Apologies to the masses for my incipient overquota flow:
But, another interpretation is that Satan is the radical egalitarian attempting to overthrow the hierarchy of God above all else (including genderneutral Man). After all, Satan brought Man knowledge and the Fall of Man made that pathetic being a "god" trying to rule God's universe. Lots of people see Milton's Satan as the Promethean Hero.
Of course the other view, also not Coxian, is that Satan wishes to replace God and likes hierarchy. A monarchist who wishes to replace the current monarch with himself. This would certainly seem to fit Melkor/Morgoth in his rebellion against Eru/Iluvatar in Tolkien more than either of the other interpretations. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, March 02, 1999 1:56 PM Subject: Re: [Fwd: Query about God]
>
>
>"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
>
>
>