The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud;

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out—like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is ‘outside the city wall’.

We must accept what was said about them by our ancestors who, according to their own account, were actually their descendants.

Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come.

There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christi

But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it.

Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics. An expression such as ‘the curvature of space’ is strictly comparable to the old definition of God as ‘a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. Both succeed in suggesting; each does so by offering what is, on the level of our ordin

you had asked LaƷamon or Chaucer ‘Why do you not make up a brand-new story of your own?’ I think they might have replied (in effect) ‘Surely we are not yet reduced to that?’ Spin something out of one’s own head when the world teems with so many noble deeds, wholesome examples, pitiful tragedies, strange adventures, and merry jests which have never

The medieval and Renaissance delight in the universe was, I think, more spontaneous and aesthetic, less laden with conscience and resignation,