The second part of my commentary on C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image is finally up.

And this chapter gets into some very interesting territory.

The Middle Ages, like most ages, were full of change and controversy. Schools of thought rose, contended, and fell. My account of what I call the Medieval Model ignores all this: ignores even the great change from a predominantly Platonic to a predominantly Aristotelian outlook and the direct conflict between Nominalists and Realists. It does so because these things, however important for the historian of thought, have hardly any effect on the literary level. The Model, as regards those elements in it which poets and artists could utilise, remained stable.

Lewis then notes that the Medieval Model far outlived what historians describe as the Middle Ages, being still in full force at the time of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, and not being completely abandoned until near the end of the 1600s (symbolically fitting, as this would have been around the time of the fall of James II and the end of Medieval kingship). And, of course, elements of it persisted as tropes long afterwards due to the influence of those authors (see, for instance, Gilbert & Sullivan). They didn’t really die out in that capacity until the 20^th century.

Here Lewis makes, to my mind, one of the most important points of the book: the distinction between ideas as present in the mind of a philosopher or scientist and ideas in the mind of an artist or layperson.

In every period the Model of the Universe which is accepted by the great thinkers helps to provide what we may call a backcloth for the arts. But this backcloth is highly selective. It takes over from the total Model only what is intelligible to a layman and only what makes some appeal to imagination and emotion. Thus our own backcloth contains plenty of Freud and little of Einstein. The medieval backcloth contains the order and influences of the planets, but not much about epicycles and eccentrics. Nor does the backcloth always respond very quickly to great changes in the scientific and philosophical level.

We will return to the idea of the ‘backcloth for the arts’ presently. For now, note the point (self-evident when you think about it) that a layman’s idea of science is not, in fact, going to be the same thing as what a scientist or great thinker says about it, for the simple reason that the layman’s mind doesn’t have the same definitions, the same connective tissue, or the same assumptions as the Great Thinker’s does. Their ideas may have the same label, but they will be found, on examination, to not be the same thing. ‘Evolution’ is going to mean something very different to an actual biologist from what it means to a junior software engineer with a Darwin fish bumper sticker.

Read the rest here. Part three will be coming…well, as soon as it’s done.