The Work
Paradise Regained was published in 1671 by John Macock for John Starkey, bound together with Samson Agonistes in a single volume. It is 2,070 lines in four books - far shorter than Paradise Lost (10,565 lines in the 1667 edition, 12 books in the 1674 revision). Milton described it to his friend Thomas Ellwood as answering Ellwood's question about what happened after the expulsion from Paradise - implying that Paradise Regained is in some sense the deliberate sequel to Paradise Lost.
The poem presents a single episode: the temptation of Christ in the wilderness (Luke 4, Matthew 4), dramatized as a sustained intellectual and theological debate between Satan and Jesus. There is very little action; the poem is almost entirely dialogue. Jesus responds to Satan's three temptations - bread/self-provision, the kingdoms of the world, and the pinnacle of the Temple - with patient, measured refusals that Milton presents as the recovery of what Adam lost: the perfect obedience that would have been Adam's had he resisted the serpent's temptation in Eden.
Contemporary readers and Milton's contemporaries generally preferred Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained seemed austere, un-epic, lacking the grand spectacle of the earlier poem. Milton himself, however, reportedly regarded it as the better poem. Modern criticism has increasingly vindicated this judgment, recognizing the depth of its theological and political thought.
Biblical Engagement
Luke 4:1-13 is the primary text. Milton follows Luke's order of the temptations (bread, kingdoms, pinnacle) rather than Matthew's (bread, pinnacle, kingdoms), and he expands the dialogue far beyond the terse biblical exchange, developing extended speeches in which Satan offers increasingly sophisticated arguments and Jesus responds with increasingly penetrating refusals. Milton adds numerous temptations not explicit in the Gospel texts: the offer of Parthian and Roman empires, the offer of Athenian wisdom, the feast in the wilderness.
Matthew 4:11 ('Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him') marks the conclusion of the temptation in Matthew's account, and Milton dramatizes the angelic ministry as a kind of coronation: the angels celebrate the victory of the Second Adam with songs that summarize the poem's theological argument. This concluding hymn is one of Milton's finest passages.
Romans 5:19 ('For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous') provides the Pauline framework for the entire poem. The Second Adam's obedience in the wilderness is the counterpart and reversal of the First Adam's disobedience in the Garden. The 'one obedient act' of Christ in refusing Satan's temptations is the beginning of the redemptive process that Paradise Lost narrates as falling into calamity.
Author and Context
John Milton (1608-1674) wrote Paradise Regained in the period following the Restoration of Charles II (1660), when the Puritan cause in which he had invested his public life was definitively defeated. He had been blind since 1652 and was dictating his poetry to amanuenses. The political and theological context of the late poems - Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes - is the experience of defeat: the failure of the Puritan republic, the destruction of godly government, the apparent victory of the forces of tyranny.
In this context, the poem's insistence on 'inner heroism' - the heroism of patient endurance, of refusing the world's seductions, of finding victory in apparent defeat - has an obvious personal application. Jesus's refusal of the kingdoms of the world is Milton's meditation on the right response to the failure of the Puritan revolution.
Themes
The poem's central theological theme is the nature of heroism. The dominant literary tradition of the epic - from Homer through Virgil to the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Tasso - celebrated heroism in terms of military prowess, political power, and worldly glory. Milton challenges this entire tradition by presenting Jesus's heroism as the refusal of all these things. The poem is anti-epic: its hero wins by refusing to fight, achieves glory by refusing glory, gains power by refusing power.
Satan's temptations are carefully graduated from the material (bread, bodily need) through the political (the kingdoms of the world, imperial power) to the spiritual (the pinnacle, the test of divine protection). Each temptation is offered in a sophisticated form that requires genuine discernment to recognize and reject. Satan's offer of Athenian wisdom - the learning of Greece's philosophers and poets - is perhaps the poem's most interesting temptation, as it requires Jesus to evaluate and reject the very cultural tradition in which Milton himself was trained.
Jesus's response to this offer - 'However, many books, / Wise men have said, are wearisome' and his preference for the writings of Moses and the prophets over Greek philosophy - has been read as Milton's critique of humanist culture, though this reading is contested.
Reception
The poem was received with disappointment by readers who expected another Paradise Lost. Its austere, dialogic form and its lack of epic spectacle made it seem like a lesser work. Subsequent criticism, from the Romantic period through the twentieth century, gradually reassessed it as a different but equally significant achievement.
Legacy
The poem established a tradition of anti-heroic Christian epic - the epic of refusal and patient endurance - that influenced Blake's treatment of Jesus in The Everlasting Gospel and has connections to the Kierkegaardian tradition of the religious individual's resistance to the aesthetic and ethical stages of existence. Its treatment of the wilderness temptation has influenced countless homiletical and theological treatments of the three temptations as a model for spiritual warfare.