“The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis”–A Book Review Series (Part 1)

Well, it’s June, so I’d better get back in my blog-writing routine! I want to start off this month by writing a short 2-3 post book review series on Jason M. Baxter’s recent book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. Lewis has always been one of my favorites, and it was his Mere Christianity that played a pivotal role in my spiritual journey. Having grown up in an Evangelical Christian home and attending an Evangelical Christian high school, it was after my junior year in high school that I started really questioning my faith. It was Lewis’ Mere Christianity (and Sting’s Dream of the Blue Turtles!) that started me down a new spiritual path in my Christian life. Later on in life, after I had become Orthodox, I had the chance to teach Mere Christianity to high school students when I was still teaching in an Evangelical school. I remember thinking at that time, as an Evangelical-turned-Orthodox-40-year-old Christian, “Man, I know Lewis was Anglican, but that guy was ORTHODOX!”

In any case, I came across Baxter’s book by chance on Amazon last year. I got the book, and over the past two months, as I finished the school year and tried to deal with all the post-tornado stuff I had to deal with, I had quite the enjoyable read. All in all, it is a pretty short book—165 pages. But if you want to better understand where Lewis was coming from in all his famous books, from Mere Christianity, The Four Loves, The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces, and The Narnia Chronicles, you will find Baxter’s book a goldmine of insight.

So, what I want to do in these 2-3 posts is simply walk you through Baxter’s eight chapters and highlight what he points out about Lewis and his decidedly medieval perspective. And that really is the point of Baxter’s book. Even though Lewis lived in the first half of the 20^th century, in the emerging “modern world,” he was thoroughly unimpressed with the “modern” mindset and worldview. By contrast, Lewis was deeply influenced and shaped by the medieval worldview. As Baxter writes in his introduction, “The professor of medieval literature had so much sympathy with the old order and its slow way of life that he felt he spiritually belonged to a generation he had not been born into. He wasn’t just a scholar of the Long Middle Ages, but a resident” (16).

So, what does that mean? Let’s find out.

Chapter One: The Lost Cathedral—The Medieval Cosmos
The first thing Baxter touches upon is Lewis’ love for the “medieval synthesis” of the world. One of the defining characteristics of the medieval man, as Lewis points out, is the impulse to organize, systematize, and codify things into an over-arching concept of reality. Whether it be the tremendous architectural achievements of medieval cathedrals, Thomas Aquinas’ work Summa Theologica, or Dante’s Divine Comedy, medieval man longed to organize all the specific details in life into a unifying whole. It is something Lewis called, a “finely ordered multiplicity.”

Now, one of the biggest misconceptions of the Middle Ages was that it was one of irrational superstition and ignorance—an age that wasn’t thoroughly unscientific. As Rodney Stark has convincingly showed in many of his works (The Triumph of Christianity being my favorite), such a view is perhaps the most irrational and ignorant caricature of all. In reality, it was the Middle Ages that gave birth to what eventually became the scientific revolution. The difference in the medieval scientific outlook and the modern scientific outlook is this: medieval man sought to understand and integrate scientific discoveries within a larger philosophical and theological framework of telos and purpose; modern man has largely divorced science from the realms of philosophy and theology, and thus has largely denied the very notion of telos and purpose within the natural world.

For example, granted, the medieval understanding of the cosmos and space was not advanced as our modern understanding—that shouldn’t be surprising, for our modern understanding stands on the shoulders of those medieval scholars. We shouldn’t think that Einstein and Hubble were necessarily smarter than medieval scholars—if they had lived in the 14^th century, it’s a very good bet that Einstein and Hubble would have been “doing science” and coming to similar explanations as those medieval scholars at the time. Intellectual ability doesn’t properly articulate the difference between the medieval world and modern world. The key difference is that the medieval world was always striving to fit the specifics of scientific discoveries into a larger pattern of reality that included philosophy and theology, whereas the modern world tends to limit scientific discoveries to the details of those scientific discoveries, without any consideration of philosophy or theology.

One could argue that such an endeavor is ultimately impossible, for, as we are seeing today, claims of “science” are being used by those who are promoting obvious philosophical and theological ideologies. The idea that one can divorce “science” from philosophy and theology is proving to be an absolute canard. Science always is being fitted into someone’s larger philosophical/theological worldview. But that is another issue…back to the Baxter’s book!

The way medieval scholars sought to illustrate the telos, purpose, and unity of the universe was by talking about it in the language of the music of the spheres. That was their way of stressing the conviction that that there was some ultimate unifying factor to all of creation. For you Star Wars fans, think of it kind of like “The Force” that unites and binds all living things together! Only, medieval scholars characterized that unifying concept as music—a cosmic symphony in which all the specific details of life contributed to the overall “symphony” of God’s created order. By the same token, medieval scholars saw the entire cosmos as cathedral, in which everything, when properly seen within God’s will and purpose, gave glory to God.

In that aspect, every specific detail in the created order ultimately was an image of eternity. This is precisely what many Greek philosophers taught: “The universe is a kind of text, which inspires contemplation of the deep patterns built in by the craftsman” (28).  It is a copy, albeit an imperfect one, of eternity. The created order, in and of itself, is sort of a sacrament of a greater reality of eternity.

Thus, as Baxter points out, the medieval concept of the cosmos impacted Lewis in two ways: (1) It saw the world as a symphony or cathedral, and (2) it saw this “world symphony” or “world cathedral” as pointing to a reality that was ultimately beyond itself. You can see these things all throughout, not just Lewis’ fictional works, but also in the works of Tolkien and many others. Indeed, it is something so embedded in our humanity, it can be seen, in varying degrees, in almost every creative work. No matter how much the modern world tries to deny the reality of God, eternity, and the divine, our very creativity that comes into play in our attempt to understand reality undercuts that modern notion and, in actuality, hearkens back to the very medieval concept of reality having a telos and purpose that Lewis was so influenced by.

Chapter Two: Breathing Narnian Air
In the second chapter of Baxter’s book, he talks about the purpose of literature itself and the medieval concept of different ways of knowing. When it comes to reading fiction, good fiction doesn’t just convey information, it “creates worlds in which we are immersed, move around within, as if traveling through a variegated landscape, where we ‘hear’ and ‘breath in’ ideas that in other contexts, were merely academic opinions” (37). In other words, good literature helps us see and understand reality in a way that cold, academic analysis can never do.

This is something that one of Lewis’ major medieval influences, Boethius, emphasized in his works, namely that there is “a hierarchy of psychological powers of perception” (40). The lowest level of perception is that of mere sense perception—just taking in what your senses give you. The middle level of perception is that of imagination—the ability to picture things within your own mind. This is followed by the ability to reason. The highest level of perception, though, according to Boethius, is one of intelligentia, or understanding. A clam has only sense perception; a dog or cat can picture things in a way a clam cannot; a human being has the ability to reason in a way a dog or cat can’t; but a true understanding of reality, how it all fits together into the whole, belongs only to God. Still, there are moments where human reason and divine understanding can intersect and overlap, where human beings, in their contemplation of the rational world are given a glimpse of that greater pattern and reality. And those moments are a gift from God.

This brings us back to the purpose of literature. It doesn’t just convey facts. It helps us see things in a different way. Good literature invites contemplation of deeper realities that go beyond just the facts and figures of this world.  And on that point, Lewis emphasizes something that every Christian (and non-Christian!) moralizer needs to take to heart. Now, one of my “beefs” with so much of modern “Christian” literature, music, and entertainment is that most of it comes across as so trite, shallow, and moralistic—as if the entire message is essentially, “Be good boys and girls!” Thus, it presents Christianity as nothing more than promoting “good morals.” In that respect, much of modern “Christian” art is nothing more than shallow, moralistic propaganda. It sacrifices true creativity and insight for oversimplistic moralizing.

This kind of thing is exactly what Lewis complained about as well when he talked about how good literature wasn’t about “teaching morality,” but rather about an “extension of our being.” Good literature “creates worlds of imaginative atmosphere, with vision and weather and smell, an atmosphere we would suffocate without, and that enlarges our being when we read well” (44). In other words, it doesn’t “convey facts” and “promotes morals” as it invites contemplation and wonder and opens up ourselves to that intelligentia. It’s the difference between the Star Wars universe, the Narnian universe, and Tolkien’s Middle Earth, on one hand, and crap like Battlefield Earth, The Twilight Series, or The Golden Compass…and yes, The Left Behind Series.

How does this relate to the medieval mindset that influenced Lewis so much? Well, whether it is Narnia, or Middle Earth, or George Lucas’ Star Wars, all great literature ultimately builds on traditions that come before it. And that is something that was part of what Baxter calls the “medieval apprenticeship tradition.” Great literature, however original in and of itself, nevertheless builds upon traditions that precede it. Great literature causes the reader to recognize those great traditions and (I would argue) those intelligentia concepts of reality within great original works of art and literature. Great literature provides new insights into very old, traditional perceptions of reality. Great literature builds upon what has been before and what has stood the test of time.

In the conclusion to chapter two, Baxter emphasizes the following about Lewis’ respect for medieval tradition: “The important thing was not necessarily inventing or concocting in an original style, but to renew, recycle, enliven the original, so that the old vision would be credible to those who livin in an incredulous age. The artist’s duty (just like the scholar’s) is to render atmosphere, so that one can breathe the air of the original” (51).

There is much wisdom in that. Alright, in my next post later this weekend, I will continue my brief jaunt through The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.