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

by Jason M. Baxter

the man who wrote letters to children recommending that they study Latin until they reached the point they could read it fluently without a dictionary;

Unlike modern pedantic scholars who are obsessed with their specialization and, thus, inordinately attach to the periodization of history, Lewis’s mind ranged generously over time:

“[My authors] are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages.”25

In Lewis’s mind, they were all “in league,” and made up a cloud of witnesses who belong to what we could call the “Long Middle Ages.” Although scholars might wish to define the Middle Ages as the era between 500 and 1500, Lewis felt such boundaries to be arbitrary.

“University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any increased flexibility in our conception of history. All lines of demarcation between what we call ‘periods’ should be subject to constant revision.”

For the third Lewis, the old books had a sense of timeliness (not just timelessness), and thus Boethius and Virgil could share space with a novelist who was his contemporary and friend (Charles Williams).

as Chris Armstrong has pointed out, Lewis, as he aged, seems to have increasingly thought of himself as a new, British Boethius. In Lewis’s opinion, both he and Boethius lived on the cusps of the Dark Ages, and so, for this reason, the late antique Roman aristocrat could provide a model for his own vocation.31

Lewis loved Boethius. Indeed, he thought that the ability not just to know but to love the Consolation, to internalize it, was a mark of which side of the 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.”33

Having abandoned the study of the old, modern barbarians no longer have access to any values other than those “of modern industrial civilization,” and so, Lewis wondered if “we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity.”

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.”39

What is more, 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.

Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.49

the medieval period was not an age of primitive superstition, but one of bookish sophistication (see epigraph), and anyone who has wandered around a great, Old World cathedral, like Salisbury Cathedral, has some idea of what Lewis’s comparison means: it is a paradoxical juxtaposition of astonishing variety, meticulous order, and a saturation of light.

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 seemed to our ancestors phenomena that pointed beyond themselves. The whole world felt like a cosmic cathedral.

In one of his greatest sermons, Lewis develops a musical metaphor, “transposition,” to refer to those various moments when a higher, more complicated system is expressed in a lower, less complicated one—for example, when a Mahler symphony, with its gargantuan orchestration for four hundred instruments, is transposed for a piano, or when a language with a huge vocabulary is translated into one with a limited one (like Latin into Anglo-Saxon). This happens, too, in our emotional lives. In the sermon, Lewis reflects on a passage from Samuel Pepys’s diary, in which the seventeenth-century author, in an effort to describe the delight and rapture he experienced at a concert, compared that aesthetic experience to the jittery nerves he had suffered when he first fell in love with his wife, as well as to the jittery nerves he experienced when seasick! The bodily experience of falling in love, the fluttering of the diaphragm that we experience when in love, the rapturous shortness of breath we experience when we listen to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, or the queasy fluttering of the diaphragm we suffer when we are sick at sea are all, on the mere physiological level, impossible to distinguish.3 But if we believe that the emotional life is higher, more varied, and more subtle than the life of bodily needs and sensations, it follows that we encounter the bodily language’s “limited vocabulary” when the life of the mind and heart overflow into our physical sensations.4 Lewis develops this tho...

what nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, and the Hubble telescope are for us, the medieval cathedral—and the cosmological “model” it represented—was for the medieval period: a kind of “experiment” that made visible an elusive and deeper truth.

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.

“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.” For Boethius, as for Cicero, there is a rational order that keeps the world in balance, keeping it from spinning out of control. 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. This is why the Consolation of Philosophy alternates between prose and verse.8

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. By perceiving this deep level of numbers, we can discover the mathematical skeleton beneath the world’s skin, and so can get at the “real” world, the deep world.

For Calcidius, and the rest of the tradition, if you cultivate a perception of the deep harmony of nature, it leads to worship, because the “soul, fashioned after the same pattern as the celestial bodies, immediately recognizes its own natural affinity to them.”18 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.”

Even more significantly, these harmonic patterns are likened to the longing and groans of a world that is earnestly engaged in making itself as like the eternal simplicity of the divine as it can. 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 ...

Physics is prayer in an iconi...

Thus the universe is a kind of text, which inspires contemplation of the deep patterns ...

All of these orchestrated motions exist because they constitute the best possible way to make manifes...

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 fun...

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 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.

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.

“anagogy,” an uplift of the heart, a sense of deep insight that comes to the threshold of worship.

a crucial terminological distinction: between “enjoyment” and “contemplation.”

The literary scholar has access not just to ancient ideas but also to ancient feelings, and thus has access to specimens even more valuable than a paleontologist’s prehistoric insect frozen intact within amber.

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 regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.30

“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.”31

Boethius’s distinction between intelligentia and ratio, like Alexander’s distinction between enjoyment and contemplation, found its echo in Lewis’s distinction between looking at and looking along the beam,

Just as Malory rewrote the legends of Arthur that he inherited, just as Chaucer translated and touched up his borrowings from Boccaccio, and just as Dante “translated” the cosmology of his age into verse—when Lewis sat down to write, he participated in a similar authorial process, a paradoxical “slavish” imitation combined with the most “cavalier” creativity. He composed in the same way as those medieval authors he studied as a scholar. Lewis borrows them, intensifies them, adds color. Perelandra turns out to be Dante and Jean de Meun in space.

The important thing was not necessarily inventing or concocting in an original style, but to renew, recycle, enliven the original, so that the old vision would be credible to those who live in an incredulous age. The artist’s duty (just like the scholar’s) is to render atmosphere, so that one can breathe the air of the original.

Lewis at one point describes a process of prayer that he calls “festooning,” according to which he borrowed a certain biblical passage, paused over it, thought on it, and then rephrased it, laying on new and fresh thoughts (hence “festooning”) so that the scriptural passage would take on freshness without losing the plain sense.

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.”53

As we will see in this chapter and the next, how we think the world works—especially as related to whether we think time and space are “imitations of eternity,” transpositions of supersensible realities—affects what we think a human being is (our psychology). Our psychology, in turn, influences our ethics and pedagogy, but also our understanding of language, and that in turn affects our sense of what makes for good style!

All this meant that the operation of the heavens could no longer be considered as designed in order to display a delicate harmonic pattern: apparently their paths were not laid out to figure forth Platonic solids (as Kepler had rhapsodically suggested), and their motion was not the propulsion due to an outpouring of love from intelligent beings. Space was made up of a bunch of rocks orbiting about chemical reactions.

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 In other words, when the cosmos is not perceived as “iconic,” having a meaning and a purpose, it turns into a lump of inert matter passively awaiting us to “dominate and use it for our own convenience.”18

In fact, 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:

You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from the devils, but gold and guns and girls. . . .

All of this—the movement from an iconic cosmos to a mechanized one—is what Charles Taylor hauntingly called “excarnation.”

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:

The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves.

All of this was of more than academic interest for Lewis, because he perceived that, over time, changes in cosmology were accompanied by corresponding changes in psychology and ethics.