Paradise Regained – John Milton, 1671 ★★½

Satan Strikes Out

There are a lot of challenges in reading 17^th-century literature; add to Paradise Regained a basic question as to what exactly is being read. Is this a stand-alone pocket epic or intended follow-up to another epic?

Yes to both is the best answer I can offer. Whether you read it for the history, the religion, or the craft itself, John Milton serves up a challenging, engaging, if unfulfilling treatment of New Testament themes, modelled on how he did the Old Testament in Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost might be in fact sequel-proof; that ends with Adam being graciously consoled with visions of mankind’s ultimate redemption. Paradise Regained sidesteps this reveal by settling on a brief portion of the Bible story; instead of a timeframe measured in countless millennia stretching across the cosmos, here you get 40 days in a desert.

Milton acknowledges a connection to Paradise Lost not only in the title of this work, but with his opening lines:

I, who erewhile the happy Garden sung,
By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing
Recover’d Paradise to all mankind,
By one man’s firm obedience fully tri’d
Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil’d
In all his wiles, defeated and repuls’d,
And Eden raised in the waste Wilderness. [Book I, lines 1-7]

Christ rejects Satan in this depiction of the Temptation story by Duccio di Buoninsegna, while happy angels look on. In Milton's account, the final rejection takes place in Jerusalem.
Image from https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-the-temptation-of-christ-on-the-mountain-duccio-di-buoninsegna.html

The other connection is the “Tempter,” i. e. Satan, so famously prominent in Paradise Lost who is even more prominent (though less effective both literally and textually) in Paradise Regained. It is as if Milton knew how later, irreligious critics would see his Satan of Paradise Lost as a secret hero, and wanted to dampen that by presenting instead Old Scratch as a dumbed-down foil to Christ’s glory.

If so, he succeeds, as Satan really gets trampled underfoot in this narrative. You may or may not admire the Devil in Paradise Lost; you can’t help but feel sorry for him here. As he explains to Jesus in the first of their desert meetings:

“This wounds me most (what can it less?) that Man,
Man fall’n, shall be restor’d, I never more.” [Book I, lines 404-405]

There is a problem inherent in Paradise Regained, one which also existed in Paradise Lost but was handled better: Readers already knew how it ends. Just like Adam and Eve get kicked out of Eden at the end of the Genesis tale, so too does Jesus prove Satan’s better in this, their first great test of wills in the desert.

"The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan." This passage from the Gospel of Mark provided a basis for Milton, as it did the above illustration from the Codex of Predis in the Royal Library of Turin, Italy.
Image from https://www.prints-online.com/jesus-desert-tempted-devil-takes-t-14321184.html

The difference is how those stories get filled out. There is great drama and emotional tumult throughout Paradise Lost, not just involving the expulsion of Adam and Eve but also of Satan and his cohorts; in Paradise Regained everything seems settled before it begins.

Even Satan notes at the outset he is not dealing with Eve this time, but with the Son of God. “In all his lineaments, though in his face/The glimpses of his Father’s glory shine.” [Book I, lines 92-93]. Satan’s game had better be good. And it isn’t.

Enough about Paradise Lost; how does this hold up on its own? There are only a couple of crossover characters, and one of them, called the “Son” in the other work and of divine nature, is reconstituted as “Jesus” here and is fully human, to the point where divine omniscience is not His to call upon but must instead be supplied by Satan. All this Jesus has for sustenance is faith.

I quite like the opening of Book II, which begins not with Christ but rather His Apostles, or some of them, pondering His sudden disappearance, followed by a view of Mother Mary doing the same. These are recognizably human moments, quite evocative in Milton’s careful handling, showcasing the humanity inherent in this story.

Russian painter Ivan Kramskoi's take on Christ in the Desert shows a Messiah with no Satan in sight, just whatever fears and doubts a viewer perceives on His shadowed face.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temptation_of_Christ

Mary’s moments of prayful worry are particularly poignant:

“Oh, what avails me now that honor high,
To have conceiv’d of God, or that salute,
‘Hail, highly favour’d, among women blest!’
While I to sorrows am no less advanc’t,
And fears as eminent, above the lot
Of other women, by the birth I bore…” [Book II, lines 66-71]

Oddly, Milton does not do this again; the focus of Paradise Regained soon shifts back and stays strictly on Christ and His adversary. Which is a problem when the contest is so one-sided as this.

The nature of Christ as depicted in art has changed over the course of time; Jaroslav Pelikan wrote a book on the subject, Jesus Through The  Centuries, which I blog-posted on. I can’t recall whether he got around to Milton’s take on Christ as presented here.

Pelikan’s examination showcases many different ways Christ has been depicted over time, including as a faithful Jew, as church father, as rebel, etc. In Paradise Regained, Jesus has two particular traits, that of stern judge and of enlightened seer, which might be a synthesis of Milton’s Puritanism and the early onset of the Enlightenment.

John Milton was blind by the time he authored Paradise Regained two years before his death; he had to dictate verses to his daughters, depicted here by French painter Henri Jean-Baptiste Victoire Fradelle.
Image from http://www.artnet.com/artists/henri-jean-baptiste-victoire-fradelle/milton-and-his-daughters-smUOO-HjHyyH5WNdzfEKcg2

He is no warm and fuzzy Christ; rather quite dismissive. In Book III, a contempt for humanity spills out. When asked by Satan, in line 21, “These God-like Virtues wherefore dost thou hide?” Jesus replies:

“For what is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and, well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise?” [Book III, lines 47-51]

This is no doubt Milton’s own take, given how the Puritan Revolution in Great Britain had turned out. People are fickle, so why set your stock in them? His Christ is hard to reconcile with the Cross.

What does resonate in Milton’s Christ is the lack of temporal ambition, a willingness to do without earthly glory. In the fourth and final book of Paradise Regained, Satan sets Christ on a high place from which to observe Rome, a glorious city with a decadent Emperor (Tiberius) ready to be toppled. Satan alternately offers control of Parthia, which he seems to regard as the only other ancient empire worth ruling. (Sorry, Egypt.)

Milton's Jesus dismisses Greek ideas, acknowledging only Socrates (whose death is depicted above by Jacques-Louis David) and him only grudgingly. "But these are false, or little else but dreams,/Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm." [Book IV, lines 291-292]
Image from https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/socrates

Christ isn’t buying. No monarchies, He says, compare to the Heavenly kingdom His Father has to offer:

“And of my Kingdom there shall be no end.
Means there shall be to this; but what the means,
Is not for thee to know, nor me to tell.” [Book IV, lines 151-153]

Jesus’s humanity, a subject of many other artists, is entirely missing here. We are told He is hungry, but no attention is given to any pains He might be experiencing, or any longings that stir beyond initial dismissal. He is instantly aware of Satan, and completely resolute against temptation, to the point of cold disregard.

When Satan finally goes all-out in his fiendish strategy and tells Christ to bow down and worship him, it comes off like some bad date where she plays with her iPhone until he makes an awkward grab at her bra. Milton’s Christ is too powerful to suggest struggle, let alone suspense.

Paradise Regained does work better when taken alone, but would anyone still read it without Paradise Lost? Sometimes even great artists produce solid if conventional works; which boils down to my take on Paradise Regained.