The Zeal in Reading Old Books

Delighting with William Chartham over crumbling codices & "pious tales"

Dear bookish friend,

Every now and then someone asks me if I regret doing my studies in English instead of theology or even history. My answer is always the same. I love and respect both those fields, and read, endlessly, the work those scholars do. But my pilgrimage into what I do now has always been through the love of beauty found in the magic of stories, words, and language itself. That beauty opens up theology to me in ways that I would never get to on my own. I end up reading and thinking theologically, but it never starts that way with me.

Every now and then I come across something that expresses this process in ways that expand my imagination. I’ve mentioned C.S. Lewis’s preface to St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation before, for instance. Lately, I’ve been reading a multitude of sermons and other pastoral materials. I was tickled with delight recently when I came across this explanation of one monk’s “zeal of reading” in Siegfried Wenzel’s Verses in Sermons: Fasciculus Morum and its Middle English poems.

Ruins of St. Augustine’s Abbey, with a view of Canterbury Cathedral in the background. Source.