Light, Vision, and the Unity of Book 3
Milton begins book 2 of Paradise Lost with the adjective High, describing Satan’s bad eminence on the royal throne of hell; he ends the book with the verb hies (2.1055), as Satan hastens toward God’s new creation in his eagerness to take revenge. Something similar happens in book 3, where the invocation to Light (“Hail, holy Light”) in the first verse is again matched in the book’s last word, a verb describing Satan: “on Niphates’s top he lights” (3.742). Both cases emphasize, through their very grammar, the devil’s fall from his former height and brightness—this was Lucifer once upon a time, now reduced, in the derisive terms of book 10, to “false glitter” (10.452)—into motion and instability. The wordplay may seem overly precious, especially given the additional similarity in sound between “high” and “Light.”1
In book 3, however, the placement of Light and lights at beginning and end is part of a much larger play on “light” that controls the book’s elaborately worked-out structure and the unity of its fiction; the word occurs sixteen times in all. Perhaps nowhere else in Paradise Lost does such a semantic pattern count more, for here it shapes, and corresponds to, the questions that book 3 poses about the unity of the cosmos itself. Does the universe hold together in a meaningful coherence? In what way does it reflect, or even depend upon, a divine Creator? The action of the book moves from the colloquy in heaven between the Son and Father, whom the angels address as “Fountain of light, thy self invisible / Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit’st” (3.375–76)—to the sun, the “great luminary” (3.576), which “Dispenses light” on the stars and earth of God’s creation, where Satan pays a visit to the watchman angel Uriel. These likenesses, reinforced by allusion, distinguish and contrast a divine, ultimately inner light with physical sunlight, God with Apollo the pagan sun god, the invisible realm of heaven with the visible world. In doing so, Isabel MacCaffrey points out, they parallel and contrast different acts and kinds of vision.2 Perhaps above all, the book contrasts the Son’s offer to sacrifice himself and bestow eternal life on humanity to the sun that “gently warms” (3.583) and “Shoots invisible virtue” (3.586) to each inward part of the universe, and that might be supposed to give it physical life.
Milton can thus appear in book 3 to rehearse older Platonic analogies and correspondences, particularly between God and the sun, the latter compared to, and sometimes identified in Hermetic thought with, an animating world-soul. Yet he does so only to suggest that such analogies no longer hold in an age of the New Science and Protestant iconoclasm. In his early treatise, Of Education (1644), Milton had written that the human imagination cannot “arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature” (CPW 2:368–69). Matters are more complicated in Paradise Lost. Raphael speculates in book 5: “What if earth / Be but a shadow of heaven, and things therein / Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?” What if, indeed?3 Book 3 tests its reader by depicting first an invisible God beside his Son, “the radiant image of his glory” (3.63), and then two possible substitutes for that initial scene, the projected Paradise of Fools and the dazzling light of the sun, both of which the language of the book, in a scheme almost as insistent as its play on “light,” describes in terms of “works,” to distinguish them from their Creator, God the “great work-master” (3.696).
The distinction had been laid out by Francis Bacon in a passage from The Advancement of Learning (1605), which could serve as a virtual blueprint for the fiction and thought of book 3. Bacon describes
the works of God, which do show the omnipotency and wisdom of the maker, but not his image. And therefore therein the heathen opinion differeth from the sacred truth; for they supposed the world to be the image of God, and man to be an extract or compendious image of the world; but the scriptures never vouchsafe to attribute to the world that honour, as to be the image of God, but only “the work of his hands”; neither do they speak of any other image of God, but man. Wherefore by the contemplation of nature to induce and enforce the acknowledgment of God, and to demonstrate his power, providence, and goodness, is an excellent argument, and hath been excellently handled by divers. But on the other side, out of the contemplation of nature, or ground of human knowledges, to induce any verity or persuasion concerning the points of faith, is in my judgement not safe: “Da fidei quae fidei sunt.”4 (2.6.1)
It is one thing to declare God’s glory in his works; it is another—and a mistake—to read back from them to divine mysteries. Bacon goes on in the same passage to draw a similar moral about Homer’s golden chain in Iliad 9.18–27, “ ‘That men and gods were not able to draw Jupiter down to the earth; but contrariwise Jupiter was able to draw them up to heaven.’ So as we ought not attempt to draw down or to submit the mysteries of God to our reason; but contrariwise to raise and advance our reason to the divine truth.”5 Milton transfers this golden chain into the fiction of Paradise Lost at the very end of book 2—the golden chain of being that Satan sees suspending the created universe, “this pendent world,” from heaven (2.1051–53), and it is up and down this chain that the ensuing fiction of book 3 will run. Bacon concludes by warning against the commixture of religion and science (he terms the latter “philosophy”): it makes for “an heretical religion, and imaginary and fabulous philosophy.”6 Bacon is more concerned with the latter: he wants to set apart natural science as an independent realm of study; Milton worries about the former, a religion brought down to earth. God is to be known not through his works, but through his soon-to-be-human image and chosen mediation, the Son.
Paradise Lost separates the higher invisibilia—“things invisible to mortal sight” (3.55) in heaven—from “nature’s works” (3.49), the lower, visible things of the Creation later narrated in book 7. At the same time, it enjoins us to believe that all depend on the same Creator, and in book 5 Raphael’s “one first matter all” speech (5.472–505) will further expound Milton’s monism: that all things, heavenly and earthly, partake of the same material being and substance (5.472).7 Book 3 distinguishes two modes of error. The future denizens of the lightless Paradise of Fools, encountered between the heavenly light of the first half of the book and the light of the sun in the second, confuse the realms and project backward the visible upon the invisible; they make the Creator in the image of his and their works. Conversely, the equally foolish alchemist philosophers in verses 598–605 disjoin the created universe from a now dispensable Creator-God, and seek an alternative power source in the sun, the new center of a Copernican cosmos. The first course leads to idolatry, the second to godless materialism, even to a revival of paganism identified with solar worship. The logic of book 3 thus depends on the repeated drawing of likenesses that threaten to collapse into false identity or to split apart altogether.
Milton stakes out in book 3 a middle ground for poetry to occupy in the era of the New Science. Eve’s innocent little question, which follows her love song to Adam in book 4—“But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (4.657–58)—already suggests the challenge to traditional religious thought of a New Astronomy that displaced the earth and men and women from its center. Why are there stars in the sky? Eve asks. Paradise Lost has a series of answers for her: Adam essays—or, as a typical husband, bluffs—a response about stellar influences perfected by the sun (4.659–73), and he reminds Eve that they share the universe with spiritual creatures up all night around them (4.674–88). Adam then turns to Raphael at the opening of book 8 and asks the same question (8.15–38)—at which point Eve, ironically enough, leaves the two of them and does not stay around to hear the angel’s abstruse exposition, which makes many of the same points. For in the meantime Satan has provided an answer of his own in the dream that he pours into Eve’s ear and that she recounts in book 5: “heaven wakes with all his eyes / Whom to behold but thee, nature’s desire / In whose sight all things joy” (5.44–45), flattery he will repeat when he seduces Eve to fall: “Thee all things living gaze on” (9.539). This is a more flattering version of Raphael’s telling Adam that the bright luminaries of heaven are “Officious” not to the earth itself, “but to thee earth’s habitant” (8.99), even as the universe is much bigger and complex: man “dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill” (8.103–4). Raphael assures Adam that at least their part of the universe is made for humanity; at the same time the angel leaves open the possibility of other worlds within the universe with their own inhabitants equally served by their stars (8.153–58; 169–70). In his appeal to her vanity, Satan seems to be tempting Eve with the comforts of the old Ptolemaic system—or to put it another way, Milton discloses the element of human self-love, what Bacon refers to as idol-making and equates with theater and poetry, that went into the making of the geocentric model that Copernicus and Galileo had exploded. Like Raphael, Milton seeks to reassure his audience that they remain a focus of God’s creation even if they may not reside at its spatial center; but he will not flatter them. Book 3 structures itself around tropes and analogies based on an older cosmology that, simultaneously and paradoxically, its poetry skeptically hollows out and labels as mental idols, fit for the Paradise of Fools placed near the book’s center. Endowed with a new form of self-consciousness, Puritan and scientific, this poetry nonetheless preserves the habit of thought that animated those discarded images and that is constitutive of poetry itself: the making of comparisons and the building of structures of words and meaning. At a moment of cosmological uncertainty, poetry offers both an instrument of criticism vis-à-vis its own tradition and, in its own formal achievement, an idea or intuition of order. At issue in the carefully worked-out verbal patterns of book 3 are the bookishness and readability of God’s creation; at stake in its semantic unity is the unity of Milton’s universe itself.
Structure and Design
An initial cluster of occurrences of the “light” in lines 1, 3, and 4 is answered by a second cluster that corresponds shortly before the book’s end (lines 713, 723, 724, and 730), and these, too, are arranged symmetrically to form a kind of frame. These correspondences are thematic as well as formal: the narrator invokes the divine fiat that brought forth light at the Creation “Before the sun” (3.1–11), while Uriel—whose name means “Light of God”—retells the creation of light and then of the heavenly luminaries (3.712–32). The larger book, moreover, divides into two parts, in the first the invocation to Light and the heavenly council that sees the Son volunteer to die for humanity (1–417), in the second the continuing voyage of Satan past the lightless site of the future Paradise of Fools to the sun, where he asks Uriel to direct him toward earth, and where his disguising himself as a cherub to fool the sharpsighted archangel (417–742) evokes Saint Paul’s proverbial warning against false apostles, “And no marvel, for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).8
The structure of book 3 replicates the division of the preceding book 2, which now seems to have been a parody, in advance, of it: a council in hell that saw Satan volunteer for his mission to earth; his voyage toward God’s new creation and stopping to ask directions from Chaos. In both books, Satan is attracted on his journey to possible substitutes for God: noise and hearing lead him to Chaos, the noncreative “spirit of the nethermost abyss” (2.956); light and vision draw him to the sun.
Each part of book 3 concludes as it begins. The first section in heaven begins with the poet’s hymnic invocation of Light—“Hail, holy Light” and ends with the angels’ hymn of praise to the Son (whom that initial “Light” may possibly have designated)—“Hail, Son of God” (3.412).9 The second satanic section begins when the flying devil lands on the dark outside of the universe and “alighted walks” (3.422)—the Latinate pun suggests that he is deprived of light. In simile Satan is compared to a vulture who
lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany wagons light. (3.437–39)
This second section ends when Satan “lights” in the book’s final verse on Mount Niphates.
In the council in heaven an unseen God casts a light so dazzling that it can be viewed only as the outskirts of the clouds that sometimes cover it or as it is “impressed” (3.388) on the Son—“In whose conspicuous countenance, without cloud / Made visible, the almighty Father shines” (3.385–86; cf. 2 Cor. 4:6). The sequel moves to a substitute luminary, the visible sun, and then to the moon, which, Uriel tells Satan, reflects the sun and uses “borrowed light” to “enlighten the earth” (3.730–31). In between, the Paradise of Fools, lying “under the frown of Night / Starless exposed” (3.424–25), will later house denizens who will be the sport of winds like the light wagons of the Chinese. Milton’s ecclesiastical satire in this passage picks up motifs from both the preceding vision of heavenly light and the later episode of the sun, and ironically mediates between the two.
To provide further symmetry between the two halves of book 3, Milton invokes the conventional pun in English religious writing between Son and sun and the interpretative tradition that identified the “Sun of righteousness” of Malachi 4:2 as Christ who, the gloss to the Geneva Bible explains, “with his wings or beames of his grace shulde lighten and comfort his Church.”10 The hinge between these two halves comes at the conclusion of the angels’ hymn to the Son:
Hail, Son of God, saviour of men, thy name
Shall be the copious matter of my song
Henceforth, and never shall my harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin.
(3.412–15)
The verses repeat conventional formulas of the classical hymn, particularly the promises of a personified “Homer” in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, whose first section, dedicated to the Apollo of Delos, begins, “I will remember and not be unmindful of Apollo who shoots from afar,”11 and ends, “And I will never cease to praise far shooting Apollo, god of the silver bow, whom rich-haired Leto bare” (177–78).12 Callimachus makes similar pledges in his Hymn to Apollo, imitating the Homeric prototype:
for Apollo has power, for that he sits on the right hand of Zeus. Nor will the choir sing of Phoebus for one day only. He is a copious theme of song [εΰυμνος]; who would not sing of Phoebus? (29–31)13
By later antiquity Phoebus (“shining”) Apollo was identified with Helios and had become the sun god. The angels of Paradise Lost praise the Son, whom both the Bible and Milton “seat at God’s right hand” (Mark 16:19)—“on his right / The radiant image of his glory sat, / His only Son” (3.62–64; see also 6.892, 12.457)—in the language that had described the pagan solar deity, even as the division of the book insists on the difference between divine light and the created sun, between a God outside of nature, and a pagan god abstracted out of nature.
Yet who plays Apollo in book 3? Milton’s double allusion to the myth of Phaethon, discussed in chapter 3, similarly divides the book into its two mirroring parts. The Father praises and further promotes his Son in the heavenly council—“By merit more than birthright Son of God” (3.309)—and recalls Apollo’s reassurance to his son (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.42–43). For the Son to be cast as Phaethon to God’s Apollo is something like the later analogy implicit in Uriel’s account of the Creation, which makes the Son like the moon to God’s sun, the true “Fountain of light” (3.375).14 Book 3 reinforces this analogy when it initially describes the “almighty Father” about whom “the sanctities of heaven / Stood thick as stars” (3.60–61) and subsequently literalizes the simile in its first description of the sun, “the great luminary / Aloof the vulgar constellations thick” (3.576–77). In the uncertainty about who plays the sun, Father or Son—a revision of traditional Christ-centered typology—there is more of a hint of Milton’s Arianism, his view of the created, subordinate nature of the Son.
The same Ovidian episode of Phaethon’s visit to Apollo the sun god is recalled in the second half of book 3 when Satan, in his disguise as stripling cherub, pays a visit to the sun and to its presiding angel, Uriel, wearing his crown “Of beaming sunny rays” (3.625). The doubling of the Phaethon story, repeated as we have seen in the War in Heaven in book 6, here reinforces the symmetry between the two halves of book 3 and its structuring contrast between the holy, divine light of God invoked in the first and the light of the physical sun in the second. It is to the latter, what would become the object of pagan worship in the form of Apollo, that Satan is symptomatically attracted. For if the first half of book 3 argues for the internalization of spiritual light, the second portrays light as one of Bacon’s created “works,” from which fools may make their paradise.
Universal Blank
The inspiration sought by the poet in the invocation to Light in book 3 is pointedly nonsolar and non-Apollonian. In its asking to see the invisible, in identifying poetic inspiration with inner light, the invocation already spells out the separation of God’s heaven from his earthly creation, divine illumination from sunlight. It argues that the eye of faith compensates the poet for his physical blindness: faith analogous to and based on the example of the Son’s faith, recounted in the ensuing heavenly dialogue, in his victory over the gloomy power of death. The book ties the invocation at all points to its subsequent fiction.
The nightly visitations of the Muse besought by the poet are compared to, but distinct from, the seasonal and daily movement of the sun:
Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks or herds, or human face divine.
(3.40–44)
So Milton had described his blindess in his sonnet to Cyriack Skinner:
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun or moon or star throughout the year,
Or man or woman.
(4–6)
The poet of the book 3 invocation not only refers, with mounting pathos, to the affliction of his blindness, but also, at the moment when he is about to depict the eternal, invisible realm of God and his light, he distinguishes his inspiration from the mediation of the temporal, physical world and finally of the human body, made in God’s image—mediation that Milton’s thought assimilates with a more traditional appeal for inspiration from Phoebus Apollo as the leader of the Muses, the sun as the source of seasonal, springtime growth (“vernal bloom”), as well as of poetic creativity.15
In fact, the invocation to book 3 rewrites—by pointedly rejecting—Milton’s own earlier version of such a scene of solar inspiration and the coming of spring, his fifth Latin elegy, Elegia Quinta: In adventum veris, composed long before in 1629.
Fallor? an et nobis redeunt carmina vires,
Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest?
Munere veris adest, iterumque vigescit ab illo
(Quis putet) atque aliquod iam sibi poscit opus.
Castalis ante oculos, bifidumque cacumen oberrat
Et mihi Pyrenen somnia nocte ferunt.
Concitaque arcano fervent mihi pectora motu,
Et furor, et sonitus me sacer intus agit.
Delius ipse venit, video Peneide lauro
Implicitos crines, Delius ipse venit.
Iam mihi mens liquidi raptatur in ardua coeli,
Perque vagas nubes corpore liber eo.
Perque umbras, perque antra feror penetralia vatum,
Et mihi fana patent interiora Deum.
Intuitur animus toto quid agatur Olympo,
Nec fugiunt oculos Tartara caeca meos.
Quid tam grande sonat distento spiritus ore?
Quid parit haec rabies, quic sacer iste furor?
Ver mihi, quod dedit ingenium, cantabitur illo;
Profuerint isto reddita dona modo.
(Elegy V 5–24)
[Am I deluded? or are my powers of song returning as well? Is inspiration at hand by the gift of spring? It is at hand by the gift of spring, and again (who would think it?) it already seeks some work from me. The Castalian spring and the forked peak of Parnassus float before my eyes, and my nighttime dreams bring Pirene to me. My breast is stirred and burns with a mysterious impulse, and inner frenzy and sacred sound goad me on. Delian Apollo himself comes—I see his locks entwined with Penean laurel—Delian Apollo himself comes. Now my mind is rapt into the heights of the liquid heavens, and I go, freed from my body, through the wandering clouds. Through the shadows and caves I am borne, through the secret sanctuaries of the poets and the innermost temples of the Gods. My spirit looks on what is taking place all over Olympus, nor does the darkness of Tartarus escape my eyes. What does my spirit sing so mightily with full throat? To what does this madness, this sacred furor give birth? Spring, which gives me inspiration, will be the subject of the song; in this way her gifts will be repaid to her profit.]
The rebirth brought by the springtime sun—Apollo is invoked by the name of his birthplace, Delos—starts a new round of poetic activity. Like the narrator of book 3, the sunstruck poet of Elegy V appears ready for an initiation into the divine: all the precincts of the pagan heaven on Olympus come into view.16 But this heavenly vision is never realized and instead—in a kind of short-circuit or self-referential logic—the poet settles on the subject of springtime creation itself, what begins as a cosmic procreation between the sun and the personified earth (Tellus), who sings a love song to Phoebus and offers him all of the treasures that their union will produce (75–78), then extends to lovemaking among humans and among the gods, who by its end have become assimilated with fauns, satyrs, and nymphs, the deities of nature. The inspiration of the sun god Apollo never raises the poet above the world of a sexualized, pagan nature of which it reveals itself to be a part.
The young poet Milton had already realized that such inspiration would not do for the higher, Christian poetry to which he aspired. He anticipated the invocation to book 3 when, later in the same year of 1629 he composed in English his first great sacred poem, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: he looked back and disavowed the Apollonian terms of his elegy. In its opening stanzas, Nature, awestruck by the birth of Jesus, knows that in wintry December, it is “no season then for her / To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour” (35–36); later in the poem the sun itself “saw a greater sun appear” (83), and hides his own light, and, still later, Apollo will be the first of a series of pagan gods expelled from their shrines (176), nearly all of whom were ancient sun gods: Milton structured the ode straightforwardly on the typology of Christ as the Sun of righteousness.17 Nature hides her guilty front and shame with “innocent snow” (39), as if to make herself pristine again, clearing the poem’s visual field in preparation for “the globe of circular light” (110) of angels that will subsequently appear in place of the absent sun. The snow cover or blank page is an earlier version of the “universal blank” that the poet of book 3 suffers from his blindness and that cuts him off from the returning seasons. This blank is similarly a precondition for divine illumination.18
or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou celestial Light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
(3.44–55)
The separation of the poet’s inspiration in the invocation to book 3 from “nature’s works” and especially from the creative agency and temporal movement and cycles of the sun thus retells an old Miltonic story. It rejects Apollo once again. If the life of Milton by his nephew Edward Phillips is to be trusted, moreover, Milton’s actual poetic creativity while writing Paradise Lost ran directly counter to the natural, springtime generation he had first celebrated in Elegy V: “his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinoctial to the vernal, and that whatever he attempted [otherwise] was never to his satisfaction, though he courted his fancy never so much, so that in all the years he was about this poem, he may be said to have spent but half his time therein.”19 The year might very well return with the spring, but Milton would not have profited from it even without his loss of sight, for he was bent on a different kind of poetry whose dictates did not come from the regenerative rhythms of nature.
Still, it was one thing for the young poet to have willed an imaginative blankness and the rejection of Apollo in order to be initiated into timeless divine mysteries; it was another for the Milton of Paradise Lost to have these imposed upon him by blindness. In compensation, the poet would tell of “things invisible to mortal sight.” This is not only an appeal for poetic power, with the uncertainty left open whether he will prove a new blind Homer or rather a failed, blind Thamyris (3.35). Nor is it simply occasioned by the present task of depicting God in his heaven, although Milton, distinguishing between God’s visible and invisible creations, does, in fact, specify in chapter 7 of book 1 of On Christian Doctrine that “THINGS INVISIBLE, at least to us, are the highest heaven, the throne and dwelling place of God, and the heavenly beings or angels” (CPW 6:311).20 The capacity to see “things invisible to mortal sight” is the basis of Christian faith itself.
Paul declares in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Paul elaborates, in the context of bearing earthly afflictions, such as Milton’s blindness, in 2 Corinthians 4:18, “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal,” and 5:7, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” Milton aligns these two verses in his concluding chapter 20 on faith in the same book of On Christian Doctrine (CPW 6:473). His contemporary Richard Baxter, the moderate Calvinist theologian with whom Milton would have disagreed on many tenets, nonetheless brings the poetic subject of book 3 together with larger, commonplace doctrine in a passage from The Life of Faith (1670): “Remember therefore that God and Heaven, the unseen things, are the final object of true Faith; and that final object is the noblest; and that the principal use of Faith is to carry up the whole heart and life from things visible and temporal, to things invisible and eternal.”21 Milton’s invocation to Light is an explicit prayer for—as well as an act of—faith.
The poet intimates at the same time that his blindness is an actual help to this faith, that because the distraction of “nature’s works” is wiped clean—“expunged and razed” (3.49)—from a mind that is now a “universal blank” page (3.48) or tabula rasa, he can more readily exercise his faith in the vision of invisible things. His blindness, that is, seems to have caused him to revise the idea suggested in Of Education that knowledge can move smoothly from the visible to the invisible. The ensuing fiction bears out the terms of the invocation, for the God Milton depicts is himself invisible, hidden either in his own light or behind the “cloud / Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine” (3.378–79) that the angels describe in their hymn; the dazzled seraphim must “with both wings veil their eyes” (3.382).22 This glory cloud bears an inverse relationship to the “cloud … and ever during dark” that surround the blind poet: blindness may be the best condition from which to describe a blinding God. Milton repeats here the arguments of his Second Defense of the English People (1654), in which he had also defended himself against the charges made by his royalist enemies that his blindness was divine retribution for his part in the regicide. He had invoked the example of the prophet Phineus, also recalled in the invocation to book 3 (3.35), whose blindness was “recompensed with far more potent gifts” (CPW 4:584) and should not be considered punishment for any crime. He goes on to claim that “we blind men are not the least of God’s concerns, for the less able we are to perceive anything other than himself, the more mercifully and graciously does he deign to look on us,” and that “divine favor not infrequently is wont to lighten these shadows again, once made, by an inner and far more enduring light” (CPW 4:590). His physical blindness initiates him to the vision of God and the light of faith, and is all the more preferable to the moral blindness that so afflicts his royalist adversaries, “that you may see nothing whole or real” (CPW 4:589).
This argument is subsequently taken up in book 3 by Milton’s God, who authoritatively redefines the terms of light and blindness as he spells out the terms of his grace.
And I will place within them as a guide
My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well used they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.
This my long sufferance and my day of grace
They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste;
But hard be hardened more, blind be blinded more,
That they may stumble on, and deeper fall;
And none but such from mercy I exclude.
(3.194–202)
The first part of the passage recasts light as the inner light within the human individual, here described as a kind of spiritual progress, while the second paraphrases Isaiah 6:9–10 to describe the blindness of those who refuse the gift of grace, this too progressive, a spiraling downward into greater blindness and hardening of their hearts: the process the poem depicts in the career of Satan and the devils.23 This inner light is characteristic of the general internalization of tropes in Paradise Lost, which will end by compensating the loss of Eden with the “paradise within thee, happier far” (12.587). Just as the invocation to book 1 tells us that God’s Spirit prefers, “Before all temples, the upright heart and pure” (1.18), before the book goes on to criticize temples through its catalog of devils and the building of Pandaemonium, so here the light of the invocation to book 3 is resituated in the individual believer. It is also the light of poetic inspiration, and the poem that we read, especially the scenes in heaven, presents itself both as an act of ordinary faith and as the pledge of extraordinary calling: the two cannot be separated.
The faith that the blind poet asserts in things unseen in the invocation is doubled inside the fiction by the Son’s faith in the most unseen of all things in which the Christian believes. His heroic volunteering to die to save humanity is followed by a confident declaration.
on me let Death wreak all his rage;
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquished; thou hast given me to possess
Life in my self for ever, by thee I live,
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due
All that of me can die; yet that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil;
(3.241–51)
There is no more moving passage in Paradise Lost than this one, whose tone Milton so superbly controls. The Son is confident, and it turns out he has reason to be. He knows that he has already twice triumphed in glory, after the War in Heaven and after the Creation—as he will triumph again when these events that correspond typologically to the Son’s Passion are repeated at the apocalyptic end of history. But the epic’s readers do not yet know about these chronologically earlier events that Raphael will later recount to Adam and Eve in books 6 and 7; the angels’ ensuing hymn gives only a summary version (3.390–98). By deferring knowledge of these previous glorifications, Milton invites the reader of book 3 to hear a quiet question and appeal lurking beneath the Son’s confidence: surely God will not leave him in the loathsome grave, will he? No creature, not even the Son, can know that he or she will rise from death and the corruption of the body: all visible evidence points to the contrary.24 Part of the pathos lies in the suggestion that death, far from the occasion for victorious triumph, may be the ultimate defeat—“lie vanquished,” “I yield,” “his prey”—imagined by a poet who has suffered political defeat and lies as well under the “gloomy power” of his own blindness. The confident Son shares his faith directly with the Father, but it is still the same act of faith in which every Christian partakes against doubt before the physical fact of death. If there is no resurrection, Saint Paul admits, “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).
Book 3 aligns these two assertions of faith, the claim of the blind poet to inner light, the claim of the Son to escape the loathsome grave. The complaint of the despairing, blind Samson that climaxes his opening speech in Samson Agonistes (SA) allows us to see how closely they may be related.
As in the land of darkness yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but O yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave,
Buried, yet not exempt
By privilege of death and burial
From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs,
But made hereby obnoxious more
To all the miseries of life,
Life in captivity
Among inhuman foes.
(SA 99–109)
The passage has a clear autobiographical cast, a portrait of John Milton at the Restoration suffering the double captivity of blindness and of thralldom to his political enemies; a second version in the invocation to book 7 of Paradise Lost describes the poet “On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round” (7.26–27). It suggests a very different mood from Milton’s defiant response to his royalist foes in the Second Defense, where he wears his blindness as a badge of honor and special, divine election. Here blindness feels as if one were already buried alive in the “loathsome grave,” the fate that the despairing Adam contemplates in book 10: “then in the grave, / Or in some other dismal place who knows / But I shall die a living death?” (10.786–88).25 Samson may free himself from this despondency at the end of the tragedy, if we are to believe the pronouncement of the Chorus, when, “With inward eyes illuminated” (SA 1689), he rouses himself to the heroic action of which no one thought him still capable: what corresponds in Milton’s biography to the heroic action of writing Paradise Lost itself. Book 3 aligns the invisible light of faith with faith in the central Christian mystery: the final, still invisible, deliverance from death. Milton’s epic, on more than one occasion, suggests that the first is the token of, even a present substitute for, the second—a paradise within—and already begins that deliverance in life itself. In Milton’s own case, this deliverance is felt in the inward illumination that his blind narrator invokes at the book’s opening and that enables his sacred song.
Vision
There is a self-evident sense in which the irradiation of divine light that would allow the poet to see “things invisible to mortal sight” anticipates as a foretaste or stand-in for the triumph over death that the Son promises to achieve and make possible for humanity: these are the same things that the poet, too, will see on rising from the loathsome grave, and which the Son reassures himself he, too, will look upon after death when he “Shall enter heaven long absent, and return, / Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud / Of anger shall remain” (3.261–63). Paul speaks of eschatological knowledge in terms of seeing God “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12), and here the removal of the cloud appears to promise not only the appeasement of God’s wrath but a new level of beatific vision, God seen without his interposing cloud, what would correspond, too, to a definitive purging of the mist and cloud of the poet’s blindness, permitting him once again to see a face divine.
The Son’s sight of the Father is one in a series of parallel or contrasting acts of seeing in book 3, generated out of the poet’s initial declaration of blindness and prayer for special inner light. These constitute another carefully constructed pattern of meaning in the book. Light, divine or physical, is the condition of sight. No sooner has the poet asked for the vision of “things invisible to mortal sight” (3.55) in place of “nature’s works” (3.49) than that vision portrays a God whose initial act is to bend “down his eye, / His own works and their works at once to view” (3.58–59).26 The inversion of perspective—God has nowhere to look but down and all that he sees is his creation—nicely plots out in advance the book’s ensuing division between its depiction of an invisible God and heaven and the visible universe, God’s “works” (as Bacon distinguishes them from God’s image), works that produce their own works and secondary effects, whether the generative warmth of the sun or the works of angels, men, and women. The book repeatedly contrasts humans, including the Son who will become human, looking up toward the higher heaven with God and the angels, including Satan, looking down on God’s lower works, works that, Uriel says, “glorify / The great work-master” (3.695–96). In the same verses in which the Son predicts his seeing the unclouded face of God after his conquest of death and his restoration of those “works” (3.277), he also foretells the repetition of God’s initial bending downward of his eye in a reciprocal gesture of paternal approval—“Thou at the sight / Pleased, out of heaven shalt look down and smile” (3.256–57). As the fiction of book 3 moves with Satan away from heaven to the visible creation lit by the sun, the upshot of this extended conceit will be, however, to suggest the asymmetry of these downward and upward modes of sight: it opposes God’s perfect vision of his works to the difficulty that human beings experience, in return, in seeing an invisible God through and beyond those works.
The downward glances of God are subject to diabolic parody when Satan subsequently gets his first look at God’s new creation. Arriving at the trapdoor that opens beneath the stairs of heaven through which the eyes of God would later regard the Promised Land of Palestine (3.534), Satan
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this world at once. As when a scout
Through dark and desert ways with peril gone
All night; at last by break of cheerful dawn
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some foreign land
First-seen, or some renowned metropolis
With glistering spires and pinnacles adorned,
Which now the rising sun gilds with all his beams.
Such wonder seized, though after heaven seen,
The spirit malign, but much more envy seized,
At sight of all this world beheld so fair.
(3.542–54)
Satan’s survey is doubly parodic, and he does more than play God. The simile that expands and enriches the implications of this moment continues a pattern that has made Satan’s journey from the Egypt that is hell across the “darksome desert” (2.973) of Chaos to the newly created universe a version of the Exodus and Satan himself a Moses figure; the simile evokes the Israelites’ desert wandering (“dark and desert ways”) and now identifies Satan with the scouts Caleb and Joshua, sent out by Moses in Numbers 13 to reconnoiter the Promised Land, the land that they will subsequently conquer. Satan’s career thus perversely charts the central biblical story that establishes the typology for the salvation that the Son has earlier offered to humanity. The simile, too, reminds us of the spy-mission nature of the voyage of Satan who, when he finally reaches Eden in book 4, declares “with narrow search I must walk round / This garden, and no corner leave unspied” (4.528–29).27 This is a particularly instrumental mode of seeing, a prelude to conquest and ultimate destruction, and it triggers envy, Satan’s typical, sinful reaction to the sight of God’s works, both here and subsequently in the poem: this envy is the subject of chapter 5. It is the opposite of the benevolent glance of God who seeks, through the sacrifice of the Son, to preserve his creation: “thou know’st,” he responds to the Son’s offer, “how dear, / To me are all my works, nor man the least” (3.276–77).
The correspondences do not end here. The dawn vision of the city gilded by the sun in the simile looks both backward and forward in the book. Satan has just been attracted from the darkness of the outer side of the firmament by “a gleam / of dawning light” (3.499–500), which turns out to be the stairs to the outside of the wall of heaven and “The work as of a kingly palace gate” (3.505), while he will now enter into the realm of light and visibility provided by the sun, which will similarly allure his eye and determine his course (3.572–73). The Janus-like simile suggests an equivalence between heaven and the created universe as God’s works—both Promised Lands—and the latter arouses wonder in a Satan who has known but is now excluded from the former, even as it repeats the book’s separation of divine from earthly light. Satan’s downward glance toward earth from the stairs of heaven, moreover, contrasts with Jacob’s upward dream vision of those stairs (Gen. 28:12) described shortly before: “The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw / Angels ascending and descending” (3.510–11)—the movement of the angels mirroring the two-way, up-and-down modes of vision depicted in book 3. The acts of seeing and knowledge are not comparable and reciprocal, however, for Jacob does not see with his own eyes but through the special revelation and divine accommodation of the dream.
The blind poet points to the scriptural passage that authorizes not only his fiction here of the outside of heaven but of the extraordinary vision that he invokes at the book’s beginning, a vision that would overgo Jacob’s by peering still more intimately inside of heaven’s walls and into “things invisible to mortal sight”: what had seemed to be promised to the Apollonian Milton of Elegy V, and has now been granted to his sacred alter ego in Paradise Lost.
The poet’s and Jacob’s glimpses into the invisible heavens are paralleled by a still third example of mortal visionary experience, the identification of the angel Uriel as “The same whom John saw also in the sun” (3.623; cf. Rev. 19:17). Uriel himself reverses the trajectory of vision, for he is one of the seven archangels who are God’s “eyes / That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth” (3.650–51), and it is Uriel who was an eyewitness at the Creation from its very beginning: “I saw when at his word the formless mass, / This world’s material mould, came to a heap” (3.708–9), those “wondrous works,” which Satan, in his disguise as a stripling cherub and sightseeing tourist or pilgrim, professes an “Unspeakable desire to see, and know” (3.662–63). Uriel, who saw the creation of the sun itself, in effect, takes over the sun’s position as eye of the universe, as the sun was called in the Orphic hymns and as Adam and Eve will address it in their morning prayer in book 5: “Thou sun, of this great world both eye and soul” (5.171).28
Uriel, as his name declares, is the true “angel of light” in the book, whereas we are meant to feel the pathos as well as the irony of the fallen Satan, the erstwhile Lucifer, transforming himself into an angel of light once again, this time in the disguise of a cherub—a member of the angelic order that was itself associated by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his vastly influential Celestial Hierarchy (1.1, 205c), with “the power to know and to see God, to receive the greatest gifts of his light, to contemplate the divine splendor in primordial power.”29 Satan attempts to recover a youthful, more innocent-seeming, as well as more diminutive and socially reduced, version of his former self—“the shape of a meaner angel,” says the Argument to book 3. This transformation anticipates the wistful desire that Satan expresses in his immediately ensuing soliloquy in book 4: had God’s “powerful destiny ordained / Me some inferior angel, I had stood / Then happy” (4.58–60). Satan utters these words, we want to remember, while he is disguised as just such an inferior angel. When that mask momentarily drops while he rejects the course of true remorse and submission to God and Uriel can now see him “disfigured” (4.127), the loss of face physically enacts Satan’s inner failure to humble and spiritually regenerate himself.
Yet, “sharpest sighted spirit of all in heaven” (3.691) as he may be, Uriel cannot initially see through Satan’s dissembling.
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone.
(3.682–84)
In the terms that book 3 has set out from its invocation, hypocrisy also turns out to be one of the “things invisible to mortal sight.”30
The Sun
In one further parallel and contrast of acts of seeing, book 3 juxtaposes John’s apocalyptic vision of the angel in the sun with a very different way of looking at the sun mentioned a few verses earlier. On his arrival on the sun, Satan is likened to “a spot like which perhaps / Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb / Through his glazed optic tube yet never saw” (3.588–90). Unlike the author of Revelation, Galileo’s telescope does not see any angel in the sun, but only the spots on or just above its surface. The news of moving and transient sunspots dismayed conservative seventeenth-century thinkers, for they attested, against Aristotle’s idea of the sun as an incorruptible and flawless sphere, to the temporal “corruption” and “generation” of matter in the heavens—Galileo preferred the less-loaded term “mutation.” Galileo described the sunspots as “produced and dissolved” on the sun “in a manner not unlike that of clouds and vapours on earth.”31 Until this recent discovery, these spots had been invisible to mortal sight, and the astronomer, who uses the telescope to get a closer look at the light of the sun, is a foil not only to John but to the poet himself, who begins the book by asking to see the invisible heavens.
Sunlight is another matter. For the Sun is created matter for Milton, even if it is matter of the lightest—in both senses of the word—kind. Even as he cites Galileo, Milton still works within the terms of Aristotelian science and describes the sun and other heavenly bodies as made up of Aristotle’s ether, the fifth element or quintessence that is without weight: they flew upward at the Creation, Uriel tells Satan, while the four other weighty, “cumbrous” elements each found their place in the new universe.
Swift to their several quarters hasted then
The cumbrous elements, earth, flood, air, fire
And this ethereal quintessence of heaven
Flew upward, spirited with various forms,
That rolled orbicular, and turned to stars
Numberless, as thou seest.
(3.714–19)
Light is “light,” and defies gravity. Nonetheless, the visible sun is the external, temporal counterpart to the invisible divine light sought by the inner eye of faith; sunlight gives the carnal imagination something to work upon and by which to confuse creation with Creator.32
This imagination, in fact, produces its own carnal version of faith’s quest for things unseen: the reduction of this fiery quintessence, the likeness of divine light, to the still lower—in fact, lowest—earthly element that is its likeness.
The place he found beyond expression bright,
Compared with aught on earth, metal or stone;
Not all parts like, but all alike informed
With radiant light, as glowing iron with fire;
If metal, part seemed gold, part silver clear;
If stone, carbuncle most or chrysolite,
Ruby or topaz, to the twelve that shone
In Aaron’s breastplate, and a stone besides
Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen,
That stone, or like to that which here below
Philosophers in vain so long have sought,
In vain, though by their powerful art they bind
Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound
In various shapes old Proteus from the sea,
Drained through a limbeck to his native form.
(3.591–605)
“Not all parts like”: Milton acknowledges and declares his allegiance with Galileo’s new observations that had called into question the uniformity and incorruptibibility of the sun; his narrator’s ensuing, ambiguous remarks that “here”—on the sun? on earth?—there might be fields, regions, and rivers (3.606–7) may even go Galileo one step better and transfer to the sun the astronomer’s hardly less unsettling discoveries, announced in the widely distributed Starry Messenger, of “heights and chasms” on the moon.33 But the emphasis of the passage shifts from one kind of scientific endeavor to another, however Milton may suggest their possible interrelation: from the astronomer’s peering into the sun to the alchemist’s attempt to bring the sun and its power down to earth. It begins as a poetic comparison; the shining sun is brighter than any shiny metal or stone seen on earth; it glows as fiery iron does in a forge or crucible. The ensuing lines continue this comparison, but as they do so, they introduce likenesses—gold and silver, the precious stones on Aaron’s breastplate—that alchemy literally connected to the sun’s quintessence and its operations, a connection that Milton may partly concede in vv. 608–12, where the “arch-chemic sun” produces metals and gems in the earth, though he has already qualified the sun’s actions upon the universe as “unseen” (3.585; cf. 5.300–302).34 But the alchemists go further, and want to capture this invisible solar power in the philosopher’s stone, “Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen.” The stone is another thing invisible to mortal sight, but the opposite of the things the poet has asked his Muse to reveal. Rather than move from the visible sun to the invisible light of God in the manner of a good Christian or, for that matter, Platonic contemplative, the philosophers seek, in a downward inversion and parody of that act of faith, to find something equally invisible, because, in this case, it is non-nonexistent: an earthly distillation of the sun’s light and quintessence, perhaps of the supposed world-soul itself, residing in their metals.35 Their “powerful art” seeks to increase human power over God’s creation, but they are on a fool’s errand.
The Paradise of Fools
The philosophers seek the stone “in vain … / In vain.” The repetition emphasizes their connection, even if it is an inverse and symmetrical one, to the Paradise of Fools that is still a future prospect when, earlier in the book, Satan stands on the lightless, windswept outside of the firmament.36
Alone, for other creature in this place
Living or lifeless to be found was none,
None yet, but store hereafter from the earth
Up hither like aerial vapours flew
Of all things transitory and vain, when sin
With vanity had filled the works of men:
Both all things vain, all who in vain things
Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame,
Or happiness in this or the other life;
All who have their reward on earth, the fruits
Of painful superstition and blind zeal,
Nought seeking but the praise of men, here find
Fit retribution, empty as their deeds;
(3.442–54)
“Vain” appears still three more times in the passage (3.457, 465, 467) that satirizes the “empty … deeds” of the fools. Earlier in the book God had promised salvation to “them who renounce / Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds” (3.291–92), but the fools have sought to make their way to heaven, like the giants among them, “With many a vain exploit” (3.465). Their error is apparently the opposite, and yet bears underlying similarity and relationship to that of the philosophers, who fix their art exclusively on this world. The fools not only seek earthly glory and happiness but confuse them with the glory of heaven and the happiness of the afterlife, as if they could take it all with them. The ultimate target is the carnal ceremonialism of Catholicism and its system of works (“the works of men”)—the “relics, beads, / Indulgences, dispenses” (3.491–92)—by which its adherents seek to buy their way to salvation in place of the faith that Protestantism and Milton’s God uphold as the sole justification of the saved. Empty deeds are coupled in the next verse with the “unaccomplished works of nature’s hand” (3.455) and, in both cases, the satire suggests the futility and ultimate monstrosity of a secondary creativity, human or natural—what God sees when he looks down on “His own works and their works”—should it become autonomous from the divine Creator and substitute itself for him. Among such “unkindly mixed” (3.456) works of nature are the mixed-race giants themselves, often assimilated with the builders of Babel who follow them in this catalog of fools (3.463–67): vanity is a form of pride, the sin traditionally ascribed to both. Catholic ritualists are the builders of “New Babels” (3.468), those who would use human and earthly means to gain heaven, and it is they and the other fools who are truly blind in their superstitious zeal, one further recasting of the physical sightlessness of the poet onto others in the form of spiritual blindness. That poet’s faith in things invisible is contrasted to the fools’ trust in their all too visible works; those who vainly seek “to pass disguised” (3.480) into heaven in Dominican or Franciscan attire anticipate Satan’s subsequent hypocrisy, his putting on the garb and appearance of a stripling cherub.
Behind this passage, it is often noted, is the episode of the moon in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso 34–35, which also attacks ecclesiastical abuses, and to which Milton alludes in verse 459 when he relocates his Paradise of Fools—“Not in the neighboring moon, as some have dreamed.” Less noted is that Ariosto’s episode is itself a satirical parody of Dante’s Divine Comedy and so is Milton’s. Like the flight of Dante through the old Ptolemaic universe of the Paradiso, the fools, briefly allowed to fulfill their fantasy, “pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed, / And that crystalline sphere” (3.481–82) and seem to be about to meet Saint Peter at the satirically reduced “wicket” (3.484) of heaven, when they encounter the winds that here batter the outside of the universe and cause them to “fly o’er the backside of the world”: an ill wind and a kind of cosmic flatulence.37 So much for Milton’s great Catholic predecessor poet. “Then might ye see” (3.489), says the narrator of the windblown fools in another reprise of book 3’s insistent thematics of vision, pointing to the special, allegorical, and tongue-in-cheek nature of the episode. This alternative way of imagining things invisible to mortal sight describes a “Limbo of Vanity,” as the Argument to book 3 puts it, that does not yet exist and that may exist only in the future minds of the fools themselves, and then exists only to be whirled away, leaving darkness and emptiness in its place, a universal blank. It is a literal mise en abyme that implicates all attempts to represent an invisible heaven: these include Dante’s poem and finally must include Milton’s own fiction that has opened book 3.
The episode of the Paradise of Fools, which some critics have found to be an indecorous excrescence in the poem, isolated from the rest of book 3 both in its content and low tone, is thus very much a piece of the book’s whole.38 Book 3 charts a progress in the imagination itself: from the poet’s vision of faith of an invisible world of heavenly light, to the fools’ creating a heaven in the image of their own works and earthly reward, to the astronomer and philosophers who ignore the invisible heaven for the visible sun and who would reduce an already material sunlight to an even more material and earthly stone. The whole book has become an exercise for the reader, who learns—the poet’s blindness has made it easier for him to do so—to separate a higher world beheld only in spirit from a lower, physical one and, nonetheless, to understand and believe in the continuity between them.
Moreover, the vanity of the fools connects them to the book’s semantics of light and lightness. Like the “cany wagons light” that the Chinese drive with sails and wind, the fools and their works become “the sport of winds.” Thus they fly upward—“Up hither like aerial vapours flew”—in a parody of the upward flight of light itself at the Creation to form the sun and stars—“And this ethereal quintessence of heaven / Flew upward.” The fools are “light”—that is, they are full of vanity—but they are compared not to physical light but to the terrestrial vapors that were thought, in the science of Milton’s time that followed Aristotle’s Meteorology (1.4), to explain the phenomenon of shooting stars. When Uriel subsequently descends on a sunbeam in book 4, he is likened to “a shooting star / In autumn thwart the night, when vapours fired / Impress the air” (4.556–58). Such vapors rise from the earth until they are ignited by the atmosphere, and then fall back from whence they came, much as the fools ascend toward heaven before they and their earthly works are blown aside. Their lightness neither brings them to the light of heaven nor achieves the qualities of physical light. The starless limbo on the outside of the universe in which they are to wander until the “final dissolution” (3.458) cuts them off equally from both.
This lightness is a judgment on the fools. The association with vapors and shooting stars links them with the greatest star that has fallen from heaven and lost its light, Satan or Lucifer, who is subsequently compared to one of the sunspots that Galileo similarly compared to rising and dissolving vapors. Satan will be balanced in God’s scales at the end of book 4:
in these he put two weights
The sequel each of parting and of fight;
The latter quick up flew, and kicked the beam;
Which Gabriel spying, thus bespake the fiend.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And read thy lot in yon celestial sign
Where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak
If thou resist.
(4.1002–5, 4.1011–13)
The passage combines a Homeric-Virgilian scene of divine weighing on the battlefield with the handwriting on the wall that judges Belshazzar in Daniel 5:27—“TEKEL, thou art wayed in the balance and art founde too light” reads the passage in the Geneva Bible. Satan’s lightness causes the scale to fly upward much as the fools do in their vanity; both are condemned to an unbearable lightness of being, to the loss of the light within, and to wandering in the dark.
Sun Worshippers
The sun in book 3 has acquired a prominence that is both old and new. “In splendor likest heaven” (3.572), “the great luminary / Aloof the vulgar constellations thick” (3.576–77), the “all-cheering lamp” (3.581): the sun already looks, as Satan will describe it in his soliloquy that opens book 4 “like the God / Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars / Hide their diminished heads” (4.33–35). The terms are Platonic, indebted particularly to the late Neoplatonism of Iamblichus that described the sun as the visible symbol and emanation of an intellectual light that itself was the emanation of the divine. “The sun regulates and guides all things celestial, like a veritable lord of the sky … it gives light to all the stars,” wrote Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century when he sums up this Platonic tradition and seeks to Christianize it in his treatise De sole.39 “Very many Platonists place the soul of the world in the Sun which, filling the entire sphere of the Sun, radiates is own rays through the fiery globe as through a heart,” Ficino notes, although five chapters later he is careful to dissociate himself from this view.40 At the same time, book 3 alludes to a new understanding of the sun made possible by the telescope, the glazed optic tube through which the astronomer looks on the sun’s lucent orb. The allusion is one of three that Paradise Lost makes to Galileo (see also 1.287–91 and 5.261–63), and that acknowledge the new astronomy that had changed the shape of the cosmos and placed the sun at its center—“By centre, or eccentric, hard to tell” (3.575), the poet remarks of Satan’s approach to the sun, anticipating Raphael’s heliocentric explanation of the planetary system in book 8. Catherine Gimelli Martin has noted the juxtaposition of this passage to the earlier consignment of the Dantesque-Ptolemaic universe to the Paradise of Fools; it suggests, she argues, Milton’s allegiance to the new heliocentrism.41
These two languages by which the sun is addressed in book 3, of the old Neoplatonism and of the New Science, were historically interrelated. In the tenth chapter of book 1 of De revolutionibus, Copernicus invoked the language of De sole and the metaphors of Neoplatonic esotericism to support his hypothesis.
In the middle of all sits Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe; Hermes Trismegistus names him the Visible God.42
Galileo himself repeated the passage in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: “Copernicus admires the arrangements of the parts of the universe because of God’s having placed the great luminary which must give off its mighty splendor to the whole temple right in the center of it, and not off to one side.” But Galileo adds the caveat that such metaphors did not constitute science: “Please let us not entangle these little flowers of rhetoric in the rigors of demonstration. Let us rather leave them to the orators, or better to the poets.”43 Nonetheless, Kepler continued to clothe his discoveries in the solar mysticism of Neoplatonism, while Milton’s contemporary poet Henry More enthusiastically embraced Copernicanism in order to demonstrate the compatibility of heliocentrism with the hoary Neoplatonic teaching that More Christianized: “The sunnes the type of that eternall light / Which we call God, a fair dilineament / Of that which Good in Plato’s school is hight.”44
As he explores the implications of a new heliocentrism, Milton the poet takes up these metaphors but in a spirit that shares something of the scientific outlook of a Galileo but owes even more to Protestantism. Milton evokes, in order to reject, a Platonic way of thinking where analogy (sunlight is our best image of divine light and the Good) becomes direct cosmic correspondence (the sun is created as the model of divine light and the Good). The latter idea argues for the human capacity to read back from God’s visible works in nature to God’s invisible supernatural being, the capacity that Milton had optimistically described in Of Education, but that he now calls into question in Paradise Lost. The idea could lead to the error of the fools in their Limbo of Vanity. It could also lead to the divinization of nature and, in particular, to the worship of the sun, which Milton, following John Selden, saw at the heart of paganism and which could devolve into a sheerly materialist conception of nature, if a nature still imbued with quasi-magical solar power.45 The alchemists in pursuit of the philosopher’s stone seek to harness that power for human ends. And the astronomer, newly placing the sun at the center of things, could be complicit with them.
The heliocentric model joins materialist and Neoplatonic discourses. Each is problematic in its own way to Milton’s religion, and his fiction seeks to pry them apart. J. B. Broadbent found one of Milton’s likely sources for his episode of the sun in the first century BCE Universal History of Diodorus Siculus, where Diodorus accounts for why Arabia and other regions “directly under the Meridian” should produce “by the power and virtue of the Sun … a world of pretious [sic] stones of different natures as well as colour and splendor.”
Truly it is very apparent, that colours, odors, fruits, different savours, greatness of creatures, forms of things, and varietie of kindes produced by the earth, are made and procreated by heat of the Sunne, which, warming the moisture of the earth, is the true and only cause of those productions.46
The passage appears to be echoed in book 3:
The arch-chemic sun so far from us remote
Produces with terrestrial humour mixed
Here in the dark so many precious things
Of colour glorious and effect so rare …
(3.609–12)
Diodorus gives a straightforward naturalistic or scientific account of solar generativity, and it corresponds to Milton’s depiction of the sun as a purely material celestial orb. Diodorus may consider the processes of creation to be hidden and marvelous, but there are no grounds here for Broadbent’s suggestion that he turns the sun into a divinity or object of cult, the “Visible God” of Hermes Trismegistus cited by Copernicus.
Milton knew, however, that there had been a historical attempt to overthrow Christianity itself in the name of a solar religion. Its leader, the emperor Julian the Apostate, addressed the Alexandrians in a letter in 362 CE:
Are you alone insensible to the beams that descend from Helios? Are you alone ignorant that summer and winter are from him? Or that all kinds of animal and plant life proceed from him? And do you not perceive what great blessings the city derives from her who is generated from and by him, even Selene who is the creator of the whole universe? Yet you have the audacity not to adore any one of these gods; and you think that one whom neither you nor your fathers have ever seen, even Jesus, ought to rank as God the Word? But the god whom time immemorial the whole race of mankind has beheld and looked up to and worshipped, and from that worship prospered, I mean mighty Helios, [is] his intelligible father’s living image, endowed with soul and intelligence, cause of all good.47
Julian’s religion imposes late Neoplatonism on the Mithraic cult of Sol Invictus that had been the religion of the Roman army; he consciously substitutes the sun for Jesus-as-Logos. In a different scheme, Selene the moon, generated from Helios, is the maker of the universe. Milton’s alignment of the Son with the reflected light of the moon in book 3 may even owe something to this latter pattern.48 Julian might worship the sun in Platonic fashion as the visible sign of an invisible, intelligible deity, but his appeal to the Alexandrians rests on a more literal cult of the visible sun, the creative power of nature worshipped in and of itself. This is what pagan religion had conduced to for Milton, as early as his Elegy V, a substitution of God’s works, headed by the sun, for their creator, a universe that seems to work perfectly well without him. When Milton next echoes Diodorus, in the words of Satan tempting Eve to distrust God and to fall in book 9, the devil sounds very much like Julian as well.
The gods are first, and that advantage use
On our belief, that all from them proceeds;
I question it, for this fair earth I see,
Warmed by the sun, producing every kind,
Them nothing.
(9.718–22)
It is not clear whether Satan is anticipating/repeating a pagan apostasy from true religion or merely fostering a godless materialism, but these are two sides of the same coin.49
It is a signal irony of book 3 that it should be the same Satan, who, in his disguise as a pious cherub, spells out the correct response of the worshipper to beholding God’s works, the “shining orbs” (3.668; 670) of heaven. He tells the unsuspecting Uriel that he has been driven by
Unspeakable desire to see, and know
All these his wondrous works, but chiefly man,
His chief delight and favour, him for whom
All these his works so wondrous he ordained,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On whom the great creator hath bestowed
Worlds, and on whom hath all these graces poured;
That both in him and all things, as is meet,
The universal maker we may praise;
(3.662–65, 3.673–76)
Although Satan can barely contain his envy of mankind, the doctrine is sound: sun and stars have been created for God’s chief creature, and sun and stars and human beings alike attest to and render praise to their “universal maker.” So Adam and Eve will later confirm in their morning prayer in book 5:
These are thy glorious works, parent of good,
Almighty, thine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sit’st above these heavens
In these thy lowest works, yet these declare
Thy goodness beyond thought, and power divine …
(5.153–59)
In their spontaneous, unmeditated hymn “to praise / Their maker” (5.147–48), the first human beings anticipate the psalmist—“The heavens declare the glorie of God; and the firmament sheweth the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). The God who is invisible to mortal sight may possibly—the “or” conveys some uncertainty—be seen in his works, but the operative word is the adverb “dimly.” The universe is a “work” that, as Bacon granted, implies a benign creator. But Adam and Eve, like Bacon, know perfectly well not to argue back from the work to, and thus confuse it with the Creator, even as they go on to address the sun in Orphic and Neoplatonic language: “Thou sun, of this great world both eye and soul, / Acknowledge him thy greater” (5.171–72). This is not, as Broadbent suggested, “a qualified worship” of the sun but quite the opposite.50 Adam and Eve use the anthropomorphic and psychic analogies as analogies: they do not invest the material sun with its own reasoning being as if it could acknowledge the greater God—this is also the pointed effect of placing Uriel in the sun, not as a Platonic planetary intelligence or daemon but as a divine watchman and God’s eye. The sun is not an animated world-soul that in turn creates and animates the universe. Later pagan error might lead one to take these analogies literally, divinize the sun as the model of a higher godhood, and worship nature itself—or rather worship the idol that human thought has made out of nature. Milton’s portrait of an original pure religion in Eden breaks those future idols in advance.
Poetry and Science
Such Protestant iconoclasm, it has been pointed out, could be historically allied to the New Science.51 Bacon combines the two in the extract from The Advancement of Learning cited at the opening of this chapter. In a parallel passage in the The New Organon (1620), where Bacon distinguishes four types of idols that stand in the way of an objective study of nature, the confusion of scientific doctrine and religious truth is a subset of what he calls Idols of the Theater, the tendency of the human mind to arrange the data of the natural world into aesthetically pleasing systems. Bacon has the Aristotelian dramatic unities in mind when he objects to stories that are “more compact and elegant” (concinniores sint et elegantiores) than the histories, human and natural, they describe.52 The old science, Bacon observes, was too bookish in its very form—it was a kind of poetry—and when systems are extracted out of readings of the Bible, they are apt to turn both science and religion into poetic fictions: Bacon repeats his charge that “from this unwholesome mixture of things divine and human there arises not only a fantastic philosophy but also a heretical religion” (Philosophia phantastica sed etiam Religio haeretica).53 Bacon consigns the old science to the realm of literature where it always belonged, its superseded truths now suitable for “ornaments of discourse” (sermones ornent).54 Galileo similarly wished to relegate Copernicus’s Hermetic language to the poets.
Where does this leave the poet of Paradise Lost? With whatever lingering nostalgia—“what if earth / Be but the shadow of heaven …?”—Milton stands on this side of the divide in human thought, described by Michel Foucault as the end of the analogical universe, and by Eugenio Garin as the incipient separation of the Book of Nature from the Book of God. Garin writes, “The book of Nature is not an extrinsic and fleshly introduction to the invisibilia Dei, to intrinsic and spiritual foundations, a return to a mysterious and hidden source; it is to the contrary, the point of departure for a discourse that is ever more simple, evident and accessible—ever less visual, allusive, emotive, and ever more rational.”55 One can feel the two books being pulled apart in the juxtaposition in book 3 of John’s vision of an angel and Galileo’s vision of spots in the sun.
Yet Milton, Christian and poet, is not ready to relinquish the link between the two books or the metaphor of the book itself. The narrative sequence of book 3 and its frame of light descend from God’s invisible heaven to the visible universe only to reconnect the latter back to God: it culminates in Uriel’s eyewitness description of the making of the universe—first the Creation of light itself, then of the stars, sun, and moon—by its divine Creator (3.713–32). With its own carefully wrought semantic unity, its neat division and parallels between heavenly and solar domains of visibility, its play on the word “light” itself, book 3 embodies the compromise that Milton finds for poetry with the New Science. One half of poetry’s task, its via negativa, rehearses the analogies of the older cosmology in order to disclose them as outmoded poetic fictions, to remove their demonic half-life and to turn them into dead metaphors, ornaments for discourse. But Milton’s book nonetheless organizes itself around the very analogy, the correspondence between God and sun, which it criticizes and discards: the old glosses, however beautiful, no longer work, but it is still possible to derive from them, and to posit in turn, an intimation of deeper structure, the universe as a divinely authored book. The too tidy patterns of poetry elicit a habit of mind that, Bacon warns, stands between the human observer and nature; by that very token, Milton counters, they can offer an idea of order and divine presence now that the new philosophy calls all in doubt. In wake of the depiction of the Lucretian Chaos of book 2, the poetic unity of book 3 may be as reassuring as the appearance in it of the character of God himself. It anticipates Raphael’s assertion to Adam in book 8 that “heaven / Is as the book of God before thee set, / Wherein to read his wondrous works” (8.66–68). Yet here, too, the book is hard to decipher, even when the Baconian interpreter reads it on its own terms as God’s work rather than as his image. The angel then adds that the divine architect “Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge / His secrets to be scanned by them who ought / Rather admire” (8.73–75). Read this book, know that it is a book, admire its author with wonder; but don’t expect to master it.
Paradise Lost dramatizes the hazards of this strategy. In repudiating false links that the human mind has forged between the works of nature and their Creator, Milton risks breaking the connection between them altogether. God may himself disappear—“invisible or dimly seen”—from a nature that has been disenchanted for the sake of properly worshipping him and in order to allow nature to be read on a new empirical basis. Like Raphael, Uriel declares that the maker of the heavens and earth “hid their causes deep” (3.707). The hidden first cause is Satan’s opening to insinuate doubt and distrust—“I question it”—and propose the sun as universal power source and incubator of creation, a materialist alternative that gained new resonance as Milton’s century came to recognize the sun as the center around which the earth moved. Paradise Lost subsequently echoes and corrects Satan’s science and that of Diodorus. In book 11, Michael tells Adam, distraught at being ejected from Eden, that God is everywhere.
Adam, thou know’st heaven his, and all the earth.
Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills
Land, sea, and air, and every kind that lives,
Fomented by his virtual power and warmed.
(11.335–38)
The passage also carefully echoes the first description of the sun in book 3,
that gently warms
The universe, and to each inward part
With gentle penetration, though unseen,
Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep.
(3.583–86)
And it still more carefully echoes Adam’s first attempt at science, his explanation to Eve in book 4 of the cooperation of stars and sun in the earth’s generative processes:
these soft fires
Not only enlighten, but with kindly heat
Of various influence foment and warm,
Temper or nourish, or in part shed down
Their stellar virtue on all kinds that grow
On earth, made hereby apter to receive
Perfection from the sun’s more potent ray.
(4.667–73)
Never mind how God’s works work, Michael now tells Adam (cf. 12.576–79): God is the true giver of life to his creation, the maker of “every kind.” You know this, the angel insists, and reminds him of what he and Eve knew in their book 5 prayer and what Adam himself knew instinctively at the moment of his creation as he recounts it to Raphael in book 8: his first words were directed to the sun, but only to ask about their mutual “great maker” (8.273–78.) Now the doctrine is repeated as the revealed truth, through the mouth of an angel. Yet this knowledge is not obvious. The invisible God works invisibly to fill and foment his creation, and the sun itself, Milton’s language insists (“unseen,” “invisible”), imitates its maker. So Satan had doubly lied when he earlier based his case on visible evidence:
for this fair earth I see,
Warmed by the sun, producing every kind,
Them nothing.
The playing off against each other of Michael’s doctrine and Satan’s skepticism repeats the division in book 3 between invisible light and the light of the sun, between the eye of faith and mortal sight. Seeing, the blind poet argues, is not believing.