In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a thousand eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself: and am never more myself than when I do. —C.S. Lewis
I try to get a night alone every week to write. I was driving home last week from an exhilarating evening with the friends who populate my stories, “characters” they are called by those who love them less, and I heard a radio broadcast about the value of great literature to the Christian.
Chuck Colson was reviewing Invitation to the Classics by Os Guinness and Louise Cowan, in which Cowan describes her conversion experience as a direct result of the Christian themes she encountered in Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and other greats. “Not until a literary work of art awakened my imaginative faculties could the possibility of a larger context than reason alone engage my mind…I had to be transformed in the way that literature transforms—by story, image, symbol—before I could see the simple truths of the gospel.”
While my experience with faith and literature did not come in the chronology of Cowan’s experience, I find mine similarly intertwined. When Plato writes of the people sitting in the darkness of a cave turning away from the blinding, painful light above, I cannot help but see how we turn away from God. When Plato goes on to describe a person who goes down into the cave, to drag one of those blind people up and into the light, I see the sacrifice of Jesus, coming into a dark world to retrieve and to save.
Not all literature works this way, but there are distinct Christian themes in much of the western canon. When I am nearly crushed by some crazy driver who wants my space of highway, I think of Les Miserables, and the thief who tried to steal silver from the bishop of Digne after being the recipient of the holy man’s hospitality. The police catch the thief and drag him back to the bishop, who claims that the silver is not his. When the police are gone, he turns to the man and says, “With this silver, I have bought your soul for God.”
It was not forgiveness the bishop practiced, or else the police who caught the man would have carried him away, with perhaps a benevolent prayer from the victim; instead, he held his possessions with an open hand, so that none could steal from him. Likewise, my stretch of highway, where my car precariously hovers between destination and destruction, is not my own, though my life depends upon it being mine. And if it is not mine, by right or by property, it cannot be taken from me; there is no forgiveness for the driver who cuts me off because there was no sin against me. And my mind moves from Les Miserables to the Kingdom of Heaven that I am seeking by laying down my rights and my life.
My favorite, though, is an ancient Greek play, Oedipus Rex, the cursed king. A prophecy predicts at his birth that he will kill his father and marry his mother, so his parents try to protect him by sending him to be raised by someone else. He finds out about the prophecy, though, and not knowing that the people who have raised him are not his parents, he runs away. He immediately meets his real father, without realizing it, and accidentally kills him. Not long after, he marries his mother without knowing who she is.
Oedipus’ fate was inescapable, according to the Greek understanding. He was doomed from birth, and nothing could save him from his terrible, inevitable fate. That “inescapable fate” was something the Greeks were familiar with; it was considered part of human nature, that we would do things that we hate, meet the very fate we flee, and the word they used for it was “hamartia,” the same word the Bible uses for sin.
Imagine if we thought of sin not only as a willfully committed act but also the bad fate that follows us around, that crushes us even as we try to flee it, an inescapable part of human nature. Sometimes it’s our fault, willful disobedience to God, but sometimes it’s just our curse. As Paul says, “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” (Romans 7:15) Paul’s sentiment was one that the Greeks were already familiar with, thanks to the story of Oedipus.
But where Oedipus and his Greek audience had no hope, we know another story—the story of the Logos, the Answer, the Word, who came to take away the hamartia, the inescapable fate, the sin, that haunts us all. Good News, indeed.
I see so much good in literature, in story-telling to help us hear and understand the world around us, the people who populate it, the Truth that animates all. Plato told allegories, Jesus told parables, and the prophets in the Old Testament relied on similar images.
The pursuit of Truth begins with a story, and though it may meander through art and literature and philosophy, all of these paths converge—and begin anew—at the cross.
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