While reading Dante’s Purgatorio, I momentarily stepped outside the poem to consider the medieval concept of the revolving heavenly spheres, or superne rote. I usually prefer to remain fully immersed in a poem while reading, but on this occasion, I felt it would deepen my understanding. C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image proved an ideal companion, transporting me away from modern sensibilities and into the minds of the long dead. My curiosity was satisfied. Purgatorio, momentarily forgotten, yielded its place to a diverse assortment of ancient texts that Lewis skillfully employed to illuminate the perspective of a medieval reader.
“Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.”
This reflection on Boethius led me further from Dante and into the realm of The Consolation of Philosophy, a book that has brought me quiet enjoyment. In the following passage, Lady Philosophy appears beside a distressed narrator:
“Now when she saw the Muses of poetry standing by my bed, helping me to find words for my grief, she was disturbed for a moment, and then cried out with fiercely blazing eyes: ‘Who let these theatrical tarts in with this sick man? Not only have they no cures for his pain, but with their sweet poison they make it worse. These are they who choke the rich harvest of the fruits of reason with the barren thorns of passion. They accustom a man’s mind to his ills, not rid him of them. If your enticements were distracting merely an unlettered man, as they usually do, I should not take it so seriously; after all, it would do no harm to us in our task. But to distract this man, reared on a diet of Eleatic and Academic thought! Get out, you Sirens, beguiling men straight to their destruction! Leave him to my Muses to come for and restore to health.’”