Titre
Paradise Lost and the Origin of "Evil": Classical or Judeo-Christian ?
Type
article
Institution
UNIL/CHUV/Unisanté + institutions partenaires
Auteur(s)
Forsyth, Neil
Auteure/Auteur
Liens vers les personnes
Liens vers les unités
ISSN
1073-0508
Statut éditorial
Publié
Date de publication
2000
Volume
6
Numéro
4
Première page
516
Dernière page/numéro d’article
548
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Langue
anglais
Résumé
Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic opem about the origin of evil, mixing classical and Christian forms and sources. This essay first explores whether “evil” is primarily a classical or Judeo-Christian concept, and shows that it is a product of the religious syncretism of the Hellenistic period. Yet among the poets, we meet this new sense of malignance chiefly in Virgil, especially in such a figure as Allecto. The essay then shows how Milton’s language carefully discriminates among these origins, so that the imagery of Hell comes from Virgil, while the conception of evil remains principally Christian, both in the narrative and in philosophical reflection. But in the final section of the essay, we see that the being whose identity is the answer to the poem’s initiating epic question (‘Who first seduc’d them to that foul revolt?’), and whose actions drive the poem into motion and inaugurate its story—Stan—, is, like his daughter Sin, a complex and seductive blend of both—and this helps to explain some of the tension we feel in his presence. He is a much more complex answer than those required by the initiating questions in Homer or Virgil, and indeed it takes the whole poem to understand that answer.
PID Serval
serval:BIB_16608
Date de création
2007-11-19T08:37:49.257Z
Date de création dans IRIS
2025-05-20T15:18:00Z