In pulling together my first syllabus, making decisions about readings and assignments, and meditating on my experience as a student, I ran into my Ph.D. supervisor. I was about to teach for the first time, and so I naturally asked my adviser, a widely respected mentor with decades of experience as both a scholar and a teacher, if he had any advice. With a sigh, he looked at me and said, “Just teach them to read, Lauren. Just teach them to read.”
It’s good advice, and it’s stood me in good stead for teaching thousands of students over the years. Like all good aphorisms, however, “just teach them to read” is both simpler and more complex than it initially seems. What does it mean to read? What are we reading? What ought we to be reading? How ought we to be reading? Of course, there are multiple modes of reading: the desperate skimming of tomes equally better fitted for life as doorstops than as sources of meditation before a seminar class. The quiet, slow, meditative, imaginative reading practice of lectio divina. The encounter with a coffee table book, turning pages to consider images more than words. The wrestling with dictionary on one hand and grammar on the other, fighting through syntactical obscurity of an ancient text. The rapid flipping through a pile of books, looking for recipes for a dinner party or mining for catchy quotes for a talk. The gobbling up a novel, turning pages to discover as rapidly as possible what happens next to the main character in whom we have become invested.
When studying church history, so much of what we tend to read is in excerpts edited and chosen for us with varying degrees of care, or even in summaries of the text rather than the text. Of course, there’s much to be said for meditating on one line, or engaging in a scholarly exploration of a contested passage, and we may indeed need some framing and other interpretative help before we dive in. But there is also much to be said for reading the complete text, and preferably reading it in one fell swoop. It has been the encounters with the whole text in a lump that have struck me as the most profound experiences of the act of reading.
There was the day I found a copy of Four Quartets for a dollar when I stopped by a popup used bookstore on my way home from my job in Washington, D.C. As I read it for the first time on the Metro, holding onto the overhead strap with one hand and the paperback with the other, I felt like I was the only person in the sea of suits on a dingy subway car who was experiencing life in color. It felt like the world had cracked open in that one experience of poetry, and as I read the whole thing swaying on the train, I was enthralled.
There was the Holy Week in which I simply sat down and read each of the Gospels in its entirety, one a day, struck by the speed and immediacy of movement in the narrative of the life of Christ.
The week I moved to Nashotah House, I spent an evening on the screened-in porch before any of the rest of the books were properly unpacked with my copy of the Rule of Benedict, watching the fireflies emerge, and considering the role of the abbot with new appreciation. The abbot “must know what a difficult and demanding burden he has undertaken” (2.31) indeed. And yet, in reading the whole thing, it’s clear that the love of God pervades every bit of that text.
More recently, as I was preparing to introduce students who had only ever read the “all shall be well” paragraph of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, I curled up on the couch with a cup of tea. I read the entirety of her short text in one fell swoop and was struck by the careful construction and deliberate structure of the text as a whole.
But a caveat may be necessary. I’m not advocating this method on every occasion. One would be outmatched by Augustine’s City of God or the scholastic summae. These were clearly not intended to be read that way. Yet many of the classics of church history really are quite short, and when we read the whole thing, enormous richness opens. If we read Athanasius’s Life of Antony as one unified text, the drama of it all is much more evident: the renunciation of wealth, Antony’s entry into the desert, his fights with demons. Athanasius’ Antony is battling demons a lot, something we miss if we read only an excerpt. I am always mystified by the number of people who prefer to read about the Benedictine rule rather than read the rule. The Rule is short—my preferred translation runs only to about 80 pamphlet-sized pages—and is intentionally straightforward in its diction and grammar. And it is only if we read the text in its entirety that we see that Benedict’s insistence that the Rule is “a little rule for beginners” in the final chapter sets us up to turn back to the very beginning of the text and start listening and inclining the ear of our heart again. Very few of us will make it through 600 pages of Hildegard’s Scivias, but we can read and listen to one of her hymns or read one of her letters and gain profound insight into her experience of the Holy Spirit’s activity. When we read Julian of Norwich’s work in its entirety, it’s clear that her deep experience of physical, mental, and spiritual anguish at the point of death at the beginning informs everything that follows in the Revelations.
So my gentle encouragement is simply to choose something old and read it. Read the whole thing. Start at the beginning, read the middle, and end at the ending. Riches await.
Lauren Whitnah, Ph.D., is Dean of Nashotah House. Her previous appointments include the teaching faculty of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and research manager and associate director of the university’s Global Computing Lab. Her current monograph project is Patrons of That Place: Sanctity and Sacred Place in Twelfth-Century Northumbria. She received the Award for Teaching Excellence from the Southeastern Medieval Association.
