by C. S. Lewis
But while this often makes criticism of authors impossible it leaves criticism of books untouched. The text before us, however it came into existence, must be allowed to work on us in its own way and must be judged on its own merits. I agree whole-heartedly with a recent critic43 that ‘it is what is made of the “story”, how it is realized, the kind of significance it is made to bear, what the poem totally communicates or does, that is our object’. As historians, as critics of authors, we may want to know whether some simile in the Brut came first from Wace or Laʒamon; whether some speech in Troilus came first from Boccaccio or Chaucer. But as readers we are concerned only to receive, as critics of books we are concerned only to diagnose and evaluate, what this simile or speech contributes to the whole ‘communicating and doing’ of the work before us. And while we are reading or criticizing we must be on our guard against a certain elliptical mode of expression which may be legitimate for some other purpose but is deadly for us. We must not say that the Grail ‘is’ a Celtic cauldron of plenty, or that Malory’s Gawain ‘is’ a solar deity, or that the land of Gome in Chrestien’s Lancelot ‘is’ the world of the dead. Within a given story any object, person, or place is neither more nor less nor other than what that story effectively shows it to be. The ingredients of one story cannot ‘be’ anything in another story, for they are not in it at all. These supposedly identical ingredients are the abstract products of analysis. Within concrete literary experiences we never meet them.
CHAPTER 3
IMAGINATION AND THOUGHT IN THE MIDDLE AGES
1
The man of the Middle Ages had many ignorances in common with the savages of more modern times, and some of his beliefs would certainly suggest savage parallels to an anthropologist. But it would be very wrong to infer from this that he was at all like a savage. I do not only, or chiefly, mean that such a view would depress medieval man beneath his true dignity. That’s as may be; some might prefer the Polynesian. The point is that, whether for better or for worse, he was different. He was in a different predicament and had a different history. Even when he thought or did the same things as savages, he had come to them by a different route. We should be quite on the wrong track if we sought the origin, at least the immediate origin, of even the strangest medieval doctrines in what some even call pre-logical thinking.
Here is an example. In a twelfth-century English poem called the Brut we read the following: ‘There dwell in the air many kinds of creatures which shall remain there till doomsday comes. Some of them are good and some do evil.’* These beings are mentioned to account for the birth of a child for whom no human father could be detected; one of them had in fact begotten Merlin. Now, if we considered this passage in vacuo, we might very well suppose that the poet’s mind was working just like that of a savage, and that his belief in aerial daemons sprang as directly from a tribal culture as coarse grass from uncultivated soil. In reality, we know that he is getting it all from a book, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, and that Geoffrey is getting it from the second-century De Deo Socratis of Apuleius, who, in his turn, is reproducing the pneumatology of Plato. Trace that pneumatology back for a few centuries or so and then at last you may come to whatever roots it had in a culture really close to savagery and a thinking possibly pre-logical. But all that is almost as remote from the medieval English poet as it is from us. He tells us about the aerial daemons neither because his own poetic imagination invented them, nor because they are the spontaneous reaction of his age and culture to the forces of nature, but because he has read about them in a book.
Here is another. In a French poem of the fourteenth century Nature personified appears as a character and has a conversation with another personage called Grâcedieu. Grace-of-God would, for various reasons, be a misleading translation, so I will call her Supernature. And Nature says to Supernature ‘The circle of the cold moon truly marks the boundary between your realm and mine forever’.* Here again we might well suppose the savage mind at work; what more natural than to locate the houses of the gods at a reasonable distance and choose the Moon for the gate between their world and ours? Yet, almost certainly that is not what is happening. The idea that the orbit of the Moon is a great boundary between two regions of the universe is Aristotelian. It is based on a contrast which naturally forced itself upon one whose studies were so often biological and psychological, but also sometimes astronomical. The part of the world which we inhabit, the Earth, is the scene of generation and decay and therefore of continual change. Such regularities as he would observe in it seemed to him imperfect; terrestrial nature carried things on, he thought, not always but ‘on the whole’ in the same way.* It was clear from observing the weather that this irregularity extended a good way upwards above the surface of the Earth. But not all the way. Above the variable sky there were the heavenly bodies which seemed to have been perfectly regular in their behaviour ever since the first observations were made and of which none, to his knowledge, had ever been seen to come into existence or to decay. The Moon was obviously the lowest of these. Hence he divided the universe at the Moon; all above that was necessary, regular, and eternal, all below it, contingent, irregular and perishable. And of course, for any Greek, what is necessary and eternal is more divine. This, with a Christian colouring added, fully accounts for the passage we began with.
Both examples—and it would not be difficult to cite more—point to the same truth, and it is a truth basic for any understanding of the Middle Ages. Their culture is through and through a bookish culture. Millions, no doubt, were illiterate; the masters, however, were literate, and not only literate but scholarly and even pedantic. The peculiar predicament of medieval man was in fact just this: he was a literate man who had lost a great many of his books and forgotten how to read all his Greek books. He works with the rather chancy selection he has. In that way the Middle Ages were much less like an age which has not yet been civilized than like one which has survived the loss of civilization. An exaggerated, but not wholly fake, model would be a party of shipwrecked people setting to work to try to build up a culture on an uninhabited island and depending on the odd collection of books which happened to be on board their ship.
Of course this is grossly oversimplified and I must immediately take notice of one complication which may have already occurred to you. Genealogically, and in some measure culturally, the medieval European had roots in the barbarian life of the north and west as well as in Mediterranean civilization. Along that line, it may be said, he had a much closer link with primitive thought than through its far-off echoes in Latin literature. This of course is true. Fragments of indigenous and spontaneous mythology survive; Germanic, in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Old High German, or Celtic (to some undefined extent) in the French romances. Popular literature, such as the Ballads, may throw up more or less disguised fragments of this at quite late periods. But we must insist that these things loom much larger in the popular picture of the Middle Ages than they did in the reality. By the time we reach the High Middle Age all the old Germanic literature has been forgotten and the languages in which it was written are unknown. And as for the Ballad and the Romance, it is important to realize that both these attractive products are the reverse of typical. It is easy to be deceived here, because it was the Ballad and the Romance which first excited modern interest in the Middle Ages; Medieval studies began there. The reason is simple. These forms appealed to the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even now many of us were first lured to Medieval studies by this romantic attraction. Even now the ‘man in the street’ thinks of the Middle Ages, if at all, in terms of the romances; popular iconography—a joke in Punch, an advertisement—wishing to suggest the medieval, depicts a knight in armour riding through desolate country, adding castles, dragons, and distressed damsels quantum suff. But the paradox is that the note is one which the real Middle Ages struck only in a minority of Ballads and Romances and hardly at all in any other form. That boundlessnes
s, indefiniteness, suggestiveness are not the common or characteristic medieval mood. The real temper of those ages was not romantic. The Arthurian stories represent, perhaps, a truancy or escape from habitual concerns.
Characteristically, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a spiritual adventurer; he was an organizer, a codifier, a man of system. His ideal could be not unfairly summed up in the old housewifely maxim ‘A place for everything, and everything in its (right) place’. Three things are typical of him. First, that small minority of his cathedrals in which the design of the architect was actually achieved (usually, of course, it was overtaken by the next wave of architectural fashion long before it was finished). I am thinking of a thing like Salisbury. Secondly, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. And thirdly, the Divine Comedy of Dante. In all these alike we see the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of a passionately logical mind ordering a huge mass of heterogeneous details into unity. They desire unity and proportion, all the classical virtues, just as keenly as the Greeks did. But they have a greater and more varied collection of things to fit in. And they delight to do it. Hence the Comedy which is, I suppose, the supreme achievement: crowded and varied as a railway station on a bank holiday, but patterned and schematized as a battalion on a ceremonial parade.
You see how this arises naturally from their situation? I described them as literate people who had lost most of their books. And what survived was, to some extent, a chance collection. It contained ancient Hebrew, classical Greek, classical Roman, decadent Roman and early Christian elements. It had reached them by various routes. All Plato had disappeared except part of the Timaeus in a Latin version: one of the greatest, but also one of the least typical, of the dialogues. Aristotle’s logic was at first missing, but you had a Latin translation of a very late Greek introduction to it. Astronomy and medicine, and (later) Aristotle, came in Latin translations of Arabic translations of the Greek. That is the typical descent of learning: from Athens to Hellenistic Alexandria, from Alexandria to Baghdad, from Baghdad, via Sicily, to the university of Paris, and thence all over Europe. . . . A scratch collection, a corpus that frequently contradicted itself. But here we touch on a real credulity in the medieval mind. Faced with this self-contradictory corpus, they hardly ever decided that one of the authorities was simply right and the others wrong; never that all were wrong. To be sure, in the last resort it was taken for granted that the Christian writers must be right as against the Pagans. But it was hardly ever allowed to come to the last resort. It was apparently difficult to believe that anything in the books—so costly, fetched from so far, so old, often so lovely to the eye and hand, was just plumb wrong. No; if Seneca and St Paul disagreed with one another, and both with Cicero, and all these with Boethius, there must be some explanation which would harmonize them. What was not true literally might be true in some other sense; what was false simpliciter might be true secundum quid. And so on, through every possible subtlety and ramification. It is out of this that the medieval picture of the universe is evolved: a chance collection of materials, an inability to say ‘Bosh’, a temper systematic to the point of morbidity, great mental powers, unwearied patience, and a robust delight in their work. All these factors led them to produce the greatest, most complex, specimen of syncretism or harmonization which, perhaps, the world has ever known. They tidied up the universe. To that tidy universe, and above all to its effect on the imagination, I now turn.
I assume that everyone knows, more or less, its material layout: a motionless Earth at the centre, transparent spheres revolving round it, of which the lowest, slowest, nearest and smallest carries the Moon, and thence upwards in the order Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; beyond these, all the stars in one sphere; beyond that, a sphere which carries no light but merely imparts movement to those below it; beyond that, the Empyrean, the boundary of the mundus, the beginning of the infinite true ‘Heaven’.
No one, as far as I know, has exaggerated the emotional and imaginative difference between such a universe and that which we now believe ourselves to inhabit; but a great many people have misconceived the nature of the difference. The cardinal error (ubiquitous in earlier modern writers, and still clung to by some who should know better today) may be expressed in the following words. ‘The Earth, both by her supposed size and by her central position, had, for medieval thinkers, an importance to which we now know that she is by no means entitled.’ Hence, of course, the probable conclusion that their theology—here, once more, pre-logical thinking might be suspected—was the offspring of their cosmology. The truth seems to me the reverse. Their theology might be thought to imply an Earth which counted for a good deal in the universe and was central in dignity as well as in space; the odd thing is that their cosmology does not, in any obvious sense, encourage this view.
First, as regards size. That the Earth is, by any cosmic scale, insignificant, is a truth that was forced on every intelligent man as soon as serious astronomical observations began to be made. I have already said that Aristotle thought the region above the Moon more divine than the airy, watery, and earthy realm below it. He also thought it incomparably large. As he says in the Metaphysics, ‘The perceptible world around us’—that is, the realm of growth, decay and weather—‘is, so to speak, a nothing if considered as part of the whole.’* Later in Ptolemy’s compendium, which transmitted Greek astronomy to the Middle Ages, a more precise statement is made; the Earth, we are told, must, for astronomical purposes, be regarded as having no magnitude at all, as a point. This was accepted by the Middle Ages. It was not merely accepted by scholars; it was re-echoed by moralists and poets again and again. To judge from the texts, medieval man thought about the insignificance of Earth more persistently, if anything, than his modern descendants. We even find quite popular texts hammering the lesson home by those methods which the scientific popularizer uses today. We are told how long it would take you to get to the sphere of the fixed stars if you traveled so many miles a day. The figure brings the distance out at something near 118 million miles.
Now of course this is a small distance compared with those of which modern astronomers talk. But we are here considering not the accuracy of the figure but its imaginative and emotional impact. From that point of view I maintain that the difference between a million, a hundred millions, and a million millions, is wholly negligible. All these figures can be used, manipulated, with equal ease by anyone who can do simple arithmetic; none of them can at all be imagined in the sense of ‘visualized’, and those who have most imagination know this best.
From that point of view, then, the medieval model of the universe is on a par with the Newtonian (I do not say, with the modern, for I want to defer the consideration of it). Either will allow you to lose yourself in unimaginable distances, to sink and say with Leopardi il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare,* and to see the Earth as a speck of dust—if, of course, that is the sort of thing you want to do. And now comes the point I really want to make. I have not said that the difference between the medieval and, say, the Newtonian picture was less than our grandfathers supposed. It was quite as great. But it was not the kind of difference we have been taught to expect.
What it really was I can, here and now, only suggest. The thing really needs to be learned not from a lecture but (you are scientists) by an experiment; an experiment on one’s imagination. It is a simple one. Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will then, I predict, begin to dawn on you.
You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier. And secondly, because the Earth is an absolute centre, and Earthwards from any part of this immense universe is downwards, you will find that you are l
ooking at the planets and stars in terms not merely of ‘distance’ but of that very special kind of distance which we call ‘height’. They are not only a long way from the Earth but a long way above it. I need hardly point out that height is a very much livelier notion than distance; it has, the moment it is imagined, commerce with our nerves, with all our racial and infantile terrors, with our pleasures as mountaineers, our love of wide prospects, and a whole vast network of ethical and social metaphors which we could not shake off even if we tried. Now these two factors taken together—enormous but finite size, and distances which, however vast, remain unambiguously vertical, and indeed vertiginous—at once present you with something which differs from the Newtonian picture rather as a great building differs from a great jungle. You can lose yourself in infinity; there is indeed nothing much else you can do with it. It arouses questions, it prompts to a certain kind of wonder and reverie, usually a sombre kind, so that Wordsworth can speak of ‘melancholy space and doleful time’ or Carlyle can call the starry sky ‘a sad sight’. But it answers no questions; necessarily shapeless and trackless, patient of no absolute order or direction, it leads, after a little, to boredom or despair or (often) to the haunting conviction that it must be an illusion. Earth and Man are, if you like, dwarfed by it, but not much more dwarfed than the Solar System, or the Galaxy, or anything else. One cannot be, in any very important sense, small where size has ceased to have a meaning. The old universe was wholly different in its effect. It was an answer, not a question. It offered not a field for musing but a single overwhelming object; an object which at once abashes and exalts the mind. For in it there is a final standard of size. The Primum Mobile is really large because it is the largest corporeal thing there is. We are really small because our whole Earth is a speck compared with the Primum Mobile.