The Discarded Image
An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature — C. S. Lewis's 1964 posthumous lecture-based reconstruction of the medieval cosmological-cultural model
Tradition: Twentieth-century English medieval-Renaissance literary scholarship
The medieval cosmological model — the discarded image of the world that organised pre-modern European literary-cultural life
The Discarded Image (1964, posthumous) is Lewis's reconstruction of the medieval cosmological-cultural model — the picture of the universe (geocentric, with concentric spheres, intelligent angelic movers, the prime mover, etc.) that organised pre-modern European literary-cultural life. Based on lectures Lewis had delivered at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1950s, the book is a guide for modern readers to the conceptual world that medieval and Renaissance literature presupposed, including chapters on the heavens, the longaevi, the soul and its faculties, the earth and her creatures, and the relation of the model to the literature it shaped. The book is among the most accessible introductions to medieval cosmology and literary culture in English.
Author
Editions cited
- The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UP, 1964, posthumous)
School Embodiments
The medieval model Lewis reconstructs is fundamentally Platonic-Ptolemaic-Aristotelian — the inheritance of classical natural philosophy synthesised by medieval Christian thought.
"The Model is, of course, derived from books — and from books that were themselves derived from earlier books, in an unbroken tradition reaching back to antiquity." (The Discarded Image)
The Catholic-scholastic synthesis of natural philosophy and Christian theology is the operating framework Lewis describes.
"The medieval mind found the world to be a single intelligible whole — created by God, hierarchically ordered, knowable in principle by the rational creature." (The Discarded Image)
Realist about the historical specificity of the medieval cosmological model — it was what people actually believed about the world, not merely a literary convention.
"To understand medieval literature, we must recover the picture of the world its authors actually held; without that picture, the literature's details are inscrutable." (The Discarded Image)
Distinguishes the actual medieval model from later distortions (the "stupid medieval" caricature) — and shows the model as an intricate intellectual structure that careful scholarship can reconstruct.
"What we call 'the medieval' is often what later periods invented as the medieval; the actual medieval thought was far more sophisticated than the caricature." (The Discarded Image)
The hermetic-magical-astrological elements of the medieval model — particularly the influences of the planetary intelligences — are treated with full philosophical seriousness.
"For the medieval thinker, the planetary intelligences are real intermediate beings between God and matter, with their own functions in the cosmic order." (The Discarded Image)
The medieval model's hierarchy of being — from prime mover through angelic intelligences to humans, animals, plants — is paradigmatically idealist in its sense that being descends from higher to lower.
"The Great Chain of Being is not a metaphor for the medieval thinker but the actual structure of reality." (The Discarded Image)
The medieval confidence that the cosmos is rationally intelligible — that careful reasoning can disclose its structure — is foundational rationalism.
"For the medieval mind, reason could grasp the cosmos because the cosmos itself was rational." (The Discarded Image)
The Neoplatonic structure of the medieval cosmos — descent from the One through the Intelligences to the material world — is the philosophical-theological background.
"From Pseudo-Dionysius through the medieval angelology, the Neoplatonic descent provides the architecture of the medieval cosmos." (The Discarded Image)
Anglican tradition.
Internal Tensions
Lewis's reconstruction has been criticised by some specialists for over-systematising what was actually a more varied medieval philosophical-theological inheritance. Its accessibility and reach to non-specialist readers is uncontested.
I. Time
The long medieval period from the Patristic-Boethian synthesis through the late-Renaissance recovery of antiquity.
Attributes
II. Space
The medieval cosmological space — the concentric spheres, the prime mover, the earth at the centre — that organised the medieval imagination.
Attributes
III. Matter
The four elements; the celestial matter of the spheres; the descending hierarchy from spirit to body.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The medieval knower who shared this model; Lewis as the modern reconstructive scholar; the contemporary reader.
Attributes
V. Energy
The intelligent-spiritual energies of the angelic-planetary intelligences; the natural energies of the four elements.
Attributes
VI. Information
The detailed medieval cosmological-theological model.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Discarded Image resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.