Reading Without Virtue
If there is no reading in culture, can there be virtue?
We have a problem with reading in the 21st century.
Of the responses available to us, the shrug of the shoulders is the only one not permitted. Dante reserved a special place in inferno for those who refused to take a side on important questions—the souls are chased around by gnats in their birthday suits behind an empty banner for eternity. I have better hopes and dreams for my everlasting soul than that.
But in seriousness, I do not believe apathy can be excused in a culture where reading is decreasing every single year. There’s a myth that literacy rates were once used to count beds in prisons because the correlation was so high between those who cannot read above a third-grade level and incarcerated men. I won’t offer you all the despairing numbers about reading since I agree with Mark Twain that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Instead, let’s talk about what we all see and experience in our postliterate culture.
When we discuss reading as a society, we are not merely talking about a pastime disappearing such as kids no longer collecting baseball cards or playing marbles, we are talking about the loss of access to the treasures of wisdom from our shared tradition. We are—without fully understanding the ins and outs of the reality—lamenting the loss of reading as a loss of virtue in our culture.
Immediately, your skin should go goose prickly about such assertions, for what about people like my great grandfather who never attended formal schooling, but was the most noble person I’ve ever met? He read the Bible every day of his life, and the pages were threadbare by his death in his 90s. But the claim is not that a nonreader can never be virtuous—the claim is that a CULTURE that neglects READING collectively cannot be virtuous.
Reading affects every part of our society.
If you have government leaders who do not read, what does that mean for how they live their life? The award-winning novelist Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, used to send a novel every year to his Canadian Prime Minister. “Corporations come and go,” Martell said, in defense of his efforts, “People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as they move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves.”[1] Leaders unversed in history, philosophy, or fiction may imagine life as nothing but number crunching or money making or power accumulation. Martel wanted his Prime Minister to conceive of human flourishing as a broader endeavor than mere work.
Or, what does a culture look like when its artists, entertainers, and producers are not readers? They spin like tops in the current moment, unable to draw from the past and speak into the future. Without what Flannery O’Connor would call prophetic imagination, these artists of the moment cannot make anything worth lasting. It is our knowledge of the past that broadens our vision and allows us to say something enduring to those who come after us. I think of films like High Noon with Gary Cooper, and the impression that it made on me as a kid. Whether or not Edmund Burke ever said it, the theme of that film matches the sentiment, “All it takes for evil to win in this world is for the good person to do nothing.” Anyone who has seen the movie may recall Judge Merrick saying,
In the 5th century B.C., the citizens of Athens[2], having suffered grievously under a tyrant, managed to depose and banish him. However, when he returned some years later, with an army of mercenaries, those same citizens not only opened the gates for him, but stood by while he executed members of the League of Government. A similar thing happened about eight years ago in a town called Indian Falls…
Can you even fathom a film today making such an obscure reference to ancient politics as a way of discerning our current cultural moment?
The movies and shows we create today are educating the broad populace about how to live their lives—what to aspire to, what to emulate, what is “normal.” If our entertainers are not readers, we will have a very superficial culture that is self-congratulatory in aspiration. Worse, we likely will have AI and ChatGPT-produced entertainment that is like giving a person bubble gum and calling it dinner. You think you ate because you chewed but you really only swallowed your own spit.
For our purposes, as Christians dedicated to education, what does it mean for schools and churches when a society does not read?
Schooling becomes impossible without reading. A truism in grammar education is that in K-2 grades, children learn how to read, whereas 3rd grade on is reading to learn. Too many high schools now push students through the system without ever asking them to read books in their entirety. One college president recently dismissed books as passé because Google has access to all the information that you need. These students arrive at college eager to download information into their heads and spew AI-produced material into professors’ inboxes as though that suffices for education.
In churches, once upon a time, we could have said “Christians are readers. [And] We are ‘people of the book,’” but today such a “vision of what it means to follow Christ…falls short,” writes Brad East, arguing that reading has no hold on churchgoers anymore in a postliterate culture. Pastors use AI for sermons. Congregations not only do not read history or philosophy or fiction, but Christians do not read the Bible itself.
The results of our nonreading culture is fragmentation, loneliness, anxiety, fear—the list goes on. While I am refraining from tying threads from a lack of reading to every problem in society, I am not uplifting reading as the cure-all antidote to cultural ills. The world has always had problems ever since death entered the Garden, and these troubles will persist until the Messiah brings about new heaven and earth. We do not look to reading to save us, but can we all acknowledge that a world without reading has become grimmer? That perhaps, just like a world without prayer, a world without faithful Christians fasting and feasting, or a world without art or generosity or music, that a world without reading is a darker one.
Reading as spiritual practice
Instead of pushing reading into the slot of harmless or fun or escapist or whatever, see reading as it is—a spiritual practice. For reading to be a spiritual practice, the activity must be formative. We should be reshaped by grace into Christ-likeness more. How might reading do this?
In reading Scripture, the spiritual practice becomes obvious, for your encounter Christ the Logos (as John calls him in John 1) in the Word itself. “The Word [that] became flesh” and dwelt among us is also still alive in the Gospels themselves. Reading the Bible places the Christian more knowingly in the presence of God. The practice of lectio divina has been around since the earliest days of the Scripture’s creation for reading, meditating, praying, and contemplating. “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,” as the Anglican collect puts it.
When Christians imagine reading nonbiblical literature, the query about spiritual practice becomes more hazy.
First, attention as self-emptying.
Simone Weil, in her reflections on the right use of learning with its end in the love of God, advocates a posture of kenosis or self-emptying before the text before you. When one abandons him/herself of all preconceptions, false ambition, or vain uses of the text before the object, then true attention to it becomes possible. Weil is writing about students learning math, so her advocacy for kenosis is not strictly about reading books. However, the practice of dying to oneself before something higher imitates Philippians 2 where Christ “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used, rather he made himself nothing….”
When we approach books (or math, in Weil’s case) with an objective to use what is before us, then we have lost all possibility of a spiritual practice. It sounds very mystical, but we are describing a mystery that is true. All true mysteries when attempted to be explained in words will sound mystical. However, the whole Christian life should be an imitation of Christ, and this process of letting go of one’s agenda before a book and receiving what the book has to give may be a starting place.
This practice of attention aids us in reading in such a way that we will read God, our neighbor, and the world around us better. We will see and imagine better. Our attention has been transformed from consumption or self-seeking to ego-less and altruistic. If we read regularly with this posture, reading itself becomes a spiritual practice.
Second: In addition to attention, reading may be a spiritual practice because it forms in the reader humility, generosity, patience, perseverance, and so many other virtues. To listen to an author rather than yourself for so many pages increases your humility. It decenters the self. To sit before a poem and have no idea what it means increases your humility. To wonder at the beauty of a sentence. To pity a villain because he or she resembles you more than you cared to admit extends generosity to a fictional character that might become practice for you granting that same open-ended care to the person next door. When you start a book without knowing what to attend to and learn as you go, overcoming your confusion, struggles, and so on, and reach the final word on that last page is like running the race with perseverance in a microcosm. It’s as good for your soul as a track competition for the athlete’s body.
Third: Reading a book is meeting a person. CS Lewis said that in “Reading great literature I become a thousand persons and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, yet it still I who see.” Our eyes are not enough by which to see the world because we are so limited. Reading gives us the opportunity to walk a while in someone else’s shoes—whether fictional, historical, or even the point of view of a self-help author. We practice loving the book the way we would love our neighbor—tiny exercises in admitting our misunderstanding, our subjective views, our blindness and accepting others’ provision. When we end a book still disagreeing, we can practice that dialogue of civility and courageous stance for truth. On a recent flight, I re-read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals for the umpteenth time, and I learned from him, underlined, scribbled “haha” in the margins, and then fundamentally disagreed with his overall conclusions. I think he’s missing a very large part of the true picture. But I don’t want to live a life where Nietzsche is not hanging out in my inner bookshelf. There’s plenty of space, and I want to be as hospitable to the dead guys as the living college students gathered in my living room for Bible study.
Conclusion
I could go on and on about the benefits of reading—in fact, I have. I’ve written a couple of books on it.
I’m an evangelist for reading because I believe that books are a valuable resource for discipleship and forming us into God’s image. I believe that biblical literacy matters for the health of the church and each Christian’s soul. I love to go running and watch Netflix as much as the next American, but when I talk about reading, I am not simply promoting my favorite hobby. And I am not talking about an elitist activity meant for the few. Weil insisted that “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. The need some light from eternity.”
There is a reason that all dystopias depict a world where books are banned or burned and the people in these apocalyptic universes are enslaved not by chains but by not having access to reading. For the God who created light with a word, for an incarnate Lord who called himself the word and revealed himself in a collection of pages of those words, the enemy is the liar who convinces you to do anything else but attend to words. Reading may not save our souls, but thank God that it was the Word who did. Perhaps we should respond by turning the page.
Current Reading
For my umpteenth time I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov in my class. Check out my book club online if this book is on your to-read list.
While I’m nearly finished with Katabasis (which was 5 *****), I paused and read When Breath Becomes Air recently and wept. It’s a true story of a neurosurgeon who dies at 37 of cancer, but he walks us through the pilgrimage from life to death beautifully—drawing on the great books tradition and leaning heavily on the Cross of Christ.
[1] Talking about Hippias, son of Pisistratus, in the 6th century and his attempt to continue his father’s tyrannical rule.