Dear Friends,
Step into my study! Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
A reader made an interesting comment/question in response to our last visit, regarding C.S. Lewis and his seemingly bizarre cosmology in his Space Trilogy:
CSL's whole cosmology in the reality of the books is fascinating, though not esp. Biblical IMO - seems to arise more from his love of Arthurian/Medieval texts, his friendship with Charles Williams? Was CSL ever connected to the so-called Order of the Golden Dawn?
Although I am by no means a Lewis “scholar,” I do have some thoughts and intuitions about this. I can see why someone might think the conceptual “pedigree” for his celestial hierarchies (The Triune God, Archangels, Angels, the Zodiac, Mankind, etc.) might be something like the “Order of the Golden Dawn,” which was a sort of 19th century secret society dabbling in all kinds of pagan mysteries and “techniques”—hermeticism, kabbalah, theosophy, and that sort of thing. Think Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (one of my all-time favorite novels) or Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code (one of the all-time worst novels). There is some superficial overlap between that kind of thing and Lewis’s conception of the spiritual and material worlds, but there is no straight line between them. Rather, it seems to me they both have a common source.
And our reader obliquely hits on it by mentioning Lewis’s love of Medieval texts. Lewis is influenced by a 5th century Christian (and also very neoplatonic) text entitled De Coelesti Hierarchia, or, The Celestial Hierarchies, written by an unknown writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius (or “Dionysius the Areopagite”). It was an incredibly influential text in Medieval scholasticism, and also a “go-to” for weird mystical/pantheistic groups like the ones mentioned above. It’s a book about cosmology, the “ordering” of the created cosmos. Pseudo-Dionysius conceives of the cosmos as a series of layered concentric circles: God is at the center, then multiple levels of angels, then humans, then, further out, the material world, inanimate objects, and so forth. You can read about Lewis’s interest in ancient cosmology and the planets in this well-regarded book, which argues that the entire Narnia series is structured by this planetary cosmology.
As for the Space Trilogy, Lewis entertains the notion that each of the seven planets (in medieval cosmology) is governed by one of the seven archangels (the “eldil”) in the celestial hierarchy. It is a bit of a messy business discerning just how many “supreme angels” there are in Dionysius himself—much older “middle platonic” texts have seven, but Thomas Aquinas seems to have “tweaked” Dionysius into three sets of three orders of angels (to arrive at nine, a more harmonious and trinitarian number), which gained, not surprisingly, ecclesiastical approval.
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