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

by Jason M. Baxter

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.