Alfred thought learning to read was his own greatest early accomplishment. He well understood that a capacity to read with discriminating and thoughtful intelligence was of incalculable value for one who would be faithful to the Word of God, and above all essential for anyone whose sense of obligation to the gospel included obedience to the Great Commandment. The new literacy allowed Christian teaching to grow exponentially. The capacity to read and write in each vernacular language spurred not only the preservation of old story, but also the creation or recording of new stories, narrative and poetry and wise reflection transformed by the Good News. By the time of the Reformation and the invention of printing, this revolutionary effect of biblically sponsored textual learning had thus transformed cultural and political process as well.
Communities formed by a common text quickly develop cadres of trained readers.
The spiritual and intellectual capital of Christian textual tradition has likewise characterized the great themes of literature in modern civilizations. In lieu of gory sagas of bloodthirst and power, these tales are resonant with the promise of spiritual emancipation. It is this hope for the Truth which sets us free that has charged the greatest poetry and prose of these two millennia since the dour historicism of Virgil and those dark and deterministic Nordic sagas. Two opposing cities, two very different notions of communion and community, as Augustine had foreseen in his City of God , came to characterize the fictional landscapes of Christian writers. Versions of the song of the heart set free, from Bunyan's Grace Abounding , to the lyrical prayer diary of George Herbert, to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets , pattern redemption at work in the poetic imagination.