“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674by presumption if he casts himself down expecting divine rescue. But as he calmly
maintains the posture into which Satan has thrust him, his passion becomes an
active conquest over Satan: he is preserved by God and at the same time, it seems,
is granted a full awareness of his divine Sonship: “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he
said and stood. / But Satan smitten with amazement fell” (4.561–2). As Milton
presents it, these episodes have relevance for Puritan dissidents subjected to the
storms and tempests of royalist oppression and invited, like Jesus, to read their
plight as a portent of God’s displeasure and their coming destruction. But the bright
day that follows the storm and Satan’s fall from the tower invite a different reading:
as Christ’s resurrection followed his Passion and his victory on the tower foreshad-
ows his victory over Satan at the Last Day, so may those dissidents expect a better
day – and in due time a victory – if they endure their trials patiently, avoid precipi-
tous action, and develop their spiritual strength.
Jesus’s victory is celebrated with an angelic banquet and a long hymn of praise
that make explicit his identity with the Son in Heaven as the “True Image of the
Father” (2.596), and also foreshadow the Millennium. The hymn, like the Father’s
speech at the outset of the temptation, indicates by shifts in tense and perspective
that Jesus’s victory is now complete, but that it is also just beginning. He has “now
... aveng’d / Supplanted Adam” and “regain’d lost Paradise,” but he is about to
“begin to save mankind” (4.606–8, 634–5). Because Jesus now understands himself
and has been exercised in all the “rudiments” or root concerns of his great warfare,
he has already won the essential victory. But that victory must now be worked out
in history, as others respond to his teaching and are thereby enabled to become
virtuous and free. Only then will Christ’s Millennial Kingdom come.
Milton ends the poem quietly. Like Adam and Eve wandering forth to begin the
human history whose end Adam has foreseen, Jesus returns from the angelic cel-
ebration of the prophesied end to his human beginnings, to live out the history the
temptation episode foreshadowed: “hee unobserv’d / Home to his Mothers house
private return’d” (4.638–9).
The title page of Samson Agonistes terms it “A Dramatic Poem,” not a drama:
Milton did not suppose that it might be presented on the Restoration stage along-
side Dryden’s exotic tragedies. But as a written text it might still prove “doctrinal
and exemplary to a Nation,” the effect he had projected in the Reason of Church-
governement (1642) for a tragedy modeled on Sophocles, Euripides, and the Apoca-
lypse of St John (CPW I, 815). In a better society, he might imagine it serving as
one of the “wise and artfull recitations” in theaters which he proposed in that tract
as a means to entice citizens to virtue (819–20). Milton made large alterations in the
biblical story from Judges 13–16: stories of Samson the trickster who tied fiery
brands to foxes’ tails and set riddles for wedding guests are all but eliminated, as are
references to Samson’s marriage to the woman of Timna. Also, by changing Dalila
from a harlot to Samson’s wife, Milton grounds their relationship in marital love
and duty. Most important, Milton conflates the biblical strong man with Job and