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January 1 - January 6, 2025
he could barely formulate an argument, write a letter, offer a word of consolation, or weave a fictional story of his own without opening up the dam and letting all the old ideas and emotions, stored up in his memory by long reading, break forth.
“Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love [the Consolation]. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalized in the Middle Ages.”
so too did Lewis feel it his duty to save not this or that ancient author, but the general wisdom of the Long Middle Ages, and then vernacularize it for his world, which was now dominated by a new type of barbarian.35 His own age was one of “Proletarianism,” which was now, in a way similar to Boethius’s barbarians, cut off from the classical past and proud of its distance from classical antiquity: we are “self-satisfied to a degree perhaps beyond the self-satisfaction of any recorded aristocracy”; we are women and men who have become as “practical as the irrational animals.”36 Having abandoned
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Lewis’s vocation, like Boethius’s, was the humble one of making old books live again: “It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”
the professor of medieval literature had so much sympathy with the old order and its slow way of life that he felt he spiritually belonged to a generation he had not been born into. He wasn’t just a scholar of the Long Middle Ages, but a resident.
as he pointed out in all of his academic writing, the medieval period was not an age of primitive superstition, but one of bookish sophistication
This idea of a musical universe—whose planets are spaced out like strings on a musical instrument—delighted the imaginations of medieval thinkers.
God, of course, is not perpetual, but eternal. And so, what, in time, is spread out over an infinite number of moments, can be found gathered into a full and simultaneous perfection in God.
We might be struck by how “gaudy” and overdecorated this sounds, but Suger (and his contemporaries) loved how the senses were overloaded with an “excess” of meaning.
Standing in a medieval cathedral gives you a kind of x-ray vision of the world. Meaning is everywhere, full and rich. The material world has been gathered to a saturation point.
We find him confessing in a March 1951 letter that he did not read novels “for the characters. It’s more that for me a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a Thing, an Object, enjoyed for its color, proportions, atmosphere, its flavor—the Odyssey-ishness of the Odyssey or the Learishness of K[ing] Lear.”
In contrast, he loathed The Three Musketeers, because it was nothing but a string of action moments: “[It] makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather.”
Indeed, this was Lewis’s trademark as a scholar, teacher, and writer: his ability to perform ideas, to use his imaginative talent to create a feeling in which the ideas under consideration were no longer dead opinions sitting on the dissection table of the mind, like in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, but rather made to live again. In this sense, he was a historian of psychology.
Indeed, as Michael Ward has argued, just as Lewis sought out literary “weather” as a reader, Lewis-the-writer borrowed from medieval myth and science to create a different planetary “atmosphere” for each of the books in his Narnian series: one breathes the atmosphere of Jupiter in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Saturn provides the weather for The Last Battle; Venus the landscape for The Magician’s Nephew; and so on.
Reason is the power of human beings, and intelligentia belongs properly only to God. And yet, Boethius hints that, in rare instances, God loans this way of seeing to human beings.
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.
a “man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
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. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I
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he felt that by creating a “world” in which Christianity could be breathed, as opposed to being only thought about, he could help remove some of the associations of religion with hushed tones and medical sterilization that he, as a child, had found so off-putting:
Perelandra turns out to be Dante and Jean de Meun in space.
Here, as Armstrong has perceptively noted, we have a modernization of the widespread medieval practice of lectio divina, a slow, monastic, prayerful, meditative “holy reading” in which boundaries between commentary and prayer are porous. In the words of Duncan Robertson, medieval lectio divina was a fluid “movement of reading into prayer.”
The world is now moving so fast that to not move is reactionary.
And yet, as we can see, behind those irascible, curmudgeonly lamentations about newspapers and cars stands a well-thought-out conviction that the whole world picture had changed, from the slow, contemplative, symphonic world (discussed in chap. 1) to the world of speed, bustle, and machine.
perceiving the world as a symphony to perceiving it as a machine.
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more pointless it also seems.”
he characterized the scientific revolution as a period of new learning and new ignorance.
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.”
The two-dimensional figure doubts dimensions he cannot perceive; the witch tries to make the Narnians doubt that there even is an overworld; modernity casts a spell that makes those secret longings for a far-off country seem like mere emotions without a proper referent. Spiritual longing seems out of place in the modern world.
Chivalry was the very endeavor to hold the parts of the human being in tension, to render a young man (in this case) an ethically whole person—that is, to unite those parts of a human being that do not naturally sit well with one another: extreme courage and gentle civility.
Dante’s Comedy, in the assessment of Marsha Daigle-Williamson, is the single most important classic for “understanding Lewis’s art,” given that Lewis employs “Dante’s masterpiece as the major literary model for his fiction.”
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.
Purification must precede illumination; and illumination precedes unity. For the medieval mind, you could not skip to the end: you had to be religious before being spiritual.
For Otto the numinous is that reality whose majesty is so far beyond our ordinary experience that it is difficult for us to classify it simply as good or bad: it is at once both alluring and dangerous, beautiful and terrifying. The numinous is mystery, which inspires a response of “stupor,” “blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.”
undefined, desired.”31 Such authors represent the negative (or apophatic) tradition: bracing, icy, pure, clean, cold—like the thin air you breathe in the mountains during the winter. It’s sobering, and purging. It wakes you up from that suffocating sentimentality that passes for religion, but which Lewis was absolutely allergic to.
The danger is to leave these negatives unchecked by any positive intuition. The mystics talk of God as they do, not because he is less human, but because he is supersaturated being, more than human. Love must not be thought of as “something less torrential or less sharp than our own temporary and derivative passions.”
it is also true that every creature, even if imperfectly, points or gestures toward that God who is above them. This is what is meant by positive or cataphatic theology.
While such a “life force” might solicit our hushed admiration and inspire our reverence, it does not irrupt into our world as a person.
the natural movements of non-Christian cultures, even if without cognizant cooperation, played a crucial role in preparing the world for the gospel of Christ.
Virgil, they breathlessly felt, was on the threshold of Christianity:
Lewis described himself as one who “first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine,” and so it was important for him to be able to explain what was true about non-Christian religions.
My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man.”
And yet, enjoying myth and being a Christian are not the same thing.
There remains a process that is peculiarly difficult in modernity, a process I will call “deep conversion” or “unveiling.”
Lewis was attentive to his whole life: the modern tendency to possess a cranky irritability about our own private, inner space. Lewis thought that in modernity human beings have a particular tendency to think of what is inside them—thoughts, dreams, feelings, emotions, desires—as a kind of inner sanctum, which they might sometimes share but is where they feel most real and authentic. Lewis thought this tendency to psychological individualism was not only peculiarly modern but presented a special obstacle to loving God, given that we are constitutionally reluctant to admit God into the inner
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there can be a fatal possessiveness, to have them as our own and in perpetuity, to hold them with the fear of losing them, not to take them as gifts, to treasure them just because they are no one else’s.
We don’t want to give up the fatal privacy of our dreams, ambitions, goals, hopes, and, sometimes, resentments, because we don’t want to die to what seems to be our truest self.
Indeed, we make these external goods—which are transitory and imperfect—a part of our identity, such that we have a difficult time conceiving of ourselves apart from them.
Lewis goes out of his way to describe Orual as one who has lived her life in the midst of external things, keeping herself busy with projects and ambitions, so as never to have to face her own vacuous interior.
at the same time he was espousing his commitment to a world of fact, he was also spending a good deal of time quietly resenting the world he believed in.
“physics” was a subdiscipline of theology. And so, in this way, nature could be thought of as a great metaphor, a sort of physical, palpable, observable, scientific “myth,” which itself was a transposition of the invisible into the visible world, at least to the extent the “impoverished” language of the natural, visible world could accommodate the higher.
