On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

But as a counterbalance, the virtue of magnanimity must also be accompanied by humility.

Magnanimity “requires

humility, so that it truthfully estimates its own possibilities, rather ...

Hope is inherently humble.

while the passion of hope and the theological virtue of hope differ in both source and kind, they are not entirely unconnected.

The presumptuous, on the other hand, “habitually regard ourselves as capable of attaining through our own powers things that in fact are impossible without help from others. Untruthfully exaggerating our own capacities . . . we render ourselves unlikely (if not unable) to lean on the help of God.”

Theological hope requires humility in the same way that the natural passion does.

Souls indifferent to the achievement of human things cannot be expected to exert themselves in divine things.72

Moreover, as N. T. Wright explains in Surprised by Hope, the theological virtue of hope is manifested not merely in eternity, but in the implications of eternity for present realities74—in other words, here and now in the relationship of the transcendent to the immanent.

Although a pilgrimage—whether literal religious travel or metaphorical spiritual journey—involves both linearity and change, it

differs subtly but significantly from the modern idea of progress, the foundation for the secular notion of human flourishing.

Progress is not the sam...

The modern idea of progress is founded on a belief in the perfectibility—or at least the unbounde...

Progress is an Enlightenment idea, grounded in the obvious and measurable progress of science but erroneously...

Although human manners and morals shift and change, and human cultures exchange one systemic sin for another, human nature does not change, let

alone progress.

Yet the doctrine of progress in the modern age does not make room for suffering. Rather, the notion of progress suggests “that the great evils heretofore experienced in history are passing phenomena, not enduring characteristics of human existence.”

Aristotle says friendship “is an absolute necessity in life.”

In The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm claims that the “deepest need of man” is “the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”

In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis famously explored four types of love, each associated with words from the Greek language: empathy (storge), friendship (philia), desire (eros), and the highest form of love (agape).

Charity perfects all the other virtues and contains all the virtues.

The definition of charity given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 encompasses the virtues of patience, kindness, contentment, humility, temperance, justice, purity, honesty, wisdom, courage, faith, generosity, and perseverance.

The definition reflects the very char...

Augustine: “Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”17

Charity is “loving God first, and all else in God.”18

Having the capability of this kind of love is part of what it means to be made in God’s image.

While charity is desire that moves us toward God, cupidity is desire that moves us away from God.

There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a desire that draws us away from God.

There is perhaps no more apt object of pity than he who thinks himself exceptional but turns out to be

merely ordinary.

Many think that we in modern Western culture have lost much of the richness of this kind of brotherly love or deep friendship, particularly in the church, where both opposite and same-sex friendships are surrounded by anxiety because of our culture’s tendency to equate nearly all forms of love with sex.

Empathy allows someone to imagine what the experience of the sufferer might be like, but compassion goes beyond empathy.

To have compassion is, literally, to “suffer with” someone (com meaning “with” and passion meaning “suffer”).

Psychologist Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy, argues that compassion—love, concern, and motivation to help others in their suffering—is more helpful and healthy than empathy—the ability to feel another’s pain.

Charity—godly love—cannot be separated from truth.

charity “is love received and given.”

Tenderness prefers death over suffering. Charity chooses to “suffer with,” the literal meaning of compassion.

Its vision of charity—love given and received—is the image of the servant who, by tending the feet of others, bears their suffering.

Of all the virtues, chastity is one of the most misunderstood. It tends to be idealized—both negatively and positively, either abhorred or idolized.

Temperance disciplines all the human appetites. As a kind of temperance, chastity tempers in particular the part of human vitality related to our desire to reproduce and to experience companionship. Temperance moderates according to the dictates of reason, which is why Augustine calls chastity, or purity, “a virtue of the mind,”5 locating it in desire rather than action.

Chastity, most simply, is fidelity.

“becoming a person with an outlook that allows one to selflessly appreciate good and attractive things—most especially bodies and the pleasures they afford—by keeping those goods ordered to the good of the whole person and his or her vocation to love.”

Chastity, then, is “not the mere absence of sex but an active conforming of one’s body to the arc of the gospel.”

Clearly, Ethan’s suffering is rooted less in the state of his circumstances than in the state of his soul.

Undisciplined sexual desire is lust. Living in a modern culture in which sexual lust is so rampant and its destructiveness so woven into the social fabric, we see this vice a bit differently than earlier Christians did.

They viewed lust as “a sin of weakness, not a sin of malice.”14

His schooling was just enough to raise his expectations, only to see them go unfulfilled, breeding in him frustration, resentment, and a sense of being ill-suited to those around him. His mind was all dressed up but given no place to go.

Ethan’s lust of the flesh arises from seeing in others qualities he lacks and, in seeing this lack, desires.

the dynamics of a relationship are determined by two people, not one.

This is the idea expressed in Ephesians 5 when it says that “husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body” (vv. 28–29). Caring for one’s spouse as one would care for oneself makes it possible to fulfill the purpose of marriage, described earlier in this same chapter of Ephesians, which is to love your wife “just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (vv. 26–27).