Tool Alpha
C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
The eldila
Beings of light whose bodies move so fast that ours look like cloud to them. Lewis gave angels a physics.
Psalm 104:4, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what are the eldila made of, and are they angels? A fan spinning fast looks like a blur you could put your hand through. Lewis turned that around: to an eldil, we are the blur. How much of that picture is old and how much is Lewis's is what this card sorts out.
A sorn explains to Ransom that the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light. What we call light is to them like water, something they can bathe in. What we call firm things, flesh and earth, seem to them thinner and harder to see than our light, nearly nothing. To us an eldil is a thin, half-real body that goes through walls; to itself it goes through walls because it is solid and the walls are cloud.
Psalm 104:4, quoted in Hebrews 1:7, says God makes his messengers winds and his ministers flames of fire. Hebrews 1:14 calls the angels ministering spirits. Scripture describes angels by what they do and how they appear, not by what they are made of.
The medieval model filled the heavens with intelligences and gave them a nature finer than ours. Lewis's swift-as-light body is his own attempt to make that nature imaginable to a twentieth-century reader.
Scripture never speculates about angelic physics. Lewis does, and he says so through the sorn, who breaks off: we will not talk of that.
Not a doctrine. It is a story's way of making the unseen realm feel more solid than the seen, which is the opposite of the usual picture.
- Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), ch. 15
