Kairos in Paradise Regained: The Divine Plan

Abstract

The divine promise in Paradise Lost that in the fullness of time Christ would be sent to redeem mankind is also Milton's promise for the poem Paradise Regained: the son will be Made flesh, time shall be, of Virgin Seed. 1 Paradise Regained is based on the fact that the set amount of time has passed, and man's redemption can occur. In God's plan for the world, everything will occur at its proper moment, when time shall be. Such moments, designated for certain significant events, were called kairoi by the Greeks and the New Testament writers, the most famous biblical reference being John vii. 6: My time (kairos) is not yet come. Milton not only has Christ speak these same words to Satan, he interweaves the theme of kairos throughout the poem, mentioning a special kind of time more than twice as often as in Paradise Lost,2 and making it the cornerstone of Christ's rejections of the temptations. Satan's constant effort is to get Christ to act before his time or kairos, and thus pervert God's plan. An analysis of Milton's views of time and history explains his use of the concept of kairos. For a sense of ultimate meaning in history, men must believe that time has a direction, that it is going somewhere. The Greeks believed only in cyclicism, the recurrence of everything. The future would be like the past; therefore, no single event could have universal significance.3 The Hebrews had a different outlook. Because of their belief in creatio ex nihilo, they could conceive of a definite beginning, with a consequent end in the common image of a line of time. They saw history as an epiphany of God, and Christians adopted the same view. Under one God, revelation occurs only once and is not repeated in another cycle