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Inklings Forever Volume 8 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Joint Meeting of The Eighth Frances White Ewbank Article 27 Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends and The C.S. Lewis & Society Conference

5-31-2012 C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy Susan Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society

Woody Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society

Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever

Recommended Citation Wendling, Susan and Wendling, Woody (2012) "C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy," Inklings Forever: Vol. 8 , Article 27. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol8/iss1/27

This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected].

INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume VIII A Collection of Essays Presented at the Joint Meeting of

The Eighth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM ON C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS and

THE C.S. LEWIS AND THE INKLINGS SOCIETY CONFERENCE Taylor University 2012 Upland, Indiana

C. S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy

Susan and Woody Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society

Wendling, Susan and Woody Wendling. “C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy.” Inklings Forever 8 (2012) www.taylor.edu/cslewis

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C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy

Susan and Woody Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society

Introduction "the dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic . . . not temporal but Readers and scholars of C.S. Lewis eternal" (p. 153). universally acknowledge his "syncretistic Daring us to take up this challenge imagination"--which fuses classical pagan of being "one of the few" who are ideas with Christian allegory--and call "prepared to go further into the matter," him a "Neoplatonist Christian" (cf. C.S. Lewis presents to us readers the ancient Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and and universal belief in spiritual Beauty; Barkman, C.S. Lewis & cosmology, or as this paper identifies it, Philosophy As A Way of Life). This paper the Angelic Hierarchy. By examining this will specifically identify the concept of the belief Scripturally and philosophically, we Angelic Hierarchy (or "spiritual can then highlight its centrality in Lewis's cosmology") as being both ancient and thinking and writing and speculate that universally accepted. The Canadian critic he believed it to be part of a spiritually- Adam Barkman warns that "Lewis's based worldview true for moderns as well fiction is not always an accurate depiction as for the ancients. of his metaphysical [spiritual] beliefs," (p. 237). Yet there are clues in the Ransom The Angelic Hierarchy trilogy that C.S. Lewis collapses the in the Scriptures distinction between "ancient" and "modern" and "fiction" and "fact" Let us emphasize at the outset precisely because he takes "ancient that "the provides the basis for all philosophy" seriously and wants us Christian reflection on . Angels are moderns to do likewise. present throughout Scripture, and must At the end of Out of the Silent be confronted by all of its readers" (Keck, Planet Lewis the author establishes that p. 8). Far from being a "mythological the fictional narrator is named "Lewis" (p. hangover from pre-modern times" 155); that he is close friends with the (Dunbar, p. 5), Scripture tells us right in 's protagonist Ransom; that he has the beginning of Genesis about 's been working on certain facts concerning creation of the cosmos and every creature planetary knowledge and medieval in and on the celestial and terrestrial Platonism; that these facts are relevant to orbs. From the patristic era through the modern times because "the medieval medieval period, the roles of the spirits in Platonists were living in the same the Genesis creation story were celestial year as ourselves" (p. 153); and frequently explored (Keck, p. 16). Yet finally, that they--Ransom and Lewis-- ultimately by the Council of Nicea in 325 must disguise these facts as fiction A.D., the orthodox Fathers declared that because humanity is in danger and that God created the angels despite the

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apparent silence of Genesis in this specific This mention of "" by John area. Lewis takes this historically Calvin reminds us that those who choose orthodox position that the Angelic to follow God's Son are constantly Hierarchy exists as part of God's creation, engaged in cosmic . yet sees the cosmos as filled with angelic Ephesians 6 warns that "we are not beings, arranged hierarchically. contending against flesh and blood, but In the Bible the angels are against the principalities, against the represented throughout as spiritual powers, against the world rulers of this beings intermediate between God and present darkness, against the spiritual Man in their function as "messengers of hosts of wickedness in the heavenly God." The Latin and Greek words for places" (RSV). Paul here clearly states "" or "aggelos" means "one sent." that the angels hold sway over the They, like humans, are created beings (Ps. world! 148:2-5; Col. 1:16-17). They are spirits; It is assumed in the ancient the writer of Hebrews says "Are they not Biblical worldview that this "angelic fall" all ministering spirits, sent to minister to occurred prior to the and that them who shall receive the inheritance of legions of fallen angels who had allied salvation?" (Heb. 1:14). In Revelation 8:2- themselves with also fell. 5 they render perpetual assistance to God :9 describes this War in and are depicted as standing "before , with , which "deceiveth the God's ." In Jacob's vision they are whole world," being cast out into the shown ascending and descending the earth "and his Angels were cast out with ladder which stretches from earth to him." Luke 8:31 tells us that a portion of heaven--a visual image of this concept of the fallen angels are currently restrained hierarchy. Angels interact with Hagar in in a spiritual prison called "the Abyss." the wilderness. The angel Later we will connect this ancient idea of announced the birth of John the Baptist the angelic fall to Lewis's knowledge of, and the Incarnation of Christ. and love for, Milton's epic poem, Paradise Further, they are represented as the Lost, and his linking of the constituted guardians of the nations at Lucifer to the story of Earth's fallen some particular crisis, such as in "Oyarsa" in his cosmic inter-planetary 10:12-21, where the . was coming to assist Daniel but was detained in the by the Prince of The Angelic Hierarchy Persia. Throughout the Bible we find it and Platonic Philosophy repeatedly implied that each soul has its tutelary angel. St. Paul refers to Realizing how extensive the principalities, powers, virtues, and Biblical teaching is on the spiritual reality dominions in Ephesians 1:21, and, writing of the angels, their place in God's creation, to the Colossians (1:16), he says: "In Him and their relationship to humanity, let's were all things created in heaven and on examine the belief in spiritual cosmology earth, visible and invisible, whether or hierarchy seen in philosophers such as thrones or dominations, or principalities Plato and Plotinus. According to Justin or powers." According to John Calvin's Pollard and Howard Reid: "In the Enneads Institutes of the Christian Religion (Vol. I, we can look into the mind of the last great Chapter XIV, Section 6, p. 145), the angels pagan philosopher of antiquity. Plotinus’s "regard our safety, undertake our universe is, broadly speaking, of a similar defense, direct our ways, and exercise a structure to Plato’s, graded in the Great constant solicitude that no evil befall us." Chain of Being from the divine to the mundane, from the eternal to the mortal,

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from God the One to nature, matter, and The Angelic Hierarchy the observed world." (Pollard and Reid, p. in Lewis's A Preface to 248) These authors pinpoint that the Twelve years prior to the legacy of these ideas continued not just in publication of the OHEL volume, in 1942, the last days of the pagan ancient world Lewis published his famous study on John but throughout later history: Milton, A Preface to Paradise Lost. In it he In the later classical world the discusses the concept of hierarchy itself, theological traditions of Christianity something he believed to be "of great (most particularly in the work of importance" (Hooper, p. 561). Further, as Augustine), , and all looked a seventeenth century English poet, to Platonic philosophy, as described by Milton's tale of the rebellion and fall of Plotinus, as a method for formulating and the angels provides further grist for articulating their own . After Lewis's ancient Neoplatonic spiritual the obscurity of the medieval period, the cosmology. In Chapter XV, "The Mistake Enneads reemerged in 1492 as one of the about Milton's Angels," Lewis defends the driving forces behind the writings of the materiality of Milton's angels by saying Italian Renaissance philosophers and in that "the whole passage . . . becomes the works of humanists like Erasmus and intelligible . . . when we realize that Milton Thomas More. [emphasis added] (Pollard put it there chiefly because he thought it and Reid, p. 250) true. In this he did not stand alone" (PPL, We emphasize this connection p. 109). Lewis then reiterates the unity because Lewis’s area of academic between the ancient writers, the Platonic expertise was precisely in this time philosophers and Christianity, saying that period of history. In the "Introduction" to "bound up with this is a belief that the his magnum opus, the Oxford History of pictures of non-human yet rational life English Literature in the Sixteenth Century presented in the Pagan writers contain a excluding Drama (popularly called the great deal of truth. The universe is full of "OHEL" volume), Lewis discusses such such life . . . genii, daemones, aerii Renaissance thinkers as Ficino, Pico, homines. And these are animals, animated Paracelsus, Agrippa and the English Dr. bodies or incarnate minds" (PPL, pp. 109- Dee. Substituting Ficino's term "Platonic 110). Further, Lewis confesses that "a " for "Neoplatonism," Lewis new period in my appreciation of defines this whole system of Paradise Lost began when I first found daemonology arranged in a hierarchy as reason to believe that Milton's picture of "a deliberate syncretism based on the the angels . . . is meant in principal as a conviction that all the sages of antiquity literally true picture of what they shared a common wisdom and that this probably were . . ." (PPL, p. 108). This wisdom can be reconciled with "voice" of Lewis the academic literary Christianity" [emphasis added] (OHEL, p. critic of Milton here sounds like the same 21) This ancient "Platonic theology," voice of Lewis the self-named narrator at according to Pollard and Reid, was the end of , both salvaged from antiquity specifically by the saying the same thing: he "has reason to Florentine Renaissance philosophers believe" that the ancient wisdom of the discussed by Lewis in his OHEL volume. Angelic/Planetary Hierarchy is fund- Pollard and Reid continue, saying that amentally and spiritually "true." Plotinus came to be recognized as "one of To complete our earlier tracing of the formative influences on Western this strand of Neoplatonic thought Christianity" (Pollard and Reid, p. 250). through the centuries of human history, let's go back to Pollard and Reid, who

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continue by stating that the "German consciousness unaffected' [emphasis idealists of the following century [late added] (Discarded Image, p. 85). At this 18th and 19th century] considered point Inklings scholars will remember Plotinus's work the basis for their that in 1936, Lewis first read Charles opposition to the growing schools of Williams' spiritual thriller, The Place of scientific philosophy, and his influence can the Lion, which not only links the ancient even be traced in the twentieth-century Platonic Ideas/Intelligences with the Christian imaginative literature in Church's "Celestial Hierarchy" but also England, spearheaded by C.S. Lewis" warns of the spiritual importance of a [emphasis added] (Pollard and Reid, p. properly perceptive "consciousness" of 250). "the celestials." Damaris Tighe refuses to see the actuality of the universe (in her The Angelic Hierarchy case, the Eagle of Wisdom) properly and in Lewis's The Discarded Image instead sees a frightening reptilian pterodactyl. Lewis was so excited by this The crucial "road map to ancient novel's theme of Platonic Forms ideas" and especially the idea of the materializing in real-life London and by universe encompassing spiritual beings Williams' thought, that Lewis met "C.W." arranged in hierarchies, is found in the in person and later incorporated him into posthumously published nonfiction work, his circle of friends in Oxford (Carpenter, The Discarded Image. Lewis describes the pp. 99-101). All of this links Lewis's own lingering, pervasive and often "change of consciousness" in his unacknowledged influence of this understanding of Milton to his friendship "spiritual cosmology," and states that "not with Charles Williams, who knew all all Christians at all times have detected about this ancient "Platonic Theology" them or admitted their existence . . ." through his esoteric studies. Williams (Discarded Image, p. 48) Below Earth's adored Milton and later lectured at moon is the "aether" or "air" which is Oxford on Milton's Comus. The force of all populated by "the Longaevi", to whom these points together reinforces my Lewis devotes an entire chapter. supposition that Lewis joined forces with Cosmically, above the earth, is "the Williams in recovering an ancient and Angelic Hierarchy" explicated in detail in Neoplatonic truth "carried forward" in the sixth century by the famed Pseudo- the writings of to the careful Dionysius, who elaborated this hierarchy reader in our more modern time period. into three triads of three species each: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dom- The Angelic Hierarchy inations, Powers, Virtues, Principalities, in Out of the Silent Planet and Angels (Keck, p. 57). As Lewis tells us, this is a "finely graded In the late 1930's and early 1940's descent of power and goodness . . .the Lewis published his three interplanetary universal principle. The Divine splendor novels, Out of the Silent Planet, (illustratio) comes to us filtered, as it and . In the first were, through the Hierarchies" (Discarded novel, the protagonist, a philologist Image, p. 73). Additionally, if we want to named Ransom is kidnapped and brought understand the "old poets", we must be to Malacandra/Mars by two evil aware that "there is a vast re-adjustment scientists, Weston and Devine, who have involved" (Discarded Image, pp. 74-5). A already made contact with higher forms few pages later, Lewis reiterates that this of life on this planet. Right here at the difference in perspective is so radical that beginning, Lewis makes the point that the it perhaps 'leaves no area and no level of reality of all such higher beings has been

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dismissed from human consciousness. innocence of Perelandra, an unfallen The type of beings that rule over the three world, he reaches the high place, so Malacandrian races are called eldils and sacred and secret, and can hear the the senior one of them, who is the conversation of angels. Indeed, he finds planetary ruler, is called Oyarsa. The himself in communion with the Planetary critic Gareth Knight states that this Spirits/Angels of both Mars and . "cosmic picture" which Lewis uses as a backdrop is drawing from "a great The Angelic Hierarchy tradition that was once common in That Hideous Strength knowledge but is now half-forgotten" [italics added] (Knight, p. 26). At the end Returning to the final volume of of their "space adventure," as already the Ransom trilogy, we notice that Lewis mentioned, Ransom and Lewis agree to returns full force to his ancient cosmic tell their story of expanded consciousness model of the universe filled with light and in fiction rather than as fact, and in the angelic beings but with planet earth, hope of being believed, they agree that "Thulcandra," being "silent" separated "What we need for the moment is not so from the light and joy of the great cosmic much a body of belief as a body of people dance of the Angelic Hierarchy. The familiar with certain ideas. If we could reason for earth's "silence" and even effect in one percent of our readers a "separation" is that earth is under the change-over from the conception of Space domination of the evil, fallen Oyarsa. As to the conception of Heaven [constituted mentioned previously, the Bible does we now know of angelic and planetary teach us about the angelic creation and Intelligences/Angels] we should have the fact that "there was " made a beginning [italics added] (Out of and that "Lucifer, a created angelic being the Silent Planet, p. 154). was thrown out of Heaven and legions of the Angelic Hierarchy with him." The Angelic Hierarchy Since we are unpacking "what in Perelandra Lewis knew" about ancient spiritual cosmology, let us probe further into what In the second novel Ransom has been called "the Myth of Angelic travels to Perelandra/Venus, which by Descent," which is elaborated in the lost ancient cosmology is the planet of the pseudepigraphical work called The Book "third heaven" which holds the true of . This book was more ancient pattern for Earth's civilization. In Lewis's than the canonical New Testament commentary on his friend Charles Scriptures and, although forgotten by the Williams' Arthurian poetry, Lewis says Church for 1500 years, was used by the that Williams calls what resides in the early Church. The third heaven "the feeling intellect", a term describes the corruption of superhuman used by Wordsworth. But then Lewis forces/angels or "Watchers", who are states that Williams, like Lewis himself, corrupt themselves and who oppress and sees the planetary "intelligences" as diminish God's creation. According to objective celestial fact and that "Williams Margaret Barker, an Oxford scholar is . . . reproducing the doctrine of the studying Second Temple Judaism and the Renaissance Platonists that Venus-- origins of Christianity, the Book of Enoch celestial love and beauty--was the pattern "...was a text from their Jewish or model after which God created the background kept and used by the earliest material universe" (Arthurian Torso, p. churches. These ideas about the nature of 286). In this novel, after Ransom thwarts evil, the danger of corrupted skills and Weston's attempt to corrupt the scientific knowledge, and the bonds of

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natural harmony in creation, must have reverse a movement of thought which has been a part of the earliest Christians' been going on since the beginning of worldview, a part of what they philosophy." Lewis describes how over assumed..." (Barker, p. 3) the centuries the progression towards Besides using the ancient idea of "modern knowledge" not only strips the humanity being under the influence of the cosmos of its transcendent meaning but fallen, evil "Oyarsa" of earth in That leads to nothing less than "the abolition of Hideous Strength, Lewis also probes the man" which actually is the title of Lewis's Enochian themes of corrupted science nonfiction companion volume to That and the breaking of God-ordained order Hideous Strength. in the heavens. The backdrop provided by all three of these "Enochian themes" in Conclusion That Hideous Strength strengthens the argument that Lewis not only "knew Although time prevents our about" the implications for humanity but further development of this ancient was working as an author to help spiritual cosmology, this exploration humanity achieve the necessary "change leads us to certain conclusions about C.S. of consciousness" required to return to Lewis. By highlighting Lewis's use of this this ancient and spiritually true spiritual cosmology in his fiction, his worldview. (Cf. Michael Ward's Planet literary criticism, his essays and letters, Narnia for the unpacking of this "ancient we can better understand Lewis's code" in Lewis's The Chronicles of message for us moderns. If we view Narnia!) ourselves as readers who are "among the few, the very few" who understand and C.S. Lewis's "Preface" to work towards this "change of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth consciousness" required to understand our spiritual danger, we can use our In March of 1952 (7 years after heightened awareness of the ancient the publication of That Hideous Strength), spiritual cosmology as an antidote to the Lewis wrote to Douglas Harding to tell "hideous strength" of the demonic him that reading the manuscript of influence of our materialist " Harding's book, The Hierarchy of Heaven culture." Could it be that our beloved Jack and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Lewis is urging us to take up his challenge Universe, had really excited him deeply. to question our modern culture's In a postscript he tells Harding "I thought dismissal of such ancient spiritual the doctrine always was that of my eldila . . worldviews as mere "myth"? Could it be ." [italics added] (Collected Letters, Vol. III, that he is calling us even now to effect a p. 101). The details of why Lewis agrees changeover in our own thinking such that with Harding and thinks that his thought we know them to be spiritually true? If represents not just "rearguard actions" we take such matters seriously, then we, against modern scientistic/mechanistic along with Lewis, become spiritually worldviews but rather "a kind of thought attuned to the "cosmic dimension" of our which attempts to reopen the whole faith and thereby become radically question" is delineated in Lewis's counter-culture and even subversive in "Preface" to Harding's book. Later our departure from mainstream reprinted as the essay The Empty Universe (modern) thinking. in the volume Present Concerns (edited by Walter Hooper and published by Fount in 1986), this essay boldly claims that Harding's book is "the first attempt to

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Works Cited Knight, Gareth. The Magical World of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Barker, Margaret. The Lost Prophet: The Book Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. Great Britain: Element Books, 1990. of Enoch and Its Influence on Christianity.London: SPCK, 1988. Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942. Barkman, Adam. C.S. Lewis & Philosophy As A Way of Life. Zossima Press, 2009. ______Out of the Silent Planet. New York: The Macmillan Co., pb. ed., 1965. Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Vol. I. Translated by Henry ______English Literature in the Sixteenth Beveridge. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Century excluding Drama. (The Eerdmans, rep. 1975. Oxford History of English Literature, Vol. III) New York: Oxford University Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C.S. Press, 1954. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton ______"De Descriptione Temporum," in Mifflin, 1979. Selected Literary Essays by C.S. Lewis. Edited by Walter Hooper (1955 essay The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. III. Ed. by Walter Hooper. NY: Harper, 1996. reprint; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and ______Beauty. Ed. by David Baggett, Gary or Reflections on Habermas and Jerry Walls. Downers education with special reference to the Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008. teaching of English in the upper forms Dunbar, Rev. Gavin G. "Worship and Warfare: of schools. New York: Harper Collins, pb. ed., 1944. The Feast of the Angels," in Mandate, Vol. 33, Number 3, Summer 2010. ______The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Elledge, C.D. The Bible and the . Atlanta: Society of Biblical ______Perelandra. New York: The Literature, 2005. Macmillan Co., pb. ed., 1965. Farrer, Austin. A Rebirth of Images: The ______That Hideous Strength. The Making of St. John's . Macmillan Co., pb. ed., 1965. Boston: Beacon Press, 1949. ______"Williams and the Arthuriad," in Friberg, Timothy, and Friberg, Barbara. Arthurian Torso. Grand Rapids, MI: Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974. Testament. Trafford Publishing, 2005. Pollard, Justin and Reid, Howard. The Rise and Godwin, Jocelyn. The Golden Thread: The Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Ageless Wisdom of the Western Modern World. New York: Penguin Mystery Traditions. Theosophical Books, 2006. Publishing House. Wheaton, IL, 2007. Porter, J.R. The Lost Bible: Forgotten Harding, D.E. The Hierarchy of Heaven and Scriptures Revealed. Chicago: The Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the University ofChicago Press, 2001. Universe. With a Preface by C.S. Reed, Annette Yoshiko. Fallen Angels and the Lewis. Gainesville, FL: University History of Judaism and Christianity: Presses of Florida, 1952. The Reception of Enochic Literature. Hooper, Walter. C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Cambridge: Cambridge University Guide. New York: Harper Collins, Press, 2005. 1996. Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Keck, David. Angels & Angelology in the Middle Sea Scrolls: Their True Meaning for Ages. NY: Oxford University Press, Judaism and Christianity. USA: 1998. Random House, Inc., 1994.

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Ward, Michael. Planet Narnia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Williams, Charles. "Introduction," in The English Poems of John Milton. The World's Classics. London: Oxford University Press, 1940 (new edition from the original 1913 edition). ______. The Place of the Lion. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans PublishingCompany, pb. reprint of original publication of 1933.

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