A Theology Of Reading Book

A Theology of Reading is the third book I've read by Alan Jacobs. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction I found to be a bit thin and banal, but after this book, I understand why he chose the title Pleasures. Breaking Bread with the Dead, his most recent release, I found invigorating and delightful. Published about two decades after A Theology of Reading, Breaking Bread shows Jacobs's development as a reader, expanding certain ideas he explores here.

I've quoted this book extensively below, so I shan't summarize Jacobs's arguments here. Love has had primacy in my understanding of theology for years, now, and applying it to reading as a hermeneutic immediately attracted me. Yet, from pastors and friends and academicians alike, I've received antagonism for building all my theological understanding on the truth that "God is love." A pastor once told me that beginning any evangelism with the love of God, rather than his lordship (as if there were a difference), was wrong. He was part of a Calvinist strain that George Eliot critiqued (see quotation from pages 26-27 below). Inelegantly, I've termed this "glory-hog" theology, one that views God as rabid for his own glory, rather than a being who is love, is glorified in love, and in whom all true love is. In "glory-hog" theology, love is often viewed as a nice, cozy, but weak afterthought, not the way in which God lives, moves, and has his being. God is not like Santa in Elf who needs to be believed to get the sleigh off the ground. Neither is he like the monster in the Doctor Who episode, "The Rings of Akhaten," who needs to be glorified to stay his wrath. As Love, God is infinitely giving, expecting nothing in return. It is this love to which he calls his people, and which Jacobs applies to the reading life.

A Theology of Reading gave me a language to understand readings where I did not choose a hermeneutic of love. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read about a year ago, was a very mixed experience for me. On one hand, I loved watching Francie grow, and learning more about her world of early 20th century Brooklyn. On the other hand, my derision for her mother Katie colored my whole reading of the book. After I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I committed to return to it. When I do, I plan to read with a hermeneutic of love rather than letting my feelings for one character define the whole experience.

In contrast, my reading of another disliked book, The Poisonwood Bible, had more of the hermeneutic of love, though I liked it even less than my first reading of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The experience of reading Poisonwood was just not enjoyable for me. I didn't connect with any of the characters, and the aesthetics of the novel didn't make me enjoy the experience. However, Kingsolver's masterful writing persisted in drawing me in, and the character of Nathan Price is embedded in my mind, though he is not a character I admire. Though the novel is not one of my literary "friends," I still respect its wonderful craft, its important message, and its power as a story. I'd happily read it in a book group or an academic setting, though once was enough for my personal reading. Reading with love does not mean that we have to enjoy or like everything we read, but that we read charitably, with complete attention, for the sake of our neighbors. Jacobs does not mention phenomenological reading here, but it flows well with his ideas.

Currently, I'm reading Rumer Godden's Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy--almost done. (Thanks for the recommendation, Christine!) Because I cherished Godden's In This House of Brede, I found it easy to being Five for Sorrow with a hermeneutics of love. One character, however, challenged my hermeneutic. Vivi is a problematic character who needs love (as all humans do), but is nearly impossible to love. This reading experience discomforts me, because it reveals my human tendency to love what is easy and spurn those who are hard to love. Yet, exploring this in the safe space of a novel is an ideal way to come to terms with my tendencies, and be more aware--and careful--of how I love people outside books. I'll speak more of reading Five for Sorrow with love in my eventual review of it. This novel is a rewarding expedition in the hermeneutics of love.

In all, I found A Theology of Reading enriching, and will reference and return to it as I continue to develop my own ideas about reading. However, for the non-academic reader, I'd recommend Breaking Bread with the Dead for an accessible, concise practice of reading with the hermeneutics of love. A Theology of Reading is hard to find, too, and expensive in the few places it can be purchased. Heavy with philosophy, literary criticism, and theology, it's not for every loving reader, but one doesn't have to read this book to read with a hermeneutic of love.

"....To read lovingly because of and in the name of Jesus Christ, who is the author and guarantor of love. These are some of the purposes of this book." (1)

[on Jesus naming love as the first and second greatest commandments] "That the one identified by the Christian Church as incarnate Love speaks these words compels our closest attention to them. To say that 'all the law and the prophets' 'depend' upon these two commandments--or this twofold commandment--is to say that the multidude of ordinances and exhortations in the Old Testament presuppose the love that Jesus enjoins. No one can meet the demands of the Law who does not achieve such love." (9)

"...it follows that there can be no realm of distinctively human activity in which Jesus' great twofold commandment is not operative." (10)

"Given the uncertain cultural position of Christianity in its early centuries, this combative attitude may be comprehensible. But the hermeneutics of love requires that books and authors, however alien to the beliefs and practices of the Christian life, be understood and treated as neighbors." (13) Jacobs brilliantly returns to this with Basil--see below.

"...the preservation of difference is absolutely central to a hermeneutics of love. I am to love my neighbor as myself, but this is a challenge precisely because the neighbor is not myself….without the preservation of difference there can be neither transmission nor harmony." (14)

"Certainly [Augustine] is not claiming that the reader can simply assume an attitude of love and then sally boldly forth, like Don Quixote, to interpret Scripture without fear. But neither is he saying that one can read Scripture properly by attending only, or even chiefly, to the avoidance of error." (16-17)

"The kind of pleasure we take in a well-crafted work of literary art is very like the pleasure we take in a well-cooked meal, in that it is something given to us by another person. It is a gift that we honor, and whose giver we honor, by receiving it with gratitude. It is not always appropriate, it is not always charitable, to take that which is offered to us in a spirit of pleasure and recreation and use it according to a rigid criterion of studious application." (24) I once helped my then-boyfriend to cook a meal for someone (incidentally, a professor of biblical studies) who proceeded to critique it in detail after eating, never stopping to appreciate that he had been fed a deliciously handmade meal at no expense to himself. He was a real piece of work, but I hope his line of work refines his character!

[quoting a review by Marian Evans/George Eliot of a book by John Cumming, a Calvinist preacher] "Dr. Cumming's theory, as we have seen, is that actions are good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference to the 'glory of God.' God, then, in Dr. Cumming's perception, is a being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and justice, considered as effecting the well-being of his creatures; He has satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and dispositions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sympathy with men by anxiety for the 'glory of God.'" (26-27)

[on Bonhoeffer] "[L]et us simply note here that [this passage] marks a kind of inversion of Marian Evans's argument in her critique of Dr. Cumming: For her, the love of God has a purely instrumental function, and is to be measured by its usefulness in prompting the love of other people (love of whatever kind), whereas for Bonhoeffer, our love of God, and our recognition fo God's love for us, is the one essential form of love: Only it liberates us to love others ever more fully and passionately." (30)

"But if our love is only preferential--if we select some books as the proper and worthy recipients of our love, while excluding others from the charmed circle, as is always the case with Aristotelian forms of love--it fails to achieve genuine Christian charity. Charity demands that we extend the gift of love to all books, and receive the gift of love when it is offered to us….there is no single form that either the giving or the receiving takes, and moreover there is no inconsistency in having certain favorite books while seeking to love all other books in the way appropriate to them….We may indeed use books--it is right and proper that we do so--but we must use them in the way that Augustine counsels, which is to say, a way that recognizes their value as parts of God's world and that therefore loves them in an ordinate matter." (32-33)

"...we will not read all books with full sympathy, with a sense of kinship, with an awareness of expanded understanding, with the conviction that this book teaches me what I need to know and could not have learned from another book. In short, not all the books we read will become our friends. But if we consider that we owe a debt of loving and constant attentiveness (or faithfulness) to all the books we read--whether they be friends, foes, or neighbors--we provide for ourselves what Bonheffer calls the cantus firmus, the ground over which variations can be elaborated and developed." (67)

"Surely such honesty and humility are necessary in a reader who would love God and her neighbor through the act of reading." (75)

"For no one can practice hermeneutical charity who is unwilling to receive a poem, a story--a work--as a gift." (81)

"A healthy suspicion, bounded by a commitment to the love of my neighbor, is more properly called discernment: not the discernment of Nietzsche's serpent, which can only suspect and therefore is not discernment at all--since its conclusions are preestablished--but the discernment that is prepared to find blessings and cultivate friendships; in short, to receive gifts. There are enormous risks involved in such an enterprise, precisely the risks that Nietzsche was at the utmost point to avoid." (88)

"The hopeless [or primarily suspicious] interpreter, in the lassitude of despair, can neither receive nor offer gifts...he or she has nothing left to love, and in the end lacks even the consolations of interpretation itself." (90)

[on Jane Tompkins's engagement with Buffalo Bill] "Tompkins's charity consists in the wholeness of her attention, her refusal to sacrifice attention to one truth so that another may be privileged. Her own judgment is not so decisive, it is complex and ambivalent, and this is appropriate to the difficulty of the task at hand." (118) Jacobs frequently quotes Iris Murdoch as a guide: "Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused." (1, and elsewhere)

"Basil readily acknowledges that everything one can learn from pagan literature one can learn still better from Scripture; but why not take every opportunity to grow in wisdom and virtue? The problem is to learn how to do so….It is precisely less "scrupulous" and more equitable reading of the pagan writers that releases them for our use, gives them a role in our school of virtue. By reading them according to the charitable spirit rather than the harsh and inflexible letter, we make them our own….Basil's model provides a powerfully liberating alternative, in which even seriously wrong-headed books can provide some nourishment." (142) Jacobs examines this extensively in Breaking Bread with the Dead.

"For Basil, it is this framework of faithful obedience to the Gospel witness that liberates the reader to read more generously, according to the spirit rather than the letter. Absent such faithful obedience, such reading would exemplify license rather than liberty, antinomianism rather than the freedom of Christian charity." (144)

"Charitable readers do not calculate the likelihood of reward for their loving attention, but their commitment to hope is a kind of calculation, a wager on the graciousness of God and on the imago dei present in the writers of books." (148)

"Love, like the Cross--but then Love is the Cross, and the Cross is Love--can be nothing but foolishness in the eyes of this world, and we laugh at foolishness….because laughter is the natural human response to incongruity….What could be more incongruous than the conjunction of love and interpretation?" (151)