If the mark of a good book is how many times a person can re-read it with pleasure, Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down is one of the best books of the 20th century. I’ve taught this book in my middle school literature class for the past three years, and every read-through is just as thrilling as the last. It has beautiful descriptions of the English countryside, deep references to myth and history, and a ripping good plot. I always read the last fifty pages breathlessly, unable to close the cover until I make it to the end. The book has wisdom, too, with insights on leadership, duty, courage, society, tradition, and community, most of which are readily applicable to real life.
Not bad for a novel about rabbits.
And if that wasn’t enough, eminent theologian Stanley Hauerwas has proved that the novel can stand up to academic close reading and theological analysis. In a 1981 essay, he points to Watership Down as a perfect example of what he calls a “story-formed community,” which, for him, means it’s a perfect example of what the church is and should be in the world. I heartily commend his essay to you, especially if you love the novel as much as I do.1 I want to take Hauerwas’s reading of the story into Theopolitan territory, where the Bible forms the liturgical life of believers, who then form culture that conforms to the life of God. Watership Down doesn’t just illustrate the community of believers in the church. It also illustrates how that community creates a healthy culture that spills into the world around it.
In the novel, a small group of rabbits (eleven, to be exact) leave their home warren because one of them, Fiver, has a vision that the warren will be destroyed. At first, the band has no clear destination, though their de facto leader, Hazel, has vague hopes of one day founding a warren where justice reigns and everyone lives in peace. After many adventures, Fiver’s gift of foresight leads the group to a high, lonely hill called Watership Down—a real place in England—where they found their new warren.
That’s a pretty good story right there. But it only takes us a quarter of the way through a book that’s almost five hundred pages long. The rest of the book describes how Hazel and his rabbits build their warren into a fair, just society by befriending other animals, avoiding angry dogs, and outsmarting a bloodthirsty rabbit warlord named General Woundwort.
At the beginning of his essay, Stanley Hauerwas says that the novel “is meant to teach us the importance of stories for social and political life.”2 In the world of Adams’ novel, rabbits love stories, especially ones about their favorite ancestor and folk hero, El-ahrairah. Through his cleverness—we might even say cunning—El-ahrairah is able to survive and thrive in a dangerous world full of animals that would like to eat him. (In rabbit language, his name means “Prince with a Thousand Enemies.”) When rabbits hear stories about their hero, they see themselves in him and respond to the world as he does.3 In the end, the stories Hazel and his friends tell each other provide the means by which they finally defeat their enemies.
Hauerwas brilliantly develops this theme, explaining how living traditions are the driving force behind healthy societies. In other words, the stories of El-ahrairah’s adventures equip the rabbits to face the future and all its challenges. For Hauerwas, this is what makes people a community:
The most basic task of any polity is to offer its people a sense of participation in an adventure. For finally what we seek is not power, or security, or equality, or even dignity, but a sense of worth gained from participation and contribution to a common adventure. Indeed, our “dignity” derives exactly from our sense of having played a part in such a story.4
Hauerwas then summarizes the story of “The Blessing of El-ahrairah,” which tells how Frith—the divine figure in the rabbit world, represented by the sun—gave the first rabbit the gift of speed, while at the same time filling the world with predators that would like nothing better than to eat him. Speed, cleverness, and alertness to danger are rabbits’ divine inheritance. When they stop telling their stories, they forget that inheritance, and their identity as rabbits falls apart, along with their ability to form any kind of just society.
For example, at one point, Hazel and his friends visit a nameless warren full of placid, healthy, almost indolent rabbits. They’re tempted to remain in this seeming paradise until they learn that the rabbits are only able to live in luxury because a nearby farmer feeds them and shoots their predators. Every so often, the farmer snares a few rabbits and takes them home for supper, but for those who survive, such an easy life is worth the risk of death. Stories about cleverness and caution—about everything that makes a rabbit a rabbit—are suppressed. The rabbits of the nameless warren do not use their gifts, and thus are ashamed to tell their stories. Without the stories, they forget about those gifts altogether and devolve into a group of strangers, each secretly hoping the others will be snared first.
The importance of storytelling in Watership Down corresponds to the Theopolitan emphasis on reading and teaching the Word. As God’s story, the Bible connects to every part of life, and by preaching from the Bible, pastors remind us who we are, what we’ve been given, and how we ought to live as a Christian community. In Watership Down, the church is the community of god-fearing rabbits, the Scriptures are rabbit folk stories, and the liturgy is telling the right story at the right time.
Of course, the next step in the Theopolitan vision involves transforming the cities of men, and we see this same progression in the novel. Hazel and his friends don’t simply create a healthy community for themselves. Their warren becomes a home base from which they influence the culture around them. Like Adam, they rule as vice-regents, ensuring that the will of God (Frith) is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Their new, exalted role is shown most clearly when Hazel and his friends first arrive at Watership Down. The down rises three hundred feet above the surrounding countryside, and as Hazel climbs the gigantic hill, he finds himself looking at the sky:
Hazel, like nearly all wild animals, was unaccustomed to look up at the sky. What he thought of as the sky was the horizon, usually broken by trees and hedges. Now, with his head pointing upward, he found himself gazing at the ridge, as over the skyline came the silent, moving, red-tinged cumuli. Their movement was disturbing, unlike that of trees or grass or rabbits. These great masses moved steadily, noiselessly and always in the same direction. They were not of this world.5
Hazel is ascending into the heavenly places, and it’s no accident that he does so at the top of a mountain. Creatures always come to mountains to meet with God, and indeed, Hazel’s first words after gazing at the clouds are, “O Frith, are you sending us to live among the clouds?” He soon realizes that, atop the downs, he can look down on the rest of the world and watch the approach of any other creature. He has ascended to the mountain of Frith and become his vice-regent.
From this moment on, Hazel and his friends begin to act like stewards. They improve their new home by building a burrow more complex and beautiful (and functional) than others. They meet other animals (a mouse and a gull) and make use of their unique gifts. They become models for how rabbits ought to live as disciples of El-ahrairah in the world Frith made. When the leader of another band of rabbits tries to take over their warren by force, Hazel responds with an offer of friendship:
A rabbit has two ears; a rabbit has two eyes, two nostrils. Our two warrens ought to be like that. They ought to be together—not fighting. We ought to make other warrens between us—start one between here and Efrafa [the rival warren], with rabbits from both sides. You wouldn’t lose by that, you’d gain. We both would. A lot of your rabbits are unhappy now and it’s all you can do to control them, but with this plan you’d soon see a difference. Rabbits have enough enemies as it is. They ought not to make more among themselves. A mating between free, independent warrens—what do you say?6
By extending this offer, Hazel takes control of the situation, inviting the warmongering strangers to make peace with his warren, which, as he says, would allow them to be more rabbit-like.
As the image of God, man occupies a similar place in the world. Adam meets with God on a mountaintop, as do Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and many others. From his mountain-throne, man tames animals, passes judgments, makes covenants, sings songs, and designs temples. In this halfway position between God and the world, man is able to carry out the will of God in the world, making earth more like heaven.
Being so close to God can be risky, however. In Watership Down, whenever their god Frith acts directly on the rabbits’ behalf, his presence terrifies them. The best example is when Holly, Hazel’s second-in-command and a rabbit with a distinctly pragmatic outlook on life, narrowly escapes a group of enemy rabbits by dashing across a railroad track. A train—a “Messenger of Frith,” he says—comes roaring out of the night and cuts down his pursuers. The experience turns Holly from a pragmatist into a rabbit of faith, full of the fear of God:
You may think it’s a wonderful thing to be saved by Lord Frith in his power. How many rabbits has that happened to, I wonder? But I tell you, it was far more frightening than being chased by the Efrafans. Not one of us will forget lying on that bank in the rain while the fire creature went by above our heads. Why did it come on our account? That’s more than we shall ever know.7
Being one of Frith’s favorite creatures doesn’t come without risks. But the rabbits who trust him know that he acts for their good, however inscrutable and dangerous those actions seem. In trusting their god, the rabbits must make peace with the fact that they don’t control their own destiny. If they follow Frith, using the stories of El-ahrairah as a guide, he will take care of them.
In a sense, being at peace with danger is the best thing a rabbit can be. “Most of us live as if we assume our social order is secure and we are safe,” Hauerwas says. “Ironically, the more our societies confirm this self-deception, the more dangerous our life becomes. We lose the skill of recognizing what danger is and where it lies.”8 The way to keep our senses sharp, says Hauerwas, is to constantly remind ourselves of danger through telling true stories. For the church, these true stories are about suffering, death, and resurrection. This is the good news with which we transform culture and bring life to the cities of men. A Christian—or a rabbit—can never be complacent. As the agents of God in the world, we too are called to take up the cross.
Christian Leithart writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also the cofounder of Little Word.