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Lewis makes no effort to hide the pleasure he derives from this view of the cosmos. He remarks that the human imagination has seldom entertained an object so sublimely ordered; the medieval universe was "tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine." Its tingling quality is especially worth noting because Lewis is here making an Anglo-Saxon pun. He wrote to his father in 1922: "[Anglo-Saxon] gives the impression of parodied English badly spelled. Thus … TINGUL for a star … think of 'Twinkle, twinkle little star.' " Almost invariably when the word appears in his subsequent works it comes loaded with astrological connotations. For instance, in The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" when Lucy lays her hand on the book of spells in the house of Coriakin, the fallen star, "her fingers tingled when she touched it as if it were full of electricity."
Lewis' delight in this old picture of the heavens was not confined to his professional life as a literary historian; he also had a much more personal and imaginative investment in it. He liked, so he said, "the whole planetary idea as a mythology," and in his poetry that idea often receives a Christian treatment. "The Turn of the Tide," a meditation upon the cosmic significance of Christ's Nativity, is one notable example. From the landlord of the Bethlehem tavern all the way up to Saturn in the outermost planetary sphere, the entire universe is breathless with expectancy about what is to happen in the Stable behind the Inn. When Christ is finally born:
Saturn laughed and lost his latter age's frost,
His beard, Niagara-like, unfroze;
Monsters in the Sun rejoiced; the Inconstant One,
The unwedded Moon, forgot her woes.
The joyous news spreads down "sphere below sphere," bringing the "shock / Of returning life" to the whole created order. Lewis used the imagery of the seven heavens in his poetry because "the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols—to provide a Phänomenologie des Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation." These are no small claims. They help explain why the celestial bodies feature strongly in his fiction as well as his poetry.
In the first volume of Lewis' trilogy of novels, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the hero, Ransom, travels to Mars; in the second, Perelandra (1943), he goes to Venus; and in the third, That Hideous Strength (1945), he stays on Earth but acts as a bridge across which the planetary intelligences pass as they come to bring about a grand dénouement. These and the other heavenly bodies overwhelm Ransom with their beauty as he floats among them at the beginning of the first book: "the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise, to dispute their sway. There were planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold." As Ransom marvels, he becomes aware that there is a spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart:
A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of "Space": at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name "Space" seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it "dead"; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment … . No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the
"happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky."
He quoted Milton's words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.
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