Book Review - Falling Inward: Humanities in the Age of Technology

Review of Falling Inward: Humanities in the Age of Technology by Jason M. Baxter, published by Cassiodorus Press, 2026.

I am honored to be among the early reviewers of this fantastic book which is a new edition of a work he has previously published. This edition, however, is expanded, revised, and more pertinent than ever as AI technology develops and social media’s negative effects on society become more and more evident.

Those of us who are standing athwart this tide attempting to choose differently for ourselves may be asking: how, then, shall we live?

This book is a beautiful answer.

This book clearly demonstrates how much the author himself has been shaped by his lifelong study of literature and the Medievals. One gets a sensation of both tremendous unity and multiplicity in the reading of this book because while there is a clear unifying theme or motif, he brings all the counterpoint to bear in all its dazzling variety, as if writing an elegant fugue.

Woven together from many strands across literary history from modern philosophy back to Homer’s epics, Jason Baxter presents us with a tapestry of light and color, and a call to see as humans ought to see, or a call for a transformation of our inner eye.

One of the things I found myself appreciating most about it as I read it is that it is not a list of superficial “band-aid” solutions such as “read more old books!” Nor is it a morose diagnosis of all our problems. It is an invitation to an taste what the author has himself tasted and captured well: the experience of beauty in all its forms and media, from literature to fine arts. It allows us the space to think more deeply about what beauty can do to us, but crucially not for us as if we expect to exploit it for our benefit.

His preface lays this out with its title “The Problem of Beauty.” The experience of beauty is not simple, and there are many types of beautiful things and yet we have a human capacity to appreciate those things simultaneously, and even to combine the elements in new and daring ways. But how do we begin to understand this?

And further, the question remains: “so what?” Why should that affect us? What need do we have of beauty, and the experience of it through art and literature? The remaining chapters make his case.

The Introduction is titled “Deep Knowledge in a Flat World.” Baxter begins the introduction by discussing his family’s experience living for a summer on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples and how that experience of the beauty of Italy provided some insight for the overall point of this book. It points to the transformative nature of beauty, and yet it is also a reorienting sort of transformation in a world that is increasingly flattened and homogenized.

From there Baxter begins to discuss Homer’s Iliad, particularly the complicated character Achilles and his rage, culminating in a glimpse of the Shield of Achilles. The shield’s moving pictures are a depiction of an eternity and Achilles’ response to the shield is emblematic for what the epic is overall conveying. Achilles gazes at it and is impressed by the fact that no matter what he chooses, he is confined by his human choice. As are we all. Our souls long for eternity but we are fragmented creatures living in time and space and history.

“And so Achilles falls into a deep, painful, outraged, enduring longing. This is what I mean by ‘falling into’ a great book. When you read about a hero, you cannot but encounter a soul that has depths. And as we, living in a flattened world, encounter a soul of depth and longing, we begin to feel an admiration creep into us, a secret hunger, that leads us to lose the taste for the merely ordinary around us.”1

When we encounter these great, complex characters, we are moved by admiration for them, and this inspires a sense of longing for more depth and a richer experience. Homer, according to Baxter, takes this heroic world and its attendant tropes and uses it to explore things that go beyond ordinary human experience.

Chapter 1 is entitled “Eucatastrophe in Ithaka: Reading the Odyssey with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.” Now Baxter explores Homer’s depiction of “nostalgia” or “painful return” through the wily character of Odysseus, whose primary motivation through the Odyssey is simply to get home. But Odysseus betrays his many layers; while he is a typical Greek hero in many respects, he is reduced to tears from hearing a bard sing of his own heroic exploits. He “melts.”

He is an Odysseus who will be stripped of everything, including his own name, on his return home, though he was revealed (even to himself) to have been the one stretching out his own heroic journey in his pursuit of heroic kleos (glory and fame). And yet after all of that, the homecoming is all the sweeter because of the losses he endured to attain it.

There is a wistful sense of spiritual longing in these stories, first composed so remotely in the past that we will never know their true origin, and yet that deep longing haunts us to this day. Here Baxter of course brings in the many insights of Lewis and Tolkien on the nature of the story, and of stories in general, especially as these stories contain significant moments of “recognition” that are akin to our flashes of imaginative insight into reality, those moments of “falling inward” whence the title of this book. Later in the chapter Baxter develops this through Plato, and his interpretation of a notoriously difficult passage from Plato’s Phaedrus and what it says about how we apprehend truth, not via logical proposition and dialectic, but by these deep, radical encounters with beautiful reality that cause us to have this sensation of falling upward and inward.

Chapter 2 is “Why Read Old Books: Recovering the Buried Past.” Continuing on the theme of Plato, this chapter begins with the tale of Atlantis as told in Plato’s Timaeus, and then the insight of the Italian Renaissance humanist and Plato scholar Marsilio Ficino. On this beginning, Baxter reorients us to the playing field we are on. The secular age with its default state of disbelief would have been alien to the default Christianity of the Medieval and Renaissance worlds. In other words, we may have reached a state of “mutual incomprehensibility” in our own age with past ages.

Thinkers today like Clifford Geertz and Sam Harris assert that religious belief is either an artificial cultural system or outright dangerous, and even those of us who are religious may find ourselves having unwittingly adopted many of the postures of disbelief simply because it’s in the air around us.

But such was not the experience of ancients, Medievals, or Renaissance people, as Baxter goes on to explore. In the Ancient world, the very atmosphere was “charged with divinity.” The presence of divinities in everyday life was taken for granted. It is true that temples and shrines abounded, rivers and springs had their own deities associated with them. Epiphanies of the gods in the ancient world can be truly terrible events. But the notion of the “enchanted cosmos” emerges here most fully in this chapter and it is a very important notion for understanding a medieval mindset.

To the Medieval mind in Christendom, God is not an absent clockmaker who winds the key and lets creation spin, but the Orderer and Sustainer of all things. Hence the medieval world is marked by belief in the “numinous,” meaning the sense that God is very much intimately concerned and involved with His creation and creatures. C.S. Lewis’ remarks on how differently we view outer space from the Medievals are pertinent here. We view outer space as mere emptiness and stars as burning balls of gas and we explore it to find more avenues of exploitation or merely to prove that we can. But to the Medievals, the heavens were the great arch of the heavenly cathedral and the stars were its lights. They were inaccessible but served to direct our reflections upward.

There is more one could say, but it must suffice for now to say that Medieval literature is far more attuned to this experience of the numinous than we are. Baxter brings in a number of wonderful texts including the Chanson de Roland and others to elaborate this point.

Chapter 3 boasts this snazzy title, “Globalism, Technology and…Poetry? Can the Humanities Contribute Anything to the Modern World?”

This is perhaps one of the real burning questions of many readers. Baxter invites the reader to imagine a world summit called to solve the world’s problems and then to imagine the types of people who would be invited: tech CEOs, politicians, scientists, etc. Never poets or artists. Again, Baxter reminds us again of another aspect of our current “playing field” (if you will). We are a Promethean people who assume we can use technology to gain the upper hand over nature. We tend to elevate science and technology and trades over humane pursuits.

Here Baxter gives us a list of things that STEM fields simply cannot do, but which can be found in a humanities mindset and are incredibly valuable even when that value is not immediately obvious.

One major point that Baxter makes here that I think sums it up well is that humanities cultivates a sense of memory that tethers us to the past. We have no shortage of thriller films on what happens when science runs rampant with nothing to restrain it. Humanities, by cultivating a sense of memory through literature, can also provide the appropriate sense of restraint because of the stories stored up in that memory. Memory is, traditionally, the mother of the Muses. No art can take place without a richly stocked memory.

Chapter 4 (my personal favorite of all the chapters) is “Falling Inward: The Gothic Cathedral as Architecture of Contemplation.” This chapter is absolutely fascinating and contains a wealth of information and reflection on the nature of Gothic architecture as microcosms of the cosmos itself, and deeply symbolic objects.

Not only were they spaces for worship and contemplation, but they were also built to rival the great architectural feats of the past, in what Baxter calls “heroic emulation.” Through the qualities of magnitudo (greatness) and varietas (diversity), the builders of the Gothic cathedral sought transcendence, and the experience of such a cathedral is to lose sight of one’s mundane worries.

This wouldn’t be a Jason Baxter book if there were not a proper homage to Dante (as well as an homage to travel literature), and here in this chapter, we learn that Dante’s Divine Comedy is called “the last Gothic Cathedral” because the poem itself displays all the same architectural prowess in scale, variety, and literary transcendence. The story is an intricately structured cathedral, and it is a representation of the world in literary terms. (Note that Dante is not saying it is a literal depiction of the world, but it is a literary picture of higher realities).

All this to say that the “cosmos,” the world writ large, was a book that the Medievals had learned to read and to some extent interpret, and it was a highly ordered, musical world, especially as it was captured by Boethius and his glorious cosmological poems in the Consolation of Philosophy.

The experience of being caught up in the awe and wonder of it was referred to by various medieval authors as “falling upward.” Those of us who have ever had a moment of “the great recognition” will perhaps be familiar with the feeling; if we have ever read a great work of literature that took us wholly outside of ourselves, we have fallen upward.

Chapter 5 is “Nostalgia for the Future: Antiquity and Eternity in Oxford Authors.”

After discussing the great Gothic cathedrals in both physical and literary form, we turn our attention to one of the most architecturally-stunning cities in the world: Oxford. It is impossible not to be haunted by the experience of Oxford because to be there is to breathe the air of centuries past and to be affected by a deep longing for that old “enchanted cosmos.”

This chapter discusses the notion of “nostalgia” again from a different viewpoint, particularly the English Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Wordsworth, and in the last of the Romantics Lewis and Tolkien.

But far from letting our nostalgia be dominated by the past, we must look to the future for the proper end of nostalgia, according to Lewis, is for that time when the “estrangement between Spirit and Nature will be healed.” We realize that we have been exiled from the past and all that the past offered, but perhaps this is a gift. It forces us to realize that we are lacking something that we deeply long for, and it makes our hope for that future restoration all the sweeter.

Chapter 6 is “How to Look at the World Like a Painter: The Meaning of Art History.”

This chapter is a lovely reflection on painters and visual artists, and it is a topic where Baxter’s prose really shines in his ability to describe not merely the appearance of a painting but its experience for the beholder. United with wonderful poems that add to the reflection on the artwork, this chapter is weaving together the themes of the previous chapters: nostalgia, hope for the future, the architecture of nature and the Gothic cathedral, the Romantics and their understanding of the imagination as a faculty of truth.

The painters particularly in focus J.M.W. Turner’s glowing world and Claude Lorrain, that master of color and light, and we come to see by the end of the chapter how the vision of the painter and the vision of the author are not so very different. By contrast, more modern artists who have lost the sense of the “enchanted cosmos” that permeates the artwork of ages past bring an artistic vision that sees the human self as the cosmos, and the only value in the artwork is what the viewer brings to it. The motivating factor of art in ages past is to take the viewers out of themselves and cause them to fall upward into a transcendent experience of an enchanted world that surrounds them, rather than emanates from themselves.

Chapter 7 is “Chatter and Intellectual Fasting: Dante and the Contemplative Life.”

That our world is filled with chatter is now a commonplace. Cheap sentiment litters our social media feeds and the material world around us. Even intellectual life has become consumeristic, and we shy away from the silence of contemplation. We read here in this chapter a quote from Dante’s Purgatorio when Vergil is bidding farewell to the pilgrim Dante, encouraging him to simply behold the world around him now that Dante has gone through purification.

Baxter here discusses the historical understanding of contemplation and solitude and its purpose in the life of a Christian, and spends some time exploring the thoughts of Thomas Merton on the topic who himself lived in deep solitude in nature, which may seem strange to us nowadays in our hyper-connected digital economy, but the impulse is millennia-old.

What if we prized the experience of simply sitting in silence and existing in nature, unplugged from all the distractions that are constantly demanding our attention? What if we did so with a mind more attuned to the numinous and to the beauty still all around us?

Towards the end of the chapter, we are treated to quotations and insight from Dante’s encounter with Beatrice in Paradiso and what this passage has to say about beauty, which is where we see how the entire book is now returning to its original theme as introduced in the preface “The Problem of Beauty.”

Dante depicts, by highly literary means, the experience of the finite human experiencing divine beauty.

The notion referred to in the title as “intellectual fasting” is an image that Dante uses consistently throughout the Divine Comedy as a metaphor for the process of careful study. The “disciplined but joyful eating of words and books” and “carefully seeking the perfect word to express an idea.”

When Dante begins to ascend the ladder of contemplatives, he immediately falls upward, which is an incredible image for contemplation of heavenly reality, and an echo of the previous chapters that examine art, and the Gothic cathedral, and beautiful transcendent poems.

The epilogue is titled “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and this title is taken from an Arthur C. Clarke story about Tibetan monks who hire two computer programmers to create a program to churn out every possible permutation of certain letters until the “nine billion names of God” can be recorded. When all nine billion names are written in the sacred books, history would end, according to this belief. The Americans begin to suspect that they will be blamed for failing to bring about the end of the world.

The notion of the sacred intruding in such away upon the secular is at the heart of the story, and it imagines a way in which technology and science could, even inadvertently, bring about the end of the world according to a religious belief system.

Baxter points out that we now live in an age where a “fundamentally religious or aesthetic approach to the natural is almost unthinkable in popular and political culture.” We are thoroughly Baconian (as in Francis Bacon) in our general outlook.

But, Baxter says, we need a fruitful marriage of the two. This is a very important thing to note about this book: nowhere does Baxter suggest that we must resort to extremes one way or another. We must navigate carefully to take the good from both.

Baxter returns to Plato’s Timaeus to explore a view of the world that accounts for a “divine craftsman” that created the visible world with a profound mathematical and aesthetic order, which was a notion that permeated Medieval and Renaissance literature and philosophy.

Through this epilogue, Baxter develops the notion of the world itself as an “icon” that points us to the divine, and this is a thread we can follow all the way back to Plato and the eerily familiar way it is discussed in the Timaeus. The implication is that it should inspire us to this greater contemplation and appreciation for the beauty and variety in the world around us.

This review is but a paltry attempt at capturing the essence of this book, but there is great enjoyment to be found in its pages and I know I will be returning to it again very soon.

In a review of another book by Dr. Baxter, I likened his Why Literature Still Matters to the Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, in the way that it captures not only the logical outcome of our postmodern ideologies but provides a compelling answer for why humane subjects are still vitally important. This book, if I may be so bold as to posit another comparison, is a fuller echo of Dorothy Sayers’ 1946 lecture The Lost Tools of Learning, which sought to posit a return to a more “medieval” point of view, while at the same time being a thought experiment influenced by modern ideas.

Falling Inward is very much a fuller, richer vision of what a medieval mindset would be like, while also navigating the complexities of the modern world we inhabit. The Lost Tools of Learning met a particular moment in time, and it has played some role in the revival of interest in classical learning in the 20th and 21th centuries, but its vision is very limited in a way that has been detrimental to its overall aims.

If we want a fuller vision of what this humane life looks like, Falling Inward is a wonderful guide. One could spend a lot of fruitful time chasing down the poems and references in it, or looking at pictures of Gothic cathedrals with new eyes, or gazing at the heavens with renewed awe and wonder. It encapsulates not merely intellectual apprehension, but a much deeper, more comprehensive experience of interior life.