Milton’s Paradise Regained and Post-Miracle Protestantism
Quinn Waller
The Protestant Reformation saw an overwhelming shift in doctrinal attitudes toward miracles and the supernatural. Consumed with purging their faith of contaminating remnants of Catholicism, Protestant theologians and politicians strongly reasserted the boundary between religion and magic that they felt had been blurred in the days of the medieval church. In this process of separation, miracles were believed to have ceased and religion became more of an internalized belief system than an external set of practices. Occurrences that at first glance seemed miraculous or supernatural were at best the misinterpretation of natural events by limited human minds, most often deceptions by the papacy intent on misleading the laity for profit, and at worst evidence of the Devil’s ruinous temptation at work in the human world. Scholars generally accept that the Reformation disavowal of miracles led to the desacralization and the demystification of the world, especially in the intellectually elevated sphere of theologians and politicians.
This rejection of the supernatural is clearly evident in John Milton’s Paradise Regained, most notably in the association of Satan with magical events and in Jesus’ refusal to miraculously channel God’s power. However, more recent scholarship, most notably published by Alexandra Walsham, has suggested that the Protestant disavowal of miracles had a more marginal effect upon the desacralization of the world than previous scholars had argued, and indeed that supernatural elements were still at play in Reformation and post-Reformation England, both on the level of popular culture and amid Protestant theology. Protestantism’s assault on the sanctity of rituals, the role of the church as the intermediary between the individual and God, and the prevalence of miracles coexisted with an emphatic insistence that both godly and demonic forces were at work in the world. Paradise Regained’s treatment of the supernatural and attitude toward the doctrine of providence serve as a petri dish within which the dynamic tension of seemingly incongruous attitudes toward the supernatural in post-Reformation England can be examined, and ultimately reflect the ongoing “magical” presence of God in a post-miracle world.
The Protestant party line toward miracles held that they had long since ceased. Though miracles did occur during biblical times, Protestants believed, God generally did not intervene in human affairs in modern times. Alexandra Walsham, in her essay “Miracles in Post-Reformation England,” describes how Protestants viewed these old miracles as “the swaddling bands of the primitive church, the mother’s milk on which it had been initially weened,” and asserts that once Christianity became established and the Gospel canonized, Protestants believed “[God] expected [the people] to believe the truth as preached and revealed in scripture, rather than wait for astonishing visual spectacles to be sent down from heaven” (Walsham, “Miracles” 273-274). No longer did God intervene in human affairs, and any papal claim to be able to manipulate God’s grace was false. God is not a servant of humanity, bound, as a genie in a lamp, to perform wonders after the correct ritual supplication, Protestants argued. Such a relationship between God and humans seemed to Protestants to be an ignorant holdover from pagan and early Christian times. In what they considered to be a modern era, it seemed inconceivable to Protestants that miracles would occur.
By precluding the existence of miracles from their society as irrelevant in a modern context, Protestants were able to summarily dismiss reports of miracles as instances of Catholic deceit, without going to the trouble of proving how each individual report of a miracle was a fallacy (Walsham, “Miracles” 278). Since God didn’t perform miracles anymore, there had to be some other explanation for the origin of supernatural-seeming events. Indeed, Protestants considered these “miracles” as possessing Satanic origins, either through the devil acting directly in the world or through Catholic agents (Walsham, “Miracles” 278). These weren’t miracles at all, but merely optical illusions produced by a master of deception in a never-ending crusade of temptation. Since neither the devil nor man, nor anybody but God could actually produce miracles (and since God no longer performed such feats), any events that appeared to be miraculous were merely counterfeit marvels. However, Protestants were reluctant to deny the possibility of a modern miracle, since to do so would place limitations on the power of a supposedly omnipotent God.
Nevertheless, Protestant theologians viewed Catholic ritual as fraught with dangerously magical implications and endeavored to present Protestantism as separate from the muddied waters of the medieval church. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic investigates this trend, finding that Protestants viewed Catholic rituals that purported to somehow channel God’s power as nothing less than necromancy, “a spurious attribution of effective virtue to the mere enunciation of words, a hopeless attempt to endow objects with a power and a strength exceeding their natural qualities,” separating themselves from a magic they believed to be no more than coercive ritual (Thomas 59). Protestants thus denied the magic of opus operandum, that the church had the power to act as an instrument to channel or manipulate God’s grace for earthly purposes. This claim smacked of papal corruption to Protestants, who believed that God was not available at earthly beck and call, and that any claim otherwise revealed malicious intent to delude the laity for papal gain or profit. Above all, Protestantism stressed the importance of the direct relationship between the individual and God, without the church acting as an intermediary.
Throughout Paradise Regained, Milton’s Satan clearly reflects these Protestant attitudes toward miracles, tempting Jesus during his sojourn in the desert with miraculously conjured feasts and visions. When Jesus first encounters Satan, disguised as an old shepherd, Satan expresses surprise that Jesus was so far removed from civilization and implies that, with such arid conditions, the only way for Jesus to be brought out of the desert is by miracle. Already, Milton situates the word “miracle” within Satan’s mouth, bestowing a negative connotation upon the word. With such impossible living conditions, and with Jesus’ power as the Son of God, Satan urges him to turn stones to bread, “so shalt thou save thyself and us relieve with food, whereof we wretched seldom taste,” thus urging Jesus to channel God’s power to intervene to save himself and kindly provide a treat for a desert dweller who so rarely encounters real food (Milton 1.344-345). But Jesus catches on to this “old man’s” identity, discerning that “thee other than thou seem’st,” reminds him that both Moses and Elijah went without food for 40 days in the desert, and questions why Satan would urge him to distrust God’s ability to sustain him. This rebuke echoes Protestant rhetoric: why would one need to channel the power of an omnipotent God? Surely such an omnipotent presence would already provide all that is needed, resulting in no need for divine intervention.
Satan further demonstrates his supernatural prowess in Book II when, presumably deciding that a simple loaf of bread wouldn’t be enough to tempt the son of God, he conjures a decadent feast in an oasis, attended by demons disguised as fair youths from classical legends. These classical figures hint at Milton’s ire toward figures of non-Christian divinity, as these characters thought to be gods or god-adjacent in their times are reconjured by the devil, referred to as “Spirits of the air, and woods, and springs” (Milton 2.374). No longer is there any pretext of channeling God’s power to create a miracle—this supernatural power springs solely from Satan. Satan produces this feast using only his own magic, bolstering the idea that such miracles derive from corrupt sources. This echoes Protestant beliefs that miracles purported to occur in the post-biblical era were not instances of divine presence intervening in the lives of humans, but rather instances of deceit, fallaciously propagated by those agents of hell, the Catholic clergy.
Jesus easily rejects these offerings, and rejects the glory of the spirit attendants, saying that if he wanted to be served, he could “call swift flights of angels ministrant arrayed in glory on my cup to attend” (Milton 2.384-385). He wants nothing to do with the supposed glory of the divinities of yore, with “nymphs of Diana’s train” or naiads or “ladies of the Hesperides,” even if they do appear “fairer than feigned of old” (Milton 2.355-358), preferring instead figures of God. Jesus’ hunch proves correct when the feast-laden table vanishes and he can hear the sound of harpies’ wings flying away, signaling that the beauty of the spirit attendants was but a façade concealing their true hideous nature. The decadence and classical allusions of Satan’s feast parallel the opulence of Catholic ritual and Latin liturgy, yet another instance of Milton’s Protestant disdain for Catholicism.
Protestants no longer felt God’s presence in their lives through miracles, and thus needed a way to find intimacy with God to fill this spiritual void. They did so by interiorizing the relationship between God and humans, turning religion from externalized ritual supplication to an internalized set of dogmas through which humanity could rationally and intellectually experience divinity (Thomas 48). Rational adults, Protestant propagandists argued, should not need spectacle and visual wonders to maintain their faith, and should instead adhere to the doctrine of sola scriptura, the idea that the Gospel is all that is needed to anchor belief. In arguing this, Protestants resituated the relationship between the individual and God to the interior—God was not externally accessed through ritual, but rather through contemplative scripture reading and prayer. Protestant propagandists attempted to align themselves with forces of enlightenment and knowledge, positioning Protestantism as accessible liberation from the superstitions of the medieval church that the clergy had used to glaze the eyes of an ignorant laity (Walsham, “Miracles” 278).
These propagandists consistently drew rhetorical parallels between miracles and food fed to infants, “seeking to associate their religion with adulthood and maturity” (Walsham, “Miracles” 278). This idea of intellectualized religion took such great hold that by the end of the Reformation, some Protestant thinkers ceased to believe even in the supernatural origin of biblical miracles. For example, an anonymous tract published in 1683 and entitled Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature argued that, as titled, there had never been a miracle that went against the laws of nature (Thomas 52). Other thinkers like botanist Nehemiah Grew denied that any miracle had supernatural causes, and astronomer Edmond Halley (of Halley’s comet) argued that the great flood recounted in the story of Noah’s ark could be explained scientifically (Thomas, “Providence”).
Though not advancing quite so far into the realm of scientific explanation, Paradise Regained nevertheless betrays the influence of the rise of rationality and the interiorization of religion. The very form of the brief epic could be taken as proof of this influence—Milton presents Jesus’ wilderness temptation as a “three-day verbal battle,”rather than a battle of power or magic. Jesus consistently defeats Satan’s attempts at temptation through coolly reasoned verbal rebuttals, using his knowledge of God to rebuff Satan’s specious arguments. Milton explicitly addresses this as the narrator describes “victory and triumph to the Son of God now ent’ring his great duel, not of arms, but to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles” (Milton 1.173-175). Furthermore, when Jesus first enters the desert, Milton is sure to emphasize the interiority of Jesus’ meditations, describing how the Son of God “one day walked forth alone, the Spirit leading, and his deep thoughts, the better to converse with solitude, till far from track of men, thought following thought […], he entered now the bordering desert” with the intent of pondering the “multitude of thoughts awakened in me, while I consider what from within I feel myself” (emphasis mine) (Milton 1.189-192, 196-199). Milton thus frames Jesus’ endeavor to understand what God wants of him as one of interior meditation, the answer already within Jesus, waiting to be uncovered through logical reasoning, rather than an attempt to solicit God’s direct advice.
This internalized conception of religion also found expression through the Protestant doctrine of providence. Darren Oldridge provides a useful explanation of this concept in The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England: “[The doctrine of providence] held that the divine hand not only guided all earthly and supernatural events but also did so for the benefit of the Lord’s servants” (Oldridge 15). Every daily occurrence purported to reflect a larger omnipotently devised plan. Therefore, people who misfortune had befallen turned within to discover the cause of their hardship. The stricken believer “was therefore to search himself in order to discover the moral defect which had produced God’s wrath, or to eliminate the complacency which had led the Almighty to try him” (Thomas 96). The doctrine of providence reflects that all-too-human predilection toward imposing order upon chaos. Rather than accept the terrifying notion of a deus absoconditus, providence maintained the idea of a governed, structured world, one in which, in the long run, virtue and vice receive their recompense in turn.
Notably, the mysticism of the doctrine of providence betrays the ongoing presence of supernatural thought within Protestant dogma, often ignored or bypassed by scholars. Traditional scholarship, greatly influenced by Max Weber’s thesis on the disenchantment of the world in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tends to maintain that the Protestant rejection of miracles and the supernatural caused a movement toward rationality that prompted the beginning of the Enlightenment and the desacralization of the world (Walsham, “The Reformation” 498). However, Walsham considers this thesis to be too simplistic of an understanding of Protestant attitudes toward the supernatural. Building on Bob Scribner’s thesis that the Protestant Reformation “modified and curtailed, rather than wholly rejected, the traditional ‘economy of the sacred,’” playing more of a marginal role in the process of desacralization (Walsham, “The Reformation” 500), Walsham argues that, critically oppositional to accepted scholarship, “Protestantism, in no sense, rejected the notion that the sacred could intervene in the world” (Walsham, “The Reformation” 508). She finds proof of this claim in the prevalence of the doctrine of providence. Protestants believed since God’s divine omnipotence was reflected in daily occurrences, everything that happened was part of a larger plan. As Thomas posits, “the course of worldly events could thus be seen as the working-out of God’s judgments” (Thomas 103). Every single daily event was thought to be divinely caused. The world was not a meaningless procession of random events, but rather each day was a reflection of God’s presence and omnipotence. Thus, the world was not devoid of the supernatural, but rather, wholly composed by it.
The importance of believing in providence is a central theme in Paradise Regained, reflected in comparisons and references to the biblical story of Job, the story of a man befallen with terrible misfortune at the hand of Satan (permitted by God), but who never loses faith. It is not a large leap at all to retroactively “discover” evidence of providence in this story—everything that happens to Job is sanctioned by God, and Job’s virtuosity and faith are eventually rewarded. Structurally, Milton follows the organization of the book of Job. The book of Job begins with a prologue in which God allows Satan, referred to as “the Adversary,” to tempt Job in order to prove his righteousness, followed by a dialogue between Job and his comforters, and ends with an epilogue in which everything Job lost is restored to him (Kahn 1). Similarly, Paradise Regained begins with a conversation between God and Gabriel, where God permits Satan, referred to as the Adversary (Milton 1.33), to tempt Jesus. This is followed by Jesus and Satan’s battle of wits, and concludes with Jesus returning to civilization, accompanied by an angelic choir (Kahn 1). Milton explicitly draws the reader’s attention to this parallel when God remarks to Gabriel that Satan “might have learnt less overweening, since he failed in Job, whose constant perseverance overcame whate’er his cruel malice could invent” (Milton 1.146-149).
Milton applies this doctrine in practice through Jesus’ trust in God–his refusal to accept the political power necessary to liberate his people from oppression illustrates his true belief in God’s divine plan. When Satan offers Jesus the opportunity to provide counsel to the great monarchs of the world, gaining glorious esteem in the process, Jesus rejects him, stating that the only “true glory and renown [is] 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” (Milton 3.60-64). Glory, then, isn’t something to be attained during our time on Earth, but is rather something that comes in heaven as a result of our actions, a belief which echoes the Protestant reassurance that “the hardships of this life would be made tolerable by the blessings of the next” (Thomas 90). When Satan later offers Jesus the ability to liberate Jews from their servitude, Jesus replies that “All things are best fulfilled in their due time, and time there is for all things, Truth hath said,” and that this would happen when “the Father in his purpose hath decreed, He in whose hand all times and seasons roll” alluding to a divine plan in which everything happens right on time (Milton 3.182-183, 186-187). Indeed, the suffering of the Jews was self-inflicted, Jesus argues, through their religious laxity, idol worship, and unrepentance, mirroring the Protestant teaching that hardship and disaster stem from “the moral delinquencies of the people” (Thomas 97). In Jesus’ worldview, suffering has its cause and virtue its reward, with all that happens in the world reflecting the wishes and plan of an omnipotent God.
Ultimately, although the Protestant Reformation attempted to separate itself from the supernatural elements of the medieval church and from the idea of the church’s ability to act as an intermediary between God and the individual, the slim possibility of miracles and the prevalence of supernatural elements providentially at work in the world did not disappear from the cultural lexicon. God was still very much present in the world through the doctrine of providence, and Protestants maintained that God still had the ability to create miracles, though such an event would be unlikely and unnecessary in a world where everything has already been divinely planned. They were reluctant to rule out the possibility of miracles, since this would be to “impose limits upon the prerogative of an omnipotent deity” (Walsham, “Miracles”).
Milton seems to speak to this too, in the climax of Paradise Regained. Throughout the brief epic, Jesus has been reluctant to use his powers and has repeatedly rebuffed Satan’s magical temptations. However, in the final scene, Satan places Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, where he challenges Jesus to stand upright, or fall and trust angels to catch him. Here, Milton subverts the reader’s expectations. Led by the earlier pattern of rebuttal to believe that Jesus will offer some clever workaround to avoid using his power for a miracle, readers are thus shocked when, as if fed up with Satan, Jesus replies “Also it is written, tempt not the Lord thy God” and stands upon the pointed roof of the temple, a feat that should be impossible (Milton 4.561). Finally, a miracle. Though Jesus has rejected overtly supernatural offerings throughout Paradise Regained, God is still actively present in the ongoing workings of Jesus’ world, and miracles are still, in a pinch, possible. The coexistence of God’s miraculous presence in post-miracle world, and the remaining potential for a miracle to still occur illustrates a dynamic theological tension in a society desperate to purge remnants of the past but unwilling to face the spiritual void that a complete disavowal of miracles and magic would produce.
Works Cited
Kahn, Victoria. “Job’s Complaint in ‘Paradise Regained.’” ELH, vol. 73, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 625-60.
Milton, John. “Paradise Regained.” Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Jason Philip Rosenblatt, New York, W.W. Norton, 2011.
Oldridge, Darren. The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England. London, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Thomas, Keith. “The Impact of the Reformation.” Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England, New ed., Penguin Global, 2012.
———. “Providence.” Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England, New ed., Penguin Global, 2012.
Walsham, Alexandra. “Miracles in Post-Reformation England.” Studies in Church History, vol. 41, 2005, pp. 273-306.
———. “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed.” The Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 2, 2008, pp. 497-528.