SOURCE: "Milton's Hero," in Review of English Studies, Vol. IV, No. XVI, October, 1953, pp. 317-30.

The heroic poem, said Davenant, should "exhibit a venerable and amiable image of heroic vertue"; this virtue, he considered, had best be Christian. Cowley, choosing a Christian hero, concurred, and Milton, dealing as usual with the substance and not the shadow, made Jesus his exemplary hero. From the virtue of the angry Achilles, even from that of the dedicated Aeneas, to that of Christ, is a long step, but recent scholarship has shown how the magnanimity of the Aristotelian prescription had been Christianized, so that "the extinction of appetite by reason," could be an heroic agony, and Milton's Christ could debel Satan and appetite not by acting but by suffering. My purpose here is not so much to develop these inquiries as to show that Paradise Regain'd contains within itself the reasons why its hero is as he is and not otherwise, and that Milton's thought was, on this deeply important subject, always and heroically consistent.

It is essential, to begin with, that we should not hesitate to accept Milton as a hero. He clearly aspired, in a remarkably unaffected way, to heroism, and thought it necessary to his day labour, "not presuming to sing high praises of heroick men … unlesse he have in himselfe the experience and the practice of all which is praiseworthy." This is not merely to say that Milton was in love with the breathed and exercised virtue of Guyon; that in his life and work he honoured the virtue which heroically rejects. He had in mind a more sharply defined heroic pattern. He cast himself as well as his Christ in this heroic mould; hence a degree of resemblance between them which has dangerously and unnecessarily been called identity. We know that from early days Milton called Christ "Most perfect Heroe"; what more does he say of his own heroism?

Like Adam, Milton was formed for contemplation and valour, not for either, but for both. He thought of his long secluded nonage as the formal period of preparation for the heroic life. The "degree of merriment" which, on Dr. Johnson's orders, we are to allow ourselves at the story of his return from Italy, need not obscure the fact that the long preparation was over; the hero went forth into the world. While he was still at Horton, Milton commented elaborately upon his long holding back from the world in the letter, written in 1632 and preserved in the Trinity MS., which ends with the sonnet on his twenty-third birthday. This letter, written perhaps to no one in particular, is a careful apology for his long seclusion, an apology perhaps the more necessary in that his long stay at Horton was only just beginning. His seclusion, he says, is not the result of an affected love of learning, "whereby a man cutts him self off from all action and becomes the most helplesse, pusilanimous & unweapon'd creature in the world, the most unable & unfit to doe that which all mortals aspire to." Rather is it the desire to be properly equipped for the great action when the time comes, "not taking thought of being late, so it give advantage to be more fit, for those that were latest lost nothing when the maister of the vineyard came to give each one his hire"; thus he excuses himself from the reproach that, having reached an age to obey Christ's command that all should "labour while yet there is light," he remains inactive. His is not the crime which preceded "the terrible seasing of him that hid the talent"; for he is preparing for the day when the talent matures.

Here Milton is conscious not only of the biblical loci, but also of the traditional Stoic positions on the life of retirement and the life of action. Apart from an orthodox defence of learning, he has a fairly open allusion to Seneca's De Tranquillitate Animi, with its debate between the philosopher and the young student Serenus, whose longing for glory disturbs his studies. The dialogue concerns the nature and purpose of different kinds of retirement. That Milton was thinking of this dialogue is confirmed by the sonnet "When I consider how my light is spent," written twenty years later. Its opening line is reminiscent of the sonnet "On his being arrived at the age of twenty-three"; it is as if Milton had refreshed his memory of the earlier poem and the letter of which it was a part. Christ commanded us to labour while there was light; but does he require our labour when there is no light? "There is," as Warton said, "a pun on the doctrine in the Gospel." But there is also a reference to the letter in which this parable was earlier quoted, and the later sonnet alludes also to the other parable, the parable of the one talent which is death to hide. Now Patience prevents the fond question "Can anything be asked of me in this hopeless plight?" by another amalgam of Seneca and Christian imagery in the sestet. This new seclusion of blindness is another retreat. What is recommended to the devotee of Virtue who is driven by Fortune from the active life? Not inertia; he is not useless. "Nunquam enim quamvis obscura virtus latet, sed mittit sua signa." His proper course is to serve still; for Milton to wait upon the Lord; for Seneca to champion the cause of Virtue…. And this is true no matter what gifts Fortune may have withdrawn….

Thus Milton, in two poems separated by twenty years, considers the pattern of heroic retirement, and seeks authority not only in the Scriptures but also in classical antiquity. The retreat at Horton, and the retreat of his blindness are alike considered in relation to a classical heroic scheme.

He grew up in the privacy of his own family, and till his age was quite mature and settled, which he also passed in private, was chiefly known for his attendance upon the purer worship, and for his integrity of life. He had cherished his confidence in God, he had nursed his great spirit in silence…. He was a soldier above all the most exercised in knowledge of himself; he had either destroyed, or reduced to his own control, all enemies within his own breast—vain hopes, fears, desires…. To evince his extraordinary, his little less than divine virtue, this mark will suffice; that there lived in him an energy, whether of spirit or genius, or of discipline established … by the rule of Christ and of sanctity.

The first two sentences could have been spoken of Christ, and the whole, with small change, of Milton himself, though the hero here celebrated is Cromwell,

Milton offers us a Cromwell on the model of the younger Scipio, though he has Christianized the model. And a little later in the Second Defence he speaks of Fairfax and how he unites "exemplary sanctity of life with the highest courage." "In your present secession, like that of Scipio Africanus of old at Liternaum, you hide yourself as much as possible from the public view. It is not the enemy alone you have conquered; you have conquered ambition, and what itself conquers the most excellent of mortals, you have conquered glory." So does Milton shape the Parliamentary generals by the pattern of Christian heroic virtue. Scipio, the model of ancient heroism, the true exemplar of the nice balance of active and contemplative, who understood the causes of retreat and was never less alone than when alone; Scipio has a key position in the pattern, whether the issue of heroism be conquest or 'the better fortitude Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom.'

Christian heroism may take either of these courses, though the latter is more Christ-like, "above Heroic." In Milton's tragedy Samson, Manoah, and the Chorus, in the course of their patient inquiry into the true significance of Samson's life, have to treat of this topic. The sham coderidden honour of Harapha is discomfited, and the Chorus comments upon his departure; heroism is comely and reviving, but the higher heroism is the active, which quells 'the mighty of the earth' "with plain Heroic magnitude of mind And celestial vigour arm'd." But the chorus supposes, ironically, that Samson is no longer to be thought of as an active hero:

But Samson is precisely the hero who debels the tyrant by plain heroic magnitude, having with Job-like patience endured suffering. The lesson of Samson becomes clear: God seems to desert his heroes, but does not. Virtue, the staple of heroism, is never allowed to die, but always rises from the ashes of suffering and acting heroes. This is the new acquist of true experience, that virtue is "vigorous most When most unactive deem'd." To the end Milton was preoccupied with the hero as the Christian electus, with the reconciliation of Christian and classical schemes of heroism, and the problem of why God apparently deserts his champion and allows him to be maimed and humiliated. Samson Agonistes is particularly concerned with the last of these issues, which is raised insistently by the accounts of the Old Testament heroes and also by Milton's own life. The Passion of Christ presents it in its most acute and terrible form. This accounts for that likeness which has been so often held against the poet.

To make his Christ unchallengeably exemplary Milton shaped Paradise Regain'd to contain a hero who complete and transcends the heroic data, not merely exemplary in his patience and heroic martyrdom, but gaining exemplary rewards, which transcend the rewards of pagan heroism—sensual satisfactions, glory, power, even secular knowledge.

The action of Paradise Regain'd concerns the primary heroic crisis, the emergence of the hero from seclusion. He is tempted; this is what Milton calls a "good temptation … whereby God tempts even the righteous for the purpose of exercising or manifesting their faith and patience, as in the case of Abraham and Job." This ordeal is necessary to the Redeemer. "For that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted." It is also necessary to Christ as Hero; he must be refined for a greater conquest, he must "lay down the rudiments of his great warfare" before the battle with Sin and Death.

Having established the situation of crisis, the poem looks back to the youth of Christ. It had been spent in learning. Like Cato, like Cromwell, Christ had been

Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,
What might be publick good.

"Therefore, above my years The Law of God I read," says Christ, perhaps, as Dunster suggests, with an allusion to the Aeneid—ante annos animumque gerens curamque virilem. He aspired to heroic acts, to rid Israel of the Roman yoke "till truth were freed"; the comely and reviving acts of the chosen hero of God. He is intended to carry out, in his own way, the prophecy of Anchises, "to teach the erring soul … the stubborn only to subdue." His mother has cautioned him against haste:

High are thy thoughts
O Son, but nourish them and let them soar
To what highth sacred vertue and true worth
Can raise them, though above example high.

And so "The time prefixt I waited", living "private, unactive, calm, contemplative" and addicted … To contemplation and profound dispute." Now, at the moment of emergence, he finds "all his great work to come before him set." The faithful cannot understand his departure into the wilderness, nor can his mother; he himself has a serene confidence in, but no rational understanding of, this vocation. But he knows, as they do not (though his mother hints at it) that his moment has come, as it came to Aeneas and Cato, to Cromwell and Milton.

So he goes forth, not like the pagan heroes to honour, but to "trouble." He goes not to act but to suffer, not to receive but to reject; to achieve "by Humiliation and strong Sufferance," and by his weakness to "o'ercome Satanic strength." He must resist the permitted strength of Satan as Job did; this is a different heroism from that of any pagan. The contrast between these heroisms is a leading theme of the poem, which resounds with the names of heroes who augment or illuminate by contrast the total and exemplary heroism of Christ.

The name of Scipio dominates the allusions to pagan heroism, and he is often present when not named. When Christ is led into loneliness,

But with such thoughts …
Lodg'd in his brest, as well might recommend
Such Solitude before choicest Society

Milton is referring us to the delicious solitude of Cicero's Scipio; so too when Christ is "Sole but with holiest meditations fed." As Scipio and Alexander rejected women, Belial need not expect Christ to fall to them. In the Third Book Satan flatters Christ; he is wise, he is capable of glory; but how shall he achieve it, sunk in his affection for the private life? Glory is "the flame of most erected spirits"; in failing to seek it, Christ lags behind some more timely happy spirits who had gone in quest of it—Alexander, Pompey, Machabeus, Scipio … But the answer is firm: Satan is himself the type of those insatiable for glory; and

If young African for fame
His wasted Country freed from Punic rage,
The deed becomes unprais'd, the man at least …

In fact Scipio had explicitly rejected this devil's idea of glory, and was free from the vulgar error which makes honour dependent upon reputation and the verdict of the mob. In no detail does Christ fall short of the model of ancient heroes.

In another place Christ compares himself with the heroes of the past—with "Quintus, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus"; those who accomplished great things in poverty, or by self-sacrifice. To rule oneself is better than to be a king, and, as Regulus showed, "to lay down Far more magnanimous, then to assume." This group of heroes is named, together with the Old Testament group—Jephtha, David, and Gideon, Heros rege major—in Christ's reply to the temptation of wealth, which is carried on entirely in these terms.

And what in me seems wanting, but that I
May also in this poverty as soon
Accomplish what they did, perhaps and more?

The virtues of these heroes are included in Christ. There are others, chiefly Job and Socrates, Christ's heathen type, "for truths sake suffering death unjust." Socrates had achieved what might be achieved by the light of nature; he was the hardest of the pagans to reject, but he did not know the truth as Christ and his successors knew it; and the new way of knowing it is the key to the heroism of humiliation. It was not available to Socrates and Scipio, and so no pagan equivalent of the true heroism will do, not even that which despises honour and gain, and drinks the cup of humiliation.

Satan professes his inability to understand how Christ proposes to be a hero. "What dost thou in this World?" he asks. The answer, we know, is suffer and reject. Satan's bewilderment, though feigned, is not uncongenial to us, however, for in dismissing the old hero Milton has dismissed the old rewards of heroism; and one consequence of the relative neglect of the poem is that the exact nature of the new rewards proposed for the new hero escapes the modern reader. Milton for excellent reasons describes them very obliquely; they are suggested by the very rewards they displace; they supersede the old rewards exactly as the new hero supersedes the old. I propose to examine this process of supersession as it occurs at four places in the poem: the banquet, the debate upon honour, the rejection of Rome, and the rejection of Athens.

There has been some debate as to why Milton, having recorded in the First Book the temptation of the stone, proceeds to an account of Satan's illusory banquet; a device which appears to repeat the initial appeal to Christ's hunger. The reason is that the first temptation is canonical, the second a quasi-allegorical development of it which is essential to the structure of the poem. Milton follows the hint in St. Matthew, who alone speaks of the angels ministering to Jesus after the temptations. This ministration, it is natural to assume, was partly of food; and Milton balances this celestial banquet with a banquet of sense, which Jesus rejects so that he may attain to the higher angelicbanquet. There is a suggestion of this scheme in Giles Fletcher's Christs Victorie on Earth. In both poems Satan offers Christ a banquet of sense. We are perhaps most familiar with this expression from Chapman's poem, which describes a systematic assault on the senses of the erotic Ovid; each sense in turn is elaborately described. Ultimately the banquet of sense is the antitype of the celestial banquet of the Symposium as Ficino explained it. The theme occurs with rich suggestiveness in Timon of Athens—the banquet having satisfied all the senses save sight, Cupid brings in a masque for its benefit:

This banquet is associated with Timon's self-deception on the issues of honour, friendship, nature, and so forth. The obscurer banquet in The Tempest concerns the depravity of Antonio and his friends. Milton uses a banquet to enforce the sensual arguments of Comus in his Masque. Now, in Paradise Regain 'd, Satan appeals to the sight with the beautiful youths and nymphs, to the smell with "the wine That fragrant smell diffus'd"; to the ear—"Harmonious Airs were heard Of chiming strings, or charming pipes"; and then he completes the tale with taste and touch:

No interdict
Defends the touching of these viands pure,
Thir taste no knowledge works, at least of evil….

The sensual impact proceeds from the highest, "the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense," to the lowest, touch and taste.

The adverbs describing the tone of Christ's responses to the temptations of Satan are always significant. At this point he replies "temperately." Temperance is not so appropriate to his continued fast as to his rejection of sensuality as it is summed up in the banquet. Christ says that he may have at will a celestial banquet,

And call swift flights of Angels ministrant
Array'd in Glory on my cup to attend.

At the end of the poem he has his proper reward:

A table of Celestial Food, Divine,
Ambrosial, Fruits fetcht from the tree of life,
And from the fount of life Ambrosial drink.

In place of the sensual banquet, the material gratifications of the conqueror, he has a celestial banquet, a banquet of love and of heavenly glory.

I have already, in speaking of Scipio's function in the poem, alluded to Christ's rejection of honour, and I need not dwell long upon it here. Christ, like Milton, distinguishes between honour which depends on opinion—insipientium opinio—and honour more absolute, of which Cicero spoke as "amplitudinem animi et quasi quandam exaggerationem quam altissimam animi" which enables a man in conquering himself to conquer all things. This distinction is as old as Plato, and its most familiar exposition in English is the debate on honour between Hector and his brothers in Troilus and Cressida; Hector holds that true honour

Holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein 'tis precious of itself
As in the prizer.

This is the most explicit statement of one of Shakespeare's most insistent themes. Milton develops the idea in a predictable way; the honour which resides in reputation is the honour of the old hero, and it is subject to envious and calumniating time. With it go all temporal distinctions and rewards. But the Christian equivalent of honour is not appraised by the common breath, and certainly does not derive its life from that source. The truth and the rewards of honour are determined "by perfet witnes of all judging Jove." No Christian can be in doubt about the distinction.

Fame, I confess, I find more eagerly pursued by the heathen than by the Christians of these times. The immortality (as they thought) of their name was to them, as the immortality of the soul to us: a strong reason to persuade to worthiness. Their knowledge halted in the latter; so they rested in the first; which often made them sacrifice their lives to that which they esteemed above their lives, their fame. Christians know a thing beyond it: and that knowledge causes them to give but a secondary respect to fame; there being no reason why we should neglect that whereon all our future happiness depends, for that which is nothing but a name and empty air. Virtue were a kind of misery, if fame alone were all the garland that did crown her. Glory alone were a reward incompetent for the toils of industrious man. This follows him but on earth; in heaven is laid up a more noble, more essential recompense.

So the poet of "Lycidas" dismisses his fears; so, in the Horton letter and sonnet, he justifies his calling. So, to Satan's reproaches concerning his tardiness in the pursuit of fame, Jesus "calmly" replies:

For what is glory but the blaze of fame,
The peoples praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus'd,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, & well weigh'd, scarce worth the praise? …
This is true glory and renown, when God
Looking on the Earth, with approbation marks
The just man, and divulges him through Heaven
To all his Angels, who with true applause
Recount his praises; thus he did to Job….

In exchange for the glory which resides in the opinion of the rabble, the Christian hero receives that which is measured by the knowledge of God. Christ's conquest "unarm'd" is celebrated at the end of the poem by a choir of angels, singing "Heavenly Anthems of his victory."

In the Third Book Satan offers Jesus the military power of Parthia. Jesus is "unmov'd" in his rejection. The "cumbersome Luggage of war" is "argument Of human weakness rather then of strength." But immediately, at the opening of the Fourth Book, Satan returns to the argument of earthly power. Milton takes extraordinary measures to emphasize the desperation of Satan's case, for his return to the attack is signalled by three powerful formal similes which are all the more impressive in that the poem is so stripped of "ornament." The Tempter embarks on his great eulogy of Rome,

To this temptation Jesus also replies "unmov'd." Rome is degenerate and base, though "once just"; it conquered well, but governs ill; his own kingdom, when it comes, "shall be like a tree Spreading and overshadowing all the Earth, Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All Monarchies besides throughout the world."

It has recently been observed that Satan's eulogy of Rome is cast in the form of an encomium urbis. The prototype is the prophecy of Anchises in Aeneid, vi, but Milton may here be borrowing more directly from Claudian. On the Roman valuation, Rome was urbs aeterna, and the culmination of the Roman imperium was the great climax of history. When Satan showed Christ the vision of Rome he was offering him the sum of pre-Christian civilization; wealth, glory, military power. Now Christ has truly been shown "The kingdoms of the world in all their glory." But his kingdom is not of this world. Just as the sensual banquet and the earthly glory have their heavenly counterparts, so the civitas terrena is replaced by the civitas Dei. Christ could no more be in doubt about the true nature of the earthly city than was the Red Cross Knight when he had seen the true Jerusalem;

For this great Citie that does far surpas,
And this bright Angels towre quite dims that towre of glas.

St. Augustine tolerated the Roman imperium, but expected it to give way to the heavenly justice. The Romans had never made good their boast, parcere mbiectis, and their imperfect justice would be superseded by the civitas Dei. Milton repeats the charge against Rome; and the hero, in rejecting the earthly city makes certain of the heavenly, to which he alludes in the language of Daniel's prophecy of the stone and the tree. Since Rome stands for temporal power and glory, and, under Tiberius, for brutality and vicious sensuality, this is an inclusive temptation, and the unmoved rejection of it is the refusal of all the rewards possible to un-Christian heroism of the active sort. Dunster, who is usually acute, remarks that it provokes the crisis of recognition, the impudent requirement that Christ should "fall down, And worship" which provokes the retort, "plain thou nowappear'st That Evil one."

There remains one more temptation before the explicit challenge of the supernatural battle over Jerusalem. It seems the cruellest and most difficult of all; the sweetness of the tempter's suggestions, the uncompromising austerity of Christ's reply, are more than anything else responsible for the coldness with which this poem has always been received.

Satan, arguing somewhat too easily, contends that since Christ is not active he must be contemplative. He therefore tempts him with the learning of Greece

There follows the glorious encomium of Athens; most modern readers know very well that they are here if nowhere else of the devil's party. But Christ makes a "sage" reply. It disturbs us that Milton, who in the past had resoundingly acknowledged his love of Greek learning and philosophy, should write this calm rejection; but its consistency is undeniable. The light of nature is superseded by "Light from above, from the fountain of light"—it is characteristic of the situation that this line should itself be redolent of Platonism. The heroes of pagan contemplation are systematically rejected: Socrates because of the avowed and inevitable uncertainty of his knowledge, Plato, who "to fabling fell"—an objection to Plato which is, ultimately, Platonic—Sceptics, Epicureans, Stoics—these because they failed to understand the impossibility of virtue without grace. The lack of divine knowledge renders all Greek learning supererogatory.

It has been observed that the force of Christ's reply is not independent of classical allusion; in fact it seems to me to owe something to Seneca's Epistle lxxxviii, which treats of intemperate learning and the tenuous relationship of learning to virtue. There is a conventional element in the rejection of useless learning which was heard in English long before Milton; but Milton specializes in the Puritan manner, identifying useful learning with the Law, and dismissing, like St. Augustine who is throughout this passage not far from his mind, the dissensions of the gentile philosophers in favour of the concord of the canonical scriptures. The hero willingly forgoes Athens for Sinai, and Parnassus for Sion. The rejection of Greek poetry in favour of 'Sion's songs, to all true tasts excelling' echoes previous attempts in English to establish the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, and Milton himself had always given a notional credence to the doctrine. Here, as elsewhere, he applies the full weight of his humanism to the antihumanist cause. He himself was a hero, but not the exemplar of heroism.

Pagan learning, then, is to Christian learning as Socrates is to Christ; as Scipio is to Christ; as the earthly honour to the heavenly and the earthly city to the heavenly; as nature to grace. Milton's devotion to his theme is responsible for the cold, unrhetorical diction of the poem, from which he has banished "swelling Epithetes" and much that might recall the pagan epic. But he does not make such sacrifices "unmov'd"; and there is in this section of the poem a profound and moving turbulence.

The last temptation translates the conflict to the plane of violent action. Christ will not throw himself down from the pinnacle; it is Satan-Antaeus who must fall, with such consolation as he can derive from his at last certain knowledge of the nature of his antagonist. At this point the supernatural powers of Christ are asserted, at first simply in his standing inactive. Immediately he receives his supernatural rewards, heavenly glory, and the banquet of celestial love; the angels also affirm his divine nature, "light of light Conceiving," and his coming reign.

The whole poem, then, is concerned to establish the character of Christian heroic virtue as distinct from pagan, and to establish the heavenly nature of the rewards which supersede the earthly recompense of the old heroes.

This is certainly in accordance with the doctrines of Tasso in his Discorso della Virtù Heroica, et delia Charità. There we learn that heroic virtue includes all the other virtues in a nobler recension, but that pagan heroism and charity are only shadows of the Christian type; even Scipio's saving his father's life is only "ombra e figura della Christiana Charità, la quale nel nascimento di Christo cominciò, & in Christo hebbe la sua perfettione …." Heroic Virtue and Charity resemble each other in many ways, and both seek a reward of glory. But Charity is the greater; and it is Charity that inspires the Christian hero.

niun Heroe espose cosi lietamente la vita per la patria, come l'huom caritativo l'espone per Christo; e i Curtii, e i Decii, e i Marcelli, e gli altri famosi Romani, Barbari, e Greci, non possono in alcu[n]o modo a i Martiri di Christo, o a' Machabei esser' agguagliati.

This is, as M. Y. Hughes suggested, the background of the poem; but Paradise Regain'd is self-supporting, and thus far more complicated structurally than is usually supposed. Milton had a terrible appetite for essentials. He took no ready-made theodicy for Paradise Lost, no prefabricated hero for Paradise Regain'd. We learn, and we find the lesson hard, why Christ is the exemplary hero by watching him in the act of confuting or transcending all the known modes of heroism. We are taught the rewards of Christian heroism by a demonstration based on the superseded rewards of the old heroes. We are shown the difficult victory of a love superior to that expounded by Plato and his equal Xenophon. The "first and chiefest office" of this love is to die. When the struggle was over, Christ, like Socrates after his victory for love, "home to his Mothers house private return'd." The "heir of both worlds" had shown how the Christian hero must deserve his reward. "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life."