C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image

I picked up C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image because I read A.N. Wilson's excellent biography of Lewis this spring, and a mention there made me think I'd like to see it. I'm glad I did.

The "discarded image" to which the title refers is the worldview of human beings in the western hemisphere--Greek, Roman, Jew, Arab, European (heavy on the Europeans--this is C.S. Lewis, an Englishman, and what we may call the Middle Ages happened largely in Europe)--between, say, Homer and the Renaissance. Lewis's argument is that in order to understand Medieval literature, it helps to understand the worldview from which it springs. No doubt. And, in going through the literature, brilliantly--is there anything Lewis hasn't read and digested?--and adroitly--his style as a writer is lucid, charming, and respectful--Lewis paints a picture of a world so different from ours it's hard to imagine.

But the task he has set himself is to imagine this world as he discovers it in literature, and he shows us how we may do the same. This, then, is as much an exercise in history and appreciation of historical difference as it is an introduction to literature. The literature becomes the lens through which we see the Medieval mind.

Lewis's tour of the heavens (imagine looking up into a bowl of beautiful, meaningful actors, not out into unfathomably empty space), the earth, and its inhabitants leaves me yearning not to return to those violent, muddy, ignorant times, but to achieve with the benefits of modern consciousness the same relationship to a meaningful world.

For those who find Rudolf Steiner a crank, idiosyncratically spouting nonsense about the spiritual world, The Discarded Image shows, by inference, that Steiner's attempt was not to inject ignorant fantasy into the hard realities of the modern world, but to recover the meaning of spirit, soul, and cosmos as they were understood in earlier times. Read Lewis's exposition of Vegetable Soul and Sentient Soul, based in several Medieval works, and see how these relate directly--they're talking about the same thing--to Steiner's concepts of etheric and astral lives. Find threads going back through the Middle Ages to Aristotle, Plato, and Herodotus that illustrate what Huston Smith calls "the perennial philosophy."

Lewis is not espousing one view over another. He's not seeking a return to older ways of thinking and knowing. He acknowledges that the medieval view of the world is largely and fundamentally wrong, or that it contains many untruths.

But he is clear that medieval thinkers were sensitive to the limits of their knowledge, acknowledging the tentative, theoretical or hypothetical nature of their concepts. Toward the end of the book, he contrasts this openness and sensitivity to the insensitive way in which we approach the apparent "reality" that we perceive given not only our scientific knowledge but also our unacknowledged, unquestioned assumptions about the world we believe we live in. In a nod to his friend, Owen Barfield, Lewis notes that the change from the ancient to the modern world is not so much a change in the facts of the world as it is a change in our understanding of what is meant by a theory.

Lewis is clear that much of what Medieval people believed was factually wrong--we needn't quibble about that--but their appreciation for logic, fact, and theory was more highly developed than ours is.

Reading History

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then, and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
– Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

When we read the accounts that those who lived before us have left behind, there are three basic possibilities for interpretation, as outlined above by the Professor (C. S. Lewis).

Take the pyramids, for instance.

Either the Egyptians were lying--priests "knew" that their gods were an illusion and that the project of spending most of their civilization's GDP on a mountainous cut stone tomb was a manipulative way to control out-of-work farmers (extrapolated from Charles Beard's cynical "economism").

Or the priests--and their followers--were mad because of rye fungus or inbreeding or some other cause and the pyramids are evidence of collective insanity.

Or they were telling the truth--in that time, at that place, a recognition of the demands on human beings in relationship to the spiritual world and the life after death called for an expression that took the form of an intuitively understood, deeply meaningful structure and symbol.

I choose to believe that, because I try to tell the truth, especially about important things and about my perceptions and thoughts about the world, others generally do the same. That collective insanity or duplicity are not the rule for human behavior and human history (yes, we can find collective manias and such). And so I try to read history giving the benefit of the doubt to those recounting their experiences of the world, their perceptions and thoughts about it.

And if their world is alien from mine, as, in history, it inevitably is, that requires me to broaden my perspective and sharpen my interpretive powers to understand more fully what it means to be human.

Curious that the land of Narnia--a glimps into the spiritual world, or one version of it--requires the same interpretive capacities as understanding history. As Owen Barfield says, one of the correctives to the illnesses of modern consciousness--limited, materialistic, bound by notions of cause and effect, subject and object--is the study of history.