Providential Reading
The Blessing of Finding Hemingway at the Right Time
Unlike many of my friends and family, I did not read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in high school. Thus, in some act of divine providence, I came to Hemingway’s work in a way closer to its publication order. It’s not a crime to read things “out of order,” but to begin with an artists’ crowning achievement is sure to create misunderstandings and disappointments. In His wisdom, God saw fit to allow me more time, more preparation before I came to Santiago and his fish, so that I might reckon with Santiago’s parable in a more mature fashion. In this way, I experienced first-hand Augustine’s admonition: “Wherefore, since it is our duty to fully enjoy the truth which lives unchangeably, and since the triune God takes counsel in this truth for the things which He has made, the soul must be purified that it may have power to perceive that light, and to rest in it when it is perceived” (On Christian Teaching, 1.10.10).
Would I have beheld the beauty of the Old Man’s struggle? Would I have recognized the dignity inherent in the fish, had I come to this text too soon? The delay in my education afforded me the opportunity to first study Scripture, and then to bring that mode of study to bear on everything subsequent to it. It was in reading the Gospels that I first recognized how “the science of reasoning is of very great service in searching into and unravelling all sorts of questions that come up in Scripture,” and how important it is to “guard against the love of wrangling, and the childish vanity of entrapping an adversary” in that reading (Augustine, 2.31.48). How much more did my understanding increase as I read the Modernists, the Transcendentalists, and the Romantics? I did not seek ammunition in the war of thoughts, but sought to understand, to respond to those questions that were first asked of me.
Though I had not read Augustine the first time I picked up my already ragged copy of Hemingway’s final published novel, I was already attuned to the argument that he was making. The fundamentals of Biblical reading, particularly the primary aspects “on which all interpretation of Scripture depends: the mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained,” were at work in my mind (1.1.1). And this is what made the difference for me. I read Santiago’s tale in the same fashion I might read of Paul at the Areopagus or Joshua before the gates of Ai. I submitted my thoughts first to what the author offered me. I saw in the Old Man a hint of my Redeemer, “who used His Mortality so well as to restore us to life” (1.14.13). Likewise, Santiago used his strength and dignity to do well, so that it might pass on from him to me.