Lewis on periodization

I spent a lot of time trying to come up with the most simpleminded and stereotypical timeline possible for this image, so please appreciate it as you scroll by

Over my Independence Day break I read The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis, an excellent short study by Jason Baxter of the literature that most shaped Lewis’s academic interests and worldview. I especially appreciated Baxter’s in-depth look at the influence of Boethius and Dante on Lewis, but what struck me most forcefully was a section quoting a lesser-known lecture of Lewis’s on how we divide and categorize past era—that is, periodization.

Periodization is one of my special interests and annoyances as an historian. I toy with and fuss over periodization the way motorheads used to sweat over their valves and plugs and carburetors. When I teach Western Civ I have to resist the urge to park on the topic every time we begin a new unit and move from the ancient to the medieval worlds, for example, or when we cross the especially blurry line into the modern.

Here’s how Lewis describes the problem in “De Descriptione Temporum,” his 1954 inaugural lecture as the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a position created for him by Cambridge University:

From the formula “Medieval and Renaissance”, then, I inferred that the University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any increased flexibility in our conception of history. All lines of demarcation between what we call “periods” should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether! As a great Cambridge historian has said: “Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.” The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a strict sense, nowhere else) has no divisions, except perhaps those “blessed barriers between day and day”, our sleeps.

This comes quite close to an example I give my own students about periodization. Every time you have a birthday, I say, some tedious person will ask “Do you feel any older?” and the answer is almost always No. That’s because the changes brought by age creep up one day at a time, regardless of the actual yard-markers of birthdays and years. Ditto the changes from historical period to historical period.

Lewis continues:

Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. . . . And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our fife. But unhappily we cannot as historians dispense with periods. . . . We cannot hold together huge masses of particulars without putting into them some kind of structure. Still less can we arrange a term’s work or draw up a lecture list. Thus we are driven back upon periods. All divisions will falsify our material to some extent; the best one can hope is to choose those which will falsify it least.

“Continuity-in-mutability” is exactly right, and by pure coincidence exactly how I approach teaching the transition from ancient to medieval. And that last sentence is one of the watchwords of my studies and teaching.

Periods are historians’ conveniences. Treat them any more seriously or concretely than that, and you begin the falsification Lewis warns of here.

From here Lewis goes on to examine and challenge some of the points usually raised as indicative of the change between these periods, and even gets in a few good digs at the present along the way. (Re. the supposed loss of learning with the onset of the Middle Ages, “if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.”) The whole thing is worth your while.

“De Descriptione Temporum” is collected in Selected Literary Essays, a posthumously published Cambridge UP volume edited by Walter Hooper. Despite being an important and insightful work, I think it’s lesser known (I read it years ago and had virtually forgotten it before reading Baxter’s book this month) because it hasn’t crept from its place in a university-published anthology into the more popular collections from religious publishers. You can read this lecture online here or in a .pdf here, though be aware that both of these online versions are riddled with typos and/or text recognition errors.

And definitely check out The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis if you’re interested in Lewis, medieval literature, or good books and great minds generally.