I've been re-reading Saint Athanasius' "On the Incarnation," one of the most beautifully written, straight-forward volumes of teaching in the history of the Christian Church. It's straight forward, and yet I struggle with it. My mind wanders. It's hard to keep still. I have the same problem when I read scripture for long periods of time. Is this ADD? Is it the result of too much over-stimulation from television and the internet? Or is it something more insidious than that? Perhaps it's the left over elements of a particularly pernicious prejudice that it has taken me many years to shed, a prejudice that resides deep in the modern psyche.

The particular translation I'm reading was done in the early 1950s and has an introduction by C. S. Lewis. While Lewis pays ample attention to the genius of Athanasius, he also takes a fair amount of time to advocate for the reading of old books. He suggests that we've been conned into thinking that only the scholars can understand the great pearls of philosophy, literature, and theology from the distant past. He argues that we need to read these books lest we be caught in the web of modern assumptions that are so ingrained into our thinking that we don't even see them. The writers of past ages are not stuck where we are stuck, not chewing on our unacknowledged common categories.  "They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing," says Lewis, "and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us."

All of this is no doubt true, and yet there is a strong predilection in modern people to avoid such books. It's a much stronger predilection than I suspect was the case even in the early fifties. It's built on a notion that goes back to at least the turn of the last century. And it's not just that such books are stuffy or hard to read. It's that they are deemed "irrelevant." They are irrelevant because they are written by people who are now dead and gone and so are unable to keep up with trends and fashions. They are irrelevant because we know so much more than we did then, so how could those people possibly have anything to say to us?

Put plainly, we are prejudiced against the past. We have swallowed a false notion of history that suggests that every succeeding age yields progress which renders the previous age ignorant and useless. We think that because we have penicillin and suffrage and digital cameras that we must know infinitely more about the human condition than Homer or Plato or even someone as recent as Lewis himself, let alone Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This notion of progressive history is demonstrably nonsense, and yet we cling to it, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I know that this notion of history is false, and yet it has been so deeply ingrained in me by our culture that I still find that I have such difficulty hearing what Athanasius has to tell me. When I agree with him, fine. But when I don't, what does he know? After all, he's dead and gone. He couldn't have been that smart if he didn't manage to discover the immortality that derives from having a Facebook profile and a Twitter account.

Lewis argues that we should alternate between modern and old books, or that at the least we should read one old book for every three newer ones. I think that perhaps this is a discipline I will try to employ, if for no other reason than to clear the cobwebs out of my head that have been accumulated by years of soaking in the narcissism of the now.