“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674the highly refined sensory delights of his pastoral retirement, Aristotle as the teacher
of a world conqueror, Socrates for his great influence on later schools, Homer for
the envy Apollo showed for his poem, Demosthenes for his ability to promote war
- degrading the learning Athens represents even judged by its own humanist lights.
Satan also seeks to undermine Jesus’s unique role as spiritual teacher by insisting on
the necessity of classical learning for the contemplative life he seems to favor, the
attainment of the inner kingship: “These rules will render thee a King compleat /
Within thy self” (4.283–4). He also insists that Christ’s prophetic and kingly offices
of teaching and ruling by persuasion require him to converse with and confute the
Gentiles in their own terms. Jesus, however, denies that the classical writers are
sources of true wisdom. Having no knowledge of the Creation, Fall, and redemp-
tion by grace, they are “Ignorant of themselves, of God much more” (4.310), though
he acknowledges, and he has himself quoted, their moral teachings, informed by
the light of nature. Since Jesus’s mission is to bring true wisdom into history he will
not accept their lower knowledge as in any way necessary, though he may possess
it: “Think not but that I know these things, or think / I know them not; not
therefore am I short / Of knowing what I aught: he who receives / Light from
above, from the fountain of light, / No other doctrine needs” (4.286–90). In this
repudiation, Milton’s Jesus reinforces for his church the position Milton defended
in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, that learning is not necessary to ministers,
who require only knowledge of scripture and the Spirit’s illumination. Jesus’s an-
swer (and Milton’s) does not repudiate learning as such, but flatly denies that it is
necessary to virtue, salvation, or the accomplishment of God’s work in the world.
Also, in Jesus’s refusal to value books above their users, we hear some echo of
Milton’s frequent disparagement of scholarly authorities, as he insisted on his own
originality and authorial parity with other writers and teachers:
However many books
Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettl’d still remains,
Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Children gathering pibles on the shore. (4.321–30)In the storm–tower sequence Jesus endures with patience the final test of the
kingdom within – violence – which foreshadows his Passion and death, the fulfillment
of his priestly office. The tower episode is contrived as the ultimate identity test:
Satan supposes that by placing Jesus on the pinnacle of the Temple he will save
himself by miracle if he is divine, while if he is merely human he will fall or else sin