Reading as a Spiritual Discipline

The past decade has seen the appearance of a number of books on the art of reading and its place in Christian life. Dr. Alan Jacobs has produced more than one volume on this subject, as has Dr. Karen Swallow Prior. Now another academic has produced what is not exactly a theology of reading but rather a series of informal reflections on the religious possibilities of the bookish life. Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson, author of Reading for the Love of God, is an Anglican and a Christian humanist with a love for the written word in its measureless variety. One of the more impressive qualities of this fairly short book is the remarkable breadth of reading evident in its pages: Its author writes comfortably about 14th-century Catholic mystics, contemporary poets, Japanese aestheticians, and Patristic theologians, as well as English, Russian, and American novelists of several periods. From the great quarry of letters, ancient and modern, Hooten Wilson has shored more than her share of fragments.

Reading for the Love of God is written for the common reader in a style both casual and clear. Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, gracefully avoids the worst of the tortured technical vocabulary that is the curse and the plague of today’s humanities departments, and in the rare instance in which she introduces some abstruse expression (e.g., “tropological reading”), she is careful to define it for the nonprofessional. As an example of haute vulgarisation, this book is a model of its kind, on a level with many titles in the old Que sais-je? series or the Oxford Very Short Introductions.

One of the mainsprings of this book is St. Augustine’s principle that “a person who is a good and true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature.” Hooten Wilson appears to apply this rule to her own reading life with an exceptional dedication, and her book stands, at the very least, as a valuable exhibition of one soul’s literary catholicity. As such, it is both a welcome encouragement and a gentle rebuke to those of us who have not always traveled in the world of books with so generous an attitude toward all of that country’s inhabitants.

To read is to adventure, as the author states in her opening chapter, and, following C.S. Lewis, she urges with conviction that what we bring back from our literary travels depends in great part on the spirit with which we first set out. If we depart with the expectation to be disappointed, or to find nothing worthy of our admiration, we will likely prove ourselves correct. Even great minds have stumbled here. Hooten Wilson quotes from an 1818 letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a friend who had sought his advice as to what sort of books ought to occupy his studies: “Nothing of mere amusement should lumber a public library,” the President replied. Jefferson emphatically denounced novels (“a mass of trash…poison that infects the mind”), insisting that the only brand of permissible fiction is that which confers the right sort of moral nutrients to its readers.

Not to condemn entire genres wholesale is one mark of a vigorous literary sensibility. Another is the patient resolve not to judge a work based on its associations with “the wrong types.” Hooten Wilson suggests that “we must not assume the book will be good or bad based on who approves or disapproves of it” — advice well taken by anyone tempted to engage in the juvenile statue-toppling that has, in recent years, become the pastime of choice for the bored philistine. Elsewhere, Hooten Wilson divides readers into four types: the no-nonsense literalist, the romantic adventurer, the liberator, and the “panoptes.” That last figure she describes as he who “reads to see how others see the world — the living, the dead…and maybe even how God sees it…this reader desires all different ways of seeing to be drawn together.” Though she insists that all these readerly types have their own strengths and abilities, it seems the last one for her stands apart on a plane above the others. I am inclined to agree.

To treat so large a subject adequately in relatively few pages might have defeated any writer who attempted the task. The weaker sections of this book are mainly those in which its author seeks to describe the spiritually medicinal virtues of reading as a Christian discipline. Early in the book, she poses the rhetorical question, “If the poem is cathartic without the spiritual direction, then Augustine would ask, ‘what is its purpose?’” It is easy enough to imagine St. Augustine challenging a reader with an inquiry of this kind, but (with respect to the Bishop of Hippo) it is more difficult to imagine a reader — even a sensitive one — caring all that much.

I have no reason to believe that Hooten Wilson is other than honest in commending to us the spiritual principles she sincerely applies to her own reading, but most of us, even those for whom it is easy to lose track of time in libraries and bookstores, are simply not tempered that way. Whether it is a good or a bad reader who opens every new book with the prayer to be challenged and improved by it, it is certainly a rare one. And since Hooten Wilson raises the subject of poetry in her chapter on Augustine, it ought to be acknowledged that there are considerable fields of verse that do not offer much in the way of spiritual nourishment, however imaginatively delightful they might be.

I have spent plenty of happy hours in the comedies of Aristophanes, the Ars Amatoria, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Rape of the Lock, and Don Juan, and have been mightily entertained by all of them. In what way precisely I was edified I am unable to say; nor do I blame the authors of any of the aforementioned works for not loading them with that “high seriousness” which 19th-century English poet Matthew Arnold prized so dearly. The exquisite diversion they offer is sufficient to confirm their greatness. This is not to suggest that great epics, novels, dramas, and romances do not inspire us on a moral level, for certainly we wish ourselves braver in the company of Hector and more merciful in the presence of Bishop Myriel. Even so, we should not expect that every poem or story we open will provide a religious experience or moral epiphany, any more than we should expect foie gras and filet mignon at every meal. At times, Hooten Wilson seems to entertain this sort of expectation. In the same vein, she writes, “The most powerful stories are those that have us cast stones at our own reflections.” Though it might sound unchristian to say so, there are many works from many ages that quite certainly have no such effect. To throw a stone at our reflection, we must find the reflection first, and as often as not — perhaps more often than not — we do not “find” ourselves in our reading. Often our reading is all the more enjoyable when we don’t.

Thankfully, Hooten Wilson provides more than enough proof that she is not a moralist simpliciter with no interest in form and technique. Her eye for beauty does not appear to be distracted by dogmatic obsessions. God knows that today’s schools could use more of this sensibility. It should be said that in no way does Hooten Wilson present herself as a self-appointed high priestess of the library, humorlessly vigilant and eager to apprehend the poor soul whose literary life is less devout than her own. Her patient handling of her material and the unembarrassed love she has for the literature of so many tribes and nations suggest that her students must be very lucky indeed to learn from her.

©2024 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

To submit a Letter to the Editor, click here: https://www.newoxfordreview.org/contact-us/letters-to-the-editor/