The Discarded Image
At the same time, Lewis takes his reader on a tour of some of the pinnacles of medieval thought (some of them inherited from Classical paganism) that have survived into the modern cultural and theological landscape.The titles of the chapters are Lewis begins by introducing the Middle Ages as a whole and by laying out the components that shaped their world view.This worldview, or "Model of the Universe", was shaped by two factors in particular: "the essentially bookish character of their culture, and their intense love of system".A Model must be built which will get everything in without a clash; and it can do this only by becoming intricate, by mediating its unity through a great, and finely ordered, multiplicity.He excludes the Bible, Virgil, and Ovid as texts that a student of medieval literature should already be familiar with.[4] As with the Classical period, he provides summaries of various texts, including: He also mentions Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae and Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Majus: "They are not, like those I have been describing, contributors to the Model, but they sometimes supply the handiest evidence as to what it was.Lewis goes on to answer the question that may arise in response to "kindly enclyning" and that is: "[Did] medieval thinkers really believe that what we now call inanimate objects [possess] sentient and purposive [qualities]"?Lewis says "in general" because "they attributed life and even intelligence to one privileged class of objects (the stars)...But full blown Panpsychism ... was not held by anyone before Camponella (1568–1639)"."[7] He then briefly summarizes the Ptolemaic universe: "The central spherical Earth is surrounded by a series of hollow and transparent globes ...Starting from Earth, the order is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; the 'seven planets'."[8] All motion moved in order from the top to the bottom: from God to the Primum Mobile to the Stellatum to each lower sphere.He notes that within the Medieval mind the universe was finite, that it was of a perfect spherical shape containing within itself an ordered variety.He concludes that while 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.Lewis sees the word fairies as "tarnished by pantomime and bad children's books with worse illustrations."[11] Lewis writes of the various creatures in the Middle Ages: fearsome, fair, and the separate beings known as the High Fairies."Fortune, to be sure does not steer the Earth through an orbit; she fulfills the office of an Intelligence in the mode proper for a stationary globe."[20] Lewis points out two ways in which the problem of the relationship between soul and body would have presented itself to medieval thinkers."The Sanguine man's anger is easily roused but shortlived; he is a trifle peppery, but not sullen or vindictive."The phlegmatic boy or girl, fat, pale, sluggish, dull, is the despair of parents and teachers; by others, either made a butt or simply unnoticed.[28] In the Middle Ages, then, the purpose of recording history, or as we know today the term "historiography," was "to entertain our imagination, to gratify our curiosity, and to discharge a debt we owe our ancestors".