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Music means not the noises it is nice to make, but the noises it is nice to hear. Good poetry means not the poetry men like composing, but the poetry men like to listen to or to read.
St. Paul says, build up the listener (1 Cor 14:4, Eph 4:29)
There is certainly not more suffering behind Beowulf than there is behind the Iliad; but there is a consciousness of good and evil which Homer lacks.
Homer is not Fallen
what is not much more than a pun on the word spot we have Galileo’s recent discovery of the sun-spots.
Satan is a moral spot on virtue, and he diminishes light, making dark what would otherwise be light
Adam was not deceived. He did not believe what his wife said to him to be true,
Lewis is here partly quoting 1 Tim 2:14 ("Adam was not deceived"), but even the (probably non-Pauline) author of that verse does not say that Adam disbelieved Eve after she was deceived. Even sticking to Milton, we know that Adam suspected what Satan said about the fruit to be true, or hoped so (IX:930-939), partly because he did not know its nature or the nature of death; he also believed Eve's report that Satan had eaten the fruit. In all this Adam and Eve were deceived.
Eve’s arguments in favour of eating the Apple are, in themselves, reasonable enough; the answer to them consists simply in the reminder ‘You mustn’t. You were told not to.’
A test that goes against reason is an unreasonable test
Jane Austen’s Miss Bates could be described either as a very entertaining or a very tedious person. If we said the first, we should mean that the author’s portrait of her entertains us while we read; if we said the second, we should mean that it does so by being the portrait of a person whom the other people in Emma find tedious and whose like we also should find tedious in real life. For it is a very old critical discovery that the imitation in art of unpleasing objects may be a pleasing imitation. In the same way, the proposition that Milton’s Satan is a magnificent character may bear two
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Satan, like Miss Bates, is interesting to read about; but Milton makes plain the blank uninterestingness of being Satan. To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.
From Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”:
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else."
Eve fell through Pride.
Yes, and the seed was planted in her while sleeping, via a venomous dream (4:800), an attack not faced by Adam.
Adam fell by uxoriousness.
In my opinion, more accurate to say idolatry. Uxurious means "having or showing an excessive or submissive fondness for one's wife" (Oxford Languages). But when Adam tries to explain to God what he did, God replies, "Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey / Before his voice" (10:145). This meaning would recall the Bible's many warnings against pagan idolatry, which included sexual rites with goddesses.
Also, Adam is repeatedly shown as hungry for knowledge, even more than Eve. It's not just his wife that makes him fall. In 9:933-940, he clearly expresses the same pride as Eve, the same wish to be a god.
