Professor John Rogers:
Paradise Regained.
Well, as anyone who's read
-- and maybe there's someone
here in this room who has read
the continuation of the novel
Gone with the Wind -- as
anyone who has read that
knows,
or as anyone who's seen,
let's say, "The Bride of
Chucky" or "The Fast and the
Furious,
Part 3," knows,
sequels are rarely greater than
the original works whose stories
they continue.
It's almost as if the
diminished appeal was something
like an inevitable and necessary
fact of the sequel.
It just comes attached to the
notion of the sequel.
I think that the disappointment
aroused by a sequel,
a sequel of any kind,
is a phenomenon about which
John Milton,
as he wrote Paradise
Regained, must have
been extremely aware.It was
Thomas Elwood -- he was one of
the young men who acted as a
secretary for Milton -- who
claimed years after the poet's
death that he had been
responsible for Milton's having
written the sequel to
Paradise Lost.
He recorded having told
Milton after he had read an
early manuscript copy of
Paradise Lost -- this is
before Paradise Lost was
even in print -- he reports to
us having told Milton,
"Thou hast said much here of
paradise lost,
but what hast thou to say of
paradise found?"
And then Elwood continues,
and it's [laughs]
a wonderful little bit of
information: "Milton made no
answer to me but sat some time
in a muse."Like a lot of
critics of Milton,
I have a hard time believing
that it was Elwood,
squirmy little Elwood,
who planted the idea of a
sequel to Paradise Lost
in Milton's head,
but I think it's nonetheless
interesting that this story has
been so widely circulated.
It's almost invariably cited by
scholars of Paradise Regained
because I think in some way
readers are looking for some
excuse really for Milton's
having written it.
Paradise Lost seems in
itself so absolutely complete
and so magnificent.
The idea that it requires a
sequel is one that seems
suspicious or questionable to a
lot of Milton's readers.Now,
Milton's own nephew,
Edward Phillips,
described the way in which
readers even in Milton's
lifetime judged the sequel to be
the inferior,
the lesser of the two works.
Phillips tells us in his
biography -- and this is
actually usefully included in
the back of the Hughes
edition -- Phillips tells
us that Paradise Regained
"is generally censured to be
much inferior to the other,
though [Milton]
could not hear with patience
any such thing when related to
him."
I love this image of the old
man impatient with any comment
that might belittle the
accomplishment of the sequel,
and I think it's a moving
image.
If Milton's nephew is right
here, as I suspect he is,
then I think it's worth
pursuing the reason for which
Milton might have considered
Paradise Regained,
 the sequel,
to be the greater work or a
work in some way more
sophisticated and more advanced
than Paradise Lost.
I think in a lot of ways it is
exactly that.Now,
surely one of the first things
that we notice when we read the
sequel to Paradise Lost
is really the radical
difference of its style.
The literary style,
or what we can think of as the
verbal texture,
of Paradise Regained
really constitutes one of
its greatest departures and
obviously one of its most
deliberate departures from the
first epic.
Although most readers of
Regained find it less
stylistically pleasing than
Lost,
 Milton has embraced
this style, I think,
for an important reason.
He has very consciously imposed
a set of constraints on his
verbal style and a set of
constraints on his entire poetic
imagination.
Our appreciation of the beauty
and the meaning of this poem is
actually, I think,
inextricable for our
understanding of this poem --
our understanding of the
severity of the lesson that this
poem has to teach us.This
poet -- and we know this because
we've spent a lot of time with
John Milton now -- was
instinctively given to verbal
excess to an almost unimaginable
degree.
He clearly had to struggle hard
to rein in a lot of his most
powerful literary impulses in
order to produce a work such as
Paradise Regained,
a work of such seemingly
charmless severity.
This poem has been scrubbed
clean of verbal and imagistic
extravagance,
scrubbed cleaner even than the
last two books of Paradise
Lost,
which were themselves radical
departures.
I think in a lot of ways
Paradise Regained
resembles stylistically,
in terms of its verbal texture,
the last books of Paradise
Lost.Now,
Milton has purged this poem as
well of the grammatical
obscurity,
the syntactical obscurity that
we found in Paradise Lost.
You remember all of those
ambiguities, syntactical
ambiguities, that were always
opening up far more signifying
possibilities than we could even
begin to deal with.
Milton has clipped so many of
those long and wandering
sentences into short and
unequivocal declarations,
and he's replaced the lushness
of so many of those similes and
literary ornaments with what we
can think of as the Puritan
austerity of simple argument and
simple statement of fact.
This poem has been written in
what is often described now as
the period's plain style --
something like the
conversational style of
unambiguous,
straightforward language that
was supposedly favored by the
Puritan clergy in the
seventeenth century,
and I think that makes sense.
This poem has been written in
what we can think of as the
plain style.But if that's
the case,
how strange and how surprising
that this poem,
which is written in a poetic
language as plain and
unambiguous as anything Milton
ever put on paper,
how unbelievably odd it is that
this poem paints for us a world
in which so few statements can
actually be understood!
All of the characters in
Paradise Regained,
and I'm including -- there
aren't that many of them -- but
I'm including,
of course, the Son of God.
All of the characters fail at
some time or another to
understand even the clearest,
even the most perspicuous
language.
Much like Adam in Books Eleven
and Twelve of Paradise
Lost, the characters in
Paradise Regained are on
some level profoundly clueless
and their cognitive incapacity
-- which actually comes in a
variety of shapes,
depending where you are in the
poem -- their cognitive
incapacity usually involves
their inability to interpret
fully and to interpret
accurately a statement or a text
that in our estimation seems to
be just about as clear and as
unambiguous as it could possibly
be.Now,
one of the texts that proves so
puzzling to the characters of
Paradise Regained is also
a puzzle to Adam in Paradise
Lost,
and so I want to look back at
the ending of Paradise Lost
in order to see a way in
which that poem had been
preparing us all along for the
sequel.
I think you'll remember our
mentioning in class that odd and
sometimes irritating way in
which Adam was always jumping
the gun in his interpretation of
future Christian history in the
lesson that Michael was
presenting him.
One of the central historical
documents that Adam seemed
particularly predisposed to
misinterpret was what is known
as the Protoevangelium,
and that's been spelled for
you,
P-r-o-t-o-e-v-a-n-g-e-l-i-u-m,
on your handout so you don't
need my orthography right now.
The Protoevangelium,
which is the Greek for "the
first gospel" or "the first good
news,"
is one of the ways in which
Christians refer to Genesis 3:
14 and 15.
It's the prophecy from the Book
of Genesis that God delivers to
the serpent.
God prophesied that the
serpent's eventual punishment --
and this is on the handout --
that the serpent eventually will
be punished: "And I will put
enmity between thee and the
woman,
and between thy seed and her
seed;
it shall bruise thy head,
and thou shalt bruise his
heel."Now,
this is the anticipation of the
end as presented -- as imagined
in Genesis.
It's this text that the New
Testament uses to forge a
connection between the story of
Christ,
which is obviously the New
Testament story,
and the initial text in the
tradition,
which is the story of Adam and
Eve.
For Christians,
Christ of course is the woman's
seed, the
great-great-great-great-
great-great-grandson of Adam and
Eve.
He will one day bruise the head
of the serpent,
who is interpreted by
Christians to be Satan even as
Satan will be dogging his
steps.Now,
the text of this prophecy is
reproduced and reworked,
I think, almost to a compulsive
degree in Paradise Lost.
Allusions to the prophecy
in Genesis, the
Protoevangelium,
appear in five separate
places in the last books of
Milton's epic and actually in
far more places than that in
Paradise Regained.
This prophecy is a text
that has to be read and
interpreted, it's mulled over
and reinterpreted,
and it's Michael's task in the
last books of Paradise Lost
to teach Adam how to read
it.
Adam has to figure out -- and
this actually in itself requires
a lot of tutelage on Michael's
part -- that the serpent is
actually Satan.
That's nothing that comes
instinctively or intuitively to
Adam, he also must learn that,
of course, the seed is the
Messiah who Adam will eventually
interpret to be the Son of
God.Let's look at the end of
Paradise Lost here
because Michael is not only
teaching Adam how to understand
the Protoevangelium,
but he's teaching us also I
think -- preparing us to read
Paradise Regained.
So this is page 463 in the
Hughes.
It's Book Ten of --
actually, I'm going to be
skipping around.
The first passage that we'll be
looking at is Book Ten,
line 179.
That's when the Son delivers
the prophecy to the serpent.
Then at line 500 of Book Ten,
we see Satan trying to figure
out what the Son could possibly
have meant.
In Book Eleven,
line 115 -- if you can flip
through pages fast enough -- God
himself explains to Michael in
heaven about the prophecy of the
seed.
Then Michael dutifully relays
this message to Adam himself in
Book Twelve, line 150.Now,
there's obviously an excessive
proliferation here of prophetic
statements, so excessive that
you probably weren't able to
flip through your books nearly
quickly enough.
It's no wonder that Adam is
really beside himself with such
an eager desire to get to the
end -- so obsessively is this
prophecy of the end presented at
the end of Paradise Lost.
Adam has learned about the
birth of Jesus,
he's learned about the Messiah
who will actually be born of a
woman,
called "the woman's seed" in
the Book of Genesis,
and he thinks he has this
prophecy of the seed completely
figured out.
He thinks he understands now
how the story of Christian
history is going to end.
So this is line 375 of Book
Twelve at the top of page 463:
O Prophet of glad
tidings, [Adam says,]
finisher
Of utmost hope!
now clear I understand
What oft my steadiest thoughts
have searcht in vain,
Why our great expectation
should be call'd
The seed of Woman…
Of course -- and we're used to
this because we've read the last
two books of Paradise Lost --
Adam is wrong to think that
he has a clear understanding of
the great expectations of the
end.
He imagines once again with a
kind of singularly dull-witted
literalism just how this
prophecy of the seed is going to
play out.
So at line 383 Adam says,
"Needs must the Serpent now his
capital bruise / Expect with
mortal pain: say where and when
/ Thir fight,
what stroke shall bruise the
Victor's heel."
Adam, of course,
had utterly imagined -- or
imagined precisely the wrong
kind of ending.
This isn't going to be a
physical fight whose victory can
be pinned down to some specific
time and specific place,
a kind of terrifying event for
which tickets could be
purchased.Michael recognizes
Adam's interpretation as a
misinterpretation and so he
corrects it.
At line 386 Michael tells Adam
this: "Dream not of thir fight,
/ As of a Duel,
or the local wounds / Of head
or heel…"
We're not supposed to imagine
some gunslinger showdown at the
end of time between the Messiah
and the serpent -- and remember
that Adam is still imagining the
serpent being a serpent;
he hasn't yet figured out that
the serpent is Satan.
We're not going to have an
actual war capable of producing
actual wounds.
Adam, of course,
in his defense -- and I think
he does need a little defending
here -- has in mind the story of
the war in heaven,
the story of an actual fight
full of local wounds that -- all
two local wounds,
they were healed instantly --
that Raphael had conveyed to
him, of course,
in Book Six and which David
Currell had wonderfully
explicated for our
benefit.But the battle that
will turn out to reconfigure all
of Christian history isn't going
to proceed along the vulgarly
literal line set forth in the
war in heaven.
It's as if Michael is trying to
tell Adam to forget everything
that Raphael told him,
to forget that monumental war
that Raphael had relayed,
because that kind of thing
simply isn't going to happen
anymore.
The fight between Satan and the
seed, or the serpent and the
seed, is going to be a much
subtler one.
The Messiah will begin his
destruction of the serpent by
becoming a man himself just like
Adam had become a man at his
birth.
That seems to be pretty much
the gist of Michael's theology
in Paradise
Lost.Well,
so Milton finishes Paradise
Lost, evidently he begins
Paradise Regained even
before Paradise Lost has
found its way into print,
and Paradise Regained is
published four years later in
1671.
It's all about that redemption,
that regaining of paradise that
Michael had prophesied at the
end of Paradise Lost,
and, as you can tell from the
title of the sequel,
Paradise Regained is all
about returning and repetition.
We shouldn't think that the
sequel here is simply repeating
and elaborating on the ideas
with which the original poem had
concluded.
While it's true that
Paradise Regained does
repeat the Protoevangelium --
that prophecy of the Son's
destruction of the serpent that
we finally figure out is
actually Satan,
and it proves to be just as
obsessively interested in that
bizarre prophecy as Paradise
Lost was -- this new poem
repeats that prophecy with a
difference.
I think there are all sorts of
ways in which the poem is
exploring and re-exploring a lot
of the implications and a lot of
the consequences of the very
idea of repetition implicit or
compacted in that prefix
re- of Paradise
Regained.
This is a work devoted to
how the lost paradise will
eventually become the regained
paradise.Obviously for
Christians,
orthodox Christians of almost
any stripe, that regaining,
that redemption will hinge on
the atonement,
on the moment of the
crucifixion.
Well, that's pretty much out of
the question for Milton,
so we have to ask the question:
how does Milton account
for that pivotal moment in
Christian history,
the turning point from the old
covenant with God to the new
covenant?
How does Milton imagine the
shift from Paradise Lost
to Paradise Regained?
The answer -- as we have come
to recognize because these are
the kinds of the answers that we
get when we ask questions about
Milton -- the answer is a
shocking one.
Milton quite simply doesn't
mention -- and this is
unspeakably sublime -- he just
doesn't bother to mention the
crucifixion in Paradise
Regained.Of course,
we already know that the
subject of the crucifixion is
one that Milton has long had an
awkward relation to.
He wasn't able to finish that
early poem, "The Passion," that
he had written as a young man.
In this new poem,
Paradise Regained,
the story ends before the
crucifixion even takes place
because for Milton,
in this absolutely remarkable
poem, the crowning moment of
Christian history and the point
at which lost paradise is
actually regained -- something
that we are,
of course, all ourselves the
beneficiaries of -- it has
nothing whatsoever to do with
the Father's sacrifice of the
Son.
And it has nothing to do with
the magnificent battle,
for that matter,
between Satan and the Messiah.
It's a moment mentioned rather
briefly in a couple of gospel
accounts of the life of Jesus.
The Gospel of Matthew and the
Gospel of Luke narrate the story
of Jesus fasting -- this all
happens in a few verses in the
New Testament -- the story of
Jesus fasting for forty days in
the wilderness and the three
temptations to which Satan
subjected Jesus during that
time.Now,
in the Gospel of Luke,
which is the version that
Milton follows most closely,
Satan tempts the Son three
times.
He asks the Son to turn stones
into bread in order to free
himself, and of course the Son
refuses.
He asks the Son to accept all
the kingdoms of the world as
Satan's own gift,
and the Son refuses.
And he asks the Son to prove
his divinity by casting himself
off the pinnacle of the temple,
and the Son refuses.
That pretty much is it,
three temptations and three
acts of resistance;
and it is this simple -- and of
course nothing is ever that
simple, but it's this more or
less simple resistance of
temptation in Paradise
Regained that constitutes
the very center of Christian
history.This is an
extraordinary and,
for me, unbelievable way of
rethinking and re-imagining
Christian theology and the story
of Christian history itself.
The very premise of this poem
is, I think, a transgressive
one, utterly changing all of the
emphases in traditional
Christian doctrine.
The focal point,
of course, in Milton's poem
isn't really theological.
It's not mystical or
sacramental: it's ethical.
It's not the magic or the
mysticism of the crucifixion or
the resurrection that has
anything to do with the
regaining of paradise here.
It is a simple and entirely,
I think, un-miraculous action
of behaving ethically.
It's something that any of us
could do.As I mentioned a
minute ago, this poem is all
about returning and repetition,
and the Protoevangelium is a
text to which the characters are
themselves continually
returning.
But there there's another text
that is repeated,
if you can believe it,
even more obsessively than that
in Paradise Regained,
 and that's the scene in
which Jesus is baptized by John
the Baptist.
The scene of the baptism is
narrated first -- it happens
right at the beginning,
at line twenty-nine of the
first book.
This is page 483 in the Hughes.
We have to look at this passage.
It's narrated first in Book
One, line twenty-nine and
following, and then it's
repeated and referred to and
worried about at least four
times after that over the course
of the poem.
This is what we first learn: 
[O]n him baptiz'd
Heaven open'd,
and in likeness of a Dove
The Spirit descended,
while the Father's voice
From Heav'n pronounced him his
beloved Son.
Now, we of course read what I
take to be these relatively
simple and unimaginative lines,
and if anything,
I think, we should be
overwhelmed by their exceptional
straightforwardness.
It's almost impossible to
understand [laughs]
what it is about this baptismal
pronouncement that could prove
so troublesome and so difficult
in the poem,
but no one in the poem -- and
that includes,
of course, the Son of God
himself -- no one in the poem
has anything even close to a
clear idea about what these
lines actually mean.This
radical uncertainty at the very
heart of the poem involves the
fact that this incredibly
important revelation is the
product merely of the Father's
voice.
We're no longer in the world of
Paradise Lost where man
can commune directly with angels
and even with the Son of God
with some frequency and with a
degree of relative ease.
Nowhere in Paradise Regained
is divinity actually
present.
Deity isn't palpable;
it's not indisputably there in
the world of this poem,
and all we have is the Father's
voice,
his pronouncements,
or in other words all we have
is a text just like the text of
scripture -- or in fact,
it is the text of scripture.
The Father has left us with a
little trail of his presence
[laughs]
in the form of the words of the
Hebrew Bible,
and everyone in the poem is
desperately scrambling to
interpret this verbal trail,
these words.All of this is
a way of saying that the
universe of Paradise Regained
is essentially,
to my mind, a secular one.
This is essentially the world
that Milton had introduced us to
at the end of Paradise
Lost,
 and in this secular
world all one can really do is
read the text and try to figure
out what it means.
This is all that Satan and the
Son are in a position to do in
Paradise Regained,
and I think this is what gives
this poem its powerfully
Modernist feel.
It's as skeptical and uncertain
as it is possible for such a
profoundly and piously religious
poem to be,
if that oxymoronic statement
makes any sense.Look at how
Satan reacts to the
pronouncement of God at the
baptism that we just looked at,
the pronouncement that this is
my beloved Son,
line thirty-three:
That heard the Adversary,
who roving still
About the world,
at that assembly fam'd
Would not be last,
and with the voice divine
Nigh Thunderstruck,
th' exalted man,
to whom
Such high attest was giv'n,
a while survey'd
With wonder…
Satan rushes to the
congregation of angels assembled
at the river Jordan because he
wants to hear -- as the other
angels do -- to hear the "high
attest" that God is bestowing
upon this man from Nazareth,
this nobody who was "the Son of
Joseph deem'd."
It's as at his hearing of this
divine voice that Satan is
"Thunderstruck."Now,
"thunderstruck" is a striking
word here.
It bursts out of this passage
as a little metaphor,
and we're taking whatever we
can get here.
We take note of it because
Milton has given us so little by
way of poetic metaphor in the
severely restrained literary
world of Paradise Regained
that we're grateful.
The word "thunderstruck" is,
in fact, so striking and so
powerful that Milton has used it
only one other time in all of
his poetry.
It's clear here that Milton is
asking us to remember that
earlier occurrence so I'm going
to ask you: Does anyone here
remember where else in Milton --
extra credit here -- where else
in Milton we have encountered
the word "thunderstruck"?
Okay.
No one in Paradise Regained
seems to have remembered the
appearance [laughs]
of the word either,
and so you're in good
company.If we can imagine
the inhabitants of the world of
Paradise Regained having
been in a position to read
Paradise Lost -- which is
something I think that Milton
sometimes asks us to imagine,
although of course it's
preposterous -- it's clear,
I think, that Milton is asking
us to remember that earlier
occurrence,
so I'm going to ask you to turn
to page 343 of Paradise Lost,
the Hughes edition.
This is the climactic
moment -- oh,
and actually I have included
this handily on your handout --
the moment in the war in heaven
at which the Son of God assumes
the chariot of paternal deity,
gets in Dad's car and proceeds
to put a decisive end to the
battle with the rebel angels.
This is what Raphael tells
Adam:
The overthrown he rais'd,
and as a Herd
Of Goats or timorous flock
together throng'd
Drove them before him
Thunder-struck,
pursu'd
With terrors,
and with furies to the bounds
And Crystal wall of
Heav'n...
It's at this terrible moment of
being thunderstruck by the
awesome power of the Son that
the rebel angels throw
themselves headlong down from
the verge of heaven.
This is obviously an
unbelievably consequential
moment -- this is the moment of
Satan's fall.
I think there's got to be a
point to Milton's recycling and
repeating of this word,
this striking word from
Paradise Lost,
in the new poem,
Paradise Regained.
I think he's signaling some
kind of connection between the
horrifying moment,
from Satan's perspective,
of the Son's victory over the
fallen rebel angels in the
earlier poem and the Son's new
victory,
or what's about to be his new
victory, over Satan that begins
at this moment,
centuries later,
at the Son's baptism.Milton
alludes to that climactic moment
in Paradise Lost but on
some level this is an allusion
that the later poem,
Paradise Regained,
doesn't know what to do with
and, in fact,
never really does anything
explicit with.
Satan is thunderstruck at the
baptism just as he was
thunderstruck at the war in
heaven,
but Satan himself is incapable
-- and this is just ingenious on
Milton's part -- he's incapable
of understanding how these two
moments might be in any way
related.I don't know what
kind of television,
if any, you all watch.
But I do know that -- not when
I was an undergraduate because
we got such terrible reception
in the days before cable,
but when I was a graduate
student and living off campus
and I had cable television -- I
spent an inordinate amount of
time watching soap [laughter]
operas during the day.
It was a way not to write my
dissertation.
If you've spent as much time as
I have watching thousands of
hours of soap operas,
[laughter]
you know what it means to be
thunderstruck,
which is something I take it to
be closely related to being
struck by lightning.
At least in the 1970s and in
the ‘80s,
there is a point in almost
every soap opera at least once
every two or three years in
which someone is struck by
lightning,
[laughter]
and the consequence is
invariably the same:
it's the condition of amnesia.
Soap operas obviously couldn't
survive without some recourse to
the amnesia plot,
the lightning-striking plot,
because it's a way to keep all
of the actors intact but
[laughs]
reconfigure and spice up a lot
of the plots,
where the same actor gets to be
someone completely new because
he has to develop an entirely
new life and new relationships
with all of the preexisting
actors and cast members.I
think it's something very close
to amnesia that Satan is struck
with at this moment in
Paradise Regained.
It's as if Satan has at this
very moment repressed any memory
of his first having been
thunderstruck.
He has completely forgotten
about the Son's role in the war
in heaven, and I actually have
to be more specific than that:
Satan is incapable of applying
to the current situation any
memory of who it was who had
beat him in the war in heaven.
He has repressed the present
significance that is significant
for the present moment of the
Son of God's victory,
and it's the nature of this
repression, I think,
which is at the very center of
Paradise Regained.The
central advance that this poem
has made over Paradise Lost
is its refusal to represent
traditional epic action.
There's no big battle here.
There's no war.
There's no huge fight in which
the woman's seed,
Christ, bruises Satan's head.
There's really actually no
overt action at all.
The hero quite simply does
nothing and he just keeps saying
no.
Whatever action this text
presents to us is clearly
psychological,
and the psychological problem
that I think overwhelms all of
the characters in Paradise
Regained is the simple fact
that they cannot [laughs]
manage for the life of them to
relate the current story that
they're inhabiting to the events
of Paradise Lost.
They have forgotten
Paradise Lost.Now,
let me ask you to think about
the dramatic situation of this
poem.
Satan knows perfectly well that
God has prophesied that one of
his sons will rise up one day
and destroy him.
He knows that this is going to
happen, and he's very clear
about the certainty of the
prophecy from Genesis 3:15.
Satan even knows that it is
this man named Jesus who's being
baptized now who will one day
destroy him and who will one day
be responsible for bruising his
head;
but Satan seems for some reason
to have no way of knowing that
the Son of God,
who will at some point in the
future be responsible for his
doom, is the same Son of God who
had devastated all of the rebel
angels,
and Satan himself of course,
in the war in heaven.
Satan has no way of knowing
that the prophesied Messiah that
he's dealing with now will turn
out to be the Son of God,
the first begotten.He has
no way of knowing that the
Messiah will be that same
absolutely insufferable angel
whom the Heavenly Father had
promoted so arbitrarily and so
ostentatiously above all of the
other angels in Book Five of
Paradise Lost.
The traumatic scene of that
exaltation, "This day I have
begot…
/ My only Son," "[T]o him shall
bow / All knees in
Heav'n…," "[H]im who
disobeys / Mee disobeys" -- you
remember all of those thundering
words of the Father.
Satan is incapable of relating
that traumatic scene to this
traumatic scene,
the traumatic scene that he's
witnessing now,
the "this is my beloved Son" at
the baptism.Look at what
Satan says -- it's excruciating
and it makes us squirm,
I think -- at the top of page
485.
This is Book One,
line eighty-nine.
Satan is trying to figure out
what God meant by his strange
utterance at the baptism.
You can see Satan coming so
close to an understanding,
but he can't seem to make the
final logical leap,
and it's a leap,
of course, that I think we all
feel confident that we would
have made or been able to make.
Line eighty-nine;
this is Satan:
"His first-begot we know,
and sore have felt,
[laughs]
he's remembering the war in
heaven]
/ When his fierce thunder drove
us to the deep;
/ Who this is we must
learn…"
So he's able to remember the
sensation of being thunderstruck
in Paradise Lost,
 but he can't connect it
with the thunderous proclamation
of the Son at the baptism.
It's as if we have a failure of
the synaptic nerves in Satan's
brain and he can't make what
seems to be to us the obvious
cognitive link.I think his
inability to make that link is
surprising,
but we have to understand that
Satan has been traumatized.
It's as if the war in heaven
had produced in Satan something
like a post-traumatic stress
disorder,
and the nature of this disorder
is his -- well,
I think it's perfectly
understandable in just simple
psychological terms.
You'll remember that the
original motive for Satan's fall
was the Father's exultation of
his beloved Son -- his now
beloved Son above all of the
other angels -- and that the
resulting sibling rivalry was
the spur for all of Satan's
later actions.
The dilemma of sibling rivalry
is at the heart of Paradise
Regained as well,
but sibling rivalry in this
poem exists solely as a
phenomenon that has to be
repressed.
Satan simply cannot and will
not make the cognitive
connection between the rivalry
he feels now to this
Messiah-character and the one
that he had felt,
that primal,
originary rivalry that had
proven so devastating in
Paradise Lost.Now,
we may feel that we can
understand on psychological
grounds the reason for Satan's
inability to read the full
meaning of God's pronouncement
at the baptism,
but I think the true genius of
Milton's poem is the fact that
the Son is just as clueless as
Satan.
The Son has even less memory,
in fact, than Satan about his
former activities in heaven.
The Son can't even begin to
reconstruct what had happened in
Paradise Lost because in
assuming his earthly mantle,
he seems to have suffered a
much greater and much more
severe case of amnesia than
Satan had.
I think it's this image of
amnesia, or of some kind of
repression or some sort of
pathological forgetting,
that may provide the most
useful way of thinking about the
relation of Paradise Regained
to the earlier poem,
Paradise Lost.Now,
let's think about it from
another perspective.
In writing Paradise
Regained,
Milton has clearly had to
repress everything that had been
-- well,
not everything but pretty much
everything -- that had been so
liberating, so revolutionary,
and so remarkable about
Paradise Lost.
Now it might be tempting to
argue, and it of course has been
argued, that Milton is just
getting old and he's getting
tired and he's not up to all
those similes now,
but Milton has severed from his
verse all of that luxuriant
ornamentation for a deliberate
and,
I think, a very important
reason.
He's purging his verse of what
we now take to be its
characteristic beauty because
he,
too, like Satan and like the
Son, is struggling to forget
Paradise Lost.
I think there's an important
sense in which Milton is
thinking of the beautiful verse
style of Paradise Lost as
something like a temptation in
this poem,
and it's a temptation that he
has to resist.
Look at the scene of the
second temptation in Paradise
Regained.
This is page 500 of the
Hughes.
This is Book Two, line 289.
The Son is beginning to get
hungry, understandably,
after his forty days in the
wilderness, and he enters a
pleasant grove where he
encounters Satan:
Only in a bottom [this is
line 289 of Book Two]
saw a pleasant Grove,
With chant of tuneful Birds
resounding loud,
Thither he bent his way,
determin'd there
To rest at noon,
and enter'd soon the shade,
High rooft, and walks beneath,
and alleys brown
That open'd in the midst a
woody Scene;
Nature's own work it seem'd
(Nature taught Art)
And to a Superstitious eye the
haunt
Of Wood Gods and Wood
Nymphs…
I think this pretty little
landscape that we have here is
rather jarring in the context of
the reserved,
the sparing,
pleasures typically afforded us
in Paradise Regained.
It's jarring because this
pleasant grove reminds us,
I think, in so many ways of the
Garden of Eden from Paradise
Lost.
Milton's description here
is, in fact, a tissue of echoes
from Book Four of Paradise
Lost where Eden opens onto a
woody theater,
just as this grove opens onto a
woody scene.
This grove seems to appear to
possess wood gods and wood
nymphs much as the verse of
Paradise Lost was filled
with the allusions to all of
those classical presences that
Milton had culled from his
lifetime of reading classical
literature.
But here the deities of pagan
literature are branded as
superstition -- "thus they
relate, erring."
All of those elements,
those aesthetic elements that
had made Paradise Lost so
lovable,
so engaging,
and so enticing are now branded
as a temptation.It's as if
the Son were being tempted with
something like the literature of
Paradise Lost when he's
presented with this opportunity
-- that he takes,
by the way -- to enter this
grove.
It's important that the Son
willingly enters this pleasant
grove that has been so carefully
fashioned, of course,
by Satan.
Readers of this poem rightly
are always shocked by this
moment because this is the Son
of God here,
after all, and he's the very
picture of virtue and of perfect
reason -- and he's made this
unbelievably stupid mistake.
This is like the mistake that
the Red Cross Knight makes in
the first canto of The Faerie
Queene, entering the wood of
error.
The beauty of paradise,
and by extension the beauty of
Paradise Lost,
is so tempting,
we could say,
that even the Son of God feels
its overwhelming magnetic
pull.Yet Milton,
I think, is still working
consciously here to renounce all
of that extraordinary poetic
license that he had taken in
Paradise Lost.
This new poem explores in more
depth and with more insight the
merit and the beauty of poetic
renunciation than any other poem
ever has.
I'm convinced of that.
This is a poem all about denial
and repression,
and its deepest and most
powerful meanings emerge not
through our sense,
I think, of what the poem
offers but our sense of what
it's not offering or what it
won't permit itself to
offer.Now,
there's an obvious and explicit
way in which Paradise
Regained is about this kind
of negation,
or this renunciation,
of Paradise Lost.
Paradise Lost was about
man's first disobedience and the
new poem, Paradise
Regained,
reverses that situation and
treats another man's unswerving
obedience to God,
an obedience so severe that at
times I think it strikes us as
unthinking or unreflective.
That's just the obvious way in
which Paradise Regained
works to negate or undo the
effects of Paradise Lost,
but there's another,
there's a more significant,
way in which Milton's later
poem attempts to forge some kind
of connection with the earlier
one.
Milton in the new poem is
acutely aware of his already
having written the great epic
Paradise Lost and with
this intense self-consciousness.
It's an entirely new neurotic
burden for Milton.
Paradise Regained takes
up the problem that had proven
so difficult and so troubling to
the younger Milton,
and he takes it up once again
but, of course,
with a twist -- and this is the
problem of the poet's career.
It's as if Milton can stand
back now and review the
autobiographical narrative he
had written for himself as a
young man and take stock in what
he's accomplished.So think
of the basic situation that the
Son of God finds himself in
Paradise Regained.
Even before the remarkable
moment of God's pronouncement at
the baptism, Jesus had grown up
with the knowledge of his future
role as the Messiah.
His mother had told him,
Mary had told him when he was a
young boy of what he was to be.
He had at a very early age a
sense of the important work that
he would perform at some future
point in time,
but he didn't know exactly what
that work was going to look
like.
He didn't have a clue as to
when he was actually supposed to
begin his work.
In short, the Son of God had
before him a narrative of his
career long before he was able
to imagine just how that
narrative was going to be
fleshed out.If this problem
sounds a little familiar to you,
that's of course because it is
familiar.
This is precisely the position
that the young Milton had found
himself in.
He had declared at a very early
age that he was chosen by God to
write a poem that his countrymen
would not willingly let die.
He was going to be England's
literary Messiah,
but that was years before he
knew what he was supposed to be
writing about or even when he
was supposed to begin writing.
As he says in Paradise
Lost, he was "long in
choosing and beginning late."
This is exactly the position
that the Son of God finds
himself in in Paradise
Regained.Look at the top
of page 487, Book One,
line 183.
This is the Son of God trying
to figure out what the Father
must have meant at the baptism:
Meanwhile the Son of God,
who yet some days
Lodg'd in Bethabara,
where John baptiz'd,
Musing and much revolving in
his breast,
How best the mighty work he
might begin
Of Savior to mankind,
and which way first
Publish his Godlike office now
mature…
Now, if we read this passage
with any sense at all,
or with any knowledge,
of its author,
I think that this moment as
seen from the life of Christ --
I don't know.
It's completely absurd.
It's a ridiculous situation.
You have Jesus thinking:
"I'm supposed to be the savior
of mankind.
Let me think.
What should I do first?
I'm really confused here."
No one else has ever and would
ever imagine such a scene of a
kind of career anxiety in some
sort of narrative involving the
Son of God.
It's laughable to think of the
Son of God as undergoing
something like a career panic
attack.But this passage is
very different and it assumes,
I think, an extraordinary
degree of significance when it's
placed in the context of
Milton's own ongoing ruminations
about his own career.
The Son is asking himself how
he should publish,
how he should make public,
the godlike office into which
he has now matured.
I think it's impossible not to
hear in these lines the
analogous concern that Milton
had himself revolved in his
breast when he was pondering
when he should publish or bring
into print the fruits of what he
knew was his godlike poetic
talent.So I want to conclude
with this suggestion,
the suggestion that Milton has
transposed the narrative -- this
is only one of the myriad things
that he's doing in Paradise
Regained -- he's transposed
the narrative of his own poetic
development onto the development
of the Son's sense of his own
identity.
By saying this,
I don't want to suggest that
all Paradise Regained is
an autobiographical poem.
I'm convinced,
of course, that it is an
autobiographical poem;
but it is first and foremost,
I think, a meditation on the
problem of autobiography.
Milton is in the amazingly
peculiar position of having
written his autobiography long
before he'd actually lived the
bulk of his life.
That's what all those career
narratives were doing that he
had penned in the early 1640s.
How do you actually live a
life, the end of which you
already know?
What's the relation of the
anticipated life narrative to
the actual experience of living?
These are, of course,
the questions that plague Adam
and Eve in the last books of
Paradise Lost as they
learn the future history of
their descendants but still have
to go about the business of
living their lives.
These are clearly questions
that get to the very heart of
Milton's relation to the
prophecy of his own poetic
talent,
and they're questions that we
will continue throughout this
week as we approach the problem
that Milton confronts when he
writes Paradise Regained.
That's this question:
what does it mean,
after all, to write a sequel to
the poem that "aftertimes will
not willingly let die"?
Okay.
I'm going to end there.
I'm going to ask you to make
sure you will have read all of
Paradise Regained for
Wednesday.
Okay. 
 
