A Flight into Reality

The Holy Father has issued a letter recommending to all Catholics, and to seminarians and priests especially, the reading of imaginative literature. He suggests that literature should be a part of every seminary’s curriculum, something that I have long believed in; and we do seem to agree on some of the reasons for it. For an education without literature, he says, is like preaching a Christ without flesh and bones. Truth thus remains abstract, without power to move.

I am reminded of what the poet Herbert has to say about the lives of preachers, comparing them to the colors of church windows that portray stories. Without those colors, without the stories you see in action, nothing strikes you to the 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 does believe, though he does not, in this letter at least, warn against the lies people tell about themselves all the time to justify what they do, or the lies that people motivated by political passions tell about others to justify their resentment, their hatred, or their sense of superiority. Very occasionally, I encounter a work of literature marked by intelligence and artistic talent carefully employed which, nevertheless, I consider to be evil because it is committed to untruth—not just because of the limitations of vision that we are all prone to, but because the author harbors a hatred of some truth he wishes to bury in lies. Such works are quite rare; I would not have spent my whole adult life teaching literature, including the great works of pagan Greece and Rome, had I thought otherwise.

Francis says that the Christian believer needs literature if he is “sincerely to enter into a dialogue with the culture of his times” (translations are mine, from the Italian). You read what current authors are writing, and what your fellows are reading, the better to understand yourself and them. The trouble, of course, is that the bulk of what people read, if they read novels at all, is junk. I do not mean just that it is not as good as Austen or Dickens or Trollope. William Dean Howells is not as good as they are, but what he does, he does well, and we can profit by him.  Francis says that the Christian believer needs literature if he is “sincerely to enter into a dialogue with the culture of his times.” The trouble, of course, is that the bulk of what people read, if they read novels at all, is junk.Tweet This

I have enjoyed many a tale told by now-forgotten authors in my old copies of The Century, Harper’s, and Scribner’s—tales that cannot vie with those of Henry James and Mark Twain published in those same magazines but that deliver real pleasure and tell truths about man. None of that would I call junk, as a well-wrought homely chair in a farmhouse is not a work by Chippendale, but it is worth having, it serves its purpose, and it is handsome in its humbler way. I mean real junk, the slovenly, the stupid, the cheap; all the worse when they are got up in flashy and shallow political guise. Junk is enabled by mass production. It sells by the millions. Nothing in my old magazines is in the same category with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, to take one abominable example.

The Holy Father believes that studying literature has helped free the Church from a “hard-of-hearing, fundamentalist solipsism” that would suppose that “a single historical and cultural form” could ever express the fullness of the Gospel. I agree. Still, I suspect that Francis and I have different kinds of solipsism in mind.

Francis disparages mere cognition of the truth, preferring instead the experience of truth. Here we need to be careful. Truth is a Person, Jesus Christ. It will not avail us to know things about him if we do not know him. Theologians we must have with us, but the little children who gathered around Christ are held up for us to imitate, to become. Still, it is the Truth that makes for the experience, not the experience that makes the truth, nor can truth known by reason be at variance with the truth we discover by experience.  

The danger of relying on our reasoning alone is that of abstraction and of applying logical categories and deductions where they do not belong: as does the hapless Don Ferrante in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Bubonic plague strikes Milan, but Don Ferrante employs philosophical reasoning on “substance” and “accident” to prove that the plague cannot exist; unfortunately, the plague’s germs do not read philosophy, and Don Ferrante dies of it. 

But there is also a danger in 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 the experience involves us as participants, as objects of moral judgment, as plaintiffs or defendants, we cannot simply say, “You must trust me.” We do not know ourselves, and what we say today we may unsay tomorrow, after we have learned more about who we are and what world we really live in.

Francis appears to believe 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 instruct them to say that this kind of action is right and that kind is wrong, will be the less likely students of literature. What I observe in the United States is the reverse. The great educational movement in our midst involves a return to what is called “classical” but what really is simply a traditional education in arts and letters that even such a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill assumed that young people should have.  

You are therefore likelier to read Homer in a conservative Christian school than at Princeton; you are likelier to read Dante at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles than at a Catholic college whose faith has become frail and thin, as it has at the great majority of such in the United States. I recall a spirited conversation I had long ago with two students from that same Biola University as they drove me to the airport in Los Angeles; it was on Palestrina and polyphony. They were the experts, and I was the neophyte. Such things no longer surprise me.  

My friend Ralph Wood, honored professor of English at Baylor, is a Baptist who loves the Catholic Church and who has spent many years teaching the works of Flannery O’Connor, that author of “the Christ-haunted South.” He is by no means alone at that Baptist college, which is far more welcoming of traditional Catholic scholars than most Catholic colleges are. If you asked me where to send a bright young Catholic so that he or she can get a strong 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 one most powerful reason for studying literature. It is to get yourself free of the solipsism of the present, to see more clearly what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” Once you leave the current welter of political passion, and the sexual fads that have careered into madness, and you open a book written in another time from ours, you stand a chance of encountering truths we have forgotten, or truths we are not permitted to notice, to affirm, to describe, to investigate, and to allow to change us from within. I take no advice about money from a profligate, and I take no advice about men and women from people of our time, who cannot find in themselves sufficient love, one sex for the other, to replace themselves with children, and whose art and literature cannot boast a single mirthful and innocent song of love in forty years.

By all means, let us read literature. May I recommend, dear readers, that you begin with the man I consider the greatest virtuoso of religious poetry in English, George Herbert? A single one of his poems will repay you a hundredfold, and you will not have to wrangle about religious or political factions to do it. Take that flight into reality.