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contains many layers of somewhat heterogeneous accretions.
What justifies my return to the Bible, to Plato, and to Aristotle
here, however, is the way all our modern notions of litera-
ture s function are reweavings of themes already present in
these origins that are not themselves original.
I would hesitate to speak of the Bible as literature. The
authority it has been granted as the word of God has far
greater force than the authority accorded to secular literature
in our culture, great as the latter has been. The reasons to read
(or not to read) the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis
are quite different from the reasons to read (or not to read)
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Why Read Literature?
Dickens, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, or even Dante and Milton,
religious poets though these latter two are. The demands
made on the reader by sacred and secular texts are quite dif-
ferent from one another. Nevertheless, the Bible has been for
us the model Book. Different versions of it have been the basic
texts for two of the three great religions of the Book :
Judaism and Christianity, just as the Koran is the sacred book
for Islam. The expansion of Christianity into a world religion
depended on making widely available cheap printed versions
of the Christian Bible. The Bible was translated into almost
every language under the sun. Protestantism, like modern
secular literature, is a concomitant of print culture. It is also a
concomitant of Western imperialism. Trade followed the flag,
but the flag frequently followed the missionaries who had
gone to Christianize foreign lands. The missionaries had often
been there first.
The Bible, along with Greek literature, has provided models
for most of the genres of secular Western literature: lyric
poetry in Psalms, epic or at least little epic, epyllion, in Job;
visionary prophecy in Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, not to
speak of those minor prophets, from Daniel and Hosea all the
way down to Zecchariah and Malachi; history or chronicle in
first and second Chronicles and first and second Kings; narra-
tive in Ruth or Esther, along with all the wonderful models of
storytelling in Genesis and Exodus; proverbs in Proverbs;
parables in the parables of Jesus in the Gospels; biography in
the Gospels; the letter as a form of literature in the epistles of
Paul in the New Testament. No doubt it is a long way from St.
Paul to Samuel Richardson s Clarissa, but the great European
epistolary novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, by
Richardson (1689 1761), Aphra Behn (1640 89), Choderos
de Laclos (1741 1803) and many others, find precedents not
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On
Literature
only in earlier published volumes of real letters by dis-
tinguished people, but also in the Pauline letters in the New
Testament, or in those by James, Peter, John, and Jude.
New Testament letters were written to specific addressees,
either to collectivities (the Romans, the Philippians, the
Corinthians, the Hebrews, and so on) or to specific persons
(Gaius in the case of the Third Epistle of John). At the same
time they are eventually published and made available to all
mankind. One does not have to be a Roman to read Paul s
letter to the Romans. In a similar way the reader is given
magical access to the private letters of Pamela in Richardson s
Pamela or of Valmont in Les liaisons dangereuses.
The Bible was for millions of people over the generations
after the first printed Bible (1535) the basic household
literature in the more archaic sense of letters generally.
John Ruskin was still one of those in the nineteenth century
who read the Bible systematically through from one end to the
other every year. He started again at the beginning, I suppose,
on each January 1. The Bible, for Christians in our culture, has
absolute authority as God s word. That word was dictated to
various inspired scribes and prophetic mediums. It was
canonized by the highest church and state authorities. The
King James Bible (1611) is so-called because it was redacted
under James I s authority. The Authorized Version was
appointed to be read in churches, that is, the churches of
the established Church of England. That is about as much
authority as you can get. It is also about as much reason to
read literature as you can imagine.
This force, in the case of the King James Bible, is associated
with the sovereignty of the nation-state. The authority of
secular literature within Western print culture has always
been distantly (or sometimes overtly) modeled on the
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Why Read Literature?
authority of sacred scripture. The latter authority has in recent
centuries tended to be sanctioned by state power. This is true
even in countries, like the United States, explicitly founded on
the separation of church and state. Perhaps because of this
connection between state power and religion, reading the
Bible in an on-line computer version that might have come
from anywhere in the world does not seem, to me at least, to
subject the reader to the same authority as a printed Bible
does.
PLATO S PUTDOWN OF RHAPSODIC POETRY, AND
THE PUTDOWN S PROGENY
Alfred North Whitehead said that all Western culture is a
footnote to Plato, however much Plato s own work may be
derivative. This is as true of Plato s ideas about poetry as of his
other cardinal concepts. Plato had two theories of why to read
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