medieval man

A reading from Owen Barfield's, Saving the Appearances (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1957):

"Let us try to place ourselves inside the skin of a medieval 'man in the street', and imagine ourselves looking out at the world through his eyes and thinking about it - not speculating, but thinking ordinary habitual thoughts - with his mind. We are not concerned with what he believed as an obligation of faith or a point of doctrine remote from experience. We are concerned with the sort of thing he took for granted."

"To begin with, we will look at the sky. We do not see it as empty space, for we know very well that a vacuum is something that nature does not allow, any more than she allows bodies to fall upwards. If it is daytime, we see the air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood proceeding from a living heart. If it is night-time, we do not merely see a plain, homogeneous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different sections of the great zodiacal belt, and secondly the planets and the moon (each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) are raying down their complex influences on the earth, its metals, its plants, its animals and its men and women, including ourselves. We take it for granted that those invisible spheres are giving forth an inaudible music - the spheres, not the individual stars... As to the planets themselves, without being specially interested in astrology, we know very well that growing things are specially beholden to the moon, that gold and silver draw their virtue from sun and moon respectively, copper from Venus, iron from Mars, lead from Saturn. And that our own health and temperament are joined by invisible threads to these heavenly bodies we are looking at. We probably do not spend any time thinking about these extra-sensory links between ourselves and the phenomena. We merely take them for granted."

"We turn our eyes to the sea - and at once we are aware that we are looking at one of the four elements, of which all things on earth are composed, including our own bodies. We take it for granted that these elements have invisible constituents, for, as to that part of them which is incorporated in our own bodies, we experience them inwardly as the four 'humours' which go to make up our temperament... Earth, Water, Air, and Fire are part of ourselves, and we of them. And through them also the stars are linked with our inner being, for each constellated Sign of the Zodiac is specially related to one of the four elements, and each element therefore to three Signs."

"A stone falls to the ground - we see it seeking the centre of the earth, moved by something much more like desire than what we today call gravity..."

"Whatever their religious or philosophical beliefs, men of the same community in the same period share a certain background-picture of the world and their relation to it. In our own age - whether we believe our consciousness to be a soul ensconced in a body, like a ghost in a machine, or some inextricable psychosomatic mixture - when we think causally, we think of that consciousness as situated in some point in space, which has no special relation to the universe as a whole, and is certainly nowhere near its centre. Even those who achieve the intellectual contortionism of denying that there is such a thing as consciousness, feel that this denial comes from inside their own skins. Whatever it is that we ought to call our 'selves', our own bones carry it about like porters. This was not the background picture before the scientific revolution. The background picture then was of man as a microcosm within the macrocosm. It is clear that he did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside him to quite the same extent as we do. He was integrated or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread. In his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo, than we are."