Field of Wonder or Final Frontier?
On clear nights, the cold skies of northern climes reveal beauty. Crisp air, sapping the warmth from mittened fingers, invites those brave enough to venture out to fill their eyes with the wonders of the heavens. The early weeks of 2025 brought a special treat to viewers in the northern hemisphere: four planets — Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars — paraded across the expanse, easily visible to the naked eye in the early evening hours. The beauty of the heavenly host arrests the eyes. Bright planets, twinkling constellations, and the flash of meteors draw our gaze upwards. As we stand marveling at the heavens, we are confronted with a question: What do you see?
Such a question seems simple, straightforward. The answer is anything but. Answering it takes us to the very heart of our sinful existence. The cosmos stretched above, visible on clear nights to our naked eye, unveils the hidden recesses of our sinful hearts. For very often, what our sight of the stars elicits is not the humble question of the psalmist — “What is man that you are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4) — but the self-exalting desire to conquer. It is hard to escape this way of thinking. Our Western environment catechizes us to see the worlds beyond our atmosphere not as a reason for wonder but as a final frontier. Why is this the case?
‘The Discarded Image’
Hard as it may be for many modern readers of C.S. Lewis to believe, he was actually an academic, a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge and Oxford. In one of his academic works, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, he helps us understand why the psalmist’s question is not generally the first to pop into our minds.
The purpose of Lewis’s survey of literature is to establish an understanding of the functioning “image” medieval and Renaissance thinkers had of the cosmos, a “Model” of the universe in which the poets and philosophers of yesteryear “combined splendor, sobriety, and coherence,” and as Lewis shows in which they delighted (The Discarded Image, 216). This image of a model of the universe was what shaped their imaginations as they considered the stars and, importantly for us, man’s place among them.
The Vertiginous Cosmos
In the work, Lewis develops several important aspects of understanding the model of the universe that gave it shape. It was “vast in scale, but limited and intelligible. . . . It is a classical rather than a Gothic sublimity. Its contents, however rich and various, are in harmony. We see how everything links up with everything else; at one, not in flat equality, but in a hierarchical ladder” (The Discarded Image, 12). In this model of the cosmos, the Earth is at the bottom of the descending ladder. To scale the ladder was to ascend to new heights of ordered beauty, realms where the stars and heavenly spheres existed in (for some, literal) harmony. Every bit of this model was established. Its outer borders were set, not increasing. The realms were distinguished by clear boundaries. And all of it had been intentionally set in motion by the First Mover.
In all this, man was decidedly small. In fact, Lewis goes so far as to call the Medieval Model of the cosmos “anthropoperipheral.” “We are,” he writes, “creatures of the Margin” (The Discarded Image, 58). Man “stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light” (The Discarded Image, 74–75). Down at the bottom of the ladder, looking out at the stars was not a gaze into empty space but a sight upward into an ordered and luminous realm.
‘Take a Walk’
To step into this model requires an intense reworking of the modern imagination. To help his reader engage in such a reversal, Lewis suggests a walk with him under the night sky. When Lewis invites you on such a stroll, you put on your shoes. Walking with him under the stars, what might we see?
Lewis first suggests that we might grow to appreciate just how small our little sphere is. The Earth is at the center, the bottom, of the ladder. The smallness of the earth stood in comparison to the given, ordered size of the spheres. A contemporary might say the same, that the vastness of space makes one feel small. The difference, Lewis suggests, is that the finitude of the medieval model sets the stargazer in “an absolute standard of comparison” (The Discarded Image, 99). The awe produced by looking into such a cosmos is not the fear of “one lost in a shoreless sea” but the wonder produced by “an immense cathedral” (The Discarded Image, 100).
Our wonder stops not with recognizing our precise finitude, for more pervades the idea of the cosmos than its breadth. In the medieval image of the cosmos, “The sun illuminates the whole” (The Discarded Image, 111). All the heavenly bodies—stars, moon, planets—reflect its light. Night is the casting of the Earth’s shadow. “When we look up at the night sky we are looking through darkness but not at darkness” (The Discarded Image, 112. Emphasis added). And the luminated realms into which we gaze sing (see Job 38:7). The wonder produced by the evening stroll increases. “You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” (The Discarded Image, 112).
One final walk with Lewis reveals more, for not only are the ordered heavens resplendent, but they are alive. If you could ascend the ladder, you would discover each realm inhabited by intelligence (or intelligences) which also exist in gradation — the closer you get to the edge, to the First Mover, the greater the activity of intelligence becomes. The intelligence closest to that First Mover is greatest “in love and knowledge” (The Discarded Image, 116). Thus, the universe is “turned inside out” (116). When we look into the heavens, we are looking into “the revelry of insatiable love.” Here, Lewis is worth quoting in full:
We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable. . . . Then, laying aside whatever Theology or Atheology you held before, run your mind up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference, of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned. (The Discarded Image, 119)
What is one to make of all this?
The Poetics of the Universe
Throughout his essay, Lewis takes pains to explain that what he describes is not necessarily a Christian understanding of the universe. But that is not the point. The question is, what effect does this have on the way we see the stars and, therefore, ourselves? For every cosmology is, finally, an anthropology.
When modern man looks into the sky, he does not see such a given order. He does not see realms upon realms, stacked with meaning and purpose, increasingly illuminated and active, mobilized by love. He is, rather, “confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance.” Instead, “it is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither” (The Discarded Image, 204). The heavenly realms are a place to conquer, to colonize, to exploit, to make a name for oneself (here we can think of everything from the commercial gimmick of paying to name a star to Elon Musk’s vision for humans as an interplanetary species).
Our (literal) outlook has drastically changed. The stars are clouded by satellites. Space is no longer illuminated by beauty; it is devoid of meaning and ripe for the taking. The Earth has grown to become the staging base of our forays into the final frontier. The possibility of intelligences in the heavens does not lead us toward intensified reflection on the First Cause but fills us with dread and an inward turn towards self-preservation (an almost ubiquitous theme in science fiction). Like a black hole devours the surrounding light, the ever-expanding universe has collapsed into the heart of man, who now makes of it whatever he will. In-lightenment produces darkness.
The effect on mankind is profound. Joseph Minich describes it as an ontological shift of subjectivity. Whereas the medieval man viewed himself as one in “a world of actors to which [he] was subject,” but to contemporary humanity, the world has become “a world of things at hand” (Bulwarks of Unbelief, 142). Minich argues that the shift aligns closely with the development of a technological view of the world, which makes individuals masters of the world rather than stewards within it. In such an elevated view—captured by William Ernest Henley’s words, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul”—the world, even the universe, becomes an object to master, a place of poiesis, each individual a solitary monarch and maker. The vocation to rule as stewards in Genesis 1:26 becomes a right to dominate. We look over our little kingdoms with Nebuchadnezzar-like hubris, “Is this not great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power . . . for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30) Or, to adopt the psalmist’s cry of adulation: “How majestic is my name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:9)
Our cities and megacities, with their bright lights and soaring towers, give physical expression to the spiritual reality. By their polluting light (does not even the term point to our longing?), they shroud the heavens so that, at most, we see but a few specks of light break through. We climb to the skies and look down on people beneath—they appear as ants in our elevated sights. We fly from city to city with windows down and faces illuminated. When we do happen to glance up, the empty heavens mirror our majesty.
Goodbye, Starry Night
We now must travel for many hours to see with clarity the wonders of the heavens. Few make the trip. Stargazing, once the norm for people whose nights were free from the bright bulbs of modern man, is the domain of hobbyists and professional astronomers. The universe is our playground. We use it to encase our world in high-speed communication or to peer at the movements of our enemies. We set people on the moon or in the International Space Station and think that we have become gods. Blinded by our downcast eyes, we blunder about a universe whose meaning has shrunk to fit the size of our best fuel tanks.
Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” depicts a view of the night sky. He painted the famous image as he looked out from the window of a room in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole monastery—a complex which had been turned into a mental asylum. It should not surprise us that one of the most iconic paintings of the sky in Western art came from the brush strokes of a mentally unstable man. Our own unwillingness to see ourselves as small and humble creatures, made by Another and given meaning by him, puts us in the room beside the famous nineteenth-century artist.
The wonder of the psalmist has evaporated from the world of today. If Minich and Lewis are right, what we need is nothing less than another Copernican revolution.
Image Credit: Unsplash
