ON READING WELL:
Finding the good life through great books
By Karen Swallow Prior
Brazos Press (Baker), 267 pages. £13.99
ISBN 978 1 587 433 962
If novels are a pleasure for you, or if by contrast and rather narrowly you feel theology is the only ladder to heaven, either way you can gain from this book.
Author Karen Swallow Prior, an American academic, is an unashamed Christian with an unashamed love of literature and very much follows John Milton’s advice on promiscuous reading.
Why? Because she believes loving great literature can help us in our love for God. Her thesis goes like this: We love stories as they catch our imagination and can help to shape our desires for good in a way that is almost unique. If we read with care and attention we get to see the human condition lit up in all its comedy and tragedy and see ourselves within it so much more clearly. Sir Philip Sidney in his 16th-century ‘Defense of Poetry’ put it like this: literature is ‘the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue’ and inflaming a reader with a ‘desire to be worthy’.
Authors with Christian worldview
Of course, this isn’t spirituality apart from God, but rather a resource to be used very much on the lines of Paul’s advice in Philippians – to think on the noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable (and one might add, as a warning, their opposites – remember the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son give us both). It does help that all the books mentioned are by authors whose worldview is steeped in Christianity even if their own faith may be unclear, and it goes without saying that the books are really good and readable.
The method used in Prior’s book, which shows her thesis at work, is to look at all the virtues, the four cardinal ones, prudence, temperance, justice and courage, the three theological ones, faith, hope and love, and the five heavenly ones, chastity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility and then discuss a book whose central theme illustrates one of the virtues. It’s not that each book is only about the virtue under discussion, or to suggest it sermonises, but rather we see the virtue so much more richly explored – and felt – in the lives of the characters. Take one example, Tolstoy’s tale, The Death of Ivan Ilych, in which a grasping bourgeois learns, at last, about love and how to die from his caring servant. So settle down and enjoy reading classic novels – through common grace another ladder to heaven.
