How Do We Judge Literature?

By Candace Rowley

“We are often admonished to beware the evils of pornography. How do we judge literature to be good or bad when we occasionally find questionable inferences and explication in literature that is thought to be great—such as found in Shakespeare, Fielding, Flaubert, and others?”

Brother Richard Cracroft answers this question in the article you can download here. Some of my favorite comments…

We are mindful of the Savior’s admonition in the Sermon on the Mount that “the light of the body is the eye,” that it is the eye that can fill our souls with light—or with darkness. When we turn our eye to literature, then, it is with a knowledge that use or misuse of literature can, as with anything that really matters, fill our souls with light or with darkness. It is up to us; we have our free agency.

The key to the problem of how one judges literature lies, then, in our own spirituality and not in a simplistic rejection of all literature. We must learn, as Francis Bacon advises us, that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” We must select carefully among the vast menu.

Reaching a solution through the Spirit, it seems to me, leads us to realize that because life and time are short, we will be able to read only a few thousand books in our lifetimes. When we pick any book, we are ruling out hundreds and thousands of other books. How important it is, then, to choose time-proven great books that will foster the Holy Spirit and enable us to rise to greater levels of truth and beauty and insight and understanding, and hence, spirituality. Many great men and women have found that a steady, systematic approach to literature has enabled them to fill their beings, in a lifetime of good reading, with the great thoughts of men and women of all the ages, for through reading great books we are put in touch with the great minds of all time, and we become their spiritual and intellectual heirs.

We know as well that much of the literature of the world springs from the promptings of the Spirit of the Lord and that our libraries are full of works written by men and women not of our faith, but “who have contemplated deeply,” President Young once said, “on various subjects, and the revelations of Jesus have opened their minds, whether they knew it or acknowledged it or not” (Journal of Discourses, 12:116). In our own reading programs we need to look into the inspired writing of such men and women, remembering, as Elder Adam S. Bennion often reminded us, that “good reading is a great guarantee of spiritual enrichment” (The Candle of the Lord, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1958, p. 266).

If you read widely and thoughtfully, and retain the companionship of the Holy Spirit as you progress from level to level in your development, you will find yourself seeking the good in everything you read, and you will not be disappointed. You will be responding, wholeheartedly, to the Lord’s injunction to “seek … out of the best books words of wisdom” (D&C 88:118), and he will reward you abundantly.