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“The coming peril,” wrote the great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton, “is standardization by a low standard.” How right he was. 

Today, more than a hundred years after these words were written, literacy levels have plummeted and the number of people who regularly read books has dropped dramatically.

The problem is especially marked among men. Many men spend their lives gazing at screens and never open the pages of a book. Most of us spend more time bowing our heads over our personal devices than we spend bowing our heads in prayer or in reading a good work of literature. 

For many of us, our gadgets have become “godgets,” to which we are not merely attached but to which we are chained addictively. The real test of whether our attachment to our devices has become toxic is to see how easy it is, or how hard it is, to give them up during Advent or Lent.

Clearly, it is not good to be spending more time with our godgets than with our God, but, what, then, can be done to break the bad habit?

We can begin by keeping our lives balanced with the “healthy trinity” of spiritual exercise, physical exercise and intellectual exercise. We need to exercise our minds as well as our bodies, which is why the reading of good books is essential. The very act of reading is intellectually engaging, differing radically from the passive experience of letting the images on a screen wash over us. 

But why read poetry instead of prose? Or fiction instead of non-fiction? In a nutshell, why should good men read great literature?

The reason is simple. Great literature shows us who we are. It is like a mirror that shows us ourselves. But it’s not merely a physical mirror that shows us our physical surface but a magical or mystical or miraculous mirror that shows us who we are beneath the surface. It shows us our character, our personality, our personhood. 

But it does much more than that. It also shows us who we should be and who we shouldn’t be. It is not merely a magical mirror but a moral mirror. It is a guide that shows us where we are and where we need to go.

Great literature does this by showing us what it is to be a real man. It shows us that a real man is one who struggles between the man he is meant to be and the man he is tempted to become. 

Great literature reflects the classical understanding of who we are as human persons. We are homo viator, which means “traveling man,” “wayfaring man,” or “man on a journey”; and, in a deeper sense, in the Christian sense, it means “man on a quest,” or “man on a pilgrimage,” or “pilgrim-man.” Each of us has one primary purpose in life, which is to get to heaven and to help others to get there. The pilgrimage of life is the quest for heaven!

But there’s a problem because we’re not merely homo viator but homo superbus also. Homo superbus means “proud man” or “prideful man,” superbia being the Latin word for “pride.” The prideful man doesn’t want to take the pilgrimage of life. Rather than choosing the way of the cross, which is the way to heaven, he chooses to go his own way on an easier path instead. This prideful path leads to nowhere in particular, perhaps, at least initially, but it wends its wearisome way finally to hell. 

Great literature does not show us that each of us is either homo viator or homo superbus; it shows us that each of us is both homo viator and homo superbus. It shows us that we are called to heaven but are tempted by hell. It shows us that humility leads to heaven, that pride leads to hell, and that the struggle between them takes place in each individual human heart. 

A civil war, or a very uncivil war, is raging in each of us for control of our soul. This is why great writers, such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, insist that the battle between good and evil takes place in each individual human heart. 

And there is a third classical understanding of who we are as human beings that great literature shows us, which is that we are anthropos, the Greek word for “man,” which means “one who looks up.” We are not like the beasts of the field who are constrained and confined by appetite and instinct. 

It is true that we have appetites and instincts, but we desire that which is beyond these mere physical needs. The animal grazes but man gazes. He looks up at the heavens, at the night sky, and asks with childlike wonder the most wonderful of childlike philosophical questions: Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are! 

In asking the question he shows himself to be larger than the star because he is a living, loving, rational being who can see the star and wonder at it and ask questions about it. The star is merely a large inanimate object that neither lives, loves nor reasons.

Those who look up in wonder (anthropos) speak best of the goodness, truth and beauty of the things that they see in the language of poetry and song, seeing the presence of the Creator in the things of creation: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars,” says Oscar Wilde. 

“Above all shadows rides the Sun,” says Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings, reminding himself, and us, that the God in heaven is higher than all shades of evil and that he reigns in triumph. Anthropos is, therefore, an ally of homo viator in the war being waged in our hearts with homo superbus for the control of our souls.

Why do good men need great literature? It is so that they can know who they are and who they are meant to be and who they are meant not to be. To be a real man is to cease to be the macho man because machismo is the toxically masculine mask that homo superbus wears when he wants to justify his own pride. 

Why do real men read poetry? It is so that we can look up from the gutter of our sins to see the stars. It is so that we can see the grandeur of God’s presence in the presence of the sunrise. It is so that we can raise our eyes to heaven and know that there’s a power that has conquered all evil. 

To be a man or not to be a man? That is the question. As for the answer, it is to be found in great literature. In the words of the great St. Augustine, all we need to do is “take up and read.”

Joseph Pearce’s latest book is Great Books for Good Men: Reflections on Literature and Manhood (Ignatius Press).