The Importance of the Medieval Cosmos

School officially begins for me next week and having spent the past week preparing, I haven’t had time to write a new piece for you. So here’s an essay I originally wrote for Forma Journal issue number 16. Next week I’ll be off at the Undiscovered Lewis Conference to give a paper, so we may be looking at either a review of the conference or another old post. But after that, I should be able to get back to regular writing. In the meantime, enjoy this essay.

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Photo by Dan Russo on Unsplash

At the end of the Divine Comedy as the pilgrim looks upon the blessed Trinity and is struck by supernatural knowledge concerning the incarnation, he reflects that what he sees is “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” For people living in the Middle Ages, the cosmos was just that, an ordered whole which moved in perfect spheres. And while each of these spheres, the planets, was itself moved by some kind of angelic intelligence, it was the love of God for the universe that caused it to move. And this movement caused a music, the Music of the Spheres, which no one could hear, for its bliss would be too much for us. And in the midst of it all, they still looked on the Cosmos with baptized pagan eyes, seeing in the planets vestiges of the gods of old, but these gods now became angels, their influences and temperaments, the will of God. Then came Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus, who first saw themselves as elevating the earth to the status of planet, since being the center of the physical universe was a bad thing (so bad that Dante actually makes Satan’s genitalia the very center of the earth which is the center of the universe). But with that shift, we must ask ourselves, have we forgotten too much? Did we leave behind aspects of the medieval conception of the universe that could still be beneficial to us today? C.S. Lewis’s answer was yes.

In an essay pre-amble to a poem demonstrating various alliterative styles of verse, Lewis wrote of the medieval view of the planets, the subject of his poem, that they have “permanent value as spiritual symbols.” What he meant specifically by this was the character of each planet: the lunacy of the Moon, the mercurial nature of Mercury, the venereal character of Venus, the Sun’s solarity, the martial nature of Mars, Jupiter’s joviality, and the saturnine nature of Saturn. These characters, these temperaments or archetypes, occupied much of Lewis’s professional and literary life.

In The Discarded Image, a book composed from Lewis’s lectures to students of Medieval Literature, Lewis writes about how the medieval model of the universe came about, citing both ancient and medieval sources, Lewis builds up to chapter five, where he gives us how the Medievals saw the planets. For many, the terms god, angel, and planet, as regarded these wandering lights in the sky, were interchangeable. But if they were gods, they were not to be worshipped, and they themselves served the one, true God. The reason they were considered, in some way, as living is because they moved. For Aristotle, things one move if acted upon by an outside force, or by the self. Self-moved objects have souls: plants, animals, and people. Well, the planets move, so they must have souls. Plus, it had become customary to see the planets as the Greco-Roman gods, hence their names.

Well, medieval people were systematizers. They took what was written by the auctores, the famous authors who shaped the world in which they lived, both pagan and Christian, and found ways to make them coalesce. So Jupiter went from being a god more interested in your wife than his own, to a planet and angel who not only symbolized joviality, a kingly magnaniminity and joy, but one who conveyed that to various people born under his influence. When Venus is dominating, you can expect love; the Moon? wandering of wits or feet or both. This may sound like New Age astrology and there are some connections between them. But the key difference is this: most modern astrology deals primarily with the horoscope, the time-vision, where one looks to see what will happen in the future based on the alignment of the stars and what stars you were born under. While there were certainly some in the Middle Ages who sought to do this, most did not. Rather, they assumed that all things are interconnected and related to one another, so of course the stars and planets present at the time of your birth have some influence over who you are, but only that, an influence, they incline, they do not determine. For Dante, astrologers were condemned to the eighth circle of Hell, that of the liars, because while they sought or claimed to tell the future from the stars, they could not. This shows that while notions of influence from the stars was considered natural, but any suggestion that they could be predictive was not.

So what then is the importance of the medieval cosmos? It doesn’t predict the future, most people today would say that the planets and stars have little to no effect on our lives, and we know the earth is not the center of the universe, let alone the solar system. So why bother with it, other than to better understand the Middle Ages? Why did Lewis, for instance, believe the planets to have, “permanent value as spiritual symbols”? To answer this, we must see how Lewis himself used the planets.

Lewis referred to the planets, and their medieval aspects, in his scholarly work, his personal life, and his fiction. In his personal life, Lewis would often go stargazing, even writing in one letter that after watching the conjunction of certain stars, he could understand why our ancestors saw meaning in their movements. In his scholarship, the planets come up in several places, not least of which his poem and essay on alliterative verse and his book, The Discarded Image. In his poem, Lewis notes the enchanting and wandering spirit of the Moon, he notes the difficulty in pinning down Mercury by calling him a “madcap rover,” the “patron of pilf’rers,” but also notes his relationship to words and meaning. Lewis calls him the “Lord of language,” and associates him with weddings, particularly the wedding of “thing with thought.” Venus, the third heaven to which St. Paul ascended in Dante’s cosmology, is all beauty and the sea and the growing of things upon the earth. Next comes the Sun, filled with ruling and intellect. The Sun is not the king of the planets, but he is kingly, and he is, as Lewis describes him in The Discarded Image, the eye of the universe. He sees all and by him we see. He imparts wisdom to us. From the Sun we move to Mars, who is called mercenary. In the poem, Lewis associates Mars’s metal, iron, with the nails of the crucifixion. And yet, we see that Mars, despite his role as infortuna minor, is necessary, after all, we call the Friday of the cruicifixion Good Friday. From Mars we move to Jupiter, and here we meet the king. Alongside the mercurial, Lewis lists joviality as one of the hardest concepts for modern people to grasp. Today it means something primarily along the lines of being jolly, joyful, convivial. And this is all true of Jove, but it is more than that. There is a magnanimity in joviality, a kingliness. Lewis says, however, that we must not think of a king at war, but a feasting king at peace in the halcyon days of summer. And finally, we meet Saturn, old Kronos, Father Time. He causes pestilence and death, Lewis describes him in the poem as “stoop’d and stumbling, with staff groping.” He is a wizened old man who causes our pains and hurts. And yet, for Dante, his is the sphere of the contemplatives. In the poem, Lewis writes that “Distance hurts us.” What I think he means here is that Saturn’s effects on the earth are so negative precisely because he is so much closer to God. As noted above, being the center of the universe is no boon to the human race. Rather it is negative for all change and sin and imperfection are found here. Saturn is the last of the planets, and in Dante is only two spheres away from the Empyrean––the fixed stars and the Primum Mobile being the final two spheres of the physical universe. So that even though God is present in all parts of the cosmos, there is a sense in which, because he is also beyond the universe, that the edges of the universe are somehow closer to him. This distance causes a kind of refraction in the light that descends from Saturn, so that even the good that may come from his events is first cloaked in a kind of natural evil.

This is all well and good, and one could find all sorts of interesting things to say about the medieval cosmos, but why is Lewis so convinced that these symbols are of permanent spiritual value and what can we do with them? The answer is twofold. First there is the usefulness of these symbols as archetypes that may help us understand ourselves, each other, and even God better. The second is in the deeper notion that the world is so ordered that nothing happens purely by chance and that what happens in one part of the cosmos has an effect on the whole.

For the planets as archetypes, one needs only turn to Lewis’s fiction. While the Narniad is Lewis’s most well known work of fiction, before that he wrote a trilogy of science fiction novels. In these novels, part of what Lewis sets out to do is present the medieval cosmos in light of modern science. When the protagonist Elwin Ransom is taken into space, a word he soon decides is a blasphemous libel of the Empyrean before him, he does not find that the Earth is the center of the solar system, nor does he find the planets as perfect, light-filled spheres spinning round in perfect circles. They are planets not unlike our own, some solid, some gaseous. He also finds two of them inhabited by rational creatures, and irrational, who worship the true God. And yet, each planet is moved through the Fields of Arbol, the Old Solar name for the solar system, by a kind of angelic intelligence called an Oyarsu. What is more, the Oyarsu of each planet maps fairly well onto the medieval understanding of them. This comes to the fore in That Hideous Strength, where, instead of going into space, the planets, represented by their Oyarses, come down to Earth. As they do, their influence is felt both by Ransom and a re-awakened Merlin, who have their particular business with them, and by the other members of Ransom’s household, who are hiding in the kitchen. While Lewis does not have all seven planets descend, he nevertheless uses their descent as an opportunity to describe the archetypal character of each. While Ransom and Merlin feel the full force of them, those in the kitchen receive a mediated presence. When Mercury comes they find themselves making puns, playing with meanings, and putting forward intellectual ideas that seem mad at first and yet on reflection ought to be taken seriously. When Jupiter descends, they dance, but not in some bacchanalic frenzy, but in a way that is both lordly and folksy. We all have these archetypes in us, but some one of them will often predominate. Lewis shows us this and by so doing gives us a vocabulary to help us articulate ourselves in new ways which were once common. To paraphrase Lewis in his essay before the poem on the planets, we know the saturnine well enough, but who doesn’t need to be reminded of Jove.

Also, attention to these archetypes can help us become more intentional in our ways of treating and dealing with ourselves and each other. If you are of a more saturnine bent, the goal isn’t to change, but to ensure that it is the contemplative side of Saturn which you feed, rather than the one which deals in death and decay. If you are more venereal, the love as only you can, but make sure your love is appropriately directed. If you are more mercurial, make sure it is the love of language and meaning you stoke, and not the changeability which cause you to turn from joy to despair. Every planet has a diurnal and nocturnal aspect, or, if you prefer, a paradisal and infernal. Our job then is to bring out the diurnal in ourselves and others and to combat the infernal.

But what does any of this teach us about God? Well, as God is the source of all things, he must also be the source of these archetypes, meaning all give us some glimpse of who he is. According to Michael Ward, in his book Planet Narnia, this is what Lewis sought to do in the Chronicles of Narnia. For those unfamiliar with Ward’s thesis, it is this: each of the seven Chronicles of Narnia, is governed by one of the seven planets of the medieval cosmos. To run through them quickly: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the Jove story concerned primarily with kingliness; Prince Caspian is the Mars story culminating in the fight between Peter and Miraz; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun story as they travel East to Aslan’s country and drink liquid light; The Silver Chair is the Moon story, concerned with wandering and madness; The Horse and His Boy is the Mercury story, concerned with the meeting of selves, story-telling, and even thievery; The Magician’s Nephew is the Venus story as it describes the creation of Narnia and contains its own version of the Garden of the Hesperedes; and finally The Last Battle is the Saturn story, concerned with the end of Narnia. Ward’s thesis has been widely accepted, though not universally. Nevertheless, he presents a convincing argument noting how Aslan himself, Narnia’s picture of the second person of the Trinity, is portrayed in ways that emphasize the planet which dominates the story. Aslan is primarily seen as the Son of the Emperor across the Sea in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he is the creator of all plants and animals, even creating the animals primarily in pairs of husband and wife in The Magician’s Nephew. And as Aslan helps us understand God through the guise of fiction, so too he helps us understand these archetypal aspects of who God is through his assumption of the planetary temperaments. To learn about the medieval understanding of the planets is to learn about who God is.

Finally, the medieval conception of the cosmos has one last thing to teach us. It teaches us that the universe is ordered, that nothing is here by accident, and that all things are united and influence one another. Is it true that those born under Jupiter, as Lewis was, are inclined to be jovial in temperament, red-faced men and women prone to laughter and with loud voices? I honestly can’t say. But, it is true that, “the heavens declare the Glory of the Lord.” It is true that their cosmic dance sings with the Music of the Spheres which we cannot now here, but may be able to glimpse and hear more fully when Christ returns. Thus, to read Dante or Chaucer or even Shakespeare who were all concerned with this conception of reality, is to get behind the purely mechanistic, even the purely naturalistic and to see the cosmos more wholistically. Lewis constantly asks his students, the primary audience of the lectures on which The Discarded Image is based, to go walk under the stars at night. He asks them, and therefore us, to look up with the eyes of a medieval man or woman. If we do so, we may learn something about ourselves and about God. So go take a walk, look at the stars, and see what you may learn. Perhaps you too may glimpse the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.