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

by Jason M. Baxter

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.”