War of the Cosmoses - Out of the Pit

Do I need to say that living in either of the forementioned "cosmoses" -- that of the Scimitar and that of Modernism -- seems paltry, meager, sordid, and dishonorable? Do I need to mention the treatment of women in either? The reductio ad absurdum of manhood to shame-based, sensory- hyperstimulated, survival of the fittest, tribal warlord systems? The lack of concern for the least, the last, and the lost?

Even the capitalist/socialist systems that have come to dominate the global spectrum -- as Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum definitively declared, and the Distributists all seconded -- are demeaning, despoiling, and denigrating. What alternative are we looking at here? Join the Amish?

Of course not. The manual labor would undoubtedly do us all great good, but nearly all of us are ill-prepared financially and otherwise to make such a leap and do justice to our families' welfare. Neither are many men today ready "to glance, even furtively, in the only direction where meaning could still be found" (René Girard) -- which is the Catholic Church. But we do have examples of how men of faith have worked from within corruption and despair in situ and, at times, in extremis?

I will not advance the argument for the third combatant in the "cosmos wars" yet. But I will give an example of how the biblical Spirit is not without witness, given to us by Mr. C. S. Lewis in his book, That Hideous Strength. In it, a worldly, success-driven young academic, Mark Studdock, finds himself hopelessly embroiled in "Belbury" -- a nest of scorpions with an agenda to rival any Modernist project on our event horizon. He "comes to himself," shall we say, in the deepest morass of indoctrination:

And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him -- something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.

IS there a Sherwood for weary yeomen, a Rivendell, still to be found today? IS there a place, a "cosmos", where the "Straight" or the "Normal" is safeguarded and lived? Can one be pulled up and out of the "training" of Scimitar or Modernism? Oh, yes. A birthright awaits every man and woman made imago dei, good friend, that nothing can take away from you, from me.