Lewis On Reading History

I didn't grow up paying attention to much of history.  After all, history was full of wretched wickedness, exemplified most acutely by those 1500 years between the ascension of Christ and that other saviour, Martin Luther, or in my family's case, Menno Simons.

It was only when I attended seminary that my view of history was redeemed.  It was there where I discovered the likes of C. S. Lewis, who thought that history, and particularly, historical literature, has a lot to teach us today.

I received a biography of Lewis for Christmas, and was delighted to find a chapter on the place and purpose of literature in it, and will jot down some thoughts and quotes gleaned from it.  The biography was written by Alister McGrath.  Lewis' quotes are in italics.  My favourite of all the quotes is bolded.

* older literature is important for us because it challenges our "chronological snobbery", the idea that current literature (and therefore, current ideas) is inevitably superior to that of the past

* reading literature of the past gives us a critically distant standpoint from our own era; it allows the past to speak into the present, to see "the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective"

* "The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the spirit of the Age by keeping 'the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.'"

* new books are still on trial, in a sense, because they have not stood the test of time; we are as of yet not in a position to judge its veracity

* "Since we cannot read the literature of the future, we can at least read the literature of the past, and realize the powerful implicit challenge that this makes to the ultimate authority of the present.  For sooner or later, the present will become the past, and the self-evident authority of its ideas will be eroded - unless that authority is grounded in the intrinsic excellence of those ideas, rather than their mere chronological location."

* "We need intimate knowledge of the past.  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion."

* My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see."

* literature enables us to "see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own."

* literature challenges us as much as it informs us: "Insisting that the text conform to our own presuppositions, to our way of thinking, is to force it into a mould of our own making, and deny it any opportunity to transform, enrich, or change us.  Reading texts is about "entering fully into the opinioins, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience" of others.  Plato called this psychagogia, an enlargement of the soul."

All quotes are taken from C S Lewis: A Life, by Alister McGrath, pages 186-189.