A Defense of Reading Fiction

Peter Leithart explores the typical Christian logic that says if we are people of the Book, we must read the Bible. And if we read the Bible to know more of God, it makes sense that we would read things like “theology, church history, lives of the saints, devotional guides, Bunyan, always Bunyan.” Yes and amen. But, he says, “It’s sometimes a different story when the question ‘Why read?’ means ‘Why should we read poetry, or fiction, or drama, or screenplays?’”

It’s sometimes a different story when the question “Why read?” means “Why should we read poetry, or fiction, or drama, or screenplays?” Ask that question, and you may get, at best, a blank stare, and at worst a harangue on the dangers of imagination.  The more orthodox your interlocutor, the more likely you’ll get the harangue rather than the stare.

Even though few Christians are “self-conscious Platonists,” Leithart says that we are often “instinctive Platonists”—

suspicious of imagination, fearful that fiction will distract them from the serious business of Christian living, worried about getting caught up in fictions that are no more than images of images.
With so many things to pray for, so many unbelievers to evangelize, so much of the Bible still obscure and almost unintelligible—how can a Christian justify spending time with the likes of Dickens and Dostoevsky, not to mention Nabakov or Updike?

Read the whole thing—part 1 and part 2—for Leithart’s defense of reading. In short, his argument is that “We read fiction and poetry for ‘pictures’ and to make new ‘friends.’”
Justin Taylor