Conspicuous Consumption

I read Paradise Lost for the first time a little while ago and enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy the yarns told about the Greek gods, so I thought I'd do a little background reading to see what I had missed. For reasons now obscure to me (the kindle edition was cheap? I liked the Narnia tales when I was of an age to do so?) I turned to C.S. Lewis, a writer who in his religiosity was sure to be uncongenial to me. In these lectures his thinking is indeed uncongenial to me, but not in a way that raised my hackles and made me want to refute it. It is simply that he is arguing from premises foreign to me about things that have little connection to the world in which I live. Too many of the things he focuses on seem like disputes about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a discussion that might be interesting if angels were, you know, real. But of course some of these things were real for Milton and his contemporaries, so perhaps they do need to be addressed. But still . . ...

  Like most contemporary non-believers, I've always found Greek mythology more alluring than Christian mythology. John Milton has helped me to see that the Christian stories make for just as good reading as the adventures of Zeus and company. Of course, as many have noted—whether or not this is what Milton intended, and whether or not Milton's contemporaries would have read the character this way—for a modern reader, Satan is the most sympathetic character. He's ambitious and a lover of liberty: he doesn't want to be under the thumb of an autocratic god-the-father, and makes a valiant attempt to get out from under that thumb. It's hard, at least nowadays, to fault him for that. The main reason, though, that Milton's Satan is so attractive is that he is the most richly drawn of all the characters, and this depth makes him fascinating in ways the other characters are not. Adam and Eve, for example, seem of little account, mere pawns (for all the big guy's clai...