“To stand upright will ask thee skill”: The Pinnacle and the Paradigm
Barton, Carol
Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000)
Abstract
Paradise Regain’d was considered inferior to the diffuse epic even in Milton’s time (though Phillips says the poet “could not hear with patience any such thing”). Criticized for its dramatic austerity, its Spartan furniture, and its placidly static hero, the poem has remained largely unsung for centuries, its true merit and its function (with Samson Agonistes) as a gloss on Paradise Lost almost completely ignored. This article sees Jesus’s imperturbability during the temptations of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil as a necessary demonstration of his rejection of Satan’s power over him, resulting from his recognition that obedience to the Devil in any form is by definition disobedience to God (a truth which, if Adam and Eve had apprehended it, would have obviated the need for the Incarnation). It posits that the moment of Redemption occurred, not at Golgotha as the crucified Messiah breathed his last on the Cross, but in Gethsemane, when the obedience implicit in Jesus’s acceptance of the cup (Matthew 26:42) atoned for the disobedience implicit, first in Eve’s, and then in Adam’s, acceptance of the forbidden fruit. And it emphasizes the fact that is Jesus (and not Christ) on whom Milton focuses his attention in because it is emulation of Jesus’s acts of obedience and faith that will lead us to rediscover that “paradise within us, happier farre.”
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