ABSTRACT
John Milton takes from the Timaeus and its tradition a conception of chaos more absolute than any entertained by modern mathematical and physical theory. The case of Adam and Eve is perhaps even clearer, since in eating the forbidden apple they are in a direct sense swallowing chaos and passing over to a mental condition of ‘distemper’, reproduced in the physical condition of the planet. Milton’s Chaos has its own eponymous god who reigns ‘by confusion’ and ‘fray’ and acts rather like James Clerk Maxwell’s Demon in noticing and increasing the potentiality for conflict between elemental particles. Milton’s reception of Galileo’s thinking, and through this thinking of his period’s most powerful aspirations towards understanding and control of the physical world, probably reveals most directly what is at stake. Galileo is the only contemporary figure directly mentioned in Paradise Lost.
