C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

Robert Boenig

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776521
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Medieval literature and the imagination of C. S. Lewis

2015 winner of the Mythopoeic Society's Award for Inkling Studies

In C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages, medievalist Robert Boenig explores Lewis's personal and professional engagement with medieval literature and culture and argues convincingly that medieval modes of creativity had a profound impact on Lewis's imaginative fiction.

The Middle Ages affected Lewis in different ways. Early in his life he found medieval narrative compelling, sharing his love for it with others and first experiencing the intense spiritual longing he termed "joy" through his engagement with it. He went on to build a successful career as a scholar who was, as he put it, "chiefly a medievalist." His creative writing not only evokes the Middle Ages but also adapts the medieval technique of appropriating and altering prior texts as a means of generating new stories. Understanding Lewis's creative appropriation of previous sources is essential for a full assessment of his achievement as a creative writer.

For Lewis, the medieval was above all a place where he encountered the spiritual. It was through the medieval in its mode of Norse myths, particularly those involving the Norse god Balder, that he experienced "joy." He delighted in hunting this joy through medieval books, like those of Malory or Chaucer, and also through more modern works that evoke the Middle Ages, such as the prose romances of William Morris. Among the works of devotion and spirituality that Lewis continually read toward the end of his life were the medieval classics The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis and Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. The medieval for Lewis was a place where he could—and did—encounter God.

Using Lewis's private correspondence, scholarly books and articles, and creative writing, Boenig charts Lewis's involvement with all things medieval, demonstrating the importance of the Middle Ages in any assessment of Lewis's literary achievements.

1

Lewis the Medievalist

In 1954, C. S. Lewis delivered his inaugural lecture as he assumed the newly endowed chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. The lecture’s title, De Descriptione Temporum, bespeaks in Latin Lewis’s unease about conventional ways of thinking about the Middle Ages.¹ The title means “about the classification of [periods of] times,” and in the lecture, he argues that the Renaissance did not signal the greatest change in Western European culture. Back in 1936, when he published his first academic book, The Allegory of Love, he had claimed that the twelfth century had initiated changes greater than those of the sixteenth associated with the term and concept “Renaissance,” but now, in 1954, he mounted an argument for an even greater change in the early nineteenth century.

Four developments of the nineteenth century convince him that the watershed then was more important than that of the Renaissance: a shift in politics, where the governed masses are looked at as people to be energized into votes and movements rather than pacified into mute obedience; a transformation of the arts away from traditional forms to those that were then new and experimental; a religious change, where people abandoned their faith, ushering in the post-Christian era; and the intrusion of machines into everyday life.

Lewis’s clever ploy is to offer himself as a “specimen,” a “dinosaur”—a survivor from the lost era, who is still capable of reading the texts produced by and in the ideology of the earlier age, which he terms “Old Western Culture,” with insight most of his contemporaries have lost. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “I stand before you somewhat as an Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners.”² As audacious and appealing as his rhetoric here may be, we might lose sight of the main point in his lecture, announced in its title. Certainly Lewis wanted to be provocative, proud of his literary conservatism in a Cambridge where the fashion was to be progressive, but more importantly, he wished to weaken the traditional boundaries between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He does so, as we shall see, not by claiming the so-called enlightened attitudes of the Renaissance for the Middle Ages but by the opposite method of extending medieval ideology forward into the Renaissance and beyond. The medieval is not only his emotional center, but it is also the center of his professional life.

We see this tendency to colonize later periods in the name of the Middle Ages played out in the pages of his scholarly writings. Also in 1954, for instance, Lewis published his longest and in many ways most substantial work of literary criticism—the long-delayed volume for the Oxford History of English Literature. Its wordy, pedantic, and dull title, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, which Oxford University Press forced on Lewis, today scares people off in a way that the intriguing The Allegory of Love and the invitatory Preface to Paradise Lost do not.³ This is a shame, for it is a rich and rewarding book, surveying the literary worth of scores of writers famous and obscure and offering both insightful specific analyses of individual authors and valuable, though often controversial, generalizations about the period as a whole.

Its subject reminds us that in his professional life Lewis was not a “medievalist” in the strict sense of the word. That is, he did not narrow his interests to one and only one period, feeling free to range broadly. In this, he differed from his friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien, who found little to interest him in anything written later than the age of Chaucer.⁴ Lewis’s “professional” career—in its own way as brilliantly successful as those he had as a writer of imaginative fiction and as apologist for the Christian faith—can serve as a reminder that narrow specialization was not always and perhaps should not always be the norm.

But English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is nevertheless useful to us as we try to measure Lewis’s engagement with the Middle Ages. Particularly in its introductory chapter, in which he sketches the important ideological shifts in science, religion, and culture that characterize that century, he lets his feelings about the Middle Ages peep through. In focusing on another literary period and, as it were, removing the medieval world from the center of his stage, Lewis gives us some access to what he really thought about the Middle Ages. In other words, he is not dressing the medieval up in its best clothing, as he does in his “medieval” books The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image; he instead lets the period wear its everyday clothes. He delineates how the literature of the sixteenth century works its way away from its “Late Medieval” mode through its “Drab” period toward its “Golden Age” (Lewis’s own terms).⁵ He is not, in other words, evangelizing for the literature of the Middle Ages as he does elsewhere.

That said, it is nevertheless startling how sympathetic he can be to the discarded Middle Ages. I remember that when I first read the book, when my own literary interests had not yet turned away from the Renaissance toward the Middle Ages, I almost felt betrayed. How could Lewis delight in the literature of the 1500s yet censure the century so strongly for its numbing misunderstanding of the centuries that had preceded it? I had no answer to that question back then, but I wish to offer one now, suggesting that this answer provides us with much insight into what made Lewis tick—not only as a literary critic but also as a creative writer.

The title of his introductory chapter, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” tells us his thesis in a nutshell: loss accompanies gain, and regress offsets progress. As any intelligent reader of his theological works understands, Lewis was no believer in the march of progress. The title of his first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, should remind us of this. This lack of enthusiasm for progress of course runs counter to the ideology of the modernists, Lewis’s own contemporaries, and the post-modernists, our own. As Lewis asserts in his essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” we still live with the presuppositions of a myth, datable to the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century and fostered in the nineteenth by Darwin, that cultures evolve rather than devolve with the passage of time.⁶ After all, we buy the latest software upgrade or the latest model car because we are acculturated into thinking that they are inherently better than the last. But for Lewis, the “New Learning” of the Renaissance—the advances in textual criticism and the recovery of Greek literature—are offset by a “New Ignorance”—an out-of-hand rejection of medieval culture that affects literature adversely at the same time as the new learning is laying the groundwork for the Golden Age of the late Elizabethans.

An example of how Lewis balances Progress and Regress might help to clarify this point. In discussing the New Geography of the sixteenth century, where the discovery of the Americas so radically affected the way people looked at not only the geographical but also the political and economic worlds, Lewis finds a passage in the works of French Renaissance essayist Montaigne that tempers our tendency to see the advances in our knowledge of the world in an exclusively positive light. “The best European minds,” he writes, citing Montaigne’s Essais, III.vi, “were ashamed of Europe’s exploits in America. Montaigne passionately asks why so noble a discovery could not have fallen to the Ancients who might have spread civility where we have spread only corruption.”⁷ Lewis thus invites us to look at the past as a more morally capable era than the Renaissance present that its writers experienced. If the explorers of the sixteenth century could arrive at places unimaginable to their medieval and classical fore-bears, those older ages possessed a moral capability that would perhaps have mitigated the violence and economic exploitation that attended the New Geography.

We see a similar ambiguity in Lewis’s handling of the New Textual Criticism:

The humanists [of the sixteenth century] did two things, for one of which we are their endless debtors. They recovered, edited, and expounded a great many ancient texts in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. We must, indeed, remember that many Latin authors had never been lost; Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Claudian, Boethius, and many others were as familiar to Dante and Chaucer as they were to Ronsard and Jonson. We must also remember, as modern scholars have shown, that a real knowledge of the ancients was not nearly so common among sixteenth-century authors as their writings would at first lead us to suppose. Quotations are often at second or third hand. But it remains true that we owe nearly all our Greeks, and many of our Latins, to the humanists: also, a prodigious advance in philology and textual criticism.⁸

Here we have praise mixed with some small blame but, more importantly, a reminder that medieval people were not quite as ignorant as people from the Renaissance—and many still today—assume. A quick glance at Dante and Chaucer corroborates Lewis’s point.

I have left Lewis’s quotation hanging, for he mentions two important developments in Renaissance attitudes toward classical literature, and this first is the only one for which we owe them only measured thanks. The second development was the predilection for Ciceronian Latin as opposed to medieval Latin, which the humanists found barbarous. There was a movement among the sixteenth-century humanists to expel from Latin, which was then still the universal European language of scholarship, the new vocabulary and the grammatical loosening that the language had developed in the Middle Ages. At its most extreme, some humanists maintained that words or grammatical constructions not found in Cicero’s writings were not to be admitted into the present Latin language. As Lewis makes clear in this chapter and elsewhere in his book, the effect of this attitude was wholly negative. Medieval Latin was, if not still a “living language,” at least a flexible and growing literary language capable of nuances and artistic literary effects. The humanists, according to Lewis, finished off Latin as a viable literary language. As he writes, “The ‘barbarous’ [medieval] books have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It would be hard to think of one single text in humanists’ Latin, except the Utopia [of Thomas More], of which we can say the same. . . . We read humanists, in fact, only to learn about humanism; we read the “barbarous” authors in order to be instructed or delighted about any theme they choose to handle.” The “barbarous” authors and works Lewis mentions are “Bede, Aquinas, the great hymns, or the Carmina Burana.”⁹ Lewis depicts a Middle Ages that is capable of offering instruction and delight, while he gives no real reason beyond pedantry to read anything other than Thomas More among the authors of the Latin literature of the Renaissance.

The very word “Renaissance” is problematic for Lewis. He notes that it was a self-congratulatory term developed by thinkers of the sixteenth century to justify their rejection—hatred, even—of all things medieval. The word implies the existence of at least three separate eras: the era of “rebirth” (the word’s meaning), the era of the original “birth,” and the bridge between them. The bridge is the “Middle” Ages—the time that must be passed before what has been lost has once more been found. Fifty-five pages into his book, Lewis comments, “It may or may not have been noticed that the word Renaissance has not yet occurred in this book. I hope that this abstinence . . . will not have been attributed to affectation. . . . If [‘Renaissance’] were merely a chronological level . . . it might be harmless.”¹⁰ Lewis then clarifies his objections to the word. Not only is it self-congratulatory, it also fosters a tendency to separate the sixteenth from earlier centuries, thus emphasizing the ways it differs from the Middle Ages rather than the ways it shares and develops medieval modes of looking at things. Lewis anticipates by almost a half century contemporary academic preference for substituting the term “Early Modern” for “Renaissance.”

But more importantly, Lewis here drops an important clue not only to his attitudes about the Middle Ages but also his methods as a creative writer. For him the medieval is an outlook, an attitude—or an ideology, if you will—that cannot be circumscribed by time markers. It is not simply a time period describable by dates like A.D.500-1500. For Lewis, the medieval seeps into later centuries, permeating them with its values and narrative strategies. We can see Lewis’s idea at work on a very practical, demonstrable level. A glance at the table of contents of The Allegory of Love or the index to The Discarded Image will convince us that for Lewis the medieval animated the Renaissance and beyond. The Allegory of Love, subtitled A Study in Medieval Tradition, as mentioned, concludes with a chapter on Spenser’s sixteenth-century masterpiece The Faerie Queen. In The Discarded Image Lewis constantly quotes, alongside the medieval authors that are the book’s mainstays, writers like Donne, Shakespeare, and Milton, and not for rejecting medieval ideas but for accepting and developing them.¹¹ In his most provocative mode, Lewis could even assert that the Renaissance had never really happened, for what unites the thinkers and writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when they are compared to those of the twentieth century, far outweighs what divides them.¹² In other words, for Lewis the medieval is a state of mind, a way of looking at things, even, as we shall see, a conduit for the spiritual.

If Lewis honors the medieval in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, in his last book of literary history published during his lifetime, The Discarded Image (1962), he attempts to systematize it.¹³ The purpose he sets for himself in this book is to describe what medieval people believed about the cosmos—the heavens, the earth, and the creatures both natural and supernatural that inhabit them. What might surprise readers who come to this book acquainted only with his theological writings is that he is not content with orthodox Christian teachings about this subject; instead he draws from classical and post-classical writers like Lucan, Macrobius, and Boethius, and also from folk beliefs to present a model of the cosmos that departs as much from today’s Christian model as from the scientific. He is, of course, not presenting the medieval model of the cosmos as in any sense “real” and is not seeking to convert his readers from either the theological or scientific models. His aim is aesthetic. He describes this model to help us read medieval literature and understand medieval thought. But he significantly does so without any condescension: though reliable neither scientifically nor theologically, for Lewis, the model is imaginatively compelling and worthy of our admiration and enjoyment.

Lewis depicts medieval people as bookish organizers who liked to hierarchize things. He writes, “At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place.’ Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight. . . . [Medieval people] are bookish. They are very credulous of books. They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour [‘author’] has said is simply untrue.”¹⁴ We are reminded that our word “author” is the first element in “authority”; for the Middle Ages something was “authoritative” because it was found in a book. The extreme scarcity of books in an age before the printing press, the extreme expense of the material used for them (valuable parchment, even more v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Floating Island
• 1. Lewis the Medievalist
• 2. Surprised by the Middle Ages
• 3. What Lewis Really Did
• 4. A Moustache and a Fishhook
• Epilogue: Soft Borders
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index