by C. S. Lewis
It would be easy to descant on the antithesis between this Theology and that which is characteristic of Judaism (at its best) and Christianity. Both can speak about the ‘love of God’. But in the one this means the thirsty and aspiring love of creatures for Him; in the other, His provident and descending love for them. The antithesis should not, however, be regarded as a contradiction. A real universe could accommodate the ‘love of God’ in both senses. Aristotle describes the natural order, which is perpetually exhibited in the uncorrupted and translunary world. St John (‘herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us’)23 describes the order of Grace which comes into play here on earth because men have fallen. It will be noticed that when Dante ends the Comedy with ‘the love that moves the Sun and the other stars’, he is speaking of love in the Aristotelian sense.
But, while there is no contradiction, the antithesis fully explains why the Model is so little in evidence among spiritual writers and why the whole atmosphere of their work is so different from that of Jean de Meung or even Dante himself. Spiritual books are wholly practical in purpose, addressed to those who ask direction. Only the order of Grace is relevant.
Granted that the spheres are moved by love for God, a modern may still ask why this movement should take the form of rotation. To any ancient or medieval mind I believe the answer would have been obvious. Love seeks to participate in its object, to become as like its object as it can. But finite and created beings can never fully share the motionless ubiquity of God, just as time, however it multiplies its transitory presents, can never achieve the totum simul of eternity. The nearest approach to the divine and perfect ubiquity that the spheres can attain is the swiftest and most regular possible movement, in the most perfect form, which is circular. Each sphere attains it in a less degree than the sphere above it, and therefore has a slower pace.
This all implies that each sphere, or something resident in each sphere, is a conscious and intellectual being, moved by ‘intellectual love’ of God. And so it is. These lofty creatures are called Intelligences. The relation between the Intelligence of a sphere and the sphere itself as a physical object was variously conceived. The older view was that the Intelligence is ‘in’ the sphere as the soul is ‘in’ the body, so that the planets are, as Plato would have agreed, ζῷα—celestial animals, animate bodies or incarnate minds. Hence Donne, speaking of our own bodies, can say ‘We are The intelligences,24 they the spheare’. Later, the Scholastics thought differently. ‘We confess with the sacred writers’, says Albertus Magnus,25 ‘that the heavens have not souls and are not animals if the word soul is taken in its strict sense. But if we wish to bring the scientists (philosophos) into agreement with the sacred writers, we can say that there are certain Intelligences in the spheres . . . and they are called the souls of the spheres . . . but they are not related to the spheres in that mode which justifies us in calling the (human) soul the entelechy of the body. We have spoken according to the scientists, who contradict the sacred writers only in name.’ Aquinas26 follows Albertus. ‘Between those who hold that they are animals and those who do not, little or no difference is to be found in substance, but only in language (in voce tantum).’
The planetary Intelligences, however, make a very small part of the angelic population which inhabits, as its ‘kindly stede’, the vast aetherial region between the Moon and the Primum Mobile. Their graded species have already been described.
All this time we are describing the universe spread out in space; dignity, power and speed progressively diminishing as we descend from its circumference to its centre, the Earth. But I have already hinted that the intelligible universe reverses it all; there the Earth is the rim, the outside edge where being fades away on the border of nonentity. A few astonishing lines from the Paradiso (XXVIII, 25 sq.) stamp this on the mind forever. There Dante sees God as a point of light. Seven concentric rings of light revolve about that point, and that which is smallest and nearest to it has the swiftest movement. This is the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile, superior to all the rest in love and knowledge. The universe is thus, when our minds are sufficiently freed from the senses, turned inside out. Dante, with incomparably greater power is, however, saying no more than Alanus says when he locates us and our Earth ‘outside the city wall’.
It may well be asked how, in that unfallen translunary world, there come to be such things as ‘bad’ or ‘malefical’ planets. But they are bad only in relation to us. On the psychological side this answer is implicit in Dante’s allocation of blessed souls to their various planets after death. The temperament derived from each planet can be turned either to a good or a bad use. Born under Saturn, you are qualified to become either a mope and a malcontent or a great contemplative; under Mars, either an Attila or a martyr. Even the misuse of the psychology imposed on you by your stars can, through repentance, lead to its own appropriate species of beatitude; as in Dante’s Cunizza. The other bad effects of the ‘infortunes’—the plagues and disasters—can no doubt be dealt with in the same way. The fault lies not in the influence but in the terrestrial nature which receives it. In a fallen Earth it is permitted by Divine justice that we and our Earth and air respond thus disastrously to influences which are good in themselves. ‘Bad’ influences are those of which our corrupt world can no longer make a good use; the bad patient makes the agent bad in effect. The fullest account of this which I have met comes in a late and condemned book; but not, I presume, condemned on this score. It is the Cantica Tria of Franciscus Georgius Venetus (ob. 1540).27 If all things here below were rightly disposed to the heavens, all influences, as Trismegistus taught, would be extremely good (optimos). When an evil effect follows them, this must be attributed to the ill-disposed subject (indisposito subjecto).28
But it is time we descended below the Moon, from the aether into the air. This, as the reader already knows, is the ‘kindly stede’ of the aerial beings, the daemons. In LaƷamon, who follows Apuleius, these creatures can be either good or bad. It is still so for Bernardus, who divides the air into two regions, locating the good daemons in the upper and more tranquil part, the bad in the lower and more turbulent.29 But as the Middle Ages went on the view gained ground that all daemons alike were bad; were in fact fallen angels or ‘demons’. Alanus is taking this view when in Anticlaudian (IV, V) he speaks of the ‘airish citizens’ to whom the air is a prison; Chaucer remembered the passage.30 Aquinas clearly equates daemons with devils.31 The Pauline passage in Ephesians (ii. 2) about ‘the prince of the powers of the air’ probably had much to do with this, and also with the popular association between witchcraft and foul weather. Hence Milton’s Satan in Paradise Regained calls the air ‘our old conquest’ (I, 46). But much doubt, as we shall see, still hung about the daemons, and Renaissance neo-Platonism revived the older conception, while Renaissance witch-hunters felt more and more confident about the new one. The Attendant Spirit in Comus is called the Daemon in the Trinity manuscript.
This much would suffice for daemons if we were at all sure that they confined themselves to the air and if they were never identified with creatures that bear a different name. I shall deal with those in the next chapter.
I can hardly hope that I shall persuade the reader to yet a third experimental walk by starlight. But perhaps, without actually taking the walk, he can now improve his picture of that old universe by adding such finishing touches as this section has suggested. Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out—like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is ‘outside the city wall’. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith’s Lucifer, ‘the army of unalterable law’, but r
ather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable. You need not wonder that one old picture32 represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball. Then, laying aside whatever Theology or Atheology you held before, run your mind up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference, of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned.
The picture is nothing if not religious. But is the religion in question precisely Christianity? Certainly there is a striking difference between this Model where God is much less the lover than the beloved and man is a marginal creature, and the Christian picture where the fall of man and the incarnation of God as man for man’s redemption is central. There may perhaps, as I have hinted before, be no absolute logical contradiction. One may say that the Good Shepherd goes to seek the lost sheep because it is lost not because it was the finest sheep in the flock. It may have been the least. But there remains, at the very least, a profound disharmony of atmospheres. That is why all this cosmology plays so small a part in the spiritual writers, and is not fused with high religious ardour in any writer I know except Dante himself. Another indication of the cleavage is this. We might expect that a universe so filled with shining superhuman creatures would be a danger to monotheism. Yet the danger to monotheism in the Middle Ages clearly came not from a cult of angels but from the cult of the Saints. Men when they prayed were not usually thinking of the Hierarchies and Intelligences. There was, not (I think) an opposition, but a dissociation between their religious life and all that. At one point we might have expected contradiction. Is all this admirable universe, sinless and perfect everywhere beyond the Moon, to perish at the last day? It seems not. When scripture says the stars will fall (Matt. xxiv. 29) this may be taken ‘tropically’; it may mean that tyrants and magnates will be brought low. Or the stars that will fall may be only meteorites. And St Peter (II Pet. iii. 3 sq.) says only that the universe will be destroyed by fire as it once was destroyed by water. But no one thinks the flood rose to the translunary regions: neither, then, need the fire.33 Dante exempts the higher heavens from the final catastrophe; in Paradiso, VII, we learn that whatever flows immediately from God, senza mezzo distilla (67), will never end. The sublunary world was not created immediately; its elements were made by secondary agents. Man was made directly by God, hence his immortality; so were the angels, and apparently not only they but the paese sincero nel qual tu sei (130) ‘this stainless realm where now thou art’. If this is taken literally, the translunary world will not be destroyed; it is only the (four) elements below the Moon which will perish ‘with fervent heat’.
The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? Not undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never get really out of doors? The next chapter will perhaps give us some relief.
CHAPTER 6
THE LONGAEVI
There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in the workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.
CHESTERTON
I have put the Longaevi or longlivers into a separate chapter because their place of residence is ambiguous between air and Earth. Whether they are important enough to justify this arrangement is another question. In a sense, if I may risk the oxymoron, their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value. They soften the classic severity of the huge design. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.
I take for them the name Longaevi from Martianus Capella, who mentions ‘dancing companies of Longaevi who haunt woods, glades, and groves, and lakes and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns . . . Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs . . .’ .1 Bernardus Silvestris, without using the word Longaevi, describes similar creatures—‘Silvans, Pans, and Nerei’—as having ‘a longer life’ (than ours), though they are not immortal. They are innocent—‘of blameless conversation’—and have bodies of elemental purity.2
The alternative would have been to call them Fairies. But that word, tarnished by pantomime and bad children’s books with worse illustrations, would have been dangerous as the title of a chapter. It might encourage us to bring to the subject some ready-made, modern concept of a Fairy and to read the old texts in the light of it. Naturally, the proper method is the reverse; we must go to the texts with an open mind and learn from them what the word fairy meant to our ancestors.
A good point to begin at is provided by three passages from Milton:
(1) No evil thing that walks by night
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meagre Hag or stubborn unlaid ghost—
No goblin or swart Faery of the mine.
(Comus, 432 sq.)
(2) Like that Pigmean Race
Beyond the Indian Mount, or Faery Elves,
Whose midnight Revels, by a Forest side
Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees . . .
(Paradise Lost, I, 780 sq.)
(3) And Ladies of th’Hesperides, that seem’d
Fairer than feign’d of old, or fabl’d since
Of Fairy Damsels met in Forest wide
By Knights of Logres, or of Lyones—
(Paradise Regained, II, 357 sq.)
Milton lived too late to be direct evidence for medieval beliefs. The value of the passages for us is that they show the complexity of the tradition which the Middle Ages had bequeathed to him and his public. The three extracts were probably never connected in Milton’s mind. Each serves a different poetic purpose. In each he confidently expects from his readers a different response to the word fairy. They were equally conditioned to all three responses and could be relied on to make the right one at each place. Another, earlier and perhaps more striking, witness to this complexity is that within the same island and the same century Spenser could compliment Elizabeth I by identifying her with the Faerie Queene and a woman could be burned at Edinburgh in 1576 for ‘repairing with’ the fairies and the ‘Queen of Elfame’.3
The ‘swart Faery’ in Comus is classified among horrors. This is one strand in the tradition. Beowulf ranks the elves (ylfe, 111) along with ettins and giants as the enemies of God. In the ballad of Isabel and the Elf-Knight, the elf-knight is a sort of Bluebeard. In Gower, the slanderer of Constance says that she is ‘of faierie’ because she has given birth to a monster (Confessio, II, 964 sq.). The Catholicon Anglicum of 1483 gives lamia and eumenis (fury) as the Latin for elf; Horman’s Vulgaria (1519), strix and lamia for fairy. We are inclined to ask ‘Why not nympha?’ But nymph would not have mended matters. It also could be a name of terror to our ancestors. ‘What are these so fayre fiendes that cause my hayres to stand upright?’ cries Corsites in Lyly’s Endymion (IV, iii), ‘Hags! Out alas! Nymphs!!’. Drayton in Mortimer to Queen Isabel speaks of ‘the dishevelled gastly sea-Nymph’ (77). Athanasius Kircher says to an apparition ‘Aie! I fear ye be one of those daemons whom the ancients called Nymphs’, and receives the reassurance, ‘I am no Lilith nor lamia’.4 Reginald Scot mentions fairies (and nymphs) among bugbears used to frighten children: ‘Our mothers’ maids have so terrified us with bull-beggars
,5 spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, nymphes, Incubus, Robin good fellow, the spoom, the man in the oke, the fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, Tom tumbler boneles, and such other bugs.’6
This dark view of the Fairies gained ground, I think, in the sixteenth and the earlier seventeenth century—an unusually hag-ridden period. Holinshed did not find in Boece but added to him the suggestion that Macbeth’s three temptresses might be ‘some nymphs or fairies’. Nor has this dread ever since quite disappeared except where belief in the Fairies has also done so. I have myself stayed at a lonely place in Ireland which was said to be haunted both by a ghost and by the (euphemistically so called) ‘good people’. But I was given to understand it was the fairies rather than the ghost that induced my neighbours to give it such a wide berth at night.
Reginald Scot’s list of bugbears raises a point which is worth a short digression. Some studies of folklore are almost entirely concerned with the genealogy of beliefs, with the degeneration of gods into Fairies. It is a very legitimate and most interesting inquiry. But Scot’s list shows that when we are asking what furniture our ancestors’ minds contained and how they felt about it—always with a view to the better understanding of what they wrote—the question of origins is not very relevant. They might or might not know the sources of the shapes that haunted their imagination. Sometimes they certainly did. Giraldus Cambrensis knew that Morgan had once been a Celtic goddess, dea quaedam phantastica as he says in the Speculum Ecclesiae (II, ix); and so, perhaps from him, did the poet of Gawain (2452). And any well-read contemporary of Scot’s would have known that his satyrs, Pans, and fauns were classical while his ‘Tom thombe’ and ‘puckle’ were not. But obviously it makes no difference; they all affected the mind in the same way. And if all really came through ‘our mothers’ maids’ it is natural they should. The real question, then, would be why they affect us so differently. For I take it that most of us even today can understand how a man could dread witches or ‘spirits’ while most of us imagine that a meeting with a nymph or a Triton, if it were possible, would be delightful. The native figures are not, even now, quite so innocuous as the classical. I think the reason is that the classical figures stand further—certainly in time and perhaps in other ways too—even from our half-beliefs, and therefore from even our imagined fears. If Wordsworth found the idea of seeing Proteus rise from the sea attractive, this was partly because he felt perfectly certain he never would. He would have felt less certain of never seeing a ghost; in proportion less willing to see one.