In the post-Enlightenment world in which we live, we are rarely left alone in peace and quiet. We are continually pushed to do more and to be more and to do so more quickly and efficiently. Traditional works of literature, however, beckon us into a world that is frozen in time yet alive with desire, purpose, and design.
Why Literature Still Matters, by Jason M. Baxter (94 pages, Cassiodorus Press, 2024)
Despite the strong praise for C. S. Lewis’s popular and academic books, and even though his lectures were highly attended, Oxford University never awarded him a professorship. Enter Cambridge, which created a professorship (Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English) just for Lewis. When he accepted the position in 1954, Lewis delivered a lecture titled “De Descriptione Temporum” (Latin for “a description of the times”). In it, he famously, or infamously, argued that the Renaissance never happened, by which he meant that the real change in European culture came not in the fifteenth but in the eighteenth century.
It was during the Enlightenment, and not the Renaissance, that Europe slowly un-christened herself, a process that was accompanied by the birth of the machine and radical changes in the nature and function of the arts. It was also accompanied by a marked shift from rulers to leaders. The role of the pre-modern ruler, Lewis explains,
was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness”. But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of “appeals”, “drives”, and “campaigns”. Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness”… of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality”.
In the post-Enlightenment world in which we live, we are rarely left alone in peace and quiet. We are continually pushed—by the state, the schools, the churches, the media, our own family and friends—to do more and to be more and to do so more quickly and efficiently. Don’t stop to ponder or to contemplate or to smell the proverbial roses. Keep moving, keep producing, keep adding letters to your name, stamps to your passport, and possessions to your home.
This transformation of life into an endless pep rally has had a deleterious effect on our health, our relationships, our social cohesion, and our spiritual walk. Jason Baxter, Director for the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College, translator of Dante’s Inferno, and author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, argues that it has equally eroded our ability to write and appreciate true literature, art, and music, all three of which rest on a foundation of true beauty.
Baxter argues this in Why Literature Still Matters, the inaugural book of Cassiodorus Press, a new publishing house “dedicated to preserving the tradition of the classical liberal arts as it was harmonized by the early and medieval church fathers.” If Baxter’s book is an indication of what is to come, Cassiodorus Press promises to be a blessing to those eager to revive the aesthetic traditions and educational vision of our medieval and renaissance forefathers. Baxter, who dialogues with “De Descriptione Temporum,” though not with Lewis’s rulers/leaders, holds up literature as a necessary antidote to the modern world’s mania for annihilating time and space.
By quoting and analyzing poems by such diverse poets as Homer, Ovid, Edmund Spenser, Robert Southwell, George Herbert, John Keats, and William Butler Yeats, Baxter demonstrates how one of the traditional roles of poetry was not to speed up time but slow it down. In his “Epithalamion,” Spenser “doesn’t want to rush through or create impact. He wants to slow time, overcome time—spatialize the temporal. He wants this poetic moment to feel dense, holy, and alive. Rather than rushing forward, he wants time to slow down, take its time, reach down into the depths within, while creating a sense of generous and slow spaciousness” (49).
Closely allied to this ministry of slow spaciousness, traditional poetry, and literature in general, closes the gap between us and the universe, natural as well as supernatural. Literature allows us to feel our connection to things outside of ourselves. In Odyssey V, Homer uses the epic simile of an octopus clinging to a reef and the image of a wild olive tree to capture the precarious moment when Odysseus is cast up on the shore of Phaeacia and finds shelter from the storm.
“The brilliance of the octopus and the wild olive,” Baxter explains, “is that they are not symbols, allegories, or types. Instead, by them, Homer gets us into the picture. It is by them that we can live out Odysseus’s tenacity and later feel his exhausted gratitude…. By these metaphors and images, we get as close as possible to a total immersion into the mythically perilous sea and the reassuring stability of earth. Indeed, in this scene, we find the master of archaic poetry weaving the weft of the human heart into the warp of the universe. Homer has closed the gap” (36-37).
This dual role played by pre-modern literature, important at all times, is even more important today in a fast-paced world of social media that continually turns our focus back on ourselves. We have lost both reflection and connection, meditation and mediation, reverence and relation. We are adrift in a world without meanings, measures, or moorings. Nothing is fixed, nothing invites us to pause and listen and enter in. We want to get a heads up on the next new thing, not dig down roots into what is solid, perennial, and lasting,
Baxter identifies in the literature (and music, and art) of the past a quality known as amplitude, which he defines as “an elaborate unfolding within space.” He then contrasts that unfolding with our modern use of amplification to mean the speeding up of time. For a poet like Spenser, amplification “was not a hyping up, an acceleration of mass, an increase of momentum, but rather the attempt to render a vision ‘full,’ generous, abundant, charged with density, alive beyond any expectation. Amplification wasn’t connected to ‘amps,’ ‘amperes,’ and getting ‘amped up,’ but to ‘ampleness.’ It was cornucopia, gracious fullness, generous abundance. It was a spatial phenomenon, not a temporal one” (48).
Traditional poems beckon us, as do the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, to join them in a world that is frozen in time yet alive with desire, purpose, and design. Precious few things do that in our world of market-funded media and consumer-driven smartphones that compel us to keep scrolling and streaming. What little beauty they offer is smooth and streamlined, promising ease without obstruction or complication. “But such ease,” Baxter warns, “comes at a cost, because smooth things also possess no harmony, no tradition, no history, no ritual, and no inwardness. It’s all on the surface: pretty and reflecting me” (22).
Though Baxter does not mention Lewis’s discussion of rulers and leaders, he does highlight Lewis’s focus on the birth of the machine. For Lewis and Baxter, the rise of technology has caused us to think about our world and ourselves in mechanistic metaphors, instead of ones drawn from nature or the divine. Rather than being creatures made in the image of God but fallen living in a God-fashioned but equally fallen world, we are so many cogs and gears operating in a clockwork universe.
As the perfect avatar of the modern, mechanized man, Baxter holds up Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. “For Verne, Fogg’s greatness was measured by his ability to exert unfailing, unemotional, and absolutely rational control over any environment. His power was that of the engineer, whose enhanced abilities came from having access to more precise instruments for analysis and more powerful tools for exerting force. While the heroes of the past had been marked by their long-suffering patience… Fogg commanded admiration because of his ability to make fortune submit to his will” (58).
While traversing the globe, Fogg never looks out the window to admire the natural or human wonders that he passes on his journey. He spends most of his time studying timetables and staring at his watch. Had he been in possession of a smartphone, I have no doubt most of his attention would have been fixed upon it, while the Alps, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, and the Grand Canyon whizzed by below him unnoticed and unappreciated. He is uncomfortably like us, outside as well as inside the church.
I am thankful to Jason Baxter for giving us permission to slow down and pay heed, and for holding up the Great Books—what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and known in the world”—as the chief vehicle for doing so. Why Literature Still Matters is slim, less than one-hundred pages, but it has the kind of passion, joy, and amplitude needed to awaken us from what C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, identified as “the slumber of cold vulgarity.”
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