Contemplation of Created Things: Science in Paradise Lost

Hugh MacCallum is a professor of English at the University of Toronto
and the author of Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in
Milton’s Epic Poetry.

This study of science in Paradise Lost attempts to show the strength and
consistency of Milton’s view of nature and man’s place in it.
Marjara emphasizes the history of ideas, and places the poet’s thought
in a large historical context. While he writes in a clear and engaging
style, avoiding critical jargon, his work is directed at a specialist
audience consisting of students of Milton or Renaissance thought. His
analysis deals closely with many passages in the epic, but no
concessions are made to the reader unfamiliar with the poet’s work.
His summaries of scientific issues are lively and skilful, and he draws
for comparison on a wide range of scientific writers of Milton’s age,
including Bacon, Boyle, Copernicus, Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, Hobbes,
Pico Della Mirandola, Alexander Ross, and John Wilkins.

Marjara argues that poetry and scientific writing share some common
features, and he describes how Milton creates in his epic a vast,
multilayered, and complex universe that achieves a balance of
imaginative speculation and objective truth. His point is that the poem
contains much contemporary science, and that it participates in many
controversies of the period. The evidence to support this claim is rich
and vivid, and includes examples from astronomy, mathematics, chemistry,
and the science of motion. Marjara’s study has an encyclopedic
character, and tells us a good deal about the 17th-century picture of
the world. Milton emerges as a thinker who builds on a conservative
foundation of Aristotelianism, but who responds to new concepts, such as
that of infinite space, as he depicts a universe characterized by
harmony and vitalism. Marjara succeeds in making us think again of the
bold spirit of exploration that links a great poet to the best
scientific thought of his age.