Through Medieval Eyes

A Look at C.S. Lewis’s Book, The Discarded Image

In childhood, I was fascinated by astronomy.¹ To think about the planets, entire globes of freezing, windy, wastelands moving silently through space, inspired awe in my young mind. Planetary surfaces covered in frozen oceans or nothing but swirling gas as far as man could tell held me captivated by their mystery. Then, of course, I followed the launch and arrival of the Mars rovers in 2003 and 2004 respectively. I distinctly remember a guest at the local library who gave a talk about the rovers, followed by demonstrations of how the rovers worked using a remote-controlled car and illustrations of what the surface might be like using dry ice. Admittedly, part of what motivated my curiosity was mild terror. Like sitting inside while a storm rages outside, I felt the comfort of being here on Earth while looking out into space, which I thought of as a great expanse of death: cold, dark, immense, and silent.

I held that view of the cosmos until I started dealing with the works of C.S. Lewis. Not just reading them, but trying to understand them. Podcasts and books from people like Douglas Wilson, Angelina Stanford, and C.R. Wiley all helped me begin to grasp how Lewis was trying to help modern man see through medieval eyes. Lewis could see that we, being full of hubris, brought our historical and cultural perspectives to whatever we read and tried to force literature into a modern understanding of the world. This can’t work, though, if we’re truly going to understand the literature of the Western Canon; specifically, medieval and renaissance literature.

As I studied, I kept coming across references to this book by Lewis that I’d not read yet: The Discarded Image. Most of the people whose thought I respected said this was perhaps one of Lewis’s greatest contributions and yet one of his least-read works. That being the case, I found an audio version this past spring and took it on.

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The Discarded Image

The discarded image that Lewis references in the title is medieval cosmology: how the medievals thought about life and creation and how that affected their literature and culture. The subtitle of the book is: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Because the book is focused on what would be helpful to know to understand medieval and renaissance literature, the book can be pretty academic in sections.

While certain passages could be dull for those not as interested in the literature aspect, there is plenty to learn. Lewis provides so much context for culture and literature outside of our time, that this book can act as a kind of antidote to historical hubris. The book is packed with eye-opening points and insights that, at every turn, made me realize how insulated we are in our historical perspectives. Even in areas where I thought myself clean from modernity’s influence, Lewis revealed that the roots go far deeper than I realized. Particularly when it comes to areas of thought like how we view the study of history, how we think about the world as we see it, and the poetic nature of creation, we are woefully deficient and could stand to learn a lot from the medievals.

Lewis helps his readers understand references to Greek and Roman literature and the myths that influenced much of medieval literature by giving some of the source material for those references. The medieval view of the cosmos is also something to which Lewis devotes plenty of space. He explains each of the seven medieval planets, their personalities, and their symbols, and references some of the passages in which the medieval authors used these symbols. For someone interested in studying the subject more deeply, Lewis provides plenty of references to other works to keep them busy studying for years. For someone like me, who had read some medieval literature but hadn’t understood it well at all, this book was a great help. It helped me make sense of some literature I’d already read, while simultaneously building my desire to read more from the medieval and renaissance periods.

Takeaways

I came away from this book appreciating Lewis as the literature professor immensely. The depth of reading he had to have done to complete this work alone would have been immense. But this work made me realize how deeply he’d read for much of his other work as a professor and writer. I’ve heard some say that Lewis was known as one of the most well-read men in the world during his lifetime; while I have no way to verify that, I believe it. He had to have read massive amounts of literature to produce the works and lectures he did. And not only that, but he read them and read to understand them. He went back and found the references and sought to understand the symbols. And then he used them in his own works. So much so that people have written entire books just unpacking the literary references in some of his fiction. He was the kind of reader I can only aspire to be.

I also walked away from this book with a much better understanding of how thin our modern way of seeing the world is. We often think like materialists and can only see what’s right in front of our noses. In opposition to that view, the medievals often understood the world to be thick with meaning. I walked away from this book wanting to learn to see the world as rich with meaning as Christians in the past have seen it. The visible creation is a means God uses, especially when paired with His Word, to teach us about the invisible creation.

Conclusion

Studying Lewis, particularly in this work, helped me see the cosmos differently. When I look up at the stars, I want my reflex to be to think of the hosts of angels faithfully serving God in their ranks, not to think of balls of flaming gas burning brightly in a gigantic vacuum. The medieval view of a cosmological hierarchy, full of creatures each obeying and praising God in their station, from the farthest star to the atoms making up the dust under our feet, is a healthy and welcome replacement for the vast emptiness of a materialistic universe.

I’ll leave you with this quote from the book itself, which I think sums up the differences between the medievals and ourselves pretty nicely.

Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely.²

1. I won’t deny that I was tempted to start this, “Space. The final frontier…” That, however, seemed disrespectful to Lewis. I felt the need, though, to be honest with you all about how much of a nerd I truly am.

2. Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, read by Richard Elwood (Saybrook, CT: Tantor Media, 2021), Spotify audio ed., 5hr., 59min.