The universe, including Heaven and Hell, that Milton imagines in Paradise Lost was much more familiar to his original audience than to today's readers. Today the heliocentric view of the solar system and many more, at times baffling, theories about the universe and its creation are accepted without question. In seventeenth-century England, the debate between the geocentric view of the universe, proposed by the ancient Roman astronomer, Ptolemy, and the heliocentric view, advocated by Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, and others was still fiercely debated.
Through the years, critics have argued confidently about Milton's view of this debate, though these same critics have often been in disagreement concerning which side Milton accepted. Evidence exists that Milton might have met Galileo. Milton mentions Galileo's telescope in the poem (V, 262–62). But, when Adam asks Raphael whether the Earth is stationary with the rest of the universe circling it or whether the Earth circles the sun along with the other planets, Raphael (and Milton) equivocates, leaving Milton's own views unstated.
Of course, the geocentric / heliocentric debate is but one small part of the cosmos that Milton presents in Paradise Lost. In general terms, Milton describes a universe with Heaven at the top, Hell at the bottom, and Chaos in between. Earth dangles on a golden chain dropped from Heaven, and, by the end of the epic, a bridge connects Hell to Earth. To grasp the significance of this view of the universe, one must examine each part separately and compare the fictional / theological construct with the scientific knowledge of Milton's day.
