In the Middle of Things
To have read a dozen books in common, to have to hand a set of shared stories, is a great pleasure and a great ground of friendship. Yet the role of literature in education today stands in question. What, many ask, is the point of reading, particularly of reading fiction? And, beset with technological distractions, shrinking attention spans, and the vituperations of certain kinds of social orthodoxy, literature is endlessly excerpted, bracketed, or abandoned. Even in places where great literature continues to be revered, a sense can emerge that its purpose is either ornamental or instrumental, that a great book is either a casual entertainment at the periphery of the business of life or a means of inculcating certain ideas, intellectual or moral.
To be sure, to read a great book is often to be entertained and to engage with metaphysics and ethics. Yet it ought also to be, at least at times, a transcendent experience that moves the will toward conformity with God. Perhaps no greater example of this is to be found than that of Dante’s encounter with Vergil’s Aeneid, which so moved the author of La Commedia as to set him off for Heaven, through Hell and Purgatory, in the company of the great Mantuan himself.
Nor is Dante alone, in the literary tradition, in taking Vergil as master. St. Augustine’s Confessions is in many respects modeled on the Aeneid. The hero takes a similar Mediterranean peregrination, giving himself to the pleasures of Carthage before making his way to Rome and, in the fulfillment of all Romanitas, laying the temporal foundations of the Church of Rome. St. Augustine must leave behind his mother, if only for a time, as Aeneas left behind Dido. He must journey, as it were, into the underworld of his own sinfulness to come at last to conversion and the blissful, momentary ascent to eternity. His apotheosis is not his own but a son’s share in the life of the Son.
We here dwell on these parallels—and many others could be adduced—in a spirit of questioning. For Augustine, following Plato, makes manifold use of both the techniques and texts of the poets while frequently excoriating their excesses and exposing the dangers they present to the reader. As he says in Book One of the Confessions, “I was forced to memorize the wanderings of some fellow called Aeneas, while forgetting my own waywardness, and to weep over Dido, who killed herself for love, when all the while in my intense misery I put up with myself with never a tear, as I died away from you, O God, who are my life.” Many passages from Ovid and even Vergil can arouse lust. The wrath of Achilles can inflame less godly rages. An author can make the weaker argument seem stronger, mislead the youth, and turn the gullible from God. And the theater, to all these other ills, can add the danger of making of a man an actor, the trick ponies of the human race, to borrow from Steinbeck.
What ought the reader to make of this tension in the Confessions, that between Augustine’s admonitions against poetry and his adaptations of its powers to his purposes? And what, in turn, can the would-be educator, especially one dealing in the literary tradition, learn from Augustine?
Certainly we ought not conclude that Augustine’s literary qualities are accidental, nor that he was simply unable to shake the enchantment that the poetry of his youth had worked upon him. Rather, perhaps it is the case that this apparent discord between message and method is a calculated invitation to the reader to think critically about literature, to examine his own experience with poetry and to discern both the dangers and the opportunities it affords him. The text is itself, on this reading, an educator, leading the reader through the terrain of Augustine’s soul into the reader’s own.
The literary tradition offers abundant examples of this kind of textual education in virtue. Plato’s dialogues are themselves such texts, especially on the esoteric reading. Many of St. Thomas More’s works function in a similar fashion, from his Life of Pico to, most notably, his Utopia. Does More actually want us to believe in a perfectly legislated island society? Or is his tale of Utopia (the non-place), delivered by Raphael Hythlodaeus (the arch-angelic “nonsense peddler”) to Morus (“the fool”), meant rather to train the reader in virtue, which cannot be mandated but only formed through the repetition of freely chosen virtuous action, that the person might little be little made ready to reach Eutopia, the good place which is not reached by ship or on foot but by desiring to go there, and desiring it valiantly and with one’s whole heart?
Further analogues abound in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It’s a text which begins with many duplicates: two ports, two inns, two church services, as though Melville is presenting the reader with points whereby he might triangulate his own position with respect to the narrative. This invitation to active engagement with the text occurs at the level of the sentence as well. When Ahab is described, for instance, as a “grand, ungodly, god-like man,” the evident discord between the two latter terms invites the reader to pause, to ponder, to wonder how it is that a man can be both ungodly and god-like, and in turn to ask the same question about himself. For who has not sensed in himself the capacity for the Ahabian, the recognition of the greatness of his God-given soul against the terrible possibility of that soul’s spurning the God who gave it? The text becomes the teacher, leading the reader out of himself by plunging him into himself.
These capacities of literature to invite reflection, capacities Augustine presses and expands continually, go beyond attempting to inculcate virtue through the distillation of moral lessons. Rather, they train the reader in virtue by allowing him to become more virtuous, both intellectually and morally, through imaginatively grappling with the text. Great literature prompts not simply passive reception but activity of soul which can itself be transformative, leading man to the fulfillment of his nature.
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited offers a particularly compelling vision of the capacities of literature to provide authentic education, education that leads the soul by stages toward conformity with God. The book is based heavily on the Confessions and, in turn, on the Aeneid, beginning in medias res, as Charles Ryder, awaiting orders at last to join battle in World War II, details his journey from youth into middle age. The journey takes Charles, following his friend Sebastian Flyte, to North Africa and back to England, which, the Gawain poet reminds us, is mythologically connected with Troy and so with Rome. Its mythos lies in direct descent from the Aeneid, but it has tragically, through the Henrician Reformation, severed itself from Rome. This societal divorce is reflected by the many marital divorces which will govern the text, and all these separations call for a return to Brideshead, a return, that is, to virginity, that virginity to which God in some sense restores the soul in eternity.
The book makes clear that it is an educational text. The beginning of the journey lies in Oxford, where Charles’s true learning begins not so much in the lecture hall as in the joy of his friendship with Sebastian, in whose rooms he learns the taste of plovers’ eggs and the cadences of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. That friendship, that love, will lead to Charles’s first sojourn at Brideshead Castle, to live wherein is “an aesthetic education.” From baroque architecture and painting to wine to fruit to flowers, Charles begins, during this high summer of 1922, to love the things of this world, to borrow an Augustinian phrase. And he becomes an artist in his own right, painting a mural at Brideshead which will mark the beginning of his journey toward becoming a professional architectural painter.
Sebastian is “the forerunner,” as Charles says, in love. The friendship with Sebastian, who has fled in alcoholic misery to North Africa, gives way after long years to the love of Julia, Sebastian’s sister. But this love is adulterous. Both Charles and Julia are already married, and both, following King Henry, seek divorce and remarriage. Mirabile dictu, Charles finds himself living at Brideshead, and poised, as old Lord Marchmain nears death, to inherit, through Julia, the place which seems time and again to have set him on the way to happiness.
In the end, though, Julia says she cannot marry Charles, cannot set up a rival good to God’s, cannot reject the truth of her faith, the strange recusant faith of a Catholic family in England.
The Charles we meet at the opening of the novel, and whom we leave at its end, is one who, outwardly, has fallen from near-felicity into misery. He is, as he puts it, “homeless, childless, middle-aged, love-less.” But that is not the final word. As Charles walks about Brideshead once more, his army unit having been posted there, as he visits the chapel and hears the soldiers on the grounds calling out “Pick-em-up, pick-em-up” in an echo of St. Augustine’s “Tolle, lege,” he feels a new lightness of heart. He has been led from love to love and at last to the love of God.
Charles’s education is one that we readers share. For, through the enchantment of Waugh’s prose, we too fall in love with the beautiful things of the world, with Sebastian, with Julia. Our hearts break when these loves seem to slip away, and that very sense of heartbreak is a reminder of the restlessness of the heart, which will indeed break again and again until it gives itself to the one who endures, the one who makes and heals and saves.
The teacher, Augustine and Waugh give us to know, ought to remember that learning begins in delight. Through the beauty of words, students are given a taste of the beauty of the Word, who eternally delights in the Father. A sense of such delight in words themselves runs through the heart of all St. Augustine’s writings. He revels in language and invites us to a share in the revelry. This deep delight can operate in such a way as even to transform what could become occasions of sin—the very presentation of sin in literature—into occasions of encounter with God. In Waugh’s prose, for instance, as well as in St. Augustine’s in treating of his own life, sins are shown to be sins. They are not presented as means to ensnare the reader through appealing to the base appetites. They are shown, rather, as reflective of some facet of goodness and as directed, by God’s mercy, to turning the wayward soul back to him.
This, too, is a part of the good teacher’s work, to help students to see, in literature, the lineaments of their own souls, to detect the fault lines in their hearts, to distinguish the savor of true delight from the fickle sweetness of sin. For there will come periods in life when the feeling of delight fades, and the choice of the good must then continue darkly, as it were, by dint of virtue formed through long effort. And literature, we have seen, can indeed offer training in virtue, not simply by proclaiming moral truths, but by occasioning opportunities for the will to move toward the good or away from the bad.
Like Charles Ryder, like Augustine in his Confessions, we are in the middle of things, journeying back, we hope, to Brideshead, to the Word through whom we have come to be. Words, though capable of leading us to sin, are nonetheless meant to offer a means of participating in the life of the Word, of harmonizing thought, speech, and deed, with the Logos. The good teacher guides the student to such harmony, inviting the student to take, to read, and at last to be redeemed.
