Sometimes I remember that pre-Paradise-Lost John Milton traveled to Italy and met with Galileo, who was under house arrest at the time, and it’s such an awe-inspiring and bizarre image I feel like I must have made it up.
Milton mentions it in “Areopagitica”, his clarion call for Free Speech in 1644.
“I could recount what I have seen and heard in other Countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their lerned men, for that honor I had, and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they suppos’d England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition into which lerning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had dampt the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had bin there writt’n now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.”
It’s fascinating to consider how Galileo’s discoveries may have informed Milton’s world-view and his conception of heaven. The spheres of the universe, the planets, the stars … all are omnipresent in Paradise Lost. There’s an awareness of new thoughts and new conceptions breaking upon the shores of religious certainty. The stars are not fixed in Paradise Lost. They are raging FIREBALLS. They are ignited, they have life to them. The Universe is alive.
Galileo himself – and his telescope – makes a brief appearance in Paradise Lost.
the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
I so much wish Milton had written in more detail about this meeting with Galileo. I want a transcript. Or a time machine so I can hide behind the drapes and eavesdrop.
The goosebump-worthy story I love about Galileo may be made-up, or at least embellished, but there’s a truthfulness in the essence. After being forced to recant, Galileo is supposed to have said – to himself – to posterity – “Eppur si muove.”
“And still, it moves.”
Science is real.
You can make me recant. You can put me under house arrest. But you CANNOT make the Earth stand still.
Eppur si muove, whether you like it or not.
whoa i never knew this!