Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.
(From "The Superstition of School" by G.K. Chesterton in 1923.)

When the current stars and stripes were established as our nation’s flag by the Second Continental Congress in 1777, they declared that the stars should be “white in a blue field representing a new constellation.” Our flag’s red and white stripes represent rays of light pouring from this union of states. Colonial Americans knew something about stargazing, but it means less and less to us amid our more and more powerful telescopes. Thankfully, many still enjoy campfires and night skies and others start astronomy clubs. But how often do we stare up at the stars, longing to hear the majestic singing that guides their stately, tireless dancing? I rarely peer into the night sky eager to see what will be exposed when the stuff that makes up our stars gets swept away by the new heavens. In Christ’s time, only a few magi (perhaps distant disciples of Daniel) looked to the stars for signs of their true King’s arrival. Unlike the daytime sun, these small lights in the night give us something that we can look at directly, an opportunity to train our dull appetites, learning to desire ears and eyes that know more fully. If we are to take Christ’s first four beatitudes seriously, learning to want more fully is a critical lesson.

C.S. Lewis described us all as poor children playing at mud pies on a dirty city street, unable to understand and respond with joy when offered a holiday at the sea shore ("The Weight of Glory," 1949). Sadly, our desires are probably more anemic now than when Lewis wrote this essay. Many today experience brief thrills over the latest pop song (which may be great), but few learn to hunger for a symphony. Many want the fifth-gen iPhone in their back pocket (which is certainly great), but few dream of even a second-generation raspberry patch in their back yard. Christians want plenty of things on Sunday mornings, but do we long to the start each week by ascending the heavenly Mount Zion and responding to God in the presence of all the saints and angels? Americans want plenty of things for our nation, but do we sacrifice so that her nobility and honor might shine out across history and the globe like a new constellation? It seems fair to say that our longings have atrophied. Even our highest personal or institutional goals are sadly utilitarian.

Learning to “want more” sounds exhausting to many of us because advertisers are constantly stimulating our appetites in crass ways. However, learning to want deeply leads to leisurely patterns of rest and labor, to an unhurried exploration of beauty rather than a frenzied pursuit of gratification. In this life, wanting greater goods always leads to needing less.

So how can star gazing teach us to want truth, beauty and goodness more fully? Putting it as pragmatically as possible, how can CCA do better at training stargazers and what should we expect to gain if we try? Answering this two-part question will require taking a few steps back so that we can get a good running start.

In Disney’s Lion King, Pumbaa replies to Timon’s theory about stars being fireflies by saying, “I always thought that they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away.” After the obligatory potty humor, the two pressure Simba into sharing what he thinks about stars: “Well, somebody once told me that the great kings of the past are up there, watching over us.” Rolling with laughter, Timon asks “What mook made that up?” and Simba backs down with, “Yeah. Pretty dumb, huh?” I don’t often recommend turning to Disney for profound wisdom, but Simba’s father Mufasa may have been closer to the truth than we think.

When God creates the stars, he makes them to rule over the night (Genesis 1:14-18). God tells Abram to count the stars (and the sand grains) while informing him that many kings will come from him. Stars mark the limits of the heavens as the sands mark the limits of men’s earthly kingdoms. (Genesis 15:5, 17:6 and 22:17) In his farewell address to Israel, Moses declared: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God” (Deuteronomy 32:8, ESV). This phrase “sons of God” is the best translation from the most ancient manuscripts and refers to an angelic council surrounding God in His heavenly throne room. This angelic council is taken as the template in God’s plans for earthly kingdoms (which gives us plenty to ponder as we consider our own national flag and its image of a new constellation). Joseph, in his final dream about his future rule over Egypt, saw stars bowing down to him (Genesis 37:9-10). We see an incredibly close association between kingship and stars as Balaam prophesies over God’s people saying, “A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel. He will crush the foreheads of Moab, the skulls of all the people of Sheth.” (Numbers 24:17, NIV) Of course, this is the very same star that the magi looked for as they awaited signs of a kingly birth that would finally bring all earthly kingdoms under God’s heavenly rule (Matthew 2:2). In several passages, Paul describes Abraham’s spiritual heirs as kings who currently reign with Christ in heaven and who already shine like stars in the universe (as well as referring to a future unveiling and reign for which all creation currently longs, i.e. Ephesians 2:6 and Philippians 2:15). In the introduction to John’s Apocalypse, Christ says to the faithful in the church of Thyatira: “just as I have received authority from my Father, I will also give that one the morning star” (Revelation 2:27b-28). Later in this same book, John relates a vision of kingly men casting down their crowns alongside the angels who surround God’s heavenly throne (Revelation 4). Regardless of how each detail is understood, this is clearly a vision of the same heavenly council referenced by Moses in his farewell song to Israel (see Deuteronomy 32:8 above). These passages are only a partial survey, but the biblical images connecting stars and heavenly kings are clearly no laughing matter.

Heavenly kings, however, are not the most frequent associates of stars in the Bible. There is such a close relationship between stars and angels that it is sometimes hard to know when the Hebrew term “heavenly hosts” means the array of stars or the angelic armies of God. These “two meanings of the Hebrew phrase for ‘host of heaven’ … reflect a probable association between angels and stars and planets in the Hebrew imagination” according to the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (edited by Leland Ryken et al, page 372). Elisha (who watched a fiery chariot carry away his master) also opened the eyes of his frightened servant during the early-morning to see a vast army of fiery chariots surrounding and outnumbering God’s enemies in the hills around Samaria (II Kings 6:14-17). God also names the stars (Isaiah 40:26 and Psalms 147:4). This relationship between stars and angels is also prominent in the account of Christ’s birth: the heavenly hosts break into song (just as the morning stars did at creation according to Job 38:7 and just as God’s people instruct the all the heavenly lights to do in Psalm 148:3) and a star guides the wise men to a particular location. Finally, seven stars are used to represent the seven angels of the seven churches in John’s Apocalypse.

To move a step beyond Disney in assessing these biblical relationships, consider this familiar passage from Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Confronted by a stately old man who claims to be a retired star, Eustace blurts out: “In our world … a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” (From chapter 14, aptly titled “The beginning of the end of the world.”) As a classicist and a medievalist, stars feature almost as prominently in Lewis’ thought as they did in the minds of most ancient people. In one more example, Lewis uses a centaur to remind us of the prophets, the magi and the apostles (from chapter 6 of Prince Caspian):

…There came in sight the noblest creatures that Caspian had yet seen, the great Centaur Glenstorm and his three sons. His flanks were glossy chestnut and the beard that covered his broad chest was goldenred. He was a prophet and a star-gazer and knew what they had come about.

“Long live the King,” he cried. “I and my sons are ready for war. When is the battle to be joined?”

Up till now neither Caspian nor the others had really been thinking of a war. They had some vague idea, perhaps, of an occasional raid on some Human farmstead or of attacking a party of hunters, if it ventured too far into these southern wilds. But, in the main, they had thought only of living to themselves in woods and caves and building up an attempt at Old Narnia in hiding. As soon as Glenstorm had spoken everyone felt much more serious.

“Do you mean a real war to drive Miraz out of Narnia?” asked Caspian.

“What else?” said the Centaur. “Why else does your Majesty go clad in mail and girt with sword?”

One of the unique and essential features of a truly formative (vs. informative) education is to produce stargazers like the Prophet Elisha or the Apostle John. Occasionally, within our own small realms of responsibility, we must each exercise the foresight of Glenstorm. Among other things, this is a matter of learning to read God’s physical creation like a book and allowing it to teach you wisdom.

Since the Enlightenment at least, Westerners (both Christian and secular) have dismissed ancient and medieval people because they failed to appreciate the physical world. We think that, for most of antiquity, humanity was too preoccupied by elaborate rituals, superstitious stories and pointless stargazing to benefit from the careful observation and exploration of God’s tangible creation. Although modern science has brought great blessing and thinkers such as Plato certainly criticized the physical world as just a weak and unstable parade of illusions, most ancient people painted and wrote almost exclusively about myths, fantasies, abstractions, and spiritual realities (whiteness, circles, courage, nymphs, angels, and dragons) because they actually did see and love creation for what she truly is: a display of divine glory delivered with both astounding diversity and tireless regularity. Physical creation is made to deliver the Creator’s goodness, truth and beauty. Matter, in all its many forms and movements, is an artist’s tool in the hands of God (and His many spiritual servants). Mass and energy are divine agents like the angels themselves. Even the most simple-minded of the ancient pagans generally understood this basic premise of reality better than the most sophisticated scientists of today. As moderns, we excel at predicting and using the material world but not at learning from it, understanding it or directing it to praise God. [See first endnote for several passages related to this.]

Jews and Early Christians easily outdid even the best pagans in their appreciation of these truths because Christ (with his prophets and apostles before and after him) provided Christian artists and thinkers with unprecedented clarity and confidence. They could live, teach and create knowing that the physical world is designed with exquisite care (created, cursed, sustained and recreated) by a single triune God. Christianity also fully explained the human enigma: we are made within this physical world to conduct the symphony. We are made as a part of the whole (connected directly to it by our bodies) and yet as the spiritual beings (and therefore the most intimate heralds and connoisseurs of God’s glory). As unique bearers of God’s image, we can portray as well as see, hear, feel, smell, taste and contemplate God’s truth, goodness and beauty all around us. Even more astoundingly, we have been given the collective project of arranging, tending and nurturing this universe so that this whole shimmering thing portrays God more and more fully. It is all assigned to us by God as a garden-city-temple to protect, build and make to flourish so that the Creator Himself might dwell in it with us forever. One result of God’s making humans uniquely in His image was that God could join His physical creation by becoming a man through the incarnation. Therefore, even though Adam and all his children rebelled and rejected the task of building this garden-city that would house God’s glory, Christ came to fulfill the mission as the second Adam. God’s eternal and uncreated Word made flesh became the central and unique contact point between God and the embodied realm in which God made humans to display and enjoy His glory.

Because the whole cosmos exists expressly to praise God, it shares the same purpose as the angels themselves. In fact, the whole world (from the greatest galaxy to the smallest sub-atomic particle) can be understood as having been designed by God (in its unfallen state) as a continual corollary to angelic singing. Our universe is an embodied angelic symphony that follows a complex yet consistent heavenly pattern because the angels are singing about God’s glory, which we display in an unparalleled way. Pythagoras was not far off the mark then, when he and his students explored the intricate connections between math, music and astronomy, calling their ideal the “music of spheres.” John Calvin (serving on the brink of the scientific revolution but often speaking with a refreshingly pre-modern voice) described this intimate angelic participation in all of life this way (within volume one of his Commentary on Ezekiel, discussing Ezekiel 10:17):

All creatures are animated by angelic motion: not that there is a conversion of the angel into an ox or a man, but because God exerts and diffuses his energy in a secret manner, so that no creature is content with his own peculiar vigor, but is animated by angels themselves.

[See second endnote for further thoughts on Calvin specifically.]

Many pagan authors (and some Christian authors) suggest that streams are the bodies of naiads and stars are the bodies of angels, but it is more Christian to say that streams, trees and stars are all instruments in the hands of God and His many angelic servants (or demonic servants in cases of idolatry). Angels may make special and powerful use of stars under God’s direction. In some real sense, stars parallel (or point to) angels and kings as they stand in heavenly array around the throne of God (awaiting the last day when God’s kingdom fully reunites with earth). In defense of those who describe stars as a kind of body, it is worth noting that Paul--while comparing our human bodies in this life with the glorified bodies that we will receive after the resurrection--lists a hierarchy of bodies that contrasts the fleshly bodies of animals, birds and fish with the heavenly bodies of the sun, moon and stars (1 Corinthians 15:38-41). However we should best conceive of the sometimes parallel relationship between stars and angles, it is clear that only humans are made fundamentally of both body and spirit, inextricably intertwined for eternity. Angels are closely connected to star imagery throughout scripture, and God himself is closely connected to sun imagery. However, we learn at the end of John’s Apocalypse (when the Lord’s Prayer is fully answered and God’s heavenly reign comes to earth with no impediments) that there will be no sun, moon or stars because the angels ultimately have no bodies and God (who spoke perfect light into existence before making the sun) has taken up full humanity (complete with scars and a full set of earthly memories collected under the starry firmament of a temporal human life).

Probably the most terrible thing that this essay could achieve is to convince you that there is a lot of information to be learned regarding the nature of stars and angels (or that I think students should all spend time learning it!). God’s written word takes angels for granted but rarely, if ever, teaches about them directly. Angels serve us, and we sing with them about God’s glory. However, they are (in an important sense) none of our business. Stars are different. They, like all the other details of God’s world, function under us as agents of God’s glory. These divinely appointed rulers of times and seasons are there to for us to interact with (look at, depict, imagine, write about, paint, study, admire, dance under, direct, command), in order that we might be matured and sustained in our imaging of God and our desire for life with Him forever in the new heavens and the new earth.

To train stargazers at CCA, we must grow slowly better at using old anthologies and dusty dictionaries alongside expensive telescopes and electronic star charts. We are not imparting information; we are awakening human souls and helping them to see the value of everything they do. It is the romance of long nights spent recording data from the sky and the discipline of poems carefully read, reread and imitated that slowly stir up, reassemble and reorient our hearts and minds to truth and beauty. These experiences patiently reveal to Christ’s people (through the thick shell of our atrophied longings) the God who made us and became one of us so that we might worship and enjoy Him eternally. Being busy products of our pragmatic age, our goals and priorities need gentle but ceaseless and radical realignment. We must recapture the purpose of school (which is the Greek word for leisure) as a place where human desires and thought patterns are formed through carefully repeated encounters with goodness, truth and beauty. At schools for Christian stargazers, old kings are honored, slow and stately patterns are imitated, love for God and his world deepen slowly but surely, priorities grow simpler and time is spent more and more profoundly.

Loves and habits formed in leisure serve most effectively in times of urgent need. As Herman Melville points out in Moby Dick, "To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil." (Quoted in The Contemplative Pastor by Eugene H. Peterson.) By God’s grace, students who have been disciplined to gaze patiently but expectantly at the stars will realize far more than we might imagine possible when they are one day called upon to act swiftly after straining through a dark night for a glimpse of our star-spangled banner.

First Endnote:

From C.S. Lewis in “Is Theism Important? A Reply” from the Socratic Digest (1952):

When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, "Would that she were." For I do no think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is, essentially, the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian men of our own day differ from his as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.

From Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible by John H. Walton (page 167):

Ontology in the ancient world was more connected to function than to substance. In other words, something exists when it has a function, not when it takes up space or is a substance characterized by material properties. This applies to everything in the cosmos, where various elements come into being when they are given a role and function within the cosmos. The neglect of curiosity about the physical structure of the cosmos is therefore not simply a consequence of their inability to investigate their physical world. The physical aspects of the cosmos did not define its existence or its importance; they were merely tools the gods used for carrying out their purposes. The purposes of the gods were of prime interest to them.

From G. K. Chesterton’s essay “A Piece of Chalk” (1905):

This, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who … were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much. ...They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day... The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. ...The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

From Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton:

That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not ‘appreciate Nature,’ because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.

From Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton:

A man may say, "I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures." But if it comes to that why should not a man say, "I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see"? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments.

…I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.

…The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.

From C.S. Lewis in Prince Caspian (chapter 4):

“Never in all these years have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom."

“I’m – I’m sorry, Doctor,” said Caspian. “It wasn’t my fault, you know.”

“I am not saying these things in blame of you, dear Prince,” answered the Doctor. “You may well ask why I say them at all. But I have two reasons. Firstly, because my old heart has carried these secret memories so long that it aches with them and would burst if I did not whisper them to you. But secondly, for this: that when you become King you may help us, for I know that you also, Telmarine though you are, love the Old Things.”

“I do, I do,” said Caspian. “But how can I help?”

“You can be kind to the poor remnants of the Dwarf people, like myself. You can gather learned magicians and try to find a way of awaking the trees once more. You can search through all the nooks and wild places of the land to see if any Fauns or Talking Beasts or Dwarfs are perhaps still alive in hiding.”

“Do you think there are any?” asked Caspian eagerly.

“I don’t know – I don’t know,” said the Doctor with a deep sigh. “Sometimes I am afraid there can’t be. I have been looking for traces of them all my life. Sometimes I have thought I heard a Dwarf-drum in the mountains. Sometimes at night, in the woods, I thought I had caught a glimpse of Fauns and Satyrs dancing a long way off; but when I came to the place, there was never anything there. I have often despaired; but something always happens to start me hoping again. I don’t know. But at least you can try to be a King like the High King Peter of old, and not like your uncle.”

Second Endnote:

In his Institutes, Calvin delivers many valuable cautionary notes regarding vain and titillating speculation regarding angels (which divine scriptures take for granted but never teach about directly). Regarding possible connections between stars and angels, it should be kept in mind that Calvin was a sober and sophisticated biblical humanist on the cusp of the astronomical revolution. Even in this context, however, Calvin does imply (within the syntax of this question from his Institutes) a parallel between the stars and the “more hidden celestial hosts” behind them: “Moses relates that the heavens and the earth were finished, with all their host; what avails it anxiously to inquire at what time other more hidden celestial hosts than the stars and planets also began to be?”

On the issue of Calvin and an appreciation for God’s physical creation, Presbyterian pastor and author Eugene Peterson gives a standard (that is, somewhat stunted) summary in the extended passage below. Based on the passage cited from Calvin’s Ezekiel commentary regarding the angelic animation of all living things, I think that there is much more to be said for Calvin’s love of the physical creation. It may have remained largely unspoken for some of these reasons given by Chesterton in the previous endnote. Nonetheless, this extended passage from Peterson at least makes the case for the fact that Calvin and a thoroughgoing appreciation for this earthly creation are far from incompatible. From The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction by Eugene H. Peterson:

Annie Dillard is an exegete of creation in the same way John Calvin was an exegete of Holy Scripture. The passion and intelligence Calvin brought to Moses, Isaiah, and Paul, she brings to muskrats and mockingbirds. She reads the book of creation with the care and intensity of a skilled textual critic, probing and questioning, teasing out, with all the tools of mind and spirit at hand, the author's meaning. Calvin was not indifferent to creation. He frequently referred to the world around us as a "theater of God's glory." He wrote of the Creator's dazzling performance in arranging the components of the cosmos. He was convinced of the wide-ranging theological significance of the doctrine of creation and knew how important the understanding of that doctrine was to protect against the gnosticism and Manichaeism that are everpresent threats to the integrity of the incarnation. Matter is real. Flesh is good. Without a firm rooting in creation, religion is always drifting off into some kind of pious sentimentalism or sophisticated intellectualism. The task of salvation is not to refine us into pure spirits so that we will not be cumbered with this too solid flesh. We are not angels, nor are we to become angels. The Word did not become a good idea, or a numinous feeling, or a moral aspiration; the Word became flesh.

...Things matter. The physical is holy. It is extremely significant that in the opening sentences of the Bible, God speaks a world of energy and matter into being: light, moon, stars, earth, vegetation, animals, man, woman (not love and virtue, faith and salvation, hope and judgment, though they will come soon enough). Apart from creation, covenant has no structure, no context, no rootage in reality. Calvin knew all this, appreciated it, and taught it. But, curiously, he never seemed to have purchased a ticket to the theater, gone in, and watched the performance himself. He lived for most of his adult ministry in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most spectacularly beautiful places on the earth. Not once does he comment on the wild thrust of the mountains into the skies. He never voices awe at the thunder of an avalanche. There is no evidence that he ever stooped to admire the gem flowers in the alpine meadows. He was not in the habit of looking up from his books and meditating before the lake loaded with sky that graced his city.

...Even though her field is creation, not Scripture exegesis, Calvin would not, I think, be displeased with Dillard's competence in Scripture. She has assimilated Scripture so thoroughly, is so saturated with its cadences and images, that it is simply at hand, unbidden, as context and metaphor for whatever she happens to be writing about. She does not, though, use Scripture to prove or document; it is not a truth she "uses" but one she lives. Her knowledge of Scripture is stored in her right brain rather than her left; nourishment for the praying imagination rather than fuel for apologetic argument. She seldom quotes Scripture; she alludes constantly. There is scarcely a page that does not contain one or several allusions, but with such nonchalance, not letting her left hand know what her right is doing, that someone without a familiarity with Scripture might never notice the biblical precept and story. The verbal word of Scripture is the wide world within which she gives her attention to the non-verbal word of creation.

...The American writers with whom Dillard is often grouped - Henry Thoreau, Waldo Emerson, John Muir - didn't go to church. They distanced themselves from what they saw as the shabbiness and hypocrisy of institutional religion and opted for the pine purity of forest cathedrals. Emily Dickinson gave them their text: "Some worship God by going to church/I worship him staying at home/with a bobolink for a chorister/and an orchard for a throne." Their numerous progeny spend Sunday mornings on birdwatching field trips and Sierra Club walks. Annie Dillard goes to church: "I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.”