Readings

Wandering The Straight And Narrow

by Rick Dietrich

I  am reading in all sorts of directions lately: Ovid’s The Art of Love in the morning before I go to work, Augustine’s The City of God in the hour I have to read during the day, and J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in the evening.

I am reading all kinds of things, and that brings me to ask again, as I sit down to write this “Readings”: “How do we choose what we read?” There is no simple answer for any of us, I suspect, rather a complex of answers. I read out of curiosity, wanting to “know” Ovid and Augustine, for example. I read for improvement: I ought to know Augustine because I am a theologian — at least, I play one on the radio — and I ought to know Coetzee, a Nobel Prize winner, because I am literate, or pretend to be. I also continue to read for enjoyment; in any case, I continue to enjoy what I read.

For example, Augustine can be almost wickedly funny, as when he tries to determine what makes the chief Roman gods chief. It’s certainly not by virtue of what they do, for there are minor gods with responsibilities far more important than those of the chief gods (and goddesses), who basically do little but indulge themselves and in the course of their self-indulgence screw things up for themselves and others — particularly poor humankind. So, if these “chief” gods do not have their high status by virtue of what they do, or because they deserve it, they must rank, Augustine determines, because they are favored by “fortune.” If that’s the case, then Fortune (the goddess Fortuna) ought to be chiefest among all the gods. But she isn’t; she isn’t among the chief gods at all. How can that be? Augustine wonders. How can Fortune have only bad fortune? Let us agree: it makes no sense at all.

Augustine takes the same attitude toward poets that Plato does. They’re dangerous, and they’re liars. (They make things up!) Augustine doesn’t mention Ovid, but when he writes about the frivolous carelessness of the Roman gods, he has in mind something very much like Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes. And Augustine’s definition both of how God is God and how God is at work in the world stands completely over against Ovid’s. For Augustine God is One, so God cannot be many. God is essentially unchangeable so cannot be always and ever changing. God is good and not careless. God is omnipotent and omniscient. So, if a god exercises power in one area but not in another, he (or she) cannot be God. If the gods know one thing but not another — are they actually better than men? For a true god is not man. (See Hosea 11:9b.) God is, instead, perfect. To be less than perfect is to be less than God.

One does not need to be the true God, however, to have great, if limited, power. In the long run, God will triumph over anything less. In the meantime, however . . .

I don’t find Elizabeth Costello as powerful as the other Coetzee novels I have read: Waiting for the Barbarians; Life and Times of Michael K; and Disgrace. But then Elizabeth Costello is not a novel. It is “a work of fiction,” as the dust jacket is careful to point out. It is, more accurately, a group of related stories and sketches, all about the title character, an aging Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello.

There is much more to say about Elizabeth Costello than that she is aging. She is a writer of international import; she is a serious writer. She is a serious woman and an extremely agile and diligent thinker. She thinks particularly about animal rights, a subject on which she is passionate (at the expense of logic), but she also thinks about love, even, to steal Ovid’s title, the art of love.

There are actually four poems collected in Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Ovid, “The Loves,” “The Art of Love,” “The Art of Beauty,” and “Remedies for Love,” not to mention the translator’s sparkling little introduction.

Humphries acknowledges that these poems, “the product of Ovid’s late youth and jaunty middle age are, by and large, frivolous stuff. Yet how brightly and clearly he portrays the social life of ancient Rome.” How much the poet loved the stuff of that life, “the play of fountains, the hum and stir of the streets, the crowds in the fashionable walks, the light of parties at evening, the theaters, the races, the shops, the comings and goings of the smart set, the chatter in the boudoirs . . . . ” How little he is interested in heaven and how much in earth.

The most interesting of the Elizabeth Costello stories is “The Humanities in Africa,” which finds the novelist defending the humanities — the Greeks and Ovid and Desiderius Erasmus — against her sister’s militant Roman Catholicism, a medieval piety that has much to say about the ethereal joys of heaven and nothing about human beauty, that knows everything about ghostly love and nothing of the delights of touching and tasting, seeing and hearing.

For Sister Bridget the way to redemption is only strait and straight. For Elizabeth, there are many pleasant side streets.

And for us? It is a matter about which we continue to struggle, I believe. We know that God has created the world good, and this is an invitation to look around us, to enjoy life. We know also that everything that is “a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6) is not for us: there are side streets that become back alleys and back alleys that lead to death.

I sit in front of my computer screen, stymied. “Is this where you expected to come to, when you wrote, ‘I am reading in all sorts of directions’? What last word did you have in mind?” I look out the window. The large Bradford pear outside is in full blossom. In only a day or two, it will be in full stink. In the meantime, . . .