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A Reason to Read Old Books

For Lewis, the reading of literature – above all, the reading of older literature – is an important challenge to some premature judgments based on ‘chronological snobbery.’ Owen Barfield had taught Lewis to be suspicious of those who declaimed the inevitable superiority of the present over the past.

…Lewis argues that a familiarity with the literature of the past provides readers with a standpoint which gives them critical distance from their own era. Thus, it allows them to see ‘the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.’ The reading of old books enable us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping ‘the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.’

– Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 187

Old books don’t simply bring an old perspective – they bring perspective. You’ll never be a great critic of culture until you gain the vantage point of cultures gone by. I meet people who think that we’re finally figuring it all out these days. We’re the best of the best, surfing the edge of the tide of history. Little do they realize there were people in ages past much smarter than we are today.

This perspective could lead to reverse chronological snobbery. We want to be careful not to put artsy glowing halos around the heads of the departed. They were far from perfect. But their perspective is needed nonetheless – if we are to have any perspective at all.

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.