Peter Leithart explains what Christians gain from reading fiction and poetry:
For Christians, the question at a certain level answers itself. We read because we are people of the book, the people of Moses, David, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Matthew, Paul, and John. We read because in reading we encounter the God who is Word. Christians extend this argument easily to “edifying” reading. If we must read the Bible, then we also, it seems, have all good reason to read theology, church history, lives of the saints, devotional guides, Bunyan, always Bunyan. No one raises a protest when a Christian sits down with a serious tome (and, frankly, are tomes ever frivolous?).
It’s sometimes a different story when the question “Why read?” means “Why should we read poetry, or fiction, or drama, or screenplays?” Ask that question, and you may get, at best, a blank stare, and at worst a harangue on the dangers of imagination. The more orthodox your interlocutor, the more likely you’ll get the harangue rather than the stare.
Few Christians are self-conscious Platonists, but we are often instinctive Platonists, suspicious of imagination, fearful that fiction will distract them from the serious business of Christian living, worried about getting caught up in fictions that are no more than images of images. With so many things to pray for, so many unbelievers to evangelize, so much of the Bible still obscure and almost unintelligible – how can a Christian justify spending time with the likes of Dickens and Dostoevsky, not to mention Nabakov or Updike?
My defense of reading here and in a second essay is this: We read fiction and poetry for “pictures” and to make new “friends.”
Read the whole thing: part 1 and part 2
(Via: Justin Taylor)
September 9th, 2010 | 7:01 pm
[...] A question it’s never occurred to me to ask . . . Comments [...]
September 10th, 2010 | 3:52 pm
Peter Leithart seems to come from a Protestant background. Protestantism is laced with dualism; in some respects and cases it is soaked in the stuff. This observation is not meant to contain any value judgment, but only fact. It goes back to Martin Luther.
Catholicism, until the very most recent period, has proven itself better defended against the poison. In fact, the ethos that irritated Luther so much was quite the opposite – it was realism, with the concomitant humanism and healthy appreciation of the properly secular. Really, it boils down to God’s approbation of creation, “And God saw that it was very good,” (Gen 1:31). There is nothing that God has made that is unclean.
Even novels and movies depicting human sexuality (provided they are properly modest) or horrible violence are not indecent in themselves. They become indecent when they glamorize reality, that is, when they cover it with illusion. When the promiscuous teenager never suffers a broken heart or a dulling of the conscience, never a pregnancy, and so on; When the violent gangster is never caught and we never see the consequences of his violence; when the soundtrack, lighting, and nonchalance making hard things smooth and easy; then a glamor is cast, an illusion is set, in which evil begins to look not so bad… good, even. But if we present things as they really are, then we have presented truth, and that is always, always, always a good thing, though not always good for every audience, just as not every medicine is good for every patient. Truth need not be grim “realistic” movies about “real life” – some of those are the worst lies. Fact is stranger than fiction; in like manner fiction can be true than “reality” and the most fictitious fiction, fantasy, can be realist of all.
Puritans hated this aspect of reality, and considered its defenders to be casuits, liars, and Jesuits. They banned theatre because they considered every untrue word to be a lie. That sort of simplistic legalism fits snuggly into dualistic worldviews, like the Puritans’ or the Muslims’, but people who believe that heaven and earth meet in the person of Jesus Christ, must make more careful distinctions. Indeed, often from childhood we are so trained.
September 17th, 2010 | 1:50 am
For fun? Isn’t that a good enough reason to read?
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