The Discarded Image

Lewis grounds his text in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, and five other pre-Christian writers. Each of these writers developed ideas that were foundational in the Medieval Model. 

Plato (427-348 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher. He is best known for his innovations in dialogue and dialectic forms, and his Republic is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of western literature. Plato’s influence on later literature is vast; neo-Platonist writers brought many of his ideas forward into the Medieval Era. 

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a prolific ancient Greek writer and philosopher; he was Plato’s student. He wrote about the natural sciences, economics, philosophy, the arts, and more. In The Discarded Image, Aristotle’s most notable influence on the Medieval Model is his division of the cosmos into the translunary and sublunary realms. This cosmology is found throughout medieval literature; it was integrated into medieval understandings of the Ptolemaic universe.

Ptolemy (100-170 CE) was a Roman mathematician and astronomer. He was greatly influenced by Aristotle’s ideas about natural philosophy. He established a geocentric model that placed Earth at the center of the universe, with other celestial bodies orbiting it. This was the basis of all medieval cosmology. 

Cicero (106-43 BCE) was a Roman philosopher and statesman who wrote extensively on rhetoric and politics. His Republic, like Plato’s, was extremely influential in the Medieval Era. Cicero’s primary influence upon medieval literature can be found in his work on dreams and the Five Zones and in his theories on Earth’s cosmic insignificance. 

Lucan (39-65 CE), Statius (45-c. 96 CE), Apuleius (124-c. 170 CE), and Claudian (c. 370-c. 404 CE), were all pre-Christian Roman writers. They served as a link between the Medieval Era and earlier classical writers, for they preserved and expanded on many of Plato and Aristotle’s ideas for the benefit of later generations. Medieval people, who placed an enormous importance on knowledge found in books, would have been more likely to incorporate an idea into their worldview if they saw it repeated in several highly esteemed sources.

Writers of the Seminal Period lived in a turbulent historical time frame. As the pagan world gave way to the spread of Christianity, literature changed significantly. Because Christian and pagan ideas were both in flux at this time, the faith of these writers is in question. Chalcidius (fourth century CE), Macrobius (fl. c. AD 400), Pseudo-Dionysius (fifth-sixth century CE), and Boethius (c. 480-524 CE) all wrote texts that contained both Christian and pagan elements. Lewis gives his best guess as to each writer’s faith based on the content of their works, but there is so little surviving biographical information that guessing is all he can do. 

Regardless of their religion, these writers were largely responsible for recontextualizing and expanding on earlier pagan writings and adapting them to their contemporary context. Chalcidius responded to and reimagined Plato’s ideas in Timaeus, framing Plato not as a pagan but as a “philosopher of creation” (44) whose ideas were not necessarily always incompatible with a Christian framework. When it was impossible to reconcile the difference between Plato’s ideas and a Christian Model, Chalcidius argued that Plato was speaking metaphorically or allegorically, hence the survival of Plato’s pagan ideas in a Christian model of the universe.

Writers from this period whom Lewis believes were pagan, like Macrobius, played a similar role to their Christian counterparts, though they were not recontextualizing older works so much as expanding on them. For example, Macrobius wrote extensively on Cicero’s ideas about dreams, categorizing and ordering the types of dreams in a way that would one day be very satisfying to the medieval mind. He also affirmed Cicero’s treatment of subjects generally thought too fanciful or fantastical to be appropriate fodder for philosophers. He did this by applying the lens of allegory to Cicero’s stories.

Lewis discusses dozens of medieval writers throughout The Discarded Image, often making no more than a passing reference to their work. The most important writers that he discusses are Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340s-1400), Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321), Bernardus Silvestris (c. 1085-c. 1178), and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274). 

Chaucer was an English poet often who is considered to be the father of English literature. He chose to write in Middle English, which was radical for the time and encouraged other writers to do the same. Before his works were written, Latin and French were the literary languages used in England; Middle English was considered to be low-brow. Chaucer is best known for his Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories written in verse. He was influenced by the writings of men from the Seminal Period, like Boethius, and his works are full of references to classical sources that were popular in the Medieval Era. 

Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and philosopher born in Florence in 1265. He is most famous for writing The Divine Comedy. Just as Chaucer established Middle English as a literary language, Dante popularized the Florentine dialect of Italian through his writing, and it is largely because of his work that modern standard Italian is so heavily influenced by Florentine linguistic conventions. The Medieval Model of the cosmos was hugely influential in Dante’s writing and can be seen in vivid detail as his narrator traverses heaven, hell, and purgatory while paying homage to writers of the Classical Period. 

Little is known about the life of Bernardus Silvestris, but his Cosmographia heavily relied on Christian neo-Platonist ideas and themes. He used allegory to discuss the creation of the universe and metaphysics, and his work was very influential for later writers like Chaucer. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas, an Italian priest and theologian, engaged with Aristotelian and neo-Platonist ideas within a Christian framework. Later writers like Dante venerated Aquinas as one of the greatest religious writers of the period. 

Countless other writers, including John Gower (c. 1330-1408), Jean de Meung (c. 1200-c. 1240), Guillaume Deguileville (c. 1295-c. 1358), and Alanus ab Insulis (c. 1128-c. 1202), exemplified the continuation of Classical Influence on the Medieval Model. Lewis cites these writers to highlight the legacy of their ideas throughout the Medieval Era and the profound impact that they had on medieval thought.