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

by Jason M. Baxter

This is what I mean by the “third Lewis” emerging alongside the first two Lewises we know better, the apologist and imaginative writer. This third Lewis is the writer who spent so much time studying medieval tales and arguments, ancient grammar and vocabulary, premodern rhetoric and the rhythmic flow of ancient speech that he could barely formulate an argument, write a letter, offer a word of consolation, or weave a fictional story of his own without opening up the dam and letting all the old ideas and emotions, stored up in his memory by long reading, break forth. Medieval literature, ancient languages, and the premodern way of looking at the universe were not just Lewis’s study or day job, but his passion, his love, his life’s work, his spiritual formation, and even his “vocation.” In his intellectual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he famously describes three moments in his youth in which he was moved to spiritual longing through reading. He comments, “The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.”18 The purpose of this book is to explore how this third Lewis is just beneath the surface even in his more appreciated imaginative and devotional writings. We will see that the great medievalist was not a successful modernizer of Christianity and writer of fiction despite the fact that he spent so much time studying old, dusty books, but because of them. And this bri...

They are George MacDonald’s Phantastes, G. K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, Virgil’s Aeneid, George Herbert’s The Temple, William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell, and Arthur James Balfour’s Theism and Humanism.

For this reason, Lewis thought an ancient Roman had more in common with human beings from the eighteenth century (like, say, Samuel Johnson), indeed, even with Jane Austen, than either of them have in common with us, “because,” he explains, “the old Model still underlies their work.”30 For this reason we can loosely think of Lewis’s medieval period as the “Long Middle Ages,” which extended from Plato to Samuel Johnson, and sometimes even to Wordsworth.

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.”

This, then, was the third Lewis, the intellectual historian driven by an intense commitment to the old books, to which he clung, stubbornly resisting the rush and pull of the current of modernity. “Translating” them into a modern vernacular, as Boethius had done for classical thought in his own day, constituted his vocation.

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

Lewis develops this thought experiment of transposition in order to construct an explanatory model for how higher spiritual realities are related to lower sensible realities. As my emotions are to my physical sensations, so too is the “higher world” to the natural world of time and nature: it fills this world and makes it seem “too full,” “too dense” to not point beyond itself. This, then, is what is at stake when considering Lewis’s admiration for medieval cosmology, because for him the medieval universe was not just a system of exploded scientific beliefs, but the natural, icon of transposition, the greatest example of the spiritual world expressing itself in the limited vocabulary of the physical, natural world. And 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. It is this iconic vision of the medieval cosmos that Lewis tried to get his students and audiences to see, and feel, and breathe. 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.

We are, in a word, “anthropoperipheral”: “We are creatures of the Margin.”17

Physics is prayer in an iconic universe.20 Thus the universe is a kind of text, which inspires contemplation of the deep patterns built in by the craftsman.21 All of these orchestrated motions exist because they constitute the best possible way to make manifest the perfection of eternity.22 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 fundamental to the understanding of the medieval world.

Although most of us think of “eternity” as that which goes “on and on,” Boethius explains, we should actually call that, “perpetuity.” Perpetuity is nothing more than an endless chain of brief moments, connected together. And given that eternity, on the other hand, is the “actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life,” Boethius can call time an imitation of eternity. 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 God, of course, is not perpetual, but eternal. And so, what, in time, is spread out over an infinite number of moments, can be found gathered into a full and simultaneous perfection in God.

Lewis, having lectured on the passage for his students, was able to turn it into an imaginative world suitable for us moderns.

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. And it is for this reason that Lewis’s mind kept drifting back to cathedrals when he wanted to describe how the medieval cosmos “felt,” because, like the medieval model, the cathedral rendered a dreamlike effect, in which viewers (both now and in the medieval period) are amazed by the myriad details; struck by how, at the same time, all of these details are framed out in a larger ordered and harmonious whole; and dazzled by how the surfaces seemed saturated in light.

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. Simply look up any of the black-and-white photographs of Salisbury Cathedral, and you’ll see what I mean.46 In short, such medieval and modern experiences of the cathedral help us reconstruct the sense of awe and fullness and saturation that Lewis himself felt when contemplating the medieval model. The very world in its ordinary operation in time and space presented an experience of “anagogy,” an uplift of the heart, a sense of deep insight that comes to the threshold of worship. The world is too full, suffused by bright colors that cut and burn. Such medieval symbolism or (better) sacramentalism, as formulated in the Platonic tradition, is the key concept to hold in mind to appreciate what it felt like to “breathe” the atmosphere of the premodern world.

scholar, teacher, and writer: his ability to perform ideas, to use his imaginative talent to create a feeling in which the ideas under consideration were no longer dead opinions sitting on the dissection table of the mind, like in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, but rather made to live again. In this sense, he was a historian of psychology.

According to the fifth book of the Consolation,17 the lowest level of taking in the world is sense perception, followed by the ability to picture things within (imagination), followed by reason (ratio), which is only surpassed by intelligentia or understanding. Each one of these powers of knowing is appropriate to different kinds of creatures: the clam, for example, has sense perception but no ability to picture things to itself like the dog or cat can do. Reason is the power of human beings, and intelligentia belongs properly only to God. And yet, Boethius hints that, in rare instances, God loans this way of seeing to human beings.18 There are moments in which the human and divine horizons briefly intersect: “It is just possible even for us to climb up to the intelligential level and get a glimpse.”19 Thus, for Boethius, human beings spend most of their lives processing the world through ratio, the reason-using, argument-generating, fact-seeking rational faculty, but in exceptional moments the more elusive, intuitive, contemplative grasp—intelligentia or intellectus—opens up within and transcends ratio. In a difficult passage, Lewis explains this teaching in Boethius in terms that recall Alexander’s distinction between “enjoyment” and “contemplation.” Angels enjoyed a perfected form of intelligentia, which medieval philosophers thought of as the simple the simple and simultaneous grasp of the truth. In contrast, that so-very-human faculty of knowing, ratio, was the ploddi...

collecting philologists will always have to view the cultures they study from without, or look “at” the historical culture, but if literary scholars set themselves in the right position, they will look from within, or “breathe” it in: Anthropologists may describe to us what modern savages do; they may conjecture what our ancestors did. . . . We cannot get inside it; not directly. But if that experience had infused its quality into some other thing which we can get inside, then this other, more penetrable, thing would now be the only medium through which we can get back to the experience itself. Such a “more penetrable thing” might be provided by a work of plastic or literary art which we can still appreciate.26 As we can see, the real value of reading literature for Lewis is not extracting good moral lessons and correct opinions, but something more liberating, more capacious, more generous.

But in An Experiment in Criticism, rather than describing it in negative terms (that is, arguing that learning makes us less likely to be deceived), he describes historical knowledge—especially as experienced through literature—in the positive terms of an “extension of our being”: 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 Literature, then, creates worlds of imaginative atmosphere, with vision and weather and smell, an atmosphere we would suffocate without, and that enlarges our being when we read well. The reader, by breathing in, living in its habitat, fixing the eye of his or her heart, becomes “another self,” is “aggrandized,” “healed,” “enlarged”—in short, the reader “transcends” the lim...

And so, medieval authors wrote in the same way they built: studding their own works with remains from the past, literary borrowings analogous to the ancient columns woven into the architectural fabric of Christian basilicas.38 Nor did Lewis miss the analogy.

Similarly, when the pilgrim returns to Eden in Purgatorio 28, the poet draws on each of the senses to make a poetically saturated scene. Dante’s garden has “verdant foliage”; it is full of the soft light of early morning; the air is fragrant; there’s a gentle breeze, dancing leaves, birds “practicing their craft,” like medieval singers engaged in polyphony. There is also a stream that runs so pure that it makes “the purest here on earth” seem defiled.47 The medieval poet’s language is shifting and kaleidoscopic, just like Lewis’s. We know in fact that Lewis had this particular canto of Dante in mind when he was composing Perelandra.48 We also know that he adored medieval garden poetry. Commenting on the garden scene in Roman de la Rose, Lewis praises it as “Jean’s highest reach as a poet. No one who remembers the fatuity of most poetical attempts to describe heaven—the dull catalogues of jewelry and mass-singing—will underrate this green park, with its unearthly peace, its endless sunshine and fresh grass and grazing flocks.”49 And so, when we compare Lewis’s Perelandra passage with its “gold” and iridescence and the very failure of the “names of green and gold” to his description of the medieval poet as painter, we see how deeply the medieval mode of imitatio affected Lewis’s self-understanding of his craft. 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...

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: If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe’s Faustus, the similarity is striking. 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. . . . The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician. . . . It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required.20 All of this—the movement from an iconic cosmos to a mechanized one—is what Charles Taylor hauntingly called “excarnation.” In a past “enchan...

We prefer Hemingway to the baroque syntax of Milton. And yet, at the same time that this older English cultivated these elaborate, cosmological conventions through its high rhetoric, there was also a sense for the weightiness of everyday things: But against what seems to us this fantastic artificiality in their education we must set the fact that every boy, out of school, without noticing it, then acquired a range of knowledge such as no boy has today; farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy. This concrete knowledge, mixed with their law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology, bred an outlook very different from our own. High abstractions and rarified artifices jostled with the earthiest particulars. They would have found it very hard to understand the modern educated man who, though “interested in astronomy,” knows neither who the Pleiades were nor where to look for them in the sky.6 In a paradoxical way, language in the old world was both more abstract and more concrete. Real things, better understood and encountered on a daily basis, called forth a range of moral commitments that a mere economic object cannot. At the same time, the abstract terms possessed a weight, a density, a reality, in part because they were being “jostled” about with the “earthiest particulars.”

Different languages vary in “tone and rhythm and the very ‘feel’ of every sentence,”7 possessing their own “personalities,”8 made up of unique syntaxes, vocabularies, and rhetorical styles: “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.”9 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 human history—the linguistic world we live in is peculiarly ill-suited to spiritual desire. As Lewis puts it in The Abolition of Man, the modern world is peculiarly arid, a “desert” not a “jungle.”10 This is also what Lewis was getting at when he referred to the “evil enchantment” of modernity.

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.” As a young man, he felt the pull of the spiritual world but, raised within the intellectual confines of modernity, he had no vocabulary that would allow him to take that quiet, whispering voice seriously, to understand it as anything but nostalgia. In his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis reflects on such “enchantment”: In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. . . . The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them;. . . . they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a sp...

The two-dimensional figure doubts dimensions he cannot perceive; the witch tries to make the Narnians doubt that there even is an overworld; modernity casts a spell that makes those secret longings for a far-off country seem like mere emotions without a proper referent. Spiritual longing seems out of place in the modern world.

In contrast to Merlin is the modern, midlevel bureaucrat, whose empty, hackneyed, dead professional prose is illustrative of the mechanized cosmos, a character the Oxford professor had fun skewering on more than one occasion.

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. The language of Gumpas and other moderns, then, differs from the linguistic world of the premodern age, in that it is simultaneously less concrete and less abstract. Gumpas doesn’t believe in high abstractions (like “Virtue,” “Fate,” “Judgment”), nor in earthly realities, only in midlevel abstractions. Similarly, Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew is also depicted as having no capacity to be attentive to the harmonic chords that are building up the world before his eyes. Present to the miracle of creation, he can only assess its potential economic value. Thoughts of beauty, wonder, and valor find no soil in the dried-up language of his modern soul: “Stupendous, stupendous . . . I have discovered a world where everything is bursting with life and growth. Columbus, now, they talk about Columbus. But what was America to this? The commercial possibili...

In conclusion, the premodern approach to the universe, and the ethical systems it constructed (chivalry), are of more than historical interest. Shifts in the tectonic plates of intellectual history altered the terrain of language; and the altered linguistic landscape created a world in which spiritual longing and just sentiments had come to feel out of place. This is Lewis’s ethical defense of “Old Western”: the old way of thinking about the world helped heal the “tragic dilemma” of being human. “As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.” But Old Western, in its mythical approach to the world, provided a “partial solution” to this fragmentation, because “in the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. . . . Or, if you prefer, 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 could teach modern writers how to cast one of those “spells . . . used for breaking enchantments,” as he put it in his “Weight of Glory” sermon, adding, “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.”6 And it was Dante more than any other author who taught Lewis about how to “build” images of weight that could allude to the dynamic truth of spiritual realities. 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.

This mystical impulse—this desire to look behind the veil of this world and speculate about what is behind—made up Lewis’s spiritual DNA. Indeed, 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. And so it might come as a surprise to find the writer constantly disavowing it, pushing it away, and discouraging his friends and readers from trying to practice it. For example, in “The Weight of Glory,” after soaring to incredible heights of theological speculation, he turns back, reins himself in, and warns people about getting carried away: What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn everyone seriously not to try.6 Likewise, in The Four Loves, when Lewis finally climbs the heights to discuss divine love, he breaks off his discussion after just one paragraph: “But all that is far away in ‘the land of the Trinity,’ not here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation.”7 And, so too, in his personal letters, he often put distance b...

For the medieval mind, you could not skip to the end: you had to be religious before being spiritual.

great Dionysius takes a more cerebral approach: since God is the cause of being, he must be “above” being, and if he is above being, then there is no predicate (no attribute) that can be properly and fully applied to him. If the author of the Cloud is practical, warm, and impassioned, Dionysius is sublime, academic, brilliant, and challenging. He teaches an “apophatic theology,” that is, a negative theology, in which we review traditional divine attributes—God’s “names”—and declare them inadequate, or cancel them out, before we then super-affirm them as being true, but only in a transcendent way.

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, we’ve seen how the man who referred to himself as “the last dinosaur” felt a closer kinship with the old writers than he did with those philosophers and theologians of his own age. Throughout his personal letters, his assessments of Kierkegaard, Maritain, Tillich, Sartre, and Barth remained tepid. In a blunt assessment for Corbin Scott Carnell, he reported, As for moderns, Tillich and Brunner I don’t know at all. Maritain I tried but did not admire. He seems to say in 10 pages of polysyllabic abstraction what Scripture or the old writers wd. say in a couple of sentences. Kierkegaard still means almost nothing to me. I read one book of Niebuhr’s—I can’t remember the title—and, on the whole, reacted against it. I tried Berdyaev, but he seemed to me terribly repetitive; one paragraph wd. do for what he spins out into a book.1 And Sartre? His thought was just a recycling of idealism (“Berkeleyan metaphysic”) now “in the mind of an atheist with a bad liver!”2 And although his French prose had “a sort of wintry grandeur,” Lewis just “couldn’t see that he was a real philosopher.”3 Barth? “Barth I have never read, or not that I remember.”4 His attitude toward modern philosophers and theologians was humorously indifferent. There was one exception though: the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whom Lewis read not long after the publication of the English translation of I and Thou in 1937, even if on the first reading he had a massive allergic reaction. For a long...

And so we are not too surprised that by the 1963 Letters to Malcolm, we have this glowing summation of Buber’s thought: He reveals Himself as Person: or reveals that in Him which is Person. For—dare one say it? in a book it would need pages of qualification and insurance—God is in some measure to a man as that man is to God. The door in God that opens is the door he knocks at. . . . The Person in Him—He is more than a person—meets those who can welcome or at least face it. He speaks as “I” when we truly call Him “Thou.” (How good Buber is!).

Ordinarily, in our scientific and technological age, we think of things [and now people, too!] as “facts”: atoms obediently moving by laws of motion and changing according to chemical laws of interaction. But Buber was interested in that quality of experience—the “you” (or, to use the older intimate form, the “thou”)—in which I am overwhelmed by an experience of a person, a relationship, an encounter for which no set of facts seems adequate to explain. Lewis found this a healthy corrective to the perennial tendency in “religion” to reduce an I-Thou encounter with God into an I-It affair of the head. In Lewis’s eyes, modern spirituality was only the latest revival of a very ancient “pantheism” according to which a cerebral “principle” or “life force” pervades the world. While such a “life force” might solicit our hushed admiration and inspire our reverence, it does not irrupt into our world as a person. But Christians, unlike the noble pagans, have the awful privilege of assenting with a “will to be known” and to let ourselves be treated “in relation to God, not as things but as persons.” In a world we can “unveil” before God.10

Virgil, called the Eclogues, a series of bucolic poems about the peaceful lives of shepherds who dreamily walk about all day in the Mediterranean countryside thinking about love and drowsily singing poetry for their lovers while reclining in the shade of plane trees. But the fourth of these poems has a different tone. In that poem, Virgil briefly sets aside “humble” matters to make bold, world-historical predictions, cryptically hinting at some hoped-for Roman savior who would end the brutal period of civil wars that were shredding Virgil’s Italy.

Indeed, for Lewis, all humanity has enjoyed some portion of this divine light, even if Christianity (and Judaism) have had privileged access to it:

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. In his very conversion story, we have a reflection of his philosophy of world religion, as well as his philosophy of history. But for Lewis the story does not end at conversion. There remains a process that is peculiarly difficult in modernity, a process I will call “deep conversion” or “unveiling.”

In other words, the “disenchantment” of the cosmos was accompanied by a psychological effect, one that, as we have seen, Lewis was attentive to his whole life: the modern tendency to possess a cranky irritability about our own private, inner space. Lewis thought that in modernity human beings have a particular tendency to think of what is inside them—thoughts, dreams, feelings, emotions, desires—as a kind of inner sanctum, which they might sometimes share but is where they feel most real and authentic. Lewis thought this tendency to psychological individualism was not only peculiarly modern but presented a special obstacle to loving God, given that we are constitutionally reluctant to admit God into the inner chamber of our life, even when we are committed to living externally in a moral way. We draw a line, and want to keep our own as our own. In a fascinating essay, “A Slip of the Tongue,” Lewis sums up this reluctance to deep conversion: 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 afterwa...

Strange as it may seem, these thoughts on the nature of Platonic myth, metaphor, and the symbolic (or sacramental or iconic) nature of the cosmos form the background we need in order to understand Lewis’s rejoinder to the objection stated above that because the medieval model is not true it is now worthless. Indeed, even modern science, he argues, is compatible with the great model precisely because a new kind of metaphorical element has reentered contemporary philosophy of science’s interest in what is called “modeling” and “paradigms.” Lewis responded to his own objection—that Christianity was fatally entangled in a web of myth—with a concession followed by a strikingly brilliant argument. “I agree. It was not true,” he says, surprising us. “But I would like to end by saying that this charge can no longer have exactly the same sort of weight for us that it would have had in the nineteenth century.” In other words, although we cannot deny that we have measured more, and with greater precision, with instruments of finer calibration, and we must admit that we have discovered fundamental forces and properties that our medieval ancestors were ignorant of, it is, nevertheless, the case that the very words “know” and “truth” in the contemporary scientific community have dramatically changed.12

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.” In this way, for Lewis, the paradigm-building of contemporary physicists, who teach the curvature of space and the erratic nature of subatomic movements, has unexpected similarities with the medieval mystic, who paradoxically asserted things like, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,” as Alan of Lille put it. 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.” 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

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.”15

When we think about the beliefs of the old world—say, how Roland could not break his sword because it had become “enchanted” with holiness, or how Saint Benedict caused clay vessels bearing poison to crack when he blessed them—we are entertained, but feel a little uneasy. In modernity it is often the case that the “bodily” and the “spiritual” don’t go together well. And for this reason, Lewis thought that “probably every Christian now alive finds a difficulty in reconciling the two things he has been told about heaven—that it is . . . a life in Christ, a vision of God, a ceaseless adoration, and that it is, on the other hand, a bodily life. When we seem nearest to the vision of God in this life, the body seems almost an irrelevance.”8 But he also insisted that this sublimation of the bodily, this marriage of the material and the spiritual, is what is to come: It is not an accident that simple-minded people [in the archaic age] . . . should blend the ideas of God and Heaven and the blue sky. It is a fact, not a fiction, that light and life-giving heat do come down from the sky to Earth. The analogy of the sky’s role to begetting and of the Earth’s role to bearing is sound. . . . The huge dome of the sky is of all things sensuously perceived the most like infinity. And when God made space and worlds that move in space, and clothed our world with air, and gave us such eyes and such imaginations as we have, He knew what the sky would mean to us.9 In other words, it is no accid...

The professor of medieval literature believed that we have to own the modernity of our sentiments, our sense of “exile” from the past and from the enchanted cosmos; we can’t falsify our emotions, pretending we see and feel as those in an older age would have felt. Nevertheless, the great lover of myth desperately wanted to acknowledge that primitive human beings had got hold of some deep truth, which is not out of date:

In the age of exile—modernity—we don’t have the option of resting in an enchanted landscape, and this helps reveal to us, again, that our deepest desire is not just to witness beauty but to hold it within. Without exile, we might have been contented with too little. Thus the sentiment of nostalgia we get from reading books from the past is not necessarily misplaced, provided we understand that they are merely symptoms of a greater longing for something that has not yet come.

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. The old model was not wrong, strictly speaking, but a kind of deep, human subconscious desire for a world that, in some sense, we are meant to occupy, but not yet.

But in the best fairy tales, the happy ending is so unexpected (“never to be counted on to recur”13) that the experience could be described as “catastrophically good,” a “Eucatastrophe,” which provides us with “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”