The James Webb Telescope seems poised to occupy our cultural attention for years to come, doing what Hubble did when it first launched in 1990 but with greater technological power in the form of a comparably much more impressive digital imaging apparatus. Our eyes are beholding things with its help that our ancestors did not and could not have imagined were in or beyond the skies they knew: ancient fires burning at the dawn of time, distant worlds whose acquaintance we might someday make, some of them orbital aquifers in the entourage of brilliant stars, potentially, we hope, we fear, other arks of Lifekind at sail on the aither. And beholding these things, our desire to go out is kindled. It always has been: the belief that the stars are human ancestors of the most important sort, that initiatory rite and cultivated virtue might return one to their halls, that myriads of gods and angels stand at worship in the endless skies beckoning those of us who can to come up, animated our religious sensibilities around the upper heavens long before we had the scientific means to gaze upon them and even understand them a bit the way we do now. The difference in our present attitude is, sadly, that we spend much of our time imagining how we might do there what we have done here: conquer, use, abuse, exploit, deplete, and move on. By recovering something of an ancient reverence in the modern cosmological context, we might instead favor our better inclinations in space exploration.
Cosmography—really, cosmic cartography—and cosmology, our account of what the universe is and is like, are composed at any given time from a variety of discourses, some of them more empirical and scientific, some of them more experiential and interpretive. The Babylonians were first-rate astronomers, capable of incredibly accurate predictions of celestial movement; they also firmly believed in the divinity of the heavenly bodies and the control they exerted over Fate, Fortune, and Freedom in the world below. Much of their knowledge was inherited and expanded upon by ancient civilizations to whom they were connected, some directly and others peripherally. Persians, Indians, Greeks, and Romans all made use of Babylonian cosmology long after the quasi-official cosmography of the ancient Near East, a flat earth emerging from the primordial seas, covered over by a succession or domes, was outmoded by empirical observations demonstrating the earth’s rotundity.1 (That this needs to be said testifies to the decline of the Western intellect, especially among those who posit themselves as defenders of so-called “Western civilization” or its values, but a spherical earth was intuited by mathematics and natural philosophy around 2400 years before the invention of modern photography and its applications in contemporary astronomy, so if there is some conspiracy to hide the truth of a flat earth, it is by now the most consistently successful religion.)
Ancient Jews and Christians were diverse in their responses to pagan science and philosophy on cosmological questions, with biblical literalists preferring the more Near Eastern construction of the universe and the veterans of Hellenic paideia generally, though not exclusively, preferring an accommodating stance of integrating the cosmology of Ptolemy’s Almagest with the biblical narrative of creation. As early as Philo of Alexandria, the difference between the Priestly and Yahwistic creation narratives of Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-3:24, respectively, and a hard rejection of the literal sense (ad litteram) as pertaining to something like a historia of the world’s origins, was a fundamental item of Greek exegesis; Clement, Origen, Basil (whose Hexaemeron does, on the one hand, reject allegorical readings but does not, on the other hand, fit quite so cozily with fundamentalist Young-Earth Creationism as is popularly believed), Nyssen, Evagrios, Augustine, Ps-Dionysios, Maximos, and Eriugena all take some version of this view. The Priestly account is the “creation” (poiesis) of the world in the Divine Logos or Nous, the Reason or Mind of God, beyond time, space, and matter, and is not therefore to be read as suggesting a literal six-day creation. This is the creation of the world the same way that a cathedral’s blueprint is the cathedral’s intelligible beginning; but even when associating the Yahwistic priestly account with the world’s sensible origins, the translation of the blueprint into construction or “molding” (plasis), these authors did not generally read the Garden Story as a literal history such that one ought to eschew secular science in cleaving to Genesis’ account of origins. And so the later Fathers, and virtually all of the medievals, were perfectly happy to adopt the Ptolemaic cosmos as their own. This is the sensible world that God begins to create in time in view of the eternal order reflected in the noetic blueprint of the universe; the union of the two in the sophianic ktisis, the eschatological creation which God has always already completed, is that Kingdom for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims all collectively hope (despite their disagreements over the exact shape of the olam haba).
The beauty, glory, and rapture of the Pre-Copernican universe is obvious in the primary texts and has been frequently commented on by scholars familiar with and interested in its contours. Callimachus’ now-fragmentary Aëtia, Aratus’ Phaenomena, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Dante’s Commedia, and the like each hymned the beauty and diversity of this universe, from top to bottom and back again, from their unique perspectives. C.S. Lewis was positively enchanted by the spiritual vision of physical reality implicit in the medieval reception of Ptolemy: his book, The Discarded Image, is still a standard on the subject (and arguably a much more interesting piece of his scholarship than either the OHEL volume he completed or The Allegory of Love), and as Michael Ward has, to my mind, conclusively proven, the planetary and astral intelligences wove themselves throughout Lewis’ life and fiction, providing the explicit plot for the so-called “Space Trilogy” (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) as well as the implicit, “kappa-element” of the Narniad.2 Lewis felt quite strongly that the celestial geniuses of the pre-Copernican heavens—from “Lady Luna, in light canoe” through to pensive Saturn—provided a syllabary that served medieval Christians quite well for naming and understanding the spiritual cosmos but lacking which modern Christians, especially in late 19th and early 20th century Britain, were at a disadvantage for addressing their unique historical situation. Interwar and postwar Europe was a decidedly “Saturnine” place, thought Lewis, in need of a spark of Joviality; the early reformations of popular sexual morality were not too libertine but too prudish, in Lewis’ estimation, at least because they were not properly Venereal enough; war was hell, surely, but partly at least because Westerners had lost a sense of how to transition from the experience of Mars as infortuna minor to the source of virtues like courage, vigilance, chivalry, and martyrdom; language had lost its meaning in the public rejection of the mercurial character of words in their relationship to one another and to reality, and a loss of genuinely classical Solar consciousness was evidenced in an epidemic of lunacy (of the astrological sort). True, thought Lewis: the picture of the universe Ptolemy gives us is not literally true, as we now know; as Eustace insists in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, stars are simply balls of flaming gas in our world, unlike the divine beings they are in Narnia. But as Lewis knew and argued, modernity had a habit of confusing formal and final causalities with material and efficient ones, with the result that changes in cosmography and physical cosmology were confused for exorcism. “Even in your world,” rejoins Ramandu, “that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of” (117). Just as in the solar Narnia of VDT, Aslan is a little more visible, so that his subtler presence in our world—as the ascended, solar Christ—might be more detectable, so too in Narnia the true essence of the heavens is personally available in a way it is not to the consciousness of our time and place.
And Lewis is right about another thing here: it is our time and largely our place, that is, the contemporary secular West, that doubts the spirituality of the cosmos. Most humans who have ever lived have felt otherwise, and many humans currently alive in other parts of the world still do. True: the West has come to feel that the stars are simply natural phenomena rather than gods because our scientific inquiries and technology allow us to know something more about stars than we did previously. We know, for example, that our Sun is mostly hydrogen, and we can extrapolate by the application of principles a historical origin and a future death for it. Some of the ancients did indeed think there would be a kind of future death and rebirth for the heavenly bodies—at least, according to the cosmology of Plato’s “Great Year”—but otherwise more often spoke of the heavens as perfect and eternal; we know better. We know that our Moon was born, probably, from a collision between our planet and some cosmic object from which gravity over time compelled debris into spherical form. We know about more planets in our solar system than our ancestors did (who, remember, did not generally think the Sun stood at the center of anything). We can take incredible photos of Deep Space with multibillion-dollar telescopes and use theoretical physics to tell impossibly big histories of the universe and make prophecies about its future. Lewis did not deny this, because no sane contemporary person can deny this: we know more right now about how the universe works as a material and mechanical continuum than we ever have in the past, and if our predictions about various physical eschatologies are correct, we may well be living in a pocket of time where this knowledge is available to us by direct observation where it may not be to our far-future descendants (should we have any).
But all of this fails to answer the question of what the universe, in its constituent parts or as a whole, really is, and there’s the rub. The ontological assumptions of most contemporary professional and popular science, that material and mechanical causes are the only real causes, and therefore that there is no validly formal or final thinking to be done, are assumptions: they are no more products of science than any other ontology, and it is very easy to trace their genealogy from early modern philosophical schools onwards rather than from raw empirical data. Growing numbers of scientists also challenge the utility of materialism as an ontology even for doing science, since materialism—at least the kind of naturalist materialism that presently prevails—fails to effectively account for phenomena that are gaining scientific credence in various fields.3 There is no phenomenon where this is more evident than that of consciousness, mind itself, which is the necessary prerequisite to all scientific endeavor: those materialist ontologies that reduce mind to the level of a mechanical or material epiphenomenon or illusion cut off the branch on which they sit when they try to do mathematics or natural science at all, since it is only ever with the human mind, with its unique conditioning, that these things are attempted, perceived, and noeticized. Put more simply, if mind is not real, then we have no reason to trust the findings of mind about the energy and matter of the physical cosmos; in which case, our very empirical basis for believing contemporary cosmology and challenging older constructions of the universe becomes itself suspect. But if the human mind is real, one must also produce a compelling account for why it should be real. If one takes the Cartesian track that the human mind alone is the light in the midst of a mindless and soulless mechanical universe, then, in addition to being able to take no more than a utilitarian interest in non-human reality, one has to really justify time spent on anything other than human consciousness, which suddenly becomes the most fascinating thing that exists. There is no connection on that reading between humanity and everything else; if not the human mind, than our every experience of sublimity in the natural world, including in the fascinating images that our witnesses in deep space return to us, are not only illusory but perhaps even immoral fancies beyond the potential they offer for further arable resources. The absurdism of this take should be sufficiently obvious, if not because it invests in Homo sapiens alone a meaningful existence in a universe impossibly bigger and older than us, in whose sight we are at best quite transient manifestations of delight and, at worst, completely unregistered irrelevancies, then because it still does not explain well why human consciousness should exist in so dead and meaningless a world beyond other than by some kind of divine intervention that would offend both scientific and theological fundaments (at least if we are speaking of the God of classical [panen]theism). And so, the only option becomes some form of panpsychism, some ontology in which life and consciousness are either interchangeable with what we normally mean by matter or, better, are the foundation from which the “material” world emerges. In that frame of refernece, human consciousness is but the parochial inflection of a universal consciousness that pervades the natural world, the things that grow and live within it, and even the things that do not live quite the way we do (that is, as water and carbon-based, organic life forms), whose ubiquity and identity guarantee the very possibility of the reason that guides our empirical, mathematical, and scientific quests, indeed, the very possibility of Truth at all.4
This line of argumentation will quickly, it should be stated, lead one in the direction of a nondualism between self, world, and God, at least if one is being intellectually honest. But it also raises once more the question not just of God but of the gods as well. Let us return to the star that is either a ball of gas or a deity. Mechanically and materially, it certainly is a ball of gas. But in a universe whose most basic stuff is consciousness, infinitely variable in its finite expressions, and where intelligibility and existence are interchangeable, the star must be at least pervaded by and manifesting of the reality of what we call consciousness or mind—otherwise, we would be incapable of perceiving or understanding it at all, except as some form of illusion. Acknowledging this, the question then becomes whether the consciousness which pervades the star as the ground of its being might have an interior experience of what it is like to be the star analogous to its experience of what it is like to be me; and here it becomes clear that the only reason I would reject this possibility is if I were still committed to the very idea I have already rejected, that human consciousness is the gold standard against which all other possibilities of mind must be judged improbable or impossible. It is not that every physical entity must possess a sense of interiority; but certainly something which pulsates with as much life and power as a star does can be thought to possess something like intentionality. Contrary to some critiques of panpsychism, that it seems to project human consciousness out onto the world, and therefore engages in a kind of base anthropomorphism, panpsychism instead brings humans fully home to the universe, making them theomorphs and cosmomorphs instead: our uniqueness is not in some sort of mechanical or material or element or part, even an immaterial process like consciousness, but in the formal and final possibilities of our nature as living, conscious souls that we may realize through our ethical imperatives to compassionate stewardship. It is not arrogance to assume that beings as obviously superior to us in the natural order as the celestial bodies possess our own powers. And so we have no less reason than the ancients did to think that the star is a living entity, a conscious soul, a creaturely god, perhaps indeed with its own ethical possibilities of mutability for better and worse, its own proper guardianship of the worlds and fields that swim through the aither in its wake (perhaps even of the children of those planets who bask in or hide from its light!), its own experience of dukkha, its own politics in galactic parliaments of its brethren. Perhaps, indeed, all such noetic celestial bodies really do cast their influenza upon our own world as they nomadically migrate the heavenly expanses, though ancient and modern critics of astrology alike are surely right to doubt that we have any reliable hermeneutics for interpreting them as mechanical processes (though perhaps the occasional daimon or jinn might interject its own circumscribed awareness of the fluctuations of Fortune in the mouth of the stray magus; who knows?).
Such a world where consciousness is the foundation of everything is also one where we would expect very much to find life, both like ourselves and unlike ourselves, elsewhere. In such a universe, reality is wired to produce life and to grant that life access to higher forms of consciousness: life on our world is not a cosmic fluke but a normative process. This is a humble observation: it is less anthropocentric to believe that what has happened here has happened elsewhere too; but for the same reason, on the flip side, what takes place here achieves a cosmic significance by its relation to what has happened many other places. When we speculate on extraterrestrial life (ET) and intelligence (ETI), we tend to use ourselves as the model; while there are probably—almost certainly, in the vast reaches of our horizons—many varieties of life and sapience that defy our own familiar categories, we are not wrong to think that in our sphere we are more likely to be something like variations on a theme rather than completely anomalous. The Kardashev Scale—a thought experiment dividing up the galactic and intergalactic cousins we might meet into Types I, II, III, IV, and Ω on the grounds of their command of energy and technology—proceeds from this assumption: the laws of evolution as they obtain here likely obtain elsewhere; and this again implies that consciousness takes manifest form in life in continuous as well as diverse ways, ways that are intelligible and to some degree predictable (however fallibly). As though living stars and worlds were not enough, we now must reckon with what our forbears only occasionally suspected: the universe is in all likelihood liberally and well-peopled.
We have as much reason as our ancestors to believe in living heavens; but unlike them, we have equally as much reason to doubt the celestial perfection that they sometimes took for granted. Where on occasion they spoke of war in heaven, we know it as a fact: the aither is much more like a tempestuous, untamable sea than anything else. The raw energies of the vacuum of space, which do not filter the radiation of the stars, the clandestine threats of strange physics and perhaps monsters we have not named, männerbunds of marauders and empires we know not yet: many things beyond us await us in the stars, and serious reflection on them might well cause us to prefer the dark, blissful ignorance of our planetary cradle. After all, if stars are intelligent, some of them might possibly be given to evil. The ancient vision of the aerial and astral orders of beings, qualified in Jewish and Christian apocalypticism as bifurcated along the binary of good and evil, might be truer a formal description than we can know with our materially and mechanically oriented instruments. More stars and galaxies burn in the ancient skies than there are grains of sand on Earth: many of them are dead but endure as memories, or at least in their own strands of distant spacetime. If there is or has been war in heaven, perhaps it is not the first?
We have no idea what we are walking into, setting out into space. And there will be no taking back our voyages further up and further in, at least if we dare to go far enough. These are not themselves reasons not to venture out: great risk can bring great reward. But why we will go is an equally important metric of the consequence of any expansion we might undertake. For what cause do anthropoi like ourselves look up from the dust to the stars? If the reasons that have motivated our expeditions here are any indication, they have very little to do with pilgrimage. For our sakes, as well as for the universe’s, it is incumbent on us to get straight our reasons for space exploration, the goals we seek to realize in becoming an interplanetary or interstellar or even galactic civilization.5 The character of our empyrean aspirations may be no less consequential than our own doom: perhaps because we trespass in the kingdoms of alien gods, but certainly because we take our own unhealed evils with us.
I commend especially J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 3-116.
The book is Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). There are still holdouts to Ward’s planetary synthesis, but their counterarguments are unconvincing, and frequently seem motivated by an apologetic discomfort with just how “pagan” Lewis’ affections could really prove to be. Ward’s thesis proceeds from a moment of inspired intuition and ingenuity, it is true, but the real strength is how comprehensively well-evidenced in Lewis’ own published and unpublished writing the theory is. The burden of proof is now rather on those who doubt Ward; certainly, the small field (and large cottage industry) of Inkling Studies has generally oriented around his work when it comes to Lewis.
See first here, then also check out Jeffrey Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2019).
I am here summarizing the arguments of many people much smarter than me. I would first commend the works of Bernardo Kastrup and his Essentia Foundation for a general introduction to the issues; I would next suggest David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 152-237; then, the works of Stephen RL Clark, particularly Can We Believe in People? Human Significance in an Interconnected Cosmos (New York: Angelico Press, 2020); then, also, Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: SUNY Press, 2006); and, finally, the works of Raimon Panikkar. For those looking for a more accessible and general introduction to nondualism and its implications for consciousness, one cannot go wrong with Alan Watts.
See the forthcoming book by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Aither
I have a couple of questions:
1. You say that we wouldn't be able to observe stars or something like that if they were not conscious. That doesn't make seem to follow to me. It seems perfectly reasonable that an object under observation can be observed without having consciousness.
2. I really like the idea of panpsychism so I'm eager to digest what I can about it bit much of it offends against phenomenal experience, at least for me. I've read a great deal of SRL Clark's work (my favorite living philosopher) and I'm on board with the idea that other modes of existence may be so foreign to us that we wouldn't know how to describe them or even if they really were conscious in our sense of the term. However, if the Sun is conscious it does a very poor job of showing it and so do rocks and plastic bottles and containers of hydrogen peroxide. In that case it seems to become an unfalsifiable assumption that ends up being a bald assertion that I can't trust my observations (both sensible and noetic) and must instead blindly accept this fideistically. I can totally tell that plants and other eukaryotic animals and even prokaryotes have consciousness. I'm less sold on gases, liquids, and minerals I guess.
Anyway you can assuage my concerns? Thanks.
An interesting reflection and nice to see Alan Watts get a mention. I have found his early 'Myth and Ritual in Christianity' v. useful over the decades.
And of course Gurdjieff would have a lot to say about cosmic influences and intelligence.
However, I don't think the pansychist path is the only real option as you suggest:
'And so, the only option becomes some form of panpsychism, some ontology in which life and consciousness are either interchangeable with what we normally mean by matter or, better, are the foundation from which the “material” world emerges.'
There is another way which Mario Crocco develops in 'A Palindrome.' In this approach 'consciousness' is not some fungible stuff. Each psyche (both human and non-human) is unique and non-fungible.
'Because of the anomic circumstantiation of each finite existentiality, cadacualtez comes not from situational transformation: the boundary conditions of a substrate's parcel cannot establish who, instead of any other person, will find herself experiencing and semoviently inflecting them rather than another substrate parcel. Cadacualtez [each-onehood] not either comes from the prebarygenic situation, because this early cosmological stage is also nomic — notwithstanding that it innerly escapes transformative elapsing since physical causation can not yet accummulate and, so, situational transformation not yet grabs hold. What such a person is, accordingly, comes directly from the grounding level wherefrom all real situations acquired its so being. That is to say, every finite existentiality is an outwardly direct production of the unoriginated portion of the reality, namely of the portion whereby there is something rather than actual nothing and which, inwardly, had previously set such something's compossibilities (Ma'at or lógos, e. g. that the low-energy exchanges over dispersivity do segregate into interactions with such and such specific coupling constants, and that semovience is not simulable and, therefore, a nomic evolution of cosmological situations, despite producing many parcels of substrate unable to do else than generating sufferances to the finite existentialities eclosed in them, is needed to freely develop, eventually, a responsible axiologic response in a few, if any, finite co-creators:' (Mario Crocco,).
http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/a_palindrome.htm