Jennifer sent me a link to this Femina post, in which Nancy Ann is responding to C.S. Lewis’s comments on the Middle English word “solempne” found in A Preface to Paradise Lost.
We moderns have trouble with solempne because we live in an egalitarian, slovenly culture where no one likes to “look up” to someone else. To really understand solempne, we need hierarchy. So the Christian has a better chance at understanding this because the most high God is our ultimate reference point.
“This means something different, but not quite different, from modern English solemn. Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity…The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp — and the very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of ‘solemnity’. To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide-spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit.”
I do think we are making strides toward recovering the idea that it is decent to wear decent clothes, although we who enjoy dressing still get a fair amount of heat for it.
Who knew that C.S. Lewis had anything to say about what we wear?