Illuminations
In the Light of Christ: Writings in the Western Tradition
by Lucy Beckett
Ignatius Press, 2006
(648 pages, $21.95, paperback)
reviewed by Franklin Freeman
“We do not decide, but are given to discover and love, what is true,” writes Lucy Beckett, teacher of English, Latin, and history at Ampleforth Abbey and College for twenty years. In her survey of the major works of Western literature, beginning with the Greek playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles and ending with the Polish writers Czeslaw Milosz and John Paul II, she does just that.
In the Light of Christ, she writes in her introduction (titled “The Order of Love”), addresses
the value to us now . . . of some great texts written in relation to the truth of orthodox Christianity, and it is the thesis of this book that their value—that is to say, their truthfulness, beauty and goodness—rests in their relation to the absolute truth, beauty and goodness that are one in God and that are definitively revealed to the world in Christ.
The Two Cities
One of her main themes is that, as St. Augustine proposed in The City of God, there are two cities in the universe, the civitas Dei (the city of God), which will never be realized here on earth, and the civitas terrena (the worldly city). The Church on earth is a corpus permixtum: in Beckett’s words, “an imperfect body of imperfect human beings . . . to be sorted out only in the judgment of God.”
These concepts provided the context to Augustine’s understanding of the relative value of literature. After his conversion, he “never cut his attachment to the writers of the Roman past,” but because of his understanding of the two cities, he never fell into English Victorian scholar and poet Matthew Arnold’s error of elevating the study of literature into a replacement for religion.
This is a natural error to fall into once one has lost his religion, Beckett writes, because “writing that reflects much goodness, truth and beauty really does bring us close to God.” But for a Christian, this study will always be subordinate to God: “The great achievement,” as St. Augustine wrote, “is to break the idols we keep within us.”
Most of the writers Beckett chooses are at least aware of this natural temptation to “divinize anything other than God,” and they strive to know more about and seek after the civitas Dei; while others (D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer, for instance) she chooses because their opposition to the civitas Dei is instructive in understanding the human soul.
Each chapter of this book is a mini-biography of its subject or subjects, but also a cultural history lesson, and finally, and most enjoyably, an exercise in wise literary criticism. Beckett delves into the religious themes of these writers, themes literary critics seldom take seriously in themselves.
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
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