Every age has a set of assumptions so widely shared that they go unnoticed. No one argues for them; they simply float in the air, absorbed without examination. A student educated entirely on contemporary texts will absorb those assumptions whole, never knowing they are there. This is not education — it is formation by accident, with no teacher present.
The Problem Lewis Named
C.S. Lewis gave this tendency a name in his introduction to Athanasius's On the Incarnation: chronological snobbery. He defined it as "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has survived the test of time is on that account discredited." The cure, he said, is simple — read old books. Not exclusively, but deliberately, and with the understanding that an old book written by a wise person is a window out of the present moment into something larger. The past does not flatter us. That is precisely its value.
What Old Books Actually Do
An old book does not share our anxieties. Thucydides is not worried about what worries us. Augustine is not shaped by the assumptions of our century. When a student sits with the Confessions, he encounters a mind formed in a different world, asking the same deep questions — about desire, restlessness, and the ends of human life — and arriving at answers that have outlasted every civilization that tried to replace them. That encounter is not mere historical tourism. It is friction, the productive kind, where a reader's unexamined beliefs get pressed and must either hold or give way.
And What New Books Do
Lewis was not calling for the abolition of new books. He was calling for proportion. New books are essential — they address the present moment, bring current knowledge to bear, and keep the tradition from calcifying into mere antiquarianism. The relationship is reciprocal. Old books expose the parochialism of new ones; new books prevent the old from becoming an idol. A curriculum that runs from Homer through Augustine through Dante through Milton and onward to the present is not a museum tour but a living conversation, with the student as a participant rather than a spectator.
"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation
The Formation Beneath the Reading
Classical educators often speak of virtue formation, and it is worth being precise about how reading old books serves it. Virtues are not habits installed by instruction alone; they are shaped by imagination, by the models a person has internalized and found compelling. A student who has spent years with Odysseus, Achilles, Aeneas, and Beowulf — and who has been guided to think carefully about where each of them succeeds and fails as a human being — carries a richer moral imagination than one whose models come only from the present. Scripture makes the point directly: "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" — Philippians 4:8. The classical tradition is a centuries-long attempt to identify and preserve exactly those things.
The Danger of the Comfortable Present
There is a particular risk for Christian students educated in isolation from the tradition: they absorb the intellectual assumptions of their moment without knowing it, then dress those assumptions in theological language. A student who has never read Athanasius may be poorly equipped to recognize Arianism when it resurfaces in a new form. One who has never wrestled with Augustine on the will may be unable to think clearly about freedom and grace when the culture presses a distorted version of either. The old books are not decorative. They are diagnostic — and prophylactic.
Why This Shapes the Curriculum
A classical curriculum sequences old books not because the old is always better, but because the old is reliably different — and difference, engaged honestly, produces thought. The student who argues with Plato, who finds Dante strange, who is surprised by how much Aquinas already considered, is doing something a passive recipient of information is not: he is thinking. He is measuring his own mind against minds that have been measured by centuries of readers before him. That is a more rigorous standard than contemporary consensus, and a more honest one.
Lewis's argument is not nostalgia. It is epistemological humility applied to time — the recognition that our moment, like every moment before it, is partial, and that wisdom requires more than one century's worth of data. Reading old books is how a student learns to stand outside his own age long enough to see it clearly, and then return to it better equipped to serve it.
Image: The School of Athens Fresco by Raphael (Ank Kumar, Infosys Limited) 02 (CC BY-SA 4.0), Ank Kumar. Via Wikimedia Commons.
