In Act 1 Samson defends himself to the Chorus: in twice marrying Philistian women, he was following inward “motions” from God. But in Act 2, speaking to his father, Manoa, he takes full responsibility for allowing those women to manipulate and betray him. His mood by the end of the second act is hopeless and near suicidal, and the Chorus, so confident in the first act that God’s ways were justifiable, is severely shaken and finds God’s ways baffling and disturbing.

Written at the age of 21 while on Christmas break from Cambridge, the Nativity Ode almost amounts to what Milton later called a “brief epic.” Its theme is “our great redemption from above,” the descent of a miraculous power down the vertical axis of being to our fallen world, redeeming in a moment of new Creation. But that moment of redemption is paradoxical—“now,” but “not yet.” And yet now—as there is a “paradise within,” there is a miraculous birth possible at every moment if we look with the inward eye of the spirit, which is to say the imagination.

Samson justifies his marriages to two Philistian women as commanded by God. Samson’s God is always an internal “motion,” never a projected supernatural figure. Echoing Paradise Lost, the Chorus says that God’s ways are justifiable—but not by reason. The case for a Trickster God, when reason and realism lead only to hopelessness and despair.

An emotionally intense drama of the mind, in which the blind and enslaved Samson confronts the failures of his life and questions the ways of God. Modeled on Classical tragedy, yet also with a hidden 5-act Shakespearean structure. Samson, originally a folktale Trickster rehabilitated into one of the Old Testament judges, is an unlikely-seeming choice for tragic hero. Samson’s opening soliloquy: the theme of despair. Despair at the self-caused ruin of Samson’s own life, including blindness. The play begins in literal and emotional darkness.

The third earthly kingdom, Athens, is the temptation of humanism and humanistic culture as a substitute for the spiritual vision of the Bible. The 3rd temptation, to stand on the pinnacle of the Temple, is the temptation to exercise one’s own will and draw upon one’s own power rather than trusting to the will of God. As with all the temptations in Paradise Regained, it is a temptation for all human beings, and the outcome is never assured. God intervenes and sustains Jesus here, but the second time Jesus is raised to a height, during the Crucifixion, it was God’s will that he go through with it and die a human death. Yet both outcomes regain paradise, though in the paradoxical sense, central to Christianity, that redemption has occurred but is also “not yet.” It is at once timeless and in time.

The suspense of Paradise Regained lies in the fact that Jesus is fully human and vulnerable.  The temptations are the temptations that every one of us faces in this world. The ultimate argument of Satan is that to survive in the world you must make a deal with the devil. You must compromise, and can only choose which temptation you will give in to—which will thereafter become your prison. The poem offers a hope that Satan is lying, that there is a way to win through. Jesus rejects, often with dry wit, the temptations of military power (Parthia), imperialism disguised as “higher civilization” (Rome), and Classical humanism as an end in itself (Athens).

Paradise Regained is a profound analysis of human nature, whether or not one is committed to its religious point of view. The enormously expanded second temptation comprises temptations of desire (2a) based on physical appetite rather than need: sex, food as sensuous luxury, riches. These are succeeded by the temptations of ambition (2b): glory and various forms of earthly kingdom, beginning with Parthia, the military kingdom, the kingdom of war, seen as necessary. The suggested need to “buy protection” from such a powerful empire.

In Milton’s interpretation, the first temptation is that of survival, of physical need. In the 2ndbook, he enormously expands the 2nd temptation into a full range of the temptations of desire, beginning with those desires that have a basis in physical appetite: sex, food, and riches. Jesus’s refusal is not mere ascetic refusal of pleasure. If he accepts Satan’s offers, he is then in Satan’s debt and Satan’s power. He also implicitly would accept the value system and lifestyle implied when such things become one’s first priority.

Milton’s Jesus is fully human and vulnerable: there are real stakes in the temptations. But that makes his temptations a model for us. Milton expands the temptations to include the full range of possible human temptation, beginning on the most basic level of physical survival, symbolized by the temptation to turn stones into bread—both for personal survival, but also to feed the hungry. “Man does not live by bread alone” sounds elitist, but is not. Jesus will go on to feed the hungry, but whatever you make your primary value becomes your God.

While not as famous as Paradise Lost, Milton’s Paradise Regained is not only comparable in artistic quality but continues the expansion of perspective that began in the last two books of Paradise Lost, from tragic fall to divine comedy. Milton’s theory of the “brief epic,” a form that has no Classical model. Paradise Regained is a recreation of the Temptation in the wilderness of Christ by Satan. It is the contest of the hero battling a serpent or monster—but deliteralized. This contest is a debate, a duel of words, the true Word against the lying words of Satan.