Book Review: The Healing Power of Ancient Literature

The Healing Power of Ancient Literature edited by Stephen Bertman and Lois Parker is a small book that crucially hinges on an anachronism, the reading of ancient literatures -- for they are several -- through the lens of classics and the sciences or arts dealing with the healing of the soul, a more contemporary concern. It is accordingly edited by a classics professor emeritus, Stephen Bertman, and by Lois Parker, the emerita director of Counseling Services at the University of Nevada, Reno. The book attempts a daring feat, namely to show that literature has a healing power, and I argue that it fails in an equally spectacular manner.

The book begins with a one page prologue, entitled 'Medicine for the Soul', where we are told quite definitively that 'literature, especially ancient literature, possesses a profound power to heal our souls, a power that is especially needed today when the rapidity of change and the force of world events combine to make peace of mind an ever more distant and seemingly unreachable goal.' (p. vii). Lois Parker briefly weighs in next by outlining the scope of the book, which reaches from Egypt to Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, Rome and China. All of antiquity is somehow read as being equivalent -- I assume because it is ancient -- and as standing as a counterpoint to our ravaged and ravaging present.

The first chapter, 'The Wisdom Tradition of Egypt', by John L. Foster considers long chunks of Egyptian poetry to demonstrate their wisdom. He suggests that the authors and their writings are very much like us: 'they are so much like us' and 'Not so much different from eulogies of today' (p. 11). Foster does not reveal any further on what basis these comparisons lie but he insists later on in the chapter, 'I have chosen to emphasize the common threads uniting our culture with the ancient Egyptians -- especially by hearing their actual words and their voices speaking' (p. 21). But I ask if these 'voices' are not rather fictional voices and therefore functioning as masks for the author whose intentions might otherwise be quite distinct from his characters?