4On The Reading Of Old Books'

4On The Reading Of Old Books'

4

ON THE READING OF OLD BOOKS'

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker2

or Butler,3

but M. Berdyaev{

or M. Maritain "

or Mr Niebuhrc,

or Miss Sayers'

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, `But how could they have thought that?' - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt"

such as Hooker, Herbert,"

Traherne,10

Taylor"

and Bunyan,12

I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius,"

St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were `influences'. George MacDonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think-as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries - that `Christianity' is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages `mere Christianity' turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, selfconsistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity,"

I learned to recognize, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales;' ,

it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser'

and Walton;',

it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal''

and Johnson;'"

there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan'"

and Boehme21

and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe - Law-'

and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed `Paganism' of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia." -0

an air that kills From yon far country blows."}

The present book is something of an experiment. The translation is intended for the world at large, not only for theological students. If it succeeds, other translations of other great Christian books will presumably follow. In one sense, of course, it is not the first in the field. Translations of the Theologia Germanica,''

the Incitation,2

the Revelations of Lady Julian of Norwich,2s

This is a good translation of a very great book. St Athanasius has suffered in popular estimation from a certain sentence in the `Athanasian Creed' .29

I will not labour the point that that work is not exactly a creed and was not by St. Athanasius, for I think it is a very fine piece of writing. The words `Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly' are the offence. They are commonly misunderstood. The operative word is keep; not acquire, or even believe, but keep. The author, in fact, is not talking about unbelievers, but about deserters, not about those who have never heard of Christ, nor even those who have misunderstood and refused to accept Him, but of those who having really understood and really believed, then allow themselves, under the sway of sloth or of fashion or any other invited confusion to be drawn away into sub-Christian modes of thought. They are a warning against the curious modern assumption that all changes of belief, however brought about, are necessarily exempt from blame.'

His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundunt, `Athanasius against the world'. We are proud that our country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, `whole and undefiled', when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius:"-

When I first opened his De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as `arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature'.;'

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