I Read Dead People
“There never was a time when those that read at all, read so many books by living authors rather than books by dead authors. Therefore there was never a time so completely parochial, so completely shut off from the past.”
T.S. Eliot
“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.”
C.S. Lewis on avoiding chronological snobbery
In the first half of the last century both TS Eliot and CS Lewis observed that modern people typically only read modern books. The situation now is of course even worse.
Lewis writes in the introduction to On the Incarnation: “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.”
Taking a quick walk through your local Christian bookstore demonstrates the truth of that observation. Even scanning my Facebook newsfeed shows the same thing. My Christian friends (the ones who are not involved in classical education) post steady streams of quotes from Beth Moore, Joyce Meyers, and Max Lucado. Sometimes I’m tempted to respond, “Do you read any dead people?”.
It’s pretty ironic given the above quote that C.S. Lewis is likely to be the only dead author modern Christians read. Those of us involved in classical education know what riches await those who seek the wisdom of the past. So, why don’t people read old books?
Yes, older books are hard. They contain difficult, sometimes archaic, vocabulary, sophisticated sentence structure and long paragraphs. Old books demand something from the reader. But I don’t think that’s the real reason people don’t make the effort. Moderns, yes even modern Christians, have fallen prey to a certain evolutionary bias in their thinking.
Evolution teaches that because man is evolving and progressing from simple to complex, that which is newest is that which is best. Old books are by definition less worthy than new books. So when moderns want the best thought on any given subject they naturally turn to the latest and therefore best writing. New and improved have become synonymous.
But, as Lewis argues, modern thought is precisely what we don’t need. We are already too steeped in our modern assumptions and biases. We need old books, ancient thoughts, to shake us free from the mass of common assumptions modern authors share. “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.”
Like Lewis, I too am a writer and therefore, “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.”
I read dead people. How about you?
All the time.
Really, the only living author I read regularly is Wendell Berry. My other favorite living author just passed away — Diana Wynne Jones.
I just don’t have time to sift through the modern stuff for what’s really good — there’s so much wonderful stuff out there and I missed nearly all of it in my own education, so I’m making up for it now. It’ll take me the rest of my life and I know I’ll never read a fraction of what’s worthwhile. It’s simply impossible to make up for a lost youth.
Great title and great post! This fascination with the latest and greatest is indirectly what has lead to our current economic situation as well. If more MBA’s read a little more about the classical virtues, maybe greed would not have become synonymous with success.
Reminds me of this quote from Robert Ghrist: “Reading anything less than 50 years old is like drinking new wine: permissible once or twice a year and usually followed by regret and a headache.”
I read a mixture of old and new. I agree with you.
> Evolution teaches that because man is evolving and progressing from simple to complex, that which is newest is that which is best.
It does? It doesn’t even teach that existing organisms are the most fit.
Thank you for this. I am very discouraged when I walk into many churches and I see the problem of modernity everywhere. If pastors would start reading the theologians of old the American church would become strong again.
I read almost dead people. Can you believe Wiki says that Jacques Barzun is 104? Man, that’s longevity. I just started reading The House of Intellect and in his chapter called, Conversation, Manners, and the Home, Barzun says, “the starting point of conversation is contradiction.” Obviously he copied that idea from one of the Deads. I wonder which one (s)? And this makes me wonder even more; why should I care if an author is dead or alive? Isn’t the real issue whether she imitates, even incarnates, the good, the beautiful, and the true?
Over at Schola Classical Tutorials, http://www.scholatutorials.org, I just read Wesley Callihan’s article, Preparing Younger Students for a Great Books Education. Under History in Part Two: The Subjects, he wrote:
“An absolutely critical role of classical education is teaching a student the relevance of the past.”
“The twentieth century has decided that the past is irrelevant, and in an excess of mind-boggling arrogance it considers our age to be the definition of reality, truth, and value. Education must oppose this in the strongest possible manner. If we teach our children primarily modern history, they will succumb to the disease. But if we teach them that our age is just one in a long series of ages, that our culture will pass and another succeed it, that ours is not intrinsically more right about what it believes or valuable in what it has produced than any other, they will be far better equipped to learn the lessons of the past. This is another reason for using primary sources in studies as much as possible and for reading Great Books: if all our studies of the past are from modern books, we are still stuck in the present.”
Because I read Callihan’s article, and now that I think on it, it’s quite obvious. We must read old books, primary sources, so that we are not stuck in the present. The dead help us transcend.
Thank you for reminding us to read Dead People. Primary sources are free from our present. That’s the only way we can go back. Moderns do incarnate eternal ideas, but they do so still chained to modernity. Dead people, ancient dead people, incarnated ideas without the burden of modern thought. Through them we transcend.