It has long been a theory of mine that, like film classifications, books could carry a kind of age-appropriate rating. This wouldn’t be to classify books as potentially damaging to the sensibilities, but rather to stipulate the age needed to obtain optimum sensibility for appreciating the wisdom of the book.
I have long thought it absurd, for example, to expect teenage schoolboys to appreciate the subtlety of Jane Austen. The nuances of ladies being wooed with nice manners and houses are lost on minds for whom ladies being wooed has only Carry On film connotations. While Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes played glissandi on my 17-year-old heartstrings during A-level French lessons, had I discovered the book first in my 40s, the idea that one’s adolescence was somehow the peak of emotional experience, and a lost domain to be forever rediscovered, would have left me bewildered.
I am increasingly discovering that the same “best before or after” applies to reading spiritual classics. As a pious youth, I thought I should read The Imitation of Christ and, having then read it, I wondered what all the fuss was about. It seemed full of foreboding and heavy on the “All is vanity, death to self” stuff, and I simply wasn’t ready to hear what it was really saying.
It is not natural – nor indeed in one sense healthy – for a young person to believe that all the world is vanity and that no one is to be depended upon, for such a view would be a kind of nihilism, a rejection of life. It’s the tritest analogy, but had Thomas à Kempis said, “You know what? Big Macs are delicious. But they also contain things that will make you fat, and, if you think about it, the purpose of eating is to keep you healthy. Yet even knowing this will not affect how delicious they continue to taste,” I would have more readily appreciated what vanity is. It’s something that will temporise and dilute the very value it seems to enshrine for you.
The life of asceticism is not a rejection of pleasure, but a purifying of the appetite to make it serve something less immediate and more nutritional than pleasure alone: to learn to crave what is life-giving rather than what is pleasurable as the priority for my action.
Similarly, the alarming-sounding death to self of which the Imitation speaks sounds strange to the ears of someone who is still at the age when it is natural to be preoccupied with questions about what that self is. On reaching a certain maturity, the sense of disquiet or incompleteness can no longer be displaced as simply the lack of that elusive maturity.
At such a point the Imitation begins to speak across the centuries. “Set before you the image of the Crucified,” comes its advice. “In the holy life and Passion of the Lord will you find all things useful and necessary.” The image of the Crucified disabuses us of illusions about what imitating Him will involve. Any progress comes from a willingness to be like him in humility and suffering; so too any transformation of the world. It is an awareness of a weakness which cannot attain true happiness any other way which cries out to Him: “Turn all earthly things to bitterness for me, all adverse things to patience, all created things into contempt. Do you alone be sweet to me from this day for evermore, who alone are my food and drink, my sweetness and all my good.”
.jpg)
