God's Story & Literary Criticism

The Joy of Reading Great Books

By Kathleen Nielson

Why should we make time to read great books? What should we read? How should we read most effectively?
The very idea of this subject is downright radical these days. We are familiar with that villain—postmodernism—who embezzled the store of confidence in objective meaning, especially the objective meaning of words spoken and written, and who then deposited that meaning in the hands of the receivers of the words—who must not receive those words but rather shape them into something meaningful for themselves.

The flow of postmodern thinking has left in its wake a general strong suspicion that we have been duped. The works called "classics" do not after all hold intrinsic value or meaning; they are simply products of their writers and times, and the best we can do is to shape meaning for them through each new reader and time. Most works traditionally considered classics, at least in our Western culture, are rather widely acknowledged now to be simply the oppressive expressions of "dead white European males." In many intellectual circles, we are now called on to laugh at these works, condemn them, radically reinterpret them, or simply ignore them as irrelevant. It is important to acknowledge that, when we talk about reading classic works, we are, to say the least, going against the flow—but it is an exhilarating going, and a crucial one, especially if we can both look back and value what our heritage brings to us and at the same time continue the flow by looking around and ahead and receiving the great works to be discovered in our world today.

Developing a Doctrine of Reading

Why should we value great works of literature? The only satisfying answer I find is one couched in biblical doctrine. There are not two different answers to this question—the general answer that applies to every human being, and the "Christian" answer. There is only one satisfactory answer, which is found in the very structure of the universe as God has revealed it, and which some people acknowledge and some people do not. This answer can be expressed in more or less theological terminology, of course. [For our purposes, in our denominational context, we can be as brazenly theological as we wish! --I would edit this. Lou]
[The theological path toward valuing literature is a long one. In our own times writers like Leland Ryken, Roger Lundin, Francis Schaeffer, and others have traveled well this road (1). Reformed teachings in particular have great light to shed on this journey, with their clear grasp of the way gospel truths must transform and reform every area of human endeavor. --I would edit this as well. Lou]

We Create With Words Because We Bear His Image

We start, of course, with the doctrine of creation, which affirms from Scripture that God is the Creator of all things, ex nihilo. The Lord God is the great Maker, from whom all other creativity springs. Only because God formed all creation and declared it good can we human beings made in His image imitate Him by making things and declaring them good. And only because God spoke words and made the universe can we human beings speak words after Him, fulfilling His image in us as we create with words. The biblical starting point of creation establishes human making-with-words as a holy and appropriate response to the Creator God who poured His goodness into creation and His own image into the human beings at the center of it. If we begin the human story anywhere else but with the words of Genesis, then we lose the ultimate reason and glory of any kind of words, and particularly of the artful shaping of words that is literature.

If any human beings should be people of words, they should be believers in the biblical story of a God who speaks to create and then continues to deal with His creation through His Word—His inspired, living Word, and ultimately Christ the Word made flesh. Believers in Christ will make the increasingly incomprehensible claim that we humans were made to live by and love words. It is almost a cliché to point out that the world presently is making a huge shift in focus from words to images (2). Words are everywhere, of course, but they’ve become cheap, utilitarian. We can make thousands of them disappear with a quick touch on a keyboard. We use reading, but we do not value it.

The dramatic decline in knowledge and enjoyment of great literature surely constitutes a part of the great divide Nancy Pearcey describes in her book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity (3). The divide Pearcey addresses is the one society in general has come to accept: between factual, scientific "truth," and utterly subjective experience and belief. Literature, of course, has been relegated to the realm of subjective experience. In so relegating it, we have cut off its connection to truth. We have, as Louise Cowan puts it, "harden[ed] our hearts against the presence of the holy(4)." We have ignored the power of our God-given imaginations, one crucial route through which God means to reach us and teach us and grow us into the image of our Creator. The glaring reality that much of the inspired word given by God comes to us in imaginative literary and poetic form makes Cowan’s charge even more pointed. Indeed, on many levels, as we ignore great literature, we are hardening our hearts against the presence of the holy.

In Great Books We Encounter the Depth of the Fall

The story of the Fall chases down the story of Creation: The second doctrine we must be quick to mention is that of human depravity. The grievous truth and consequences of the Fall offer a second answer to the why of great literature, which is made up of the stuff of human experience in a fallen, broken creation that used to be Eden. Literature tells over and over again the story of fallenness and brokenness, as well as of a longing for the Eden we lost. Sometimes the telling is explicitly Christian, as has been the case with much of Western literature. Its Christian roots, of course, constitute one major reason Western world literature is being debunked and an important reason why Christians must claim it as a treasured heritage. Dante in the 14th century wrote not theology but rather a huge theologically-based poem about the results of sin; there is hardly a more vivid way to grasp the nature of sin and its logical end than to descend the levels of hell with him in the Inferno. In such poetry we encounter the Fall, lived out to its depths.

But such telling comes not only from centuries past and not only through Christian voices. The 20th century overflows with examples of those who imaginatively portray the truth of lostness and depravity, even if in many cases the authors would not have explained their works in that way. T.S. Eliot, when he wrote works like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," was expressing even in the magnificently ordered fragmentation and startling imagery of his poetry the malaise of a whole civilization that had turned away from God and the certainties of faith. Only later in his life did Eliot embrace Christianity. From then on his poetic portrayals of the fallen human condition became increasingly full of the light of biblical hope.
Literature not only reflects depravity; it also is infected with depravity, for the whole imaginative process both of creating and receiving has been distorted by the Fall. Literature at best reflects truth imperfectly and at worst offers or induces an unbiblical view, or even sinful behavior.

The Best Books Reflect a Redemptive Worldview

However, that second doctrinal truth pushes us on to the next, the doctrine of redemption, the beautiful heart of the gospel whose rhythm sounds in any great literary work, even if ever so faintly. I’m not talking about a happy ending, but about a sense of the restoration of something lost, even if that sense is only a haunting one—as in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, whose central characters are tormented by their need for redemption and by the one Redeemer whom they often deny or don’t even know.
Centuries before Christ, writing in a pagan culture, a writer as distant as Homer offers an amazing example of a redemptive worldview. The Odyssey is far from a Christian work, but it communicates that universally understood sense of redemption, even restoration, pictured through the epic tale of a man trying to get home. Homer’s story somehow echoes or reflects the one, big, true story of the universe: a story of redeeming (at great price) what was lost. The sense of home and of hope, of course, stretches the doctrine of redemption to its ultimate end, reaching out to the final restoration and glorification of heaven, that home for which every human being longs, knowingly or not. There is a kind of homesickness with which every person instinctively resonates, because of the truths of creation and fall and redemption which are at the heart of the universe God created and over which He reigns.

If it is indeed true that these biblical doctrines tell the true big story of the universe, then every little story of every kind must relate to it. If not—if there is no such intrinsic relation between the fundamental doctrines of the faith and the literature we read—then that literature may be accurately deemed irrelevant, evil, or simply useful as a mouthpiece for propagandizing the Christian message. None of these perspectives is dead these days. I recently spoke with a young lady who stopped dating a man who refused to read fiction because it took away from his Bible reading. And of course we have only to visit some of the more popular Christian bookstores to find the kinds of novels or poetry written simply to propagate the most simplistic or sentimentalized versions of Christian truth.

What Should We Read?

Was Mark Twain right that a classic is a book that people praise and don’t read? What makes what we would call a classic? I have spoken of literature as the artful shaping of human experience in words. Well, then, who is to decide what is artful, and what kind of shaping of what kind of experience is great? In one sense, I don’t need to address this question, because wise people through the centuries have made judgments on it, and I am willing to trust such judgments. I will not choose to take time, even though people these days call for it, debating whether Dante or Milton or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot should be called great. One argument for attending a Christian liberal arts college, by the way, is that it may well form part of the steadily decreasing number of institutions of higher education which still teach an accepted body of classic works that have shaped our civilization and our world. Many Christian colleges do this is because they have not generally rejected the truths of Scripture—truths that rear their heads so explicitly in much of the history of Western world literature.

Read works that people you respect, both dead and alive, would call great. Talk to your thinking and reading friends. Look up trustworthy books that recommend good books (5). Make a list. Always carry a book. It’s not a complex matter to get started. As you read the books which have lasted through the centuries, you will gradually begin to understand the importance of artistry and style; the way style is inseparable from content; the complex, universal human experience and truths great works get at; and the transforming effect of reading and rereading a worthy work. These are some of the basic qualities of great literature.

Of course, our lists of great works constantly adjust and stretch, to embrace the discovery not only of contemporary great writers but also of past writers previously overlooked. As Roger Lundin explains, literature deals with a host of individual classics, not with a fixed canon of sacred works. Only one collection of books is a canon for Christians. So, as we see women and minority writers emerging in literature anthologies, we should be open. Lundin for one does not seem worried that "Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier are out, and Phyllis Wheatly, Frederick Douglass, and Toni Morrison are in (6)."

How Should We Read These Books We List And Carry?

First, we should remember the "why" of literature, in its most fundamental, doctrinal sense. As T.S. Eliot explained, Christians must not keep "their religious and moral convictions in one compartment, and take our reading merely for entertainment, or on a higher plane, for aesthetic pleasure (7)." It makes a world of difference if we read believing in one Creator God who created all things good, and in the effect of the Fall on all things, and in the redemption of all things ultimately and only through Christ. We will delight in the various ways great literature reflects and lights up these truths, and we will notice and respond appropriately when a work offers a way of seeing that is contrary to biblical truth. We will make judgments. We can say that Virgil’s huge, culture-shaping epic espouses a kind of nobility which is not Christian but which magnificently and truly shows the painful striving of human beings for a higher good which they vividly sense but cannot control or perfectly attain. We can judge whether a popular contemporary novel is or is not pushing a fundamentally anti-Christian worldview. We must not read without the huge, biblical story of the universe alive and effective as we digest what we read.

Second, we must read with historical perspective. Consider Bill Moyers’ famous observation that we Americans seem to know everything about the last 24 hours but very little about the past centuries. No longer can we expect that people will know the stories of Romeo and Juliet, or Christian’s journey to the Celestial City, or Jonah and the whale. No longer can we speak of James Joyce’s Ulysses (or discuss the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?) assuming the shared context of The Odyssey. We need, and we need to teach our children, to follow C.S. Lewis’ counsel to "keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds," which, he says, "can be done only by reading old books." "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones (8)." Flannery O’Connor argued that "fiction, if it is going to be taught in the high schools, should be taught as a subject and as a subject with a history." Her conclusion is typically wry and memorable: "And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed (9)."

Third, we should read with humility. Literature can open worlds and windows of human experience we could never otherwise know. Works from other cultures and times can enlarge our imaginations, our understanding, and our capacity for compassion. Reading a few short stories by the 20th-century South African writer Bessie Head recently expanded my understanding of what it means to be cut off from one’s place and traditions. Many of today’s feminist-leaning critics use a writer like Anne Bradstreet to prove the strength of mind and voice of a woman who survived the repressive Puritan culture of 17th-century New England. However, when we listen with appropriate humility to Bradstreet’s voice, we cannot help but be, in a way, schooled by the beauty of personal faith in a sovereign God which this devoted wife and mother was able to pour out into beautifully crafted lines of verse. Critics, as we know, can too easily shape a writer’s work according to a particular critical grid. On the contrary, a great writer has to be allowed to shape us as readers, and this process demands humility.

Finally, may we read with delight. How simply delightful that Romeo should not say, "Wow, she’s beautiful!"—but, rather, "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" How delightfully engrossing to lose oneself utterly in the somber, strangely passionate story of Jane Eyre. How delightfully, deeply simple the worship to be found in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ "Pied Beauty," as we taste his "dappled things" like "skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow" and "rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim." Hopkins offers a lesson in one way of delighting in a writer’s words—and that is not to be too ponderous or slow in the reading process. Hopkins’ poetry is hard to figure out word by word, but when you take in the rhythm of his words and lines in a flow, you get the sense of what he’s all about, even if you’ll have to go back later, perhaps, to study every word.
Such delight takes us back to where we started, because any delight in words is delight in our Creator God who made us word-creatures in his image. There is no other starting point or ending point for a Christian reading literature than to thank our Creator and Redeemer God, and to seek to bring Him glory in our use and enjoyment of words.

(1) See for example Leland Ryken’s Triumphs of the Imagination: Literature in Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979) and Windows to the World: Literature in Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985). See also Susan V. Gallagher and Roger Lundin, Literature Through the Eyes of Faith (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1989). See also The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1996).
(2) For excellent discussions of words and images, see Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), and Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990).
(3) Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2004.
(4) "The Importance of the Classics," Invitation to the Classics, ed. Louise Cowan and Os Guinness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998), p. 23.
(5) For a start, see Veith’s Appendix: "A Reading List."
(6) "The Classic Are Not the Canon," Cowan and Guinness, p. 26. See also his chapter in Literature Through the Eyes of Faith: "The Value and Limits of Reading the Classics," pp. 103 – 116.
(7) Eliot’s influential essay "Religion and Literature" can be found in a valuable collection edited by Leland Ryken: The Christian Imagination: Essays on Literature and the Arts (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1981), pp. 141-154.
(8) "On the Reading of Old Books," God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 201-202.
(9) "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade," Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 137, 140.

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