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The Discarded Image

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Table of Contents:

Preface

I The Medieval Situation

II Reservations

III Selected Materials: the Classical Period

A The "Somnium Scipionis"

B Lucan

C Statius, Claudian, and the Lady "Natura"

D Apuleius, "De Deo Socratis"

IV Selected Materials: the Seminal Period

A Chalcidius

B Macrobius

C Pseudo-Dionysius

D Boethius

V The Heavens

A The Parts of the Universe

B Their Operations

C Their Inhabitants

VI The Logaevi

VII Earth and Her Inhabitants

A The Earth

B Beasts

C The Human Soul

D Rational Soul

E Sensitive and Vegetable Soul

F Soul and Body

G The Human Body

H The Human Past

I The Seven Liberal Arts

VIII The Influence of the Model

Epilogue

Index

In his "An Experiment in Criticism", Lewis suggests that the heart of literary experience is the surrender by the reader to the work being read; that good reading is the entering into the views of others and going out of ourselves.

With regard to medieval literature, this requires two things: the facts behind a host of unfamiliar references, and even more importantly, a remake of how to think of reality. Readers who insist on reading works of the period with their modernism intact are "as travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the continent, mixing only with other English tourists, enjoying all they see for its 'quaintness', and having no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives." While Lewis says "I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit", he also says of them, in a somewhat chilling echo of the Sermon on the Mount: "They have their reward."

It is to those who want a much greater reward that Lewis directs "The Discarded Image." While he provides the reader with hard information concerning medieval philosophy, cosmology, biology, education and literature, imparting the individual facts is the lesser part of his purpose. What he really aims at is to completely detach the reader from all of the unconscious beliefs and attitudes that a lifetime spent in modern culture brings, and substitute for them those of the educated medieval man.

What the description I've just given you of this book does not do is to describe what the experience of having that done to you is like. I found it compelling and disorienting. One by one, the familiar intellectual landmarks were stripped away from my mental image of the world, and strange new ones put into their place. Vertigo is the word that comes closest to describing the feeling; I found I had to stop reading every couple dozen pages to give myself time to recover. This was so even though my familiarity with the philosophy, theology, and cosmology of the period was, by any non-specialist standard, quite high. The reason, I think was not so much that my knowledge was inferior to Lewis' (although of course it certainly was) as that I had only thought of these matters from an external "objective" point of view - I had never before tried to actually enter into that view of the world before. The result of Lewis' instruction on the matter was a combination of delight at the new insights so gained and humiliation at the revelation of the deep limitations of the "knowledge" I had possessed before.

In sum, I found reading "the Discarded Image" to be an extraordinary experience, and its value in no way depends on my using the information gained to identify some off-hand reference of Chaucer's. What Lewis describes in "An Experiment in Criticism", he demonstrates here - how completely different reading is when it is done well compared to when it is merely done.

The title sounds like something for the specialist in Medieval literature, doesn't it? Don't be put off by that or by the subject matter. There are a number of reasons to read this book.

Here is Lewis the common teacher, not the religious writer. You will find no polemic here. But, paradoxically, Lewis may be more persuasive and display more passion when he is neither trying to persuade nor be passionate. This book originated in a series of lectures, and it shows. There is love for both subject and reader on every page. Lewis writes simply and beautifully, so those of you interested in fine prose will find much here.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the comparison Lewis draws between ancient and Medieval thought and the modern. Sometimes these comparisons are direct, but more often they are subtle, implicit. But, by continually pairing the two worldviews, whether directly or not, Lewis leads us, like the master teacher he was, to reflect on our own way of thinking.

For example, Lewis highlights good and bad aspects of Medieval writing. For one, Medieval writing revels in detail. This can be rich or boring, depending. But, the reason for such detail, Lewis suggests, is that Medieval writers were contemplating a world they loved and felt part of. Thus, to a lover, details about one's beloved are never overdone. In contrast, most of us feel somewhat alienated in today's society, don't we?

Lewis also suggests that Medieval writers copied earlier writers. Early writings are, like Cathedrals, products of many craftsmen. The need to be original or creative was subsumed by humility. Medieval writers did not want focus, like so many of today's artists, on themselves. Instead, they wanted to direct attention to contemplation of the figures and subjects of their writing. Pride in craft may have been present, but is was subordinate to love of subje

This book is an utter, unqualified delight.

That C.S.Lewis was a fine writer is not open to dispute. It is also no secret that he was a master of discursive, analytical, sympathetic literary criticism. (The collection of articles published posthumously as "On Literature" by Walter Hooper contains some fine examples.)

We are also only too well acquainted with Lewis the bully, abusing his prodigious gifts as a debater and marshaller of arguments in the service of his religion. "Mere Christianity" is an overwhelming argument for God - but it leaves the bitter aftertaste of intellectual coercion.

In "The Discarded Image", he does not wish to convince us of anything. He only wishes to explain. We are invited along on a tour of the beliefs and opinions about the world held in the Middle Ages. (The travel-guide metaphor is Lewis's own, from the Introduction.) The effect is of an immensely well-informed and articulate man discursing on his favourite subject.

Mere knowledge and enthusiasm on the part of the author would not be enough to make this unusual book interesting. It is Lewis's combination of strengths as writer that bring Medieval cosmology, religion and science to life. But such is his skill that we almost don't notice what has gone into the presentation. Only when we reflect on what must have been required to organise facts, determine what is essential, leave out what isn't, use analogies, draw distinctions, make comparisons and follow lines of thought does the achievement really sink in.

For example, his description of Arisotlean astronomy and its legacy to the Middle Ages is a masterpiece of brevity. It tells us everything we need to know for what follows, and nothing more; yet simutaneously we experience a sense of the vastness of the subject-matter. Our curiosity is awakened, our immediate needs satisfied and our imagination stimulated. THIS is writing!

The section on Mother Nature shows Lewis the philologist to great effect. He first has to disengage our minds from the modern conception of Nature, which he does by investigating what we actually do mean by the word nowadays and how that has evolved over three hundred years. At that point, we are ready to understand the entirely different relationship to the world that was conveyed by the same word in the Middle Ages.

Throughout, there is not a wasted word or an unnecessary turn of phrase.

Enjoy!

This is one of Lewis's more difficult-to-find academic works. However, if you find it and read it, you will not be disappointed. I read the book on my own initiative while taking a master's class in Medieval literature. I probably learned as much from his book as I did from the whole class, and it opened up countless delightful possibilities for future enquiry. It also gave me a great idea for my final paper, which I'd been lacking the inspiration to write.

What's more, this work is still respected in academia. Recently I was reading a Cambridge thesis on the subject of early printing (The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein) and came across a quote from _The Discarded Image_ (an uncited quote, which was annoying, but that's another story). Eisenstein quotes most authors in order to disagree with them, but she didn't disagree with Lewis (added to him, qualified him, but didn't disagree), which was unusual. Lewis was one of the few authors in her field that Eisenstein did not attack! I also passed _The Discarded Image_ along to one of my previous college professors and he decided to include ideas from it in his Survey of English Literature course.

If you want to know how medieval men and women saw their world-their belief in supernatural beings intermediate between angels and devils, their admiration for all kinds of organization, their heavy reliance on the snippet of Plato to which they had access-read this book. You will never see the Middle Ages quite the same way again.

I was pleased to see a reference to Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by a previous reviewer. This reviewer has, I believe, achieved an understanding of the heart of what Lewis was trying to gain here: the ability to insert, into the minds of his readers, a contingent understanding of the frames within which the Middle Ages reading public saw their world.

What Lewis is describing was not metaphysics. It was real physics, the way real people looked at a real world. "It was not true," Lewis admits, but he goes on to make two further claims that cannot, I think, be disproved:

1. The medieval model of the universe was filled with "delight." It was beautiful in a way that inspired poets and artists of all sorts to creativity. Lewis points out that the mentality of a creative artist of the Middle Ages, inspired by the Discarded Image as a model of the universe, was much less egotistical than many creative people are expected to be today. Artists routinely produced masterpieces and then did not sign them. Simply working on a corner of the Model was enough.

2. The medieval model of the universe was not true and has since been disproved by modern physics, but we can have no assurance that the models we follow and believe in today are true, either. In fact, to philosophers of human thinking like Kuhn and Lewis, every "model" that we come to believe in from time to time is contingent; all of them either have been, or some day will be, superseded by new models.

Lewis was a Christian, and he felt an Appreciative-love for the European Middle Ages that he wanted his readers to share. I hope the readers of this review will believe me when I say that Lewis did not over-play his own religion in this book. He fearlessly makes it clear that, if the Middle Ages and their aesthetic model of the universe had aspects of beauty in them, these aspects were as likely to be due to elements of pagan survival as they were to Christianity. We are repeatedly reminded that the European Middle Ages were not a high-tech, totalitarian theocracy, but a very poor world in which a wide variety of Christian and pre-Christian cultural forces jostled with each other.

G.K. Chesterton once said that the hidden feature of God is His mirth. Perhaps this, too, is Mr. Lewis' hidden feature. He had the last laugh in his last book. For most of his literary career, especially after his thunderous critique of what he called "modernism," which now is labeled "post-modernism," in The Abolition of Man, Mr. Lewis decried our reductionistic models of both man and the universe. Post-Christian views in science and literature, he argued over and over again, are brittle, hopeless, and utterly without joy. If we cling to our modernist (now post-modernist) models, we will not survive, he kept claiming. Of course, Mr. Lewis knew that to say this out-right would offend, so he carefully cloaked his message in such classic stories as The Chronicles of Narnia and Perelandra. The messages from stories are more easily received than a whack on the head. He told stories about how modern man was destroying himself by denying God and truth. Do you, dear reader, realize that Mr. Lewis was telling you another story across the entire book, The Discarded Image? He used the literature of the Medieval and Renaissance periods to let you know that your current models are wrong. Of course, he was aware that the details of the Medieval model were also wrong. Are all models wrong? Yes, because a model is an imperfect representation of reality. Our models will always be wrong, but we must keep trying to create better ones. The modern model is less effective than the Medieval one because today we repudiate tradition (see page 211) and with great pride we place ourselves at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy (as we condemn the idea of hierarchy!) (see this message repeated on pages 74, 85, 185, and 220. He was not repeating this theme for nothing. In contrast to the modern model of man and universe, the Medievalist humbly placed himself at the bottom of the hierarchy with God at the top. Though Mr. Lewis is clear that he does not want to return to the Medieval model of man and the universe, he challenges us to create the more complete post-post-modern model that restores God to His rightful place. There it is in black and white on page 221: "...when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes." Translation: If society is hell-bent upon finding evidence for the supremacy of man (philosophical, theological, scientific) it will be found. If society is heaven-bent upon finding evidence for the supremacy of God, it will be found. This is Mr. Lewis's final message to us: Open your heart to God and your mind will find the evidence and the models, that are developed in your society, will follow. I have to chuckle when reviewers praise this book because it is a "refreshing" departure from Mr. Lewis' Christian writings. On the contrary, he has just told you of his Christian beliefs cloaked in cogent analyses of Medieval literature rather than in stories for children. His mirth is showing.

"The Discarded Image" first appeared in print in 1964, the year following Lewis' death. It first appeared in paperback in 1967, and my copy of that edition is heavily marked up and falling to pieces after years of use, in High School and as an undergraduate and graduate student. It is safe to conclude that I am an admirer of the book. (Also of Lewis' fiction, and his other works of criticism; with a few exceptions, the books on Christianity which made him widely known are of little interest to me.)

It contains the substance (and presumably the final wording) of Lewis' lecture series introducing medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford, and, presumably, reflects what he taught his students at Oxford, and, at end of his life, was trying to establish at Cambridge. It is admirably concise, remarkably clear, and, for anyone who does not remember that it is described as only an introduction, at times frustratingly limited. In a very few pages he encapsulates some of the main features of European thought between, roughly, the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the publication of "Paradise Lost". It represents the essence of a lifetime of actually reading the literature, and he is able to illustrate his points with convincing, and sometimes rather obscure, examples.

On the basis of my own experience, "The Discarded Image" is helpful not only in understanding the literature of the Christian West during the Middle Ages, but also a lot of Jewish and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Islamic literature from the same period. Ptolemy and Aristotle, at least, seem to have been everywhere.

In this context, it is perhaps fair to warn potential readers coming to the book directly from Lewis-the-Christian that he displays throughout a remarkable sympathy for a variety of views (pagan, Neo-Platonic, medieval Catholic, and so forth) which they may find disturbing. Education, not edification, is his primary focus. (Of course, there are those who refuse to consider Lewis a real Christian at all, but an agent of the Devil, and possibly even the Pope -- but they probably wouldn't dream of opening this book, anyway.)

To use a catch-phrase introduced to scholarship in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Lewis is presenting an "Old Paradigm" of the Universe, the very presuppositions of which have been replaced by a series of "New Paradigms" during the last four centuries. It describes a vast but finite world of natural hierarchies, in which much that we find commonplace was rare (and vice versa). It is an effort to equip the student to think and perhaps even feel in medieval, not modern, terms. I can think of no one who has so successfully evoked the sensation of living in a Ptolemaic or Aristotelian cosmos.

By the time this book appeared, Lewis' well-earned reputation as a Christian apologist had largely overtaken his status as a prominent critic of medieval and renaissance literature (established by "The Allegory of Love" in the 1930s). Although "The Discarded Image" has generally been in print (about a dozen paperback printings between 1967 and the 1994 "Canto" edition in slightly larger format, and almost as many since), it never seems to have attained the prominence some (myself included) think it deserves. Even Norman Cantor's praise for the book in "Inventing the Middle Ages" is moderated by complaints about what it doesn't contain, and the dispatch-like brevity imposed by its origin.

It is nice to think that the present "Canto" edition represents a determination to keep the book available. And the cover illustration of this edition (from an illuminated manuscript of "The Romance of the Rose," one of the key works of the High Middle Ages) is certainly more attractive than the blue, with red and white lettering, chosen for the original edition and Cambridge paperback.

It was always an attractively written book, and, literally, memorable; perhaps a little too much. With reference to an observation by another reviewer: I can sympathize with anyone found quoting "The Discarded Image" without attribution. After numerous readings, I have sometimes found it hard to remember just where an idea, or even a turn of phrase, came from, only to recognize it there while looking for something else.

(Reposted from my "anonymous" review of September 10, 2003)

To begin with, it must be acknowledged that the subtitle of this work is apt to be misinterpreted. Lewis's last book of his own initiative, which but for some late corrections would have been published in the final months of his life, might be better understood as a 'preface' to mediaeval and Renaissance literature than as what is now most often meant by an 'introduction'. For his stated purpose is not one of identifying, summarizing, and expounding major works, but of explaining the world-view or Model of the universe which informed any educated writer or reader of the time.

Lewis is concerned that a student may succeed in achieving a semblance of comprehension yet be wholly mistaken in his or her grasp of mediaeval literature through projecting onto it either very modern ideas or, perhaps worse, modern misconceptions of what our ancestors believed. While he does touch on authors and writings familiar from the average undergraduate survey course, he dwells far more on, and digs more deeply into, somewhat obscure examples which he feels better represent the mindset of the era. Boethius and his THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY get particular attention and are alluded to repeatedly throughout. Lewis then proceeds to outline the mediaeval picture of the universe's structure; of the inhabitants it held; and of the psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical aspects which integrated the whole system.

All of this gradually reveals a cosmology far more sophisticated and a civilisation rather better informed than they are often credited with being. Understanding of the nature of the universe was not so erroneous as is now generally supposed; and where it was indeed wrong, it was nonetheless remarkably insightful as well as internally consistent. The mediaeval era emerges as the vital and extraordinary world it was, and as a fertile ground in which the so-called 'Renaissance' took root and flourished.

Lewis concludes with a cautionary reminder that our own notions of the universe and of 'Reality' itself remain comparatively incomplete and are certain to be superseded one day, not merely by new discoveries but by the ever-shifting philosophies and tastes which determine what questions are asked and thus what answers are found.

This is a book I genuinely hope to read again. Parts of it, I confess, were a bit beyond me, if chiefly because I had too little acquaintance with what was under discussion. Even so, Lewis's characteristic wit, conversational style, and contagious enthusiasm succeeded in making me wish to improve my familiarity with his subject. And to inspire such interest is surely a teacher's purpose even more than the mere passing on of information.

C.S. Lewis is just such a pleasure to read. And this book is simply a joy. I am a PhD student in medieval history and have read an awful lot of books on the medieval mind and this is by far the best. There is a slight tendency in Lewis' writing to see philosophy as the sole motor of history--but this is to be expected from his generation and it doesn't detract from the picture he paints. The best part about this book is that when I was finished reading it, I loaned it to my mother, who has absolutely no formal medieval training, and she loved it too! It's such a relief to escape the arrogant jargon of academics, that just masks their ignorance and inane analysis, and explore the world of ideas with such a master of clear and honest language.

The title sounds like something for the specialist in Medieval literature, doesn't it? Don't be put off by that or by the subject matter. There are a number of reasons to read this book.

Here is Lewis the common teacher, not the religious writer. You will find no polemic here. But, paradoxically, Lewis may be more persuasive and display more passion when he is neither trying to persuade nor be passionate. This book originated in a series of lectures, and it shows. There is love for both subject and reader on every page. Lewis writes simply and beautifully, so those of you interested in fine prose will find much here.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the comparison Lewis draws between ancient and Medieval thought and the modern. Sometimes these comparisons are direct, but more often they are subtle, implicit. But, by continually pairing the two worldviews, whether directly or not, Lewis leads us, like the master teacher he was, to reflect on our own way of thinking.

For example, Lewis highlights good and bad aspects of Medieval writing. For one, Medieval writing revels in detail. This can be rich or boring, depending. But, the reason for such detail, Lewis suggests, is that Medieval writers were contemplating a world they loved and felt part of. Thus, to a lover, details about one's beloved are never overdone. In contrast, most of us feel somewhat alienated in today's society, don't we? And, isn't this reflected in contemporary novels?

Lewis also suggests that Medieval writers copied earlier writers. Early writings are, like Cathedrals, products of many craftsmen. The need to be original or creative was subsumed by humility. Medieval writers did not want focus, like so many of today's artists, on themselves. Instead, they wanted to direct attention to contemplation of the figures and subjects of their writing. Pride in craft may have been present, but is was subordinate to love of subject.