“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674prophetic vision in which the hero, instead of viewing his own destined kingdom as
Aeneas does, sees and rejects all the kingdoms that are not his. There is an epic
catalogue of the kingdoms of the World displayed to Jesus; a martial pageant of the
Parthian warriors; and a few striking epic similes in Book Four, in which Jesus
assaulted by Satan is compared to a winepress vainly attacked by buzzing bees, to a
solid rock against which waves ineffectually beat, to Hercules conquering Antaeus,
and to Oedipus overthrowing the Sphinx. Milton sets up the Jobean “brief epic”
frame at the outset, as Satan in the character of “Adversary” wandering to and fro
upon the earth comes upon another assembly, Christ’s baptism, at which a superla-
tive hero is exalted by God as his champion.^110 Like Paradise Lost this poem also
incorporates other genres into the epic frame: continuous dialogue in which Satan’s
inflated epic rhetoric is met by Jesus’s spare answers; a pastoral grove where Satan
presents a sensuous banquet and also the more refined and enchanting “Olive Grove
of Academe”; a romance topos in which Jesus reprises the conventional situation of
a young knight who meets his first tests in the wilderness before being recognized as
champion or king; and angelic hymns at the beginning and end of the temptation
sequence. But this poem eschews the soaring, eloquent style of Paradise Lost for one
appropriate to this subject: more restrained, dialogic, and tense with the parry and
thrust of intellectual exchange.
Milton’s Arianism is central to this poem, allowing for some drama in the de-
bate–duel between Jesus and Satan even though the reader knows that Jesus will
not fall. In Paradise Lost Milton portrayed the Son in heaven as mutable and as
sharing only such part of the divine knowledge and power as God devolved upon
him at certain times. Here he portrays the incarnate Christ in accordance with De
Doctrina Christiana’s treatment of kenosis as a real emptying out of the divine knowl-
edge and power the Son exercised in heaven, so that he is “liable to sin” and subject
to death in both natures (CPW VI, 438–40). The poem opens with Jesus in that
situation: God describes him to the angels in almost Socinian terms: they now and
men hereafter are to learn from the temptation episode “From what consummate
vertue I have chose / This perfect Man, by merit call’d my Son, / To earn Salvation
for the Sons of men” (1.165–7). Then, as Jesus withstands the several temptations,
he gains, apparently by divine illumination, an ever more complete understanding
of who he is and what he is to do.
The question of identity is the primary focus for the poem’s tension, centering on
the title “Son of God” bestowed in a special way upon Jesus at his baptism. As Satan
later remarks, that title “bears no single sence.” Revealing some feelings of sibling
rivalry with Jesus, Satan declares, “The Son of God I also am, or was, / And if I was,
I am; relation stands; / All men are Sons of God,” and then indicates that one purpose
of his temptations is to discover “In what degree or meaning thou art call’d / The
Son of God” (4.514–20). In his first council a puzzled Satan recognizes that Jesus
shows some glimpses of his Father’s glory, but he cannot imagine that this humble
man is one with the Son in Heaven: “His first-begot we know, and sore have felt, /