The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

_“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”-_C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books”

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” - L.P. Hartly, The Go Between

Will anyone be able to understand modern literature, half a millenia from now? How could they make sense of our in-jokes, backwards science, pop culture references, and unspoken assumptions that no longer apply. The same is true of the literature of the past. The farther it is from us, the harder it is to understand. We read it with confusion or, worse, a false hope that we fully comprehend what we are reading. We need old books to come with commentaries and footnotes, explaining the allusions that fly over our heads and the references which no longer hold.The Discarded Image is just such a guide, but for an entire several century period of literature. Lewis does his level best to explain what the medievals actually believed, what their values were, and how they understood the universe to work; all of which are essential to actually understanding what they wrote.

So, who exactly were these people? These knights in shining armor, troubadours, peasants, monks, merchants, and kings? What were they like? How did they think?

Lewis’s answer is that they were a bunch of nerds.

The First Fandom

“They are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue. And they inherit a very heterogeneous collection of books; Judaic, Pagan, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoical, Primitive Christian, Patristic. Or (by a different classification) chronicles, epic poems, sermons, visions, philosophical treatises, satires. Obviously their auctours will contradict one another…If, under these conditions, one has also a great reluctance flatly to disbelieve anything in a book, then here there is obviously both an urgent need and a glorious opportunity for sorting out and tidying up. All the apparent contradictions must be harmonized. A Model must be built which will get everything in without a clash; and it can do this only by becoming intricate, by mediating its unity through a great, and finely ordered, multiplicity.”

Who would win in a fight: Superman, or Goku?

It’s a ridiculous question. They’re both fictional characters, to start. They not only have separate creators, but since they were first put down in comic book form they’ve been iterated on by hundreds of creators in multiple mediums for several decades. The fictional settings these characters are placed in have different rules, histories, and laws of physics. Goku has quasi-magical martial arts powers, Superman is non-magically (somehow) powered by the sun. Superman lives on an Earth similar to our own, Goku lives on an Earth that is ruled by a dog-emperor. They have nothing to do with each other, and neither was ever real to begin with.

Yet that won’t stop nerds fromfiguring out an answer anyway.

Being a nerd means taking unimportant things like that very seriously. For instance, nerds often argue about which fictional works are canon and which aren't, which is a mind boggling distinction to make if you think about it for five minutes. “This comic book really happened, this other comic book was just a story!” The impulse to systemize, to catalog, and to understand is strong among nerds. They dedicate hours of their lives to filling fan-wikis, assembling timelines, and collecting reference works. It’s one of the principle things that defines someone as a nerd. If you’re the kind of person who would look at the question of whether the Highlander tv series is in the same continuity as the movies and ask “Who cares?!” then you ain’t a nerd. Or, at least, not a Highlander nerd. Maybe you’re a car nerd with strong opinions about what’s really a muscle car.

Medieval authors were a pack of gigantic nerds, and they were all part of the same fandom. The fandom didn’t have a name because for them it was simply the reality they lived in, a combination of all science and history. Lewis calls it The Model.Yet like all fans they did not make the Model. They inherited it from the glorious past, from the few books that survived the fall of Rome and reached them. Often they didn’t have the actual books, but only the commentaries and fan-works based on them by the nerds who came before them. Like any modern fandom the medievals took what had been passed down to them and iterated on it. They wrote fan-fiction, they cataloged timelines and events, they organized and categorized and debated what was canon. Together they put together an understanding of reality and their place in the universe based entirely on works written hundreds of years before.

Naturally you can’t put together hundreds of almost random surviving books from multiple authors and ages, Pagan and Christian, Greek and Roman, fiction and non-fiction, without having a multiplicity of contradictions. In order to fit them all into the same Model (into a_shared universe_, you might say) the contradictions would need to be explained away. What you end up with is an understanding of reality that is both entirely derivative yet an original work of art in its own right. Lewis writes:

[The Model] is vast in scale, but limited and intelligible. Its sublimity is not the sort that depends on anything vague or obscure…Its contents, however rich and various, are in harmony. We see how everything links up with everything else; at one, not in flat equality, but in a hierarchical ladder. It might be supposed that this beauty of the Model was apparent chiefly to us who, no longer accepting it as true, are free to regard it–or reduced to regarding it–as if it were a work of art. But I believe this is not so. I think there is abundant evidence that it gave profound satisfaction while it was still believed in. I hope to persuade the reader not only that this Model of the Universe is a supreme medieval work of art but that it is in a sense the central work, that in which most particular works were embedded, to which they constantly referred, from which they drew a great deal of their strength.

To examine all the elements of the Model in detail would take a book: namely, the book I’m reviewing. Let's look at the model at its broadest and biggest, ignoring for now the fact that if we zoom in on any part we’ll find it filled with intricate detail.

A Layered Universe

The medievals got almost their entire understanding of the physical universe, and our place in it, from Ptolemy and Aristotle. There were additions and refinements from other sources, mostly Roman, but they were drawing on the same Greek ideas. Aristotle divided everything into two realms: everything above the orbit of the Moon, and everything below it. This wasn’t an arbitrary division but the result of a very real problem.

Aristotle, being interested both in biology and in astronomy, found himself faced with an obvious contrast. The characteristic of the world we men inhabit is incessant change by birth, growth, procreation, death, and decay. And within that world such experimental methods as had been achieved in his time could discover only an imperfect uniformity. Things happened in the same way not perfectly nor invariably but ‘on the whole’ or ‘for the most part’. But the world studied by astronomy seemed quite different. No Nova had yet been observed. So far as he could find out, the celestial bodies were permanent; they neither came into existence nor passed away. And the more you studied them, the more perfectly regular their movements seemed to be. Apparently, then, the universe was divided into two regions. The lower region of change and irregularity he called Nature. The upper he called Sky. But that very changeable phenomenon, the weather, made it clear that the realm of inconstant Nature extended some way above the surface of the Earth. ‘Sky’ must begin higher up. It seemed reasonable to suppose that regions which differed in every observable respect were also made of different stuff. Nature was made of the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air. Air then (and with air Nature, and with Nature inconstancy) must end before Sky began. Above the air, in true Sky, was a different substance, which he called aether. Thus ‘the aether encompasses the divine bodies, but immediately below the aethereal and divine nature comes that which is passible, mutable, perishable, and subject to death’.

The rest of the universe follows a similar principle and is also divided into layers. The heavens are made up of 9 concentric spheres, each one housing a celestial body. From top to bottom the order is as follows:

The Primum Mobile, which is the outermost part of the universe and rotates, which drives the movement of all the layers beneath it.
The Stellatum which contains all the “fixed” stars. These are the stars that don’t move relative to each other when observed with the naked eye. They are in contrast to the “planets” which are stars that move relative to the fixed stars and to each other.
Saturn
Jupiter
Mars
The Sun
Venus
Mercury
The Moon

However, the layers don’t stop there! Everything below the Moon is made of the four elements, and these elements also stack themselves in layers based on their “purity”. The layers of Nature were:

Fire
Air
Water
Earth

The order of air, water, and earth makes sense. After all, if you put dirt, water, and air in a jar you’ll quickly find that they sort themselves into the same order. Fire throws us off a bit: if there was a layer of fire between ourselves and the Moon, then why isn’t the sky glowing like a flame? The answer is that they believed the bright flames we see in a campfire or a candle are actually impure fire. The burning wood or wax are made of other elements as well as fire, and flames occur when those “impure” elements are cast away. Pure fire is transparent and quickly rises upwards through the air to find its proper layer. Anyone who has seen the visible distortion of hot air rising off a campfire can understand how they came to this belief.

This layered model of the universe is entirely Pagan in origin. From Christianity only two new layers were added. Above the Primum Mobile, as a kind of layer 0, was “The Very Heaven” where God dwelled. It wasn’t a physical place, but more of a recognition that everything that isn’t God’s Creation must be God. The other layer they added would be layer 14, underneath Earth, Hell. As you ascend higher into the heavens you get closer and closer to God; as you descend lower and lower towards the Earth you get farther and farther away from Him, until you reach the very center of the universe which is the farthest possible place from God.

The most significant difference between this model of the universe and our own, at least at an imaginative level, is that the Model’s universe is finite. We look out on the universe and see an infinite void, populated by more stars than we can count. The medievals in contrast believed in a universe with definite proportions and a specific size.

So how big is their universe? “As to estimates of distance, we are fortunate in having the testimony of a thoroughly popular work, the_South English Legendary_: better evidence than any learned production could be for the Model as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are told there that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of ‘forty mile and yet some del mo’ a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum (‘the highest heaven that ye alday seeth’) in 8000 years.” Doing a little back of the table math put the radius of the Universe as greater than 116,800,000 miles.

The finite yet immense size of the universe naturally had a strong impact on the medieval perspective:

These facts are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only insofar 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 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. And the fact that the height of the stars in medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything–and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere…is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word ‘small’ as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence 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. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.

It's worth noting how emotionally at odds this Model of the universe is with the one we are often taught the medievals had. When we learn about the Copernican Revolution and Galileo defying the Church we are often given the idea that heliocentrism was opposed because it meant Earth was no longer the center of the universe; that is to say, the most important part of the universe. Yet the opposite was the case. Earth is at the bottom of the universe, the scummy seabed of the universe where all the muck sinks to and collects. Earth is smaller than all the other stars and planets, save the moon, and in comparison to the spheres is too small to be seen. Earth is far closer to Hell than to Heaven: millions of miles closer. It may have been the center of the universe, but it was also the lowest and worst place. Heliocentrism changed that. “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 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 vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life.”

Myopic Medievals

Medievals (and the ancients who came before them) had no sense of scale when it comes to fiction. If there is a giant in the story then his size will be inconsistent: one minute he’ll be so massive that his glove is mistaken for a viking mead hall, and the next he’s small enough that his drinking horn can be lifted, with effort, by a man of average height. Similarly there is no sense of scale that comes with distance: a man is carried up to the heavens and at one point looks down and sees the Earth as smaller than a pebble, yet shortly after describes seeing beasts and ships moving around on it.

They also had no sense of anachronism. When they depicted stories from ancient Rome or the Bible in literature or painting they would have all the characters dressed like themselves, with the same technologies and customs. You might see Julius Caesar conquering the Gauls in a suit of armor, or King David decked out in ermine and hose.1

Yet despite their blindness when it came to distance, whether physical or chronological, medieval writers had an intensely clear vision of what was right in front of them. They will describe a lady’s clothing in exacting detail, or note the changes of expression on a knight’s face, or otherwise take careful note of the most mundane details.

The Middle Ages are unrivaled, till we reach quite modern times, in the sheer foreground fact, the ‘close-up’. I mean things like the little dog’s behavior in the Book of the Duchess_; or ‘So stant Custance and looketh hire about’; or, of Constance again, ‘ever she prayeth hire child to hold his pees’; or, when Arcite and Palamon met for the combat, ‘Tho chaungen gan the colour in hir face’...This sort of vividness is now part of every novelist’s stock-in-trade; a tool of our rhetoric, often used to excess so that it hides rather than reveals the action. But the medievals had hardly any models for it, and it was long before they had many successors._

Why this love of detail? Lewis thinks it comes from the Model itself. If you believe the universe is a beautiful, orderly, and finely crafted work of art, then it colors every mundane detail.

If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning–or at least a shape–to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. Ours, most emphatically, was not the wedding garment, nor the shroud. The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.

However, this confidence in the significance and beauty of all things was a bit of a double edged sword:

The typical vice [of Medieval literature], as we all know, is dulness; sheer, unabashed, prolonged dulness, where the author does not seem to be even trying to interest us…One sees how the belief in a world of built-in significance encourages this. The writer feels everything to be so interesting in itself that there is no need for him to make it so. The story, however badly told, will still be worth telling; the truths, however badly stated, still worth stating. He expects the subject to do for him nearly everything he ought to do himself.

Concluding Remarks

C. S. Lewis is known today first as a Christian apologist, and secondly as a writer of fantasy and science fiction. It can be easy to forget that writing was not the primary concern of his life, or how he spent his days. He was a scholar and teacher, teaching English Language and LIterature at Oxford University for twenty-nine years, and then a further nine years teaching at Cambridge as the Chair ofMediaeval and Renaissance Literature (a chair Cambridge created for him specifically, to poach him away from Oxford). Most of his adult life was concerned with teaching and studying literature. The Discarded Image is one of the rare chances to experience Lewis the scholar, writing on a subject he had taught for decades and knew better than the back of his hand.

The book is very well written, as is to be expected from Lewis. While the book is dense with information it is a pleasure to read. Lewis was one of the best writers of the 20th century for taking complicated ideas and writing them in a way that almost everyone can understand. The book is not only benefited by his decades of experience with the subject, but also all his practice at the art of writing, as it likely was the last book he ever wrote, being published a few months after his death.

I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in European history, medieval literature, or who just likes learning new things in general. If you are a fan of Lewis’s other works then I can recommend it without reservation. It is Lewis through and through. I regret that I was not able to touch on more than a fraction of the book’s content. I didn’t even get to touch on: fairies, the Antipodes, astrology, the five wits, the four humors, Bestiaries (“Home dwellers in an unscientific age will believe almost anything about foreign parts; but who could have believed, and how, what the Bestiaries told them about eagles, foxes, or stags?”) the three souls of man, or the Seven Liberal Arts. It is for the best that I have no more time to write before my deadline, for if I did I would no doubt write a book about this book. It would be an inferior book by far, so instead of doing that I will simply recommend you read The Discarded Image.

1This blindness to anachronism continued into the modern age, particularly among folk and fairy tales, which is why today fairy tales are typically set in the late 18th or early 19th century. That’s when the brothers Grimm published their famous book. By taking oral tales that had constantly been “updated” to be contemporary and writing them down, they froze them into the form they took at the time of writing.