In 1900, William L. Poteat (then professor of biology at Wake Forest College) delivered three lectures at Southern Seminary—later published under the title Laboratory and Pulpit.[1] In these lectures, Poteat argued that pastors should be more friendly towards science, which, he suggested, had changed the world. He proclaimed:
1. William Louis Poteat, Laboratory and Pulpit (American Baptist Publication Society, 1901).
Christianity is absolute; our apprehension of it is progressive. It does not change with the times; it is we who change….The theological ferment and confusion of this end of the century is but the effort to restate the doctrine of God and man in conformity with the new knowledge [i.e. biological evolution]….The period of transition is, indeed, painful and perilous, but that is how we grow from more to more. Let us rejoice in our growing apprehension of God, and when he pours us out the new wine of life, fetch us new bottles to receive it.[2]
2. Poteat, Laboratory and Pulpit, 52, 53, 54.
Poteat believed that something had to change in his own modern era. While he claimed it was we who needed to change, and not Christianity itself, what he offered was in fact nothing less than a changed Christianity.
Poteat’s promotion of biological evolution illustrates a tension that confronts Christians today: What do we do with so-called cultural progress and innovation? To be sure, we live in an advancing world. Johannes Gutenberg changed history with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. James Watt’s steam engine aided the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, artificial intelligence poses new questions for our present and future life and labor. Despite all of this, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), and “Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). So, how might Christians live in an age which seems to constantly compel them “forward” (often in the wrong direction)? In this short article, I offer a brief answer to this question with three reminders by gleaning from C.S. Lewis and Jason Baxter on the medieval mind.
Onward to the Past: Some Help From Lewis and Medieval Cosmology
In his book The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, Jason Baxter discusses Lewis’s belief that the scientific revolution brought a dangerous cosmological shift toward what Lewis called the “mechanization of the world picture.”[3] The supernaturally charged ancient and medieval “world picture” (i.e., worldview) changed after Galileo discovered sun spots, which he thought were “flaws.”[4] This change in cosmology and worldview was significant in Lewis’s eyes.
3. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022), 59, Kindle.
4. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, 60.
“Medieval cosmology” refers to the way that men and women in the European Middle Ages (500–1500 AD) perceived the world around them.[5] Prior to the advancements of modern astronomy, people in the middle ages crafted an entire cosmology which, Lewis wrote, “is in a sense the central work [of art] . . . to which [the medieval] constantly referred, from which they draw a great deal of strength.”[6] Baxter describes how the medieval cosmos was a world of symphony, harmony, and order.[7] This was the conception of the universe which Lewis found so antithetical to the world after the scientific revolution. Lewis captures this medieval cosmology in an essay, which I quote at length below:
5. We derive “cosmology” from the Greek words kosmos (“world”) and logos (“speech, word”).
6. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964, 2013), 12.
7. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, 22–28.
Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true [namely, that the earth is the center of the universe]. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. . . . You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier. And secondly, because the Earth is an absolute center, and Earthwards from any part of this immense universe is downwards, you will find that you are looking at the planets and stars in terms not merely of “distance” but of that very special kind of distance which we call “height.” They are not only a long way from the Earth but a long way above it. . . . Now these two factors taken together . . . at once present you with something which differs from the Newtonian picture rather as a great building differs from a great jungle. You can lose yourself in infinity; there is indeed nothing much else you can do with it. . . . The old universe was wholly different in its effect. It was an answer, not a question. It offered not a field for musing but a single overwhelming object; an object which at once abashes and exalts the mind. For in it there is a final standard of size. The Primum Mobile [i.e., the “first-moving,” the universe’s outermost sphere that contained all other astrological elements] is really large because it is the largest corporeal thing there is. We are really small because our whole Earth is a speck compared with the Primum Mobile.[8]
8. Lewis, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper, (Cambridge University Press, 1966), 47–48, emphasis mine. Baxter introduced me to this quotation, but I have quoted here more extensively from Lewis’s own essay.
Lewis expounds medieval cosmology’s infinitude, concreteness, and glory. There was certainty as it functioned as “a final standard of size,” offering certitude rather than question. One sees in Lewis’s quotation the largeness of the medieval universe and the impression he thought it ought to have on mankind. Medieval cosmology is much more complex,[9] but Lewis’s picture here provides a sufficient source for musing.
9. For those interested in the details of medieval cosmology, consider reading chapter 1 in Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis for a brief introduction or C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature for a more thorough treatment.
Medieval cosmology in the eyes of contemporary science is false—so shouldn’t we pay no heed to it?[10] What might medieval cosmology as here described by Lewis, and with the help of Baxter, encourage among Christians as they consider their lives in a progressing age? I offer three considerations.
10. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, 143–144, 146, 151.
Back to the Future: Three Reminders From the Past that Help Us Live in the Advancing Future
1. Remember that we do not live in a mechanized universe.[11] Our highly technological age tempts us to think purely in terms of technology and machinery, as Lewis has observed. The medieval cosmos reminds us that the world is not a machine but a divinely established order: “a rational order that keeps the world in balance, keeping it from spinning out of control.”[12] Scientific discovery has overthrown such previous cosmologies from a factual standpoint: we live in a heliocentric universe ruled by the laws of gravity. However, we do not need to accept the details of medieval cosmology in toto in order to resist the temptation of “world mechanization.” Medieval cosmology reminds us that “[t]he heavens declare the glory of God” rather than just spin for spinning’s sake.
11. Thanks to Baxter’s chapter on “mechanization” for inspiring this observation.
12. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, 25.
2. Remember that we mustn’t know all things. The medieval universe described by Lewis above is a world of mystery. Science tempts us to think that we know all or can know all. However, mystery is entirely appropriate for finite human begins. Consider the great questions that YHWH asks Job:
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4–7)
3. Remember that we are but clay. In his thought experiment, Lewis posits what we should feel after after considering the stars. There is a sure sense of smallness we should have because the universe is so large—it is “a single overwhelming object.” This is Baxter’s second observation in his chapter on Lewis’s understanding of the relevancy of the medieval model. For Lewis, “both modern cosmology and the medieval picture, perhaps surprisingly, share the same attitude regarding the peripheral location of human beings in the dazzlingly strange, grand, and varied universe we inhabit.”[13] These ideas parallel biblical injunctions about mankind’s humility in the hands of God. Paul’s answer to the question of election is simple: “Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” (Rom. 9:21). The medieval cosmological mind reminds us to be “abashed and exalted,” to borrow Lewis’s turn of phrase, and helps us spur on our own meditation of this world and its telos. Often it is before such grandeur that we remember the Lord’s precious words, as in Isaiah: “I, I am he who comforts you; who are you that you are afraid of man who dies . . . and have forgotten the Lord, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth” (Isa. 51:12–13).
13. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, 149.
Stop and See the Stars
In an age of increasing learning, developing, and innovating, the medieval world and its cosmology, encourages us to slow down. We ought to heed Lewis’s challenge and consider the stars at night as though Copernicus had not yet come—that is, in a way that we do not default to a mechanized worldview. What might we find but a reminder of the God who far transcends all our greatest understandings (Rom. 11:33) and rules the world in perfect order (Heb. 1:3) beyond our human comprehension?
