HKB
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Often appears with: knowledge and scholarship · gentiles and learning · fate, destiny, and necessity · education and the training of the young · doubt, skepticism, and certainty · athens
Usually: argument (1) · crisis of belief (1) · detachment (1) · skepticism (1)
“It is written, The first of all commandments, ‘Thou shalt worship The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.” John Milton, Paradise Regained · precept
Satan claims his worldly offering was only a test and that the Son seeks knowledge like a scholar, then urges him to learn from the Gentiles and points to Athens as a model.
130 For him I was not sent, nor yet to free That people, victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal—who, once just, Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquered well, But govern ill the nations under yoke, Peeling their provinces, exhausted all By lust and rapine; first ambitious grown Of triumph, that insulting vanity; Then cruel, by their sports to blood inured Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts expose…