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 heavens, not space
Ransom finds that space is not dead and dark but an ocean of light, and decides the old name was better.
Psalm 19:1, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: is the sky empty, or full? A dark room or a lit stage. Modern people picture space as black and empty. Lewis's hero finds it pouring life into him, and the book ends hoping readers will trade the idea of Space for the idea of Heaven.
On the voyage Ransom finds that the name Space is a libel on the radiance around him. He decides that "older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens," quotes Psalm 19 and Milton, and feels life pouring into him. At the end of the book the narrator says that if even one per cent of readers change from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, it would be a beginning.
Psalm 19 says the heavens declare the glory of God. Psalm 148 calls the heavens, the angels, the sun, moon and stars to praise him. Scripture's heavens are full and speaking.
The medieval model pictured the heavens as full of light, music and intelligence, and Lewis taught that model for years. McGrath records that Lewis found it delightful and that his Oxford lectures on it became The Discarded Image.
Lewis's heavens are physically full of life in a way Scripture does not describe. The psalmist's heavens praise; Lewis's heavens also nourish.
Not anti-science. Lewis is attacking an imagination of space as dead, not astronomy.
- Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), chs. 5 and 22
- McGrath, C. S. Lewis, A Life (2013), on The Discarded Image
