A Preface

Last week on our episode we were with Dr. Michael Reeves and I believe we left him somewhere on a deserted island but he seemed to be happy. He had his books and I think I heard from him recently that he’s already made his way through Tolkien. So, he’s having a good time. Well one of the books that he mentioned is a book by Athanasius On the Incarnation. And as we are talking about that book, we also spoke of an edition of that book that was put out with an introduction, or a preface, by C.S. Lewis. I thought it would be good to return to that preface. This is just not any preface, it’s a preface by C.S. Lewis. And it’s not to just any book, it is to this classic work, Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. The very first sentence of Lewis’ preface reads, “There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateurs should content himself with the modern books.” He  goes on to say, how, take for instance, Plato. You want to read Plato? Well, the modern reader would never think of simply reading Plato. They would all read about Plato. Lewis says this is “topsy-turvy.”

We should remind ourselves that these ancient writers and these old books, well, they don’t bite. They’re not as harmful as we think they might be. They’re not as dangerous, we shouldn’t fear to tread. But Lewis suspects there is more than fear that keeps us from old books.  It might be our misguided contentment with our own age and with the perspectives of our own age. And so, Lewis continues in his preface, “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."

He proceeds to speak of our blindness to our own assumptions. And then he says, “None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half know already, and where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill." "The only palliative," Lewis says, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” And then he ends with a rather clever line, he says, “To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

So we don’t have the books that are not written yet, but we do have the books that have been written. And it is these old books that can give us a refreshing, even necessary perspective on our age. Well of course the book at hand is this book by Athanasius. Athanasius’ epitaph is "Athanasius contra mundum"—Athanasius against the world. As Lewis continues in his introduction he says, “Athanasius stood for the Trinitarian doctrine whole and undefiled when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those 'sensible' synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, including among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is Athanasius' glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.”

And so we have Athanasius against the world taking a stand for the Orthodox view of Christ and writing that down in his book On the Incarnation. A book that we can read today seventeen–hundred years later and be encouraged in our faith. So thank you C.S. Lewis for your preface, and thank you Athanasius for your book.