My long-neglected Substack has at last been coaxed back into life with the first of a commentary series on C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image:

Lewis starts off with a lengthy illustration of a key and oft-neglected fact of the Medieval mind:

Medieval man shared many ignorances with the savage, and some of his beliefs may suggest savage parallels to an anthropologist. But he had not usually reached these beliefs by the same route as the savage.

(Note: To be clear to anyone who doesn’t know, Lewis uses the term ‘savage’ in its old, nonperjorative sense of ‘a people in a simple or primitive state of social development’)

Savage beliefs are thought to be the spontaneous response of a human group to its environment, a response made principally by the imagination. They exemplify what some writers call pre-logical thinking. They are closely bound up with the communal life of the group. What we should describe as political, military, and agricultural operations are not easily distinguished from rituals; ritual and belief beget and support one another. The most characteristically medieval thought does not arise in that way.

He then proceeds to give two examples of Medieval ideas – first the notion of a intermediary class of ‘spirits’, some good, some bad, inhabiting the air, second the distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘sky’, with the Moon as its boundary – and traces them to their classical sources, before concluding:

What both examples illustrate is the overwhelmingly bookish or clerkly character of medieval culture. When we speak of the Middle Ages as the ages of authority we are usually thinking about the authority of the Church. But they were the age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilisation. In a savage community you absorb your culture, in part unconsciously, from participation in the immemorial pattern of behaviour, and in part by word of mouth, from the old men of the tribe. In our own society most knowledge depends, in the last resort, on observation. But the Middle Ages depended predominantly on books. (emph. mine) Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture.

This is the key point, and will be the central theme of the book: that Medieval man is extremely ‘bookish’, drawing his framework and understanding of the cosmos primarily from the things he has read, especially the works of antiquity. That is to say, the medievals, though not a broadly literate society, were enormously influenced by what they read. A medieval author would hardly ever dream of ‘making something up;’ he would instead draw from and perhaps prune and ‘correct’ some great author of the past. Nearly every facet of the medieval cosmos can be traced back to some classical or near-classical work, set into an overall Christian frame.

Read the rest here

My plan is to continue the commentary throughout the book, though some sections will have more or less depending on how much I have to say about them. It’s not a long book, so it shouldn’t take too many installments. I will try to make them as regular as I may: say about every week or two.

In the meantime, I’ll also be aiming to start providing other forms of content – e.g. fiction – more regularly to the magazine. Now that my job situation is more settled, my goal is to give this and my other creative projects more priority again.

Be that as it may, enjoy this first installment of a walk through a truly fascinating book.