In the mid-1970s science fiction authors Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford wrote an award winning novelette entitled If the Stars are Gods. The story describes the first contact with aliens who ask to meet the human who “best knows” our Sun. Anxious to exploit the situation and garner as much technical information as possible, our leaders send them a famous, semi-retired astronaut/physicist living in a colony on the Moon. He plies the aliens with technical questions but they are completely uninterested. It turns out that yet another alien race had built their ship and they operate it the way most Americans operate their TVs and computers, without true understanding. What they want to know about is our Sun.

But not physical details – heat, light, gravity, etc. What the aliens want to know about is the “personality” of our star and how it affects us in our daily lives! (Conversely when we inquire about the alien’s star no physical details are offered, only a description of its “moods”.) Among the aliens there are specialists capable of “talking” to the stars and they want permission to speak to ours. Contact with humans was a courtesy! The astronaut eventually convinces the aliens to show him how to “talk” to the stars. A clever, witty story.

I thought of this work when I stumbled upon Prof Alan Scott’s monograph about Origen’s views of the stars and ancient cosmology. Are the stars rational beings? Are they conscious? These questions roiled intellectuals in the ancient Greco-Roman world and had some relevance to Christianity as it developed in the larger Hellenistic world. The book is divided into three parts. First, a discussion of the view of the stars in ancient Greek philosophy – Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Second, a discussion of the thinkers and environment that would have immediately affected Origen – Philo, Clement of Alexandria, and the Hellenistic education system. Lastly, Scott directly discusses Origen’s surviving writings.

Reading back over this description I can see where it might sound like a long, dull 700 page tome, but the text, with notes, is less than two hundred pages. A concise and precise and lively survey. And a nice ten page bibliography for those who want to make a deep dive. This book admirably provides what I require. It helps explain things I knew about but didn’t really understand and tells me stuff I didn’t know about at all.

It’s kind of a waste of time to defend one’s own interests I suppose but it’s a natural question what relevance any of this has otherwise. The early church developed in just this milieu. Second Temple Judaism was thoroughly Hellenized; long gone are the innocent days when scholars could imagine some kind of “pure” Judaism, free from Hellenistic “infection”. On top of that the writers of the New Testament were clearly influenced. How could they not be? For example, scholars have pointed out how closely Paul’s views of the Resurrection body in I Cor resemble Stoic and Middle-Platonist philosophical ideas. And Neo-Platonism profoundly affected the intellectual life of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

But what about the Stars? Astral worship was common in the ancient world, including the Ancient Near East. These practices were apparently common enough to have to be repeatedly condemned by pious Torah observant Hebrews in the scriptures. But as Scott points out, they came fairly late to Greek thought. And then mostly though philosophical speculation. For the Greeks motion was an indicator of intelligence and will. But were the stars themselves divinities or simply objects moved by divinities? And what to make of the planets and their retrograde motion? The Platonists were obsessed with transcendence and assumed that spirit must be immaterial, so if the stars are divine then how come we can even see them? The Stoics didn’t have this problem since they associated spirit with the body and simply assumed the stars were made of Pneuma, a finer material stuff. (The same “stuff” that Paul thought composed the Resurrection body, remember.)

And this for me is the nub of the issue. It’s not just that these folks had less scientific knowledge than we do. They lived in a profoundly different conceptual universe. A universe where stars were alive. Like the aliens in the story, to understand them we have to reorient our own way of thinking. But the point is this – the doctrines of the church were formulated in just such a world. These doctrines make perfect sense within that context. But do they really make sense in ours? Can modern believers really be said to “believe” in the same way as the ancients? Does the attitude of even the most pious contemporary fundamentalist churchgoer resemble in any way the attitude of Jesus’ original disciples? Is it even possible to connect to those old ways of thinking? And if we can’t?

Raise your hand if you ever could really believe that the stars are conscious and alive outside the imagination of a story. But can you really believe that Jesus could walk on water? Or that he could bodily ascend into the clouds? What about the Virgin Birth? Or the Resurrection? What books like this remind us is that the only way we can really contact these ancient ways of thinking is through the power of the imagination. But is that enough?