conditions surrounding and leading to the fall as means of supporting their explications.
By interpreting Genesis, in Paradise Lost, Milton's purpose---like that of St. Augustine in City of God--in part, is to "justify the ways of God to men" (I.26). God's ways do not always seem fair, and Milton tackles the task of making them "apparent" in his depiction of the Creation Story. In doing so, however, he must overcome and explain many areas of confusion that arise because of the emphasis in Genesis on the goodness of God's creation, the omnipotence of God, and the hard and cold fact that human experience of the creation is not mainly of good but of evil or misfortune.
Milton solves these confusions surrounding the "Fall" by the use of Augustinian theology. Confusion mainly lies in the concept of how the exceptionally "good" creation of God, set in a perfect paradise, perverts itself into the problem of evil, or in the words of the aphorism: If God be G
...