Why Read Old Books?
by Professor Dominic Manganiello, D.Phil.
A few years ago I taught an enrichment mini-course on fantasy literature to some local high school students. On opening day I explained to them that while we would examine books such as Alice in Wonderland and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, our main focus would be on The Lord of the Rings. At that point an eager yet perplexed face in the classroom shot up his hand with a query: "Sir, I know you would like us to study the classics, but will we be reading any modern stuff?" The fact that Tolkien's famous work was first available in 1955 could not save it in the eyes of that young man from being consigned to the annals of ancient literary history. Viewed from his perspective, I suppose any book, no matter how widely read, is bound to lose its initial appeal and so one might as well turn to something recent for reading pleasure. Behind this innocuous preference for modern books, however, lies a common assumption ingrained in our culture that "everything is provisional and soon to be superseded" (Lewis, "De Descriptione Temporum," 11), that the new is always better than the old. What Solzhenitsyn calls this century's "relentless cult of novelty" has allowed its devotees to claim that the past has no authority and so no relevance for us today. Should we throw out our old books, then, and rest content, like the heroine of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, that at least "a part remains, of one's classics, to help one through the day?"
The answer, of course, is no. We should keep our old books and read them assiduously, for, as G.K. Chesterton explains, to lose one's cultural memory deliberately would be like squandering the family inheritance:
If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole ... estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs. He is certainly not the kind of heir who ever visits his estate: and, if he really owns all the historic lands of ancient and modern history, he is a very absentee landlord. He does not really go down the mines on the historic property, whether they are the Caves of the Cave-men, or the Catacombs of the Christians, but is content with a very hasty and often misleading report from a very superficial and sometimes dishonest mining expert. He allows any wild theories, like wild thickets of thorn and briar, to grow allover the garden .and even the graveyard. He will always believe modern testimony in a text-book against contemporary testimony on a tombstone ... any man who is cut off from the past, is a man most unjustly disinherited, and all the more unjustly, if he is happy in his lot, and is not permitted even to know what he has lost. ("On Man: Heir of all the Ages," 73-4).
Ignorance may be bliss, but at what cost?
To be good stewards of the family estate we need intimate knowledge of our cultural heritage. The tendency of the modern mind to judge previous ages by the absolute standard of the present reflects the "chronological snobbery" that C.S. Lewis defines as "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited" (Surprised by Joy, 207). If all truths are period products, as the modernist is wont to argue, then our current judgements can have no claims on universality either. We are apt to forget that the present age is also a "period," and certainly has, like all periods, its particular strengths and weaknesses. Lewis reminds us that:
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...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 ... 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. 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. ("On the Reading of Old Books, 202).
"Those who do not learn from the past," warns George Santayana, "are condemned to repeat It (cited in Kreeft, 19).
Although we have advanced in scientific knowledge, technological progress alone does not mean we are wiser than our ancestors. T .S. Eliot replied to someone who once said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know' ("Tradition and the Individual Talent," 16). A failure to perceive the continuity between past and present would mean not knowing who we are and where we came from. "If we fail to see that we live in the same world that Homer lived in," Wendell Berry writes, "then we not only misunderstand Homer, we misunderstand ourselves. The past is our definition" (Standing by Words, 14). Contemporaneity, in the sense of being "up-to-date," is of no value if we nourish our souls on the characteristic illusions of the modern world. The only contemporaneity worth having, Berry reckons, is to live in that "perennial and substantial world" where "all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries" (Standing by Words, 13). Reading the old books fosters continual dialogue with members of this community against and across time.
Because they contain the wisdom of the ages, foundational books can both speak to and challenge our present cultural preoccupations. This is the conviction not only of modern writers like Eliot and Berry , but it was also the practice of the old writers themselves such as Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who loved to quote the maxims of great men as a way of measuring the degree of his mind's openness to truth:
I like to rise above myself, to test my mind to see if it contains anything solid or lofty, or stout and firm against ill fortune, or to find if my mind has been lying to me about itself. And there is no better way of doing this ... except by direct experience ... than by comparing one's mind with those it would most like to resemble. (Letter dated Sept. 25, 1342).
Timeless maxims that "convey authority pleasurably" are always up-to-date both in the sense of meeting the needs of modern times and providing an untimely correction to them (cf. Pieper, "The Timeliness of Thomas Aquinas." 12). When presented with a statement made by any writer, whether ancient or modern, our first question should not be "is it new?" but 'tis it true?" C.S. Lewis concludes that "a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village...[and one] who has lived in many times ... is in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age" ("Learning in Wartime," 35).
To distinguish between what is true and what is fashionable has never been easy. Cynics have always existed. The first cynics flourished in Athens around 400B.C. and were known as the "dog-philosophers" (a pun on their names in Greek) because they snarled at all pretence. Diogenes, the most prominent member of this group, believed that happiness does not depend on possessing material goods, and so he decided to live in a barrel (or a bathtub in some accounts), owning nothing more than the bare necessities, a cloak, a stick, and a bread bag. One day while Diogenes was sitting beside his barrel getting a sun tan, Alexander the Great happened to pass by, noticed him, and asked if there was anything he could do for the poor man. "Yes," came the reply. "Stand to one side. You're are blocking the sun." Thus Diogenes proved his point that he was no less happy than the great conqueror. A self-styled "Socrates gone mad," Diogenes spent his whole life looking allover the world for an honest man, but he could not find one. Socrates himself was no cynic but he also exposed the shortcomings of his age, even during his famous trial: "You, my friend,....a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,....are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?" (Apology,828). This was an untimely correction that still applies to us today. (The failure to read good books, Allan Bloom cautions us, fortifies "our most fatal tendency ... the belief that the here and now is all there is" [Closing of the American Mind, 67].) Although Socrates could not find one wise man among his fellow-citizens, his search was not futile like that of Diogenes: "The truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and... He intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing" (Apology, 821). Out of humility Socrates never considered himself wise either, but he embraced philo-sophia, or the love of wisdom, until his dying days.
Dear students, this year we, too, will pursue the kind of learning that is a form of love. We will study the traditional liberal arts, a pursuit some have considered a waste of time. Saint Thomas More, that "man for all seasons" as Erasmus liked to call him, thought otherwise. "Just as the hand," he said, "is [made] more nimble by the use of some feats; and the legs and feet are ~ more swift and sure by the custom of going and running; and the whole body is more agile and lusty by some kind of exercise; so is it no doubt that reason is by study, labor, and the exercise of logic, philosophy and other liberal arts corroborated and quickened" (cited in Wegemer , A Portrait of Courage, 89). This rigorous training that builds up the whole person should inspire the mind to seek wisdom, or the knowledge of the highest truth (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I. 23; X.6ff.), with the spirit and rectitude of intention described by St. Bernard: "Some seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity; others seek knowledge that they may themselves be known: that is vanity; but there are still others who seek knowledge in order to serve and edify others: that is charity" (cited in Pieper, Scholasticism, 89). May we, too, love to learn in order to learn to love.
This charitable exercise of the mind will allow Eternal wisdom to sow the seeds of the precious fruit that will ripen in God's good time. John Henry Newman envisaged this process of intellectual and spiritual growth as follows:
Let us consider... how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classical author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces ... at length come home to him, when long. years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival...[These lines] give[e] utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.
And what the experience of the world effects for the illustration of classic authors, that office the religious sense, carefully cultivated, fulfills towards Holy Scripture. To the devout and spiritual, the Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions. And, again, to the disconsolate, the tempted, the perplexed, the suffering, there comes, by means of their trials, and enlargement of thought, which enables them to see in it what they never saw before.
Henceforth there is to them a reality in its teachings, which they recognize as ... the best of arguments, for its divine origin... Reading, as we do, the Gospels from our youth up, we are in danger of becoming so familiar with them as to be dead to their force, and to view them as mere history. The purpose of meditation is to realize them; to make the facts which they relate stand out before our minds as objects, such as may be appropriated by a faith as living as the imagination which apprehends them. (Grammar of Assent, 78-9).
From the reality of the Divine word on the page we will be led to contemplate the Lord's real Presence in all our doings. The Great Book, which contains the Word of God entrusted to the loving care of our "Alma Mater Ecclesia" (Tolkien, Letters, 109), and which enlightens all ages and situations, will enable us to see the whole creation as another book filled with traces of His Divine Wisdom (cf., St. Bonaventure, Hex. 12. 14).
Although no wise man could ever exhaust the depths of the nature of a mosquito, as St. Thomas Aquinas once said, God gave us our intelligence to seize the truth here below, even in the obscure and partial manner, while waiting to see it in its complete splendour (cf., Gilson, "The Intelligence in the Service of Christ the King," 5). This is not to say, of course, that intellectual work is more praiseworthy that other types of work. All noble human realities can be directed towards their proper end and elevated to the supernatural order. "The work of a Beethoven, . and the work of a charwoman," C.S. Lewis maintains, "become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly 'as to the Lord'" ("Learning" 32). Performing intellectual work is not the only way to heed the divine call, but it is our appointed task for this year at least. We should therefore be mindful of the fact that, in the words of Lewis again, "the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received" (37).
We will read old books, then, because in the past lie the foundations of our present and future hope. We will discover that the writings of the masters deal with "primal and conventional things ... the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life." These works remain "original, not in the paltry sense of being new," Chesterton points out, "but in the deeper sense of being old: [they are] original in the sense that [they deal] with origins" (Robert Browning). "Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home and parents?" Odysseus asks in Homer's Odyssey. In far lands he shall not, though he find a house of gold." The same sentiment inspired some poignant verses of Eliot:
Home is where one starts from ...
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Four Quartets).
The young Augustine experienced the same consoling truth: "You are never new, never old, and yet all things have new life from you ...I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!" (Confessions I.4; X.27). On loving the Wisdom and Truth incarnate in Jesus, Augustine would later say, "Though Wisdom himself was our home, He made himself the way by which we should reach home" (On Christian Doctrine I.11.14). The quill, one of the charges on the Augustine College crest, refers us to the words of the psalmist, "my tongue [is] as ready as the pen of a busy scribe " ( 45: 1) . May each sojourner, each one of us, in accordance with talents and graces received, become a scribe in training for our true home, like a householder who brings out of his treasures things both new and old (cf., Mt 13:52).
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"Dear young people . . . the hope of the Church and your homeland. . . The talents which you have received from the Lord which lead to commitment authentic love, and generosity bear fruit when you live not merely for things that are material and fleeting, but thy every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God'".
Pope John Paul
Cuba, Jan. 23, 1998