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An Aesthetic for a New Ascetic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2022
Paradise Regained, which opens with an “eremite” (I.10) and ends at home, examines different recurring response to the conditions of modernity: how some people attempt a retreat from the world. By expanding on the Temptation of Jesus (the Son of God in Paradise Regained) by Satan, a set of stories told in the Gospels of Matthew (4:1-11), Mark (1:12-13), and Luke (4:1-13), Milton’s Paradise Regained revises the Temptation in the Desert, casting the world as a series of temptations to be avoided, just four years after Paradise Lost narrates giving into temptation as a felix culpa. To generations of readers, “retreat” comes freighted with political or military connotations that can unfortunately lead the contextual scholar back to the Restoration, i.e., with Milton in retreat from the Stuart monarchy. Paradise Regained proposes a spiritual domestic retreat, and one in which the particular government is irrelevant.
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