Milton’s cosmic game of chess

In past columns I have indicated links between chess and such immortals as King Alfonso the Wise, Tamburlaine the Great, Shakespeare, Goethe, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Duchamp.  I have, however, searched in vain for any specific reference to chess in the works of our glorious 17th century 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 which Satan wins, the clue being in the title: Paradise Lost.

In the cosmic battle, God starts off with multiple advantages, including thunderbolts. This might be equated with superior technique in the opening of a game of chess. Such devastating weapons overthrow Lucifer and his rebellious angels and almost win 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. No longer the fallen angel Lucifer, he is now Satan, “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. Satan 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. As generations of critics and scholars have observed, the Devil gets the best lines. For example:

“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.”

In Book 1 of Paradise Lost, Lucifer has challenged God in Heaven, but lost, and lost badly. Lucifer, formerly the brightest of the angels, has now been hurled down into the burning pit of hell by God after the battle. Now Satan, he is lying prone in the Hell, grovelling or floating in the fiery slime at the bottom. At this dramatic moment, as we first encounter Satan, Milton compares him to the whale, or the Leviathan: a sea monster which (like the later 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.

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), the battle is not only unjustified, it actually 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 the manner in which 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 up, 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 round 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 key words 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, which is the standard devilish instrument, often seen in Dante’s Inferno and other 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. Pitch 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. “Pitchy”: with one word Milton conjures a complex plethora 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. 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 after his Fall as seemingly shrunken and diminished in the eyes of his companion Beelzebub.

Two words, but with an increasing crescendo of many, many different meanings.

For this week’s main game, in a winning position, the (almost) almighty Kasparov takes his eye off the ball in Sokolov vs. Kasparov

And to conclude this week, a link to a game thoroughly in accord with today’s mischievous date: Nimzowitsch vs. Systemsson

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from  Blackwell’s . His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.  

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