“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674The tree seems to refer to the power of his spiritual kingdom to transform all the
earth; the stone refers to his Millennial Kingdom which will crush all earthly mon-
archies and their evils, according to the usual exegesis of the prophecy in Daniel
2:44. But Jesus refuses to say when or how his Millennial Kingdom will come,
intimating that it will come when people are prepared for it, by internalizing and
enacting in history the virtue and love of liberty his gospel promotes. At this point
a sharp exchange between Jesus and Satan uncovers the unstated condition of these
offers: worship of Satan, which is involved whenever any of these worldly goods
are made into idols. In some ways this near-last poem reprises Milton’s first major
poem, the Nativity Ode: in both the casting out of idols is the necessary precondi-
tion for the establishment of Christ’s kingdom in this world.
Milton then contrives a still more striking climax. Satan presents Athens, the
zenith of classical learning, poetry, and oratory, as the fount of the nonmaterial
goods Jesus needs to achieve his own defined goals, though, significantly, he does
not claim that learning is in his gift. The evocative description of pastoral delights in
the “Olive Grove of Academe” recalls those delightful scenes of retired study in
idyllic pastoral surroundings that the young Milton praised in Il Penseroso, Prolusion
VII, and Lycidas:^122
See there the Olive Grove of Academe,
Plato’s retirement, where the Attic Bird
Trills her thick-warbl’d notes the summer long,
There flowrie hill Hymettus with the sound
Of Bees industrious murmur oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rouls
His whispering stream. (4.244–50)The beauty of the passage indicates the continued atttraction of retired study for
Milton, but his hero (like Milton himself) resists that lure to continue his active
work in the world. The harshness of Jesus’s responses seems to reveal Milton’s
deep-seated anxieties around the issue of learning, for they apparently repudiate the
classical learning that has been so important to Milton throughout his life. Classical
philosophy is “false, or little else but dreams, / Conjectures, fancies, built on noth-
ing firm” (4.291–2). The Hebrew poets are far superior to classical poets, who sing
“The vices of thir Deities, and thir own” (4.340) and, once their “swelling Epithetes”
are removed, are “Thin sown with aught of profit or delight” (4.343–5). And the
Greek orators are far inferior to the Hebrew prophets in teaching “The solid rules
of Civil Government” (4.358).
But Jesus recognizes that Satan’s version of learning is tainted, and Milton chal-
lenges his readers to make similar discriminations. Satan is here an arch-Sophist,
proposing universal knowledge not as a way to truth but as a means to power,
glory, and pleasure: “As thy Empire must extend, / So let extend thy mind o’er all
the world”; “Be famous... / By wisdom” (4.221–3). Satan praises Plato chiefly for