Milton's Rival Hermeneutics: “Reason is But Choosing”

10. Satan in Paradise Regained: The Quest for Identity

205 Satan in Paradise Regained The Quest for Identity Stella P. Revard Although Paradise Regained is based on the accounts told briefly in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke of Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, Milton both enlarges and elaborates on the temptations and adds new material. Much more happens in Paradise Regained than Satan’s tempting and the Son’s refusing. Interspersed between the biblical temptations is an extended dialogue of Satan with the Son in which Satan not only strives to make Jesus disclose exactly who he is but also mounts an impassioned defense of himself—his person and his own goals. Satan’s interrogative of Jesus—“Who are you?”—is balanced by his own assertion—“Who I am.” Paradise Regained is often read as a quest on Satan’s and the reader’s part to define Jesus’ nature as human or divine or both. As Mary Ann Radzinowicz asserts, it is a mistake to make “the divinity of the Son the assumption and not the discovery of the poem.” Certainly, as Jesus acknowledges in 10D 206 Stella P. Revard his soliloquy in book 1, Jesus knows he is Messiah, but, as Radzinowicz and John Rogers both argue, there is no reason to suppose that he remembers his superhuman Sonship in heaven.1 It is only at the conclusion of the poem that the angels confirm in their hymn that the human and divine Son are one. However, what Jesus accomplishes in rejecting Satan’s temptations—despite Satan’s urging that he use his superhuman powers—he accomplishes by human means alone. Meanwhile, as Satan endeavors to discover Jesus’ identity , he himself is involved in a separate quest of his own in which he defines himself as the Son’s adversary. No one to my knowledge has named Satan the hero of Paradise Regained, but in the brief epic Satan functions in a broad way as an agonistic figure to the Son, engaging the reader’s attention to a parallel and almost equal degree. The usual verdict on Satan in Milton’s later epic is that he is much diminished in almost every way from the Satan of Paradise Lost—a mere shadow of his former self—if we may even regard the two Satans as the same character. Thus, it is necessary to judge the later Satan by a different yardstick of interpretation, for in tempting the Son, he is moved by different motives and engages in a different type of temptation from that in Paradise Lost, where he is motivated both by envy and pride. At the Son’s elevation to kingship Satan is fraught With envy against the Son of God, that day Honor’d by his great Father, and proclaim’d Messiah King anointed, could not bear Through pride that sight. (PL 5.661–65) After his fall he is “full fraught with mischievous revenge” (PL 2.1054) and determines to tempt Adam and Eve.2 The Satan of Paradise Regained is spurred by different motives and aims. Although he was “with envy fraught and rage” (PR 1.38) upon witnessing Jesus proclaimed at his Satan in Paradise Regained 207 baptism as Son of God, he tempts Jesus basically through plain necessity and self-defense. Mindful of the prophecy that the seed of woman will bruise his head, Satan seeks to learn whether the child born of a virgin and proclaimed at his baptism Son of God is indeed that promised seed and whether he might somehow circumvent that prophecy by tempting Jesus to sin or by making him beholden to him and not God for the kingdom that he is prophesied to possess.3 Satan convenes a council of his followers, telling them that they must defend their kingdom against potential overthrow: And now too soon for us the circling hours This dreaded time have compast, wherein we Must bide the stroke of that long threat’n’d wound, At least if so we can, and by the head Broken be not intended all our power To be infring’d, our freedom and our being In this fair Empire won of Earth and Air. (PR 1.57–63) In some sense Satan seems, at least at the beginning, to have no personal animus against Jesus, only a practical need to bring him down in order to preserve himself and his own lordship over...