On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

The premises that literature makes moral statements, that these statements can strengthen the moral life of a reader, and that literary criticism should explore the moral dimension of literary texts began in classical antiquity and held sway until the twentieth century.

Because the world since the fall contains both good and evil, Milton says, virtue consists of choosing good over evil.

Prudence is a form of wisdom. The ancients distinguished between two kinds of wisdom: speculative wisdom (sophia), related to the world of abstract ideas, and practical wisdom (prudentia), related to the concrete world of particular actions.

Satire is the ridicule of vice or folly for the purpose of correction. It is a harsh way to communicate truth, but pointing to truth—by first pointing to error—is its goal. Satire mocks—but it does so with a moral aim.

“morality is not sufficient for virtue; virtue also requires intelligence and lucidity. It is something that humor reminds us of and that prudence prescribes. It is imprudent to heed morality alone, and it is immoral to be imprudent.”22 By forcing us to test our understanding and application of prudence, satire paradoxically deepens our understanding of prudence.

Why good comedians often have an edge of prophet calling the wilderness to them. They make fun (in a witty way) if our modern way of life pointing out the folly. Comedy can be looked at as a guide on a culture’s moral boundaries.

The Great Gatsby offers a larger-than-life picture of a life spun out of control by excess. If temperance is “selfless self-preservation,” then Gatsby is the epitome of intemperance: “self-destruction through the selfish degradation of the powers which aim at self-preservation.”27 Nick recognizes the fatal nature of this intemperate world when he observes that in it “are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”28 Consumption does indeed consume us.

Yet temperance is more than merely restraining from vices. While restraint is one aspect of temperance, there is more to it than simply negation. Inherent to temperance is balance, as evident in the Old English word temprian, which means to “bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else.”30 This is why the process of strengthening a metal is called “tempering.”

Injustice, no matter how seemingly private, always has public consequences.

Carton blesses Lucie for this “sweet compassion” toward him.42 Yet love and compassion “cannot substitute for justice.”43 Compassion is individual and voluntary. It also has no cost.44 Justice, on the other hand, exacts a price. Because the world is broken, making what is wrong right is costly. In other words, justice requires sacrifice. For the sake of Lucie, Carton offers his life as sacrifice to the mob that demands the head of Lucie’s husband, Charles Darnay, who is guilty only of being born to those who abused their power—power Darnay has long renounced.

Justice avoids both selflessness and selfishness. Only when one attains this virtuous mean can one be just within oneself, and within one’s community, for justice is about giving everyone his or her due: oneself, others, and God. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Scripture admonishes (Matt. 22:39). Implicit in this command is the idea that one must love oneself and that one cannot love one’s neighbor properly without such love. One cannot love one’s neighbor properly if one loves oneself too much—or too little. In an important sense, then, the virtue of justice begins with justice toward the self.

Both justice and beauty are the expression of proper proportion.

Beauty arises from the unity of the separate parts. A note that sounds off in one song sounds lovely within the context of another.

“It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level. Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care.”

While beholding beauty, the gazer’s perception begins to shift rightly as a binocular being focused. What was always there but unclear is now sharp, crisp, and prominent.

Justice requires a proportionate exchange. Carton’s act of self-sacrifice transcends mere equity. In this way, Carton’s death, while unjust, is beautiful. Likewise, when Christ took his place on the cross for the sake of humanity and paid the price in blood for the sins of the world, it wasn’t fair. But through his sacrifice, we are justified, and that is beautiful.

Courage is measured not by the risk it entails but by the good it preserves.

The person who is virtuously courageous displays not merely a single act of courage but the habit of courage. Courage—or fortitude, as it is often called—is defined most succinctly by moral philosophers and theologians as the habit that enables a person to face difficulties well.3

Reading virtuously, reading faithfully, depends greatly on accepting a text on its own terms and attending to how it is told as much as, if not more than, what it tells.

Read a book and it will tell you how to read it.

The four conditions of hope are that it regards something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain. The practice of hope, Aquinas says, is “a certain stretching out of the appetite towards good.”10

Watchfulness is part of hope. Watchfulness counters both despair and sloth, which is the “beginning and root of despair” and inhibits “courage for the great things.”52 Sloth is considered a capital sin because it prevents a person from becoming what God wants her to be and who she truly is.53

Sloth stops us from seeking God, and that means we do not find him.”4 Paradoxically, then, the busiest people can be the most slothful. Frenetic activity can be what most effectively keeps us from what we are supposed to be doing, particularly seeking God and his righteousness. Being busy is easier than being good. This is why sloth’s being “a sin of omission, not commission,” by one way of thinking, “makes it deadlier.”5

There’s something about those promises offered to us in the Bible. They are always there, but until life prepares us to receive them, they are just like the key Christian had in his pocket all along but didn’t remember until he was ready to use it.

Language is indirect or mediated in a way that images and pictures are not. All language is, in a certain sense, metaphorical, and allegory simply amplifies this aspect of language.

The excessive vice related to suffering is wrath.

Patience is a virtue, not in overlooking wrong, but in refusing to do wrong in overcoming wrong. But untempered by patience, such an impulse becomes wrath. On the deficient side of the scale is a lack of spirit or carelessness or sloth.

If in the face of evil or suffering one simply does not care, no patience is required. But such lack of care is, like wrath, a vice. Patience is not inaction. As the Bible says in James 5:11, patience is not passivity but perseverance.

Patience is a virtue only if the cause for which that person suffers is good. Yet the source of suffering might not always be good. We cannot—in the name of patience—ask someone to endure abuse, since the cause of such suffering is evil, not noble.