Summary: A defense of reading old books as a way to counter an orientation toward bias.
I have read many of Alan Jacobs’ books. I think he is one of the best essayists writing. I think I have read all of his books except a couple. Unlike some writers, he is not someone with one primary theme and hits that same theme repeatedly.
In some ways, Breaking Bread with the Dead could be considered an update to CS Lewis’ defense of reading old books from Lewis’ introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius. And if you have not read that one, you should. It is brief and accessible, and classic for a reason.
But Jacobs’ is not just updating Lewis, he is also expanding on why old books matter, especially today. One of the biggest reasons modern people object to old books, besides the orientation toward the new, is concern about how past sins are normalized in old books. Those sins, like the support of slavery or sexism, etc., are discussed extensively in a section about Frederick Douglass’ reading of an old book about public speaking that inspired Douglass’ work. I think Jacobs’ is working well here, but his reasoning did not entirely convince me. Part of the argument I agree with is that different eras have different orientations, and we need different orientations. And I appreciate that Douglass was inspired by a book not written in his own context.
But it is different for Douglass to read a book that had a section about an enslaved person being freed and finding those words to inspire his own freedom, and readers today reading books by people that justified slavery. In Douglass’ case, he had minimal access to books and only a few books that he could have read. Today we have almost unlimited access to books. I am not saying we should never read books by people that have views that we disagree with. But I do think that in making his argument for reading things that we may disagree with, Jacobs made some leaps that were unpersuasive, even as his larger argument, I do agree with.
We should read old books and books from outside of our culture to be challenged by the different ways that both people from other cultures and older cultures think. But there are people from the past and other cultures who agree with us in many areas but use different thinking patterns to get there. I was listening to an interview with Mika Edmonson earlier this week, and he was asked about his tweet saying, (my paraphrase), “that it was possible to have a good theological library and not own books by slaveholders.” We can read old books by people that also at the time of slavery decried slavery in their own time.
One of the unaddressed issues in this book is how some of the old ideas were used for purposes that matter to how we receive them today. For instance, in The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, Joel McDurmon spends a long section on Robert Dabney and how many, including John Piper, still recommend Robert Dabney’s books because of Dabney’s position on biblical theology. But as McDurmon points out, Dabney’s biblical theology was expressly to uphold white supremacy (in the sense of racial superiority). We do not need a biblical theology that was designed for the purpose of white supremacy when we also have biblical theology that was not designed for the purpose of white supremacy. We also have books like Plain Theology for Plain People, a book of theology initially published in 1890 at the same time Dabney was writing that has a traditional biblical theology but was also written by a Black church pastor who was originally born into slavery. Charles Octavius Boothe was one of the early pastors of Dexter Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, later pastored by Martin Luther King Jr.
Alan Jacobs is advocating discernment. And he is advocating reading books that will challenge us and our current ideas. Jacobs’ central metaphor is that we are sharing table fellowship (the Eucharist) with authors who are also Christians but may have different ideas. I agree with this framing and that we should seek to be challenged by those who do not agree with us in every aspect of our thinking. And I agree with Jacobs that we must love and read charitably other Christians. I also agree that there are various benefits to seeking out old books, even if I do not read as many old books as I think I should. And while I am not entirely convinced by all of his reasoning, I think Jacobs makes a reasonable argument about why we should not automatically dismiss authors with ideas that we find objectionable. As with all things, discernment matters, and part of how we grow in our discernment is by experience, which means we need to be expanding our reading and thinking.
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook