By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Oct. 27, 2025
Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, Word and Song, devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College
You are the company you keep. And here, the more agreeable you are, the more susceptible you are to the infection.
The seraph Abdiel has stood up against Satan’s lies to his subordinate angels and warned him to seek pardon from the Father and the Son while there is yet time. But Satan replies with haughtiness and contempt, telling Abdiel he had better get lost: “Fly, ere evil intercept thy flight.” Abdiel must bear up alone because none of all the hosts under Satan’s authority will listen to reason. He leaves, but not before he addresses Satan and his hosts one last time:
O alienate from Heaven, O Spirit accursed,
Forsaken of all good! I see thy fall
Determined, and this hapless crew involved
In thy perfidious fraud, contagion spread
Both of thy crime and punishment.
It is not the only time the poet Milton employs the image of contagion to describe the spread of evil or its punishment. No one then knew of germs, but they did know about contagion, literally what you catch by touch, even if the contact is through the air. They knew that the clothes of someone who had died of the plague should be burned—and Milton is certainly thinking here of the plague. Evil is caught by contagion. We are mimetic creatures. What we see, we tend to imitate, even if our imitation involves opposing what we see. …
