Mapping milton's multiverse: paradise lost and the poetics of creation

Milton represents the cosmos of Paradise Lost as an analog to the world views of his time, but also as literal poetic material-text on a page, and the corresponding oral recitation of such text. By representing cosmological space as poetic work, Milton demonstrates the role of human creativity in constructing cosmological knowledge. Milton's presentation of creativity thus informs not only our understanding of early modern cosmology but cosmological theory more widely (Paradise Lost resonates surprisingly with very recent cosmological science). In Paradise Lost, creativity is portrayed as a messy, collaborative process that gives rise to a corresponding web or ""multiverse"" (to crib a term from contemporary physics) of shared and competing worlds. Part I of my dissertation consists of one chapter that addresses the relationship between chaos and cosmology in Paradise Lost and describes a kind or degree of chaos present in all aspects and spheres of the poem's worlds. Part II consists of two chapters about the relevance of historical context to the cosmology of Milton's poem. Both the astronomy and the geography of Milton's time presented an openness to revision akin to the chaos portrayed in Paradise Lost. Part III consists of two chapters about the poetic representation and structure of the space in Paradise Lost. In the first of these (Chapter 4), I introduce the idea of poetically creating a universe by teasing out the relationship between Milton's text and poetic sound. Milton's Chaos (the nature and disposition of which has been hotly debated by Milton critics) is a meta-poetic realm of unorganized sound. The devils' capitol Pandemonium (which nearly all critics read as a negative presentation of values adverse to Milton's own) is in fact the poem's clearest representation of the work poetry does with sound to build cosmological space. My final chapter (Chapter 5) situates such poetic work in connection with the role of Milton's human characters in making their world; their participation in God's creative work. I argue that Virgil's Georgics provides something of an inspirational influence, something of an interpretive framework for the regenerative work of Adam, Eve and Milton in Paradise Lost.

􀀰􃀀􀀤􂐀􀀳􃌀􀀳􃌀􀀬􂰀􀀱􃄀􀀪􂨀􀀃􀌀􀀰􃀀􀀬􂰀􀀯􂼀􀀷􃜀􀀲􃈀􀀱􃄀􀂶􋘀􀀶􃘀􀀃􀌀􀀰􃀀􀀸􃠀􀀯􂼀􀀷􃜀􀀬􂰀􀀹􃤀􀀨􂠀􀀵􃔀􀀶􃘀􀀨􂠀􀀝􁴀􀀃􀌀􀀃􀍐PARADISE LOST 􀀤􂐀􀀱􃄀􀀧􂜀􀀃􀌀􀀷􃜀􀀫􂬀􀀨􂠀􀀃􀌀􀀳􃌀􀀲􃈀􀀨􂠀􀀷􃜀􀀬􂰀􀀦􂘀􀀶􃘀􀀃􀌀􀀲􃈀􀀩􂤀􀀃􀌀􀀦􂘀􀀵􃔀􀀨􂠀􀀤􂐀􀀷􃜀􀀬􂰀􀀲􃈀􀀱􃄀 􀁅􄔀􀁜􅰀 􀀶􃘀􀁓􅌀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁆􄘀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀀃􀌀􀀮􂸀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁑􅄀􀁈􄠀􀁗􅜀􀁋􄬀􀀃􀌀􀀺􃨀􀁄􄐀􀁏􄼀􀁏􄼀 􀀤􂐀􀀃􀌀􀁇􄜀􀁌􄰀􀁖􅘀􀁖􅘀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀁗􅜀􀁄􄐀􀁗􅜀􀁌􄰀􀁒􅈀􀁑􅄀􀀃􀌀􀁖􅘀􀁘􅠀􀁅􄔀􀁐􅀀􀁌􄰀􀁗􅜀􀁗􅜀􀁈􄠀􀁇􄜀􀀃􀌀􀁗􅜀􀁒􅈀􀀃􀌀􀁗􅜀􀁋􄬀􀁈􄠀􀀃􀌀􀁉􄤀􀁄􄐀􀁆􄘀􀁘􅠀􀁏􄼀􀁗􅜀􀁜􅰀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀 􀀷􃜀􀁋􄬀􀁈􄠀􀀃􀌀􀀸􃠀􀁑􅄀􀁌􄰀􀁙􅤀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀁖􅘀􀁌􄰀􀁗􅜀􀁜􅰀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀􀀃􀌀􀀸􃠀􀁗􅜀􀁄􄐀􀁋􄬀 􀁌􄰀􀁑􅄀􀀃􀌀􀁓􅌀􀁄􄐀􀁕􅔀􀁗􅜀􀁌􄰀􀁄􄐀􀁏􄼀􀀃􀌀􀁉􄤀􀁘􅠀􀁏􄼀􀁉􄤀􀁌􄰀􀁏􄼀􀁏􄼀􀁐􅀀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁗􅜀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀􀀃􀌀􀁗􅜀􀁋􄬀􀁈􄠀􀀃􀌀􀁕􅔀􀁈􄠀􀁔􅐀􀁘􅠀􀁌􄰀􀁕􅔀􀁈􄠀􀁐􅀀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁗􅜀􀁖􅘀􀀃􀌀􀁉􄤀􀁒􅈀􀁕􅔀􀀃􀌀􀁗􅜀􀁋􄬀􀁈􄠀􀀃􀌀􀁇􄜀􀁈􄠀􀁊􄨀􀁕􅔀􀁈􄠀􀁈􄠀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀 􀀧􂜀􀁒􅈀􀁆􄘀􀁗􅜀􀁒􅈀􀁕􅔀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀􀀃􀌀􀀳􃌀􀁋􄬀􀁌􄰀􀁏􄼀􀁒􅈀􀁖􅘀􀁒􅈀􀁓􅌀􀁋􄬀􀁜􅰀 􀀧􂜀􀁈􄠀􀁓􅌀􀁄􄐀􀁕􅔀􀁗􅜀􀁐􅀀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁗􅜀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀􀀃􀌀􀀨􂠀􀁑􅄀􀁊􄨀􀁏􄼀􀁌􄰀􀁖􅘀􀁋􄬀 􀀷􃜀􀁋􄬀􀁈􄠀􀀃􀌀􀀸􃠀􀁑􅄀􀁌􄰀􀁙􅤀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀁖􅘀􀁌􄰀􀁗􅜀􀁜􅰀􀀃􀌀􀁒􅈀􀁉􄤀􀀃􀌀􀀸􃠀􀁗􅜀􀁄􄐀􀁋􄬀 􀀰􃀀􀁄􄐀􀁜􅰀􀀃􀌀􀀕􁔀􀀓􁌀􀀔􁐀􀀘􁠀 􀀦􂘀􀁒􅈀􀁓􅌀􀁜􅰀􀁕􅔀􀁌􄰀􀁊􄨀􀁋􄬀􀁗􅜀􀀃􀌀􀂋􈬀􀀃􀌀􀀶􃘀􀁓􅌀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁆􄘀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀀃􀌀􀀮􂸀􀁈􄠀􀁑􅄀􀁑􅄀􀁈􄠀􀁗􅜀􀁋􄬀􀀃􀌀􀀺􃨀􀁄􄐀􀁏􄼀􀁏􄼀􀀃􀌀􀀕􁔀􀀓􁌀􀀔􁐀􀀘􁠀 􀀤􂐀􀁏􄼀􀁏􄼀􀀃􀌀􀀵􃔀􀁌􄰀􀁊􄨀􀁋􄬀􀁗􅜀􀁖􅘀􀀃􀌀􀀵􃔀􀁈􄠀􀁖􅘀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀁙􅤀􀁈􄠀􀁇􄜀 Th e U n i v e r s i t y o f U t a h G r a d ua t e S c h o o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Spencer Kenneth Wall has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Barry Weller , Chair 12/4/2014 Date Approved Richard Preiss , Member 12/4/2014 Date Approved Dennis Kezar , Member 12/4/2014 Date Approved Scott Black , Member 12/4/2014 Date Approved Isabel Moreira , Member 12/4/2014 Date Approved and by Barry Weller , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of English and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Milton represents the cosmos of Paradise Lost as an analog to the world views of his time, but also as literal poetic material-text on a page, and the corresponding oral recitation of such text. By representing cosmological space as poetic work, Milton demonstrates the role of human creativity in constructing cosmological knowledge. Milton's presentation of creativity thus informs not only our understanding of early modern cosmology but cosmological theory more widely (Paradise Lost resonates surprisingly with very recent cosmological science). In Paradise Lost, creativity is portrayed as a messy, collaborative process that gives rise to a corresponding web or "multiverse" (to crib a term from contemporary physics) of shared and competing worlds. Part I of my dissertation consists of one chapter that addresses the relationship between chaos and cosmology in Paradise Lost and describes a kind or degree of chaos present in all aspects and spheres of the poem's worlds. Part II consists of two chapters about the relevance of historical context to the cosmology of Milton's poem. Both the astronomy and the geography of Milton's time presented an openness to revision akin to the chaos portrayed in Paradise Lost. Part III consists of two chapters about the poetic representation and structure of the space in Paradise Lost. In the first of these (Chapter 4), I iv introduce the idea of poetically creating a universe by teasing out the relationship between Milton's text and poetic sound. Milton's Chaos (the nature and disposition of which has been hotly debated by Milton critics) is a meta-poetic realm of unorganized sound. The devils' capitol Pandemonium (which nearly all critics read as a negative presentation of values adverse to Milton's own) is in fact the poem's clearest representation of the work poetry does with sound to build cosmological space. My final chapter (Chapter 5) situates such poetic work in connection with the role of Milton's human characters in making their world; their participation in God's creative work. I argue that Virgil's Georgics provides something of an inspirational influence, something of an interpretive framework for the regenerative work of Adam, Eve and Milton in Paradise Lost. CONTENTS ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................ vii INTRODUCTION: ENTANGLED WORLDS ........................................................ 1 Notes ...................................................................................................... 16 PART I: WHAT DOES THE WORLD IN PARADISE LOST LOOK LIKE? ......... 17 􀀦􂘀􀁋􄬀􀁄􄐀􀁓􅌀􀁗􅜀􀁈􄠀􀁕􅔀􀁖􅘀􀀃􀌱 1 THE MILTONIC MULTIVERSE (AND SOME ALTERNATIVES) ................... 18 Milton's Multiverse .................................................................................. 21 Contextual Vocabulary for a Multiverse .................................................. 44 God's Place in a Multiverse .................................................................... 56 Notes ...................................................................................................... 73 PART II: WHAT DOES THE WORLD AROUND PARADISE LOST LOOK 􀀯􂼀􀀬􂰀􀀮􂸀􀀨􂠀􀀢􂈮...........................................................................................................􀀑􁄮..... 76 2 NEW SCIENCE AND NEWER SCIENCE: KNOWLEDGE AS REVISION OF A MODEL ............................................................................................................. 77 New Science Models .............................................................................. 81 Literary Responses to New Science Models: Cavendish and Milton ..... 94 Scientific Responses to New Science Models: The Anthropic Principle .............................................................................................................. 119 Knowledge In (Is) Revision ................................................................... 126 Notes .................................................................................................... 132 3 OLD CARTOGRAPHIC PROBLEMS IN NEW GEOGRAPHIC REGIONS .. 136 Peripheral Centrality: America and the Universe ................................. 139 Disrupting Unstable Worlds: Marlowe and Milton ................................ 150 Vast Infinitude Confined ....................................................................... 181 Notes .................................................................................................... 195 vi PART III: WHAT DOES PARADISE LOST LOOK LIKE? ................................ 198 4 MILTON'S POETICS OF CREATION: TEXTS, SOUNDS AND SPACES .. 199 The World As Sound ........................................................................... 204 The World As Text: The Enjambed Universe ...................................... 221 The World As Text: The Ekphrastic Universe ..................................... 233 The World As Intertext ........................................................................ 245 Notes ................................................................................................... 257 5 PASTORAL V. GEORGIC: MADE WORLDS AND WORLD MAKING ....... 261 Georgic World Making ......................................................................... 268 Georgic Re-creation, Renovation ........................................................ 279 The Need for Re-creation: Death and Fecundity ................................. 301 Notes .................................................................................................... 317 APPENDIX: PLACES IN PARADISE LOST .................................................... 322 REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 325 LIST OF FIGURES Figures i.1 The Miltonic Multiverse (simplified) ............................................................... 8 i.2 Geographic Locations of Epic Similes in Paradise Lost .............................. 10 1.1 The Miltonic Multiverse ............................................................................... 22 1.2 Boethius' Universe ...................................................................................... 47 1.3 Thomas Digges' Universe ........................................................................... 52 1.4 The Miltonic Multiverse as Augustinian Hierarchy of Being ........................ 64 2.1 Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula Auctore F. de Wit ............................ 105 3.1 Waldseemüller's New World ..................................................................... 145 3.2 Die Ganze Welt in Einem Kleberblat ........................................................ 146 3.3 Tamburlaine's World(s) ............................................................................. 193 INTRODUCTION ENTANGLED WORLDS I began my project with a question: What does the world of Paradise Lost look like? I approach this question visually and spatially, in terms of how the world of Milton's poem is physically laid out and is imagined to appear. Milton represents the world in his poem as a mixture of shared and competing worlds within worlds (Heaven, Hell, Chaos); of provisional worlds, subject to creation and re-creation by various forces (divine, demonic and human forces). What I call worlds, Milton would call "creation." All of Creation is Milton's stage for Paradise Lost, and all the poem's significant action is creation.1 This project is a description of the poem's world or worlds, and by necessity, it is a definition of those worlds, as well. The worlds or cosmos2 of Paradise Lost present themselves to every reader of the poem, but in order to come to terms with a world of the poem, we must not only catalog the things that world contains, as I do systematically in the appendix to this dissertation, and as I partially do at more critical length in Chapter 1. We must also determine where and what that world is. In one sense, the "world" of a fictional text like Paradise Lost is the fictional space posited in that text. In a different sense, the "world" of Paradise Lost is its contemporary context, its historical and cultural situation. 2 The poem's fictional space and its surrounding context are related, so an account of the former requires attention to the latter. Consequently, two questions grew out of my project's initial question. What kinds of spaces are imagined in the poem Paradise Lost? What kinds of spaces did John Milton's contemporaries and influences imagine that they inhabited? What does the world in Paradise Lost look like? What does the world around Paradise Lost look like? The visual and spatial dimension of my project leads to another kind of definitional problem, because the question of how the world of Paradise Lost appears is not the same question as how the world of Paradise Lost is imagined to appear. The world around Paradise Lost may look one way to an observer and be imagined differently on a map. Similarly, even as readers can imagine or envision the heights of heaven and the depths of chaos described in Paradise Lost, the poem appears to those readers as words on pages, as blocks of lines in blank verse. The sound of the poem's recitation corresponds to this appearance. If we imagine a world in Paradise Lost, then any map or account I make of that world is a tertiary representational construct, two degrees removed from the world itself. The secondary construct between the poem's world and my account of it is the poem itself. My interest in space takes me to the material space the poem occupies, the textual and aural spaces into which the poem can fit. So I ended up with three questions. What does the world in Paradise Lost look like? What does the world around Paradise Lost look like? What does 3 Paradise Lost look like? This dissertation is organized around my tripartite question of what the world in Paradise Lost looks like, what the world around Paradise Lost looks like and what Paradise Lost looks like. Part I answers the question of what the world in Paradise Lost looks like and consists of one chapter describing the cosmic space represented in Milton's poem. This chapter addresses the relationship between chaos and cosmology in Paradise Lost and describes a kind or degree of chaos present in all aspects and spheres of the poem's world. Part II answers the question of what the world around Paradise Lost looks like and consists of two chapters about the relevance of historical context to the cosmology of Milton's poem. Both the astronomy and the geography of Milton's time presented an openness to revision akin to the chaos portrayed in Paradise Lost. My first chapter in Part II (Chapter 2) is about early modern astronomy and science as artful models of knowledge. In this chapter, I join the growing ranks of scholars who argue that Milton was not insensitive or unresponsive to the scientific mind set of his time. I also examine the anthropic cosmological principle in twenty-first century physics as a more recent instance of science that resonates with Milton's cosmological claims. The second chapter in Part II (Chapter 3) is about early modern geographical alignments of continents old and new. Much of the recent work on Milton and geography has focused on imperialist politics and on cartographic practices, whereas my approach is more focused on geography per se, on the new places and continent arrangements shown on early modern maps. 4 Part III answers the question of what Paradise Lost looks like and consists of two chapters about the poetic representation and structure of the space in Paradise Lost. In the first of these (Chapter 4), I introduce the idea of poetically creating a universe by teasing out the relationship between Milton's text and poetic sound. The final chapter (Chapter 5) situates Milton's poetic work in connection with the role of his human characters, Adam and Eve, in making their world; their participation in God's creative work. I argue that Virgil's Georgics provides something of an inspirational influence, something of an interpretive framework for the regenerative work of Adam, Eve and Milton in Paradise Lost. It is impossible to give a brief, unified answer to my first question, the question of what the world in Paradise Lost looks like. The cosmic spaces described by the poem seem provisionally stitched together despite their conflicting incongruities with each other. The space of Paradise Lost seems chaotic, and its chaos seems to extend well beyond the stretch of universe sandwiched between Heaven and Hell. The unifying principle of the world in Paradise Lost appears to be disunity. Moreover, the world in Paradise Lost appears to be infinite. Milton's Satan gives us a brief and heady encapsulation of his world's infinity and plurality when he declares, "Space may produce new worlds" (Paradise Lost I.650). I have repeatedly written that the world in Paradise Lost "seems" chaotic or "appears" infinite, and I have not been using words like "seems" and "appears" merely to hedge analytical bets. Paradise Lost presents its world or worlds not as they are but as they appear, and they appear differently to different kinds of characters in the poem. Throughout the 5 poem, Milton grants his God a perspective-I mean the term "perspective" quite literally-that allows Him to totalize the infinite sprawl of the poem's world. However, readers of the poem are rarely invited to approach this perspective. I must resign myself to writing about Miltonic worlds (plural), even when I restrict my focus to the world(s) in Paradise Lost. But in my obstinate desire to conceptually unify the worlds in Paradise Lost, I have cribbed a paradoxically unifying term from twenty-first century physics: the multiverse. In Chapter 1, I consider some useful points of contact or comparison between multiversal physics and Paradise Lost, but on the whole, physicists describe a multiverse of universes quite different from the multiverse I find in Paradise Lost. Indeed, even among different schools of physicists, the term "multiverse" can mean different things. String theorist Brian Greene explains, With its hegemony diminished, "universe" has given way to other terms that capture the wider canvas on which the totality of reality may be painted. Parallel worlds or parallel universes or multiple universes or alternate universes or the metaverse, megaverse, or multiverse-they're all synonymous and they're all among the words used to embrace not just our universe but a spectrum of others that may be out there. (4) I am taken with the term "multiverse" because it simultaneously, paradoxically acknowledges multiplicity and universality simply by verbally merging the two terms. The term "multiverse" undoes older models of universal totality, and yet, as Greene writes, this singular term is also in the service of conceptual efforts to "capture the wider canvas" which encompasses "the totality of reality." Paradise Lost is analogous to the multiverse in this respect, in the poem's repeated attempts to paradoxically hold "vast infinitude confined" (Paradise Lost III.711). I have chosen to use the twenty-first century term "multiverse" for its apt, 6 succinct description of the world in Paradise Lost. I do not mean to suggest with the term that Milton's understanding of the cosmos was somehow anachronistic, better suited to my time than to his. The chaos of the world in Paradise Lost has its correlative in the chaos of early modern cosmology, astronomy and geography. The poem itself overtly connects its wide cosmos to the widening worlds of early modern discovery and science. At the same time, Paradise Lost, like other Renaissance texts, employs modes of destabilizing space that predate early modern discovery. The genius of these texts is often the way they bring early modern discovery into dialogue with older, medieval or classical models of cosmology, not to make the older models look simple, but to reveal their analogous complications, to make connections between unstable spatial conceptions across a wide history. So, while I am not arguing that Paradise Lost is anachronistically modern, I am also not arguing that the poem's spatial resonances are temporally bounded in Milton's little corner of the seventeenth century. I realize that my above argument runs the risk of sounding like the discredited cliche of Milton's timelessness. I prefer to think that the space of Paradise Lost is timely; so deeply is it timely that it resonates with a very wide breadth of specific moments in historical time. The idea of an open, chaotic universe was not born with the seventeenth century, but we are the twenty-first century inheritors of the seventeenth-century flavor of this concept. Milton's play with the idea of multiple worlds and universes, his conception of infinite space, his coinage of the term "planet earth" all feel deeply relevant to a twenty-first century understanding of the cosmos. 7 Just as multiple worlds mix and compete in the multiverse represented in Paradise Lost, the world (or multiverse) in the poem mixes with the world around the poem in a chaotic web of relations. I have been arguing above-as I will argue at greater length in the chapters below-that the world in Paradise Lost and the world around Paradise Lost share an analogous relationship of resemblance. Chaos is not the Americas, but it is an analogous space under conceptual revision. But the world of the Americas, the early modern world of exploration and discovery is also represented more directly in Milton's poem, which complicates the distinction between a world without and a world within Paradise Lost. In the poem's epic similes, for instance, disparate geographic locations in Milton's historical world are presented in a different fictional register from that of the poem's cosmic expanses. With some mental effort, a reader can place the spaces of the similes somewhere on the dot of the earth nestled somewhere in the poem's multiverse (Figure i.1); but it feels more natural to mentally oscillate between Adam's prelapsarian world and Milton's contemporary world as between the tenor and vehicle of a simile. The trouble with trying to pin down fictional worlds, generally, is that fictions can operate and represent in multiple registers, and those registers do not easily align or conform. When I read the Iliad, I get the impression that I am, in fact, reading two stories: the primary, martial narrative, of course; but also a different narrative of manual laborers, of day-to-day chores and activities-a mother who "brushes a fly away from her child who is lying in sweet sleep," an expert carpenter, in whose hands "a chalkline straightens the cutting of a ship's 8 Figure i.1 The Miltonic Multiverse (simplified) 9 timber," and the like (Iliad 4.131, 15.410). The episodes of this more homely narrative are strung together by the similes that both describe and interrupt the poem's martial action. The similes in Paradise Lost have a comparable if different function. They provide an alternative or parallel geography for the space or world of the poem (Figure i.2). Figures i.1 and i.2, Milton's multiversal sandwich and the reaches of Milton's Earth, are both reasonable extrapolations from the text of Paradise Lost. One map may entertain a greater quantity of the poem's textual references, but neither is more truly "in" the poem than the other, on a qualitative scale. Both are places the poem represents to its readers' imaginations. I am interested in mapping and diagraming the relations between imagined places in Paradise Lost, much as Franco Moretti diagrams a far broader sample of literary places. In his Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti argues for "[r]elations among locations as more significant than locations as such" (55), and consequently, his maps of literary places work like geometrical diagrams, matrices of relations. He explains his decision "not even to ‘superimpose' them [the diagrams] onto geographic maps to make the point absolutely clear" (56); the point, that is, that his maps work like diagrams. However, the disparate Miltonic spaces of Figures i.1 and i.2 demonstrate the problem of prioritizing relational diagrams over the specific territory upon which they are superimposed. The diagrams can be made only after the literary territory is chosen, and the choice is by no means given, since a work like Paradise Lost contains different kinds of territory. Mapping Paradise Lost entails diagraming relations between 10 Figure i.2 Geographic Locations of Epic Similes in Paradise Lost 11 worlds and fields, as well as relations within worlds and fields. The problem of which world to map and which map to use for Paradise Lost demonstrates the need to think about what the poem itself is, and by extension, what it looks like, my third question about the space of the poem. What kind of textual artifact or oral performance can produce or contain my two competing maps, since neither map is in fact the text? The text in fact looks like this: Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage Transports our Adversary, whom no bounds Prescribed, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss Wide interrupt can hold. (Paradise Lost III.80-4) Different printings from different time periods will of course look slightly different, but my point is that anyone who visually confronts the poem will have to confront something basically like the above block of blank verse. Of course, the poem's blank verse refers to the worlds in my maps. In Fictional Worlds, Thomas Pavel describes how referential literary structures can move readers to the kinds of semantic worlds I have mapped in Figures i.1 and i.2. Pavel recounts of textual experience that "before confronting higher-order perplexities, we explore the realms described by compendia and texts, which stimulate our sense of referential adventure and, in a sense, serve as mere paths of access to worlds: once the goal is reached, the events of the journey may be forgotten" (73). Milton's poem, however, frustrates efforts to forget or transcend its prosodic "paths of access" to its fictional worlds. The passage from Paradise Lost that I cited above is all about Satan's paths of access to Man's universe, and his paths 12 through the cosmos coincide with readers' paths through the verse about his paths. As he transgresses his "bounds/ Prescribed" and breaks free of "all the chains/ Heaped on him" (III.81-2, 82-3), readers transgress the bounds of the enjambed line to finish the thought and see what Satan is doing on the lines below. We break free of the line breaks as Satan breaks free of the chains. As he crosses "the main abyss/ Wide interrupt" that cannot hold him (III.83-4), we cross the smaller abyss or gap of the line break that divides the description of "the main abyss/ Wide interrupt." God tells His Son that "rage/ Transports" Satan across the cosmos (III.80-1), but enjambment transports him down the page. The enjambment in this sample passage is just one simple instance of the poem's consistent play with prosodic and poetic space. Navigating the verse of Paradise Lost is as much a spatial experience as is imagining the poem's semantic worlds. Moreover, as my above reading of the poem's enjambment demonstrates, the poetic space of Paradise Lost both reveals and complicates the character of its semantic space. The poem can refer simultaneously to itself and outside itself. Its catalogues, ekphrases and plots work both as referential devices to the stuff in an imagined world and as self-referential reminders of the poem's artifice, like its prosodic rhythms. The cosmological sandwich, the geographic discoveries, the enjambed lines of poetry-look back over them, and you have three images of Milton's poem. Each is present for an imaginative reader. Each resembles the other two in illuminating ways, but not one of the three can be reduced to a mere shadow or symbol of another. Together, they form a multiverse even less unified than 13 the overlapping infinities of Heaven, Hell and Chaos. Mikhail Bakhtin describes something like the multiversal relationship the world in a poem has with the world around it when he argues that the space of literature "becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (84). This interconnection of literary space and historical time is what Bakhtin calls a fictional work's spacetime or "chronotope" (a term and concept he cribs from the Einsteinian physics of his time). In his essay on the chronotope, Bakhtin concludes by describing the special relationship between a created (literary) work and its creator's world: However forcefully the real and the represented world resist fusion, however immutable the presence of that categorical boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction; uninterrupted exchange goes on between them, similar to the uninterrupted exchange of matter between living organisms and the environment that surrounds them. (254) The brilliance of Bakhtin's osmotic metaphor is its suggestion of interdependence without fusion. The literary work is not the world but cannot be understood apart from its dynamic relation to the world. So Paradise Lost is in dialogue with the world around it. Its textual space is distinct but not apart from the world it imagines and the world it engages. Harry Berger describes a general Renaissance and post-Renaissance propensity to create "heterocosms," fictional or hypothetical universes, and he argues that these other worlds or universes stand in something of a quasi-independent, quasi-subordinate relationship to the surrounding world. He explains, 14 The Renaissance heterocosm was more literally a second world because it was conceived as being set over against not an other world or a first world but the first world. The first world is the actual universe of kingdoms, planets, stars, and angels. It comprises the natural, historical, and spiritual environments of man. Depending on one's viewpoint, one could ascribe its created structure to nature or God or both and its apparent character to perception or tradition or both. (16) Berger thus locates the Renaissance attitude toward the universe "somewhere between" the medieval and modern attitudes (16). The Renaissance perspective is unlike some older, more unified models of reality, without heterocosms, but it is also unlike a kind of modern skepticism, in which "all universes will be separate and equal; none will have priority over any other" (16). According to Berger then, the Renaissance conception of universe or universes allows for diverse kinds of worlds, including fictional worlds, within a more totalized structure of reality. Paradise Lost presents itself within such a structure. I think the paradox of that structure's diversity in totality is best encapsulated in the term "multiverse." Paradise Lost provides a large, multifaceted test case for my conception of fiction as multiverse, as a heterogeneous presentation of different kinds of spaces. Further, the poem is not merely constructed as a fictional multiverse, as all fictions are. It overtly, self-reflexively presents its own construction or creation, in the context of creation as a broader idea, thus throwing the conditions of poetic creation into clearer light. In Milton's poem, creation is a messy (chaotic?), involved and collaborative process; a vast and elaborate joint venture between God and humans, gardeners and poets. It is this collaborative 15 act of creation that produces and suggests a multiverse of shared worlds and competing worlds in Paradise Lost. 16 Notes 1. Throughout this dissertation, I capitalize "Creation" when referring to the worlds created by Milton's God, in order to distinguish God's "Creation" from other senses of the term. 2. Here and throughout this dissertation, I use the word "cosmos" as a plural term. PART I WHAT DOES THE WORLD IN PARADISE LOST LOOK LIKE? CHAPTER 1 THE MILTONIC MULTIVERSE (AND SOME ALTERNATIVES) In connection with his study The Universe as Pictured in Milton's Paradise Lost, William Warren published a diagram representing the whole of the universe imagined in Milton's epic, with the sphere of humanity's own universe centered and circumscribed in a larger sphere of Chaos bottomed by Hell and topped by Heaven (27). In his critical edition of Paradise Lost, Alastair Fowler prefaced the annotated text with a chronology of the poem's events. Fowler observes that "the central, fourth, day of creation, Day 17, the central day also of the poem's 33-day action, occupies in [the] 1667 [edition of Paradise Lost] the central book. On that day is created the sun, whose central place is suggested by Raphael at the centre (viii 123) of a long paragraph" (32). Warren and Fowler approach the cosmology of Paradise Lost at a near century of critical distance from each other, and their approaches are different in significant ways. Warren assumes a geocentric universe in Paradise Lost, whereas Fowler supposes (or at least entertains) a heliocentric one. Warren attends to cosmological space. Fowler's focus is time.1 Fowler employs Renaissance numerology in his analysis. Yet both Warren's account and Fowler's share a desire to center the cosmos of Milton's epic. Both Warren and Fowler order and 19 balance Milton's cosmos by centering them. In centering Milton's universe, Warren thrusts Chaos to the periphery. Fowler omits Chaos altogether. Fowler's thirty-three day chronology, in which the creation of the sun marks the central day, jumps straight from the Parliament in Hell to Satan's arrival at Adam's universe. Fowler justifies the chaotic gap in his chronology by arguing that "one may exclude duration referred to but not represented or quantified" because "[i]n Renaissance realism, there was no necessary continuity between vague durations (implied by words like ‘often') and definite poem time" (30). There is a certain logic to excluding from chronology a realm like Chaos, "[w]ithout dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,/ And time and place are lost" (Paradise Lost II.893-4). But the poetic text describing Chaos as such is more tangible and thus more temporal. Perhaps Fowler's jump from Pandemonium to the stars is less jarring than his jump from Book I to Book III. In Milton's text, Chaos is present as an idea and a narrative arena. As both, it challenges if not frustrates ordered schemas of the poem's cosmology.2 In spatial terms, Chaos de-centers and unbalances such schemas. It is like a centrifugal force that pulls them apart. Moreover, Milton refuses to leave chaos in Chaos. The idea of chaos is not confined to the narrative arena in which it finds clearest expression.3 Chaos, the realm through which Satan travels in Book II of Paradise Lost, is obviously chaotic, but Milton's Hell, Paradise and even his Heaven all present (without containing) their own kind of chaos. Gordon Teskey, with justification, entitles one of the chapters of his book on Paradise Lost, "Why, This Is Chaos, Nor Am I 20 Out of It" (65). In this chapter, I make the descriptive case that Milton's cosmic space is chaotic; that his epic presents multiple universes in a vast, asymmetric multiverse. As a coda to this argument, I explain how Milton can reconcile this chaotic multiverse with his representation of its omnipotent, omnipresent creator. Milton's God may transcend His chaotic Creation or see it from a fundamentally different perspective than that of His creatures, but the chaotic perspective retains a force over both God's creatures and Milton's readers. The remainder of my dissertation treats, in one way or another, what Milton does with his chaotic multiverse and what readers make of it. As a description, this first chapter is the groundwork of the subsequent arguments. From the outset of the description, let me clarify its key term, "chaos." Depending on its context, the word "chaos" may apply more or less aptly to the multiverse Milton imagines in Paradise Lost. Somewhere between the gaping orifice of the word's etymological origins and the hidden order latent in modern chaos theory, Milton conceived of a Chaos more amorphous, more unstable and above all more open, less comprehensive. The defining feature of the Miltonic cosmos is their vastness. Everywhere, vistas stretch beyond horizons, leaving characters and readers uncertain about the shape of perimeters and parameters that may not even exist. Everywhere, seeming frontiers open up into surprising new regions. Milton's characteristic enjambment serves a multiverse that is spatially enjambed (for more on this idea, see Chapter 4, which inaugurates my dissertation's section on poetic creation). Chaos is technically a paradoxical realm without "place" or "dimension" (II.894, 893), but Milton nevertheless 21 represents it as a vast space. Its vastness provides room for various, heterogeneous elements in unbalanced, competitive relation with each other. The poem's other realms resemble Chaos in their own vast heterogeneity, and the poem's entire multiverse resembles Chaos as a collection of overlapping infinite or indefinite spaces or universes. Chaos in Paradise Lost is characterized by plurality, asymmetry and extension. I have endeavored to represent these characteristics in my own visual representation of Milton's multiverse (Figure 1.1), in which the various realms all stretch beyond the frame of my canvas, the collage-work implies heterogeneous materials, and the photo-realism suggests depth or extension in every direction. Milton's Multiverse Paradise Lost provides no word for the entirety or totality of its cosmic spaces, which is a telling omission. Perhaps the closest candidate for an all-encompassing term is uttered by Satan near the beginning of the poem, when he declares, "Space may produce new worlds" (I.650). If Satan can be trusted (a hypothetical statement with built-in irony), "space" is a singular arena for the production of plural worlds or universes or cosmos. However, in this formulation, space is little more than an inexhaustible backdrop for a plurality of worlds or universes. The term and idea of space provide only weak conceptual glue for comprehending and totalizing the poem's cosmology. Indeed, the singularity of space emphasizes by relief the plurality of worlds, and Satan's statement is the poem's clearest encapsulation of that plurality. A complementary image presents itself when Satan reaches Chaos' frontier with 22 Figure 1.1 The Miltonic Multiverse For a list and description of the references mapped on this image, see Appendix. 23 Heaven and sees [f]ar off th' empyreal Heav'n, extended wide In circuit, undetermined square or round, With opal tow'rs and battlements adorned Of living sapphire, once his native seat; And fast by hanging in a golden chain This pendant world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon. (II.1047-1053) Humanity's entire universe of planets and countless stars is a tiny bubble within a chaotic amalgamation of wider worlds. The poem's omission of a single term for this amalgamation hints that the cosmic mixture is not, in fact, singular or total. My term "multiverse" stands in as approximate shorthand for the absent term of universality that Milton always teasingly withholds. Milton teases his readers not only by withholding a term for his entire cosmic expanse but by disqualifying candidate terms. He disqualifies these terms for cosmic totality not by rejecting them but through the more potent strategy of deploying them in reference to mere parts of the whole. The term "universe" cannot mean everything if it refers to one small piece of everything. This process of disqualifying cosmic terms is subtly at work when Satan says, "Space may produce new worlds" (I.650). The statement rejects the concept of one closed, complete universe and does so more forcefully by paradoxically pluralizing a synonym for the term "universe." In twenty-first century English, the word "world" has become nearly synonymous with "planet," but in Paradise Lost, "world" is repeatedly used as a synonym for a universe or cosmic system. Had Satan said, "Space may produce new places," or "Space may produce new realms," he would have evoked a wide expanse, but not necessarily the infinite 24 redefinition of universality implied in the idea of multiple "worlds." Milton both employs and undoes the universal, totalizing connotations of the word "world" more overtly when he describes Satan's entrance into the human universe or world of stars and planets. The poem recounts that Satan "[d]own right into the world's first region throws/ His flight precipitant, and winds with ease/ Through the pure marble air his oblique way/ Amongst innumerable stars, that shone/ Stars distant, but nigh hand seemed other worlds" (III.562-6). The human universe or "world," as Milton here explicitly terms it, contains and opens into an astronomical plurality of apparent "other worlds." In the course of reading five lines of the poem, Milton's readers are called upon to read the term "world" in two different senses, emphasizing the impression that plural other worlds exist. In this passage, Milton's epic does its fair share of the cultural work that shifted the associations and synonyms of "world" away from universes and toward planets, but not without some connotational tension for readers who retain both meanings. Again and throughout Paradise Lost, Milton plays on the paradoxical tension of "other worlds" or "another world," which become key terms in the epic. Chaos, the personified Anarch of his eponymous realm, refers to Adam and Eve's universe of stars and planets, "heav'n and Earth," as "another world" "[h]ung" over his realm (II.1004, 5). Beelzebub too, while addressing the demonic parliament, refers to the human universe as "another world," with a "new race," though one "like to" the angels (II.346, 347, 348), both novel and familiar. This uncanny familiarity is key for establishing the different portions of 25 Milton's multiverse not as mere different portions but as sorts of alternative universes, paradoxical reiterations of the total world. Again, God calls the new universe "[a]nother world" for another race to replace the fallen angels (VII.155). And Sin says to Death, "Satan, our great author, thrives/ In other worlds" (X.236- 7), referring with a mix of intuition and conjecture to the Archfiend's spoiling of Adam's world. The angel Raphael, on the other hand, refers to Heaven, the realm of God and angels as "another world," rhetorically wondering to Adam whether it is licit or even possible to "unfold/ The secrets of another world" (V.568-9). Raphael's rhetorical doubts emphasize the difference and distance between Heaven and Adam's world, but Milton uses the same term, "another world" interchangeably for either. Either is the "other" world from the perspective of the other. It may be a stretch to claim these other worlds are exactly on par with each other, but they are parallel parts of the larger multiverse. Neither is singular and neither encompasses the other. Elsewhere in the poem, parts of Adam's universe are referred to as worlds of their own even as Adam's universe encompasses them, as when Satan passes the "other worlds" on his astronautical voyage (III.566). Raphael similarly refers to other stars as "other worlds" when he instructs Adam not to dream of them (VIII.175). When Adam is shown the survival of Noah and his family in vision, he observes, "God vouchsafes to raise another world/ From him" (XI.889-90), using the word "world" in its oldest sense as an age of humans. Milton uses the word "universe" more tightly than he uses the word "world." In all but one case in Paradise Lost, "universe" refers to Adam's realm 26 of stars and planets. It never refers to the totality of the poem's cosmological space. Whereas the idea of "other worlds" may slip casually by the twenty-first century reader, other universes sound strange and science-fictional. "Universe" remains a potent term for the totality of unified reality. Thus Milton's revisionary play with the term "universe" to express less than everything remains easily audible. In the poem's creation account, the Son took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things: One foot he centred and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds This be thy just circumference, O world. (VII.225-31) This universe, addressed by the Son as "O world," is distinguished as Adam's realm, as well as our realm and Milton's realm, or at least a poetic representation of it; but it is also distinguished from the profound and obscure Chaos beyond and around it.4 In the poem's one use of the word "universe" that does not refer to Adam's stars and planets, Hell is described by the narrator as a "universe of death" (II.622), its own alternative universe characterized by its own variation on universal rules. Death replaces life as the generative force of Hell-"Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds/ Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things" (II.624-5)-just as "darkness visible" replaces light as the effect of flame (I.63). Milton deploys the adjective "universal" throughout his poem with less selectivity and precision than the noun "universe." "Universal" appears to be an adjectival expression of cosmic totality in the case of God's Son being 27 "[a]nointed universal king" (III.317), a sense the serpent appears to parody by titling Eve "universal dame" (IX.612). 5 On the other hand, Adam and Eve are clearly referring to their own universe of stars and planets in stated distinction from God's abode when they address God in their morning hymn of praise, observing, "Thine this universal frame,/ Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then./ Unspeakable, who sits above these heavens" (V.154-6).6 At other points in the poem, the adjective "universal" evokes a great quantity, perhaps the totality of a particular set or system. There is a "universal host" of devils (I.541) and a "universal hubbub" in Chaos (II.951). Upon returning triumphant from Earth, Satan expects the "universal shout" of his followers, and instead receives a "universal hiss" as all of them are turned into snakes (X.505, 508). Raphael recounts that at God's creative command, "the tender grass" clad the Earth's "universal face with pleasant green" (VII.315, 216), meaning the whole surface of the Earth was covered in verdure. And Michael and Adam observe Noah saving his family from "[a] world devote to universal wrack" (XI.833), when the Earth's whole surface is covered in water. The rebel angels resolve to "fall/ In universal ruin last" (VI.796-7), a case in which "universal" suggests "total" in a more abstract, conceptual sense. And God says Abdiel has "borne/ Universal reproach" (VI.33-4), when the faithful angel has only appeared devoid of supporters and has in fact just been warmly welcomed by a multitude of allies. Paradise Lost repeatedly requires its readers to shift their perspective on what a universe appears to comprehend. The poem's perspectival shifts have a vertiginous effect on readers' 28 imaginations, as does the sheer scope of the poem's various universes. When Satan ventures into Chaos, he many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity. All unawares, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft. (II.928-38) The episode is dizzying, as Satan's path repeatedly changes direction, and when the nitrous cloud thrusts him aloft, the bottom of a universe falls out beneath him. Readers are repeatedly told that Chaos is deep, "the hoary deep" (II.891). When we are briefly asked to hypothesize Satan falling through Chaos indefinitely up to this hour in time, we must imagine an infinite depth in Chaos' space; a depth which grows ever deeper with every moment, year and century that passes between Milton's composition of the lines and the hour of their reception by us, Milton's readers. The conversion from time to space, while intuitive enough to be forceful, adds to the chaotic experience of shifting and reassessing spatial assumptions. Even though on one level it makes sense for Chaos to present infinite or indefinite depth, the idea contrasts with the vague suggestion that Hell is a realm below Chaos in Milton's multiverse, so readers are forced to reorient themselves. Chaos the Anarch refers to Hell as a "dungeon stretching far and wide beneath" his realm (II.1003). Despite its wide extent, Hell does not stretch far enough to catch Satan were he to fall through the depths of Chaos. The enormity of Hell provides a relative scale for the 29 greater breadth and profundity of Chaos, if in fact it is correct to think of Hell and Chaos as contiguous worlds in the same kind of space. Satan refers to "profoundest Hell" (I.251) and observes that God's thunder "ceases now/ To bellow through the vast and boundless deep" (I.176-7). Raphael recounts that when the rebel angels fell from Heaven, "Hell saw/ Heav'n ruining from Heav'n and would have fled/ Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep/ Her dark foundations" (VI.867-870), as though Hell could be no deeper, could move no further from Heaven's height. If Hell and Chaos are both the "boundless deep," if both are bottomless, one could fall or sink infinitely deep through either. From the inside, each world is its own inexhaustible universe. Milton's "argument" for Book I of Paradise Lost addresses without resolving the complexity by observing that Hell, the place of Satan's banishment, is located "not in the centre (for Heaven and earth may be supposed as yet not made, certainly not yet accursed) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called Chaos" (page 120). The argument blurs the bounds between Hell and Chaos, thus obscuring the spatial relationships between these two worlds, as well as the relationship of either to the space of the larger multiverse. God similarly conflates-one dare not say "confuses"-Hell and Chaos when He condemns the rebel angels and refers to "the gulf/ Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide/ His fiery Chaos to receive their fall" (VI.53-5). Of course, even Milton's God must be allowed a little metaphorical leeway when He speaks in Milton's language. In one sense, God simply means that Hell or Tartarus is chaotic, that it "opens wide" like a chaotic mouth. But since the rebel angels will indeed fall into Chaos 30 proper after being ejected from Heaven, before landing in Hell, God's simpler meaning is inflected or infected with some cosmographic confusion over the regional identities of Hell and Chaos. The easiest way to understand the identification of Hell as Chaos is that a part of Chaos became Hell after the fall of Satan and before the creation of the human universe, a solution that implicates portions of Milton's multiverse in a longer cosmic history as well as a larger cosmic expanse.7 The expanses of Chaos are asymmetric as well as indefinite. They stretch and shift in surprising directions, and they are filled to their brim with incongruous elements. The poem describes Chaos as "[t]he womb of nature and perhaps her grave,/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds" (II.911-16). Chaos is more and less than either sea, shore, air or fire; a heterogeneous mixture of all in which all remain distinct enough to contend and jumble without synthesis. Milton mimics the packed contiguity of incongruous elements in Chaos through the rhythm of his line: "Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire." This line is almost entirely monosyllabic-the only exception being "neither"-allowing Milton to pack it with words. The line emulates Chaos as an ample yet crowded container of things. Moreover, the monosyllables are harsh and distinct, falling less easily into a metrical pattern of stresses than polysyllables do. Basically speaking, the harsh monosyllables make for a rough, uneven line about a rough, uneven place. More specifically, the distinct 31 syllables evoke the heterogeneity of Chaos' disparate elements. This effect is even more accentuated in a slightly earlier passage describing Chaos: For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce Strive here for mast'ry, and to battle bring Their embryon atoms. (II.898-900) In, "Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire," the regularly intervening "nor" in the list of chaotic categories lends a degree of rhythmic alternation to the line. "Nor," while a monosyllabic word, is a small word, usually unstressed, and arguably of less semantic significance to the line. By contrast, in "For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce," most of the monosyllabic nouns and adjectives are lined up side by side, and a decent argument can be made for stressing all or any of them. The next line (II.899) is less monosyllabic and more regularly rhythmic, but the hard alliteration of "battle bring" echoes both the harsher preceding line and the elemental contest in Chaos. Again, Milton creates the same prosodic effect when he describes Satan's progress through Chaos. The poem narrates that Satan, O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies. (II.948-50) This is Milton's most extended use of monosyllabic verse. In three whole lines, we get only one polysyllable, "pursues." The lines re-create the vast crowdedness of Chaos and the difficulty Satan has making his way through it. These are thick, difficult lines to read aloud and to process; lists in which an overabundance of particulars fade into a blurred yet heterogeneous mass. The three lines are prosodically similar, encouraging readers to take them as one list, 32 but in fact they are three lists grouped according to different categorical and grammatical logic. The first is a list about Chaos' features, the next two lists about Satan's movement. The first two are lists of nouns-though the first list mixes nouns and adjectives-the third a list of verbs. Though each list is distinct, conceptual links of various kinds can be made between lists, but some kinds of conceptual links undo others. Like the elements of Chaos, the lists are heterogeneous entities that combine in provisional, contradictory relations with each other. The word "or" plays a regulating and conjunctive role in the lists, like "nor" in the poem's earlier line. However, "or" also echoes "o'er." At points these near-homonyms are practically indistinguishable. "O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare," could be read with just as much sense, "O'er bog, o'er steep; through strait, rough, dense; o'er rare." Milton underscores his assertion that the shifting features of Chaos may be one thing or another by troubling the identity of the word "or" itself. Even in the later lines of this passage, where "or" clearly means "or" and not "o'er," the sound of both words persists, reemphasizing the earlier line's semantic trick, and endowing the word "or" with greater resonance and stress, more monosyllabic weight. Rough, monosyllabic verse is less obviously and metrically patterned than much of the poetry in Paradise Lost, but Milton uses monosyllables frequently enough in his description of Chaos to establish them as the sort of prosodic pattern for Chaos. The payoff of establishing this pattern is that Milton can use it to evoke Chaos elsewhere in his poem. Raphael says that after the creation of the Earth and its animals, "Air, water, earth,/ By fowl, fish, beast, was flown, was 33 swum, was walked/ Frequent" (VII.502-4). The created Earth is different from the chaotic materials out of which it was created in important ways, but it is similar in the basic way that it is crowded with heterogeneity. Earth and these lines about it are stuffed with stuff. The monosyllables fill and spill out of Milton's enjambed line. They describe and mix creatures and environs, animals and actions, bringing together words with different categorical valences and grammatical functions through the similarity of their sound. Before (in fact, just before) he describes Chaos in monosyllabic lines, Milton describes Hell as explored by "adventurous bands" of demons, adventurers who "found/ No rest: through many a dark and dreary vale/ They passed, and many a region dolorous,/ O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,/ Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,/ A universe of death" (II.615, 617-22). Various but regularly patterned regions-"many a frozen, many a fiery Alp"-give way to a less legible sprawl of disparate features-"rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death"-expressed in a dense list of monosyllables whose near-rhymes seem as pertinent an organizing principle as their meanings. The effect is daunting, disorienting and basically chaotic upon first encounter. When considered in connection with the later, similar lines describing Chaos, Milton's Hell looks more specifically chaotic, more reminiscent of Chaos itself. The two cosmic realms resemble each other, and given the narrative ordering of the poem, it might be just as appropriate to say Chaos is reminiscent of Hell. The cold region of Hell nicely exemplifies the place's variety and extension. Beyond the river Lethe, the demonic explorers discover that "a frozen 34 continent/ Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms/ Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land/ Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems/ Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice" (II.587-91). Hell contains or includes various climes, but not according to any discernable order, whether moral or geographic (or rather, infernographic).8 The cold region simply appears over the horizon and beyond the river, for readers and demons alike, another continent, both distinct from and contiguous with the region of fire (by Milton's time, "continent" connotes both geographic distinction and contiguity). Its precise frontiers with the fiery region remain mysterious, as does the orientation of either region to the whole of Hell, if Hell is a whole, and not in fact a bottomless hole. Moreover, the different regions of Hell are not organized around any sort of punitive logic, at least not of the kind that aligns particular regions with particular crimes and punishments. Rather, the poem narrates concerning the cold region, Thither by harpy-footed furies hailed, At certain revolutions all the damned Are brought and feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce, From Beds of raging fire to starve in ice Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine Immovable, infixed, and frozen round, Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire. (II.596-603) The cold region contributes to the punitive character of Hell by making the punishment of all the damned less regular, more diverse, vaguely ordered only according to unspecified "periods of time," "certain revolutions." Revolutions of what, the poor and bewildered explorers of Hell might ask. The poem might be throwing out a vague hint that Hell is basically round or referring simply to cycles of time. Satan, as well as the demonic explorers, encounters Hell as a vast, 35 indefinite space: "sometimes/ He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left,/ Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars/ Up to the fiery concave tow'ring high" (II.632-5). When he reaches Hell's gate, apparently somewhere near the top of Hell, the doors "on their hinges grate/ Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook/ Of Erebus" (II.881-3). The poem here as elsewhere obscures the question of whether Hell occupies the absolute bottom of the multiverse. The grating doors appear to shake the lowest bottom of everything, period, until the enjambed phrase clarifies that it is the bottom of Erebus (presumably synonymous with Hell) that shakes. At times, the fallen angels themselves exert a regulating force over the irregular landscape of their domain. The survey of the demonic explorers at least partially maps and makes legible the indistinct features of Hell. Earlier, Satan's entire army of followers moves "[i]n perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood/ Of flutes and soft recorders" (I.550-51). They act within a structured hierarchy and organize their movements according to patterns of military discipline and of music. At other points in the poem, however, the devils contribute to and amplify the chaos of their environs, as when certain among them, in order to pass the time, "with vast Typhoean rage," "[r]end up both rocks and hills, and ride the air/ In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wild uproar" (II.539-41). These devils engage in elemental upheaval. That chaos should manifest itself in Hell is perhaps less surprising than chaos in Heaven, given longstanding negative attitudes toward chaos and disorder in Western culture. However, John Rumrich points out that 36 "[s]ynesthetic confusion abounds in Milton's heaven, where ordinary limits are meant to be overcome with ease" (1038). Regina Schwartz interprets Paradise Lost as a repetitive opposition of creation and chaos, yet she observes that for the poem, "[C]reation and chaos are so ‘involved and interwoven' that they constitute one another" (7). Chaos thus persists in all of God's Creation.9 Heaven bears some resemblance to Chaos in its extension and the apparent asymmetry of that extension. If Heaven has any bounds, they remain well beyond the ken of God's creatures and Milton's readers. From Satan's view, "[f]ar off" in Chaos, "th' empyreal Heav'n, extended wide/ In circuit, undetermined square or round" (II.1047-8). Dante likens his inability to comprehend God to "the geometer" who "intently seeks/ to square the circle, but he cannot reach,/ through thought on thought, the principle he needs" (Paradiso XXXIII.133-5). Milton's description of Satan's view of Heaven narrativizes this abstract geometrical trope for divine incomprehensibility, giving Satan and readers a celestial region of indeterminate shape in navigable space. Personified Chaos tells Satan that Adam's universe is "linked in a golden chain/ To that side Heav'n from whence [his] legions fell" (II.1005-6). This description answers Satan's question of where the new universe is located but raises further questions about the shape and cosmic location of Heaven. If Adam's universe is attached to one side or portion of the Heavenly expanse, it is unclear how that "side" spatially relates to the totality of Heaven or to the wider multiverse. Chaos identifies a side of Heaven above or opposite to the Chaotic space between Heaven and Hell (the space through which Satan's legions fell). If Hell lies below or opposite 37 this side of Heaven, it is unclear what lies above or beyond Heaven's other sides, or if in fact nothing lies beyond sides of Heaven that stretch and dissolve into infinity. The extent of Heaven looks as boundless from the inside as from the outside. When Raphael narrates actions that take place within Heaven, he tells Adam that angelic armies traverse "[r]egions to which/ All thy dominion, Adam, is no more/ Then what this garden is to all the Earth,/ And all the sea, from one entire globose/ Stretched into longitude" (V.750-4). Not Heaven, but any one of an unspecified plurality of regions within Heaven exceeds the extent of Earth to the proportion that Earth exceeds the extent of Paradise. Raphael again narrates, "[O]ver many a tract/ Of Heav'n they march'd, and many a province wide/ Tenfold the length of this terrene" (VI.76-8). Raphael's statement that various provinces of Heaven are ten times the extent of Earth conveys the message that Heaven is unimaginably large. But when Raphael describes the extent of Heaven's regions through relative proportions-Paradise: Earth, Earth: Heavenly region-he conveys the message along with the vertiginous sensation created by vast spaces, a sensation that attends revising one's perspective and (hopefully) regaining one's bearings. To understand Raphael's second description of Heaven's vast regions, readers must simply imagine ten earths. To understand Raphael's first description, we must shift between imagining Earth as big and small; we must imaginatively zoom out at dizzying speed from an Earth that dwarfs Paradise to some far off place where we can see Earth dwarfed by Heaven. 38 In Paradise Lost, Heaven is not simply the dwelling place of God. In fact, it is unclear if God can even be said to be in the same "Heaven" inhabited and traversed by angels. He sits enthroned above and apart from the angels, "as from a flaming mount, whose top/ Brightness had made invisible" (V.598-9). The poem first introduces Him thus: Now had the Almighty Father from above, From the pure Empyrean where he sits High throned above all heighth, bent down his eye, His own works and their works at once to view: About him all the sanctities of Heaven Stood thick as stars, and from his sight received Beatitude past utterance; on his right The radiant image of his Glory sat, His only Son. (III.56-64) The immeasurable height of God's throne gives Heaven dimension as well as extent. Both the breadth and height of Heaven seem infinite, but they do not necessarily extend infinitely through the same kind of space. While aspects of Heaven's topography appear inherently like Chaos, chaos enters Heaven more obviously and significantly when war breaks out among the angels. Satan's rebellious forces are responsible 10 for initiating this celestial chaos, but the loyal angels also contribute to it.11 Indeed, the archangel Michael's loyal forces instigate the most dramatic elemental upheaval in the celestial war. In response to Satan's artillery, to the hills (For Earth hath this variety from Heav'n Of pleasure situate in hill and dale) Light as the lightning glimpse they [Michael's forces] ran, they flew, From their foundations loosening to and fro They plucked the seated hills with all their load, Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops Up lifting bore them in their hands. (VI.639-46) 39 Michael's army employs the pleasant, mild variety of the Heavenly landscape to unleash a more confused mixture of elements that disrupts the very foundations of the landscape. We get a brief truncation of Milton's characteristic chaotic lists in the "[r]ocks, waters, woods" thrown about by the warring angels. Of course, Satan's forces, while not the instigators of this particular brand of chaos, readily join in with it. The result is "horrid confusion heaped/ Upon confusion," to the extent that "all Heav'n/ Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread,/ Had not th' Almighty Father where he sits/ Shrined in his sanctuary of Heav'n secure,/ Consulting on the sum of things, foreseen/ This tumult, and permitted all, advised" (VI.668-9, 669-74).12 God is evidently and necessarily in a Heav'n secure, somehow removed or at least conceptually distinct from the Heaven that can go to wrack without His intervention. Heavenly chaos and Satan's responsibility for it are even more problematic in the case of the rebel angels' artillery. When Satan proposes using gunpowder against Michael's army, in a moment up they [the rebel angels] turned Wide the celestial soil and saw beneath Th' originals of nature in their crude Conception; sulfurous and nitrous foam They found, they mingled, and with subtle art, Concocted and adusted they reduced To blackest grain, and into store conveyed. (VI.509-15) The rebels unearth and unleash the chaotic force of gunpowder on Heaven. But they do not create this force. It is waiting for them to pervert it in the soil of Heaven itself; "nitrous," like the "tumultuous cloud,/ Instinct with fire and nitre" in Chaos (II.936-7); "sulfurous," like "the fiery deluge, fed/ With ever-burning sulfur 40 unconsumed" in Hell (I.68-9). Either Heaven's soil and elements are made up of the same nitrous and sulfurous material found in Chaos, or else the boundaries of Heaven and Chaos are so close and porous that the rebels have managed to dig a hole to Chaos through Heaven's soil. Before being expelled past Heaven's walls, into Chaos, the rebels have found a backdoor to the place. A weird, similar portal to Chaos exists on Earth, as shown to Adam by the angel Michael. Michael recounts that Nimrod and his followers "shall find/ The plain, wherein a black bituminous gorge/ Boils out from underground, the mouth of Hell:/ Of brick, and of that stuff, they cast to build/ A city and tower, whose top may reach to Heaven" (XII.41-4). It would appear that a Hell of sorts is located in the center of Milton's Earth, after all. The scene clearly recalls the earlier one in which Satan's forces cast their implements of rebellion against God from chaotic, subterranean materials. But chaos manifests itself in Adam's universe in broader and less negatively charged ways, as well. C. S. Lewis claims that in Paradise Lost, he [Milton] invented a most ingenious device for retaining the old glories of the builded and finite universe yet also expressing the new consciousness of space. He enclosed his cosmos in a spherical envelope within which all could be light and order, and hung it from the floor of Heaven. Outside that he had Chaos. (100) This is a neat claim, and it provides a nice mental image of Milton's multiverse on a large scale, with the created universe of humanity surrounded by yet separated from a violent sea of Chaos.13 However, a closer inspection of that universe on a smaller scale reveals a great deal of chaos within to answer the Chaos without. Even before we enter Adam's universe, its totality and symmetry prove a matter of perspective: "a globe far off/ It seemed, now seems a 41 boundless continent/ Dark, waste, and wild" (III.422-4). When Satan and Raphael fly into and through this universe, they each pass "innumerable stars, that shone/ Stars distant, but nigh hand seemed other worlds" (III.565-6), "[s]ail[ing] between worlds and worlds" (V.266-8). The space is filled with plural worlds, and to all appearances, both space and worlds are endless. Uriel calls this universal space a "vast infinitude confined" (III.711). Earth, its sun and the familiar planets are just a portion of this infinitude. Their spatial relation to the larger universe of starry worlds is unclear. And even the spatial relation between the Earth and the sun is unclear. In response to Adam's question of whether the sun circles the Earth, Raphael gives no definite answer, only posing the hypothetical question, "what if seventh to these [the six planets]/ The planet Earth, so steadfast though she seem,/ Insensibly three different motions move?/ Which else to several spheres thou must ascribe,/ Moved contrary with thwart obliquities,/ Or save the sun his labour" (VIII.128-33). As elsewhere in the poem's descriptions of cosmic spaces, Raphael asks readers along with Adam to imagine the Earth in two different ways, alternating between spatial conceptions. Raphael presents a bivalent astronomy, geocentric or heliocentric. This bivalence resembles Lewis' claim that Milton presents both the old and newer senses of space through the universe and Chaos respectively, but Raphael locates his bivalent astronomical hypotheses squarely within Adam's universe. On Earth, variety and categorical confusion evoke Chaos. Earth, like so many of the poem's spaces, is vast and crowded. As noted above, "Air, water, earth,/ By fowl, fish, beast, was flown, was swum, was walked/ Frequent" 42 (VII.502-4). In Paradise, the narrator observes, "Nature here/ Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will/ Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet,/ Wild above rule or art; enormous bliss" (V.294-6). As a sort of microcosm, or rather a plural microcosmos, Paradise is characterized by irregularity and enormity (for more on the role of Paradise in Milton's understanding of chaos and creation, see Chapter 5). Eve's table, prepared for the visit of Raphael, presents an even smaller microcosmos within Paradise. The poem narrates, [F]rom each tender stalk Whatever Earth all-bearing mother yields In India East or West, or middle shore In Pontus or the Punic Coast, or where Alcinous reigned, fruit of all kinds, in coat, Rough, or smooth rined, or bearded husk, or shell She [Eve] gathers, tribute large, and on the board Heaps with unsparing hand. (V.337-44) Eve's table is a jumbled heap of the Earth's bounty, a variety of fruit from a variety of global regions all mixed together into the mother of all fruit salads. Eve's table mixes categories of time, as well as place. The poem explains, "Raised of grassy turf/ Their table was, and mossy seats had round,/ And on her ample square from side to side/ All Autumn piled, though Spring and Autumn here/ Danced hand in hand" (V.391-5). Seasonal time collapses and combines on Eve's table, and the ordered metaphor of a dance only partially regulates the earlier description of a pile. The image of a pile or heap is a curious mixture of chaos and order in Milton's poetry. In the war in Heaven, "on a heap/ Chariot and charioteer lay overturned" (VI.389-90). In Hell's cold region, the hail "[t]haws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems/ Of ancient pile" (II.590-91). In these passages, heaps and piles describe chaos and ruin. But Uriel narrates 43 God's creation, "I saw when at his word the formless mass,/ This world's material mould, came to a heap:/ Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar/ Stood ruled" (III.708-11). The gate of Paradise is "a rock/ Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds" (IV.541-2). In his discussion of the heap of dead in Samson Agonistes, Teskey describes a heap as "a thing made, as a work of art, and not just as any work of art but as the vision of the desire out of which works of art arise" (194). The plurality of universes in Milton's multiverse contain or manifest chaos. Angels contend in Heaven and atoms contend in Chaos. The different realms or universes also contend with each other, jostling for territory and vying for influence. Milton's multiverse presents not only the chaos of universal plurality but the chaos of universal competition. Personified Chaos tells Satan, I upon my frontiers here Keep residence; if all I can will serve, That little which is left so to defend Encroached on still through [y]our intestine broils Weak'ning the scepter of old Night: first Hell Your dungeon stretching far and wide beneath; Now lately heav'n and Earth, another world Hung o'er my realm, linked in a golden chain To that side Heav'n from whence your legions fell. (II.998-1006) His frontiers threatened by multiple other realms, Chaos has set up court on those frontiers, perhaps because the cosmic struggle is desperate enough to require his presence at the front lines, perhaps because Chaos' domain is all frontiers, despite its extent. The vision of Milton's multiverse is one of overlapping infinities with contested boundaries. 44 Contextual Vocabulary for a Multiverse The multiverse presented in Paradise Lost leaves readers groping for a vocabulary to express it and a tradition to contextualize it. There are other multiverses before and besides Milton's, but they run against the current of a long and powerful tradition of comprehensive symmetry that has shaped the popular vocabulary for concepts of being and of space. Finite totality lies embedded in the structure and etymology of the word "universe." Plato's Timaeus makes an ancient argument for our universe's unity. Plato's speaker Timaeus reasons, the whole which encompasses all intelligible living beings can never be one of two, with another alongside it, because then there would have to be another living being for them both, of which they both would be parts, and then it would be more correct to speak of this universe as having been made in the likeness of that one, the one that includes both, rather than in their likeness. (19) Timaeus' reasoning entails some Platonic philosophy about being, likeness and derivation, but his basic point is simpler and largely semantic. To speak of the universe is to speak of everything, and if something exists beyond the bound of what we call the universe, it makes more sense to expand the bounds of our definition than to speak of plural universes. In order to fundamentally reject the identity and totality of the universe, one would need to reject the idea of "everything" categorically. The universe's totality entails comprehensiveness and vice versa. Thus Timaeus concludes of the divine maker's universe, "[T]he structure he made was single, a totality consisting of all totalities" (21). Plato argues further through Timaeus that the universe is symmetrical as well as total. Again describing the divine maker, Timaeus says, 45 The shape he gave it [the universe] was the one that was both appropriate and natural to it. The appropriate shape, for the living being that was to contain all living beings within itself, would be the one that includes all shapes within itself. And so he made it perfectly spherical, equidistant in all directions from its centre to its extremes, because there is no shape more perfect and none more similar to itself. (21) Again, Platonic philosophy about being and derivation comes into play, requiring the universe to be similar to itself. Again, a simpler logic undergirds this specific philosophy. Symmetry and totality are concepts that need not be invariably paired with each other but which complement each other when so paired. Both relate to the idea of identity. And the idea of a circular, spherical universe intuitively suggests and complements the idea of comprehensiveness on at least a metaphorical or synecdochic level. Spheres make good containers. The finite, total, spherical universe-arguably a creation of classical antiquity-profoundly influenced the medieval imagination. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy provides an illustrative case of the concept's wide application. Personified Philosophy instructs Boethius, Imagine a series of concentric circles revolving around the same axis; the innermost one lies closest to the single nature of the central point, and itself acts as a sort of axis round which the other circles lying outside it can turn. The outermost circle travels round in a wider circle, and the further it departs from the undivided middle point, the more widespread is the area over which it extends. Should anything ally and attach itself to the mid-point, it is absorbed into its undivided nature, and it ceases to separate and to spread in all directions. Similarly, whatever distances itself further from the highest Mind becomes enmeshed in the broader chains of Fate, whereas the closer to the axis of the world which a thing approaches, the freer it becomes from the control of Fate. If in fact a thing clings fast to the unchanging nature of the divine Mind, it becomes motionless, and it also passes beyond the necessity imposed by Fate. As the power of reasoning relates to the intellect, as becoming is to being, as time is to eternity, as a circle is to its mid-point, so is the shifting chain of Fate related to the unchanging oneness of Providence. (88-9) 46 A hasty read-through of this description produces little surprise. Philosophy's concentric circles so neatly match the familiar classical model of the universe's heavenly spheres. The surprise comes upon realization that Philosophy is not in fact referring to the heavenly spheres. Rather, the circles she asks Boethius to imagine are a spatial conceptualization of the otherwise abstract relationship between Providence and Fate in governing the universe (Figure 1.2). To be sure, that relationship complements and indeed generates the more familiar spherical structure of what we would call the material universe. Philosophy explains, "The chain of Fate moves the heavens and the stars, intermingles the elements and transforms them by their interchange; it also renews all things which come into existence and die, by the generation of like offspring and seeds" (89). But Boethius demonstrates a medieval tendency or preference to think of the universe in terms of the structure of heavenly spheres even when not describing those spheres directly. For Boethius and Philosophy the spherical structure is antithetical to confusion and chaos. Philosophy explains, "[The best possible ordering of the world exists only if the undivided nature which abides in the divine Mind inaugurates an unvarying sequence of causes, and this sequence with its own immutability constrains the world of change which would otherwise float away at random" (Consolation 89). Sphericity contains and regulates the mutability of experience. The most famous medieval universal sphere is, of course, Dante's. The Divine Comedy presents a universe with a place for everything and everything in its place. That broad characterization does no justice to the local complexities of 47 Dante's cosmic travels, for the surprising places he finds allotted to specific things and people, to the theological and narrative puzzles that trouble the poem's presentation of order. Nevertheless, the macro-order of Dante's universe is there. A larger scale problem with that order manifests near the very close of Paradiso, in the outermost sphere of material sense and in the Empyrean. In the outermost, ninth sphere, Dante sees fiery rings encircling an unthinkably small, unthinkably bright point. His guide Beatrice explains, "On that Point/ depend the heavens and the whole of nature" (XXVIII.41-2), to which Dante responds nonplused, "But in the world of sense, what one can see/ are spheres becoming ever more divine/ as they are set more distant from the center" (XXVIII.49-51). Near the end of Dante's cosmic journey, the theology of Figure 1.2 Boethius' Universe 48 its spatial logic is inverted (producing something closer to Boethius' rings of Fate encircling Providence). And perhaps the cosmological space itself is inverted along with it. As Dante approaches the fiery circles, he observes, "So did the triumph that forever plays/ around the Point that overcame me (Point/ that seems enclosed by that which it encloses)/ fade gradually from my sight" (XXX.10-13). The paradox of the enclosed Point's comprehensive enclosure may be an illusory trick of perception, or else the space of Dante's entire journey has just been made irrational by human standards of rationality. Either way, readers get the sense of vertigo that comes from conceptual revision of spatial orientation.14 Either way, Dante finds himself in the Empyrean without being able to narrate how he arrived there. Beatrice says, "From matter's largest sphere,/ we now have reached the heaven of pure light" (XXX.38-9). It is not clear whether Dante has entered the paradoxical Point seen from the ninth material sphere or transcended it. However, an inverted spherical cosmos is still a spherical cosmos and thus a finite one. My point is not that Dante's vision of the universe is perfectly ordered, rational and free of surprises. Surprises and challenges to the order of his universe abound throughout The Divine Comedy. But they are just that: challenges. A vision of universal order and symmetry is the frame and assumption against which disruptions play. In Paradise Lost, there is no universal frame, no outermost sphere or central point, only a chaotic sprawl of competing world systems in every direction. Milton's chaotic sprawl contrasts with current scientific cosmology as well as ancient classical cosmology. Lewis writes, "[T]o look out on the night sky with 49 modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest-trees forever and no horizon" (99), and he thus concludes that Milton "is perhaps the first writer to use the noun space in its fully modern sense-‘space may produce new worlds'" (100). Lewis may be right about the current popular imagination of outer space. He is not quite right on a more technical level. In fact, Milton's use of the term "space" to express the inexhaustible arena for plural creations is consistent with the scientific understanding of space in his own time. Descartes imagined space as an abstract arena (Greene, Fabric 25), and Newton conceived of space as a "real, physical entity" but also as "the transparent empty arena in which we are all immersed and within which all motion takes place" (Greene, Fabric 27). Newtonian space affects but is not affected by the objects and forces it contains. By contrast, the space of Lewis' time and of ours is in fact understood by physicists to be the Einsteinian spacetime of general relativity. As physicist Brian Greene explains, "Space and time are dynamic in general relativity: they are mutable; they respond to the presence of mass and energy; they are not absolute" (Fabric 75). Again, in the popular imagination, general relativity implies a radically asymmetric and unstable universe of weirdly warped space. In the discipline of cosmological physics, though, general relativity combines with other theories and observations to present a universe that is symmetrical, at least on the largest of cosmic scales. Unlike the universe of classical antiquity, the universe described by cosmological physics is changing (expanding, to be specific), but its expansion is also symmetrical (Fabric 231). Greene explains, 50 If all the matter and energy in the universe were to be smeared uniformly throughout space, and if, after this was done, there turned out to be more than the so-called critical density of about .00000000000000000000001 (10 ) grams in every cubic meter-about five -23 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter-Einstein's equations would yield a positive curvature for space; if there were less than the critical density, the equations would imply negative curvature; if there were exactly the critical density, the equations would tell us that space has no overall curvature. (Fabric 242-3) The three possible curvatures of space yield slightly more possible shapes of space, all of which are symmetrical (Fabric 517n13). The three most intuitive shapes associated with the possible curvatures are the sphere, the infinite plane and the infinite saddle.15 Unlike at least some ancient models of the universe, the universe as described by cosmological physics is not bounded in the sense of having an outside limit. Finite versions of the flat plane and the negatively curved saddle exist, but (to use imprecise language) they fold or wrap into themselves and have no edges (Fabric 241). The sphere must be finite but also wraps into itself-universal space may be described by the surface of the sphere, and not by the interior, as in the ancient classical model. The current work in cosmological physics demonstrates that the universe may be boundless and may even be infinite yet still be symmetrical, unified and total. Milton's multiverse upsets the concept of universality not simply because of its indefinite appearance of infinitude, but more so because of the amorphous, uneven texture of its infinite spaces. One fruitful place to look for a contextual vocabulary suited to Milton's amorphous multiverse is the science and cosmology of his own place and time, that is Renaissance England and early modern Europe more broadly. Even when various early modern thinkers remained committed to an ontology of 51 universal symmetry and smoothness, their epistemological method could be rough and provisional, the mark of knowledge in periods of intellectual upheaval. In some cases, early modern thinkers described the world itself in provisional, incomplete terms. In his image of a heliocentric universe or system, Thomas Digges, "the English Copernican credited as the first astronomer to make the claim of spatial infinity" (Hill 29), depicts infinite stretches of stars extending outside the circular frame of the solar system, to the edge of the image's rectangular frame and implicitly beyond, thus leaving his representation of the total universe purposefully incomplete (Figure 1.3). Additions and revisions to early modern astronomy and geography are familiar, easy-to-visualize instances of a general reworking of intellectual disciplines in the early modern period. My dissertation treats both astronomy and geography in relation to the cosmology of Paradise Lost. Chapter 2 charts Milton's engagement with not only the new astronomy but the new science and epistemological methods behind it. Chapter 3 discusses the new worlds and world alignments of early modern geography in connection with the universes and universal competition in Paradise Lost. Early modern intellectual developments influenced Milton because he was a seventeenth-century English writer. However, the early modern period was not the only time of upheaval in intellectual traditions nor the only time when challenges to the concept of universality were thinkable. Ideas akin to Milton's multiverse from outside the early modern period may be less relevant to Milton the writer but of equal value to readers of Milton building a contextual vocabulary for his multiverse-and given the depth and breadth of Milton's own reading, it is 52 Figure 1.3 Thomas Digges' Universe ("ThomasDiggesmap.JPG," Wikimedia Commons, 2007, Web, 3 February 2015, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasDiggesmap.JPG) 53 not even safe to dismiss the relevance of earlier texts and traditions to Milton the writer. The symmetrical, comprehensive universe enjoyed a prevalence in classical and medieval thought, but not to the complete exclusion of other kinds of cosmic representations. In his study of ancient conceptions of the afterlife and Hell, Alan Bernstein notes the indefinite organization and location of Hades in Homer's epics, particularly The Odyssey. Bernstein writes that the land of the shades visited by Odysseus, is not defined with literal precision. In general there seems to be a level expanse between a river and the actual dwelling of the dead. Yet it is not clear in Homer which river it is, or what its function. Similarly, it is uncertain whether Erebos is a synonym for the house of Hades, and both describe the whole region generically, or whether the house of Hades, with its gates, is a particular spot within the underworld. (25) Further, "the land of the dead is very far away from human habitation," "Odysseus travels not beneath the earth but far to the west," and there is some "ambiguity between depth and distance" (25). Bernstein contrasts Homer's land of shades with more ordered, organized worlds of the dead in ancient myth and classical literature. He notes, "Unlike the banks of the underworld river in ancient Egypt, the otherworld visited by Odysseus has no map" (25). And he contrasts Virgil's Aeneas, who "traversed the whole jurisdiction of Pluto," noting that "Plato's moral categories are charted on Virgil's underworld landscape" (61, 73). Along with the plot details of Odysseus' journey, the narrative structure of its retelling by Odysseus suggests the indefinite, irregular status of the land of shades. Odysseus' story of his travels is divided into four books of Homer's epic, Books IX, X, XI and XII. Book IX treats Odysseus' adventures among the Kikonians, Lotus-Eaters and Cyclopes. Book X treats Aiolos, the Lastrygones 54 and Circe. Book XI is Odysseus' visit to the shades. Book XII treats the Sirens, the twin dangers of Skylla and Charybdis, and Helios' cattle. It will be seen, then, that with the exception of the shades, Odysseus' adventures are organized into groupings of three. Moreover, in each of the three groups of three, the third adventure takes up, disproportionately, the most narrative time, the most lines of poetry. 16 Only the shades disrupt this regular pattern. They do not assimilate clearly if at all into the geography or the narrative of the larger poem. Odysseus' journey to the land of shades presents cosmological variety in horizontal, navigable space. In this kind of space, other worlds are simultaneously more accessible and less comprehensible than the ordered realms of a universe like Dante's; more accessible because they are sprawled across the same kind of space; less comprehensible because they are not organized according to a clear and complete combination of moral and spatial logic. Asymmetry is at least apparent in the irregular adjacence of the various worlds to each other. Various medieval texts present similarly horizontal cosmos, in which supernatural and sacred places overlap more mundane landscapes in uneven distributions. In the early medieval St. Brendan's Voyage, a group of monks sail to vaguely hellish, Limbo-like and Edenic islands in the northeastern Atlantic (115, 93, 125). Nearly everywhere the monks travel, they encounter monasteries and settlements furnished to meet their needs (88, 91, 97, 109). This kind of space seems wondrous and sacred, if not fully supernatural and otherworldly. Similarly, in the space of the Arthurian grail quest, knights like Sir Galahad, Sir Perceval and Sir Bors can ride and sail to 55 sacred sites where otherworldly relics are kept (Malory 107). The example of the grail quest demonstrates the influence of the romance genre on the horizontal cosmos of medieval texts. The generic space of romance differs sharply from the space of Paradise Lost because it is more flexible and more local to the mundane, but it compares with the space of Paradise Lost because it is irregular and unmappable. The most timely and concise vocabulary for Milton's resistance to universality comes from the language of twenty-first century physics. The term "multiverse," which describes the cosmos of Paradise Lost relatively well, is among the words currently used by physicists "to embrace not just our universe but a spectrum of others that may be out there" (Greene, Hidden Reality, 4). Even as the most current work in physics teaches that the space of our universe is symmetrical and possibly finite, the newest and most radical theories in physics posit or imply that our symmetrical universe is a small part of a wider reality filled with other universes. Like the other worlds of earlier cosmological systems-including Milton's-these other universes are both familiar to and different from each other. Greene summarizes, In some [theories of a multiverse], the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time; in others, they're hovering millimeters away; in others still, the very notion of their location proves parochial, devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes. In some, the laws are the same as in ours; in others, they appear different but have a shared heritage; in others still, the laws are of a form and structure unlike anything we've ever encountered. (Hidden Reality 5) In other words, not only may there be other universes in wider cosmological space but they may be other universes in the sense that they work according to 56 different physical laws. However, they cannot work according to any physical laws or in the absence of rational physical laws. They could not, derived as they are from viable theories based on accepted scientific observation of this universe and its physical laws. Different and plural as the multiple universes of physics may be, most bear some kind of relation to each other in terms of their laws as well as their spatial orientation, and even those most radically different from our universe have their theoretical basis in the science of our universe. Theories of multiverse reject or revise definitions of universal space and laws but still situate physical experiences and observations within a mathematically rational, scientifically consistent framework. Hence the term "multiverse," while expressing multiplicity, is itself singular. Greene describes "multiverse" as among the terms that "capture the wider canvas on which the totality of reality may be painted" (Hidden Reality 4). So while the word "multiverse" is a usefully concise placeholder for expressing the bodies of ideas that challenge the concept of universal totality, the term does not express an absolute rejection of universality. As we shall see in the following section of this chapter, though, Milton's rejection of universal totality in Paradise Lost is also not absolute. God's Place in a Multiverse Those interested only in the cosmological structure of Milton's fictional worlds may stop here and proceed on to the following chapters. The next two treat the historical context of Milton's worlds. The final two treat their poetic construction. Those concerned with Milton's theology, however, cannot accept the chaotic collection of worlds in Paradise Lost without addressing the problem 57 of where and how an omnipotent God can fit in such a multiverse. Milton is not so unorthodox as to imagine God dethroned and implicated in the universal competition, but the theological concept of God's omnipotence is not clearly reflected in the represented cosmological space of the poem. It is not clear that one power and principle governs that space. In order to accommodate a representation of God to Milton's multiverse, we must either reevaluate and revise our description of it, or we must work out a theologically acceptable relationship to it for God. One possible relationship of God to a multiverse is a relationship of transcendence. The worlds and space of Paradise Lost may be irrational and chaotic, but that chaos does not implicate God if He does not inhabit the category of space. References to God throughout the poem can be read as expressions of His transcendence, albeit in the spatially bound metaphors and figures of human language. Raphael describes God thus: Meanwhile th' eternal eye, whose sight discerns Abstrusest thoughts, from forth his holy Mount And from within the golden lamps that burn Nightly before him, saw without their light Rebellion rising, saw in whom, how spread Among the sons of morn, what multitudes Were banded to oppose his high decree And smiling to his only Son thus said. (V.711-18) Everything about this description and narrative makes deliberate nonsense of the idea of God in space. God's body is unimaginable, impossible to realize as a visual image. He is a smiling, talking eye. But Milton's poetry separates the identification of God as "th' eternal eye," by six lines and five clauses, dependent and independent, from its predicated actions of smiling and speaking. The effect 58 is a representation of God that is involved and disjointed, rather than grotesquely, literally bizarre. The spatial, corporeal references to God's body contradict and undo each other. God's body and his sensations in space are designed by the poetry to make contradictory nonsense. God sees rebellion "without" the light of His Mount's golden lamps. The primary meaning of this description is unimaginable enough. God can see what lies beyond the circumference of the lights. Milton highlights the point by punning on the sense of "without." In addition to seeing beyond the lamps, "without their light," God sees in the absence of their aid, "without their light." Paradise Lost describes God looking at the entirety of the cosmos. From, this divine perspective, the worlds of the poem are total, comprehended in one universe or multiverse. Moreover, God is pictured outside it. Milton narrates, "Now had the Almighty Father from above,/ From the pure Empyrean where he sits/ High throned above all heighth, bent down his eye,/ His own works and their works at once to view" (III.56-9). God can view the totality of creative work at once. This singular perspective implies what the narrator subsequently makes explicit, that "from his prospect high," "past, present, future he beholds" (III.77, 78). God transcends time as well as space and views the entirety of what a twenty-first century reader might term the spacetime of the universe or multiverse. Of course, this description of God's transcendence is fully structured within the concept of space and spatial relation. God's transcendent perspective depends on the spatial coordinates of exteriority and height-which in turn reopens the whole question of universal totality, because God is somewhere 59 outside and above His Creation. However, God is poetically represented as transcending the spacetime of His Creation which may theologically signify His transcendence of space and time categorically. An early modern metaphor for this transcendence that remains relevant today is the cartographical perspective of mapmakers and map readers. Though mapmakers exist in their own space, they transcend the representational space of the map (for more, see Chapter 3). A twenty-first century equivalent involves the relationship between time and space in the multiverse theorized by some physicists who work on inflationary models of cosmology. An inflationary force, a sort of antigravity, is among the contested theoretical candidates for explaining the big bang and the expansion of our universe. So one line of multiversal reasoning goes, "inflation is naturally a process that never ends; it produces bubble universes upon bubble universes, of which we inhabit but one" (Hidden Reality 71). These bubble universes exist in multiversal space, so it is possible to imagine and theorize a space outside them. Each bubble universe can continue to expand and inflate indefinitely, so as Greene explains,"what appears as endless time to an outsider appears as endless space, at each moment of time, to an insider" (Hidden Reality 68). In other words, in an inflationary multiverse of bubble universes, eternity is the outside of infinity. Greene writes, "Much as Hamlet famously declares, ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space,' each of the bubble universes appears to have finite spatial extent when examined from the outside, but infinite spatial extent when examined from the inside" (Hidden Reality 68). It is too bad 60 that Greene reached for an allusion to the more culturally familiar Shakespeare in order to describe this principle of inflationary physics when the more apt early modern comparison would haven been Milton's "vast infinitude confined" (Paradise Lost III.711). In Paradise Lost, Adam's universe is manifestly bigger on the inside. Milton's entire multiverse may work on a similar principle if we follow to their conclusion the implications of a multiversal sprawl and its transcendent Creator. If God transcends all space, He does not inhabit a space akin to the multiversal expanse outside bubble universes. Nevertheless, the inflationary multiverse is a useful analogy for conceptualizing God's transcendent perspective because it describes transcending not only an area of space but a kind of space. Space and its bounds appear and work differently inside and outside the bubble. The idea of God's spatial transcendence raises a new theological problem-new to this chapter, old in the history of theology-namely, if God does not inhabit the category of space, how does He participate in it? The best recourse to solving this problem is probably some version of an Augustinian hierarchy of being, in which different levels of space and reality are linked through subordination to each other. At first inspection, such a hierarchy seems amenable to Milton's multiverse. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine explains both God's transcendence of and His hierarchical relationship with His Creation. Augustine begins by imaginatively hypothesizing a hierarchically flattened cosmological space and the problem of God's implication in such a space. He writes, "I placed before my spirit a conspectus of the entire creation-all that we 61 can perceive in it, earth, sea, air stars, trees and mortal animals, and all that we cannot perceive, the firmament of heaven above, all the angels, and all the spiritual beings" (115) and continues, I did not make its size precisely what it is, for that I could not know, but I made it as great as seemed appropriate, but on every side finite. I visualized you, Lord, surrounding it on all sides and permeating it, but infinite in all directions, as if there were a sea everywhere and stretching through immense distances, a single sea that had within it a large but finite sponge; and the sponge was in every part filled from the immense sea. (115) In this formulation, God exceeds the universe in His spatial extent but shares the same space occupied by the universe. This space is flattened in the sense that it is one arena for everything including God. After conjuring this mental map of the universe, Augustine explains the theological problem with it: "But being God, God created good creatures. See how God surrounds and fills them. Then where and whence is evil?" (115). If God comprehends and permeates all, nothing contrary to God should exist. Augustine determines that this problem requires a complete reconceptualization of cosmological space. He writes, as to God, I considered the other things below you, and I saw that neither can they be said absolutely to be or absolutely not to be. They are because they come from you. But they are not because they are not what you are. That which truly is is that which unchangeably abides. (124) And he concludes, "[A]ll things that are corrupted suffer privation of some good. If they were to be deprived of all good, they would not exist at all" (124). Technically and theologically, Augustine rejects the whole notion of God occupying the same kind of space His creatures occupy. They do not exist in the sense that He exists. Practically and metaphorically, Augustine replaces the 62 horizontal space of his initial mental map with a vertical space, hierarchized with God at the top and lesser degrees of being below. Because Augustine understands God's being in terms of degree, he posits a God who transcends all of His Creation yet stands in relation to it. Everything that is not God is defined in relation to God, through a comparative relation of goodness and mutability, and through a genealogical relation of creature to creator. God's being is absolute, and everything else exists in a relative state between being and nonbeing because everything else comes from God. Augustine's idea of degrees of being is basically Platonic and expresses in modified form a concept in Timaeus. Plato argues, through Timaeus, "[F]or the time being, we should think of there being three kinds: the created world, the receptacle of creation, and the source, in whose likeness the created world is born" (42). It would appear Plato differs from Augustine, and in a sense he does, in positing not only a creative source and his ontologically subordinate created world but a receptacle of creation, independent of the creator. On the basic point, though, Plato and Augustine agree that the creator is a different kind of being than the derivative universe he creates. In this sense, the creator may be said to transcend the universe. Further, while Plato posits a receptacle for creation, he imagines the receptacle as close to nothing as something can be, and in that sense, it resembles the state of nonbeing that Augustine subordinates beneath God and His creatures. Plato's Timaeus describes the receptacle as a generic "moulding stuff" and further argues, if it [the moulding stuff] were similar to any of the things that enter it, it would be no good at receiving and copying contrary or utterly different 63 qualities when they enter it, because it would leave traces of its own appearance as well. That is why, if it is to be the receptacle of all kinds, it must be altogether characterless. (43) Yes, the receptacle of moulding stuff exists, but it exists without character and attributes, an unimaginably bland chaos out of which the divine maker forms the universe. Milton's cosmological sandwich of Chaos and Creation between Heaven and Hell bears a rough resemblance to Augustine's hierarchy of being, creation and nonbeing (Figure 1.4). However, the particular details in Milton's multiverse put strain on this Augustinian parallel. Theologically, the biggest inconsistency is Chaos. Rumrich points out, "Whereas Augustine had no equivalent of chaos in his philosophy because he believed in creation ex nihilo, Milton, an exponent of creation ex deo, believes that the realm of potential creation possesses a shadowy existence of its own" (1041). It is difficult to ascertain precise theological positions from a work of poetry like Paradise Lost. Chaos may poetically figure some subordinate position in the Augustinian chain of being, perhaps something like the Platonic receptacle of creation. The best argument against such a Platonic interpretation of Milton's Chaos is the representation of its character. Poetic license notwithstanding, it is difficult to get Plato's passive receptacle out of Milton's violent, elemental ocean of noise. In terms of plot, in terms of how Milton's characters navigate his multiverse, the biggest inconsistency with the Augustinian hierarchy is the rigidity of that hierarchy's strata. Milton's multiverse roughly resembles a sandwich, but in fact, as discussed above (and visually represented in the skewed lines by which I 64 Figure 1.4 The Miltonic Multiverse as Augustinian Hierarchy of Being 65 represent the borders of Heaven and Hell in Figure 1.4), Hell is not an absolute spatial bottom to Chaos, akin to a category of absolute nonbeing; nor is Heaven clearly an absolute ceiling akin to a category of absolute being. Chaos either surrounds Hell and Heaven, or else overlaps them with its own spatial infinities that operate by a different spatial logic. To a lesser degree, the cosmological variegation within Heaven, Hell and Adam's universe similarly strains the notion that Milton's multiverse is organized into Augustinian strata of hierarchized being. The inconsistencies in the Augustinian reading of Milton's multiverse potentially trouble the more basic idea of a spatially transcendent God. The trouble may be smoothed through interpretation or ignored. Or an alternative model can be sought for God's relationship to the multiverse. One alternative remains to question whether Milton's cosmos are in fact as chaotic and asymmetric as they appear to God's creatures and Milton's readers. The need for a transcendent God rests on the premise that the character of the visible universe falls short of His perfection to some degree. Rumrich argues that Milton's Chaos "represents an indeterminate material principle whose complex disorder persists dynamically in any order" (1041). Might Milton intend the inverse to be true? Might complex divine order persist dynamically in any apparent disorder? Such an assumption opens up its own theological and ethical problems but complements Milton's monistic understanding of God and universal matter, his belief in "one first matter" that proceeds from God in all created things (Paradise Lost V.472). Raphael argues for order in apparent 66 chaos in the specific case of the angels' "[m]ystical dance, which yonder starry sphere/ Of planets, and of fixed, in all her wheels/ Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,/ Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular/ Then most, when most irregular they seem" (V.620-4). According to Raphael, the stars as well as the angels' dance, Adam's universe as well as God's Heaven possess a regularity invisible to perception. God argues that Chaos and all of reality work according to a similar principle, when He sends His Son into Chaos to create Adam and Eve's universe. God says of Chaos, "Boundless the deep, because I am who fill/ Infinitude, nor vacuous the space./ Though I, uncircumscribed myself, retire,/ And put not forth my goodness, which is free/ To act or not, necessity and chance/ Approach not me, and what I will is Fate" (VII.168-73).17 God's ability to fill boundless infinitude though He retires from it is a knotty theological problem. In effect God states that evil in the universe is not inconsistent with His omnipresence, but the logic behind that statement is riddling.18 God partially explains the riddle by recourse to His absolute freedom, a necessary condition of His omnipotence, but this divine characteristic answers only the question of why He could retire from the infinitude of Himself, not how He could nor why He would. Difficult as the theological reasoning behind it is, the assertion is more straightforward. God comprehends and orders the infinitude of reality. There is no necessity or chance outside His power. Chaos is only the part of God's being that looks like Chaos because He wills it to be so. If Chaos somehow remains part of God even when He withdraws from it in a sense-as opposed to the more Augustinian notion that Chaos is ontologically 67 inferior if withdrawn from God-then the ontological problem of God's place in the multiverse becomes an epistemological problem of recognizing God in the multiverse. Chaos is a matter of perspective, and the fullest perspective reveals God's hand everywhere. The case of Sin and Death's depredation of Adam's universe illustrates the way wider perspective works as an alternative to categorical transcendence as an explanation of God's relation to His creatures. Augustine writes to God, "For you evil does not exist at all, and not only for you but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it" (125). If accepted, this theological position would seem to invalidate the entire plot of Paradise Lost, which is at its heart a story of cosmic breaking and entering; first by Satan, and subsequently by his followers, including Sin and Death. The Augustinian answer to this problem is that Sin and Death are nonentities or very close to it, walking personifications of the deprivation of good. Milton's God explains the entrance of Sin and Death differently. God says to the angels in Heaven, See, with what heat these dogs of Hell advance To waste and havoc yonder world, which I So fair and good created; and had still Kept in that state, had not the folly of man Let in these wasteful furies, who impute Folly to me; so doth the prince of Hell And his adherents, that with so much ease I suffer them to enter and possess A place so heavenly; and, conniving, seem To gratify my scornful enemies, That laugh, as if, transported with some fit Of passion, I to them had quitted all, At random yielded up to their misrule; And know not that I called, and drew them thither, 68 My hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth Which man's polluting sin with taint hath shed On what was pure; till, crammed and gorged, nigh burst With sucked and glutted offal, at one sling Of thy victorious arm, well-pleasing Son, Both Sin, and Death, and yawning grave, at last, Through Chaos hurled, obstruct the mouth of Hell For ever, and seal up his ravenous jaws. (X.616-37) In an Augustinian vein, God attributes the presence of Sin and Death to an absence of good in Adam and Eve's universe, to that universe's corruption and vitiation. However, God also points to the positive usefulness of Sin and Death. They are built into the system of God's Creation as a sort of cosmic garbage disposal in the event of material corruption. Somewhat jarringly, God owns Sin and Death, acknowledges these things of darkness His, refers to them as "[m]y hell-hounds." They are part of the order of His cosmic design. God's eschatological conclusion on the fate of Sin, Death and Hell further emphasizes His knowledge and ordering of things, adding a temporal dimension to His control over the space of His universe. Sin, Death, the scoffing devils and even the loyal angels who need to be informed of God's design see evil triumphant because they lack the spatial breadth and temporal length of God's view. Milton describes God holding forth on this broader view and observing the actions of Sin and Death "[f]rom his transcendent seat" (X.614). As I have noted above, the idea that God transcends space may be expressed in spatial terms, through the simpler analogy of a commanding view. So perhaps God's superior view of Sin and Death expresses a more fundamental transcendence of the space inhabited by Sin and Death or by Adam and Eve. On the other hand, a good enough view might make transcendence of the universe unnecessary. 69 God and His view may transcend the partial misunderstandings of His creatures' limited perspectives without transcending the goodness of His own total Creation. The symmetry that physicists describe in the cosmological space of our universe illustrates the importance of a sufficiently wide or removed perspective to recognizing cosmic order. While human physicists lack the capacity to look down on the entirety of the spacetime of their universe like the God of Paradise Lost, a combination of astronomical observation and mathematics allows them to conceptualize the universe in total at the macro level. These observations and analyses have confirmed a principle of physics known as the "cosmological principle," that "if the universe is examined on the largest of scales, it will appear uniform" (Greene, Hidden Reality 15). Greene recounts, astronomical observations have provided substantial support for the cosmological principle, but only if you examine space on scales at least 100 million light-years across (which is about a thousand times the end-to-end length of the Milky Way). If you take a box that's a hundred million light-years on each side and plunk it down here, take another such box and plunk it down way over there (say, a billion light-years from here), and then measure the average overall properties inside each box-average number of galaxies, average amount of matter, average temperature, and so on-you'll find it difficult to distinguish between the two. In short, if you've seen one 100-million-light-year chunk of the cosmos, you've pretty much seen them all. (Hidden Reality 16) The cosmological principle expresses a symmetry (though not a divine order) in universal space hidden from everyday observation unaided by telescopic power and mathematical interpretation. Recognition of universal symmetry requires consideration of space on an enormous scale. To look at the night sky, the distribution of matter through space on the largest scale we can see appears 70 irregular and uneven. Like God's creatures in Milton's poem, we cannot readily see how the apparent irregularity of our world contributes to the universe's larger regularity. Only through the cosmological principle is it possible for physicists to narrow the space of the entire universe to a maximum of three curvatures and a handful of attendant shapes. Understanding of cosmological symmetry provides a means of extrapolating the shape of a universe too large for humans to actually observe in its entirety. Greene explains, "The cosmological principle-the assumed homogeneity of the cosmos-constrains the geometry of space because most shapes are not sufficiently uniform to qualify: they bulge here, flatten out there, or twist way over there" (Hidden Reality 21). The cosmological principle allows physicists to eliminate large numbers of shapes from contention as candidates for the shape of the overall universe. Consequently,"If you take account of scientists' widely held belief that, over large-scale averages, all locations and all directions in the universe are symmetrically related to one another, then you're well on your way" to determining "the overall shape of space" (Greene, Fabric 238). The same principle of symmetry that helps physicists conceptualize the universe on the macro-level guides a cutting edge physical theory for understanding matter and forces on the smallest micro-level, namely superstring theory. String theorists posit that "everything, all matter and all forces, is unified under the same rubric of microscopic string oscillations" (Greene, Elegant Universe 16). These oscillating strings determine the properties associated with the subatomic matter 71 and force particles of more conventional quantum physics. If string theory is correct, the entire universe is symmetrical in terms of its deep laws and cosmological makeup as well as its shape: "in principle absolutely everything, from the big bang to daydreams, can be described in terms of underlying microscopic physical processes involving the fundamental constituents of matter" (Elegant Universe 16), at least according to what Greene calls a "reductionist" perspective on string theory. String theory posits something akin to the "one first matter" from which everything in Milton's multiverse proceeds, according to Raphael (V.472). Moreover, string theory informs several models of the cosmological multiverse, implying that a deep symmetry inheres even in those spaces beyond the bounds of our own spatially symmetrical universe. The workings of the multiverse may be, like the space of the universe, yet regular then most when most irregular they seem. And so the multiversal sprawl of Milton's collection of worlds may be a perception and representation masking a unified, rational vision. If Milton's multiverse is a perception, though, it is not a mere perception. Its uncertain ontological status does not eliminate its practical, representational force for those who perceive it. All of God's creatures in Paradise Lost, from Satan to the humans to the angels patrolling Chaos' frontier with Hell (VIII.230) navigate and respond to this chaotic multiverse as their reality. Even the Son, (arguably) not a creature, must ride forth into Chaos after hearing the Father's caveat about Chaos' ontological status (VII.166). All of Milton's readers imagine and process the multiverse presented in Paradise Lost. In Raphael's discussion of astronomy 72 with Adam, Milton explores the value of partial, limited perceptions of the universe to knowledge of the universe beyond those limits. In the following chapter, I analyze this relationship between knowledge and limits at length and connect it with another currently contested area of cosmological physics, the anthropic principle. 73 Notes 1. As in contemporary notions of spacetime (though with less mathematical precision), Paradise Lost blurs distinctions between space and time at the cosmic level, as in the following passage: "Nine times the space that measures day and night/ To mortal men, he with his horrid crew/ Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf" (John Milton, Paradise Lost I.50-2, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard, New York: Penguin, 1998, 122). 2. In The Astronomy of Milton's ‘Paradise Lost', Thomas N. Orchard presents a schema that circumscribes Chaos within an ordered universe (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1913, 64). In Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution, Dennis Danielson presents a table that describes Chaos as a multiversal extension containing all God's other creations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014, 49-50). 3. Throughout this chapter and dissertation, "Chaos" capitalized refers to the realm or its personification, and "chaos" lowercase refers to the more abstract idea. 4. In a similar reference, the angel Uriel says of the cumbrous elements and ethereal quintessence out of which God created Adam's universe, "The rest in circuit walls this universe" (III.721). Like Raphael, Uriel refers to the human universe in terms of boundaries and environs. The three other references to Adam's realm of stars and planets as a "universe" are as follows: the sun "gently warms/ The universe" (III.583-4); Adam asks God, "[H]ow may I/ Adore thee, Author of this universe,/ And all this good to man?" (VIII.359-61); and the serpent calls Eve "queen of this universe" (IX.684). 5. Similarly ambiguous usages of the term "universal" to describe all or perhaps part of Milton's multiverse occur when the serpent says Eve should be