On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

One must be vulnerable to suffering some kind of injury in order to be considered courageous.

“One can follow one’s conscience, and in doing so honestly think in one’s heart of hearts one is acting well, and yet be acting wrongly,” as in the case of the “erroneous conscience” of the slaveholder.28 Such thinking demonstrates the seared conscience the Bible talks about in 1 Timothy 4:1–2, a conscience rendered insensitive by abandoning scriptural teaching for too long.

To expose the lies that hide the moral truth revealed by nature and the God of nature requires effort, trauma, or some sudden epiphany. Or a great novelist.

so good!

The difference in the two is in acting in good faith or not.33 These two kinds of ignorance illuminate the fact that it is possible to do “things we sincerely think are good, but which actually corrupt us, others, and society as a whole.”34

In addition to shaping individual experience and character, great literature has a role in forming the communal conscience and public virtue. We can understand a great deal about a culture—its strengths, its weaknesses, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature that it not only produces but reveres.

Moral strength is one kind of courage. Perhaps it’s the foundation of all courage.

While our works cannot save us, our habits can strengthen our faith.

An understanding of faith as not only a gift that is received but also a virtue that is exercised will emphasize any single moment less and the accumulation of moments more.

To be human is to be “in the state of being on the way,”6 which is a kind of hope. From Homer’s Odyssey to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the journey is one of the oldest and most prevalent motifs in literature. Hope has been called “the virtue of the wayfarer,”

Within a theological context, the vices of despair and presumption concern our posture toward God’s ability and willingness to forgive sin. To presume forgiveness is a sin against God in his justice.23 Aquinas says, however, that the sin of presumption is “less grave than despair”24 because to despair is a sin against God in his goodness and mercy.

Hmm. But when trust is absolute, how is this different than presumption?

Hope is not the same as oblivion or naiveté. Hope requires reckoning with the world as it is, with reality.

Sloth is considered a capital sin because it prevents a person from becoming what God wants her to be and who she truly is.

Why should we suppose that persons who lack the habit of aiming for the arduous good in earthly matters are nonetheless well prepared to attempt the most difficult of goods?

Progress is an Enlightenment idea, grounded in the obvious and measurable progress of science but erroneously applied to the human condition. This explains why the science that informs medicine improves over the ages but our poetry does not. 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.

Harvard Medical School’s famous Grant Study, which followed the lives of hundreds of men for seventy-five years, concluded that the most significant factor in life satisfaction is warm and loving relationships throughout one’s life. The study’s director summarized the findings this way: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

Augustine explains that love is the “impulse” to “enjoy God on his own account and one’s neighbor on account of God.”

The tragedy, of course, is not in failing to be exceptional but in the greater loss of rejecting the glories of everyday gifts.

Augustine points to the necessity of truth to love when he says, “What is not loved for its own sake is not loved at all.”

Without love, Wesley says, “nothing can make death comfortable.”

I think I am like most of us in wanting to shield myself from the intimate, uncomfortable, messy processes that mark the ending stages of life. We live in a culture that keeps death, dying, and aging as far from most of us for as long as possible. Geography often separates us from the aging of our elders, and medical science from our own aging.

Death will come. And when he does, he will not be a stranger. Death is the shadow that has trailed us all our days, and comes ’round to meet us at the front door. No lock can keep him out forever. How we die will depend on how we live and how we love,

It’s the age-old story, the paradox of the extramarital affair, confirmed by research: had the time, attention, and emotion spent on the affair been invested in the marriage instead, the affair might never have occurred.

In marriage, they find themselves alone together.

And as with all the virtues, diligence is not virtuous unless it is put toward a virtuous end. Persistence in planning a robbery or harassing strangers on the internet isn’t a virtue any more than loyalty is virtuous when it’s given to a mobster or a Klansman.

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.

Such differences point out the strength of virtue ethics over rules or outcome-based approaches. Human excellence varies from person to person, whereas rules do not.

Although applied to a goal, diligence itself isn’t measured by outcome.

Diligence is probably both the hardest and the easiest virtue to cultivate. It’s easy in the sense that it’s inherently simple: whatever it is you are doing, keep at it with care and attention, and then keep at it some more.

he is able to endure these accusations and respond with the truth: “All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honor is merciful, and ready to forgive.”

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.

Slow down. Don’t be in a hurry. Life is long. Work hard, and the rewards will come. The dreams you have—some of them—will come true; those that don’t will be replaced by others, maybe even better ones.

As connected as patience is to suffering, it is no wonder that, as theologian N. T. Wright points out, we “applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”2

But while suffering is inevitable, we can choose how we bear it. Patient character has everything to do with our will, as opposed to our circumstances.

She has come to recognize that time is required “to be wise and reasonable”13 and is wise enough to recognize when she is not.

Anne’s transcendent view of persuasion and patience owes to what Alasdair MacIntyre says in After Virtue is her “teleological perspective,”23 a perspective that keeps ultimate purpose and end in mind.

A world of many rules and expectations lends itself to outward conformity that makes an impression—an impression that need not be in agreement with internal nature. The more appearances matter, the more counterfeits abound.

Patience “is not a fundamental virtue so much as a complex of other virtues,” particularly

patience is traditionally understood to be a subvirtue of courage.

We “are profoundly ambivalent about kindness” in that we “are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”3

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” Such failures include, Saunders goes on to explain, “those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”

The root of pride, according to Aquinas, is lack of submission to God; pride, therefore, is “the beginning of all sin.”

And if knowing oneself is not already difficult enough (indeed, even impossible given the deceitful nature of the human heart), true humility requires not only an understanding of oneself but also an understanding of objective reality outside of oneself. As Josef Pieper explains, “The ground of humility is man’s estimation of himself according to the truth.”

Because “gratitude recognizes and prizes the work that another does and who the other is,”35 gratitude requires humility.

But the truth is that knowing what we are good at and what we are not, doing what we are supposed to do and not what we aren’t, being what we are supposed to be and not what we aren’t, is the essence of true humility.

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.”