Due Oct 20
Newton’s Laws; Halley’s Comet
How Newton’s theory offered mathematical rigor to Kepler’s Laws and thus cemented the Sun-Centered episteme.
Astronomy Reading
- Impey, Ch. 3.10-11, 3.13 (“Isaac Newton”, “Newton’s Law of Gravity”, and “The Birth of Modern Science”).
- Openstax Astronomy (pdf | online), Chapter 3.2-3.5.
Arts Assignment
Watch the 8-minute introductory video, then read Book 3 of Milton’s Paradise Lost. This is a challenging reading, so I encourage you to focus on a particular section from the list below. In 1-2 ¶s, comment on Milton’s cosmology as reflected in your chosen passage:
- Invocation, lines 1-55
- Description of Heaven, lines 56-76
- God’s pre-knowledge of the fate of Humankind and the Son’s willing self-sacrifice, lines 77-134
- Satan walks upon the stony exterior of the created world (i.e. the outside surface of the cosmos as we know it) which in times to come will be the “Paradise of Fools,” lines 416-500
- Satan sees the Gates of Heaven and the stairs by which angels travel down from Heaven to visit Earth, lines 498-554
- Satan plunges down past the multitude of stars to land on the Sun, lines 540-590
- Satan encounters the incredibly bright and alchemically potent substance that makes up the sun, then sees the angel Uriel, who stands sentry there, lines 588-629
- Satan disguises himself before speaking to the sun-angel and getting directions to Eden, lines 630-735
John Milton uses paradise lost as a way to dramatized and to construct a narrative around the Christian beliefs of creation and the devil. His cosmology is extremely dramatic and very convoluted with the usage of his archaic and dramatic prose. I must say I enjoy how dramatic everything is in his story, it truly feels like there are wars being fought of great magnitudes. The tale of creation truly feels as grand as the events. He focuses on the characterization of Satan throughout his passages. He often portrays Satan as a misunderstood angel, a patron of freedom from the perceived oppression of God. This is a very interesting characterization as Satan is normally never described this way in any story. Normally he is a being of pure evil, rather than one of broken spirit and strong conviction.
Milton throughout these passages uses biblical terminology, great concepts, and painted imagery to illustrate a great cosmology of the heavens and earth in tangle with the existence of satan and God. These concepts bring the story alive as he tells it through this medium.
One thing I find very interesting when comparing Dante’s ideas of Heaven, Hell, and who/where Satan is to Milton’s ideas reflected in his story is the scale and mobility of everything. As I mentioned before Milton illustrates a grand dramatic story, however, his depiction of Satan is almost an opposite to the established and commonly believed idea of Satan sedentary in hell. He depicts a Satan who moves and actively fights and perverts on earth, and interestingly enough as seen in the passage of him talking to Uriel, acts in the celestial bodies. This is a deliberate idea of Galileo, who demonstrated the imperfections of the moon and stars. These ideas would clash with what was commonly accepted at the time, and would go against the church even. Milton’s depiction of the grand history of the universe through Paradise Lost evidences the emerging ideas of imperfection amongst space.
The most interesting thing for me is the way the heavens and space are interchangeable/the same thing. Milton does stress that the heavens were god’s creation, it seems that some cathartic action took the heavens out from a formless infinite to what it is now. Strangely, god and the sun are not the same thing, which is something that’s true in some cultures. In his final line he discusses things that are invisible to mortal sight, and how celestial light needs to illuminate them. We see the difficulty humans still have at this time when looking into space represented here, requiring the celestial bodies to be lit for visibility. The whole passage comes off as grateful. Obviously, he’s talking to a diety, so it makes sense that he would be. Beyond that though, it really demonstrates how much religious impetous there was at the time, and how much of it related to space.
For this paper I chose the part where Satan flies through the stars and lands on the Sun (lines 540-590). The main reason for this choice was the fact that this passage correlated with our readings. Firstly, what I found interesting about this passage was the fact that Milton does not seem to pick one particular theory of the Universe. He himself admits that it is “hard to say”, whether Satan flies by “centre, or eccentric” as he believes. This admission seemed reasonable for the time period when Milton was writing his Paradise Lost, after Galileo, but prior to Newton’s confirmation. Regardless of this, one can see that the Sun is definitely the main character of this passage. Milton refers to it as to the “great luminary”, and the planets are rotating around its “all-cheering lamp”.
What I thought was the most intriguing was the passage where Milton attempts to describe how the planets move. Milton implies that maybe they are “turned / By his magnetic beam.” This means some kind of energy or a power emitted by the sun, which moves through space. Reading this at the time of Newton Week made this passage especially intriguing because what Milton is saying is essentially the same question that Newton would solve a couple decades later with the concept of gravity. Of course, Milton does not attempt to do any kind of physics in the poem, and his explanation is much more poetic than scientific.