To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton

5. Paradise Regained in the Closet: Private Piety in the Brief Epic

147 5 Paradise Regained in the Closet Private Piety in the Brief Epic Vanita Neelakanta Certainly if it were not an excellent thing for a man to be in secret with God, Satan would never make such head against it. Thomas Brooks, The Privy Key of Heaven (1665) Critics have long wondered why Milton, in Paradise Regained, focused on Jesus’ interlude in the desert with its quiescent mood as opposed to a more dazzling episode in the remarkable history of the Son of God incarnate. I suggest that the answer may be sought and found within the seventeenth century prayer closet. Inspired by Christ’s injunction in the Sermon on the Mount to “enter into thy closet, and when thou shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matt. 6:6), the early modern prayer closet was a private area demarcated within the household into which the devotee could retire to pray alone.1 It was deemed a privileged site of private access to God by Puritan as well as 148 Vanita Neelakanta Church of England writers.2 As interest in private prayer grew steadily between 1600 and 1660, many treatises and manuals were published detailing how devotion in the closet was to be conducted: when, where, in what manner, and to what end.3 The subject of Paradise Regained—Jesus’ 40 days and nights of fasting and prayer in the wilderness where he withstands the temptations of the devil as reported in Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, and Luke 4:1–13—was cited in many of these tracts as an instance of exemplary devoutness in solitude. Reading Paradise Regained in conjunction with the copious and immensely popular contemporaneous literature of private prayer recovers the valuable connection between Jesus’ solitary devotion in the wilderness and the intimate relationship with God made possible by the prayer closet. Such a connection foregrounds the brief epic’s preoccupation with holy contemplation and private self-examination. Further, it accentuates the anxiety Milton’s poem shares with closet literature about the private performance of piety—even in the most enclosed of places. Read in this way, Paradise Regained becomes a crucial intertext for exploring a set of dichotomies central to the discourses of the seventeenth century prayer closet: secrecy versus disclosure, public versus private, and knowledge versus ignorance. Although Milton himself states in De doctrina Christiana that “any place is suitable” for prayer, implying thereby that the only closet the worshipper needs is the pious heart, other advocates of private prayer propounded a literal interpretation of the biblical directive to “enter into thy closet.”4 For example, in The Privy Key of Heaven; or, Twenty Arguments for Closet-Prayer, Thomas Brooks affirms that Christ’s words are “plain” and therefore should be taken “literally,” not allegorically. If Christ himself “speaketh of shutting the door of the chamber,” that is precisely what the righteous Christian ought to do.5 Oliver Heywood likewise insists on the materiality of the closet. His Closet-Prayer, a Christian Duty (1668) identifies the closet as “any secret place,” a “close or secret chamber, a withdrawing room, retiring place, where a person is not seen or heard, nor “Paradise Regained” in the Closet 149 yet is disturbed in his devotions by any noise or commotion; a secret conclave or apartment locked up where no company is admitted.”6 The particular contours of the space do not matter to Heywood as long as it serves as an effective sanctuary from the chaotic thrumming of the quotidian world. Architecturally, the early modern closet frequently took the shape of a small room or a closed-in recess in the house where the devotee could retire from public view and engage in an intense and unmediated communion with his or her maker. Sometimes it was little more than an aperture secreted in a massive wall, within a false chimney stack, or in a high basement with little or no natural light.7 In his important study of English country homes, Mark Girouard posits that in a world where servants might be in constant attendance, even in the living chambers, the closet became the one place where the occupant could be entirely alone. Effie Botonaki agrees: the closet provided “the privacy needed for gestures such as kneeling, sighing, groaning, and crying as well as for mental gestures such as meditation and prayer.”8 In this architectural configuration, privacy...