INTRODUCTION
“We turn to the helps,” writes C. S. Lewis in the preface to his last book, the posthumously published Discarded Image, “only when the hard passages are manifestly hard. But there are treacherous passages which will not send us to the notes. They look easy and aren’t.”Footnote 1 Only when we encounter a known unknown do we reach for commentaries, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the like. Meanwhile, the unknown unknown slips by, hiding in plain sight. Often, however, it is precisely the unknown unknown—precisely what a premodern author fails to mention, or mentions in a way that escapes the modern reader’s attention—that is vital to understanding not only the work at hand but ideas and experiences central to entire epochs of intellectual and cultural history.
One such unknown unknown is the subject of this article. In a startling paragraph buried midway through the book—which may explain why it has failed to attract more attention over the years—Lewis argues that the universe imagined by premodern Europeans was not only bounded, geocentric, resounding with the music of the spheres, and teeming with extraterrestrial life. It was also bright. “Nothing,” he writes,
is more deeply impressed on the cosmic imaginings of a modern than the idea that the heavenly bodies move in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity. It was not so in the Medieval Model…. Nowhere in medieval literature have I found any suggestion that, if we could enter the translunary world, we should find ourselves in an abyss of darkness. For their system is in one sense more heliocentric than ours. The sun illuminates the whole universe…. And as they had, I think, no conception of the part which the air plays in turning physical light into the circumambient colour-realm that we call Day, we must picture all the countless cubic miles within the vast concavity as illuminated. Night is merely the conical shadow cast by our Earth. It extends, according to Dante (Paradiso 9.118) as far as to the sphere of Venus. Since the Sun moves and the Earth is stationary, we must picture this long, black finger perpetually revolving like the hand of a clock; that is why Milton calls it “the circling canopie of Night’s extended shade” (Paradise Lost 3.556). Beyond that there is no night; only “happie climes that lie where day never shuts his eye” (Comus 978). When we look up at the night sky we are looking through darkness but not at darkness.Footnote 2
How many had read Dante (1265–1321) and Milton (1608–74), and missed it? In part, this is because to Dante, Milton, and their contemporaries this would have rarely required explicit statement—note that all of Lewis’s examples come from space travel narratives, one of few contexts where such statement is more likely, although by no means guaranteed. In part, it is because even where an explicit statement does appear, the modern reader is likely to overlook or misconstrue it. We look up at the dark night sky and know that we are, essentially, looking at space: space as it really is, beyond the planet’s atmosphere. Equally, we know that the bright day sky is merely an optical effect caused by sunlight’s interaction with this atmosphere. But for Dante and Milton, Lewis argues, it was the other way round. Night was the optical effect. A fortuitous one, to be sure, raising the curtain on the otherwise hidden theater of the heavens—but it was in daytime that one saw space as it really was. We know that if we take off in a spaceship at noon, we will emerge into eternal night. They thought that if they took off at midnight, they would emerge into eternal day.
WHEN DID SPACE TURN DARK?
Two of Lewis’s quotations, from Dante’s Divine Comedy (ca. 1308–21) and Milton’s Masque (1637), are fairly straightforward. Ascending through the Ptolemaic heavens, Dante and Beatrice reach the sphere of Venus, where, they learn, “the shadow of [their] world shrinks to a point.”Footnote 3 His terrestrial errand complete, Milton’s Attendant Spirit returns to his native land, the “happy climes that lie / Where day never shuts his eye / Up in the broad fields of the sky.”Footnote 4 The third quotation, however, from Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), merits a closer look and a whistle-stop tour of the poem’s unique and still imperfectly understood cosmology.Footnote 5 As imagined in Paradise Lost, the universe came into being with the creation of Chaos, a realm of primal, unformed matter which comprises God’s “dark materials,” from which all further creation proceeds.Footnote 6 The second realm, made out of this Chaos, is Heaven, the abode of God and angels.Footnote 7 When a portion of the angels rebelled against God, and were defeated and cast out of Heaven, a third realm, Hell, was fashioned as their place of banishment. Finally, God created another species of rational beings and a fourth realm for their habitation, which we can call the Cosmos. Somewhere in this Cosmos is the Earth, somewhere on this Earth is the Garden of Eden, and somewhere in this Garden of Eden are the first two members of the new species, still enjoying their original, unfallen bliss. Such, in the broadest outline, is the cosmological map that meets the reader at the poem’s beginning, with each species and order of beings in their proper place: God and his angels in Heaven, Satan and his devils in Hell, Adam and Eve in the Cosmos, and Chaos filling the rest.
The passage quoted by Lewis, however—the curious description of “the circling canopy / Of night’s extended shade”—arrives three books into the poem, at a critical junction in its plot and a key crossroads in its universe. The initial equilibrium has disintegrated. Having broken out of Hell on a mission to corrupt humankind, Milton’s Satan has just accomplished the greatest feat of space travel known to literary history as it stood in the 1660s, traversing the dark depths of Chaos and landing on the outer shell of the Cosmos. The Cosmos is of immense size, containing “worlds and worlds” in addition to our own, yet is still minute in comparison to this infinite, volatile darkness which surrounds it.Footnote 8 To withstand its onslaught, the Cosmos is protected by an opaque and impervious outer shell, and can only be accessed through an “op’ning…, where bounds were set / To darkness”: an aperture at the top of this shell, where special conditions apply, keeping Chaos at bay while facilitating commute between the Cosmos and Heaven.Footnote 9
It is through this aperture that Satan first looks into the Cosmos. Even by the standards of Paradise Lost, a poem yet to be fully recognized as one of the most daring and intricately constructed works of early science fiction, this is an extraordinary moment. The reader has already traveled with Satan out of Hell, through the dark abyss of Chaos, and across the outer shell of the Cosmos. But these are all realms beyond the reach of human experience, populated by beings we would regard as aliens. Now, however, a threshold is about to be crossed. One such alien, an assassin dispatched by a superior extraterrestrial race, is about to enter our universe. Before he does so, however, the alien pauses for a moment at the aperture, “Look[ing] down with wonder at the sudden view / Of all this world at once.”Footnote 10 And what does he see? As modern readers, we expect him to see the same dark universe that we see. Yet the poem goes out of its way to stress that precisely the opposite is the case: that Satan is passing out of darkness into light. An extended simile likens him to a military “scout,” who
Satan then throws himself into this bright universe, at which point readers meet with the verses quoted by Lewis, describing the unobstructed breadth of his view: “Round he surveys, and well might, where he stood / So high above the circling canopy / Of night’s extended shade.”Footnote 12 Earth is not yet in Satan’s sight—or at least he is not yet able to identify it among other cosmic bodies—but the reader is invited to imagine how their planet would appear to such a space traveler, approaching it from a distance beyond the shadow’s reach. Later on, Satan will orbit the Earth hiding in this shadow—“r[iding] / With darkness” in “the car of Night”—to escape the attention of the angels guarding Eden, who commence their watch when “night measure[s] with her shadowy cone / Half way up hill this vast sublunar vault.”Footnote 13
Between them, Dante and Milton thus afford the reader four perspectives on the same cosmological phenomenon. To Adam and Eve, looking up from Earth, night is a “canopy”; looking down from Venus, Dante and Beatrice see this canopy in reverse, as it “comes to a point”; riding in its “car,” Satan experiences it from within, at a point between these extremes; and, finally, all of Milton’s space travelers, angelic and demonic, take in the complete view, with the enormous “shadowy cone” extending into an otherwise bright Cosmos. Of particular significance here is the idea that the planet’s shadow would itself be visible, and that looking at Earth from a sufficient distance, one would actually see, as Lewis puts it, “this long, black finger perpetually revolving like the hand of a clock.” As strange as that sounds, there is no other way of interpreting the fact that the “cone” itself is said to be “shadowy”—rather than what is shadowed by it—or the image of “the circling canopy,” or the meaning of the word “extended” in “night’s extended shade.” But more of that below—for the moment, suffice it to note that beyond Earth’s shadow, and shadows cast by other opaque bodies, Milton’s Cosmos is certainly bright. This is clear already from the cited passages and is then further stressed once Satan begins his descent into it, “wind[ing] with ease / Through the pure marble air”—echoing the Greek marmareos, “flashing, gleaming, twinkling”—and surveying it “far and wide … / For sight no obstacle found there, nor shade, / But all sunshine.”Footnote 14
If Lewis is right, this is a phenomenon whose significance extends far beyond Dante and Milton: a major shift in the European cosmological imagination comparable to those from geocentrism to heliocentrism or a bounded to an unbounded universe, yet one which has gone almost entirely unnoticed, and whose cultural impact remains virtually uncharted.Footnote 15 Numerous questions arise here, but the fundamental one, preliminary to tackling any others, is that of the shift’s basic historical shape. If this is what we used to believe, when did we stop believing it? Lewis assumed bright space was tied to geocentrism and therefore discarded along with it. But as Alastair Fowler would point out, annotating the same verses in Paradise Lost, “the shade revolves irrespectively of whether the system followed is geocentric or heliocentric; in the former case the motion will be diurnal, in the latter annual.”Footnote 16 Here again, however, an important observation appeared in a format unlikely to reach a wider audience, as a parenthetical remark in one of hundreds of footnotes in Fowler’s extensively annotated edition of the poem. Fowler did not engage with the question of the shift itself and the topic remained dormant for almost half a century, with very few authors touching on it, and none advancing it further.Footnote 17
Here the story takes an unexpected turn. Tracing the critical reception of Milton’s universe, John Leonard revisits and refines the ideas put forward by Lewis and Fowler.Footnote 18 He also pauses, however, to reflect on a curious passage in David Masson’s (1822–1907) classic biography of Milton. “Our imagination of the physical cosmos,” writes Masson in the work’s sixth volume, published in 1880,
is that of an absolute, boundless, ocean of azure space, pervaded by stars and starry archipelagos. We cannot by any effort send our imaginations completely round it…. By a daring act, we may, in our fatigue, refuse to imagine the starred portion of space as boundless; but then all we can do is to conceive the enormous sphere of blue in which our astronomy hangs as backed and surrounded by a still outer shell of blackness, which must itself be infinite…. This is the conception of the cosmos to which we are habituated by the teachings of modern science.Footnote 19
An “enormous sphere of blue”? What is Lewis’s discarded image doing in an educated Victorian imagination as late as 1880? Masson’s universe is clearly uncentered and unbounded, but why is it divided into a “starry portion” and an “outer shell of blackness”? And why is the “starry portion” still imagined to be bright, and specifically bright blue? How is it possible for Masson to believe that such a cosmology represents “the teachings of modern science”? Is he simply a cosmological illiterate, unrepresentative of the wider opinion of his time? Or might his comments be indicative of not only a major transformation in our experience of the universe but also one which, at least in the popular imagination, occurred much later than previously suspected?
When did space turn dark? And, in particular, when did space turn dark in the popular as opposed to the educated imagination? However important, the work of protoscientific and scientific thinkers only establishes the baseline for gauging the shift’s wider cultural impact, where the relevant perspectives in the history of science need to be supplemented by those in literary history, art history, and cultural and intellectual history at large. The following two sections of this article draw on all these domains, surveying textual and visual sources extending from the ancient Mediterranean to the First Space Age, to provide the first comprehensive outline of this development. The discussion then returns to Milton’s Paradise Lost to illustrate the significance of the shift in engaging with the poem’s cosmological imagination, and with premodern literature and culture in general.
BRIGHT UNIVERSES
To begin with, is it really true? Did premodern Europeans genuinely believe in a bright universe? This is certainly what Milton believed, and what is strongly implied in Dante, but are these merely poetic fictions or are they representative of premodern thought? As the ensuing pages will show, the latter is unquestionably the case, although an important caveat must be kept in mind. Namely, unambiguous acceptance of dark space is encountered at least as early as the ninth century in Arabic science, and Arabic sources influence at least some European thinkers, such as Ristoro d’Arezzo (fl. 1282) and, via Ristoro, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519).Footnote 20 However, this influence seems to have been limited and cannot be traced beyond Leonardo. Further work may find more dots to connect here, but on the present evidence, dark space had to be rediscovered by later European thinkers, with the first unambiguous statements appearing in the mid-seventeenth century. The story that emerges is thus more complex than envisaged by Lewis and Leonard, but is still, in its European segment, broadly the same story.
The earliest potentially relevant statements emerge in ancient Greece. Typically, however, these are incidental remarks in passages dealing with other topics, and thus very difficult to evaluate. What, for example, of the reported view of Empedocles (ca. 490–30 BCE) that “the earth makes the night by opposing [the sun’s] rays”?Footnote 21 Clearly Empedocles attributes the exchange of day and night to perceived movements of heavenly bodies, but does he understand that night is the norm and day the anomaly? Or does the fact that night has to be “made” mean precisely the opposite? What of Plato’s (428/7–348/7 BCE) description of Earth as “the wardress and fashioner of night and day”?Footnote 22 Here again the exchange is attributed to the Sun’s perceived revolution around the Earth, but how does Plato imagine the backdrop, so to speak, against which the exchange takes place? Later on, Ptolemy (second century CE) instructs that the color of an astronomical globe should be “somewhat deep, so as to resemble, not the daytime, but rather the nighttime sky, in which the stars actually appear.”Footnote 23 If Ptolemy accepted dark space, would he have not simply written that the globe should be dark because that is what the universe, beyond the local effects of Earth’s atmosphere, is really like? Could not his sentence be construed as suggesting the opposite—that the darkness of the night sky is only the state in which the stars “appear,” rather than in which they actually are?
All three passages, among others, can be construed to support bright space, yet none is entirely without ambiguity. One ancient passage, however, explicitly states the belief. Refuting mistaken opinions about the nature of the Milky Way, Aristotle (384–22 BCE) explains that
astronomical researches have now shown that the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and that the stars are far farther away than the sun from the earth, just as the sun is farther than the moon from the earth: therefore the vertex of the cone formed by the rays of the sun will not fall very far from the earth, nor will the earth’s shadow (which we call night) reach the stars.Footnote 24
Aristotle’s astronomy is indeed correct in outline: our planet does cast a conical shadow extending more than twice as far as the Moon, but far short of even the nearest planet, let alone the nearest stars. Aristotle’s modern reader knows, however, that without any perceptible objects for it to fall on—other than, periodically, the Moon—the shadow itself is invisible, and the sky seen on a cloudless and moonless night is essentially no different than space as such. Does Aristotle know that? What is one to deduce from his parenthetical remark, not strictly required by the argument: “the earth’s shadow (which we call night)”? To say that night is Earth’s shadow can only mean that the space outside of it is not-night—that it is day. And this is technically correct, of course, if by day and night we simply mean the presence and absence of sunlight at regular intervals. In this sense, there is day and night even where there is no atmosphere and, therefore, no change in the perceived color of the sky. The question, however, is not whether Aristotle understands, as he clearly does, that the portion of the heavens beyond the shadow is illuminated, but how he imagines its appearance. Does he imagine it simply as the blue day sky seen on Earth? Does he imagine it as bright but not necessarily blue? Is there a difference between how he imagines illuminated space in the sublunary as opposed to the superlunary realm?
All these questions would merit further discussion, yet the key phrase—“the earth’s shadow (which we call night)”—must denote bright-space belief, and was so understood in later antiquity. By this point, the idea begins to appear even in works of literary criticism, such as the Homeric Problems of Heraclitus (fl. ca. 100). Here Heraclitus discusses a verse from the Odyssey referring to certain islands as thoai, an adjective which normally means “swift”: “From there again he”—Telemachus on his return to Ithaca—“steered for the swift [thoēisin] islands.”Footnote 25 But how could islands be “swift”? This was a crux already in antiquity and commentators proposed that as used here, thoos meant “pointed” rather than “swift”: thus, among others, Strabo (ca. 62 BCE–24 CE), arguing that “by ‘thoai’ the poet means the islands that are ‘pointed,’” identifying them as the Echinades.Footnote 26 From this, Heraclitus further argues that the same meaning extends to Homer’s references to night as thoē. Contrary to the established reading, these do not mean “swift” but “pointed” night, demonstrating the poet’s knowledge of the relative sizes of the Sun and the Earth, the Earth’s spherical shape, the conical shape of its shadow, and the equation of night with that shadow:
[Homer] had no intention of saying anything about the speed of firmly rooted islands (that would be absurd) but only about their shape, which produces a line terminating in an acute angle. So night could reasonably be called thoē, because the extreme end of its shadow ends in a sharp point.
In scientific terms, this passage demonstrates that the universe [i.e., the world; kosmos] is spherical. Mathematicians tell us that the shapes of shadows fall in three ways…. When the source of light is greater than the area it illuminates, the shadow is in the shape of a cone, narrowing down from a broad beginning to its slender end…. Homer therefore, wishing to show anyway that the sun is larger than the earth, as most philosophers think, very reasonably called the night thoē because it terminates in a sharp point at the end…. Homer was the first to suggest this, and the hint given by this one word cuts short the innumerable disputes of the philosophers.Footnote 27
Originally misattributed to a much earlier thinker, the astronomer Heraclides of Pontus (ca. 390–after 322 BCE), the Homeric Problems first reached print as part of an Aldine collection of 1505, with a separate edition, including a Latin translation by the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner (1516–65), appearing in Basel in 1544.Footnote 28 Milton’s annotated copy of Gessner’s edition survives, and it is no surprise to find the quoted passage treated with particular interest: the only passage Milton marks in all of the Latin translation as well as the only passage he marks in both the Greek and the Latin (fig. 1). This is likely the germ of those arresting images of the conical shadow in Paradise Lost: Milton probably thought of them as an erudite imitation of Homer, as explicated by what he believed to be one of the most ancient surviving authorities on both Homeric poetry and cosmology.
Figure 1. Milton marks the quoted passage in his copy of Heraclitus, 1544, sigs. e4r, l1r–v, now at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 881 H2151544.
There is no need, however, to posit a specific source for the general idea, which persists throughout later antiquity and beyond. “All the space above the moon,” writes Pliny (23/49–79), “is clear and filled with continual light, but to us the stars are visible through the night in the same way as other lights in shadows.”Footnote 29 “[T]he earth’s shadow,” writes Macrobius (fl. ca. 400), “creat[es] on earth the darkness called night”; “by cutting off the light, [it] causes darkness to fall back upon the earth.”Footnote 30 Proclus (412–85) comments on the quoted passage from the Timaeus:
[the Earth] is such as to create night, for it produces the cone, since its shadow is the cone and its size and shape give the shadow such a size and such a shape…. The Earth, therefore, is the creator for both [day and night] when it jointly produces these things that are so conjoined in collaboration with the Sun—though the Sun is to a greater extent the cause of day, while Earth is the cause of night.Footnote 31
This final qualification in particular shows that Proclus is imagining a bright universe, for if one were to use his language to express the dark-space view, one would say precisely the opposite: that Earth is to a greater extent the cause of day, an effect specific to its atmosphere.
It is clear, then, that at least some ancient authors imagined space as bright, and their work remained influential throughout European premodernity. To take only a single example of this continuity, Aristotle’s passage is echoed by Pliny, who is echoed by Bede (672/3–735), who is one of the sources for Bartholomeus Anglicus’s (fl. ca. 1220–50) On the Properties of Things (ca. 1240), which is translated into English by John Trevisa (ca. 1340–1402) in the 1390s, and additionally adapted by Stephen Batman (1542–84) in 1582: “in Ethere,” Elizabethans could still read here, “is day euerlasting, no night commeth after day light, and no wonder: for the shadowe of the earth, which is cause of the night, commeth not in so high a place.”Footnote 32 The belief persists throughout the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a poem by Edmund Spenser (ca. 1522–99), a personification of Fame ascends “Above the reach of ruinous decay / And with brave plumes doth beate the azure skie.”Footnote 33 “[S]able night the azure skies shall hide,” writes Edward Fairfax (ca. 1568–ca. 1632/5), translating Torquato Tasso (1544–95): space remains azure at night, only temporarily obscured to our view.Footnote 34 “Come, thick night,” bids Lady Macbeth,
The penultimate verse has troubled generations of commentators, yet the image is entirely appropriate for night as understood in the period—and is again reminiscent of ancient sources, including the description of the Milky Way by Manilius (fl. ca. 14), “shin[ing] like a glowing path in the dark-blue of the heavens, as though it would suddenly open up the sky and let forth the light of day.”Footnote 36 Hester Pulter (ca. 1605–78) sends her thoughts on a tour of the solar system, “Above the gloomy shades of death and night.”Footnote 37 Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81) recounts how “Th’all-forming Word stretched out the firmament / Like azure curtains round his glorious tent.”Footnote 38
Hutchinson’s verses offer one common explanation for space being not just bright but specifically bright blue: the firmament was blue in color and in looking up at the day sky one is simply looking at the ceiling of the universe and the floor of the Empyreal Heaven above it. As James Howell (ca. 1594–1666) more explicitly puts it, it is the “Heaven Chrystalline / which by [its] watry hue / Do’st temper and refine / The rest in azurd blue”—simultaneously comprising, in the words of Thomas White (1592/93–1676), “those azure floors the Angels tread.”Footnote 39 Elsewhere, Nicholas Gibbens (fl. 1601–02) states explicitly what his contemporaries usually take for granted—namely, that air itself can be shadowed: “one halfe [of the Earth] onely at one time, can behold the brightnes of the Sunne, the other halfe being shadowed by the compasse of the whole, which also shadoweth the ayre neere about it, and must needes thereby be depriued of light.”Footnote 40 This explains how one could believe that night is the planet’s shadow and that, viewed from beyond its reach, the shadow would itself be visible. Elsewhere still, there is debate on the shadow’s length. Does it extend to the sphere of the Moon (Pliny), or the Sun (Macrobius), or Mercury (Philoponus [ca. 490–575]), or Venus (Dante), or perhaps fails even to reach the Moon, as rather implausibly reported by Domingo Gonsales, the space traveler of Francis Godwin’s (1562–1633) Man in the Moone (1638):
The Clouds I perceived to be all under me, between me and the earth. The starres, by reason it was alwaies day, I saw at all times alike, not shining bright, as upon the earth we are wont to see them in the night time; but of a whitish Colour, like that of the Moone in the day time with us: And such of them as were to be seene (which were not many) shewed farre greater then with us…. As for the Moone being then within two daies of the change, she appeared of a huge and fearful quantitie.Footnote 41
This passage shows how deeply ingrained the notion was even with authors whose astronomy was as rudimentary as Godwin’s—for obviously, if it was “alwaies day” already at this altitude, Earth’s shadow would not reach the Moon, ruling out the correct explanation, known since antiquity, of lunar eclipses. With more space at disposal, other relevant topics could be discussed: for example, biblical accounts of light and “the waters above the firmament,” or the developing understanding of Earth’s atmosphere.Footnote 42
Bright-space belief then continues alongside emergent dark-space belief throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and into the early twentieth century. It is to be noted, however, that the final instances in the collected evidence appear only in religious writings or writings of authors with a prominent religious profile. In 1894, an American rabbi still believes that what he sees at night is the same “azure space” he sees at day, merely “dyed black by night,” as do some minor Christian poets of the 1900s and 1910s.Footnote 43 The most recent example is from 1927, and it is no coincidence that it comes from a Miltonist, Martin A. Larson, commenting on Raphael’s “one first matter all” speech in Paradise Lost: the poem’s key statement of the monism Milton adopted by the later 1650s, distinguishing between such notions as body and soul only as degrees on a continuum of material existence. This applies to all creation, including the unfallen Adam and Eve, to whom Raphael promises that their bodies
“In all sober earnest,” Larson comments, “is it really unreasonable to believe that man, who has, as science tells us, developed from a little mass of quivering jelly, may, with a lesser further evolution, be able to throw off the dross of his material body and sail upon the depths of azure blue?”Footnote 45 As the context makes clear, Larson’s “depths of azure blue” are not merely the day sky as seen from Earth. They are still, on the doorstep of the Space Age, the same bright blue universe that Lewis presumed to have been discarded three centuries earlier. This, however, would seem to be about as late as one may expect to find it in educated Western sources, and it seems significant that Larson was, in his own words, “reared in a highly fundamentalist religious denomination,” rejecting its “dogmas and practices” less than a decade before writing the quoted passage.Footnote 46 Bright space could have survived longer in such closed communities, religious or otherwise, and perhaps longer still in the uneducated and less educated strata of early twentieth-century society.
Finally in this section, there are also visual representations of bright blue universes. These must be treated with caution since many clearly do not aim at any level of realism, and since, from about the twelfth century onward, the color blue becomes associated with divinity in European visual culture.Footnote 47 In part, then, this is a chicken-and-egg problem: is the universe painted blue because the color symbolizes divinity, or does blue symbolize divinity because it is the imagined color of the heavens, where divinity is traditionally assumed to reside? Here also further work is needed, but with at least some blue universes encountered in premodern European art, the simplest explanation is that they reflect their authors’ genuine belief in such a universe. This is presumably the case with at least some depictions of Earth as a dark planet in the center of blue universes (figs. 2 and 3), including of its shadow extending into such universes (figs. 4 and 5), with isolated instances again persisting at least until the later nineteenth century (fig. 6).
Figure 2. The black marble: Earth, “without form, and void,” in a bright blue universe, surrounded by “the waters…above the firmament” (Genesis 1:2, 7; KJV). Book of Hours of Louis de Laval, France, fifteenth century, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS Latin 920, fol. 3r, detail. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Figure 3. Jan Provoost (?), Sacred Allegory, ca. 1475–1525, oil on wood, 50.5 × 40 cm, Louvre, Paris, RF 1973 44, https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010061903. Musée du Louvre and Tony Querrec, 2017.
Figure 4. Manuscript of William of Conches’s De philosophia mundi, France, ca. 1277. J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig XV 4, fol. 150r, detail.
Figure 5. Peter Apian, Astronomicum Caesareum (Ingolstadt: Apian, 1540), sig. H3r; cf. title page, sigs. F3r, H4r, I1r. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Figure 6. Anaxagoras holding a light blue celestial sphere. Eduard Lebiedzki after Carl Rahl, Philosophers of Athens, detail, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 1888. Artwork in the public domain. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
DARK UNIVERSES
As already mentioned, dark space was accepted by Arabic thinkers as early as the ninth century. This is unambiguously the case in al-Kindi’s (ca. 800–70) essay “regarding the cause of the azure-blue color which is seen in the atmosphere in the direction of the sky and which is considered to be the color of the sky”:
The shadowy air above us is visible by that what the light of the Earth and the light of stars intermingle into a colour in the middle of shadow and light and this is the azure-blue colour.
So it has become evident that this colour is not the colour of the sky, but only something which is exposed to our sight when light and shade encounter it.Footnote 48
Al-Kindi’s student al-Sarakhsi (ca. 835–99) not only accepted this but apparently argued that from the tops of high mountains the sky would appear black even in daytime.Footnote 49 “It is known,” writes al-Biruni (973–after 1050), “that the air which fills up the heavens is transparent, and so the light in it is not perceived.”Footnote 50 Al-Biruni also specifically argues that the night is not the Earth’s shadow, unseen except in lunar eclipses, and dismisses al-Sarakhsi’s claim on both theoretical and empirical grounds, having himself climbed Mount Davamand and seen no black space from it.Footnote 51 By the thirteenth century, al-Qarafi (1228–85) treats this as a commonplace:
Question: Why is the sky blue, when according to the astronomers it has no color?
Answer: One does not see the sky at all, and what we don’t see, we see as dark [without color]…. And so the sky is black, and under it is the air, which is transparent and luminous. Our gaze penetrates the air and sees it against the sky, so to speak…. Thus, the blue color (lazward) results from the purity of the air and the darkness of the sky, for we are dealing here with the mixture of the black and the pure.Footnote 52
Arabic tradition is behind the explicit endorsement of dark space in Ristoro d’Arezzo’s Composition of the World, the earliest such instance in a Western source in the collected evidence. “According to the statements of the scholars,” Ristoro writes, “the sky is actually supposed to be colorless,” and, consequently, dark to human sight.Footnote 53 The blue day sky results from sunlight “mixing” with its darkness: “When I look at the [day] sky and gaze with my own eyes on this darkness that lies beyond the light, I see how the light mixes with the dark along the way, like muddy water when it rises up into the clear water above. And to the eye, the result of this mixture of dark and light is the colour blue.”Footnote 54
Ristoro’s treatise would not reach print until the nineteenth century, but it found a sympathetic reader in Leonardo da Vinci, who follows it on this point:
The blue of air arises from the thick body of illuminated air between the tenebrous [region] above and the earth. Air by itself does not have the qualities of odors or flavors or colors, but grabs onto the similitudes of things that issue from them. The blue will be more beautiful the greater the tenebrous [region] behind it, as long as the distance is not too great nor the humidity too high.Footnote 55
Leonardo’s notebooks contain further comments on the subject, including an account of empirically testing the theory during an ascent of the Alpine massif Monte Rosa around 1505–15. Unlike al-Biruni four centuries earlier, Leonardo claims that he did see “above me the dark air…because less thickness of air is interposed between the summit of this mountain and the sun.”Footnote 56 This observation, however, would remain unprinted until modern times, and even the posthumously compiled Treatise on Painting, which includes the previously quoted passage, would not appear until 1651, by which point dark space was being independently rediscovered by European thinkers. Ristoro’s and Leonardo’s writings circulated in manuscript, but their impact appears to have been very limited. The basic premise of a paradigm shift thus remains justified, although it fails to map neatly onto a premodern/modern or a Western/non-Western divide. Some dark-space belief is encountered already in premodernity, but this only makes the persistence of bright-space belief more remarkable, and returns us to the central question at hand: once accepted by protoscientific and scientific European thinkers, when does dark space enter the wider popular imagination?
As already noted, Lewis erroneously assumed that bright space was tied to geocentrism. The argument reappears in a recent study by Craig Koslofsky: “The new astronomy explained that the rotation of the earth on its axis produces day and night, but it also implied another kind of night: the endless darkness of space.”Footnote 57 In support, Koslofsky quotes passages from Georg Rheticus’s (1514–74) Narratio prima (1540): “by [rotation], the terrestrial globe produces day and night and the changing appearances of the heavens, accordingly as it is turned toward the sun”; and Copernicus’s (1473–1543) On the Revolutions (1543): “the revolution of day and night…belong[s] wholly and immanently to the terrestrial globe.”Footnote 58 These passages certainly bear out the first and uncontroversial part of Koslofsky’s claim—that rotation explained the exchange of day and night—but they do not show how this “implied” a dark universe. Elsewhere in the Revolutions, Copernicus is more explicit than most: “while the rest of the universe is bright and full of daylight, night is clearly nothing but the earth’s shadow, which extends in the shape of the cone and ends in a point.”Footnote 59 Similarly with Koslofsky’s reading of the famous remark by Blaise Pascal (1623–62): “thrown into crisis by the thought of a polycentric and infinite universe of darkness…. Pascal cried out that ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’”Footnote 60 The quoted words say nothing about whether Pascal imagined space as bright or dark. Elsewhere, describing the Sun as “that brilliant light set like an eternal lamp to illuminate the universe,” he sounds closer to the former view.Footnote 61
Koslofsky also discusses interesting passages from the work of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), such as the following from Boehme’s Aurora:
People have always supposed that the heavens were many hundreds or thousands of miles from this earth and that God dwells alone there as in heaven. …
Indeed, prior to the knowledge and revelation I write of, I myself considered the true heaven to be nothing other than the one that closes us in with its round circle, bright blue and high above the stars. I was of the opinion that there and there alone God possessed his peculiar being, ruling by the power of his Holy Spirit in the world here below.Footnote 62
Koslofsky reads this and other passages in Boehme as distinguishing between a bright Ptolemaic and a dark Copernican universe.Footnote 63 However, Boehme is here contrasting the traditional idea of the Empyreal Heaven, extending beyond the bounded universe, with a nonlocal Heaven imperceptible to human sense.Footnote 64 This is made additionally clear elsewhere in Aurora, where the bright blue realm is identified as “the upper water of nature” (an extrapolation, clearly, from the biblical “waters above the firmament,” but placed in the supralunar region):
You cannot see heaven with your physical eyes. The blue sphere you see in the heights is not the heaven. It is only the old body that can properly be called corrupt nature. But its appearance, as if there were a blue sphere above the stars by which the place of this world were shut off from heaven, which people have thought until now, is not correct. What they see is the upper water of nature which is much brighter than that beneath the moon. When the sun shines through the depths, it appears bright blue.Footnote 65
Far from rejecting the blue cosmos, then, Boehme even provides an original explanation for why it is blue. In principle, heliocentrism made no difference here, as we find with another mystically inclined seventeenth-century Copernican, Henry More (1614–87), for whom space likewise remains “the azure Orb,” “azure skie / …from Saturn to the Sunne,” “this azure round,” “that Circle blue.”Footnote 66
Two other astronomical developments have been proposed as dispelling bright space: Olbers’s paradox and telescopic observation. In 1576, Thomas Digges (1546–95) proposed what is evidently the earliest modern model of an unbound universe, accepting the heliocentric system of Copernicus but expanding the sphere of fixed stars into infinitude.Footnote 67 Functionally, this realm retained the role of the old Empyreal Heaven, being the abode of God, angels, and blessed souls, but was now part of the universe rather than beyond it. Digges further argues that of this infinity of stars, “we onely behoulde sutch as are in the inferioure partes,” the rest being “by reason of their wonderfull distance inuisible vnto vs.”Footnote 68 Commenting on this, William Poole argues that Digges “realized that the darkness of night is not just a consequence of the earth’s shadow, and that space was itself usually dark. He explained this presuming that starlight was too feeble to fill the whole sky with light.”Footnote 69 Since Digges never explicitly raises the topic of the perceived color of space—or such related topics as the nature of night and the role of Earth’s shadow—Poole must mean that dark space is implicit in or entailed by his argument about the visibility of stars, but this is not the case. Adherents of bright and dark space both see the same night sky and both can posit the same universe as Digges, ask the same question of it, and arrive at the same answer. The only difference between them—their explanation of why the night sky is dark—is irrelevant to the argument and cannot be inferred from it. Digges’s “Description” does not include sufficient information to deduce his position with certainty, but like Copernicus, he sounds closer to bright-space belief: for example, when he describes our Sun as “spherically dispears[ing] his glorious beames of light through al this sacred Coelestial Temple,” and still more so when he writes of his starry outer space as “GARNISHED WITH PERPETVALL SHINING GLORIOVS LIGHTES INNVMERABLE FARR EXCELLINGE OVR SONNE BOTH IN QVANTITYE AND QVALITYE.”Footnote 70
Edward Harrison has cited Digges’s view as the earliest instance of what would later, after the work of Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840), become known as Olbers’s paradox: in a universe filled with an infinity of stars—or at least a number sufficiently large for any line of sight directed at the sky to terminate in the surface of a star—why do we not experience the sky simply as a uniform expanse of starlight?Footnote 71 What applies to Digges applies to Olbers’s paradox more generally. The topic is a distraction in the present context, but one which should be briefly addressed, especially because the paradox is now often posed as the question of why the sky is dark at night. Olbers’s paradox does manifest itself most acutely at night, when unimpeded light of infinite or sufficiently numerous stars should be reaching the terrestrial observer undimmed by that of the Sun. However, posing it in these terms is potentially misleading, because for the modern thinker the question of why the sky is dark at night extends seamlessly into that of why the universe is dark at all times, as there is essentially no difference between the two. Harrison makes this leap already in the opening paragraph of his book:
Why is the sky dark at night? The answer to this old and celebrated riddle seems deceptively simple: The Sun has set and now shines on the other side of the Earth. But suppose we were space-travelers and far from any star. Out in the depths of space the heavens would be dark, even darker than the sky seen from the Earth on cloudless, moonless nights. The riddle becomes: Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?Footnote 72
This is how Olbers’s paradox presents itself only to one who already takes dark space as granted. Again, however, the only prerequisite for posing the paradox is the idea of a universe filled with an infinite or sufficiently large number of stars, and it is perfectly possible to entertain that idea while believing in a normally bright universe.
Harrison offers a different explanation for the decline of such a universe: “The invention of the telescope at the dawn of the scientific age destroyed the old belief in celestial light and plunged the heavens into darkness.”Footnote 73 No argument is provided for this claim, and it is hard to see what it might be. The telescope helps one look further into the darkness, but how does it help one determine whether one is, as Lewis put it, looking at it or looking through it? Further inquiry into astronomical sources is another desideratum in any future work on the shift. In principle, however, it does not seem that the new astronomy alone could dispel bright space or was even interested in this question, which makes no practical difference to astronomical observation and calculation, and does not appear among topics studied in twelfth- to seventeenth-century astronomy and cosmology.Footnote 74 The key lies not in correctly understanding the structure of the universe, or seeing further into it, or the issues raised by Olbers’s paradox. It lies in comprehending or at least intuiting the nature of Earth’s atmosphere and the space beyond it, and eventually, in going up there and seeing for yourself. Otherwise, there is no reason—not physical and especially not metaphysical—to suspect that daylight is the anomaly and darkness the norm, and every reason to assume the opposite. Without compelling evidence to the contrary, what reason did a premodern Christian have to believe that the heavens, which centuries of both learned and popular tradition handed down to them as a realm of eternal light, were really a realm of eternal darkness?
On the present evidence, European thinkers begin to rediscover dark space in the seventeenth century. An interesting transitional case is presented by the work of the English atomist Walter Charleton (1619–1707), explicitly directed against those who believe that the blue day sky derives from the blue color of the firmament, a view held “not only by vulgar, but many transcendently learned Heads.”Footnote 75 The day sky is blue because space is filled with “swarms of minute bodies” and when exposed to sunlight it acts like a gigantic prism, “produc[ing] a Cærule Tincture.”Footnote 76 Moreover, the very fact that the day sky is perceived as blue proves the firmament is not blue. If the firmament was blue, the sky would, “by reason of the vast Space betwixt [the firmament] and our sight, and the repercussion of the greatest part of the rayes of Light, from our eye, by those Myriads of Myriads of Myriads of small bodies replenishing that intermediate Space, necessarily appear of some other colour.”Footnote 77 It is the night sky that holds the clue to the color of the firmament, as Charleton further argues in his discussion of light, explaining why the night sky is dark in spite of the vast space beyond Earth’s shadow being illuminated:
Not that we deny the necessary reflection of many of the Luminous rayes proceeding from the Sun, by those myriads of myriads of particles floating in the Atmosphere; and so the remission of them back again toward their source, and the consequent diminution of the shadow invironing the same: but that we conceive the proportion of rayes so diverted, to be so small, as to be much below the observation of our sense…. Thus also in the night are we no whit relieved by the aer, or Æther surrunding our Horizon, or more properly, our Hemisphere beyond that region, to which the Cone of the Earths shadow extends: though the Sun doth as freely and copiously diffuse its light through all that vast Ocean of Aer, or Æther beyond the extent of the Earths shadow…: which could not be, if any sensible proportion of light were reflected toward us by the particles of the Aer, or Æther, replenishing the subcælestial space. Hence comes it, that what Light remains to our Hemisphere in the night, ought to be referred, not to any Reflection of the Suns rayes from the sublime aer, or Æther; but to the Stars, or Moon, or both. And this is also no contemptible argument, that the Concave of the Firmament is Opace, and not azure, as most suppose.Footnote 78
The blue effect is created only by sunrays traveling in the observer’s direction, whereas at night they travel away from the observer, with most terminating in the firmament. If the firmament was reflective, many of these rays would travel back to us and we would experience night as a dimmed version of day, whatever the color effect would be. Because this is empirically not the case, the appearance of the night sky shows that the firmament is unreflective and therefore pitch black to human sight. Charleton thus goes about as far as possible toward accepting dark space without actually crossing that threshold. His space is neither bright nor dark, its perceived color depending on the orientation of the observer, changing from bright blue to pitch black as the observer turns toward and away from the Sun.
After Leonardo da Vinci, the earliest instance in the collected evidence of a European author categorically accepting dark space appears in the Magdeburg Experiments (1672) of Otto von Guericke (1602–86). Comparing Guericke’s view to Charleton’s, one sees at least two major differences conducive to this position. First, Guericke’s universe is unbounded and he is not distracted by factoring into his thinking a nonexistent firmament. Second, the “ether” that fills Guericke’s unbounded universe is not composed of myriads of atoms, or of any other matter, but is simply “pure,” “empty” space, and in such space, where “no body is present, there can be no friction causing brightness or light.”Footnote 79 Consequently, “if a person were standing alone in the atmosphere and there was no body lighted by the sun either underneath or before him, he would see nothing other than shadow unless he turned around and looked at the sun.”Footnote 80 This also explains the blue color of the day sky, which
has its source in black and white, for at the point where air is devoid of the most rarefied aqueous humors and is absolutely pure, there the white ends and the black begins…. At the mid-point between black and white, the cerulean color comes into existence, just as a drop of milk and a drop of ink set next to one another mingle and produce the cerulean color at their point of contact.Footnote 81
Indeed, so convinced is Guericke of the purely optical nature of the day sky that he even argues that “if someone were positioned at the bottom of a well sufficiently deep that all reflections of light ceased, he would experience the shadows of night there and consequently would see the stars of the heavens even at mid-day.”Footnote 82
One can thus assume growing awareness of dark space among scientifically minded European thinkers from about the mid-seventeenth century onward. However, bright space appears to have been still widely accepted in the eighteenth century. In a work aimed at the general audience of the period, the German theologian Christoph Christian Sturm (1740–86) writes:
To judge simply by our senses, we might imagine the sky over our heads a great vault painted blue…. [S]uch an idea could hardly be formed but by the common people and children; yet there are many people who think themselves superior to those, who form very absurd notions of the sky and its blue appearance by day…. If we could rise as high as pure æther, …the sky would seem to us as black as at night; for all objects that do not transmit to us any rays of light appear so…. Our air is full of little particles, which, when lighted by the sun, receive a motion, which produces new rays; and these particles, though dark in themselves, become visible to us when lighted up. Their colour is blue.Footnote 83
Another century later, the transformation is still far from complete. In 1858, the Scottish minister, cartographer, and astronomer James Gall (1808–95) imagines ascending into space in daytime, and comments: “We look around, and oh, how strange! the heavens are black—blacker than night; although the sun, unchanged in disc, pours his cool light in rays of terrible intensity.”Footnote 84 Gall knows space is black but still expects his audience to find this “oh, how strange!” to imagine. Gall even includes an illustration of “Earth as Seen from the Moon,” whose modest execution, along with its mistaken idea about the visual effect of Earth’s atmosphere, should not blind us to its historical significance, being one of the first attempts at a realistic visual representation of Earth as a blue planet in black space (fig. 7).Footnote 85 Gall’s estimation of his audience agrees with other statements from the period. Victorian readers of Paradise Lost take note of the poem’s bright universe without finding it worthy of comment, presumably because, like David Masson, they themselves still believe in it.Footnote 86 A reader of Plato similarly observes without comment that the philosopher imagines “the earth hung like a dark ball in the midst of an azure universe.”Footnote 87 “Tell us the history of the stars,” a poet asks a comet: “Of those bright orbs that shine afar, / In azure realms.”Footnote 88
Figure 7. Gall, facing p. 40. Gall believes that, seen from space, Earth’s atmosphere would not be transparent, with “a gauzy envelope of bright azure blue” obscuring the view of the planet’s surface (Gall, 38–39). Author’s personal collection.
Elsewhere, however, there are definite signs of change. In 1873, a description similar to Gall’s appears in a work by the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke (1810–88):
If we could go out into space…we should find ourselves surrounded by an abyss of darkness; night above, below, around; night everywhere, with its myriad stars. The sun is on one side, burning, an intense globe of light,—too intense to look at,—but no blue sky, no reflected light, no gradations of sunrise and sunset, of half-seen objects. Nothing is anywhere but the brightest light and the blackest darkness.Footnote 89
The language is still elevated and there is still a sense that Clarke is providing an account of something that is not common knowledge, but there is nothing quite as emphatic as Gall’s “oh, how strange!—the heavens are black.” This is also the period when the science of the blue day sky is near-conclusively explained in the work of John William Strutt (1842–1919), clarifying the phenomenon now known, after Strutt’s baronial title, as the Rayleigh scattering.Footnote 90 Leonard cautiously conjectures that this was the principal impulse behind the shift, but Strutt was merely refining what was already a matter of common knowledge, at least among scientists.Footnote 91 As he notes in his first paper on the subject, “that the light which we receive from the clear sky is due in one way or another to small suspended particles which divert the light from its regular course” is already “generally admitted”—the question was not of whether this was the case but of how precisely it worked.Footnote 92
Another relevant development is the increasing convergence between real and imaginary space exploration, starting with the era of crewed high-altitude ballooning between the 1920s and 1960s.Footnote 93 Going back to the quotation from Lewis’s 1964 Discarded Image, it is of interest that this section of the book is based on an earlier, 1956 talk which Lewis gave to the Cambridge Zoological Society. Rethinking the premodern cosmos for an audience of scientists rather than humanists, Lewis includes details he later omits, such as the observation that “we have even, in stratospheric ascents, gone high enough to see the blue curtain grow thin at the zenith so that blue turns to black and the night of space almost shows through.”Footnote 94 Here Lewis must be referring to what was, at the time of writing, the record-holding balloon flight of the US Army’s Explorer II, which reached the height of twenty-two kilometers on 11 November 1935. “[T]he sky was very dark,” reads the report in National Geographic, “almost black, with the merest suggestion of dark blue.”Footnote 95 In turn, the passage in the 1956 lecture itself partly derives from a still earlier, nonscholarly work by Lewis. Not long after Explorer II made the news, he began writing his first science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, whose protagonist finds himself drugged and abducted, waking up on a spaceship flying away from the Earth. Apprehensive at first, he soon comes to embrace the experience:
A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam…. No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the
happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky.
He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.Footnote 96
It is thus no accident that it is precisely Lewis who first takes note of the bright premodern cosmos. This makes perfect sense in terms of his profile, as unusual now as it was then: a professional scholar of premodern European literature and culture who was at the same time a practicing science fiction author, closely attuned to the relevant scientific and technological developments of the day.
Space exploration then accelerates dramatically after World War II, with major breakthroughs already in the 1940s and 1950s. For instance, the report of another record-setting balloon flight—Strato-Lab 1, piloted by Malcolm D. Ross and M. Lee Lewis, reaching twenty-three kilometers on 7 November 1956—explicitly recorded that “this was the first time that the sky overhead was seen as black.”Footnote 97 This milestone, however—humans first seeing with their own eyes the blackness of space in daytime—has apparently gone unnoticed even in specialized histories of the subject. The first black-and-white photographs of Earth from space were taken as early as 1946—by the US military, employing cameras mounted on captured V-2 rockets—and published to great fanfare in the American press. Along with other early images, however, they failed to capture the popular imagination.Footnote 98 This has been attributed to their inferior quality, certainly in reproduction if not in the original. More likely, however, they lacked what is for many people a much more important attribute: that same “human interest” that Samuel Johnson found “want[ing]” in Paradise Lost two centuries earlier.Footnote 99
Animals were being launched into space by the 1940s: fruit flies at first but eventually mammals one could empathize with, most famously Laika, whose 1957 flight entered popular culture far beyond the Iron Curtain. Yet it was another level entirely to send humans up there and have images of their experiences, all unfolding against that vast black curtain, flood the mass media and the culture at large. Here again there are indicative developments already by the close of the balloon era, notably with the double-record flight and parachute jump performed on 16 August 1960 by Joe Kittinger of the US Air Force’s Project Excelsior, making the cover of Life magazine (fig. 8). At thirty-one kilometers above the planet’s surface, eight more than Ross and Lewis reached back in 1956, Kittinger reported “a frightening first-hand view of space, applying equally to Americans and to the Russians. ‘There is a hostile sky above me,’ he said. ‘Man may live in space, but he will never conquer it.’”Footnote 100 This remark, however, is the single deviation from Life’s unabashedly partisan, pro-American coverage, celebrating the nation’s “new space hero” and focusing on the human aspect of the mission.Footnote 101 Kittinger looked upward, seeing the blue summer skies over the New Mexico desert fade into a freezing black void, but the cameras on his gondola were pointed downward, aiming to capture “some of the most exciting pictures of a man’s daring ever made.”Footnote 102
Figure 8. Joseph Kittinger jumps from Excelsior III on 16 August 1960. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. An image of Kittinger mid-fall appeared on the cover of Life magazine, 29 August 1960.
Soon, however, the two would appear in the same frame. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, followed by the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. Gagarin’s memoir provides the first eyewitness account of what so many previous authors could only imagine: “On the horizon I could see the sharp, contrasting change from the light surface of the earth to the inky blackness of the sky. The earth was gay with a lavish palette of colours. It had a pale blue halo around it. Then this band gradually darkened, becoming turquoise, blue, violet and then coal-black.”Footnote 103 The book contains a prominent propagandist element and has often been suspected of being at least partly ghostwritten, but there is little cause to doubt the authenticity of this particular passage, including Gagarin finding the spectacle “very beautiful and pleasing to the eye.”Footnote 104 But was that the whole story? Already in the following paragraph, one reads how, hurtling through orbit, the cosmonaut
recalled some Americans writing that nobody can foretell what will be the effect of space on man; but one thing is certain, they said, in space man will be bored and lonely. I felt nothing of the kind. The radio connected me like a navel cord to the earth. I received commands and transmitted reports of the work of all the ship’s systems, and in each word from the earth I felt the support of the people, the Government and the Party.Footnote 105
The imagery of the passage undercuts the confidence it is attempting to convey, with the metaphor of the “navel cord” turning the reader’s attention back to Earth and hinting at the psychological burden of the undertaking. Whatever else it was, the first spaceflight was a terrifying experience and the author instinctively maps the cosmonaut, ensconced in his capsule and relying on mission control guidance, onto an image of total dependance and vulnerability, that of an unborn child in the womb. The same metaphor then comes to underwrite the first “spacewalk”: the near-fatal, as it was later revealed, twelve minutes and nine seconds Alexei Leonov spent tethered to Voskhod 2 on 18 March 1965. A week later, a grainy image of Leonov appeared on the cover of Time magazine (fig. 9), with the accompanying article repeatedly stressing the mission’s peril, including the ultimate horror of “the umbilical cord” snapping and the cosmonaut floating away into the darkness.Footnote 106 Perhaps it is this image more than any other—an adult human reduced to the helplessness of a newborn, upside down, making their first, fumbling motions in the lethal black void—that made dark space not only a scientific and intellectual but also cultural and psychological reality.
Figure 9. Cover of Time, 26 March 1965. Reproduced with permission.
Beyond this point, the story accelerates to a pace which cannot be meaningfully summarized here. If not earlier, however, then certainly after 20 June 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 walked on the Moon in a live televised broadcast seen by millions worldwide, it is safe to assume that dark space became ubiquitous in the popular imaginary. The same period also sees the first high-quality color images of the whole Earth floating in black space, including the iconic Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) (figs. 10 and 11).Footnote 107 Meanwhile, any lingering bright-space belief can be presumed to decline precipitously, except perhaps in communities remaining outside of the cultural mainstream.
Figure 10. Earthrise, taken by Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968. NASA, AS8-14-2383.
Figure 11. Blue Marble, taken aboard Apollo 17 on 7 December 1972. NASA, AS17-148-22727.
MILTON’S UNIVERSE AND THE UNKNOWN KNOWN
There is thus sufficient evidence for a shift in the European cosmological imagination from a bright to a dark universe, although further work should refine and, where necessary, revise the outline provided above. Instead, let us now return to Paradise Lost, which is not only a significant milestone in the shift but also exemplifies some of the broader intellectual and methodological issues it raises. As already noted, the poem places our solar system, along with numerous others, inside a bounded Cosmos. Peering over Satan’s winged shoulders, we are shocked to discover this Cosmos is bright. We are less shocked, however, by the dark Chaos which surrounds it—but we should be. Obviously, Milton’s Chaos is not modern outer space, its principal features deriving from a range of premodern literary, philosophical, and religious sources. Yet the way Milton combines and extrapolates from this material results in a realm strikingly reminiscent of space as we now imagine it. Milton’s Chaos is “infinite.”Footnote 108 It is the beginning and possibly the end of all things: “The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave.”Footnote 109 It contains exotic forms and interactions of matter—“neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, / But all these in their pregnant causes mixed / Confus’dly”—yet is somehow also “hollow” and “void.”Footnote 110 It is utterly hostile to human life, as shown by the fact that even Satan navigates it only “with difficulty and labour hard,” in spite of possessing a body far superior to a human’s, “Not tied or manacled with joint or limb,” and capable of adopting any shape, “Dilated or condensed.”Footnote 111 Finally, Milton’s Chaos is, emphatically, dark: “a place of utter darkness,” “The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss,” “the palpable obscure,” “a dark / Illimitable Ocean,” “the hollow dark,” “this darksome Desart,” “the darksom Gulf,” “dark, wasteful, wilde,” “the vast profunditie obscure,” “unvoyageable Gulf obscure,” and so on.Footnote 112
Here the contemporary reader faces a problem inverse to that posed by the brightness of the Cosmos. We overlook Milton’s bright Cosmos because it is too strange. His dark Chaos, however, is too familiar. We do not overlook it so much as look through it, unconsciously conflating it with aspects of our own cosmological imaginary, informed by modern space exploration and science fiction. This applies not only to the poem’s cosmology in general but also to particular motifs and episodes. Consider one of the highlights of Satan’s cosmic odyssey, masterfully positioned at the conclusion of book 2. Although still far from his destination, Satan has now made it through the densest portion of Chaos, emerging into a calmer region where “Nature first begins / Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire.”Footnote 113 Some of Heaven’s light reaches into this “emptier waste, resembling air,” revealing to Satan a distant glimpse of “once his native seat,” still called “th’ empyreal Heav’n” yet no longer extraneous to but part of the total universe.Footnote 114 Although Satan had never seen it from this perspective—“extended wide / In circuit, undetermined square or round”Footnote 115—Heaven is a familiar sight. “[F]ast by” it, however, Satan now notices a new, much smaller “world,” still no more than a speck of light in the dark abyss: “in bigness as a star / Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.”Footnote 116
Numerous readers have misunderstood the passage, identifying this “world” with Earth.Footnote 117 It is not the Earth, however, but the entire Cosmos which Satan sees. Other authors had already imagined the Earth as a tiny body in an immeasurably larger universe. Literary representations of the motif go back at least as far as “Scipio’s Dream,” the closing section of Cicero’s (106–43 BCE) partially preserved Republic, which premodern readers knew from the widely influential commentary by Macrobius. “From here,” Scipio notes, floating among the stars, “the earth appeared so small that I was ashamed of our empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface.”Footnote 118 Next to the Earth is the even smaller Moon (which Cicero calls a star): “the smallest of [the stars] was that farthest from the sky and nearest the earth, which shone with a borrowed light.”Footnote 119 Here as elsewhere, however, Milton not only imitates his predecessors but attempts to surpass them. He pushes Cicero’s image further, from the Moon compared to the Earth to the faintest star compared to the Moon, and then squeezes our entire universe inside that faintest star. All that Scipio sees—all of the bright Ptolemaic heavens, bathing in the light of “the sun, leader, chief, and regulator of the other lights, …of such magnitude that it fill all with its radiance”Footnote 120—is a mere mote in what Satan sees. Even Heaven, however immense, is no bigger than the Moon within the same analogy, when viewed against the infinite abyss of Chaos. Nor is it only in scale that Milton departs from tradition: he could also be the first to imagine such a scene against a backdrop of darkness rather than light.
Correctly construing the verses, tracing their sources, situating them within wider perspectives in literary and intellectual history: all of this is imperative if our goal is to recapture how remarkable they must have seemed to their first readers, accustomed to thinking of the universe, when they thought of it at all, as a globe of everlasting daylight, resting safely in the palm of God’s hand. There is a further difficulty, however, residing neither in the text nor the context, but in us: in aspects of our own cosmological imaginary which, having grown uncannily close to Milton’s, desensitize us to some of the most daring reaches of his cosmic vision. This applies even to readers who take no particular interest in these subjects. For example, even such readers are likely to have seen another landmark photograph, the Pale Blue Dot, taken by the Voyager 1 probe in 1990 at the suggestion of the widely influential science communicator Carl Sagan (1934–96): “It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance (and perhaps also our last for decades to come).”Footnote 121 Popularized by Sagan’s work, the photograph shows Earth from a distance of six billion kilometers, as a barely visible blue mote in what would be a uniformly black abyss, were it not for some sunlight scattering in the camera lens (fig. 12). Even for a reader who has not seen the photograph itself, it is virtually impossible for them not to have been indirectly exposed both to the basic visual motif and the associated ideas and sentiments, reiterated to the point of cliché, in a wide range of sources and contexts. When Satan spots the Cosmos as a bright dot in the darkness of Chaos, relieved only by faint heavenly light filtering from above, we thus need to invest a conscious effort in defamiliarizing the scene, or our imagination will inevitably read the Pale Blue Dot into it.
Figure 12. Pale Blue Dot, taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990. NASA, PIA00452.
Other passages fall prey to the same treacherous familiarity. Satan eventually reaches the Cosmos, landing on its outer shell:
Nothing like this had yet been imagined, let alone seen, by Milton’s contemporaries. For us, however, anthropomorphic beings walking under the black sky of a barren world is an image all too familiar from the ubiquitous visual documentation of the Apollo missions (fig. 13)—even down to such details as the sky being not only black but “Starless,” as it mostly was for the moonwalkers, and as it appears, although for entirely different reasons, in most of the visual material they generated. A fuller appreciation of the premodern cosmological imagination thus requires not only historicism but self-historicism. It requires attention not only to the unknown unknowns of premodernity but to the unknown knowns of modernity: an excavation of our own cosmic unconscious, if only so we could then suspend it, to the greatest degree possible, in approaching a work like Paradise Lost.
Figure 13. Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke, photographed by John Young on 21 April 1972. NASA, AS16-114-18427.
Even then, however, the question remains of how Milton arrived at such a cosmology. Some knowledge on his part of the advances in the relevant domains of the emergent new sciences should be neither doubted nor exaggerated.Footnote 123 In fact, what if it is precisely such limited exposure, filtered through the heterodox theological and philosophical beliefs Milton came to embrace in the final two decades of his life, and mobilized by a remarkably daring and vivid poetic imagination, that produced one of the earliest major artistic responses to the developments outlined above? Three centuries before the Apollo astronauts would report of how “fragile” our planet appears, glittering in the black vacuum of space, Milton suspends a “frail” bright world in a terrifying dark abyss, and protects it from that abyss by something that is not, but is functionally equivalent to, an atmosphere.Footnote 124 Like most of his contemporaries, he possessed no compelling scientific evidence, and even less religious and cultural impetus, to imagine anything like that. And yet he did, and it is hard not to see Paradise Lost as the missing link in the process these pages have been tracing: a poetic premonition of the transformation which had already begun to unfold, and which would eventually have us travel Satan’s journey in reverse, out of the eternal day of the premodern imagination and into the eternal night we now inhabit.
Vladimir Brljak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He previously studied at the University of Zagreb (BA) and the University of Warwick (PhD), and held the Thole Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He has held visiting fellowships and grants at the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for the Study of the Book (2017), the Huntington Library (2018), Durham University (Seedcorn Fund Award, 2022), and the Warburg Institute (2022–23).
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