On Loving Books

How to proper love books

Photo by Gülfer ERGİN on Unsplash

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In Josef Pieper’s magnificent essay on love in Faith, Hope, Love, he argues that love involves saying to someone, “It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!” In short, love is an affirmation of the creational “It is good” that God declared. It is an affirmation of someone’s very being in the world. But it is not an affirmation of their sins or all their lifestyle choices. As Pieper clearly says, that would be a failure to love someone. The lover always desires the good of the beloved. I get into all this in To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, but what I want to focus on today is how this framework for understanding love applies to our love of things, particularly books. What does it mean to affirm the creational goodness of books? What does it mean to desire their good or the author’s good? How do we seek their good in our lives? While I could have picked any number of objects in this world to focus on, the decline in literacy makes this a particularly pressing issue. As a culture, we are failing to love books. And I think by meditating on how to love books well, we will learn a few things about how to love other things in God’s creation well, to his glory.

The simple phrase, “It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!” expresses an exuberance and even surprise, the wonder of something in God’s universe. Our temptation in life is to take things for granted. In a time when all information is instantly accessible to us, and all books are (seemingly, although not really) available to us on Amazon, we come to feel that books are trivial things. Not precious. Not wonders. Not worth marveling at. Not worth giving thanks over. Because behind Pieper’s proclamation is the implication that we are thanking God for the goodness and wonder of the existence of the thing. This is about cultivating an awareness that we have the privilege of delighting in the goodness and wonder of great books! To love books is to cultivate that awareness and to turn it in gratitude to God in thanksgiving.

This means making time for books. Setting aside our phones and sacrificing distractions to be with books because we know they are good for us (when they are great books).

We put our love in practice by how we read. And we read by desiring the good of the author. By this I mean that we don’t deny where the author goes astray from facts or from the truth of God’s reality. We don’t affirm the failures of a book or the personal sins of the author or the ungodly ideas embodied in the book. And we also don’t ignore the beauty of the book. The loveliness, the truth, the places where God’s reality shines through like the Sun and enlightens the reader, maybe even despite the personal beliefs of the author. This is in line with Paul’s command in Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

To love the book, to desire the good of the author, we should think on what is worthy of praise in a book. We should think on what is just, and lovely, and true, without affirming or denying the existence of what is false.

In this way, we honor and love the author as well as the book, because we treat the author as a real human being made in the image of God and responsible for his or her actions. Just as in a normal human relationship, we must never deny or ignore the sins of our beloved if we truly love them, we cannot love a book and deny its failures and the author’s sins. But similarly, we can love and affirm in the beloved and the book what is lovely and beautiful and glorifies God. Having that discernment is both important in relationships and reading.

Another way we put our love in practice is by allowing books to shape us. And this assumes we have done the work of discernment to sort out what is wise and what is folly in books. But even when we have done that process, great books challenge us and our vision of the world. That is part of the “wonder” of books. That we don’t just read them, they read us, interpreting us and our lives, cultivating our character and making us more virtuous, godly people.

My favorite kind of non-fiction book is the kind that puts language and a framework to something I only understood in hints and guesses, in shadows. Peter Berger’s A Rumor of Angels, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society all did that for me. And they formed me and my perception of the world.

My favorite fiction does something similar. It resonates with something I have felt but couldn’t express, or it beautifully enacts something I’ve wrestled with. J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair all do that.

My favorite poetry does something slightly different. It offers me wise counsel, courage, and devotion to God. I’m speaking specifically of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets and “Choruses from The Rock.”

With each of these works, I finished them thinking, “It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!” And as a natural outgrowth of my love, I wanted to share them with others, so they could learn to love what is lovely. Only the jealous lover hoards his or her discoveries. You want to share your books, share their existence with others. In my job, I believe it is my central duty to teach students to love what is lovely.

We could go on to talk about caring for books, not dog-earing books, etc. But I think the main thing is that when you truly love books, you desire the good of the author. You seek to read the book as it was meant to be read. You treat the book with respect. You allow it to form you in just the way God would have it form you. And you celebrate the goodness of its creation as a work of art or craft, as a sign of common grace. And you thank God for books.