Do The Reading
The Why, Who, and How of Retrieval
Editor’s Note: This essay is a lightly edited version of the keynote lecture delivered at the inaugural Camp AmRef.
Six months ago, John Ehrett created quite the stir among those in our circles, with his essay “The End of Protestant Retrieval.” At its root, Ehrett sought to cross-examine the motives of why people retrieve doctrine (taken in the broadest sense)—in this case, doctrine from our Protestant forefathers. Ehrett proposed a more modest devotional model, wherein by studying our Christian tradition “we Christians honor God with our minds, and … teach ourselves to better live as Christians under conditions where our precommitments are not universally, or even widely, shared.” Now, the goal I have in this brief lecture is not to respond to the Ehrett essay yet again (I already did so). Instead, what I want to do is interrogate the question of retrieval (or “doing the reading”) by focusing, in good scholastic fashion, on three interlocking questions: (1) Why (cur) must we do the reading? (2) Who (quis) must do the reading? And finally (3) How (quomodo) ought we to do the reading?
Let us begin with the first question: “Why must we do the reading?” Now, Ehrett argues, as I just mentioned, one such purpose: he suggests that by reading our tradition, we become attuned to the way in which our forefathers sought to live faithfully as Christians in their own societies, presumably encouraging us to do the same. Of course, this is hardly objectionable. Indeed, I think he is right. The chief purpose of retrieval or, doing the reading, is what Richard Baxter calls “love and practice.” Doing the reading is, at its core, practical. Accordingly, we must read what is most useful and/or necessary for ourselves.
Much of our reading of the past is mimetic. We want to imitate the thinking and piety of those whom we deem to be virtuous. This is why Alex Petkas’ Cost of Glory podcast or Ben Wilson’s How to Take over the World Podcast are so popular, both of which cover historical figures in order to instill in us, moderns, a zeal for greatness. Of course, Petkas and Wilson do not want us to emulate the precise political, nor especially the religious, musings of a Sulla or a Steve Jobs, but they do want us to appreciate and imbibe the virtues which both Sulla and Jobs exemplified. Similarly, when we read about some Huguenot family in the 16th century traveling by boat four hours every Lord’s Day to worship at a Protestant church, our first thought probably is not, “wow that is such a great idea”—we should go and do likewise, let’s haul our five children in the van and travel half-way across the state each Sabbath to worship at the best church we can find. Rather, if our minds and hearts are rightly ordered, we realize that the lesson to be learned is not about travel, but public worship—it is something serious; it’s important; it’s not to be treated lightly.
But such practical motivations are not the only reason to do the reading. Baxter again is helpful here. He identifies other motives for doing the reading. For example, he notes that studying languages and logic helps one’s memory. Moreover, one of the main reasons to do the reading, for Baxter, is in order to determine controversies. Smart people say x; other smart people say y. Thus, we are forced to determine which side is right! I suspect this is why Francis Turretin’s Elenctic Theology is so popular.
Baxter notes further reason to do the reading: to avoid contempt. Oh, how I wish people were more willing to avoid contempt! We naturally avoid shame. There is hardly anything more uncomfortable than being in a conversation with many learned and well-respected people and knowing nothing about something you ought to clearly know something about! The only solution is to do the reading. We could identify others, such as pure curiosity—we just have to know about the 1980 hostage situation at the Iranian embassy in London and the subsequent siege. For whatever reason, the subject interests you, and you must know more. Or maybe studying a topic or them is simply pleasurable. Perhaps you enjoy reading early modern accounts of spiritual apparitions like I do.
But none of these reasons accounts for what I take to be the main motivation for reading our own Protestant tradition. Perhaps it is the historian in me, but when I question my own desire to read early modern Protestants, I realize that it is because it encourages me to reassess my own beliefs. I want to read things which challenge our own sitz im leben. When we read the past, what is most striking, most noteworthy, most jarring, is not the stuff that people in every age deal with or believe (although that itself is worth taking note of). It is all the stuff that is unusual that strikes us.
For example, reading a Christian defending the institution of slavery is itself somewhat notable. But finding out that a former African slave at the beginning of the eighteenth century wrote a defense of the compatibility of slavery and Christianity for his master’s thesis at the University of Leiden is more unusual. Or reading the humanist, Juan Luis Vives, arguing that make-up for a woman is unlawful—that’s an unusual perspective for us to encounter. Or, it is striking to find out that nearly the whole Christian tradition has deemed dancing (in all forms) to be illicit. Or what how about Baxter nonchalantly maintaining that war would be just if a nation didn’t allow Christian missionaries to proselytize in their land! Or finally, it is striking and strange to discover that John Knox, in his 50’s, married a 17-year old and that then, when he died, his widow married one of the main parties in the murder of Queen Mary’s secretary, David Rizzio.
Doing the reading, in other words, moves the Overton window of acceptability and possibility or, at least, what is a live option for dogma and praxis. As an aside, this might be one of the reasons I am so open to conspiracy theories (which does not mean that, once investigated, I always cave to them). I have been so shaped by alternative historical narratives by reading the actual sources, that I have been almost habituated to assume that things are weirder than I would expect or weirder than what I have been told.
What about how we ought to do the reading? Baxter, yet again, is helpful here. Baxter notes that for any given discipline—whether, politics, theology, philosophy, or whatever—we typically begin at the basics of a discipline. So, if you want to know about the history of ancient Egypt, you probably need to start with the basic principles: its language; government; economy; daily life; big events; geography; leadership; religion; etc. But then, secondly, you are forced to do more reading in order to have a fuller understanding of those basic principles. So, for example, you read books on all the different dynastic periods; you might travel to Egypt; you read a few books on the building of the pyramids, or what have you. After that, however, you start to realize that there are disputes among scholars in the field—the dating of this dynasty or that dynasty; where did ancient Egyptians come from, that is, what was their ethnic/racial makeup; etc. etc. Moreover, in the fourth place, once a person has come to master such principles, he will need to know how to defend them.
In other words, once you have mastered the basic principles and given them a deep dive, you ought to be in a position to defend them. Presumably, at such a point, mastery of the original sources is paramount. After all, how would you defend the economics of ancient Egyptian society without appeal to various early documentation and artifacts? A final step identified by Baxter is what he calls ornamental and subservient. He seems to mean that we begin to read other material (not substantially related to a discipline) which functions as a way of elucidating or serving the main discipline. Again, applied to Ancient Egyptian history, this might mean a study of Pre-Mosaic Abrahamic religion, and the sort of influence it might have had on Egypt when the Jews were, in mass, in their land. Or one might study ancient near eastern iconography in order to better understand and explain the uniqueness or lack thereof of ancient Egyptian iconography.
Not surprisingly, Baxter’s model is consonant with basic early modern education. After someone spends seven or so years mastering Latin, he goes off to university and begins studying disciplines. If Richard Holdsworth, who was Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge and a member of the Westminster Assembly, was normative for seventeenth century university education, then one of the first disciplines one studies is logic. What did Holdsworth’s curriculum look like? During the mornings of the first three months of university education, he recommends the student read one minor logic text and then a major one; in other words, an introductory text and a more advanced one. Giving detailed instructions for every part of his curriculum, Holdsworth begins: “This [reading of the logic texts] will give you the grounds of Logick, and therefore as a groundworke must be gott very perfectly, and exactly.” Holdsworth compares this beginning with a grammar student’s introduction to Latin and the necessity to learn one’s Latin grammar perfectly. Holdsworth demands that the student read through the introductory or smaller logic text twice before moving on to the larger, more advanced one. Spending two months on the first smaller logic text, the second larger logic text is to be read, while keeping notes in a notebook on how the larger logic text answers such questions as where do we get the term “logic,” what are its ends and uses, why is logic an art rather than a scientia, etc. In the second quarter, the student is to continue studying logic in the morning, comparing other logic texts he can get his hands on with the major one he read the previous quarter; in the last month of the second quarter a third logic text is to be fully read. The morning of the third quarter is to be dedicated to controversies in logic.
There is a further observation that is important to make at this point, namely that certain disciplines are so connected with other ones that it is impossible to master the one without the other. For example, obviously if you are wont to become an expert in Germany’s role in WWII, you would need to learn German! Baxter himself observes this. Baxter considers what studies an aspiring theologian must be proficient in in order to be a good theologian. Apart from logic and languages, he points to politics or law. Baxter writes:
“The doctrine of Politicks, especially of the Nature of Government and Laws in General, is of great use to all that will ever understand the Nature of Gods Government and Laws, that is, of Religion. Though there be no necessity of knowing the Government and Laws of the Land or of other Countreys, and further than is necessary to our obedience or our outward concernments, yet so much of Government and Laws as Nature and Scripture make common to all particular forms and Countreys, must be known by him that will understand Morality or Divinity, or will ever study the Laws of the Land. And it is a preposterous course, and the way of Ignorance and errour, for a Divine to study Gods Laws, and a Lawyer mans Laws, before either of them know, in general what a Law, or what Government is, as nature notifieth it to us.”
Baxter’s emphasis on mastering natural disciplines previous to the supernatural discipline of theology is connected to a principle he almost ubiquitously mentions throughout his writings, namely, God made us first men, before he made us Christians. He means that it is our duty to understand the nature of man and the world we are placed in before moving on to more complicated or down-stream disciplines, including theology itself.
To be sure, Baxter insists that the very first place we should begin our studies—and he has in mind young children—is with our duties towards God and man, and the means of salvation. But after that, our learning must go higher. A student’s first philosophical ruminations should be “of your selves; To know a man,” and then, “with the knowledge of your selves joyn the Knowledge of the rest of the works of God; but according to the usefulness of each part to your moral duty; and as all are Related to God and You.” Observe, again, Baxter’s end for our studies—moral virtue.
The final question worth asking is, who ought to do the reading? Anyone who knows me well, will probably intuit where I am going with this. I do not think that everyone should be doing the reading, at least the type of reading we are accustomed to doing. And, of course, Baxter agrees. First, he posits this basic advice: “Choose such Books as are most suitable to your state.” He goes on:
“It is worse than unprofitable, to read Books for comforting troubled minds, to those that are blockishly secure, and have hardned, obstinate, unhumbled hearts: It is as bad as to give Medicines or Plaisters contrary to the Patients need, and such as cherish the disease: So is it to read Books of too high a style or subject, to dull and ignorant hearers. We use to say, That which is one mans meat, is another mans poyson. It is not enough that the matter be good, but it must be agreeable to the case for which it is used.”
Early moderns weren’t egalitarian. Baxter in another place writes:
“Still remember, that mens various capacities do occasion a great variety of Duties [note the word duties here]: some men have clear and strong Understandings, by nature: These should study Things as much as Books; For possibly they may excell and correct their Authors. Some are naturally of duller or less-judicious heads, that with no study of Things can reach half so high, as they may do by studying the Writings of those who are wiser than ever they are like to be. These must take more on trust from their Authors, and confess their weakness.”
Put another way, you may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, and you may be incapable of doing independent thinking, but you can still do the reading and confess your limitations.
The point of all of this is that it is important to know yourself—know thyself was the philosophical maxim on the temple of Apollo in Delphi—and you must also know those with whom you are conversing. If you might humor me for a moment, and permit me to put on my dad-hat, I want to offer some wisdom.
In our circles on the Christian right, we love to edgelord; we post all sorts of edgy material to win a single convert, and when we have succeeded, we make them twice as much an edgelord as we are. Moreover, in the process, we often make normies our sworn enemies. Ironically our modus operandi often smuggles in an unhealthy egalitarian assumption—that everyone is fit or able to digest the same material. Revolutionary ideas are as susceptible to producing the likes of a John Adams as they are of producing a Maximilien Robespierre. And while I have little doubt that there may be some value in reading, say, revisionists accounts of WWII or even of the American Revolution, it is not a diet everyone can properly digest.
Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely for revisiting old narratives, reading politically incorrect books, and even some strategic edge-lording; but we ought to be clear-eyed, having a plan. Do not lose the war because of your edginess. If you are going to lose, lose it despite your canniness and wisdom.
A final piece of advice (and I learned this from listening to Ben Wilson’s podcast). I will leave you with some advice learned from Vladamir Putin’s leadership. If you want to convince someone of something (particularly something which seems prima facie absurd to them), you cannot simply provide them reasons to believe it is true, you have to make them want to believe it. In other words, spend less time on what is true and more time on getting folk to want to believe the truth.
How does Putin, even after murdering Russian journalists and blowing up Russian apartments and blaming Chechen radicals in order to justify the Second Chechen War, continue to garner support in Russia? Because he made people want to believe he would not do that—that the government—the Russian government—is too virtuous to do such a thing. How did Bush convince us to go to war with Iraq a second time? By making us want to believe that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.”
But note well—I am assuming that truth is, in fact, on our side. The post-war order has been largely a disaster. Blessings of liberty have actually been a curse. And governments should kiss the Son, lest he be angry. But we cannot be satisfied simply with showing people that there is some plausibility in what we believe; we need to work at causing people to want to believe it to be true.
I am not saying I have all the solutions, but I am convinced that this is a key rhetorical ploy for winning—and edgelording with Naziism, however ironic, I would submit, will not be the winning strategy. There are plenty of other ways to move the Overton window, ways more effective at making people want to believe what you have to say.
The winning strategy will be doing the reading (both quietly and publicly), keeping in view the aforementioned purposes of reading: how one ought to do the reading, and who ought to read what without succumbing to gratuitous (and egalitarian) impulses. Shocking people is not winning. Becoming a pariah is not validation. Doing the reading properly is not about getting clicks.
Image Credit: Brintons carpet factory in Kidderminster, c. 1870. Wikimedia Commons.
