The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music.

At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems.

The elementary Historicism which sees divine judgements in all disasters—the beaten side always deserved their beating—or the still more elementary sort which holds that everything is, and always was, going to the dogs—is not uncommon.

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.

There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely.

The last, and neo-Platonic, wave of Paganism which had gathered up into itself much from the preceding waves, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and what not, came far inland and made brackish lakes which have, perhaps, never been drained.

the same impulse we see at work in much medieval architecture and decoration. We may call it the love of the labyrinthine; the tendency to offer to the mind or the eye something that cannot be taken in at a glance, something that at first looks planless though all is planned. Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths. At ever

He will find his whole attitude to the universe inverted. In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.

huge wealth of subordinate stories, each of which has itself a beginning, a middle, and an end, but which do not in the aggregate display any single trend in the world depicted. These can be told for their own sake. They need not, perhaps cannot, be related to the central theological story of the human race.

Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.