Milton’s Twilight Zone

This chapter begins with the setting of hell and the viewpoint of its demons, which are fundamental to what follows and not merely a conventional beginning in medias res. These opening books provide the contrast so important to wisdom and choice and, more exactly, the initial, experiential sight and locus of evil and death in the poem: here blackness and the sunlight figured in epic similes are focal. Concentrating next on Light in Book III and moving out to make connections with Night, twilight, and darkness in heaven and Chaos, the argument focuses on the relation of Night to Milton’s God. Both the cave in the mount of God and the deep of Chaos and Night not only figure womb and tomb but do so bi-sexually. This chapter ends with God’s analogy of redemption, the analogy of Edenic being, Satan’s parody of it, and the analogical reading of history.

Proportional Thinking in Kepler’s Science of Light

Light is at the center of Kepler’s optics, astronomy, and cosmology. Verbal and mathematical analogy, whether as concept, proportion, or both, is crucial to his methodology and his habits of thought. Kepler is an intellectual hybrid who combines Neoplatonic and perspectivist ideas about light with mathematical and physical discoveries anticipating those of Descartes and Newton. Kepler is strikingly engaged with the interface of the immaterial with the material that light effects, as well as with correspondences and other connections between the celestial and terrestrial realms. Analogy, the salient means of linking the known with the unknown, the abstract with the sensible, is conspicuous throughout his work. This chapter focuses on Kepler’s study of light, geometric optics, and their bearing on the observation of astronomical phenomena. Both Donne and Milton were acquainted with Kepler’s ideas (as with Spenser’s).

“The Body of This Death”

In Romans 7:24, Paul utters a cry that has echoed down the centuries: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Paul’s moving outcry attracted the sustained attention of poets in early modern England, among them Spenser, Donne, and Milton, not only because of Paul’s anguish but also because of his unusual phrasing and figuration. The Bible carefully specifies “this death,” which suggests that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind. Yet physical death is implicit in the Adamic sin that human beings inherit and is thus embedded in their fallen nature. Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s figures of Sin and Death explore the inextricability of spirit and flesh in the body that is this death.

Analogy, Proportion, and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries

The term proportion, a variant of analogy, occurs repeatedly in Donne’s two Anniversaries, epic commemorations of a young woman’s death. In The First Anniversarie, this word-concept extends to the loss of cosmic coherence, form, harmony, correspondence, and even comprehension. Donne’s dramatized speaker stages a performance that shows him to be stuck in the past, the Old Testament, the body, and this ruined world. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne’s speaker has a new lease on life, and he offers a dynamic renewal of vision that is fundamentally analogous. In this Anniversarie, unlike The First, the very physicality of death, captured in analogy, enables redemption. At its end, desire returns as the erotic, Christian-Neoplatonic connector between heaven and earth, between the soul’s longing for God and God’s for the soul. Desire has become the affective realization of analogical construction.

Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene

Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos engage the subjects of sin and death from start to finish—from the introduction of Mutability herself through the end of her pageant—but Spenser’s Mutability is neither a simple mirror of the Fall nor a metonymic encoding of it. The Cantos open with a staged construction of Mutabilility’s figure, and her story draws on numerous renderings of change, including the Bible, Ovid, Lucretius, and Boethius, without merely repeating any one. Related passages on sin and death in The Faerie Queene, books I and II, have particularly relevant, significant ties to the subjects of time and mortality in the Cantos, as well as to questions of narrative and figuration. Mutability’s pageant explicitly engages with mortalism, the death of the soul, or the individual soul, along with the body, a concern that makes sense as an offshoot of Spenser’s engagement with materialism elsewhere in his epic. (This is another preview of Milton as well.)

Connecting the Cultural Dots

This chapter engages the history and structure of analogical figuration. It enables a theorized broadening of concerns from negation to construction, sin and death to life and light, and puts poetry and religion under the same canopy of creativity as science. Analogy, alternatively named proportion, is equally familiar to mathematicians, scientists, and poets. The theorized roots of analogy are Aristotelian—a subcategory of metaphor with a basis in mathematics. Early modern analogy has drawn the attention of contemporary scholars from many disciplines—historians of science, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and religion—but often in isolation from one another. Instead, my argument emphasizes the bond among disciplines in their use of analogy for exploration, experiment, and discovery. It also addresses continuity and change between early modern and ancient uses of analogy and frames them with modern ones. Science and rhetoric are two of its major foci.

Satanic Ethos

This chapter on Paradise Lost is a diptych. The first of its panels shows the origin of evil, hence sin, in Satan’s envy when the Son is exalted, an envy that underlies Satan’s self-authoring pride. This panel focuses on negation and death. The second panel, which examines God’s terms of exaltation, focuses on questions of individuality, allness, and pride, each of which has a more positive potential. Both panels grow out of two crucial speeches in Book V. In the first speech treated, Raphael recounts Satan’s response to the Son’s exaltation; in the second, the proclamation of Sonship itself, God reveals its ultimate purpose. This chapter also engages a circularity that exists in the poem and the intellectual culture of which it was and remains a dynamic part. Satan’s ethos is central to this circularity.

Introduction

The word issues derived from Latin exire, “to go out,” “to go forth,” embraces meanings that include “outflows,” “problems,” and “extensions.” The figuration of death flows into contrasting figurations of life and light, and light extends to its use specifically in analogies of vision and being: Fiat lux. Poiesis, “making, producing, creating,” is fundamental to insight in the sign systems of mathematics and verbal language, both of which use analogy constructively. Traditionally, analogy is the connector between the known and the unknown, the sensible and the infinite, this earth and what is beyond it. The first three chapters of this book treat evil, sin, and death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, and these treatments open into questions of mortalism, individuation, self-knowledge, and the means by which we represent and consider them. Chapter 4 turns to the history and theory of analogy, and subsequent chapters examine analogy, light, and death in the science and poetry of Kepler, Donne, and Milton.