Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/139

 PARADISE LOST

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��however, Paradise Lost makes some inuo- vations. The mediaeval belief had been that through this outside region, of infinite extent, spread the radiant Empyrean, or Heaven of Heavens, the mysterious seat of the God-head, and the pinnacle (to use a term of one dimension) of that graduated hierarchy of heavens of which the sphere of the Moon was the lowest, and in all which dwelt angelic presences. Before Milton's day, this conception of Heaven as including the ten spheres of the Mundus or material universe, had become at least obsolescent ; and Heaven had been trans- ferred, in most minds, entirely to the mys- tical realm which spread beyond the en- velope of the Primum Mobile, in other words, it had been made identical with the Empyrean, till then set apart as the crown and culmination of the heavenly orbs. But as it was extremely difficult to picture Heaven thus as a sphere, enveloping the material universe on all sides, a further contraction naturally followed, and Heaven came to be thought of as " above," that is, as situated in the zenith-portion, humanly speaking, of extra-cosmic infinitude.

This nai've popular conception Milton followed, and made even more picturesque and tangible. He is careful to say that wherever he speaks of heavenly things con- cretely, it is always as symbols that they are to be understood ; but this is only a theologian's apology. As poet, his busi- ness was with concretions, and he took pains at every point to make the setting of his drama optically rememberable. Hea- ven he represents as a place of radiance in the " zenith portion " of infinite space, separated by walls and towers of light from Chaos, a dark amorphous region of warring elements beneath. Before the fall of the rebellious angels and before the cre- ation of the Mundus, or world of Earth and its enveloping spheres, Chaos occupied all this lower portion of infinitude; but after those events, Hell was hollowed out in the nadir portion of Chaos to receive the

��defeated armies of Lucifer ; and the Earth with her enveloping spheres was also cre- ated out of Chaos to receive Man, the in- heritor of the divine affection forfeited by the rebel angels at their fall.

Not content with even so tangible a divi- sion of space as this, Milton makes unmis- takable the relative positions of Heaven, the Universe, and Hell, as well as telling us something of their comparative sizes and distances. The Universe hangs by a golden chain from the floor of Heaven, or rather from its brink, for of course, for purposes of visualization, a length and breadth limit must be set to the region. When Satan far off in Chaos catches sight of the world-ball hanging thus from the luminous stretch of Heaven, he likens it to " a star of smallest magnitude close by the moon." Hell, we are further told, is situated three times as far from Heaven as the centre of the earth is distant from the Primum Mobile, or, in other words, three semi-diameters of the world-ball beneath Heaven, and nearly one semi-diameter be- neath that ball itself. To complete the " stage-setting " of the action, we must add a few details. A ladder of light reaches downward from the gate of Heaven to an opening directly beneath in the Primum Mobile; this ladder constitutes the regu- lar means of communication between God and his World, and can be raised at will when not needed by his angelic messengers. After the temptation and fall of Adam, a corresponding means of communication be- tween Hell and the Universe comes into existence in the shape of a bridge built by Sin and Death across the dark and warring abyss of Chaos. If we will push the visual image to its last point of exactness, we must conceive this bridge stretching from Hell-gate upward to a point on the outer surface of the Primum Mobile near the foot of the heavenly ladder, since there alone is ingress afforded into the spheres which encircle the earth.

The extreme exactness of Milton's delin-

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