4. Books and the Discipleship of the Mind
4
Books and the Discipleship of the Mind
Alonso of Arragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears best in four things: old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon, Aphorisms and Apothegms
These words of the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon came to mind as I began to think about what I might say, not just in honoring my friend Bill Reimer, the longtime manager of the famous bookshop at Regent College, Vancouver, but also reflecting on the wider significance of books in relation to Christian discipleship. One of the things that I most looked forward to during my visits to Regent College was spending time with Bill, musing on the complex and shifting worlds of publishing and bookselling. As an author, I valued his wisdom and insights. Bill has managed to sustain a bookshop in the midst of cultural and economic turbulence and change, offering both the college and the Canadian Christian community a significant theological and spiritual resource. In honoring him and reflecting on our shared passion for books, I offer the following thoughts on why books still matter and what we can learn from them.
Books open our minds and our imaginations, allowing us to see God and our world as others see them and reflect on what we find. The French novelist Marcel Proust spoke of the “only true voyage of discovery” being “not to travel to new landscapes, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others.” Whatever else they may be, gifted authors are fundamentally people who have seen something others have missed and enable us to grasp and appreciate this new way of seeing things in and through their writings. The best writers are not self-promoting narcissists who demand that we look at them, but those who invite us to look through them at what they have seen, so that we too might share in their experience. They are windows to something that is greater. Those who have seen this before us thus stand to one side so that we might see where they are pointing rather than be distracted by them.
It’s a wonderful thought: the possibility of transcending our own limitations by looking at the world as others see it, allowing their vision of things to enrich or challenge our own. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, this kind of literary engagement “heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.” In reading great literature, Lewis found that he was able to transcend his limits, while still remaining himself: “Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.” Lewis himself saw authors not as spectacles to be admired, but as a “set of spectacles” through which we can look at the world and see it in sharper focus and increased depth of field.
For so many, as for Lewis, an engagement with literature is a gateway to the enrichment of our vision, allowing us to see things that we had hitherto missed; perhaps it might challenge our ideas and force us to review them, considering alternatives that had hitherto been seen as unthinkable. That was certainly Lewis’s own experience at Oxford in the early 1920s, as he began to immerse himself in the study of English literature. As he reflected on the varying quality of literary representations of reality, Lewis came to realize that those of modernist writers such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells “seemed a little thin,” lacking depth or any capacity to comprehend the complexity of real life. The shallow rationalist mind-set that they embodied seemed to be unable to cope with the “roughness and density of life.” Yet, to his evident surprise, the still-atheist Lewis came to realize that what he then called “the Christian mythology”—as expressed, for example, in the writings of George Herbert—seemed to excel as a medium for “conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it.” Lewis’s love of literature was thus integral to his later discovery of the rational and imaginative appeal of Christianity. As he later said, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.”
I too experienced this capacity of books to break spells and open up new ways of visualizing and inhabiting our world. Like many young people in the late 1960s, I regarded the idea of God as outdated nonsense. This was a time of intellectual and cultural change, in which the traditional “certainties” of the past became increasingly precarious and unsettled. By the age of sixteen, I was convinced that the natural sciences alone could satisfy our intellectual longings and answer our deepest questions. If science could not answer a question, it was not a real question in the first place. I took it as a self-evident truth that science entailed atheism. Where some railed against the metaphysical austerity of a godless world, I took my cues from Nietzsche, seeing atheism as a bold assertion of meaninglessness, a distinguishing mark of intellectual bravery and integrity.
My future, it seemed to me then, lay in the study of science, which I confidently expected to lead to an interesting career on the one hand, and the intellectual confirmation and consolidation of my atheism on the other. To my delight, I learned that I had won a scholarship to Oxford University to study chemistry, with effect from October 1971. In the meantime, I decided that I would use my remaining time at school to extend my reading in aspects of science.
After a month or so of intensive reading in the school’s science library, I came across a collection of dust-shrouded books in a battered bookcase labeled “The History and Philosophy of Science.” I was suspicious back then of both history and philosophy, tending to see them as uninformed criticism of the certainties and simplicities of the natural sciences by those who felt threatened by them. Philosophy, in my view, was just pointless speculation about issues that any proper scientist could solve easily through a few well-designed experiments. What was the point? In the end, however, I decided to work my way through these volumes. If I was right, what had I to lose by doing so, apart from some time?
By the time I had finished reading those books, I realized that I needed to do some very serious rethinking. Far from being half-witted obscurantism that placed unnecessary obstacles in the place of relentless scientific advance, the history and philosophy of science asked all the right questions about the reliability and limits of scientific knowledge—questions that I had not faced thus far. I was forced to confront the awkward realities of the underdetermination of theory by data, the phenomenon of radical theory change in the history of science, the difficulties in devising a “crucial experiment,” and the enormously complex issues associated with devising what was the “best explanation” of a given set of observations. I was overwhelmed by an intellectual tidal wave, battering my settled way of thinking, muddying what I had taken to be the clear, still, and above all, simple waters of scientific truth.
Things thus turned out to be rather more complicated than I realized. I had enjoyed the beauty and innocence of a childlike attitude to the sciences and secretly wished to remain in that secure place, but those books opened my eyes. I knew there was—and could be—no going back to the simplistic take on the natural sciences that I had once taken for granted. I could not escape the new world I now began to inhabit. I had lost my epistemic innocence and had to find my way through the irrefractable and irreducible landscape of a grown-up world. I had once breezily dismissed Bertrand Russell’s suggestion that philosophy tries to teach us “how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation.” I could now see his point, which cut the ground from under my simplistic certainties, demanding a more nuanced and cautious engagement with reality.
I found that I could no longer hold on to what I now realize was a somewhat naive scientific positivism. It became clear to me that a whole series of questions that I had dismissed as meaningless or pointless had to be examined again—including the God question. I did not turn from atheism to Christianity as a result of reading those books. Rather, they forced me to realize that atheism was a faith, a belief that could not be proved to be true. Science was more intellectually malleable than I had realized. It did not entail atheism or, indeed, any religious or antireligious ideology. It was just science and had to be respected as such.
So if atheism was actually a faith, should I not reconsider other faiths that I had earlier dismissed precisely because they were faiths? I first began to grasp the intellectual depth and resilience of the Christian faith during my first term at Oxford University, but my earlier reading of the books mentioned above had prepared the way for this breakthrough. It broke the spell of scientific atheism and opened my eyes to deeper and richer ways of thinking about science. The traps Lewis had warned of were the traps into which I fell—and from which I emerged a wiser person.
As I began to grow in my faith, I found myself drawn toward the study of Christian theology. After all, we are told that the process of Christian discipleship engages and makes demands of all our faculties: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). We are called to love God with all of our minds: to think about our faith. When rightly understood—and it is so easily misunderstood—theology is about an imaginative enlargement of our vision of God and the corresponding expansion of our mental capacity to grasp and appreciate the rich and rewarding “big picture” of reality that lies at the heart of the Christian faith.
Christian theology is the natural and necessary outcome of our personal encounter and sustained engagement with the person of Jesus Christ. We are drawn to the Gospel accounts of Christ, finding that he appeals to something deep within us. Yet we need to try to put into words precisely what it is that we have found and ask how what others have found could further enrich our own experience and understanding of the Christian faith. We Christians are the wandering people of God, sojourners and wayfarers in our strange world, whose shared vision of the meaning of life and the hope of glory keeps us going as we travel through a landscape that is so often shrouded in mist and darkness. And those who have traveled this road before us are able to pass down to us their wisdom and insights.
While I have gained much from conversations about faith from my fellow travelers through the landscape of the Christian faith, I have found that my personal faith is now enriched and deepened mainly by reading books. Although many other books have helped me, I have come to see that Bacon was right: there is something special about having “old authors to read”—not least because the best of the more recent books so often represent reworkings and reappropriations of those older ideas and approaches.
So why do I take such pleasure in reading the works of long-dead authors, such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Augustine of Hippo, and Athanasius of Alexandria? Books become classics for a reason—namely, that people continue to find in them something of value and excellence, to which they return again and again. Classic writers help us to break free from our naive assumption that the most recent is the best; that the wisdom of the past is somehow discredited or eclipsed by more recent writing. Newer books are in the process of being assessed: some will stand the test of time, others will not. The greatest challenge a book faces is perhaps not how it is judged today, but how it will be judged a generation from now. Will it be valued? Will it be remembered at all?
The Christian classics—such as Athanasius’s On the Incarnation or Augustine’s Confessions—possess the ability to tether us to our collective past, offering us resources that inform us about our faith while also revealing the blind spots of our own chronological parochialism. They anchor us to a continuous tradition of reflection, allowing us to see the great questions and problems of our own time and culture through the eyes of others. As Lewis observed in his own introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, we need to “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” One of the chief values of old literature lies in its ability to expose the assumptions that we so often take for granted as self-evidently correct, but are actually culturally situated and will one day seem strange to future generations.
Let me note one of those fashionable assumptions that would have seemed strange in the past and, I suspect (and hope), will seem strange in the future as well: that we can invent our own intellectual and moral worlds. It seems to me that some now inhabit a “post-truth” world, in which people simply make up their most cherished beliefs and see this as entirely reasonable and straightforward. We create a world that fits in with our preconceived ideas or our deepest longings and take offense when our imagined certainties are challenged. Why worry about someone else’s so-called reality when we can create our own and subjugate our perceptions to our longings? T. S. Eliot was prophetic in his suggestion that we “cannot bear very much reality.” Yet Eliot seemed to be objecting to an evasion of reality, whereas many now deny the existence of any reality, save that which they have personally constructed.
One of the more disturbing characteristics of this post-truth age is that people limit themselves to their own narrow communities, regarding connection or communication with other communities as signs of intellectual contamination or cultural degradation. We all too often live in self-reinforcing and self-referential intellectual and cultural bubbles, members of “in-groups” who demonize inferior “out-groups,” thus dividing the world into heroes and villains and unproblematically locating ourselves among the former. We read only “approved” newspapers and “safe” web postings from “trusted” authors, anxious to avoid any hint that we might recognize good or truth in others, which would invariably lead to a humiliating ejection from our favored “in-group.”
That’s why we need to read books. They put us in touch with a wider world. They force us to confront and evaluate alternative views of the world and ways of inhabiting it. They invite us to listen to forgotten, marginalized, or suppressed viewpoints. We can indeed criticize views we find uncomfortable or wrong; we cannot, however, haughtily dismiss them with the scorn that was such a trademark of the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens—an intellectual embarrassment that is now happily receding into the distance. Hitchens believed that a contemptuous dismissal of religion signaled intellectual virtue on his part, when it was actually a sign of prejudice-fueled superficiality, woodenly and predictably compliant with the norms of his cultural “in-group.”
Lewis was right in his suggestion that those who call themselves “freethinkers” are so often the willing prisoners of a “glib and shallow rationalism.” Books invite us to imagine new worlds and new ways of thinking. The New Atheism seems to think it can only survive by censoring our reading habits and suppressing our imaginations. Both Lewis and I came to faith through reading books, realizing that they raised questions about the reliability and coherence of our earlier atheism. So why, I often wonder, are so many Christians reluctant to use literature as an apologetic gateway? Why do so many of us share the seventeenth-century Puritan writer Richard Baxter’s superficial judgment that, since literature is fictional, it engenders and encourages falsities? Surely there is more that needs to be done here.
A powerful objection might be raised here, rightly demanding our consideration. “What you say is all very well, but why books? Why not just use the online text of those books? Surely they convey exactly the same information but in a much more convenient form?” It is an entirely fair objection. Why do we need the bulky physical objects that we call “books” when their content is easily available in a more modern and compact format? So let me explain why I think there continues to be something about books that gives them a distinct place in our lives.
First, when I buy a book, it becomes mine. When I was younger (and poorer), I used to write my name inside the cover of every book I bought, alongside the date and place of its purchase. So, reaching into my hopelessly disorganized accumulation of books (which is so chaotic I could not really describe it as a “library”), I can see that I bought Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in Blackwell’s bookshop, Oxford, on September 29, 1973, and Thomas F. Torrance’s Theological Science in Heffer’s bookshop, Cambridge, on June 2, 1979. Those books became part of my own story as I discovered and absorbed new ideas and tried to work out how they fitted into my own journey of faith. They are milestones along my own road of reflection, marking moments when I invited these writers to become my conversation partners in my evolving exploration of the Christian faith.
As I browse through my bookshelves, I find myself reconstructing my own intellectual journey and its moments of illumination and transition. I share with C. S. Lewis what some might consider to be a shocking and destructive habit of entering into dialogue with authors by underlining choice sentences in their books and entering my own comments (sometimes appreciative, sometimes critical) in their margins. Those annotations and disfigurements are marks of critical engagement and assimilation, a testimony to my reading of the text and an indication of how I reacted to what I encountered. On reading a text, I can see what grasped my attention, what questions were raised, and, occasionally, a new line of thought that emerged from this sustained interrogation of the text. (Lewis would often read texts multiple times, using different colors of ink to distinguish his comments on each reading.)
When working on old books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, I often found passages marked by previous readers of those bygone ages, who had underlined them or drawn lines or pointing fingers in the margins, highlighting what those long-dead readers had found and valued in the texts. The physical reality of a book can thus serve as a testimony to the value of the text and the engagement of its readers. Marginal annotations signal what C. S. Lewis’s close friend Neville Coghill once termed a “continuous intoxication of discovery,” by which he meant that a reader’s mental horizons are expanded and enriched through close reading of a text. I can find physical and mental pleasure in handling old books, imagining who read them before me and wondering what they found within their pages. Why did they underline that word or phrase? What process of reflection lies behind that cryptic marginal nota bene?
Recently, I published a study of the neglected Swiss theologian Emil Brunner. Like several of my recent books, this represented the late outcome of about twenty-five years of study and reflection, which began when I studied Brunner during a research trip to the University of Zürich in 1986. I gradually built up a library of Brunner’s published works for close reading and annotation and slowly worked through them all, trying to absorb and make sense of the development of his thought. One of those books proved frustratingly difficult to acquire: his 1930 work Gott und Mensch, a collection of four essays on theological aspects of personal existence. In late 2012, I finally found a secondhand copy listed in the stocks of a Swiss bookseller and promptly ordered it. It arrived a few days later and I unwrapped it with much pleasure and anticipation, looking forward especially to reading its essay on “biblical psychology.”
I opened the book, to find the name of the previous owner of the work inscribed on its title page. It was Brevard Childs (1923–2007), professor of Old Testament at Yale University from 1958 until 1999, considered by many (including myself) to be one of the most influential biblical scholars of the twentieth century. I found myself overwhelmed at the thought of holding and reading a book that the founder of canonical criticism had held and read before me. It reminded me that I was part of a great tradition of wrestling with Scripture and the reality of God that included such giants as Brunner and Childs. My pleasure in reading the text was thus both deferred and enhanced. I did indeed read the book later, and with great profit, but my most powerful and emotive memory of that reading was not so much what I had read but the thought of who had read it before me.
Let me make another observation. In reading a book, I force myself to read it in its totality. I may be looking for something specific—such as the discussion of a specific idea, the exploration of the meaning of a word, or a reference to an individual. Now, some might say that this is a mark of someone who urgently needs to discover the tools of modern scholarship. Why read works in their entirety when all an intelligent reader needs to do is use the “search” function to find any relevant passages in an electronic version of the text quickly and painlessly?
One obvious answer is that I might indeed be a kind of intellectual dinosaur, whose ossified research techniques reflect the conditions of the 1970s, which is when I began the serious business of research. Now, I have to admit that this is probably true, yet I still want to suggest that we recognize the weaknesses of this increasingly common practice of electronic searching. The discipline of reading books comprehensively and totally allows me to grasp their inner logic, to enter into the mind of the author in a way that is simply impossible if I were to limit myself to searching for individual words or phrases. This electronic process may be quick and easy, but it is also shallow and superficial, evading the critical process of intellectual inhabitation of a text that is the hallmark of serious scholarship.
Whether I am reading C. S. Lewis or Emil Brunner, I feel myself called on as a scholar to read them properly, carefully, and fully. Grasping the “big picture”—whether explicit or implicit—in someone’s writings demands reading them closely and completely. I am conscious of my obligation as a scholar to give them due consideration and attention, knowing that a close reading of any worthwhile book will deliver its intellectual and spiritual rewards. Even when reading someone who I know I will end up criticizing—such as Richard Dawkins—I still take care to read his works in their totality, not making myself dependent on the kind of disembodied and decontextualized textual snippets that now circulate on the internet.
Finally, I have come to realize the importance of what I can only describe as serendipity—an unexpected discovery of a wonderful turn of phrase or a refreshingly different idea that I had not set out to explore. It happens to me regularly when browsing university library shelves, looking for a specific book, only to discover that the one next to it on the shelf (which is usually unknown to me) turns out to be far more interesting and engaging, opening up new and unexpected approaches to the same topic. Recent studies of creativity have highlighted the importance of such “accidental” discoveries and have argued for the need to enhance our capacity to be taken by surprise by these gracious moments of disclosure. As Pek van Andel and Danièle Bourcier recently suggested, we need to cultivate our capacities to remove blinders (l’art d’enlever des oeillères), maximizing the possibilities for new discovery and insight. The physical realities of books are like treasure troves, waiting to be found in libraries—or in the Regent College bookshop!
And so I finally turn from the praise of books to those who run bookshops. It is very possible to emphasize the importance of books while overlooking the means by which these find their way into our hands. Let me go back to that rather splendid quote from Francis Bacon with which I opened this chapter, in which he confessed his pleasure in finding “old wine to drink.” The manager of a bookshop is like a good sommelier, who can recommend books—recent or vintage—that match their readers’ needs, stretch their minds, and nourish their souls.
Earlier in this chapter, I reflected on my own experience of encountering books that I never knew about, stacked on shelves alongside more familiar works, awaiting my accidental discovery. What, though, if I had a guide—someone wiser and more informed—who would accompany me on my journey of exploration and discovery, reaching over my shoulder as I browsed, whispering, “Look at that one! You’ll enjoy it!” The best bookseller is someone who loves books and knows which ones can be recommended. That’s why I take such pleasure in honoring Bill. There are so few like him, just as there are so few theological bookshops that can compare to the one at Regent College.
If I were to end on a more somber note, I might express concern about the future of the publishing industry and, in particular, the radical changes that we have seen in the world of religious publishing in the last two decades, as so many familiar Christian publishing houses have merged or disappeared. Yet we need to remember that we live in a changing world, in which we have experienced seismic shifts in so many things, including the ways in which we access texts, the ways in which we read them, and the changing technologies by means of which they are produced. Perhaps medieval manuscript copyists were alarmed at Johannes Gutenberg’s new printing press, fearing it might create havoc with their livelihoods and callings. Yet change always has an upside, as well as a downside, and we too easily focus on our fears and fail to see the opportunities that accompany these changes.
I do not know what the future of religious publishing will be, but I do know the importance of the “life of the mind”—the expansion of our vision of God and our need to grasp more firmly and fully the realities of the Christian faith. We need to be able to tap into the wisdom of others—past and present—who have the potential to inform, encourage, inspire, and challenge us. I suspect that printed books will continue to be with us for a long time to come, but whatever the future will hold, we need people like Bill who can point others to the rich pastures of Christian writing that have sustained so many in the past, and I believe will do so in the future as well. Bill has been, for many, a gateway to the wisdom of faith, and I take the greatest pleasure in honoring him and the sapiential role he has played for so many—including myself.
A paper written in 2017 for the students and faculty at Regent College, Vancouver, in celebration of Bill Reimer, the longtime manager of its famous bookshop. This essay was originally published in Crux, a journal of Christian thought and opinion published by the Faculty and Alumni of Regent College, Vancouver, BC, Canada, and is reproduced with permission.