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"It was beautiful," C.S. Lewis confided, "on two or three successive nights about the Holy Time, to see Venus and Jove blazing at one another, once with the Moon right between them: Majesty and Love linked by Virginity—what could be more appropriate?" Thus Lewis wrote to the poet Ruth Pitter early in January 1953, recalling what he had seen in the night sky during the Christmas that had just passed.
As the Nativity story is retold year by year, all those who hear it are bound to think—however briefly—about the original Star of Bethlehem that led the Magi to the cradle of Christ, but few would then go and scan the horizon for vestiges of its rising. Lewis was different. He was fascinated by the heavens and by astrology—although what he meant by "astrology" is different from what most modern people understand by the word, as we shall see.
He was a keen amateur astronomer and had a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom at The Kilns, his Oxford home. According to one of the girls evacuated there during World War II, he used it to introduce his youthful charges to many of the sidereal wonders of the universe. Using the naked eye, he did the same for his pupils at Magdalen College: Derek Brewer remembers how Lewis once "pointed out to us the extremely rare conjunction of five planets all brilliantly visible in a circle." His letters frequently detail the pleasures he took in the firmament: "Isn't Jupiter splendid these nights?" he exclaimed to one correspondent in 1938; "Do you ever notice Venus these mornings at about quarter past seven?" he asked his godson in 1946. "She has been terrifically bright lately, almost better than Jupiter."
Jupiter (Jove) was Lewis' favorite object of attention in the night sky; that was because, according to medieval cosmology, Jupiter was the "best planet," Fortuna Major. Lewis used to tell his university lecture audiences, "Those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced and red-faced." He would then pause before adding, "It is obvious under which planet I was born"—which always raised a laugh.
He lectured on the subject because he thought that familiarity with the pre-Copernican cosmos was essential to a proper understanding of medieval and renaissance literature, and in The Discarded Image, the published version of his lectures, he repeatedly encourages his readers to take a stroll under the sky at night. Looking up at the heavens now, he argues, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. Now we sense that we are looking out into a trackless vacuity, pitch-black and dead-cold. Then we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast, lighted concavity. In the nearest part of the sky our eyes would have seen—or, rather, seen through—the transparent sphere in which the Planet Luna revolves, then the larger sphere of Mercury, then the still larger one of Venus, and so on through the spheres of Sol, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, each sphere rotating more rapidly than the last and each exerting a peculiar influence upon mundane people and events. Beyond Saturn's sphere we would have seen the heaven of the fixed stars, the Stellatum, and, beyond that, the Primum Mobile, the sphere which conveys movement to all the other, lower spheres. Further than the Primum Mobile we would not have been able to see, for that would take our sight outside the created order into the Empyrean, the very home of God. One of the divine titles was "the Unmoved Mover" because God moved the Primum Mobile "by being loved, not by loving; by being the supremely desirable object." It is in this sense, Lewis says, that we should understand Dante's immortal line, the final words of The Divine Comedy: "The love that moves the sun and the other stars."
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