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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Milton's students have lived, and fairly placidly on the whole, with the problems they have discerned in Paradise Regained or with feeble solutions in despite of the poet's plain instruction to read his work as, before all else, a parable for the church. If we bow to his authority we have only to explain centuries of critical silence; once delivered from the accepted interpretation of the poem as a manual of holy living, we shall no longer need to guess why John Milton, who eternally found his own habits blameless, should in a piece of pietism unique among his works, in a “quietistic, Quaker-like poem” denying his constant humanism, consign to the devil the chief blessings of this world, most of the arts that polish life, many of the goods that he had sought for himself, and, leaving himself without excuse, then invite his friends to regard the result as his finest work. His very pride in the brief epic must, for all its undeniable beauties, seem a little like a mother's love for a defective child unless he meant a little more than meets the careless ear, inasmuch as the most resolute exculpations have not entirely explained away the poem's “inhospitable bareness,” its generous portion of didactic tedium, and the dramatic failure of its static contest.
1 This interpretation, which receives a passing nod from Denis Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker (London, 1944), p. 195, is probably the usual reading. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1946), p. 305.
2 Tillyard, Milton, pp. 309-310, and “The Christ of Paradise Regained, etc.,” SP, xxxvi (1939), 252. Tillyard's suggestion that Milton had repented his share in regicide is a heroic resolution of a real paradox, though it hardly consists with opinions expressed here.
3 “Paradise Regained,” The Tradition and the Poem (Baltimore, 1947), p. 67. On this point she has been misunderstood and reviewed accordingly: JEGP, xlvii (1948), 204.
4 This observation, like those on ministerial learning which follow, requires documentation beyond the scope of an article. I have dealt with the background of Milton's expressions of intellectual modesty in a monograph, “Milton and Forbidden Knowledge,” near completion. The learned-ministry controversy is lightly touched in the following documented studies: Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1945), pp. 20-21; R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (St. Louis, 1935), pp. 105-119; Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1942), pp. 230-233; esp. David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (London, 1940), pp. 65-72. See William Dell, The Stumbling Stone (1653), pp. 27-30.
5 Milton, Works, Columbia Ed. (New York, 1931-38), iii, 75 (16-17); esp. 160 (5)-165 (25); 274 (2-15); 335 (25)-336 (17); 367 (20); iv, 61 (17-18, 24-25). Note particularly rv, 323 (19) ff., Areopagitica.
6 Elizabeth Pope, p. 28. For later exegesis see, e.g., Bruno Bauer, cited by Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus su Wrede (The Quest of the Historical Jesus), tr. W. Montgomery (New York, 1948), p. 145. Modem commentary takes for granted the symbolical character of the Temptation story. See, e.g., Roy B. Chamberlin and Herman Fieldman, eds. The Dartmouth Bible (Boston, 1950), p. 965.
7 Works, iii, 168 (15-17); and esp. 161 (1-3) and 362 (13, 21). Of the remaining allusions to texts or incidents from the Temptation stories, some happen to occur in ecclesiastical passages—e.g., xvii, 75 (6)—but all except the first three mentioned above are fragmentary, bearing not one way or another on the total meaning: i, 24 (24); ii, 359 (382); iii, 128 (17-18); xii, 71 (9); xiv, 359 (12); xv, 99 (16), 305 (14); xvii, 57 (1), 149 (11), 243 (19-21).
8 See, e.g., George Herbert, “The Church Militant,” l. 174, or the Baptists' London Confession of 1646 in Edward B. Underhill, ed. Confessions of Faith, Hanserd Knollys Soc. (1854), pp. 32-35.
9 Milton, Works, xvi, 239 (23-28).
10 The will of God revealed by the Spirit can be understood, for later instruction, in the normal sense of “scripture,” the only Puritan directory of worship; for what the Spirit communicates immediately to Christ will appear, for Christians, in the Gospels or in similarly inspired writings of the New Testament. That Milton looked toward Quakerism is an unnecessary assumption.
Satan supplies some of the early testimony to Christ's Kingship when he fears, perhaps with ironical justice, that Christ will appear soon “in the head of nations” (i, 98-99). In Milton's exegesis the last word could mean “the church”: xvi, 249 (5).
11 Augustine, Civ. Dei xx.9. To the abundant exegesis devoted to the Kingdom of Christ (or of God, in Christian usage) the Catholic Encyclopedia, Hastings, or another standard work of reference will provide introduction adequate here. Modern theologians often keep Augustine's reading, adding others; see, e.g., Charles Gore et al., eds. A New Commentary on Holy Scripture (New York, 1946), N. T., 294-297.
12 Thomas Hobbes, English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth (1841), ii, 254 (4)-255
Note (5) in page 795 ff., and see Gen. Index sub “Kingdom [of God].” Cp. Jeremy Taylor, Works, ed. Heber and Page (1859), i, 36.
13 Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons, Anglo-Catholic Library (1843), v, 462 (end) ff., 551 ff.
14 John Calvin, Institutes, ii, 15 (3); William Perkins, Works (1612), i, 4-5.
15 See, e.g., William Dell, Right Reformation (1646), pp. 2, 16, 28, etc., and Ep. Ded.. sig. A3.
16 xv, 297 (7) ff. Note the flat statement in 301 (2-3).
17 xvi, 359 (9) ff., which read with xv, 301 (21-25); xvii, 397 (21-26).
18 xvi, 363 (22) ff., 367 (14) ff.
19 xvi, 343 (5-11).
20 It is unequivocally assumed in late writings: v, 250 (4) ff.; vi, 22 (3-18), 89 (19-28), 124 (4-11). In the antiprelatical and divorce tracts it is not clear that Milton had or had not narrowed his definition: ii, 203 (1); iv, 15 (25-27). This very identification, meant to sunder the temporal and spiritual—as in v, 57 (16-26), where the church is plainly meant—has been made a ground of some dubious argument for Milton's approach to political millenarianism, as if by the Kingdom of Christ he meant an earthly kingdom ruled by Christ.
21 xvi, 305 (11, 26).
22 iii, 121 (22-23).
23 iii, 268 (13)-269 (10); cp. 55 (3-4).
24 xvii, 53 (22), 55 (12, 20), 57 (4, 19); cp. 135 (20) and 143, C. D.
25 xvi, 337 (10); cf. Lat., 336 (8).
26 iii, 251 (24-27); vi, 22 (5) ff., 23 (15) ff., 97 (5-18), 250 (11-16).
27 Note the use of “trust”: vi, 76 (28); 90 (25, 27), 91 (5, 11); see 96 (14-16).
28 Satan's campaign is divisible into three phases, according to strategy: fraud (deception by disguise), snares (lures), and terrors (terrors and threats first, then violence). The poet sketches the tripartite plan in i.97, and again in i.178. The snares, the lures of the central section, graded upward according to their inherent “show of worth” (n.226) instead of their usual potency in human life, reflect the three vita of ethics: voluptuaria, activa, and contemplativa, as is confirmed in n.409-410, iv.214, and iv.370-371. The first of these three allurements is divisible into illegitimate sensuality (rejected for Christ by Satan) and sensuality which seems lawful (ii.229-230). In the last, similarly, Satan offers two baits: art and, finally, philosophy. In the midst of this balance stand the four lures of the active life: riches, glory, “kingdom,” and “empire” (iv.369). For bona thus graded systematically precedents abounded in ethical writings, among them Richard Barckley, The Felicitie of Man (1598), Francis Rous, The Arte of Happines (1619), or works of Boethius and earlier writers. The poet's intellectual achievement lay not chiefly in his keeping an ecclesiastical intention that he understood to be in his biblical original, but rather in his reducing the refractory données of scripture and history, simultaneously and without distortion, to both radical Independency and classical symmetry. Let us reflect, in passing, that the trifling overlap between the stones-bread and banquet temptations becomes completely negligible if we consider that a world of difference in “tempting” separates the fraud from the enticement and that the poet expected no reader to meditate upon the literal food in either.
29 See, e.g., iii, 165 (26).
30 See, e.g., Robert Some, Treatise [Confuting Barrow and Greenwood] (1589), pp. 5, 7-9.
31 iii, 55 (5) ff., 143 (12-20); esp. 175 (9-11).
32 Many an earlier commentator had disguised the Tempter, but Elizabeth Pope (p. 48) has found none who made so much of the disguise as Milton. He could, of course, avail himself of the antichristian connotations that Spenser's Archimago and Fletcher's hermit had helped to establish for Satan's pastoral weeds.
33 iii, 147 (11), 355 (18) ff.; xvii, 143 (18-22).
34 iii, 2 (7, 25-26).
35 xvii, 51 (6) ff.
36 iii, 3 (27-28).
37 iii, 4 (1) ff., 125 (11); xvi, 165 (1) ff.
38 iii, 127 (18). Note the antithesis, lines 14-15; cp. 4 (5-15).
39 iii, 355 (8-14).
40 xvii, 73 (18) ff., C. D.
41 iii, 362 (16-17).
42 iii, 129 (11-13), 147 (11), 353 (23-26)-355 (25).
43 iii, 273 (23).
44 iii, 25 (16) ff., 54 (24), and Milton's dozen allusions and clear references to the poisonous Donation of Constantine.
45 iii, 65 (10-26), 164 (26-28); v, 44 (1)-45 (7).
46 iii, 54 (28), 364 (13).
47 iii, 160 (27-28)-161 (1-3, 6-10). An ecclesiastical reading of P.R. subtracts none of the relevance, here, of M. Y. Hughes, “Milton and the Sense of Glory,” PQ, xxviii (1949), 107 ff., or, throughout, of Hughes, “The Christ of Paradise Regained and the Renaissance Heroic Tradition,” SP, xxxv (1938), 254 ff.
48 xv, 299 (23) ff.; add vi, 20 (18-23) ff.; xvi, 335 (12).
49 See, e.g., George Herbert, “The Church Militant,” 11. 175-210, and Milton, vi, 19 (14-26).
50 iii, 219 (8-11). For passages suggesting the thought or expression in the vista of Rome, see vi, 172 (3) ff.; viii, 239 (25)-251.
51 “The Sources of Milton's Pandemonium,” MP, xxix (1931-32), 194.
52 See J. M. Batten, John Dury (Chicago, 1944), pp. 170-171.
53 vi, 17 (16-18); xvii, 395 (2-6); and iii, 251 (24) ff.; vi, 22 (5)-23 (25), 97 (5) ff., 250 (15-16); xv, 75 (15-22).
54 xvi, 165 (7-9), 167 (11-15), 177 (21-28), 247 (17-20).
55 xvi, 343 (ll)-345 (19).
56 iii, 102 (22-24)
57 vi, 94 (16) ff., 95 (9-11), 96 (8-11).
58 vi, 95 (22-26); xvi, 263 (26) ff.
59 vi, 95 (15-18).
60 iii, 147 (4) ff., 153 (2-4); esp. 189 (23)-195 (9).