[Greetings from Austin! Lately, I’ve found myself drawn to great works concerned with cosmology—meaning, for my purposes, books that imagine and explore the nature and structure of the universe. This strange tug has me visiting (and re-visiting) works like the Republic and Timaeus by Plato, The Discarded Image and the Ransom Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Part of this fascination, I suspect, has to do with the current world events and a deep sense that history is not one linear line of moral progress.
Often, when we think about the ancient world, we assume that the people who occupied those times were primitive and ignorant; less often (especially when talking of the so-called “Dark Ages”) do we think that the way our ancestors viewed the world has something to teach us. Yet, while we may know more than our ancestors about the matter in the material world, I can’t help but feel a conviction that we have forgotten some of the more important things—the things about the world beyond our senses. Hence, this obsession with the classics concerning cosmology.
With what remains of this essay, I’ll focus mainly on the Medieval Mind, its hierarchical view of the cosmos, and how our abandonment of it contributes to modernity’s meaning crisis.]
[Figure]1
When the mid-1900s saw Nietzsche announce the death of God, C.S. Lewis say our world was one populated by Men Without Chests, and Simone Weil point to our species as uprooted, there was a sense among great thinkers that something very vital had gone missing. That man, with his conquest of Nature and scientific hunger, “[h]aving eaten up everything else, [ate] himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.”2
Of course, Nietzsche, Lewis, and Weil disagreed on what precisely that very vital thing-gone-missing was. And each was, in my view, right to an extent, as it was not any one thing in isolation, but a variety of things working together that conspired to create a cultural zeitgeist that swept modern man into a meaning crisis. To try and list all of the factors that so conspired is beyond the scope of this particular essay, but we can look at least one: the move away from the medieval view of the cosmos.
The Medieval View
Taking cues from classical writers like Plato (Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus), Virgil (Aeneid), Cicero (Somnium Scipionis), and Lucan (Pharsalia), and early Christian fathers like Saint Augustine, the medieval philosophers and poets (Aquinas, Milton, Chaucer, Dante, etc.) painted a picture of the cosmos that sees the deepest desire of man fulfilled by a movement upward along a hierarchy.
Sitting atop that hierarchy was the Summum Bonum and Unmoved Mover—the Highest Good, the Sun, source of all light and movement, known as God to many religions. At the bottom was Earth (and the men who inhabited it). The Moon, for Cicero and the medievals, represented the boundary point where the temporal things passed into the eternal.3 In the mind of the medievals, as in Plato, the soul’s deepest longing was to return to the top of the hierarchy because that’s where it came from.
This view of the cosmos diverges from most modern conceptions in a few ways. One is in how what we call ‘Nature’ is viewed. For the medieval poets, Nature was not everything (as the Pantheist claims). Like everything else, Nature was created. “She was not God’s highest, must less His only, creature. She had her proper place, below the Moon. She had her appointed duties as God’s viceregent in that area.”4
Another way the medieval view differed from the common modern conception is there was a realm beyond time and space—a space we humans cannot explore where things exist unchanging in their ideal state (Plato’s realm of the Forms).
To feel the effect of these divergent views, as Lewis counsels three times in The Discarded Image, we must walk under a night sky. His first mention of this exercise involves imagining ourselves at the bottom of the universe looking up (rather than out):
These facts are in themselves curiousities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realising how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it. The recipe for such a realisation is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous… 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.5
The second time Lewis advocates for a starry walk, he emphasizes a shift from seeing space as vast emptiness to seeing it as bursting with divinity. Where we moderns imagine that the heavenly bodies move “in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity” of terrifying silence, the medievals saw the sun illuminate the entire cosmos and heard its harmony:
If the reader cares to repeat the experiment, already suggested, of a nocturnal walk with the medieval astronomy in mind, he will easily feel the effect of [the medieval view]. The ‘silence’ which frightened Pascal was, according to the Model, wholly illustory; and the sky looks black only because we are seeing it through the dark glass of our own shadow. You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music.6
The third and final time that Lewis suggests a starlight walk, he encourages the wanderer to see themselves as looking in (rather than out):
I can hardly hope that I shall persuade the reader to yet a third experimental walk by starlight. But perhaps, without actually taking the walk, he can now improve his picture of that old universe by adding such finishing touces as this section suggested. 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 the 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 mind runs] up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned.7
The Discarded Order
With our view of the medieval mind now in sight, we can see how their world was an ordered one. Heaven was at the top, Earth was at the bottom, and life was a moving up and down a ladder.
Medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place.’ Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent activities, he was equally full of the impulse to fomalise them. War was (in intention) formalised by the art of the heraldry and the rules of chivalry; sexual passion (in intention), by an elaborate code of love… There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up.8
In the medieval image, “everything links up with everything else; at one, not in flat equality, but in a hierarchical ladder.”9
When the Enlightenment discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and others showed the universe was heliocentric, gravity made things fall, and things in space changed like everything on Earth, the world saw these discoveries as sufficient to upend the medieval model of the cosmos.
What they didn’t see coming, however, was how much humanity was doomed to drift when detached from a high star. Without it, there is no up, and there is no down. There is no better to move toward and no worse to move from. When the medieval model is discarded entirely, the world becomes flat and dull, without meaning or movement toward anywhere worth going.
After completing Lewis’s prescribed exercises, we are left to wonder whether we have been misled. Maybe the Dark Ages were not so dark and the Enlightenment not so light as the titles would have us believe. Maybe ours is the age that is truly dark, and that is the reason we now find ourselves caught neck deep in the quicksand of a meaning crisis, where people have been uprooted—disconnected from themselves, each other, the world, and from an optimistic future—and anxiety disorders, depression, despair, and suicide are on the rise across the globe.
Maybe the medievals were onto something after all.
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P.S. Just as Lewis qualifies his views in his epilogue to The Discarded Image, I, too, want to be clear about two things: (1) I understand that we know more about the reality of the material universe than the medieval who held false beliefs on many fronts; and (2) I am not advocating for a wholesale return to the medieval world. What I am doing, however, is wondering whether we might have lost something when scientific discoveries caused us to discard the medieval image in its entirety. Just because the medieval were wrong about some things does not mean that they were wrong about all things. The collateral damage of doubt is often the baby thrown out with the bathwater.
Part of the point of this essay is to raise my serious doubts about the modern model of the cosmos that replaced the medieval one. The modern scientific model suggests: (1) our sense experience can reveal everything about reality to us, and (2) that reality is evolutionary rather than revolutionary—that is, the model no longer supports the view that all perfect things precede all imperfect things and subscribes, instead, to the idea that the starting point (our starting point) is always lower than the developed.10 On (at least) those two fronts, I side with the medievals.
As we leave each other, I’ll end with this reminder:
No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many… how much of the total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest [depends on our honest examination].11
Across the bottom of the painting reads what I believe to be the following (read top and bottom lines, with sentences split into three columns): qui coelum cucenit mediumque imumque tribunal sensit consiliis ac pietate patrem (“He who embraces the heavens, the middle, and the bottom, felt his father by his counsels and piety”); lustravitque animo cuncta poeta suo nilpotuit tanto mors saeua nocere poetae (“and the poet looked over everything in his mind, and felt that a cruel death would hurt the poet so much”); doctus adest dantes sua quemflorentia saepe quem viuum virtus carmen imago facit (“the learned man is present, giving his own which flourishes often, which the virtue of the living makes a song of image”).
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (from now on “The Discarded Image”), p. 215.
Without being fully aware of this until recently, I think my use of the Moon in my book covers for my “This Way to the Stars” series serves a similar poetic purpose.
The Discarded Image, p. 39.
The Discarded Image, pp. 98-9.
The Discarded Image, p. 112.
The Discarded Image, pp. 118-9.
The Discarded Image, p. 10.
The Discarded Image, p. 12.
The Discarded Image, p. 220.
The Discarded Image, p. 223.