The End Which is Really the Beginning
The End Which Is Really the Beginning
David Russell Mosley
As Jupiter and Saturn met in the night sky, a declaration was made. “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord,” the Psalmists rightly exclaim, unaware of the future meeting between these two planets, coming so close that from our perspective, they formed a single star, shining out on the Winter Solstice. Sadly, cloud cover meant I was not able to view this glorious, celestial event. Nonetheless, the occurrence reminded me of when, on my birthday in 2019, I stayed up late with a telescope borrowed from my local library in Concord, New Hampshire to watch the Super Blood Moon. It was one of the first times I had successfully used a telescope and seen something so astonishing with it.
For the past few years, I have been taken with the stars. The experience of teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy certainly added to my interest, but it was encountering Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia that elevated the interest to a cosmic level. For those unfamiliar, Ward argues that the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia map onto the seven planets of medieval cosmology. The work is nearly exhaustive, and the evidence is overwhelming. Lewis himself was clearly and evidently attracted to and interested by medieval cosmology—his book The Discarded Image dedicates a whole chapter to explaining how medieval poets saw the seven planets. His science fiction trilogy takes the medieval conception of the planets—as being governed by angelic intelligence that shares all the good traits of the gods after whom they’re named—and brings it into the modern universe. It is not out of the question, therefore, to read the Narniad in relation to the medieval understanding of planetary activity.
This brings me back to the recent conjunction: On December 21, it was not just any two planets, but it was specifically Jupiter and Saturn who met in the night sky. For the Medievals, these were the final two planets—beyond them was the realm of the fixed stars, the first moved, or Primum Mobile—and there ended the physical universe. Nothing, or perhaps in another sense, everything existed beyond it. These final two planets, however, held an interesting place of importance to the medieval mind.
Saturn, called Kronos in Greek mythology, was seen as the bringer of death, decay, pestilence, plague. We get our images of Father Time and of Death as a hooded figure carrying a scythe from such inspired depictions of Saturn. He was often called the Infortuna Major—the Greater Misfortune. Medieval people would see our current pandemic as a result of his influence on the world. But Saturn is also the home of the contemplatives in Dante’s Paradiso; he could be seen as leading to a time of mysticism and meditation upon God. But still, the saturnine, as his character is called, is not good. Jupiter, however, is another pleasant matter altogether.
Jupiter, which is a contraction of the Latin phrase Jove is pater or “Jove is father”, is considered as the king of the planets from the medieval perspective. His temperament is the jovial, which Lewis believed was difficult to define in his own age—it means more than simply jolly or joyful. With greater precision, a jovial person is described as magnanimous, a person of great peace and happiness and joy and festivity and kingliness. Lewis tells us to imagine a king at peace, in the halcyon days of summer, feasting and laughing deeply and truly. Unlike his father, Saturn, he is the Fortuna Major, the Greater Fortune. And yet, for all his kingliness and peace, and even his size, greater than that of the other planets (save the Sun), he is second-to-last. Saturn, it would seem, has the final say—but perhaps not.
According to Michael Ward, The Last Battle is Lewis’s saturnine book; it’s not hard to see why he thinks that. After all, it is the final book, the last battle. Narnia is destroyed and Father Time appears to aid in Narnia’s destruction. Everyone dies and nothing of Narnia as we knew it is left. But then something unexpected happens: the Pevensies, alongside their Narnian friends, begin to recognize the country on the other side of the door. At last they realize that this Narnia is the true Narnia and the other is merely a shadow. They have, to some extent, returned to the beginning, but all is new, different, made perfect. This is the return of Jove, but not the planetary Jove, nor the angelic Jove, but the true Jove, the King of kings, the Lord of lords. Saturn does not get the final say, and as they move “further up and further in” they discover even deeper and truer realities as they make their way to Aslan’s country, not ending the story, but beginning it in earnest. And of course, the first of the Chronicles Lewis wrote was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, his jovial story, according to Ward.
So perhaps, we can take this declaration in the stars as a reminder that time will not always hold the sway it holds now. George Herbert, in his poem, “Time” says of his subject, which he views through the lens of Saturn:
“Perhaps some such of old did passe,
Who above all things lov’d this life:
To whom thy sithe a hatchet was,
Which now is but a pruning knife.
Christ’s coming hath made man thy debter,
Since by thy cutting he grows better.”
Christ’s coming turns Time’s scythe into a pruning knife, helping us to grow on the vine that is Christ. And so we are also reminded in this conjunction that Saturn makes way for Jupiter. Saturn may come last of the planets in medieval cosmology, but it does not have the final say. This ultimately powerful position falls to the true Son of the true Father of which, in some ways, Jupiter and Saturn are analogies—imperfect analogies, as all analogies must be—but analogies that can teach us if we have the eyes to see.
As I laid on my living room floor, the windows open so I could better see the moon rise and turn blood red, I was moved in my inmost being. The great celestial dance is set for signs and seasons as Genesis 1 tells us. They declare the glory of the Lord. They sing the inaudible music of the spheres, the sound of which is so true, so beautiful, so good, so real that in our fallenness we cannot hear it and survive and so it is hidden from us. All this passed through my mind as I contemplate the movements of Jupiter and Saturn in Advent at the tail end of a year that has felt like hell for so many of us. And in it, I have hope because I am reminded that I wait for my Savior, who is coming soon both in the stable at Christmas and again at the end of all things, the end which is really the beginning.
David Russell Mosley
Writer & Theologian
David has been published in U.S. Catholic Magazine, The Christian Century, The Imaginative Conservative and Macrina Magazine. He also wrote a blog for Patheos Catholic for many years called, Letters from the Edge of Elfland.
Photography by Luke Stackpoole
