(Seven paragraphs beginning with "After foretelling his grandson's future..." to the end of the Scipio section ending with "...which a medieval theologian would have added.")
In the original study, Monica had posted some ideas that led into this section, so I had used them as a starting point. I’m reproducing them here too, although I’m modifying them slightly as well as my replies to make them a little clearer in the current context (the original comments had confusing references unique to events at the time of the original study)
[from Monica]:
>Just a couple of thoughts. First is the injunction against suicide. I
>can't remember if suicide is mentioned in Narnia or not, but I
>remember Orual attempting it in TWHF and being summarily
>stopped. Interesting how somewhere before or during the Middle
>Ages suicide became -- not something honourable as in other times
>and countries -- but something disallowed.
And of course we see a whole slew of suicides at the end of THS, the implication that they have been "dictated" by the dark macrobes (of hell) and that the defeated NICE personnel have become too subsumed to resist it.
Probably a different subject, but I wonder how Lewis would view the enchanted sleep that one of the seven Lords (was it Rhoop? Not sure) voluntarily "went under" on Ramandu's island in order to "escape" the horrors of he had experienced on the Dark Island. That seems to be at least one of the motivations of people tempted to suicide in depression-related situations. But of course I'm sure the enchanted sleep was seen as a healing thing and not as a "permanent" escape from all life as suicide is.
[from Monica]
>Another interesting point concerns the
>astronomical thought of the day. Lewis says the earth was
>considered a very small body in the universe. Compared to the size
>of the stars, the entire Roman Empire was little more than a dot. The
>insignificance of the earth "was part of the moralists stock-in-
>trade…to mortify human ambition". Yet, Later in history, when the
>'new science' changed the architecture of the universe, moralists
>said the opposite -- they said that God couldn't possibly care about
>the earth when it was such an insignificant part of the universe. It
>was an argument that caused many to lose their religion, though it
>was the same argument used centuries before to support it.
I would also point out (or perhaps just re-emphasize) that the medieval view has been twisted by modern science and common understanding so that the modern view of man's insignificance can be seen (incorrectly) as a contrast to the supposed “glorified Earth” medieval view. In other words, moderns imagine that since medieval cosmology put the earth at the center, this meant that Medievals were putting man on a pedestal, as it were, and glorying in that position. But in fact, by putting earth at the center, Medievals were more implying that earth was at the “bottom of the heap” and that Man was insignificant for that reason.
That incorrect modern impression of the Medieval view leads to the rather condescending view that Medievals were "obviously" stupider than we, sort of like the modern common misunderstanding that thinks that Medievals thought the world was flat. (Lewis will bring this up more than once in side-comments throughout the book. In fact, in light of Lewis’ insistence about the modern error of thinking that Medievals viewed the world as flat, it would be interesting at some point to discuss the idea of Narnia being a flat world. What was Lewis’ point there, I wonder?)
--Stanley