C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image

In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this [Medieval Model], he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light (pp. 74-75).

To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical (p. 99).

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out -- like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life (pp. 118-19).

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 (C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 185).

(About once every five years I find myself re-reading CS Lewis's luminescent account of the medieval world view, in order to remind myself of why I became a medievalist in the first place. Elsewhere he contrasts the modern view of darkness, which is pervasive except where it is interrrupted by sunlight, to that of the middle ages, which regarded night as but a temporary shadow cast by the earth in the path of the sun -- a shadow cast upon a lawn on a sunny day. Increasingly, however, I've had my misgivings about this happy cosmology. In the final chapter, CS Lewis responds to what seems to be the only possible objection: that it's not true. (To which he replies that we have created an alternate model of the universe for our own age ["nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her" (p. 223)].) But there is something unnerving and finally wrong about this comfortable hierarchical arrangement, in which God is in the heavens and all is right with the world -- "the rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / He made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate." It's always been CS Lewis's argument, like Milton's, that we only find true freedom once we discover our true place in the universe -- that Satan, in contrast, was free only to jump off a cliff. But try telling that to the peasantry, the vast majority of the medieval populace, the 90% who lived like animals in grinding obscurity and poverty, no more valued than their cattle -- try telling them that, having found their place at the rich man's gate, that only then were they truly free. It's a self-satisfied, rich man's vision of life that seeks to preserve the status quo -- a stay against confusion, as Robert Frost once said of rhyme; but a stay against liberty and equality as well.)