"The vernacular is the real test"

From a good review of The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case against Scientism:

...Aeschliman’s target is the regrettable tendency of scientism — the ideology that exaggerates the role of empirical science in forming our view of the world — to “destroy the vision of man as imago Dei by picturing and perceiving him instead as a creature driven and primarily determined by laws of matter and force.”

And while he is criticizing that scientism, Aeschliman gives us a reading of C.S. Lewis — anchored in Lewis’s minor classic The Abolition of Man (1943) — that shows Lewis to be at once philosophically astute and rhetorically potent. On the point in question — the primacy of ordinary language — Lewis expressed himself with matter-of-fact eloquence: “Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”

.... From whom are we to learn how to speak again? From the “great central tradition” of classical and Christian civilization which is Aeschliman’s second great concern in The Restoration of Man. While he chronicles the spread of scientism since the Enlightenment, he also tells the tale of those who have opposed it every step of the way, from Pascal and Swift in the early years, to Newman and Dostoevsky in the 19^th century, to Chesterton, Lewis, and Solzhenitsyn in more recent decades. These were the writers and witnesses who strove to “revive, nourish, and protect the common human reason against specialists and fanatics who would reduce it to sense perception only.” They were the prophets who insisted that science “depends upon philosophy for the validity of its terms and procedures and to guide the uses to which scientific knowledge will be put.” And they were the true philanthropists, who sought to nourish the souls of men and women with something more substantial than what engineers can produce. They wrote satires, poetry, novels, biographies, essays, and even plays, because they knew that “some more popular form than rational argument” would be “necessary to counteract scientific materialism’s more immediately tangible and visible appeals.”

By placing C.S. Lewis within this great tradition, Michael Aeschliman has reminded us that if we would regain our purchase on the true meaning of words, we must have recourse to the very fonts of wisdom, in the works of Augustine and Aristotle, Jane Austen and the Psalms, St. Paul and soon-to-be-saint John Henry Newman. The Restoration of Man is a book marked by tremendous learning worn lightly, deployed vigorously, and offered generously to a generation that has forgotten how to think because it has lost its grip on the meaning of words.

'The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case against Scientism' Book Review | National Review