[Greetings, friends, from Bora Bora! I write to you as I watch the waves run across the turquoise waters of the South Pacific Ocean. When I lift my gaze from my computer, I find the great Mount Otemanu—an extinct volcano —staring back at me. In the evenings, the light of the stars pours onto the back deck of my bungalow. The moon glows here as if it knows of the gift it was given—a halo outlines the whole sphere, even the dark side, as its reflection falls on the ocean below.
But the beauty here is not limited to what’s above the surface. For the first time in my life, yesterday, my eyes witnessed first-hand the beauty below it. I swam with the sharks, sting rays, and some unidentified species of yellow-striped fish. I entered the underwater world of King Triton and explored the colorful Coral Garden. As a child of the same Craftsman, I remembered just how little I remember of my origin. How much education I still have left.
As Fate would have it, I also happen to be reading T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” which sees Merlyn training a young King Arthur (Wart) before he takes the throne. A key part of Wart’s education involves living for a day as certain animals—a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose, and a badger. Along the way, Wart learns a number of necessary lessons, each preparing him to be a good king. I’ve felt myself (partially) participating with Wart at different points along my adventures in Bora Bora. The bird I became when flying my drone, the fish when swimming with the sharks.
Combine all of the above with my recent reading of Plato’s Timaeus and my already boiling affinity for the stars, and you have the recipe for today’s post: how nature—specifically, the stars—helps us see.]
Poets and philosophers throughout the ages, both pagan and religious, have noticed something peculiar: without words, the stars stir within us some eternal longing. For those of you following my writing, you may recognize such an inspiration in my work with my choice to title my first book series “This Way to the Stars,” which itself comes Seneca’s description of the promise of philosophy1 and Virgil’s description of the promise of piety (or loyalty to destiny).2 Sic itur ad astra. Thus is the way the stars.
But perhaps my favorite symbolic use of the stars as a guide comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, where each installment—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—ends with a look at the stars (referenced in turn below). In the Inferno, after traveling through all the levels of Hell, Dante and his guide, Virgil, emerge to see heaven’s beacon once more:
My guide and I came on that hidden road
to make our way back into the bright world;
and with no care for any rest, we climbed—he first, I following—until I saw,
through a round opening, some of those things
of beauty Heaven bears. It was from therethat we emerged, to see—once more—the stars.3
After their tour through the terraces of purgatory in Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil find the stars once again beckoning them on in some unspoken way.
From that most holy wave I now returned
to Beatrice; remade, as new trees are
renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I waspure and prepared to climb unto the stars.4
Then, finally, at the end of it all in Paradiso, Dante comes face to face with the divine Light and source of it all and finds that it was not the stars themselves, but the Love that moves them—the force behind them—that he was after. Stars were the beacon but not the Light.
Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—bythe Love that moves the sun and the other stars.5
As with many words, a look at the Latin origin sheds a little more light on the topic. Two Latin words specifically: stella (meaning star or heavenly body, as in constellation) and sider (coming from considerare, which means “to look at closely, to observe” or, literally, “to observe the stars”). We also see sider used in the Latin desiderare, from which we get the verb desire (to wish or long for something). What the etymology implies, then, is something like what the poets and philosophers have long recognized: in staring at a star, we feel the absence of something lost and long for its return.
In his Timaeus (a dialogue that takes place the day after the dialogue recorded in the Republic), Plato offers a mythical explanation for this feeling6—stars, being a degree of separation closer to the divine, are a visible stepping stone toward our invisible origin. In the dialogue, Plato’s main character, Timaeus, explains to Socrates that the Craftsman first made the stars and then, after forging souls, assigned each soul to a star before shooting them into bodies.
Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star—then having mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them of their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. The souls were to be implanted in bodies, which were in a perpetual flux, whence, he said, would arise, first, sensation; secondly, love, which is a mixture of pleasure and pain; thirdly, fear and anger, and the opposite affections: and if they conquered these, they would live righteously, but if they were conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived well would return to his native star, and would there have a blessed existence…7
With this as our origin, Timaeus explains to Socrates, we now look up to the heavenly bodies to not only gain knowledge about ourselves but to be educated by eternity and apply the insights to our lives:
But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man. This is the greatest boon of sight: and of the lesser benefits why should I speak? even the ordinary man if he were deprived of them would bewail his loss, but in vain. Thus much let me say however: God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.8
As agents of the Timeless, stars teach us how to participate in eternity. From the way they unselfishly share light to the way they move so willingly with the will of the Creator, the stars are our guides.
We don’t need to know the literal answer to why the stars move us to recognize the truth that they do. We don’t need to wholesale subscribe to Plato or Dante to admit that the way the world moves us with a force outside of us suggests something objective is at work, even if we disagree on its name and its attributes.
Stare at the stars long enough and you will learn something about yourself. How could that possibly happen if the stars did not express some standard worth aspiring toward? Why would mountains make me weep if they were not speaking to me? We don’t need to know why it happens to get a sense of what it means—that something is talking to us through them. That we learn something about ourselves, our origin, and our purpose when we listen to their unspoken words. That’s what the poets and philosophers have long recognized with their references to the stars.
To know who we are and where we come from, we must stare intently at the farthest edges of space. We must look further out to see further in. We must put ourselves in the presence of beauty and let it rearrange us. We must let the starlight pour in on behalf of the Craftsman who created it all and unwind our will back into alignment.
All we have to do is show up open to receive and listen. The wisdom of the world soul will take care of the rest.
That, my friends, is the ultimate education.
Seneca, Letter 48: On Quibbling as Unworthy of the Philosopher. “Is this the path to heaven?”
Virgil, Aeneid, Book IV, line 641. “This way the starward path to dwelling-place divine.”
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 34, lines 133-139.
Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto 33, lines 142-145.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto 33, lines 142-145.
I say Plato, but it is difficult to know which ideas Plato used in his dialogues to produce good literature and which ideas he actually subscribed to.
Plato, Timaeus, available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1572/1572-h/1572-h.htm (hereinafter, “Timaeus”).
Timaeus.