The Discarded Image Review

If it wasn’t clear from the picture we gain of CS Lewis in reading Inklings that the man was far more than the author of a rather popular children’s fantasy series replete with Christian metaphors and themes, The Discarded Image should lay those doubts to rest.  Cogently, clearly, and concisely, Lewis presents a comprehensive understanding of the dominant thought paradigm underpinning the world view of the Middle Ages.  It reveals him to be deeply versed in the classics, possessed of remarkable insight, and fully capable of distilling his knowledge into an approachable form.  Indeed, even if you are unwilling to explore the literature of the period, The Discarded Image will at least allow you to dip a toe into those waters.

However, it is not intended as a replacement for reading the classics.  Indeed, it is easy to forget sometimes that, not so long ago, it would not be unusual to find many authors familiar with a common corpus of literature dating back to the Middle Ages and before: Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Boethius, Pliny, Seneca, Aurelius, Plato, Aristotle…these thinkers’ works were considered all but mandatory reading, often in the original language, and it was quite expected that an author could make a reference to Paradiso and expect the readership to catch it.  I am still working through many of these texts, and perhaps the most challenging part of reading The Discarded Image was to resist the temptation to add every single historical work Lewis references to my reading list.  To return to the point, The Discarded Image was written as an introduction to these sorts of works and to a study of the period, a way of helping a reader to frame the classics and encounter the medieval mindset with a notion of how the medieval would have approached those texts.

In that sense, I may have derived more personal benefit by reading this a few years ago.  By this point, while I have not read all the classics, and certainly am not as deeply familiar with them as Lewis and his contemporaries, I’ve gained sufficient insight into the worldview of the European Middle Ages that I already shared many of Lewis’ conclusions.  This did not much diminish my appreciation of the text, for it was reassuring to have my own conclusions confirmed, and the writing is eminently readable, but it is to say that, if you are closer to the beginning of your engagement with the classics, this book will be of far greater benefit.

Not that I did not derive fresh insights.  Lewis repeatedly demonstrates his habit for incisive, cross-grain thinking about matters which others, and especially others in the scholastic community, do not think to question so deeply.  The observation, for instance, that the Model which the scholarship of the Middle Ages produced was so definite and so structured as to be almost constricting, so that there is no real conception of empty, unbounded space as there is in the modern day, but instead the entire universe is given a containment, so that looking up into the night sky is more akin to looking up at the vastness of a cathedral than it is to looking out into infinity.  The Discarded Image does an excellent job of guiding the reader to understand (not just to imagine or comprehend) the medieval mindset and how it viewed the world.  It also does more to highlight the rationality and deep-thinking nature of the time than any book purporting to deliberately dispel the conceptions of the Dark Ages: The Light Ages, for instance.

Of course, you may still question why this matters.  We are, after all, not medieval scholars.  We are preoccupied with our own intricate models of the universe which may or may not be accurate reflections of reality, replete as they are with dark matter, dark energy, quantum foam, and emergent space-time, and there is little appetite for a cosmogony, a Model, that is viewed almost universally as superstitious and backwards.  Indeed, even most modern religious people would likely find the teachings of the Model disconcerting, almost paganistic, with its multitudes of angels, daemons, principalities, intelligences, devils, fairies, and so forth.  Certainly no church service I’ve ever attended has dared suggest inhabitants of a transcendent reality beyond the Trinity, an angel or two, and the vague hosts of a poorly defined heaven.  And yet.  And yet, through Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Bernoulli, Maxwell, Gauss, Bohr, Einstein, Hawking…through centuries of scholarship, we are perhaps not so much building upon a different foundation as we are continuing to draw from the tradition of understanding the universe that can be traced back to the Middle Ages.  Our language itself is replete with metaphors and allusions rooted in the Model as surely as it is with references to the ancient Greeks.  Adjectives like sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic are derived from the medieval understanding of the humors.  The modern idea of temper and our many sayings surrounding it is similarly derived from the ideas of the Model.  Core ideas of philosophy, etymology, and morality can be traced back in ways both obvious and subtle to the Model to which The Discarded Image exposes us.

In other words, reading about the Model is not just about gaining insight into the mindsets of long-dead medieval scholars and artists, or being better able to read and understand classic pieces of literature for which few people retain an appreciation.  It is about informing our understanding of our modern world, of the ideas we continue to echo, and of the assumptions which we make without questioning, without realizing they are assumptions at all, so fundamental are they to how we view the world until something like the Model comes in with a set of assumptions so different that they set ours into sharp relief.  Yet, not so different that we cannot gain a deeper understanding of both from the insights of the other.  And that’s not just an argument for why you should read The Discarded Image– it’s an argument for that being where you start.