Milton’s Hell Revisited

MILTON'S HELL REVISITED ERNEST SCHANZER THERE are, as every reader knows, two Hells in Paradise Lost. There is the geographical and there is the spiritual Hell, Hell the macrocosm and Hell the microcosm, the Hell which is the abode of the fallen angels and the Hell wruch these angels have created in their own minds. The one is self-created and self-imposed, the other is created and imposed by God. Much the same, of course, is true of Heaven, Paradise, and Chaos. Always in Paradise Lost there is this close relation between microcosm and macrocosm, between the mind of man or the angels and their dwelling-place. Thus, when a state of mental chaos succeeds to the paradisaI state of mind in Adam and Eve, God imposes a cOTTCSponding measure of Chaos upon the Universe . When Satan and his followers create a state of Hell in their own minds they are expelled into a region which in material terms mirrors their mental state. The actual fall from Heaven of Satan and his legions is thus merely the geograprucal adjustment to an already accomplished series of spiritual events. And there are other factors which bear out this interrelation of mental and geographical facts in the poem: the movement from the mental Heaven or Paradise to the mental Hell is an outward-going movement, a movement from the centre to the periphery, from God to the Self. For Milton wishes to show that the movement from God to the Self leads inevitably towards isolation which will land us sooner or later in a region as remote as possible from the Universe of light and love and joy, in a region wruch goes by the name of Hell. The mental Hell is thus essentially marginal. And therefore Milton locates the abode of Hell "in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called Chaos," as remote as possible from the light of Heaven. On the other hand, God is placed on a mount in the very centre of Heaven, while Paradise is on a mount in the centre of Eden, wruch itself is in the centre of the Universe . And on the fall of Adam and Eve their mental movement from the centre to the periphery, from God to the Self, is accompanied by its geographical equivalent in their descent from Paradise into Eden. It is both a downward and an outward movement, like that of Satan, only of much less magnitude, just as the extent of their mental movement towards the periphery is much less than that of Satan. Bearing then in mind the consistent parallelism of mental and geograprucaI facts throughout Paradise Lost, let us now consider the macrocosm of Hell. 136 Vol. XXIV, no. 2. Jan., 1955 MILTON'S HELL REVISITED 137 It is one of God's creations and is thus like the Empyrean and the Universe in consisting of ordered matter. But God created Hell, unlike Empyrean and Universe, not in a state of goodness but made it evil: A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good; Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire. (II, 622--8) On the one hand, then, Hell consists of ordered matter in a state of evil, bringing forth perverse and monstrous forms. On the other hand it resembles Chaos, with its fierce extremes of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, in close conjunction, and with its "perpetual storms of whirlwind and dire Hail" in certain regions (II, 587-603). But unlike Chaos, which is in a neutral state and is potentially good, Hell is wholly evil, and in its chaotic aspect resembles rather the chaotic element in the Universe after the Fall, that is to say it is chaos imposed by God, created chaos rather than uncreated chaos. As we have been led to expect, the same twofold state that exists in the macrocosm of Hell, with on the one hand ordered matter in a state of evil and on the other a condition of things resembling Chaos, is also...