On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Kindness isn’t sexy. It doesn’t dazzle you with wit and charm and verve. We want to be with the kind, even if we don’t want to be the kind. People envy the rich, the beautiful, the powerful, the courageous, and the wise. Do we ever envy the kind? Envy, in fact, is the vice that, in the classical tradition, opposes kindness. Perhaps this seems strange until we look at what kindness truly is. Kindness isn’t mere niceness. Although kind and nice are nearly synonymous now, the history of both words shows a once-sharp difference that is still helpful to consider today. Nice comes from a Latin word that means “unknowing” or “ignorant” and in Middle English came to mean “senseless” or “foolish.”4 The linguist Henry Watson Fowler opines, in his characteristically colorful way, that the current meaning of nice as similar to kind came about when nice became “too great a favourite with the ladies who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.”5 In its etymology, kind means something radically different from mere agreeableness. Indeed, kind, rightly understood, can include all sorts of disagreeableness. Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family. Kindness is like love. The love we have for family members takes different forms. It is no...

Another, more subtle observation about kindness can be made from the story of King Solomon’s wise judgment in the dispute between two women, each claiming an infant as her own (1 Kings 3:16–28). One woman had accidentally smothered her child in the night and swapped her dead child for the other woman’s living child. Unable to tell which woman was the true mother of the living child, Solomon stated he would settle the matter simply by dividing the child in two and giving one half to each. The woman who agreed to this horrific solution obviously was not the child’s mother. She would prefer for the living child to be dead than for the other woman to have what she no longer had. Her response reveals both her envy and her lack of kinship to the child. The child’s true mother reveals both her kinship and her kindness in desiring the good of the child, his very life, even if the other woman were to have him instead of her. It’s not a very nice story. But this story that illustrates kindness also illustrates how kindness is not always nice. If kindness means treating someone like family, then kindness must include all the varieties of ways that family members show love for one another through the entire range of circumstances, conditions, and situations they find themselves in. Sometimes loving a family member requires gentleness. Sometimes toughness. Often forbearance. Always honesty and truth. This is another way being kind and being nice differ. Niceness has no inherent link to...

moral philosophers have long considered the virtue that opposes pride—humility—to be the foundation of all other virtues. John Chrysostom calls humility the “mother, and root, and nurse, and foundation, and bond of all good things: without this we are abominable, and execrable, and polluted.”5 Or as Peter Kreeft writes, “The greatest virtue keeps us from the greatest vice.”6 Without humility, without an understanding of our proper place within the order of creation, we cannot cultivate the other virtues. We cannot even come to Christ, or to true knowledge, apart from humility. Augustine wrote in one of his letters that the way to truth begins and ends with humility: In that way the first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility: and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction, not that there are no other instructions which may be given, but because, unless humility precede, accompany, and follow every good action which we perform, being at once the object which we keep before our eyes, the support to which we cling, and the monitor by which we are restrained, pride wrests wholly from our hand any good work on which we are congratulating ourselves.7 But do we know what true humility is? “Nothing is more deceitful,” says Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, “than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”8 False humility so abounds that we often distrust humility when...

The virtue of humility, most simply defined, is an accurate assessment of oneself. And, of course, it is impossible to assess oneself rightly apart from God.

Before O’Connor knew for certain who she was and what she was good at, when she was struggling to learn this along with the craft of writing, she kept a prayer journal at school. In it, she wrote this prayer: “But dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let me wash it and let my heart overflow with love washing it.”50 Humility is taking our place, no matter how small (or big), and fulfilling that place with a heart overflowing with love. The good life begins and ends with humility.