Loving the Right Thing
In which we explore truth, reading as moral exercise, Jane Eyre, and the next phase of this publication
As a child, reading for me was primarily an emotional experience. I was drawn to literature that made me feel excited, brave, peaceful, or hopeful.
As a young adult, reading was mostly an intellectual endeavor: I devoured biography, history, philosophy, and sociology. Required or not, I read to gain insight into the world around me.
Lately, I find I’m drawn to the same sort of literature that captivated me as a child for similar reasons to those I had as a young adult. I read now - I think I’ve said this before - to understand myself as well as the world I live in.
However, it has not been until very recently that I have begun to learn that this is what good literature is for. Good literature is doing what it does best when it shows us ourselves, shows us the world beyond our narrow corner of it, and invites us to practice showing up in the world well, often by allowing us to vicariously experience the lives of other people.1
As Daniel Nayeri’s puts it in his deliciously written novel Everything Sad Is Untrue:
"Reading is… a conversation across time. It is a means of hearing, through the medium of ink and paper, the voices of other human beings, and it is in those voices that we hear the echo of our own humanity."2
As a feeling person in a troubled world, no wonder I’ve anchored my writing recently in what I’m reading. Reading may actually be meant to help us make sense of it all.
This post is the last installment on why people who seem to agree on big ideas disagree on what to do with them. It will also be the jumping off point for a new theme of this newsletter over the next long while. So if, as you read, you have a feeling there is more to be said and explored, I wholeheartedly agree.
So far, we have explored how everybody shares the core value of humanity, no matter which position we take on an issue or how far apart those positions seem.
We have also explored that what we value most about humanity is the heart: the feeling, passionate, creative, and loving element that makes us unique.
Finally, we looked closer at the heart as not only the most valuable but the most powerful element of humanity, and I proposed that if we are to get anywhere worth going, we must let the heart lead us there like a good compass.
But, clearly our hearts do not always lead in the same direction, and sometimes they lead us astray. What does a heart as guide look like, and how do we follow it well?
Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the forces that pull the compass of our hearts. To properly guide us, they must be pulled only by the one and only real magnetic north, not by a magnet nearby or by the weirdness of the Bermuda Triangle. In other words, for humanity to flourish,3 we must orient our hearts to the right thing. We must love what is right. Or, as the Greeks have it, what is true.
In defense of truth
In Abolition of Man, a central text for this series, C.S. Lewis defines truth as the unchanging moral laws which are true in the same way that “2+2=4” is true. If we can’t agree on this, we simply cannot do math. These laws are self-evident and indisputable. To deny them is to undercut all further reasoning.
These moral laws include respect for human life, good faith and veracity, justice, duties to family and community, and more. Throughout the book, Lewis refers to them as “the Tao” or “the Way.” Or, my favorite, the ancient Hebrew term that he uses in the endnotes: emeth.
Emeth means “that which does not deceive, does not give, does not change, that which holds water.”4 This is truth that is not merely factual but foundational – ultimately reliable. Lewis says:
[Emeth] is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar…5
This is not a “head-first” type of truth, but the kind that exists in the very fabric of our being. It is written on our hearts by emeth-personified, who made us in His image. It is an innate knowledge. It is a thing we do not primarily understand or experience; it is a thing we love.
As I discussed in an earlier post, dystopian fiction often depicts societies in which rationality or animalistic instincts rule instead of the heart. This leads to shouting matches, which are always won by the person with the most power. Soon, power - and people who wield it - becomes the new ultimate thing, and humanity suffers.
In drama and elsewhere, characters are often guided by a heart that is not oriented to emeth: disaster and suffering usually follow.6
These literary genres show how ignoring or rejecting emeth is a recipe for human non-flourishing. It’s also one reason we disagree. If we don’t have a solid reliable emeth to refer to or start from, we cannot discuss what’s “better.” We cannot discuss or persuade or reason together at all. We can only enter a shouting match that someone will win and someone will lose.
In Abolition of Man, Lewis was writing in an age and a place where it was fashionable to reject emeth. Humanism, existentialism, phenomenology, the belief that “moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone” were popular. Measuring the world according to one’s own perception of it was popular. In this context, Lewis’s defense of emeth went directly against the popular view.
Rejecting an absolute or subjective set of values is still popular. The idea of something constantly and transcendently true makes many of us uncomfortable. Anything universal invalidates individual truth, negates personhood, ignores personal experience, and does violence to those who fall outside traditional definitions of what it looks like to practice that truth. Any universal at all smacks of the humanity-killing authoritarianism that we all want to avoid.
It’s Not All That
Another thing that is popular is defining the absolute too broadly. While it is frightening to some, for others, the idea of absolute truth can be comforting. Subjectivity may feel scary, and so to avoid it we may elevate all the things that seem solid and trustworthy, familiar and comfortable to the level of absolute. And then, if we are not careful, we end up allowing culture and tradition and much else to take the place of emeth in our hearts.
This “adding on” is another reason I think we disagree. Just as ignoring truth eliminates basis for discussion, so does “adding on” to it. Here too, we mean different things by words like truth, ultimate, and good. This what I think is happening with certain commentators on Abolition who have troubled me so much. I think they’ve heard in Lewis a defense of emeth and thought, “Yes, absolutely! All this subjectivity and individualism and self-determination is destroying humanity. Let’s get back to how things were, when we knew what was what.” And what they mean is, “let’s get back to traditions and customs that are clear and comfortable and good for us.”
And I get it – it can be tempting to imagine that Lewis is saying more than he is. It can be tempting, wary of the chaos of subjectivity, to imagine that Lewis is calling us to hold on to certain ways of interpreting ancient texts, particular vocational and personality attributes for different sexes, policies that defend traditions, and customs that make us feel certain about the world and ourselves.
The only problem is that these things are not emeth. When Lewis and others talk about absolute or innate truth, they are talking about what is eternal, indisputable, reliable, obvious enough to merit no discussion anywhere in the world. What is emeth is values: peace and honor and responsibility and honesty, not traditions or customs, not even facts. The latter are ways certain people at certain times have tried to honor emeth, but they are not the thing itself. And we must learn to tell the difference. We must have no other gods before Him.
These thoughts were already stewing in my mind as I read Charlotte Bronte’s brilliant 1847 masterpiece, Jane Eyre, and it was like she and I were sitting down to tea together.
Jane
At its publication, Jane Eyre was considered a rebellious and revolutionary novel. It was particularly criticized by church leaders for casting them in a negative light. In the preface to the second edition, the author gives a fiery rebuttal:
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is — I repeat it — a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.7
She pulls zero punches.
She is not only defending her magnum opus from its haters; she is directly reprimanding all of us who follow the rules but forget about love, or who twist love itself into something systematic, understandable, and rational, over which we can have power. She reprimands us for adding traditions, theories, practices, and prejudices to the gospel, and missing Christ.
She is also warning of the very real danger of driving people away from Christ by confusing Him with human doctrines. It is no wonder people reject Christ when the institution that purports to be His body presents a twisted, besmirched version of the emeth that is already etched on their hearts.
If the church is an institution that claims to help orient compasses, Bronte is warning us that we have not been doing our jobs. Instead, we have been telling travelers that they must wear certain traveling gear, climb only certain hills, and walk with certain company; it’s no wonder so many give up on the idea of magnetic north at all.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you don’t go in, and you don’t allow those entering to go in.” -Matthew 23:13
Jane, however, never fell in love with religious institutions: she was always an outsider to and sometimes a victim of them. She never felt belonging to or identification with the bodies and rules that claimed to hold the keys to truth. Jane somehow fell in love with emeth itself.
She also fell in love with Mr. Rochester. And this is why she is such a powerful heroine: she demonstrates what it looks like to choose between two loves. As much as she loved Mr. Rochester, when she realized that his pull on her heart led away from her true love, she had already made her choice. Her choice to leave was nothing more than checking her compass and taking the road it pointed out, painful as it was.
In the most heart-wrenching passage of the novel, she tells Mr. Rochester:
Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?8
Jane shows us the meaning of passionate love of emeth. Her body and her soul rise in mutiny, but her heart remains pulled strongly in one direction. And she warns her reader against a heart pulled toward anything else.
Where do we go from here?
So why do we disagree? Some of us have lost our compass. Some of us have heard so many conflicting directions north that we’ve forgotten where we’re headed. Some of us have seen this and learned to distrust the idea of real north altogether. It’s very hard to navigate with conflicting or non-existent compass readings.
So how do we move forward? We must train our hearts to love what is good, to love emeth, to love Christ. But how? We know how to train our heads through study and our bodies through exercise, but how do we train our hearts?
I don’t really know. I’ve been struggling with this question while writing this. However, just yesterday I opened a book that’s been in my Kindle queue for weeks and found wisdom there that offered a promising response. The book is On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior. Reading good literature, she says, allows us to feel things with the characters, and by reacting to the good and the evil in them, vicariously having the character’s experiences and emotions, we train our hearts to virtue. Reading good literature, she says, is like exercise for our hearts. Reading good literature is moral formation.
Of course, reading good literature is not the only way to train our hearts. What other ways do you know of? Spiritual disciplines, music? Or is it even something we have control over at all? I would love to hear your thoughts.
For now, I’m more convinced than ever that a solid love of emeth is crucial to human flourishing. At the same time, I am falling out of love with many things that I used to consider absolute. And the magnetic pull on my heart toward what remains is increasing. What remains is solid and reliable and true. What remains is Christ.
Following Christ more closely is teaching me to be quicker to listen and slower to judge. To look for and nourish the humanity, even of those with whom I disagree. To have conversations about what’s better, what’s more loving, what’s good, what’s merciful, and to seek these things. To discuss issues “on their own merits,” not based on who’s saying what and why or what will make me comfortable. I’m not there yet, but those are the right directions.
Thank you for reading this last post of my first season of writing publicly.
Of course, there is much more for reflection and future posts. I’m going to take a break for the summer, at least from essays like this one. Next, I want to dive deeper into literature that discusses truth vs. tradition and literature that helps the reader practice drawing a distinction between the two. Send me all your book ideas book recommendations!
On that note, I sign off for the summer. I hope you take some time to be still this summer. I will try to. In the fall, I’ll be here again.
Prior, K. S. (2018). On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Brazos Press.
Nayeri, Daniel. Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story). Levine Querido, 2020.
I borrowed this term from Karen Swallow Prior, per above.
Lewis, C. S. (2022). The Abolition of Man. HarperOne. p.105.
Ibid, p.18.
See Oedipus Rex, Anna Karenina, First Knight
Brontë, C. (1847). Preface to the second edition. In Jane Eyre (2nd ed.). Smith, Elder & Co.
Ibid, ch.27.