A highly idiosyncratic reading — especially of Dante. After all, both Beatrice and Virgil lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory to the Beatific Vision. That’s a vision of the Biblical God. I’m too lazy to check — but seem to remember that this radiant and much celebrated passage occurs in the final canto of the Paradiso.
I myself join those who prefer the Inferno. But even there Dante frequently rejoices in the eternal punishment of evildoers. What do you make of the passage about Capaneus, who Prometheus-like challenged the status of Zeus? Can you cite textual evidence that Dante blames God for the fate of Capaneus?
Regarding Milton, there is of course the “Paradise Regained.” I grant you that this is an inferior product. But there’s also the “Samson Agonistes” and the “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” — both of which are first rate.
Blake I’ll grant you — as radically heterodox, not as anti-Christian. “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau….” Blake also greatly esteemed St. Teresa of Avila.
Aren’t you disregarding much of the plot of “Frankenstein”? After all, Victor is equated with Prometheus, not with God. God in the Biblical account creates Adam and gives him a mate. Frankenstein fashions the Fiend (as he calls him) and then, ultimately, refuses to grant him his mate. This is what infuriates the Fiend. It’s hard to see, also, how Byron would take vengeance on the Creator the way that the Fiend takes vengeance on Frankenstein. God is he “whom thunder hath made greater.”
I despise the unrelenting sentimentality in the speaking styles of both Victor and the Fiend. Won’t they ever stop whining?
In this context, I ignore Whitman and Dickinson. Poe is a greater poet than either. Although not Irish, he could also whip them in a fistfight.
It’s important to realize here that I’m not a literalist even when it comes to most passages in the Bible. If great works of literature only had one reading, would they be worth our time? I suspect that the literalism imposed on you in your youth has colored your understanding of the Biblical texts. That’s fine if it’s how you want to read them. But it’s not the only way.
Being led to heaven by a lover who is someone else's wife and a pagan poet is not exactly orthodox.
I find all the "hell" nonsense amusing. Have christians never read their bibles? If they had, they would know "hell" was never mentioned in the Old Testament by either Yahweh or any of his prophets. "Hell" was a pagan Greek/Roman myth grafted into the NT by charlatans. They even got the name wrong, since Hades had heavenly regions like the Elysian Fields and Blessed Isles. The Roman version had Elysium and the Fields of Asphodel.
The Greek hell was Tartarus, a word that appears in only one verse in the entire bible, and that verse is about fallen angels awaiting judgment, so it was not for humans and was not eternal.
I'm not disputing that Milton was a great writer. But as William Blake observed, Milton was of the Devil's party and didn't know it. He tried to "justify the ways of god to man" and ended up making Satan and Eve tragic heroes for the ages by opposing a tyrannical dictator.
Was Prometheus wise to create human beings? The Shelleys may not have thought so.
It bears noting that Frankenstein was the villain, an over-ambitious would-be-god, and that Mary Shelley never called the creature a fiend or monster herself. It seems obvious that her sympathies were with the creature, not the doctor.
Byron could have inspired the idea of a creation seeking vengeance on its Creator. Percy Shelley was an atheist, so the Shelleys would not be constrained by religious beliefs about the Creator. The biblical god never succeeded at anything he attempted, except mass-murdering innocents, and the bible even says that he couldn't defeat tribes with high-tech iron chariots. So why assume "gods" are undefeatable?
I like Poe, but I think Whitman and Dickinson were the greater poets. What did Poe write that rivals "A Noiseless Patient Spider?"
I don't believe anything in the bible, so I'm not a literalist. But I argue against the christian religion and the "christians" who elected Trump, the soon-to-be first dictator of the United States, are literalists. And so, like Voltaire and Twain, I point out the massive flaws in the bible and the religion it spawned.
If christians are willing to admit that the bible is full of satanic commandments and primitive demands for bloody sacrifices, and they don't believe Jesus was "god" or a "sacrifice," etc., then I wonder what there is left to believe, but I have no real problem with them. Unfortunately billions of christians believe such things, so I do what I can to point out the reasons not to believe.
Beatrice Portinari was not Dante’s “lover,” just the object of his courtly love. There was no canoodling involved. And Virgil explicitly says that he can only lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory. Virgil’s not allowed in Heaven.
I don’t have Hebrew, so I don’t know the Old Testament in the original. But I know the New Testament pretty well. Where it says “Hades,” it means the land of the dead, not the place of eternal punishment. This was the same word used by the translators (from Hebrew to Greek) of the Septuagint. Admittedly, people who rely on translations often think otherwise. But that’s not the fault of the text.
I agree that Satan is the hero of “Paradise Lost.” But Eve? She’s just a stooge. And Satan’s status as hero is a matter of the poem’s formal structure. It doesn’t mean that Milton is holding him up as a model for future generations. On the contrary, the action of the poem shows his gradual degradation. I say, “Evil be thou my good,” as often as the next guy — but it’s not really a salutary wish. I do agree that Milton’s portrayal of God the Father and the Messiah are repulsive. This is what Blake meant, I believe, when he says Milton was of the Devil’s party.
Another fault with “Paradise Lost” is that Milton had no sense of humor.
When I read Frankenstein, my sympathies are certainly with the Fiend, and I quickly learn to detest Victor. But it’s not clear that the novel is as committed to this view as I am. Walton, after all, admires Frankenstein to the end. And the Fiend repents. All of the guys in this story are sissies. They all have fine feelings and think that those entitle them to something. As I said, I despise the tone.
Re Poe, I mean, take your pick. “Annabel Lee.” “Alone.” “Israfel.” Poe is certainly the most influential American poet. The symbolistes were the heirs of Poe, not of Whitman.
You seem to labor under the misapprehension that the Bible “spawned a religion.” On the contrary, Christianity existed before the Bible as such was written. The first New Testament books were the letters of Paul — and Paul was persecuting Christians before he wrote any letters. Again, your viewpoint derives from the literalism of a sect.
Lover in the sense that Dante loved Beatrice despite them both being married to other people.
The King James Bible and several other versions translate both Sheol and Hades, incorrectly, as hell. This led to billions of christians believing there is an actual hell.
And if there is no hell, what does Jesus save christians from?
The mistranslations aside, Revelation says human beings will be tortured with fire and brimstone, in the presence of the Lamb and Holy Angels. Hell did end up in the NT, regardless of terminology. It also appears as the Lake of Fire, where the "worm dieth not" or something like that.
The bible also talks about the "day of judgment" with various punishments after death, the sheep being separated from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, etc.
I don't see Eve as a stooge. She acquired the knowledge of good and evil, and would have been far more of a stooge if she didn't eat the forbidden fruit.
"Annabel Lee" is my favorite Poe poem, and I do like Poe, but I don't think it compares with the best poems of Whitman and Dickinson.
Whitman is far more influential than Poe in my opinion. Whitman was the first major free verse poet, and there is a lot more free verse being written than Poe-like poems. And Whitman was the first major poet to write openly about certain taboo subjects. Far more influential.
How many christians would there be today without the bible?
Again, I don't have the misapprehension that all christians are literalists. I write knowingly in opposition to the literalists. I do wonder how Jesus can be the "savior" without something to save people from. Without "original sin" the only possible sinner would be the Creator if such a being exists.
The literalists are obviously wrong, but the only form of christianity that makes sense to me is Gnosticism, with Jesus being the agent of a Good God who is trying to undo the original sin of the Creator. That seems like quite a stretch still, but otherwise what are christians being saved from?
Well, Michael, it’s been fun. But I feel a little guilty about occupying so much space at your blog. So I’ll try to answer briefly and then let you have the last word if you want it.
My comment on “Hades” was intended specifically to address the question of translation. I didn’t intend to deny that the NT contained references to eternal punishment. In that vein, I’ll observe that “Hell” is etymologically a perfectly adequate translation both of Hades and of Sheol, since it’s the Anglo-Saxon and Norse name of the realm of the dead.
You got me on the free verse business. It is indeed still in the ascendant. I’d question whether contemporary free verse owed that much to Whitman, though. Is e.e. cummings imitating Whitman? T.E. Hulme? Wallace Stevens in “13 Ways”? I can’t see it. Seems like haiku had more to do with a lot of that. I’d like contemporary free verse better if it were more like Whitman’s.
I’m going to cheat a little bit here and invoke Poe’s entire literary output. Poe’s tales functionally founded numerous genres of popular fiction — as Arthur Conan Doyle first observed. Also, Poe’s influence extends far more than Whitman’s into foreign cultures: French, Latin American, Russian. I’m biased, I admit — a Poe guy through and through.
How many Christians today without the Bible? Hard to tell. Most early converts were illiterate — as were most of the Apostles. But Christianity was by far the most bookish religion of the Greco-Roman world. Literate Christians were obsessed with writing books — only some of which made it into the NT or survived in any form. So I can’t call that one.
Your theological perspectives on original sin and predestination sound a lot like Mormonism — which denies both doctrines at the cost of dispensing with an omnipotent Deity. Sterling McMurrin is the authority on this topic. But you can learn a lot about it by reading the science fiction stories of Orson Scott Card.
Your earlier expressed desire to invalidate Christianity makes me want to remind you: it’s been tried before and didn’t really work out. One instructive example is the Emperor Julian, whom I much admire. The most powerful man in the Greco-Roman milieu and a fine Greek prose stylist, he sought to end the pernicious cult of the Nazarenes with his official decrees (being careful to avoid actual state martyrdom, which he knew only encouraged these fanatics) and wrote against it with great power. Read “Misopogon,” “The Twelve Caesars,” or “Against the Galileans.”
Athansius dismissed Julian’s efforts with the quip: “It is a small storm and will soon pass.” The Emperor died of a wound inflicted during his ambitious foray into Parthia. A spear in the side, no less. He was 32 years old.
Poor guy.
(P.S. In Christianity, Jesus saves from eternal death. Even Mormons believe this in their way.)
Length is not a problem. I'm happy to have your input.
There is a tremendous, obvious difference between the realm of ALL the dead and a place of eternal torture like the christian hell, which is molded after Tartarus, not Sheol or Hades. After all, Hades had heavenly regions like the Elysian Fields and Blessed Isles. You strike me as a stickler for accuracy, so I'm scratching my head here.
I think e.e. cummings was probably influenced by Whitman and Dickinson, although I'm just guessing. The musicality of Whitman and the eclecticism of Dickinson. The heresies of both.
I have written about Poe's influence on detective stories, psychological thrillers, science fiction, etc. But other than "Annabel Lee" and his poem about the bells, I can't rank Poe with the greatest writers. I do like "The Raven" as a dark comedy, not a horror poem.
I know very little about Mormonism, other than Bishop Romney's magical underwear and Cayman Island IRA, into which he stuffed entire companies.
If there is an omniscient deity, he/she/it leaves a lot to be desired, a conclusion I reached independently at age eleven when I read the bible from cover to cover.
I have read Orson Scott Card, and he surprised me by complimenting one of my poems not too long ago.
I have no doubt that my musings will undermine the teetering edifice of christianity and cause its eventual collapse, to be replaced by something better. An event at my christening informed me that this is what I came to this hellish planet to accomplish. ;-)
A highly idiosyncratic reading — especially of Dante. After all, both Beatrice and Virgil lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory to the Beatific Vision. That’s a vision of the Biblical God. I’m too lazy to check — but seem to remember that this radiant and much celebrated passage occurs in the final canto of the Paradiso.
I myself join those who prefer the Inferno. But even there Dante frequently rejoices in the eternal punishment of evildoers. What do you make of the passage about Capaneus, who Prometheus-like challenged the status of Zeus? Can you cite textual evidence that Dante blames God for the fate of Capaneus?
Regarding Milton, there is of course the “Paradise Regained.” I grant you that this is an inferior product. But there’s also the “Samson Agonistes” and the “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” — both of which are first rate.
Blake I’ll grant you — as radically heterodox, not as anti-Christian. “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau….” Blake also greatly esteemed St. Teresa of Avila.
Aren’t you disregarding much of the plot of “Frankenstein”? After all, Victor is equated with Prometheus, not with God. God in the Biblical account creates Adam and gives him a mate. Frankenstein fashions the Fiend (as he calls him) and then, ultimately, refuses to grant him his mate. This is what infuriates the Fiend. It’s hard to see, also, how Byron would take vengeance on the Creator the way that the Fiend takes vengeance on Frankenstein. God is he “whom thunder hath made greater.”
I despise the unrelenting sentimentality in the speaking styles of both Victor and the Fiend. Won’t they ever stop whining?
In this context, I ignore Whitman and Dickinson. Poe is a greater poet than either. Although not Irish, he could also whip them in a fistfight.
It’s important to realize here that I’m not a literalist even when it comes to most passages in the Bible. If great works of literature only had one reading, would they be worth our time? I suspect that the literalism imposed on you in your youth has colored your understanding of the Biblical texts. That’s fine if it’s how you want to read them. But it’s not the only way.
Being led to heaven by a lover who is someone else's wife and a pagan poet is not exactly orthodox.
I find all the "hell" nonsense amusing. Have christians never read their bibles? If they had, they would know "hell" was never mentioned in the Old Testament by either Yahweh or any of his prophets. "Hell" was a pagan Greek/Roman myth grafted into the NT by charlatans. They even got the name wrong, since Hades had heavenly regions like the Elysian Fields and Blessed Isles. The Roman version had Elysium and the Fields of Asphodel.
The Greek hell was Tartarus, a word that appears in only one verse in the entire bible, and that verse is about fallen angels awaiting judgment, so it was not for humans and was not eternal.
I'm not disputing that Milton was a great writer. But as William Blake observed, Milton was of the Devil's party and didn't know it. He tried to "justify the ways of god to man" and ended up making Satan and Eve tragic heroes for the ages by opposing a tyrannical dictator.
Was Prometheus wise to create human beings? The Shelleys may not have thought so.
It bears noting that Frankenstein was the villain, an over-ambitious would-be-god, and that Mary Shelley never called the creature a fiend or monster herself. It seems obvious that her sympathies were with the creature, not the doctor.
Byron could have inspired the idea of a creation seeking vengeance on its Creator. Percy Shelley was an atheist, so the Shelleys would not be constrained by religious beliefs about the Creator. The biblical god never succeeded at anything he attempted, except mass-murdering innocents, and the bible even says that he couldn't defeat tribes with high-tech iron chariots. So why assume "gods" are undefeatable?
I like Poe, but I think Whitman and Dickinson were the greater poets. What did Poe write that rivals "A Noiseless Patient Spider?"
I don't believe anything in the bible, so I'm not a literalist. But I argue against the christian religion and the "christians" who elected Trump, the soon-to-be first dictator of the United States, are literalists. And so, like Voltaire and Twain, I point out the massive flaws in the bible and the religion it spawned.
If christians are willing to admit that the bible is full of satanic commandments and primitive demands for bloody sacrifices, and they don't believe Jesus was "god" or a "sacrifice," etc., then I wonder what there is left to believe, but I have no real problem with them. Unfortunately billions of christians believe such things, so I do what I can to point out the reasons not to believe.
Beatrice Portinari was not Dante’s “lover,” just the object of his courtly love. There was no canoodling involved. And Virgil explicitly says that he can only lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory. Virgil’s not allowed in Heaven.
I don’t have Hebrew, so I don’t know the Old Testament in the original. But I know the New Testament pretty well. Where it says “Hades,” it means the land of the dead, not the place of eternal punishment. This was the same word used by the translators (from Hebrew to Greek) of the Septuagint. Admittedly, people who rely on translations often think otherwise. But that’s not the fault of the text.
I agree that Satan is the hero of “Paradise Lost.” But Eve? She’s just a stooge. And Satan’s status as hero is a matter of the poem’s formal structure. It doesn’t mean that Milton is holding him up as a model for future generations. On the contrary, the action of the poem shows his gradual degradation. I say, “Evil be thou my good,” as often as the next guy — but it’s not really a salutary wish. I do agree that Milton’s portrayal of God the Father and the Messiah are repulsive. This is what Blake meant, I believe, when he says Milton was of the Devil’s party.
Another fault with “Paradise Lost” is that Milton had no sense of humor.
When I read Frankenstein, my sympathies are certainly with the Fiend, and I quickly learn to detest Victor. But it’s not clear that the novel is as committed to this view as I am. Walton, after all, admires Frankenstein to the end. And the Fiend repents. All of the guys in this story are sissies. They all have fine feelings and think that those entitle them to something. As I said, I despise the tone.
Re Poe, I mean, take your pick. “Annabel Lee.” “Alone.” “Israfel.” Poe is certainly the most influential American poet. The symbolistes were the heirs of Poe, not of Whitman.
You seem to labor under the misapprehension that the Bible “spawned a religion.” On the contrary, Christianity existed before the Bible as such was written. The first New Testament books were the letters of Paul — and Paul was persecuting Christians before he wrote any letters. Again, your viewpoint derives from the literalism of a sect.
Lover in the sense that Dante loved Beatrice despite them both being married to other people.
The King James Bible and several other versions translate both Sheol and Hades, incorrectly, as hell. This led to billions of christians believing there is an actual hell.
And if there is no hell, what does Jesus save christians from?
The mistranslations aside, Revelation says human beings will be tortured with fire and brimstone, in the presence of the Lamb and Holy Angels. Hell did end up in the NT, regardless of terminology. It also appears as the Lake of Fire, where the "worm dieth not" or something like that.
The bible also talks about the "day of judgment" with various punishments after death, the sheep being separated from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, etc.
I don't see Eve as a stooge. She acquired the knowledge of good and evil, and would have been far more of a stooge if she didn't eat the forbidden fruit.
"Annabel Lee" is my favorite Poe poem, and I do like Poe, but I don't think it compares with the best poems of Whitman and Dickinson.
Whitman is far more influential than Poe in my opinion. Whitman was the first major free verse poet, and there is a lot more free verse being written than Poe-like poems. And Whitman was the first major poet to write openly about certain taboo subjects. Far more influential.
How many christians would there be today without the bible?
Again, I don't have the misapprehension that all christians are literalists. I write knowingly in opposition to the literalists. I do wonder how Jesus can be the "savior" without something to save people from. Without "original sin" the only possible sinner would be the Creator if such a being exists.
The literalists are obviously wrong, but the only form of christianity that makes sense to me is Gnosticism, with Jesus being the agent of a Good God who is trying to undo the original sin of the Creator. That seems like quite a stretch still, but otherwise what are christians being saved from?
Well, Michael, it’s been fun. But I feel a little guilty about occupying so much space at your blog. So I’ll try to answer briefly and then let you have the last word if you want it.
My comment on “Hades” was intended specifically to address the question of translation. I didn’t intend to deny that the NT contained references to eternal punishment. In that vein, I’ll observe that “Hell” is etymologically a perfectly adequate translation both of Hades and of Sheol, since it’s the Anglo-Saxon and Norse name of the realm of the dead.
You got me on the free verse business. It is indeed still in the ascendant. I’d question whether contemporary free verse owed that much to Whitman, though. Is e.e. cummings imitating Whitman? T.E. Hulme? Wallace Stevens in “13 Ways”? I can’t see it. Seems like haiku had more to do with a lot of that. I’d like contemporary free verse better if it were more like Whitman’s.
I’m going to cheat a little bit here and invoke Poe’s entire literary output. Poe’s tales functionally founded numerous genres of popular fiction — as Arthur Conan Doyle first observed. Also, Poe’s influence extends far more than Whitman’s into foreign cultures: French, Latin American, Russian. I’m biased, I admit — a Poe guy through and through.
How many Christians today without the Bible? Hard to tell. Most early converts were illiterate — as were most of the Apostles. But Christianity was by far the most bookish religion of the Greco-Roman world. Literate Christians were obsessed with writing books — only some of which made it into the NT or survived in any form. So I can’t call that one.
Your theological perspectives on original sin and predestination sound a lot like Mormonism — which denies both doctrines at the cost of dispensing with an omnipotent Deity. Sterling McMurrin is the authority on this topic. But you can learn a lot about it by reading the science fiction stories of Orson Scott Card.
Your earlier expressed desire to invalidate Christianity makes me want to remind you: it’s been tried before and didn’t really work out. One instructive example is the Emperor Julian, whom I much admire. The most powerful man in the Greco-Roman milieu and a fine Greek prose stylist, he sought to end the pernicious cult of the Nazarenes with his official decrees (being careful to avoid actual state martyrdom, which he knew only encouraged these fanatics) and wrote against it with great power. Read “Misopogon,” “The Twelve Caesars,” or “Against the Galileans.”
Athansius dismissed Julian’s efforts with the quip: “It is a small storm and will soon pass.” The Emperor died of a wound inflicted during his ambitious foray into Parthia. A spear in the side, no less. He was 32 years old.
Poor guy.
(P.S. In Christianity, Jesus saves from eternal death. Even Mormons believe this in their way.)
Length is not a problem. I'm happy to have your input.
There is a tremendous, obvious difference between the realm of ALL the dead and a place of eternal torture like the christian hell, which is molded after Tartarus, not Sheol or Hades. After all, Hades had heavenly regions like the Elysian Fields and Blessed Isles. You strike me as a stickler for accuracy, so I'm scratching my head here.
I think e.e. cummings was probably influenced by Whitman and Dickinson, although I'm just guessing. The musicality of Whitman and the eclecticism of Dickinson. The heresies of both.
I have written about Poe's influence on detective stories, psychological thrillers, science fiction, etc. But other than "Annabel Lee" and his poem about the bells, I can't rank Poe with the greatest writers. I do like "The Raven" as a dark comedy, not a horror poem.
I know very little about Mormonism, other than Bishop Romney's magical underwear and Cayman Island IRA, into which he stuffed entire companies.
If there is an omniscient deity, he/she/it leaves a lot to be desired, a conclusion I reached independently at age eleven when I read the bible from cover to cover.
I have read Orson Scott Card, and he surprised me by complimenting one of my poems not too long ago.
I have no doubt that my musings will undermine the teetering edifice of christianity and cause its eventual collapse, to be replaced by something better. An event at my christening informed me that this is what I came to this hellish planet to accomplish. ;-)
Cheers,
Mike
Oops. Typo. That’s Athanasius!