Pride and Prejudice and St. Isaac

For a job, I teach literature (medieval and modern). For fun, I was recently reading Scott Cairns' book The End of Suffering with a few friends. It happened that I came across one of the many St. Isaac of Syria quotes during a reading for book club just as I was finishing up teaching Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Blessed is the person who knows his own weakness, because awareness of this becomes for him the foundation and the beginning of all that is good and beautiful.

A couple days before I read this quote, one of my students (I teach at a private Christian school) had asked me why there was so little Christianity evident in Austen's novel. Of course there's the parson, Mr. Collins, but if he is a Christian he is intended a thoroughly ironic one, remarking on one occasion to Mr. Bennett that the death of Lydia would have been a blessing compared to her elopement. I asked the student to wait until we finished the book and then bring up this question again.

When the question came up a few days later, I began by sharing the Isaac quote with the class. I asked them if there were any characters in this book that illustrated (positively or negatively) this quote. It didn't take too long for the answers to come. In many ways, I had stumbled onto what still seems to be a very helpful way of looking at Miss Austen's work--or at least many of her characters.

I will attempt to keep this brief.

Two characters in the novel illustrate St. Isaac's quote perfectly. Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are each made painfully aware of their weaknesses (prejudice and pride, respectively) in what is the turning point of the novel (at least for our--and St. Isaac's--purpose): Darcy's proposal and his letter to Elizabeth (in Volume II, chapters XI and XII).

Elizabeth and Darcy are not the only characters that are confronted with their own weakness. (Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins, Lydia, Lady Catherine, Wickham, and many others all have rather glaring faults; though whether or not they are as aware of them as the reader is, I leave to you to work out.) But Lizzy and Darcy are the only characters that feel the full weight of this awareness. That is, instead of justifying their actions--which is certainly my preferred response when I am criticized--they become genuinely humbled by this painful realization. And, just as Isaac predicts, this awareness marks the point that their lives actually are able to receive the good and beautiful things that follow later in the novel.

Returning to the question of just how "Christian" Miss Austen's book is (again, a fairly common concern for the parents/students where I teach), I want to suggest here that this is a completely backwards question for a Christian to be asking of a novel/novelist.

Let me put it this way. I think we create problems for ourselves when we expect the writer to put a sufficient amount of "Christianity" into his or her work. We then accept or reject specific books based on whether or not they conform to (or reinforce) our own idea of what Christianity is. This seems in many respects a pointless exercise. (As a side note, this overt "injection" of Christian morality into a plot is what makes many of the popular Christian novels so distasteful to Christian readers like myself. It smacks of sanctimony, and I am sanctimonious enough as it is without having it modeled for me as a virtue in the books I choose to read.)

Instead, I think the role of a Christian reader is to be able to actively see Christianity (that is to say, Christ) in the text itself. In this way, our approach to literature mirrors what should be our approach to people. In Matthew 25:31-46 we are challenged to see Christ in the people we meet everyday. If we can't do this, it is quite clearly a problem that we will be held responsible for.

How lucky we are to be able to practice this with the books we read.