The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Paperback)

It contains the substance (and presumably the final wording) of Lewis' lectures introducing medieval and Renaissance literature to students at Cambridge (and, presumably, earlier in his career at Oxford). It is admirably concise, remarkably clear, and, for anyone who does not remember that it is only an introduction, at times frustratingly limited. In a very few pages he encapsulates some of the main features of thought between, roughly, the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the publication of "Paradise Lost". It represents the essence of a lifetime of actually reading the literature, and he is able to illustrate his points with convincing, and sometimes rather obscure, examples.

On the basis of my own experience, "The Discarded Image" is helpful not only in understanding the literature of the Christian West during the Middle Ages, but also a lot of Jewish and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Islamic literature from the same period. Ptolemy and Aristotle, at least, seem to have been everywhere.

In this context, it is perhaps fair to warn potential readers coming to the book directly from Lewis-the-Christian that he displays throughout a remarkable sympathy for a variety of views (pagan, Neo-Platonic, medieval Catholic, and so forth) which they may find disturbing. Education, not edification, is his primary focus. (Of course, there are those who refuse to consider Lewis a real Christian at all, but an agent of the Devil, and possibly even the Pope -- but they probably wouldn't dream of opening this book, anyway.)

To use a catch-phrase introduced to scholarship in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Lewis is presenting an "Old Paradigm" of the Universe, the very presuppositions of which have been replaced by a series of "New Paradigms" during the last four centuries. It describes a vast but finite world of natural hierarchies, in which much that we find commonplace was rare (and vice versa). It is an effort to equip the student to think and perhaps even feel in medieval, not modern, terms. I can think of no one who has so successfully evoked the sensation of living in a Ptolemaic or Aristotelian cosmos.

By the time this book appeared, Lewis' well-earned reputation as a Christian apologist had largely overtaken his status as a prominent critic of medieval and renaissance literature (established by "The Allegory of Love" in the 1930s). Although "The Discarded Image" has generally been in print, it never seems to have attained the prominence some (myself included) think it deserves. Even Norman Cantor's praise for the book in "Inventing the Middle Ages" is moderated by complaints about what it doesn't contain, and the dispatch-like brevity imposed by its origin. It is nice to think that the present "Canto" edition represents a determination to keep the book available.

With reference to an observation by another reviewer: I can sympathize with anyone found quoting "The Discarded Image" without attribution. After numerous readings, I have sometimes found it hard to remember just where an idea or turn of phrase came from, only to recognize it there while looking for something else.

What's more, this work is still respected in academia. Recently I was reading a Cambridge thesis on the subject of early printing (The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein) and came across a quote from _The Discarded Image_ (an uncited quote, which was annoying, but that's another story). Eisenstein quotes most authors in order to disagree with them, but she didn't disagree with Lewis (added to him, qualified him, but didn't disagree), which was unusual. Lewis was one of the few authors in her field that Eisenstein did not attack! I also passed _The Discarded Image_ along to one of my previous college professors and he decided to include ideas from it in his Survey of English Literature course.

If you want to know how medieval men and women saw their world-their belief in supernatural beings intermediate between angels and devils, their admiration for all kinds of organization, their heavy reliance on the snippet of Plato to which they had access-read this book. You will never see the Middle Ages quite the same way again.

Preface

I The Medieval Situation

II Reservations

III Selected Materials: the Classical Period

A The "Somnium Scipionis"

B Lucan

C Statius, Claudian, and the Lady "Natura"

D Apuleius, "De Deo Socratis"

IV Selected Materials: the Seminal Period

A Chalcidius

B Macrobius

C Pseudo-Dionysius

D Boethius

V The Heavens

A The Parts of the Universe

B Their Operations

C Their Inhabitants

VI The Logaevi

VII Earth and Her Inhabitants

A The Earth

B Beasts

C The Human Soul

D Rational Soul

E Sensitive and Vegetable Soul

F Soul and Body

G The Human Body

H The Human Past

I The Seven Liberal Arts

VIII The Influence of the Model

Epilogue

Index

In his "An Experiment in Criticism", Lewis suggests that the heart of literary experience is the surrender by the reader to the work being read; that good reading is the entering into the views of others and going out of ourselves.

With regard to medieval literature, this requires two things: the facts behind a host of unfamiliar references, and even more importantly, a remake of how to think of reality. Readers who insist on reading works of the period with their modernism intact are "as travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the continent, mixing only with other English tourists, enjoying all they see for its 'quaintness', and having no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives." While Lewis says "I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit", he also says of them, in a somewhat chilling echo of the Sermon on the Mount: "They have their reward."

It is to those who want a much greater reward that Lewis directs "The Discarded Image." While he provides the reader with hard information concerning medieval philosophy, cosmology, biology, education and literature, imparting the individual facts is the lesser part of his purpose. What he really aims at is to completely detach the reader from all of the unconscious beliefs and attitudes that a lifetime spent in modern culture brings, and substitute for them those of the educated medieval man.

What the description I've just given you of this book does not do is to describe what the experience of having that done to you is like. I found it compelling and disorienting. One by one, the familiar intellectual landmarks were stripped away from my mental image of the world, and strange new ones put into their place. Vertigo is the word that comes closest to describing the feeling; I found I had to stop reading every couple dozen pages to give myself time to recover. This was so even though my familiarity with the philosophy, theology, and cosmology of the period was, by any non-specialist standard, quite high. The reason, I think was not so much that my knowledge was inferior to Lewis' (although of course it certainly was) as that I had only thought of these matters from an external "objective" point of view - I had never before tried to actually enter into that view of the world before. The result of Lewis' instruction on the matter was a combination of delight at the new insights so gained and humiliation at the revelation of the deep limitations of the "knowledge" I had possessed before.

In sum, I found reading "the Discarded Image" to be an extraordinary experience, and its value in no way depends on my using the information gained to identify some off-hand reference of Chaucer's. What Lewis describes in "An Experiment in Criticism", he demonstrates here - how completely different reading is when it is done well compared to when it is merely done.