'The Discarded Image' Commentary - Part Two: The Backcloth of Ideas
A Survey of C.S. Lewis's Final Book
Prof. Lewis devotes the second chapter of his book to making some necessary clarifications both regarding the Medieval Model itself and his own approach to it. I must imitate him by doing the same regarding my approach: I do not propose to do a thorough, chapter-by-chapter, point-by-point examination of Lewis. I’m not intellectually equipped for that, and by that point you’d be much better off just reading him. Instead, I’ll be following along and only commenting on whatever seems to me particularly interesting or jogs ideas from my mind.
And this chapter gets into some very interesting territory.
The Middle Ages, like most ages, were full of change and controversy. Schools of thought rose, contended, and fell. My account of what I call the Medieval Model ignores all this: ignores even the great change from a predominantly Platonic to a predominantly Aristotelian outlook and the direct conflict between Nominalists and Realists. It does so because these things, however important for the historian of thought, have hardly any effect on the literary level. The Model, as regards those elements in it which poets and artists could utilise, remained stable.
Lewis then notes that the Medieval Model far outlived what historians describe as the Middle Ages, being still in full force at the time of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, and not being completely abandoned until near the end of the 1600s (symbolically fitting, as this would have been around the time of the fall of James II and the end of Medieval kingship). And, of course, elements of it persisted as tropes long afterwards due to the influence of those authors (see, for instance, Gilbert & Sullivan). They didn’t really die out in that capacity until the 20th century.
Here Lewis makes, to my mind, one of the most important points of the book: the distinction between ideas as present in the mind of a philosopher or scientist and ideas in the mind of an artist or layperson.
In every period the Model of the Universe which is accepted by the great thinkers helps to provide what we may call a backcloth for the arts. But this backcloth is highly selective. It takes over from the total Model only what is intelligible to a layman and only what makes some appeal to imagination and emotion. Thus our own backcloth contains plenty of Freud and little of Einstein. The medieval backcloth contains the order and influences of the planets, but not much about epicycles and eccentrics. Nor does the backcloth always respond very quickly to great changes in the scientific and philosophical level.
We will return to the idea of the ‘backcloth for the arts’ presently. For now, note the point (self-evident when you think about it) that a layman’s idea of science is not, in fact, going to be the same thing as what a scientist or great thinker says about it, for the simple reason that the layman’s mind doesn’t have the same definitions, the same connective tissue, or the same assumptions as the Great Thinker’s does. Their ideas may have the same label, but they will be found, on examination, to not be the same thing. ‘Evolution’ is going to mean something very different to an actual biologist from what it means to a junior software engineer with a Darwin fish bumper sticker.
Dr. Johnson makes a similar point in one of his political essays, in which he reminds his readers that there is a very marked difference between a political model or theory and the actual experience of practical politics; the written law as intended is never going to be the same as the law in practice. In the same way, the conclusions of the scientist never survive their journey to the mind of the public without considerable damage. The necessary context simply don’t exist in the lay mind, and if the man is to make sense of it at all he must jury-rig a framework that may or may not approximate what the scientist is really trying to tell him. The fact that evolutionary ‘levels’ are still a popular concept is an obvious example of this.
(This whole phenomenon is yet-another reason why an ‘expertocracy’ or a rule according to a hand-crafted scheme of government or on the advice of credentialed experts is usually a very bad idea – because even if the expert knows what he’s talking about, the bureaucrat who works under him probably doesn’t – but that’s getting us off track).
A layman or, more especially, an artist will not absorb a scientific theory in its totality, with its supporting evidence, counter-evidence, and implications. He’ll take whatever of it he finds striking or which appeals to his sensibilities.
Contrary to what our expectations might be, Lewis points out that the true scientist is actually going to be far less attached to his theories than the layman will be:
The great masters do not take any Model quite so seriously as the rest of us. They know that it is, after all, only a model, possibly replaceable.
He goes on to explain the fact, which should be common knowledge, but isn’t, that all scientific theories are provisional: they are patterns made to account for observed facts with as few assumptions as possible. As more facts are observed, these patterns may have to be adjusted or abandoned. This is, in fact, the true moral of the shift from a Geocentric to a Heliocentric universe: for thousands of years, all observed facts pointed to a stationary earth orbited by the celestial bodies. Then new observations were taken, new technologies developed, and the model had to be first modified and then finally discarded entirely and replaced. Science is never quite ‘settled’ as it were. The ‘matter’ of science are the raw observations of facts, of which more are always being made, and if those facts fail to fit the pattern then the pattern must be adjusted or replaced.
(Around here Lewis makes the invaluable observation that “the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual’s scientific education.”)
Lewis pays the scientists of his day the compliment of believing that they will generally see things in this light. I don’t know that I would be so sanguine about today. I certainly would like to believe that most real, working scientists – the ones who focus on doing research and not the ones who appear on talk shows or write their names to ready-made bestsellers – still have this detached, self-aware understanding of their work, but we must remember that Lewis was writing before, or just at the beginning of the rise of the governmental grant cycle or the modern university system. ‘Science’ is much more politicized in the west today than it seems to have been in his time. We have, as Lewis puts it (describing the Galileo case) a ‘new theory of the nature of theory:’ one that says an approved scientific theory is to be taken as dogma.
In any case, the point is that the Medieval Model of the universe under discussion is not so much a concept proposed by scientists or philosophers as it is a filtering of several such concepts down into the mind of the public and, more specifically, the artist. The Discarded Image is not a history of ideas, but a sketch of the image of reality that those ideas created in the minds of scholars and artists.
Lewis describes this as the “Backcloth of Ideas;” a vague, generalized picture of the cosmos that is familiar to all educated people and mostly taken for granted on the grounds that it comes from those who ‘ought to know’. For the Medieval, it was the ‘old wise’ authors. For the modern, it is the scientists and assorted other credentialed experts.
In my opinion, this Backcloth of Ideas is one of the most interesting concepts in the whole book. This is the usually unspoken picture of how the world works that an artist can assume in his audience without thinking about it. You can dispense with it, but if you do you must somehow signal that this is what you’re doing. This, Lewis indicates, is why many modern readers struggle to understand or to see the point of earlier books: because this backcloth has been changed since then and is no longer familiar to us. It is this backcloth that he is primarily trying to sketch for us.
This whole concept is is one of those things that, of its nature, is taken for granted and remains almost unnoticed until someone points it out. And, of course, as soon as it is pointed out it inevitably raises another question, one that Lewis leaves largely unexplored as not fitting with his subject: what does our backcloth, our model of the cosmos look like?
From twisting our mental eyes around to try to see what lurks at the back of our mind, we can at least discern a few key points: for instance, it is, as Lewis points out later in the book, evolutionary. That is, our natural assumption is that things start off primitive and imperfect and become more perfect as they develop and grow. This doesn’t mean that everyone believes in evolution, but it does mean that most people assume an evolutionary perspective, and even if they do not, they will be familiar with the concept and recognize this as the common view of the world around them. One would also say that, with this, it holds a dim view of the past and prefers egalitarian values in society.
Now is not the time for a full examination and critique of the current model, but once the notion is planted in your head you almost naturally start trying to piece it together. It would be a good service to our generation, albeit a daunting undertaking, to try to work out a map to that model and where it came from: to write, as it were, a modern companion piece to Lewis (perhaps titled The Not-Yet Discarded Image).
The evolution example illustrates another key point about the Medieval Model: that isn’t a question of what ‘everyone’ believed, but of what an artists or poet could assume to be familiar territory for his audience.
This point deserves some more attention before we leave the question of the modern model. It seems to me that much if not most of the more repugnant trends in modern media may in fact be less a matter of deliberate malice or ill-will than they are a matter of following the ‘model’. Again, the further one strays from the backcloth of ideas, the more work must be done, and this is not only difficult but is often detrimental to storytelling (time spent explaining how your assumptions differ from the audience’s assumptions is time not spent telling the story, and in the hands of amateurs is often extremely tedious). Of course, in most cases I don’t think it makes much difference; again, the model or backcloth is going to be the perspective for most people. But it does mean that the issue of immoral or unhealthy content runs a lot deeper than it might appear. It also makes me a little more comfortable in giving a certain amount of leeway in these areas when it comes to fiction.
Then, of course, there is the practical side, which is that anyone aspiring to art or storytelling simply cannot afford to neglect ‘the model,’ whatever he thinks of it. Even if he himself disbelieves it in every particular, it must be taken into account because it is what the bulk of his audience will be expecting. Storytelling is, at its most basic, communication, and if the audience’s model of the universe leads them to think the author meant white when he meant black, then communication has failed. The necessity of The Discarded Image is itself due to the confusion that comes when an author is read by someone who is looking for a different backcloth. Again, an author may reject the model, but he must somehow let the audience know that he is doing so, which requires extra effort on his part.
It must also be remembered that the artist’s needs are different from the philosopher’s or the scientist’s or the theologian’s. It is the latter’s job to try to make a consistent and coherent image of the cosmos, while the former’s job is to edify and entertain his audience (to put a difficult question in simple terms). Lewis makes another one of his extremely apt comparisons here by pointing out that an artist must know anatomy, but he needn’t know physiology (even if, from a biologist’s point of view, physiology is more important). And since the latter is much more likely to change than the former, the artist’s work won’t develop much as the sciences do.
To put it another way, the author’s job is to engage with the audience’s imagination. An idea may be striking and fruitful to the imagination without having a solid grounding in reality. The idea of life on Mars persisted long after scientists had rendered the idea obsolete, and very few science fiction authors let the near-impossibility of terraforming the Red Planet prevent their writing stories about it. So too, the Medieval model persisted in fiction for centuries after its image of the world had been passed over by philosophers and scientists, and even in its heyday it contained much that would have been rejected by serious thinkers.
One result of this is that good art and good poetry is much more enduring than good science. The Medieval model of the universe is long since discarded, but Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare are as relevant as ever. To take an even more extreme example, the Minoan worldview, whatever it may have been, must be far more obsolete still, yet Homer still reigns supreme.
One conclusion we might draw from this is that the frequent commendation that a work is “realistic” or “true to life” is not actually as strong of a quality as it might seem. Realism only gets you so far in poetry (though that’s too large a topic to pursue far at the moment).
On that note, one aspect about the Medieval model that may be surprising is that it is not at all the same as the Christian worldview, and in some ways is actually at odds with it:
At first we may fail to notice this, for the cosmology appears to us, in its firmly theistic basis and its ready welcome to the supernatural, to be eminently religious. And so in one sense it is. But it is not eminently Christian. The Pagan elements embedded in it involved a conception of God, and of man’s place in the universe, which, if not in logical contradiction to Christianity, were subtly out of harmony with it. There was no direct ‘conflict between religion and science’ of the nineteenth-century type; but there was an incompatibility of temperament. Delighted contemplation of the Model and intense religious feeling of a specifically Christian character are seldom fused except in the work of Dante.
Among other things, Lewis points out that the Medieval model often takes a rather dim view of the body – inherited from the Classical world – as well as requiring some explanations to fit in free will alongside fate.
Partly for this reason and partly because of the aforementioned distinction between the philosopher and the artist, Lewis notes that the model is almost wholly absent from the great spiritual works of the day. St. Bernard, Thomas a Kempis, and their ilk ignored it entirely, while St. Thomas subjects it to the same exacting, yet humble analysis as everything else, applying contemporary science sparingly and with numerous caveats.
Though one quasi-exception, which Lewis doesn’t mention, is St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life, which is filled with delightfully quaint specimens of Medieval zoology used as illustrations (granted, that comes from well after what is generally considered the Medieval period, but Lewis lays stress on the fact that the model persisted as a literary assumption well into the 17th century).
I would say that one of my main takeaways from this chapter is that to be able to recognize the model or worldview or ‘backcloth’ of one’s own age as being a model, etc. – as opposed to simply being reality – is one of the marks of the educated mind. The fact that, say, classical liberalism is itself a philosophy, with certain assumptions and assertions of its own is something the average modern has as much difficulty in grasping as the average Medieval would have had in grasping the idea of Christianity as one religion among many, or the celestial spheres as only one possible interpretation of the night sky.
That is one reason why this book is so valuable: not only in mapping the Medieval mind, but also in bringing the very idea of the backcloth and the ‘model’ of the cosmos to the mind of the modern reader.