The Greatest Divide

. Of all historical cliches, few have been more persistent than the notion that between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance stands history's Great Divide. From his new rostrum as professor of Medieval and Renaissance English literature at Britain's University of Cambridge, C.S. (The Screwtape Letters) Lewis has joined a campaign to give the cliche its honorable discharge. If there is a Divide, says he in his recently published inaugural lecture, it is "the [division] in the history of the West that . . . divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott."

Virgil to Eliot. For a historian such as Gibbon (1737-94), says Lewis, it was only natural to see the chasm between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. "The partial loss of ancient learning and its recovery at the Renaissance were for him both unique events . . . But we have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists . . . "To Gibbon the literary change from Virgil to Beowulf . . . would have seemed greater than it can to us. We can now see quite clearly that these barbarian poems were not really a novelty comparable to, say. The Waste Land ... I do not think that any previous age has produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists and Picasso has been in ours."

Seneca to Freud. Lewis would say the same of the Christianizing of Europe, a process once regarded as "unique [and] irreversible." "But we have seen the opposite process . . . Roughly speaking, we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian . . . for us it falls into three--the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian . . . It appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not . . . Surely Seneca and Dr. Johnson are closer together than Burton and Freud?"

In politics, art and religion, says Lewis, the old frames have been shattered. The biggest change of all, he believes, is not finished yet--the change born of machines. "How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation,' with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'? ... I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones . . . Our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defense and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder [our ancestors] ... I conclude that it really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man . . ."

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