'The Discarded Image' Commentary - Part Three: Major Sources and Familiar Faces
A Survey of C.S. Lewis's Final Book
Chapters three and four of The Discarded Image deal with some of the chief sources of the Medieval Model. Lewis starts off by stating that a thorough examination of these sources is beyond the scope of his book, and much more is it beyond the scope of this commentary. I’ll content myself, therefore, with going over some of the highlights.
Not only does Prof. Lewis decline to do a thorough examination of the sources, but he also passes over the most important of them on the reasonable grounds that the reader is probably already familiar with them:
Thus there are perhaps no sources so necessary for a student of medieval literature to know as the Bible, Virgil, and Ovid, but I shall say nothing about any of the three. Many of my readers know them already; those who do not are at least aware that they need to. Again, though I shall have much to say about the old astronomy, I shall not describe Ptolemy’s Almagest. The text, with a French translation, is available and many histories of science exist. (Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.) I shall concentrate on those sources which are least easily accessible or least generally known to educated people, or which best illustrate the curious process whereby the Model assimilated them.
(I like that Lewis assumes a French translation of a Greek text is enough for his students to work with).
Of course, in our day the idea that an ‘educated’ person is likely to be familiar with the Bible, let alone Virgil and Ovid, is less certain, and that “those who do not [know them] are at least aware that they need to” much less so. But we will leave such people to get out of that fix as best they can while we follow Lewis’s example.
As I say, I won’t go through each source, since that’s beyond my knowledge. I’ll instead take note of some of the key points and familiar faces that will be showing up in these sources.
On that note, Lewis makes a very interesting point at the start of chapter four, which deals with what he calls the seminal or transitional period when paganism was dying out and Christianity becoming ascendent. Namely, that in such a time period the question of who belonged to which faction is by no means clear. Educated men of both camps would have read the same books, attended the same lectures, cited the same sources, and thought using the same ideas. They often interacted on friendly terms (as an example, which Lewis doesn’t cite, the philosopher Hypatia had both Christian and pagan students, and her own religious affiliation is uncertain at best). A modern man would find little to chose between the two except that he would be more familiar with the name ‘Christ’ than the name ‘Plotinus’.
In the same section, he notes the existence of two ‘parties’ of Christians: a ‘leftist’ party seeking to banish all pagan influences and remnants, and a ‘rightist’ party eager to catch up and save whatever seems good about paganism and to find foreshadowings of the Gospel among non-Christian writers.
Whatever we think of this as a reading of Church history, it is invaluable as a quick summary of the what is meant by the over-used and under-defined terms ‘Right and Left:’ that, in a revolutionary system, the former seeks to retain what it judges to be valuable of the old order, while the latter seeks a total break and purgation that the revolutionary doctrine may shine pure. But that’s a topic for another time.
One of the first familiar commonplaces which we meet with is the littleness of the Earth and all its concerns. Citing the dream of Scipio from Cicero’s Republic (which, alas, is mostly lost apart from certain passages), Lewis says:
Scipio now noticed that the stars were globes which easily outstripped the Earth in size. Indeed the Earth now appeared so small in comparison that the Roman Empire, which was hardly more than a point on that tiny surface, excited his contempt (xvi). This passage was constantly in the minds of succeeding writers. The insignificance (by cosmic standards) of the Earth became as much a commonplace to the medieval, as to the modern, thinker; it was part of the moralists’ stock-in-trade, used, as Cicero uses it (xix), to mortify human ambition.
The difference between the Medieval and modern writer in this regard is that, if we’re honest, the modern thinker is much more likely to regard the Earth as all-important in practice than the Medieval writer. However much they may say that the Earth is unimportant, the stock and trade of most science fiction writers is to make it of central importance and the survival of mankind the main theme. This is, of course, because it’s much harder for them to adopt any other perspective. The Medievals had a transcendent understanding of the universe in which God and the things of God were infinitely more important than the things of Earth, while the modern has the sheer size and scope of the universe, but little else.
The best expression of the Medieval perspective in a modern work comes from The Lord of the Rings (unsurprisingly a very Medieval-minded book):
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
By contrast, someone like, say, Arthur C. Clark or Isaac Asimov may say that the fate of humanity is cosmically unimportant, but there isn’t a clear idea of what is cosmically important instead, so we’re left with a human perspective nonetheless. Or you have the likes of Doctor Who, where in the midst of a whole universe of species, yet there is ‘something special’ about mankind and the earth. What that is tends to be pretty vague or subjective, but it’s assumed regardless.
In any case, the unimportance of the earth and all that seems so very grand upon it is an idea that goes back to pre-Christian thought and was eagerly adopted by the Medievals. Lewis later cites a similar passage in Lucan, depicting the soul of Pompey ascending to heaven and laughing at the chaotic mess that was his funeral, all such earthly dignity being matters of indifference to him now.
This is, of course, very compatible with Scripture: “For I will behold thy heavens, the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou hast founded. What is man that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4-5). The idea recurs in Boethius, where Philosophy deconstructs the idea of glory and fame as things to be desired by not only pointing out the littleness of the earth, but also the scope of time and how unlikely it is that even a very famous person in his day should be remembered a hundred or a thousand years hence (rather ironic in hindsight, given that Boethius is one of those favoured few).
Another idea expressed bother in Cicero and the next example, Lucan, is that of the five zones of the Earth: the arctic and antarctic, which are uninhabitable due to cold, the two temperate zones were men dwell, and, separating them, the torrid zone, which is uninhabitable due to heat. Seeing that the southern border of the known world was the Sahara desert (it having been centuries, as far as I know, since the Egyptians ventured south of the Nile), this makes a good deal of sense. And given how feverishly deadly the equatorial regions are, especially around Africa, it’s not without some truth. This also meant that, while the men of the Middle Ages believed there were men living in the antipodes, they thought they would never be able to reach them or have any contact with them, much the way some people today believe that alien life exists on other planets, but that we will never have any contact with them due to the distances involved.
It is from these authors too that we meet our old friend, Nature. Lewis cites several passages from Medieval and Renaissance literature in which she plays a large part as one of the familiar tropes and figures, along with her semi-sister, Fortune. Right down to the present day, we’re used to talking about Nature as a she, with the commonplace of ‘Mother Nature’ being used everywhere from politics to comic strips, and even in serious matters.
But as Lewis points out, Nature is a comparatively young goddess. She has no place in classical mythology, nor in Plato. Only a handful of classical writers, and those from a later period, mention her at all. The reason for this Lewis explains in one of the best passages in the book:
Nature may be the oldest of things, but Natura is the youngest of deities. Really ancient mythology knows nothing of her. It seems to me impossible that such a figure could ever arise in a genuinely mythopoeic age; what we call ‘nature-worship’ has never heard of what we call ‘Nature’. ‘Mother’ Nature is a conscious metaphor. ‘Mother’ Earth is something quite different. All earth, contrasted with all the sky, can be, indeed must be, intuited as a unity. The marriage relation between Father Sky (or Dyaus) and Mother Earth forces itself on the imagination. He is on top, she lies under him. He does things to her (shines and, more important, rains upon her, into her): out of her, in response, come forth the crops—just as calves come out of cows or babies out of wives. In a word, he begets, she bears. You can see it happening. This is genuine mythopoeia. But while the mind is working on that level, what, in heaven’s name, is Nature? Where is she? Who has seen her? What does she do?
In short, you can’t anthropomorphize ‘nature’ so long as ‘nature’ simply means ‘everything’ or ‘the cosmos’. You need to separate and subordinate the world around you to something else in order to perceive it as having a personality. ‘Nature’ as a distinct entity can only exist in relation to the supernatural, and vice-versa (G.K. Chesterton makes this point in The Ball and the Cross when the atheist Turnbull denies any such thing as ‘nature’ and then is discomforted when his Catholic opponent, MacIan points out that nothing can therefore be called miraculous or ‘supernatural’, rendering his argument against miracles moot).
The Medievals, of course, never had this problem, since they started out from the perspective that Nature was not God’s only creation, nor even the highest.
She had her proper place, below the Moon. She had her appointed duties as God’s vicegerent in that area. Her own lawful subjects, stimulated by rebel angels, might disobey her and become ‘unnatural’. There were things above her, and things below. It is precisely this limitation and subordination of Nature which sets her free for her triumphant poetical career. By surrendering the dull claim to be everything, she becomes somebody.
In the modern world, of course, she is still not everything. But instead of being contrasted with the supernatural, modern man takes the rather extraordinary step of contrasting ‘nature’ with...man himself. There is Mother Nature and there are the works of man. Nature is, at different times, an unconquerable goddess who carelessly overturns man’s futile efforts and retains her rule over the earth and a damsel in distress menaced by civilization and requiring the chivalrous care of man to save her from man (no one ever accused moderns of being consistent).
(In this same chapter, Lewis recounts the one known example of a typo achieving apotheosis, but I will leave that to tantalize my audience into the reading the book).
In chapter four, we encounter Nature’s sister goddess: Fortune, who receives her definitive description in Boethius’s On the Consolation of Philosophy (which, as Lewis notes, is one of the most important books for anyone seeking to understand the Medieval point of view). She is the fickle goddess who turns her wheel to dispense the goods of the world: money, fame, success, and, of course, good and bad luck. Her duty, as both Boethius and Dante describe it, is to pass these goods around more or less at random so that no one will think that they are the highest of goods and wise men will learn not to desire them.
Nature and Fortune together form a kind of dyarchy over worldly affairs, as Celia and Rosalind jocularly describe in the early parts of As You Like it:
Cel. Let us sit and mock the good housewife
Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may
henceforth be bestowed equally.
Ros. I would we could do so, for her benefits
are mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind
woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.
Cel. 'Tis true; for those that she makes fair
she scarce makes honest, and those that she
makes honest she makes very ill-favouredly.
Ros. Nay, now thou goest from Fortune's
office to Nature's: Fortune reigns in gifts of
the world, not in the lineaments of Nature.
This notion of Fortune, as Lewis says, is “one of the most vigorous defences ever written against the view, common to vulgar Pagans and vulgar Christians alike, which ‘comforts cruel men’ by interpreting variations of human prosperity as divine rewards and punishments, or at least wishing that they were. It is an enemy hard to kill; latent in what has been called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ and rampant in the historical philosophy of Carlyle.”
Indeed, it is an enemy all too common today as people, for instance, cite the enormous material success of the United States as proof the excellence of its institutions and ideology, or the triumph of secular, Enlightenment ideas in Europe as evidence of their truth. Our worldview today rests in large part on the Whig interpretation of history and ‘judgment of history’ and ‘being on the right side of history’ (one might argue that the institution of voting is itself grounded in this idea), by which the good and the true inevitably triumph over the bad and false. This requires some convoluted interpretations when it comes to the rise of evil regimes, hence the desperate attempt by the victorious allies in World War Two to link fascism and Nazism with pre-modern Europe instead of being the thoroughly modern, self-identified-progressive post-Liberal ideologies they were.
Lewis had previously attacked this notion in his poem Cliche Came Out of the Cage by calling modern skeptics:
you… who worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).
Related to this is the way that ‘Lady Luck’ – the modern version of Dame Fortuna – has subtly become solely the dispenser of good fortune. We say things like ‘lady luck came and found me’, and attribute bad fortune to her ‘leaving’ instead of its being part of her nature to dispense both good and bad. We look only for the positives of worldly success; the negatives are not supposed to be part of the game. We’ve lost the Boethian idea that all luck is, in fact good luck, taken in the right spirit. What we call ‘bad luck’ serves to strengthen and prove good men and to correct bad ones, if they will so take it.
Again, this is similar to what we said above regarding the celestial perspective on the world: it logically requires something above and beyond the material world in order to make sense. Regarding the small position of the earth, we keep the point while losing the perspective to actually make it (like knowing the answer to a geometry problem while denying the proof). Regarding fortune, we keep the image, but lose the point.
In these chapters we also encounter a topic that is less familiar than it might appear at first: the demons or daemons. But these are not thought of as the fallen angels; rather, they’re a class of being the occupies a middle ground between gods and men. They are the ‘airy spirits’ whose bodies are comprised of air or an air-like substance usually invisible to us. The idea being that it is fitting for all parts of creation to be filled with suitable inhabitants; so, there are terrestrial creatures in man and the various beasts, aetherial creatures in the gods (who dwell in the ‘aether’ above the orbit of the Moon), and aerieal creatures in the daemons.
Lewis himself gave perhaps the best depiction of them in a modern work in the form of the eldila in the Space Trilogy, which were beings who dwelt in the heavens and the air, and whose bodies seemed to be composed of light. A much darker take on the concept can be found in H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond, which posits that the air teams with innumerable entities existing beyond our perception and (usually) as unaware of us as we are of them.
Another, more familiar instance of them are the genii in the Arabian Nights tales (‘genius’ being the Latin translation of the Greek ‘daemon’). Traces of their status of ‘airy spirits’ can be found in things such as modern depictions of their lower halves being smoke trails, or even in the way the titular character in I Dream of Jeanie could be trapped in air-tight compartments.
Lewis makes a very interesting comment at this point:
It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.
I will leave you, reader, to apply this comment to the world we see around us.
Now, the question is when the demons became definitely separated from the daemons and synonymous with devils. Some early authors link them with angels in general (Lewis follows this to an extent in the Space Trilogy), forming a cosmic triad mirroring the Platonic division of the human soul (into reason, passions, appetites). St. Augustine pioneered the view that all daemons were evil, but this didn’t become widespread among Christian writers until the Middle Ages.
As a final note, regarding the Platonic city, Lewis makes a point that really must be kept in mind and reiterated, as it contradicts most modern ideas of Medieval (and Modern) thought: that the Medieval Model is not anthropocentric, but “anthropoperipheral.” Man does not occupy the centre, but the outskirts, what Lewis puts in modern terms as “suburban.” Man is not the king of creation, nor the outcast, nor even quite irrelevant: he is the Ward Cleaver or Archie Bunker of creation, the small, provincial being on the outskirts of the really important matters, which he can see and imitate, but not participate in.
How does this fit with the idea of the Earth being the centre of the cosmos? “Because, as Dante was to say more clearly than anyone else, the spatial order is the opposite of the spiritual, and the material cosmos mirrors, hence reverses, the reality, so that what is truly the rim seems to us the hub.”
For Modern man, whatever he says about being ‘just another animal’ and unimportant in the universe, he stands at pinnacle of the evolutionary summit, the bottom of which is shrouded in darkness. The summit of creation is man, and specifically the enlightened man, or perhaps that which man will create (the content of the ‘enlightenment’ has changed over the generations, but it remains essentially the same basic idea). For Medieval man, he stands at the bottom of a mountain whose top is “invisible with light.”
But more on that next time.