“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674four books, 2,070 blank-verse lines. Contemporary readers were no doubt sur-
prised, as some modern critics have been, by Milton’s choice of the temptation in
the wilderness as subject rather than the Passion–Crucifixion narrative, and with his
portrait of an austere, naysaying Jesus who discounts and refuses all worldly pleas-
ures and goods.^105 But this choice of subject follows naturally from Milton’s belief
that self-knowledge and self-rule are preconditions for any worthy public action in
the world. The temptation episode allows Milton to present Jesus’s moral and intel-
lectual trials as a higher epic heroism, as a model for right knowing and choosing,
and as a creative and liberating force in history. As a political gesture, it allowed him
to develop a model of nonviolent yet active and forceful resistance to the Restora-
tion church and state.^106 Also, this choice contests royalist representations of Charles
I’s trial and execution as a martyrdom imitative of Christ’s Passion and death by
presenting Jesus enacting the essential meaning of the term “martyr” – a witness to
the truth.^107 The unmoved Jesus standing firm against every temptation and trial
invites association, not with Charles the royal martyr, but with Puritan dissidents
subjected to harassment and persecution. The Jesus–Satan debates can also lead
readers to think rightly about kingship, prophecy, idolatry, millenarian zeal, the
proper uses of civil power, the place of secular learning, and the abuses of pleasure,
glory, and power. Significantly, the poem’s structure gives primary attention to the
Messiah’s kingdom and its relation to secular monarchies and their values, giving
over Books Two and Three, and much of Book Four, to that issue. Milton’s Jesus
is the projection of his author in a teaching role, as he undertakes,
By winning words to conquer willing hearts,
And make perswasion do the work of fear;
At least to try, and teach the erring Soul
Not wilfully mis-doing, but unware
Misled. (1.222–6)In the epic proposition and invocation the Miltonic Bard, who in Paradise Lost
had explored in four extended Proems his authorial anxieties, difficulties, and choices,
now adopts a curiously recessive and objective stance throughout. The opening
lines, the only time in the poem when he speaks of himself or invokes the inspiring
Spirit, are marked by an easy, confident tone:
I who e’re while the happy Garden sung,
By one mans disobedience lost, now sing
Recover’d Paradise to all mankind,
By one mans firm obedience fully tri’d
Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil’d
In all his wiles, defeated and repuls’t,
And Eden rais’d in the wast Wilderness.
Thou spirit who ledst this glorious Eremite