Literature And Lent
By PAUL KRAUSE
Books have the power to change your life. They can make you a better human, a better lover, a better Christian. We have a great treasure for our personal and spiritual nourishment. And in this Lenten season, reconnecting with the love and transfiguring power and beauty of literature should be a priority for all Christians.
One of the great tragedies of modern Christianity, especially Catholicism, has been the gradual decline and fall of the artistic and literary tradition that was so essential to our identity and consciousness.
The forsaking of high art and literature has impoverished our souls, our Church, and our culture. Yet the evidence for the enduring power and grace offered by art and literature endures. Countless adaptations, articles, and books on the likes of Dante, Chesterton, or Tolkien appear year after year; countless new readers are brought into an implicit Christian vision in picking up the pages of Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, and The Lord of the Rings.
Lent is a time to draw closer to the “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” I often tell students who have a fondness for literature to take the Lenten season to cultivate that love to the True Love that sprinkles its message of beauty, goodness, and truth in the pages of books and poems we pick up and read (whether for the first time or again for a new time).
Literature, of course, deals with the human condition. And the human condition is predicated on love — the greatest virtue of the Christian faith and the part of human nature that Christianity has concerned itself most extensively with. To be drawn closer to love and to understand love is what part of being made in the image of God entails.
The Christian theological tradition, following the more developed anthropologies laid out by St. Augustine and his successors, maintained that because God is Love and Reason humans are made in that image to share in love and reason. Ipso facto, humans are made in love for love and in wisdom for wisdom; what makes humans unique is that they can know and experience love rather than just experience love (like the other animals).
Here we have the great wellspring of the human spirit of love to wrestle with: literature. Great literature, especially, concerns itself with what humans have always concerned themselves with — the contemplation of love. Yet we know from the treasures of the literary garden that love is often disparate and contradictory from our written pages.
To some, this is a grave problem. To let ourselves read such works that clearly do not reflect a Christian perspective is tantamount to allowing oneself be tempted toward the abyss. I find this crypto-philistine outlook depressing and ultimately counterproductive.
The grounding we have in the truth of love from Revelation allows us the ultimate window into literature and permits a more thorough understanding of literature. Through Christian eyes we can discern the truth and shortcomings of all literary works. Moreover, we can also declare why certain works fall short of the Christian understanding.
Works, for instance — which implicitly agree with St. Thomas Aquinas that love is “the unitive force” — that help bring two together as one and grant a sense of serenity to those individuals can be appraised for espousing precisely what Christians have long understood.
Insofar that such works promote that unitive serenity in the spirit of mere eroticism, though, can be equally reproached for failing to see the unitive serenity that sexual union brings is due to the sacrament instituted by God and not mere erotic yearning.
Furthermore, that love is stronger than death and unites us with the beloved even after death equally falls into this category of understanding from Christian eyes: Christians can, and must, appraise what is truth or can be discerned as truthful from the great garden of literature while also warning against the insufficiencies that such stories also proclaim. It is part of spiritual preparedness and maturity.
Lent, then, is the most appropriate time to wrestle with literature and discern the profundities of literature given that Lent itself is the heightened season of wrestling and discerning the love of God and His sacrificial Passion and death that unites Him with us (and many great works do, in fact, proclaim this message in their own unique ways).
The refusal to wrestle is an abdication of the Christian fight and imperative. Even reading the great saints reveals to us that they wrestled with the non-Christian writers of their time, appraising what they found useful and critiquing what they knew to be insufficient. The entire tradition of intellectual appraisal and criticism we have inherited is, frankly, a Christian invention and should not be tossed away because of the fearful misassumption that reading non-Christian authors will jeopardize one’s soul.
We have a great opportunity, in this world of canceling and deconstruction, to be lights in the darkness. The light we shine, though, is not simply because we read and have knowledge or an education. The light we shine is in the love of learning and reading we embody and share, that illuminous and radiant shine from the heart, with others.
To love is to be moved to the Love that governs all things and is embodied in the love that moves literature.
From Christian eyes, then, we can appraise the failures and shortcomings of literature. We can also see the truth, limited or universal as it may be, in the great works that have moved human hearts and souls whether for millennia, hundreds of years, or just the past decade or two.
Let me now conclude by returning to Tolkien, who has been in the news lately because of an upcoming Amazon adaptation of his mythos and world-building. Tolkien brings to us the realities of good and evil and the struggles to live a life of happiness and love in a “fallen world.”
Moreover, Tolkien’s most famous works (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) are fundamentally pilgrim stories. Our protagonists embark on pilgrimage. In their pilgrimage they not only encounter evil and must overcome it, they also must embody that virtue that is now lost in modernity: perseverance. Following 2 Timothy: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” Tolkien’s characters are transformed not merely because of their confrontation with evil but because of the pilgrimage they set out on.
While we affirm that we are a pilgrim Church and that our life, from start to finish, is a pilgrimage, Lent brings the idea of pilgrimage to the fore of our lives. We find in reading the pilgrimage of our lives, of our souls — whether in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, or Tolkien. Having an enriched spiritual life through reading is one of the many joys of Lent.
And in reading we can also be drawn closer to the God who journeyed, died, and rose again with, and for, us.
