High Fantasy and the Medieval Model part 4: COSMOS VS CHAOS

Tolkien, Lewis and the Medieval Model part 4 of 7

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I’ve titled this post “Cosmos vs Chaos” to highlight the differences in outlook on outer space (or what the ancients would call “The Heavens”) between High Fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and the Hard Sci-Fi of writers I read in my youth, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Issac Asimov.

Webster’s dictionary defines Cosmos as: “an orderly harmonious systematic universe.”

Meanwhile Webster defines Chaos as:“a state of things in which chance is supreme especially : the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.”

I use the word Chaos to describe the opposite of Cosmos, not to infer that the universe does not obey physical laws, but that the difference between the two is really one of design.

Does the universe have a maker? Is such beauty we see in the heavens purely an accident?

High Fantasy and Hard Sci-Fi would give different answers to this question and that is what I will be discussing in this post.

COSMOS

It has always struck me as ironic that the most beautiful description of space I’ve ever read comes not from a sci-fi novel, but from a Christian fantasy story.

From “Out of the Silent Planet” by C.S. Lewis:

“he looked up and recognized the source of the dim light in which, without noticing it, he had all along been able to see the movements of his own hands. There was some kind of skylight immediately over his head — a square of night sky filled with stars. It seemed to Ransom that he had never looked out on such a frosty night.

Pulsing with brightness as with some unbearable pain or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes, dreamlike in clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his attention, troubled him, excited him, and drew him up to a sitting position. At the same time they quickened the throb of his headache, and this reminded him that he had been drugged. He was just formulating to himself the theory that the stuff they had given him might have some effect on the pupil and that this would explain the unnatural splendour and fullness of the sky, When a disturbance of silver light, almost a pale and miniature sunrise, at one corner of the skylight, drew his eyes upward again. Some minutes later the orb of the full moon was pushing its way into the field of vision. Ransom sat still and watched. He had never seen such a moon — so white, so blinding and so large.

The room was walled and floored with metal, and was in a state of continuous faint vibration — a silent vibration with a strangely lifelike and unmechanical quality about it. But if the vibration was silent, there was plenty of noise going on a series of musical raps or percussions at quite irregular intervals which seemed to come from the ceiling. It was as if the metal chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with small, tinkling missiles.

…all he ever remembered of his first meal in the space-ship was the tyranny of heat and light. Both were present in a degree which would have been intolerable on earth but each had a new quality. The light was paler than any light of comparable intensity that he had ever seen; it was not pure white but the palest of all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a floodlight. The heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin like a gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowsiness: rather, intense alacrity. His headache was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth.”

***

In all my reading of Hard Sci-Fi in my youth, I’ve never read any passage that made space travel as beautiful as this. Oh, there had been plenty of wondrous and interesting planets, but space itself; that was always a barren place; hard and deadly. This makes sense of course from a purely physical, scientific perspective. If an astronaut stepped out into space without the protection of his spacesuit the vacuum alone would kill him in seconds, and solar radiation, unimpeded as it is on earth by our fortuitous magnetosphere and ionosphere, would eventually cook our unfortunate astronaut’s remains to a crisp.

Out of the Silent Planet was published in 1938, decades before humans sent the first man into space. The idea of space travel is a very old one however, and authors of the Classical, Medieval and Renaissance periods wrote of it.

Lewis, in his book The Discarded Image (the last book he completed before his death in 1963), describes what he calls the “Medieval Model,” a summary and explanation of Medieval and Renaissance literature as a way to understand the Medieval mind. And this includes what authors in those times thought of the Cosmos.

There is a common misconception that modern people have about the pre-Galileon concept of the universe: namely that an “earth-centric” view meant that people in the Middle Ages thought that because the earth was at the center of the universe, humans were the most important thing in it.(1)

Lewis describes their worldview as a bit more nuanced than that. As he puts it in The Discarded Image, chapter 5 “The Heavens”

“The central (and spherical) Earth is surrounded by a series of hollow and transparent globes, one above the other, and each of course larger than the one below. These are the ‘spheres’, ‘heavens’, or (sometimes) ‘elements’. Fixed in each of the first seven spheres is one luminous body. Starting from earth the order is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; the ‘seven planets.’*

Beyond the sphere of Saturn is the ‘Stellatum’, to which belong all those stars that we still call ‘fixed’ because their positions relative to one another are, unlike those of the planets, invariable. Beyond the Stellatum there is a sphere called the First Movable or Primum Mobile. This, since it carries no luminous body, gives no evidence of itself to our senses; its existence was inferred to account for the motions of all the others.

And beyond the Primum Mobile what? The answer to this unavoidable question had been given, in its first form, by Aristotle. ‘Outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time. Hence whatever is there is of such a kind as not to occupy space, nor does time affect it.’

The timidity, the hushed voice, is characteristic of the best Paganism. Adopted into Christianity, the doctrine speaks loud and jubilant.

What is in one sense ‘outside the heaven’ is now, in another sense, ‘the very Heaven’, caelum ipsum (2), and full of God, as Bernardus says. So when Dante passes that last frontier he is told, ‘We have got outside the largest corporeal thing (del maggior corpo) into that Heaven which is pure light, intellectual light, full of love’ (Paradiso, XXX, 38). In other words, as we shall see more clearly later on, at this frontier the whole spatial way of thinking breaks down. There can be, in the ordinary spatial sense, no ‘end’ to a three-dimensional space. The end of space is the end of spatiality. The light beyond the material universe is intellectual light.”

*For a look at how important this concept of seven planets was to Lewis’ view of the Medieval Model read Michael Ward’s “Planet Narnia.” For a history of how the planets were named, see note 4.

While we would view the solar system as planets traveling around the sun, held in place by gravitational forces and moving in a series of ringlike orbits, a well educated Medieval European would see the universe as a series of hollow spheres, the smallest being earth and therefore, at the physical center, but spiritually speaking, at the lowest point.

Other than the earth, each of these hollow sphere are clear; with the seven planets known to them fixed in their places and each moving because of the effect of the larger sphere beyond it. (5)

The Medievals would not see our place at the center of the universe as a high position, but a low one; as we are the sentient beings farthest from the throne of God. Above us are nine levels of angels and several types of Longaevi (lit. longlivers or Long Lived Ones), whom we might call faerie or fay folk, between us and Heaven. (More on the Longaevi in another post.)

Above all else though, the Medieval mind would see the universe as a place of both order and complexity, created by a God of both infinite intelligence and infinite power.

*It should be remembered that the knowledge that the world is a sphere goes very far back among educated Europeans. Writing in the 4th century BC, Aristotle taught that the earth was spherical. In the early 2nd century BC, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the spherical earth with surprising accuracy. (see notes 3 & 6) And of course those many paintings we see of Medieval monarchs holding an orb with a cross on top meant something very specific: namely that Christ rules over a world that is understood as a sphere.

***

Turning now to Tolkien, we find a great love of stars and other heavenly luminaries.

In the Silmarillion, the stars, the moon and the sun, are all created by a Valar (a class of angels appointed to watch over the earth), under the direction of God (Eru Ilúvatar or The One).

The newly created elves awake under those stars and celebrate their beauty under a seemingly eternal night sky. Throughout the tale, there is a special relationship between the stars and the elves. The first words the elves spoke were about the stars. When an angel is sent to find them after their creation, he calls the elves “The Eldar, the People of the Stars.”

The moon and sun are made later in the Silmarillion and come from two great lamps which light the world, one silver and the other gold. These reside on Valinor, the island of the Valar. After the lamps are destroyed by Melkor (Lucifer), they have their lights retained in the two trees of Valinor and in moon and sun. (When the two trees of Valanor are later destroyed by Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant, only the gems known as the Silmarils, not the moon or the sun, hold their light in its truest form.)

In “The Return of the King,” after Sam has rescued Frodo from the orcs, we read:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”

In the Silmarillion, Tolkien Valar serve the same function as the gods of ancient Greece, as they are charged with the affairs here on earth and with specific areas of influence: Tolkien’s Manwe resembles Zeus as ruler of the air and his Ulmo resembles Poseidon as ruler of the waters, (of course minus all the adultery, seduction of mortals, siring of monsters and other such things the Greek gods were famous for).

Later in the Silmarillion, we find the heavenly bodies shepherded by angels or other beings. For example, at the end of the First Age, Eärendil the Half-elven, wearing the last Silmaril on his brow, is tasked to ride across the sky with the jewel shining forth as a star.

You see a joining of ancient mythology with Christianity on our neighboring planets in Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, (Out of the Silent Planet, Peralandra and That Hideous Strength) with its close association of the planets with the Roman gods by those names; transformed by Lewis into angelic rulers over their namesake worlds sent by God.

While in The Chronicals of Narnia, Prince Caspian marries the daughter of a star in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (her father is the one educating Eustace about the nature of stars in the quote that begins this article.)

Greek and Roman mythology may have had the greatest influence on the outward shape of the works of Lewis and Tolkien, but it was the Judeo-Christian scriptures which influenced the primary purpose of those works.

God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And He made the stars as well.

–Genesis 1:16

On what were its foundations set, or who laid its cornerstone, while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

-Job 38:7

***

I’ve titled this article “Cosmos vs Chaos” for a very specific reason; as I believe this goes to the very heart of the difference between High Fantasy and Hard Sci-Fi.

For Lewis and Tolkien, their focus on the beauty of stars and other heavenly bodies serves a purpose, which can be summed up in one verse:

The heavens declare the glory of God

-Psalm 19:2.

CHAOS

Contrast Lewis and Tolkien’s views of stars and the universe with the Author C. Clarke short story “The Star” (story synopsis from: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/star )

“Religion, and in particular religious faith, are central themes in “The Star.” The narrative is the interior monologue of the central character, a Jesuit astrophysicist. He is aboard a starship on a mission to investigate the causes of a supernova in a distant galaxy. He and the rest of the crew discover the artifacts of a highly developed civilization, carefully preserved on the only planet that remains in orbit around the supernova. Knowing that all life would be wiped out when their sun flared into a supernova, this race of sentient beings left a record of who they were and what they accomplished. The pictures, sculptures, music, and other relics of a very humanlike race doomed to destruction depress the crew and investigating scientists, who are far from their own homes and lonely. What the narrator has learned but not yet communicated to the others is that the supernova that destroyed this civilization was the Star of Bethlehem, which burned brightly in the sky to herald the birth of Jesus Christ. His discovery has caused him to reexamine and to question his own faith. The narrator reports that his colleagues have asked him how to reconcile the destruction of an entire civilization with a merciful and loving God. His answer: that “God has no need to justify His actions to man,” is not accepted by the others, who say that the random destruction of worlds is further proof that there is no supreme being, that “the Universe has no purpose and no plan.”

***

“The heavens declare the glory of God” vs “the Universe has no purpose and no plan.”

Cosmos vs Chaos in a nutshell. The main difference between High Fantasy and Hard Science Fiction reduced to two sentences. The question I have for readers of these genres is not which universe is more “real,” but which universe would you rather live in?

NOBILIS VOS ESTOS,

William R. McGrath

Notes:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/galileo-myth/
“caelum ipsum” Latin: Heaven itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
https://www.history.com/news/who-named-the-planets
The phrase “the music of the spheres” comes from this concept. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis
The video below lists several ways ancient people knew the earth was round. (Main info begins at the 3:35 mark).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=313icHT2XF8