Introduction
here is a strange idea abroad that in
every subject the ancient books should be read only by the
professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the
modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature
that if the average student wants to find out something about
Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a
translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium.
He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all
about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling
him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one,
for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet
one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself
inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only
knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more
intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student
will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of
what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books
on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main
endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand
knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand
knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to
acquire.
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 Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or
M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.
Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am
a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern
books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would
advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice
precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less
protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive
contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the
amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested
against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all
its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself)
have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood
without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you
join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will
often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem
to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you
will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier
stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the
same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may
be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to
accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its
real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain,
central Christianity ("mere Christianity" as Baxter called it)
which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper
perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old
books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow
yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one
to every three new ones.
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 or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us
can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase
it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.
Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew
already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with
which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to
keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our
minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of
course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no
cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we.
But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors
we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and
palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not
because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go
wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future
would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but
unfortunately we cannot get at them.
I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics,
almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such
as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, 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 con-
temporaries—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,
self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost.
In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to
recognise, 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
Boehme 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.
It was, of course, varied; and yet—after all—so unmistakably the
same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to
us until we allow it to become life:
From yon far country blows.