Reddit reviews Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

I'm not challenging you - just curious. I know only a very little bit, but only from listening to tidbits here and there. And I've never read Milton.

Cause if I understand correctly, as Christianity was influence by Greek (specifically Platonic, although my understanding is that Judeo-Christianity is rooted more directly in Aristotelian) philosophy the dualistic nature of good and evil was more pronounced. Until then, it was more of a naturalistic perspective where God was 'good' because He was God, and else wasn't necessarily 'evil' exactly, but more just not of God and thus perishable. We can guess that the early Hebrew speakers had a somewhat more holistic viewpoint by their descriptions of the necessity of men and women (in early Exodus), real and not real, blessed and not blessed (Cain), and so on.

The study of Job, which some philosophers (e.g.Richard Holloway) find less than satisfying, suggests that not all who suffer are punished and that the temptation of the righteous (through suffering, anyway) is through some non-God, though not necessarily anti-God, being. The contemporary interpretation has made the temper, the fallen star, and God's enemy all the same; this dark and light, evil and good idea is very intertwined with Greek dualism; although I've heard discrepancies between the natural 'Greek' interpretation and the spiritual 'Hebrew' interpretation of dualism.

If that's so, then while Milton surely popularised the notion of an evil being, and maybe even named him, it would only have been a natural progression of the dualism that later-Judaism and even early or middle age Christianity would have accepted. Even John (in Revelation anyway) and Paul articulate Greek reasoning - Harold Bloom talks about this specifically in his assessment of St. Paul's genius.

The western world often contrasts this post-Greek, Judeo-Christian dualism with the decidedly more holistic philosophies of eastern spiritualism and philosophy. I can only imagine that while we tend to contrast them (by virtue, I think, of our English language, with all its capacity to describe differences) the easterners see them as two sides of the same coin.