The Love That Moves the Sun

As SpaceX prepares for its initial public offering, touted as potentially the largest in history, the company’s mission statement has been much on my mind. Its terms are nothing if not ambitious: “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” 

Human life seems poised, indeed, to expand beyond the old familiar world; whether that prospect forms the stuff of joy or horror is a matter of imagination, particularly with regard to how one imagines man to be oriented to the universe. 

Is he a destroyer, a pox, a colonizer? Is man the virus after all? Or is he a steward, called to kingship and a share in governance, who, though flawed and often foolish, has it in him by grace to advance the motion of divine love in the universe?

Those who espouse the latter view will take issue with SpaceX’s second and third mission components. God has revealed the true nature of his creation already, and the divine consciousness is everywhere at work. God’s is the love, Dante reminds us, “that moves the Sun and other stars.” 

This is not to say, of course, that the exploration of space can offer us nothing in terms of the advancement of our knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, our wonder at the universe that divine love moves. But to suppose the superlunar sea of wonders devoid of consciousness is to imagine God’s creation as a frightfully lonely place and to ignore a literary tradition which has long discerned the divine consciousness at work beyond the sky. 

That tradition has roots in ancient mythologies, in the persons of Helios and Jupiter, Diana and Mercury. Our Greek and Roman forebears wonder, Is there not something divine about the moon and sun, the planets and stars? Do the heavens not bear a power to which we are in some way subject?

Nor was such wonder a hallmark of pagan or pantheistic impulse alone. The Christian tradition found in the heavens the marks of the divine mind and signs of that ladder of being that leads from earth through the stars to Heaven. 

Dante, of course, far from merely marveling at the stars, takes his Comedic pilgrim journey among them, traveling ever farther, ever faster in the whirl of those heavens seeking by their more and more perfect motion to imitate the eternal movement of divine love itself. Moving from the moon to Venus and the Sun, meeting there such saintly luminaries as Aquinas and Peter and James, Dante not only reminds us fellow pilgrims of the hierarchical arrangement of the universe but also insists upon the physicality of a Heaven in which the Resurrected Lord and the Blessed Virgin dwell, body and soul. 

Not so Catholic, if equally epic, John Milton, in Book 8 of Paradise Lost, has his Raphael affirm to Adam the wonder of space: “for Heav’n / Is as the Book of God before thee set, / Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learne / His Seasons, Hours, or Dayes, or Months, or Yeares.” Adam, having gazed at the vastness of space and mused on the apparent prodigality of a God who would render so much being for the sake of so little humanity, is finally nonetheless cautioned to be “lowly wise,” and to “Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live.” Let man be concerned with his sphere and, wondering at the universe, be yet not perplexed thereby.

C.S. Lewis, taking these lines as his inspiration, would nonetheless disregard their admonition and give full scope to dreams of other worlds in his Space Trilogy. And in his imagination, space, though perhaps frightening in the way that all great and vast things are—terrible in a shadow of the way that God himself is terrible—is nonetheless a place of intense cosmic joy, brilliant with the light of the sun and moon and stars. Lewis’s cosmos is everywhere alight with divine consciousness, and yet his hero, Ransom, can still know the joy of discovering those lesser consciousnesses with whom God has populated his universe. 

Then, too, the literary tradition of wondering about and even venturing into space recognizes that man’s consciousness has already illuminated the cosmos. The mind, Aristotle insists, is in some sense all things; it is open and oriented toward the whole of reality. Standing in awe before the vastness of space, man finds to his wonder that his own mind is still more vast, more copious in its capacity for measuring reality, more astonishing still in its being fashioned for communion with the one by whom all this universe is made.

To suggest that space does not know the light of consciousness is to lack that imagination which characterized Dante and Milton, Lewis and Hesiod, and the whole tradition of authors for whom each wonder of the created order is a sign of the life of the Creator. 

If we have as a culture lost sight of the tradition (and what generation has not stood in need of refreshment?), then the time is ripe for recovery. The Catholic imagination is no mere unscientific foray into the void of the unrealistic self; rather, it is the capacity for encountering the world according to the image of the One who fashions and sustains it. If we raise our eyes toward the heavens and seek to journey thither, let us go equipped with that imagination which recognizes Divine Love as the force that moves the sun and all the stars.