The Holy Father has issued a letter He recommends that all Catholics, especially seminarians and priests, read imaginative literature. He suggests that literature should be part of the curriculum of every seminary, something I have long believed in; and we seem to agree on some of the reasons for this. For an education without literature, he says, is like the preaching of a Christ without flesh and bones. The truth thus remains abstract, without the power to move anything.
I am reminded of what the poet Herbert has to say about the lives of preachers when he compares them to the colors of church windows that depict stories. Without those colors, without the stories you see in action, nothing touches your heart:
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience, ring.
That there is a truth to tell, Francis believes so, but does not, at least in this letter, warn against the lies that people constantly tell about themselves to justify their actions, or against the lies that people tell about others out of political passion to justify their resentment, hatred, or sense of superiority. Very rarely do I come across a literary work marked by intelligence and carefully deployed artistic talent that I nevertheless consider evil because it is committed to untruth—not only because of the limited view we are all prone to, but because the author harbors a hatred for a truth he wishes to bury in lies. Such works are quite rare; if I had thought otherwise, I would not have spent my entire adult life teaching literature, including the great works of pagan Greece and Rome.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Francis says that the Christian believer needs literature if he wants to “enter into a sincere dialogue with the culture of his time” (the translations are mine, from the Italian). He reads what current authors write and what others read in order to understand himself and them better. The problem, of course, is that most of what people read, if they read novels at all, is rubbish. I don’t just mean that it’s not as good as Austen or Dickens or Trollope. William Dean Howells is not as good as them, but what he does, he does well, and we can benefit from him.
I have many stories by now forgotten authors in my old editions of The Century, Harper’s, And Schreiber’s– stories that cannot compete with those of Henry James and Mark Twain, published in the same magazines, but which give real pleasure and tell truths about man. None of it I would call junk, just as a well-made, plain chair in a farmhouse is not the work of Chippendale, but it is worth owning, it serves its purpose, and it is beautiful in its humbler way. I mean real junk, the sloppy, the stupid, the cheap; all the worse when it comes in a flashy and superficial political garb. Junk is made possible by mass production. It sells by the millions. Nothing in my old magazines is in the same category as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, to give a disgusting example.
The Holy Father believes that the study of literature has helped to free the Church from a “deaf, fundamentalist solipsism” that assumes that “a single historical and cultural form” could ever express the fullness of the Gospel. I agree. Yet I suspect that Francis and I have different kinds of solipsism in mind.
Francis despises the mere knowledge of truth and prefers instead the Experience the truth. Here we must be careful. The truth is a person, Jesus Christ. It will not do us any good to know things to him if we do not know him. We must have theologians with us, but the little children who gathered around Christ are to be imitated and become what we can become. Yet it is truth that produces experience, not experience that produces truth, nor can truth known by reason contradict the truth we discover by experience.
If we rely only on our reason, there is a danger of abstraction and the application of logical categories and conclusions where they do not belong: as the unfortunate Don Ferrante does in Alessandro Manzoni’s The fiancés. Milan is ravaged by the bubonic plague, but Don Ferrante uses philosophical arguments about “substance” and “chance” to prove that the plague cannot exist. Unfortunately, the plague germs do not read philosophy, and Don Ferrante dies from it.
However, there is also the danger of exaggerating the reliability of our experience. It is not just that our experience must be limited. It is that No man is a reliable judge in his own case. When we are brought into the experience as participants, as objects of moral judgment, as plaintiff or defendant, we cannot simply say, “You must trust me.” We do not know ourselves, and what we say today we may be able to take back tomorrow, after we have learned more about who we are and the world we really live in.
Francis seems to think that people who often appeal to what we can know cognitively about God and man, good and evil, and the Christian faith, people whose clear moral categories direct them to say that this kind of action is right and that kind is wrong, are less likely to be students of literature. What I observe in the United States is the opposite. The great educational movement in our midst involves a return to what is called “classical,” but which is really simply a traditional education in the arts and literature that even a utilitarian like John Stuart Mill believed young people needed.
They are therefore more likely Homer is more likely to be read at a conservative Christian school than at Princeton; Dante is more likely to be read at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles than at a Catholic college whose faith has become frail and thin, as is the case at the vast majority of such colleges in the United States. I remember a lively conversation I had long ago with two students from the same Biola University as they drove me to the airport in Los Angeles; it was about Palestrina and polyphony. They were the experts and I was the novice. Such things no longer surprise me.
My friend Ralph Wood, distinguished professor of English at Baylor University, is a Baptist who loves the Catholic Church and has spent many years teaching the works of Flannery O’Connor, author of “The Christ-haunted South.” He is by no means alone at this Baptist college, which is far more open to traditional Catholic scholarship than most Catholic colleges. If you asked me where to send a bright young Catholic to receive a solid education in literature among Christian believers rather than risk his faith among people who know neither literature nor theology, I would recommend Baylor in a heartbeat.
But we have not yet mentioned the most important reason for studying literature. It is to free oneself from the solipsism of the present, to see more clearly what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” When one leaves behind the present confusion of political passions and maddened sexual fashions, and opens a book written in a different age from our own, one has the chance of encountering truths we have forgotten, or truths we must not perceive, acknowledge, describe, examine, and allow to change us from within. I will not take advice on money from a spendthrift, and I will not take advice on men and women from people of our time who do not find in themselves enough love, of one sex for the other, to replace themselves with children, and whose art and literature cannot boast of a single happy and innocent love song in forty years.
Let us read literature, by all means. May I suggest to you, dear readers, that you begin with the man I consider to be the greatest virtuoso of religious poetry in the English language, George Herbert? A single poem of his will benefit you a hundredfold, and you don’t have to fight with religious or political factions to do it. Take that flight into reality.
