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It was this professorial Lewis who in a 1955 letter lamented that modern renderings of old poems made up a “dark conspiracy . . . to convince the modern barbarian that the poetry of the past was, in its own day, just as mean, colloquial, and ugly as our own.”
Lewis has no problem citing ancient Aristotle and Athenian Plato, not to mention Wordsworth, to help clarify the medieval model. In other words, it was habitual for him to put ancients in dialogue with Christians, and medieval Christians in dialogue with Romantics, despite the intervening millennia, in a way that recalled Dante’s own blending of various eras (see his Inferno 1, where the pilgrim meets the ancient poet Virgil).
Great Divide your heart was on: “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.”
Thus, by writing “On Living in an Atomic Age,” Lewis did something analogous to the late medieval writers (like Chaucer) who had translated Boethius from Latin into Middle English or French or Italian. He, too, was a “popularizer” of ancient wisdom for a barbarian age. He was following in Boethius’s footsteps.
In other words, what Lewis admired most was not simply this or that medieval belief or doctrine, but rather the whole way of viewing the world, the whole ensemble, the whole intellectual “atmosphere” of what I have called the Long Middle Ages, and it was that which he, as the modern Boethius, felt it was vital to preserve, explain, and make intelligible, even within modernity. In short, Lewis perceived that for the medieval period, the natural world, like so many stained-glass windows, was, as it were, transparent to a light from beyond this world. What are for us merely natural processes
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Music is philosophical therapy, bringing the soul back into tune with the great Conductor’s universe.
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. In a cathedral, then, the spiritual world feels like it is leaking in, and our response is to want to soar up and through and out.
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. According to Ward, Lewis translated (or vernacularized) all of the medieval planetary system (as described in Discarded Image) into modern books for modern children.
“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
Boethius helped him find his “vocational” calling to create literary worlds that did not beat audiences with Christian facts but, rather, rendered atmosphere in which Christianity could be seen according to intelligentia. In fact, 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:
In a second passage in Surprised by Joy Lewis targets newspaper reading, mocking the falsity of the desire to be up to date, which he labeled an “appalling waste of time and spirit.” Those who do read the newspaper acquire “an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.”2 With age, Lewis grew more and more pessimistic about modernity, how it tends to “annihilate space” and increase in speed,3 melt down
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In sum, while the medieval cosmos was alive, a great living being, a world that moved because it experienced desire, for modernity the world is made up of passive lumps of matter, waiting to be acted on by forces, suspended within space. (The word space in this sense is a modern coinage.)
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.”
There doesn’t seem to be a moment in Lewis’s adult life in which Dante was not close at hand and vividly present in his thoughts. The Florentine was a constant interlocutor. Just as when Augustine wanted to talk about love or loss, and would reach into his mind to try to find language adequate to capture the power of the experience, and would inadvertently begin quoting passages from Virgil, Lewis would open his mouth to say something moving and personal and find himself quoting Dante.13
We can see why reading the Paradiso felt, to the youthful Lewis, like joining in some “spacious gliding movement, like a slow dance, or like flying.” It was ethereal, but at the same time tactile and tangible and sensuous and palpable. Dante’s language constantly evokes ordinary, terrestrial events, daily crafts, and diurnal happenings—such as growth, and eating, and clothing. Dante uses concrete and humble things even when gesturing, in wonder, at that distant country of heaven. In other words, Lewis loved Dante because he made his heaven envelop, penetrate, invade, burn, and restlessly seek
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“Do you mean that Hell—all that infinite empty town—is down in some little crack like this?” “Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. . . .” “It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.”
This counterintuitive advice is related to a standard teaching in the mystical tradition, that there are moral and spiritual stages of growth, which one must proceed through in the right order: 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.
In other words, the very names from a different age have lingered and survived into our world, carrying with them a faint perfume from distant times. We cannot even speak without, however obliquely, thinking in myth. Moreover, the myths weren’t essentially untrue. They were based on deep ancient intuitions—the premonitions of the praeparatio evangelica—that the physical world was moving “in answer to the eternal music,” based on the fundamental belief that God uses the natural world to express “himself through the minds of poets, and [uses] images in their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of
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I say my prayers, I read a book of devotion, I prepare for, or receive, the Sacrament. But while I do these things, there is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution. It tells me to be careful, to keep my head, not to go too far, not to burn my boats. I come into the presence of God with a great fear, lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have to come out again into my “ordinary” life. I don’t want to be carried away into any resolution which I shall afterwards regret. . . . This is my endlessly recurrent
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“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”30
