Why avoid the OLD works in favor of the 'Modern' ones?

David Ames
David Ames Member Posts: 2,971 ✭✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Why avoid the OLD works in favor of the 'Modern' ones?

 From the Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis page 149 of 175

 "It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let this secret out. But in the intellectual climate which we have at last succeeded in producing throughout Western Europe, you needn’t bother about that. Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge— to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour— this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father Star and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that ‘history is bunk’, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE"

 [[* Where 'Our Father' is the Devil]]

 Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Screwtape Letters (pp. 150-152). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 We need to read the old books and ask 'Is this true' and not just reject it because it is old.

And we need the works of C S Lewis in Logos.

 

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