Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

by C. S. Lewis

  Secondly, the mediation of celestial influences through the air illustrates a principle that runs through the whole universe. Last time I compared that universe to a great building: I should now like to compare it to a fugue—the orderly and varied reiteration of the same ‘subject’. When Donne says

  On man heavens influence workes not so,

  But that it first imprints the ayre,*

  he is making one statement of that subject. You have here, you see, a triad in the form: Agent (the planets), Medium (the air), Patient (man, and, in general, Earth). It is a triad which still has its appeal; I suppose that aether, at no very distant period, was accepted because we wanted a medium or go-between. But it appealed very much more strongly in the Middle Ages. The Triad is repeated on every level.

  First, among the angels themselves. The Middle Ages learned all about their triadic organization from a Latin version of a (probably sixth-century) Greek theologian whom we know as Pseudo-Dionysius. The method by which he dovetails his triadic angelology into his Old Testament, where (by our standards) nothing like it is to be found, is a charming example of the process I mentioned before—the great medieval labour of harmonization and syncretism.* He points out that in Isaiah vi the angels are crying out ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ not (as we might expect) to God but to one another. Why? Obviously because each angel is handing on his knowledge of the Divine Sanctity to the angel next below him. The only exception is the Seraphim. They alone of all creatures apprehend God immediately. But as soon as you reach the Cherubim you have a triad; God as agent, Seraphim as medium, Cherubim as patient. Then below that, Seraphim as agent, Cherubim as medium, Thrones as patient. And then the same triad within the second hierarchy and the third; and of course between the first, second, and third hierarchies as wholes. It is a continual devolution as if God, who in a sense does all things, will yet do nothing immediately which can possibly be done through the mediation of His creatures. And as if even this were not enough, we are then told that within each individual angel, of whatever class, the triad occurs again; each has primary faculties which act through the medium of secondary faculties on tertiary faculties. Thus you get not only triad above triad but triad within triad till the mind is dizzy with them.

  All this, within the angelic world itself. But the moment one steps outside that world one finds that it itself, collectively, is part of a vaster triad. For God governs the world through the angels; the whole angelic population, without prejudice to its complex internal triads, is the medium between God as agent and Nature (or Man) as patient. Just so on Earth a King governs the commons through the barons. But this of course was not, for the medieval mind, a mere analogy. It was the real earthly and social reproduction of the triad. I say ‘social’ to distinguish it from ‘individual’; for within the individual man, as within the individual angel, the triad is repeated.

  It is indeed repeated twice, once on the ethical and once on the psychological level. Ethically (and here, at many removes, they were following Plato) the triad is Reason, Emotion, and Appetite. Reason, seated in the head, governs the Appetites, seated in the abdomen or beneath it, by the aid of the more fully human and civilized emotions which were located in the thorax; such things as shame, honour, pity, self-respect, affection. This ethical triad was accepted for millennia. The effort now sometimes made to lead a civilized life on reason alone, rejecting the emotions, the attempt of the monarchic head to rule the plebeian belly without the aid of that aristocracy in the thorax, would have seemed to Plato a rash venture; like what motorists call ‘driving on your brakes’. It is hard on the brakes and leads to skids. On the psychological level the individual triad depends on the doctrine of the triple soul. But the word anima had a larger and less exclusively religious range of meaning than soul; ‘life’ would sometimes be a better translation. There is vegetable soul, common to all plants, which gives only life; sensitive soul, which gives life and sensation; and rational soul, by which we think. Man of course has all three: when things are going right inside him, his rational governs his vegetable through his sensitive.

  A thirteenth-century author, Alanus, works out the theological, the social, and the individual triads in terms of castle (or citadel), city, and the lands beyond the city walls. These are literally given, of course, in the social one; a king in his citadel, the barons in the city, the peasants in the fields outside. In the individual the head is the citadel, where the empress Sapience keeps her court. In the City of the Breast lives the high baronage of Magnanimity. Outside, in the abdomen, or still more outside, in the genitals, live the common appetites. But it is the theological triad that most concerns us at the moment. The castle of God is the Empyrean, the region beyond the outermost sphere. In the city, in the vast ethereal spaces, dwell the cosmic nobility, the nine orders of angels. Down here on Earth there is a place permitted to us ‘as to aliens’, he says, ‘outside the wall’.57

  Outside the wall—that is the point. Go back for a moment to the experience I mentioned at the beginning; that of looking up at the stars as you come out from an opera or a feast. The full contrast between the medieval experience and ours is only now apparent. For whatever else we feel, we certainly feel that we are looking out; out of somewhere warm and lighted into dark, cold, indifferent desolation, out of a house on to the dark waste of the sea. But the medieval man felt he was looking in. Here is the outside. The Moon’s orbit is the city wall. Night opens the gates for a moment and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps which are going on inside; staring as animals stare at the fires of the encampment they cannot enter, as rustics stare at a city, as suburbia stares at Mayfair.

  I have spoken advisedly of ‘high pomps’. My account so far has perhaps made this complex, densely peopled cosmos a little too severe, made the operations of the spheres and the angels sound, as we should say, ‘a little too like work’. I could correct that more easily if I had slides. I am thinking in particular of one picture which represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile itself. It is of course wholly symbolical; they knew perfectly well that such a creature—it had no body—could not be literally depicted at all. But the symbol chosen is delightfully significant. It is a picture of a girl dancing and playing a tambourine; a picture of gaiety, almost of frolic. And why not? These spheres are moved by love, by intellectual desire, never sated because they can never completely assimilate themselves to their object, and never frustrated because they continually do so to the fullest extent which their nature admits or requires. Their existence is thus one of delight. The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one. They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect Object.

  A modern mind will of course say that the men of that age fashioned heaven in the likeness of Earth and, because they liked high pomps, the Mass, coronations, pageants, tournaments, carols, attributed such activities par excellence to the translunary world. But remember that they thought it was the other way round. They thought that the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the social hierarchy on Earth were dim reproductions of the celestial hierarchies. The pageantry and ceremony which they indulged in to the utmost of their powers were their attempt to imitate the modus operandi of the universe; to live, in that sense, ‘according to nature’. That is why so much medieval art and literature is concerned simply with asserting the nature of things. They liked to tell, and to be told again and again, about the universe I have been describing. Any poet in any poem is liable to start describing the angels, the spheres, the influences, the metals, and a hundred other things I have not had time for—gems, beasts, the Zodiac, the Seven Virtues, the Seven Sins, the Nine Worthies, the nature of winds, the divisions of the soul, herbs, flowers, what not. They wrote it, they sang it, painted it and carved it. Sometimes a whole poem or a whole building seems almost nothing but verbalized or petrified cosmology. In all this I have never found one trace o
f the savage idea that by representing the things on Earth you somehow helped them to happen in the universe. Their minds were not like that. It was rather the spontaneous desire of us ‘aliens outside the city wall’ to participate as far as we can in the glory of the life of the city; like the Mothers’ Union doing in the village hall the same play that was done in London—a legitimate, absurd attempt, and very good fun for all concerned.

  Two points which may have caused some discomfort remain. Is it, imaginatively and emotionally, tolerable to have the Earth spatially central and, at the same time, in some other sense, a furlong outside the wall? And is it quite satisfactory to have an infinite space outside the highest heaven? It is, if we take their thought at its highest level. On that level it involves something of which no model could be drawn on a blackboard, nor even easily made in three dimensions.

  Aristotle had said ‘Whatever is outside the highest Heaven is of such a sort that it needs no place, nor does time affect it’.* It is typically Aristotelian in its dry caution, typically pagan in its reverent timidity. Taken over by Christians, this of course turns into something much more positive and resounding. As one author says, all that heaven is Deo plenum, full of God. Or, as Dante says, it is luce intellectual piena d’ amore (Paradiso, XXX, 40). In other words there isn’t exactly any space beyond the cosmos. The Empyrean is the boundary of space, not in the absurd sense which would force us to put more space outside it but in the sense that it is the point at which the spatial mode of thought breaks down. To reach the end of space is to reach the end of spatiality.

  Dante makes this vivid to us by an astonishing tour de force. He cannot of course make the spaceless imaginable in the strict sense. What he does is to show us space turning inside out; that teaches us pretty effectively that spatial thinking, as we ordinarily know it, has broken down. First, to prepare us, he gives us this remarkable image. The Primum Mobile is described as the ‘vase’ in which time has its roots—‘look elsewhere for its leaves’ (Paradiso, XXVII, 118–20). Time, of course, in the old philosophy, was generated by the movement of the Primum Mobile. But consider the image—a gigantic tree growing downwards through those 118 million miles, its roots in the stars, its leaves being the days and minutes we live through on Earth. I had almost said ‘the leaves of its topmost branches’, for one cannot help thinking of them as topmost: what is down for us must be up for the tree, its sap must be coming up, its roots must be its lowest point. Thus he begins to turn the universe inside out. Then, later, in the Empyrean itself, he is shown a point of light round which nine lights are circling, the nearest to the centre moving at the highest speed and the furthest out at the lowest. Of the centre Beatrice says ‘Heaven and all nature hangs upon that point’ (Paradiso, XXVIII, 41–2); it is what Aristotle says in so many words of the Unmoved Mover. The point is an exposition of God; the nine (so to call them) planets are the nine angelic hierarchies and you see that this is our universe inside out. In our visible world the circumference, the Primum Mobile, moves quickest and is nearest to God; the Moon moves slowest and is nearest what we call the Centre—i.e. the Earth. But the true nature of the universe is exactly the opposite. In the visible and spatial order Earth is centre; in the dynamic, invisible order the Empyrean is centre, and we are indeed ‘outside the city wall’ at the end of all things. And the centre of that Centre, the centre of Earth, is the edge, the very point at which all being and reality finally peter out. For in there (as we call it), out there (as we ought to call it) is Hell—the last outpost, the rim, the place where being is nearest to not-being, where positive unbeing (so to call it) asymptotically approaches that zero it can never quite reach.

  Such was the medieval cosmos. It had of course one serious drawback. It wasn’t—or a good deal of it wasn’t—true. I have rather been inviting you to consider it as a work of art; perhaps, after all, the greatest work of art the Middle Ages produced. Of course it was not a mere fantasy. It was intended to cover, and up to a point did cover, the facts as they knew them. And perhaps in calling it untrue, we should all now mean something other than our grandfathers meant. They would have taken the Newtonian account as simply true and the medieval as simply wrong. It would be for them like the difference between a good map and a bad one. I suppose most people would now admit that no picture of the universe we can form is ‘true’ in quite the sense our grandfathers hoped. We would rather speak of ‘models’. And since all are only models, we should be prepared to find in each something of the nature of the artist as well as something of the object. From that point of view, too, a study of the various models has its interest. I think the medieval and Newtonian models—the one so ordered, so sublime, and so festive, the other so trackless, so incapable of form—reflect the older, more formal and intellectual world and the later enthusiastic, romantic world pretty well. What our own models—if you continue to allow us models at all—will reflect, posterity may judge.

  CHAPTER 4

  DANTE’S SIMILES

  There is some good poetry in the world, such as that of the Anglo-Saxons, which uses no similes. And there is some poetry, such as that of popular song, which uses about the same amount of simile as ordinary conversation: a woman is as fair as a flower, or a dancer as light as a leaf on a lime-tree. The simile, as a fully-fledged poetic device, falls generally into three classes. The class with which all of us are most familiar, the simile of Tennyson, Arnold, Wordsworth, Milton and Spenser, derives through Virgil from Homer. The second class is that of the unhappily named ‘metaphysical’ simile. The third class may be called the Dantesque simile, for in this, as in some other matters, ‘the phoenix Dante is a vast species alone’. Indeed, Dante’s position in the history of simile is an important one. The ‘metaphysical’ kind may be in some degree indebted to him: and he, in his turn, had read Virgil, if not Homer, and was quite familiar with the Homeric type of simile and sometimes used it. But standing outside the renaissance tradition of imitation, he made this type merely a starting-point for a development of his own. He thus gives us a specimen of what might, but for the Renaissance, have become the traditional usage of high European poetry, but what is, in fact, almost confined to himself.

  The Homeric type must, I suppose, descend from a primeval conversational usage of simile. Someone must once have seen, and said, that a warrior went at the enemy like a lion and slaughtered them like sheep, his purpose being simply to convey the triumphant energy of the assault, to make clear his meaning and not to adorn it. In the actual Homeric poems we find similes of this sort. When we are told that Athene directs the arrow away from Menelaus as far as a mother drives away a fly from a sleeping child (Iliad, IV, 130), the whole simile taking a line and a half, I do not think this is said for the sake of bringing in a charming picture, for the picture is not elaborated, but simply to make clear the change of direction in the arrow’s flight. The simile is really doing what all similes pretend to do—illustrating. And perhaps the same is true of the comparison between Ajax and the donkey in Iliad, XI, 558: a comparison ridiculous and bathetic in the extreme if it is taken as decoration, but illustrating to a nicety the situation it describes. But we find elsewhere that Homer has already allowed himself a liberty with similes much like the Roman senator’s liberty of speaking beyond the question. Thus the foot-soldiers follow the two Ajantes not merely like a cloud, but like a cloud which a shepherd sees, from a high ridge, coming across a sea on a strong wind, black as pitch, and it makes him shudder and he sets about getting the sheep into a sheltered place (Iliad, IV, 275). The cares of the shepherd have nothing whatever to do with the Locrian contingent in Agamemnon’s army. This is the ‘long-tailed’ simile, ancestor of all the similes in our modern poets down to Bridges. I question whether the vignettes of early Greek life which it so often admits into Homeric poetry are introduced on any very conscious principle of emotional echo or emotional contrast to the business in hand. It sounds much more as if a poet were interested in the vignette for its own sake. I say ‘interested’ rather
than ‘charmed’, because the matter contained in these Homeric similes is not often very obviously poetical, and must have been even less so to contemporaries. They are a product of that inexhaustible appetite for things as they are, which fills the Homeric poems so delightfully full of good, detailed butchering, cooking, carpentry, seamanship, laundry-work, house-building, and wood-cutting, and which makes it so hard for Homer to tear himself away from the shield of Achilles because, in the shield, everything he has ever seen and heard can be described. His unjaded zest for all that goes on in the world reminds one of an intelligent small dog’s determination to find out what everything smells like and tastes like and whether it is edible; and it bears no small part in producing what Kinglake excellently calls the ‘strong, vertical light of Homer’s poetry’.*