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

by Jason M. Baxter

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...