John milton paradise regained5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() It crept into “Paradise Lost,” where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, “Areopagitica,” Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, “an undeserved thraldom upon learning.”īeyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter-it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman-there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Milton was thirty years old-his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, “Paradise Lost,” all lay before him. ![]() ![]() Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. Milton’s Satan is charismatic, but Milton consistently shows his cause to be unjust. ![]()
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