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

by Jason M. Baxter

For all of these reasons, Lewis could assert, in his Cambridge address, that “the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West” is “that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott.”33 More important than the gap between, say, Egypt and Greece, or ancient Rome and the Christian era, or between the medieval period and the early modern period, was the transformative period that he himself had been born at the very end of.

IN HIS 1979 ESSAY “STANDING BY WORDS,” the plainspoken farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist from Kentucky, Wendell Berry, declared that there are “two epidemic illnesses in our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded”: “the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons.”1 That seems obvious enough. But Berry’s next claim is deeper and, if true, more disturbing: “What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language.”2

In other words, in Berry’s critique, it is possible for a culture to become blind to moral responsibility, to lose a sense of courage and clarity, because it has become trapped within its own way of speaking. Certain fundamental, interior, and virtuous responses are suffocated because they do not have the linguistic atmosphere and habitat they need to flourish.

Our speech makes up a linguistic microcosm, the medium through which we describe our hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions, and as such it absorbs and reflects the atmosphere of the world in which it is shaped.

“A language has its own personality; implies an outlook, reveals a mental activity, and has a resonance, not quite the same as any other. Not only the vocabulary—heaven can never mean quite the same as ciel—but the very shape of the syntax is sui generis.”

The uniqueness of language is due, in part, to the “world picture” that serves as the habitat in which that language is born, develops, and adapts. The cosmos gets into the language, like rainwater seeps into subterranean aquafers and regulates the height of the water table.

Because of this connection between language and world picture (what I have been calling, “cosmic imaginary”), not only should we expect language to change from age to age, but we should also expect that on this side of the Great Divide—the fundamental rupture in history that rendered modern society radically different from any other epoch in h...

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.11

Gumpas’s speech is littered with abstractions, and abstractions of things that have become more important than real things, real loves. He feels some vague loyalty to hazy bureaucratic value words like development and economic necessity, terms that seem full of imperative urgency but have no power to evoke love for real, concrete things, in contrast to the Elizabethan schoolboy who knew and loved “farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy.” No. Gumpas is a modern. He would have loved to have helped us in our effort to flatten curves and social distance.

In effect, Lewis argues, schoolchildren are implicitly taught that if they claim “that waterfall is sublime,” they are making a worthless claim, because “I have sublime feelings about that waterfall” is merely a subjective assertion. And so, the schoolchild is silently led to hold two propositions: “That all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”24 This is the swollen, gorged Subject. All meaning lies within when the universe has been emptied.

The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. . . .

If we are always standing back, keeping the world at a distance to analyze, categorize, and quantify its parts, then we will forever be in the position of looking “at” the beam. And if that is the case, then we will lack the spiritual resource of the “heart,” which must aid the reason to make for a fully-formed human being. But modern education divorces the heart and mind, and the consequences are fatal, literally: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.”26

And so, unlike modern attempts to create fact checkers and problem solvers and critical thinkers, Lewis’s beloved old authors tried to model, inspire, and foster the just sentiments of piety, reverence, justice, and wonder.

Similarly, Lewis was inspired by the gentle and frank Thomas Traherne, whose Centuries called (in a phrase that echoes Lewis’s “just sentiments”) for a “rendering to things their due esteem”30—that is, not just an understanding of the natural world but also a love and worshipful reverence for it. Traherne makes the argument that the greatest gift given to humankind is the natural world, and the appropriate way to receive it is, first, to study it, but then to wonder at it, to treasure it within, until you come to revere it: “The World is unknown, till the Value and Glory of it is seen: till the Beauty and the Serviceableness of its parts is considered. When you enter into it, it is an happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity; and to find GOD in exchange for oneself. Which we then do when we see Him in His Gifts, and adore His Glory.”31

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.

myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to.”36

Although medieval writers were as aware as we are of the limitations of their images (that is, they did not believe their metaphors were speaking any literal reality about spiritual truths), they were nevertheless willing to devote significant effort to trying to use positive pictures as symbols and “transpositions” of heavenly realities.5 And this medieval awareness of the task of “transposition” could serve as a guide to modern writers.

Dante taught him how an artist could cast a “counterspell” in which the good feels weighty and attractive, a spell to overcome the “evil enchantment” cast by modernity.

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

the medieval poet was the beneficiary of living in a cosmos that was inherently poetic.

In Lewis’s words, the chief characteristic of Dante’s poetry is its “almost sensuous intensity about things not sensuous.”14 In contrast to the “dull catalogues of jewelry and mass-singing,”15 Dante’s poetry gets more concrete, more sensible, more tangible, with every step closer toward God.

Dante’s language is vibrantly alive, as if a higher mode of being were irrupting in a lower language, and as if, under high pressure, the lower language were melting down.

This is a good example of how a poet performs “transposition.”

In this revelatory moment, then, Lewis reveals that his story is an imaginative vehicle—a modern fantasy story or fairy tale—devised to make a metaphysical (and medieval) point: 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. Pure concentrated joy.

Lewis himself summed up the whole essence of the Christian life as turning “from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain”!5

for both Lewis and Dante, the Christian life culminates in something higher than morality. At the highest level of spiritual perfection, there is a kind of play, a joyful unfolding of freedom.

Lewis was pastorally and pedagogically hesitant about mysticism for two reasons. The first is that the more difficult task for us human beings is the humbler and more regular one: being consistent, being faithful, acting with fortitude, and acting out obedience with alacrity, or as Lewis puts it, “Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning.”10 The second reason for hesitance is Lewis’s fear that mysticism—explained at length in Miracles, as we will see—could lead to a vague “spirituality,” a misty belief in a “divine principle.” By rendering God into a life force or “principle of happiness,” I also effectively delete from my imagination “personality,” that there is a God seeking me, and who wants me to live for him.11 This personal accountability is more frightening because it makes concrete demands on my time, energy, and life, as opposed to some vague, uplifting sense of duty.

Medieval authors knew that the ultimate goal of the Christian life was not ethical, but to come to the point at which one loves God freely and unbounded.

Lewis’s own description of his conversion, according to which an unknown urge—a desire for “Joy”—tugging, anonymously and namelessly within, turned out to be a loving person. This is an autobiographical recapitulation of what he believed had taken place on the general level of human history. In other words, Lewis’s own conversion is a microcosmic reflection of the slow historical preparation of the human race, the praeparatio evangelica. Over the course of centuries, an indefinable and indefatigable longing found its expression first in myths, legends, and religious rituals, but eventually “condensed” into the historical person Jesus Christ, analogously to how young Jack’s reading and aesthetic experiences were preparation for encountering Christ.

Lewis exquisitely called this angry and territorial voice that was resistant to conversion the desire to be free from “interference”: No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at the center what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of “treaty with reality” could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one’s soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, “This is my business and mine only.”28

What strikes us as most real is that which is tangible, visible, external, and physical, and thus we spend our life in exile, as it were, from ourselves, seeking meaning outside of our truest self.

“At this point I become what some would call very Evangelical. I do not think any efforts of my own will can end once and for all this craving for limited liabilities, this fatal reservation. Only God can.”

Lewis undertook his first imitatio, or recycling and rewriting, of this passage (for The Great Divorce) in order to explore what would have happened if a Dante-like figure (in this case the Tragedian) had not come to make a deep confession. The second time Lewis rewrote the final canti of Purgatorio, though, he did so in order to portray an intensely personal I-Thou moment of unveiling: the judgment of Orual.

Lewis asks, “What, then, are we really doing” when we pray? God does not need to be informed about our fears and needs, and given that we “are always completely . . . known to God,” what are we actually doing when we express the desires of the heart to God?55 To answer this, Lewis used the metaphor of unveiling—that is, letting ourselves come to be known by God, letting ourselves come to be in tune with his being. God knows most creatures as “things,” such as “earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae.” They are objects of Divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact . . . and (b) ascent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled His sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view.56

Why can we not, as he puts it in “Myth Became Fact,” just dispense with myth, throw away the hull, and keep the kernel of religion? Because every act of thinking is already a metaphorical or mythological act!

All language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical.10

The whole model was guided by the intuition that the very order and physical operations of the universe were expressive of an invisible world; “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.

We can pose questions about the simple, underlying levels of reality and get answers with predictive power, but our answers do not help us get at the essence of what’s happening at the deeper levels. Our observations make up mere “models.”

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.”

It was from modern physicists, then, that Lewis borrowed the term, “Model,” which he used to refer to the medieval cosmic imaginary. But, he insisted, it would be a mistake to think of these as smaller reduplications such as scaled-down model ships or airplanes. Rather, the model of the physicist (as well as the medieval theologian) merely “suggests.” It does not represent.13

Everything interesting, festive, fiery, light, clean, and harmonious was way out there, while we, poor fools, dwell at “the lowest point” of the universe, “plunged . . . in unending cold”; the earth was “in fact the ‘offscourings of creation,’ the cosmic dust-bin,”20 “‘the worst and deadest part of the universe,’ ‘the lowest story of the house,’ the point at which all light, heat, and movement descending from the nobler spheres finally died out into darkness, coldness, and passivity.”21 As we have seen, this is what Lewis called our “anthropoperipheral” position in the cosmos, where, from a great distance, like spectators who didn’t get into the stadium, we watch, struggling to hear a sound or catch a glimpse of that distant excitement.22

Bacchus is the liberator, the joy-bringer, the mirth-maker, and he shatters our frigid paradigms of religion when they become nothing more than being nice and respectable and socially responsible: “Bacchus and the Maenads—his fierce, madcap girls—and Silenus were still with them. . . . Everyone was awake, everyone was laughing, flutes were playing, cymbals clashing. Animals . . . were crowding upon them from every direction.”4

In this way, the model, despite some of its factual inaccuracies, had something deeply (psychologically) true at its core: a longing for the obliteration of the distinction between the spiritual realm and material; or, to state it positively, a desire for a world in which God shows himself forth in the visible world and in which our own minds can incarnate themselves in the world around us. Lewis was nostalgic for the future.