A Christian Guide to the Classics E-Book

Leland Ryken

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Christian Guides to the Classic
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 159

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Most people are familiar with the classics of Western literature, but few have actually read them. Written to equip readers for a lifetime of learning, this beginner's guide to reading the classics by renowned literary scholar Leland Ryken answers basic questions readers often have, including "Why read the classics?" and "How do I read a classic?" Offering a list of some of the best works from the last 2,000 years and time-tested tips for effectively engaging with them, this companion to Ryken's Christian Guides to the Classics series will give readers the tools they need to read, interact with, and enjoy some of history's greatest literature.

Leseprobe

A CHRISTIAN GUIDE TO THE CLASSICS

LELAND RYKEN

A Christian Guide to the Classics

Copyright © 2015 by Leland Ryken

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Dual Identity, inc.

Cover image: Shutterstock.com

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4703-4ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4706-5 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4704-1Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4705-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ryken, Leland.

A Christian guide to the classics / Leland Ryken.

    1 online resource.— (Christian guides to the classics)

    Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4704-1 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4705-8 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4706-5 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4703-4 (tp)

1. Christianity and literature. I. Title.

PN49

809—dc23             2015011574

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Contents

Preface  1 Misconceptions about the Classics  2 What Is a Classic?  3 Why We Should Read the Classics  4 The Greatest Classic: The Bible  5 How Not to Read a Classic  6 How to Read a Classic  7 Christian Classics, Part 1  8 Christian Classics, Part 2  9 Secular Classics10 Where to Find the ClassicsAfterword: Reflections on Reading

Preface

This book is a defense of works of literature (and by implication works of art and music and even nonartistic texts like political and historical ones) that go by the name of classic. In our current cultural situation, several distinct groups exist in relation to the classics. One is enlightened non-Christians who value the classics in many of the same ways that Christians value them. A second group is people of liberal (or “politically correct”) persuasion who have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the classics and try to eliminate them from the public’s possession and school curricula. A third group is Christians who value the classics.

In this book, all supporters of the classics, Christians and non-Christians alike, would agree with most of what I say in defense of the classics. We will see, however, that a Christian worldview and outlook supply a few additional arguments and lines of defense. This is why the book is entitled A Christian Guide to the Classics. Christians have a value-added defense of the classics and methodology for assimilating them.

Every art form, discipline of thought, and activity (such as sports) has its classics. In this book, I have discussed the subject in terms of literature because I am a literary scholar, and additionally because this book belongs to a Crossway series of Christian guides to literary classics. Nevertheless, what I say about literary classics has ready carryover to other art forms and disciplines.

To defend the classics requires that we understand what they are. The lay of the land for this book consists of answering three main questions, spread over multiple chapters:

What is a classic?Of what value is a classic?How should we read and assimilate a classic?

CHAPTER 1

Misconceptions about the Classics

There have always been misconceptions about the classics, but until recently these were relatively minor. The picture changed when liberal or “politically correct” advocates wrongly decided that the classics are harmful to society. These false claims need to be refuted. We need to realize at the outset of our discussion that all claims made about the classics are self-revealing of the people who make the claims. The rival positions often say less about the classics themselves and say more about the values and mind-sets of the people who hold the positions. The Christian defense of the classics grows out of the Christian value structure, and attacks on the classics are rooted in the worldview and political outlook of the attackers.

The context in which any defense of the classics occurs today is the contemporary assault on the classics by people of liberal persuasion. They are the ones who have made the classics a life-or-death matter intellectually and educationally by attempting to suppress the classics and keep people from reading them.

I will note in advance that some of the material covered in this chapter will be taken up in greater detail at various points later in this book.

Misconception #1:The classics are irrelevant to us today because they come to us from long ago.

This claim of irrelevance is an expression of what some scholars call “the myth of the contemporary.” Those who hold this mind-set think everything contemporary is automatically better than what preceded it. Correspondingly, something that belongs to the past is inferior. Sometimes this expands into a presumptive rejection of everything from the past for no better reason than that it comes from the past.

One way in which the liberal establishment has killed the classics is to remove them from course syllabi. About thirty years ago professors and students in English departments started to lose interest in literature and to replace it with other material. A graduate student is recorded as saying that he was bored with Wordsworth’s poetry but couldn’t get enough of the philosopher Heidegger. The result is that in most English courses today, literary texts are barely touched.

The first thing to say is that this viewpoint presupposes that the past holds little value for us today. The issue of how we should regard the past will loom large in later sections of this book, so we do not need to say a lot about it here. At this early point, all we need to do is express disagreement with the premise that the past is irrelevant. Under that umbrella, we can note the following:

Anyone who looks at the contemporary scene can see that it does not represent an ideal. On many fronts the modern world is in a state of decline. To hold it up as an ideal by which to denigrate the past is preposterous. At the very least, we need to be open to the possibility that taking an excursion into the accumulated wisdom of the past by way of the classics might provide an avenue for bringing order to our present situation.The pleasure principle is also a relevant consideration. For people who develop the capacity to enjoy being transported from their own time and place to a world of long ago, reading the classics is one of the inexpensive pleasures of life. It is a right and a delight that we can exercise simply by opening a book.The classics have a particular knack for capturing what is universal in human experience. As a result, they are perpetually up-to-date, contrary to what devotees of the contemporary myth claim. The case can be made that Homer is as up-to-date and relevant as a contemporary novel. It just takes more interpretive skill to see the relevance of Homer, and that is where literature courses and published literary criticism show their worth.Taking excursions into the past by reading the classics opens up alternatives to the way things are in our everyday world. At every point in history, good alternatives have existed to the current situation regardless of what ultimately occurred. If we do not tap that source of insight, we become victims of what is imposed on us by the circumstances and thinking of the present.

The foregoing barely scratches the surface of what can be said about the benefits that come from the classics by virtue of their pastness; more will be said in later chapters.

“Nowhere has the attack on the old literature been more strident than in the very place where we might have expected that it would have been most stoutly defended, the university literary departments. . . . The activities of [those] who have been taking the old literature apart seem oftentimes so excessively violent, so irrational, and so counter-productive, so contrary to self-interest as to mystify us” (Alvin Kernan, “What Killed Literature”).

Something additional that needs to be noted is that not all classics come to us from the past. Many of the classics of the past were originally classics in their own time. There have always been contemporary classics. Even if we decide that a classic needs to stand the test of time before fully meeting the criteria of becoming a classic, the passage of time merely validates the status of the work as being a classic. It had the qualities that made it a classic right from the start.

Misconception #2:The classics are elitist and instruments of social oppression.

This line of thought requires some unpacking. We can start with the charge of elitism. There are multiple fallacies in the claim that the classics are elitist, but also some truth. We can start with the obvious: to enjoy reading the classics, we need to be initiated into them. Until we are introduced to Homer or Milton or Hawthorne, they are a foreign world to us. The corresponding question is, “So what?” This is true of every human activity or skill or realm of thought.

We do not know how to write until we are taught to do so. Until we learn to read, we are excluded from reading books. We cannot play baseball until we are initiated into the rules of the game and the techniques of holding a bat and throwing the ball. Playing the piano requires us to take piano lessons as a prerequisite. There is nothing elitist about any of these activities. It is simply in the nature of life that we are prevented from doing certain things until we are initiated into them, usually by someone who takes us under wing and educates us. The word elitist carries automatic sinister overtones that need to be rejected.

“Nor do I agree that great books and ideas are distinctively masculine; nor that they are at all elitist. On the contrary, I believe them to be distinctively human and eminently democratic. They have survived the ages precisely because they are accessible to people of different backgrounds and characters, all of whom can aspire to understand them and to be elevated by them” (Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Revolution in the Library”).

The charge of elitism usually implies that someone is acting as a gatekeeper to keep people on the outside from entering. But reading the classics does not exclude anyone. Classic books are free in a library or can be found inexpensively at hand. The only force of exclusion from the classics is the inertia or unawareness of the person who has not yet entered that world. The gateway to the classics is wide open for anyone to enter. All it takes to enter the “realms of gold” (John Keats’s metaphor) that we know as the classics is to allow oneself to be educated into the joys of reading them.

There is a small way in which the claim of elitism is true. One dimension of being elite is that in whatever field, the pursuit of excellence—raising the bar of achievement high—does not appeal to most people. As a result, the people who value the best almost automatically place themselves into a smaller category. To those who are content with a lower level of achievement (or who have not been educated into something higher), a common maneuver is to stigmatize achievers with the label elitism. At this point we need to accept the label as honorific.

For example, anyone who strives to follow Jesus’s command in the Sermon on the Mount that “you therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) is in a small and “elite” group within the broader society. So much the better. We do not denounce all-American basketball players because only a few rise to that small circle of superior athletes, nor do we attempt to prevent the public from playing basketball. Instead we honor the small circle of players who rise to the top.

The claim that reading Homer’s Odyssey or Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an instrument of oppression should be named for what it is—preposterous. The classics as a whole embody the entire range of intellectual and political viewpoints that the human race has produced through the ages. They are not monolithic. At the heart of the “politically correct” enterprise is censorship. Attempting to keep people from reading the classics is in fact an instrument of suppression. We live in a cultural situation in which the liberal establishment attempts to deny people access to any literary work that does not advance the propagandistic cause of liberalism. There is absolutely no way in which reading Dickens’s Great Expectations enslaves anyone who reads it. The censorship consists of the attempt to make sure that no one reads Dickens if certain people do not wish to read him.

Misconception #3: Because we know that classics are great works, we can presume that they tell us the truth.

The two misconceptions discussed above share the quality of undervaluing the classics. But it is also possible to overvalue them or value them incorrectly. This is a danger that resides with those who elevate the classics, just as the first two misconceptions belong to people who dislike the classics and attempt to make sure that people do not have access to them. It is possible to attach an automatic and arbitrary positive value to the classics that they do not entirely merit.

The fact that a great artist portrays a world view “does not mean that we should automatically accept that world view. Art may heighten the impact of the world view (in fact, we can count on this), but it does not make something true” (Frances Schaeffer, Art and the Bible).

The most common manifestation of this is to venerate the classics (and especially those belonging to the classical Greco-Roman tradition) so highly that in effect they are regarded as being beyond criticism. No work of literature is above criticism. The fact that a classic is artistically and intellectually great does not necessarily mean that it embodies the truth. We know this partly because the classics do not agree among themselves. In fact, taken together, they express the full range of human thinking and feeling, both good and bad. Additionally, the only book that Christians should presuppose to be completely trustworthy and truthful is the Bible. We need to weigh whether all other works match up to biblical truth, not presume that they do.

Misconception #4:The classics are relics in the museum of the past, and their primary function is to preserve the past as something that we can visit.

Earlier I made the case that part of the value of the classics is the very fact that most of them come to us from the past (and many of them from the distant past). But this line of defense, too, can be carried to an untenable extreme. Some enthusiasts for the classics view them only as a gateway to the past, with no regard to what is contemporary in them. These people are historians and antiquarians at heart; they simply like to know about past people and cultures.

“There are various legitimate reasons for teaching a diversity of works in college classrooms, but at the heart of our curriculum should be the ‘canon’—a list of classic works that embody in a universally significant manner the common experience of men and women and enable us, by studying them, to grow into the full humanity that we share with others. . . . We teach such works because they help us to discern the order and purpose in human existence. . . . An acquaintance with great literature is certainly no substitute for character, but it enhances the moral imagination and is a good thing in itself” (R. V. Young, At War with the Word ).

There is nothing wrong with this love to know about the past. However, to read the classics only as giving us information about the past is to reduce the scope of what they stand ready to give us. In fact, that would be to make them a source of historical data instead of a living presence. Works of literature embody universal and timeless human experience, and the classics should be read as imparting that form of knowledge to us. The classics are partly windows to the past, but as works of literature they are (even more) pictures of what is true for all people at all times in all places, including us.

Misconception #5: Classics are by definition long and difficult works.

We most readily think of the classics in terms of masterworks—long works such as epics and novels and perhaps, with a little bending of the definition, plays such as those of Shakespeare. These works are difficult and demanding, requiring literary expertise and sophistication. They are works that are studied in advanced high school courses and college literature courses.

Several things are wrong with this automatic assumption that classics are necessarily long masterworks.

First, every genre has its classics, including short works and simple ones. There are classic nursery rhymes (Mother Goose) and children’s literature (The Tale of Peter Rabbit). Dick and Jane is a classic first-grade reader. There are classic riddles and sayings (“A penny for your thoughts”). There are classic hymns (“Amazing Grace”) and proverbs (“Curiosity killed the cat”). Folk stories, such as Little Red Riding Hood or Paul Bunyan, can be classics. So can murder mysteries (Sherlock Holmes). I offer these categories simply as examples that show that a classic does not need to be a long and difficult masterwork.

Frederick Buechner is a sophisticated literary and theological writer. Yet he has many times claimed that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the enduring and influential classics in his life. He claimed that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is “not only the greatest fairy tale this nation has produced but one of its great myths” (The Annotated Wizard of Oz ). Buechner said in an interview that he “lived in Oz more than in whatever house we were living in at the time.” He even made The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the basis of one of his novels.

Second, short lyric poems can be classics. Hundreds of them are. They meet all the criteria that will be explored in chapter 2. It is therefore misleading to picture the classics, either to ourselves or others, as being more formidable than they are.

Furthermore, we are all entitled to have our own private list of classics. If they serve the function of classics in our personal lives, they are classics to us. The Narnia books by C. S. Lewis and the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder have been classics to generations of families. They are children’s books for children and also adult books for adults, and in both cases they are simple stories and not epics on a par with Milton’s Paradise Lost.