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

by Jason M. Baxter

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...