Milosz and Einstein; Milton and Galileo: the cosmologic poet and the physicist.

Oskar Milosz, France's contribution to cosmologic poetry, conceived his universe in the 1920s in the "poems" Ars Magna and Les Arcanes. (1) His predecessor in the genre, Englishman John Milton. formulated his system two hundred and fifty years earlier in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Despite differences in era and language, Milosz and Milton's cosmologies offer excellent counterpoints to each other. Poetic cosmologies are the meeting point of scientific and religious concepts, and Milton and Milosz's systems in their descriptions of the physical universe serve as bookends to the Newtonian phase of the scientific revolution.

Newton's anni mirabiles, as he called them, his miracle years, extended from 1664 to 1666, when Milton was also finishing the first of his biblical epics. In these years Newton invented the calculus, conceptualized gravity, and performed the prism experiment separating light into individual colors which became the basis for his theory of colors and his book of 1704, Optiks. Thus, the young brilliant Newton and the old blind Milton were contemporaries during particularly creative periods of their professional lives. Newton called his creative period "his miracle years" retrospectively for, a mistrustful man, he did not speak of them to his colleagues at Cambridge University where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. His fame begins with the publication of the Principia in 1687, thirteen years after Milton's death.

Milosz devised his cosmology just as Newtonism was ending and the Einsteinian synthesis was taking hold. Einstein's miracle year was 1905, when he published three articles in Max Planck's journal Annalen der Physik in which he replaced Newton's absolute space with a relative space--the special theory of relativity; argued for the existence of atoms; and overturned the wave theory of light by introducing the "photon," laying the foundation for quantum mechanics. However, the moment when Einstein's achievements would explode beyond the world of theoretical physics to that of culture in general had to await the ends of a Belle Epoque and a World War.

Eddington's Experiment

In the Spring of 1919, the English astronomer Arthur Eddington sent expeditions to South America and Africa to photograph the Hyades star cluster during a total eclipse. According to Einstein's recently published general law of Relativity, the sun's gravity would bend the light coming from the cluster.

The experiment was successful, the light curving in accordance with Einstein's equations, and Eddington, who had a nose for publicity, announced the proof of the theory of Relativity with great fanfare in November 1919. That month can be seen in retrospect as the starting point of the Einstein phenomenon. In 1921 Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in that year made a world lecture tour that further cemented his renown.

In the decade that followed an army of vulgarizers published books and articles popularizing Einstein's ideas, while philosophers like Russell, Bergson, and Whitehead measured Relativity's impact on the intellect and the imagination.

What were the first effects of Relativity's discovery and popularization on the imagination? The poet William Carlos Williams in a 1921 issue of Contact published the poem "St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils," a celebration of Relativity calling the new thinking "a spring-time of the mind." (2) And in 1926, Archibald Macleish wrote a poem simply entitled "Einstein," while in France a poet with a small but dedicated following, then as now, Oskar Milosz, read the Parisian popularizers of Relativity in books like La physique et la metaphysique des theories d'Einstein (1922) and decided that the poetic description of time, space and matter on which he had been working on since at least 1915, a full blown poetic cosmology, was in fact being validated in the startling truths revealed by Einstein's Relativity.

Epitre Storge

In 1917, in the Revue de Hollande, Milosz had published a long prose poem entitled Epitre a Storge. "Storge" is a Greek word that Emmanuel Swedenborg used in his book Conjugial Love to describe parental love, the feeling a mother and father have for their children, and Milosz makes "Storge" an allegorical character to whom he addresses his poem. Rooted in a vision he had experienced the previous summer (described in the Epitre), Milosz laid out his cosmology, which he based on the identification of space, time, and matter, a "bloc," in his word, "an absolute and simultaneous identity," created at the same moment inside what he calls "Mouvement" (Ars Magna 18). (3) He writes in "Memoria," the second chapter of Ars Magna: "Movement is One, because it is space and time apprehended in matter." (4)

Milosz made Epitre a Storge the first of the five chapters of Ars Magna, published in 1924. Ars Magna was a term employed by medieval alchemists to describe their science. In April 1926, in an issue of La Vie des Lettres, appeared Milosz's crowning poetic achievement, Les Arcanes, and the next year he published it in a book, accompanied by an exegesis eight times longer than the poem itself.

Ars magna and Les Arcanes

The genre of poetic cosmology to which Ars Magna and Les Arcanes belong has a long history which goes back in the West to Hesiod and Lucretius and in the Christian era has its greatest examples in Dante's Commedia and in Milton's biblical epics. Dante's cosmology is based on the pre-Copernican Ptolemaic system with the earth at the center of the universe, and an Aristotelian conception of movement, in which all bodies fall toward a center, the center being the Earth. In the seventeenth century, inertia as proven by Galileo and Newton replaced the Aristotelian explanation of movement. In 1638, the twenty-nine-year-old Milton made the grand tour of the Continent, travelling to France and Italy, and met Galileo in Florence. He described the meeting in the Areopagatica:

There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. (5)

In Paradise Lost Milton speaks of the moon:

 whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesole.

1,287-89

Milton's space is poetically post-Dantesque because scientifically post-Ptolemaic. Satan travels through it from Pandemonium to the earthly Eden. There is no seven-story mountain; hell is not below the surface of the earth but in a place separated from it. Milton's space is also post-Galilean in that the moon's revolution is not conceived as a perfect circle dividing the movement of the heavenly spheres from an imperfect sublunar space, as Aristotle bad proposed, but as being regulated by the same laws, as the "Tuscan artist" understood when he first saw the moons of Jupiter and realized that the earth was not alone among the planets in having a satellite.

The Newtonian system of an absolute space in which objects move in predictable, mathematic relation to each other clamped down on the Western mind in the eighteenth century. The French historian of science Alexandre Koyr, gives a devastating account of the nefarious effects of Newtonism in his 1948 lecture "The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis," (6) but he had been preceded one hundred fifty years earlier by William Blake, another cosmologic poet, who had made Newton one of his anti-trinity of misdirected English materialist thinkers along with Bacon and Locke.

When young, Milosz called himself a "neo-romantique" and he later translated Byron and Shelley, but William Blake was not in the poetic canon in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Oskar Milosz's cousin, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, in his book The Land of Ulro (1977, in Polish) first examined the similarities between William Blake and Oskar Milosz, among which was their shared reading of Swedenborg. But Oskar Milosz, as far as present scholarship can determine, never read Blake, and in his own mind, his precursor as a cosmologic poet of the scientific revolution was Edgar Allan Poe, specifically Eureka, a Newtonian nightmare in which Poe posits a crushing infinite space and a God who "now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe." (7)

To create his system, Poe relied on the Newtonian popularizers and astronomers of his day. Milosz took a different approach. He created his system from the ideas of a number of major poets, marginal philosophers, verbose mystics, and discredited alchemists: Goethe he called his spiritual master, Swedenborg his celestial master. (8) His other influences are the Protestant mystic Jakob Boebme (Ars Magna 65, 156), the alchemical physician Paracelsus (Ars Magna 40, 152), the Illuminist philosopher Louis Claude St. Martin (Les Arcanes 116), and, less marginally, Lessing (Ars Magna 64) and Kant (Arcanes 130). Milosz conceived his system apart from the scientific thinking of his day, and only during the composition of Ars Magna checked its veracity against contemporary science and then proceeded onto the writing of Les Arcanes, confident that points of agreement existed between his poetic cosmology and the new physics.

The first three decades of the twentieth century comprise the moment when the Newtonian world view gave way to Einsteinian physics, which ever since has been changing the way we see the universe, though even today traces of Newtonism persist in some people's thinking: the image of man as an ant crawling on a rock suspended in infinite space. As Milton's epics were written between the fall of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian universe and the rise of Newtonism, Milosz's two prophetic poems were written on the borderline between the Newtonian and Einsteinian syntheses. These two poems are the first truly cosmological poems of the Einsteinian era, more ambitious than Williams' or Archibald Macleish's, and equally ambitious to the Commedia, Milton's epics, and Blake's Milton and Jerusalem.

Milosz's system is based on a certain number of key words: etre, lieu, memoire, chose, and l'epoux et l'epouse, the last two leading to the long discussion of the Adam and Eve story that concludes Les Arcanes, and in which the two characters come to represent, among other things, freedom and the consciousness of freedom.

The two most important words in his system are : "le sang" and "le Rien."

Sang, Lumiere, Pensee

Blood is the symbol of two things in Milosz: all that causes movement and all that is incorruptible. Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust has Faust sign his pact in blood, and Milosz translated the first act of Faust. But blood as a symbol has a long history stretching from hoary vampire legends to the blood of Christ in the Christian ritual. Jean-Bellemin Noel in his book on Milosz notes that the poet had read a French translation of a 1914 English-language biography of Paracelsus and had annotated the chapter in which the Swiss alchemist remarks that our bodies heal themselves of many illnesses and theorizes the existence of a vital essence he calls the "mumia," the internal curative that, "resides in blood; it is the matter of the miracle that is movement, this constructor blood." (9)

What is blood? "By the word blood we understand living cosmic matter endowed with spontaneous movement" (Traveller 315). According to Milosz, the first thought of the King of this World, his term for Adam, was the perception of his own movement, followed instantaneously by a feeling of love for the rhythm in that movement. This one bipartite thought becomes the subtle fire and the first gushing (le jet initial) of Thought. That gushing fire of the first Thought being a sort of second creation, an image of the creation of the universe itself, the bang, the Fiat, as Milosz calls it, the "Let there be."

Blood was created at the same moment as the universe itself For Milosz, blood is a symbol of this first jet, Movement. In Les Arcanes he writes: "blood is the sum of all the spiritual energies manifested in the initial creation." Blood is also half of the first relation that appears in the universe, the relation of the seer to what is seen. In this initial form, Milosz calls blood "the immaterial light of God's vision of beauty and love" (Arcanes 64). So blood is light and light is blood. As blood is to the human body, light is to the universe. They are what makes movement possible for the physical structures they inhabit.

Thought begins with the recognition by Adam of his own movement. For Milosz, thought is an act "in which we situate all things and is at its origin only knowledge... only the awareness and love of movement; it is therefore indissolubly united to the movement of the universe" (Traveller 237). For the human mind, thought is the equivalent of blood and light. It is to our mental existence as blood is to our bodies and light is to the universe. One of Milosz's most celebrated verses states that "the brain is the satellite of the heart." And for Milosz the heart is the source of thought. He conceived the heart as being the sun of the body, and the brain, like the moon, reflects what comes from it, remarking at another point that it is no accident that the brain and the moon have a similar color (Arcanes 63).

That is a poet's image, and what the comparison leads to is that (as for all the cosmologic poets mentioned save Poe), for Milosz, everything in the universe is human. Nothing exists in all creation that is not related to the human being. We are at the center of all processes.

That leads to the problem of where is this human universe? Or as Miosz puts it in his great question: where is space? (Arcanes 14).

Le Rien

Like Blake, Milosz attentively read Swedenborg, in particular the books Conjugial Love and The True Christian Religion (Guise 92-161, esp. 155). Also like Blake, Milosz created his system by placing it inoppositionto Swedenborg's. Blake criticized the Swedish scientist and mystic for his "angelism," and for a tendency toward pantheism. For Milosz, Swedenborg and thinkers like him who have visions of spiritual worlds are simply thinking incorrectly, because in order to describe their spiritual worlds they must place them in opposition to a material world in which they find themselves. But for Milosz there is no material world. Matter is one with space and time which have their existence in movement. In his cosmology the universe is not a place; it is a state.

When first approached, Milosz's concept of the Nothing appears difficult because our mental habits when considering space are contradicted by it, as Relativity contradicted Newtonian physics. The major reason that Milosz believed his system to be Einsteinian was because his universe, like Einstein's, is not infinite but unlimited. Einstein theorized a curved space-time. In the illustrative example of Stanford mathematician Robert Osserman: if you leave in a space ship from any given point in the universe and travel in a straight line, you will eventually arrive back at the same place because space is curved.'0 Milosz posits the existence of corporeal and spiritual lights each bound to curved space, but one within his space-time-matter and the other within his category Thought, saying:

as in the theory of the curvature of space, corporeal light traces a circle of eighty-four billion years, so, too, our spiritual light, the prime mover whose transformation clothes matter, seems to complete in everyone from first birth to last death, an enormous cycle of dynamic phenomena, the vehicle of our moral evolution.

(Traveller 296)

The popularizers of Relativity taught Milosz that space was curved, and Milosz took that as a starting point to theorize the existence of a kind of curved spiritual space whose reason to exist is man's moral development. A textbook example of how a cosmologic poet imaginatively transforms the facts of science in his system.

Because there is no spiritual world out there, either inside or outside the universe, only a "Nothing," each particle of space in space-time-matter becomes an opening to that Nothing. Blake in the first book of Milton expresses the idea like this:

or every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans blood.
Is visionary: and is created by the Hammer of Los
And every Space smaller than a Globule of Mans blood. Opens
Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow

Milosz puts it that each "minimal part" of space is "the golden door of memory," "the issue from the Labyrinth," the entry to "the divine Not hing"(A rcanes 32-39). The Nothing is synonymous, for Milosz, with the word Love. Thought, and in particular Memory, must be attracted by the Nothing, and Thought is, because the state that the Nothing offers is what Milosz calls Immobility, the port at the end of the storm, the cessation of movement, or as the poet describes it in Epitre a Storge (Arcanes 165) "the terrifying majesty of absolute repose" (Ars Magna 21-22). In this state the only action that exists is what Milosz calls Affirmation, and the symbol of Affirmation, for him, in both the human universe and the divine Nothing, is prayer.

Milton and Milosz

Milton and Milosz share a "vitalist" perspective that conceives matter as being animated by a living spirit. Nonetheless, there is nothing exactly equivalent in Milton to Milosz's blood as a symbol of incorruptible movement. In Milton's poems movement is not presented as a crucial element in the formation of order out of Chaos. The same hold true for Milosz's Nothing. Milton's divine and human actions occur in the same universe in places separated by a space that is neither completely Ptolemaic nor Copernican. Milosz's Nothing is "another space," a state neither inside nor outside our present space but something entirely different from it (Arcanes 32-3 5). In passing from Milton's almost Newtonian to Milosz'sEinsteinian space, the level of abstraction in poetic cosmology increases dramatically, as it does in the passage from celestial mechanics to Relativity.

The most striking similarity between Milton and Milosz's cosmologies is the importance of the Adam and Eve story to both. Milosz's version differs considerably from other interpretations. In Les Arcanes, there is no serpent, or Satan in the serpent as Milton puts it; no tree of knowledge; no apple. Instead, what happens is that Eve simply asks Adam: is it true that what separates me from you is the Nothing? Adam looks up and sees an eagle fly toward the sun. And the Fall has occurred. He has become aware of space. Previously, Nothing, in a general and in Milosz's specialized sense, separated him from God; their relation was direct. Now Adam feels the warmth of the stones under his feet, Milosz's symbol for Adams decision to try to become the King of a lump of clay floating in endless space, and to place that space between him and the divine. Eve, of course, takes some of the blame, but her fault in Milosz' s cosmology is the desire to materialize love. Before he sees the eagle, Adam had no ego; when he said I , it was Eve speaking, she being completely in him, as Adam was completely in God. Since this moment, a separation of these three abstraction-characters organizes the universe of Milosz's cosmology.

Consequences for the debate between scientific and religious thinking

Einstein is quoted as saying that "religion without science is blind, and science without religion is lame." (12) Cosmologic poetry like Milton and Milosz's is the point of confluence of the religious and scientific. From a poetic synthesis a vision of the universe is formulated which eventually influences how men and women understand space, time and matter and has a large impact on their feelings about such issues as the soul, empirical proof, the existence of God, and the ethics of scientific advancement.

Poetry is the link between science and religion, these two ways knowing the world, for this reason. A religion enters into a social space and carves out a place for itself, or folds itself into or absorbs existing religions. It allies itself naturally with the arts, which create stories and images that provide a coherent social space, an envelope, in which human beings can function. Cosmologic poets like Dante, Milton, Blake, and Milosz synthesize the stories and images of religion and what they understand of their era's scientific consensus and create anew vision of our ultimate concerns usually only appreciated in the future, which is in a sense where they were living. Great poetry then seeps back into the society and fixes all the scientific and religious beliefs in people's mind through the spell of verbalbeauty. Rimes that work themselves into the mind, images that seem to come from no where and everywhere. Eventually this envelope must be broken out of too, as religions adapt to cultural transformations and science discovers new facts and forms new consensuses.

Milosz used ideas from pre-Newtonian science, in fact rejected knowledge, mostly from the medical alchemist Paracelsus, but there were other books on alchemy in his library, and he combined that rejected knowledge with his own peculiar Judeo-Christianity: he had a free-thinking Lithuanian father and a Jewish mother, read the Old Testament in Hebrew, and, after passing through an occult phase in his early forties, in 1927 became a practicing Roman Catholic and remained so for the last twelve years of his life.

That Milosz used a discredited science to arrive at a cosmology that has point in common with Relativity does not validate alchemy. What it does demonstrate, as does the work of other poets such as Nerval and Breton, is that alchemical language was always closer to the language of poetry than to that of science. Science and poetry have different standards of validation. Scientific cosmologies are subject to the law of proof through experiment. Poetic cosmologies are arrived at intuitively and find their validation through our emotions. Neither method is foolproof, but the standards of judgment, simply put, reason and emotion, each have their just claim on us. Indeed, poems like Ars Magna and Les Arcanes become influential because they teach us about the faculty where reason and emotion meet: the imagination.

Each human being's imagination constructs its own universe in which to experience its existence. It does so by using what is lying around in the mind it makes up a part of. What a poet puts in their mind through their readings are not physical laws but imaginative truths that sometimes have unusual or unhappy sources. Milton is an important poet, for one reason, because he identified what was important in the Bible just as literal belief in its truths was becoming impossible and a new way of reading for its truths was becoming necessary. Blake was an important poet for many English speakers in the twentieth century because his poetic description of human psychology, which has similar roots to Milosz's cosmology, felt so true. Might Milosz's human universe cast a similar spell on twenty-first century Francophones? It is doubtful but possible. One day French culture might feel the need to break out of a perceived slough by turning away from its present canon de modernite (Baudelaire, Mallarme, Breton, Rimbaud). As Czeslaw Milosz says of his cousin in his book The Witness of Poetry: "He believed that he would be read and understood by distant generations, happier than his own, for they would live in a time when harmony between man and the universe had been recovered." (13)

(1.) Ars Magna (Paris: Silvaire, 1961); Les Arcanes (Paris: Egloff, 1948).

(2.) Cited in Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985)68-71.

(3.) All translations in this essay, unless noted by reference to the American edition of Milosz's poetry, The Noble Traveller, are the author's.

(4.) The Noble Traveler (West Stockbridge: Lindisfarne, 1985) 249.

(5.) John Milton, The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1998) 1014.

(6.) Newton: Texts, Background, Commentaries, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York: Norton, 1995) 58-72.

(7.) Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka, ed. W. H. Auden (New York: Rinehart, 1950) 589.

(8.) Milosz calls Swedenborg his celestial master and Goethe his spiritual master in the marginalia to his copy of Swedenborg's book L 'Amour Conjugial. First noted by Stanley M. Guise, "La Sensibilite Esoterique de Milosz," Dissertation, Sorbonne, 1964, p. 155.

(9.) La poesie-philosophie de Milosz: Essai sur une ecriture (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977) 84.

(10.) Poe fry of the University (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 88.

(11.) "David Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) 127. (Book 1, plate 29, 19-20.)

(12.) Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza, 1954) 46.

(13.) Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 24.

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Author:	Palmieri, David
Publication:	West Virginia University Philological Papers
Article Type:	Critical essay
Geographic Code:	4EUFR
Date:	Sep 22, 2002
Words:	4103
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