This Project Is In The Works
“Good reading of old books is the best way to become immune to the errors of the present age… The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
C. S. Lewis (Introduction to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation)
Throughout history, a small handful of books have done something extraordinary: they have ignited and shaped the greatest minds of every era. These works didn’t merely entertain or inform; they transformed the way people think, believe, and live. What is it that makes certain books endure for centuries (even millennia) while countless others fade into obscurity? Why do Plato, Shakespeare, and Dante still command our attention when mountains of more recent writing have already been forgotten?
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One of the greatest measures of a work is simple but unforgiving: it must stand the test of time. Trends come and go, empires rise and fall, theories fail, yet these books remain alive: quoted, debated, loved, and wrestled with by each new generation with a new set of principles. But what if we forget or refuse to embrace these classics? Classics which our forefathers have used their lifetime to create? We repeat trends, raise fallen empires or repeat theories already proven false. We become the villains and violent antagonists of history believing ourselves to be heroes. A wise man would honor the experience of his elders. Of course, the Bible stands alone as the most influential book in human history—the foundation of faith and the deep structure beneath much of Western law, ethics, literature, and art. Yet God, who spoke through Scripture, is the same Creator who endowed human beings with reason, imagination, and the capacity to discover truth. As St. Augustine puts it in talking about Plato, “For all the truth that is found among them belongs not to them but to God.”
When we read Homer or Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas, we are not just studying the past; we are sitting at the feet of giants who saw further than their contemporaries and, often, further than we yet see today.
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So when we ask, “What books most inspired the greatest minds in history?” we are really asking, “Which works have most reliably pointed brilliant men and women toward truth, goodness, and beauty?” The answers to that question—the true classics—are treasures worth a lifetime of reading, because in them we meet not only the minds of the past, but the one who created the mind.
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"It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out."
Proverbs 25:2