The Discarded Image
Welcome to Medieval Wanderers!!! This is the blog site for our English Medieval period class. Please feel free to post as often as you like, staying focused on the topic for the blog. For our first blog, we are commenting on The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Make sure you proof your writing well so that the site looks like it is written by English majors.
Please comment on the following quote from the Epilogue, especially noting the distinction Lewis makes between the words "know" and "truth." Explain what Lewis means, and apply these ideas to a postmodern culture in light of his entire discussion of the medieval model of the universe. After you discuss this, feel free to bring up anything else you want to about the book.
"I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true."
"I agree. It was not true. But I would like to end by saying that this charge can no longer have exactly the same sort of weight for us that it would have had in the nineteenth century. We then claimed, as we still claim, to know much more about the real universe than the medievals did; and hoped, as we still hope, to discover yet more truths about it in the future. But the meaning of the words 'know' and 'truth' in this context has begun to undergo a certain change."
Please comment on the following quote from the Epilogue, especially noting the distinction Lewis makes between the words "know" and "truth." Explain what Lewis means, and apply these ideas to a postmodern culture in light of his entire discussion of the medieval model of the universe. After you discuss this, feel free to bring up anything else you want to about the book.
"I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true."
"I agree. It was not true. But I would like to end by saying that this charge can no longer have exactly the same sort of weight for us that it would have had in the nineteenth century. We then claimed, as we still claim, to know much more about the real universe than the medievals did; and hoped, as we still hope, to discover yet more truths about it in the future. But the meaning of the words 'know' and 'truth' in this context has begun to undergo a certain change."
posted by Dr. Mark Hall | 2:42 PM
3 Comments:
I think Lewis's assertion that the Model is no longer considered "true"--that we now realize that there is more we "know" about the universe and have revised our Model to one that agrees more thoroughly with our current scientific understanding--is necessary. After all, he has devoted an entire book to a discussion of a Model that, at least for me, almost does become real (if only for a brief time). Yet his discussion of knowledge and truth, and how these words are changing, is also necessary.
In the 19th century, we thought that to know something, we could examine "facts" and realize through the imagination what something must be like ("truth"). To discover truth was to go beyond the mathematical and scientific facts and envision the reality that they created. Now, Lewis suggests, we believe that we can only know the facts and figures--anything beyond them is something false that we create to help ourselves (in our limited intellect) understand them. The facts are truth, and they are all we are capable of knowing. He says that we have created our new model of the universe out of this mindset and out of our need to present a better explanation of the way we think things work. And we see things differently from the medievals. We believe in evolutionary progress rather than constant Divine order, and as our beliefs have changed, we have "found" empirical evidence to support them. Thus, we have abandoned the old Model for a newer model that encompasses more of our current "truths." However, Lewis predicts, this new model will eventually fall aside for a newer model because models are never fully true. They are the best explanation at a given time for the workings of the universe as they are currently known.
I loved this book, although I have to admit it has made me realize my lack of education in comparison to Lewis's. There is one other thing that stands out to me, now that I have finished reading it:
It is interesting how Lewis develops the theme that more recent thinkers/writers build upon works and ideas that came before them. I saw it in the earlier chapters: Apuleius presented some of Plato's ideas but expanded them. Later, Chalcidius did the same thing, and so forth. One man's ideas became the catalyst for another's ideas. Later, in Lewis's discussion of the Model's influence on literature, he devotes quite a bit of time to the idea that medieval writers rewrote older stories using "facts" given by previous writers and adding their own perspective on how things really must have been. Literature, for them, was a constant retelling of a story to create a more accurate picture--a picture that fit better with their understanding. I would like to suggest that our development of Models is our way of doing what the medieval writers did to classical works: we retell the "facts" of how the universe works in a way that makes them more real to us.
One last thing: Am I the only person who LOVES the title of this blog? "Medieval Wanderers" somehow reminds me of Tolkien's line: "Not all who wander are lost." This is going to be so fun!!!
I want to focus on the knowledge portion of Lewis's comment more strongly than the truth. My understanding of the quotation from the book led me to pose a different question. Have we really come as far in knowledge as we would like to believe? In reference to the Model, I must admit that although their scientific calculations were incorrect their Model was more on target than what we sometimes teach today. I have heard it said before that although technology has advanced remarkably in the past 1000 years, knowledge has remained the same. That is to say that Lewis's statement that "we claim to know much more about the real universe than the medievals did" is true even in our extremely advanced society. We claim to know much more, yet when we look at the Cosmology of the universe we begin to realize that we still know very little. This is what I believe that Lewis is trying to say here. The medievals had no frame of reference in the way of satellites, imaging, and space travel in general. Yet they managed, with their limited technological resources to study and understand that there was a difference between the stars and planets, that constellations were moveable and changeable in reference to the position of the Earth, and that the workings of the Universe directly affected the world they were living in daily. This causes one to wonder, what method of learning about the heavens did the medievals use? These men, and I say men because of the medieval mindset that I am sure prevented women from voicing their curiosities, were able to look into the heavens and see that which we still follow today to some extent. As Peter showed us in his presentation of the model universe the medievals created, with the exception of their idea of center, part of the Model was remarkably accurate. I am very impressed with their ability to discover so much with so little technology. To think that they created a way of thinking that is still alive in scientific circles connects us to them in a way that can not be explained. It is no wonder that so much focus has been put into the study and discovery of the medieval era.
By the way Dr. Hall, I love this book! I was hesitant to read it after my last experience with Lewis (i.e. The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man), however I feel that Lewis has restored my confidence in his nonfiction writing with this book.
Oh, and Jana, I do love the title Medieval Wanderers! It gives me a very gothic feeling! The Pre-Raphaelites and Inklings would be proud of us!
I particularly appreciated Lewis' statement, concerning the Medieval Model, that "Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety,and coherence in the same degree." The Medieval Model made a serious attempt to integrate all knowledge of the time within the framework of belief in a Creator who has created a harmonious universe in which man may - and must - find harmony within himself, with the physical universe, with his fellow man and above all, with God. While not "true" in the sense that it completely and correctly explained the phenomena which it observed - at least according to our knowledge today - Lewis rightly posits that this model created a universe of "splendour" in its understanding of the order and indeed majesty of the physical world and the corresponding spiritual world. He finds it "sober" in at least its belief in man's responsibility to God and to man's need of Divine aid. And it is coherent in that it attempts - and succeeds - in "saving the observations" of the time under a metanarrative, that is, Christinaity infused first with Platonic and then Aristotleian thought. In other words, the universe "made sense" and it was to some degree "knowable." Postmodern culture deconstructs the security of this belief. The Medieval model had as a basis a reliance on all books, and an almost equal reverence for them all, whether fable or scientific discovery, as sources of knowledge and constructs of truth. The postmodern model, if it can be called such, rejects reliance on all book and deconstructs their contents! The Medieval model created a profound unity and it may be argued that the significant achievements of the Middle Ages flowed from that fount. Postmodern thought creates a profound disunity and posits no overriding truth; in fact, it rejects the very possibility that such can exist. Lewis distinguishes between "know" and "truth" and suggests evolving definitions for them by discussing a man "knowing" a foreign country by studying contour lines on a map. Even sense knowledge, aided by instruments, is not truly knowledge until it perceives the reality - full or not - of the thing itself. Our "knowledge" for example, of the mechanics of genetics, is not knowledge until we know to what whole it tends. And it is out of that "whole knowledge" that truth - the information about the concrete reality - proceeds. The postmodern culture has deconstructed the possibility of much of what might be called elementary knowledge by refuting that there is any metanarrative which explains that to which it tends. Thus, for Lewis, to "know" seems to be that information about the whole that allows the "knower" to be "at home in the universe" but he also seems to imply that knowledge is becoming more isolating, less "useful" than before in its definition. Truth, for Lewis, is the "full" information about reality, which is connected into the imagination, and perceives a unity rather than a disunity. And he also suggests that truth may become irrelevant, unknowable and quite "beside the point." This is the direction where the deconstructs of postmodern thought tend.
Like Jana and Aimee, I think this is a totally cool idea to have a blog where we can think outloud together! (or think in ether - Aether?!?! - together) I think that Lewis may have been thinking what Winston Churchill once said that in the 20th and 21st centuries, people were not going to have very much "fun." We seem to inhabit a world in which nothing is True so everything can be "true" (whatever that will mean.) In the end, we may all be like the blind man with the elephant: each touching a portion and understanding it rightly in a very limited way, but not truly knowing it and certainly not seeing all parts together to understand the truth of the beast.
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