Contemplation of Created Things: Science in Paradise Lost.

Harinder Singh Marjara aims to demonstrate that Milton's understanding of science in Paradise Lost was not out of date and to relate the poem's science to its moral and theological vision. Marjara painstakingly shows that Milton's representation of the universe is situated within a mid-seventeenth-century discourse of science consisting of "a mixture of orthodox Aristotelian opinions supplemented with beliefs that show an unmistakable influence of unorthodox scientific sources" (43). Noting that earlier commentators such as Svendsen worked from a linear understanding of the history of science, Marjara aligns himself with a more recent contextual approach which appreciates the overlapping of science, literature, and theology in Renaissance scientific writing. His extensive citations of seventeenth-century scientific writing confirm that Milton's blending of science and theology was a feature of the scientific writing of the period. The book is replete with information concerning seventeenth-century concepts of motion, generation, and exhalations, and Marjara skillfully illuminates Milton's reliance on a few basic principles to explain a broad range of natural processes. I am less sanguine about the second dimension of Marjara's project; his study of Milton's "scientific imagery," as he calls it, does not produce any new insights on the many moral and theological problems raised by the science of Paradise Lost, but rather seems intent on celebrating what we already know about Milton: that he was a great poet not a scientist.

Marjara divides his labors into three movements: a general section that establishes Milton's relationship to Aristotelianism and Renaissance scientific breakthroughs; a section devoted to the physics of Paradise Lost; and a final section called Milton's Philosophy of Nature. " This order appears logical enough, but in the reading I found the organization of the book as a whole to be confusing and repetitious. This difficulty may be related to the claim that "in Milton, as in the scientists of the time, only a razor-thin line divides theological beliefs from scientific and philosophical opinions" (238); but Marjara's handling of this problem results in a monotonous and shapeless series of demonstrations of the coherence of Milton's scientific and moral concerns and their congruence with Renaissance scientific opinion. What is more, to avoid the zeitgeist fallacy of reducing Milton to his scientific background, Marjara begs the question of the relationship between poetry and science, as is evident in the following representative passage that concludes the first of two discussions of heliocentrism: "On the basis of the generally accepted scientific beliefs Milton erects a much broader and grander vision of the universe than the scientists, since he makes his vision relevant to his larger poetic purpose" (85). Rather than argue for a relationship between science and poetry implied by his comparatives, Marjara simply assumes the reader shares his humanist perspective.

As the passage just quoted suggests, Marjara's scholarly demonstration of the unity of science and morality in Paradise Lost is conducted as if nothing has happened in literary studies since Svendsen's Milton and Science (1956). Thus, what could be a timely study seems instead belated. His lack of a theory of discourse seriously undercuts his ability to explore the relationship between scientific and poetic texts. Marjara is unable to do more than rehearse the slide between physics and metaphysics both in Milton and in his scientific sources. The opening chapter of the book, "The Poetics of Science," is a superficial discussion of the role of imagination and fiction in science (both science and poetry use fiction but in different ways). More troubling is the unexamined privileging of poetry over science that runs through the entire book. It strikes me as a truism that Milton's acceptance or rejection of certain scientific ideas was largely determined by "his poetic needs" (301). One might turn this argument around to ask why Milton felt the need to include so much scientific discourse in his poem. In any case, the challenge of a fresh approach to Milton's poetic use of science would entail an analysis of the competing systems of humanist and scientific power/knowledge in Paradise Lost. But Marjara's Paradise Lost is a harmonious vision, not a site of discursive struggle. The source of the vision is the Christian Humanist Milton whose poetic needs mesh smoothly with theological and moral motives; when conflicts between poetry, theology, and morality do arise, as in Milton's Chaos, they are finessed or dissolved by appeal to the poetic prerogative (see his discussion of Chaos on 91-102). Contemplation of Created Things offers students of Milton potentially useful summaries of some scientific topics of the seventeenth century, but it also unwittingly points to the need for a critical investigation of Milton's aesthetic mediation of science, morality, and theology in Paradise Lost.