The Discarded Image

In another contradictory argument, Lewis notes in Chapter 7 that when people praised poetry, they would praise the rhetoric, or the form of the poem. In Chapter 8, however, he claims that medieval writers thought their stories were so delightful that they deserved to be told even if they were told badly. In other words, Lewis is now claiming that the content, not the form, is most important in the medieval mind, but he never acknowledges this contradiction.

When describing the importance of the Model, Lewis once again makes many inherently racist assumptions about so-called “savage” cultures. He gives a truncated description of what he believes rainmaking rituals consist of and how he guesses those who engage in them might be interacting with the divine. By oversimplifying rainmaking traditions (which exist in various cultures all over the world), Lewis is dismissing cultural phenomena as superstitious and ignorant instead of engaging meaningfully with them on their own terms. Ironically, it is exactly this kind of dismissal that he is trying to discourage among students of medieval literature who fail to take cultural context into account and instead make snap judgments. In a further irony, there was a rainmaking ritual called the aquaelicium that was practiced in ancient Rome, one of the cultures that Lewis upholds as an example of the highest, most sophisticated human civilizations.

Almost all medieval texts show the prevalence of Classical Influence on the Medieval Model. For example, the writer of Gawain traces Arthur’s lineage all the way back to Troy, once again affirming that western Europeans in general and British people in particular have inherited—intellectually and perhaps genetically—the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Lewis has already traced how classical influences helped to build the Model, with people taking ideas from many different contradictory writers and combining them to make a cohesive whole. Medieval people came to regard the Model as being so beautiful and perfect that it was worth admiring for its own sake. This admiration became a unifying gaze, and people during this time frame regarded the Model as a perfect explanation of the universe instead of a patchwork of ideas drawn together from disparate and often conflicting writers. It is only with long-term cultural establishment that the Model became the apparently perfect and satisfying view of the universe that appears in so much medieval literature.

It is also important to note Lewis’s contention that the Model was a profound source of comfort in medieval literature, particularly because of its reliance on The Prevalence of Hierarchy and Order. Such medieval works often included long detailed catalogs of objects; by contrast, few modern texts have such lists. Hierarchy in literature told readers where they were in the universe, creating a soothing effect by reiterating what readers of the time already knew. Thus, there was little sense that literature should be challenging or shocking. As Lewis explains, this extreme reliance on order in writing can make the reading experience itself rather dull, but it can also bring delight. From the medieval perspective, if the world were aligned in perfect order according to God’s will, there may have been little room for surprise or novelty, but there was also little room for that which was disturbing, unexpected, or inexplicable.

It can be challenging for modern students to fully internalize this Medieval Relationship to Literature, for almost everything that is considered valuable or necessary in modern literature is absent or inverted in the medieval canon. Today, bookstores and libraries are neatly divided between fiction and non-fiction, whereas among medieval writers, truth was not even an isolated or important concept. Writing an original work was not merely unnecessary; it was genuinely bad. Comfort and predictability reigned supreme in medieval literature: Everything built on (and stole from) everything else. Through these norms, medieval literature became a way to uphold the status quo, and with The Discarded Image, Lewis endeavors to bring these stark cultural differences to light in order to aid modern students of medieval literature in better understanding these texts. While there were writers in the Medieval Era who were pushing boundaries and creating radical texts—Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English is a good example—this radicalism was an almost unintended side effect of an otherwise highly systematized and conformist literary era.