The medieval cosmos reminds us that the world is not a machine but a divinely established order: “a rational order that keeps the world in balance, keeping it from spinning out of control.” Scientific discovery has overthrown such previous cosmologies from a factual standpoint: we live in a heliocentric universe ruled by the laws of gravity. However, we do not need to accept the details of medieval cosmology in toto in order to resist the temptation of “world mechanization.”

In 1900, William L. Poteat (then professor of biology at Wake Forest College) delivered three lectures at Southern Seminary—later published under the title Laboratory and Pulpit.[1] In these lectures, Poteat argued that pastors should be more friendly towards science, which, he suggested, had changed the world. He proclaimed:

Christianity is absolute; our apprehension of it is progressive. It does not change with the times; it is we who change….The theological ferment and confusion of this end of the century is but the effort to restate the doctrine of God and man in conformity with the new knowledge [i.e. biological evolution]….The period of transition is, indeed, painful and perilous, but that is how we grow from more to more. Let us rejoice in our growing apprehension of God, and when he pours us out the new wine of life, fetch us new bottles to receive it.[2]

Poteat believed that something had to change in his own modern era. While he claimed it was we who needed to change, and not Christianity itself, what he offered was in fact nothing less than a changed Christianity.

Poteat’s promotion of biological evolution illustrates a tension that confronts Christians today: What do we do with so-called cultural progress and innovation? To be sure, we live in an advancing world. Johannes Gutenberg changed history with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. James Watt’s steam engine aided the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, artificial intelligence poses new questions for our present and future life and labor. Despite all of this, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), and “Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). So, how might Christians live in an age which seems to constantly compel them “forward” (often in the wrong direction)? In this short article, I offer a brief answer to this question with three reminders by gleaning from C.S. Lewis and Jason Baxter on the medieval mind.

Onward to the Past: Some Help From Lewis and Medieval Cosmology

In his book The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, Jason Baxter discusses Lewis’s belief that the scientific revolution brought a dangerous cosmological shift toward what Lewis called the “mechanization of the world picture.”[3] The supernaturally charged ancient and medieval “world picture” (i.e., worldview) changed after Galileo discovered sun spots, which he thought were “flaws.”[4] This change in cosmology and worldview was significant in Lewis’s eyes.

“Medieval cosmology” refers to the way that men and women in the European Middle Ages (500–1500 AD) perceived the world around them.[5] Prior to the advancements of modern astronomy, people in the middle ages crafted an entire cosmology which, Lewis wrote, “is in a sense the central work [of art] . . . to which [the medieval] constantly referred, from which they draw a great deal of strength.”[6] Baxter describes how the medieval cosmos was a world of symphony, harmony, and order.[7] This was the conception of the universe which Lewis found so antithetical to the world after the scientific revolution. Lewis captures this medieval cosmology in an essay, which I quote at length below:

Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true [namely, that the earth is the center of the universe]. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. . . . You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier.

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1. William Louis Poteat, Laboratory and Pulpit (American Baptist Publication Society, 1901).

2. Poteat, Laboratory and Pulpit, 52, 53, 54

3. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022), 59, Kindle.

4. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, 60.

5. We derive “cosmology” from the Greek words kosmos (“world”) and logos (“speech, word”).

6. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964, 2013), 12.

7. Baxter, Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, 22–28.