“Mommy, can we read a little Charlotte?”
My 3-year-old son walked down the stairs from his nap and saw me reading on the couch. His question was endearing, not only because he wanted me to read him a book but because he chose such a marvelous one.
I hadn’t realized he was listening closely when I read Charlotte’s Web to him and his older sister. This had been my first foray into the pastoral world of E. B. White, complete with talking farm animals and highly intelligent arachnids. It’s one of several classic stories I’ve recently added to my repertoire—including Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, and Charles Dickens tales—and there’s a reason these stories merit their timelessness: they make us want to be better people.
Why classic stories? Couldn’t we find more direct, less frivolous ways of growing in virtue? Isn’t it better to be pragmatic in teaching children, lest they miss the point of the narrative? In the second edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian—a retired university professor and a dad, grandfather, and child-at-heart—argues no. Good stories speak, he says, while “the imagination lights the way” (24). Journeying through 15 classic stories, Guroian “illuminates the power of classic tales and their impact on the moral imagination” (back cover). And he does it so well that I’m a believer.
Consider this my attempt to persuade you. (If I do my job well, you won’t only want to read Guroian’s book—you’ll want to read the stories he commends.) Every child—and every adult—should favor classic tales, giving them their due space on the bookshelf and in the mind, because good stories awaken us to what’s good, true, and beautiful. They enliven us to God, and they show us our need for him.
Everyone Should Read Classic Stories
Avid fiction readers will enjoy Tending the Heart of Virtue, but I’d just as strongly recommend it to skeptics of fiction—those who’ve favored the “more practical” genres over seemingly fanciful stories. If this is you, you may need Guroian’s book more than you realize, and your heart will be the better for it, especially if you move beyond this book into the stories he discusses.
There are at least three reasons you should read classic stories.
1. The moral imagination is in jeopardy.
Guroian opens his book by arguing for the preservation of the moral imagination: “Children need guidance and moral road maps, and they benefit immensely from the example of adults who speak truthfully and with moral strength” (1). Yet these “moral road maps” have been jeopardized by a modern society that values autonomy and reason—not the straight and narrow certainty of truth through faith but the “anti-human trinity of utilitarianism, subjectivism, and relativism” (2).
The result, C. S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, is that “we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue.” Our society demands we are “good” people raising “good” children—yet it devalues and even scorns the means by which true, enduring virtue is cultivated.
Our society demands we’re ‘good’ people raising ‘good’ children—yet it devalues and even scorns the means by which true, enduring virtue is cultivated.
Believers in Jesus know better. Our classic human story exists within a broken, corrupt world that longs for the restoration of goodness, truth, and beauty—yet we search for it in all the wrong places. We were created by God to know him and reflect him, but since the beginning, we’ve rejected our purpose. We no longer seek true north but have suppressed the truth about God and “exchanged [it] for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:18–25).
We need classic stories because we need our futile minds and foolish hearts awakened to the truth (1:21). Even those of us who consider ourselves Christians need a daily reawakening to God’s reality and a renewing of our minds (12:1–2). This is ultimately what the Bible does—the story that makes sense of all others—and, through common grace, it’s what many classic tales do too. We need to “stimulate and instruct the moral imagination” (3) as only compelling stories can—the way Jesus did during his ministry.
2. Classic stories reveal rather than report.
Why did Jesus teach using parables? Why would he tell about a prodigal son returning home to his father instead of merely saying “God is love,” or illustrate the nature of God’s Word using four different soils? What was the point of all the word pictures Jesus painted? “The images and metaphors in these stories stay with the reader,” Guroian explains, “even after he has returned to the ‘real’ world” (25).
We’re visualists. Stories help us place ourselves in the realms of both good and evil—joining characters in their decision-making, solving their problems alongside them, and learning from their encounters, victories, and mistakes—all without having to face the consequences ourselves. This is the “safety and assurance of these imaginative adventures,” Guroian says (24).
Even those of us who consider ourselves Christians need a daily reawakening to God’s reality and a renewing of our minds.
Good stories show, rather than tell. They reveal, rather than report. And in this way, they speak.
Take Charlotte’s Web, for example (a story Guroian covers). A pig named Wilbur is rescued from becoming one family’s Christmas dinner by the loyalty and wit of his faithful spider-friend. The reader might even say Charlotte laid down her life to save Wilbur. How much more powerful is the message in this beloved story than simply telling a child to “be a loyal person” and a “good friend”? Maybe, just maybe, when a companion is in a precarious place, the child will have learned the power of loyalty—not only from a sermon but from a spider.
3. Adults need their imaginations reawakened.
We adults would be lying if we said our imaginations are as they once were. Everyone knows the slow fade of the inner child. Confronted by worldly responsibilities, disappointments, and evil, we’ve become jaded and dull, while reason and practicality win the day (which isn’t always a bad thing).
But the Christian life is an imaginative life. We’re looking to a God we can’t see (2 Cor. 5:7), casting our full weight on a kingdom we can’t touch (Heb. 12:18), and straining toward a better country (11:16). The stories we read for fun may not lead us to the gospel directly, but they’ll make us long for it to be true. We’re imagining the goodness, truth, and beauty we know to be most real and asking God to make himself and his invisible kingdom increasingly known to us.
“Common sense alone would affirm,” Guroian writes, “if there is a story, there must surely also be a storyteller” (37). And so we’ll benefit all our earthly days from glorious stories that have stood the test of time and prevailed—stories that reawaken our dull hearts, point us to the big story, and ready us to receive it in all its glory.
The Gospel Coalition