Here in Part 2 of my look at Jason Baxter’s book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, I want to take a quick look at Chapter 3, “From Symphony to Machine,” and Chapter 4, “Evil Enchantment.” Let’s jump in…
Chapter 3: “From Symphony to Machine”
Within the first few pages of Chapter 3, it becomes abundantly clear to the reader that C.S. Lewis really didn’t like the modern world that much. He hated cars, he found newspaper reading to be an “appalling waste of time and spirit” (on the account that so much of it is just vulgar sensationalism—just imagine what Lewis would think of social media and the internet!), and when he felt that Oxford was getting to modernized and industrialized, he moved to the more country town of Cambridge. As Baxter puts it, Lewis clearly preferred the sound and atmosphere of “an ancient woodland” to the “inferno of mud and noise and steel and concrete.”
To get to the heart of the matter, Lewis realized that the atmosphere in which one lives can either embrace and promote contemplation and wonder or destroy it—and the modern world, as far as Lewis was concerned, left very little room for quiet contemplation. And how one thinks about the world affects how one thinks about human beings. And that, in turn, “influences our ethics and pedagogy, but also our understanding of language, and that in turn affects our sense of what makes for good style” (59). Simply put, how we view what creation is ultimately affects everything else, be it education, literature, psychology, language, or art. In a very real way (and not in the way some more stringent Christian apologists use the term), our worldview really does affect everything.
To the point, as far as Lewis was concerned, probably the biggest “negative” that the scientific and philosophical revolutions had on culture and society was that they rejected the “conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole” and replaced it with the conception of the world as being governed by cold, mechanistic laws under which every individual thing was subject to. What does that mean? Look at the subtitle to this chapter: “From Symphony to Machine.” The medieval world viewed everything in creation as being part of a divine symphony that ultimately gives glory to God, whereas the modern world has replaced the notion of God with “scientific laws” that, although allowing man to become more efficient and faster at “producing stuff,” has rendered him feeling alienated and isolated from not only other human beings, but with the world as a whole, not to mention from himself as well.
Or more simply put, the medieval world viewed human beings as image-bearing musicians who can contribute to the overall symphony of creation, whereas the modern world views human beings as cogs in a machine that has to produce more stuff. (Or as Pink Floyd famously sung, “All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall”). This is what Lewis was getting at in his book, The Abolition of Man, where he talks about how the new “modern” learning has actually made us more ignorant of purpose and rationality itself. Lewis called modern learning a “spiritual cancer” precisely because it has reduced everything to facts and figures and has discarded contemplation and any notion of purpose and true meaning as “unscientific.”
Baxter sums up Lewis’ view in this way: “Modernity requires speed, passion, zeal, and magnetism. It stirs up, shouts louder, and pushes forward. It melts down and surges on, sweeping everything along with it, unlike the Oxford of the scholar’s youth, which, lost in the pleasant dreams of academic pursuits, had ‘nothing of the beast’ because it was ‘not built for gross material gains’” (68).
Chapter 4: “Evil Enchantment”
This view of modern education leads us to the next chapter in Baxter’s book, where he discusses not only Lewis’ view of modern education, but also how the very use of language affects how a society affects our ethics, morality, and very view of the world. Simply put, if language is the medium through which we describe our hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions, then the type of language we use inevitably has an impact on those hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions. Language doesn’t just describe—it shapes and creates.
And that is why Lewis talked about the “evil enchantment” of the modern world. By rendering the notions of God and the supernatural as “not real” and “fiction,” and by subverting the previous language of “myth,” “fantasy,” and “fairy stories” to now mean “kiddie stories,” the new vocabulary of the modern world confines itself to just describing facts, and details, and statistics that push for ever-expanding material progress. Consequently, there is no language left to help express the very real spiritual longings within human beings. Oh, they can’t be “real.” They must be just childish and ignorant feelings. Forget about them and be productive.
That, Lewis said in Abolition of Man, is wrong with so much in the modern world, particularly education. He wrote, “almost our whole education had been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth” (74). By doing that, much of the modern world (education included) pushes people to forget the very existence of spiritual realities. It dismisses those spiritual longings everyone has as being “childish fantasy” that has no real business in the modern world. It essentially divorces the heart and mind. That is what Lewis was getting at when he wrote, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful” (81).
He wrote that in the mid-20th century. I wonder what Lewis would think of today’s western world, where not only do we “remove the organ and demand the function” in terms of virtue and morality, but we are now literally advocating the removal of fully functioning organs and refusing to acknowledge the sterility that results from it. The castration of morality and virtue within education has trickled down throughout society as a whole, to where castration and sex-reassignment surgeries are considered morally good.
In any case, Lewis praised the medieval education system of trying to instill virtue and honor within the pursuit of knowledge—the integration of the heart and mind in education. The modern attempts to divorce the heart and mind in education has led to a different kind of person. As Baxter writes, “Unlike modern attempts to create fact checkers and problem solvers and critical thinkers, Lewis’s beloved old authors tried to model, inspire, and foster the just sentiments of piety, reverence, justice, and wonder” (82). I would add that those people who strive for piety, reverence, justice, and wonder end up being tens times better fact checkers, problem solvers, and critical thinkers, precisely because they are the kind of people who unite the heart and mind in their view of the world. They are not people who are divorced within their very being.
For Lewis, traditional education was an affair of both the heart and mind. That was the kind of medieval education that led to the creation of universities, cathedrals, advances in music, art, you name it. Anyone who studies the medieval world will see that it was bursting with creativity and ingenuity—and that was the result of the medieval concept of education. By contrast, as Lewis states, the modern world has essentially “made the fruitful land a desert.” Therefore, the task for any educator in the modern world (or more properly, the task of any truly subversive educator in the modern world) “is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts” (84).
Baxter ends his chapter by noting the medieval concept of chivalry. Far from being some outdated social practice, Baxter (like Lewis) says it needs to be brought back, front and center. As Lewis put it in his essay, “The Necessity of Chivalry,” “The important thing about the chivalric is the double demand it makes on human beings. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maiden-like, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the -nth [degree] and meek to the -nth [degree]. [Medieval chivalry] taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valor of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop” (85).
Simply put, the chivalric code of the medieval world has a lot to teach modern people who tend to be influence and taught more by modern political slogans, corporate ad campaigns, and talking points from activist groups. In today’s world that seems (depending on your political extreme) to idolize the likes of Dylan Mulvaney and Andrew Tate, and who champion the causes of drag queens and the Proud Boys, the pursuit of chivalry and virtue is a completely foreign endeavor. Sorry, Dylan Mulvaney is not a woman, and Andrew Tate is not a real man.
In time, I hope more people will reject the education of the modern wasteland and embrace once again the lush gardens and woods of the medieval world, where true men and women cultivate both the heart and mind to embrace the fullness of reality, and not the castrated and sterile caricatures of men and women (that really are neither) that we see today.
So enjoying this series of posts. I just happen to be reading CS Lewis!