Between Law and Nature: The Similes of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes

Abstract: John Milton often relied on reason as a basis for uncoerced reform, but new kinds of rationality—particularly reason of state and modern natural law—increasingly posed problems in the later seventeenth century. These ethically minimal forms of rationalism structure the satanic temptations of Paradise Regained , and Jesus resists such temptations by turning to legal positivism, the position that norms derive not from rules' inherent rationality, but from their origin in preexisting authority. Positivism reaffirms ethical value in a naturalistic world, but it also potentially entails the worst features of rationalism: violence, determinism, and amorality. Paradise Regained thus ends by hinting that Jesus's response to Satan may fail fully to escape naturalism. In particular, the conflicted dialectic of naturalism and positivism explains the Antaeus and Sphinx similes, which readers have often seen as strangely out of place, and illuminates as well the perplexing similes at the end of Samson Agonistes .