The devil, so they say, has all the best tunes, and this seems to be the case when it comes to literature as well. Nobody would take a guided tour of Dante’s Paradiso if they could have one of the Inferno instead. Milton’s God sounds like a bureaucratic bore or constipated civil servant, while his Satan shimmers with mutinous life. Nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver Twist if they could have a beer with Fagin instead. So why is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring? Why is it that when I told my thirteen-year-old son I was writing a book on evil, he replied “Wicked!”?
One answer, I think, is that it is not virtue that is boring but a particular, very familiar conception of it. Think of Aristotle’s man of virtue, who lives more fully and richly than...
