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.35 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.”36 Having abandoned
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