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http://www2.riverdale.edu/~bpahlka/milton.html
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Copernican Cosmology and Linear Perspective in Milton's Paradise Lost
by William H. Pahlka
In his epic effort to "justify the ways of God to man," Milton was trying,
among other things, to give a rational account of the origin and nature of
evil in a universe created by a benevolent God. The existence of evil had
always been, of course, a theological question, even after Augustine had the
genius to think of it as a question to be answered through autobiography. An
epic is superior to a theological summa because it can draw on a wider range
of modes of knowing than a treatise restricted to logical argument can. And
epic is superior to autobiography because it more fully transcends the merely
personal, and because epic is traditionally built upon the entire ethos of a
culture, in a way that Augustine's Confessions could never manage to be. The
culture of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been
shaped by several revolutionary upheavals. My purpose here is to show how
Milton used two elements of the newly solidified Renaissance worldview to
give a new answer, never before possible, to an eternal question. Those two
elements were the perspectival space of Renaissance art and the heliocentric
cosmology of Renaissance science.
Milton's knowledge of astronomy and cosmology was quite sophisticated. He
mentions Galileo's telescope in Paradise Lost, and it is probable that he met
Galileo when he was a young man travelling in Italy. In his account of the
creation in Book VII and in the discussion that follows in Book VIII, whether
the earth or the sun moves, Milton has both Raphael and Adam speak as if the
earth is motionless at the center. They both seem to assume that, as if by
habit. Furthermore, in Raphael's passage from heaven to earth, it seems clear
that the angel enters the universe through a door in the outermost shell of
the old medieval universe and then flies down past all the planets to the
earthly center. Satan, in Book IX, specifically describes the earth as
located at the center of all the heavenly bodies, and he ought to know,
having been knocked from highest Heaven, past Earth, through Chaos, to the
lowest floor of the universe, Hell. The "stage setting" of the poem, then,
seems to be an Aristotelian, geocentric universe.
But the question is held open in a variety of ways. Milton has Raphael poke
fun at the orbs within orbs, the epicycles upon epicycles of the Ptolemaic
system. When Adam has heard Raphael's description of the creation of the
universe, he responds with a question that suggests he has been reading
Kepler and Galileo. He asks, in effect, "Wouldn't it be easier, more
economical, and more appropriate to make the universe so that the earth moves
about and the heavens sit still?" It's a pretty sharp question for innocent
young Adam to be asking. Raphael's answer contains, as Walter Curry has shown
(116-22) specific echoes of one of the prevailing heliocentric theories of
planetary motion of 1674 (Paradise Lost's publication year and 13 years
before Newton's "final" answer). Raphael offers a picture of a cosmos with
the sun at the center and the earth in motion, but only as a hypothesis--very
odd for one of God's angels to restrict himself to hypothetical statements
when he would surely know something more solid himself. He explains that the
sun gives off a magnetic force which moves the other planets, the earth
included. The theory here was William Gilbert's, the man whose ideas Kepler
shared and modified. Clearly, Milton was writing under the direct influence
of Gilbert. Finally, several times in Paradise Lost, Milton refers to the
idea, much bandied about in his day, of the possibility of numerous other
inhabited worlds, never quite committing himself one way or the other.
But just when Milton seems most technical and specific about a modern,
Copernican model, he backs off strongly. Raphael tells Adam that the earth
might well be moving along in space, but the truth is ultimately unknowable,
since if the earth is moving,
...she advances her silent course
With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps
On her soft axle, while she paces even,
And bears thee soft with the smooth air along. VIII: 163-66
Raphael concludes,
This to attain, whether Heaven move or earth,
Imports not, if thou reckon right. VII: 70-71
On the one hand, this is the old Augustinian doctrine that knowledge of the
physical universe is superfluous for those who have achieved faith and
charity. On the other hand, Milton may be uncannily foreshadowing the
twentieth-century understanding that neither arrangement is "real," since bo
th are illusions tied to a particular limiting perspective. In other words,
either system will do, as long as you reason properly from the terms you have
chosen. In Paradise Lost, Milton himself "uses" both cosmologies, and even
makes the confusion created by this unsettled issue an image of a larger
moral concern. I would argue that Milton is here setting up the terms under
which Adam and Eve will either stand or fall, and of course we know they
fall. Some kinds of knowledge are uncertain, but it is still within human
power to ''reckon right," that is, to use right reason, the moral sense given
to humanity by God. For Milton, morality is a function of reason, but natural
phenomena are also knowable through reason, and the same reason applies to
both. Thus, Milton can justify the ways of God and explain the origin of evil
by presenting the fall as faulty science, so to speak. When Adam and Eve err,
it is partly because they reason from knowledge that is not at all certain.
Eve, in particular, places her confidence in a perspective which is highly
plausible and "rational," but not rational in the sense Milton means when he
speaks of "right reason." At the moment she falls, Eve takes uncertain
knowledge as certain knowledge, and the imagery of the fall suggests a
connection between Eve's confusion and the confusion about whether the cosmos
is heliocentric or geocentric.
Circular motion in physical space is an image of very frequent occurrence in
some parts of Paradise Lost. Circular motion, indeed, is one of the signature
attributes of Satan. Adam worries that Satan will circumvent them if he and
Eve separate. Satan is described as perverse, where the Latin root is verso,
vertum, meaning "to turn," especially, to turn in circles. He is described as
"involved in rising mist," as "voluble," and as suffering from his revolving
thoughts. The Latin root is volvere, "to roll." When we first see him in Book
I, Satan is rolling on the floor of hell, and words derived from the Latin
volvere appear again and again in that scene and in others. When he enters
the snake (which he finds "In labyrinth of many a round self-rolled"), he
moves not prone along the ground, but in
Circular base of rising folds, that towered
Fold above fold a surging maze. . . .
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect
Amidst his circling spires. 497-502
His head at the top of the circling spires is a "turret," or round tower. He
"curl[s] many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve." Satan is always in motion,
just as his thoughts are never at rest, never at peace. He moves from end to
end, from pole to pole, "traversing colures" (longitudinal circles running
through the poles). He is on the circumference of things, sinking, rising,
but never finding peace at the still central point. When he comes to earth,
he says, "With what delight could I have walked thee round,/ If I could joy
in aught" (114-15). In the midst of his seduction of Eve, his very mind seems
made of the vast expanses, ups and down, and wheeling orbits of cosmic space:
Thenceforth to speculations high or deep
I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind
Considered all things visible in Heaven,
Earth, or middle, all things fair and good. 602-05
To see an example in which these verbal cues are clearly highlighted, take a
look at these two passages from Book IX.
.
To return to this essay, simply close the Book IX window
As we watch Satan "roaming the orb," it's difficult not to think of Milton's
ridicule of the Ptolemaic system which
gird[s] the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. VIII: 82-4
Satan's cosmological character was indeed a given. His name before his
expulsion from heaven had been Lucifer, and Lucifer is the morning and the
evening star, the very star whose sinking below the horizon marks the
beginning of Book IX. We know it as the planet Venus, the most obvious
example in the Ptolemaic system of the explanatory power of epicycles. Venus
rises and falls, approaches and withdraws, brightens and darkens as it moves
around a circle whose center is also moving in a circle. As Satan loops about
the earth like a planet following the complex path of Ptolemaic epicycles, we
sense chiefly the indignity and ludicrousness of such frenzied convolutions.
If Satan is circumferential, God is central. This is a major governing
metaphor of Paradise Lost. Hell, for instance, is located "As far removed
from God and light of heaven as from the center thrice to the utmost pole"
(I: 73-4). In keeping with an old Augustinian metaphor, God is the heavenly
center who extends throughout the universe, a circle whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The issue, finally, is not
whether we perceive the earth or the sun as the center of the cosmos, but
whether we recognize that God is central and Satan is peripheral. I have been
emphasizing cosmology to this point, but now is a good time to shift the
focus momentarily to the spatial perspectives of art. The perspective from
the center is the eternal, uncontingent, comprehensive, God's-eye view. It is
always at rest. The perspective from any point on the circumference is
arbitrarily stipulated, limited, subject to change, incomplete. It is always
restless. Here, of course, is one aspect of the essential difference between
medieval and Renaissance painting. The former simply assumes the powers of an
eternal, spatially unconstrained vision; the latter willingly accepts the
narrowing down to a particular point in space and time as a determinant of
the scene. Thus medieval art may exhibit the same character on a canvas doing
a variety of different things at different times, with no regard for the
violations of normal time and space considerations, whereas Renaissance art
puts considerations of time and space above narrative and symbolic
expressiveness, and thereby forfeits such "holistic" possibilities. To
express these issues in more mathematical terms, God is a point, indivisible,
unified, eternal, existing outside of space and time; and Satan is extension
(line, arc, enclosure) existing in time, giving shape to space, divisible and
therefore always partial, always deficient, torn between poles, in transit
between beginnings and endings.
Now, we need to ask again, What is in the center? Perhaps we ought not to
trust Satan on this point, but what he says fits, and he says it right here
at the beginning of Book IX:
Terrestrial Heaven, danced round by other Heavens,
That shine, yet bear their bright, officious lamps,
Light above light, for thee alone, as seems,
In thee concent'ring all their precious beams
Of sacred influence! As God in Heaven
Is center, yet extends to all, so thou
Cent'ring receiv'st from all those orbs. (103-09)
In two ways, Satan confuses the issue as far as physical fact is concerned.
By making earth a heaven, he renders ambiguous the question whether the
cosmic center is earthly or heavenly. Secondly, he tosses in that sneaky
phrase, "as seems," and thereby insists that physical reality is always a
question of (mere) appearances. But once we get past those quibbles, it's
clear that the center of the unfallen cosmos is earth, and not the sun. I say
"unfallen" because Adam and Eve, before they disobey, live in a divine realm,
not yet alienated from the great Center of Being.
The circuit of the paradisal garden is extremely narrow. In fact, that is
Eve's problem. How can we be happy, she asks, "thus to dwell/ In narrow
circuit straitened by a foe"? (322-23). Though their assigned labor is simply
to carve out of the wilderness as much garden space as they need, Eve seeks
to expand the circumference of their world, and has to be told by Adam, "our
joint hands/ Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide/ As we need walk"
(244-46). The narrower their circuit, the closer they are to the divine
center, and to the rest and eternity which is represented by that immobile
point. As a symbol of appetite, Eve naturally presses for expansion, against
Adam's rational preference for concentration, or concentering. Even in
praising her, Adam metaphorically describes her as if she were orbiting
around him: "I from the influence of thy looks receive/ Access in every
virtue" (309-10). The terms here posit Eve as a heavenly body orbiting the
earth, since in astrology planets affect people on earth by what were called
"influences."
It is only from the point of view of unrestrained appetite that the narrow
circuit of paradise seems too little. Indeed, paradise is naturally nothing
but a wild jungle; it is truly a paradise only insofar as the pair tend it in
obedience to God. The world, in other words, is enormously dependent on one's
state of mind, or one's point of view (perspective). In Book I, Satan speaks
the famous lines, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a
heaven of hell, a hell of heaven" (253-4). Because Adam and Eve are
originally obedient to God and because they keep a proper relationship among
the various faculties of their souls, they make a paradise of a wilderness,
carving out a little circle of garden that would otherwise overgrow them,
"with wanton growth, tending to wild" (211-12). The wilderness is transformed
because their own minds are in good order; Reason rules over Will and
Appetite. By right reason, man knows his place and his work, and so his world
is a paradise. The state of mind matters more than the disposition of space.
Satan's mind turns all heavens to hells. Admiring the Earth he finds so
heavenly, he says,
. . . the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes Bane. 119-23
In essence, Satan persuades Eve to expand her circumference, an inclination
she had already expressed to Adam. In this wild enclosure, among these
beasts, who sees thee? he asks. All things adore your celestial beauty, but
you would be best admired where universally admired, he continues. You should
be viewed as a goddess among gods, adored and served by angels numberless
(540-48). He praises her "celestial beauty'' (540) and her "beauty's heavenly
ray" (607). He tells her that he has attained a life more perfect than Fate
meant him to have, and speaks of "venturing higher than my lot" (690), in
what amounts to a perverse turn on the idea of Pico that man has no fixed
place in the chain of being. He persuades her to rise, to go up in the world,
to take her place in the heavenly orbits. But to do that is to accept the
polar universe of ups and downs in which Satan moves so restlessly. The very
ideas of "up" and "down'' are a deception from the centralized viewpoint of
paradise. In a world where God is reality, and where God is the center, the
only two directions that exist are "toward the center" and "away from the
center." Satan relies on the traditional images of the old Aristotelian
worldview to make Eve move away from the divine center toward the orbital
circumference where he moves around so restlessly. In his false geometry, up
is good and down is evil. In keeping with his general rationalism, Milton has
provided a geometric explanation of the fall, which involves reasoning
faultily from deceptively defined terms.
Satan understands these things. At the opening of Book IX, out of Eve's
hearing, he says, "Who aspires must down as low/ As high he soared" (169-70).
Later, Adam says that Satan was "true in our fall,/ False in our promised
rising" (1069-70). The promise, of course, was only an illusion created by
Satan's geometric, cosmological cleverness. Remember Adam's account of what
might go wrong if he and Eve separate:
But God left free the will; for what obeys
Reason is free; and reason he made right,
But bid her well beware, and still erect,
Lest, by some fair appearing good surprised,
She dictate false, and misinform the will . . . . 351-55
The first great sin is an intellectual error, a rational misunderstanding.
God gave humans sufficient reason to sustain their divine existence, but he
left open the possibility that reason might shift away from its proper
"orientation" ("still erect") and thus be subject to distorted perspectives
and reversals of values and definitions. In justifying God's ways in human
history, Milton invokes, not reason as abstract logic or mere good sense, but
reason as it functioned in some major cultural ideas of his time: the
cosmology and the spatial perspectives of Renaissance art and science. Eve is
like a medieval woman moderately disoriented by the heliocentric world model
and the perspective paintings of the new age. The fact that she is symbolic
of Appetite does not make her prone to evil. Appetite is a good part of God's
design for the universe. What brings about sin is a failure of reason, which
in losing its erectness, its geometric bearings, destroys the proper
hierarchy of Reason, Will, and Appetite which constitutes the human soul.
One of the first things that happens after Eve eats the apple is that she
bows down in reverence to a tree (835), placing above herself one of the
plants which she formerly was supposed to govern and control. When her reason
is thus disordered by false appearances, nature itself shudders, grows wild,
and ceases to be what it seemed before, a paradise. Having joined his wife in
eating the fruit, Adam weaves a crown from the plants for one who has begun
to worship plants. The two of them
. . .fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the Earth. 1009-1l
As part of his justification, Adam says that he cannot return without her "To
live again in these wild woods forlorn" (910). In one sense, paradise was
always wild woods, but it is the alteration in their mental states that makes
that perspective dominate at this point. That is the psychological meaning of
Adam's hope that their error will not destroy the natural world
. . . which in our fall,
For us created, needs with us must fail,
Dependent made. 941-43
But of course it has fallen, and so they scorn it. Unfortunately, what they
scorn when they scorn the Earth is themselves, since they are fashioned of
earth. Thus they hope for wings to join Satan in his "heavenly" flying.
Later, Adam asks the pines and cedars to grow luxuriant and to hide him, to
protect him from the eye of heaven (1088). Caught on an Earth they now
despise, they see themselves at the lowest point in an up-down system,
instead of at the center of the divinely ordained circle that Satan had
called a "Terrestrial Heaven." All the gains of upward movement turn out to
be loss and falling.
Did it make any difference to Milton whether the sun or the earth was at the
center of the cosmos? He certainly made use of the intellectual uncertainty
created by the Copernican revolution, but I doubt that he was deeply
committed to a particular cosmography. Even Satan knows that the mind is its
own place, that reason rightly ordered is sufficient for a certain and
positive understanding of spiritual space. But the spatial organization of
the physical universe cannot be known with certainty, and things uncertain
can be manipulated. This, too, Satan knows well. In the absence of a
''God's-eye perspective,'' the meanings of "up," "down," "high," and "low"
become slippery and changeable. That's one of the lessons of the Copernican
revolution, which removed from the universe any absolute concept of up and
down, high and low. The Earth, which had been the center and the bottom of
the universe, was suddenly moving along on a circumference. The old
Aristotelian and the new Copernican systems are both illusions, based upon
chosen perspectives. This is one of the great concepts of the Renaissance.
Henceforth, no frame of reference could absolutely and confidently be assumed
to be the frame of reference.
Is Milton saying that the Copernican revolution, which takes humanity out of
the center, as Satan does Eve, is the equivalent of humanity's fall from
grace? The cosmological shift was unquestionably a loss of innocence, a
painful destruction of the Ptolemaic illusion of security and centrality. But
that is not Milton's point. He is saying that the intellectual issues
involved in our understanding of rational space are the product of the same
rational faculty in us that brought about our fall. He is using the problems
of science and art as clues to the meaning of the problem of evil. A
sophisticated knowledge of Renaissance cosmology and of perspective method in
painting can help us to understand the fall from grace as a problem of
muddled reason. The problem, put most simply, is that Eve made the rational
mistake of interpreting a limited, eccentric viewpoint as if it were a vision
of the whole, with none of the limitations of a particular, and therefore
partial, perspective. Adam and Eve looked at the universe, with Satan's
guidance, through a rational faculty that had been turned upside down--or
worse, a rational faculty that accepted the false terms of "up" and "down" as
if they were real. Eve allowed her will to bend her reason around to a false
viewpoint. That bend, that "inclination" (the word has a special meaning in
Paradise Lost) is the beginning of a shift from a centered vision in which
reason remains rectified, upright, straight, to a bent vision, the result of
flying about in circles in a restless, shifting, confused, revolving point of
view. These are the terms used to describe Satan's mind, and what a
fascinating mind it is! No wonder the Renaissance gave us visual arts with
such strong concern for linear perspective, for angles of vision, for local,
temporary, limited, restricted points of view. On the one hand, these are
deceptive, troubling, fragmented, fraught with danger; on the other hand,
they are the products of reason, and if our moral reason is to remain
upright, we need to understand them for what they are, so we will not be led
astray by them.
To put it another way, comprehensive vision belongs to God, at the center;
perspective vision is Satanic. But perspective is not evil. Satan's motions
at the circumference, far from the divine center, marked by polar oppositions
and restless shifting about in time and space (like science itself) are all
we exiles from paradise can manage. We cannot stand at the center. But even
the changing perspectives of local space and temporary time are part of God's
ultimate geometry, just as the circumference is always defined by and
dependent on the center. Circumferential Satan himself is only a temporal and
spatial extension of God's eternal and infinite centrality. The mind is its
own place, says Milton, and "real" space then becomes a mental entity. Satan
can make a hell of heaven; God can make a heaven of earth; and Adam and Eve
can make a hell of earth. Presiding over all these shifting frames of
reference is the all-inclusive mind of God Itself, both center and
circumference, which can transform up to down, high to low, or, ultimately,
transform all such false oppositions into unified Being.
WORKS CONSULTED
Curry, Walter Clyde. Milton's Ontology, Cosmogony, and Physics. Lexington: U
of Kentucky P, 1966.
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Merritt Y. Hughes, ed. New
York: Odyssey Press, 1957.
Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers. New York: Universal Library (Grosset),
1963.
Note: Line numbers for Paradise Lost refer to Book IX, unless otherwise
indicated.
-----
Om
K
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