by C. S. Lewis
I have been speaking so far only of dimensions. But the effect of the old model becomes even more interesting when we consider order. It is not merely very large, it is a whole of finely graded parts. Everything descends from the circumference with a steady diminution of size, speed, power and dignity. This ninefold division is harmoniously crossed by a threefold division. All above the Empyrean is in a special, immaterial, sense ‘Heaven’, full of the Divine Substance. From the Empyrean down to the Moon is the realm of aether—that strange half-matter in which so many different ages have believed, on what seems to a layman very inadequate evidence—changeless, necessary, not subject to Fortune. From the Moon down to the Earth is the realm of air (for they thought the air extended to the Moon’s orbit), which is also the realm of luck, change, birth, death, and contingence.
You see why I compared it to a building—though indeed any great, complex work of art—Paradise Lost or Euclid’s Elements or Spinoza’s Ethics or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—would have done almost as well. It is a structure, a finished work, a unity articulated through a great and harmonious plurality. It evokes not mere wonder but admiration. It provides food for thought and satisfaction for our aesthetic nature. I think everyone will see what I mean if I say that in passing from the Newtonian to the Ptolemaic cosmos one passes from the romantic to the classical. Milton could describe the Moon as looking
Like one that had bin led astray
Through the Heav’ns wide pathles way.*
That hits off admirably the feeling many generations now have had when they look at the night sky: I do not think any ancient or medieval man would have felt so. That particular charm, the charm of the pathless, was one that the old universe lacked; it had a severer, a more robust attraction and appealed to a more formal imagination.
After the dimensions and the order, we must consider the dynamics. I have already said that movement earthward from any part of the whole was conceived as movement downward. In that sense they understood what we would call gravitation. Thus one philosopher says that if you could bore a hole through the Earth and drop a stone down, the stone would come to rest at the centre. And in the Comedy, Dante and Virgil come to the centre where they find Lucifer embedded and have to climb down his shaggy sides in order to continue their journey to the Antipodes; but Dante finds to his surprise that after they have passed his waist they have to climb up to his feet. For they have of course passed the centre of gravitation. But they never talk of gravitation. Their way of describing it is to say that every natural object has a native or ‘proper’ place and is always ‘trying’ or ‘desiring’ to get there. When unimpeded, flame moves upwards and solid bodies move downwards because they want to go, you may call it, ‘home’. Is this animism? Did they really think that all matter was sentient? Apparently not. They will distinguish animate and inanimate as clearly as we do; will say that stones, for example, have only being; vegetables being and life; animals, being, life and sense; man, being life, sense and reason. The truth is that their language about inanimate bodies was the same kind of language that the modern man uses—I mean, the modern ‘plain’ man, not the modern scientist or philosopher. When a modern says that the stone fell ‘in obedience to the law of gravitation’, he does not really think there is literally a law or literal obedience; that the stone, on being released, whips out a little book of statutes, finds the chapter and paragraph relevant to its predicament, and decides it had better be a law-abiding stone and ‘come quiet’. Nor did the medieval man believe that the stone really felt homesick, or felt at all. Both ways of putting it are analogical; neither speaker would usually know any way of expressing the facts except by an analogy.
But of course it makes a great difference to the tone of your mind which analogy you adopt—whether you fill your universe with phantom police-courts and traffic regulations, or with phantom longings and endeavours. The second alternative, which the Middle Ages adopted, is connected with another and more far-reaching doctrine which is not merely analogical. We are now approaching the junction between their cosmology and their theology. The theology involved is, however, not that of the Bible, the Fathers, or the Councils, but that of Aristotle. Of course they thought it consistent with Christianity; whether they were right in so thinking is not my concern.
The infinite, according to Aristotle, is not actual. No infinite object exists; no infinite process occurs. Hence we cannot explain the movement of one body by the movement of another and so on forever. No such infinite series could, he thought, exist. All the movements of the universe must therefore, in the last resort, result from a compulsive force exercised by something immovable. He thought that such an Unmoved Mover could move other things only by being their end or object or (if you like) target—what he calls their ‘Final Cause’—not as one billiard ball moves another, but as food moves the hungry man, as the mistress moves her lover, as truth moves the philosophical inquirer. He calls this Unmoved Mover either ‘God’ or ‘Mind’. It moves the Primum Mobile (which of course sets all the inferior bodies in motion) by love.* But notice that this does not mean what a Christian would naturally mean by the word. There is no question here of a beneficent Being loving the world He has created and descending to redeem it. God, in Aristotle, moves the world by being loved, not by loving; by being the supremely desirable object. This of course implies not only consciousness but high rationality on the part of that which is moved. Accordingly we find (not now by analogy, but in strictest fact) that in every sphere there is a rational creature called an Intelligence which is compelled to move, and therefore to keep his sphere moving, by his incessant desire for God. It was disputed whether the Intelligence is ‘in’ the sphere as the soul is in the body (in which case the sphere must be envisaged as an eternal and exalted animal) or as a man is in a ship (in which case the corporeal sphere is a kind of instrument). On the whole the second view won. A modern may ask why a love for God should lead to perpetual rotation. I think, because this love or appetite for God is a desire to participate as much as possible in His nature; i.e. to imitate it. And the nearest approach to His eternal immobility, the second best, is eternal regular movement in the most perfect figure, which, for any Greek, is the circle. Hence the universe is kept going by the continual effort of its most excellent parts (each a little slower and feebler than the one above it) to conform their behaviour to a model of which they always fall short. That of course is the real meaning of Dante’s (often misunderstood) line about ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’. Even so, love is perhaps too ethical a word; ‘appetite’ would be better. In this scheme God is the quarry, the Intelligences the huntsmen; God is the mistress, all things else the suitors; God the candle, and the universe the moth.
2
In my last lecture I suggested the experiment of a starlit walk taken with the assumption that Ptolemaic astronomy is true. In order to bring that old model into fuller activity, I now want to recall an experience which, I suppose, everyone has had; that of coming out from some indoor function of pomp and importance, an opera or a debate or a feast, and suddenly looking up at the cold stars above the housetops. What seemed so big while we were inside is all at once dwarfed. The sky is like an ironic comment on this and on all other human concerns. If we remember our Pascal, we may even murmur ‘The silence of those eternal spaces frightens me’. After that, we may rally and hit back and say, still using Pascal, that though we are small and transitory as dew-drops, still we are dew-drops that can think,* which is (we presume) more than can be said for the galaxies. Let us now try to understand why neither of these reactions—neither the initial deflation nor the come-back—was at all likely to occur to a man of the Middle Ages.
He did not think that the spaces he looked up at were silent, or dark or empty. Far from being silent, they were perpetually filled with sweet, immeasurable sound. The vast hollow spheres, turning each at its proper interval inside its superior, gave out a blended harmony. There were various explanations of the fact
that we do not hear it. One of the oldest and most pleasing was based on the travellers’ tale that those who lived near the great cataract on the Nile were unconscious of its noise. Because they had always heard it, they never heard it. The same would obviously hold true in an even higher degree of the music of the spheres. This is the only sound which has never for one split second ceased in any part of the universe; with this positive we have no negative to contrast. Presumably if (per impossibile) it ever did stop, then with terror and dismay, with a dislocation of our whole auditory life, we should feel that the bottom had dropped out of our lives. But it never does. The music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night and in all ages.
Nor were those high regions dark. The darkness in which the stars (for us) are set is merely the darkness of the long, conical shadow cast by the Earth when the sun is below our feet. They knew, from their theory of lunar eclipses, that the apex of this dark cone must fall well above the moon. Beyond that apex the higher heavens are bathed in perpetual sunshine. In a sense, no doubt, we should say the same. But then we are aware (as they, I think, were not) of the part played by the air in diffusing sunlight and producing that bubble of luminosity which we call day; we have even, in stratospheric ascents, gone high enough to see the blue curtain grow thin at the zenith so that blue turns to black and the night of space almost shows through. They knew that, up yonder, one was above the air, in whatever they meant by aether; they did not know that one would see the sun flaming in a black pit. They thought on the contrary that they would be floating (for Milton is here a medieval) in
those happie climes that lye
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the skye.*
And these spaces, bright and resonant, were also inhabited. We have already peopled them with the Intelligences who either animate or guide the spheres. Distinct from these, but of course equally immortal and superhuman, are the angels. Their natural habitat is between the Empyrean and the Moon and their number is probably enormous. Unlike the aerial daemons who live between Moon and Earth, they have no bodies—such, at least, was the view that finally prevailed—but are naked minds. We, like them, are rational, but there is a great difference. We have an immediate and intuitive grasp only of axioms and have to seek all other knowledge by the laborious process of discursive thinking. They are wholly intuitive; concepts are as palpable to them as apples or pennies are to us. In fact, their reason is to ours as noon to dusk. Clearly when you look up at a sky peopled by such creatures as these, it is just no good asserting ‘I am a dew-drop that thinks’. The very necessity of ‘thinking’ (as we ordinarily understand the word) is the measure of our inferiority.
Understand that the vast majority of these bodiless minds have no concern at all with us. We touch only the lowest fringe of angelic life. For angelic life also is graded; the word angel is, rather unfortunately, used both for the whole lot and also for the lowest rank—just as we use sailors sometimes in contrast to ships’ officers, but sometimes in a sense that covers all who enable the ship to sail. They are ordered in nine classes which are arranged in three groups of three classes each. The top hierarchy, which consists of the creatures classified as Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, looks exclusively God-wards, absorbed in contemplation of the Divine essence, and unconcerned with the created universe. The next hierarchy (Dominations, Virtues, and Powers) has some responsibility for the general order of nature. The lowest hierarchy deals with human affairs; Principalities with the destiny of nations, Archangels and Angels, in varying ways, with those of individuals. You will notice that even at such a unique crisis as the Annunciation the Mother of Christ was visited only by an Archangel, a member of the lowest class but one. That gets the perspective right. It is this conception, as well as the poet’s own genius, which gives to Dante’s angels a sublimity and masculinity never captured by later art. It is the loss of this conception which finally vulgarizes the angels into those consumptive girls with wings that figure in so much Victorian stained glass. The full degradation of the Cherub—the fat baby who has played that rôle ever since Raphael—will perhaps be clearest if we remember that the word probably comes from the same root as gryphon. Even for Chaucer a cherub was a creature of fire: not at all ‘cuddly’.
But I must crowd the sky a little more. Medieval man looked up at a sky not only melodious, sunlit, and splendidly inhabited, but also incessantly active; he looked at agents to which he, and the whole earth, were patients. Besides the Intelligences and the angelic hierarchies there are the planets themselves. Each of them is doing things to us at every moment. First, on the physical side, the beams of each planet (which penetrate through the Earth’s crust) find the appropriate soil and turn it into the appropriate metal; Saturn thus producing lead, Mars iron, the Moon silver, and so forth. The Moon’s connexion with silver, and the Sun’s with gold, may be real survivals (at many removes) of pre-logical, pictorial, thinking. Venus is, perhaps, a maker of copper because she was, centuries earlier, Kupris, the lady of Cyprus, and that accursed island produced copper in ancient times. Why Saturn made lead, or Jove tin, I do not know.
But of course, as everyone has heard, the planets had a more than physical effect. They influenced the course of events and they influenced human psychology. Born under Saturn, you were disposed to melancholy; born under Venus, to amorousness. At this point, clearly, there is a rich survival of classical Paganism into medieval culture. And of course the names of the planets, and their representations in art, are those of the ancient planetary gods. As far as my reading goes, no one appears to have been at all worried about it. There was, indeed, a quarrel between the theologians and the astrologers, but not exactly about that. So far as I know, no theologian denied the general theory of planetary influences. The important question, theologically, was whether the planets compelled or merely disposed men to action. If they compelled, then of course there was an end of human freedom and responsibility. If they merely disposed, then planetary influence, like heredity or health or education, was merely part of the concrete situation handed over to the individual to do the best he could with. The theologians were in fact, as so often, fighting against determinism. Nor were they fighting against a phantom: in renaissance times, if not before them, astrological determinism was very widely accepted. It seemed (odd as this sounds to us) to have the support of age-old experience and common sense, and the theological resistance seemed idealistic wishful thinking. In the Middle Ages men’s minds no doubt wavered. The ordinary, moderate, respectable view was summed up in the maxim sapiens dominabitur astris; a wise man, assisted by Grace, could get over a bad horoscope just as he could get over a naturally bad temper.
That, as I have said, was the important question on the theoretical level. On the practical level orthodox people, while admitting planetary influence, strongly disapproved of ‘judicial astrology’, the lucrative practice of foretelling the future. They did not need to deny that some astrological predictions of human behaviour might be correct. Planetary influence could not remove free will but it could alter the states of mind and imagination which free will has to deal with. Any man can master this psychological raw material and thus refute the prediction; but few men do and therefore the predictions will succeed as regards the majority. Just in the same way and for similar reasons a modern theologian might say that Marxian predictions based on economic determinism or Freudian predictions based on psychological determinism will usually be true, and true about mass-behaviour, but not necessarily about a given individual.
I stress the parallel between astrology and more modern forms of determinism in order to bring out a point which, though I have made it elsewhere, is too important to be passed over. We must never allow ourselves to think of astrology as something that belonged to the romantic or dreaming or quasi-mystical side of the mind; above all, we must not connect it with magic. Astrology was a hard-headed, stern, anti-idealistic affair; the creed of men who wanted a universe which admit
ted no incalculables. Magic sought power over nature; astrology proclaimed nature’s power over man. Hence the magician is the ancestor of the modern practising or ‘applied’ scientist, the inventor; the astrologer, of the nineteenth-century philosophical materialist. Neither figure, by the way, is specially typical of the Middle Ages.* Both flourished as much, if not more, in the ancient and in the renaissance world.
I have already said that the medieval man thought he was looking up at a luminous universe through the dark shadow of the Earth. He was also looking up at the region of aether through the region of air. The air was the medium through which all the influences from above reached him. The whole air could become healthy or unhealthy as the result of certain conjunctions in the upper sky. Hence a medieval doctor could explain widespread illness by saying ‘It’s due to this influence’. If he were talking Italian he would no doubt say questa influenza, and that word has stuck. I mention the air, however, not merely to bring in that curiosity but for two other reasons.
First: the air is below the Moon. That is, as you have heard, it is excluded from the region of necessity and regularity. In the air, as on the Earth, you have contingence and the irregular; in the air you have the aerial daemons who can, like men, do either good or evil. Here we come to an important difference between medieval and modern man. The ordinary modern (I do not mean the modern scientist) would regard regularity—or, if you like, monotony—as a symptom of inferiority. The fact that the heavenly bodies always behave in the same way, while men do this and that and change their minds, would be for him presumptive evidence that the former are irrational and inanimate and that we, we ‘dew-drops’ that think, are to that extent their betters. For the same reason, if he believed in the aerial daemons and the planetary Intelligences, he would probably prefer the daemons. The Middle Ages inherited from the Greeks a very different view. Aristotle in the Metaphysics remarks that in a household (he is of course assuming a household with slaves) the free members are precisely those who have least chance to live ‘at random’. The slaves can do that; for the free people ‘everything is mapped out’. It is a surprising picture but, I have no doubt, a true one; all ancient literature goes to show that a house-slave is, of all servants, the least like a robot. But I quote it here for a different reason. Though Aristotle does not make it perfectly clear, scholars are agreed that he is intending to compare the heavenly bodies with the free people and the salves with us. For the heavenly bodies ‘everything is mapped out’; our liberty to live ‘at random’ marks our inferior status. We, like slaves, have or take ‘spare time’ and in it ‘potter about’, chatting, making love, playing games, cracking nuts or ‘just sitting’; they, like Aristotle himself, have their strict programme.