As an enthusiastic, though occasional, listener of The Literary Life podcast, I was intrigued by Jason M. Baxter’s several interviews and subsequent work with the podcast’s sister-school providing literary education online, the House of Humane Letters. A Dante scholar and professor at Benedictine College, Baxter has recently written an accessible work on the literary influences that shaped the mind and writing of C. S. Lewis. I read this book with a group of friends and thought it worth sharing with the HSF audience.
Book Summary
Introducing Lewis
Baxter begins his book by reintroducing the Lewis that many readers know and love but with a twist he calls (as Owen Barfield once did) “the third Lewis” (2). As one of the most prescient and accessible Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, Lewis is well-known for his apologetic works and his fiction; the third Lewis Baxter explores in this book is the scholar of medieval literature, the life-long passion and “day-job” of the beloved essayist and novelist. Baxter describes how this lasting devotion to medieval literature oozed out into all of Lewis’s writings, including personal letters and children’s literature. By engaging with some of the same medieval thought and authors that so influenced Lewis, we can begin to understand his writing even better and to see with the vision he hoped to pass on to his modern audience.
Introducing the Mental Model of the Long Middle Ages
After introducing this third Lewis, Baxter spends a chapter building a quick mock-up of the “lost cathedral” that Lewis called the medieval model (20). Lewis’s entire book The Discarded Image is devoted to unpacking the mental model of the universe that permeated the “long Middle Ages” (Lewis’s conception of this time period is roughly “from Plato to Samuel Johnson, and sometimes even to Wordsworth” [11], because of these authors’ underlying view of the cosmos). Medieval people viewed the universe as a coherent, harmonious whole infused with divine life and energy; in a word, the created world was “sacramental.” Every created thing, whether man, beast, star, or planet, was a “transposition” of some part of the mind of God.
Modernity’s Evil Enchantment
Baxter then shifts to explaining the transition in thought that occurred from the scientific revolution onward to the modernity with which Lewis was interacting. Our conception of the world went from that of a symphony to a machine; no longer “alive, a great living being, a world that moved because it experienced desire,” the modern world is now “made up of passive lumps of matter, waiting to be acted on by forces, suspended within space” (65).
This mechanization of the world picture that began in the field of science creeped inward, shaping the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world through a change in language. As the physical world was drained of inherent meaning, the human psyche began to inflate; the meaning that was lacking in the physical world could be found if we looked inside ourselves. This shift in the center of meaning (from outside to inside of ourselves) is part of what Lewis called the “evil enchantment” of modernity (72).
Re-enchantment
After this sketch of the modern human condition as Lewis saw it, informed as he was by a medieval view of the cosmos, Baxter then turns to Lewis’s favorite “re-enchantments”: Dante, mysticism, and myth. Lewis loved Dante for his “metaphorical sensuousness”—his ability to put transcendent truths in the most earthy and human terms, and Lewis cultivated this skill for his own fiction (96). Baxter considers The Great Divorce Lewis’s rewriting of Dante: an imaginative journey revealing a very medieval truth about (among other things) the emptiness of evil and the fullness of joy in God (96–98). It is this comingling of the earthly and the heavenly, along with feeling the full weight of the joy of goodness, that can break the “evil enchantment” of modernity.
Lewis’s love of medieval mysticism was tempered by the knowledge that pursuing mystic communion with God outright would probably end badly—in a vague spiritualism unmoored from doctrine and discipline. He knew and taught that the obedience of everyday life was the difficult and necessary beginning of a life in communion with God. However, a life of religious observance and obedience was not the end goal for Lewis or the medieval mystics he read. The end goal of the Christian life is to “come to the point at which one loves God freely and unbounded” (105). Baxter shows how Lewis was influenced by such medieval works and authors as The Cloud of Unknowing and Nicolas of Cusa and that the result was a theme in his works of “double focus—the simultaneous reality of God’s infinite ‘transcendence’ and of his radical presence” (116). Reclaiming this double-lens view can be another important step in re-enchanting the modern world.
Finally, Baxter’s tour of Lewis’s medieval thought would not be complete without a discussion of myth and True Myth. The medievals loved the ancient pagans—such as they knew of them. Baxter explains the concept of praeperatio evangelica, a belief held by medieval Christians that the rise and fall of civilizations and the old myths, stories, and philosophy were given as preparation for the arrival of the gospel. (I find I would call the same phenomenon “providence.”) It was the admittance of this way of seeing, encouraged by Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, that led finally to Lewis’s conversion. For Lewis, the Christian faith was a myth, but it was more than a myth: it was the True Myth, the “myth that became fact” in time and space (145).
Baxter concludes his book by emphasizing that reading medieval authors and understanding the way they viewed the cosmos is still valuable for us today. Although we have a more accurate understanding of the physical reality of space (in some ways!), the medieval view of the universe—and the theology that undergirded that view—is a needed corrective for today’s materialists without chests. As Lewis said so well in Miracles, “The archaic type of thought which could not clearly distinguish spiritual ‘Heaven’ from the sky, is from our point of view a confused type of thought. But it also resembles and anticipates a type of thought which will one day be true. That archaic sort of thinking will become simply the correct sort when Nature and Spirit are fully harmonized” (162).
Reflection
Like many things lately, I got to this book by reading fairy tales. As I have read and learned about the deep Christian symbolism present in medieval fairy tales, I have a deeper desire to be able to step into the shoes of those Christian ancestors and borrow a little of their enchanted vision of everything from stars and planets to plants, animals, and mankind. This desire led me first to Lewis’s The Discarded Image—a fascinating but difficult read. I had hoped that Baxter’s book might be a gentler treatment of the same subject matter; I was partly right.
Baxter’s first few chapters provide a broad-stroke picture of what it felt like to see the universe with a medieval mind. The finer details about what some of that actually entails, such as is enumerated in The Discarded Image, are not to be found, however. His juxtaposition of the medieval concept of the world as a symphony or cathedral against the modern idea of the world as a machine is insightful. His beginning argument presenting Lewis as the Boethius of modernity was fascinating and made me want to pick up some Boethius right away—not an easy feat!
But The Medieval Mind’s great strength was in presenting Lewis’s thought and interaction with the medieval model and the writers that preserved it. Baxter has done a wonderful job at introducing the third Lewis to an audience that might not otherwise meet him. He pulls from many of Lewis’s scholarly works that I had never heard of, and I cannot wait to get further acquainted with Lewis’s academic writings in this area. Baxter is obviously familiar himself with many of the medieval authors Lewis loved; in addition to inspiring me to read more Lewis, this book has inspired me to dig into the medieval source material itself.
The chapters included on mysticism I found more difficult to understand; I am not sure how that perspective fits in with my own Reformed Arminian, Free Will Baptist heritage. Baxter is Roman Catholic and thus has an easier time incorporating some of these medieval authors into his own theology. I find it an appropriate challenge for us Protestants to continue wrestling what was good out of the middle ages without denouncing the needed reform of the sixteenth century.
For these reasons, I highly recommend a thoughtful reading of Baxter’s book. I believe you will find it a welcome garden gate leading into the greater estate of medieval thought; it is a worthy tradition to wrestle with and learn from.
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