Living Wittily

The Divine Comedy, Everyman's Library, and taking our lives seriously.

In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose celebrates the magnificent achievement of J M Dent's Everyman's Library, 'the largest, most handsome, and most coherently edited series of cheap classics'.

Over the years I've read a number of literary classics in the Everyman's Library Editions, and now own a number of them in their contemporary dress. They're still remarkably cheap given the quality of the production. I don't collect them, but now and again when I want to appreciate the beauty of a book as well as the quality of its contents, I indulge. How is this for a publisher's description of their product:

Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The original series reflected the choices and prejudices of its time - 1906 Edwardian England, in which Empire, Western Europe and maleness acted as cultural blinkers - though not as much as some have claimed. The new series begun in the mid 1990's is much more inclusive, and though it still gives prominence to items in "the Western Canon", there is now due recognition of other important voices. It's this modern Everyman's which I enjoy reading, holding, looking at. There are several key poets, several of the great novels, and an assortment of miscellaneous personal preferences I'd like to accommodate in the already tightly budgetted space on my bookshelves. (Now the Everyman's Pocket Poets - they are already claiming space on the narrow shelves and wee corners where others don't fit).

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever". More prosaically, a number of life coaches and social psychologists are suggesting one way to beat the credit crunch, defy  economic despair, dispel the can't-afford-it gloom, is to go on allowing ourselves the occasional luxury enjoyment, the regular encounter with beauty, a deliberate evasion of barcode valuation. For some it's chocolate, or concert tickets, flowers, colourful clothes - actually I like all these options as well - but a selection of them kinda books what are described above? Would that be credit crunch defiance - or denial? Well no - it would be commendable cultural responsibility, responsibly developed literary taste, judicious aesthetic choices made in a crass consumerist market - aye right.

Anyway, I've quietly been making my way through Dante's The Divine Comedy, which I've never read all the way through. The photo (a reminder of sunshine on a dreich Scottish January weekend) is of Dante's statue which we visited a couple of years ago when in Verona - and I remember wondering why I'd never tackled a full reading of one of Europe's literary masterpieces. So I've started. 100 Cantos - finished by Easter? There are now several industries devoted to things to do before you die - places to visit, foods to eat, people to meet, ambitions for which to reach - haven't come across one yet about books to read before you die. Nevertheless.

Hazlitt's comment on Dante's achievement explains why Dante's is a voice to be attended to at some time in life:

" He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world...He is power, passion and self-will personified".

Each day for around twenty minutes I'm attending to a voice which to me is strange, often compelling, at times perplexing, but which requires sufficient honesty and courage to have mind and heart, motive and desire, act and being, sifted by verse which is surgical in psychological exposure, but ultimately therapeutic in spiritual vision and intent. At times I've suspected Dante has been reading that diary of our inner life we all keep, which records in encrypted code those truths about us that no one else is allowed to know - but God knows, and in a moral universe, eternal consequence follows.

Robert Browning once described Dante in two lines:

Dante, who loved well because he hated,

Hated wickedness that hinders loving.

The paradox of that line, hating "wickedness that hinders loving", at least recognises the ambiguity of shame and dignity, of guilt and glory that comprises, and compromises, human existence at its worst and best.

Libraries as Supermarkets for the Imagination

Thinking about my earlier life recently - triggered by reading someone else's memoirs - I realised that I could remember the great freedom of mind and expansiveness of spirit that mobile, local and public libraries brought into an otherwise routine and limited life. Routine and limited for various obvious reasons – we lived in the country at a time when working folk couldn’t afford cars, TV was OK but not the pervasive and persuasive time waster it is now, being in the country there weren’t many options for after school activity. Well, anyway, I’ve always been a reader – from Corn Flake packets to Reader’s Digest, newspapers, and at every stage and phase of life, books.

From primary 5 ( I was 9 or 10) I remember the large leather suitcase with LIBRARY stamped on it, which was brought round the classes on a trolley each Friday afternoon for us to choose a book and return the one borrowed last week. That's where I first read Kidnapped, The Invisible Man and Children of the New Forest. Then there was the local library at East Kilbride
in the early 60's when it was a new new town, and the library a new glass sided shiny building. That's where I developed a never lost interest in biography, stories that were real because the people were real, and in stories about animals, and in which animals are the narrators – so Watership Downdidn’t require the mental re-adjustment others felt they had to make.

Then there were the Carluke and Lanark Public Libraries, which supported my reprehensible Western phase. I must have read dozens of not very politically correct stories of stereo-typed goodies and baddies - that was before I graduated to Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley adventures, Evelyn Anthony espionage, a long phase of Douglas Reeman (naval war), Hammond Innes and even a few of Neville Shute.

But in those libraries I also began to read history, which along with biography I think accounts for my lifelong interest in the history of ideas and the people who have them! My current love for history, who we were before we became who we are, came into being against the best efforts of the gentlest most boring teacher I ever had to immunise all pupils against ever catching any long term infection or enthusaism for history. Her nickname was Texas, on account of her slow drawl, in which she enunciated word for word and with sing-song, lilting pathos, her handwritten notes from a blue jotter, concerning the various demeanours and misdemeanours of the key players in the Scottish Reformation and the various fates they met. At 13 years old, I couldn’t have cared less about the young, innocently foolish, (or even culpably stupid) Mary Queen of Scots, though I was a bit more sympathetic to the verbally violent theological hard man John Knox.

It took me several years, a conversion experience and a life-changing call to ministry to get me inside a history book again with serious intent. Having left school with nil points as far as qualifications were concerned, and sure God was calling me to be a minister I had to get some Highers. One of them was History, another English and a third French. The first two have remained lifelong enthusiasms. French I can still read well enough but have all but lost spoken French.  More later………

In praise of thin books

Well . Been away to Manchester on a staff retreat which was a mixture of important discussions we needed time and space for, meeting with colleagues at Northern Baptist College, (including a shared meal at one of the local restaurants on Curry Mile), and time for shared conversation and friendship. In the intervening couple of days some of you have upheld the virtues of the thin book. Thansk for all the suggestions, and maybe worth offerinf some responses.

Trevor, since the Bible is a book of books you could probably choose any one of them as a thin book. Printed as a Penguin paberback I doubt if matthew's Gospel or isaiah would go much beyond 60 pages. So it isn't that the Bible doesn't count as a thin book - it counts as 66 of them.

Kate - not sure where I said suggested thin books need to be theological - so in case I gave that impression, it wasn't intended. Amongst the non theological nominations for my thin book shelf would be Saint Exupery's Little Prince, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, and Dag Hammarskjold's Markings (which if it is theological, isn't defined by its theology).

Gavin - Dissident Discipleship has 245 pages, which makes it a rather thick, thin book. But Augsburger's earlier books are nearly all within the 160 page limit. But thanks for pointing out a book that doesn't reduce discipleship to a ten quick steps programme, but affirms discipleship as a following after Jesus which is characterised by life practices which bear witness to who Jesus is.

The Manse Cat is a veritable thin book enthusiast, and it was good to have amongst others, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. I once witnessed this wee book lift the spirit and strengthen the hopefulness of a wonderful Christian lady at the time pushing 80. I still have a letter from her in which she quotes Brother Lawrence and Evelyn Underhill with the surprised gratitude of someone who had just had their medication changed and it was doing wonders. And Nuttall's slim biography of Richard Baxter is like all that Nuttal wrote - discretely erudite, written in restrained and elegant prose, and quietly taking its place alongside weightier works as the one that portrats baxter with affection and authority.

The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass gave me indigestion after a Christmas dinner years ago, when I read the entry on the bearded man shouting in church with the riposte, 'he shaved others, himself he could not shave'.

Bonhoeffer's Life Together is as Graeme says, one of those books which is thin only in the sense of its pagination. I've found that it's a book people either love or hate - its demanding, uncompromising, exposure of spiritual psychology and human dynamics as they are worked out in a close-knit, intensely focused community seldom make for comfortable reading. Yet like many others I've read it several times - each time wincing at the accuracy of his observations, at times resentful of such astringent exhortation, and having to own the painful truth that few church fellowships would be prepared to take this thin book as a year's experiment to test the too easy assumption that if all the world were Christians all problems would be solved!

John Colwell's The Rhythm of Doctrine is both a very good brief systematic theology based on the Church Year, and, I hope, an outline of what could become an original and valuable series of larger books expanding on the theological approach John has opened up - and I hope he does them! Few books claiming to be systematic theologies manage to be both brief and sufficiently rigorous - along with this one, Nicholas Lash, Believing Three ways in One God and Kathryn Tanner's Jesus Humanity and the Trinity, being amongst the more obvious. 

Right. I'm off to read one of the thinnest books in the Bible. I'm preaching on Jonah tomorrow. I know the story well, and the way it destabilises safe theologies and possessive spiritualities. In less than four modest chapters this story turns worlds upside down, changes worldviews, forces a revision of how its readers think of God, and ends with one of the most wonderfully funny lines in the whole Bible. In fact, going back to Trevor, and his search for a thin Bible, raises the question of thin books in the Bible. Ruth is a masterpiece in the same tradition of revising theologies built on unexamined assumptions about God. Lamentations expresses the darkness of the darkest hours - or decades, yet with an adamantine determination not to let God go. Philemon isn't a book - it's a letter, but I have a commentary on its 24 verses that is 550 pages long - and the incongruity of such a hefty commentary for such a brief occasional letter, is only felt if we haven't recognised the mustard seeds of Kingdom revolution implied in all the courtesies and gentle nudges woven throughout. A thin book, thick with possibility, eh?

Exegetical prestidigitation.....Eh?

Her Testimony is True

"Establishing equality for all persons regardless of their gender (or any other characteristic) is a cause surely born in the heart of God. But the cause of women's equality is not advanced, rather, it is hindered whenever we attempt to force biblical texts to say things we might wish to hear but they do not say. Just as it is dishonest to deny that certain New Testament texts sanctioned slavery, but also fallacious to argue that such texts warrant the sanction of slavery today, it is counterproductive to contend that the Gospel of John is a document that passes edicts for its context and for ours on how women can and should function in the church. That sort of reading amounts  to an act of exegetical prestidigitation that in essence admits that those who would use the Bible  as a warrant to impose specific patterns of order from ancient communities onto modern ones have a case worthy of being contested. It is to lend dignity to what is actually a frivolous case for the subordination of women....

God's will for Christians is not that they rigidly duplicate the life and ministry of Jesus or his first disciples or the Johannine community (as if such a thing were possible), but that they discover, through the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ for each community in its own time and place. It is possible to discover God's will for any contemporary context by Spirit-led exegetical and hermeneutical study of John's Gospel, but not by prohecting contemporary contexts back on to it. Any exegesis is strained that has the Gospel of John setting out roles for people on the basis of gender or any other category, and is in fact contrary to john's teaching that all believers are God's children who, born of the Spirit, move in ways that defy human delineation (Jn 1.12-13; 3.5-8).

The witnessing disciple responsible for the inscription of John's Gospels defines the book as a testimony, and his testimony is vouched to be true (Jn 21.24). Are the testimonies of the women that this disciple reports also guaranteed to be true? Is her testimony true just as his testimony is true. It depends, then as now, not upon the gender but upon the faith of the witness who is born of the Spirit as a child of God. Their testimony is true who truly believe that the messiah, the Son of God, is Jesus."

(Her Testimony is True. Women as Witnesses According to John, JSNTS 125, Robert G Maccini (Sheffield Academic Press 1996) 251-2.

Bob's own disclaimer in the Preface is an important indication of how hard good scholarship tries to make allowances for the scholar's own standpoint. Just one more reason why I love RGM as a friend and respect him as a scholar.

'Because of my vested interest in the advancement of women in the church, I am predisposed to want the New Testament to be favourable towards women. That predisposition cannot be removed, and so I have tried to keep it in view if not in check by playing the devil's advocate against myself throughout the research. Readers will judge for themselves whether or not this gambit was desirable, successful, or even possible.'

Her testimony is True

I quite deliberately chose all the poems for Holy Week from women poets.(Did anyone notice?) The passion story and its aftermath in the resurrection accounts is populated by women whose intervention at different times is as decisive as that of the men. In a story too often read as if Pilate, Judas, Peter and Caiaphas were the key actors, there is a need to hear those other voices. Like those of the woman who anointed Jesus, of the serving girl in the courtyard, of his mother, the women who stood and stayed on Calvary when the men were hiding, Mary Magdalene, and those practical love driven women who gathered the spices together, along with the anointing and binding cloths, and trudged out to do what no one else was ready to do.

I have a very special book, gifted to me by its author Robert Gordon Maccini (Bob is rightly proud of his middle name, which is only one of the connections between us that keeps us close friends with the Atlantic between us). Bob's PhD was supervised by Dr Ruth Edwards at the University of Aberdeen, and under the rigorous and reverent scholarship that characterises all Ruth's own work, it developed into a close and authoritative study of the role of women as witnesses in John's Gospel - in its published form its title is Her Testimony is True. Over the years I've read a pile of books on John's Gospel, and this one is amongst the most significant, because of its meticulous re appropriation of texts too often sidelined by the claim that the testimony of women was inadmissible in Jewish courts.

As a reassertion of the role of women as credible witnesses in the life of Jesus, their original and pivotal role in the story of the Gospel, and as an eloquent questioning of the marginalising of women in the ministry of the Church, Her Testimony is True is a book of continuing significance. Bob doesn't force biblical texts to say what he might want them to say, given that he is a passionate advocate of women's ministry - Becky supported Bob's studies by working in ministry in Aberdeen, and has gone on to develop and focus her own vocation in a pastoral and preaching ministry. No, the texts should speak for themselves, when content and context are carefully and honestly examined. Tomorrow I'll post the last couple of paragraphs which both sum up Bob's research, and explain why during Holy Week this blog insisted we hear the voices of women - whose testimony is true.

Rationalisation, excuse making and library fines

Today I had another one of those threatening but courteous reminders about an overdue library book. Just so that I know, and don't forget, and therefore will be in the words of the Authorised Version, "inexcusable O Man!", I am being reminded of the cumulative nature of the library fine system, and being forewarned that I may soon face my very own personal credit crunch. Thing is, the book cost £4 about 12 years ago, so unless I return it soon I will be paying the purchase price without actually buying it. Then again, why not just return the thing - but life's been too busy and a wee fine seems a fair trade-off to attend to other priorities. Or why not renew it online. Well, can't renew it online once it has hit the fine trajectory.

But the genius of the cumulative fine system is that it pushes returning the book up the priority list, the speed of ascent directly proportionate to projected expense. I have found by previous experience that mitigating circumstances have neither relevance nor purchase power with the library staff. The same courtesy that informs the tone of the emails is discernible in the non-negotiating, smiling but unyielding insistence that, yes indeed, you do owe an arm and a leg, and until you pay it, the amount increases at an alarming rate. And once it reaches a certain level of impressive indebtedness, your library access will be suspended.

So, as well as last minute Christmas shopping, and as a contribution to peace on earth and goodwill amongst all people, I'm going to return the blessed book, pay my dues, wish the librarian a happy Christmas, and maybe even include a wee box of chocolates for those vigilant guardians of literature, scholarship, literacy and culture. Anyway being charged for keeping a book longer than the agreed borrow date isn't so much a fine, as a legitimate rent payment, a modest charge for the hire of educational input, huh? Rationalisation - one of the more obvious signs of excuse making, when to re-quote Paul, "You are inexcusable, O man!" I'm off to the library..........

The Joy of Theological Interpretation of Scripture

For a while now I've browsed in and out of the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. Now I'm changing the metaphor and doing some systematic trawling. In recent years biblical studies has been increasingly paying attention to the theological message that is woven throughout the literary variety of the Biblical texts.The near exclusive focus on historical and literary criticism created much too thinly textured interpretive results, and the turn towards theological exegesis, the tradition of pre-critical exegesis and study of how texts have been received and used within the Church, now opens up opportunities to weave a texture much more satsifyingly rich, complex and varied in pattern.

Edited by the splendidly productive Kevin Vanhoozer, whose own contribution to theological hermeneutics is of benchmark quality with volumes such as First Theology, Is There a Meaning in This Text, and The Drama of Doctrine, this one volume reference is worth studying in its own right, as well as serving as an important reference ready to hand for those who want to do theological mining equipped with up to date tools. Biblical topics, the biblical books, leading figures in theological interpretation and major themes and issues in hermeneutics are covered by articles almost always extensive, substantial and freshly written from a theologically articulate perspective.

Do I need to know about pragamtism, post-structuralism, interlocutionary act, etymologycal fallacy, speech-act theory - now that I've read them, yes I did. Does the treatment of biblical books differ from the usual introductory information tediously compiled in brieze block 'Introductions'? Yes, because the history of interpretation and the theological themes of each book are set in place and the book's canonical connections are often indicated. What about questions of meaning, metanarrative, methodology, metaphor and models, music and mysticism - well you'll notice all these areas of interest occur under M, indicating the wide range of concepts and principles explored, here and elsewhere in the book.

Major articles on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the history of Israel, relationship between the testaments, law, pauline epistles, provide important orientation. Survey articles such as Protestant, Catholic, Charismatic and Medieval biblical interpretation, Western Literature and the Bible, Asian and African biblical interpretation help to widen our too narrow horizons. Substantial doctrinal articles on God, truth, creation, Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, the last things and a general (brilliant) article on systematic theology and biblical interpretation re-train minds habituated to historical and literary questions to discern the theologocal and ecclesial implications of the text as it has been received and has now to be retrieved.

By now you'll guess I am an enthusiast of this book. Years ago I spent a whole week of reading time immersed in Stephen Neil's History of New Testament Interpretation (revised and updated to 2000, by Tom Wright). It is a seminal book in my own intellectual biography - it set me off on trails into the history of how the Bible has been studied, interpreted, used and abused.

This volume, though a different kind of book is confirming what I've been persuaded of for some years, that the Bible deserves far more reverence, humility and scholarly respect than is evident in either the often over-confident and intellectually arrogant academy, or the often even more over-confident and intellectually arrogant ideologies of fundamentalism. The focus on theological intepretation of Scripture, informed by the catholic and receptive traditions of the church whose book Scripture is, and open to the Spirit who enables personal study, ongoing reflection, communal discernment, and prophetic appropriation and application of Scripture, promises a much more radical obedience to the text. Theological intepretation, evinced from disciplined textual study, employed by minds and hearts that recognise the reality of Scripture as divine discourse, to my mind (and heart) pays due homage to this remarkable gift of God, the Bible by which we nourish, nurture and ennervate the church.

Two weeks to Christmas - still time to drop hints and offer to solve someone's problem by suggesting the gift you'd like!

Sean's meme - I have read enough .......

Here's my attempt to respond to Sean's meme here.

I have read enough.....

1. I have read enough Thomas Merton to know that silence and solitude are not self indulgent pursuits of the ultra-spiritual, but the necessary disciplines to self giving love, that make it possible to have a self worth giving.
2. I have read enough Kathleen Norris and Esther De Waal to know that the Rule of St Benedict  provides a framework of spirituality that takes the ordinary routines of life and integrates them into a spirituality that values stability founded upon, and community centred upon, the Word of God read and lived together.
3. I have read enough Chaim Potok, Elie Wiesel and Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the apostle Paul, to know that my own Christian faith is deeply indebted to, genetically connected to, the life and thought of God's ancient people Israel as they emerged from their encounter with God.
4. I have read enough George Herbert to know that words used with pastoral precision and poetic craft, in the 17th century as the 21st, become sacraments of truth and gifts of grace.
5. I have read enough James Denney to know that 'the last reality of the universe is eternal love, bearing sin'.
6. I have read enough novels by Anne Tyler, Gail Godwin and Carol Shields to know that when it comes to understanding what goes on inside us, what drives our deepest family relationships, what is the meaning of forgiveness and of love as costly self-expense, what to make of disappointment, how to hold on to friendship faithfully but not possessively, how to creatively use or destructively express anger, how to live through broken trust and learn to trust again, just how to make something of that whole fankled emotional liability we call the human heart, then these women novelists are far more perceptive guides than most pastoral theology I've read - much of it still written by men!
7. I have read enough Jurgen Moltmann to know that he isn't the last word in systematic theology, and that I don't always agree with him, but his is a passionately written theology of the Passion, drawn from a conception of the Triune God defined by intra-Trinitarian love that is kenotic, passionate and redemptive - and therefore liberating.
8. I have read enough Karl Barth to know that I'll probably never be able to read all of Karl barth, but it won't be because I've stopped trying.
9. I have read enough of Rick Warren.
10. I have read enough of Julian of Norwich to know that her Revelations of Divine Love constitutes one of the high points of medieval theology, one of the masterpieces of Christian mysticism, one of the most profound reflections on the cross ever written, and is the first major theological writing by a woman in English.

Commemorating Ordination 10: Dorrien the Historian; Wright or wrong on Romans; and James Denney

Nearly finished with this series. And the ordination commemoration book for this year arrived yesterday. Stuart saw me swithering over it in Blackwells at Oxford, and predicted that I wouldn't hold out long. I hate being predictable!

More of that later. Here's the two for 2001-2. The first helped me understand the intellectual and spiritual integrity, as well as the political and social agendas, of American liberal theology. The second is now a standard commentary on Paul's theological Matterhorn, his letter to Romans.

2001 Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology. Volume 1.

Before this book Dorrien the historian wrote a fine history of American Evangelical thought in the 19th and into the 20th Century. This is part of a three volume history of the theology that became a reaction to fundamentalism, both as religious and as political movement. Christianity in America is a rich, diverse, large-scale cultural given, and even today alignments of fundamentalism and liberal theology are largely on predictable party lines. Dorrien's ability to trace influential personalities, unravel cultural changes, understand the reflexive impact of politics on theology, and theology on politics, as well as his sympathy with the religious content of his own national history, make this an important three volume history. It is an account of a way of thinking that remains influential and an important corrective to current perceptions of American right wing Christianity.

2002, Tom Wright, Romans (Included in the New Interpreter's Bible, Volume X)

This completed my set of this major commentary. Like all sets, the contributions are mixed in value. One or two I can do without, and some are far too good to be imprisoned within a major set. Of the latter Wright on Romans, Brueggemann on Exodus, Fretheim on Genesis, O'day on John, McCann on Psalms and Craddock on Hebrews were worth publishing sepearately.

But Wright on Romans? - well of course a lot of folk think he is Wrong on Romans. Me - I think this commentary is one of the most refreshing and passionate treatments of the text I've used. I don't buy into all that he wants to make Paul mean - but neither do I buy into all that Moo, Fitzmyer, Cranfield or Dunn say. But for a readable and different take on Romans, justification and the mind of Paul, I now make sure I read Wright on whatever passage, and then check him with those who say Wright is wrong.

By the way, I have a presentation bound copy of James Denney on Romans, which used to belong to Professor James Orr. It is inscribed in Denney's precise neat handwriting,

"Rev. Prof. Orr, D.D. with kindest regards from James Denney".

It is one of my personal treasures. As much as any, or many, of the books I've bought over the years, James Denney's writing has been a reminder of the centrality of Christ, in whom the grace of God comes to us in holy judgement and merciful love. And whenever tempted to become cynical, trivial or self-serving in ministry, several pages of Denney pulls the heart back to the centre of things, to the Christ of the Gospel and the Gospel of Christ. I gladly gave three years of my life to doctoral studies on the intellectual biography of Denney. It was a debt waiting to be paid.

Commemorating Ordination 8. Great Books

1996 David Denby, Great Books

One of the great literary and cultural arguments for the last generation has been whether or not there is a Western Literary Canon. And if there is, is this a good thing? Isn't it the case that those who say what the great books are, have the advantage of dictating literary and cultural values? Classics are attributed an authority that can be used as a way of silencing, marginalising, even rubbishing the voices that don't fit the favoured elites and empowered cultural norms. After all why should George Eliot's Middlemarch represent the great novelist's literary benchmark, and Bridget Jones be dismissed as chick lit? Or why should Homer's Odyssey be given canoncial status and placed on a different literary level from Lord of the Rings, arguably the greatest quest fantasy of the 20th century? And is Jane Austen the epitome of literary craft and human observation or at best a more or less boring, perhaps an occasionally amusing writer, who pales alongside today's more emotionally outspoken and psychologically informed writers like Margaret Attwood, Anne Tyler or Penelope Lively?

I bought David Denby's, Great Books, to commemorate my ordination in 1996, and to indulge my passion and interest in the influence of reading, and the role of books as great literature on the culture of the individual mind and of any given society. David Denby was in 1996 Film Critic for the New York Magazine (still is I think). In 1961 as a student he took the 'Great Books' course at Columbia University but didn't take it all that seriously. So 30 years later he went back to take the course again, as an experienced, mature, hardened social and media critic, and to do so in a class, interacting with the students and 'instructors'. The book is the account of that year - and it is wonderful reading, at times annoyingly clever, but mostly honest and wise. He describes lying on the sofa reading and trying to 'get' Kant, feeling the heart-rending tragedies of Sophocles, amazed at the subtly cynical but politically effective power plays of Machiavelli, bemused by Hegel, won over by Jane Austen, going with the flow (of consciousness) that is Virginia Woolf's take on human experience....and so on throughout the whole academic year.

Denby summarises and criticises, respects but isn't intimidated by this exploration of great literature; arguing with mostly everyone, just as often humbly listening to students half his age who are an entire culture removed from Denby's generation, sometimes he is arrogantly declaring what this or that means, must mean, might mean - but through it all trying to hear what these great books say about what it means to be human, to live a human life, yes to LIVE a human life. I would have to say for myself I learned more about human existence and reflection in this book than in a dozen theology monographs. This is a modern encountering the post-modern in the classroom thirty years on.

Denby is passionate about what he writes here - this year back at Columbia clearly deepened the irrigation channels in his own spirit. Here is his own description of the ennui that drove him back to school, the creeping boredom that comes from being saturated by media images, the mind being deprived of reflective substance, the emotions depleted from overstimulation and moral muscle atrophied through lack of sufficient exercise:

By the early nineties I was beginning to be sick at heart, sick not of movies or movie criticism but of living my life inside...the society of the spectacle - that immense system of representation and simulacra, the thick atmosphere of information and imagery and attitudes that forms the mental condition and habits of almost any adult living in a media society. A member of the media, I was also tired of the media; I was more than uneasy in that vale of shadows, that frenetic but gloomy half-life filled with names, places, chatter, acts, cars racing, gunshots, expertstalking, daytime couples accusing one another of infidelity, the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom, the low hum of needs being satisfied.

That last italicised phrase is the clue to the book. Denby went looking for substance, not to have needs satisfied, but to understand the nature of human longing that gives rise to needs, to encounter the tragic and the comic, the romance and the quest, the philosophical search for enlightenment and the poet's quest for meaning. And he went looking for all this in the great books of the Western Canon.

Here is Denby again

I know longer knew what I knew. I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away. I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs. The foundations of the building were turning to sand while I sat in the upper balconies looking out at the sea. Feeling the wiggle, I knew I was in trouble. I sensed my identity had softened and merged into the atmosphere of representation, and I couldn't quite see where it ended and I began. My own memories were lapsing out into the fog of media life, the unlived life as spectator.

As a Christian, a preacher, a pastor, and as a human being first of all, I found this book to be quietly but persistently an argument for recovering the power of literature to shape and enrich, to inform and nourish, to deepen and in the end to humanise, human life. I've read this book three times and expect to enjoy it again.

And it is ridiculously cheap on Amazon - which tends to suggest not everyone thinks it's as wonderful as I do. Don't care! Or as Catherine Tate might say, (and with due acknowledgement of the source!), in language unlikely to establish itself in the Western Canon, 'Not bovvered'!