Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius
In his epic about the Fall, Milton includes versions of two famous characters of classical myth who fell from the heavens: Icarus, who fell when he ignored his father’s warnings and flew too high on his wings of wax and feathers; and Phaethon, who fell, struck by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, from the solar chariot of his father Apollo, the chariot he had unsuccessfully tried to drive through the sky, in spite of Apollo’s plea that he forbear. Ovid tells the stories of the two highfliers as parallel myths in the Metamorphoses and twice couples Icarus and Phaethon as figures of his own fate in the Tristia; Renaissance poets would similarly juxtapose the two as figures of excessive pride and immaturity.1 They thus provide analogues to the fallen offspring of Milton’s epic, Satan and Adam and Eve, as well as contrasting foils to its good sons, the Son of God and Milton the poet himself. Milton further evokes these classical myths of falling in order to confront behind them the Epicurean doctrine of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, the epic poem about an atomic universe that is in a state of free fall. At stake is nothing less than the cosmology and theodicy of Paradise Lost. Milton mentions neither Icarus nor Phaethon by name, however. The reworking of their myths needs to be excavated by patient philology from complicated, but coherent and deliberate systems of allusion to earlier epic poetry and to Milton’s own youthful Latin poem, Naturam non pati senium (NNPS; Nature does not suffer old age), as well as to Lucretius. It will then become apparent how the epic poet who would justify the ways of God to men and explain the Fall that brought death into the world engages, beneath the surface of his text, the godless Roman poet and his doctrine of sheer contingency and purely natural mortality. Meanwhile, the myths of Icarus and Phaethon shape the metaphors of a poem in which falling is depicted as the failure of aspired flight. These metaphors will contrast to the soaring poet himself, a successful Icarus, lifted in spirit on the wings of verse.2
Icarus and Satan’s Fall Through Chaos
Satan has scarcely taken off from the mouth of hell in book 2 when he begins to plummet through the unfathomed depths of Chaos.
At last his sail-broad vans
He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke
Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a league
As in a cloudy chair ascending rides
Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets
A vast vacuity: all unawares
Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not by ill chance
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud
Instinct with fire and nitre hurried him
As many miles aloft:
(2.927–38)
The preceding chapter described Satan’s fall and his rebound “As many miles aloft” (2.927–38) as a recollection of the whirlpool Charybdis that swallowed down and cast up the ship of Homer’s Ulysses in the Odyssey. The scene of Satan’s fall is also, as the present discussion demonstrates, Milton’s version of the fall of Icarus. Through allusion, it reaches back and gathers together a whole series of epic predecessors who are themselves joined to one another in a continuous chain of allusion—Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso, and, above and behind all of them, Lucretius. The series begins with Virgil’s own submerged reference to Lucretius.
VIRGIL AND LUCRETIUS
The story of Icarus is present by its absence on the doors of the temple of Apollo at Cumae described by Virgil at the opening of the sixth book of the Aeneid. Positioned at the gates of the underworld (6.107) and in the groves of Avernus (6.19), the temple was built by Daedalus in order to commemorate his landing place after he had flown from Crete on his artificial wings of feathers and wax. He dedicated his “remigium alarum” to Apollo—the “oarage of his wings”; the wording suggests a mariner making a votive offering after surviving a stormy voyage or shipwreck, and Daedalus had indeed made a journey over the sea. Of course, we know that Daedalus was not alone: his son Icarus, the myth tells us, flew too close to the sun, fell into the waves, and drowned. The climax of Virgil’s ekphrasis of the temple doors describes the scene that is not there. Daedalus, we are told, tried two times, but could not bring himself to depict his son’s “casus” (6.32): Icarus’s fall, which was also the accident that befell him.
What is this myth doing here? Virgilian critics have pointed to the way that the reference to the son who does not survive mirrors the end of book 6, the lament for Augustus’s nephew and designated heir Marcellus. Daedalus’s skill in fashioning the figures on the doors is comparable to Virgil’s own artistry in depicting the procession of future Romans who later parade before Anchises, among whom Marcellus both does and does not take part.3 As the survivor of a long sea journey, moreover, Daedalus is similar to Aeneas at this point in the poem: having reached his destination in Italy, Aeneas, too, has hung up his oars. True enough; but the myth of flying—and falling from the sky—has a particular resonance in this particular part of the world.
Avernus, we are told at verse 242, derives its name from the Greek “Aornum,” that is, the place without birds, for no flying creature could safely wing their way there—“super haud ullae poterant impune uolantes / tendere iter pinnis” (Aeneid 6.239–40)—thanks to the sulfuric exhalations sent up from the earth and lake. Virgil’s source is his great predecessor, Lucretius, who devotes a section of book 6 of his De rerum natura (DRN) to a description of the phenomenon.
Nunc age, Averna tibi quae sint loca cumque lacusque
expediam, quali natura praedita constent.
principio, quod Averna vocantur nomine, id ab re
impositumst, quia sunt avibus contraria cunctis,
e regione ea, quod loca cum venere volantes,
remigi oblitae pennarum vela remittunt
praecipitesque cadunt molli cervice profusae
in terram, si forte ita fert natura locorum,
aut in aquam, si forte lacus substratus Avernist.
is locus est Cumas aput, acri sulpure montes
oppleti calidis ubi fumant fontibus aucti.
(DRN 6.738–48)
[Now listen, and I will explain what is the nature of those Avernian regions and their lakes. In the first place, they are given the name Avernian because of the fact that they are dangerous to all birds, because when they have come in flight to those places, forgetting the oarage of their wings they pull in their sails, and fall headlong with their soft neck outstretched to the earth, if that is the nature of the place, or into the water, if the lake of Avernus lies below. This place is near Cumae, where the mountains smoke, filled with bitter sulfur and rich with hot springs.]
Behind Virgil’s Cumae and the “remigium alarum” that Daedalus dedicates at its temple lies Lucretius’s Cumae and its surrounding sulfuric district of Avernus, a district fatal to birds and to their “remigi … pennarum”: the textual echo is clear, and has been noted by earlier commentators.4 Lucretius offers two naturalistic explanations for the birds dropping from the sky. The noxious fumes sent up from Avernus may simply poison them (DRN 6.818–29), or, as Lucretius returns to a favorite idea, they may create a vacuum or void.5
Fit quoque ut interdum vis haec atque aestus Averni
aera, qui inter avis cumquest terramque locatus,
discutiat, prope uti locus hic linquatur inanis.
cuius ubi e regione loci venere volantes,
claudicat extemplo pinnarum nisus inanis
et conamen utrimque alarum proditur omne.
hic ubi nixari nequeunt insistereque alis,
scilicet in terram delabi pondere cogit
natura …
(DRN 6.830–38)
[It happens at times that this power and effluence of Avernus disperses the air which lies between the birds and the earth so that an almost empty space is left. When they have come flying to this place, the flapping of their pinions suddenly goes halting and in vain, and all the effort of both wings is nullified. When they are unable to rest or persist upon their wings, nature assuredly compels them to fall to earth by their own weight.]
With no air on which to ride, Lucretius explains, the birds drop from the sky over Avernus. The repetition of “inanis” connects the void to the empty flapping of their wings. They thus look very much like the battling atoms that fall by their own weight through the void that Lucretius describes in books 1 and 2 of De rerum natura—“corpora cum deorsum rectum per inane feruntur / ponderibus propriis” (DRN 2.217–18).
Just why, in fact, does Virgil refer back to Lucretius’s version of Avernus in the description of Daedalus’s temple that frames Aeneas’s descent into the underworld? He allows us to see a naturalistic explanation lurking behind the myth of Icarus. Birds drop from the sky around the lake of Avernus; eventually this somewhat freakish, if perfectly natural phenomenon produced a story of a winged boy who fell from the sky. Virgil’s use of the periphrastic term “uolantes” at verse 239—which we assume refers to birds but connotes flying creatures more generally—nicely suggests how the mythic imagination could translate a falling bird into a falling birdman.
But Lucretius, we should remember, was not trying in his sixth book to demystify the story of Icarus. He was after bigger game. He wrote of Cumaean Avernus:
ianua ne forte his Orci regionibus esse
credatur, post hinc animas Acheruntis in oras
ducere forte deos manis inferne reamur …
quod procul a vera quam sit ratione repulsum
percipe; nam de re nunc ipsa dicere conor.
(DRN 6.762–64; 6.766–67)
[nor should it be thought that this perhaps is the gate to the kingdoms of Hades, nor should we think that from here perhaps gods of the underworld lead souls down to the borders of Acheron … for you perceive how far that is removed from true reasoning; for I am trying now to speak of the facts themselves.]
Lucretius is anxious in this passage to dispel the idea that Avernus is the gateway to an underworld that does not in fact exist but is a figment of the superstitious human imagination. Virgil, however, seems flatly to contradict Lucretius by placing Aeneas’s descent into Hades in book 6 hard by Cumae and its temple. There is a tendency in the criticism of the Aeneid to see Virgil as a kind of anti-Lucretius, to see his epic combating the Epicurean rationalism and godlessness of his predecessor. But Virgil was himself, according to ancient testimony, a student of Epicureanism, and it is possible that the Aeneid, by its allusions here to book 6 of the De rerum natura, has it both ways.6 It can produce an epic underworld scene along the lines of the Odyssey and, at the same time, tip off the sophisticated and skeptical modern reader that this underworld at Cumaean Avernus is not something to be believed literally. Like the myth of Icarus that grows out of the local birdlessness that gives Avernus its name, so the whole underworld episode that follows is a mythic imposition of the human imagination. In this respect the temple doors (“foribus” [20]) that open book 6 are the counterparts of the doors of ivory that close the book and through which Aeneas leaves the underworld. These are the doors of false dreams that cast back upon the whole episode an aura of unreality.7
DANTE, TASSO, OVID
If Virgil describes the flights of Daedalus and Icarus, using the oarage of their wings, as a kind of sea voyage through the air, Dante, in turn, in Inferno 26 would describe the failed ocean voyage of his Ulysses as a kind of Icarian flight.
e volta nostra poppa nel mattino,
dei remi facemmo ali al folle volo,
sempre acquistando dal lato mancino.
(Inferno 26.124–26)
[And turning our stern toward the morning in the east, we made wings out of our oars for our mad flight, constantly gaining on the left] (i. e., going to the southwest)
Dante tells the story of a Ulysses who never made it home, but set off on a pure adventure beyond the Columns of Hercules at Gibraltar into the uncharted waters of the Southern Hemisphere where, in sight of the mountain of Purgatory, his boat capsized and he and his men drowned. It is the allegory, as John Freccero and others have demonstrated, of a proud, Platonic, contemplative flight, that, without the guidance of Christian revelation, is doomed never to reach the true celestial homeland of the soul: hence, it is a parodic countertype to the poet-narrator’s own journey, a descent into humility that will take him to Purgatory and finally to heaven.8 It is contrasted in Dante’s canto with the flight of the prophet Elijah on his chariot and his bodily assumption into heaven (26.34–39), and it is contrasted as well to the boat, piloted by an angel that Dante sees bringing the saved to the island mountain of Purgatory. His guide Virgil cries out to him:
Vedi che sdegna li argomenti umani,
sì che remo non vuol nè altro velo
che l’ali sue tra liti sì lontani.
Vedi come l’ha dritte verso il cielo,
trattando l’aere con l’etterne penne,
che non si mutan come mortal pelo.
(Purgatorio 2.31–36)
[See how he disdains human instruments, and wants no other oar or sail but his own wings to sail between such distant shores. See how he holds them straight toward heaven, cleaving the air with his eternal wings that never moult as does mortal plumage.]
Where Ulysses made his literal oars into wings, the angel, called an “uccel divino” (divine bird), two verses later (2.38), dispenses with oars and sails and propels the boat with the beating of his wings; he has, that is, an oarage of wings like the one that Daedalus successfully used to reach Cumae. There is a right way and a wrong way to get to Dante’s heaven. Ulysses attempted to turn his oars into wings for a mad flight, and the verbal recollection of Virgil’s book 6 makes him instead like that other mad flyer, Icarus, who similarly drowned when he fell into the sea.
Torquato Tasso would explicitly allude to the failed voyage of Dante’s Ulysses and incorporate it into a whole complex of poetic meaning in canto 15 of his Gerusalemme liberata (1581), the epic that provided Milton with his most chronologically proximate model and that already did much of the synthesizing of earlier epic models for him. In this poem about the First Crusade in the year 1099, Tasso stages a sea journey through the Mediterranean and then beyond the gates of Gibraltar. A boat piloted by the personification of Fortune—here, like Dante’s angel, the minister of divine providence and a kind of angel herself—conveys two knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, outside the known world to the Fortunate Isles (the Canaries). There they retrieve their companion, the poem’s military hero Rinaldo, who is at the moment the erotic captive of the beautiful Syrian enchantress Armida. Armida has carried off Rinaldo in her flying chariot and keeps him sequestered in an enchanted garden perched atop a mountain that recalls Dante’s island mountain of Purgatory on the top of which sits the original garden of Eden. In answer to Ubaldo’s question about whether anyone else has ever sailed their course, Fortune both looks back on Ulysses and predicts the future voyage of Columbus. Of Ulysses, she says:
Ei passò le Colonne, e per l’aperto
mare spiegò de’ remi il volo audace;
ma non giovogli esser ne l’onde esperto,
perché inghiottillo l’ocean vorace,
e giacque co ’l suo corpo anco coperto
il suo gran caso, ch’or tra voi si tace.
(GL 15.26.1–4)
[He passed the Columns of Hercules, and spread the audacious flight of his oars through the open sea, but it did him no good to be skilled at seamanship, for the voracious ocean swallowed him up, and his great mischance still lies buried with his body, which now remains unsung among you.]
The fate of Ulysses is still unsung, Fortune says, because in the eleventh century Dante has not yet been born to sing it. The echo of Dante’s Ulysses is clear—“dei remi facemmo ali al folle volo,” and behind that passage lies Dante’s own original in Virgil’s story of Daedalus and Icarus. The sea voyage of Ulysses was a kind of flight, and the Virgilian “oarage of wings” is understood in the verb spiegare—“to spread”—which suggests the spreading of a bird’s wings in flight. Tasso changes the “folle volo” into a “volo audace.” He thereby only intensifies the recollection of Icarus, for, following a typical Renaissance practice of contaminatio, the imitation of several models at once, he has included a reference to another classical version of the story of Icarus, the one told by Ovid in book 8 of the Metamorphoses.
cum puer audaci coepit gaudere volatu
deseruitque ducem caelique cupidine tractus
altius egit iter. rapidi vicinia solis
mollit odoratas, pennarum vincula, ceras;
tabuerant cerae: nudos quatit ille lacertos,
remigio carens non ullas percipit auras,
oraque caerulea patrium clamantia nomen
excipiuntur aqua…
(Metamorphoses 8.223–30)
[As the boy began to enjoy his audacious flight, he deserted his leader, and led by a desire for the sky, he took a higher path. The nearness of the consuming sun softened the fragrant wax that bound his wings together; the wax dissolved; he beat his bare arms, lacking oarage, they had no hold on the air, and his lips calling his father’s name were engulfed in the blue waters of the sea.]
Tasso’s “volo audace” translates the Ovidian “audaci … volatu.” We should note that Ovid’s passage itself contains a tiny recollection of Virgil’s book 6 in the “remigio,” the oarage, that Icarus’s now bare arms are said to lack.9 Tasso imitates Dante as Dante imitates Virgil, and he similarly imitates Ovid as Ovid imitates Virgil. He also appears to echo Virgil directly: the “gran caso” of Ulysses recalls the “casus” of Icarus that Virgil’s Daedalus could not bear to depict. Through the resulting Latinate pun, it is both a fall into the ocean that swallows him up and a surrendering to the chance that is sheer contingency—in contrast to Tasso’s Fortune herself, subsumed into God’s providential plan.
Tasso’s fiction contrasts Dante’s Icarian Ulysses not as Dante had done, with the individual soul on its pilgrimage to Purgatory and heaven, but with the boat of this Christianized Fortune, and, as Fortune goes on to prophesy, with Christopher Columbus, the navigator who will successfully sail out of Gibraltar and discover a whole New World.10 The predicted voyage of Columbus is, however, no less divinely sanctioned than that of Dante in his poem, for it opens the way to the evangelization and civilization of the hitherto unknown continent—as Fortune tells Ubaldo and Carlo, “la fé di Piero / fiavi introdotta ed ogni civil arte” (GL 15.29.5–6; the faith of Peter and every art of civilization will be introduced there). She goes on to apostrophize the Genoese explorer.
Tu spiegherai, Colombo, a un novo polo
lontane sì le fortunate antenne,
ch’a pena seguirà con gli occhi il volo
la fama c’ha mille occhi e mille penne.
(GL 15.32.1–4)
[You will spread so far your fortunate sails to a new pole that Fame with its thousand eyes and thousand wings will hardly be able to follow your flight with its eyes.]
The passage echoes the earlier description of the ill-fated Ulysses. Where Ulysses “spread” his flight with oars, here Columbus spreads his fortunate sails—an acknowledgment of the new technology of the caravel. Columbus, too, achieves a kind of flight: the fiction refers, in a not very concealed way, to a common play on the explorer’s name, “Colombo,” which means “dove.”11 The contrast to Dante’s Ulysses goes further, for when Fortune predicts that many-winged and many-eyed Fame will barely be able to follow Columbus’s flight with her eyes—“ch’a pena seguirà con gli occhi il volo”—she again echoes Inferno 26. Here, in Dante’s simile, it is Elisha whose eyes cannot follow the fiery chariot of his master Elijah as it rises to heaven.
E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi
vide ‘l carro d’Elia al dipartire,
quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi;
chè nol potea sì con li occhi seguire
ch’el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,
sì come nuvoletta, in su salire:
(Inferno 26.34–39)
[And such as he who avenged himself by means of the bears saw the chariot of Elijah at its departure, when the horses reared up and rose toward heaven: for he could not so follow it with his eyes as to see anything but the flame alone, like a little cloud, ascending on high.]
The simile describes the tongues of flame that Dante sees in Inferno 26, each of which contains and endlessly consumes a sinner within it, including the double flame that holds Ulysses with his comrade Diomedes. Tasso appears to have understood how this reference to Elijah and his chariot contrasts in Dante’s fiction to the voyage of Ulysses. If the “volo audace” assimilates Ulysses to the failed flight of Icarus, Tasso here aligns the “volo” of Columbus with the cloudy ascension of Elijah, both successful, transcendent flights, although the transcendence of Columbus is that of earthly fame, worthy of being memorialized in poetry and history—“di poema dignissima e d’istoria” (GL 15.32.8). Tasso’s fiction, that is, opposes Ulysses/Icarus to Columbus, just as Dante’s poem had opposed Ulysses/Icarus to Elijah.12
SATAN VOYAGER
The journey of Tasso’s knights to the Fortunate Islands is one of the many models that lie behind the episode of Satan’s journey across Chaos to the created universe in book 2 of Paradise Lost. Beelzebub has earlier in the book referred to “this new world” (2.403) as “the happy isle” (2.410), and later in book 3, Satan passes through stars that seemed “happy isles, / Like those Hesperian gardens famed of old, / Fortunate fields, and groves and flowery vales, / Thrice happy isles” (3.567–70), as he makes for earth and for Eden, a garden located atop a mountain like Dante’s Eden and like Armida’s garden in the Canaries on the future route of Columbus. After Satan has done his evil work with them, and they cover their nakedness, the fallen Adam and Eve will be compared to American natives whom “of late / Columbus found … / Among the trees on isles and woody shores” (9.1115–18). At the end of book 2, as he reaches the boundaries of creation, the archfiend is likened to “a weather beaten vessel” that “holds / Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn” (2.1043–44). Near the very end of the episode, too, Milton finally names Ulysses (2.1019) the most prestigious epic voyager, to whom all subsequent maritime epic heroes are implicitly compared. The devil’s journey through Chaos, as we saw in the chapter 2, is a little Odyssey, and Satan, we shall now see, recalls not only Homer’s Ulysses, but the failed Ulysses of Dante and Tasso as well.
But, in fact, Satan does not sail: he flies. At least he moves through the use of his wings. Thus, an epic tradition that begins with the flying Daedalus and Icarus as metaphorical sailors, traveling with the oarage of their wings, and then describes sailors such as Ulysses and Columbus as metaphorical fliers who make oars or sails into wings, now comes full circle with the Satan of Paradise Lost. Milton’s fiction, moreover, takes the tradition back even before Virgil’s Icarus to Virgil’s own Lucretian subtext. The amount of poetic memory layered into the passage is quite extraordinary.
At last his sail-broad vans
He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke
Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a league
As in a cloudy chair ascending rides
Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets
A vast vacuity: all unawares
Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not by ill chance
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud
Instinct with fire and nitre hurried him
As many miles aloft:
(2.927–38)
Satan’s wings are sail-like, and, in fact, he needs an updraft from the mouth of hell to get moving. Milton jokes at the devil’s expense with the phrase “Uplifted spurned the ground,” where “spurned” suggests a proud act of will on Satan’s part, while it appears that he is being passively lifted up by the surging smoke. The phrase will be echoed in Milton’s account of the fifth day of the Creation and the creation of the birds:
They summed their pens, and soaring the air sublime
With clang despised the ground …
(7.421–22)
The birds despise the ground as Satan spurns it, but they are real fliers, while Satan seems here to be more of a literal “airship” (though elsewhere in the poem he appears to fly under his own power). His wings are like sails that need a favoring wind to keep him going. At first he meets with success and his flight becomes “audacious”—the adjective, emphasized by a typical Miltonic inversion and by its placement at the beginning of the verse, recalls, faintly but unmistakably, the “volo audace” of Tasso’s Dantesque Ulysses and the “audaci … volatu” of Ovid’s Icarus, and it already suggests the fall that is about to come: this is the pride before the fall. Moreover, the “cloudy chair ascending” makes of this proud flight a parodic version of the ascension of Elijah in his chariot: “chair” has the meaning of chariot in seventeenth-century English, and we may remember that Dante’s Elisha sees his master rising to the heavens in his “carro” like a little cloud—a “nuvoletta.” Thus Milton, no less than Tasso, is able to bring into play Dante’s two contrasting figures in Inferno 26: the falling Icarus and the ascending Elijah; they are combined here and compressed into two lines, to denote both what Satan is and what he is not. The effect, moreover, is to moralize flight in a stark way in Paradise Lost: either one is on the way up to God and heaven, or one is condemned to a terrifying fall into untold, oceanic depths.
And Satan now does fall. He meets a “vast vacuity,” a Lucretian void, and like one of the birds over Lake Avernus, he plummets downward through the infinite space of Chaos. We now realize that those exhalations that first carry him aloft rise from a hell that in its characterization as the “burning lake” (1.210) of Revelation 20:14–15 is also a kind of Avernus. The “surging smoke” is the sort of sulfuric exhalation that according to Lucretius creates pockets of vacuum above Avernus and causes birds to fall from the skies there, lending the place its name. We should note that in the phrase “Fluttering his pennons vain,” Milton creates a new meaning for “pennons”—making it now signify “pinions / wings” instead of the normal “pennants / banners”—in order that we hear the “pinnarum” in Lucretius’s Latin original behind this passage: “claudicat extemplo pinnarum nisus inanis” (DRN 6.834).
The “vast vacuity,” however, is more than the local effect of the exhalations of the lake of hell, the kind of phenomenon that, as Virgil’s allusion to Lucretius in Aeneid 6 would suggest, provides a naturalistic origin to the myth of Icarus. This void through which Satan, Milton’s Icarus, plummets goes on forever and is to be identified with Chaos itself, with its endless reaches of space filled with randomly colliding atoms. This part of Milton’s cosmos is also Lucretian in inspiration. As John Leonard has argued, the idea of a universe protected by its walls amid a sea of otherwise warring atoms derives from De rerum natura, and he properly suggests the terror, as well as the grandeur, of the vision, shared by Milton and Lucretius, of “the void profound / Of unessential night” (2.438–39)—“inane profundum” (DRN 1.1107)—the infinite, and possibly lightless universe.13 Within this vast expanse of space, Satan is himself reduced to a Lucretian atom in free fall and subject to “high arbiter / Chance” (2.909–10). We remember Dante’s and Tasso’s Icarian Ulysses, who committed himself without divine guidance to the randomness of adventure and whose drowning is characterized by Tasso as an accident of chance—a “gran caso.” Satan is saved from a metaphorical drowning in deep oceanic space only by a chance explosion of the nitrous particles of Chaos—possibly a parody of the Lucretian clinamen, the creative swerve of atoms—and hurtled back on track to earth and to the seduction of humanity. This “ill chance” is our bad luck, for otherwise Satan would still be falling.
The belittling of Satan is comic, and is shortly followed by a fall in poetic diction that anticipates the bathetic literary manner that Alexander Pope would satirize as the “Art of Sinking”—“half on foot, / Half flying; behoves him now both oar and sail … With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way / And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies” (2.941–42, 2.949–50). The episode nonetheless engages seriously with Lucretius and with the implications of his godless universe. Milton combines Stoic and Lucretian-Epicurean cosmological models in order to cordon off the created world from the surrounding, infinitely extensive void of Chaos. Lucretius would have it that Chaos is the condition of the whole universe and that worlds created by accidents of chance within it are due in time to fall back through entropy into its disorder, as he declares at the end of book 1 of De rerum natura; Milton acknowledges this possibility when he calls Chaos, “The womb of nature and perhaps her grave” (2.911; cf. DRN 5.295). It is a possibility that would ultimately render the universe and human life absurd, and the poem sinks still further when it identifies Chaos with the nonmeaning of Babel—“a universal hubbub wild / Of stunning sounds and voices all confused” (2.951–52; cf. 12.60–62). But Milton resists this possibility by designating Chaos as that sector of the universe to which God has not put forth his “goodness” (7.171)—that is, his creativity—although he is careful to note in his De Doctrina Christiana (1.7) that such raw matter, in its potential to be shaped by God into creation, is good in itself and contains “the seeds of all subsequent good … It was in a confused and disordered state at first, but afterwards God made it ordered and beautiful” (CPW 6:308; Works 15:22). Milton’s Chaos is noncreative rather than entropic; it is the “world unborn” (7.220) or, more starkly, the “abortive gulf” (2.441), and its perpetually warring “embryon atoms” (2.900) can never combine long enough to reach elemental form. Its “high arbiter” (2.909) Chance cannot take the place of God’s Spirit that sat “brooding on the vast abyss” (1.21) and create new worlds out of this Chaos. When Satan, attracted by the noise, looks for the “spirit of the nethermost abyss” (2.956; 2.969), he finds the personified “anarch” himself, old and faltering (2.988–89), who proves to be his merely passive ally.14
In this light, Satan’s fall as a type of Icarus similarly corrects the Lucretian vision of a universe ruled by chance. Milton uses the Christianized Icarus-figure of Ulysses depicted by Dante and Tasso to counter the unbelief of Lucretius—and of Virgil, whose recollection of his Epicurean predecessor suggests that Icarus fell not because of any act of his own, but because it is the nature of things to fall. Like the mythic Icarus, Satan has disobeyed his father and aspired too high; his falling here repeats his nine-day fall through Chaos when he and his fellow rebel angels were rooted out of heaven (2.993–98, 6.871–77). Like the Dantesque Ulysses, Satan is on his own, without God, and hence gives himself up to chance. Having cut himself off from the divine source of meaning and creative order, Satan’s fall into the confused meaninglessness and random disorder of Chaos is both the result and the emblem of his sin. So Satan internalizes his falling in his soliloquy in book 4.
Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
(4.73–78)
When he speaks these words Satan is no longer in Chaos, but on the terra firma of the earth in the new, solidly built universe that God has created in his absence. But he still feels that he is falling. Miltonic wordplay transforms Satan’s flight into a vain attempt to flee both from an angry God and, more powerfully, from his own inner torment. This Icarus is drowning in a despair as deep as the infinite reaches of Chaos itself. It is not the universe that is falling, then, Milton responds to Lucretius, but rather the hardened sinner, who, unable to repent, falls ever further away from his Creator. Moreover, Satan’s interior state corresponds here not only to the Chaos into which he was falling earlier, but to hell, the bottomless pit: the hell that is his consciousness of falling itself, of having fallen and continuing to fall from a former state of happiness and goodness. Satan, that is, goes beyond the noncreative state of Chaos; his sin makes him positively decreative, both of himself and of God’s other creations that he seeks to reduce back to Chaos: “only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts” (9.129–30), he ultimately confesses in his soliloquy in book 9, as he sets out to ruin God’s greatest creation, Adam and Eve.
Phaethon, the Son, and the War in Heaven
Satan’s decreative impulse comes into play in Milton’s reworking of the myth of another would-be highflier who falls: Phaethon. Milton doubles his versions of the myth, however, in order to depict God’s Son as a successful Phaethon, who drives the Chariot of Paternal Deity in the War in Heaven and restores the heavenly landscape that the warfare of Satan, the failed, falling Phaethon, has caused to go to rack and ruin. But Milton’s target is once again the cosmology of Lucretius. His fiction not only refers back to Lucretius’s own naturalistic discussion of the Phaethon myth, it also evokes the Latin university poem written toward the beginning of Milton’s poetic career, Naturam non pati senium, itself a polemic against Lucretius. It thereby testifies to Milton’s long-standing preoccupation with the Roman poet’s dark view of a world that grows old and must fall eventually to pieces.
It has been noted by Barbara Lewalski that God’s praise of his Son in the heavenly council of book 3,
Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
Godlike fruition, quitted all to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By merit more than birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good,
Far more than great or high …
(3.305–11)
contains an echo of Apollo’s reassurance of his paternity to Phaethon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
“nec tu meus esse negari
dignus es, et Clymene veros” ait “edidit ortus”
(Metamorphoses 2.42–43)
[“nor is to be denied that you are worthy to be my son, and Clymene,” he said, “has proclaimed your true origins …”]
It seems a rather odd recollection that Milton uses to hammer home an important point: that the Son is distinguished more by his merit than by his birthright, that his merit has earned or demonstrated his special birthright among God’s other creatures, the angels. The Ovidian Phaethon goes on to show, in a spectacularly catastrophic way, that he is indeed unworthy of carrying out the work of his divine father. Lewalski does not develop the parallel much further.15 But, in fact, the Son has demonstrated his merit once before, during the War in Heaven and the following Creation of the universe, and he has done so by playing the role of Phaethon. These events are narrated subsequently in the poem by Raphael in his conversation with Adam and Eve in books 6 and 7.
At first, it is Satan who seems to have cast himself in the role of Phaethon or Apollo in the War in Heaven. Already back in book 3, Satan’s visit to the sun, as Davis Harding suggested, recalls the visit of Ovid’s Phaethon to his father Apollo, the sun god: the “golden tiar” with its “beaming sunny rays” (3.625) of Milton’s Uriel, the angel of the sun, echoes the crown of shining light that Apollo takes off —“circum caput omne micantes / deposuit radios” (Met. 2.40–41)—when he greets his son.16 Satan’s disguise as a “stripling cherub” (3.636), we may add, reinforces the resemblance of the two passages in which a youth approaches the resident divinity of the sun. Now this is the same Ovidian scene that Milton has just imitated in book 3 when God pronounced his Son worthy by merit. The juxtaposition within the same book of two versions of Ovid’s fiction distinguishes a good Phaethon and good son of God from a bad one. A similar juxtapostion takes place in book 6. Satan makes a grand entry into battle.
High in the midst, exalted as a god
The apostate in his sun-bright chariot sat
Idol of majesty divine, enclosed
With flaming cherubim, and golden shields;
(6.99–102)
Satan’s war chariot bears an obviously imitative relationship to the Chariot of Paternal Deity with its “four cherubic shapes” that will appear later and that Milton derives from the vision of Ezekiel 1. It is, moreover, an Apollonian chariot—“sun-bright”—and already suggests that Satan will repeat the fate of Phaethon.17 The war that Satan wages confirms the identification, for it begins to destroy the very foundations of heaven. Phaethon, as Ovid retells his story in the Metamorphoses, was unable to drive the sun god’s chariot and, as a result, began to burn up the universe. The scorched, personified Earth called on Jupiter to come to the rescue.
si freta, si terrae pereunt, si regia caeli,
in chaos antiquum confundimur! eripe flammis,
si quid adhuc superest, et rerum consule summae!
(Metamorphoses. 2.298–300)
[if the seas, if the land and the realms of the sky perish, we will be confused in ancient Chaos! if anything yet remains, save it from the flames, and consult the sum of things!]
All parts of the world, including Jupiter’s own heaven, are at stake, Earth warns, and they risk returning to the confusion of primeval Chaos from which, in Ovid’s version of the Creation, they first came. Jupiter, the almighty father—“pater omnipotens” (304)—responds by striking Phaethon down with his thunderbolt and thereby saves the world from impending destruction. Phaethon is carried headlong with flames in hair—“At Phaethon rutilos flamma populante capillos / volvitur in praeceps longoque per aera tractu / fertur” (Met. 2.319–21). So Paradise Lost tells us of Satan at its beginning: “Him the almighty power / Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” (1.44–45). Now, through Raphael’s narration, we see that Phaethon-like fall enacted.
Satan’s warfare brings about a return to Chaos in at least three ways.18 First, his invention of gunpowder involves digging up the raw materials of Chaos itself.
materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fiery spume, till touched
With heaven’s ray, and tempered they shoot forth
So beauteous, opening to the ambient light.
These in their dark nativity the deep
Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame …
(6.478–83)
Satan intuits that heaven, as will be the case of the created universe in book 7, is also made out of the stuff of Chaos, “the deep,” confused matter that lies in darkness waiting to be shaped by the divine Creator. These are the “originals of nature in their crude / Conception; sulphurous and nitrous foam” (6.511–12) whose explosive properties Satan will himself experience still later in the chronology of the poem, when he is blown back upward from his fall through Chaos in book 2 by a “tumultuous cloud / Instinct with fire and nitre”; only now, retrospectively, do we recognize the poetic justice of that moment: Satan was hoisted by his own petard. In his attempt to find an equivalent to God’s dreaded thunderbolt (6.491), Satan’s gunpowder plot thus already brings Chaos back into creation.
Second, the war between the rebel and loyal angels is a civil, “Intestine war in heaven,” and resembles the “intestine broils” (2.1001) of the warring atoms of Chaos. The atoms wage “endless wars” (2.897), and it is Satan’s strategy to keep the War in Heaven going forever—“if one day, why not eternal days?” (6.424); God himself concedes that “in perpetual fight they needs must last / Endless” (6.693–94) unless he intervenes, and this eternal strife, too, would turn heaven into an image of the never-ending wars of Chaos.
Third, when the mountains that the good angels pluck up from their foundations to overwhelm Satan’s cannons are met by similar mountains cast by the rebel angels in return—“So hills amid the air encountered hills” (6.664)—this version of the gigantomachy both verges on comic mock-epic and suggests cosmic decreation.
Infernal noise; war seemed a civil game
To this uproar; horrid confusion heaped
Upon confusion rose: and now all heaven
Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread …
(6.667–70)
The initial emphasis is on unintelligible noise: “war” spreads acoustically into “uproar; horrid.”19 The gigantomachy and the piling of Pelion on Ossa were conventionally assimilated with the building of the Tower of Babel. Milton has already drawn on this association in his description of Satan’s “royal seat” in book 5: “as a mount / Raised on a mount, with pyramids and towers” (5.757–58; cf. the coupling of “Babel, and the works of Memphian kings” applied to Satan’s later temple-palace in Pandaemonium at 1.694). Here Babelic confusion rises on confusion like the unfinished tower itself and turns heaven into the “hubbub wild” and “voices all confused” of a meaningless Chaos.
The war that Satan brings to heaven would plunge God’s creation back toward the confusion of Chaos, and it resembles the destruction wrought by Ovid’s Phaethon—“in chaos antiquum confundimur,” the Earth cries out in the Metamorphoses, imploring Jupiter to consult on the sum of things, to take care for his universe. It is to that destruction that Milton now alludes as God intervenes to end the war.
and now all heaven
Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread,
Had not the almighty Father where he sits
Shrined in his sanctuary of heaven secure,
Consulting on the sum of things, foreseen
This tumult, and permitted all, advised:
That his great purpose he might so fulfil,
To honour his anointed Son avenged
Upon his enemies, and to declare
All power on him transferred:
(6.669–78)
The echoes of Ovid’s “pater omnipotens” and “rerum consule summae” are clear; God is in the position of the Ovidian Jupiter responding to the destruction wrought by Phaethon’s unsuccessful attempt to drive his father’s chariot.
But now Milton inverts the Phaethon story, for God tells his Son, “Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels / That shake heaven’s basis, bring forth all my war, / My bow and thunder” (6.711–13). God makes the Son into a good Phaethon, and his assertion that the Son will prove himself “worthiest to be heir / Of all things” (6.707–8) recalls (and in the poem’s chronology anticipates) the declaration in book 3 of the Son’s worthiness—“Found worthiest to be so by being good”—which, we have seen, echoes the words of Ovid’s Apollo to Phaethon. There are Apollonian associations in the bow (6.763–64) that the Son employs together with his Jovian thunderbolts.
This is a Phaethon who restores rather than destroys the universe. The tone and action of the War in Heaven change after the mock-heroic mayhem of its first two days has threatened to spiral out of control. The Son’s first act is to put heaven’s landscape back into place.
Before him power divine his way prepared;
At his command the uprooted hills retired
Each to his place, they heard his voice and went
Obsequious, heaven his wonted face renewed,
And with fresh flowerets hill and valley smiled.
(6.780–84)
It was the Son—as by God’s Word, Abdiel had reasoned and warned Satan back in book 5 (835–39)—who created all things in the first place, including heaven and the angels, and his return of heaven to the way it was repeats that original creative act. It also anticipates the Son’s creation of the new universe in the following book 7, especially his command to Chaos that similarly prepares the way for his divine chariot.
Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou deep, peace,
Said then the omnific Word, your discord end:
Nor stayed, but on the wings of cherubim
Uplifted, in paternal glory rode
Far into chaos, and the world unborn;
For chaos heard his voice: him all his train
Followed in bright procession to behold
Creation, and the wonders of his might.
(7.216–23)
Both of these moments show the creative Word at work, and Milton has carefully brought out their analogy. At the sound of its voice and fiat, both a chaotic heaven and Chaos itself are reduced to order. The Son’s ensuing expulsion from heaven of Satan and the rebel angels is similar to his taking the chaos—the noise, violence, and discord—out of Chaos in order to extend that creativity into its reaches. The fulmination and fall of Satan and the bad angels through Chaos into hell completes Milton’s reworking of the Phaethon myth. Satan, the bad, aspiring Phaethon who seeks to take the place of the divine Father and comes close to wrecking heaven, is finally not struck by divine “thunder” (6.854), for the Son, the good, obedient Phaethon and worthy driver of his father’s chariot, holds back—“he meant / Not to destroy” (6.854–55)—and merely roots Satan and his crew out of the celestial precincts. They are indeed “thunderstruck” (6.858), but we should probably understand this adjective metaphorically: the Son’s ten thousand thunders earlier “in their souls infixed / Plagues” (6.837–38)—it is warfare with literal psychological weapons—and here they are similarly driven by forces, “terrors” and “furies” (6.859), that are more inner and spiritual than external: panic terrors suitable to a “herd / Of goats” in stampede or to demonically possessed Gadarene swine tumbling over into the deep (Matt. 8:32).20 Milton carefully cordons off the Son from the physical warfare of the first two days of the heavenly conflict.21
The confrontation of these two Phaethons in the War in Heaven constitutes a kind of cosmogonic struggle between divine creativity and the decreative force of Satanic evil that introduces war among things and makes them fall apart. It is at the same time a particular contest between Milton’s Christian cosmology and the godless cosmology of Lucretius. For Lucretius, too, presents a version or understanding of the Phaethon story, one of the very few mythic references in De rerum natura. It appears at the climax of the section in book 5 (64–415) where Lucretius explains that while the universe and matter may be eternal and indestructible, the visible world within it that we inhabit is not: it is mortal just as we are, and someday the mechanism of this world will come crashing down: “multosque per annos / sustentata ruet moles et machina mundi” (DRN 5.95–96). The Roman poet rules out the possibility that the gods created the world for men and women (DRN 5.156–80). Having rather come into being by chance out of the rain of falling atoms, this world—the sum of things—can be battered and eventually destroyed by other groups of atoms coming out of the infinity of space like a violent storm, “corruere hanc rerum violento turbine summam” (DRN 5.368), a passage that Milton appears to remember when he describes the newly created world “with ever-threatening storms / Of Chaos blustering around, inclement sky” (3.425–26).22 Lucretius continues to suggest that in the incessant battle among the four elements—which Milton translates into the battle in his Chaos of four elemental principles, “Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce” (2.898)—one can gain ascendance and bring about universal destruction. Indeed, this has already happened, and now Lucretius produces his clinching evidence.
ignis enim superavit et lambens multa perussit,
avia cum Phaethonta rapax vis solis equorum
aethere raptavit toto terrasque per omnis.
at pater omnipotens ira tum percitus acri
magnanimum Phaethonta repenti fulminis ictu
deturbavit equis in terram, solque cadenti
obvius aeternam succepit lampada mundi
disiectos redegit equos iunxitque trementis,
inde suum per iter recreavit cuncta gubernans,
scilicet ut veteres Graium cecinere poetae.
quod procul a vera nimis est ratione repulsum.
ignis enim superare potest ubi materiai
ex infinito sunt corpora plura coorta;
inde cadunt vires aliqua ratione revictae,
aut pereunt res exustae torrentibus auris.
umor item quondam coepit superare coortus …
(DRN 5.396–411)
[For fire once gained the upper hand and, spreading around, burned many things when the fierce might of the horses of the Sun carried Phaethon off course through the whole of heaven and all over the earth. But the almighty father, spurred then by harsh anger, cast down aspiring Phaethon with the sudden force of a thunderbolt from his horses to earth, and the Sun meeting him as he fell, took up the eternal lamp of the world, and brought back his scattered horses and yoked the trembling steeds; thereupon, driving them on their way, he created all anew. That is how the ancient poets of the Greeks have sung of it. But it is removed very far from true reason. For fire can dominate when the atoms of its matter gathered from the infinite are preponderant in number; thence its forces subside defeated by some reason or the world perishes, burned up in a firestorm.
Water also once, having gathered together, began to dominate …]
Lucretius tells the story of Phaethon to discount it as myth—“thus they relate, / Erring”—at the same time that he argues, in euhemerist fashion, that it is poetic testimony to a real event: a catastrophic fire that once almost destroyed or did destroy the earth. If the fire subsided, as did a similarly ruinous deluge, which he goes on briefly to discuss, it did so because it was thwarted by other natural elements, not because some sun god, in whom Lucretius does not believe, restored creation (“recreavit”), and not because of the intervention of a “pater omnipotens,” in whom he especially does not believe. Ovid takes this section of the De rerum natura to epitomize its dark message when he presents his history of Latin literature in the Tristia.
explicat ut causas rapidi Lucretius ignis,
casurumque triplex vaticinatur opus.
(Tristia 2.425–26)
[Lucretius explains the causes of devastating fire, and sings the fall of the threefold world] (i.e., earth, sea, and sky)
Lucretius, for Ovid, is the poet who sings the end of the world in conflagration, and we can note how Lucretius’s language in this part of his poem—“hanc rerum … summam” and “at pater omnipotens”—reappears in Ovid’s retelling of the Phaethon story. Just as Virgil’s depiction of Icarus suggests through allusion a naturalistic Lucretian explanation of the myth, so Ovid’s version of Phaethon alludes to an explicit Lucretian explanation of the origins of this myth in a real natural disaster. And Milton is aware of the poetic operation going on in both cases and how they testify to an Epicurean vision of a world falling into entropy and toward its demise.
For Milton had already countered this vision and the Lucretian Phaethon in his early Latin poem, Naturam non pati senium, probably written between 1627 and 1630 while the young poet was at Cambridge. Lucretius is the obvious target of this poem, which attacks the belief of some blind and benighted thinkers who ascribe their own human mortality to nature (1–7). The first half of the poem consists of a series of sarcastic rhetorical questions and statements about this presumed aging of the earth and its eventual destruction. The passage reaches its rhetorical climax with a vision of the collapse of the universe onto itself (and then is immediately followed by the poem’s second half, which rebuts this vision and the erroneous doctrine that stands behind it).
Tu quoque Phoebe tui casus imitabere nati
Praecipiti curru, subitaque ferere ruina
Pronus, et extincta fumabit lampade Nereus,
Et dabit attonito feralia sibila ponto.
Tunc etiam aerei divulsis sedibus Haemi
Dissultabit apex, imoque allisa barathro
Terrebunt Stygium deiecta Ceraunia Ditem
In superos quibus usus erat, fraternaque bella.
At pater omnipotens fundatis fortius astris
Consuluit rerum summae, certoque peregit
Pondere fatorum lances, atque ordine summo
Singula perpetuum iussit servare tenorem …
Floridus aeternum Phoebus iuvenile coruscat,
Nec fovet effoetas loca per declivia terras
Devexo temone deus; sed semper amica
Luce potens eadem currit per signa rotarum …
(NNPS 25–36, 41–44)
[And you, too, Phoebus, will be supposed to imitate the fall of your son with a precipitous chariot, and headfirst will be carried in your sudden fall, and Nereus will send up steam from your extinguished lamp, and will make a cadaverous hissing on the astonished sea. Then also with the uprooting of its foundations the peak of lofty Haemus would burst asunder, and the Ceraunian mountains, dashed down and striking the lowest underworld, will terrify Hades, who had used them against the gods in fraternal war.
But the almighty father, who has set the stars more firmly in their place, has taken care for the sum of things, and he has fixed the scales of the fates with a sure balance, and commanded every individual thing to preserve its perpetual course in the universal order … Phoebus shines with the bloom of eternal youth; the god does not veer his chariot downward to warm an exhausted earth, but always potent with cherishing light drives through the same tracks his wheels have made …]
The Phaethon myth stands at the center of Naturam non pati senium, and Milton takes it, in its Lucretian sense, to stand for a once-and-future destruction of the earth by the aging and instability of its own elemental framework; the sun will fall from the sky, as Phaethon did once before, and this time take his chariot with him. Milton similarly understands the uprooted mountains of the gigantomachy, wielded here, it seems, in a kind of civil war among the gods, as figures of cosmic destruction. Both of these myths will shape the War in Heaven and turn it, too, into a test of the order of God’s creation. The unmistakable Lucretian-Ovidian tag, “At pater omnipotens … / Consuluit rerum summae,” which will also be reworked in the War in Heaven, already indicates here God’s reassuring care for the universe he has made.23 Milton throws back in Lucretius’s face the Roman poet’s own sarcasm about a supreme deity who cast Phaethon down.24 Yes, the poem declares, just as the almighty father in the myth preserved the world when Phaethon was about to wreck it, so there is a God who keeps the sun and the rest of the universe running in its usual place. There will be no Phaethon-like destruction randomly visited on the earth as Lucretius teaches. Milton ends by conceding a final conflagration that will indeed destroy the earth, but only when God is ready for it at the Last Judgment—“Ingentique rogo flagrabit machina mundi” (NNPS 69). This is the true version and the poem’s final correction of Lucretius’s description of the “machina mundi” (DRN 5.96) falling by its own shaky elemental forces into ruin.
Milton thus rewrote Lucretius’s version of the Phaethon myth twice, first in Naturam non pati senium and again in Paradise Lost, and the epic itself rewrites the early university poem. In both cases, he denies the Lucretian reading of the myth, which understands it as a story of inevitable cosmic decreation in a universe ruled by chance. He asserts instead the providential guidance of the Christian God who maintains his universe in rational running order and prevents it from disintegrating into Chaos. In Paradise Lost, this divine maintenance is enacted when the Son, playing the role of a good Phaethon in his father’s chariot, returns the disordered scenery of heaven back into place, an act that is portrayed as one and the same thing as his defeat of Satan and the rebel angels, who are responsible for reintroducing Chaos into heaven. Satan falls from heaven through Chaos as a bad Phaethon, as earlier in the poem we have seen him fall as Icarus. There, too, Milton contested a Lucretian interpretation of the myth—the one that Virgil builds into the allusive texture of the Aeneid—which would have seen Icarus falling not from audacious aspiration in disobedience to his father’s commands, but because falling is in the nature of things.
Milton’s strategy is consistent in his anti-Lucretian treatment of these two myths of falling in Paradise Lost. He alludes to naturalizing readings of Icarus and Phaethon. But in their place, and in resistance to the Epicurean implications of such readings, Milton reaffirms their conventional, moral reading—these are stories about sons who want to be equal to or go beyond their fathers, but prove unable to sustain their ambitious flights. Milton renders this moral explicitly Christian. Sin makes Satan fall like Icarus into a Chaos ruled by chance, and he will still feel as if he is falling there even when he reaches the newly created world. Sin makes Satan begin, like Phaethon, to destroy heaven through his rebellion and warfare.
Nonetheless, the fact that Milton chooses to confront the Lucretian versions of these myths, and the poetic power, too, of his images of Satan’s falling through Chaos and of the ruin and confusion of the War in Heaven, testify to an anxious preoccupation with De rerum natura. It was an anxiety that dated back to Naturam non pati senium, and suggests just how much of a challenge the Lucretian atomic universe of chance and entropy posed for his Christian belief. In Naturam non pati senium, Milton accused those who, like Lucretius, saw the universe aging and falling at last into dissolution, of daring to measure nature by their own mortal condition—“suis metiri facta deorum / Audet” (NNPS 4–5). If men die, nature dies, and Lucretius’s own message is, reciprocally, that from the example of a dying nature human beings should accept the fact that death is the end. This was a conclusion that Milton as a Christian was bound to contest. The great subject of Paradise Lost may indeed be to depict how death came into the world through sin and thus to give death a meaning. The Son’s defeat of Satan in the War in Heaven not only prevents God’s creation from falling into ruin and keeps it ever new; the three days of warfare anticipate the Son’s Passion, which is his victory over death. Yet by the time he came to write Paradise Lost, Milton had accepted the mortalist position that the human soul dies with the body: he had come close to conceding the central and most scandalous point of De rerum natura (DRN 3.417–829).25 So Milton’s doubts and fears may have run deeper, and he may have admitted the force of Lucretius’s naturalistic arguments. We can only speculate. Perhaps his unease with the Epicurean doctrine he confutes is measured in the very indirectness of his approach to it: Milton buries his allusions to Icarus and Phaethon, neither mentioned by name, and to the Lucretian passages to which they further refer, as if they occupy a troubled poetic substratum of his epic, kept out of sight and out of mind.
Flight and Fall
The resonance of these episodes, and of the Icarus and Phaethon myths submerged beneath them, is nonetheless felt throughout Paradise Lost as it returns again and again to the opposition of flying and falling. Here, too, moralizing may help keep at bay the Lucretian prospect of a universe that is itself falling into non-meaning. It is not enough to portray the Fall: fallenness is measured by flightlessness or false attempts at flight. At the same time, the poet Milton, invoking his Muse, finds his personal relief or exemption from a fallen condition in the winged elevation of his verse.
Milton rewrites the low comedy of Satan’s fall through Chaos into the still lower comedy of the anti-Catholic satire of the limbolike Paradise of Fools in book 3. “Up hither like aerial vapours flew” (3.445): the fools fly up through their own vanity and emptiness, an inversion of Satan and Lucretian atoms falling downward by their own weight through an empty void. When they think to arrive at Saint Peter’s gate, a violent crosswind “Blows them transverse ten thousand leagues awry / Into the devious air” (3.488–89), echoing the “Ten thousand fathom deep” of Satan’s earlier fall. The fools are the “sport of winds” blowing from Chaos, much as Satan was the plaything of its warring elements, and as they “Fly o’er the backside of the world” (3.494) to their fool’s paradise, the scatological nature of these ill-winds is suggested.26
A few verses later, moreover, Milton describes the true gate of heaven, at whose foot
a bright sea flowed
Of jasper, or of liquid pearl, whereon
Who after came from earth, sailing arrived,
Wafted by angels, or flew o’er the lake
Rapt in a chariot drawn by fiery steeds.
(3.518–22)
The fools’ unsuccessful ascent to heaven (3.486) is opposed, as was Satan’s fall, to the flight of Elijah in his chariot and his assumption as one of the “Translated saints” (3.461), together with Enoch whose ascension, “Rapt in a balmy cloud with winged steeds,” will be described in book 11 (706).27 This flight is also a kind of sea voyage above heavenly waters, contrasted to the failed flight of the drowned Icarus. The passage, Fowler suggests, may also recall the angel who ferries the saved souls to Dante’s Purgatory, a purgatory that the Paradise of Fools is satirizing.28
Delusory flight features in the dream that Satan pours into Eve’s ear and that she describes in book 5. Her visitant, “shaped and winged like one of those from heaven” (5.55), tells her:
Happier thou mayst be, worthier canst not be:
Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods
Thy self a goddess, not to earth confined,
But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes
Ascend to heaven, by merit thine …
(5.76–80)
The temptation is to flight and to the godhood that such flight would prove, and it is also colored with the vocabulary of worth and merit that has been associated with the Son as a new version of Phaethon. Earlier, Adam has observed that he and Eve “Have nothing merited” for their happiness (4.418). Now Satan is casting Eve in the role of Phaethon, and setting her up for a fall; he himself is earlier described high on his throne in hell at the opening of book 2, “Satan exalted sat, by merit raised / To that bad eminence; and from despair / Thus high uplifted beyond hope aspires / Beyond thus high” (2.5–8) in a parody of the Son’s true merit, a passsage that will be echoed when Satan appears, Phaethon-like, in the War in Heaven: “High in the midst exalted as a god / The apostate in his sun-bright chariot sat” (6.99–100). No sooner has Eve in her dream eaten the forbidden fruit than
With him I flew, and underneath beheld
The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide
And various: wondering at my flight and change
To this high exaltation; suddenly
My guide was gone, and I, me thought, sunk down,
And fell asleep;
(5.86–92)
In her high, godlike exaltation, Eve echoes the aspiring Satan, while her sinking down suggests both a fall and a drowning in sleep. The satanic dream mimics Adam’s true dream where a “shape divine” (8.295) brings him “over fields and waters, as in air / Smooth sliding without step” (8.301–2) to an Eden laden with tempting fruit. It also has its counterpart in the true heavenly ascent planned for human creatures, for it parodies in advance Raphael’s subsequent speculation in the same book 5 that, through a process that includes a vegetarian diet, and thus also seems to involve eating fruit, although fruit of a different kind, the bodies of Adam and Eve “may at last turn all to spirit, / Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend / Ethereal …” (5.497–99). Man, as God first created him, Milton says, was indeed meant to fly—at least eventually as he became “worthier.” But the Fall into original sin changed matters.
It is, ironically, such divine flight that Adam and Eve first imagine themselves experiencing when together they eat the fruit of the forbidden tree.
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the earth; but that false fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire inflaming, he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him
As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn:
(9.1009–15)
Satan spurns the ground; the birds at their creation despised the ground; Adam and Eve would scorn the earth. To the internal echoes of the poem Milton grafts a wicked parody of Plato’s discussion of the wings of the soul in the Phaedrus. There Socrates explains to Phaedrus how the soul that descends into the body and into matter has lost the wings that “carry it aloft to the regions where gods dwell” (246e), and that these wings can be regrown through the experience of love kindled by the sight of the beautiful beloved.
For by reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby his soul’s plumage is fostered, and with that warmth the roots of the wings are melted, which for long had been so hardened and closed up that nothing could grow; then as the nourishment is poured in, the stump of the wing swells and hastens to grow from the root over the whole substance of the soul, for aforetime the whole soul was furnished with wings. Meanwhile she throbs with ferment in every part, and even as a teething child feels an aching and pain in its gums when a tooth has just come through, so does the soul of him who is beginning to grow his wings [pterophuein] feel a ferment and painful irritation. (251b–c)
Although Socrates goes on to preach the chaste, sublimated, love of the philosopher (256b–d), it is clear that the throbbing wings of the soul that he describes here bear a more than metaphorical relationship to the pangs of sexual desire and to the male erection. Milton maliciously strips away the metaphor altogether as Adam and Eve fall into fornication. If they are preparing for Platonic flight to the heavens, they crash and burn on takeoff. Their imagined wings are glossed subsequently in the narrative, if at a chronologically prior point in the plot, in book 10; Sin declares that she feels “Wings growing” (244) within herself on the eve of the Fall, as she and Death hasten toward earth. There the now fallen Adam finds himself in the same spiritual condition to which Satan had earlier born witness.
O conscience! into what abyss of fears
And horror has thou driven me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged!
(10.842–44)
There is no stopping once one begins to fall—unless, in the case of Adam, prevenient grace comes to the rescue in the person of the repentant Eve. The unredeemed and unredeemable Satan, on the other hand, felt “in the lowest deep a lower deep” of torturing despair ready to devour him: the state of hell is an endless free fall.
A Poetry Against Falling
Milton gives us another, more personal, version of the spiritual state of the reprobate in the words of his God in book 3. Of his grace the Deity says,
They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste;
But hard be hardened, blind be blinded more
That they may stumble on, and deeper fall;
And none but such from mercy I exclude.
(3.199–202)
Milton is paraphrasing Isaiah 6:10 and its later appearances in Matthew 13:14, and at the very end of Acts in chapter 28:27: “Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.” But as he spells out the relentless logic of perdition, Milton’s intercalating of scriptural texts (see the ensuing Isaiah 8:14–15) allows us to feel the special resonance for the sightless poet in danger every day of stumbling and falling. It is as if Milton were trying to persuade himself that the physical affliction of his blindness is not to be confused with the spiritual affliction of despair for which it serves as a figure—that fearful state of falling ever deeper and farther from God. “This is not me,” the poet says, even as his royalist enemies saw his blindness as a divine punishment and a sign of reprobation.29 Or, instead, the blind Milton fights off his own dejection and projects it onto the character of his despairing devil.
For Milton the poet intends rather to fly, and he intends to do so precisely as a highflying Icarus, an Icarus who in this case will not fall. He characterizes his poetry in the opening invocation to the Muse of Paradise Lost as “adventurous song / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above the Aonian mount” (1.13–15). This is poetry that will go beyond the middle course—“medio”—that both Ovid’s Daedalus (Met. 8.203) and Apollo (Met. 2.137) counsel their sons Icarus and Phaethon to take. Milton is, in fact, revising the pledge that Guillaume Du Bartas (1544–90) makes at the beginning of La Sepmaine (1581) to maintain a middle course and to avoid the fate of an Icarus-like poetic overreacher, seeking too curiously into divine mysteries.
Piqué d’un beau souci je veux qu’ore mon vers
Divinement humain se guinde entre deux airs:
De peur qu’allant trop haut, la cire de ses ailes
Ne se fonde aux rayons des celestes chandeles:30
(La Sepmaine 1.113–16)
[My heedfull Muse, trained in true Religion,
Devinely-humane keepes the middle Region:
Least, if she too-high a pitch presume,
Heav’ns glowing flame should melt her waxen plume;]31
(Sylvester, trans., The Divine Weeks 1.1.135–38)
Where Milton depicted the Son as a successful Phaethon, he, Milton, claims to be a successful Icarus in his poetic flight, a claim that he repeats at the opening of book 3 when he speaks of revisiting the light “with bolder wing” (3.13), still bolder than the audacious flight—“audaci … volatu”—of Ovid’s Icarus. In the fiction of the Metamorphoses, Ovid doubled and rewrote the Phaethon story in the story of Daedalus and Icarus to suggest that the flight of the artist-poet is the mortal version of, or surrogate for, the experience of real divine flight.32 Milton juxtaposes the mythical figures in a similar way to promise himself the godlike exaltation of poetry.
In the invocation to book 7, the figure shifts to an analogous myth. With half of the poem left to sing, the poet renews his claim to soar (7.3), and implores his heavenly Muse for a safe landing.
with like safety guided down
Return me to my native element:
Lest from this flying steed unreined (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower clime)
Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.
(PL 7.15–20)
Flying on the winged Pegasean steed of poetry, Milton acknowledges the possible alternative of falling; having soared transgressively high on Pegasus, Bellerophon was thrown to earth and—with obvious resonance for Milton—was blinded.33 His fate was similar to and already associated in antiquity with the falls of Phaethon and Icarus. Horace explicitly couples Bellerophon and Phaethon in Odes 4.11.25–28 as examples of overreachers. But it is Icarus that, as we shall see, the same Horace twice presents as a figure of failed poetic flight in the cluster of classical texts that lie behind this passage.
Milton is most directly rewriting the end of Pindar’s seventh Isthmian ode, where the Greek lyric poet prescribes a moderate old age for himself: he will sing with his hair entwined with a garland, praying that he avoid the envy of the gods. Pindar invokes the counterexample of Bellerophon who sought to ride Pegasus up to the homes of the gods and of Zeus, and was thrown by his mount. As he asks the Muse to return him back safely to earth after recounting the War in Heaven, the epic poet Milton presents himself as having completed the sublime Pegasean flight that his lyric predecessor declined to make (and he has gone well above the transgressive Bellerophon, too). Milton’s gesture is both doubly self-congratulatory and doubly aware of the potential risks he incurs, for even to emulate, not to overgo, Pindar’s own sublimity can lead to a fall. So Horace had asserted in the Odes.
Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari,
Iule, ceratis ope Daedalea
nititur pinnis vitreo daturus
nomina ponto.34
(Odes 4.2.1–4)
[Whoever tries to emulate Pindar, Iulus, attempts to fly on waxen wings of Daedalean workmanship and will give his name to a glassy sea.]
To venture the poetic flight of Pindar, the highflying Dircaean swan—“Dircaeum … cycnum” (25)—is almost certainly to repeat the fate of Icarus, a failure to keep aloft, and we saw how Satan’s fall in Chaos momentarily lowered the poetic register, a failure, too, of achieving a name for oneself as a poet.35 In Odes 2.20 Horace had more confidently proclaimed his poetic immortality when he describes his own transformation into the swan of poetry; he feels downy feathers growing out of his arms and shoulders: “nascunturque leves / per digitos umerosque plumae” (11–12). The poet’s fame will carry him, he says, in double form, half man, half bird, through the sky on no common or light plumage—“Non usitata nec tenui ferar / pinna biformis per liquidum aethera” (1–2)—and he is unworried lest he repeat the fate of Icarus, whose fame he has now, in any case, surpassed: “iam Daedaleo notior Icaro” (13).
The young Milton had this poem in mind when he wrote to Charles Diodati in September 1637.
quid cogitem, quaeris? ita me, bonus Deus, immortalitem. Quid agam vero? πτεροϕυω et volare meditor: sed tenellis admodum adhuc pennis evehit se noster Pegasus, humile sapiamus. (Works, 12:26)
[Do you ask what I am meditating? by the help of heaven, immortality of fame. But what am I doing? pterophuo (I am letting my wings grow) and preparing to fly: but as yet our Pegasus raises himself on very tender pinions; let us be lowly wise.]
The Greek verb, we should note, is the same that Plato used in the Phaedrus to denote the growth of the wings of the soul, here transferred to the preparation of the poet for flight, a poet who is also a Bellerophon on a still unfledged Pegasus.36 His younger self could scarcely get off the ground, but the Milton of Paradise Lost has reached and maintained the sublime, and guaranteed his deathless fame. Where Satan, then Adam and Eve, sought to fly, only to fall and be plunged into depths of psychic affliction, Milton is uplifted and returned to earth by the miracle of poetry. The poet and the Son are the only characters of Paradise Lost to achieve successful flight.
Still, the poet of book 7 is anxious lest he himself fall, and he goes on to say that he is indeed “fallen on evil days / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues” (7.25–26), the darkness of his blindness and of the political world of the Restoration, and he raises the specter of one more drowning: the “wild rout” whose “savage clamour drowned / Both harp and voice” of Orpheus (7.36–37). But the Muse returns each night to stop him from falling into despondency. In his last invocation in book 9, the trope of flight persists even as the poet worries that climate and an age too late “damp my intended wing / Depressed, and much they may, if all be mine, / Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear” (9.45–47). We should hear the modern meaning of “depressed,” already current in the seventeenth century, in Milton’s formulation: fallenness is a kind of dejection from which one can be rescued by the wings of poetry.37 Milton’s verse wishes to be sacred, and he claims that it could not succeed, or even exist, without divine prompting. But even for the devils left behind in book 2 to build a civilization without hope, song “suspended” hell (2.554), providing relief, however temporary, from their fallen state.38
To conclude with this personal application of the mythic figures of flying and falling to Milton and his poetry is not to reduce Paradise Lost to a battle against the poet’s depression. But, in powerful way, it is that, too. In the world of both physical and spiritual death after the Fall, where it is impossible for the faithful to stand, much less ascend, unless upheld by grace (3.174–80), where, by the end of the poem, Adam and Eve are walking downhill toward the “subjected plain” (12.640), the only flight above the fallenness of things may be the imaginative flight of poetry. The soaring elevation of his verse approximates the Icarus-like Milton to the Phaethon-like heroism of the Son, and poetry offers him its own kind of salvation.
Milton conceives of his Muse as a special form of grace that keeps him and his poem aloft, a guarantor of the high style. Yet this therapy brings him closer in spirit to Lucretius than he might have wished to admit. It is after the Roman poet has presented his darkest doctrine—telling his readers to face the facts about individual extinction and to stop worrying about it—that he turns in the famous proemium to book 4 of De rerum natura to offer them the honeyed cup of poetry as a sugarcoating to his medicine. Perhaps the one constant consolation that Lucretius and Milton give us to hold on to against contingency is the epic poem itself, which, in the process of representing and giving form to a condition of falling, seeks in some measure to counteract and contain it. Another way of putting this is that the saving Christian myth depicted in Paradise Lost cannot be distinguished from the efficacy of mythopoesis itself. But Virgil’s Daedalus, to end where we have started, suggests in stark terms one epic poet’s knowledge that art may not be adequate to the task. Daedalus indeed knew how to fly. But as he seeks to sculpt the fall of his son Icarus—to give form to his grief and thus gain some degree of mastery over it—the hand of the artist father makes two attempts, and then itself falls away.