The idea of Nature as a book written by God is the most meaningful Galilean allusion in Milton’s sacred poem. Galileo’s most revolutionary and long lasting ‘contribution’ to modernity was his differentiation between the two books: Holy Scripture and the book of Nature, both written by God and aiming at the same truth. The great astronomer contended that the two books were both ‘written’ by God and aimed at one and the same truth, but with diverse languages and for different readers. Though the formulation of that distinction was Galileo’s defensive move against the Inquisition, it was to prove the origin of a dangerous aporetic dichotomy between the sciences of man and those of nature, a split which was to cause a painful feeling of deprivation of meaning in the modern individual who found that his passionale, impulsive psychic organization was irreducible to a rationally ordered external world. The article argues that, by mentioning three times Galileo in Paradise Lost, Milton, though ambivalently, ambiguously, sometimes latently, was attempting a cultural, poetic reparation. He tried – as an extreme defence of his poeic monistic materialism – to keep together ethics and science, the ways of God and the ways of nature, the heaven of God and the sky of astronomy.
Milton and Galileo: The Astronomical Diet of Paradise Lost
PIAZZA, Antonella
2008
Abstract
The idea of Nature as a book written by God is the most meaningful Galilean allusion in Milton’s sacred poem. Galileo’s most revolutionary and long lasting ‘contribution’ to modernity was his differentiation between the two books: Holy Scripture and the book of Nature, both written by God and aiming at the same truth. The great astronomer contended that the two books were both ‘written’ by God and aimed at one and the same truth, but with diverse languages and for different readers. Though the formulation of that distinction was Galileo’s defensive move against the Inquisition, it was to prove the origin of a dangerous aporetic dichotomy between the sciences of man and those of nature, a split which was to cause a painful feeling of deprivation of meaning in the modern individual who found that his passionale, impulsive psychic organization was irreducible to a rationally ordered external world. The article argues that, by mentioning three times Galileo in Paradise Lost, Milton, though ambivalently, ambiguously, sometimes latently, was attempting a cultural, poetic reparation. He tried – as an extreme defence of his poeic monistic materialism – to keep together ethics and science, the ways of God and the ways of nature, the heaven of God and the sky of astronomy.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
