The Clean Sea Breeze
— C. S. Lewis, on reading old books · 1944
clean sea breeze · C. S. Lewis
the older air that shows an age what it cannot see
about itself; got only by reading old books.
from his preface to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, 1944.
The Clean Sea Breeze · a place to enjoy and reflect on them.
A seminar to begin with
Seminar · The Faith
Alexandria, around 318. A presbyter and his bishop fall out over one sentence about Christ, and within seven years the emperor has summoned three hundred bishops to settle it. The argument, as Arius and Athanasius actually made it.
Read the seminar →The spine. Creation to new creation, read as one narrative — everything else is commentary on this.
The doctrines in the order they assume one another — God, Scripture, Christ, salvation, the Church.
From the apostles to now — the arguments, councils and reformations that shaped what we say.
The texts themselves — Nicene, Chalcedonian, Westminster — read as they were written.
Not four subjects — one course. All of it beneath Christ in all.
Commentary of the month
The Story begins where the Bible does. Seven chapters of the commentary on this site are assigned to the course’s opening units — creation, the fall, the flood, the covenant with Noah. Read them in order.
Begin with Genesis 1 →Lewis’s rule
That is the whole method. Pick a room, read the seminar, then the chapter it points you to. The course is long; a unit is one sitting.
Start with the seminar →For He was made man that we might be made God.— Athanasius, On the Incarnation §54
Why the name
From Lewis’s famous preface to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Lewis argues that the antidote to the intellectual fashions of the present is to let the “clean sea breeze of the centuries” blow through our minds by reading old books. Here it becomes a philosophy: go backward through the Christian tradition in order to see the present more clearly.
inkling·s