“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674When his fierce thunder drove us to the deep; / Who this is we must learn” (1.89–
91). Jesus’s meditation as he enters the desert shows that he also has no recollection of
his former state. He has learned what he knows of himself as the promised Messiah
from his mother’s testimony and from reading the Prophets: that his birth was mi-
raculous, that he is “King of Israel born” and will sit on David’s throne; and that he is
to work redemption for humankind through “many a hard assay even to the death”
(1.254–66). But he does not yet understand the full meaning of the prophetic meta-
phors, or of the divine Sonship proclaimed at his baptism, or just what his “God-like
office now mature” will entail (1.188). He is conscious of his limited human knowl-
edge, being led “to what intent / I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know,” but also
of the guidance and ongoing illumination of the Spirit: “For what concerns my
knowledge God reveals” (1.291–3). These uncertainties sometimes make for mo-
ments of emotional distress, as when the hungry Jesus experiences a hunger dream in
the desert and questions, “Where will this end” (2.245). Or when Satan “inly rack’t”
voices his psychic desperation to have it over with, even though it means his destruc-
tion: “I would be at the worst; worst is my Port, / My harbour and my ultimate
repose, / The end I would attain, my final good” (3.209–11).
In this poem Milton portrays a Satan who has degenerated from what he was in
Paradise Lost; evil has further coarsened his nature, though he is still cunning, even
brilliant. His advantage in the temptations is his direct observation of human mo-
tives and human weakness throughout history, which Jesus knows only through
wide reading. But more than compensating for that is the divine illumination Jesus
merits, leading him to understand the spiritual meaning of the scriptural metaphors
and prophecies which the literal-minded Satan cannot fathom. The poem’s action
turns on a central paradox: Satan appears to do all the acting, dancing around Jesus
in a fever of motion, trying one approach and one argument after another, while
Jesus remains impassive and unmoved. Yet it is in Jesus’s consciousness that real
change takes place, as he progresses by somewhat uneven stages to full understand-
ing, whereas Satan cannot resolve the puzzle about Jesus’s Sonship and mission
until his utter defeat and fall from the tower force realization upon him.
Milton creates epic scope in his brief epic by making the temptation episode
encapsulate past and future history through typological reference and allusion. God
sets these terms, describing Jesus to the angels as an “abler” Job and a second Adam
who will win “by Conquest what the first man lost / By fallacy surpriz’d,” and
build a new Eden (1.151–5). God also declares that he is to lay down in the wilder-
ness the “rudiments” (157) of his great warfare, epitomizing there the exercise of
his office throughout history. The debates between Jesus and Satan make continual
reference to commonly accepted Old Testament and classical figures of Jesus and
the functions of his office – Moses, Elijah, Gideon, David, Job, Socrates. To these,
Satan proposes counter-models – Balaam, Antipater, Caesar, Alexander, the schools
of Greek philosophy – or else insists that Jesus must conform himself exactly to his
types and thereby limit himself by the mandate of the past. Satan’s temptations