Robert Coles was a Harvard professor who wrote a number of best selling books in the 1980’s and ’90’s on the moral development of children that shocked the educational establishment. In an article appearing in Christianity Today (Feb. 6, 1987) he made a number of observations that powerfully underscored my 50 year obsession with older books. Here’s three quotes from that article that still resonate with truth
Most people in our own time will be shocked that these are the words of a Harvard professor!
“A man like Tolstoy knew more psychology than the whole twentieth-century social science scene will ever know. All the stuff about the stages of dying coming out now–why not just go back and read The Death of Ivan Ilyich? It said everything. And who has added any wisdom to the field of marital problems since Anna Karenina? I simply wander from one place to the next, teaching these novels and trying to, in a way, undo the Devil in the [Harvard] medical school, law school, and business school.”
Robert Cole, p. 19
“Nothing I have discovered about the makeup of human beings contradicts in any way what I learn from the Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos, and from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and from Jesus and the lives of those he touched. Anything I can say as a result of my research into human behavior is a mere footnote to those lives in the Old and New Testaments.”
p. 20
“Are students really better off with the theories of psychologists than the hard thought of Jeremiah and Jesus?”
p. 20
Read older books people. There is wisdom in them has been tested by time. I have 20 or 30 books on marriage in my personal library. I have seen nothing in them to surpass Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Nothing. It is both warning and corrective. Both harrowing and enthralling. Its lessons are so profound, that I return to it over and over, having read the book four times (at least), I still make new discoveries of its depth and wisdom.
And don’t forget the oldest of them all. Read your Bible. Read it again and again and again. You will never fathom the depths of it but you will always profit from a contemplation of its teachings. You will never, this side of heaven, understand all of it, but every interaction with it will make you wiser. It is God’s love letter to world. Seek Him and find Him in its pages so you can live with Him for eternity.
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