Milton’s ‘Darkness Visible’

Paradise Lost opens with Satan waking up in Hell, his ‘Prison ordain’d/In utter darkness’ [PL, 1:71–2]. Utter darkness, mind. Nevertheless, despite this complete darkness, Milton describes the topography, its devilish inhabitants and the city they build with a wealth of visualised detail. How can he, and therefore we, see? In a famous phrase, Milton describes how Hell contains a mighty furnace that somehow, even in utter darkness, illuminates: ‘a great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible’ [PL 1:62–63].

‘Furnace’ is one of Milton’s Latinisms: furnax means ‘oven, kiln, furnace’, a word that derives from the Greek θερμός (thermos), heat. But heat and light are not necessarily the same thing. And ‘darkness visible’, as a phrase, has certainly puzzled critics and readers mightily. The thing is: it looks, on its face, like a flat contradiction. If things are truly dark, they are not visible; and vice versa.

Many interpreters have split the difference and assumed that Milton doesn’t really mean what he says: that, though very dark, there is some dim illumination here, some mode of crepuscularity (T S Eliot talks of Milton’s ‘twilit Hell’). The problem is that’s not what the poem actually says. Satan’s environment is characterised by utter darkness, not ‘mostly-utter, only-partial-actually darkness.’ What’s going on?

Robert J Edgeworth offers one interpretation, arguing that ‘there can be flames which give no light — an impossibility in nature, made possible in Hell by divine suspension of the natural order for punitive purposes.’ Likewise he says ‘there can be sight (and description) in absolute blackness — an impossibility in nature, of course, but made possible in Hell by that same, or a concomitant, divine suspension of the natural order.’ He elaborates:

The pain of Hell involves the transmission of an effect (the pain of burning) from its natural cause (fire) to its natural subject (in classical psychology, the soul), without passing through its natural medium (the body: the devils are spirits). In much the same way the sight of Hell involves the transmission of an effect (vision) from its natural cause (the burning lake, and similar objects) to its natural subject (again, the soul) without passing through its natural medium (light). [Robert J. Edgeworth, ‘Milton’s “Darkness Visible” and Aeneid 7’, The Classical Journal 79:2 (1984), 97]

My problem with this is that is requires us to posit a different, new kind of light operating in Hell, one that works in broadly the same way as ‘our’ light (such that we can see things by it, describe what we can see and so on, as Milton does of Hell) but which is quite different to the ‘brightness visible’ of the upper world. This strikes me as theologically inept. Light is cognate with God himself. In John 8:12 Christ calls himself the ‘Light of the World (φώς τοῦ κόσμου, phōs tou kosmou) — indeed, the Greek is rather more capacious than the King James Version translation implies, for Christ lights not just planet Earth but the entire cosmos. [There’s also a theological pun in the original: for φώς means both ‘light, illumination’ and also ‘man, mortal’ — such that Christ is both the light of humanity and the Son of Man]. The notion of God as light is all over the Old Testament: ‘The Lord is my light’ [Psalm 27:1]; ‘the Lord shall be thy everlasting Light’ [Isaiah 60:20]; fiat Lux [Genesis 1:3].

The idea that Satan could have, as it were, his own brand of light, Pepsi to God’s Coke, with which his realm is illuminated — or intenebrated — makes no theological sense. It would put the Devil on a quasi-equal footing with the Creator, a notion Milton would have found entirely unacceptable.

I think Milton’s phrase invites us to think not of exterior illumination, but rather of the capacity to see. We talk of the ability to ‘see in the dark’, although what we strictly mean — in our Newtonian cosmos — is the ability to see in very dim light, which brings us back to Eliot’s twilit Hell. But Renaissance and Early Modern thinkers did not necessarily understand eyes that way.

Here’s 17th-century Venetian doctor Julius Millo, whose Naturae morbos decernentis arcanum (1654) — ‘Assessment of the Hidden Natures of Disease’ — includes the following paragraph, in its chapter on ophthalmological illness:

Sic oculi quorundam serpertum noctu scintillant, & carbunculus gemma in tenebris lucet, quia cuncta hæc solidissima sed perspicua sunt. contrarium accidit, si perspicuus hic humor tenuis fuerit, sintque; eum continentes membranæ porositatibus peruiæ. nam tunc non immanet lucis fulgor, debilemque; subinde visionem reddit, nisi specillis dilabentem fulgoren: detinentibus obuiam eamus. hæc enim est causa, cur aliquibus à somno experectis obiecta in tenebris visibilia occurrant, quia somni nempe temepore perspicuus oculorum humor crassitiem nactus luminis detinct fulgorem tenebris obuolutum. [Julius Millo, Naturae morbos decernentis arcanum (1654), 31]

There are certain types of serpent whose eyes sparkle in the night, just as there are carbuncle gems that shine in the darkness, because these things, though solid, are transparent. The contrary case obtains with the clear humour of the eye which, as is known to be the case, is thin and contains within itself the pores of the [retinal] membrane. But consider those occasions when light is not all around, but only weakly present; those times when things return to visibility, or fade away in decaying glimmering rays. Or consider those people who have been locked in a dark prison cell, and how — the case is equivalent — some people waking from sleep are able to see objects visible in darkness. This is because during sleep, the transparent humour of the eyes acquires the thickness of light, and conceals within itself a brightness veiled by darkness.

This isn’t actually how eyes work, of course; they don’t, sponge-like, soak up light. But this was 17th-century medical thought on the matter, during the very decades Milton was writing his epic. Millo believes the eye can retain within itself remnants of light it has previously seen, and so is able sometimes discern things visible in darkness, in tenebris visibilia. And perhaps this is what Milton is thinking of with regard to his Hell. It’s not that the black flames of the furnace put out any actual illumination: they are hot but not bright, the dakness is utter. But Satan’s eyes, having once gazed upon the light of heaven — having, indeed, in one sense been the light of heaven, as ‘Lucifer’ — retain within them some remnant of that light, which in turn reveals to his gaze the direful and otherwise wholly dark lineaments of his new habitation. The phrase ‘darkness visible’, then, would mean not ‘a darkness that makes other things visible’, but a darkness that was visible to him.

Actually, it occurs to me that Millo’s underlying idea — that certain solid crystals, or liquid eye-humours, can absorb light, retain it and release it at a later point — has had a longer life than its physical impossibility ought to have allowed. The jewels in Ballard’s Crystal World (1966) work this way. Tolkien writes about his silmarils, carbuncle gems that shine in the darkness because they have taken into themselves the light of elven stars (Sam is given by Galadriel a vial of a fluid that operates similarly in Lord of the Rings). We know this is not how solids, or fluids, work; but it doesn’t outrage our sense of plausibility, doesn’t bounce us out of the story.