On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

What this means is that it is in the nature of literature to place examples before us—examples of virtue to emulate and vice to repudiate. In our day, this is stigmatized as “surely a very simplistic view of literature,” to which my comeback is, “Tough—this is demonstrably how literature works.” On the self-evident nature of this, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s comment in regard to Sir Philip Sidney that “the assumption . . . that the ethical is the aesthetic par excellence is so basic to Sidney that he never argues it. He thought we would know.”

But certainly, literature does not inform on such matters as well as history textbooks and lectures do. Whatever similarities there might be in the content of, say, a documentary on the French Revolution and A Tale of Two Cities, the differences between their forms make all the difference in the way we experience them. Reading literature, more than informing us, forms us.

Reading and interpreting literature notoriously lacks hard and fast rules. It is this very quality that makes literature exciting for some, frustrating for others. There is no one right reading of a literary text—but there are certainly erroneous readings, good readings, and excellent readings. Similarly, virtue ethics, rather than proffering a rigid set of rules by which to determine decisions (deontological ethics) or considering the likely consequences or outcomes of a decision (pragmatic ethics), relies on moral character, developed through good habits, for the governing of behavior. For the most part, this is the hardest and most challenging course. Cultivating and exercising wisdom is harder than consulting a rule book. As Aristotle says, “Both skill and virtue are always concerned with what is harder, because success in what is harder is superior.”

Another example is the rule among some male leaders not to meet alone with a woman, which sounds moral and wise but generally becomes impossible to practice without falling into other errors such as disrespect or discrimination. Yet many today assume its prudence and adopt the rule without examination. Prudence is wisdom at work on the ground, doing good and avoiding evil in real-life situations.

Consider the contempt for the related word prude, which has no positive connotations whatsoever. Prudery, prudence, prudent: each in today’s usage suggests a narrow-minded, slim-souled, hand-wringing Pollyanna. (Being of a certain age, I can’t hear any of these words without remembering Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live imitating George H. W. Bush saying, “Wouldn’t be prudent!”)

This points to a problem in the purity culture popular today in some strains of Christianity. The movement’s well-intentioned attempt to encourage believers to remain virgins until marriage unfortunately misses the mark by inadvertently making sexual purity a means to an end (such as alluring a fine marriage partner or being rewarded with a great sex life once married) rather than being a virtue in itself. Furthermore, apart from a more holistic sense of virtue, and in particular the virtue of chastity (the topic of chapter 8), virginity itself means little—as evidenced by the creative ways people maintain their virginity while remaining anything but sexually pure and by a former US president who claimed he’d not committed adultery because he’d engaged in all but intercourse with his mistress, and as further evidenced by situations in which virginity (not chastity) is lost through sexual assault.

Pamela offers a more complicated picture than Fielding gives it credit for, but his reading of the novel effectively demonstrates how easily morality slips into moralism, how finely drawn the line is between the law and legalism, and how readily the promise of blessings is mistaken as a contract for material prosperity.

Unlike a lampoon or a parody or other forms of low comedy, satire relies on both a shared moral standard and a shared desire to attain that standard. This makes satire tricky for two reasons: first, agreement on moral standards varies from age to age, and second, some simply don’t believe that it’s anyone’s job to “correct” anyone else’s behavior. We live today in times that are hard for satire for both of these reasons. Vice and even folly are more and more seen as being “in the eyes of the beholder.” Absent agreement on these, satire just seems mean. On the surface, ridicule doesn’t seem kind, of course. But to ridicule what is wicked or foolish in hopes of preventing more of the same is much kinder than letting wickedness or folly continue along their merry, destructive way. Moreover, the sharp bite of satire leads some to think satire must be pessimistic, misanthropic even. Yet the truth is that the satirist, someone who tries so hard to improve the world, must, I think, love people very much. Even God’s inspired Word contains plenty of irony and satire, such as when Job mocks the worldly-wise friends who’ve taunted his faith, saying, “Doubtless you are the only people who matter, and wisdom will die with you!” (Job 12:2). The satirist loves in the way of God, who chastens those whom he loves. There is only one thing worse than being chastened: that is, not being chastened.

This fact points to an interesting quality of vice: it is just as likely to be accidental as intentional. In this way, virtue opposes vice not only in its moral content but in its acquisition as well. Vice is natural to human beings in their fallen state. But virtue must be practiced, become a habit, and be inhabited by a person in order to attain excellence.

Temperance is the virtue that helps us rise above our animal nature, making the image of God in us shine more brilliantly. For humans, unlike animals, pleasure is tempered by understanding. Developing desires for the good requires understanding. Human beings are creatures who are rational as well as spiritual and who, as such, do not approach pleasurable activities purely physically. The temperate person is one who “understands these connections between bodily pleasures and the larger human good, and whose understanding actually tempers the desires and pleasures.”8 Temperance is liberating because it “allows us to be masters of our pleasure instead of becoming its slaves.”

The difficulty of balancing between excessive and deficient pleasures is evident all around us in many ways, not only in the present, but in human history as well. Two ancient schools of thought that demonstrate the extremes of excess and deficiency in regards to physical pleasures are Stoicism and Epicureanism, one advocating restraint and the other indulgence as the way to the good life. We might not adopt their extremes in such intensely philosophical ways today, but the influence of these approaches is all around us. This ping-ponging between excess and deficiency in the indulgence of our animal appetites manifests in endless ways in American culture today: all-you-can-eat buffets and detox diets, pornography and purity culture, fast food and slow food, the sexual revolution and the death of sex,10 McMansions and tiny houses, the prosperity gospel and the gospel of self-denial. Even in the longer view of our nation’s history, we see this wild pendulum swing: the excesses rampant today are the counter swing to the Puritan roots of our country’s beginning. This ongoing tension that has always defined American culture is at the heart of one of the most quintessentially American novels: The Great Gatsby.

But nature—including human nature—is like a balloon. If squeezed at one end, the air inside simply moves to the other end. If squeezed enough, the balloon will burst. Extremes will eventually out. The virtue of temperance keeps us from bursting at either end. Aptly, The Great Gatsby is set during a time characterized by the impulse to suppress: Prohibition. The historical background to the story exemplifies in itself how excess in one direction can lead to an equal and opposite excess in the other direction.

But Gatsby loves an ideal, not a woman. He loves an idea—winning the prize that to him symbolizes the attainment of his dreams—not flesh and blood. Daisy is for Gatsby like the volumes of books that fill his library shelves: with pages uncut and unread, their value is in what they symbolize, not what they are.

The narrative demonstrates Nick’s active effect on the story—even in his passive way—in a subtle scene at the end of the novel. When Nick returns to the vacant mansion sometime after Gatsby’s death, he reports, “On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.”53 Nick’s act of erasure is a reminder that every telling of every story requires judgments, choices of what to leave in, what to leave out, what best to remember, and what best to forget. In showing us Nick’s choice to erase the insult to Gatsby, the novel reminds us that we too are unreliable narrators of our own stories. And therefore the judgments made by our own limited perspectives must be tempered against the all-seeing eyes of God.

When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.

the injustice of one person against another cannot be contained. Injustice, no matter how seemingly private, always has public consequences.

In England, public trials and executions had become, as noted above, a national form of barbaric entertainment. Not coincidentally, many of the first penal reforms in England, begun just before and during Dickens’s lifetime, were led by Christians. Christians were among the first to question widespread application of the death penalty as well as its treatment as a form of public entertainment. Dickens himself contributed to a developing consciousness of the depravity of such excessive punishment and the injustices that cultivated the criminal element in the underclass. Dickens feared that unchecked injustice in nineteenth-century England might re-create what unchecked injustice in France in the previous century had led to, and A Tale of Two Cities was his warning call.36

The novel’s vision exposes the truth that prolonged systemic injustice inevitably bears the bitter fruit of violence.

Here is a picture of injustice unleashed upon the world seemingly without limits. The detail is excessive—but that doesn’t make it gratuitous. The excess is the point.

The truth about justice in this world is that it can never set things exactly right. We never will, whether on the personal, the public, or the cosmic scale, be able to bring those delicate scales of justice into perfect balance.

Although the words just and fair are often used interchangeably, justice usually involves objective, universal standards of judgment, while fairness is often felt subjectively as a sense of right proportion within particular circumstances. In a perfect world, what is just is also fair. In a fallen world, however, justice does not always feel fair. In our fallen humanity we often bristle at the holiness of a God whose justice does not always strike us as fair. The parable of the workers in the vineyard, all of whom are paid the same agreed-upon wage although some worked fewer hours, is a perplexing example of this (Matt. 20:1–16).

Both justice and beauty are the expression of proper proportion.

In aesthetics, the perfect proportion is known as the golden ratio or golden mean. Named after a thirteenth-century mathematician, the Fibonacci numbers quantify the ideal ratio between length and width, a proportion found universally in beautiful faces, buildings, and throughout nature on both cosmic and microcosmic scales. The prevalence and consistency of this ratio offers a startling counter to the subjective (and modern) notion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Beauty arises from the unity of the separate parts. A note that sounds off in one song sounds lovely within the context of another. The Victorian settee that looks garish in a beachside cottage is perfectly suited to a turn-of-the-century mansion. The elegant neck of a giraffe would be absurd on a short-legged creature like a dachshund. Justice, likewise, cannot exist apart from the context of the community of people it serves.

Justice in this world will ever and always be a matter of correcting, balancing—ever progressing (or regressing), never perfected. The injustice my friend’s grandmother experienced in being a slave did not end with her life. That injustice forever shaped her children, and her children’s children, including my friend. My friend forgives those injustices. But even forgiveness cannot negate the ripple effects of the past. To pretend otherwise is itself a further injustice. With the endless injustices and causes that overwhelm us today, it’s common for us to set these concerns against one another as though one cause must compete against another: we must choose the cause of women or the poor, of religious liberty or the environment. We often think of justice as parcels of land, and we concern ourselves with the size and distribution of its lots. But justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.