Looking At and Looking Along

Reading the Great Books with C.S. Lewis

Educators of a certain stripe like to throw around the language of the “great books”: an unofficial list of canonical texts of our so-called Western Civilization. In a latter post I’ll offer a short history of the great books tradition (a history that is perhaps surprisingly progressive and inclusive !), but in this post I want to consider how one reads the greats—no matter from what historical era or ideological perspective they might come from.

I’d want to say that one of the things that distinguishes a “great” book from others is the ability to read it simultaneously in two different registers or with two different types of vision: an analytical one and an synthetic one. The first explores the text’s meaning and significance for its own day; the second explores the text’s meaning and truth for ours.

One of my favorite texts for helping my students learn how to read the greats with this double-visioned seeing is C.S. Lewis’ essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In that essay on hermeneutics (the art of interpretation), Lewis imagines himself standing in a darkened toolshed, noticing a beam of light coming through a crack in the door. As he looks at the beam of light, he notices the dust particles floating in it, the shape and contour of the beam, and so on. But once he steps into the beam of light, he no sees it, but rather he looks along it. No longer does he focus on the beam itself, but rather he sees by means of the light, including the sky, clouds, and trees through the crack in the toolshed door.

Lewis’ point in this brief meditation is to highlight different hermeneutical postures we can adopt. “Looking at” examines a text at a remove; it is analytical, critical, and aims to be as objective as possible. “Looking along” is what we might call a sympathetic vision, a way of personally entering into the framework and assumptions of a text and considering it from within. Looking along is deliberately subjective and personally engaged. Neither looking at nor looking along is better; indeed, both are necessary for a fuller understanding of a given text or idea. But Lewis does claim that “every looking at is also a looking along”—we are always looking along some imaginative, hermeneutical light. Only with this intentionally binocular vision, by looking at and looking along, can we begin to understand the text at hand.

So it is for us and the great books. We can look at them, analyzing their arguments, their language, their presuppositions, the success (or lack thereof) of their literary and intellectual accomplishment. We can and must look at the text in this way, encountering the book first on its terms, learning to exegete its meaning from within its historical context. But at the same time, we must look along the great books by imbibing their wisdom, inhabiting their vision, and seeing our world through their eyes.

So for example, when teaching Dante’s Paradiso, I want students to look at the text to understand the history of metaphysics and biblical interpretation that Dante is drawing on in Paradiso 29 when he writes

“Not to increase His good, which cannot be,
but rather that His own reflected glory
in its resplendence might proclaim I am

in His eternity, beyond all time,
beyond all comprehension, as pleased Him,
Eternal love opened up into new loves.” (Paradiso 29.13-18)

At the same time, I want my students to look along this vision, to understand from within what it might mean to look at another person as the unfolding of God’s eternal Love in the specific time and space that is my neighbor. We’ve not read a great book properly if we can only analyze and assess it. To read it correctly we must also inhabit it—at least for a time. A great book isn’t simply read; it is lived.