“Omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum.”
—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
To an almost frightening degree, the world of John Milton’s Paradise Lost teems with life. The sensation of reading it involves a confrontation with redoubled images; a fractal-like filigree of allusions; and sheer descriptive growth, be it verbal, vegetal, or intellectual. Whether they are of Godly or Satanic provenance, Milton festoons his text with images, rhetorical positions, Latinate vocabulary, cities and planets built with uncanny rapidity, immeasurable clauses, endless poetic enjambment, a wildly fecund natural world, multiform and unisex deities, and accretive allusions, such that the reader is dazzled and overwhelmed by the abundance, rather like Adam and Eve are overwhelmed by the garden’s amplitude and density. He creates here in a mad fury that imitates his heterodox God. Satan and God, while representing extremes of being in his cosmology, are nevertheless part of the same generative universe. Far from being opposite sides of a coin, they are rather the same Janus-faced being, enjoined by the lockstep of their enmity, and their sameness is largely the result of God’s omniscience and His apparent lack of a subjective life outside of the missteps of His creations, over which he obsesses. But what, then, is on the other side of the God/Satan coin? Beneath the text (literally beneath the lowest depths of the lowest point of the story) is a vast, churning nothing that seems to threaten the fragile and pendulous world above, whose very existence is characterized as violent disharmony, and at times, perhaps most frightening, as emptiness. Chaos, its realm, its lawlessness, its lack of taxonomy and boundaries, feels like the poem’s true antagonist—and also, perhaps, the poet’s. But God’s order is not the solution to Chaos. Milton presents and does not resolve the following paradox: Paradise Lost suggests that evil, without God, is mere anarchy; but that good/God, without Chaos, tends toward stagnation. Both the womb and grave are necessary to this cosmology.
Chaos has conjugal power early on. Our first encounter in the text with chaos is in the first few lines, where he (she?) is characterized as the primordial matter from which God makes the universe: “the Heav'ns and Earth / Rose out of Chaos” (I.9-10), which conforms to a classical conception of chaos as the matter from which all else arises, having been ordered or separated into constituent parts by a deity or force of nature. In Liber I of Metamorphoses, Ovid characterizes Chaos as “rudis indigestaque moles / nec quiquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem” or “A rude, jumbled mass of inert matter; an undigested host of atoms all seething together without shape [1]” until “Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit” or “a god and superior nature settled the dispute” (I.7-9, I.21). Milton, unsurprisingly, makes this “better nature” the Christian God. But the personification of formless, disordered, empty space takes on some aspects of royal consort, female counterpart, or sexual partner to the deity in the poem’s opening, and it appears that God relies on this partner for creation. Milton apostrophizes the Holy Spirit at the opening of the poem, invoking Him as classical poets invoke the muses. Milton characterizes Him thus:
…Thou from the first
Was’t present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant… (I.9-22)
Thus, the deity is both brooding upon the Abyss as a female bird does on her eggs (Milton often uses “Abyss” synonymously with Chaos), and also impregnating it. This hermaphroditic bird-God is as grotesque and uncanny as any hybrid creature in world mythology, and the idea, bordering on blasphemous, suggests that creation rests squarely on the interaction of male and female energies, albeit in the same being. Or at least it suggests that a female role is required for the generative, monistically corporeal act of creating. Ovid’s “superior nature” does not act in this copulative sense. We might place God’s insemination in interesting contrast to Satan’s phallic war machine which he deploys in the war with heaven, a sort of giant cannon expelling ballistics, which, while they don’t bring death to the heavenly host, definitely do not bring life. What man (and devil) fashions with his hands is ugly, mechanized, flawed, while man’s imperative to be fruitful and multiply, endowed with a flake of God’s generative powers, is true creation in God’s image.
The early version of Chaos is pure potential energy, neither good nor evil but a necessary state in the transfer of matter from disorder to order and back again. Milton’s is a surprisingly contemporary scientific sense of the early universe: Some of his astronomical speculations would be at home today, where the more metaphysical side of astrophysics might liken his chaos to the state of the universe at the point of the Big Bang. Here, and in the poem, God takes us, in the classical sense, from Chaos to Cosmos to Chaos. For Milton’s monism held that there would be an eventual and ultimate transformation from separateness to the oneness of all things, when “God shall be All in All” (III.341). In Dionysian form, this feminine chaos, the “womb of nature,” is necessary for social and creative balance with God’s Apollonian order, even though it is simultaneously “her grave” (11.911). But this estimation of chaos is belied by Milton’s insistence that God is the origin of all things, which would necessarily preclude a Chaos outside of Him. So, by this logic, the procreative power of Chaos is just an aspect of God’s totality. John Rumrich discusses the erotic potential of Chaos in “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos,” in which he observes that “Far from being invariably hostile to creation, the energy of chaos seems vitally involved with creatures’ aspirations and erotic desires” (1039). Pregnancy, birth, they occur often in Paradise Lost, and they are not only the purview of God. Just as God opens Adam’s body to extract a rib with which to fashion Eve, so Sin is born of Satan’s head from “the left side op’ning wide” (II.755), and Mammon observes that there is a hill in Hell, and that “in his womb was hid metallic Ore” and Mammon’s crew “Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound / And dig'd out ribs of Gold” (I.673-90). All the people of the universe, apparently, have access to wombs and dark materials, and not necessarily in the places one might expect them, including the poet. The womb seems endlessly linked with chaos.
Wombs and abnormal births are sprinkled throughout the text, hinting at endless generative potential, as Neil Forsyth discusses in “Milton’s Womb.” Forsyth links Milton’s ambivalent rendering of Chaos and Night as dramatizing the “Dangers that surround not only Satan on his journey but also the narrator on his” (81). The womb is necessary: The womb is menacing, for as John Leonard notes in “Milton’s Cosmos,”
Milton does refer to “the wide womb of uncreated Night” (II.150), but that is no indication that Night’s womb is healthy or fertile. Night is an “Abortive gulf” (II.441). It breeds “embryon atoms” (II.900) but fails to give them form. The very sight of Night’s womb threatens “utter loss of being.” (xx)
Night and Chaos appear hand in hand. A dangerous pair. Night, the consort of Chaos, is an “abortive gulf,” so the womb, without the Godhead’s “dark materials,” can produce little but negation: “neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, / But all these in their pregnant causes mix’t” (II.912-6). But there is also a sense that without this disordered stuff there can be only stagnation and stasis. Without Chaos and evil, God at times (to risk heresy) seems in danger of stagnating. His paradise often feels static—too timeless and unchanging; staid and legalistic are many of His discussions with the Son; his expectation that forever and ever His creations should fear and praise him, without end, feels megalomaniacal, tyrannical, and… well, boring. There is some horror in this “goodness.” Something has to give; the Fall is necessary, at the very least for narrative reasons, and Milton’s task is to give birth to a narrative. A poet cannot write an epic without strife; God’s world is nothing without Sin, Death, encroaching Chaos to define and offset goodness. “Milton wanted very much to believe in a… universe illumined by God’s love,” says Leonard, “and to that end he banished Hell and Night beyond the walls of the universe. But Night creeps back in his despite” (xxii). A lack of movement is the enemy here, not Satan, not evil, and not Chaos. Milton the poet stands at the border of Chaos with Satan, peering into it, and Forsyth speaks of the symmetry between poet and creation:
We share the experience of “the wary fiend” in his anxious hesitation on the very brink of Hell. The syntax stalls for line after line while the nature of chaos is explored in subordinate clauses heaped together “confusedly” (II.914), until at last the opening phrase returns, “into this wild Abyss,” as in a musical composition, and the narrative resumes. (79)
This stuff of creation queers the pitch of a stable universe. It resembles a protean, primordial earth, changing and growing and clamoring and vying against… a lot of everything, or a lot of void (one cannot help but think of “nothing” in its Renaissance slang sense of female genitalia—also a source of generative power, and likewise frightening to poets). Forsyth notes that while many thinkers of his day wrote on Chaos, “it is only Milton, through his variatio, who makes it a womb” (88). This sense of Chaos as both necessary and dangerous—its very variatio--evokes the fine political line Milton walked between empire and freedom.
At times Chaos takes on a different mien, gender, and apparent purpose, so that reconciling him with the womb of nature grows thorny—and perhaps echoes Milton’s own difficulty reconciling artistic chaos and sovereign control. Chaos comes to represent a state of disorder that requires conquering or colonizing—a very different congress between the deity and His—subject? Creation? Lover?—than the cooperative, procreative one in the poem’s opening lines. Here Chaos is male, and personified, and dangerous, and, when Satan encounters him, he runs with a fast crowd: Rumor and Tumult and Discord are among his “Demogorgons” (II.965-8). Chaos’ gang resides in his murky realm, which is described as “a dark / Illimitable Ocean without bound / Without dimension, where length, breadth, & heighth, / And time and place are lost” (II.892-3). When Satan first takes off from Pandaemonium on his vengeful quest, he has a harrowing encounter with the void. At first he makes progress in his flight, but then,
…all unawares
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.932-8)
Leonard discusses the troubling ideas this representation of chaos here presents—a darkness through which Satan would, as you read this, still be plummeting had he not been caught and lifted by a cloud—and not only because Hell is thus not the lowest point in these conceived spaces (indeed, etymologically, “Abyss” means “bottomless”), but that this void stands as God’s antagonist, which destabilizes Milton’s theology: “An evil chaos would suggest that either God is not good, or He is not all-powerful” (Leonard xx). It only took nine days to plummet to Hell from Heaven, and now we see that an endless emptiness yawns beneath all of these, a fall through which would take potentially thousands of years. In “Milton’s Hostile Chaos,” Regina Schwartz surmises that the truly terrifying concept to Milton is indeterminacy: “Indeterminacy—I think again of the unstable visage of the Anarch, Chaos—may well pose a greater threat in Milton’s moral universe than the Satanic one of a definite willed disobedience” (348). But this indeterminacy threatening God’s goodness and/or omnipotence is just one of many paradoxes, each piling upon the next until they veritably overwhelm the reader. As Rosalie L. Colie writes in “Time and Eternity: Paradox and Structure in Paradise Lost,” readers of the book are forced to reckon with vast contradictions at every turn and ultimately they “must accept the paradox and come to some sort of terms with it,” which might indeed be Milton’s point: That our job is to puzzle through such contradictions without hope of resolving them, but where the puzzling itself is undertaken as a kind of worship (128). If Chaos is both an aspect of God and His antagonist, then the battle between order and chaos is eternal and pre-ordained and is required for the operation of the “good” universe; and it is simultaneously an affront to the Godhead and the order He seeks to create and maintain.
The universe God creates is characterized by boundaries, limits, and separations, with a functional sense of progress and a differentiation between its various quadrants, unlike Chaos’ frenzied ocean without bound. Milton later describes the universe as a “firm, opacous globe” protected by a God-made shell from the ravages of the Abyss (III.418). Chaos expresses hostility toward God when Satan journeys to meet him in Book II. The lord of this disordered realm sends Satan off with his blessing, wishing him luck in his mischief, for “Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain” (II.1009). Julie Stone Peters addresses this change in the characteristics of Chaos in “A Bridge Over Chaos,” suggesting that Chaos as a state of warlike disorder is metonymy for political anarchy, a subject about which Milton had some understandable ambivalence. Such a state needs God’s impulse of separation into constituent domains to enact territorial control. She notes that this later Chaos is
allied to hell and, notably, in a state of eternal war… Chaos thus offers us a figural rendering of war that generalizes what we have learned from the War in Heaven: war is the condition of a disordered cosmos not yet subject to territorial order or the rule of law. (276)
Later, when the Son commands, “Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou Deep, peace, / …your discord end” (VII.216-7), this edict is akin to an act of colonialism that tames the tumultuously rebellious matter and void. Quite a departure from the brooding on the “egg” of chaos and impregnating it. Peters makes the case that this paradox within the text’s attitudes toward chaos—as mother nature/womb and as bellicose enemy in need of housebreaking—mirror the political anxieties of the day, for Milton’s political reality held in tension
The simultaneous creation of sovereignty as ur-principle and of global rights as super-principle; the legal prohibition of violence and an insistence that violence is the heart of the global legal order; the recognition of global law’s very dependance on global chaos for its existence. (273-4)
In her final estimation, Peters assures us that these paradoxes are specific to Milton’s time and ethos and moreover they are the same ones we grapple with internationally to this day, for many of the anxieties we experience today were birthed in Milton’s time. They reside in the instability of his text, including
The view that chaos needs our shaping hand; the repressed fear of Pandaemonium afar—a realm of devils who pose a threat to our sovereignty, since, after all, boundaries are always permeable and the devils may already live among us… Heaven and Pandaemonium… have always offered a vision of a cosmos in which good and evil are clear and unmixed… But even Milton knew that Heaven and Pandaemonium are, on earth at least, hopelessly and forever intermingled. (292)
One imagines that Milton might be straddling too wide a chasm in trying to have it both ways, but everywhere in his text the truth is slippery, knowable only in part, or provisionally, or as metaphor heaped upon metaphor. Hell is not without regal splendor; Heaven is not without darkness. Good and evil, slyly intermixed, confuse Milton’s written world as much as they confuse the real world, despite his efforts to separate, delineate, circumscribe. But at the end of the day Milton is a poet. He is far more interested in Truth than in dogma, and unfortunately the “dark materials” of scripture force him to contort into strange shapes to make his galactic brain conform to the source material: It is not a great fit. His ideas and allusions and creations pour out onto the page faster than he can stop them. While it is the source of creativity, of Milton’s creativity and God’s, Chaos is also a space of anarchy and political discord, and Milton does not know what to do with something so indeterminate. When Milton is in doubt, his strategy is to offer both interpretations, and leave it up to the reader to reconcile them.
Whether chaos is a lover, a womb, an embodiment of infinity, one of God’s many faces, a rebellious child in need of discipline, or a nation in need of subjugating, it seems to be something the text cannot survive without. A simple word search reveals that the word “chaos” appears in every book but two at least once, and often more than once. Unlike Ovid and Lucretius, Milton’s chaos is not used up in the act of creation: It might not even be diminished. It remains a churning, dangerous ocean beneath our feet, erupting now and then the raw material for poems, worlds, galaxies, universes, in a process that is endless and amoral and cyclical. Milton is interested in progress. When things are not progressing, changing, morphing, in Heaven, Hell, earth, the void, that is where creativity begins to yield to death. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Milton coined the astronomical sense of the word “space,” as in “outer space.” This space outside the universe created by God is often a hostile and terrifying place, perhaps the more so because it is empty. It is alternately referred to as “the void,” “the abyss,” “the deep.” This stretch of changeless dark formlessness seems to frighten Milton. Leonard notes that unlike others of his time, Milton “has no difficulty in accepting the existence of life on other worlds. It is the thought of unpeopled emptiness that chills him” (xxii). How prescient of the terrors of our day, now that we understand more about the actual composition of the universe, its scale; its apparent meaninglessness; our fragility within the crush of time and the probable eventual heat death of the universe. Milton’s frenzied creation, the indistinguishable good and evil of his story, the state of continuous process and progress and change, become a defiance in the face of stagnation. God becomes a tyrant in stillness and order: He is at his best when he is moving, copulating, writing the epic poem of the world and choreographing the dance of the stars. All the frenzied creation, wombs and tombs and cycles feel like a shoring against the ultimate, eventual ruin: Silence, killer of gods and men, swallower of worlds.
In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius meditates on natural cycles: “esse videtur / omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum. / Ergo terra tibi libatur at aucta recrescit” (V.258-60) or “It appears that our universal mother is also our communal tomb. And so the earth poured over your body is nourished and grows because of it.” Milton is not here a poet-for-the-defense, vindicating the ways of God to man: It could be that he fails his own theodicy by design, because the God of scripture is too small for him. He is, rather, adding his own frenzy of creation to the music of the spheres, to a universe whose very movement and energy defies the chilling stillness of the void.
Chaos has conjugal power early on. Our first encounter in the text with chaos is in the first few lines, where he (she?) is characterized as the primordial matter from which God makes the universe: “the Heav'ns and Earth / Rose out of Chaos” (I.9-10), which conforms to a classical conception of chaos as the matter from which all else arises, having been ordered or separated into constituent parts by a deity or force of nature. In Liber I of Metamorphoses, Ovid characterizes Chaos as “rudis indigestaque moles / nec quiquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem” or “A rude, jumbled mass of inert matter; an undigested host of atoms all seething together without shape [1]” until “Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit” or “a god and superior nature settled the dispute” (I.7-9, I.21). Milton, unsurprisingly, makes this “better nature” the Christian God. But the personification of formless, disordered, empty space takes on some aspects of royal consort, female counterpart, or sexual partner to the deity in the poem’s opening, and it appears that God relies on this partner for creation. Milton apostrophizes the Holy Spirit at the opening of the poem, invoking Him as classical poets invoke the muses. Milton characterizes Him thus:
…Thou from the first
Was’t present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant… (I.9-22)
Thus, the deity is both brooding upon the Abyss as a female bird does on her eggs (Milton often uses “Abyss” synonymously with Chaos), and also impregnating it. This hermaphroditic bird-God is as grotesque and uncanny as any hybrid creature in world mythology, and the idea, bordering on blasphemous, suggests that creation rests squarely on the interaction of male and female energies, albeit in the same being. Or at least it suggests that a female role is required for the generative, monistically corporeal act of creating. Ovid’s “superior nature” does not act in this copulative sense. We might place God’s insemination in interesting contrast to Satan’s phallic war machine which he deploys in the war with heaven, a sort of giant cannon expelling ballistics, which, while they don’t bring death to the heavenly host, definitely do not bring life. What man (and devil) fashions with his hands is ugly, mechanized, flawed, while man’s imperative to be fruitful and multiply, endowed with a flake of God’s generative powers, is true creation in God’s image.
The early version of Chaos is pure potential energy, neither good nor evil but a necessary state in the transfer of matter from disorder to order and back again. Milton’s is a surprisingly contemporary scientific sense of the early universe: Some of his astronomical speculations would be at home today, where the more metaphysical side of astrophysics might liken his chaos to the state of the universe at the point of the Big Bang. Here, and in the poem, God takes us, in the classical sense, from Chaos to Cosmos to Chaos. For Milton’s monism held that there would be an eventual and ultimate transformation from separateness to the oneness of all things, when “God shall be All in All” (III.341). In Dionysian form, this feminine chaos, the “womb of nature,” is necessary for social and creative balance with God’s Apollonian order, even though it is simultaneously “her grave” (11.911). But this estimation of chaos is belied by Milton’s insistence that God is the origin of all things, which would necessarily preclude a Chaos outside of Him. So, by this logic, the procreative power of Chaos is just an aspect of God’s totality. John Rumrich discusses the erotic potential of Chaos in “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos,” in which he observes that “Far from being invariably hostile to creation, the energy of chaos seems vitally involved with creatures’ aspirations and erotic desires” (1039). Pregnancy, birth, they occur often in Paradise Lost, and they are not only the purview of God. Just as God opens Adam’s body to extract a rib with which to fashion Eve, so Sin is born of Satan’s head from “the left side op’ning wide” (II.755), and Mammon observes that there is a hill in Hell, and that “in his womb was hid metallic Ore” and Mammon’s crew “Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound / And dig'd out ribs of Gold” (I.673-90). All the people of the universe, apparently, have access to wombs and dark materials, and not necessarily in the places one might expect them, including the poet. The womb seems endlessly linked with chaos.
Wombs and abnormal births are sprinkled throughout the text, hinting at endless generative potential, as Neil Forsyth discusses in “Milton’s Womb.” Forsyth links Milton’s ambivalent rendering of Chaos and Night as dramatizing the “Dangers that surround not only Satan on his journey but also the narrator on his” (81). The womb is necessary: The womb is menacing, for as John Leonard notes in “Milton’s Cosmos,”
Milton does refer to “the wide womb of uncreated Night” (II.150), but that is no indication that Night’s womb is healthy or fertile. Night is an “Abortive gulf” (II.441). It breeds “embryon atoms” (II.900) but fails to give them form. The very sight of Night’s womb threatens “utter loss of being.” (xx)
Night and Chaos appear hand in hand. A dangerous pair. Night, the consort of Chaos, is an “abortive gulf,” so the womb, without the Godhead’s “dark materials,” can produce little but negation: “neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, / But all these in their pregnant causes mix’t” (II.912-6). But there is also a sense that without this disordered stuff there can be only stagnation and stasis. Without Chaos and evil, God at times (to risk heresy) seems in danger of stagnating. His paradise often feels static—too timeless and unchanging; staid and legalistic are many of His discussions with the Son; his expectation that forever and ever His creations should fear and praise him, without end, feels megalomaniacal, tyrannical, and… well, boring. There is some horror in this “goodness.” Something has to give; the Fall is necessary, at the very least for narrative reasons, and Milton’s task is to give birth to a narrative. A poet cannot write an epic without strife; God’s world is nothing without Sin, Death, encroaching Chaos to define and offset goodness. “Milton wanted very much to believe in a… universe illumined by God’s love,” says Leonard, “and to that end he banished Hell and Night beyond the walls of the universe. But Night creeps back in his despite” (xxii). A lack of movement is the enemy here, not Satan, not evil, and not Chaos. Milton the poet stands at the border of Chaos with Satan, peering into it, and Forsyth speaks of the symmetry between poet and creation:
We share the experience of “the wary fiend” in his anxious hesitation on the very brink of Hell. The syntax stalls for line after line while the nature of chaos is explored in subordinate clauses heaped together “confusedly” (II.914), until at last the opening phrase returns, “into this wild Abyss,” as in a musical composition, and the narrative resumes. (79)
This stuff of creation queers the pitch of a stable universe. It resembles a protean, primordial earth, changing and growing and clamoring and vying against… a lot of everything, or a lot of void (one cannot help but think of “nothing” in its Renaissance slang sense of female genitalia—also a source of generative power, and likewise frightening to poets). Forsyth notes that while many thinkers of his day wrote on Chaos, “it is only Milton, through his variatio, who makes it a womb” (88). This sense of Chaos as both necessary and dangerous—its very variatio--evokes the fine political line Milton walked between empire and freedom.
At times Chaos takes on a different mien, gender, and apparent purpose, so that reconciling him with the womb of nature grows thorny—and perhaps echoes Milton’s own difficulty reconciling artistic chaos and sovereign control. Chaos comes to represent a state of disorder that requires conquering or colonizing—a very different congress between the deity and His—subject? Creation? Lover?—than the cooperative, procreative one in the poem’s opening lines. Here Chaos is male, and personified, and dangerous, and, when Satan encounters him, he runs with a fast crowd: Rumor and Tumult and Discord are among his “Demogorgons” (II.965-8). Chaos’ gang resides in his murky realm, which is described as “a dark / Illimitable Ocean without bound / Without dimension, where length, breadth, & heighth, / And time and place are lost” (II.892-3). When Satan first takes off from Pandaemonium on his vengeful quest, he has a harrowing encounter with the void. At first he makes progress in his flight, but then,
…all unawares
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.932-8)
Leonard discusses the troubling ideas this representation of chaos here presents—a darkness through which Satan would, as you read this, still be plummeting had he not been caught and lifted by a cloud—and not only because Hell is thus not the lowest point in these conceived spaces (indeed, etymologically, “Abyss” means “bottomless”), but that this void stands as God’s antagonist, which destabilizes Milton’s theology: “An evil chaos would suggest that either God is not good, or He is not all-powerful” (Leonard xx). It only took nine days to plummet to Hell from Heaven, and now we see that an endless emptiness yawns beneath all of these, a fall through which would take potentially thousands of years. In “Milton’s Hostile Chaos,” Regina Schwartz surmises that the truly terrifying concept to Milton is indeterminacy: “Indeterminacy—I think again of the unstable visage of the Anarch, Chaos—may well pose a greater threat in Milton’s moral universe than the Satanic one of a definite willed disobedience” (348). But this indeterminacy threatening God’s goodness and/or omnipotence is just one of many paradoxes, each piling upon the next until they veritably overwhelm the reader. As Rosalie L. Colie writes in “Time and Eternity: Paradox and Structure in Paradise Lost,” readers of the book are forced to reckon with vast contradictions at every turn and ultimately they “must accept the paradox and come to some sort of terms with it,” which might indeed be Milton’s point: That our job is to puzzle through such contradictions without hope of resolving them, but where the puzzling itself is undertaken as a kind of worship (128). If Chaos is both an aspect of God and His antagonist, then the battle between order and chaos is eternal and pre-ordained and is required for the operation of the “good” universe; and it is simultaneously an affront to the Godhead and the order He seeks to create and maintain.
The universe God creates is characterized by boundaries, limits, and separations, with a functional sense of progress and a differentiation between its various quadrants, unlike Chaos’ frenzied ocean without bound. Milton later describes the universe as a “firm, opacous globe” protected by a God-made shell from the ravages of the Abyss (III.418). Chaos expresses hostility toward God when Satan journeys to meet him in Book II. The lord of this disordered realm sends Satan off with his blessing, wishing him luck in his mischief, for “Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain” (II.1009). Julie Stone Peters addresses this change in the characteristics of Chaos in “A Bridge Over Chaos,” suggesting that Chaos as a state of warlike disorder is metonymy for political anarchy, a subject about which Milton had some understandable ambivalence. Such a state needs God’s impulse of separation into constituent domains to enact territorial control. She notes that this later Chaos is
allied to hell and, notably, in a state of eternal war… Chaos thus offers us a figural rendering of war that generalizes what we have learned from the War in Heaven: war is the condition of a disordered cosmos not yet subject to territorial order or the rule of law. (276)
Later, when the Son commands, “Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou Deep, peace, / …your discord end” (VII.216-7), this edict is akin to an act of colonialism that tames the tumultuously rebellious matter and void. Quite a departure from the brooding on the “egg” of chaos and impregnating it. Peters makes the case that this paradox within the text’s attitudes toward chaos—as mother nature/womb and as bellicose enemy in need of housebreaking—mirror the political anxieties of the day, for Milton’s political reality held in tension
The simultaneous creation of sovereignty as ur-principle and of global rights as super-principle; the legal prohibition of violence and an insistence that violence is the heart of the global legal order; the recognition of global law’s very dependance on global chaos for its existence. (273-4)
In her final estimation, Peters assures us that these paradoxes are specific to Milton’s time and ethos and moreover they are the same ones we grapple with internationally to this day, for many of the anxieties we experience today were birthed in Milton’s time. They reside in the instability of his text, including
The view that chaos needs our shaping hand; the repressed fear of Pandaemonium afar—a realm of devils who pose a threat to our sovereignty, since, after all, boundaries are always permeable and the devils may already live among us… Heaven and Pandaemonium… have always offered a vision of a cosmos in which good and evil are clear and unmixed… But even Milton knew that Heaven and Pandaemonium are, on earth at least, hopelessly and forever intermingled. (292)
One imagines that Milton might be straddling too wide a chasm in trying to have it both ways, but everywhere in his text the truth is slippery, knowable only in part, or provisionally, or as metaphor heaped upon metaphor. Hell is not without regal splendor; Heaven is not without darkness. Good and evil, slyly intermixed, confuse Milton’s written world as much as they confuse the real world, despite his efforts to separate, delineate, circumscribe. But at the end of the day Milton is a poet. He is far more interested in Truth than in dogma, and unfortunately the “dark materials” of scripture force him to contort into strange shapes to make his galactic brain conform to the source material: It is not a great fit. His ideas and allusions and creations pour out onto the page faster than he can stop them. While it is the source of creativity, of Milton’s creativity and God’s, Chaos is also a space of anarchy and political discord, and Milton does not know what to do with something so indeterminate. When Milton is in doubt, his strategy is to offer both interpretations, and leave it up to the reader to reconcile them.
Whether chaos is a lover, a womb, an embodiment of infinity, one of God’s many faces, a rebellious child in need of discipline, or a nation in need of subjugating, it seems to be something the text cannot survive without. A simple word search reveals that the word “chaos” appears in every book but two at least once, and often more than once. Unlike Ovid and Lucretius, Milton’s chaos is not used up in the act of creation: It might not even be diminished. It remains a churning, dangerous ocean beneath our feet, erupting now and then the raw material for poems, worlds, galaxies, universes, in a process that is endless and amoral and cyclical. Milton is interested in progress. When things are not progressing, changing, morphing, in Heaven, Hell, earth, the void, that is where creativity begins to yield to death. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Milton coined the astronomical sense of the word “space,” as in “outer space.” This space outside the universe created by God is often a hostile and terrifying place, perhaps the more so because it is empty. It is alternately referred to as “the void,” “the abyss,” “the deep.” This stretch of changeless dark formlessness seems to frighten Milton. Leonard notes that unlike others of his time, Milton “has no difficulty in accepting the existence of life on other worlds. It is the thought of unpeopled emptiness that chills him” (xxii). How prescient of the terrors of our day, now that we understand more about the actual composition of the universe, its scale; its apparent meaninglessness; our fragility within the crush of time and the probable eventual heat death of the universe. Milton’s frenzied creation, the indistinguishable good and evil of his story, the state of continuous process and progress and change, become a defiance in the face of stagnation. God becomes a tyrant in stillness and order: He is at his best when he is moving, copulating, writing the epic poem of the world and choreographing the dance of the stars. All the frenzied creation, wombs and tombs and cycles feel like a shoring against the ultimate, eventual ruin: Silence, killer of gods and men, swallower of worlds.
In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius meditates on natural cycles: “esse videtur / omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum. / Ergo terra tibi libatur at aucta recrescit” (V.258-60) or “It appears that our universal mother is also our communal tomb. And so the earth poured over your body is nourished and grows because of it.” Milton is not here a poet-for-the-defense, vindicating the ways of God to man: It could be that he fails his own theodicy by design, because the God of scripture is too small for him. He is, rather, adding his own frenzy of creation to the music of the spheres, to a universe whose very movement and energy defies the chilling stillness of the void.
Notes
1. Latin translations mine.
1. Latin translations mine.
Works Cited
Colie, Rosalie L. “Time and Eternity: Paradox and Structure in Paradise Lost.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 23, No. ½, Jan-Jun 1960, pp. 127-138.
Forsyth, Neil. “Milton’s Womb.” Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, May 2009, pp. 77-89.
Leonard, John, Editor. “Introduction: Milton’s Cosmos.” John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Penguin Classics, 2000, pp. xvi-xxiii.
Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Perseus Digital Library, accessed 7 Dec 2021, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0130%3Abook%3D5%3Acard%3D235.
Milton, John. “Paradise Lost.” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, 2003, pp. 173-454.
Ovid, 43 B.C.E-18 C.E. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Liber I-V. Edited by William S. Anderson, U. of Oklahoma Press, translated by Saramanda Swigart, 1996.
Peters, Julie Stone. “A ‘Bridge Over Chaos’: De Jure Belli, Paradise Lost, Terror, Sovereignty, Globalism, and the Modern Law of Nations.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 57, No. 4, Fall 2005, pp. 273-93.
Rumrich, John. “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos.” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 5, Oct 1995, pp. 1035-46.
Schwartz, Regina. “Milton's Hostile Chaos:‘... And the Sea Was No More.’” ELH, Summer 1985, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 337-374.
Colie, Rosalie L. “Time and Eternity: Paradox and Structure in Paradise Lost.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 23, No. ½, Jan-Jun 1960, pp. 127-138.
Forsyth, Neil. “Milton’s Womb.” Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, May 2009, pp. 77-89.
Leonard, John, Editor. “Introduction: Milton’s Cosmos.” John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Penguin Classics, 2000, pp. xvi-xxiii.
Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Perseus Digital Library, accessed 7 Dec 2021, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0130%3Abook%3D5%3Acard%3D235.
Milton, John. “Paradise Lost.” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, 2003, pp. 173-454.
Ovid, 43 B.C.E-18 C.E. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Liber I-V. Edited by William S. Anderson, U. of Oklahoma Press, translated by Saramanda Swigart, 1996.
Peters, Julie Stone. “A ‘Bridge Over Chaos’: De Jure Belli, Paradise Lost, Terror, Sovereignty, Globalism, and the Modern Law of Nations.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 57, No. 4, Fall 2005, pp. 273-93.
Rumrich, John. “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos.” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 5, Oct 1995, pp. 1035-46.
Schwartz, Regina. “Milton's Hostile Chaos:‘... And the Sea Was No More.’” ELH, Summer 1985, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 337-374.
Saramanda Swigart has a BA in postcolonial literature and an MFA in writing and literary translation from Columbia University. Her short work, essays, and poetry have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Superstition Review, The Alembic, Fogged Clarity, Ghost Town, The Saranac Review, and Euphony to name a few. She has been teaching literature, creative writing, argumentative writing, and critical thinking at City College of San Francisco since 2014.