The temptations of Milton’s work are powerful. Rare is the reader who is not seduced, at least initially, by the power of Satan’s speeches in the first two books of Paradise Lost. Professional “Miltonists” may have moved beyond this reaction – or at least may claim to have done so – but other temptations abound. The famous reading of Stanley Fish, in Surprised by Sin, takes the idea of readerly temptation quite seriously, making it the backbone of a powerful interpretive paradigm that is still with us approximately forty years later. However, it is not the temptation to identify with “Sin” or with “Evil” that has long been most powerfully present in contemporary (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) Milton studies, but instead, the temptation to identify with Milton’s portrayals of the divine. From C. S. Lewis’s claim that “Many of those who say they dislike Milton’s God only mean that they dislike God,” to Dennis Danielson’s famous titular claim in Milton’s Good God (as well as his argument that the success of the poem and the success of its theodicy are in a direct relationship), Milton scholars have often been concerned to defend Milton’s literary character the Father with all of the energy of an actual defense of an actual deity in which they actually believe (or, at the very least, a deity in which they argue Milton actually believed). In short, Milton studies have long flirted with a curious kind of critical idolatry. In the terms of this odd critical veneration, Milton’s Father is God, or is at least Milton’s overt idea of God, and as such he had best be defended with all of the intellectual might a sympathetic critic can bring to bear.

Milton’s own works, however, contain eloquent refutations of this kind of equation between representation and that which is represented, especially at the level of the divine. Milton declares, in De Doctrina Christiana, that “God, as he really is, is far beyond man’s imagination, let alone his understanding” (CPW 6:133). If God is beyond imagination, let alone understanding, how can he be represented in literary form? The answer lies in Milton’s depiction of the human Jesus (more often referred to as the Son), in Paradise Regained.