Paradise Lost and Heresy
Post last updated 1 month, 4 weeks ago
Christianity-themed beginning of the year
My first two books read this year were Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God by Catherine Nixey and Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton, the former being a nice gift I got from a friend, while the latter has been on my to-read list for a long time.
While I'm not religious at all, I've always been interested in religion from a scientific and humanistic standpoint, and reading all the major religious books is on my list of things to do before I die. That being said, the chaining of these two books proved to be a happy incident because I could compare how people felt religion versus how others analyzed religion some hundred years later.
Heresy1
Nixey presents how early Christianity was viewed and received, both inside and outside the Roman Empire’s borders. From the book, we learn that what we now associate with Christianity is one of the many versions that circulated during the first few centuries after Jesus was born. It's very interesting to learn that many educated people mocked or simply didn't find anything special about some of the core ideas of Christianity, like the miracles performed by Jesus or the virginal birth.
One will also find more saddening facts about early Christianity, like the disdain the early Christians had for human knowledge (they were especially against philosophy), the very aggressive suppression of religious liberty after Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, and the view of women and other minorities as lesser humans.
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained
I read it in the original and, while I thought my English was quite good, I often found myself struggling to understand some words or subtler meanings, but I could get a pretty good idea about what was happening. It took me a lot longer than I expected to finish it, but it was worth it.
From the get-go, the poem is wonderfully written and was a pleasure to read, if one can ignore some of the actual things that are written. By this, I mean some logical fallacies regarding the power of God and some misogynistic ideas. It was frustrating that I could sympathize more with Satan than with God, Jesus, or Adam. Eve was almost a good character, had she not been one-dimensional. But those were the views of the epoch, and while I don't resonate with them, the reading was a delight.
Having context
I could appreciate more of the ideas and beliefs in Milton's poem, having read Nixey's work beforehand, and I encourage everyone who reads fiction from a certain period to also read some nonfiction about those times and themes.
One surprising thing I realized after I finished Paradise Lost was that I feel like Dante was a lot more generous toward the classics than Milton, even though the former lived some three centuries earlier. What a weird thing.
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It's significant that the Greek etymology of the word is that of choice.↩