Jason M. Baxter > Quotes

“Christianity is the prince of myths, the ultimate and final myth, what our scholar of medieval literature called a "true myth." By this he meant that Christianity was a mythological picture of the world with one important and extraordinary difference: its mythological features entered into history and time and wore a face.”
― Jason M. Baxter

“If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement. This is a portmanteau word and means “government by advertisement.” But my intention is not satiric; I am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, 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 “appeal,” “drives,” and “campaigns.” Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness.” And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them “rulers.” “Leaders” is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“In Virgil’s mysterious prophecy, in which he cryptically refers to the “hound” who will bring justice and righteousness to the world (Inf. 1.97–102), we do get a clearer sense of what the wolf embodies—that is, the avaricious, lustful, and gluttonous appetite that, even though it gets what it wants, cannot but desire more.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“What we find, then, is that Dante’s musical program embodies theological realities. Infernal sinners remain willfully rebellious. In life they broke away from the human community to pursue some good in vicious competition with the rest of the human race. Now, as a community, they fail to achieve concord. Like musical notes that remain independent, their retained individuality is ugly and broken. Repentant sinners in purgatory, on the other hand, now willfully submit their individuality to the community. They learn now what it is like to live as members of a body. And thus they erase their tendencies to erratic individualism, forcing their voices into the unison of the simple plainchant. But with the polyphonic hymns of Paradiso, we have not only concord but also a simultaneous expression of individuality: Dante gives us a vision of heaven as a million-part motet.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“As skeptical, modern scholars, we can only smile condescendingly at such quaint medieval readings of the past, but such medieval commonplaces, irritants for modern readers, became personal, scholarly challenges to C. S. Lewis, who loved to take up and defend the most recalcitrant of old beliefs, especially when they had been obvious to everyone in the premodern world and have only become dubious to”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“We might equally well call our medieval authors the most unoriginal or the most original of men. They are so unoriginal that they hardly ever attempt to write anything unless someone has written it before. They are so rebelliously and insistently original that they can hardly reproduce a page of any older work without transforming it by their own intensely visual and emotional imagination, turning the abstract into the concrete, quickening the static into turbulent movement, flooding whatever was colorless with scarlet and gold. They can no more leave their originals intact that we can leave our own earlier drafts intact when we fair-copy them. We always tinker and (as we hope) improve. But in the Middle Ages you did that as cheerfully to other people’s work as to your own.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“In some ways, even if the 1962 list would have puzzled Lewis’s fans, devoted to the man for his apologetics or fiction, it would not have surprised his students, or his close friends. The Oxford professor, like most academics, loved to make lists, and so enumerations of his favorite authors and books appear everywhere in his writing.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“The soul, since by its nature, what it is, and is related to the higher kind of reality in the realm of being, when it sees something akin to it or a trace of its kindred reality is delighted and thrilled and returns to itself and remembers itself and it’s own possessions… Being in the presence of such beauty doesn’t just reverberate with the inner me, but also makes me want to pull that best part up and out of me, to strip off all that is superfluous and useless, and be the purest, cleanest version of me. By seeing beauty, I want to be beauty. When I see beauty, I have the sense that everything can change. I can start over. I can liberate the inner me. Plotinus then, imagines a kind of dialectic in which I am shocked by beauty, inspired by it, reverberate with it interiorly, and then resolve to impose more unity on my life, become less disordered, so that I slowly become like what I admire. Plotinus calls this working on your inner statue. Over the course of time, as I polish the statue and reduce the difference between me and the external experience of beauty, a kind of inner light pools up within me, an intellectual generosity, a spiritual magnanimity. At this point, says Plotinus, I am ready for the deep dive within.”
― Jason M. Baxter, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Recovering the Wildness of Spiritual Life - Library Edition

“When comparing the drab, modern, mechanistic world in which humans are the only intelligent agents to a world of paganism, charged with spirituality, under pressure, as it were, threatening to erupt out of the ground with irrational and exuberant joy, Lewis leaned toward the pagan. Contrast such premodern visions of exuberant joy with how Lewis described the dolorous piety of modern religion, what he called a “minimal religion” which has “nothing that can convince, convert, or (in the higher sense) console: nothing, therefore, which can restore vitality to our civilization. It is not costly enough.”2 It is, seemingly, for this reason that Bacchus keeps making unexpected appearances throughout the Narnia books.3 Bacchus is the liberator, the joy-bringer, the mirth-maker, and he shatters our frigid paradigms of religion when they become nothing more than being nice and respectable and socially responsible: “Bacchus and the Maenads—his fierce, madcap girls—and Silenus were still with them. . . . Everyone was awake, everyone was laughing, flutes were playing, cymbals clashing. Animals . . . were crowding upon them from every direction.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“Sometimes these periods of questioning and confusion can extend over days or months. We often call them periods of depression, but it's a kind of spiritual ‘waylessness.’ For so many writers, from classical antiquity to the Brothers Grimm, being lost in the forest is one of the most frightening experiences imaginable, because you don't know if you are making progress. Have you already walked here? Are you going away from your destination? Are you walking in circles? You don't know, if you have no path to guide you. In a similar way, we can sometimes wake in our lives and wonder why we are pursuing the goods we have committed ourselves to. Whatever happened to the big dreams? Those impossibly heroic goals? How did you get stuck in this dark wood?”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“Boethius can call time an imitation of eternity. Time, as it were, is almost a “parody” of eternity, a “hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them.”23 God, of course, is not perpetual, but eternal. And so, what, in time, is spread out over an infinite number of moments, can be found gathered into a full and simultaneous perfection in God.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“I thought I saw how stories of this kind [i.e., his Narnia stories] could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. . . . The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But suppose that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“In Dante, though, they also have an allegorical element, as if the greatest punishment of the wicked is not necessarily to receive external chastisement but rather to be left to the desires of their own hearts. Some scholars speculate that the three beasts might represent envy (in the leopard), pride (in the lion), and cupidity (in the wolf).”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“But Psyche, repeating words from Lewis’s favorite poet, George Herbert, says, “you must stand up . . . Did I not tell you . . . that a day was coming when you and I would meet in my house and no cloud between us?”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“new to this place when I saw / a mighty one come here, crowned in victory. / He dragged out from among us the shade of our first parent, / and the shade of Abel, his son, and that of Noah,” and so on (Inf. 4.52–56). This is the event that ​you find portrayed on Byzantine icons or in medieval illuminations, in which Christ comes into hell and kicks down the doors, which the devils feebly hold against him. Christ, bursting into hell, grabs the wrists of Adam and Eve and the other patriarchs and energetically pulls them out of limbo. This is the so-called harrowing of hell, which, according to ​Christian tradition, took place on Holy Saturday, before Christ’s own resurrection—the very event that the liturgy is celebrating while Dante walks through this realm.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“Much of medieval literature is what Lewis, in one scholarly article, refers to as “traditional poetry.” Certain poems, such as the Iliad or the poems of Thomas Malory, are not individual acts of inspiration, but rather are more the works of a storyteller who, repeating the essential plot line, weaves new characters, themes, descriptions, or details into the basic outline he inherited, a kind of literary recycling. Lewis had analyzed, in particular, the Arthurian legends, which had been repeated, retold, translated, updated, and modified. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, they tended to become accumulations of the techniques and additions of all previous editions rather than a unique and unrepeatable literary vision. Lewis felt that critics in his age would dismiss an author as “derivative” and “unoriginal” who “merely” repeats what has been said before, or who does not invent his or her own personal style. But the greatest authors of the medieval period were just this: shapers, composers, and recyclers of old materials. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Malory borrowed and translated, but also mended, updated, and altered. They wrote traditional poetry in the sense that they felt it their chief task to dress old stories in new garb. In other words, by adopting this medieval conception of the art of composition, Lewis could liberate himself from the need to be “original.”
― Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

“Aeneas is indeed, then, a man of devotion (to family, gods, and followers), but his special strength is his ability to resist any kind of mediocre settlement in which he would capitulate and found a city on a site that could provide mere subsistence. What he seeks is to found a city centered on divine revelation again.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy