What's So Great About Ushas?

John Watkins · 17 Jul 2008, 12:03 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:03:15 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
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Are we talking about a literal personality for the Earth, or for the
universe?

Lewis actually explicitly notes in The Discarded Image that the Earth was
not classically given a guiding intelligence.  This is because, in the
Ptolemaic system, the Earth is stationary while the heavens move.  Being
stationary, the Earth obviously needs no intelligence guiding its movement.
According to Lewis, the first person to propose that the Great Chain of
Being including the Earth possessing a distinct "persona" in the sense that
Saturn and Jupiter do was Dante (Discarded Image 139, if anyone has it), who
proposed that the governing intelligence of Earth was Fortune.  Lewis
tweaked that idea to make the governing intelligence of Earth a Satan
analogue in the Space Trilogy.

Nevertheless, despite the (very debatable) commonality of "great chain of
being" theories (and conflating them all into a single system is kind of
sloppy), the "people who came up with Christianity" did not typically
ascribe some sort of "literal persona" to the planet Earth.  The Great Chain
most just posited that there must be a bunch of interesting spiritual beings
"higher" than man and "lower" than God.

As for the universe as a whole, the closest thing the ancients and medievals
had to such a concept was the Primum Mobile.  It's true that philosophers
tended to talk about the Primum Mobile as though it had a persona, but Lewis
is quick to point out that that's just how people spoke back then--to say
"the Primum Mobile revolves because it loves God" is no more literal than to
say "water desires to run downhill," which is exactly how medievals (and
Tzadkiel, for that matter) did in fact talk.  Lewis actually mocks moderns
for taking this literally by pointing out that we use an even more
personalizing metaphor--"Water runs downhill because it must obey the laws
of physics."

So I'm far from convinced that the ancients or medievals as a rule ascribed
a "personality" to the "World."  A necessary obedience to what we'd now call
metaphysical laws, sure.

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:39 AM, David Duffy <David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au>
wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>
>
>> I don't see anything about the world having a literal persona distinct
>> from God, and I don't recall seeing anything like that in Aristotle's
>> elementalism, either.
>>
>>
> A more recent SFnal realization is in CS Lewis's _Space Trilogy_.  Earth is
> (or has :)) a silent planet.
>
> David Duffy.
>
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