Part Three of my commentary on C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image is finally up at my Substack.

Parts One and Two can be found Here and Here.

Chapters three and four of The Discarded Image deal with some of the chief sources of the Medieval Model. Lewis starts off by stating that a thorough examination of these sources is beyond the scope of his book, and much more is it beyond the scope of this commentary. I’ll content myself, therefore, with going over some of the highlights.

Not only does Prof. Lewis decline to do a thorough examination of the sources, but he also passes over the most important of them on the reasonable grounds that the reader is probably already familiar with them:

Thus there are perhaps no sources so necessary for a student of medieval literature to know as the Bible, Virgil, and Ovid, but I shall say nothing about any of the three. Many of my readers know them already; those who do not are at least aware that they need to. Again, though I shall have much to say about the old astronomy, I shall not describe Ptolemy’s Almagest. The text, with a French translation, is available and many histories of science exist. (Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.) I shall concentrate on those sources which are least easily accessible or least generally known to educated people, or which best illustrate the curious process whereby the Model assimilated them.

(I like that Lewis assumes a French translation of a Greek text is enough for his students to work with).

Of course, in our day the idea that an ‘educated’ person is likely to be familiar with the Bible, let alone Virgil and Ovid, is less certain, and that “those who do not [know them] are at least aware that they need to” much lessso. But we will leave such people to get out of that fix as best they can while we follow Lewis’s example.

As I say, I won’t go through each source, since that’s beyond my knowledge. I’ll instead take note of some of the key points and familiar faces that will be showing up in these sources.

On that note, Lewis makes a very interesting point at the start of chapter four, which deals with what he calls the seminal or transitional period when paganism was dying out and Christianity becoming ascendent. Namely, that in such a time period the question of who belonged to which faction is by no means clear. Educated men of both camps would have read the same books, attended the same lectures, cited the same sources, and thought using the same ideas. They often interacted on friendly terms (as an example, which Lewis doesn’t cite, the philosopher Hypatia had both Christian and pagan students, and her own religious affiliation is uncertain at best). A modern man would find little to chose between the two except that he would be more familiar with the name ‘Christ’ than the name ‘Plotinus’.

In the same section, he notes the existence of two ‘parties’ of Christians: a ‘leftist’ party seeking to banish all pagan influences and remnants, and a ‘rightist’ party eager to catch up and save whatever seems good about paganism and to find foreshadowings of the Gospel among non-Christian writers.

Whatever we think of this as a reading of Church history, it is invaluable as a quick summary of the what is meant by the over-used and under-defined terms ‘Right and Left:’ that, in a revolutionary system, the former seeks to retain what it judges to be valuable of the old order, while the latter seeks a total break and purgation that the revolutionary doctrine may shine pure. But that’s a topic for another time.

Read the rest here.