“The only reasonable approach to understanding the world is to read old books, build a basic reality map from the old models, and then use your reality map to navigate the deluge of new content.”
I saw this quoted on TwitteX, though there was no author cited. Of course C.S. Lewis also famously said something similar when he offered the palliative to overcoming the current intelligentsia zeitgeist was;
“to keep the clean breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
I basically agree with this though I would like to add a twist. The twist has to do with the opening quote with its talk about building a basic reality map in order to provide a kind of map key to understanding the ongoing conversation.
It is true that reading old books is key to rising above the fog of the current intellectual scheme. However, I would add that not only reading old books is key but every bit as important is reading books that deals with the history and progress of ideas. Some have referred to this as reading widely and deeply in Intellectual and Social History. Old books will present one to new ideas that challenge the current zeitgeist but books dealing with the history of ideas allows one to see the how ideas have arisen and fallen in history and how those ideas have impacted men and historical movements.
Of course any book dealing with the History of Ideas is only as good as the beginning point and Weltanschauung of the author. As such, one will have to read more than a few books by different authors on the history of ideas. Once one begins to understand the workings of ideas and how they influence men and cultures one can find some traction in building a mental reality map that can be used in order to understand other mental maps when one encounters them. By building one’s own mental reality map one reinterprets all reality through that reality grid and is not themselves reinterpreted by unfiltered and unknown ideas that could well be alien to the Christian faith.
Having a well functioning mental reality map also helps in knowing how to frame an argument. I have often thought it is like a surgeon knowing which size scalpel (blade) to use for a necessary incision. If we have a understandable reality map and if we know how different ideas work then we are prepared to analyze almost any argument we encounter as well as knowing how to best frame an argument.
However, none of this does any good unless we first have our own mental reality map by which to navigate the wild seas of the intellectual zeitgeist. To try to be somewhat concrete here I am arguing that as Christians we have to have the mental reality map that can identify someone advancing, for example, Mysticism, Romanticism/Transcendentalism, Deism, Monism, Nihilism, Gnosticism, Darwinism, Spencerism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Postmodernism, etc. This sounds intimidating and of course it does take some time and practice but it really is not as difficult as it might first sound to build a Christ honoring reality map.
It helps to know at the outset that once worldviews are boiled down to their essence there exists really only two worldviews, though there are countless variants to those two worldviews. There is the Christian World and life view and there is the Humanist world and life view. There are only two and there can be no others, though, once again, the variations can be endless. For example, within Christianity the different variations are Reformed, Lutheranism, Baptist, Holiness Churches, Pentecostal, etc. The purest version of the Christian World life view is non-Baptistic Calvinism. All other variations are weakened because they have in their systems some admixture of humanism and so are inconsistent and often incoherent. Still, a epistemologically self conscious Pentecostal is going to have a worldview that they understand is on a collision course with Existentialism (for example). Well, at least I think they would. I’ll let you know if I ever meet an epistemologically self-conscious Pentecostal.
As we keep building our basic reality maps over the course of our lives (and it is a lifetime adventure) we become better equipped to demolish arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and to take every thought captive to obey Christ.
It should to without saying that this basic reality map cannot be restricted or contained to any one sphere of thought. Basic reality maps are by necessity totalistic. That is, basic reality maps map out every area of life. Of course this means that all “Christian” dualisms that arise are going to be ruled as a basic reality map that is spurious. (Yes, R2K, I am looking at you.)
When we begin to get our basic reality map down then every book we read, every lecture we listen to, every conversation, every bit of music becomes both subject to our basic reality map and potentially a new bit of information to add to our basic reality map.
Now, returning to old books, they can be helpful in all this because they are going to be written according to a reality map that we likely are not going to see much of any longer, though, and this is important, old books can easily be just as full of errors as recent books — only as coming from a different direction than what we might be used to seeing in our own thought conditioned age. For example, reading Aquinas might be profitable for someone with a muscular basic reality map, but it will ruin someone whose reality map is not yet mature. (I’ll get in trouble for that observation.) Still, even if you don’t like my example, you can think of other examples that might prefer. A more acceptable example might be spending time reading Lyman Beecher — who if taken seriously would really scrooge up anybody’s basic reality map.
In the end, it is not the age of the book that matters so much as the ideas that are being presented. The advantage of old books is that they could well present to us ideas that are now obsolete given the fact that idea grids come and go in terms of popularity.
As an aside here, it is because basic reality maps are now in flux and changing that accounts for so much of the conflict in what is thought of as being the conservative church. The basic reality map that guided the era of the Enlightenment, advancing in muscularity so that it found its greatest strength in what is now called “the Post-War consensus,” is being ripped up by a younger generation who has come to see the falsity of many aspect of that basic reality map. Naturally enough, I see some of that as exceptionally good and some of what is being offered by way the new reality maps replacing the old as horrid.
Good old books that help in building good basic reality maps;
Augustine – The City of God
Augustine – De Magistro
Athanasius – On The Incarnation
Francis Turretin – Elenctic Theology (3 volumes)
Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné – History of the Reformation
John Calvin – Institutes of Christian Religion
Johannes Althusius – Politica
Samuel Rutherford – Lex Rex
Martin Luther – Bondage of the Will
John Owen – The Death of Death in the Death of Christ
Erasmus – In Praise of Folly
John Bunyan – Pilgrim’s Progress
John Milton – Paradise Lost
Three Forms of Unity / Westminster Confession
Authors tracing the history and/or impact of ideas that help in building good basic reality maps
Harold Berman – Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Two Volumes)
Gordon H. Clark -Thales to Dewey / A Christian View of Men & Things
C. Greg Singer – From Rationalism to Irrationality
Stow Persons – American Minds: A History of Ideas
Glen Martin – Prevailing Worldviews of Western Society Since 1500
Francis Nigel Lee – Communist Eschatology
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin – Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot / Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times
Henry Van Til – The Calvinistic Concept of Culture
David Naugle – Worldview; The History of A Concept
J. Gresham Machen – Christianity and Liberalism
Cornelius Van Til – The New Modernism
R. L. Dabney – Secular Discussions
R. J. Rushdoony – The One & The Many / Institutes of Biblical Law
Colin E. Gunton – The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity / The 1992 Bampton Lectures
John Frame – History of Western Philosophy and Theology
Carroll Quigley – Tragedy and Hope
Clearly, I can’t give an exhaustive list and there are many other books that need to be on these lists.
