The Middle Ages is not done yet...

 

Alongside not bathing (a stereotype that happens not to be true) and mouths of rotting teeth (equally false), one other aspect of the Middle Ages we can do without apparently is the Medieval model of the cosmos. Superseded by science, it might remain of antiquarian interest but no more than that. In no way can it be be believed in or operate as a model whose contemplation may have something to offer us in the course of our lives. We have, happily or not, superseded the medieval mind.

C.S. Lewis, however, thought differently and not only was he an engaged, and engaging, scholar of that very mind but sought to imaginatively transpose it in forms that put it to use in helping shape minds anew whether through Christian apologetics, science fiction or children's fantasy.

Jason M. Baxter's 'The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind' lucidly explores how he did so, and more importantly why we might ourselves think it important.

We might think it important because the medieval mind was at home in a meaningful cosmos an act of creation in which we could find roadmaps for our own journey as humans. It was a cosmos that was alive with presences, gathered within an understanding of ultimate, personal presence, that of God. We dwelt in a world that, first and foremast, was objectively whole in which values were as robust a kind of thing as trees or rock, perhaps more so! Or perhaps, more precisely, where trees and rocks could be as appropriate to the language of morals as of botany or geology. It was a place where myth, properly understood, remained a tool with which to think.

None of which is immediately apparent now - in a world which, in the phrase one of one physicist, has become more meaningless, the more we know of it, where values are subjective, where we wander on an uninteresting planet on the edge of an indifferent universe, and where matter, separated from mind, either God's or our own, is simply dead stuff.

But beneath these appearances, people still possess transcendental longings, the world still appears beautiful, and the cosmos feels suspiciously alive!

Baxter takes us on two intertwined journeys - one through the Medieval mind and one through what Lewis creatively made of it - to help us reconsider our rejection. 

Two areas of particular interest stood out for me - the recognition by Lewis that myth is akin to modelling - how we create meaningful pictures of how the world might work - and this is a practice of mind that persists. Lewis had an alert interest in the development of quantum mechanics and this long before Capra drew attention to the linkages between mystical views of the world and the strange emergent world of the sub-atomic level (indeed as did many of the founders of quantum physics). Myth is a modality of thought that wrestles with the mystery of things - and, yes, is not factual in a literal sense but neither it is necessarily untruthful.

The second was to remind us that though the medieval mind thought the cosmos was geocentric in no way did this imply central - matter, in fact, was the outer rim of creation and humanity might be loved by God but not uniquely so; and, other realms existed that held radically different beings to whom God responded and loved - a feature deeply apparent both in the Chronicles of Narnia and in Lewis' Science Fiction. The universe was as expansive to the medieval mind as the contemporary, even as it imagined that expanse in a different modality.

Meanwhile, Lewis was alert to what we have lost in the modernity - the separation of values and facts, a sense that this world is enfolded in another higher world, of the possibilities of meeting God as person, rather than a spiritually significant, if somewhat abstract force that makes no demands. The beauty of Baxter's book is to show how Lewis puts all those possibilities back in play in a contemporary form yet a form deeply informed by his reading of 'Old Books'.

Once again I came away realizing that my mind (in so far as I have one) is attuned to a different world - in this illuminating book - it is ‘medieval’ but could equally be thought of as ‘indigenous’. It moves through an alive world that is a spiritual gifting, and deeply personed.