| C. S. Lewis' writings fall into three categories: fiction, Christian philosophy, and medievalist scholarship. Many critics have examined C. S. Lewis' fiction for correlations to his Christian philosophy, yet few have discussed his fiction as the work of a medievalist. This thesis will attempt to fill that gap by examining Lewis' use of medieval concepts of order in his Chronicles of Narnia and Space Trilogy.;In his non-fiction work The Discarded Image, Lewis describes in some detail the medieval model of the cosmos. Lewis carries over certain important ideas of that ordered model--concepts concerning the nature of God, angels, planets, and outer space--to the cosmos of the Space Trilogy and that of Narnia. Furthermore, Lewis' worlds display a medieval propensity for order: both Narnia and the neo-medieval cosmos of the Space Trilogy have their own hierarchies similar to the Great Chain of Being, and in Narnia, numerology serves to organize experience. |
