The Thermodynamics of Infernal Justice in Book 1 of Paradise Lost

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“Vaulted with fire”: The Thermodynamics of Infernal Justice in Book 1 of Paradise Lost

J.P. Conlan University of Puerto Rico [email protected]

Abstract

Historians of science have noted that Milton’s figurative reference to the “spotty globe” of Satan’s massy shield identifies Milton as an adherent of the New Astronomy promot- ed by Galileo. Understood in light of the techniques of surveying employed by Galileo, the same shield also speaks to Galileo’s use of parallax, whereby the scientist made his drawings more precise by viewing alternately from the vantage of the heights of Fesole or the valley of the Arno. Milton mentions these places in his epic simile of Satan’s shield: the science behind Satan’s arms in Paradise Lost reveals that Milton’s deep commitment to liberty informs his imagination of how God structured the pains of hell.

Keywords

Milton – Paradise Lost – satan – shield – Galileo – physics – optics

Describing the dimensions of the “ponderous shield,/Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,/[that Satan] behind him cast” Milton writes that

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.1

1 Paradise Lost 1. 286–91. All quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Areopagitica are from Hughes’ edition and shall be cited parenthetically in the text.

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The tenor of the simile signals that the Shield’s dimensions—the breadth of its circumference, its ponderousness, mass, “temper” and greatness—are the subject of the comparison. The vehicle defines both the gauge of measurement— “like the Moon” in nature—and the precision of this standard: how “the Tuscan Artist” viewed the lunar landscape with the most advanced optical instruments of the day. Milton’s biographers have identified the “Tuscan Artist” as Galileo Galilei, whom Milton in Areopagitica claims to have visited in his Italian home.2 Galileo’s artistic skill, recognized by artists in his own time, was in the geometric art of perspective drawing.3 In 1588, at twenty-four years old, Galileo had applied to become the geometra, to teach perspective and techniques of chiaroscuro in the Accademia del Disegno in Florence.4 As his day job, Galileo was “the Mathematical Professor at Padua.” Astronomers found Galileo’s examinations of the moon’s topography particularly notable because Galileo used triangulation to calculate the heights of the mountains on the lunar landscape. As diagrams in Siderius Nuncius indicate, the circumference of the moon served as Galileo’s gauge: deviation from the circumference was measured by way of the tangent with which it intersected.5 Historians of science have noted that the passage’s reference to the “spotty globe” identifies

2 Milton declares in Areopagitica that he “visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner to the Inquisition” (quoted in Nicolson, “Milton and the Telescope” 8). “There is no independent record of this visit,” writes Gordon Campbell, “but it is not improbable: Galileo’s illegitimate son was among those whom Milton met at the Svogliati, and Milton could have met the old man either in his house in Arcetro or in Vincezo’s house on the Costa San Giorgio, where Galileo was staying for medical treatment” (490). Lieb’s “Illuminati” casts doubt on Milton’s meeting of Galileo, as Milton did not mention the astronomer’s blindness (Passim 54–95). If the autobiographical passage itself is insufficient to definitively establish Milton’s acquain- tance with Galileo himself, this simile comparing Satan’s shield to the spotty Globe of the moon and other passages written after Milton’s Italian journey ought, nonetheless, serve to establish Milton’s familiarity with Galileo’s work. On the difference between Milton’s knowledge of Galileian astronomy before and after his Italian trip, see Cook, esp. 204–05; and Nicol- son, “Milton and the Telescope” 3–11. Those asserting that Galileo is the only contemporary figure whom Milton referenced directly in the poem include Gilbert at 152 and Partner at 130. Galileo’s Tuscan identity is allowed also because, by naming the moons of Jupiter after famous members of the Medici clan, Galileo sought and achieved the patronage of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany (Ostrow 235 n. 95. Cf. in general, Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier 30. For a more developed and nuanced view of his patronage relations, see Biagioli, “Galileo’s Self- Fashioning, Galileo, Courtier, esp. 20–59). 3 The Florentine artist, Lodovico Cardi, called Cigoli, praised Galileo’s skill in perspective drawing; Galileo’s interest and talent resulted in him being admitted to the Accademia del Disegno in 1613 (Edgerton 225). 4 Núñez Centella & Sánchez 18. 5 Galilei, Siderius Nuncius, D1v.

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234 Conlan

Milton as an adherent of the New Astronomy, for Galileo’s drawings of the moon’s uneven topographical features refuted the Aristotelian presumption that the moon’s surface was smooth.6 Philologists building on this detail have corrected an earlier, less rigorous philology that did little more than recognize that the literary tradition of comparing a shield to the Moon dates back to the Iliad: while the shape and brightness of the shields borne by Achilles and Radimund make them moonlike, it is the “Ethereal temper, massy, large and round”7—that is, the quality of enormous size—that in Milton’s simile makes the circumference of Satan’s “ponderous shield”8 and the moon alike.9 According to the simile’s vehicle, the circumference of Satan’s shield is exactly as large as the Moon as it exists in nature, measured as Galileo drew its features through the telescope. Understood in light of the techniques of surveying employed by Galileo, the paired mention of Fesole and Valdorno speaks not so much as to the clarity of the Italian sky10 but to Galileo’s use of parallax,

6 Analyzing Galileo’s scientific allegiances, Allan H. Gilbert references these lines to point out that “Milton follows the new astronomy in describing the moon,” in that “[t]he rough and irregular character of its surface was one of the matters on which Galileo insisted against the followers of Aristotle”(159). 7 Paradise Lost 1.285. 8 Paradise Lost 1.284. 9 Awareness of the literary tradition leads James Whaler slightly astray as he defines the tenor as the shield and the vehicle as the “Moon seen through the telescope” with emphasis on its “ethereal brightness and size” (Whaler 1053). Also presuming merely a comparison within the literary tradition, Broadbent wrote in 1960 that “With the shield, Satan outdoes Goliath and Achilles as an epic hero” (72). Closer attention to philology has corrected this understanding. As Fowler pointed out in 1968, while Homer compared Achilles’s shield in Iliad 19.373 to the moon, and Spenser compared Radigund’s shield to the moon in Faerie Queene, 5.5.3, these comparisons referenced the moon as an index of shape and brightness, while Milton’s comparison references size (60–1, n. 1. 286–91). Likely building off Fowler’s earlier observation, Bloom has written that: Homer and Spenser emphasize the moonlike brightness and shining of the shields of Achilles and Radigund; Milton emphasizes size, shape, weight as the common feature of Satan’s shield and the Moon, for Milton’s post-Galilean moon is more of a world and less of a light. (Bloom 133; also quoted in Wittenberg 27.) More recently, focusing on the “ethereal temper,” Freeman has underscored that the moon as drawn by Galileo using the telescope was spotted and dented instead of mirror- smooth, and has plausibly argued that, by way of reference to the “spotty globe,” Milton was highlighting the shield’s imperfections, a fact confirmed in the War in Heaven when it revealed itself to be ineffective protection, as it failed to protect Satan from Abdiel’s blow (6.192–93) (Freeman 129–30). 10 Focusing on the geographical detail in the simile, Whaler claims that Milton “would have us see the moon not merely through the eyes of the most quick-sighted and intelligent

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“Vaulted with fire” 235 whereby viewing alternately from the vantage of the heights of Fesole or the valley of the Arno, he made his drawings all that more precise.11 Parallax is the means whereby a viewer uses a known span on the horizon seen from two points of perspective to calculate by way of triangulation his or her distance from an object. Milton references both the telescope and parallax in Paradise Regained: when describing the means whereby Satan provides Christ a vision of all of the kingdoms of the world all at once, Milton as narrator raises the question:

By what strange Parallax or Optic skill Of vision multiplied through air, or glass Of Telescope, were curious to inquire.12

Galileo understood parallax: the Dialogue of Cecco di Ronchitti (1605), often attributed to Galileo, rehearses a dialogue in Paduan dialect between a shep- herd and his brother that mocks doctors of philosophy on a number of sub- jects, including “this awful mess about parallax.”13 As Crystal Hall points out, the shepherds in this dialogue demonstrate by climbing trees and changing

astronomer of the age, but under ideal atmospheric conditions, under the clear dry sky of Italy… and then you are prepared to imagine the brightness of that shield of Satan’s” (1058). 11 For those who hold with the Hockney-Falco thesis, “that from the early fifteenth century many Western artist used optics …—mirrors and lenses (or a combination of the two)— to create living projections [, and that] [s]ome artists used these projected images directly to produce drawings and paintings” (Hockney 12), it is worth considering that Milton referenced Galileo as “The Tuscan Artist” because he was signaling that Galileo employed the parallax effect to achieve the illusion of perspective in his drawings. Seventeenth- Century artists employed mirrors and lenses to cast shadows and images of forms on canvasses. Daniel Barbaro in his Della Perspettiva is the earliest book of artists’ techniques that Hockney has located that mentions projections by way of lenses. The description of the instrument’s lens is remarkably akin to that of the telescope that Galileo was to invent. Henry Wotton writing to Lord Francis Bacon in 1620 relates Kepler’s reference to drawing produced by the camera oscura as “non tanqua Picto, tanquam Mathematicus.” Constantine Huygens relates in 1622 his experience in England with the camera oscura produced by Cornelius Drebbel (Hockney 210–11). Given Milton’s reference to the two place names, it may be worth investigating if Galileo’s shaded drawings of the moon in Siderius Nuncio are tracings of the moon’s topography first as they projected themselves through the telescope or camera oscura on his piece of paper from the top of Fesole and then as they projected themselves through the telescope at a lower altitude in Valdarno. 12 Paradise Regained 4.40–2. 13 Hall 1325 n. 107, citing Galilei, Drake and Dahlstrom 43.

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236 Conlan their altitude that “the apparent position of a celestial body against a starry background would change if the earth moves and the stars are fixed. Thus, a displacement caused by parallax would prove the Copernican theory.”14 In the seventeenth century, scientific interest in the geometry of parallax also arose as astronomical observations by telescopes located in different places made it possible to draw conclusions about these bodies’ “location, size, shape, and speed based on the results recorded at different sites.”15 A close reading of Siderius Nuncius indicates that Galileo often used parallax when he looked through his telescope to survey the moon. His means of measuring the magnification of his telescope involved him using binocular vision, with the circle seen through the lens appearing orders of magnitude smaller than the control. Upon explaining this theory, Galileo indicated that he had measured the power of his optic glass to be nearly thirty-times magnification by way of the known diameter of the moon. His calculations of the earth’s changing distance from the moon was similarly phrased in terms of parallax, as he concluded that the moon was sometimes as far away as sixty hemispheres of the earth and sometimes as near as two, the known span serv- ing as his measuring stick. And, as mentioned above, his conclusion that the moon has mountains of four Italian miles in height (4 × 1458 meters = 5840 meters) implicitly implied a type of parallax effect as he calculated this height in reference to the known diameter of the moon. If parallax informs the disjunctive binocular reference to Fesole and Valdarno, the simile neither betrays logical digression,16 nor moves frivo- lous emotional associations,17 nor distorts the reader’s sense of reality,18 nor

14 Hall 1325. 15 Hall 1325. 16 Unable to explain the relevance of the place names, James Whaler characterized the simile as the paragon of a simile that betrays ‘’the classical pattern with logical digression” (1053). 17 In 1935, focusing on the Italian character of the telescope and its stimulus of the imagination, Nicholson twice misquoted the passage, leaving out the Moon altogether (Nicholson, “Milton and the Telescope” 11; Nicholson, “The ‘New Astronomy’” 435). In 1942, C.S. Lewis employed the simile to distinguish between the “logical connections which the poet puts on the surface and the emotional connections whereby he really manipulates our imagination” (269). In 1947, T.S. Eliot described the “inspired frivolity” of the geographical detail as a mark of Milton’s genius (Eliot, “Milton (1947)” 328; Eliot, “Milton” 204). Martz feels in the simile a measure of the astronomer’s blameless artistry (243); Ferry imagines in the simile a reference to the Fallen world (276). 18 In 1952, Brooks posited that the simile pretends to describe the moon but actually works by transporting the reader back a “sufficient distance…to take in the whole tremendous

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licenses sequential reading,19 nor, even less, requires allegorical exegesis to be explained.20 Rather, as this pairing of viewing stations at different altitudes speaks to the gauge that the Tuscan Artist used to “descry new lands,/Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe,”21 the astronomical cognoscenti were put on notice that Galileo’s use of the “Optic Glass” was trigonometrically precise— and certainly far more so than the employment of the telescope by the “crude intellects” contemporary to the Oddo and the Merlin of Giulio Strozzi’s Ve- netia edificata,22 or by those members of the philosophical establishment of whose intransigent stubbornness Galileo was to complain in a 1611 letter to Johannes Kepler, who did not wish to view the planets or the moon through the telescope, though Galileo offered them the opportunity to do so a thou- sand times.23

scene” (19). In 1957, Anderson asserted that “The simile mentioning Galileo and his telescope (1.286–91) startles us with its degree of particularization that goes much farther than anything in Vergil” yet claimed that Milton’s “comparison carries us past the bound- aries of immediate reality,” demonstrating Milton’s intention to “demonstrate the exis- tence of the unseen world” (130). In 1958, Geoffrey Hartman classified the simile among Milton’s “magnifying and diminishing similes” that, “shifting in space and time so skill- fully,” renders “our sense of the reality of hell” insecure (4). In 2011, Angus Fletcher claimed that the “[T]he simile warps both time and space at once. It draws the narrative, at least on Satan’s behalf, into the orbit of the New Philosophy” (Fletcher as quoted by Cefalu at E163). In 2013, Julia Staykova’s claimed the simile established an “analog[y] between enti- ties of incompatible magnitudes, contours and significance: a shield like a moon, a mast is like a wand the demonic troops are like leaves floating on water” (169). 19 Breaching decorum that divides simile from fable, Lerner allows the topographical images from different places to flow together as if they, in the reader’s mind, form a Grand Tour that, Orlando-Furioso-like, involves the Moon itself (Lerner 304). In a similar vein, in 1991, Schwartz recounted the experience of self-reflection on the simile as a type of sight- seeing itself and explored in excruciating detail the means whereby the reader processes the simile in its narrative context (87). In 1992–3, Cooley characterized Milton, and not the reader, as unsure (248). 20 A not-uncommon trend among politically oriented critics has been to allegorize the place-names: Fish 27, Brooks 19, Picciotto 49, Schwartz 88, Fry 203–4, and Harris 115 have built shaky structures upon the disjunctive relationship between the top of Fesole above and Valdarno down below. 21 Paradise Lost 1.290–1. 22 Hall n. 85 (1319), citing Strozzi’s La Venetia edificata. Poema heroico di Giulio Strozzi (Venice, 1624) at 7.56 (1–8). 23 Galileo to Kepler (19 August 1610), Galileo Galilei, Opere, Vol. x (Florence: Barbera, 1900): 423, as referenced in Biagioli (564).

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Satan’s Defiant Posture

The vehicle’s emphasis on both the gauge of the lunar span and the precise means and techniques of measuring the lunar landscape lends the tenor, Sa- tan’s shield, an exact dimension. Translated into a mathematical formula, the circumference of Satan’s shield is exactly as large as the value that Galileo gave the circumference of the moon when he was measuring the topographical features of this “spotty Globe.”24 When calculating the height of the mountains in Siderius Nuncius, Galileo estimated the diameter of the moon to be two- sevenths of the earth’s diameter,25 presumed at the time to be 7,000 Ital- ian miles, one Italian mile corresponding to 1458 meters. As “massy, large and round”26 as the circumference of the moon as Galileo used it to measure the topographical features of that “rocky Orb,”27 the diameter of Satan’s shield in Milton’s poem thus spans 2956 km,28 or 9,698,162.73 feet. This precisely measured circumference finds its full meaning when juxta- posed trigonometrically to the simile defining the length of Satan’s spear:

His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine, Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand He walkt with to support uneasy steps Over the burning Marl29

While the simile describing the size of Satan’s shield yields an exact value, the simile describing the length of the spear includes its measurement within a range defined by a proportional equation: “length of wand”: “tallest Pine”: : “tallest Pine”: “length of spear.” Allowing a wand to be no smaller than 1’ long and the “tallest Pine” made into an admiral’s mast no less than 100’ long and no greater than 300’ long, the length of the spear falls in the range of 10,000 to 90,000 feet long. Certainly, there is some imprecision here. When the two similes are con- sidered as defining a geometric shape, however, the imprecision becomes irrelevant: the tallest Norway Pine or Red Pine made into a mast for an admiral,

24 Paradise Lost 1.291. 25 Galilei, Siderius Nuncius, D1v. 26 Paradise Lost 1.285. 27 Paradise Lost 6.254. 28 Piccolino & Wade 160. 29 Paradise Lost 1.292–6.

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“Vaulted with fire” 239 like the hms Sovereign of the Seas launched in 1637, was likely no more than 200 feet tall; that value allowed, Satan’s spear is 40,000 feet long. Arithmetic comparison reveals the diameter of the shield that Satan carries to be orders of magnitude greater than the length of the spear that Satan uses to prop himself up off the burning stone. Long division gives us a ratio of roughly 242:1. With persons, instruments and techniques of professional surveying em- phasized so consistently throughout the simile, the 242:1 ratio between the size of the shield and the length of the prop speaks to more than a vague indication as to Satan’s massive size. To the surprise of the reader, misled by the narrator’s fallen language and Beelzebub’s lies, the two measurements combined in a geometric form denote Satan’s abject posture. As the Adversary uses the spear to prop himself up as he moves across the flaming loam, the combination of the two images of Satan’s arms establishes a right triangle: Satan’s feet, the base of the spear, and Satan’s hand on the spear are the triangle’s points; Satan’s shield, the same length as the diameter of the moon, is the hypotenuse of triangle; the length of the spear is the vertical leg of the triangle equivalent to distance that Satan’s head is off the ground.30 Applying the same expertise in trigonometry that Galileo used when viewing the moon to the data in the simile produces a very precise understanding of how Milton imagined punishment to be voluntarily apportioned in Hell. The paired image of “his ample Shield”31 with its “vast circumference”32 as big as the moon and Satan’s proportionally miniscule spear-used-as-crutch describes Satan’s angle of inclination (∠a) to be an acute angle whose sine (Op- posite over Hypotenuse) is no more than 40,000 over 9,698,162.73, or 0.0041244. Sin (∠a) = 0.0041 describes an angle (∠a) of 0.23631138 degrees or 0.00412441 radians. Presuming that the shield, circular and concave on its interior, covers Satan from head to heel yields the finding that Satan is nearly prone on the burning marl. By way of illustration, were Satan shrunk to heroic scale, a mere ten-feet tall, his crutch would leave him roughly half-an-inch off the ground: if

30 Fish, rightly recognizing that the shield is paired with the spear, argues that the spear is of an indeterminable length and that Milton only gives the reader the illusion of concrete- ness. “How large is Satan’s spear?” Fish asks hypothetically, following with “The answer is, we don’t know, although it is important that for a moment that we think we do.” Begging the question, Fish deems that “any attempt either to search out masts of Norwegian ships or to determine the mean lengths of wands is irrelevant” (27). The sense of scale, though, makes the exact size of the pine largely irrelevant: no matter what reasonable value one might assign a leg of the right triangle dependent on squaring the height of a tree, the angle of elevation is less than one degree. 31 Paradise Lost 6.255. 32 Paradise Lost 6.256.

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240 Conlan he is not writhing forward on his belly, he is planked, a posture that differs only nominally from the recumbent posture of those fallen angels whom Beelzebub scorns as “Groveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Fire.”33 Satan moves forward less like a tortoise than like a sea snail, or limpet, dragging himself forward across the molten rock by a tooth, lubricated by his slime. This conclusion as to Satan’s posture is initially unsettling. Milton refers to Satan’s spear as a prop with which Satan “walkt with to support uneasy steps/ Over the burning Marl.”34 Milton’s ironic use of “walkt” has led scholars to imagine Satan upright, stumbling with painful steps,35 or “striding” or even “lumbering.”36 The two similes, when conceived geometrically, disabuse the reader of these inaccurate hypotheses, one brought about by the imprecision of a fallen narrator, the other brought about by hearkening to Beelzebub, the well-known Father of Lies.

The Thermodynamics of Satan’s Suffering

The martial objects of the conjoined tenors signal the Adversary’s defiant ori- entation; the trigonometric precision of the conjoined vehicles defines his nearly prone position. Viewed as a unit, the two similes define, by way of Sa- tan’s spiritual attitude and physical posture, Milton’s understanding of the relationship between the intensity of infernal punishment and the operation of free will in hell. As the landscape over which the Adversary crawls is aflame with sulphu- rous fire, Satan’s progress to the shore by way of “uneasy steps,”37 “[n]ot like those steps/On Heaven’s Azure,”38 promises to sear him thoroughly throughout. Voluntarily bearing the shield on his back, he has confined himself within a kiln of his own design: the natural effect of Satan’s wearing his ponderous shield to defy the Almighty is to collect and concentrate hell’s heat upon him. By using Galileo’s figures, we can calculate that the circular shield captures the heat rising over 30,452,231 square feet of smoldering volcanic stone. Its

33 Paradise Lost 1.280. 34 Paradise Lost 1.295–6. 35 Stein 38. 36 This calculation disabuses the reader of theories like Broadbent’s that Satan “strides to the edge of the lake to call his legions” or that Satan “lumbers” (72). Dobranski suggests that the visual imagery indicates that Satan proceeds tortoise-like across the landscape (500). Proper calculation, however, offers a corrective even to this theory. 37 Paradise Lost 1.295. 38 Paradise Lost 1.296–7.

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interior pr esumably concave, the shield focuses the infernal volcanic heat on and around Satan’s back. In other words, that “the torrid Clime/Smote on him sore besides, Vaulted with fire”39 occurs not solely nor even principally because a vengeful God engineered it so. Rather, the ferocity of the penal fire that Satan suffers as he draws himself on his belly toward the lake of fire owes itself solely to eternal justice punishing Satan’s ongoing choice to “oppose[ ] the rocky Orb/ Of tenfold Adamant, his ample Shield/A vast Circumference,”40 demonstrably ineffective in the War in Heaven, between himself and God. Recall of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians underscores that the Adversary might have chosen differently. “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil,”41 wrote Saint Paul to the Ephesians,

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness. And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all fiery darts of the wicked.42

Those who knew the scriptures would find their knowledge rewarded: just as Paul’s letter to the Ephesians describes it, in the hand of the Fiend, the spear as Milton defines it proportionally is more like a dart than a lance. Thrust into the burning rock, the dart is presumably a remnant of the “fiery Darts” of Paradise Lost.43 In his description of an armed Satan moving across the smoldering landscape of hell in book i of Paradise Lost, then, John Milton created both a foil for Paul’s counsel and an image that illustrated John Milton’s commitment to showing that God’s mercy extends even to Hell. The description of Satan en- cumbered by shield and spear highlights how Satan’s exercise of right reason might have relieved even him, though damned, from an eternity of searing pain.

39 Paradise Lost 1.297–8. 40 Paradise Lost 6.254–6. 41 Ephesians 6:11: kjv (Holy Bible). 42 Ephesians 6:12–16: kjv (Holy Bible). 43 Paradise Lost 6.213.

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As a preface for taking up the shield of faith to extinguish the fiery darts of the wicked, Paul requires the Ephesians to stand, their “feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace” (see above). Were Satan to have thrown off his shield and stood on top of his massive target, the ethereal temper of the shield of nearly planetary mass interposed between himself and the molten ground below would have literally eclipsed the heat rising from the ground. The effect of the interposed shield would have formed a cylinder or cone of shelter from the rising heat. Within this cylinder or cone, Satan, standing in preparation for the gospel of peace or kneeling to extinguish his fiery dart, would have found himself both relieved from the kiln-like heat of his earlier defiant abject posture and in the lee of the infernal volcanic heat rising from the flaming ash.

Milton’s Counterpoint to Lodovico Cigoli’s Fresco

Curiously, as we entertain the quasi-Pauline positioning of the moon-like shield that Satan defiantly rejects, the term “Tuscan Artist” transforms itself into a polysemous reference. Steven Ostrow draws our attention to the fact that,

a fresco painted by Lodovico Cigoli in a papal chapel in Rome at the beginning of the second decade of the seventeenth century represents the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,’” just as Saint John the Evangelist describes the celestial woman in Apocalypse 12:1.44

Cigoli’s fresco represents the Moon on which the Virgin stands as a crater- pitted crescent.45 The Florentine painter Lodovico Cigoli and Galileo Galilei were close friends and correspondents who shared an interest in scientific and pictorial matters.46 As Ostrow points out, the “Tuscan Artist” who painted this fresco did not copy either the printed illustrations in Siderius Nuntius or Gali- leo’s own drawings,47 but, having in his possession a telescope and informing Galileo in a letter dated 23 March 1612 that he could see the moon quite well, he likely modeled this depiction of the pitted moon on his own observations. In

44 Ostrow 218, 221, 222, figs. 2 and 3. 45 Ostrow 218, 221, 222, figs. 2 and 3. 46 Ostrow 222. 47 For a contrasting view unsupported by textual evidence, see, for instance, Edgerton 230.

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“Vaulted with fire” 243 his fresco, he tilted the moon on its side so as to at once represent the natural moon as viewed through an optic glass and simultaneously to allude to the iconography of the Virgin in the Crescent, a symbol of the Church Militant.48 Conscious that Milton likely saw Cigoli’s fresco, Ostrow struggles to make sense of Milton’s simile describing Satan’s shield. The allusion to Ephesians helps. By way of this juxtaposition of shield and spear, Milton communicates that, even though he is damned, Satan is in large part in control of the tor- ment that he suffers in hell. That “the torrid Clime/Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire”49 owes itself solely to the Adversary’s decision to interpose his shield between himself and heaven above. It is Satan’s choice, not God’s vengefully engineered punishment, that he broils. Michael Lieb reminds us that Milton in Areopagitica “envisions the process of ascertaining Truth dialectically in extremely emotional terms,”50 such that “oppositions will ‘joyn’ and ‘unite’ in a kind of ‘spirituall architecture.’”51 Yet when we reason spatially about how Satan’s arms unite to define the peculiar spiritual architecture that Satan erects for his own infernal confinement, the remembered images of other structures remind us that that we cannot adopt the fatalistic sense that Milton’s Fallen Angels are “[c]aught in a paralysis of unfulfillment .… In the illusion that they have the power to act,” such that “if they act at all, their mobility is only temporary and is effected only through the will of God.”52 Satan’s shield and spear are portable. The Adversary himself, not God, joins and unites them into a spiritual architecture that intensifies Sa- tan’s pain: the infernal fires, not vengeful flames, sear only in order to persuade. They are but tangible inducements for the Adversary to lay down his arms, to repeal his martial posture and to expose himself to the mercy of God. Thus, the paired image of Satan’s arms reveals that Milton’s deep commitment to liberty informs even his imagination of how God structured the pains of hell. The truth to be pieced together is that Satan is capable of mobility even in Hell, and, by way of searing fires, God seeks to persuade him to voluntarily disarm. The finding surprises the reader by confirming how deliberate was Mil- ton’s intent to interrelate “fall” and “stand” as literal images of posture with the spiritual opposition of the terms as transgress and remain obedient and the consequential cosmographical meanings between the terms as descend

48 Ostrow 230. 49 Paradise Lost 1.292–8. 50 Lieb, Dialectics 6. 51 Areopagitica 2.544–55; Lieb, Dialectics 5. 52 Paradise Lost 1.209–13; Lieb, Dialectics 125.

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precipitously to Hell and not undergo such a change.53 Were the Adversary to have abandoned his defense against God and adopted an erect posture—a posture of surrender in preparation for the Gospel of peace—a logic as unde- niable as trigonometry and thermodynamics tells us that some degree of God’s mercy would have been readily at hand. But as it was at the time of the Fall, Satan’s intuitive reason is so flawed that the Spirit fallen in “the painful kines- thesia of hell”54 cannot—or chooses not—to use a modicum of common sense and the tools at hand to shield himself from the infernal heat. The allusion tells the reader that in hell as elsewhere in Paradise Lost, God’s law is natural law. It is the duty of the reader of Milton’s poem to reason out how this law works: if the conjoined similes of Satan’s arms are emblematic of anything, it is that Milton’s epic similes are guideposts—or, perhaps better put, lenses—that allow the reader to both penetrate the obscurity of the epic narrator’s fallen narrative voice and properly distance the reader’s response from the confusion that would otherwise arise from listening to and believing the fallen angels’ wondrous lies.

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