C. S. Lewis on the Limits of the Historical-Critical Method

In a superb paper prepared for a 2006 Marianist universities meeting, James Heft, Chancellor and University Professor of Faith and Culture at the University of Dayton, points out a number of ways a Marianist university might appropriate its own tradition and thereby strengthen the educational experience it offers to its students. The advice Heft gives will be of interest to anyone in the field of education, but especially, it seems to me, to deans and chancellors of Christian colleges and universities, Catholic, evangelical, or otherwise.

In footnote 13, Heft introduces and cites a fabulous C. S. Lewis quote (reproduced by Kevin Edgecomb on his blog from another source; Kevin's citation led me to find this one):

The experienced devil in C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters explains to a novice devil how to produce an intellectual climate in the universities that make it very unlikely that one will ever arrive at wisdom: “Only the learned read old books, and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient author, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question.’ To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thought or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But, thanks to Our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that ‘history is bunk’” (conclusion of letter 27).

A pair of questions always worth asking: what are the characteristic errors of the age in which we live and move and have our being? – and: what are the characteristic truths of the age in which the biblical authors lived and moved and had their being?

And, to put the more fundamental question in provocative terms: can the truths of one correct the errors of the other? Is it a two-way street, and if so, on the basis of what criteria does one distinguish truth from error?

And, to refocus once again, how then, in an age convinced of its superiority over all previous, shall we be nourished by the past?

UPDATE: Shawn Flynn links to this post and offers insights of his own.

Comments

[Smerdykov]

If you want to hear a tremendous reading of the selection of the Screwtape Letters quoted above, the PODCAzT number 19 (http://wdtprs.com/blog/podcazt/)
has a nice example reading from the audio book read by John Cleese. If you only want to hear the selection read out loud it is in the third section starting at about 18 minutes. Enjoy.

[slaveofone]

Well, I'm afraid that Lewis was behind the times... Already at his time and most definitely in ours, the error of the age is not whether there is knowledge in the past which can correct knowledge in the present, but rather whether there is such a thing as knowledge at all. Or rather, that there is only phenomenal knowledge: the only thing one can truly know is what one believe they see when they look outside of themself, whether or not that has any correspondence with a possible differing actuality. What defines knowledge in this age is thyself. That's why it will never matter what evidence you have which proves Sam Harris, Michael Moore, fundamentalist Christians, or anybody living in Hebron wrong...because the only true knowledge is that which is defined by their own existential perspective.