Friday, February 08, 2008

 

Learning From The Past

Back in November, Jollyblogger quoted C.S. Lewis extensively. Lewis said:
Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my ow thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date has is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also a "period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
Forget the details here of who and what the discussion is about, and let's focus on the generalized take-aways

Now that, dear friends is one heck of an indictment. There is a corollary to this thinking that I also find interesting - that much of what has happened in the past is not worth our attention today, simple because it is past.

I am tempted to use this as a basis to attack much of today's "conventional wisdom," but that is too easy. I wish to focus instead on the corollary.

Think about religion for a minute. More than almost any other human activity, it preserves knowledge and wisdom through time. It certainly has done so longer than anything else. As an institution that is what the church is really all about - the preservation of the information about what we believe. We do that in any number of ways, from writing to sacrament, to in some cases, art. Why do we fail to grasp this?

Why does each age feel it must reinvent the wheel? In part because we confuse message and media. But the problem is that those two things are not entirely inseparable.

Let me give you and example from my experience. Quantum mechanics. Mathematics is a form of media, it communicates any numbers of things very efficiently and in ways that cannot be done otherwise. Quantum mechanics is elegant and completely sensical mathematically. However, when one attempts to describe quantum mechanics in English (or French, or Russian, or German or...) much of it sounds just flat out silly.

Why do biblical scholars work so hard to learn biblical languages? Same reason.

Yes, we need to communicate the gospel to modern ears, but part of that means we need to teach modern ears and eyes how to understand old media, or else we risk losing the message in the new media.

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