World Views (3): Medieval

By George Elder, 6/9/26

In the previous Post on the “Biblical World View,” I noted that within the Bible itself a shift away from the oldest cosmology had already begun.

1) In regard to “heaven,” we see this in the New Testament where Paul writes indirectly of himself:

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. (2 Corinthians 12:2)

Here we learn that there are at least three heavens—not just one—as if the biblical Firmament has become striated.

It is also true that in ancient Near East mythology, three heavens are sometimes mentioned—as are seven heavens. This latter number is likely influenced by the fact that five planets are visible to the naked eye. Since the ancients did not distinguish between what we call planets and the sun and moon—they saw altogether seven celestial bodies occupying seven heavens. This may have influenced Paul’s account.

This “Founder” of Christianity is also telling us that he has been influenced by the Greek distinction between the human body and the immaterial soul and is not sure what to make of it. This distinction is not very biblical—in Hebrew thought, the human being was more of a unit. But philosophical Platonism and Orphism considered the body something of a “prison” of the soul (psyche) that seeks release. The idea would lead to Christianity’s dim view of the body and to asceticism.

A scripture called 2 Enoch (late 1^st century CE?) is among the biblical “apocrypha”—i.e., of “doubtful” authenticity and not included in either the Jewish or Christian canon. It had great influence, nonetheless, because of its “first person” account of an ascent into the seven heavens. Enoch said he was sleeping when “two men” with faces “like the shining sun” and arms “like golden wings” appeared at the foot of his bed: “I awoke from my sleep, and the two men were really standing by me.” (Sparks, The Apocryphal Old Testament, 337)

They took him to the first heaven, to the second, and then the third (Paul’s heaven) called “Paradise”—complete with the four rivers and trees in full bloom, as in the “Garden” of Genesis. The “men” explain that: “This place, Enoch, is prepared for the righteous . . . as their eternal inheritance.”

But there are higher heavens and many angels—with specific names like Gabriel, Michael, and Vreveil. Eventually, Enoch reached the seventh heaven and saw from afar “the Lord sitting on his throne.” He was paralyzed by fear, fell on his face in worship:

And with his own mouth the Lord called me. “Take courage, Enoch, do not be afraid: get up and stand in my presence forever.”

Thirteen centuries later, Dante will make the same journey—in poetic imagination—through ten heavens.

2) The “afterlife,” too, changed within the Bible. We read in the Book of Daniel (2^nd century BCE) that the prophet “had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed.” An angel told him the secret of the End of the world:

There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (NRSV 12:1-2)

This is the first biblical allusion to a general resurrection, informing us that the final destiny of humanity is no longer a murky underground Sheol.

Instead, the afterlife will feature—in the Day of the Lord—some kind of sorting or judging of the righteous and the wicked in order to receive their just rewards of “everlasting life” or “everlasting contempt.”

Jesus implied that this happens much earlier—at an individual’s death. While dying on the cross, he told a criminal dying beside him—the one who asked to be remembered when Jesus Christ came into his “Kingdom”—"Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43) There is no waiting. Christianity was then obliged to teach two “Judgments”—a preliminary one at death and then, awkwardly, a final one at the Apocalypse with the same result. 

Scholars agree that Judeo-Christianity was influenced here by the Persian (i.e., ancient Iranian) religion of Zoroastrianism. With its keen sense of “good” as opposed to “evil,” it taught that the deceased’s soul would come to the Chinvat (“separation”) Bridge. If the soul was righteous, the bridge would widen as the soul walked joyfully toward Paradise. If it was unrighteous, the bridge would narrow—even to the width of a razor—whereupon, the evil soul would fall off the Bridge into a foul-smelling pit of darkness and unending torture.

Traditions, however, must be ready to be influenced. And the old biblical notion of an amoral Sheol—that underground afterlife for both the good and the bad—did not satisfy a growing moral sensibility that Justice must be served.

3) Nor could the “earth” remain flat as in the Bible. That was due to Greek thought, as well. Plato said it first in the Timaeus dialogue—arguing that a good divine Craftsman of the world would necessarily create the earth in a “perfect shape,” namely, a sphere. Plato’s student, Aristotle, was more of an observer and said this was proved by the curve of the earth’s shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse and by noticing how a ship’s mast slowly disappears on the horizon of the sea—consistent with a spherical earth.

Aristotle, however, was not averse to speculation. He went on to posit that the entire universe was spherical with seven celestial bodies moving in circular orbits. He thought they were carried by their own discrete spheres—nesting concentrically within each other—around an immovable earth at the center of the universe itself.  Logically, all this had to have a Final Cause, a divine Unmoved Mover, beyond which one could not speculate.

The Hellenistic astronomer, Claudius Ptolemaeus (better known as Ptolemy) systematized Aristotelian thought in the second century CE. Being also a mathematician, he was able to predict planetary movements with greater accuracy than anyone before him. It was a great feat—especially since the geocentric “Ptolemaic Model” of the universe was wrong—but it would not be challenged for more than a thousand years.

The Christian world view

When Christianity became legal in 313 CE and then the only legal religion in the Holy Roman Empire in 380 CE, it was already thinking through its own distinctive world view. Although non-Christian in origin, Ptolemy’s model was accepted—with some “Christianization.” It was, after all, the best science of the day. And despite tension with what the Bible said in earliest scripture, the Church accepted the changes that we have noted. They expressed, after all, the creative edge of culture.

In fact, the history of Christian thought (before the anti-intellectual Reformation and today’s uneducated display) is primarily one of creative assimilation. Augustine assimilated Plato in the fifth century and moved Western culture ahead. Thomas Aquinas assimilated Aristotle in the thirteenth century and made modern science possible. By then Christianity had in place its definitive world view, what C. S. Lewis has called the “medieval synthesis”—”the whole organization of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe.” (Lewis, The Discarded Image, 11)

Lewis goes on to say this Model was “beautiful,” reminding him of a Gothic cathedral that visually contains everything yet is coherent, that architecturally reaches toward the sublime yet is heavily rooted, that a person can enter and feel secure—knowing that life is meaningful.

If we imaginatively slice the sphere of the medieval universe in half, we see what it looks like in an early diagram. There is the earth at its center, not because it is central in significance but because it is physically most dense. Although immovable, it is mutable—composed of the “four elements” that keep combining in countless ways to provide our experience. The visible land and waterways on the earth signify the heavier elements of “earth” and “water;” the outer rings of clouds and flame signify the lighter elements of “air” and “fire.”

Beyond the earth, all is “ether.” This was for Aristotle a fifth element (a quintessence) that was much finer than air, translucent, pure—i.e., divine. Even the planets were somehow denser forms of ether embedded in their ethereal spheres that somehow kept their shape. The Church could accept all this as several Christian heavens that were increasingly pure or sacred beyond our earth: beginning with the lowest and least pure heaven of the Moon, then the purer heaven of Mercury, Venus, etc. That the religion kept the pagan names of these planets is evidence of a spirit of assimilation. The Sun, we see, is embedded in the fourth sphere or heaven—circling the earth.

Acknowledging the Bible’s account of the world—albeit weakly—the eighth sphere is called the “Firmament.” We see that it carries the “fixed stars,” fixed not only in their relationship to each other but in the sense that they were all thought to be at the same distance from earth. The ninth heaven may be a similar biblical reference since there are supposed to be “waters” above the “firmament”—here, a “Crystalline” or clear layer in which there is no celestial body.

Finally, in this closed universe, we come to the tenth heaven. It is called the “Primum Mobile” (prime mover). This sounds almost like the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle but instead is a fast-moving outermost sphere that generates the energy moving all the other spheres below it. This notion may have come from Ptolemy or from other astronomers who kept refining the system over the centuries. But in it we can feel the dynamic character of the medieval Model—not only its purportedly physical energy but also its crackling numinosity. What we cannot hear, although present, is the Music of all these spheres as they rub against each other whirling above us!

The Church advised its parishioners—as did the ancient Greeks and Romans—to look up to the heavens and their orderly movements, their regularity, and read them as a template to order one’s own life. Indeed, the Church so ordered itself in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, an arrangement that was said to mirror the hierarchy of the angels around the throne of God.

And where is this throne? Outside the universe itself, in a “heaven of heavens” or metaphysical realm that was often called the “Empyrean.” The word is rooted in “pyre” or fire but alludes primarily to fire’s “light” or the divine Light that sustains the world and is the goal of all the righteous. The Latin in our diagram—just outside the ethereal world—reads, “Empyrean heaven, the habitat of God and all the elect,” i.e., all the saints and all those who have died and gone to heaven. This infinite and indefinable expanse is the First Cause or Unmoved Mover of the universe. More personally, it is the dwelling place of the God of the Bible, who created the universe, who spoke with Abraham, and sent his Son to our world to save us from our sins. 

The precise opposite of the Empyrean is the unimaginably dense center of the earth, the metaphysical location of Greek “Hades” or Old English “Hell” where the wicked are tormented forever in a different kind of fire that sheds no light in eternal Darkness. 

It was absolutely essential that a medieval Christian feel “blessed”—to be happy, to live well, even to survive, and to avoid Hell upon death. Fortunately, there were blessings from many sources: from God himself, from Christ his Son, and the Holy Spirit; from the intercession of the Virgin Mary, from one’s guardian angel, or patron saint. A blessing would come as a kind of gift called “grace” (Latin, gratia, “favor, kindness”).

Through its seven Sacraments, the Church made divine favor readily accessible: baptism, confirmation, holy communion, confession and penance, anointing the sick and last rites, marriage, and ordination. One did not even have to understand how these channels of grace worked in order to avail oneself of their beneficent effects. Nor did one have to understand the intricacies of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic-Christian world view in order to feel satisfied, secure. Lewis writes: “The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos.” (121)

Jungian Comment

Jung speaks similarly of “medieval man”:

For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the center of the universe, circled by a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. (CW 10, par. 162)

Yet this is why Jung also said he could not be a Christian:

I think it is perfectly correct to make use of these psychotherapeutic institutions which history has given to us, and I wish I were still a medieval man who could join such a creed. Unfortunately, it needs a somewhat medieval psychology to do it, and I am not sufficiently medieval. (CW 18. par. 370)

One can hear a Roman Catholic today protesting: “We’re not medieval! We’ve accepted the Copernican view of the universe and have apologized for the Galileo affair. We agree not only with Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis but also with the astrophysicist’s Big Bang to explain an expanding universe.”

What this Catholic Christian has not done, however, is agree with Kant that it is impossible for the human mind to know anything beyond the mind’s capacity. He or she still believes in “God” in a metaphysical “place”—in an Empyrean just outside the edge of the universe. I suspect that Catholics have merely swapped the medieval locations of “earth” and “sun” and continue to live (unconsciously) in a world just as we have described it in this essay, albeit heliocentrically. Psychologically, it is possible to live in a different time and place than one lives physically. 

A Protestant Christian, liberal or fundamentalist, might also protest: “We’re not medieval! We’ve gotten rid of all that papist ‘hocus pocus,’ their angelology and cult of saints, their surreptitious worship of Mary as a goddess. All of that threatens a truly monotheistic understanding of God.” But this Protestant still believes in “God” somewhere outside the universe. Attending one of their funerals, one hears that they still believe in “heaven and hell.”

The fundamentalist has even more trouble than the Catholic with paleontology’s dinosaurs, with biology’s evolution, with anything that upsets what we now know to be true but is not in the Bible. Fundamentalists—or “Evangelicals,” as they prefer to be called, so as not to seem like the fundamentalists in other religions—are in some ways contained within the earlier “Biblical world view” that preceded the “Medieval” one. 

I find it interesting that religious “world views” persist even when they are superseded. It is clear to me that Christianity is an evolutionary advance on Judaism—the expectation of a political savior or Messiah superseded by a more interior understanding (by Jesus) of what that means. Yet Judaism continues alongside its religious “advance.” Similarly, Roman Catholic Christianity was superseded by Protestantism’s less institutional and more individual understanding of what it means to be religious. Yet Catholicism continues alongside its creative correction. I do notice that these corrections tend to be incorporated, silently, into the older religious forms.

One way to understand this overlapping of “world views” is that our psyches are layered and nothing is lost. Looking again at our diagram of the Medieval Model, there is our ego at the center—psychologically dense and mutable, yet where we “live.” We are surrounded by many layers of the “ethereal” unconscious that is increasingly “pure” as it expands beyond consciousness or deepens within us toward the archetypal unconscious—where the only “God” we can know resides.

It is useful to understand these layers as the “historical” strata of humanity that persist within us and are never really superseded. We must not be cut off from them in order to resist the inflation that comes with knowing more and in order to be wise about the human condition.

Edward Edinger, who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, was asked in an interview if he were Jewish. He answered: “I am one-third Jewish, one-third Catholic, one-third Protestant and one-third secular humanist.” (Elder and Cordic, American Jungian, 219) He was making a wry point about the archetype of the “Three and the Four” but also saying that these are the “four major religious viewpoints in the Western psyche.” They can continue as “four factions,” forever competing against each other externally—or they can be allowed to coexist as different and helpful psychological truths within us.

Finally, we observe from these materials that our ancestors were fascinated by the image of the “circle” and the “sphere”—with or without any external reference. The image explained “everything,” because it could contain everything in what was thought to be a perfect shape. In the thirteenth century, St. Bonaventure famously defined “God” himself as “a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”  It is significant, therefore, that Jung was fascinated by the circle. He wrote about the Eastern ritual maṇḍala (Sanskrit, “circle”): “I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 197)

Jung means that the “circle” or the “sphere” symbolizes psychological wholeness. And wholeness means becoming conscious of (and accepting, perhaps actualizing) all that we are, to the extent we are capable. All that we are is the individual “Self” that provides our stable, down-to-earth identity—but then that opens out, like so many concentric spheres moving around us, onto the family Self, the ethnic Self, the national Self, etc.

It is satisfying, therefore, to realize that our forebears were fascinated by the circle and the sphere not only for astronomical reasons but also because they, too, knew in some way that we are intended to be whole.

From Peter Apian, Cosmographia, 1524