Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

THE STORY OF the temptations of Jesus has been variously treated in the New Testament. Mark, in its characteristic terseness, devotes only two verses to the subject (1:12–13) that amount to no more than a summary. Providing a much lengthier account, the other two of the Synoptic Gospels agree on all essential features but diverge partially in the order of presentation. Both Matthew (4:1–11) and Luke (4:1–13) begin with the temptation of changing stones to bread; thereafter Matthew follows with the temptations of Jerusalem’s temple and of empire, whereas Luke reverses the order and ends the account with the episode of the temple’s pinnacle.

That the biblical account forms the basic plot of Paradise Regained is familiar to all students of Milton. Why the poet chose to follow Luke’s version instead of Matthew’s is, however, a question that continues to intrigue, particularly in view of the latter book’s preeminent position in the canon and in the history of biblical interpretation before the challenge to its priority was mounted by critical scholarship. In seeking to understand the poet’s choice, modern criticism of Milton has often sought to establish the preference for Luke’s order on the basis of its correspondence with other aspects of Christian doctrine or exegesis. Thus, for those who would see in Jesus’ experience a victorious recapitulation of that undergone by the first human couple in Paradise, Milton’s is a poem that perfectly mimes the “triple equation” obtaining between Luke’s account and the temptations of Eve, the elaboration of which itself is derived directly from 1 John 2:16 (the lust of the flesh [bread/hunger vs. fruit/desire], the lust of the eye [sight of fruit vs. sight of empire], and the pride of life).¹ For other critics, who would argue that the wilderness experience of Jesus provides the inaugural ordeals that launch him on his public ministry, the three temptations of both source and poem essentially test the readiness of the incarnate Christ in relation to the offices he must assume: prophet, king, and priest.² In such a view, the poem’s structural pattern is finally determined by the venerable practice of typological exegesis of scripture.

In any attempt to address this problem of the poet’s inventive use of his source, there can be little doubt that Milton is both steeped in the lore of Christian theology and profoundly responsive to antecedent tradition. Even for seventeenth-century England, a period marked by the greatest proliferation of writers embodying the most successful union of religious and literary sensibilities, Milton still remains a near-unique example of poetic prowess and theological acumen. His mature compositions, as modern scholarship has thoroughly documented, consistently enlist talent and erudition to probe and illumine many of the cardinal but vexing themes of his faith.

Even with such commonplace allowance for the decisive role of theology in shaping Milton’s poetic art, however, it is hard to acknowledge that the plotting of Paradise Regained owes its organizing principle primarily to the poet’s desire to honor a particular strand of tradition. Once the Lukan account is chosen as the more appropriate source, of course, the biblical text would impose its own formal constraint on the poetic construct. Indeed, the poem everywhere suggests that its author is very much aware of the impingement made by traditional exegesis (triple equation, typology) on his source. Nonetheless, it is difficult to believe that a poet daring enough to rearrange scripture (as when he makes Adam’s request for a mate in Paradise Lost 8.363–366, 383–391 the initiative to woman’s creation, a request subsequently endorsed by the Deity’s own assessment of the essential privation in man’s solitary condition [PL 8.445, citing Gen 2:18]) would write in mere conformity to a prior schema of interpretation, however crucial and estimable that schema might be. Milton, in other words, must have seen something in the Lukan account itself, in contrast to the Matthean, that was more genial to the conception of his poem, to the way he wanted to tell the story of Christ’s temptations. In that regard, moreover, the typological correspondence to prophet, king, and priest by itself hardly provides a binding order of presentation, since this sequence of office varies interchangeably among biblical commentators and even within the discourse of a single author.

This brief study of the order of temptations in Paradise Regained, therefore, seeks to address the problem by focusing once more on the poem’s internal constraints, on how the poet seems to have crafted his story in response to the particular biblical text. At the same time, the study compares certain aspects of the poem to one possible but neglected source, The Combate Between Christ and the Devill Expounded, by the Puritan divine William Perkins (1558–1602).

The choice of Perkins is dictated by both the man and the work. Though he died six years before Milton was born, Perkins and his writings were held in such high esteem in England and on the Continent that they continued to exercise a strong influence on the circle of Puritan thinkers gathered at Cambridge.³ His collected works were found in the library of Nathan Paget (1615–1679), a physician who befriended Milton and who might have leased his house to the poet in 1651.⁴ Written as a homily on Matt. 4:1–11, The Combate is arguably the longest treatment of Christ’s temptations by a Protestant thinker prior to Milton’s own poem. Indeed, as we shall see, there are important similarities surfacing in both Perkins’s and Milton’s thought on the subject that might indicate a certain common context of understanding.

One notable thread of that context concerns the exact meaning of the title Son of God, which Jesus was declared to be by the voice from heaven during the baptism episode. In Matthew, that episode is followed at once by the account of the temptations. Like many precritical commentators who envisage a literal and direct continuity of the Gospel narrative at this point, Perkins’s discussion of the events in the first part of chapter 4 rests on the assumption that the narrative continuity betokens a deeper inner logic linking the two episodes. The temptations of Jesus arise from a necessity that can be differently discerned in either the divine or the demonic perspective.

As far as the Devil is concerned, the baptism of Jesus provides the immediate cause of his action. That incident precipitates a crisis of knowledge because he needs to know what is the true identity of this person whose lineage has received such a miraculous, public declaration. Thus Perkins writes:

That similar reasoning underlies Milton’s portrayal of Satan’s character and motivation is apparent from the first moments of his brief epic. Although Luke inserts some sixteen verses of genealogy of Jesus (3:23–38) between the episodes of his baptism and temptation, it is clear as well that Milton’s conception of his story at this particular point seems to presume the Matthean logic, since he does not envisage a break between the two incidents.

In contrast, however, to Matthew’s genealogy, which stresses Jesus’ Jewish descent by linking him only with Abraham and David, the Lukan catalog traces Jesus’ forebears back to the original creation, to Adam, now named by the evangelist (3:38) as the descendant or son “of God” (τοῦ Θεοῦ). Such broadening of the line of descent places an emphasis on the common humanity of Jesus that in turn might have given further impetus to the debate on the meaning of sonship structured in the poem. If Adam already enjoyed such a nomenclature, what is so special about this late descendant of his when he is declared to be “son of God”? Thus, upon introducing Jesus as “the Son of Joseph” who came to the river Jordan “as then obscure, / Unmarkt, unknown” (PR 1.24–25),⁶ the narrative immediately switches to Satan, who happens to be circling in the air above the earth and thus has overheard the divine proclamation of Jesus’ status. Haunted by the threat of the protevangelium and the more recent realization that “the Womans seed / … is late of woman born” (PR 1.64–65), Satan tells his crew that “Who this is we must learn, for man he seems / In all his lineaments, though in his face / The glimpses of his Fathers glory shine” (PR 1.91–93). Throughout the poem, then, the burning issue for Satan is whether he can discover the exact identity—and hence the nature—of this man Jesus. The frustration of his repeated attempts understandably drives him to ever more desperate and dangerous means.

If Paradise Regained, in comparison with the “cosmic grandeur” of its epic antecedent, appears “bleakly simple” to a modern critic,⁷ the biblical source of Milton’s poem is even more stark and laconic. According to Matthew’s matter-of-fact narration, “then was Jesus led up of the spirit [identified more specifically by Luke as the Holy Spirit] into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.”⁸ There is no explanation offered either before or after the episode as to why Jesus must undergo such an experience. The ostensibly motiveless character of the narrative, in fact, is what renders it especially hospitable to interpretation, for exegetical theology has always felt obliged to plumb the fateful significance of this simple and yet highly dramatic encounter between the incarnate Christ and his tempter.

The history of biblical exegesis has long advanced the opinion that the temptation experience provides an indispensable initiation readying Christ for his entire redemptive ministry. Thus John Calvin offers two reasons for “Christ’s withdrawal into the wilderness: the first, that after a fast of forty days He should as a new, indeed a heavenly, man advance to the pursuance of His task, and the second, that only after He had been tested by temptations, after His preliminary training, would He be equipped for such an arduous and distinguished mission.”⁹ On the other hand, a writer like Perkins directly links the temptations to the nature of the redemptive task itself, for Christ must somehow undo satanic success wrought in the first humans.

Concerning the person of Christ, the brief epic gives unambiguous focus to his humanity. As far as the poetic narrator is concerned, the long promised “Greater Man” of Paradise Lost has finally appeared and is now the subject of this poem. Even when he is mentioned by God, Jesus is described as “This perfect Man, by merit call’d my Son” (1.166). Concerning his work, what is stated in the poem sheds light also on what is not. While critics fret about the lack of any reference to the Crucifixion in Paradise Regained, the Father specifies what task is assigned to Christ. In the poem’s precise context, Jesus is not charged with saving humankind from the penalty of disobedience, for that would involve the Atonement, but only with the recovery of Paradise, the edenic condition lost to the first couple when they fell but subsequently promised to Adam as a displaced, internal state: “A Paradise within thee, happier farr” (PL 12.587). To accomplish this, Jesus is sent forth to “resist / All … sollicitations” of the Devil, “Winning by Conquest what the first man lost” (PR 1.154).

The limitation of the poetic action is thus grounded first upon the crucial fact that Christ is seen to be a man and that he is expected to accomplish this part of his earthly mission as a man. Though military metaphors show up in the Father’s speech, they are not meant to associate the subject of his discourse with the preincarnate Son’s heavenly warfare that crushed the revolt of Satan (PL 5, 6). The battle plan prescribed here is “By one mans firm obedience fully tri’d / Through all temptation,” the completion of which would signal the defeat and repulsion of the Tempter. If in Paradise Lost Milton sought to construct a poetic theodicy based on the fundamental premise that evil can never limit, stymie, or exhaust the resourcefulness of the good, hence the Divine is continuously depicted as capable of action that transforms, saves, and salvages, his intentions in his brief epic seem no less fervent in striving to uphold the honor and wisdom of his God.

To “justifie the wayes of God to men” within his second epic’s highly specific confines, however, requires another attempt at the justification of human nature. He has to show, bluntly put, that God did not make a mistake or fall short of his own ideal in the creation of Adam and Eve. It is not enough, as the received tradition of Christian theology has generally held, that a uniquely costly means of redemption was devised for man’s salvation even prior to the Fall;¹⁰ and thus the entire line of theological argument epitomized by the so-called felix culpa motif, in my judgment, has but limited appeal to Milton’s thinking. His reticence to devote any major poetic effort to the treatment of Christ’s passion may signal a similar reservation on his part. Because primal human failure is for Milton an ineradicable fact of history as he knows it, he feels much more obliged, when the opportunity arises in a poem like Paradise Regained, to demonstrate that a human qua human¹¹ can withstand the most seductive and severe test of temptation. Only this can redeem the worth and wisdom of the original creation. This concern explains the prominent allusions to Job in the poem that all critics have noticed, but Job’s qualified success seems only to intensify the zeal of Milton’s God. The man Jesus now occasions a new and decisive wager with the Devil.

The ability to resist is premised on a paradox of Christian existence favored by Milton: strength derived from the weakness of utter dependence on the Divine.¹² Though the wilderness experience is planned by the Father as a staging moment when Christ “shall first lay down the rudiments / Of his great warfare” before he is actually sent “To conquer Sin and Death” (1.157–159), the mode of operation remains the same throughout the Son’s earthly career: “By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: / His weakness shall o’recome Satanic strength / And all the world” (1.160–162).

This second limitation of action that necessitates the poetic emphasis on Christ’s passivity¹³ finds correlative extension in the constraint of the form in which he is to encounter Satan. Milton’s biblical source already stipulates a dialogic confrontation, but the apposite nature of such a meeting is enlarged by the poet’s own interpolations. The first lines of Christ’s soliloquy as he appears in the poem (1.196–198),

Samson’s utterance in turn recalls the old, blind Oedipus of Sophocles’ tragedy. Begging the gods for “some great consummation” (καταστροΦήν τɩνα) for his life, he recognizes, when the end does arrive, his inward stirring as the god driving him on (έπείγε γάρ με τοὐκ Θεου᾿ παρόν, 1540) and leads, unassisted, his daughters and his benefactor Theseus to his final resting place at Colonus. The intertextual resonance of Samson and Oedipus strikes an especially suggestive chord, since both their dramas are built on the urgent, desperate need to wrest some meaning from their devastating experience of humiliation and suffering. Only the recovery of a sense of divine purpose will enable each of them to seal his shipwrecked existence with one, climactic heroic act that will at the same time bequeath lasting benefits to his community.

The life of Milton’s Christ, of course, has no need of salvage, but like his biblical and classical counterparts, the hero of this brief epic stands at the threshold of a perilous, momentous conflict, of which its imminent occurrence and purpose, however, he is at the moment unaware (PR 1.291–293).¹⁴ In the retrospective and prospective reaches of the long soliloquy (PR 1.196–293) that surveys what Jesus knows of himself, his upbringing, and what he anticipates to accomplish in the world, the hero reveals both political zeal (“To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke”) and a dawning Messianic consciousness (“what was writ / Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes / Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake / I am”). His knowledge sheds further ironic light on satanic tactics about to be deployed: whereas Satan, perpetually racked by doubt and uncertainty, seeks to acquire a knowledge that would, if granted, confirm his doom, Christ knows the telos of his life, his serenity buoyed by the conviction that divinely prescribed goals are to be achieved only by lawful and timely means. Most important of all, his meditation gives voice .to the cherished Miltonic preference, particularly after the failure of the Puritan revolution, for pacific means to do God’s work. Instead of seeking to overthrow “proud Tyrannick pow’r” by violence, his Christ holds “it more humane, more heavenly first / By winning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make perswasion do the work of fear” (221–223).

This last and third limitation of the action clarifies the nature of the “deeds / Above Heroic” that the poet seeks to tell. That the temptations of Jesus must in some way reenact the experience of the first human couple but reverse its result is arguably a motif firmly embedded in even the most primitive Christian documents, the two Synoptic Gospels themselves. If in Milton’s interpretation of the Fall his Eve and Adam suffer calamitous defeat in a verbal contest over the interpretation of God’s specific commandment and prohibition, his poetic Christ can recover Paradise only if he could prove himself to be Satan’s superior in this “rematch.” If it can be said of his Eve that Satan’s “words replete with guile / Into her heart too easie entrance won” (PL 9.733–734; see also line 550),¹⁵ the man Jesus must show himself “greater” in being able to resist and block such entry. Christ’s affirmation of “winning words” and “perswasion” thus not only reveals his understanding of verbal potency,¹⁶ but it also defines in anticipation the form of action he will take in the coming agon of wit and rhetoric.

Perceiving the limitations that the poet has structured on the action also enables us to see more clearly the shape of its progressive development. The history of biblical interpretation has variously classified the temptations of Jesus. “A former generation” to John Calvin, according to that theologian, understood Matthew’s account of the temptations as those of gluttony, ambition, and greed.¹⁷ William Perkins, on the other hand, speaks of “three great conflicts … tending to bring Christ to unbeliefe, … to presumption, … [and] to idolatrie” (3:370). For Milton, however, the over-arching issue of all three episodes can still be summed up in the matter of obedience. Since obedience or faith must have its own object, the prominence of scripture in his biblical source is, for him, no accident, for the Second Adam is there confronted repeatedly with the necessity of deciding what constitutes the proper response to, and use of, the word of God.¹⁸

In the initial speeches to Christ (1.320ff., 337ff.) by Satan disguised as an “aged man in Rural weeds,”¹⁹ the attack at once focuses on Jesus’ new and publicly declared identity as the Son of God and on the problem of trust in God’s providence made more acute by that identity. Satan’s challenge to turn stones to bread is occasioned not merely by the attested hunger of Jesus after forty days fasting (Luke 4:2), but it is also built upon the danger of wilderness, a poetic interpolation. So treacherous and desolate is the immediate region in which the two strangers find themselves that Satan, in response to Christ’s declared faith in God’s guidance (PR 1.335–336), can assert that only a miracle (1.337) can assure his interlocutor safe passage. The logic appears both swift and keen: if you happen to be the Son of God, why not act to relieve your legitimate need, an act that will at the same time deliver you from the environing peril?

The glosses that Milton has his Christ elaborate on the cited Deuteronomic text (8:3) to counter Satan’s ploy bear the symmetry of biblical typology. The wilderness of Israel’s experience is archetypical precisely because it has always been the testing ground for the community’s faith in God’s providential sustenance; hence the fitting allusion to Moses and Elijah, to manna and other heaven-sent provisions. Christ’s rebuttal not only rejects any ground for “distrust” but also hoists Satan with his own petard. Instead of gaining the knowledge he seeks on the Son’s true identity, he is compelled to reveal something of himself: “I am that Spirit unfortunate” (1.358). The lengthened debate that closes the epic’s first book continues to show satanic semblance unmasked by the Son’s discernment, ending with the deft poetic insertion of a theme of patristic theology into Christ’s words. With Christ’s advent, pagan oracles deemed the mouthpiece of Satan are all silenced.²⁰ Had Satan been a more alert student of historical theology in the poem’s ironic anachronism, this decisive pronouncement of Christ (1.455ff.) might well have been a dead giveaway as one clear indication of the Son’s self-revelation. As it was, the poetic “Fiend” was “inly stung with anger and disdain” and ready to try his hand once more.

The redoubled efforts of Satan begin with another demonic council. Belial’s suggestion to “Set women in [Christ’s] eye and in his walk” (2.153), actually a foil to Satan’s greater cunning, is quickly rejected. Biblical history may attest to a string of such prominent figures as Adam, Samson, and Solomon falling prey to their “Wives allurement,” but Satan has already perceived that the target of their plotting is “wiser far / Then Solomon” (2.205–206). Demonic sexism demands more subtle tactics:

The victory of Christ during the first temptation episode apparently has not solved the problem that occasioned the temptation itself: still ravaged by hunger, he is appropriately pondering again on the relationship between the needs of nature and God’s support. Inasmuch as Satan starts again with the scene of a banquet, the symbol of food may lead the reader to think that it is a repetition of the first temptation. Considering the issues raised, however, one can readily see that it truly belongs to the second temptation (or groups of temptation). The temptation to empire that sums up this episode concentrates on what are the lawful possessions of the Son of God.

The appeal is skillfully double-edged. As the Son of God (and if it was indeed true), Jesus would assume natural lordship over the entire cosmos. But even as man, he is also the head of all creation in the great chain of being. Our recognition of the manifold magnitude of Christ’s possessions gives clue to both the length of this episode and its order in the poem.

William Perkins reveals a bit of the theologian’s concern for rational explanation and his own amusing literalism when he comments thus on the Devil’s reported attempt to show Christ the kingdoms of the world.

What leads Perkins to devise a solution of “a counterfeit vision” supplied by Satan is precisely the inclusiveness of the biblical assertion: showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, the Tempter says, “All these things will I give thee.” Since Milton’s poem necessitates his miming the action of Satan, the poet’s means of conveying a developed sense of this “all” is to break up the episode into several segments. Only thus can his poem give scope and substance to the meaning of what such kingdoms and their respective glory entail.

If the first temptation essentially seeks to seduce Christ into a misuse of his miraculous powers should he be the divine Son, the second temptation is in every sense a critical test of how Jesus understands his own humanity. For the entire group of temptations that occupies books 2 and 3 can be summarized as the temptation to autonomy on the part of the human creature, to bestow priority on one’s own need and law. It is not the transgression of limits but the aggregation of what is within bounds to oneself that defines this temptation. Thus Satan asks:

To this rhetorical affirmation of the Son’s licit dominion, it is no accident that the key word describing the manner of Jesus’ response is “temperately” (2.378), for as in other poems, the doctrine of temperance serves as the cornerstone of Milton’s effort in delineating one crucial aspect of human perfection. Temperance will serve as his Christ’s choicest weapon in crushing all forms of wealth, honor, glory, and popular praise that Satan can offer precisely because it is a virtue that, in its concrete exercise, defines his unfailing submission to God’s providential will. It is thus a virtue that gives unity to the life of the preexistent Son and the incarnate Christ. More than the typical Puritan advocacy of frugality or the doctrine of Aristotelian magnanimity oft cited from The Christian Doctrine (2.9), temperance substantiates the Pauline doctrine of kenosis (Phil. 2:5–11), which declares that Christ, “being in the form of God,” did not cling to or grasp after (ἁρπαγμὸν) that “equality.” If the church’s teachings often stress this notion of voluntary self-emptying of divine prerogatives and attributes as the distinctive character of the Incarnation, Milton’s epic here places the emphasis squarely on the meaning of how Jesus as man “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death.”²¹

The form that obedience takes entails extending that original surrender further into the human sphere: the resolute and persistent refusal to insist on one’s rights (“That which to God alone of right belongs” [3.141]), an astonishing, hard truth when seen in the total drift of Western civilization. The entire course of the Son’s incarnational sojourn, the motion toward human existence, may be construed as one long, arduous, and (in the poet’s view) triumphant effort to reverse—and thus remove—all internal and external inducements to godlike aspirations on the part of the human creature. As befits the teachings of the Gospels, the sustained focus is trained therefore on the internal conquest of self (“he who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King” [2.466–467]). Consistent with the received paradox of Christian existence (“That who advance his glory, not thir own, / Them he himself to glory will advance” [3.143–144]), the normal orders and expectations of ethics and politics are reversed (“who best / Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first / Well hath obey’d” [3.195–196]).

Given this perspective, Christ’s rejection of all satanic overtures becomes understandable and consistent. The lavish banquet spread by Satan well exceeds “lawful desires of Nature”; the riches that he claims to be his are “impotent” because they lack “Virtue, Valour, and Wisdom.” As for military conquests and popular praise, which should be the definitive goal of one’s “thirst for glory,” especially if one, like Christ, is endowed with “God-like Vertues” (3.21), such an imperial theme is at once countered by the poet’s favored examples of “patient Job” and “Poor Socrates,” who, “For truths sake suffering death unjust, [live] now / Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours” (3.98–99). Even the more specific urging for Christ to claim his legitimate heritage (“to a Kingdom thou art born, ordain’d / To sit upon thy Father David’s Throne” [3.152–153]) by delivering Israel from the hated Roman yoke, and to which enterprise Satan promises the Parthians for assistance, is met by Christ’s insistence that his time “hast not yet come.”²² He will no more usurp the sole prerogative of the Father, “in whose hand all times and seasons roul” (3.187), than indulge in wanton excesses.

Satan’s final effort in completing the temptation is the proffering of wisdom, the extension of mind and knowledge as a broadening of rule (4.221–230). Jesus’ rejection of classical learning and its stern denunciation trouble modern ears, but we need to remember the premise of that rejection. It is not merely the appeal to the Bible as the compendium of knowledge, a theological commonplace since patristic times,²³ or the inferiority of pagan learning. It is rather the strict subordination of knowledge’s end in relation to the particular user. “Other doctrine” is “granted true” (4.290) by the Son, but he in his situation has no need of such. The acknowledgment of receiving “Light from above, from the fountain of light” abrogates any necessity for him to seek such knowledge and its purported benefit as Satan describes it—“These rules will render thee a King compleat / Within thy self, much more with Empire joyn’d” (4.283–284)—because Jesus has already demonstrated a vastly superior understanding of what the kingship over self truly means. As we have seen over the long course of this temptation, Satan’s conception of empire contrasts completely with Christ’s. If the characteristic thrust of the Tempter’s suasion is for self-aggrandizement (“nor to stay till bid”), the disposition of Jesus throughout is exactly the reverse (“Shall I seek glory then, as vain men seek / Oft not deserv’d? I seek not mine, but his / Who sent me, and thereby witness whence I am” [3.105–107]). Any attempt to put self ahead of God’s providential order, even if it is in the name of service to God, idolizes in fact creaturely status and interest, the equivalent of worshipping Satan. This was, after all, the ultimate thrust of Satan’s bidding in both source and poem (4.166–169). Milton, by amplifying the brief account of the Gospels into several episodes, has made the far-reaching implications of such bidding abundantly clear.

Against the “temperance invincible” of the Son, Satan’s range of reactions—surprise, bewilderment, fear, and rage—may in part resemble that of the unsympathetic reader. How could any putative Son of God be so exasperatingly passive (“What dost thou in this World?”—4.372), so seemingly wanting in human energy and motivation? Satan’s behavior, as the Miltonic simile of “surging waves against a solid rock” reveals, now becomes increasingly destructive and, ironically, self-destructive. His predicament stems from his failure to discover, on his terms, the Son’s identity, and from his unwillingness to heed his adversary’s warning that such discovery might spell disaster for him (3.200–201). His final assault on the pinnacle, unleashing the latent violence of his character, uses a physical dilemma (the poet’s invention) to force a spiritual one.

The Gospel account tells nothing of the pinnacle’s danger or difficulty, but the rapid epanalepsis of Satan’s challenge (“there stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright / Will ask thee skill” [4.551–552]) confronts Christ with two treacherous alternatives: he could be physically killed²⁴ or he could act in presumption of God’s preservation. In either case, Satan thinks he would win by learning “In what degree or meaning” his adversary is called the Son of God. Despite Christ’s success in standing, which results in Satan’s simultaneous “fall,” the problem of Sonship and its precise meaning persists and continues to divide the opinion of the critics. For some, the moment is a decisive revelation of divinity, when the hero’s self-knowledge converges with the knowledge sought by his antagonist in one dramatic utterance.²⁵ For others, the scene is an anticipatory, symbolic enactment of his crucifixion, when he fulfills his priestly role and function of offering himself as a sacrifice.²⁶ There are even those who would argue that the inherent ambiguity of the cited biblical text in Christ’s answer (“Tempt not the Lord thy God”) and of the context (what is the referent of “the Lord thy God”?) makes it impossible to affirm a definitive solution.²⁷

In view of the drift of this essay’s argument, I would side with the emphasis on Christ’s human success in undergoing the third temptation.²⁸ The statement “Tempt not the Lord thy God” must once more be understood in the context of the biblical injunction to obedience (Deut. 6:16). When the wandering Israelites demanded water from Moses, they were accused of “putting the Lord to test” by asking the question, “Is God still with us?” (Exod. 17:7). If the entire experience of temptation, as Michael Lieb so aptly describes it, can be considered a “descent” of Jesus into himself by confronting “the human dimension of his personality,”²⁹ the succinct quotation of scripture to rebut the satanic misuse of scripture represents the most signal triumph in that dimension. Though perched on an “uneasie station,” Christ would rather risk death than risk forcing the hand of his God. His physical success in standing, whether because of skill (the satanic conjecture) or “Godlike force” with which he is “indu’d” (the angels’ closing hymn of praise), justly serves as the transparent metaphor of his spiritual victory, his crowning act of obedience as the “Greater Man.”

Because of the constraint of space, I have avoided discussing thus far the difficult issue of the Miltonic understanding of the two natures of Christ. The poet’s unorthodox views are by now familiar. He has argued in chapter 16 of The Christian Doctrine, when commenting on the Gethsemane episode, that “the presence of an angel would have been superfluous, unless the divine nature of Christ, as well as his human, had needed support.”³⁰ Could not the same understanding inform the magnificent climax of the poem? An affirmative answer to the above question is exceedingly tempting, though not without a formidable barrier. Even allowing for the poet’s penchant for advancing his own peculiar views on sundry theological issues, no student of his can presume that Milton has forgotten the plain scriptural assertion that “God cannot be tempted” (james 1:13). If Jesus triumphed at last over Satan in theophanic form, how could he be said to have “aveng’d / Supplanted Adam” by exercising that “one mans firm obedience fully tri’d”?

On the other hand, the research of Barbara Lewalski has helped us see that Milton’s understanding of the communicatio idiomatum in the hypo-static union exceeds the norms of orthodox theory, in such a way that “whatever Christ says of himself, he says not as the possessor of either nature separately, but with reference to the whole of his character, and in his entire person, except where he himself makes a distinction. Those who divide this hypostatical union at their own discretion, strip the discourses and answers of Christ of all their sincerity.”³¹

If this understanding is applied to Paradise Regained, the Christological implications may seem radical but not out of character. As Milton has made it clear in his previous epic, his poetic theodicy is built on “the paradox central to the Christian affirmation that man who bears the image of God must also live by the realization that he is not like God.”³² His shorter epic devoted to dramatizing one crucial episode in the earthly life of the Son of God must now show how he redeems Adamic failure to live in accordance with that paradox. The Son in his earthly existence, even by satanic testimony, appears to be most godlike (1.91–93). Thus the saving irony emerging from the temptations of Jesus is that the most characteristic action of this “godman” (Milton’s preferred designation of the incarnate Christ in On Christian Doctrine is ΘεάνΘρωπος) is his adamant rejection of all godlike affectations. Amid the manifest plurality of meanings inherent in the phrase “the Son of God,” Satan’s quest is to pin down a definitive significance for his adversary. The Miltonic Christ, however, is one who resists to the end any hint of wishing to bear that title “in higher sort” (4.198). The Son, who possesses the fullest semblance to the Father, who embodies in the greatest plenitude the divine image, is he who eschews all such profession and pretension, who aspires, in short, not to be God. Only this sort of self-emptying and self-giving, in the poet’s thinking, can merit the promise of corresponding divine elevation:

The clarification of the nature of the temptations enacted in the poem also helps us understand the order of their presentation. In the poet’s conception the first and third temptations essentially revolve around a single issue, but the temptation to empire has to be stretched out to achieve its full impact. Moreover, the temptations of stones and empire involve no satanic appeal to scripture, whereas the pinnacle episode has the Tempter quoting directly from the Hebrew Bible. The head-on confrontation of the contestants’ use of scripture over an invented hazard provides the opportunity for swift, potent climax. The Lukan order thus cannot be reversed without undercutting the literary effectiveness of mounting theological tension. In A Harmonie of the Gospels John Calvin writes:

2. The definitive study here is Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained” (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1966). See also Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1955); Howard Schultz, “A Fairer Paradise? Some Recent Studies of Paradise Regained,” ELH 32 (1965): 275–302; Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdom of God (London: Faber & Faber, 1964). In the most recent book-length study of the epic, John T. Shawcross reaffirms the structural schematics of both Pope and Lewalski. His own interpretation of the poem’s structure, however, is based on the following understanding: “the first temptation investigates man’s relationship with the self; the second, with community; the third, with his God” (Paradise Regain’d: Worthy T’Have Not Remained So Long Unsung [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988], p. 45).

6. All citations of Milton are taken from Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Student’s Milton (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1930). Perkins comments at this point: “So long as Christ was a private man he lived with Joseph and Marie a private life; but being baptized, and thereby installed into the office of Mediator, he returns not to Bethlehem or Nazarett where he was borne and brought up, but gets him presently into the wildernesse, there to encounter Satan” (Combate Between Christ and the Devill, 3:374). Citations of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes in this essay are abbreviated as PL, PR, and SA, respectively.

10. Book 3 of Paradise Lost makes high drama of the Deity’s self-deliberations in the persons of the Father and the Son. The poetic utterances that foreordain humanity’s redemption may have the ring of Calvinism, but the theological cast of Milton’s prose and poetry is not easy to pin down, as it runs the gamut of Reformed theology—mainstream and radical, Calvinist and Arminian. See Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 233–340; Dennis Richard Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

11. It is necessary to skirt the consideration here of the two natures of Christ and all the attendant speculative formulas enshrined in the history of Christian thought. Milton’s view on the matter is unusual to say the least, if not downright heretical. His position taken in the prose treatise The Christian Doctrine has been shown to harbor shades of unorthodox opinions such as Nestorianism and Adoptionism. See Lewalski’s informative survey in chap. 6 of Milton’s Brief Epic. On the other hand, Paradise Regained is not a poem about the possible varieties of Christology.

15. Commenting on the first temptation in the Gospel account, Perkins draws a specific parallel with Eve’s experience in Genesis: “First hee labours to weaken her faith in the truth of Gods threatening; which done, he easily brought her to actual disobedience” (Combate Between Christ and the Devill, 3:381). A small point of interest here is the word easily, used by both Perkins and Milton.

16. Some recent articles on this theme are Elaine B. Safer, “The Socratic Dialogue and ‘Knowledge in the Making’ in Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies 6, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp. 215–226; Leonard Mustazza, “Language as Weapon in Milton’s Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies 18, ed. James Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), pp. 195–216.

20. Lactantius (Divine Institutes 2.16) considers pagan oracles to be devils posing as gods. Origen (Contra Celsus 7.3) and other Christian writers sought naturalistic explanations for the prophetic ecstasy of the priestess at Delphi. Milton’s fondness for this theme already surfaced in his early poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629). The fifth-century Spanish poet Prudentius describes (in Apotheosis) the flight of the pagan gods from their shrines at Christ’s birth. But the crucial source for Milton’s poetic assertion here seems to be Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel (5.18–36; 6.7), which details pagan denunciations of the oracles and their silence upon Christ’s first advent. Plutarch, in two dialogues (De E apud Delphos and De defectu oraculorum) also speaks of the decline of Delphi. See the treatments in Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles (Amsterdam: Mortier, 1687), chaps. 2–3; Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 62ff.