"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> Carrol,
> So, is Milton's Satan a "god" or a "human" in your view? If so, is he
> "in the details"?
> Barkley Rosser
I have never made up my mind. (I kid my religious friends by saying that the only decent definition of "god" is the Homeric one: any "one" is a god if he/she/it is immortal. Hence all religions that believe in immortality are polytheistic.)
I treated Satan as human in my article; that is I treated him as a reactionary English Baron reacting against the extreme abstraction (i.e., "egalitarian" in the bourgeois sense) of the new order in heaven, which eliminated hierarchy among the angels. (That's a very crude condensation of a 12,000 word paper.) But Milton's God, despite Milton's resolute adherence to Calvinist anthropomorphism, is definitely an abstraction. His voice is not the voice of an agent but the voice of REALITY speaking. And looking at abstractions from and Aristotelian/Marxist viewpoint, "he" would definitely be in the details.
Satan would be a bourgeois individual despite himself (his longing to be a place in a hierarchy).
Carrol