The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

"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Scientific Revolutions," Lewis is presenting an "Old Paradigm" of the Universe, the very presuppositions of which have been replaced by a series of "New Paradigms" during the last four centuries.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).

Table of Contents:PrefaceI The Medieval SituationII ReservationsIII Selected Materials: the Classical PeriodA The "Somnium Scipionis"B LucanC Statius, Claudian, and the Lady "Natura"D Apuleius, "De Deo Socratis"IV Selected Materials: the Seminal PeriodA ChalcidiusB MacrobiusC Pseudo-DionysiusD BoethiusV The HeavensA The Parts of the UniverseB Their OperationsC Their InhabitantsVI The LogaeviVII Earth and Her InhabitantsA The EarthB BeastsC The Human SoulD Rational SoulE Sensitive and Vegetable SoulF Soul and BodyG The Human BodyH The Human PastI The Seven Liberal ArtsVIII The Influence of the ModelEpilogueIndexIn 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'

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!