#The Sublunar System Speaks

[hidden-1n-the-sand]

the ATTWN hyperfixation saga continues: today we forced our roommate to read it :D :D and our physics teacher. college watch out we are a bunch of feral creatures that are obsessed with ATTWN and we WILL be annoying about it. :D

[kabane52]

Christianity and Cosmos

I have been thinking, especially in light of C.S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy, how the cosmology of scripture and of antiquity relates to the cosmology with which we are acquainted today, in part from the physical sciences.

One major difference between the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages is the nature of celestial bodies. Scripture speaks of celestial bodies as living beings with some connection with the angels. Moderns generally think of them as flaming balls of gas or little specks of rock. There is no scientific reason for this shift- if it were not directly known to us by introspection, there would be absolutely no reason to associate the rich mental life which we know from experience with the electromagnetically illuminated half-ball of meat we call the brain. Why then do we so swiftly dismiss the living dimension of the heavenly bodies?

The seven heavenly bodies of old cosmology are Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each of these is associated with an archangel, forming the host called the “Seven Planetary Archangels.” God holds all things in existence, making them what they are by the constant processive act of the logoi, sustaining a thing as precisely what it is with its intrinsic qualities. We know that living things participate co-operatively in this act of sustenance. For example, the human body is actively sustained by the co-operative motion of the human soul (as the formal cause of the body), having the causal powers it does immediately from God. And so I take this to represent something like the relationship of the heavenly hosts to the celestial bodies of Heaven.

There is thus an authentic analogy between the soul-body relationship and the relationship between the Archangel Michael and Sol, the sun. But it is an analogy, and while the sun is Michael’s body in one sense, there are other senses in which this is not true. This is why the heavenly hosts both are and are not the stars of Deep Heaven. The celestial bodies constantly move in relation to each other according to precise mathematical patterns which we describe in the equations of physics. The Cosmic Orchestra is the Spirit of God singing out the logoi intrinsic to the Eternal Word from the Father. And by the same token, the planets whirl around the sun by the constant activity of the seven planetary archangels. The Heavenly Host is, after all, a Great Orchestra. 

In Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy, the Devil is described as the Lord Archangel of Earth. I have wondered whether this might be precisely the truth of it. The Earth is the birthplace of the human family, and it is from Earth that the whole of the heavenly hosts will come into its glory. So the unfallen Enemy was the brightest of all the great angels of the heavenly bodies. Certain language in scripture is consistent with this portrait. 

I think in particular of the phrase “prince of the power of the air.” What is the “air”? In Philo and other authors, the “air” describes the realm of the cosmos which is beneath the Moon- in other words, the sublunar realm.Why would the enemy be called the “prince” of this aerial realm? It would be quite sensible if he were the foremost of the angelic princes, appointed as the tutelary spirit and Lord Archangel of the foremost of worlds. The upper atmosphere is the aerial realm where the prince’s proper dominion ends, and Luna is the boundary of the province of creation known by the name “Earth.” We note, of course, that the King of Kings and Lord of Lords has, since the exaltation of Christ, laid siege to the prince of this world’s fortress, and intends to break down his defensive structure- i.e. the “gates of Hades” which shall not prevail against the Church. 

Let us consider this in light of Paul’s description of the “third Heaven.”

The first Heaven would be the aerial realm, marked off by the sky-curtain woven by the Creator. Some have seen the idea of a sky-curtain as primitive. I say this is sloppy thinking. We can easily imagine a biological organism with physical limbs so thick and strong that he could pierce a woven curtain without the slightest resistance. Why is it not a concrete description to call our blue sky the “sky-curtain” simply because the materials from which it is made are gases and reflected photons rather than fabrics? At night the sky-curtain becomes transparent and we can see past its boundary into Deep Heaven. The boundary of our world is Luna, the Moon, the silver Gate to Heaven.

Beyond Luna is the “second Heaven.” In the second Heaven there are stars and worlds unnumbered. We are told in scripture that God created a formless, void, and dark mass of water on the first day and lit it up. On the second day He divided these waters- one of these divided parts became the outermost part of “greater Earth” or what we call the physical cosmos. The other part became our seas, and on the third day those seas gave birth to land-masses. In the gap between the “waters above the Heavens” (in the words of the Psalmist) and the “waters below” is placed the sun, the Moon, and all stars and planets. Against the popular myth, the enormity of the cosmos has been known since antiquity. Ptolemy states that relative to the Heavens, the Earth is but a mathematical point. 

Interestingly, there is some evidence (including the so-called cosmic “Axis of Evil” and certain data indicating, though not unquestionably, “quantized redshifts”) that the cosmos is organized in concentric circles of supergalactic clusters whose innermost region is the region including our world and galaxy. This is the structure of the Heavenly Host as can be seen in countless works of Christian art, most famously the Beatific Vision. It is likewise the structure of star systems, planetary systems (a center with concentric rings of heavenly bodies circling it), atoms, and so on. 

I note with some curiosity that man has never succeeded in passing Luna into the second Heaven. We have sent our probes, but our feet were planted on the Lunar Gate herself fifty years ago. Plans were made to plant our feet elsewhere. But perhaps providentially, they have always come to nothing. Are we under divine quarantine until redeemed humanity is prepared to do its divinely appointed task? Shall redeemed humanity come into its own and truly exercise dominion as we were called to do? There are in Deep Heaven worlds unnumbered, and from what we can tell, they are barren. Perhaps we shall come into our own as the Likeness of God and, by the Holy Spirit, become true sub-creators, calling forth great seas and forests, and shaping the descendants of the beasts made by God into beasts making up the ecosystems of other worlds. Those who know me know that I genuinely expect a golden age in Church History when obedience, not disobedience, is the rule for generation after generation and when our false start has been blotted out and the years of human bent-ness become as nearly nothing in the long future of the human family before the Great Morning- that which we are accustomed to calling the “last things” but which is really the full beginning. 

Beyond the second Heaven is the “third Heaven”, where God is manifest in full splendor and with which the whole creation is destined to have uninterrupted commerce. But even prior to this day, it may be that commerce with the celestials becomes as common as any other activity. The world of Heaven- saints, angels, and countless other beings surrounds us at all moments. It is not that they have been taken away, but that our eyes are closed. If there comes a day before the Great Morning when the circumcision of the heart and the indwelling of the Spirit has made sanctity a normal pattern of human life (after all, sanctity is normal human life, that in which man lives as he was always meant to), then perhaps commerce between the children of Adam still in the body and the other world will become a regular occurrence. The ladder linking Heaven to Earth has been made in the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus Christ, but its full implications are still largely unrealized. 

[hidden-1n-the-sand]

sorta wish we were referred to as luna more often. belive it or not dan doesnt actualy front that much tbh