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Milton's Stand Against Religious Conformity in Paradise Regained

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Heroic Deeds of Conscience: Milton’s Stand against Religious Conformity in Paradise Regained David R. Schmitt abstract Scholars have long debated how to interpret the closing temptation in Milton’s Paradise Regained. In this essay, David R. Schmitt argues that Milton uses the idiom of conscience in Paradise Regained to make an assault upon the political and persecutory imagination of the Restoration and, in the closing temptation, to transform Nonconformity into a heroic stance of faith. Situating the poem within Milton’s writings on toleration and the historical circumstances of Nonconformity, Schmitt argues that Milton not only defends conscientious liberty in his polemical engagement but also poetically embodies it in the Son of God’s final stand in Para- dise Regained. keywords: Milton on toleration; religion in the public sphere; conscientious deliberation; silence as protest; Of Civil Power; Of True Religion with the epic opening of Paradise Regained, Milton leads his readers into a paradox. On the one hand, Milton voices epic ambition, promising to sing of “deeds / Above Heroic” that will transform an “Eremite” into a warrior and the desert into his “Victorious Field / Against the Spiritual Foe.”1 On the other hand, as Barbara Lewalski has shown in her magisterial study, Milton frustrates any traditional epic expectations. In place of a battle and an active hero, Milton offers protracted verbal argument and a puzzlingly passive Son.2 The invocation promises “deeds” but the reader is offered words and, to make matters worse, the Son’s words throughout the poem renounce Satan’s proffered means for action in the world. The Son does nothing and yet this inactivity is supposed to be heroic. Milton’s opening promise of epic “deeds” and the 1. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), 1.9–17. References to Milton’s poetry are from this edition and cited in the text by book and line number, Paradise Regained as PR, and Paradise Lost as PL. 2. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained” (Providence, R.I., 1966), 102–10. See also Stuart Curran, “Paradise Regained: Implications of Epic,” Milton Studies 27 (1983): 209–24. Pp. 105–135. ©2013 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2013.76.1.105. huntington library quarterly | vol.76, no. 1 105 106 david r. schmitt Son’s ensuing inactivity create a paradoxical problem for readers and critics alike. What does one make of this active inactivity? Critical discussion has long labored over the radical passivity of the Son. Earlier critical studies tended to emphasize Milton’s disengagement with politics and po - lemics in the poem. The Son’s radical passivity, indeed, the poem’s inwardness and reli- gious interiority, signaled a Miltonic retreat from political action.3 This retreat was variously configured as a sober reflection on the past, marking the errors of the radical sects during the civil wars; as a temporary strategic withdrawal into quietism; or as a permanent disillusioned retreat from public political action into private spiritual con- cerns, the solace of “A paradise within” (PL 12.587). In each case, Paradise Regained was read as not actively participating in contemporary polemics but as standing oddly at a distance from the Restoration. Recent critical studies have concentrated on historiciz- ing Milton, reading Paradise Regained by contrast as Milton’s intentional poetic in - volvement in Restoration politics. These studies, however, disagree about precisely what issues Milton was engaging. Ironically, the Son’s heroic passivity invites critics to discern a constellation of Miltonic political and religious activities, ranging from voic- ing republican discourse in the Restoration,4 to redefining Royalist Restoration spec- tacles of punishment and celebration,5 to sanctioning Quaker religious experiences both persecutory and prophetic.6 These disparate readings of Paradise Regained, identifying it as intensely private or controversially public, reveal more than changing approaches in literary and histor- ical study. They actually reflect Milton’s poetic diction, for Milton chose the language of conscience as the central paradoxical idiom of Paradise Regained, and he did so with an intimate understanding of its religious and political implications. Far from being a Miltonic retreat from public controversy into private spirituality, Paradise Regained demonstrates Milton’s intentional use of private spirituality to engage in public reli- 3. For example, see W. Menzies, “Milton: The Last Poems,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 24 (1938): 80–113; E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1961), 295–312; Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden ([Toronto], 1965), 112–17; Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revo- lution (Totowa, N.J., 1981), 167–79; and more recently Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (Chicago, 1988), 231–82, esp. 231–33 and 279–82; and Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge, 1990), 225–45. 4. See David Norbrook, “Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 122–48; and John Coffey, “Pacifist, Quietist, or Patient Militant? John Milton and the Restoration,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 149–74. 5. See Laura Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, Ohio, 1994), 13–41, 123–41; see also N. H. Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 86–105; and Stella P. Revard, “Charles, Christ, and the Icon of Kingship in Paradise Regain’d,” in Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence, ed. Peter E. Medine, John T. Shawcross, and David V. Urban (Pittsburgh, 2010), 215–39. 6. For example, see David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contempo- raries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001), 242–68; Steven Marx, “The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers,” SEL 32 (1992): 111–28; and Peggy Samuels, “Labor in the Chambers: Paradise Regained and the Discourse of Quiet,” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 153–76. standing fast as nonconformity 107 gious and political debate.7 In this regard, a number of critics have helpfully situated Paradise Regained within the trajectory of Milton’s polemical engagement in contro- versies over civil power and religious liberty.8 The plain-style prose arguments of Mil- ton’s contemporaneous tracts,9 the constellation of issues appearing in both those tracts and the poem, and the topicality of this work in relation to heightened public debate over toleration10 encourage such a reading. In light of such work, this essay ana- lyzes what has become a crux of the poem, the closing temptation on the pinnacle of the Temple. Briefly examining Milton’s polemical engagement in arguments over tol- eration reveals the rhetorical dexterity with which Milton uses the idiom of conscience in Paradise Regained to make an assault upon the political and religious persecutory imagination of the Restoration and, in the pinnacle scene, to offer a poetic and polemi- cally resonant justification of dissent. Milton’s Polemical Engagement Consider the rhetorical terms of Milton’s controversial engagement. In the polemical pamphlets surrounding debates about indulgence and toleration in the 1660s and early 1670s, what constituted true freedom in religious interiority and how its private practices related to the public religious community were at the center of debate.11 For 7. While tracking Milton’s use of an autobiographical voice, earlier fashioned in his prose polemics, to speak through the Son of God throughout Paradise Regained, Thomas Corns offers a closing penetrating glance at the subversive quality of the Son’s disputations with Satan, in “‘With Unaltered Brow’: Milton and the Son of God,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 119–20. 8. See Joan S. Bennet, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 161–202; Katsuhiro Engetsu, “The Publication of the King’s Privacy: Paradise Regained and Of True Religion in Restoration England,” in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Perry and Joad Raymond, Studies in Renaissance Literature 7 (Cambridge, 2002), 163–74; Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), 115–53; Stella Revard, “Milton and Classical Rome: The Political Context of Paradise Regained,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 18 (Binghamton, N.Y., 1982), 409–19; Gary D. Hamilton, “Paradise Regained and the Private Houses,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood, Medieval & Renais- sance Texts & Studies 126 (Binghamton, N.Y., 1995), 239–48; David Quint, “David’s Census: Milton’s Politics and Paradise Regained,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York, 1987), 128–47; Phillip J. Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge, 2009), 57–69, 188–200; and Sharon Achinstein, “Toleration in Milton’s Epics: A Chimera?,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford, 2007), 224–42. 9. John Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power and Considerations Touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church, ed. Robert W. Ayers, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. in 10 (New Haven, Conn., 1953–82), 7:239–72, 274–321; and, following the publication of Paradise Regained, John Milton, Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration, ed.
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