<div dir="ltr"><div>Are we talking about a literal personality for the Earth, or for the universe?</div><div><br></div>Lewis actually explicitly notes in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Discarded Image </span>that the Earth was not classically given a guiding intelligence. This is because, in the Ptolemaic system, the Earth is stationary while the heavens move. Being stationary, the Earth obviously needs no intelligence guiding its movement.<div>
<br></div><div>According to Lewis, the first person to propose that the Great Chain of Being including the Earth possessing a distinct "persona" in the sense that Saturn and Jupiter do was Dante (Discarded Image 139, if anyone has it), who proposed that the governing intelligence of Earth was Fortune. Lewis tweaked that idea to make the governing intelligence of Earth a Satan analogue in the Space Trilogy. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Nevertheless, despite the (very debatable) commonality of "great chain of being" theories (and conflating them all into a single system is kind of sloppy), the "people who came up with Christianity" did not typically ascribe some sort of "literal persona" to the planet Earth. The Great Chain most just posited that there must be a bunch of interesting spiritual beings "higher" than man and "lower" than God. </div>
<div><br></div><div>As for the universe as a whole, the closest thing the ancients and medievals had to such a concept was the Primum Mobile. It's true that philosophers tended to talk about the Primum Mobile as though it had a persona, but Lewis is quick to point out that that's just how people spoke back then--to say "the Primum Mobile revolves because it loves God" is no more literal than to say "water desires to run downhill," which is exactly how medievals (and Tzadkiel, for that matter) did in fact talk. Lewis actually mocks moderns for taking this literally by pointing out that we use an even more personalizing metaphor--"Water runs downhill because it must obey the laws of physics." </div>
<div><br></div><div>So I'm far from convinced that the ancients or medievals as a rule ascribed a "personality" to the "World." A necessary obedience to what we'd now call metaphysical laws, sure. </div>
<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:39 AM, David Duffy <<a href="mailto:David.Duffy@qimr.edu.au">David.Duffy@qimr.edu.au</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Jeff Wilson wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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I don't see anything about the world having a literal persona distinct from God, and I don't recall seeing anything like that in Aristotle's elementalism, either.<br>
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A more recent SFnal realization is in CS Lewis's _Space Trilogy_. Earth is (or has :)) a silent planet.<br><font color="#888888">
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David Duffy.</font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
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