Modern Age - Fall 2016 - 131

REVIEWS

which faith, order, and moral law are normative. What liberals
such as I. A. Richards, William Empson, and Edmund Wilson had
heralded as a new road to utopia was, in fact, a disastrous turn
into a dark and murderous wood. In its harshness of form, incomprehensibility, rejection of tradition, hostility toward conventional
institutions, and reductive materialism, modernist literature was
unlike anything that had come before.
The crux of the issue was the modernist elevation of self as the
sole arbiter of taste, a development not unrelated to the rise of
totalitarianism. As the Zaleskis point out, Lewis often repeated
George MacDonald's adage, "the one principle of hell is 'I am my
own'" (149). Gradually, between stumbling across MacDonald's
fiction in 1916 and converting to Christianity in 1931, Lewis came
to see the dire implications of modern theories of self-empowerment. Self-sufficiency of the modern sort is grounded in pride
in the expansive powers made possible by science and reason
untethered from the past, and this crippling pride is the source of
alienation of man from nature, from other men, and, most important, from God. As Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, "A proud man
is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as
long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is
above you."
As scholars, Lewis and Tolkien defended an open-minded
approach toward learning that stressed a holistic and humane
attitude as opposed to the "scientific" and activist approaches
that arose with the work of Richards and Leavis. Despite the popular success of the Inklings' fiction (and in Lewis's case, nonfiction)
among a general readership, their scholarly work was far from
inconsiderable, and it was especially important for the example
it set as a defense of a humane approach to learning based on
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Modern Age - Fall 2016

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