CSL, Medieval Thought, Stars and Planets

Narnia and the Christmas Star | Narnia Lore Explained
Into the Wardrobe | 26 Nov. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cnBLJkbxzI

2:47 Apart from a Bishop of Paris defining in 1277 that stars aren't actually alive or to angels like flesh is to our soul, how do you know, they are not alive in our world?

Or were you using "cosmology" in the sense of "current model of"?

3:08 How do you know light years even exist, in our world?

Apart from blind trust in experts and "current model of cosmology" that is ...

6:01 Plato and early Medieval Macrobius (who may have been a Pagan) considered stars were alive.

What we see is to a kind of sentient being, like what flesh and skin are to our souls.

Aristotle and Scholasticism (Thomas and Stephen Tempier were not Pagans) considered stars were moved by angels.

What we see is to an angel, like a bike is to a cyclist.

8:40 While the primum mobile (I think St. Thomas considers this as sphere of fix stars not above it) receives its (daily) movement from God in a non-mechanic way, as a direct result of God's will (like a planet moving through its sphere receives that (larger periodic) movement from the angel, like the Sun moving full circle eastward in relation to primum mobile in one year), the transfer down, as I read Aristotle and Thomas, was mechanic.

I think this point, invisible crystalline spheres that touch each other and transfer the daily movement down, since then disproven by Tycho Brahe, may have been the one item where St. Thomas on that famous occasion felt all his works were like straw. He presumably felt he had strawmanned St. Paul's proof of God from Geocentrism (Romans 1) in his own version of Prima Via.

8:45 The idea that the Primum Mobile was compelled by the love of God is actually a position which would probably fall under condemnations in 1277, the Averroistic slant to Aristotle (inherent in the Philisopher himself, though Thomas preferred glossing over that).

That's the kind of position held by people like Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant. Now, to be fair, Dante doesn't judge their heterodoxy the way Tempier did.

No, in St. Thomas, the Primum Mobile is moved by a direct act of God ... just as in St. Paul. That's why Geocentrism and the succession of days proves God's power inexhaustible.

9:00 Would you mind giving me the reference in St. Thomas?

I know Latin and can look it up in Opera Omnia. If CSL stated Thomas held this, he may have misread a Quaestio form and mistaken an objection (videtur quod) for what Thomas really held (respondeo esse dicendum). Obviously, it's ages since I read The Discarded Image, so, I'm not trying to correct you on CSL.

[To the poem, I object not]