did god let satan's revolt happen? If he's all-mighty, why didn't he stop it himself. why did he make his son do it. if they can't die anyways and heal all wounds, what is the point of swords and spears
And don't tell me "it's old literature." They most definitely had good literature. This gives me newfound appreciation for Shakespeare which came out decades before this and is definitely good stuff
He didn't have the desire to force the apostates out of heaven himself, instead letting his angels suffer, yet immediately after decides to create earth
So stupid. They fucking warn them not to eat from the tree, and about the "enemy" that would tempt them. Paradise was guarded by cherubim but still satan gets in, and Eve is like "lol okay"
this book HAS moments, and potential. It could have been great if he didn't latch on to classical stuff so hard. I like this part, where god tells adam he too is the only one of his kind, where is his partner?
iirc Milton deserves some credit at least for revolutionizing the bible-as-literature framework and exploring some of the superhuman biblical characters as characters in a way that wasn't really done very seriously before... ...but his takeaways are overall pretty orthodox.
I'm pretty sure his most out-there idea was "OK but what if Satan is bad for, like, comprehensible reasons, and not just to be muwahaha evil for the fun of it?"
his character definitely aren't as humanist as Shakespeare's, but he was also starting from material where there's... basically zero characterization at all and what exists isn't exactly super consistent
like prior to Milton, God is "hrgh rawrgh I am jealous and wrathful except when I'm not because uwu my son but I'll still send you to be tortured for eternity if you annoy me" and that's it
(at least in terms of well-known things, there's probably some material that never really circulated just because we know there were a lot of priests with ideas that the church either didn't care about or explicitly rejected and banned as heresy, and anything with a whiff of humanism tends to go in that pile)
I mean love is definitely a major fixture of the theology of most canonical versions of Jesus (i.e. with the exception of a few passages where he kinda sounds like a tremendous asshole) but squaring that with the politically expedient "do what I say OR ELSE" and "I have never been wrong about anything ever" frameworks requires some adjustments
(in fairness, Christianity didn't remotely invent either of those, but before the alignment of the Church with the Roman Empire, it had been difficult for a single religious organization to approach Roman Imperial levels of centralized authoritarianism)
Eden is one of many stories that require either wild mental acrobatics or quite a bit of creative extrapolation and interpolation to resolve the issues of theodicy
God: mood
Angels: ...hey! I mean, technically not wrong, but still!
Let's find out. CChuuni is it true?