This coming Friday will be the 126th birthday of C.S. Lewis. Last year, the excellent C.S. Lewis podcast, Pints with Jack, started C.S. Lewis Reading Day on Lewis’s birthday to help us remember and promote the work of one of the best Christian authors of the twentieth century. To help support their efforts, I’ll be sharing an essay I’ve written on Lewis every day this week. Some will be old essays, some may be new, but they’ll all be about Lewis.
Today’s post is continuing my cosmic theme. This is an essay I first wrote for U.S. Catholic Magazine. Enjoy.
I love to look at the stars at night or early in the morning. On the night leading into my birthday last year, there was a lunar eclipse and a blood moon. I opened a window in my living room, it was too cold to sit outside, and I laid down on the floor watching the moon turn almost black and then blood red. I lay there for over an hour watching the movements of the sky, enamoured by them and by the one who set them into motion. Stargazing for me that night was an act of prayer.
I was moved by the beauty of the heavens to praise God. And this is how I often feel when staring into the night sky. I see those lights, so many of them, we’re told, burned out millennia before now, and yet their light continues to reach us. This must be part of what the Psalmist meant when he said, “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord.” But it is not just the beauty of their light. It is their movements, the cosmic dance. Nowhere for me was this more evident than on the night of the blood moon. Foreordained since the ceation of our galaxy, the earth passed between the sun and moon. I nearly wept as I reflected on the God who made these planets, these gods of the night sky. The sheer magnitude of the cosmos, giant gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn, novae and supernovae exploding and reforming, all the nebulae, galaxies, black holes, and here we are on our seemingly insignificant planet, the home of the God become man. I am moved by this thought, that for whatever reason, whatever else might be happening in the universe, God became man here. How can I not be moved to praising God as I consider all this?
In the Middle Ages, before the discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo, the earth was believed to be the center of the cosmos. This, by the way, was not a good thing. The heavens were believed to move in perfect circles, they were unchanging, except in their constant motion. On earth things are always changing, and change meant the possibility, and later the actuality, of sin. The planets, on the other hand, were perfect, moved through their course by angelic intelligences. This is why the people of the Middle Ages and the Ancient world called the celestial expanse, the heavens. They would watch the sky, seeing in its movements the beauty and love of God. For medieval authors like Boethius and Dante, the love of God moved “the sun and the other stars” (Par. 33.145). The first discoverers of heliocentrism were not attempting to disenchant the cosmos, but rather to come to accurate, but often still prayerful understandings of the universe. Still, as the sciences became unhooked from the spiritual realities behind them, the cosmos became space.
C.S. Lewis was a great lover of stargazing, and of the medieval model of the universe. In his science fiction trilogy, Lewis presents us the medieval cosmos with a modern twist. Since the books take place in the modern world, they present a universe where the sun is the center of our solar system and the earth is one of the planets that wanders in the heavens. And yet, as Elwin Ransom, the main protagonist particularly of the first two novels, is first traveling through space, he has this reflection: "Now the very name "Space" seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam[…]. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens––the heavens which declared the glory[…].”1 And it is passages like this and those in Dante that have me sitting outside, often with an app, to help me discover the stars and planets as they move across the night sky.
One of the things that has profoundly helped me stargaze as prayer is the ability to recognize the planets, even if I’m not always certain which is which. These former gods turned angels also represented archetypes, figures and characters foundational to reality. Thus when I see Jupiter in the summer or Venus on an autumnal morning, I made to think of the jovial and venereal characters. I think of kingliness and jollity, feasting and festivals, love and beauty. And I am again reminded that these things too come from God. The planets remind me too that the whole of the universe is connected. We are made of stardust, and the fate of the planets is bound up in us because we are bound up in Christ.
Much of how the Medievals understood the cosmos has since been disproven. But their approach, and the way Lewis mimics it in his fiction, to the cosmos inspires me to pray. I look up at the night sky and see the beauty and wonder of the universe. I am moved, always, when gazing upon the stars to pray. I give thanks to the God who, “determines the number of the stars,” and “gives to all of them their names” (Ps. 147:4). I think on the fact that we are made of stardust, and that the stars themselves along with everything else in creation has been united to Christ in the Incarnation, that all things exist for a reason the chief of which is to give praise to God. And I wonder too about the future, not because I think the stars can tell me what is to come, but because to look on their vastness, their innumerability, is to see an analogy for the eternity God intends to share with us. I am left to consider too the earth itself, for the stars and planets exist, in part, to give light and knowledge. For God said, “‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth’” (Gn. 1:14-15). Their light brings us to the one who is the Light of the world, the one in whom all other lights participate and receive their radiance. After all, Christ calls himself the Morning Star.
So tonight, look to the stars. Look at them and listen for their inaudible music. Look at them and remember that what a star is made of is not the sum total of what a star is. Look at them and remember that the heavens declare the glory of the Lord. Look at them and pray.
1 C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003), 34.
Splendid essay! Eager to read more.
Beautiful. The natural world was made to become heaven. That's it's density but we can see it now.