SOURCE: "Milton's Hero," in Review of English Studies, Vol. IV, No. XVI, October, 1953, pp. 317-30.

In the following essay, Kermode examines the depiction of Christ in Paradise Regained, establishing Christian heroic virtue as distinct from pagan.

The heroic poem, said Davenant, should "exhibit a venerable and amiable image of heroic vertue"; this virtue, he considered, had best be Christian. Cowley, choosing a Christian hero, concurred, and Milton, dealing as usual with the substance and not the shadow, made Jesus his exemplary hero. From the virtue of the angry Achilles, even from that of the dedicated Aeneas, to that of Christ, is a long step, but recent scholarship has shown how the magnanimity of the Aristotelian prescription had been Christianized, so that "the extinction of appetite by reason," could be an heroic agony, and Milton's Christ could debel Satan and appetite not by acting but by suffering. My purpose...