The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

by Jason M. Baxter

considering Lewis’s admiration for medieval cosmology, because for him the medieval universe was not just a system of exploded scientific beliefs, but the natural, icon of transposition, the greatest example of the spiritual world expressing itself in the limited vocabulary of the physical, natural world.

Thus the Oxford professor’s interest in medieval cosmology was not merely an arcane, archaeological antiquarianism. Why? Because being able to see the world with medieval eyes could provide even modern people with a “model” for thinking about the relationship between the natural and spiritual world.

In other words, the planets are spaced out proportionally to one another, so that the distances between Earth and Mars, and Venus and Jupiter, correspond to harmonic intervals of chords. As the planets rotate, they create a kind of intellectual music, to which we earthlings have become deaf, but we can regain the ability to hear this music through study or through beautiful music, which imitates the same harmonic proportions.

This idea of a musical universe—whose planets are spaced out like strings on a musical instrument—delighted the imaginations of medieval thinkers. Boethius, to take one example, borrowed this idea from Cicero. In a particularly beautiful poem in his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius, too, imagines himself high above our universe, viewing the cosmos stretched out beneath his feet.

You can hear the author’s excitement and delight as he describes the choreographed movements of the universe: Starmaker, master of spheres, At whose command the heavens spin In the constellations’ dance that you On your steady throne hav...

“Not even the blowing winds are random,” says Boethius rhapsodically. In other words, Boethius closed his eyes, looked at the earth in his mind’s eye, watched its seasons springing up and falling away, and perceived the heavens rotating, all in ordered rhythms.

This is what Boethius, in his lesser-known work De musica, called “the music of the cosmos.”

It ensures that elements of different kinds bond properly to one another; it regulates how the seasons cycle in an ongoing carousel; this order also regulates how the stars and planets turn. He calls this cosmic order “music” because it is a deep, mathematical harmony that frames out the world in understandable patterns.

What is more, Boethius (again like Cicero) taught that through instrumental music we can regain a “taste” of the musicality of the world, and thus retune our souls to cosmic music. Music is philosophical therapy, bringing the soul back into tune with the great Conductor’s universe.

Lewis poignantly described this medieval attitude by likening the state of human beings to those who watch the celestial spectacle from afar, from the outskirts. Watching its beauty, we are overwhelmed, and desire to imitate it to the extent we can. We are, in a word, “anthropoperipheral”: “We are creatures of the Margin.”17

For Calcidius, “mathematics” is more real than the visible, because it is the rational design of which everything else is merely a physical expression.

In other words, despite the messiness of earthly reality, we find underneath the material a paradigm of order, and thus we can see that, in an extraordinary phrase, “time is an image of eternity.”

Eternity is the world’s “paradigm” (its exemplar, goal, and end), and that end is invisible and full of joy, the realm of “pure intelligible light.” For this reason, the visible world, in Plato’s phrase, is a great “icon”: it is an artistic representation that translates into a new medium the eternal principles of a higher order.

The very physical movements of the world constitute a kind of longing to measure up. Physics is prayer in an iconic universe.

All of these orchestrated motions exist because they constitute the best possible way to make manifest the perfection of eternity.22 And when we grasp this point, we have come to the heart of the “iconic” nature of the model Lewis so admired. It is a difficult concept—time’s imitation of eternity—but Lewis thought it was fundamental to the understanding of the medieval world.

Although most of us think of “eternity” as that which goes “on and on,” Boethius explains, we should actually call that, “perpetuity.” Perpetuity is nothing more than an endless chain of brief moments, connected together. And given that eternity, on the other hand, is the “actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life,” Boethius can call time an imitation of eternity. Time, as it were, is almost a “parody” of eternity, a “hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them.”23

The world which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions. . . .

The whole world, then, can be read as a “symbol”—that is, a “copy,” as in a mirror that distorts an image or a portrait that merely sums up a likeness. When dealing with our earthly “images” or “copies” or “depictions,” we know that the real thing is better: because it is alive, in motion, has color and depth. And so, we must apply this to the cosmos. It is copy.

For Calcidius (as well as for Cicero and Boethius) the heavens are quite literally a symphony: “The Pythagorean doctrine is that the world consists of harmonic ratio and that the celestial bodies, separated by intervals which are congruent and consonant with one another, produce musical sounds owing to the extremely rapid impulse of their flight. . . . Musical sounds are produced by stellar movement.”

The long, Platonic tradition, then, taught Lewis two things: to see the world as a symphony but always to take this symphony (or cathedral) as a symbol or sacrament or transposition, which gestures at something beyond.

The world itself is but a sketchy translation of a poem that no one has ever heard.

Lewis loved the metaphor, and thus, he frequently spoke of how such “atmosphere” or “climate” or “weather” or “landscape,” or “microclimate,” was the single most important thing in literature.

As we can see, the real value of reading literature for Lewis is not extracting good moral lessons and correct opinions, but something more liberating, more capacious, more generous. Literature is the ability to fix “our inner eye,”27 an act of looking.

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison.

The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.

Lewis irreverently calls the hallowed scientific revolution a period of “new ignorance” because he believed that by choosing to focus on quantifiable measurements to the exclusion of all other types of inquiry, modern science had brought modern culture into an ethical and social desert, on account of its willful suspension of “judgements of value” and its decision to strip nature of all “qualitative properties” and to “ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity.”17

Lewis points out that science and magic are more closely related than modern science would like to admit, because in essence they have pursued their crafts with the same end in mind. The modern world took up “the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return.”19 The only reason it preferred science to magic is because science worked:

All of this—the movement from an iconic cosmos to a mechanized one—is what Charles Taylor hauntingly called “excarnation.” In a past “enchanted age” there was a “strong sense” of the sacred, which “marks out certain people, times, place, and actions” and is “by its very nature localizable, and its place is clearly marked out in ritual and sacred geography.”21 Our modern world, on the other hand, is haunted by a sense of loss: “This is what we sense, and often regret the passing of, when we contemplate the medieval cathedral. God-forsakenness is an experience of those whose ancestral culture has been transformed and repressed by a relentless process of disenchantment,

Lewis described such a process as the slow spread of a spiritual cancer, which began by disenchanting the universe, moved to demystifying the

human body, and ended by casting doubt on the very possibility of rationality:

We move from a language of metaphors “with phantom longings and endeavors” to a “universe with phantom police-courts and traffic regulations,” or, in other words, a world of desire and intelligence to a world of mechanical “laws.”26 The results of the mechanization of the world picture is that spiritual longing has come to feel out of place. And, as we will see in a later chapter, this longing is a theme that haunted the medieval scholar’s essays, fiction, and even his autobiography.

both language and ethics are connected to our cosmic imaginary. Our speech makes up a linguistic microcosm, the medium through which we describe our hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions, and as such it absorbs and reflects the atmosphere of the world in which it is shaped.

But what happens when the mechanized world picture becomes so obvious, such a part of the structures of our mind, that we cannot remember, or even imagine, an alternative? Lewis had a special name for this condition: “evil enchantment.”

The human being coached and trained in the old education, then, was meant to have a whole range of just sentiments, like some kind of internal piano keyboard: a whole range of noble sentiments, ready to be played in response to the corresponding reality without, in lamentable contrast to the modern “trousered ape” and “urban blockhead” who have never been able “to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water.”

in medieval thought pure evil is the same as nothingness, it’s like absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Ultimate happiness is, rather, ontological fullness. Pure concentrated joy.

The first is that the more difficult task for us human beings is the humbler and more regular one: being consistent, being faithful, acting with fortitude, and acting out obedience with alacrity, or as Lewis puts it, “Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning.”10 The second reason for hesitance is Lewis’s fear that mysticism—explained at length in Miracles, as we will see—could lead to a vague “spirituality,” a misty belief in a

“divine principle.” By rendering God into a life force or “principle of happiness,” I also effectively delete from my imagination “personality,” that there is a God seeking me, and who wants me to live for him.

Lewis’s eyes, modern spirituality was only the latest revival of a very ancient “pantheism” according to which a cerebral “principle” or “life force” pervades the world. While such a “life force” might solicit our hushed admiration and inspire our reverence, it does not irrupt into our world as a person.

Christianity is the prince of myths, the ultimate and final myth, what our scholar of medieval literature called a “true myth.” By this he meant that Christianity was a mythological picture of the world with one important and extraordinary difference: its mythological features entered into history and time and wore a face. Christianity is the pure white light that had revealed itself in a myriad of fragmented colors, as refracted through the prism of history over centuries before the advent of Christ.

“God became man” is tantamount to saying, “myth became fact.” Christianity is the culmination of the mythological age, while at the same time the “final” myth, given that it “condenses” legendary longing into a concrete, historical, flesh-bound person, a story that is then entrusted to the historical succession of people who make up the church. Myth became a person. The It becomes a You.

Christ’s resurrection, Lewis insists, is a wholly new chapter in the world, an opening of a door that had been previously locked. Whereas moderns tend to think of the resurrection as important, because of its proof value (if we know it happened, then we can prove Jesus Christ’s divinity), Lewis argues forcefully that this misses the greatest part of the miracle. It is not just some proof to win an argument, but the first act of drawing all of creation up to a new level of dignity. Moreover, it was the first act in refashioning space and time itself, as well as the relationship between mind and matter.

Tolkien concludes his famous essay by reminding us that this is exactly our situation: It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history. . . . This joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. . . . It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. . . . Art has been verified.15

The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty’s remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future, rooted “deep down things.” It is hope. And the great thing about true hope, this nostalgia for the future, is that it has none of the irritability, fear, anxiety, and discouragement that flavors many of the words of those who describe the demise of Christendom in our day. We were denied the garden, and then we were exiled from the enchanted cosmos. Now we must own our modernity. But by doing so, we engage in an extraordinary ascesis of the senses. We must move forward and look beyond.