Except of an email from Donald F. Theall to the author, 11 February 2008: “There are two comments offhand I’d make at the moment regarding your work. First is your appropriate recognition of Eric’s helpfulness and of his deep submersion in his father’s work; the other involves your perceptive treatment of Wyndham Lewis’ influence on McLuhan. Lewis appealed to McLuhan more than the others because he provided a much closer affinity to McLuhan’s own complex dilemmas and retained a very Anglo-Catholic oriented direction toward what society should be achieving (much closer than any other to McLuhan’s post-Protestant attachment to Catholicism). Both of them also could critique the limitations of the narrowly focused theological view of the officials of the Church. Like Lewis McLuhan could neither come to a dedicated acceptance of modernism or of the old morality. One could go much more deeply into this discussion, but not in the space of a letter.”
3 comments:
"THAT man is a religious animal is incontestable: so it is no wonder that religion, or religious modes of feeling, keep breaking in, in this fashion, upon his most prosaic under takings. We are accustomed to refer to this phenomenon as ‘idealism’. But it is better to have your ‘idealism’ awakened by the appeal of a lofty abstraction, such as the concept ‘God’, than by a tomato, or a turbine; I believe we may agree as to that.
In the matter of ‘religious’ manifestations, the peculiar godless christianity of Anglosaxon communism is entirely meaningless: in effect it is an exploitation of the automatic christian responses and reflexes which have survived the extinction of Christianity among the western proletariat, or intelligentsia. It is concocted out of the refuse of discarded emotions, engrained in Christendom, and which cannot at once be extirpated — emotions of ‘decency’, of ‘charity’, of ‘kindliness’, of ‘compassion’, and of ‘selflessness’.
All these things possessed until yesterday the authority of the dogma of a great religion. But without that authority they are meaningless, and can only survive for a relatively short time. For there is no rational basis at all for the cultivation of those feelings.
LEFTWINGS OVER EUROPE, Lewis
Was this view true for Mars?
Thank you for the excerpt. It is interesting.
McLuhan’s treatment of and eventual praise of George Meredith appears to have been constructed in view of a similar diagnosis of the state of Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon West. It is also interesting to contrast these remarks with McLuhan’s later probes on “rationality” and those that put on the “death of God” movement/phenomenon/audience.
That said, however, I doubt Lewis’s observations here have much to do with H. M. M’s personal and private faith and religion — other than to indicate the ground that it grew in and issues that he had to confront and overcome. I would prefer to leave any and all discussion of H.M.M, the private man, to his family, friends, and St. Peter. I am only interested in his public work.--AC.
Your question is answered concisely in “Popular Cultural Mosaic,” an unpublished paper co-authored with Marshall Fishwick.
Post a Comment