Jason Baxter > Quotes

“The world itself is but a sketchy translation of a poem no one has ever heard”
― Jason Baxter

“In this way, Boethius served as a special exemplar. Just as the sixth-century philosopher lived in an age overrun by barbarians (“huge, fair-skinned, beer-drinking, boasting thanes”) and desperately gathered and saved whatever fragments he could from the old “high Pagan past,” so too did Lewis feel it his duty to save not this or that ancient author, but the general wisdom of the Long Middle Ages, and then vernacularize it for his world, which was now dominated by a new type of barbarian. His own age was one of “Proletarianism,” which was now, in a way similar to Boethius’s barbarians, cut off from the classical past and proud of its distance from classical antiquity: we are “self-satisfied to a degree perhaps beyond the self-satisfaction of any recorded aristocracy” we are women and men who have become as “practical as the irrational animals.” Having abandoned the study of the old, modern barbarians no longer have access to any values other than those “of modern industrial civilization,” and so, Lewis wondered if “we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity.” In this way, Lewis followed the path of Boethius, who chose not to focus on “what divided him from Virgil, Seneca, Plato, and the old Republican heroes” but rather, “he preferred [a theme] that enabled him to feel how nearly they had been right, to think of them not as ‘they’ but as ‘we.’ Lewis’s vocation, like Boethius’s, was the humble one of making old books live again.”
― Jason Baxter

“Medieval spiritual masters recommended a vigorous reading program to keep the heart fresh. For this reason, they illustrated their books lavishly, built cathedrals with all kinds of surprising side chapels and variously colored marbles inlaid in the floor, and constructed cloisters with capitals carved with wildly exuberant images of monsters and fishes.”
― Jason Baxter, Dante’s Inferno: A New Commentary

“Unlike modern pedantic scholars who are obsessed with their specialization and, thus, inordinately attach to the periodization of history, Lewis’s mind ranged generously over time.”
― Jason Baxter