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

by Jason M. Baxter

We can pose questions about the simple, underlying levels of reality and get answers with predictive power, but our answers do not help us get at the essence of what’s happening at the deeper levels. Our observations make up mere “models.” In this way, for Lewis, the paradigm-building of contemporary physicists, who teach the curvature of space and the erratic nature of subatomic movements, has unexpected similarities with the medieval mystic, who paradoxically asserted things like, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,” as Alan of Lille put it. In this way, both the medieval mystic and the modern physicist hint, gesture, suggest at what is beyond ordinary thinking. The modern physicist believes that the closest we can get to the “real thing” is mathematical approximations. Everything else is merely an analogy. In this way, Lewis contested, modern scientists have returned to using “parables,” being unable to speak about ultimate reality apart from making “models.” It was from modern physicists, then, that Lewis borrowed the term, “Model,” which he used to refer to the medieval cosmic imaginary. But, he insisted, it would be a mistake to think of these as smaller reduplications such as scaled-down model ships or airplanes. Rather, the model of the physicist (as well as the medieval theologian) merely “suggests.” It does not represent.13