One of Milton's Sources of Knowledge of the World

According to Verity, Milton relied heavily for his knowledge of geography upon Peter Heylyn, who wrote Microcosmos: a Little Description of the Great World. in 1621.  It was later expanded to become the  Cosmographie of 1657.


From WP:

At college, where he was dubbed 'the perpetual dictator’, Heylin had been an ouspoken controversialist. He subsequently became an outspoken preacher and one of Charles I's clerical followers. He was a prolific writer, and a keen and acrimonious controversialist against the Puritans. Among his works are a History of the Reformation, and a Life of Archbishop William Laud(Cyprianus Anglicanus) (1668).

He was the writer of the "Cosmographie", an attempt to describe in meticulous detail every aspect of the known world in 1652, the geography, climate, customs, achievements, politics, and belief systems. It appears to have been the first description in print of Australia, and perhaps of California, Terra del Fuego, and other territories in the New World. He objected to the name "America" as it placed undue glory on Amerigo Vespucci, and recommended "Columbana" or "Cabotia" as more indicative of the true discoverers, Columbus and Cabot.

Two quotes from Brecht

Life of Galileo:

GALILEO: Overnight the universe has lost its centre, and by morning it has countless ones. So that now each -- and none -- is regarded as its centre. For suddenly there is plenty of room.

...

THE VERY OLD CARDINAL: Are they still in there? Can they really not dispose of this triviality more quickly? Clavius ought to understand his own astronomy. I hear that this Signor Galilei banishes mankind from the center of the universe to some where at the edge. He is, therefore, plainly an enemy of the human race. And he should be treated as such. Man is the crown of creation; every child knows that, God’s highest and most beloved creature.

How could He place such a miracle, such a masterpiece, on a little remote and forever wandering star? Would He have sent His Son to such a place?

How can there be people so perverse as to believe in these slaves of their own mathematical tables? Which of God’s creatures would submit to such a thing? 

"By center, or eccentric, hard to tell"

The dimensions of Milton's cosmology are virtually impossible to gauge -- any pictorial representation is bound to be misleading.

We really have no idea of the relative sizes of hell, chaos, and heaven. We can say that the created world - all that is "nature," including the galaxies, is tiny in the vast interminable spaces between heaven and hell. Satan sees the universe at the end of Book 2, hanging like a small jewel from heaven:

And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.

I.e., the created universe is to Heaven as the smallest star is to the Moon.

The "distance" between heaven and hell is mostly chaos, which by definition is pretty indefinite.

Also, above the universe, heaven looms so large that it's impossible to tell its shape, as there is no point from which an eye could see enough of it to judge whether it's square, round, etc.:

Farr off th' Empyreal Heav'n, extended wide
In circuit, undetermind square or round,

Thus the rendering of these elements as in the diagram below is misleading by suggesting knowledge where none exists:

Also, as this commentator notes, it's impossible to determine what lies in the center of the finite Universe - the earth? the sun? Milton appears to leave this rather basic fact open to dispute, along with so much else:

The outer spherical shell of the universe ("whole turning", i.e., the world including the earth) is created by God out of a region of chaos (or abyss "bottomless") using a pair of golden compasses--the shell of the universe is suspended from heaven by a golden chain. A flight of retractable stairs goes down to it from heaven. Hell was a separate enclosure within chaos. According to traditional medieval ideas of cosmology (to which Milton partly subscribed), in the space between the center of the universe (which may either be the earth or the sun--Milton does not assume a geocentric universe) and the outer shell of the universe are ten concentric transparent and immaterial spheres: comprising the moon, 5 planets, sun [or earth], fixed stars, crystalline sphere, and the primum mobile or rhomb (which moved all the spheres within)...

The idea of the infinite universe as having its center everywhere and nowhere apparently has a long pedigree:

Alain de Lille, a 12th century theologian, borrowing from the Corpus Hermeticum of the 3rd Century:

"God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

While Giordano Bruno wrote:

"We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere." 


(Bruno is also credited with being the first to think "the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are of identical nature as the sun." Wikipedia)

Pascal used the following words:

"God is a circle; His centre is everywhere, His circumference is nowhere."

Incidentally, Nicholas of Cusa worked within a similar awareness of complications deriving from careful consideration of infiinitude.

"The famous saying that God is "a sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere" is, in fact, first found in a pseudo-Hermetic treatise of the twelth century, and was transferred by Cusanus to the universe, as a reflection of God, in a manner which is Hermetic in spirit..This concept was basic for Bruno, for whom the innumerable worlds are all divine centres of the unbounded universe." - Francis A. Yates, Bruno.

Cusa also anticipated Copernicus in asserting that the Earth revolved around the Sun, breaking with the Ptolemaic model:

Bartolomeu Velho's image of the Ptolemaic Universe