“The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis” by Jason Baxter–A Book Review Series (Part 3): Dante and Mysticism

Here in Part 3 of my look at Jason Baxter’s book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, I want to take a quick look at Chapter 5, “Why Lewis Loved Dante,” and Chapter 6, “How to Pray to a Medieval God.” Let’s jump in…

Chapter 5: Why Lewis Loved Dante
I first read Dante’s Inferno back in high school. I didn’t like it. I mean, yes, it was a very imaginative and creative work, but I was a 16-year-old kid and that book was really hard to understand! On top of that, the obsession with torture seemed a bit much. And to be honest, I’ve never gotten around to reading Dante’s Purgatorio or Paradiso. Although I’ve come to appreciate him more as an adult, I don’t think Dante is ever really going to be among my favorite authors.

That being said, he clearly was one of Lewis’ favorite authors. The reason why is the focus of Baxter’s chapter. It basically has to do with the contrasting ways the medieval world and the modern world tended to view the cosmos in general and heaven in particular. Since you live in the modern world, you know full well what the general picture and assumptions regarding what heaven is like. As Baxter puts it, “…for most modern believers our image of heaven is watery, sallow, remote, shadowy, and faint. It doesn’t have any ‘weight’ or gravity or thickness (or ‘atmosphere’), and thus we often don’t feel a positive attraction to goodness” (88).

You know what that means: mellow angels floating around in heaven playing harps, almost every depiction of Jesus in every movie—where he is just so syrupy-sweet “nice,” and just so serene that there is just something about him that says, “he may look human, but he’s not…really. Look, he’s always dressed in white, and even in first century Judea, his hair is always neat with just a perfect amount of styling gel!”

To the point, in the modern world, “spiritual” always means “airy, non-material, vanilla, and boring.” You know, like watching the Lawrence Welk show for eternity!

That’s not how medieval writers depicted heavenly realities and the spiritual world—and that’s why Lewis loved them, especially Dante: “Lewis admired medieval literature because he thought the old poems admirably creative positive, heavy, sensuous images that gave weight in the imagination to elusive spiritual realities” (88). This is precisely what we see in Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, where heaven is depicted, not as less-physical/material, but more-physical, almost super-material. Simply put, heavenly glory is too weighty and “too material” for mere earthly creatures to bear. We are the shades and shallow ones. The Spiritual world isn’t less material, but more material and more sensuous and more alive.

It is that attempt to describe spiritual realities with sensuous intensity that caused Lewis to admire Dante so much. As Baxter writes, “Lewis loved Dante because he made his heaven envelop, penetrate, invade, burn, and restlessly seek to come within” (94). By doing that, Dante invested the material world with a sacramental and symbolic character. The material world was an icon of spiritual realities. It pointed to something more real and more weighty than the shallow life we experience in this creation. And for that reason, writers like Dante (and Lewis) invested the material things in this world with deeper meaning and glory, just like an actual icon, by pointing to a greater reality, is not only beautiful in and of itself, but takes on that “weight of glory” of heaven that penetrates into our world.

One final thing to note about what Baxter says in this chapter. It has to do with the medieval concept of evil and hell. In the modern world, not only are “heavenly” and “spiritual” things often depicted in a vanilla-like manner, but more sinful things are depicted as highly sensuous, alluring, and attractive. I mean, when have you ever scene a priest portrayed as fully alive and embracing all the joys of life? Probably never. By contrast, how many villains are portrayed going to parties, enjoying fine wine and sumptuous food? Sure, that guy owns a strip club and sells drugs out the back door, but wouldn’t you rather be at the club enjoying a few drinks and dancing than with that pasty-looking priest back in an empty church, pretending that “Highway to Heaven” and “Touched by an Angel” are actually good shows? Please!

Now, the truth is that to an extent the more “naughty” way of life can be seductive. But in the modern world, it is almost portrayed as the real positive good. Sure, every band member of said rock band ended up in rehab, and sure the bass player over-dosed and died, but man, wouldn’t you love to live the rock star life just for a little bit? In a way, come to think of it, the modern mindset is pretty nihilistic, which is ironic because, as Baxter points out, “in medieval thought, pure evil is the same as nothingness, it’s like absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. [By contrast] ultimate happiness is, rather, ontological fullness. Pure concentrated joy. The simultaneous possession of the fullness of life. Such fullness makes evil deeds—which seem so threatening, enticing, alluring, and enchanting—seem pathetic and almost nonexistent by contrast” (98).

In other words, the medieval world saw through the allurement of sin and evil to what it really is—nothing. It was able to do that because it had a firm grasp on the “weight of glory” and the solidness and Spirit-empowered physicality of heavenly realities. Having that firm grasp made it easier to see the shallowness of sin and evil for what it really is. By contrast, the modern world, by caricaturing spiritual things as airy, non-material, and, well, boring, cannot see through the allurement of sin and evil, because it has no grip on what really is real. The “valley of the shadow of death” is home; it’s not something one passes through. And that’s the tragedy of the modern world.

Chapter 6: How to Pray to a Medieval God
Although the title of this chapter is “How to pray to a Medieval God,” it really is an extension of the previous chapter’s main point that this world is a shadowy icon of the weightier reality of heaven. Baxter begins with a brief discussion of parts of Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, particularly moments in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” and “The Last Battle” where characters realize that the New Narnia is a “more real” and “more solid” version of the old Narnia. It gets to the heart of Christian mysticism: “the quest to seek out that for which we barely have a name, to encounter God in the fullness of his glory, at the center of my heart” (102). For Lewis, the whole essence of the Christian life was a matter of turning “from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain” (102).

Or, if I can put it this way, it is about becoming “more real,” about becoming fully human image-bearers of God in a renewed and redeemed creation. And that involves going on a spiritual journey and maturing and growing in the process.

Unfortunately (and Baxter briefly mentions this), the modern Evangelical version of Christianity often reduces Christianity to a matter of moral rule-keeping, as if the entire goal God has for us is to be good little boys and girls. A child, precisely because he is childish and immature, might think, “I’m a good boy because I cleaned up my room when mommy told me to.” But an adult knows that cleaning up one’s room doesn’t make one “good.” Cleaning up one’s room is evidence that a person is a more mature, more responsible human being. And more mature and responsible people don’t need to be told to do certain things—they don’t need certain “rules”—because they are mature and responsible enough to do the right things.

That is why most people don’t really have to worry about many of the laws that are on the books. You can legalize all hard drugs, I’m still not going to take them. Certain laws and rules are there to keep immature and irresponsible people in line and to prevent them from harming others. That is why an obsession with rules and morality often says more about the people obsessing over them than it does about God and Christianity itself.

That is why, as Baxter says, “Indeed, for both Lewis and Dante, the Christian life culminates in something higher than morality. At the highest level of spiritual perfection, there is a kind of play, a joyful unfolding of freedom” (102).

Of course, there is a danger in saying that, because what it isn’t saying is that morality isn’t important. In fact, Lewis warns about the polar opposite of obsessing with moral rule-keeping in his book, The Screwtape Letters, where Screwtape recommends to Wormwood to keep Christians distracted with a fuzzy kind of “mystical thinking.” Basically, “Make him a mystic, and land him in hell.”

The funny, but sad, thing is that you find many Christians who display this fuzzy, amorphous version of Christianity as well. They’re all about “being spiritual” but frown at all forms of traditional Church practices. I have a few former friends from graduate school who really got into this “being spiritual without being religious” mindset and it was sad to see. But Lewis believed that was just a foolish canard. You can’t skip to the end and achieve illumination without first going through the steps of purification that inevitably come in one’s spiritual journey. As Baxter says, “…there are moral and spiritual stages of growth, which one must proceed through in the right order: Purification must precede illumination; and illumination precedes unity. For the medieval mind, you could not skip to the end; you had to be religious before being spiritual” (105).

In the rest of the chapter, Baxter talks about apophatic theology and how to grow in one’s Christian walk one must “enter into the cloud of unknowing” to encounter God in a deeply personal way. Again, “Medieval authors knew that the ultimate goal of the Christian life was not ethical, but to come to the point at which one loves God freely and unbounded” (105). Of course, as we’ve already said, “entering the cloud of unknowing,” at least to modern ears,” easily can take the form of embracing a fuzzy kind of mysticism where one “experiences an indwelling principle” or “spiritual force.”

As Baxter discusses, Lewis, taking his cue from Medieval writers like Dante, would have none of that. The purpose of “entering into the cloud of unknowing” isn’t to experience some impersonal spiritual force or principle, but to encounter the highly personal God of the universe. You are seeking to know a Who, not a what. Again, you are seeking to know a weightier personal presence—no, that isn’t good enough—a more real Person, not just experience some impersonal spiritual feeling.

To illustrate Lewis’ understanding of mysticism, Baxter ends his chapter by discussing a scene in Prince Caspian involving Lucy and Aslan that was at both “other-worldly” and intensely personal at the same time. Lucy was given a mystical glimpse of the reality that was beyond the present world, but it only lasted a moment—such is the case with mysticism. As long as we live in this old creation, our glimpses of the world to come and heavenly realities, however intense and powerful, only last for a brief moment. As Baxter writes, [Mysticism] “…is a blend of the terrible, the awful, the profound, and the transcendent; but also the unexpectedly down-to-earth, the homely, the personal, the lovingly intimate. But in the end, it is not to last for long. Such mystical encounters are sweet but brief” (118).

And I’ll only add that if you’ve and a mystical encounter, it isn’t something you really are in a hurry to describe to people…unless it is by some creative or artistic means.

And that is why Lewis loved Dante. The creative opened the gate to the mystical.