Reading like Aristotle

“Now my normal everyday experience, as human being, of the world around me depends entirely on what I bring to the sense-datum from within; and the absorption of this metaphor into my imagination has enabled me to bring more than I could before. It has created something in me. A faculty or a part of a faculty, enabling me to observe what I could not hitherto observe. This ability to recognise significant resemblances and analogies, considered as in action, I shall call knowledge; considered as a state, and apart from the effort by which it is imparted and acquired, I shall call it wisdom.” Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction

The Latin word “littera” means “letter” in the sense of a letter like we learn our ABCs as small children. In the plural “litterae” means epistles or, more importantly, literature, whence our present-day term “literacy.”

This is the topic of an upcoming conference by the House of Humane Letters, where I will be presenting a talk, so it is something that I have been considering and discussing with my colleagues, and my angle of consideration is largely through classical antiquity, as I will explain shortly.

The notion of “literacy” is currently receiving a lot of “air time” culturally because we are to some extent recognizing that our society largely lacks literacy. More important than the lack of literacy, we also lack definitions.

To be “literate” in one sense is being able to decode words on a page and connect some meaning to them. Likewise to be “numerate” means to be able to perform mathematical functions with at least some understanding of what you’re doing. That still doesn’t make you a mathematician. We have a higher expectation of numeracy than of literacy.

That said, however, the United States is currently facing what the “experts” are calling a “literacy crisis.” Children do not read for pleasure anymore. Adults don’t read for pleasure either. Or if they do, it seems like the most popular genres are ones like “romantasy.”1

No one reads literature, really, or knows what literature is. No one knows anything about history or literature; at least, rarely to any depth. You’re more likely to find someone who knows something about science or medicine than you are to find someone knowledgeable in the “humane” subjects.

It’s a job getting some people to read a text message that is longer than a sentence plus emojis, let alone an email that contains more than a single paragraph.

But the problem isn’t even so much that people can’t read. They may be able to decode words on a page and to some extent put some meaning to it or comprehend something about it, but that doesn’t mean they are truly literate, or truly “lettered.”

However the notion of the “truly literate person” is an impossible thing to measure. True “literacy” is something one can know only when they see it.

How do you know if someone is truly “literate"?” I find that a really good conversation about books is a good place to start in general. But of course, that will never show up in test scores or surveys. It takes time and trust. One isn’t always willing to share one’s taste in books because it might result in “judgment” which is evidently a fate worse than death.

But true literacy is more like the ability to apprehend the meaning of things beyond there mere ink splotches on a page. Words are not mere sounds or puffs of air we can skillfully use to manipulate others. Despite the vagaries of etymology and sound changes and other linguistic phenomena that we can track over time, words do have some deeper power that is beyond the power of linguistics and semantics to encapsulate.

True literacy is the thinking that makes connections and detects resonances between things, and can see beyond the mere letters to the deeper significances of things.

Aristotle’s Poetics makes use of the term mimesis to describe what is happening on stage in a tragic performance, and as best as I can tell, “representation” is the best way to translate it. A tragic performance is a “representation” of something real, and it is significant that Aristotle develops this notion while treating of plays that are mostly mythic in setting and character.

Aristotle’s literary theory (as the Poetics is indeed the first systematic treatment of what we might call “literary criticism” that we know of) assumes reality as a baseline for existence.2 We exist in reality, and thus the successful tragedy is one that provides the best “representation” of that reality.

Now it must be said that most tragedies are on mythological themes and include “unreal” characters and situations. This would be an obvious objection to the statement above. However, Aristotle doesn’t mean “realism” in the way that we might describe a Virginia Woolf novel. What he seems to mean is the notion that tragedies, even ones chock full of mythical themes and scenarios, depict a reality that runs deeper than the mythical setting and characters. The sin of hubris and its inevitable consequences is one that shines best in such a mythical setting, and its consequences are very well-displayed when displaced into an “unreal” backdrop. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is about as “unrealistic” as it gets, and yet it conveys with blistering accuracy the very nature of the society in which it was produced. Therein lies its greatness.

Aristotle repeats many times throughout the Poetics that a successful literary work (and he is primarily discussing tragedy and epic in comparison with one another) must conform to the internal logic of the story and setting. By doing so, the tragedy is not merely a vessel of falsity but a canvas for deeper human realities: no matter the setting, the consequences of hubris are real. The darkness and terror of war and its aftermath is real, whether it is in the mythical setting of the Trojan War or not. The twists and turns of human life are very real and can seem utterly random to us unless we later come to understand something we did not before as in the case of Oedipus (Aristotle especially highlights Oedipus Rex as an outstanding example of many qualities of a successful tragedy).

There is a layer of reality that runs deeper than the mere setting and characters of a story, whether it is trying to be “realistic” or not. And that is what Aristotle assumes as a baseline for engaging in the “criticism” of tragedy (criticism in the sense of ‘literary criticism’ as a field of study).

This is not to say that we must agree with Aristotle and slavishly follow his ideas as dogma. Our literary artists such as Shakespeare have transcended the need for Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action by weaving together stories across time, place, and which include multiple subplots, and no one would honestly deny the effectiveness of the Shakespearean drama. Nevertheless, the important thing is this notion that there is a “representation” (mimesis) of something taking place that runs deeper than the setting and characters.

Plato, in his famous and oft-misunderstood denunciation of the poets in his Republic, is concerned about poetry being a representation that removes us from reality because we ourselves live in a distortion of a greater reality, so poetry at best is a distorted representation of distortion. Plato himself is too enraptured with the poetry of his society to give it up. If there is indeed a world of ultimate perfections that we must reason our way towards by engaging in philosophical dialectic (that is, questioning), then listening to a depiction of a mythical event is only something that will lure us away from that pursuit.

Aristotle has no such qualms. Instead, the tragedy and its elements are a signpost to a reality which he assumes exists and is to some extent knowable via observation and reasoning, and so it is possible to bring oneself into greater conformity with that knowable reality, even when the patterns of that reality are conveyed in a mythic setting by mythic characters.

Literature as a signpost to reality rather than something that moves us further away from reality provides us with a key distinction that I wish to dwell on here as I explore the idea of what constitutes true “literacy” and not merely one’s ability to decode words.

An ancient impulse in the reading of literature was to find how great art was pointing to reality, or pointing outward towards things that transcend the immediate. Homer’s epics are in a time-less mythical setting that cannot be pinned down despite our best efforts, nevertheless, the ancients mined Homer for wisdom that they considered relevant at all times because there is a deeper reality being explored and shared through the work. Plato quotes Homer frequently, and states ruefully in the Republic that Homer is the true educator of Hellas. But the assumption was that Homer points to something true, even when no one believed that the Trojan War happened literally.

Homer was ancient Greek wisdom literature in the way that the Book of Proverbs or James is wisdom literature to the Christians. The character of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs is a picture of the very real existence of wisdom, and she is a literary signpost that helps us find it. By depicting her as a lady the author of Proverbs gives us a concrete image for a very abstract concept. It is very effective and does not mean that wisdom is any less real for being an abstract concept. Its attributes shine through in Lady Wisdom.

Another example that came to mind was how Pindar’s Odes have lived on despite the seemingly ephemeral task of glorifying athletes whom no one remembers because the principle of the athletic accomplishment is greater than the athlete himself, something A.E. Housman also understood well:

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

From Housman, “To an Athlete Dying Young.”

Thousands of year earlier, Pindar writes:

ἐπάμεροι: τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ
ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,
λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών:

"Ephemeral creatures; what is a someone? What is a no one?
Man is a dream of a shadow, but when Zeus-given brilliance
comes, a shining light comes upon men, and a pleasant lifetime.” Pindar, Pythian 8.95-97

Pindar treats of athletes and their ephemeral glory, and yet they live on through his words that have echoed for millennia because they convey something that is more significant than their immediate moment. Housman immortalized the dead young athlete forever, no matter who he is. The irony of the grass-like nature of humanity that withers after a day and the everlasting words of the poet. Life itself is ephemeral but the words of the poet are not.

There is something deeper at work. A deep magic, if you will. The deep magic points far outside of us. It reminds us of our own mortality and that there is, or must be, something beyond us.

The main problem with modern theories of reading is that they make literature into a signpost for our inner selves or for all the worst things in our society, or our barren notions of our society. Nothing could be more toxic to the reading of literature than for us to be taking every little detail of a literary work and making it about ourselves or about our societal power struggles.

For what else did Freud do but make literature in a signpost of our own repressed desires and feelings in his landmark work The Interpretation of Dreams? Or Jung with his notion of the collective human subconscious? Or Marx with his vision of power struggles? It is twisted to take such an approach, and deeply unsatisfying.

To ask the question “what is this old book saying to me in particular?” is to miss the point by several zip codes.

To ask the question “what is this old book saying about power imbalances in my present society?” is to embroil the book in questions it not meant to answer and cannot answer. That simply isn’t the point.

And we come to the part of the article where perhaps my own belief on this topic shines through no less than a Zeus-given brilliance to Pindar’s athlete. I have my own assumptions that I bring to any such discussion, and it does me no good to hide it. One can disagree, certainly.

Nevertheless if we are people who serve a creator God who made the world, including the pre-Christian societies that never heard of Christ, we should expect that even those pagan works contain signposts to reality, and a God-given reality.

Aristotle lent himself very well to Aquinas’ theological thought because an Aristotleian view of reality goes rather well with a “sacramental” view of the world we inhabit. Even when stumbling in the dark, mankind finds signposts to the truth even if he is reading those signs upside down and backwards. The waters of the Flood are a signpost to baptism, and baptism is a signpost pointing to death and resurrection and the cleansing of sin through Christ. The flood stories of other world mythology participate in that. The imagery of the Tree of Life points to the Life of Christ in His sacrificial death on a tree and His resurrection. Christ is the Tree of Life. All things are signposts to the glory that cannot be compared with our present state.

The truly literate person can detect such resonances. And one need not necessarily be a Christian to have the ability to see the deeper significances to many things, or to be able to detect the echoes and resonances between works. However, a Christian perspective certainly helps when it comes to appreciating and understanding the Western tradition, and seeing the deeper meaning of it. We are not meant for this world but for a greater one, if we follow the signposts aright.

The greatest literary echo is that which points us to our deep longing for redemption and its fulfillment in Christ.

Thus we return to the mundanity of literacy and statistics about reading and writing. Perhaps no one wants to read anymore because the navel-gazing agenda of most of our literature teachers in the 21st century Anglosphere is disheartening, discouraging, and at times sickening. We long for something better, but have all been taught that it can’t be found in dusty old books that we’ve been taught to treat like Narcissus’ pool.

Perhaps if we stopped that nonsense and recognized that literature is art to be enjoyed, and that it can impart intense joy and fulfillment in the discovery of beautiful art, we’d find more people reading. We’d find more people taking unpedantic joy in their knowledge and the further acquisition of it.

That’s what we were created for to begin with. To enjoy the LORD, and to enjoy the things that He made. He made the poet and the painter no less than He made the trees and mountains.