Lewis on Reading Old Books

Difficult, old, obscure, texts — and why they are worth it.

C.S. Lewis is most famous for his Narnia series — a series towards which I feel quite fondly, but one which deserves its fair share of criticism. But some of Lewis’ best work, in my opinion, is his non-fiction.

I’m not talking about Mere Christianity (which is a bit flimsy in its argumentation) or his other directly theological work. Lewis’ work as an apologist is weak compared to the rest of his output. The Abolition of Man is a much stronger work than Miracles or anything like that, and The Discarded Image may be Lewis’ strongest book. But Lewis also shined as an essayist.

One of his very fine essays is ‘On the Reading of Old Books.’¹ Originally written as a preface to a translation of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation and thus intended for a Christian audience, the lesson of this essay is useful any serious reader.

Lewis begins:

There is a strange idea abroad that 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.

This strange sentiment still lingers. When I recommend books on philosophy, I am often chastised (sometimes in very strong language) for recommending difficult primary texts. The worry seems to be that I am going to overwhelm a student of philosophy, or just a reader who wants to give it a shot, with books that just aren’t suitable. These critics go on to say that I should recommend introductory textbooks written by contemporary philosophy.

Similarly, new readers of philosophy often want a gentle introduction — that is what they explicitly ask for. And they assume that a gentle introduction will be a modern introductory work as opposed to, say, my usual recommendation of Plato’s complete works.

All of this would make sense if it were the case that readers by and large weren’t capable of reading primary texts. But speaking from a place of experience, I can say that most college-aged students absolutely can. But before they can read primary texts, they have to be convinced of two things. First, they need to be convinced that this is within their capacity. Second, that reading primary texts is actually worth it.

I am not certain why students regularly assume they are incapable of reading primary texts, but I have my suspicions. I believe it is because they have been told they are incapable. They doubt their abilities to read difficult texts because some teacher at some point told them that these works are very hard, require expertise, and should probably be avoided for now.

I think the teachers mean well when they do this. They are trying to impress upon their students that these are texts that one must take seriously. They want them to recognize that these texts reward careful and continuous study. They do this out of respect for the text.

But as we respect the old books, we need to also maintain our respect for current students. We need to impress upon them that they are capable of learning to read difficult texts. Reading, after all, is a skill — and it is a skill that just about anyone can develop.

The natural question is how to teach a student to read a difficult, or even just old, text. The answer is simple: just show them how. In the classroom, I found that this could be done in about a week — meaning roughly three hours of class time, given the schedule of most introductory courses. In the first session, I would assign a reading. I would give pointers for how to read it. I would talk about how to take notes and how to identify the thesis of a work. I would tell students to try and answer the following questions:

1. What is the topic of the text? This is the most generic answer to the question ‘What is this about?’ Answers might be very general terms like God, ethics, justice, etc.

2. What does the author believe about the topic? This is getting us closer to identifying the thesis — though I’ve found that articulating a writer’s thesis is a skill that develops a bit more slowly.

3. How does the author try to convince you? This segues nicely to analyzing and evaluating arguments.

Then, I’d have the students read the text on their own. When we reconvened later in the week, we’d try to answer these questions together. And along the way, I would show students how I would answer these questions — all the while referencing the text.

As mimetic creatures, human beings learn by example. A teacher should not just present himself as someone who already knows all about the text — that just teaches the student how to posture as an intellectual. Instead, you need to show them how reading works in practice.

By now, students are at least partially convinced that they are capable of reading old texts. But they’ll need to practice for awhile, and practice is tedious and frustrating. So you need to convince them that it is worth the effort. Just pointing out that these books are very good isn’t convincing (I’ve tried!).

Lewis has one very good argument for reading old books. It is worth it to just quote him at length here:

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.

In other words: reading old books actually exposes your assumptions.

This is counterintuitive at first. We often think of reading old books as a way to see what people in the past thought. The idea that reading old books teaches us something about ourselves is less obvious.

Consider the work of ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle. When I was first introduced to Aristotle, I was appalled by how shoddy the arguments were. It seemed to me that Aristotle’s entire ethical project rested on the assumption that what was natural was therefore good. But I had been taught from the beginning of my philosophical education that this was a fallacy — many natural things were in fact bad. Over time however, I learned that Aristotle and his contemporaries had a very different view of nature than our own. In a world of teleology and essences, the Aristotelian inference was justified. If I wanted to expose Aristotle’s poor reasoning, I would need to refute his more foundational assumptions.  Before reading Aristotle, I had not thought seriously about the how the concepts of nature, essence, and so on had evolved over time — I had just taken the modern view for granted. In short, reading Aristotle taught me about my own metaphysical prejudices.

One of the great barriers that we face is that we don’t know what we don’t know. Old books are one of the ways to solve that problem.

This is not the only reason to read old books. But it is the argument that I have found to be most immediately compelling. I talked to my students about moral blindspots in the past – the easiest and most salient example would be 18th-19th century racial prejudices – and then asked them to consider the possibility that they have their own moral blindspots.² Maybe some of those blindspots would be exposed by reading books from very different times and places.

1. Available to read in the collection God in the Dock. Also available as a rather ugly PDF.

2. Moral blindspots aren’t the only kind of blindspot. But I found that moral blindspots seem to grip students in a way that my Aristotle anecdote did not.