Tea at Trianon: C. S. Lewis, Eamon Duffy, and the Medieval Spirit

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 8, 2024

C. S. Lewis, Eamon Duffy, and the Medieval Spirit

From First Things:

Nearly thirty years later, Eamon Duffy—who is, as Lewis once was, a professor at Magdalene College, Cambridge—published The Stripping of the Altars, a very different exploration of medieval ideas and customs. Where Lewis soars to the heavens, to the very boundaries of the Empyrean, Duffy inches his way across the parishes of a lost England, recreating traditional religious ideas and practice in the period before and after the Reformation. Yet despite their obvious differences, these two books have come to form a kind of diptych in my mind.

The Discarded Image is suffused with the delight that is never far off in so much of C. S. Lewis’s work, across all genres. “The human imagination,” he writes, “has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos.” This cosmos is not the trackless waste of modern fears and imaginings, but an enormous, vertiginous, orderly building, something that we can both look up at and look into, and which Lewis carefully reconstructs for us, source by source, chapter by chapter.

And this building is teeming with life. Lewis describes the “Intelligences” that occupy the celestial spheres and keep them in motion; the graded angelic population of Seraphim, Cherubim, Hosts, and so on downward; Dante’s blessed souls—the wise and just princes on Jupiter, the now penitent but once lawless lovers on Venus, the beneficent men of action on Mercury. Multiple forms of purposeful life crowd into the vast, ethereal region between the Moon and the primum mobile, or outermost sphere.

Lewis attributes this aspect of the medieval model to what he terms “the Principle of Plenitude,” inherited in part from ancient writers such as Apuleius. According to this imaginative and philosophical principle, the universe “must be fully exploited. Nothing must go to waste.” If, for instance, between aether and earth, there is a belt of air, then “ratio herself demands that it should be inhabited.” And so the air beneath the moon is also home to its own distinctive beings, the “daemons.”

Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars is less interested in the doings of the medieval heavens than the medieval earth. It has been credited with transforming the historiography of pre-Reformation England. As Professor Duffy writes in his introduction to the most recent edition, the products and practices of late medieval Christianity were not “a meaningless mount of mumbo-jumbo, culpably remote from the personality and teaching of Jesus, strong on magic, weak on personal responsibility”; instead, they “represented the ritual building-blocks of a coherent worldview that expressed itself not in individualist striving after personal authenticity, but in powerful symbolic gestures designed to shape and create community.”

Duffy devotes a chapter to “Signs and Seasons” and it is here in particular that I began to make a connection between his and Lewis’s book. Just as the medieval mind could not seem to tolerate the idea of cosmic spaces without life, purpose, and intelligence, so it would not tolerate time stretching on without color, meaning, and ritual. Duffy writes at length about two great feasts of the liturgical year—Candlemas and Holy Week—and the core ceremonies and practices that grew up around them. But we hear also of minor offshoots such as Plough Monday and St. Agnes’s Eve, with their idiosyncratic customs and observances, and of Corpus Christi processions in York where citizens whose houses lay along the route were required to “hang before ther doors and foorfrontes beddes and coverynges of beddes of the best that they can gytt and strewe before their doors resshes and other such flowres.”

All of this and more was part of the common life of the visible Church, which, as Duffy reminds us elsewhere, Thomas More valued so highly and was so determined to defend. On the eve of the Reformation, “the rhythm of the liturgy ( . . . ) remained the rhythm of life itself.” (Read more.)