In Book Eight of Paradise Lost, Adam asks the angel Raphael (the “divine Historian”) his questions about the intricacies of the universe. Why are there more stars than necessary to light the Earth? Why should so many planets revolve around the Earth when the Earth, “with far less compass move,” could circle them instead? Like any newborn, Adam’s curiosity and needs are endless. Raphael is gracious enough not to be annoyed by the onslaught, but still does not give credence to Adam’s doubt. Instead of justifying the existence of “numbered stars” or delineating whether the universe is geo- or heliocentric, Raphael dismisses the questions altogether:
Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, him serve and feare;
Of other Creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever plac’t, let him dispose: joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy faire Eve; Heav’n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:
Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there
Live, in what state, condition or degree,
Contented that thus farr hath been reveal’d
Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav’n.
(8.166–78)
It’s a startling passage! Many interpret it as a profoundly anti-intellectual statement in a book otherwise celebratory of erudition. Raphael quells scientific curiosity (“Dream not of other Worlds”), and instead encourages inwardness (“Think onely what concernes thee and thy being”). The contemporary reader can’t help but think of the political ramifications of this proposed single-mindedness, nor can she help but feel something of a letdown at Milton’s turn here. Through eight books, we’ve adventured through the universe—learning new theories, words, and histories on every page—and are now instructed to disregard this journey and prune some flowers.
But perhaps the passage suggests, implicitly, that attending to one’s limited realm—garden, wife, work—is far from an indignity. In her lecture on these very lines, Professor Ayesha Ramachandran extrapolated that Raphael advises us here to improve the world through directing our attention and efforts to our local communities, as opposed to the grander, more prestigious spheres over which we do not, in fact, have much control. Milton’s epic is celebrated as one of the first to focus on human, domestic affairs (choice, marital problems, sex and intimacy, home) and the first to measure “the void profound” (God, creation, space). In connecting these two extremes of scale—this age-old tension between the self and world, between what we can know and influence and what we cannot—Milton seems to esteem the nobility of staying in one’s garden: small-scale work that lacks lofty ambition, but is nonetheless valuable.
I’ve come to revere this deceptively simple endeavor to “be lowlie wise.” I first read the poem as a freshman with all the innocence and wonder of Adam. My hometown, a village on the Hudson River of around 5,000 people, was the garden in which I did not intend to stay, and Yale was the star-studded sky. Political Science classes were taught by professors who’d been cited by Supreme Court justices (“more than fifty times!”). Writing classes were taught by professors who’d been chief editors at The Wall Street Journal. A Rhodes Scholar passed out snacks at a sorority’s open house, and the Dramat hosted an intimate chat with one of my favorite actors. It was enrapturing. And the big, awe-inspiring universe didn’t just gesture for me to keep up, but for all of us: it was not uncommon for my classmates, in this vein, to have ambitions to one day be President of the United States.
I, too, was drawn towards the stylish highs (not quite President—Canadian birth squandered that option), in part because they were mesmerizing, but also because they seemed like the important things to do. In discussing Professor Ramachandran’s interpretations with her, she recalled similar views when she first graduated from college: “I had a moment where I really wondered whether I wanted the kind of political pathway that I think many Yale students imagine, in part because the larger question there is, does a small change in the world around you make a difference, or do you have to make a big change? And with a Yale degree, ought I to go for some big change?” But upon venturing down the International Law path, interning for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ramachandran had a revelatory experience: “I distinctly remember sitting in the Palais des Nations with all these well-dressed people, in these hearings about the torture treaty and taking notes for the person for whom I was working, and I remember thinking, ‘wow, we’re all here, having a fancy meal at this beautiful place, and people are being tortured, and nothing is actually being done about it.’” Ramachandran eventually concluded that for her, tangible impact could be found in education, teaching one small class of students at a time in Afghanistan. “Part of what Paradise Lost reminds us of is that the ethical position is to do what we can in our everyday world, and that if we start there, those things ramify.”
Dizzied by all my future paths, I felt very small and simultaneously very large throughout my freshman year, not unlike the way I felt reading Paradise Lost. The poem overwhelmed me with knowledge and artistry and zoomed me through vertiginous changes of scale—from the wide vistas of the cosmos to the precise catalogues of Eden’s flora; from the unformed matter in the Sea of Chaos to the wild ringlets of Eve’s hair. Each detail seemed to celebrate Raphael’s evocation of the intricate scala naturae—the idea that there is a hierarchy that orders beings, from inanimate matter all the way up to God, suggesting a teleological progression of complexity and perfection in the natural world. I soon saw that Yale similarly celebrates hierarchies—not just of people, but of things worth doing, things worth working for or towards.
It seems an automatically accepted truth, ingrained in us as children with clichés like “shoot for the moon; if you miss, you land among the stars,” that we should set our sights on only the highest of goals. This makes sense on its surface level: your “reach” schools are likely to have more robustly funded programs and facilities than your “safeties,” the more “prestigious” newspaper will pay you more for your writing than a smaller publication, and maybe the big city you wish to live in will afford you a better social life than some suburb of Baltimore (no offense, Baltimore.) And yet Milton’s lines here interrogate this assumption: why must “lowlie” take on a negative connotation compared to the “highs” of Heaven when, after all, the “low” to which we are asked to apply ourselves is “Paradise”? Why was I under some natural supposition that working to help elect someone else or writing for a smaller publication were merely stepping stones towards the “real thing,” or a regrettable fallback when the real thing did not pan out?
The most humbling experience of my first year of college was the realization that I had very little control over the grand spheres, and that jumping right to some top rung was impossible. But the experience of reading Milton made me question this desire altogether—not only the inclination to climb some figurative “ladder”—but the inclination to influence a lofty, distanced world rather than my own and that of the community around me. Milton recognizes human limitation; without access to a God’s-eye view or a true understanding of cosmic order, all we can know is what we see, conjecture, and experience through our own being. Raphael reminds us of this, and gently leads Adam and the reader away from the desire for the grand, prestigious sphere toward a humbler—and perhaps richer—knowledge of himself, his partner, and the world that they inhabit and shape together.
Thus, Adam, human beings, the reader, are not trivialized in this passage, but elevated to a position of enhanced responsibility, given a direction much more difficult to pursue than lofty ambitions: know thyself, and do work that is in accordance with this sacred, hard-earned knowledge. To spend one’s college years in pursuit of this honesty seems the best use of time, and to commit with respect and appreciation to honest, “small-scale” work, perhaps the best use of a life. As Michel de Montaigne succinctly states, maybe in the spirit of Raphael, “it is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to use our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside.”
Certainly, ambition is valuable and not to be eschewed—indeed, reaching for grand heights may be the best way to learn how we can rightfully use our beings—but the thoughtful, kind, learned, and dedicated graduates of Yale are needed all over the place, not only at the tippy top.
