Philosophical Context: The Baroque

Introduction

The Baroque inherits the Renaissance’s daring and pays for its consequences. By the seventeenth century, everything the previous period set in motion — the new science, the Reformation, the celebration of individual freedom — has produced consequences that are exhilarating, terrifying, and often catastrophic. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) devastates Central Europe in the name of religious truth. The English Civil War ends with the public beheading of a king. Galileo is silenced and condemned to house arrest. The universe revealed by the telescope turns out to be inconceivably larger than anyone had imagined, and the comfortable old picture of Earth at the center of a small, orderly cosmos has been permanently destroyed.

The thinkers in this unit are all, in different ways, responding to this atmosphere of grandeur and crisis. They share an awareness that the stakes are enormous — the questions being asked are not academic but existential, with consequences measured in wars, executions, and the reorientation of humanity’s place in the universe. This is the intellectual world in which Milton writes Paradise Lost: a world where freedom is real but dangerous, knowledge is powerful but insufficient, and the relationship between the individual and authority has become a matter of life and death.

The Human Position

What is a human being, and where do we stand in the order of things?

If Pico della Mirandola placed the human being at the center of creation and celebrated our freedom to become anything, Pascal — writing a century and a half later — places us between two abysses and asks whether we can bear it. His “Two Infinities” passage in the Pensées is one of the great set pieces of European philosophy: the universe expands outward beyond comprehension, the microscopic world contracts inward beyond perception, and the human being is suspended in the middle, too small to grasp the infinite, too large to grasp the infinitesimal. “What is a man in the infinite?” Pascal asks. “A nothing compared with the infinite, an all compared with the nothing, a middle point between nothing and all.”

This is not despair — or not only despair. Pascal’s other great insight is that our very awareness of our wretchedness is what makes us great. “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.” Our dignity consists entirely in thought — and thought is what reveals to us how small we are. This is a distinctly Baroque paradox: grandeur and misery are not opposites but two faces of the same condition.

Approaching the question from a very different angle, Hobbes offers an equally unsettling portrait. In his account of the “state of nature,” human beings are fundamentally equal — but equality is revealed as a surprising disaster. Anyone can kill anyone else. Without a common power to keep them in awe, people exist in “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes does not celebrate human nature; he anatomizes its dangers. We are creatures whose freedom, left ungoverned, produces not Pico’s self-creating magnificence but universal war.

Connection to Paradise Lost: Milton places human beings in a universe of staggering scale — Satan’s journey through Chaos, the vast distances between Heaven, Hell, and Earth — that rivals Pascal’s two infinities. His central characters embody Pascal’s paradox: Adam and Eve are at once the crown of creation and pitifully vulnerable, magnificent in their freedom and devastating in their capacity to misuse it. The poem insists, against Hobbes, that human beings are capable of genuine goodness, but it also shows with unflinching honesty how freedom makes catastrophe possible.

Knowledge and Its Limits

How do we know what we know, and how far can knowledge take us?

The Renaissance had opened the floodgates of empirical inquiry with the achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes — and the Baroque does not close them. Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) represents the supreme achievement of the scientific revolution: a mathematical framework that explains the motions of everything from falling apples to orbiting planets. The universe operates according to laws that human reason can discover and express with precision. This is an astonishing triumph of knowledge.

But the Baroque thinkers are also acutely aware of what knowledge cannot do. Pascal, himself a brilliant mathematician and physicist, insists that reason has limits. The “Two Infinities” passage is, among other things, an argument about epistemology: we are constitutionally incapable of grasping either extreme of reality. “Our intelligence holds the same position in the order of the intellect as our body in the extent of nature.” We can know the middle of things — but the foundations and the ultimate reaches are hidden from us. And the deepest truths, Pascal argues, are not accessible to reason at all: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” God is perceived by the heart, not by the intellect.

Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World offers a different angle on the limits of knowledge and on who gets to pursue knowledge in the first place. Her protagonist becomes empress of a fantastical world and immediately reorganizes its intellectual life, assigning different species of hybrid creatures to different branches of inquiry. The passage is playful, but it raises serious questions about the relationship between power and knowledge, about who controls the institutions of learning, and about whether the structures we build to organize knowledge might also constrain it.

Connection to Paradise Lost: The poem is structured around a series of conversations about knowledge and its proper limits. In Book VIII, the angel Raphael warns Adam not to inquire too deeply into the mechanics of the cosmos: “Be lowly wise,” he counsels. The question of how much human beings are meant to know, and of when and how knowledge becomes dangerous, runs through the entire poem. The Fall itself is an epistemological catastrophe: Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; Adam consents to join Eve in her defiant folly, and their descendants reap the consequences. Milton does not condemn knowledge as such — he was himself one of the most learned men in Europe — but he insists that knowledge pursued without wisdom, humility, and love engenders destruction. This is Pascal’s argument translated into narrative.

The Individual and Authority

What is the relationship between the person and the structures that govern them?

This is the thread where the Baroque is at its most intense and most divided, because the seventeenth century has just lived through the most dramatic confrontation between individual conscience and sovereign authority in European history: the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I.

Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651 — two years after the king’s beheading — is written in the shadow of that catastrophe. His argument is that the only alternative to the war of all against all is the total surrender of individual judgment to a sovereign power. We give up the right to govern ourselves; in exchange, the sovereign provides order, safety, and the possibility of civilized life. The sovereign’s authority is absolute; to resist it is to invite a return to the chaos of the state of nature.

Milton is Hobbes’s great antagonist on this question. Paradise Lost can easily be read as a sustained refutation of the Hobbesian worldview. Milton had served in the Commonwealth that executed the king. He believed that political authority must be earned, not merely imposed; for him, obedience is only meaningful when it is freely given. Milton’s God is initially callous when confronting the inevitable suffering of Adam after the Fall (“Ingrate, he had of me / All he could have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall”), yet he also articulates a powerful justification for the necessity of free will: “Not free, what proof could they have given sincere / Of true allegiance, constant faith, or love?” The entire architecture of Paradise Lost depends on the idea that freedom is not a problem to be solved but the precondition of meaningful moral existence.

Emelia Lanyer’s “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women” adds another dimension to this thread. Writing in 1611 — the first book of original poetry by a woman published in England — Lanyer challenges the patriarchal authority that blamed Eve (and by extension all women) for the Fall. Her argument is daring: if Eve sinned out of love and a desire for knowledge, Adam sinned out of weakness despite having received God’s command directly. Lanyer’s provocation demonstrates that the question of who has authority to interpret the foundational stories of a culture, and whose voice gets heard in that interpretation, is as much a part of the Baroque intellectual landscape as Hobbes’s political theory.

Connection to Paradise Lost: The poem stages the individual-authority question at the highest possible stakes. Satan rebels against divine authority and frames his rebellion as a fight for freedom — “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” But Milton makes clear that Satan’s version of freedom is self-deception: his “liberty” leads only to enslavement to his own rage and pride. Adam and Eve, by contrast, are genuinely free within a structure of loving authority — until they choose to break it. The poem asks: what does legitimate authority look like? What does genuine obedience look like? And what happens when free beings make the wrong choice? These are Hobbes’s questions, answered in a way Hobbes would never have accepted.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

From the Renaissance: Pico’s self-creating human becomes Pascal’s thinking reed, trembling between infinities. Galileo’s triumphant empiricism becomes Newton’s magnificent but impersonal mathematical universe, in which the human significance that the Renaissance assumed is no longer guaranteed. Luther’s individual conscience, which defied the Pope, has produced a century of religious warfare. The Baroque does not repudiate the Renaissance; it takes the Renaissance seriously enough to confront its consequences.

Toward the Enlightenment: The Enlightenment will attempt to resolve the Baroque’s tensions by doubling down on reason. Where Pascal said the heart has its reasons that reason cannot know, Kant will say: dare to use your own understanding. Where Hobbes demanded submission to absolute authority, Locke will argue for authority by consent. The questions the Baroque raised — about whether reason is sufficient, about whether freedom leads to flourishing or to ruin — do not go away. Austen’s comedies of manners will explore them with a precision the Baroque thinkers never achieved.