The Discarded Image

Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of racist attitudes and biases put forth by the author.

“Savage beliefs are thought to be the spontaneous response of a human group to its environment, a response made principally by the imagination.”

C. S. Lewis frequently criticizes beliefs or cultures that he arbitrarily deems to be “savage” and contrasts them with civilizations that he believes were intellectually and culturally superior. He suggests, without evidence, that these “savage” cultures do not share knowledge or expertise with other cultures, unlike medieval Europeans. By taking this intrinsically ethnocentric stance, Lewis imbues his arguments with racist biases from the very beginning, tainting an otherwise scholarly discussion, ignoring the fact that no culture or civilization adheres to a single source for its ideas, and no culture is automatically superior to another.

“Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one.”

In this passage, Lewis makes it a point to emphasize that medieval writers established credibility by basing their work on the writings of Greek or Roman writers and philosophers. Because they were a people concerned with The Prevalence of Hierarchy and Order, this approach allowed them to adhere to existing structures of thought instead of straying beyond the bounds of the established order.

“I hope to persuade the reader not only that this Model of the Universe is a supreme medieval work of art but that it is in a sense the central work, that in which most particular works were embedded, to which they constantly referred, from which they drew a great deal of their strength.”

The Medieval Model informs Lewis’s understanding of medieval literature. It was the absolute foundation on which medieval writers built their texts; Lewis therefore stresses that modern students must understand