Recovering Part of a Discarded Image

CS Lewis wrote an outstanding introduction to Medieval thought in The Discarded Image. 

Perhaps we should recover a piece of that image. We can begin by ending what Lewis labels “chronological snobbery,” but since his time has become “chronological bigotry.” He was attacking the disposition of some in his time to think new ideas were automatically better than old ideas. Today one is more likely to meet people who assume all old ideas are false or (at best) useless.  One need not argue against an idea further than saying it is old.

This intellectual bigotry gets what little support it has from scientific progress. We have used old ideas about the natural world to develop better ideas and our ability to manipulate nature is much greater than it was. If we wish to know how something works in nature, the newer the resource, the better it (generally) will be.

Natural science knowledge is not like other forms of knowledge. The kind of progress that the scientific methods produce is not replicable in other areas. Ethics, the study of what ought to be, can clarify, examine new problems, but generally does not need “progress.” Killing innocent people for fun is known to be wrong, was known, and will be known. Similarly, philosophy progresses (to the extent it does) through amplification, clarification, and occasionally by the rejection of ideas. A basic concept, like the idea that “mathematical objects exist apart from mind,” might be right or wrong, and arguments about the idea do grow more sophisticated, but the idea itself is very old (pre-Socratic) and is not going anywhere!

Like all forms of bigotry, chronological bigotry keeps us from learning how wrong we are! If we do not approach a writer in charity (a disposition to take him or her at best), then we will not see what we have missed!

Charity toward writers that we know to be brilliant can do no harm, but might do us great good! In reading an author we even might end up disagreeing with like David Hume, we should begin by seeing why such a great thinker thought as he did. We cannot understand fully without learning to love the author and have charity towards his intellectual ideas. Humble reading of great authors helps us participate, even for just a moment, in greatness while arrogance destroys.

There is a deeper skill that the Medievals cultivated that we have lost, however. That is the disposition to harmonize great writers and so produce new and interesting ideas. The Medievals (wrongly) thought that great thinkers could not disagree and so the problem must be their own misunderstanding of the text. This error, however, allowed them to work hard at creating fascinating new structures intellectually. They were mistaken that what they created was what Aristotle, Plato, or some other thinker thought, but the new creation was often as interesting as the original! In the mind of a world class genius like Thomas Aquinas, the result was at least as interesting as the original.

This is the part of the discarded image of the Medieval worldview that we should emulate. What do we make of all the great works we have read? Do they cohere? If so, how? Is there a way of reading Plato and Nietzsche (to pick two seeming opposites) where they agree? This has proven very valuable to me, because finding disagreement is very easy, just as criticism is easier than creation. The work of finding a deeper unity is harder and better for me. Often I find there is a deeper unity beyond superficial disagreement that is in fact part of the original texts. At other times, the synthesis that would be possible was not anticipated by the original authors, but (somewhat) interesting in its own right.

Approaching great texts as if there is agreement and as if we can find that agreement is worthwhile. It takes us out of the role of judge and critic of  superior work and sends us on an errand that sometimes finds a treasure: a deeper understanding of the work. Most often, we find some ideas clustered around the authors that are “sort of like” the original ideas and generally inferior . . . neo-Platonism, neo-Nietzsche, neo-Hume . . . but the act of creation, even our inferior creations, is still helpful. Just as writing a poem, even if we cannot be Langston Hughes, is worth doing, so is creating a great synthesis in the way of Saint Thomas.

His was a great cathedral reaching to Heaven with many spires. I can aspire to be a small cottage with a cheery fire around which we gather for intellectual fellowship: a jolly little sub-creation of a cheerful mind.

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This post is (loosely) based on a lecture I gave to students at The Saint Constantine School in November, 2016.