Outer Space Is Down

Where the heavens go when they can’t be up.

SpaceX/Getty Images

I had a telescope.

You could punch in the code for Mars on a 90’s-era purple keypad and LCD screen and the thing would hum around for a bit and you would stick your eye socket on the little rubber cup and - well, I don’t remember it working perfectly. We re-entered the day’s date and re-orientated the tripod even due-r north with the help of a little plastic floating sphere compass that I got from the Boy Scouts. In the end, we just manually pointed the business end at the Red Planet.

Through the looking glass, the visible alien mountain tops weren’t like Mount Rushmore or a Redwood tree. There was awe, but not reverence - at least not in that subtle sense of “striving upward.” It was more like a gnostic hug. Something other people, sleeping in their beds, didn’t know about.

The nighttime dome of heaven actually demands more reverence to the naked, unknowing eye. Just a couple of nights ago, I went out to look at the stars, bright as they are in rural Louisiana, and really tried to imagine what it felt like to be a tribesperson; That is to say, knowing and feeling it to be a domed cloth with pinpricks of the light shining beyond it. What is cool is that if you really try to forget what you know about modern astronomy and imagine how big it would have to be to match your perceptions of it as a dome, it will take on an apparent size. And the apparent size is staggering. You can’t feel infinity, but you can feel huge, which is paradoxically much larger than the vague infiniteness you normally cast on that darkness. Try it next time you’re looking at the stars.

It’s really no wonder that when Galileo gazed through the telescope and started shattering that massive star-stained-glass dome of night, the Church wanted him to shut up. That little instrument was a dart to a vast mural painted on a hot air balloon. The phenomenological deflation that was the result of the de-centering of Earth is still taking place, really. It was the last time outer space was firmly “up.”

C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy tried to re-frame this problem in a way that is beguiling but ultimately unconvincing. The science of his science fiction has not, to be blunt, altogether aged well. He tried to re-make the eternal black coldness we all know to be outer space into Heaven. When the main character goes there, for example, he learns that space is actually bright and hot, because the sun is up there. Obviously.

This is that classic C.S. Lewis’ oh-so-English appeal to common sense. It would almost be convincing, if my head wasn’t so filled with the Apollo missions and the photos of deep space from the Hubble: dead, dark, and cold. He couldn’t have known about that, of course, but, even still, his grasp of how forces like gravity interact with perception was certainly imaginative, if not a little child-like. It’s sort of disturbing, actually, to see his lucid style of writing transposed over a subject that I know more about than him (my advantage over Lewis is only chronological). Still, it reveals him to be a fallible human, and makes me wonder which of his other brilliant insights would seem naïve if only I wasn’t so hopelessly ignorant on the topics involved.

This is not to diminish the great Lewis, of course. He is probably my second favorite writer, second only to his close friend Tolkien. However, I think the Space Trilogy, specifically, helped me understand why his fiction never soared quite so high as The Lord of the Rings.

The man was undeniably light-speed brilliant in the conventional sense. He had a profound grasp of literature, language, and philosophy. What’s more amazing about him, arguably, is that his world-class mastery of his subject material did not disfigure him, fill him with a superiority/inferiority complex, or stop him talking like a regular bloke. As a result, his philosophy and theology is crisp and readable while simultaneously deep and well-defended. He’s really one-of-a-kind, as far as I can tell. You feel you are always approaching a systematic grasp of all cosmic mysteries, which you can handily repeat to your friends at a party. Writerly-types and quote-posters love that about him.

You can, however, see where this style of thinking goes wrong when you look at the Space Trilogy. The brilliant characterization of materialist scientists as actually being in concert with world-destroying demonic entities is convincing and awesome as a purely theological thought experiment. But it is all seriously undermined by Lewis’ wonky understanding of the material universe in light of more recent discoveries. People will argue and say that funny physics work as an artistic choice, and they do, I agree. But the fact that these books are not “classics” and instead hidden gems for people like us, says more than enough.

Tolkien’s novels, on the other hand, have reshaped the minds of an entire generation, mostly without their conscious knowledge. Thousands of high fantasy tomes have been written - his books created that entire genre. That’s not to mention the games and movies it all then spawned. People don’t need to consciously know why they are so drawn to the images of wizards, elves, evil, and the knights of the European middle ages. They just know that it represents something true and so tickles their attention toward it and upward indefinitely.

Lewis’ style, as crisp and as fun as it is to share and quote, is no good in this non-explicit realm. In fact, it’s worse than no good (“bad?”) - it turns sour with time and repeated use because it resonates mostly with the intellect. If you ring that bell long enough without also resonating deeper in the body, it starts to ring false, and then you become deaf to it.

Actually, Tolkien openly didn’t like Lewis’ style. He pinned it on his over-use of direct allegory. You can read his explanations about the rift, but I’ve always found him a little unclear and sometimes contradictory. I think his discomfort is hard to put into words (that was more of Lewis’ forte, anyway). You just know it when you see it. It’s ascetic and therefore, in the end, we all know, when we’re honest with ourselves, that there is something inherently more dignified about Tolkien’s fiction. The only reason I can say this more directly than Tolkien maybe could is only that I have perspective on how their works went down in history and, boy, did Tolkien hit a nerve unlike anyone, except maybe Shakespeare.

For more clues, you might also look at the fate of their biggest influences: their respective churches. Tolkien was a Catholic and Lewis was a Protestant - an Anglican. In my town, there is an Anglican church right next to the Catholic church. The former is the most beautiful church and graveyard I have ever seen. On Sunday, however, you will only be greeted by about seven octogenarians. Down the street, in the more humble but still beautiful Catholic church, there are so many people there for mass that they have to have an overflow room, playing the service on a TV, which is also full, and a dozen kids are running between people’s legs.

The ongoing religious revival, mostly taking place in the more orthodox churches, makes me hopeful that we’re waking up from a Cartesian dream. One that began, coincidentally or not, around the time of the Protestant Reformation. For the last 500 years, our heads slowly floated out of our bodies, which made us think everything was like a clock or an engine or now a computer. A dream that perhaps culminated in the Great Wars in the time of Tolkien and Lewis, which is also the cultural context of each of their most enduring works. Mere Christianity for Lewis and, of course, Lord of the Rings for Tolkien.

Mere Christianity was directly written as a radio talk for the troops fighting WWII. Amazing. It’s coming-home-for-Christmas-Eve-level touching to imagine Lewis giving the boys some hope in their great fight. And what did he choose as his topic to revive their spirits? Christian apologetics. And that wasn’t some aberration. No, when fighting an actual war with your blood and bones, you are thrilled at the chance to remember what the Cartesian dream taught you to forget. To help you fight the Nazis, but also to fight the creeping nihilism of internalized modernity, so that you might be able to convince your clever modern mind for a moment that noble sacrifice is worthwhile. As they say, there are no atheists in a foxhole, especially when Uncle Clive was speaking on the radio.

I do love that book, but Lewis does try to fight fire with fire, and so he sometimes can’t tell when his materialist gun backfires. He uses those clear, static, and orderly images that the materialist minds love so much, against them. In some places, it approaches the style of a Zen koan, where words are intentionally meant to confuse your linguistic mind in order to get to deeper and subtler levels of thought, e.g. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” From Lewis: “What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.” Mostly, though, Lewis is best when he makes the great mysteries clear, explicit, and reasonable. In this way, he is able to speak to the mind of the doubter and the unbeliever perfectly. He was one himself.

Despite Tolkien helping Lewis convert to Christianity, Lewis does not end up joining the Catholic Church. He remains Anglican. Whatever reasons he had, this makes good symbolic sense, because the Protestant tradition is characterized by a call for universal explanations and clarity. They saw the mysteries held by the Catholic Church merely as power-plays. They demanded, among other things, that everyone have access to scripture and the right to practice how they saw fit. They certainly had a good point, as evidenced by the corrective Counter-Reformation of the Catholics. However, my experience leads me to believe that mysteries held by a clergy are not just power plays - they are also requirements for a stable corpus. A body dies without the sacred and those committed to keeping it safe from the profane gaze of the public.

Which brings us to the obvious power of Tolkien’s fiction. In it, there is a creeping mystery, even to Tolkien himself. Wizards and elves exist in complex hierarchies and histories, the ages have texture and meaning, and Gandalf himself is a “Guardian of the Secret Flame,” which meant that he knew about the creator God of Middle Earth and yet did not tell anyone. Instead, he was merely a guide along the Hobbit’s journey, to understand the nature of reality through their personal sacrifices. Tolkien, I believe, saw himself as a “Guardian of the Secret Flame.” He thought it highly unlikely he could make any explicit claims about God, and felt it was better to guide people home, as unlikely as it was, by telling a great story. That helps explain why he found Lewis’s overt symbolism and explicitness to be crass and presumptuous. Tolkien believed that technology - even the technology of explicit and non-poetic language - was the Ring of Power. Anyone who thought they were wielding it for good would soon find they had eventually done the bidding of the enemy and not understand how it even happened.

Which brings us back to our nearly-abandoned Anglican church, with its icon-less white-washed walls and simple, explicit modern style. A modern Protestant church is almost like a prelude to a SpaceX facility without any rockets in it, or a rock concert without the sex or drugs. Is it any wonder, then, where have all the people gone? Of course, they went to the secular culture, which is far superior at doing the explicit and profane, or to the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which are superior at protecting the sacred. I’m not saying Lewis is in charge of the current reality of his church, but the proof is a little in the pudding. Where is everyone, oh-so convinced by his crisp arguments?

Tolkien’s church, much like Tolkien’s fiction, ignored the power of the explicit. They kept all the strange myths and rituals - they trusted that great believers of the past must have had a reason for re-telling enacting them that is far beyond anyone’s time or capacity to put into language. And guess what? Their pews are packed with commoners and elites alike, drawn in by the semi-opaque veil draped over sacred mysteries. And guess what else? Amazon is spending billions to go try to retell Tolkien’s great mysteries.

Lewis unconsciously adopted a materialist frame and transposed it onto his Christianity - namely, he believed that heaven was “up” and “in the sky,” but also believed the materialist idea that physical, literal “space” and its measurable 3D coordinates matter in estimating “where” heaven is. He trapped himself into needing to believe something that wasn’t strictly true, and it undermined him once the notion of cold, dead space became commonly accepted. That’s what always happens when you try to use the One Ring. It gives you power, but then it undermines you in surprising ways. It is always looking for its master, nudging you slightly here and there, until it finds its moment to strike.

The simpler solution to Lewis’s problem is one that we’ve come up with completely intuitively since his time: Space is not the heights, it’s the depths. It’s why you sail a space “ship” in an endless “sea of stars.” It’s why we didn’t go with the Russian “Cosmonaut” (order of heaven sailor) and instead we went with “Astronaut” (star sailor), and why space represents internalness, depth, and isolation in books and movies. I’m pretty sure 2001: A Space Odyssey is about this psychic shift after realizing space is down (don’t quote me on that).

Tolkien never tries to solidify anything into such explicit terms, so his story flexes and breathes with the times. Like an old house, his world is up for interpretation and even contradiction. Even the physics of space itself is not exclusively a material or an easily understood phenomenon in Middle Earth. Places stretch or shrink, confuse or enlighten, Sheol or Eden, all depending on the larger context of the characters and their aims, and even the reader himself.

You can go online and watch thousands of hours of YouTube videos of people giving fifty contradictory explanations of Middle Earth. Some of them are serious, novel, or post-secular and profoundly clever, some are pedantic and shallow (was Sauron RIGHT?!) It all remains fun and keeps coming because none of what is explicit is canon. The moment the explicit becomes canon, the game is over.

Maybe me even saying “Outer Space Is Down” is itself too explicit - and maybe it is, because God knows I am a millionth as patient a communicator as either Tolkien or Lewis was. But in this case I think what I’m doing is less trying to shift perception, but rather just pointing out that the perspective has already shifted. When Jeff Bezos launched himself into space, the image is not of him soaring high over our heads like a daring demigod, but rather a dork in a metal tube plunging his own depths.

That’s frustrating, I’m sure, to both Musk and Bezos, who would much prefer we all feel that the Tower of Babel isn’t finished yet, and they alone have the blueprint and budget for the next add-on. “You should buy real-estate on Mars!” They try to convince us like someone selling timeshares. It’s almost sad.

I like Ted Chiang’s story “The Tower of Babylon,” because in that version, when the intrepid people finally get to the top of the great tower, it turns out it is the bottom. It’s a hyperdimensional cylinder. That’s pretty much what happened with outer space. It’s incredible how well the physical universe aligns with our symbolic perceptions (makes you wonder if it all could possibly be a coincidence, or even what a coincidence even is, in the end). If you fix your gaze on only one way to measure “up,” (in this case the measurable, physical 3D space), your arbitrary measure eventually flips on you, becomes its opposite, and you find yourself in hell (Hades). It’s all so damn symmetrical and ironic, like a good Greek Tragedy.

In the great post-modern work House of Leaves, a father notices that his house is slightly larger when measured on the inside than on the outside. Becoming increasingly obsessed with this measurement, he eventually finds an unexplainable door. Through the door, he finds endless rooms and doorways. He ties a rope around his waist to go deeper and deeper into the impossible house. It progressively gets colder, darker, and stranger. There is a predator, hiding, somewhere… Eventually, he reaches the center of the house and, in his bent and self-referential perception, he finds only himself there, frozen, dying, and floating in a meaningless space full of mirrors.

That, I think, is our current, functional symbolism for space. No longer the Heavens for us to ascend into, but more like Satan at the bottom of hell in Dante’s Inferno - frozen by his meticulous measurement, rebellion, and self-obsession, each movement only freezing him more. Or, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, deep space is an image of ourselves, old, and eating our technology like food.

So, which way is up?

I don’t think we should try to rescue outer space from the fate of “down” like Lewis did. It will only serve to confuse and disorient us when the facts dispute our intuition that heaven is up. That doesn’t mean there is, as John Lennon wrote, “No heaven above us, only sky.” Heaven is certainly above us; we’ve just been small-minded in our understanding of “above.”

In Lord of the Rings, space is a semi-psychological phenomenon. The mood of a place is as real as the rocks and wind that forms its contours. When looking for heaven and trying to keep your gaze up, don’t focus so much on the cold spaces between the stars. Focus, instead, on the places that evoke a secret harmony, and see if there is one small step you can take toward higher and higher accord.

That way is up.