ABSTRACT
When Paradise Lost ends, both Adam and Eve and the poem’s reader leave Eden behind to go into the fallen world-literally, for Adam and Eve, and figuratively for the reader. A fit reader will share in Adam and Eve’s feeling of hope. The promise of Christ’s victory to come provides a sense of light in dark days. In Paradise Regained, Milton presents a struggle between Satan and Jesus which typologically represents the triumph to come, the source of hope to believers in a world of tragedy. That struggle is not the military struggle Adam imagines at the end of Paradise Lost, but a struggle over faith and doubt as expressed through Biblical interpretation. Jesus undergoes trial in the wilderness, a trial which allows him to triumph through his superior skill at spiritual reading. And the poem challenges its readers to follow along in Jesus’ steps, and make their own attempt at the process of interpretation Jesus employs. The poem makes the effects of Jesus’ process of spiritual reading visible, while leaving readers to uncover that process for themselves by replicating it.
