The Medieval Mind Of C. S. Lewis

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 C. S. Lewis was divinely inspired. In a broader sense, God gave him the ability to draw inspiration from his surroundings, including older literature on the nature of the world. His perspective is a fusion of many, and by studying how those ancient lenses affected Lewis, Jason M. Baxter sets out to deepen our understanding of Lewis’ works. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis (How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind) speaks to the broader beliefs Lewis held as a result of his personal literary experience, while also offering distinct examples of how Lewis directly adapted systems from ancient texts into his work, the works of Dante and Boethius being of particular note.

Lewis once stated that a cathedral is a paradoxical juxtaposition of astonishing variety, meticulous order, and a saturation of light. He said this when comparing a cathedral to the broader landscape of medieval literature, with the definition of Medieval synthesis completing the analogy. Medieval Synthesis is the idea that every Medieval work contains a harmony of theology, science, and the developing history people were learning and experiencing at the time of writing. He also referred to that harmony as an intellectual atmosphere, and he said that cultivating/protecting the memory of that atmosphere was a task that Boethius concerned himself with. Lewis felt a kinship with Boethius because he, too, wished to preserve the past atmosphere.

Another of Lewis’s thoughts that Baxter focuses on is this: a truly vivid work of art forms as a result of an author pouring emotion and effort into the pages, so much so that it overflows, and though the reader can still only see the beauty within the pages, there are hints as to the even deeper perspectives and meaning that the author does not explicitly imply. Just so, the world around us is so vibrant because God poured as much character and substance into the world and its inhabitants that it hints at the overflow that awaits in heaven, and at his inner qualities that are not explicitly stated in the beauty of an icy fjord or a serene forest.

In a 1956 lecture, Lewis challenges his audience to look up at the stars, trying to force them to adopt the pre-Copernican view. He explains that when a medieval person looked up at the starry sky, they did not see an infinite abyss, but instead felt it as both finite and even pushing down on us. This is because, if space is finite, the stars are at a distance more like a height, and that finite distance makes their presence tangibly felt. Lewis states that this is a good exercise because the Newtonian idea gives you little choice but to be somber in the face of scale, as there is nothing else to be done about the knowledge. A stagnant idea cannot answer new questions.

Baxter then discusses Lewis's borrowing this idea from Boethius about the difference between perpetuity and eternity, seeing eternity as more fulfilling—the reality the imperfect world strives for—while perpetuity is hollow, with no vivid shifts in state of mind. In The Allegory of Love, Lewis discusses the symbolist philosophy: for the symbolist, we humans are the allegory, not the characters in our books. What we view as reality is as two-dimensional to God as books are to us.

Baxter uses the creation scene in The Magician’s Nephew as an example of Lewis’s belief in the symphony of creation showing up in his writing. Baxter then uses a scene in That Hideous Strength as another example of Boethius’s touch on Lewis, contrasting the spiritual enlightenment of Ransom and Merlin in the room above with the strong, merely earthly experiences and desires born of man's thought that are present in the summoning of the Oyarses below.

A medieval writer cited by Lewis, Jean de Jandun, wrote that he was not overwhelmed by the beauty of Notre Dame, but rather in awe over the many ways in which it is beautiful, as well as describing each surface of the cathedral as saturated by those who have viewed it throughout history, full of meaning to the point of excess.

Lewis states that the most underappreciated aspect of literature is atmosphere; a text cannot be complete without a distinct character in the setting. This is why he dislikes The Three Musketeers: the atmosphere is negligible and the setting is bland. In a letter to an admirer, he calls the substance of a setting the “thing.” He believes in the literary pursuit of isolating and harnessing the idea of atmosphere.

Lewis defines the hidden element within a text as the “Kappa Element,” or hidden element. In his own work, the kappa element goes as deep as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe being the atmosphere of Jupiter, The Last Battle as Saturn, and The Magician’s Nephew of Venus, with each of the books causing the growth within the characters of each of the qualities magnified by the corresponding seven Oraynes in That Hideous Strength.

Baxter then moves on to talking about Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy once more, how, in the fifth book, he sets out this hierarchy: the lowest form is sense (perception); next, the ability to picture what is within (imagination); followed by reason (ratio), which is itself only surpassed by intelligentia (pure understanding). Boethius then states that intelligentia can only be possessed by humans by the gift of God. All of these distinctions are present within multiple of Lewis’s sermons.

The Medieval Mind contains multiple quotes from the final pages of An Experiment in Criticism, published near the end of Lewis’s life in 1961. “What then is the good of–what is even the defense for–occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing the inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist-on Dante’s earthly paradise, Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles, Chaucer’s or Spencer’s Lady Nature, or the Mariner’s skeleton ship?” “Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others, Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.” “But in reading great literature I become a thousand men yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed 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?”

Next, Baxter discusses how many scholars dismiss each new rendition of the Arthurian legends as unoriginal or of lesser importance than prior renditions, but C. S. Lewis viewed them differently. He thought of it like a snowball rolling down the hill, growing in size and shape. Each new iteration may not have included any massive changes, but over time, the story has become a true testament to literary accomplishment, consistently interpreting chivalrous themes. His approval of this medieval tradition of refinement, or imitatio, freed up his own writing from the pressure of being “Original,” leading to works like Till We Have Faces, which is a modern version of an imitatio that is instead called a modernus, or a story framework generated by studying an exemplary writer from the past. Macrobius, in his anthology of the ancients, Saturnalia, stated that his work was like a conductor bringing together a chorus of unique voices to create a unified theme, a view later embraced by medieval authors. In Lewis’s essay, Morte d’Arthur, he likened reading these anthologies to admiring Wells Cathedral, “a work of art upon which multiple generations labored, which no man foresaw or intended as it now is.” An example of this is the thoughts of Ransom upon first seeing Perelandra, which are in colorful imitation of Dante’s Purgatorio Canto Seven. Both passages feature kaleidoscopic detail. We know that these similarities were a conscious decision because Lewis stated as such.

Quote from Lewis’ Abolition of Man: “We do not look at trees weather as Dyads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spencer may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars have lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.” Then, the same chapter quickly dives into how much Lewis hated cars. “The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it 'annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation, pilgrimage, and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.” In That Hideous Strength, there is a section about the college allowing industrialism to destroy a garden within Bracton College, disrupting the stream of peace that galvanized contemplation. This was a voicing of his fears, the mechanical threats to Cambridge.

The next passage of Medieval Mind discusses one of the medieval authors, Calcidius, who thought that the moon was a unique, mysterious cause of lunacy and the boundary between earth and ether, whereas Galileo revealed that the moon was just another rock hurtling through space. The Newtonian revelation that planetary elliptical orbits were merely gravity causing planets to “fall” in circles was also in stark contrast to Cicero and Boethius’ view that planets were propelled through the sky by an outpouring of love from God. Newton also shattered the concept of the cosmos of transposition, a powerful idea that translated the harmonic ordering of time and space into a deep metaphorical method of perceiving eternity. All of these advancing ideas, though true, contributed to the stunting of celestial awe, just as industrial inventions lessened the impact of the unsurpassed power of the natural processes God designed. As Steven Weinberg said: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more pointless it also seems.” There was another metaphorical loss during the time of Galileo, caused by Shapin. “Only some of our ideas of bodies might now be treated as objective…. Other experiences and ideas would now have to be regarded as subjective–the result of our sensory apparatus actively processing impressions serving from the real, primary realm.” Essentially, some sensations that humans feel are fabrications of the mind. The most commonly known examples of this are that water is not wet and that fire does not exist, but is instead the human way of visualizing thermal reactions, so that we may avoid them. Suddenly, “microchemical reality took precedence over common experience, and subjective experience was severed from accounts of existence.” So humanity was forced to reckon with a world that is, in actuality, flavorless, odorless, and colorless —simply a series of interlocking microstructures whose various mathematical extensions and motions form the fictional sensation. In the first chapter of Lewis’ English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, talking about the willful suspension of judgments of value, stripping nature of qualitative in favor of quantitative. Lewis goes as far as to state that modern science and magic are identical in that in the pursuit of both, they make “the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return.” He even states that repentance of science must be considered. Then, the author gives another quote from The Abolition of Man: “At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the universe. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colors, smells, sounds, and tastes, finally solidity itself…. As these items are drawn from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account, where they are classified as our sensations, thoughts, images, or emotions. Each Subject becomes gorged and inflated at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method that has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves.”

This is an extension that Jason Baxter offers: “Medieval people spoke of the rock falling as desiring, longing to return to its natural place, like a pigeon flying back to its nest by homing instinct. In this way, the medieval cosmos, saturated with presence and soul, was densely alive and exerted a moral pull on the mind. It was an orchestra.” Lewis summed all of these concepts as a narrowing of the definition, “reason.” The concept has shrunk from a complex interplay of Intellectus and Ratio to the power by which one separates one proposition from another. The gap is bigger than that which separated Egypt and Greece, and Rome from Dark Age England.

A quote from Lewis’ “Dante’s Similes,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature: “I think Dante’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do. There is a curious feeling that the great poem is writing itself, or at most, the tiny figure of the poet is merely giving the gentlest guiding touch, here, and there, to energies which, for the most part, spontaneously group themselves and perform the delicate evolutions which make up the Comedy.” In essence, Lewis is saying that to write poetry in Medieval times, you would simply have to organize the current scientific view into verse. In his sermon “Weight of Glory,” Lewis said: “You and I have need for the strongest of spells that can wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.” Dante taught Lewis the “Counterspell” for the “Evil Enchantment” of modernity. In his three most important scholarly works, Lewis refers to Dante around seventy times, including his prior and lesser-known work, Vita Nuova, talking about its “sensual intensity about things not sensual.” One of Lewis’ most peculiar undertakings was counting and categorizing every simile and metaphor in the last eleven canto of Paradiso. “There are three images and metaphors that refer to smells; two images for pressing seals into wax; two metaphors borrowed from the life of the student; four images that use the metaphor of sleep and waking to describe a reaction to heavenly phenomenon. Then there are five images of children, mainly nursing infants, and only seven metaphors that refer to marriage or erotic love. On the other hand, surprisingly, there are also seven metaphors to “weighing” or “weight.” Lewis’s favorite image slash simile of all time is in Paradiso 25, “When Dante is being examined by Saint James on the virtue of hope, the pilgrim, like a student taking a very difficult oral exam, looks up in search of comfort and encouragement from his professor. The poet describes this gaze as similar to when one looks up at nearby mountains, which do not just seem high, by dizzying, exerting weight merely by being so high.” Dante finds the holiness of the Saints post-glorification in death to be greater than the mass of a mountain. Baxter postulates that this was on the mind of Lewis in his famous sermon “Weight of Glory” on 2 Corinthians 4:17. Back to counting. There are nine images of clothing, including Adam swaddled like in a blanket. There are also nine metaphors that refer to being bound by rope, as well as nine metaphors of smiling, laughter, and even wounds, such as how “love bites only with many teeth”, each. Then, he talks about the twelve metaphors of opening and closing things, the sixteen zoological metaphors, twenty-four for weather —such as dawn, dew, sunrises, and plentiful rain —twenty-four more images for civic functions, twenty-five images of light and heat, and twenty-five images of plants and vegetation. These metaphors are why Lewis describes reading Paradiso  as a “Spacious gliding movement, like a slow dance.” They made heaven envelop, penetrate, invade, burn, and restlessly seek to come within. Dante’s imagination, within the story, when he sees all the saints he spoke of their spiritual radioactivity commingled in one place, floundered, racing between collections of flowers, one rose, a city, an orderly marching army, then just the petals of a white rose, before we soon hear of sparks leaping out to on flowers that are like rubies inscribed with gold, before the sparks are inebriated by flowering odors and they plunge back into the river. Then, he states that he saw all of this vision like a hill reflected in a body of water at the base. Each saint individually outdoes the entire old celestial order.

Lewis adapted Dante’s descriptive plasticity in The Great Divorce, with the novel's beginning giving a sense of déjà vu similar to that of The Inferno. Upon arrival in heaven in the novel, we also experience déjà vu regarding Paradiso. George MacDonald replaces Virgil, and Sarah Smith, the ordinary housewife, enters in a procession similar to Beatrice in Purgatorio 29.

Baxter gets into Lewis’s expression of the danger of mysticism, that is, settling for mere numinous sensation. By turning God into a principle of happiness, you remove the personality that makes a relationship with him possible. To be spiritual, you must first grow in faith and understanding regarding God’s mystery, not just immediately grasping for a vague sense of righteousness. There is also the discussed idea of negative theology: the claim that words for divine attributes are inadequate, super-affirming them as not true while pointing to a transcendental idea. Baxter then discusses the apophatic tradition of cold awe evident in Perelandra. Then he discusses cataphatic theology, focusing on the heaviness and “fast motionlessness” of the spirit that permeates all. The passage reaches its climax in the paradox of acknowledging the truth of both cataphatic and apophatic theology. Cusanus speaks of the universe as an infinite set of micro-infinities, drawing on emerging contemporary mathematical ideas to reckon with the paradox, combining cataphatic and apophatic ideas. One of Lucy’s encounters with Aslan is an example of how these ponderings relate to C.S. Lewis’s process, as it contains those disparate elements of cold awe and childlike engagement.

Baxter presents another of C. S. Lewis’s analyses of Dante, including the poet Stasius being portrayed by Dante as a Christian, and shows it to be a manifestation of Praeparatio Evangelica. Baxter then digs into a deep-seated fear of C. S. Lewis that God has to overcome: the fear that his inner sanctum of the mind would be interfered with. Prior to gaining understanding, Lewis was afraid of the idea that no thought was his alone. The solution is to separate earthly identity from true purpose, making it possible to love God for God’s sake, as that was the true reason for which our soul was created. Then, Baxter concludes this train of thought by discussing how the ending of Till We Have Faces is an imitation of Purgatorio’s ending, and how they both represent how to unveil oneself. That process of unveiling oneself is praying in the presence of angels, heralding the imminent righteousness of God.

In Chapter Eight, Modern Science and Medieval Myth, Baxter discusses Lewis’s debates with atheists who looked down on early Christianity's belief in the ancient cosmological model. Lewis ultimately sees all “models” as metaphors and untrue, yet all equally valuable in regard to that which they represent (No model is a fantasy, and no model is a catalog of reality). Then, the passage goes on to demonstrate this in how Lewis’s Space Trilogy explores the blending of old and new thought, with modern science allowing Ransom to glimpse a universe that is decidedly Medieval in nature. In the conclusion of this chapter, Baxter presents this as a testament to C. S. Lewis's open-mindedness in theorizing how alternative intelligent lifeforms could fit into a biblical philosophy.

The conclusion of Medieval Mind includes many quotes from Lewis’s most famous essay, The Weight of Glory. The conclusion as a whole summarizes the discussion of Medieval cosmology. In particular, it emphasizes that the old cosmology was what Lewis believed to be the future, and that the current understanding of the universe is an intermediary phase before a return to the numinous state of the Medieval Cosmos.

The Chase Verdict is that The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis displays all the ideas above and more, with many further examples and strong logic. However, the novel as a whole is not particularly condensed, and this article is more time-efficient than the full read.