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

by Jason M. Baxter

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