Milton's students have lived, and fairly placidly on the whole, with the problems they have discerned in Paradise Regained or with feeble solutions in despite of the poet's plain instruction to read his work as, before all else, a parable for the church. If we bow to his authority we have only to explain centuries of critical silence; once delivered from the accepted interpretation of the poem as a manual of holy living, we shall no longer need to guess why John Milton, who eternally found his own habits blameless, should in a piece of pietism unique among his works, in a “quietistic, Quaker-like poem” denying his constant humanism, consign to the devil the chief blessings of this world, most of the arts that polish life, many of the goods that he had sought for himself, and, leaving himself without excuse, then invite his friends to regard the result as his finest work. His very pride in the brief epic must, for all its undeniable beauties, seem a little like a mother's love for a defective child unless he meant a little more than meets the careless ear, inasmuch as the most resolute exculpations have not entirely explained away the poem's “inhospitable bareness,” its generous portion of didactic tedium, and the dramatic failure of its static contest.
The temptations of politics: Jesus’ temptation and ours in John Milton’s Paradise Regained