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

by Jason M. Baxter

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...