Paradise Regained

Overview

Published

1671, in one volume with Samson Agonistes (London: printed by J.M. for John Starkey); licensed for the press on 2 July 1670 and entered in the Stationers' Register on 10 September 1670

Composed

Uncertain; usually placed between 1665 and 1670, after Paradise Lost was finished

Genre

Brief epic on a biblical subject, largely in dialogue

Length

Four books, 2,070 lines (502, 486, 443 and 639)

Metre

Unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse)

Source

The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (Luke 4:1–13; Matthew 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13), in Luke's order

Setting

The Jordan and the desert beyond it, during the forty days after Jesus' baptism; visionary views of Parthia, Rome and Athens; the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem

Protagonist

The Son of God, a man not yet publicly known, who discovers his calling while refusing every temptation

Antagonist

Satan, who tempts the Son in a series of disguises and arguments in order to learn who he is

Relation to Paradise Lost

Presented as its sequel: one man's obedience recovers what one man's disobedience lost (PR 1.1–7)

Context

John Milton (1608–1674) published Paradise Regain'd in 1671, four years after the first edition of Paradise Lost, in a small volume that also contained his tragedy Samson Agonistes. He was by then blind, a survivor of the Restoration of 1660, during which he had briefly been arrested and had seen the republic he had served as Latin Secretary collapse. The two 1671 poems are often read together: both present a solitary hero tested by temptation and both reflect, in different ways, the experience of political defeat.

The best-known account of the poem's origin comes from the Quaker Thomas Ellwood, who read to the blind Milton and found him a cottage at Chalfont St Giles during the plague of 1665. Ellwood records that Milton lent him the manuscript of Paradise Lost and that, returning it, he remarked: 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost; but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?' Later, in London, Milton showed him the new poem and said that he owed it to that question (Ellwood 1714). The anecdote cannot settle the date of composition, but it is the main reason the poem is usually placed in the later 1660s (Lewalski 2000) (Campbell 2008).

Milton had long imagined a shorter epic form. In The Reason of Church-Government (1642) he set the 'diffuse' epics of Homer, Virgil and Tasso beside the Book of Job as 'a brief model'. Barbara Lewalski's Milton's Brief Epic (1966) showed that Paradise Regained belongs to a recognisable tradition of short biblical epics and that Job, with its dialogue between a tested man and a tempter permitted by God, is its central model (Lewalski 1966). The Father himself recalls Job in the first book (PR 1.147), and the Son returns to him twice.

The story comes from the Gospels. After his baptism Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, fasts for forty days and is tempted by the devil. Matthew and Luke give the same three temptations in different orders; Milton follows Luke, so that the temptation of the kingdoms comes second and the temptation on the pinnacle of the Temple comes last, as the climax. Around this framework he adds a great deal: the councils of Satan, the doubts of the disciples, Mary's meditation, a banquet, offers of wealth, glory, military power, empire and learning, a night of storm, and a closing angelic hymn. Elizabeth Marie Pope showed how much of this expansion draws on centuries of commentary on the temptation (Pope 1947).

The poem has never been as popular as Paradise Lost. Milton's nephew Edward Phillips reported that it was generally thought much inferior to the earlier epic and that Milton could not bear to hear it called inferior. The Romantics, however, admired it; Wordsworth and Coleridge both praised its finish (Wittreich 1970), and William Blake painted a series of twelve watercolour designs for it (Butlin 1981). Modern criticism, from Arnold Stein and Lewalski to Stanley Fish and the historicist readings of the 1990s, has made it one of the most closely argued of Milton's works (Stein 1957) (Fish 1971) (Knoppers 1994).

Plot overview

At the Jordan, John the Baptist recognises Jesus, the Spirit descends on him like a dove and the Father's voice declares him his beloved Son. Satan hears the voice and calls a council in the air, where he tells the fallen angels that he must discover who this Son is and overcome him by fraud. In Heaven the Father announces to Gabriel that he will expose the Son to Satan's temptations, so that angels and men may see what perfect obedience is. The Son, led by the Spirit, walks into the desert, reflects on his childhood and on what he has learned of his calling from Scripture and from his mother, and remains there for forty days.

Satan approaches disguised as an old countryman and asks him to turn stones into bread; the Son sees through the disguise, and Satan, now unmasked, argues about his own role as a servant of God and a source of oracles. Meanwhile the new disciples, Andrew and Simon among them, lament the Son's disappearance, and Mary waits patiently for its meaning. Satan holds a second council, rejects Belial's advice to tempt the Son with women, and returns as a courtly figure with a magnificent banquet, then with offers of wealth. The Son refuses each.

Satan then offers glory, and from a high mountain shows the Son the armies of Parthia, promising that with their help he could seize the throne of David and free the lost tribes of Israel. The Son replies that his kingdom will come in God's time and by other means. Satan shows him imperial Rome and offers him all the kingdoms of the world if he will worship him; the Son answers with the first commandment. Satan then offers the learning of Athens, which the Son also rejects in favour of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Satan returns the Son to the wilderness and troubles his night with a terrifying storm; in the morning he admits that he still does not know in what sense the Son is the Son of God. He carries him to the highest pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and dares him to stand or cast himself down. The Son replies 'Tempt not the Lord thy God' and stands, and Satan falls. Angels bear the Son to a flowery valley, feed him with heavenly food and sing a hymn of his victory, and he returns, unobserved, to his mother's house.

Book by book

Characters

The Son and his followers

The Son of God (Jesus)

The protagonist, a man of about thirty who has grown up in obscurity at Nazareth and has just been proclaimed the Son at his baptism. He knows from Scripture that he is the Messiah but not exactly how his work is to be done, and he learns more about himself in the course of the temptations. He is calm, brief and exact in his answers, mostly quoting or applying Scripture, and his victory consists in refusing. Milton presents him chiefly as a perfect man tested by obedience, which has made his theology a subject of debate.

Mary

The Son's mother. She speaks one soliloquy (PR 2.66–104), recalling the Annunciation, Simeon's prophecy and the loss of the boy Jesus in the Temple, and resolves to wait patiently. Her patience parallels her son's, and the poem ends with his return to her house.

Andrew, Simon and the disciples

The 'Plain Fishermen' who have just met Jesus at the Jordan. When he disappears, they lament and hope that he will restore the kingdom to Israel, but resolve to wait on Providence. Their hope for a political deliverer shows the expectation that Satan tries to exploit.

John the Baptist

The 'great Proclaimer' who baptises at the Jordan, recognises Jesus as the one he was to announce and witnesses the descent of the Spirit. He appears only in the opening narrative and in the Son's memories.

Heaven

God the Father

Speaks once, to Gabriel and the angels in Book 1, announcing that he will expose the Son to Satan as he did Job, so that all may see 'This perfect Man, by merit call'd my Son'. His speech defines the temptation as a public trial and the Son's weakness as the means of victory.

Gabriel and the angels

Gabriel, who announced the Son's birth to Mary, is addressed by the Father in Book 1. The angels sing a hymn of anticipation there and, at the end, rescue the Son from the pinnacle, feed him and sing the closing hymn of victory.

Satan and his council

Satan

The tempter, appearing first as an old countryman and then as a courtly gentleman. Unlike the heroic rebel of Paradise Lost, he is cunning, rhetorical, at times almost pitiable, and haunted by despair. His main purpose is to discover in what sense the Son is the Son of God. Each failure drives him to a larger offer, until the pinnacle forces the issue and he falls.

Belial

The 'dissolutest Spirit that fell', who in Book 2 advises Satan to tempt the Son with beautiful women. Satan rejects the plan, arguing that such a temptation would succeed only with weaker men.

The infernal council

The fallen angels whom Satan summons twice to the middle air, in Book 1 and Book 2. They are frightened by the new threat and consent to Satan's plans; at the end Satan returns to them with the 'Joyless triumphals' of his failure.

Themes

Obedience and inner heroism

The poem's opening lines define its subject as 'one mans firm obedience fully tri'd', and its hero wins without fighting. He refuses food, wealth, glory, armies, empire and learning, and his only act is to stand. Milton calls these 'deeds Above Heroic', claiming a higher heroism than the epic tradition of wrath and conquest. Paradise Lost had already called patience and martyrdom the 'better fortitude'; Paradise Regained makes that idea the whole action.

The Son's heroism is one of waiting. He repeatedly tells Satan that his time has not yet come and that he will act when God decrees. Mary and the disciples share this patient expectation. Whether patience is a political virtue, or a retreat from politics, is one of the main questions readers bring to the poem.

Identity and self-knowledge

Both protagonists are trying to learn who the Son is. Satan knows the voice from Heaven but not its meaning; the Son knows from Scripture that he is the Messiah but discovers only gradually how his mission is to be fulfilled. The temptations become a kind of examination through which identity is revealed (Stein 1957) (Rushdy 1992).

This makes the poem a theological drama as much as a moral one. The Father's words 'This perfect Man, by merit call'd my Son' and the Son's slow self-discovery raise the question of how Milton understood the Son's divinity, and the final scene on the pinnacle has been read as the moment when it is at last disclosed.

True and false kingship

Many of the temptations concern rule: wealth as a means to power, glory, Parthian arms, Roman empire, and the persuasive power of learning. The Son answers that self-government is the truest kingship and that his own kingdom will come by means that Satan cannot know. The poem contrasts outward power and spectacle with inward rule.

Published eleven years after the Restoration, by a poet who had defended the execution of Charles I, these arguments cannot be politically neutral. The Son's rejection of empire, armies and the spectacle of courts has been read as a critique of the restored monarchy (Knoppers 1994).

Time and Providence

Satan's argument is always that the moment is now: the Son is hungry, Judaea is oppressed, Tiberius is old, the Parthians are on the march. The Son's answer is that 'All things are best fullfil'd in thir due time'. Waiting is not idleness but trust in God's ordering of history. The poem ends with the Son's public ministry still in the future.

Word against spectacle

Satan's temptations are visual: banquets, armies, cities and philosophical schools are shown to the Son in elaborate descriptions. The Son replies with words, usually Scripture, and often very few. The poem trains its reader to distrust splendour and to value the plain and exact word, a lesson reflected in its own style (Fish 1971).

Motifs

'It is written'

The Son answers the three Gospel temptations with quotations from Deuteronomy, as in the Gospels, and many of his other replies cite or apply Scripture. Satan quotes Scripture too, at the pinnacle. The poem is a contest of interpretation in which the right reading of Scripture is the hero's weapon.

Hunger and food

The Son fasts forty days, dreams of Elijah's ravens and Daniel's pulse, refuses the stones and the banquet, and is finally fed by angels with fruits from the tree of life. Food links the poem to the apple of Paradise Lost and contrasts lawful need with luxury.

Standing and falling

The Son 'stoodst Unshaken' in the storm and 'stood' on the pinnacle; Satan 'fell'. The motif links the poem to the Fall of Paradise Lost, where Adam was made 'Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall'.

Disguise

Satan approaches as a countryman and as a courtier; the Son sees through each disguise. Behind them lies the larger question of what is hidden in the Son himself, a man in whose face 'The glimpses of his Fathers glory shine'.

Symbols

The wilderness

The desert where Israel wandered forty years and where Moses and Elijah fasted forty days becomes the scene of a new Eden: Paradise 'rais'd in the wast Wilderness'. Its barrenness strips the action down to dialogue and choice.

The mountain

The 'specular Mount' from which Satan shows the kingdoms of the world is a place of vision and temptation, a dark counterpart to the hill from which Michael shows Adam the future in Paradise Lost.

The pinnacle of the Temple

The highest point of the 'Fathers house' becomes the test of the Son's identity. To stand there is impossible for a mere man; the Son's standing marks the end of the trial and the fall of Satan.

The mother's house

The final destination of the poem, a private, humble home. It answers the palaces, cities and thrones of the temptations and reminds the reader that the victory has been won in secret.

Critical debates

Genre and the relation to Paradise Lost

Is Paradise Regained an epic, and is it a sequel? Milton called it a poem in four books and opened it with a formal invocation, but it has little action, a limited setting and much debate. Lewalski argued that it is a deliberate example of the 'brief epic' modelled on the Book of Job, a form with its own tradition of short biblical narratives, and that it rethinks epic heroism around Christ's offices as prophet, king and priest (Lewalski 1966).

Its relation to Paradise Lost is also debated. Ellwood's anecdote suggests a sequel, and the opening lines invite comparison; but the later poem omits the Crucifixion and locates the regaining of Paradise in the temptation. Some readers see it as the theological completion of the earlier epic, others as a different, more austere kind of poem that corrects it (Ellwood 1714) (Carey 1997) (Martz 1964).

Patience and politics after the Restoration

The Son's refusals have been read as political quietism: after the defeat of 1660, the poem would counsel withdrawal into the inner life. Christopher Hill rejected this view. In his account the Son's patience is the discipline of a defeated revolutionary who refuses premature or illegitimate means and waits for God's time, without abandoning the hope of change (Hill 1977).

Laura Lunger Knoppers read the 1671 poems against the public spectacles of the restored monarchy, arguing that the Son's inward discipline and contempt for display oppose the culture of the Restoration court (Knoppers 1994). David Loewenstein places the poem alongside the writings of radical sectarians, including Quakers, for whom spiritual inwardness was itself a form of resistance (Loewenstein 2001).

The rejection of Athens

Does the Son's speech against Greek learning (PR 4.285–364) express Milton's own late view? Some readers have taken it so and found it a disturbing reversal of the humanism of Of Education and Areopagitica. Others argue that the Son rejects not classical learning but Satan's offer of it as a substitute for revelation and an instrument of power; that the Son claims to know these things already; and that the passage allows a place for 'moral vertue ... By light of Nature'.

A further view connects the speech with the poem's own practice: the Son prefers the 'majestic unaffected stile' of the prophets, and Paradise Regained is written in a deliberately plain manner. The rejection of Athens is then a statement of poetics as well as of doctrine (Lewalski 1966) (Fish 2001).

The theology of the Son

The Latin treatise De Doctrina Christiana, discovered in 1823 and attributed to Milton, holds that the Son is subordinate to the Father and not co-eternal with him, a position often loosely called Arian. Paradise Regained, with its 'perfect Man, by merit call'd my Son' and its human, self-discovering hero, has been read in that light (Lieb 2006).

The attribution of De Doctrina was challenged by William B. Hunter; a team led by Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns concluded that it is Milton's, though an unfinished work in progress (Hunter 1998) (Campbell 2007). Readers also disagree over how far a poem should be glossed by a treatise: the Son's humanity in the poem can be explained by orthodox kenotic theology, in which the divine Son 'empties himself' in becoming man.

The pinnacle: does Satan learn who the Son is?

The climax turns on an ambiguous line: 'Tempt not the Lord thy God'. Read as a quotation of Deuteronomy, it means that the Son, as man, will not tempt God by forcing a miracle. Read as a declaration, it identifies the Son as the Lord whom Satan is tempting, and his standing as a manifestation of divinity. Pope surveyed the exegetical tradition behind the episode (Pope 1947); Lewalski and others see it as the moment when the Son's full identity is revealed to himself and to Satan (Lewalski 1966).

Others resist a single answer. The poem says only that Satan, 'smitten with amazement', fell. Whether he understands what he has seen, and whether the Son's standing is a miracle or simply an act of trust, is left to the reader (Fish 1971) (Rushdy 1992).

Style and the reader

Early readers found the poem dry, and its style is very different from the grand manner of Paradise Lost: fewer similes, simpler syntax and long stretches of argument. Louis Martz connected it with the meditative tradition and the middle style of Virgil's Georgics (Martz 1964); Lewalski showed that Milton varies his styles deliberately, reserving richness for Satan's temptations (Lewalski 1966).

Stanley Fish argued that the poem works on its readers by frustrating their desire for action. Every time the reader expects the Son to do something, he does nothing, and the reader must learn to see that refusal as the action (Fish 1971).

Reception

According to Edward Phillips, the poem was generally judged inferior to Paradise Lost, to Milton's displeasure. That judgement prevailed through much of the eighteenth century. The Romantics revalued it: Wordsworth is reported to have thought it the most perfect in execution of Milton's poems, and Coleridge praised it as perfect in its kind (Wittreich 1970). Blake painted twelve watercolours for it, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Butlin 1981). Modern criticism since the 1940s has treated it as one of Milton's most demanding achievements.

Key passages

Questions for study

1. In what sense does Paradise Regained 'regain' Paradise, if it ends before the Crucifixion?

   Look at the opening lines and the angels' hymn (PR 4.596–635). Consider the parallel between the first Adam's disobedience and the Son's obedience.

2. Why does Milton follow Luke's order of the temptations rather than Matthew's?

   Think about what the pinnacle achieves as a climax: the question of identity, the contrast of standing and falling.

3. How does the poem redefine heroism?

   Compare 'deeds Above Heroic' (PR 1.15) with the heroes cited by Satan in Book 3 and with the warrior angels of Paradise Lost.

4. What do the scenes of the disciples and Mary add to the poem?

   None of them is in the Gospel temptation narratives. Consider the theme of waiting and the different expectations of a Messiah.

5. How does Satan in Paradise Regained differ from Satan in Paradise Lost?

   Consider his disguises, his rhetoric, his confession of despair (PR 3.203–22) and his uncertainty about the Son.

6. Is the Son's patience politically quietist?

   Weigh the Son's insistence on 'due time' against Hill's and Knoppers's readings of the poem in the context of the Restoration.

7. How should we read the rejection of Athens in a poem by so learned a poet?

   Note who is offering the learning and why, the Son's claim at PR 4.286–88, and the concession at PR 4.351–52.

8. What does the Son know about himself at the beginning of the poem, and what does he know at the end?

   Compare the soliloquy of Book 1 with the scene on the pinnacle. Consider the idea of kenosis.

9. What is the effect of the poem's plain style?

   Compare the Son's brief answers with Satan's descriptions of the banquet, Parthia, Rome and Athens. Consider PR 4.359 on the prophets' 'majestic unaffected stile'.

10. Why does the poem end with the Son returning 'private' to his mother's house?

    Think about the theme of obscurity and secrecy, the role of Mary, and the work that the angels' hymn says is still to come.

Further reading

• Butlin, Martin. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1981.
• Campbell, Gordon, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie. Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Carey, John, ed. Milton: Complete Shorter Poems. 2nd ed. Harlow: Longman, 1997.
• Ellwood, Thomas. The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood. London: Printed and sold by the assigns of J. Sowle, 1714.
• Fish, Stanley E. 'Inaction and Silence: The Reader in Paradise Regained.' In Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, edited by Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971.
• Fish, Stanley. How Milton Works. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.
• Hughes, Merritt Y., ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957.
• Hunter, William B. Visitation Unimplor'd: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.
• Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
• Knoppers, Laura Lunger, ed. The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes. Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of John Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained. Providence: Brown University Press; London: Methuen, 1966.
• Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
• Lieb, Michael. Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006.
• Loewenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Martz, Louis L. The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.
• Pope, Elizabeth Marie. Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1947.
• Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
• Stein, Arnold. Heroic Knowledge: An Interpretation of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957.
• Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr., ed. The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970.
• Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr., ed. Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971.