In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Does Relation Stand?Textual and Social Relations in Paradise Regain’d
  • Joseph Mansky

We are constantly being told that the Jesus of Paradise Regain’d is his Father’s son: “the undoubted Son of God,” “[God’s] Son belov’d,” “this perfect Man, by merit call’d [God’s] Son.”1 In Jesus’s recollection, Mary presents the case most clearly when she enjoins him to stamp his Father’s image on himself: “By matchless Deeds express thy matchless Sire” (PR 1.233). After hearing his mother’s account of his conception and nativity, Jesus returns to the Old Testament, searching through “the Law and Prophets” to confirm his identity (1.260). The relation between scriptural passages thus determines his paternal relation. Paradise Regain’d ends, however, not by foregrounding this relationship—despite the best efforts of the angelic choir—but with a “private” return home to “his Mothers house” (4.639). Jesus’s “private” life with his mother offers a nonhierarchical model of social relation, in contrast to the vertical hierarchy of God the “most High” (1.128). The Son’s comparative reading puts his parental relationships and their consequent social relations into uneasy contact—and even into conflict. [End Page 45]

When, near the end of the poem, Satan doubts the uniqueness of Jesus’s relation to God, he addresses precisely this issue: what is the nature of the spiritual, filial, and social relations that Scripture produces? Satan wonders:

In what degree or meaning thou art call’dThe Son of God, which bears no single sence;The Son of God I also am, or was,And if I was, I am; relation stands;All men are Sons of God.

(PR 4.516–20)

Satan does not so much challenge as expand Jesus’s epithet (which, following the book of Job, he also claims for himself): it “bears no single sence” since it can assume various “degree[s]” or “meaning[s]” depending on its scriptural context.2 Satan proceeds to demonstrate the semantic range of the title by calling himself the “Son of God,” deferring then affirming this identification through the use of chiasmus—“The Son of God I also am, or was, / And if I was, I am.” By retracting his self-identification in the first line, Satan is able to assert it more strongly in the second, establishing a principle of temporal continuity that he tersely states: “relation stands.” Behind this principle lies a literal or genealogical notion of divine sonship. In De doctrina Christiana, Milton asserts, “In scripture there are two senses in which the Father is said to have begotten the Son: one literal, with reference to production; the other metaphorical, with reference to exaltation.”3 Satan tends toward the literal sense of “begetting” as “production” both here and near the beginning of the poem, when he acknowledges that the fallen angels know all too well the Son, God’s “first-begot” (1.89), but confesses that he remains in doubt about the identity of Jesus. Since Satan refuses to treat begetting metaphorically as “exaltation,” his wide but undiscriminating interpretation of Scripture defines sonship as a genealogical relation that stands despite his precipitous fall.4

Does relation stand? Critics disagree. Kevis Goodman believes that “if the Son is to stand, relation must fall,” while Price McMurray sees implicit in the Son’s rebuke to Satan during the final temptation on the pinnacle “the idea that relation does [End Page 46] indeed stand.”5 As I will argue, “relation” does not necessarily stand or fall in the poem’s climactic moment but, rather, specific relations are upheld or severed as Jesus stands and Satan falls. At issue here are the textual relations between verses in the Bible and the spiritual and social relations between Father and Son, God and Satan, and Jesus and humanity that depend on the meaning of the term “Son of God.” But there is one very important relation missing from this list, and one also largely neglected by critics of the poem: Mary and Jesus.6 In contrast to the hierarchical relationship between Son and Father, this relation is antiauthoritarian and is linked to radically comparative reading practices that the paternal...

pdf