Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century

by Various, Michael H. MacDonald (Editor)

Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it. How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things. The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word.

311 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

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Reviews

[Randy Elrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of my top ten books of all-time!!

[Phil Faris]

Exceptional

[A. Johnson]

I got this from the library--and the preface and intro along make it worth reading. We'll see how it goes from here.

After 2 consecutive chapters on Waugh I stopped.
It would have kept me reading had I had more reasons to stick with the book ( a class or book club)

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent set of essays on lewis, Chetserton and Eliot and DL Sayers.