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Always Moving Yet Never Leaving Anything Behind (C.S. Lewis)

Alister McGrath quotes the opening lines of The Allegory of Love:

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.

He then comments,

Where some argue that humanity must embrace a synthesis of contemporary science and social attitudes as ‘the truth’ – to be contrasted with the ‘superstitions’ of the past – Lewis declares that this simply leads to humanity becoming a by-product of its age, shaped by its predominant cultural moods and intellectual conventions. We must, Lewis argues, break free from the shallow complacency of ‘chronological snobbery,’ and realise that we can learn from the past precisely because it liberates us from the tyranny of the contemporaneous.

C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 184

Humanity is not like the jump from the horse and buggy to the car, in which the horse and buggy gives up the ghost and disappears. Humanity does not, or at least should not, move from life to death, or from one life to another form of life. Humanity is (continuously) alive; it has an organic unity and continuity stretching from generation to generation. The Fourth Commandment, ‘Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land,’ acknowledges as much. If our days are to be prolonged, we must recognize, and especially honor, the continuity of life and the precedents set by those who came before us.

Chesterton made the claim in Orthodoxy that a belief in tradition is simply a belief in the ‘democracy of the dead.’ It is not only our (modern) vote that counts; humanity must acknowledge that the votes of the past cast by our ancestors count for something as well. They may have voted wrong from time to time, but their votes have impacted us and should be acknowledged, and honored where possible.

If you resist the reading of old books, for example, you are doomed to live in the claustrophobic present without any ventilation. A knowledge of, and respect for, the past is like the joy of opening a window in a stuffy room. It lets fresh air in. It is old air, but to us it is fresh.

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