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The Mind is its Own Place: Paradise Lost, I. 253–255
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
Satan's fall from heaven to hell is an external or physical reflection of his moral degeneration from Lucifer to Adversary. Yet Satan himself understandably rejects this parallel, insisting that his is
A mind not to be changed by Place or Time.
That is Satan's conclusion; the major premise upon which his argument depends is this:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
As Isabel MacCaffrcy notes, Satan's boast is at odds with the action of the epic as a whole; and, as D. C. Allen's scholarship has shown, it perhaps is based on heresy. I nevertheless suggest that to reject Satan's speech out of hand is in one way wrong, for the premise of his argument—if not the conclusion—is partially true. And fully to appreciate the way in which Satan's logic goes awry requires, I think, an understanding of the philosophic background from which Satan's words arise.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1963
References
1 Quotations are from Paradise Lost, ed. Hughes (New York, 1935).
2 MacCaffrcy, , Paradise Lost as ‘Myth’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 68–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allen, , ‘ Paradise Lost I, 254-5’, MLN, LXXI (1956), 324–326.Google Scholar Satan's related statement—‘myself am Hell’ (IV.75)—has been discussed frequently, most notably by Hughes, Merritt V., ‘ “Myself Am Hell,” ’ MP, LIV (1956), 80–94 Google Scholar; Hughes’ study includes a survey of previous scholarship and a number of analogues for both of Satan's remarks.
3 Physics, IV.5 and De caelo, I.3. That the Aristotelian definitions are basic is evident from their appearance not only in the commentaries but also in such works as ‘Plutarch’, De placitis philosophorum, I.19; Avicenna, Le Livre de Science, tr. Achena and Massé (Paris, 1958), II, 27; Stanley, Thomas, The History of Philosophy, 4th ed. (London, 1743), p. 628 Google Scholar; and Milton, , Art of Logic, Columbia Works, xi, 81.Google Scholar
4 Discourse on Method, iv.
5 Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and tr. Loemkcr (Chicago, 1956), 1, 180. This kind of thinking did not originate in the seventeenth century. Ibn Gabirol, for example, had said that intelligentia is the ‘place’ of intelligible forms just as matter is the place of natural forms; see Fons vitae, cd. Bäumker, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mitlelaltcrs, Band I, Heft 2-4 (Münster, 1891), 291 (and see p. 153 for the idea that ‘omne simplex et spirituale locum non occupat’). Still earlier, Tertullian had said that incorporeal things have no locality of their own except in so far as they have access to body (Adversus Hermogenes, XLI). Similarly, medieval angelology argues that the substance of angels is not subject to place; see, e.g., the discussion of Aquinas (and the authors cited by him) in Summa theologica, Part I, Q. lii.
6 Adversus mathematicos, x, 31-35.
7 Ed. Baur, , Beitrage z. Ges. d. Phil. d. Mittelalters, IX, 415.Google Scholar McKeon, Charles, A Study of the Summa philosophiae of Pseudo-Grosseteste (New York, 1948), p. 59 Google Scholar, argues that this distinction implies that ‘place in itself would consist, not in the fact of being bounded, but in the possibility’.
8 Curry, Walter C., Milton's Ontology, Cosmogony and Physics (Lexington, 1957), pp. 35–43 Google Scholar, quotes a number of historical precedents for Milton's conclusion, the closest being Philo's statement that God ‘contains but is not contained’ (Curry, p. 41). The closest parallel which I have seen occurs in the preface to Wolfgang Musculus’ Common Places of Christian Religion (London, 1563): God ‘is incomprehensible, and without all place himselfe, yet is in a sorte the verie place in whom all thinges doe commenly reast and repose’. See also Aquinas, Sutmna, Part 1, Q. viii, Art. 4: ‘Whether to be everywhere is proper [only] to God’ and Part 1, Q. lii, Art. 2: ‘So, then, it is evident that to be in a place appertains quite differently to a body, to an angel, and to God. For a body is in a place in a circumscribed fashion, since it is measured by the place. An angel, however, is not there in a circumscribed fashion, since he is not measured by the place, but definitively, because he is in one place in such a manner that he is not in another. But God is neither circumscriptively nor definitively there, because He is everywhere’.
9 De corpore, English Works, ed. Molesworth (London, 1839), 1, 94-96: place ‘is the phantasm of a thing existing without the mind simply’; time ‘is the phantasm of before and after in motion’.