- the
influence of Galileo on John Milton -
Susan Biggin, Oxford
I DEATH BLOW TO ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY
"Through
optic glass the Tuscan artist views [the moon's orb] at evening from the top of
Fesole or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, rivers or mountains in her spotty
globe" [1]
So John Mi1ton refers to Galileo in his first book of Paradise Lost, written some twenty years
after Milton visited Galileo in Italy, in 1638-9, just a few years before
Galileo's death. Indeed, Galileo was the only contemporary of Milton mentioned
in Paradise Lost. Why had he been singled out? Stepping back a decade or two,
let us review the events leading up to the meeting of these two giants of the
seventeenth century.
The Trouble had started around 1610, when Galileo
reported his telescopic observations of the moon in his Sidereus Nuncius.[2]
Galileo and Kepler had been broadly supporting the Copernican theory,
proposed in 1514, of a stationary sun and circularly orbiting planets.
Galileo's night-sky telescopic observations carried out in 1609 revealed four
moons round Jupiter, known now as the Galilean moons. So everything did not have to orbit directly around the
Earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought.
The rest is history. Galileo writing in Italian (not the
usual academic Latin) found wide support outside the universities. After
various conflicts with Rome, Galileo, around 1616, acquiesced to the command
never to defend or hold the Copernican doctrine. However, with a change of Pope
in 1623, Galileo was given permission to write a neutral treatise. Galileo's
sense of humour showed up as he later quipped, in his Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems,[3] "I should think that anyone who
considered it more reasonable for the whole universe to move in order to let
the Earth remain fixed would be more irrational than one who should climb to
the top of a cupola just to get a view of the city and its environs, and then
demand that the whole countryside should revolve around him so that he would
not take the trouble to turn his head." This led eventually to house
arrest, but the work was smuggled out of Italy to Holland and published as Two New Sciences, to be the genesis of
modern physics.[4] For as Galileo said, "The Bible shows the way
to go to Heaven, not the way the heavens go."[5] Einstein three
centuries later wrote that Galileo possessed "the passionate will, the
intelligence, and the courage to stand up as the representative of rational
thinking" in the face of priestly superstition.[6]
II NEW FOCUS FOR MILTON
The novelist, poet, playwright does not create in a
vacuum: his world-view is influenced by the philosophical and scientific
climate of his time. Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein – all had their
impact. John Donne, a contemporary of Galileo, was a metaphysical writer, a
mystic, but instantly recognized the significance of Galileo's telescope,
expressed in the stirring lines:
"Man has weav'd
out a net, and this net throwne
Upon the Heavens, and
now they are his owne."
In fact, the Moon, sun spots, the phases of Venus, are
all cited in Paradise Lost. But
before looking more closely at Milton's prose, let us consider how Milton
responded to his meeting with Galileo. Milton was deeply affected by two
distinguishable issues regarding Galileo's experience – the censorship he had
suffered and his discoveries per se. Milton's
writings subsequent to his Italian tour switched from his earlier lighter,
romantic poetry, to the meatier, maturer, philosophical open prose which
reflects his profound reaction of course also tempered by the backcloth of the
grindings of the Reformation and Restoration in England. Milton's major
writings owe part of their soul to Galileo. As expressed by Kenneth Clark,[7]
"Without Galileo's discoveries Milton's universe would have taken a less
grandiose form."
The Whole of Miton is poured into the stupendous poem Paradise Lost, whose first drafting can
be traced to 1642, though the composition is traditionally said to have begun
in 1657-8, completed in 1665. At that era, world history was seen in a frame of
three events: the creation and fall of Man; the life and death of Christ; and
the end of the world and the day of judgement. All three have a place in Paradise Lost. Scattered throughout the
blank verse are references to the discoveries of Galileo: these include the
moon in Book I Line 287, sun spots Book III Line 589, the phases of Venus (like
the moon often described then as having horns) Book VII Line 366, moons such as
Jupiter's satellites Book VIII Line 148.
In Book VIII, around Line 168-9, Milton's angel Raphael, who,
incidentally, has just summarized centuries of patching up of the Ptolemaic
system, cautions Adam against his thirst for knowledge. Milton is not attacking
science itself – how could he, given his broad tributes to Galileo, but takes
astronomy as the tangible example of enquiry far removed from basic human needs
and likely to engender irreligious pride – echoes of Eve's temptation. He adds
Christian urgency to Socrates' concern with the moral life, and is rather
fearful of excessive pursuit of mere knowledge.
This whole outlook is challenged by movements in New Science in recent
decades of our own time. Paul Davies, in God
and the New Physics,[8] believes ironically that science offers
a surer path to God than religion, and Pope Pius XII addressed the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences in Rome in 1951 on the implications of modern scientific
cosmology.[9]
IV "IF WE THINK TO REGULATE
PRINTING"[10]
Of the seemingly boundless aspects of this poet and thinker, one in
particular stands out, that of libertarian. Milton's fierce role as spokesman
for liberty was seeded from his time spent in Italy with the one great man he
met there, Galileo. In 1644, Milton's famous tract Areopagitica[10] was
published, which recalls Galileo's situation. Traditional censorship was in the
balance in England, as elsewhere, in the 1640 decade, and in Areopagitica Milton brought all the
eloquence of a scholar and a poet to the denunciation of censorship before
publication. The tract has its place in Milton's general campaign for liberty,
title-paged with a verse from Euripides:
"This is true Liberty:
when free-born men,
Having to advise the public,
may speak free,
Which he who can, and will,
deserves high praise;
Who neither can nor will may
hold his peace.
What can be juster in a state than this."
[11]
Milton's cause of freedom, born in Italy, nourished by principle and
reckless courage, gave birth to a republican idealist, who lived on as a
warrior of freedom long after his death in 1674. William Wordsworth appealed in
1807[12]:
"Milton! thou
shouldst be Living at this hour;
England hath need of
thee; she is a fen
Of stagnant waters,"
and
"We must be free
or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake;
the faith and morals hold
Which Milton
held."
V EPILOGUE
We have seen in this brief cameo the influence of
Galileo on just one man, John Milton, who was moved to capture in perennial
print not only the scientific achievements of Galileo, but also the then
burning issue of freedom of expression. We thus see Milton caught up in both
Galileo's seeding of the birth of Modern Science, and also the other cause for
which Galileo is immortal – liberty: Milton became inextricably bound up in the
continuing machinations of the late Reformation and of the Restoration.
These latter kept Milton busy all his middle years, his
sense of honour and duty towards his country and the liberty of its people
delaying the onset of his writing of Paradise Lost until his later years,
despite its having been planned since he was nineteen years old,[13]
before he knew of the existence of Galileo, and at the very time that Galileo
wrote to his patron about the order from the Holy Office in Rome to suspend copies
of his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief
World Systems – but it was too late, that Spirit of Genius was free.
REFERENCES
1 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, Line 288, 1667
2 Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, 1610
3 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632
4 Stephen W Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Press, London, 1988
5 C Ronan, The Astronomers, Evans, London,
1964, p152
6 Albert Einstein, Foreword to G Galileo, Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems, University of California Press, 1953, p xvii
7 Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, BBC Publications, London, 1986, p 218
8 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK, 1983
9 Pope Pius XII, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 8 (1952) 143-6, 165
10 John
Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
11 Euripides,
Suppliants, Lines 438-41, ~ 410 BC
12
William Wordsworth, National Independence and Liberty, Part 1,1807
13
FE Hutchinson, Milton and the English Mind, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964 (3rd
edn)
SCIENTISTS
AND WRITERS DATES
Galileo Galilei 1564
- 1642
William Shakespeare 1564
- 1616
John Donne 1572
- 1631
John Milton 1608
- 1674
Isaac Newton 1642
- 1727
William Wordsworth 1770
– 1850