Something Else Great

By the way, would you admit this--that to lose the sense of man's greatness is not fatal when men think something else great instead? Man can look pretty small in the Psalms, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Lucretius: but the poetry remains glorious because God, or the gods, or Natura are great. The modern predicament is that having voted man into the chair and then lost belief in Man, there is no glory left.

--letter from C. S. Lewis to George Hamilton, August 14, 1949, in Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (ed. Walter Hooper; HarperCollins, 2004), 967; emphases original