The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis Quotes

“If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement. This is a portmanteau word and means “government by advertisement.” But my intention is not satiric; I am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness.” But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of “appeal,” “drives,” and “campaigns.” Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness.” And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them “rulers.” “Leaders” is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“When comparing the drab, modern, mechanistic world in which humans are the only intelligent agents to a world of paganism, charged with spirituality, under pressure, as it were, threatening to erupt out of the ground with irrational and exuberant joy, Lewis leaned toward the pagan. Contrast such premodern visions of exuberant joy with how Lewis described the dolorous piety of modern religion, what he called a “minimal religion” which has “nothing that can convince, convert, or (in the higher sense) console: nothing, therefore, which can restore vitality to our civilization. It is not costly enough.”2 It is, seemingly, for this reason that Bacchus keeps making unexpected appearances throughout the Narnia books.3 Bacchus is the liberator, the joy-bringer, the mirth-maker, and he shatters our frigid paradigms of religion when they become nothing more than being nice and respectable and socially responsible: “Bacchus and the Maenads—his fierce, madcap girls—and Silenus were still with them. . . . Everyone was awake, everyone was laughing, flutes were playing, cymbals clashing. Animals . . . were crowding upon them from every direction.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“But Psyche, repeating words from Lewis’s favorite poet, George Herbert, says, “you must stand up . . . Did I not tell you . . . that a day was coming when you and I would meet in my house and no cloud between us?”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“As skeptical, modern scholars, we can only smile condescendingly at such quaint medieval readings of the past, but such medieval commonplaces, irritants for modern readers, became personal, scholarly challenges to C. S. Lewis, who loved to take up and defend the most recalcitrant of old beliefs, especially when they had been obvious to everyone in the premodern world and have only become dubious to”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“We might equally well call our medieval authors the most unoriginal or the most original of men. They are so unoriginal that they hardly ever attempt to write anything unless someone has written it before. They are so rebelliously and insistently original that they can hardly reproduce a page of any older work without transforming it by their own intensely visual and emotional imagination, turning the abstract into the concrete, quickening the static into turbulent movement, flooding whatever was colorless with scarlet and gold. They can no more leave their originals intact that we can leave our own earlier drafts intact when we fair-copy them. We always tinker and (as we hope) improve. But in the Middle Ages you did that as cheerfully to other people’s work as to your own.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“Much of medieval literature is what Lewis, in one scholarly article, refers to as “traditional poetry.” Certain poems, such as the Iliad or the poems of Thomas Malory, are not individual acts of inspiration, but rather are more the works of a storyteller who, repeating the essential plot line, weaves new characters, themes, descriptions, or details into the basic outline he inherited, a kind of literary recycling. Lewis had analyzed, in particular, the Arthurian legends, which had been repeated, retold, translated, updated, and modified. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, they tended to become accumulations of the techniques and additions of all previous editions rather than a unique and unrepeatable literary vision. Lewis felt that critics in his age would dismiss an author as “derivative” and “unoriginal” who “merely” repeats what has been said before, or who does not invent his or her own personal style. But the greatest authors of the medieval period were just this: shapers, composers, and recyclers of old materials. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Malory borrowed and translated, but also mended, updated, and altered. They wrote traditional poetry in the sense that they felt it their chief task to dress old stories in new garb. In other words, by adopting this medieval conception of the art of composition, Lewis could liberate himself from the need to be “original.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“I thought I saw how stories of this kind [i.e., his Narnia stories] could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. . . . The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But suppose that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“Boethius can call time an imitation of eternity. Time, as it were, is almost a “parody” of eternity, a “hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them.”23 God, of course, is not perpetual, but eternal. And so, what, in time, is spread out over an infinite number of moments, can be found gathered into a full and simultaneous perfection in God.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“In some ways, even if the 1962 list would have puzzled Lewis’s fans, devoted to the man for his apologetics or fiction, it would not have surprised his students, or his close friends. The Oxford professor, like most academics, loved to make lists, and so enumerations of his favorite authors and books appear everywhere in his writing.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind