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In the Light of Christ: Writings in the Western Tradition (review)

Anyone who has taught classic texts for many years will at once recognize and appreciate the confident tone, penetrating insight, and elegant turn of phrase that characterize Beckett’s writing. In twenty interpretive chapters, Beckett covers an impressive range of texts from the Western literary canon— including Sophocles, Plato, Virgil, the medieval Benedictines, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Dickinson, Santayana,Wallace Stevens, Eliot,Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and Simone Weil, and concluding with Czelslaw Mil /osz and John Paul II. And everywhere there is Augustine,not just in the two chapters devoted to him but also as the template used to interpret all the other writers, however different from each other they may seem. Beckett explains, “These writings have been chosen both for their quality and for their closeness to an Augustinian understanding of absolute and relative value”(p.14). Indeed, In the Light of Christ is an exercise in Christian neo-Platonism. Beckett contends that the texts she has chosen are classics because people are ineluctably drawn to “their truthfulness, beauty and goodness,” that they thus can only be understood in terms of “their relation to the absolute truth, beauty, and goodness that are one in God and that are definitively revealed to the world in Christ” (p. 1), and that this can be best seen through the lens of the “Augustinian, Catholic tradition” (p. 3). Beckett insists that this holds true not only with Bernard of Clairvaux but also with Plato and Saul Bellow.