Here in Part 4 of my look at Jason Baxter’s book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, we are going to look at the final two chapters: Chapter 7: “Deep Conversion and Unveiling,” and Chapter 8: “Modern Science and Medieval Myth.” I’ll just say up front that I do not think this is a well-written post. Hopefully, there will be some good things to take away in it.
Chapter 7: Deep Conversion and Unveiling
Chapter 7 focuses on Lewis’ understanding of spirituality, his opinion of “modern spirituality,” and his attitude toward myth and the Gospel. To begin with, Lewis viewed modern spirituality as “only the latest revival of a very ancient pantheism according to which a cerebral ‘principle’ or ‘life force’ pervades the world” (121). Simply put, modern spirituality embraces a very ambiguous and “fluffy” type of spirituality whose only demand on the person is it becomes anything the person wants it to be. It is largely vacuous and shallow with no real aim or point.
By contrast, Lewis saw the Gospel as presenting Christ and the ultimate aim and goal of all of creation and history. That means that Christian spirituality is centered on a person, and therefore is not some kind of ambiguous, pantheistic life-force notion. In addition, it means that Christianity sees all of history as having an aim…and that leads one to the view that Lewis got from medieval thinkers regarding praeparatio evangelica, namely that the “natural movements of non-Christian cultures…played a crucial role in preparing the world for the gospel of Christ” (122). In other words, Lewis believed that there were “seeds of truth” in ancient cultures, their writings, and their mythology, that prepared the world for the Gospel of Christ.
In other words, just as Christ was the fulfillment of the Old Testament story, Lewis saw Christianity as the completion and the “fleshing out” of so many of the ancient myths. Christianity was the “prince of myths,” or as Lewis called it, “true myth.” It was proclaimed that the stories and lessons that we find in myth actually (to use a biblical word) became incarnate in the Jesus Christ of history. As Lewis said, “God became man [is saying] myth became fact” (126). Baxter elaborates on it this way: “Christianity is the culmination of the mythological age, while at the same time the ‘final’ myth, given that it ‘condenses’ legendary longing into a concrete, historical, flesh-bound person, a story that is then entrusted to the historical succession of people who make up the church. Myth became a person. The It become a You” (126).
For example, some skeptics deny the resurrection of Christ and claim it is just another version of the myth of Osiris. Lewis would say, “Of course there are similarities—that’s the point! The difference is that the Gospels are not mythology. The Gospels are making historical claims. Therefore, what we see in the myth of Osiris actually happened in history…and that is what the Church proclaims.
It was this realization that Christianity is the proclamation that “myth became history” that led Lewis to become a Christian. In fact, it was his discussions with the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that led him to Christianity. That is what Baxter is getting on in this chapter regarding “deep conversion.”
Related to that is what Baxter calls “unveiling” in regard to the salvation process. Now, the very modern Evangelical concept of salvation carries the notion that you have to come down to an altar call, confess your sins, “let Jesus into your heart,” and then you’re in! You know, “get saved.” When I was a kid, the emphasis in youth group and the church service was always to get a person to come down and get saved, because what if they died tomorrow? Simply put, the modern Evangelical concept of salvation tends to see it as a one-time event that “gets your ticket stamped” to get to heaven. But Lewis (as most Christian thinkers throughout history) viewed that initial act of “getting saved” as only the first step in a much longer process.
That much longer process is what “unveiling” is getting at. To the point, Lewis saw that Christians, especially in the modern age, really value their individuality and privacy. As Baxter puts it, “We don’t want to give up the fatal privacy of our dreams, ambitions, goals, hopes, and, sometimes, resentments, because we don’t want to die to what seems to be our truest self. We would rather cling to these small things, holding them before us like a veil to shield our face from God” (132).
Thomas Merton touches upon this same idea when he talks about how we all have a “false self” that is like a mask we wear to hide our true selves from (ironically) ourselves, others, and God. But to follow Christ isn’t a matter of just responding to an altar call one time. It involves the daily killing off of our false selves in order to find our true selves in Christ. It is a process of becoming more like Christ.
Chapter 8: Modern Science and Medieval Myth
Baxter’s final chapter deals with Lewis’ view of modern science. In particular, it has to do with how the modern world immediately downplays the importance of mythology, equating it with children’s stories, fairytales, etc. That mindset is the hallmark of a modern worldview that elevates “science” as the only means by which truth can be known and that (since science ultimately deals with only the natural world) ends up embracing philosophic naturalism. The result is that certain atheist skeptics see mythological parallels between the Gospels and other ancient myths, or they see that not every single claim in the Gospels (or the Bible as a whole) can be “scientifically verified” by archeology and end up concluding that the whole thing is just “stories written by bronze age goatherders,” or something to that effect. They immediately dismiss all of it.
Lewis, though, didn’t see things that way. He saw the importance of literature, creativity, and myth in the conveying of truth. And this is a key element of the medieval worldview. To the point, medieval thinkers saw that everything in the natural world was an icon of spiritual realities. To be clear, it was scholars in the medieval world who laid the groundwork for modern science. Sure, the discoveries and advances made in the modern world have obviously surpassed what was discovered and known in the medieval world, but we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are today in the realm of science if it had not been for the original work of medieval scholars and scientists.
The distinguishing difference between science in the modern world and science in the medieval world isn’t the depth of scientific knowledge. That’s just a given. Of course, we in the modern world know more and have discovered more. That’s the nature of the scientific method. Rather, the distinguishing feature is a philosophical difference. The medieval world held to the belief that whatever was discovered in the natural world ultimately pointed to a deeper reality—and hence was an “icon” of that deeper reality. Of course, just as science is limited to describing natural things, so too is language limited in what it can describe and explain—and that is where the language of myth comes into play.
Myth doesn’t describe historical or natural realities. It uses descriptions of those things to prod our imagination and creativity to ponder the deeper realities beyond them. It points to realities that lie beyond the natural world in which our history is played out. In that respect, Baxter says that the medieval mystic and the modern physicist both “hint, gesture [and] suggest what is beyond ordinary thinking” (148). The irony is that although we in the modern world elevate science to be the be-all-end-all of what is considered reality, science itself is constantly discovering things that don’t act according to the known natural sciences and laws.
Conclusion
I know this post has a lot to be desired, but I want to end by mentioning something that Baxter says in his conclusion. The bottom line is that Lewis viewed the modern world in a state of exile. The mechanization of everything and the elevating of science to be the sole arbiter of truth has had the effect of stripping our understanding of the world as sacred and sacramental. And this can sadly be seen even in the way many modern Christians talk about the importance of Christ’s resurrection. It seems that most of the time, modern Christians treat the resurrection as something we have to “prove” in order to convince people of Christ’s divinity—we end up treating the resurrection as a scientific fact that needs to be proven. Now although, the claim of Christ’s resurrection is a historical claim for sure, treating it as if it were simply a fact that needs to be proven missing the point. As Baxter writes, “It is not just some proof to win an argument, but the first act of drawing all of creation up to a new level of dignity. Moreover, it was the first act in refashioning space and time itself, as well as the relationship between mind and matter” (164).
The medieval world got that. It realized that the resurrection of Christ had transformed everything and gave us a glimpse of that “deeper reality,” what the New Testament calls the “new creation” and the “Kingdom of God.” That is why theology was called the “Queen of the Sciences.” Theology—and the resurrection of Christ that lies at the heart of all Christian theology—was not some detached, theoretical pursuit completely detached from science. It was the inspiration for science, for the more we learn about the natural world, the more we can contemplate how the natural world acts as an icon of the world to come. And that requires imagination, creativity, art, and wonder.
