‘Adam’s Sin Heaps Guilt On/Say the Bells of John Milton’
At the beginning of Book 3 of Paradise Lost Milton addresses Light:
Hail holy light, ofspring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
The irony is that Milton, here addressing God as Light, the speaker of fiat lux, is himself blind. He cannot see what he hymns.
thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that rowle in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs,
Or dim suffusion veild.
This is not a problem, however. Milton knows that faith is, specifically, that which is not seen [Hebrews 11:1 — Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων; ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’]. He still believes, and will continue to write his poetry, like ‘Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,/And Tiresias and Phineus Prophets old’. He will, in a passage that influenced Keats, sing like the nightingale:
as the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledg fair
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Natures works to mee expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
I was reading this passage, and I wondered if the opening invocation, ‘Hail holy Light’, was traditional, perhaps part of church liturgy. It goes nicely into Latin: Ave sancta lux. But I wasn’t able to track any examples down: it’s not part of the liturgy of the hours, the phrase doesn’t occur in any Latin hymns. I googled to the best of my ability and found nothing: — which presumably means that Milton invented the address himself. I was ready to give up when I chanced upon a different angle: bells.
Bells were hung in church towers to be tolled (‘that I may see and tell’, says Milton at the end of that passage opening Book 3, ‘of things invisible to mortal sight’). And the European tradition was to inscribe bells with certain mottos, in Latin or in the vernacular.
Thus there grew up in the Middle Ages what were called the virtues of the bell. These were usually expressed in two or three words of Latin, and anywhere from two to twelve were inscribed on a bell according to its location, importance. and use. The best known are the three on a bell of 1486 at Schaffhausen, Switzerland, which inspired Schiller three hundred yean later to write his immortal poem, ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’, The Song of the Bell. The conciseness of the Latin gives a power which no translation can convey; VIVOS VOCO — MORTUOS PLANGO — FVLGVRA FRANCO (“I call the living; I wail for the dead; I break the lightning”) It will be seen that, from our present-day viewpoint, the virtues vary from the highly religious to the deeply superstitious. In the Middle Ages there was no clear dividing line between the religious and the non-religious. It was therefore quite natural that the inscription which mentioned such virtues as, “‘I praise the true God”, “I signal the sabbath”, “I note the hours”, “I arouse the lazy”, “I call for assembly”, “I weep at the burial” should also include “I torment demons”, “I drive away the plague” “I break offensive things”, and even, “I dispel the winds”, “I drive away the cloud”, “I break the lightning”, “I dispatch hail”, and “I extinguish fire”. [Percival Price, ‘Bell Inscriptions of Western Europe’, Dalhousie Review (1966) 423–24]
The bell at Schaffhausen, Switzerland, was very famous; it’s likely Milton knew of it. And though FVLGVRA FRANCO may have been an example of the more ‘superstitious’ type of inscription that Price notes in his second set of examples there (as it might be: ‘I will protect you against lightning bolts’), it also strikes a Christic note, I think. Who else was it broke Satan like lightning?
When Jesus son of Mary second Eve,
Saw Satan fall like Lightning down from Heav’n[Paradise Lost 10: 183–4; Milton is quoting Luke 10:18]
Among the things inscribed on bells was a legend addressing light:
Those last six virtues were inscribed on the bells of 16th/17th-century Hatfield Church (these six bells were replaced with eight in the eighteenth-century) and, so far as I can see, on other bells too. “Ave Fili Lux Salvator” means: Hail the Light of the Son, our Saviour. Might Milton have been thinking of this?
Milton, though he could no longer see the light of day, could (of course) still hear the sounds of bells being tolled on the sabbath. More, he doesn’t just hear: he sings. He is, in a sense, a sounding bell upon which is written these words: hail holy light.
I find myself intrigued by this, and — if I didn’t have other, more pressing demands upon my time right now — I’d like to explore it further. At the head of the post you can see the title page to Fabian Stedman and Richard Duckworth’s book Tintinnalogia (1668), published by the same publisher as Paradise Lost, working out of the same church-yard: St. Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street. That this church survived the great fire of London was taken as a sign of specific divine favour. The bell-tower of this church houses ten bells (weight 10–3–23, in G). Milton must have heard them tolling many times. In the early 1660s, it was Fabian Stedman, co-author of the Tintinnalogia, who rang the great bell of St Mary-le-Bow, famous from the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ rhyme. Milton must have heard that often, too.
