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The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915) (publicdomainreview.org)
30 points by apollinaire on March 18, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



This is archive.org's reader and scan, even pulls it from their cdn. I'm surprised you can embed it completely unbranded.

Apparently the greyed background link at the bottom takes you to the official site but just in the theater view. So I still can't navigate out of it to actually see archive.org without inspecting the url.

I'm mixed on this. archive.org should probably have some branding or site navigable something somewhere, right? nobody has brought it up over at https://github.com/internetarchive/bookreader/ . archive.org is fantastic. I don't know how to suggest to them to surface their brand and the library project.


I once made a graphic to illustrate Dante’s universe to scale as best I could (the moon is 1px). Just a bit of fun, not a scholarly work. https://postimg.cc/YLfDrSvW


I wonder if the Marvel Overextended Universe could stretch to cover that?


Lucifer's more of a DC property than a Marvel one. Marvel's got a lot of Devils but generally they've all been shown one way or another to not be the 'real' Lucifer, while DC had a long-running series about an explicitly Abrahamic Lucifer (which was loosely adapted into the TV series of the same title).


> And yet, how better to approach his Paradise Lost (1667), which takes Satan (barely mentioned in the Bible)


You may want to re-read Job. Satan's not a name, it's a job title.


Thanks. In the Hebrew version of the Old Testament, there were 10 locations with the word "Satan". Six of those refered to humans. The other four instances were for other servants of God. My point is that the word Satan is not what people today, after translations and various interpretations, take it to mean.


Yes. Satan originates from pre-Islamic Arabia, they were spirits that led one astray or blocked ones path. I think the interpretation doesn’t always need to be nefarious, either.


But Revelation 12 says (the) Satan is one and the same as the devil and “that old serpent” (presumably the serpent in the garden). It’s possible of course that various beings had taken on the role, and the devil was just one of them


> presumably the serpent in the garden

That association never made sense to me. In Genesis, it's pretty clear that we're talking about an actual serpent (which gets punished to crawl in the dirt for its part in the whole affair). Quote: Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made (Genesis 3:3, NIV)

Contrast to Revelation, eg He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. (Revelation 20:2, NIV). Looks like just a bit of flowery language to me, a paraphrasis of 'dragon', and not necessarily meant as reference to other serpents that make appearances in other biblical stories...


> In Genesis, it's pretty clear that we're talking about an actual serpent

I’m not sure it is clear. If we are talking about an actual serpent, it’s only in the sense that there’s a familiar “just so”-type story which provides the framework for a cosmic, theological story overlayed on top of it (“how the serpent lost his legs”). But a common reading of it is that the garden in Eden is a “home of the gods” — a mountaintop garden, populated by Yahweh, the snake, and Adam and Eve without their “garments of skin”, and possibly others (the mysterious “they will be like us”). So in this reading, the serpent would be one of the gods/sons of God/divine council. His “being made to crawl in the dirt”, as you put it, would then be a condemnation to live a terrestrial existence, “going to and fro on the earth, and ... walking back and forth on it”.


If you just consider the internal logic of the story, it looks like a fable:

The protagonists of the story, First Man and First Woman ('earthling' and 'life-giver') get tempted by a talking animal to eat magical fruit. This upsets God, who had planted the magical tree in his garden, where he likes to take a stroll. The story then goes on to handily explain why snakes have no legs, why childbirth is painful and why only humans wear clothing in one fell swoop.

One interpretation would be that this is coded language for cosmological and theological capital-T Truth (such as the serpent being the devil). My interpretation would be that a fable got put into an athology of other stories about man's interaction with God, and that anthology got elevated to Divine Revelation of Unquestionable Truth, leading people to read all kinds of things into it that were never intended.


Sure, but when you are considering it theologically (and not historically) you are asking about what theologians/the church teaches and understands, and the internal logic of the bible and church teaching, not what the “actual” truth of the story is (an interesting question but a different area of inquiry).

As a Christian I’m happy for it to be both a fable in the sense you describe and true in a theological sense (some Christians would disagree with my position of course).


Just note that the message might change depending on your take on the story. For example, there's a difference between being led astray by some malevolent cosmic power, or a mundane trickster...


It actually isn't. Take a look at an exegesis of it from any of the church fathers. The "dirt" it is sentenced to crawl in is mankind, made clear only pages apart ("for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return").




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