The Discarded Background
By his own admission, C. S. Lewis grew up a rationalist, shaped by a naturalistic viewpoint characteristic of the modern West. Naturalism holds that Nature (usually capitalized) is all that exists. Religion is nice, perhaps even inspiring, but it isn’t the stuff of real life.
In 1925, Lewis became a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. There he met J. R. R. Tolkien. Six years later, Lewis was at a dinner party with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. He was expressing his difficulty with mythological tales which Lewis said are beautiful and moving, but “lies and therefore worthless.”
“No,” said Tolkien, “They are not lies.” He went on to tell Lewis…
“You look at trees and call them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more about it. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw these stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to eternal music.”
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes what happened the following day: “When we [Warnie and Jack] set out [by motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”
I share this story because Tolkien recognized what Lewis had never imagined: an ancient mythological background saturated with spiritual beings. Beginning some 500 years ago, it was discarded for a naturalist background. “The heavens” were discarded for mere blue sky.
You can see when the mythological background began to be discarded when you visit the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy, as Kathy and I recently did. About midway through the tour, the ancient background, so beautifully moving in depicting what’s real and true, is discarded for mere clouds and sky. Check the date. It begins about 500 years ago.
I think this explains the times in which we live, what Paul Kingsnorth calls The Void of the West. How so? Well, there’s an old idiom: You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry. But it’s just as true that you don’t miss your water if you’ve never tasted water, if your life is devoid of water. Western Christianity is devoid of the mythological background, leaving us in a void.
The problem with a void is you don’t see what you’re missing.
Lewis did come to see the void. But what he kept secret until a much later date (1955) was how he had for some time been “quietly resenting the world he believed in”—the world of mere fact and matter.[1] Lewis was haunted by the mythological, which Tolkien brought to a moment of crisis and Lewis described this way: “The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”[2]
The left hemisphere is the rational half of the brain. The right hemisphere is better with poetry and myth. The left appreciates an artist’s technique (shading, lighting, and so on), the right hemisphere perceives an artist’s telos (purpose), which is usually depicted in the background in subtle ways. The left hemisphere tends to not see this, which presents a problem since 95 percent of the Western world’s population biases the left hemisphere.
That means most folks who visit the Uffizi miss seeing how the mythological background has been discarded. And I suspect that even if this fateful turn of events was brought to viewers’ attention, most would say the ancient mythological background is beautiful and moving but, as everyone knows, the universe isn’t really enchanted. C’mon, man.
No doubt feeling moved is important, but the aim behind older backgrounds was not only to move viewers by the beauty of an artist’s technique but to lift our eyes to the higher beauty of telos. The telos was to move us to such a degree that we long to have God take possession of us in our entirety, to transform us into souls worthy of Heaven.
Now I recognize most of us don’t have the time or money to visit the Uffizi Museum. But you can read Lewis’ The Discarded Image, or his space trilogy which begins with Out Of The Silent Planet. The main character, Ransom, is kidnapped and flown to Mars. Expecting to be afraid of space, he instead feels awe as he basks in the wondrous views outside the ship.
Ransom’s kidnappers pooh-pooh this, telling him the revitalizing health he’s feeling is simply from solar rays that do not reach through Earth’s atmosphere. Very naturalist. Very rationalist. Very much like Lewis before he met Tolkien.
Ransom suspects this isn’t true. He begins to feel a “progressive lightening and exultation of heart” that he comes to see has a “spiritual cause.” Like Lewis after his conversation with Tolkien, Ransom feels “a nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him.”
He had read of ‘Space’… the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. No: Space was the wrong name.” Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens that declared the glory—the…
And then Ransom remembers three lines from the Epilogue of Milton’s Comus where the Attendant Spirit describes his heavenly abode, the heavens, which are saturated with spiritual beings. Ransom begins to perceive that this is reality.
When we begin to perceive how the mythological background depicts reality, we begin to see two mysteries related to eternity and the world in which we live. Augustine, Dante, Lewis—even Iain McGilchrist—note these two mysteries. When we fail to see them, we live in a void, the Void of the West, as I did for decades. In my next post, we’ll begin unpacking these mysteries.
[1] Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (InterVarsity Academic, 2022), 143.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955), 170.