This morning I started a new book for my history/literature class. The book is On the Incarnation by Athanasius, who was the bishop of Alexandra in the mid 300's A.D ( Don't feel bad if you don't know who or what this is. I didn't even know Athanasius or his book existed until I learn what I was read for this class!) The introduction was by C.S.Lewis. He explains why it is better to read old books straight from the source rather then taking some biased professor's ideas about what he thinks the author is really trying to say. Then he says this:
" In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognize, like some all too familiar smell, that almost
unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was
there ( honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there ( grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was
there ( grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again with the mild, frighting, Paradisial flavor, in Vaughan
and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe- Law and Butler were
two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out: it lay in wait where a
man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queen and the Arcadia. It was, of
course, varied; and yet- after all- so unmistakeably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is
death to us until we allow it to become life:"
I must admit that while I haven't heard of half the men that C.S. Lewis refers too, I thought that this was a beautiful, dare I say it, almost poetical way of describing the beauty to be found in old books and why it is sooo important to read them. So I guess I will go look up the men I don't know right now and figure out what they wrote and if there is a translation in English!
Happy Monday!
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