I’ve done a little more reading around the subject (yep: I wiki’d it). But don’t imagine that what follows is at all scholarly, correct, or even sustainable. It simply reflects my current, limited understanding

First: Paradise Lost. Milton used the Garden of Eden allegory as a metaphor for England’s fall from grace after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the Crown. That’s what I’m told. Maybe this means that God in the poem was King Charles in reality. And while appearing to be perfect, i.e., good, He in fact was evil and trapped Eve into taking the Forbidden Fruit. Thus eating the Forbidden Fruit is participating in an evil regime - the monarchy - and the expulsion from Eden is the demise of the Commonwealth. Although in reality, the Restoration happened after the Commonwealth crumbled, not the other way round.

Second: As to perfection, the ancients did not understand the concept in the way we do today. For them, perfection was “endless” or “great”. Later Parmenides regarded perfection as complete, or entire, and finite. Plato considered the world to be perfect because it was spherical and moved in a perfect circle. It was also in a state of harmony because it had been created by a good demiurge (a creator god who is not necessarily supreme). Thus “perfection” has limits: the creator does not. Aristotle appears to have held the same view – the world was perfect, but the creator was not.

Not even when the Christianity came along was God held to be perfect. He could not be, because He was not finite. Only a finite being lacks nothing and is therefore perfect (I don’t follow that idea at all! Aquinas put it this way, "That is perfect, which lacks nothing of the perfection proper to it" which is a little easier to understand, I think). Also, the divine is beyond human comprehension and is beyond anything we can imagine, including perfection.

It was Descartes who attributed perfection to God. Descartes was a contemporary of Milton, and I think it is likely that the latter was aware of his ideas. I do not know if he was influenced by them, though. According to Descartes, God possessed “perfections” which implies that He was greater then any one perfection and probably greater than all of them together.

Thus, the apparent paradox in Paradise Lost may be resolved if you allow that God is above perfection (we have already considered this in earlier posts), and that Milton did not even consider it necessary to consider perfection. It still leaves open the question whether God was good or evil to “test” Adam and Eve, knowing that they could not possibly pass that test, and then to cast them out of Eden for failing.

TYWD