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

by Jason M. Baxter

According to the fifth book of the Consolation,17 the lowest level of taking in the world is sense perception, followed by the ability to picture things within (imagination), followed by reason (ratio), which is only surpassed by intelligentia or understanding. Each one of these powers of knowing is appropriate to different kinds of creatures: the clam, for example, has sense perception but no ability to picture things to itself like the dog or cat can do. Reason is the power of human beings, and intelligentia belongs properly only to God. And yet, Boethius hints that, in rare instances, God loans this way of seeing to human beings.18 There are moments in which the human and divine horizons briefly intersect: “It is just possible even for us to climb up to the intelligential level and get a glimpse.”19 Thus, for Boethius, human beings spend most of their lives processing the world through ratio, the reason-using, argument-generating, fact-seeking rational faculty, but in exceptional moments the more elusive, intuitive, contemplative grasp—intelligentia or intellectus—opens up within and transcends ratio. In a difficult passage, Lewis explains this teaching in Boethius in terms that recall Alexander’s distinction between “enjoyment” and “contemplation.” Angels enjoyed a perfected form of intelligentia, which medieval philosophers thought of as the simple the simple and simultaneous grasp of the truth. In contrast, that so-very-human faculty of knowing, ratio, was the ploddi...