Paradise Regained Read Blind
1. Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and was tempted by Satan. Paradise Regained is John Milton’s re-telling of those temptations, with expansions and inventions. In Milton’s version, Jesus is openly unmoved by the temptations, he is absolutely immune: fitting, theologically, but it makes Paradise Regained a dramatic poem with very little drama. The original, in the Gospel of Luke, is short, curt, more mysterious and more interesting.
2. Two moments do draw attention. First, in Book III, after several failures, Satan turns to praise, attempting an indirect temptation to worldly glory:
I see thou know’st what is of use to know,
What best to say canst say, to do canst do;
Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words
To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart
Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.
Equipped with such goodness, why does Jesus not go and exercise it?
These godlike virtues wherefore dost thou hide?
Affecting private life, or more obscure
In savage wilderness, wherefore deprive
All earth her wonder at thy acts, thyself
The fame and glory...
Jesus’s reply is surprising, for its dim view of those he’s tasked to save:
For what is glory, but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar....
Such misanthropy! Where is man made in God’s image? Where is man made a little lower than the angels?
Also interesting is Satan’s follow-up, he seems to have caught Jesus in a slip:
Think not so slight of glory; therein least
Resembling thy great Father: he seeks glory,
And for his glory all things made...
I expected Jesus to respond that his Father seeks love, not glory (the Greatest Commandment: to “love the Lord you God with all your heart”)—or seeks glory only as an act of love—but he does not. In fact the word “love” appears only once in the poem, and it is Satan who uses it. (He says he is still able to love, “or at least contemplate and admire / What I see excellent.”) Instead, Jesus rebuts Satan thus: God has done so much,
what could he less expect
Than glory and benediction,
and anyway, if men did not “return” glory to God, they
would likeliest render
Contempt instead, dishonour, obloquy.
In sum: glory is better than the alternative. This is not much of a reply? What am I missing?
3. The other interesting moment is the poem’s shift, from Satan’s futile and therefore boring attempts to tempt Jesus, to Satan’s (apparent) confusion over who Jesus is, for there is drama in Satan’s distress at his ignorance:
Since neither wealth, nor honour, arms nor arts,
Kingdom nor empire pleases thee, nor aught
By me proposed in life contemplative,
Or active, tended on by glory, or fame,
What dost thou in this world?
This is the exalted analogue of that hilarious scene in Office Space, where the Bobs, exasperated, ask Tom Smykowski “what would you say...you do here?” And then—Satan’s (false) warning, that if Jesus rejects the easy and certain, but worthless rewards that Satan offers, the greater good he aims for is not guaranteed, the only guarantee is suffering—these may be the most powerful lines in the poem:
if I read aught in heaven,
Or heaven write aught of fate, by what the stars
Voluminous, or single characters,
In their conjunction met, give me to spell,
Sorrows, and labours, opposition, hate
Attends thee, scorns, reproaches, injuries,
Violence and stripes, and lastly cruel death,
A kingdom they portend thee, but what kingdom,
Real or allegoric I discern not.
See also: Book Review: Paradise Lost; Late Milton.