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

by Jason M. Baxter

In this way, both the medieval mystic and the modern physicist hint, gesture, suggest at what is beyond ordinary thinking. The modern physicist believes that the closest we can get to the “real thing” is mathematical approximations. Everything else is merely an analogy. In this way, Lewis contested, modern scientists have returned to using “parables,” being unable to speak about ultimate reality apart from making “models.”

In this way, Lewis was adamant that, despite his admiration, he was not recommending “a return to the Medieval Model”; rather, he wished to suggest “considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none. . . . No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many.”

I hope you do not think I am suggesting that God made the spiritual nebulae solely or chiefly in order to give me the experience of awe and bewilderment. I have not the faintest idea why He made them; on the whole, I think it would be rather surprising if I had. As far as I understand the matter, Christianity is not wedded to an anthropocentric view of the universe as a whole.

The genius of all this is that even if such a multiuniverse reality were true—in which we human beings are just one of many intelligent races, on the periphery of our own universe, living out our own version of the salvation story—this does not mean we are unimportant. In Lewis’s imagination, we have to remember that it is Aslan who is judge; Aslan who is maker; Aslan who is quietly whispering to souls. In this way, every race, however peripheral, is at the center of its Creator’s affection.