Is There a Virtue in This Text?: Reading Well through Interpretive Community

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 34-43

Is There a Virtue in This Text? Reading Well through Interpretive Community

Zachary Beck East Texas Baptist University

As an English professor at a Baptist university that is unabashed in its framing of learning within Christian faith, I want to train my students to think about literature from a Christian perspective. I teach Critical Theory, a course required for all English majors and education majors who specialize in English. On the first day of class, I teach my students that a critic is first and foremost a reader and that to be a student and critic of literature is to be a student of reading well. But my students quickly encounter perhaps the central question for a Christian reader of literature: to adapt the well-known church song, will they know we are Christians by what we read or how we read? Most students enter my class having defined their identity as Christian readers by their reading of the Bible—what they read. Certainly, Christians have long been recognized as “people of the book,” especially after the Reformation rallying cry of Sola Scriptura. This rallying cry also reveals that many Christian readers find identity as much in the Sola as in the Scriptura—they will know we are Christians by what we don’t read. As Christians we embrace the Bible as the word of God that teaches us about the character of God and our relationship to him. St. Paul writes to Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tm. 3:16-17, ESV). Conversely, non-scriptural texts must be regarded with suspicion, for they may mislead the Christian reader with false teaching or worldly wiles. Thus, St. Augustine bemoans the waste of his youth studying classical literature: “I was forced to memorise the wanderings of Aeneas— whoever he was—while forgetting my own wanderings; and to weep for the death of Dido who killed herself for love, while bearing dry-eyed my own pitiful state, in that among these studies I was becoming dead to You, O God, my Life” (Confessions I.XIII.20). Augustine’s parents and teachers applauded his mastery of literature and rhetoric when they should have mourned his ignorance of the one true God. While Paul’s commendation of the Scriptures and Augustine’s grief over his benighted soul are true, they do not present the full picture. In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, Augustine argues that non-scriptural texts—even works by pagan authors—can contain valuable truths; he refers to these truths as the Egyptian gold that the Israelites plunder in their escape from bondage (II.40.60). This observation would suggest that how a Christian reads these texts—how one

separates the gold from the dross—is more important than what the text is. In the Book of Acts, the Ethiopian eunuch appeals to the apostle Philip, “How can I [understand what I am reading], unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31a). The Scriptures equip Christ-followers, but they also need guidance in how to receive that equipping. Similarly, Paul is not urging Timothy for the first time to read the Scriptures; he is reminding Timothy of the lessons he has taught him. Those lessons will emerge for Timothy when he turns to the Scriptures in Paul’s absence because Paul has set up a framework for how to read the Scriptures through his long, fruitful discipleship of Timothy. Even with God’s word, the “Good Book,” readers cannot ignore how to read well. In the introductory chapter to her excellent book On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior presents two different perspectives on what to read. She quotes Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, who seems to favor greater discrimination in one’s choice of reading: “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but the well reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best” (17). By contrast, in his Areopagitica, John Milton argues for “promiscuous” reading: “Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason?” (Quoted in Prior 15). Prior seems to side with Milton on what to read, based on her own experience:

[B]y reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately, I learned spiritual lessons I never learned in church or Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that I would never have encountered within the realm of my lived experience. Most importantly, by reading about all kinds of characters created by all kinds of authors, I learned how to be the person God created me to be. (14)

Prior credits “reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately” for shaping her as a person and a Christ-follower. Yet she argues that “it is not enough to read widely. One must also read well. One must read virtuously” (15). Thus, the Christian reader cannot focus solely on what to read; she must also consider how to read.

Prior is convinced that literature can act as a school of virtue. The reader immerses herself in the story and vicariously experiences alongside the characters moral deliberation and action, which helps readers develop their own virtues: “Just as water, over a long period of time, reshapes the land through which it runs, so too we are formed by the habit of reading good books well” (19). But if readers do not have a sense of how to make virtuous judgments before coming to the text, how can they be sure to make the right judgments as they read? What if the text’s author is very talented aesthetically but bankrupt morally? Will the reader be led astray morally through an enjoyable aesthetic experience?

Prior argues that these problems are overcome by literary language, which “is virtuous in and of itself, and it figures forth virtue in the reader as well” (26). She attributes this inherent virtue of literary language to a transcendental quality of polysemy:

Words carry resonances that spill beyond the bounds of logic and even conscious thought. [Graham] Ward says of literary texts that “their acts of naming and our acts of reading” cannot but conjure the possibilities of transcendence, “particularly when we attend to experience rather than dictionary definitions, as either a writer or a reader.” The fullness of literary language echoes meaning—and reminds us that there is, in fact, meaning. (22)

This transcendence would seem difficult to verify beyond the testimony of the individual reader. Indeed, Prior does not maintain the stance of literary language’s transcendental goodness, arguing that “[l]literature is birthed from our fallenness” and that “the desires that are cultivated by books…can pull us toward the good life—or toward false visions of the good life (as Gustave Flaubert shows in romance-reading Emma Bovary)” (26). In attempting to protect the moral value of reading good books well, Prior locates virtue within the text but has difficulty providing a convincing account of how virtue could be located there. This difficulty can be avoided through a greater emphasis on the first step in the cultivation of virtue—training. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares “that none of the moral virtues is implanted in us by nature, for nothing which exists by nature can be changed by habit” (1103a). People do not possess the virtues naturally, according to Aristotle; therefore, he believes that “to be a competent student of what is right and just…one must first have received a proper upbringing in moral conduct” (1095b). A person must learn about the virtues before she can act virtuously. Yet knowledge about the virtues, although necessary, is not sufficient for a person to be virtuous: “[M]ost men do not perform such [virtuous] acts, but by taking refuge in argument they think that they are engaged in philosophy and that they will become good in this way. In so doing, they act like sick men who listen attentively to what the doctor says but fail to do any of the things he prescribes” (1105b). Talking about virtue does not make one virtuous. For example, a philosophy professor may be able to explain to his students what prudence is but then make numerous imprudent decisions in his personal life. Knowledge of the virtues must be put into action, and that action must become habitual. Aristotle compares virtuous action to other practical skills:

[W]e acquire [the virtues] by first having put them into action, and the same is also true of the arts. For the things which we have to learn before we can do them we learn by doing: men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-

controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage. (1103a-b)

Not only does Aristotle emphasize action with regard to being virtuous, he applies rigorous criteria when assessing whether an action is virtuous or not: “first of all, he must know what he is doing; secondly, he must choose to act the way he does, and he must choose it for its own sake; and in the third place, the act must spring from a firm and unchangeable character” (1105a). A person’s action can be judged virtuous, claims Aristotle, only when that person has voluntarily chosen the action, knowing that the action is virtuous and for the sake of its virtue; furthermore, this knowledge and love of virtue must be woven into the person’s moral fiber. Thus, to be virtuous, a person first has to learn what virtue is and then intentionally practice virtue until virtuous actions become second nature to her, out of her love for virtue. It would seem that Milton’s promiscuous reading would not aid a reader’s growth in virtue, unless she comes to the texts with an understanding of virtue already in order to discern truth from error. Nor would a reader be able to follow Baxter’s advice to choose the best books to read without either the knowledge of what to look for within them or a virtuous person telling the reader which texts to read. But even in the latter situation, the reader with a reading list in hand from her virtuous friend would be like the Ethiopian eunuch who needs a guide for understanding. The what is insufficient for Christian readers; they also need the how, which they gain through community. In his work Is There a Text in This Class? Fish argues that meaning is not inherent within a text but rather is made of a text by the members of a particular community reading it within a particular context. A well-known example from his book is the list of linguists’ names Fish put on the blackboard for one class, which he then identified as a poem for analysis in the class immediately following, which covered “English religious poetry of the seventeenth century” (Fish 322). From this anecdote Fish observes, “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities” (326). In other words, Fish’s students successfully interpreted the names on the blackboard as a poem, first, because Fish had told them it was a poem and, second, because they had been trained—by Fish and by numerous other people since they were young—that a poem has a certain set of qualities. So when these students are told by their professor that a poem is on the board, they see it as a poem and derive meaning from how they see it. According to Fish, “Indeed, these categories are the very shape of seeing itself, in that we are not to imagine a perceptual ground more basic than the one they afford…. To be in the situation (this or any other) is to ‘see’ with the eyes of its interests, its goals, its understood practices, values, and norms, and so to be conferring significance by seeing, not after it” (334). But what if Fish had not told his students that the list of names on the board was a poem? Fish would argue that his students would have attributed to the list whatever significance would be most appropriate to their community and situation at that moment. Perhaps they would have read it as a list, or perhaps

they still would have read it as a poem, even without Fish’s prompting. Either way, the students would attribute some meaning to the names on the board as soon as they saw it, even if that meaning were “group of words that is unfamiliar but might be important to me.” For, as Fish points out in a different chapter, “one is [not] trapped forever in the categories of understanding at one’s disposal (or the categories at whose disposal one is), but that the introduction of new categories or the expansion of old ones to include new (and therefore newly seen) data must always come from the outside or from what is perceived, for a time, to be the outside” (314-315). Rather than questioning the presence of meaning, Fish is simply questioning its location, moving it out of the text and into a community of readers. The presence of meaning is never in dispute, and the reader can never not take an interpretational stand: “[T]here is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought…” (319-320). Yet when a reader is deeply immersed within a community, or when a community is widely pervasive, “the meanings they enable seem ‘naturally’ available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances” (309). For example, if a reader is in a community that already agrees upon what virtues are, how to get them, and why one should practice them, then she could readily agree with Prior that “[l]iterature embodies virtue…by offering images of virtue in action and…by offering the reader vicarious practice in exercising virtue…” (15). It may seem like literary language “is virtuous in and of itself, and it figures forth virtue in the reader as well” (26), but just like Fish’s students who interpret the list of linguists to be a seventeenth-century religious poem, Prior’s readers can successfully interpret novels and short stories as exhibiting virtues, first, because Prior has told them these literary works contain virtues and, second, because they have been trained to recognize virtue and find it desirable. Readers may think that I am questioning the presence of virtues or offering a moral relativism; like Fish, however, I do not wish to question the presence of virtues but to relocate them out of the text and into the reading community. Donald G. Marshall describes how reading has always been a communal act, evident in how we acquire the ability to read:

It is obvious that we have learned to read and that means that we have been taught by others…. Much more than learning to decode marks on a page, we were learning what reading various texts in various ways could do for us: inform, entertain, provoke thought…. We have internalized an activity that retains at every point the traces of its social origin. (76)

Marshall points out that learning to read includes learning to interpret and that such learning is a communal activity: “Interpretation—the process by which we know our neighbour’s mind—is what we seek in all our social and spiritual relations…. Every act of interpretation aims ‘at an ideal event,—the spiritual unity of community.’ Interpretation thus reveals its ethical and religious

significance” (82). Thus, not only do we learn from our interpretive community what lists and poems are, we also learn what virtues are and why we should pursue them. Yet Marshall observes that modernity has transformed reading into a solitary, individualistic activity: “[T]he picture of the isolated self reading and attempting to understand a single text, so that reference to other readers comes in only after individual understanding has been achieved, is deeply ingrained in all of us” (71). Solitary reading as a means to moral truth has Cartesian underpinnings. In his Discourse on Method, René Descartes surmises that the proper apprehension and acquisition of knowledge must be sought in solitude, “resolving to search for no knowledge other than what could be found within [himself], or else in the great book of the world” (5). Notice that Descartes refers to the world as a “great book,” but he believes it is one to be perused by the private reader. Through his reading of the world around him, Descartes seeks to divest himself of the assumptions put on him by his membership in interpretive communities: “I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed myself from many errors that can darken our natural light and render us less able to listen to reason” (6). He resolves to use his own “natural light” to discern unimpeachable truth: “[M]y entire plan tended simply to give me assurance and to cast aside the shifting earth and sand in order to find rock or clay” (16). Thus he forms his foundational epistemology, his first philosophy, when he finds an ideal solitude: “[T]he onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no worries or passions to trouble me, I remained for an entire day shut up by myself in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my thoughts” (6-7). Crucial to this picture, both for Descartes and for its implications for our current assumptions about reading, is the necessity of freedom, not merely from distraction or interruption—which every reader longs for—but from “example and custom” and “the many errors that can darken our natural light” (5). Before continuing my discussion, I want to clarify that what has been described above is Descartes’s method for discerning foundational truth— reality—in order to build a clear-eyed philosophy based on unquestionable, objective knowledge rather than custom, prejudice, or guesswork. This method does not reflect his perspective on reading, which actually is communal: he holds that “the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most honorable people of past ages, who were their authors, indeed, even like a set conversation in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts…” (3). For Descartes, reading itself is a conversation which he entered into within the communal setting of school as one of the “academic exercises with which we occupy ourselves.” Notice also that reading is a cultural handing-down of the “best thoughts” of “the most honorable people of past ages”; Descartes says that he has “been nourished on letters since [his] childhood” (3). The communal nature of reading and the gradual accretion of knowledge over time are weaknesses of reading in Descartes’s eyes. In spite of the venerability Descartes grants to the great tradition of Western letters, he turns

away from them: “[A]s soon as age permitted me to emerge from the supervision of my teachers, I completely abandoned the study of letters” (5). He abandons reading because he cannot find within the great philosophers the complete certitude he deems necessary for an accurate perception of reality:

Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful, I was not at all so presumptuous as to hope to fare any better there than the others; and that, considering how many opinions there can be about the very same matter that are held by learned people without there ever being the possibility of more than one opinion being true, I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false. (5)

Dissatisfied to be constrained by his community and the people who had shaped it before him, refusing to join any other community because each suffers from the same constraints, Descartes relies on his own supposed intellectual sovereignty: “And thus I thought that book learning, at least the kind whose reasonings are merely probable and that do not have any demonstrations, having been composed and enlarged little by little from the opinions of many different persons, does not draw nearly so close to the truth as the simple reasonings that a man of good sense can naturally make about the things he encounters” (7-8). Thus, when confined to a toasty room by himself on a wintry day in Germany, Descartes prefers to consult his own mind for foundational truth rather than a good book. The Western assumption of a reader as an isolated, free agent can lead the Christian reader to neglect communal learning as an essential element in the pursuit of truth, whether that be the cultivation of virtue in Prior’s case or the establishment of first principles in Descartes’s case. In other words, it is not sufficient that Descartes was exposed to literature in his formative years but that he was nourished: he read under “the supervision of [his] teachers” (5). When Descartes enters that oven-heated room to meditate on first philosophy, he believes that his is a solitary, sovereign mind when really it has been molded by, and is under the influence of, his family, his teachers, his cultural experiences—in short, his community. Similarly, Prior may praise her prodigious reading for teaching her “spiritual lessons [she] never learned in Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that [she] would never have encountered within the realm of [her] lived experience” (14), but those lessons gained through reading were not learned in a vacuum. She is able to grasp spiritual lessons through her voracious reading because she went to church and Sunday school. She is able to grow emotionally and intellectually because the realm of her lived experience forms the scaffolding that she can use to build on her mental edifice. Later in her introduction, Prior acknowledges, “Our actions, our decisions, and even the very perceptions we register in our consciousness have been primed by the larger

story—of our family, our community, our culture—in which we imagine ourselves” (27). If the reader is isolated and must discover virtues inherent within the text, then what to read becomes the more pressing question. We should follow Richard Baxter’s advice, hoping to get our hands on the best books available, but the question remains how one chooses those books. If the reader is discipled in the virtues by her community, then how to read takes precedence. We can enter the world of any text with a framework of virtues already in place and gain moral knowledge from the immersive experience through the act of interpretation. Readers steeped in virtue, enmeshed in their community, can be promiscuous readers, as John Milton prescribes. To return to my students in Critical Theory, my goal is to transform them from solitary Christian readers defined by what they read or don’t read into a community of Christian readers defined by how they read. This transformation is crucial not just because the literary vocation demands wide reading but also because the world bombards them with all manner of texts for all manner of purposes. Christian readers cannot focus exclusively on what to read because they live in a media-saturated world, which requires a strategy for reading from a perspective of faith. As Robert Scholes observes, “Students should learn to read a range of texts, from various times and places, in various genres and media, in ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of textuality…. That students who graduate in English should be excellent readers, ready to encounter unfamiliar texts, to situate them, interpret them, and criticize them—these are the goals of an English education with respect to the consumption of texts” (118, 119). In my class, we analyze genres of “high” literature, such as novels, short stories, and poems, but we also consider “low” forms as well, such as children’s books, scenes from movies, and advertisements. But the analysis of texts as a Christian interpretive community cannot simply be a determination of which texts align with Christian values and which do not. If the interpretive process stopped there, it would be little better than once again determining what to read, because the texts that did not meet “Christian standards” would not receive deeper analytical attention. Scholes points out that a similar kind of textual discrimination can take place in English departments in which “high” texts are treated with reverence and “low” texts are ignored. Rather, “[g]ood reading involves reading every text sympathetically, trying to get inside it, to understand the intentionality behind its composition. It also involves reading every text unsympathetically, critically—but the sympathetic has to come first or the critical reading is impossible” (118). The moral formation that Prior sees in reading literature comes through such a sympathetic reading: “Our desires as human beings are shaped by both knowledge and experience. And to read a work of literature is to have a kind of experience and to gain knowledge” (21). The reader can be drawn into a textual world and vicariously face the same challenges, dilemmas, revelations, and triumphs of the characters in the text. Such a sympathetic immersion can happen even with a product advertisement: the reader can see the desires the advertiser is trying to evoke and make moral judgments about them.

This sympathetic reading finds its parallel in the evangelical missionary investing her life in the people with whom she shares the gospel. The sympathetic Christian reader adopts St. Paul’s strategy to “become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings” (1 Cor. 9:22-23). In my Critical Theory class, I speak of different theoretical approaches as lenses. When students don the deconstructive, Marxist, or postcolonial lenses, they can see different aspects of a text emphasized. The survey of contemporary literary theory actually promotes sympathetic reading on two levels: immersion in the text to be analyzed and consideration of the values that frame the critical lens as well as what is at stake in the textual encounter. At the beginning of the semester, students “adopt” a short story to work with for the duration of the course. With each critical approach we examine, they put on those lenses to interpret their short story. By the end of the semester, when they have to write a longer critical research essay on their adopted story, they have gained an intimate knowledge of it by reading it from many different perspectives. Once we have practiced the sympathetic reading of texts using various critical lenses, we are able to submit our reading experiences to Christian reflection—how does the reading experience move beyond mere sympathy to an act of redemptive love? Here the community of readers plays an important role. Our class is not merely a meeting of colleagues; we are also a fellowship of believers who can help one another bring our faith to bear on the texts. I guide my students through the different theoretical perspectives, pointing out ways that these seemingly atheistic approaches have a place in God’s economy. For example, we look at how Jesus uses deconstructive techniques when responding to the Pharisees’ legalism and how the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert exemplifies Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness. We discuss what it means to be a Christian interpretive community and why it is important for such a community to read “immoral” texts like Fifty Shades of Gray. It is imperative that Christians, and all readers steeped in virtue, not only read all sorts of books but also discuss them together. The purpose of the critical act is to facilitate the instruction and delight of readers in one’s community, so restoring the communal dimension to reading is crucial. After all, Aristotle’s treatment of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics serves as the groundwork for his political theory: we learn how to be virtuous so that we can live together in community. I agree with Karen Swallow Prior that “[t]hrough the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience” (21). But to make the most of that vicarious experience, readers have to constantly return to the actual experience of living in community. They first must be trained in virtue by the community. Then they must practice sympathetic reading, discerning the intentions of the text before making a moral pronouncement. Finally, they must share what they have learned through their reading about the virtues and refine their interpretive strategies within their community. Just as Christians should be recognized wherever they go by how they love others, so also should a Christian’s

reading practices be shaped by the communal pursuit of loving God and neighbor. They will know we are Christians by how we read, rather than by what we read.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Martin Ostwald. Prentice Hall, 1999. Augustine. Confessions, 2nd edition, translated by F. J. Sheed, edited by Michael P. Foley. Hackett, 2006. _______ . On Christian Doctrine, translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr. Prentice Hall, 1958. The Bible. English Standard Version. Bible Gateway. Bible Gateway/Crossway, 2016. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Donald A. Cross. Hackett, 1998. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, 1980. Marshall, Donald G. “Reading and Interpretive Communities.” The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory, edited by David Barratt, Roger Pooley, and Leland Ryken. Baker Books, 1995, pp. 69-84. Prior, Karen Swallow. On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Brazos Press, 2018. Scholes, Robert. “A Fortunate Fall?” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd edition, edited by David H. Richter. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 111-119.