Thursday, October 22, 2009

C.S. Lewis on what to read - Old or New?

Here is C.S. Lewis writing in an introduction to a work by Athanasius about what he would urge others to read as practice.

"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. [To be replaced today with M. Driscoll or J. Osteen or J. Meyer] 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
."


Very few of us read what forces us to think preferring instead to have the thinking done for us often to the detriment of original depth and quality.

Oh yes, and please don't read what's not being written here! I'm just encouraging reading the ancients....

Simon

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