Oscar Wilde said, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” For the most part, however, literary critics since Aristotle disagree with Wilde. In fact, until the turn of the 20th century, the practice of literary criticism was primarily dedicated to exploring how books taught us about morality. On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior returns to this long-established conversation. How do we become good humans? And how can Great Books help us achieve that? By exploring the ways critical works of literature illustrate cardinal, theological, and heavenly virtues, Prior challenges those who believe reading “after virtue” is a simplistic or naive approach. Her appeal to modern readers is twofold: Excellent books do shape the quality of our moral life, but only if we practice the virtues necessary to read well.

Within the framework of Aristotelian philosophy that established the ancient world’s understanding of virtue, practicing virtue was a means toward the ultimate human purpose: happiness. Later, Christianity declared a similar approach. However, for Christians, the ultimate human aim (happiness) also has a relational quality: communion with God in eternity.

Today, we live by the remnants of a different tradition, the Enlightenment, which undermines both Aristotelian and Christian views of virtue, calls into question all instincts toward the transcendental, and focuses our attention on the material world. For this reason, discussing virtue in modern times is almost impossible. Since a shared moral language relies on a common destiny outside of our own lives, discussions about virtues become subjective when we view life as only material. Consequently, we begin to confuse living a moral life with our sentiments for self-preservation.

Fortunately, our innate responses to the meanings of good books reveal that somewhere deep in us, we can converse with the transcendent; that our nature longs to participate in the shared, immemorial human journey towards the absolute good. Unlike a dictionary or a manual designed to exclusively transmit information and assert statements, literature uses poetic language to paint a whole experience in our minds. As such, representations of virtue achieve the same effect. We not only learn about virtues (their practical benefits and uses), but we also experience their poetic breadth and width when they invade our imagination, whether through positive or negative examples. 

Indeed, literature shows that our personal, frail desires are dull compared to the extraordinary principles that build a moral life.

Temperance is a virtue molded by a lifetime of slow and ordinary discipline. Contrary to popular belief, it is also a virtue that nurtures true pleasure. Through temperance, we achieve a proper enjoyment of our desires, such as food, drink, sex, and the use of goods. All of these appetites are necessary for life and part of our happiness, but only if we master them rather than become enslaved to them. Temperance, in other words, is the balance that allows us to enjoy the pleasures of life without destroying ourselves, and thus pleasure itself. 

Indulgence and insensibility are the two vices at the extreme ends of the spectrum of temperance. Today, we are mostly stimulated by these extremes: minimalism and hoarding, fast food and extreme diets, sexual licentiousness and purity culture. This swinging pendulum of extremes at the heart of American culture underlines the narrative of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby is a man consumed by sexual appetites, wealth, and visions of glory. He lives in the age of Prohibition, a time characterized by a cultural compulsion to suppress. 

The destruction of the characters in the novel can be attributed to their inability to reconcile the polarities of their lives and culture: the West Egg and the East Egg, working and upper classes, lack and excess, etc. Gatsby’s story and context teach us that achieving temperance is not simply a matter of restraint from vices but a balanced mixing of opposites. 

For Gatsby, one internal polarity he cannot reconcile is his relationship between the real and the ideal, for imagination is another dimension of temperance. Gatsby’s love for Daisy is founded on his craving to satisfy an impossible and forbidden desire: the wife of a richer, more powerful man. Since it is not Daisy, but the greatness of his scheme that drives him, Gatsby imagines in her a pleasure that does not really involve her whatsoever and thus can never be fulfilled. In many ways, Daisy is to Gatsby what the books in his flashy library are to his ego; they are never opened or read but only used to project an image of grandiosity. 

Temperance also possesses a quality of time and pace. Gatsby’s longing to recover some vision of his former self that has passed and now wasted is a symptom of a disordered relationship with time. This sense that he doesn’t have enough time puts his spirit “in constant, turbulent riot.” Squeezing time too much, it turns out, is a waste of time—for time runs out for all who ask too much of it. 

At the opposite end, we encounter Nick Carroway. Although a modest and struggling businessman, he represents the intemperance of being too passive. Nick’s lack of judgment and unreliability as the narrator only make him ignorant of his effect on Gatsby’s life, but do not relinquish his responsibility. Though he attempts to remain a mere observer, we are reminded that passivity is also a choice. Living our story requires that we judge good from evil, but it also requires acknowledging that our understanding of good and evil is limited—basically, it requires temperance!

In The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy tells the story of Ivan’s last days as he experiences the consequences of a lifetime spent serving the vice of cupidity. The word cupidity comes from the god of erotic love, Cupid. In the Christian tradition, cupidity happens when we love things on account of themselves: pleasure, status, wealth, and so on. From an early age, our main character served sensuality and vanity by structuring his life around success and decorum. Ivan’s love for appearance is his downfall, conveyed metaphorically when he falls trying to hang a drapery in his newest and biggest home, causing a fatal injury that eventually kills him. 

On his deathbed, Ivan realizes the things and people he spent his life with are unable to bear his suffering with him. He lacks all forms of loves: brotherly, erotic, and familial. In fact, because Ivan only bonded with his wife, family, and friends for the perceived benefit they would give him as a man of status, he in turn, receives the same treatment. Ivan’s so-called friends only endure the inconvenience of paying condolences because they believe his death will help advance their wealth and careers.

Ivan’s acquaintances and family do not suffer with him because they imagine they are immortal beings. Their love for the things of this life deludes them into thinking that they are abstracts rather than particulars, that they exist outside of the limits of nature. This is why the majority of the novel's characters are blind to the scope of the situation, the emptiness of their relationships, their mortality, and their vanity. They all whisper to themselves: “Well, he’s dead but I’m alive!” And though Ivan knows full well that people are lying to his face when they tell him he is only experiencing a brief illness, he also has difficulty accepting the truth.

The problem with only loving appearances, status, and manners is that such love is incapable of reaching some of the gloomier parts of life, like dying at 45.

Love makes itself available only to those who are willing to love things for what they are and in the right proportion. Love demands that we face the reality of the human condition, both the transcendental realities and the here and now realities like mortality. 

In the Christian tradition, agape refers to supernatural love, a quality of love that is sacrificial and self-giving. Agape enables us to generate love toward people that are detestable in our eyes, or to experience love in bleak and hapless situations. Agape love is far too great for us to create, which is why we rely on God to provide it. We can participate in this love—though we may not possess it—because we are created in God’s image and are part of his economy. 

It is not until his last moments that Ivan finally asks: “But what is the right thing?” And suddenly it grows clear to him. He looks at his wife and son, feels sorry for them and releases them from more suffering by dying. Ivan realizes that an encounter with the fullness of reality creates a love that is more than just polite sentiments. This love bears other’s burdens, which is impossible if we pretend burdens don’t exist.

The novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton shows us sides of lust that we rarely entertain. At first glance, Ethan is a likable guy. After returning home from school to take care of his dying mother, he falls in love with his cousin Zeena, who comes to help him. They get married. Within a year, Zeena becomes ill with hypochondria and their union begins to collapse. Then Mattie Silver enters the picture and Ethan falls in love with her. 

Of course, Zeena—like her husband—bears responsibility for their failing marriage. She makes herself very hard to love and often complains with a “flat whine” that makes her company unbearable. So when Ethan abandons the wife of his youth, who has false teeth and lashless eyes, to spend time with Mattie, we understand that his situation is hard. However, this does not excuse his betrayal. 

Research confirms that if people put the time, attention, and emotional investment they give their affairs into their marriage, the affair could be avoided altogether. Though Ethan never has sex with Mattie, he is culpable of being unchaste emotionally and spiritually with her. Even in modern times, we still embrace the idea that hard things must be worked at, but we often make an exception for marriage. If (or rather, once) it gets hard, we bail. 

When Ethan decides to give more time and attention to Mattie than to his ill wife, the arrogant spirit of self-sufficiency begins to fester inside of him and leads to his ruin. In the vows of marriage, both partners become one body and each of them shapes the other. Under this logic, what makes a marriage work is caring for your partner the way you would care for yourself. Ethan’s lust, therefore, is an abandonment of himself. 

Ethan and Zeena's situation is worsened by the fact that they live in the lonely, private, and stoic town, intentionally named Starkfield. Lust, we find, is a vice borne in isolation, whereas chastity is a virtue supported by a community. Unsurprisingly, this pattern is active in the world today. Consider the fact that the same technology that created a crisis of loneliness is also the birthplace of most porn addictions. 

All in all, the meaning of chastity is often assumed but little understood. Simply said, chastity is fidelity to ourselves, our partners, and our community—no matter how we square it, it demands more than mere suppression of sexual desire. Chastity is something mighty that instructs us to properly arrange a good desire within a hierarchy of other good desires. Ethan did not commit any sexual act and yet he was unchaste to his wife, to Mattie, and to himself. 

Christian and secular thinkers alike have reduced the meaning of chastity by over-idealizing or abhorring it. The ancient Christian and pagan cultures idealized the virtue so much that they confused it with celibacy. This reductionary view inspired others, like atheist poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, to make fun of chastity by saying it was the "virtue of the cheaply virtuous / Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost." Similarly, Aldous Huxley described chastity as "the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions." 

The opposite of chastity, lust is not a vice of malicious intent but of powerlessness in the face of the hollow sensualities of life. Even Dante, in his epic poem The Divine Comedy, represented lust as one of the most delicate of sins, only worthy of being punished in the second circle of hell, where strong blasts of wind perpetually whip around love-starved souls. 

Similar to temperance, diligence lives in the mean of two extremes: burnout and idleness. It is a balance between putting too much effort into an endeavor and not putting in any effort. Both extremes are equally harmful to a person. Moreover, diligence is internal as much as external. Internal diligence involves the heart, mind, and soul. External diligence is seen in our actions and work. 

Diligence is not a virtue we can fully evaluate just by looking at external outcomes. We can easily notice physical laziness in others, but it is harder to perceive apathy and carelessness in someone’s affections and thoughts. Modern systems favor and praise vices such as workaholism or perfectionism and we confuse them with diligence. A hard-core work ethic may help us drown our worries with money and things, but it will never surpass the riches of a diligent mind, heart, and soul. 

In The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan narrates the trials of Christian in his journey to the Celestial City. Taken literally, the story is the journey of a man toward a perfect city and the obstacles he encounters along the way. Allegorically, Pilgrim’s Progress is the embodied representation of a Christian life well lived: Resist temptation, walk through the narrow gate, overcome obstacles, and enter into eternity with God. The names of the book’s characters represent the exact things they symbolize: Mr.Talkative, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Hopeful, Christian, etc. Yet, the simplicity of these metaphors is deceiving.

Bunyan makes a daring claim by placing the Christian message in the form of allegory, namely that the truth of life has both a material nature and a poetic nature. In other words, life is similar to an allegory. Living “the good life" involves both our external participation in the world, and our internal sensibility and understanding of it. Likewise, The Pilgrim’s Progress depends on both the tangible and the intangible—a little imbalance on either side and the allegory veers off track. 

Seeing The Pilgrim’s Progress for more than just a straightforward story requires diligence from the reader. Understanding it as an allegory for life requires internal and external work. Readers must work to grasp the story’s true meaning, just as people must work to grasp the true meaning of life. Understanding the depths of Bunyan’s allegory depends on our internal discernment and pursuit of Godly desire.

The excellence of a good work of literature hides behind both content and form. Content refers to what is said, for instance, in The Great Gatsby about Gatsby’s mad life, whereas form refers to how it is said through the poetry of Fitzgerald's deliciously crafted sentences. 

Just as with true virtue, the aesthetic experience of a literary work is only accessible to those who delight in it for its own sake. Under this logic, the impact of a work of literature in our lives is tied to our willingness to make sacrifices and engage with its content and form. 

Technology has facilitated our addiction to short, abrupt, and fragmented pieces of information by giving us tools that prioritize content and neglect form. Websites like CliffsNotes tell us concisely the ideas, characters, and themes of a book. But the benefits of knowing about books are vastly different than experiencing said knowledge through narrative and form. Though engaging with content can expand our discussions about books, making fast-food-style information our sole source of meaning combines two very dangerous things: arrogance and laziness. Arrogance because we are overly confident about the information we consume, and laziness because we are satisfied with superficial knowledge. How something is communicated is just as important as what is being communicated. 

Like a good friend, a good book changes the way we live. But just as with friends, reading literature well must be based on mutual responsibility. We can trust great literature will offer an insightful representation of life's moral dimensions and inspire a love of virtue in us. But to acquire the wisdom in these books, they demand our appropriate time, affection, and patience to both their content and form. They demand virtue in return.