The Discarded Discarded Image

C. S. Lewis once wrote a book entitled, The Discarded Image, and a friend of mine recently found a copy at the dump.

When I found out, I was still raving about the book, having just read it for the first time, (a different copy) and you can imagine my reaction. Even now, when my fiery infatuation has cooled into a foundation for a lifelong affection, I still can't see why anyone would pitch the book, except perhaps some crazed Chestertonian who thinks everyone named Smith should start a smithy, and every smith call himself Smith. (What would I be? Keyclacker?)

Anyhow, it is a great book. I'm hoping that the title alone (The Discarded Image) has so intrigued you that you've already yanked your power cord, taken off for your nearest library on foot, and are, in fact, no longer reading this.

Still here. Well, if I may quote a review which was recently quoted on a major art blog: Read this book. You will never see the Middle Ages quite the same way again. So there you go.

Blast. You are persistent. And yes, I suppose that quote would also apply to Timeline, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Middle Ages Ruined My Marriage. So what's so special about the Discarded Image?

Medievals were weird

Medievals were different from us.

This sounds obvious. It is. But when we're in the mood for a light read and pick up The Canterbury Tales or Speculum Astronomiae, we easily assume that, after all, medievals couldn't have been that different. We're all people. We all know that love conquers all, that apples grow on trees, that the stars are flaming balls of gas, that the universe is, on balance, a vast, cold, empty space...

Quickly we slide into universal truths that are anything but. (Universal.) We're flinging presuppositions at books by people who had a whole other Model of the universe. We are apt to be confused. What can we do? We can decide the medievals were weird. They were vastly inferior to us, and they probably couldn't even make shirt buttons smaller than pie plates. Or, we can read The Discarded Image, a glowing exposition of the medieval Model.

Or, we can keep flogging the blogging (as Gurgi might say), hoping we'll get all the best bits and not have to read it ourselves.

Well, you can forget it. No way am I going to try to summarize a book by C. S. Lewis. The man chose each word with the care of a jeweler. He could have written this blog in three sentences. But I made a promise, and I will mention a few things.

A Bookish Culture

According to Lewis, medievals were bookish. A savage culture relies on direct experience (the Moon's disappearing; I bet a god's eating it). A modern culture relies on empirical evidence (the Moon seems to be disappearing; fortunately, I have personally reenacted all the major historical astronomical observations from Galileo to the last issue of Astronomy Magazine, so I know firsthand that the Moon is actually a hunk of rock revolving around our planet, and need take nothing on blind faith). But the medieval culture believed their books. Aristotle had written that the Moon was the boundary line between the divine, unchanging Sky above and the imperfect, immutable Nature below. And that was that.

If their culture is regarded as a response to an environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. (5)

Of course, even the benighted old medievals couldn't help but notice faint divergences between, say, Ptolemy and St. Augustine. A good modern would dismiss them both and read someone's blog, but the medieval revered his books. The Dark Ages had left him so few. Lewis asks us to imagine being shipwrecked, and having to rebuild our whole culture based on whatever odd books happened to be in the hold. Each auctor had to be right. Somehow everything had to fit into one gigantic, consistent system. That's how Lewis sees the average medieval scholar, an indefatigable systematizer, bustling about and tidying up a world-sized pile of conflicting data. One feels that they always had an answer for everything. One feels that, for once in history, a rough equality prevailed in the matrimonial forum.

Influential Planets

I had no idea the medievals were so wild on planets. When they said Jupiter, you couldn't be sure if they meant the actual planet, or the god, or the source of influence, or all three at once. If influence sounds like astrology, it is. The medieval Church apparently had no problem with the idea that planets influence men, as well as animals, plants and even minerals. (Perhaps a scientist wouldn't either; I've often read that hospitals always record an unusually high birth rate on full moons.) With typical Catholic precision, theologians argued ferociously about whether the planets could make you do anything, or only influence you. In that slight distinction lies the existence of human will. But the influence of the planets seems to have been regarded by everyone as obvious. So obvious, in fact, that their influence in the earth even made particular metals.

Here Lewis shares a whole glut of information which I simply must reduce to a table for you. Mostly because HTML tables are currently Evil Incarnate, Perpetually Unclean in the sight of Blessed CSS—but I have a Data Dispensation.

(Question marks mean that Lewis forgot he was supposed to be filling in a table.)

I'm not going to go look up my own planetary profile, but I sense that this simple chart may illumine many a confusing line in venerable prose and poetry. Also, as Lewis points out, each planet was a whole personality type. Today, we can easily imagine an amorous Venus or melancholic Saturn, but we have to strain for a mercurial or a jovial type (Lewis is very careful about jovial; it's not Fezziwig). These are whole personality types which we've nearly forgotten.

A World of Desire

We think of the universe as obeying the laws of science. A rock plummets to the earth because it has to. It's the law.

Medievals thought the rock fell because the earth was its desire.

Not that they imagined the rock with a crush. But the rock sought the earth as a lover sought his beloved. Truthfully, I don't quite get this myself, except on a very vague level, and there it floors me. We look about us and project a gigantic machine. They looked about and saw desire, rock seeking earth, bird seeking nest, the spheres seeking God. The whole universe moved by love.

At the center of it all was the Primum Mobile, the Unmoved who moved all by being beloved. Certainly, in the Christian order of Grace, God took the initiative, bounding down to be crucified. But in the order of Nature, as inherited from Aristotle, he was the beloved. One artist even showed the Primum Mobile as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball (119).

The Great Dance

Nothing is more deeply impressed on the cosmic imaginings of a modern than the idea that the heavenly bodies move in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity. It was not so in the Medieval Model....The 'silence' which frightened Pascal was, according to the Model, wholly illusory; and the sky looks black only because we are seeing it through the dark glass of our own shadow. You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music. (111, 112)

Three times, Lewis asks you to take a walk under the stars, and view the night sky with medieval eyes. On the last such journey, he reminds you that as a modern, you feel you're looking out. But a medieval was looking in, glimpsing the undending pursuit of the Beloved, where each thirst was always delighted yet not quenched. The greatest medieval pomps here on Earth were mere attempts to participate in that Great Dance.

Pick a Model, any Model

In the Epilogue, Lewis does get around to the minor point that the Model, though delightful, doesn't happen to be true. But this is C. S. Lewis; he's not going to take that lying down. What about our Model? A month can't go by without a major science magazine announcing with excitement that Everything We Know About the Universe is Piffle. This is great fun, and I like trippy computer graphics as much as the next guy, but the tendency to dogmatism seems a trifle amnesiac. Is today's Pronouncement tomorrow's Piffle? It's at least a possibility. In fact, once you get past popular magazines, you find that twentieth century science has made it quite clear that we will never know the physical world the way Newtonians thought they did. Now we know how little we know, and that all our Models will always be provisional. There's no shame in that, but it does demand that we

regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolising none.... No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy.... [E]ach reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's knowledge.... [N]ature gives most of her evidence in answers to the questions we ask her. (222–223)

Now for some Dante.