The long, Platonic tradition, then, taught Lewis two things: to see the world as a symphony but always to take this symphony (or cathedral) as a symbol or sacrament or transposition, which gestures at something beyond. The world itself is but a sketchy translation of a poem that no one has ever heard. And it is for this reason that Lewis’s mind kept drifting back to cathedrals when he wanted to describe how the medieval cosmos “felt,” because, like the medieval model, the cathedral rendered a dreamlike effect, in which viewers (both now and in the medieval period) are amazed by the myriad
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