Narrating Ethics

Leading and Leadership
Edited by Timothy Fuller. University of Notre Dame Press
264 pp. $25 cloth, $15 paper

Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying
Edited by Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass. University of Notre Dame Press
630 pp. $25 cloth, $15 paper

The Eternal Pity:Reflections on Dying.
Edited by Richard John Neuhaus. University of Notre Dame Press
200 pp. $25 cloth, $15 paper

Working: Its Meaning and Its Limits.
Edited by Gilbert Meilaender. University of Notre Dame Press
288 pp. $25 cloth, $15 paper

Everyone a Teacher
Edited by Mark Schwehn. University of Notre Dame
Press. 392 pp. $25 cloth, $15 paper

Recently my eight“year“old son came home from school in (atypical) frustration: a project from his art class was proving unexpectedly recalcitrant and, in his judgment, was taking up far too much of his valuable time. After relating the sad tale, he cried out, “What’s the point of Art, anyway?”

Ah yes, the Platonic question”we all come around to it eventually. What indeed is the point of art? What is it good for? And most of us know Plato’s answer: it’s not good for much. It carries us ever farther away from the truth that can be known properly only through a dialectical (question“and“answer) encounter that allows us to recollect the inbred knowledge which, in this ever“changing world, we have forgotten. Moreover, art, especially literary art, consists mostly of lies. Better to follow the sure, though rigorous, route of philosophy if it’s truth that one is after.

Yet despite the Platonic warnings, philosophers”especially moral philosophers, and others concerned with the great question of how we should live”have typically found literary art, at least, quite useful. Even Plato himself showed no reluctance to elaborate a tale when, in his judgment, the situation called for it. And virtually any basic philosophy textbook one could name will have a number of literary “examples” or “illustrations” (these terms, as we shall see, need to be thought about) of philosophical themes, questions, and issues.

Likewise, the University of Notre Dame Press has recently published five volumes under the general heading of The Ethics of Everyday Life, and, naturally, the books are well stocked with selections from literary works that the editors deem germane to the general topic at hand, whether that topic is work, courtship and marrying, teaching, or dying. Timothy Fuller’s volume on Leading and Leadership is the only exception: just a handful of its selections are literary. Among the others, one“third to one“half of the selections are literary, even under a fairly strict definition of the term that excludes philosophical and theological essays with considerable literary merit. As I say, one would expect such mining of literature for memorable characters, scenes, phrases, and events. But, however common the practice is, it may be worth thinking about for a while. Why do we expect such mining? And what do we expect it will do for us, the readers? In thematic anthologies of this type, what’s the point of Art?

A common answer to our question might go something like this: thematic anthologies are organized around abstract topics that need to be illustrated with literary examples because those examples are more concrete and therefore more comprehensible to the common reader. Indeed, such an answer is so familiar as to be beyond controversy, but for that very reason we should spend some time thinking about its categories and assumptions. All of the italicized words imply, or enact, a particular view of knowledge and understanding: the view that the general categories are more substantive (at least philosophically or in terms of reflection) than the “examples.” That is, the hidden assumption of this way of talking is that if readers had sufficient philosophical training, and sufficient clarity of mind, the “examples” would be unnecessary.

It was precisely this view of knowledge that, more than two hundred years ago, provoked the philosopher David Hume to write essays. In his explanatory “Of Essay Writing,” he begins by making a distinction between the “learned” and the “conversible” branches of society.

The learned are such as have chosen for their portion the higher and more difficult operations of the mind, which require leisure and solitude, and cannot be brought to perfection without long preparation and severe labor. The conversible world join to a sociable disposition, and a taste of pleasure, an inclination to the easier and more gentle exercises of the understanding, to obvious reflections on human affairs and the duties of common life, and to the observation of the blemishes or perfections of the particular objects that surround them.

Hume finds the learned world to be dominated and populated almost exclusively by men, while women are “the sovereigns of the empire of conversation” (though men also dwell, as subjects, in that world). The task that Hume sets himself in his essays is to draw the two worlds together, for he laments their severance:

The separation of the learned from the conversible world seems to have been the great defect of the last age, and must have had a very bad influence both on books and company: for what possibility is there of finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures without having recourse sometimes to history, poetry, politics, and the more obvious principles, at least, of philosophy? Must our whole discourse be a continued series of gossiping stories and idle remarks?

Thus Hume’s decision to write “literary” essays for poorly educated but “conversible” women; whereas the learned men, accustomed to “the higher and more difficult operations of the mind,” could proceed to the “severe labor” of reading Hume’s philosophical treatises”though with the occasional break to enjoy the pleasures of feminine society. What the conversibles get from this deal is knowledge; what the learned get is social polish and the opportunity to disseminate knowledge to a crowd incapable of acquiring it for themselves. The role of the literary essay is to expedite this meeting of very different worlds, and to help dissipate the inevitable friction between them.

One could cite any number of current examples of this attitude towards literature, but let’s take just one, from the political philosopher Ronald Beiner’s book What’s the Matter with Liberalism? Beiner makes my point especially nicely because the “Prologue” to his book, called “The Theorist as Storyteller,” is a defense of “the narrative dimension of our quest for truth.” Beiner argues that to consider theorizing as a mode of storytelling is not to diminish theory, but to enhance and embolden it. However, Beiner is quick to say, theoretical storytelling is not to be confused with the philosophical use of fiction. “Theory may well incorporate fiction . . . but it needn’t do so, and in any case its use of fiction is certainly subordinate to the very different purposes of theory.” Beiner takes care not to “dissolve the distinction between theoretical and literary activity.” Thus what may superficially appear to be a respectful attitude toward literature proves, upon examination, to be thoroughly patronizing: the theorist, the philosopher, is a self“sufficient storyteller; the products of the novelist, while they may prove to be occasionally useful (presumably for strictly exemplary purposes), “certainly” cannot be granted philosophical seriousness. Throughout Beiner’s work, and work of this kind, philosophy is virtually equated with theoria , or detached reflection”an ancient equation, to which Beiner but adds the idea
that theoria is a kind of narrative.

This is almost Platonic, but not quite. Though Plato was at great pains to insist upon the superiority of philosophy (by which he means dialectical inquiry only) to literature as a means of discovering truth, he would never have claimed that philosophy was any sort of storytelling, even a superior sort. Storytelling for Plato is what you do when you have heard about something; you repeat a story that you have heard from someone who (in his or her turn) was repeating it without knowing the truth of the matter. What the teller or hearer of such a story possesses is something quite different from truth, which one discovers only through the agonistic rigors of the dialectical encounter. What Beiner wants is to have it both ways: to claim the superiority of philosophical theoria to literature while simultaneously claiming that such theoria is the best sort of storytelling. This leaves to literature no indispensable role in the quest for truth about what Beiner calls “the grand questions of human nature and human destiny.” It may be used, if one desires, to illustrate that which has been learned, and can (in principle, at least) be taught, on other grounds”theoretical, philosophical grounds.

It is hard to overstress the dominance of this view of the relationship between literature, stories, or art more generally, and (philosophical) knowledge. Indeed, a position analogous to Beiner’s has shaped”to take an example close to the heart of my own interests”understandings of the narrative portions of Scripture almost since the beginnings of the Church. Consider, for instance, how many preachers and theologians understand Jesus’ parables (against the textual evidence, by the way) as a series of “concrete examples” meant to illustrate “general spiritual principles.”

But what if, despite the ubiquity of this view, it is wrong? What if some fictional (or nonfictional) narratives are able to discover truths about “human nature and human destiny” that are inaccessible to theoretical reflection? I would like to suggest that, if this high view of narrative’s ability to generate (not merely illustrate) knowledge is ever right, it will be within the realm of “everyday ethics.” For the everyday is precisely what is most inaccessible to “general principles.” This is why the reductive quasi“narrative examples used in ethics classes for the last thirty years”which have us throwing people off lifeboats or stealing drugs for our dying children”rarely touch on the genuinely everyday. The popularity of the television series Survivor can be accounted for on like grounds: it presents a decontextualized, drastically simplified ethical cosmos in which people make decisions that bear little resemblance to the ones that we regularly face. Indeed, Survivor is little more than a dramatization of bad ethics textbooks. The assumption behind such impoverished “stories” is that only when the complexities and contingencies of everyday life are stripped away can we get at the underlying “principles” of ethics. And this may well be true. But what use are ethical principles that vanish from our sight once complexity and contingency enter the picture?

If we look at this issue from the literary perspective, it is readily seen that “everyday ethics” is the province of the novel. Not the everyday per se, mind you, for much modern poetry is deeply in love with the quotidian”“bearing witness / To what each morning brings again to light,” as Richard Wilbur says in his great poem “Lying.” But poetry illuminates the beauty of the ordinary moment , giving it full attention and even adoration:

Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine“vent which natural law
Spins on the grill“end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen“swept pasture land, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter.

How beautiful; how just. And the ethical significance of such attentiveness to the particularity of the created world should not be undervalued. Yet in the more common sense of the term “ethical””involving one’s choices and responsibilities to oneself, to others, and to God”the ethical dimension of everyday life finds its fullest exploration in fiction. Historians of ideas commonly give the Reformation considerable credit for both the rise of the novel and the attribution of dignity to the everyday”through, for instance, its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and its belief that all Christians (not just those who have taken vows) have a divinely appointed vocation. But the point need not be argued here. Suffice it to say that there is undoubtedly a deep connection between the development of the novel and an unprecedented attention to the ordinary. When Balzac begins his great novel Père Goriot with an astonishingly detailed inventory of almost every shabby, tacky object in and around the house of Madame Vauquer”and then proceeds to use the language of epic heroism to describe the adventures and misadventures of a callow youth from the provinces trying to “succeed” in Paris”he is engaging in a project that Homer or Dante, or for that matter Shakespeare, would have found incomprehensible.

It may be that certain Christian beliefs about the dignity and value of each human life, however apparently insignificant, undergird and even produce the genre we call the novel; but by the time of Balzac those beliefs had, among the intelligentsia at least, become attenuated if not invisible, leaving the fictional genre floating there, in ethical mid“air as it were, unsupported by any particular set of convictions. I am strongly tempted to argue that the kind of philosophical liberalism that emerged in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century was a way of trying to articulate and justify the value placed on ordinary human life by novels. Indeed, this argument would scarcely overrate the importance of the novel in post“Enlightenment European society (though its importance in America was less). Great novels present the everyday bathed in a warm, even illumination like that of Vermeer’s interiors (themselves a product of the same cultural moment).

Surely the compelling power of those books had to have some philosophical justification. As Iris Murdoch points out, the philosophy of John Stuart Mill (once he had his utilitarian upbringing tempered and corrected by literary experience, as he records in his Autobiography ) amounts pretty much to this. As Murdoch also notes, Mill’s philosophy is notably unsuccessful at justifying and defending the value of the ordinary individual life”considerably less successful than, say, the novels of Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy. It is likely that the average philosophical liberal owes his or her beliefs more to an encounter with George Eliot than one with John Rawls; indeed, it is difficult to imagine Rawls convincing, or even interesting, anyone whose mind has not already been shaped by nineteenth“century fiction. (Interestingly, I do not believe that there is a single literary example in the six hundred pages of the Theory of Justice ”a rhetorical miscalculation, at the least, on Rawls’ part.)

The question is, why are novels so much more effective than philosophical arguments at articulating and promoting a liberal view of human value? Could it be that the texture of everyday life is something that finds its full worth, and adequate description, only in narrative form? If so, it would follow that “the ethics of everyday life” must be a narrational ethics, grounded in and fully communicable only through stories. Some may protest at this, and protest by calling our attention back to those Christian principles out of which the novel originally emerged. But in the biblical faiths of Judaism and Christianity, it is narrative that always produces, rather than derives from, or exemplifies, principles. Indeed, everyday ethics may be said to begin when Moses descended from Sinai, with the Law’s scrupulous attention to every aspect of ordinary people’s ordinary lives; and Sinai is an event comprehensible only within the context of the narrative we call “the history of Israel.”

But how does this account of the narrative embodiment of ethical meaning work? Let’s get down to cases. In the largest and richest of the Everyday Ethics books, Leon and Amy Kass’ Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying , we find an excerpt from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . At eleven pages, it is one of the longer ones in any of the volumes. It is placed within a section called “Why Marry? Defenses of Matrimony,” and is given its own subtitle by the Kasses: “For Love or Money?” The episode that the Kasses provide involves Mr. Collins, the cloddish and sycophantic young clergyman who (according to the terms of a legal document called an “entail”) will inherit the estate of his cousin Mr. Bennett, leaving the cash“poor Bennett’s five daughters unprovided for. Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth, the oldest Bennett daughter and the heroine of the story. Were Elizabeth to accept him, at least some of her family’s financial uncertainty would be relieved, and the estate would remain in the family. But to her father’s great relief and the vast discomfiture of Mr. Collins and his enthusiastic supporter Mrs. Bennett, Elizabeth declines”only to discover, soon afterward, that Mr. Collins’ amorous overtures have been accepted by her friend Charlotte Lucas.

The Kasses say that the chapters they excerpt “make clear what prompts a Mr. Collins and a Charlotte Lucas to marry, and indirectly and by contrast, what might lead an Elizabeth to marry.” I am not sure that matters are so clear; the “Love or Money?” headline may be misleading here. There’s no reason to think that Charlotte is marrying simply or even primarily for money: as she tells Elizabeth, though in the more reticent language of a young Regency lady, she’s not getting any younger (Charlotte is twenty“seven, Elizabeth only twenty) and doesn’t know how many more chances for matrimony she will have. Moreover, she speaks of the value of having “a comfortable home,” even in the admittedly imperfect company of Mr. Collins, and though Elizabeth cannot imagine that this is a significant consideration, perhaps that’s a failure of experience on Elizabeth’s part. (Later in the novel, when Elizabeth visits the Collinses, she has to admit that “there [is] really a great air of comfort” about the house, and notes Charlotte’s “evident enjoyment of it.” Mr. Collins remains cloddish, but perhaps Charlotte’s choice is not as completely indefensible as Elizabeth thinks. Austen remains silent on this point.)

Moreover, it’s not clear that, were she to agree to marry Mr. Collins, Elizabeth would be acting from purely mercenary motives. Money might be involved, but so too would be the peace of mind and future security of her parents and sisters. What Pride and Prejudice seems to show is that money cannot always be so neatly disentangled from other values, and the value of money from the value of what one receives in exchange for it. (We live by various economies, almost all of which overlap.) Indeed, the great function of the novel in relation to everyday ethics is its ability to demonstrate the various forms of entanglement, the ways in which even small and apparently simple choices”still more the evidently momentous ones”can have unanticipated repercussions and unintended consequences.

All this is not to say that the Kasses were wrong to give the episode the title they do”though perhaps they are wrong”but rather to show that no category or nostrum can account for the nuanced and fully contextualized ethical world of great fiction, even when it is given to us in small chunks. Of course, neither the Kasses nor anyone else would contest this point: we all recognize, though we may also sympathize with, the mistake made by the young Richard Rodriguez, who tells this story in his wonderful autobiography Hunger of Memory :

In the sixth grade I simply concluded that what gave a book its value was some major idea or theme it contained. If that core essence could be mined and memorized, I would become learned like my teachers. I decided to record
in a notebook the themes of books that I read. After reading Robinson Crusoe , I wrote that its theme was “the value of learning to live by oneself.” When I completed Wuthering Heights , I noted the danger of “letting emotions get out of control.” Rereading these brief moralistic appraisals usually left me disheartened. I couldn’t believe that they were really the source of reading’s value. But for many more years, they constituted the only means I had of describing to myself the educational value of books.

We may smile wryly at this boy’s labored attempts to find categories with which to organize his experiences as a reader; but of course the desire to categorize never goes away, even if our methods grow more complex. One of the problems with William Bennett’s Book of Virtues (and its progeny, such as The Children’s Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass) is that it tends to do for its readers what the young Rodriguez did for himself, that is, to provide an executive summary of a given tale or poem’s “moral””and in an editorial preface to the tale or poem. For instance, “Good people stick to good manners, as this story from a turn“of“the“century reader reminds us.” “Aristotle would have loved this poem and the one that follows it. The first illustrates excess, the second deficiency. The trick to finding correct behavior is to strike the right balance.” Such prevenient instruction actually impedes the act of reading by telling readers in advance what the stories will teach them. (The latter example is particularly lamentable, since it precedes one of Hilaire Belloc’s hilarious “Cautionary Tales””in this case, “Rebecca, Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably””which manage simultaneously to moralize and make fun of moralizing.)

The attentive reader may already have noted that the Austen novel we were just discussing offers in its very title a neat set of categories, a binary scheme (pride/prejudice) by which we can organize our experiences as readers. Yet even as she employs such a scheme Austen implicitly notes its limits. Very early in the book we hear this discourse from Elizabeth’s youngest sister Mary:

“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing I believe . . . . Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

Mary is a comic character, more specifically the kind of comic character we call a bore . She bores people because she does not recognize that such abstract nostrums do not constitute conversation, or even significant reflection”just as the young Rodriguez did not realize the inadequacy of the “morals” that he appended to the books he read, and so bored himself. Austen, in her typically sly way, here warns us against an unimaginative use of the very scheme she offers in her title”and indeed, confusion ultimately comes to the reader who notes the early identification of Mr. Darcy as a “proud man” and assumes that Elizabeth must therefore represent “prejudice.” In this book, matters don’t fall out that neatly: but if hard cases make bad law, they make good novels.

We see, then, the difficulty of finding schemes or categories adequate to the ethical world of well“written fiction. (Badly written fiction is another matter.) If the schemes were adequate, then the fiction would be unnecessary. Yet no one thinks that such schemes are adequate. The question that we then face is whether philosophical arguments about the quality and features of the life well lived are significantly more adequate”sufficiently adequate, as Hume and Beiner suggest, to make the use of literature in elucidating the moral life unnecessary, if occasionally useful. Thinking back to the moral choices faced by Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth Bennett, we might see dialectical argument as having this in common with schematic categorization: it can, in a highly generalized way, take such overlapping and often competing obligations into consideration, but has no hope of teasing out the practical interaction of those obligations. The moral philosopher who sought to produce “examples” with the richness and depth necessary to an adequate account of the moral life would find himself or herself writing novels”which is indeed what happened to Iris Murdoch, who, though a professional philosopher, wrote only a handful of philosophical treatises, but twenty“five substantial works of fiction that collectively provide a compelling picture of the moral world of late“twentieth“century British intellectuals.

If my argument here is right, then the ideal means to illuminate “everyday ethics” might be in books just like these: compilations, anthologies, gatherings of poems and stories. Poems provide photographs, as it were, of the moral life: frozen moments of dilemma or insight. Thus Richard John Neuhaus’ employment of Dylan Thomas’ impassioned “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” or Gilbert Meilaender’s choice of George Herbert’s précis of the Lutheran theology of vocation, “The Elixir”:

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything
To do it as for thee; . . .

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.

Because lyric poems possess this capacity to focus, freeze, and intensify, they tend to be brief, and therefore can be given in these anthologies in full; but the narrative forms are different, and I believe there is only one complete story in any of the volumes, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (in The Eternal Pity ). This is not a bad thing, as long as it is clear that excerpts are excerpts. If poems are ethical photographs, excerpts from stories are more like cylindrical plugs of rock removed for study by a geologist: the plugs register certain structural features of a formation, lay bare some of its strata, and reveal some of the forces that created it, but cannot capture the whole massive form. If the plugs stimulate interest in the larger geological productions, if the excerpts stimulate interest in the comprehensive story of which they are a part, they will have served their proper purpose.

This is not to say that fiction contains no set“pieces that to some degree stand alone. In Working , Meilaender includes the famous mowing episode from Anna Karenina , which unforgettably portrays the experience of being lost in one’s work, absorbed (in this case) in the physicality of the task:

The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished itself of its own accord. These were blessed moments.

But of course the beauty and meaning of this passage are intensified when we realize that this “blessed” relief from the burdens of self“consciousness is something only very occasionally granted to Levin, and near the end of the book wholly withdrawn from him. That is, the set“piece is wonderful in itself, still more wonderful in the narrative context from which it stands out as a miraculous and longed“for moment.

Some set“pieces, of course, are too much of a good thing; Dickens was famous, or notorious, for those. One thinks particularly of the death of Little Nell, from The Old Curiosity Shop , a scene from which Dickens would later extract tears by the bucketful in his public readings. (As Oscar Wilde said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”) Father Neuhaus spares us Nell, preferring instead little Paul Dombey, whose end is less mawkish”though not as compelling, in my judgment, as the story of Jo, the illiterate crossing“sweeper in Bleak House . But with regard to our last earthly act the set“piece of all set“pieces is surely the death of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illych, which Neuhaus rightly includes. (It may seem too obvious a choice, but like great tunes, great stories are famous for a reason.) Even so, Ivan’s tormented demise makes more sense and has more power in the context of the life that precedes it: Tolstoy’s genius is nowhere more evident than in his decision to begin the story with Ivan Illych already in the coffin and then to circle back to describe a life that was “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

In some cases, though, the extracts are more powerful standing alone than in context. Neuhaus offers the gut“wrenching climax to Peter DeVries’ novel The Blood of the Lamb , which struck me more forcefully in the anthology than it did when I read the novel itself, which is a flawed one. Likewise, by excerpting from Hard Times Dickens’ description of Mr. Gradgrind’s teaching methods, Mark Schwehn allows us to focus our attention on the questions of what teaching is, should be, and should not be. Ultimately, I expect, we will want to look at the whole novel and see how Dickens’ critique of Gradgrind’s teaching fits within his larger critique of the mechanization and rationalization of a culture under the sway of Benthamite utilitarianism; but there are good reasons for extracting the “plug” from this larger complex of ideas and considering it on its own terms.

In the end this is what a good anthology”and each of the anthologies under consideration here is a good one”does: provide extracts suitable for meditation. Or, to replace my geological metaphor with the gustatory one Paul Griffiths uses in his excellent book Religious Reading , provide “gobbets” that can be chewed to extract their flavor, gobbets that can ultimately be swallowed and digested as sources of nourishment. That metaphor is a venerable one: in medieval monastic practice the word of God was to be tasted with the palatum cordis (the “palate of the heart”) and then chewed, ruminated upon ( ruminatio means chewing), before being digested. If stories and poems are to play a role in the development of ethical consciousness and living, they must be treated in like manner. The Ethics of Everyday Life series offers us an opportunity to read in just this way; though no book can compel profitable reading.

Developing his account of the role that anthologies play in “religious reading,” Griffiths draws an interesting contrast between two “ideal types” of anthology. The first type tends to contain large “gobbets” (perhaps even complete works), rarely if ever indicates their source, offers paraphrases as well as exact quotations, and provides few if any instructions for how to categorize its contents. The second type is “an anthology the sources of whose excerpts are carefully and precisely indicated, together with information on how to find them; whose gobbets are of widely varying length; whose method of quotation is only and exactly verbatim; whose method of organization appears designed for repeated use and reference rather than for memorial storage (perhaps it contains indices, subject headings, and the like).”

In Griffiths’ view, the former type of anthology is more characteristic of “religious reading,” whereas the latter “is likely to be an object for consumerist reading, plundered for particular purposes, kept on the shelf for repeated use. Its blooms [this is another traditional metaphor employed by Griffiths] are not likely to be used in the formation and nutrition of a religious account.” That first kind of anthology, so rare today, is a more personal document, closer to a commonplace book, and hence”so Griffiths argues”more amenable to playing a significant and sustaining role in a religious account of life and in religious practice.

Does this distinction work? Only in part: anthologies like the Ethics of Everyday Life volumes may not create or even offer major sustenance to a religious view of life or to religious practice, but they are something more personal and substantive than the anonymous and methodical kind of anthology that Griffiths refers to as nonreligious. It’s worth noting that, as the preface common to all five books notes, these anthologies grow out of dialogues among friends, friends from different religious traditions (Jewish, Catholic Christian, Protestant Christian) who nevertheless share a belief in the necessity of religious tradition, the interest of their own traditions in the ethical contours of ordinary lives, and the importance of finding various ways, direct and indirect, to cultivate the ethical gardens of those traditions. Such cultivation includes, one would think, the making of anthologies.

It’s also worth noting that the editors trust their traditions sufficiently to provide less direct interpretive direction than William Bennett does in his collections; indeed, the volumes do not embody a single approach to the task of organizing and commenting on the anthologized materials. Some introduce each gobbet individually, some introduce whole sections; some have simple organizational schemes, some more complex. But literature provides these editors with insights and stories that help make sense of religious traditions”but which themselves make sense, or complete sense,
only by being included in an overarching religious tradition. If poems and stories do not precisely constitute those traditions, they seem to be necessary to its full expression, to have a value that is more than merely heuristic or instrumental. When asked how we should work, or love, or teach, or die, we naturally respond with stories; one might go so far as to say that questions beginning with “How” demand answers in narrative or poetic form. And that”minimally, though certainly not exclusively”that’s the point of Art.

Alan Jacobs is Professor of English
at Wheaton College.