I have often 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 seventeenth-century poet, John Milton. Then I realized 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 is in danger of winning, 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 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 been hurled down into the burning pit of Hell by God after the battle. Now Satan 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, based on standard medieval bestiaries, is that the sailor anchors his ship on Leviathan. But what is Leviathan going to do when morning comes? It will wake, crush the ship, or drag it beneath the waves. How can there be any sort of real battle against the power God wields? There cannot be. Far from being an almost level fight, which might have gone either way, the battle is not only unjustified; it was not a battle in any true sense at all. This panoply of information is conveyed by one seven-letter word: dubious.
We now move from the triple meaning of the word “dubious” — could go either way, unjustified, not a battle at all — to that moment where Milton depicts the manner in which the rebellious angels are 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 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 refused to release the imprisoned 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.” The 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 seen in Dante’s Inferno. It can mean “to descend,” “to hurl,” or “to bowl in an underhand way.” Pitch can also mean dark, black, or tar-like. It can signify opposition, as in a pitched battle, or simply falling. In addition, it conveys oscillation or hovering in the air, unstable movement at sea — the locusts swerving, much like the fallen angels themselves.
“Warping,” meanwhile, signals throwing, twisting, bending, distortion, or perversion. Milton is describing the oscillating, swerving movement of the locusts, while simultaneously conveying the character of the fallen angels: their deviation from God, their distortion of truth, and their diminished state after leaving Heaven. Satan himself appears shrunken in the eyes of Beelzebub, embodying both loss of stature and moral decline.
With these two words, Milton conjures an astonishing multiplicity of meanings: physical, moral, temporal, and spiritual. Just as Satan/Lucifer carries out his diabolical strategy in Paradise Lost, so does Milton present the broader principle: actions and consequences, power and strategy, are rarely straightforward. The cosmic game of chess has been set, with God as the dominant force, yet Satan remains a player, capable of cunning, swerving, and survival.
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. As we saw above, Milton actually refers to Satan after his Fall as seemingly shrunken and diminished in the perception of his co-demon, Beelzebub.
Two words, but with an increasing crescendo of many, many different meanings; and, just as Satan/ Lucifer carries out his diabolical strategy in Paradise Lost, so we now witness the Wokistas in both the UK and USA, seeking to implement a death cult agenda, consisting of assisted suicide and last minute abortion. Fortunately, President Trump, Pacis Defensor, is in the forefront of combatting such evils of the dark arts. Let us hope that the new UK Prime Minister, in waiting, the heir apparent to control of the British political system, also encourages common sense to prevail.
