What will we call home one century from now—a thicket, a nation, the Earth itself? According to a common proverb in the Middle Ages, “Most of us are at home one place on Earth, while experienced travelers are at home many places on Earth. But the truly wise are at home no place on Earth.” In that time, people thought life on Earth could only tarnish the soul. The Earth itself was corrupt, and ultimately doomed, along with those too devoted to it. Home was in heaven, and the Earth was only a perilous stopover on the soul’s pilgrimage.
This attitude of contempt for the Earth had its own tradition of travel literature (providing the seeds for today’s science fiction), in which a human soul casts off the body’s husk in sleep or death and flies toward heaven, turning back just in time to see the world, pitifully small and poor as a freckle on the void.
I was lost in Germany, but we are lost on Earth unless we decide what we will call home. We can begin to consider what our home might be like—and to assess what we value as home—by visiting some of these early travel accounts by Cicero, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and others. In certain ways these imaginative journeys of the past are remarkably similar to the actual travels by astronauts of our own time. We can read the image that came from Cicero’s reed pen as a prophetic simulation for Apollo 11, just as the space programs of the last twenty years may prefigure the human mission in the next century.
Before Copernicus, before Christ, in the first century B.C. when Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a political tract called De re publica, his sense of politics involved both the duties of the individual citizen and the plan of the cosmos. In the final chapter of his book, a character from Roman history named Scipio Africanus the Younger dreams that he has sailed out toward the stars to learn his destiny. It’s wonderful out there for Scipio, and like the astronauts of our own time he reports that “the blazing stars” are far brighter than what we see from Earth. As he hovers, amazed among the stars, the spirit-forms of his father and grandfather appear, terrifying him, but then assuring and informing him: he should strive, they say, in the work of the Empire, for nothing is dearer “to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the establishment of federations bound together by principles of justice.” But as he listens, Scipio turns and looks back, and is struck by the size of the distant Earth—“so small that I was ashamed of our Empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface.”
Cicero was right to be skeptical about the Empire; for all his service to the state, when political enemies seized control they nailed his severed head and right hand to the podium from which he had so often—and so eloquently—addressed the Roman citizens. His “Dream of Scipio” survived, however, as a famous example of cosmology and dream-literature. The ability of this work to look simultaneously inward in dream, backward in history, and outward in cosmology was a model to be copied by medieval writers for centuries. Through the edition and commentary of a fourth-century writer named Macrobius, Scipio’s Dream was known intimately by everyone seriously interested in astronomy through the seventeenth century. This included Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Kepler, and others who copied the Dream in their works. Even today, Cicero’s way of looking at Earth from outside the atmosphere and yet inside the mind recurs. Though Michael Collins (the third member of the Apollo 11 team) probably never read Cicero, he describes a mental journey toward the stars in words similar to Cicero’s: “I can now lift my mind out into space and look back at a midget Earth. I can see it hanging there in the relentless sunlight.” The conclusion Collins draws from that perspective also echoes Cicero: “I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced.”
The early fourteenth century in Italy was a time of very noisy human argument. That tiny, distant world was what Dante, lifted toward heaven in his Divine Comedy, called “the threshing floor that makes us so ferocious,” as he glanced back at Earth from the constellation Gemini. Gemini (besides being the name of five American missions into space in 1965) was Dante’s astrological birth-sign. He was in exile from his native city of Florence when he wrote about the small, scarred floor of Earth. Like Cicero, he sensed his true home among the stars, and in his vision he did not look back at Earth with longing or regret, but with relief to be away. Earth was a distant chapter in his past.
Another cosmic traveler eager to be away was the hero of Chaucer’s courtly romance, Troilus and Criseyde. At the close of this story, the Trojan knight and lover Troilus has been killed in battle by Achilles, and his heaven-bound spirit flies up through the eight concentric spheres of the medieval cosmos, brushing aside the four material elements of earth, water, air, and fire, until he bursts out into the realm of the fixed stars and hears the “hevenyssh melodie” that drives the universe. Then he turns and glances back at the Earth:
And when he was slain in this way
His light spirit blissfully rose
Up to the hollowness of the eighth sphere,
Leaving behind on either side the elements;
And beyond he saw with utter attention
The wandering planets, harkening to harmony
With sounds of heaven’s melody.
And down from there he eagerly studied
This little spot of earth, that by the sea
Is embraced, and he totally despised
This wretched world, and held all vanity
Compared to the sheer happiness
That is in heaven above.
Especially in my translation, perhaps, this is one of the soberest passages in Chaucer, and some readers have doubted that the author of the Canterbury Tales actually wrote it. In a sense, he did not. He only borrowed it from Macrobius, who borrowed it from Cicero, who borrowed it from Lucretius, who borrowed it from Plato, who got it from the Muse. Actually, Chaucer’s Troilus is himself quite jolly at this point: “within himself he laughed at the sorrow / Of those who wept so sincerely for his death.” Their concerns are so distant, so tiny, blind, absurd. Troilus is jolly at the expense of those he left behind—the wretched Earth and its citizens.
With Milton in the seventeenth century, the traditional language of Cicero’s cosmic vision remained, but the attitude toward the value of the Earth began to change. Where Chaucer’s Troilus despised “this litel spot of erthe,” in Paradise Lost the angel Raphael tells Adam,
. . . this earth a spot, a grain,
An atom, with the firmament compared . . .
Though, in comparison of Heav’n, so small,
Nor glistering, may of solid good contain
More plenty than the sun that barren shines
Whose virtue on itself works no effect
But in the fruitful Earth.
Maybe it was Milton’s blindness that brought this change of heart. Maybe it was the chill distances of space that Galileo’s telescope and Kepler’s mathematics had begun to actualize. Something made Milton and his contemporaries begin to imagine that from out in space the Earth would be small, yes, very small—but somehow winsome, fertile, a garden for a good life. The Earth had been small for Cicero, but therefore worthless. For Milton’s Raphael, the tiny atom of Earth holds Eden, and is a kind of heaven in small. From Milton and those who followed him, we inherit both the vision of Earth’s smallness and a sense of empathy with it. A hundred years after Milton, cosmic travelers in Voltaire’s Micromegas first sight the Earth from space: “they discerned a small speck, which was the Earth. Coming from Jupiter, they could not but be moved with compassion at the sight of this miserable spot, upon which, however, they resolved to land.”
Cosmic travel literature continued from the seventeenth century with an increasing interest in the