A Fantasy Novel Seeking Ultimate Truths

by N. E. Davis

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale)

by David Bentley Hart

Angelico Press, 432 pp., $22.95

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A kōan: If the world were other than it is, how would you know?

In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis in full scholastic mode invites us to imagine the world as the medievals saw it: as gravity itself, the most solid and stable thing there was. “You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down.” Elements order themselves along a rarefied gradient from outer fire to innermost earth. “Beyond” the fixed sphere of the stars is the intellectual light of God: There is no agoraphobia like that which modern man feels before the pathless void. Earth is heavy sediment, the house of heaviness and Hell in Dante’s telling, the stone at the bottom of the uttermost well.