Milton’s cosmic game of chess: Raymond Keene OBE

In past columns, I have indicated links between chess and such immortals as Shakespeare, Goethe, Napoleon and Nietzsche. I have, however, searched in vain for any specific reference to chess in the works of our glorious 17th poet, John Milton. Then I realised that his unparalleled epic, Paradise Lost, is, in fact a cosmic game of chess played between God and Satan. And it is a game in which Satan wins, the clue being in the title…Lost! 

Milton joins that select group of epic poets, Homer, Virgil, Dante …who have aspired to describe the horrors of Hell and returned…hoc opus hic labor est, as Virgil put it. 

True, in the cosmic battle, God starts with multiple advantages, thunderbolts for a start, which might be equated with the superior technology in the opening of a game of chess, and this devastating weapon almost wins the whole game for the Almighty. 

Nevertheless, after suffering the setback of being hurled with his legions of discontented demons into the pit of Hell, Satan fights back. The arch-fiend ( a phrase coined by Milton, but which gained considerable later currency in such literary creations as Prof Moriarty, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and my personal favourite ZZ von Schnerk, the bloodthirsty film producer from the 1960s Avengers TV series) uses long term strategy and high cunning to strike at God’s creations, Adam and Eve, whom the Lord signally fails to protect from his rival’s devious schemes. 

In Milton’s. epic, God remains a somewhat aloof presence, while Satan, his cohorts and their evil lucubrations, invite far more attention from Milton, and the Devil gets the best lines. 

“That with the Mightiest raised me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along ⁠
Innumerable force of Spirits armed,
That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power opposed,
In dubious battel on the plains of Heaven,
And shook his throne.”
—John Milton, Paradise Lost

In book one of Paradise Lost, Satan (Lucifer) challenged God in Heaven but lost, and lost badly. Lucifer, formerly the brightest of the angels, has now been hurled down into the pit of hell by God after the battle. Satan is lying prone on hell’s floor, grovelling or floating in the slime at the bottom. At this dramatic moment, as we first encounter Satan, Milton compares him to the whale, to a Leviathan, to a sea monster: a sea monster which, like the Kraken, is capable of sucking down and destroying ships and sailors.

“ Or that sea-beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works

Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream.

Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,

The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,

Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,

With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,

Moors by his side under the lee, while night

Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.

So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay,

Chained on the burning lake.”

The implication of course, based on standard mediaeval bestiaries, is that the sailor anchors his ship on Leviathan, but what is Leviathan going to do when the morning comes? He’s going to wake up and crush the ship or sink it or drag it underneath the waves.

Furthermore…. How, logically speaking, can there be any sort of battle, in a real sense,  against the sort of power which God wields? Of course, there cannot be. Far from being an almost level fight, which could have gone either way (according to Satan’s assessment of “dubious”) the battle is not only unjustified, it was not a battle, in any true sense, at all. This panoply of information, and different debating viewpoints, is conveyed by one seven-letter word: dubious. 

We now move on from the triple meaning of the word “dubious” (could go either way, unjustified, not a battle at all) to describe the Battle in Heaven, to that moment where Milton is depicting how the rebellious angels have been overthrown, after being hurled out of Heaven by God and now grovelling in the fiery wastes of Hades. They rise when Satan calls them and swarm into the sulphurous air. At this moment, Milton produces the most fantastically multi-dimensional evocation of the demons in flight.

In the section that follows “Amram’s son” is Milton’s term for Moses, who famously called down the Biblical plague of locusts on Egypt, when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to release the imprisoned and exiled Israelites:

“ As when the potent rod Of Amram’s son, in Egypt’s evil day, 

Waved around the coast, up-called a pitchy cloud Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind,

That o’er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung

Like Night, and darkened all the land of the Nile;

So numberless were those bad Angels seen

Hovering on wing under the cope of Hell,

‘Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires;

The keywords in this passage are “pitchy” (describing the cloud of locusts) and “warping.” What do “pitchy” and “warping” mean? The basic root word “pitch” can mean “throw” since the Angels were “thrown” from Heaven into Hell. It can also bring to mind a pitchfork, the standard devilish instrument often seen in Dante’s Inferno and artistic imaginings of Hell. It can mean “to descend”. It can mean “to hurl”. It can mean “to bowl” or “throw in an underhand way”.

And what do the devils do? They are underhand. They are dishonest. It can also mean dark – pitch black. It can signify tar-pitch, a pitchy substance associated with Hell. It can also mean to oppose, as in, a pitched battle. It can mean to fall.

Summing up the various ideas conveyed with this one word: falling, opposing in battle, underhand, blackness, tar, descent … and in addition and, indeed, above all, it can mean oscillating, hovering in the air, or unsteady and unstable at sea. This cunningly creates a link back to the futility of pinning one’s hopes on the unreliable Leviathan, as a firm anchorage. We are presented by Milton with a picture of bad Angels, demons now hovering under the ceiling of Hell, where they are imprisoned. Oscillating, pitchy. In one word Milton conjures a complex litany of different meanings.

What does “warping” mean, and, in particular, why should locusts warp? Locusts, of course, devour crops, cause starvation and kill people. Although they are, in fact, morally neutral, hungry insects though the effects of their predation can seem “evil” to humans. “Warping” can also mean “throwing”. The demons have been thrown from Heaven.

The connection with “pitchy” is already becoming clear and for etymological derivations see the German “werfen” or the Old English “moledewarp” which means the “mouth thrower” or mole, significantly an underground animal which hates the light! “Warp” can also signify: to twist, to bend, to be warped, perverted, swerving.

Ostensibly Milton is describing the oscillating, swerving movement of the locusts. With the same word, he is also conveying the character of the fallen angels, the devils, their past and future history. Where are they going? They are swerving from God. They are distorting God’s truth. They are miscarrying. They are turning away from the face of God and also they are shrinking, by leaving Heaven and deserting God and his truth. Milton actually refers to Satan seemingly shrunken and diminished in the eyes of his companion Beelzebub.

Two words, but with an increasing crescendo of many, many different meanings, as one might expect from a man with perfect command of two languages, his native English and Latin. In the latter tongue, the Lingua Franca of Europe at that time, Milton was, in fact, Secretary to Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, which took over temporary management of England between the reigns of King Charles I (beheaded) and King Charles II ( The so-called Merry Monarch due to his large number of mistresses and illegitimate offspring) both a far cry from the ascetic and devout John Milton.