The longlivers

After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use. To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi: In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.) There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it. In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their…