Pope Francis’s Apologia for Literature

L ast year, in a New Yorker article about the decline of the English major, a Shakespeare scholar admitted that until about two decades ago, he “probably read five novels a month. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot.” What accounts for that decline? It’s not, he explains, “because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” If even prominent academics are distracted from reading, what hope is there for the rest of us? Studies confirm that few of us read literature anymore. According to a National Endowment for the Arts survey from 2018, only 41.8 percent of American adults reported reading fiction in 2017. Poetry was in even worse shape: Less than 12 percent of adults reported reading verse. Compare that to the early 1980s, when about 57 percent of Americans read literature, and nearly 20 percent reported reading or listening to poetry.

Given this decline, it’s a welcome occasion when one of the world’s most widely respected public figures comes to literature’s defense. And I don’t mean Reese Witherspoon.

In a letter released last month, Pope Francis argues that, far from being “merely a form of entertainment,” literature can be a valuable “part of one’s path to personal maturity.” Although his primary audience is priests, he makes clear that many of his points apply to all Christians and, for that matter, nonbelievers. The document is a compelling if imperfect argument that should be taken seriously by anyone who cares about literature or Christianity.

Pope Francis joins many apologists when he emphasizes literature’s ability to “develop an imaginative empathy that enables us to identify with how others see, experience and respond to reality. Without such empathy, there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, mercy.” This empathy not only helps us understand others; it also consoles us to “discover that our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone.” But Francis (perhaps recalling Flannery O’Connor’s complaint that critical praise for writerly compassion means “the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human”) also acknowledges that empathy does not negate judgment or criticism. “Literature is not relativistic; it does not strip us of values,” he insists, nor does it “dispense from moral judgment.” Rather, it prevents “us from blind or superficial condemnation.”

Along these lines, and to the surprise of no one familiar with his pontificate, Francis also emphasizes literature’s role in establishing dialogue. Borrowing from his countryman Jorge Luis Borges, Francis defines literature as “listening to another person’s voice,” and as such it can “make us sensitive to the mystery of other people, teaches us how to touch their hearts.” Reading the literature of our own time can help us understand our own culture — and therefore help us understand how to evangelize it. Conversely, when we read literature from other cultures, we recognize the wisdom of other peoples and places. When Christians read non-Christian works, “We can recognize the presence of the Spirit in the variety of human experiences, seeing the seeds of the Spirit’s presence already planted in the events, sensibilities, desires and profound yearnings present within hearts and in social, cultural and spiritual settings.” One might add that reading works from the past can reveal the limitations of our own time.

Pope Francis also makes the powerful point that because literature helps us understand humanity more deeply, reading literature can make us “all the more sensitive to the full humanity of the Lord Jesus, in which his divinity is wholly present.” This is an important reminder not only of literature’s power but of Christ’s humanity. He supplements this point in the final paragraphs by identifying “the affinity between priest and poet [which] shines forth in the mysterious and indissoluble sacramental union between the divine Word and our human words.” An appreciation of the word, experiencing human language at its most evocative and powerful, helps us better appreciate the Word made flesh — and vice versa.

I confess that there are some odd passages, as when the pope compares “the difficulty or tedium that we feel in reading certain texts” to “what Saint Ignatius calls spiritual ‘desolation.’” He seems to be analogizing boredom or frustration with a literary work to falling into mortal sin. That strikes me as an extreme comparison, though perhaps it can be a more effective way to push through a dull passage than refilling your coffee mug.

More importantly, Pope Francis says little about the elevating power of beauty. As Saint John Paul II wrote to artists 25 years ago:

The theme of beauty is decisive for a discourse on art. . . . In perceiving that all he had created was good, God saw that it was beautiful as well. The link between good and beautiful stirs fruitful reflection. In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.

Similarly, Bishop Robert Barron argues, “The best evangelical strategy is one that moves from the beautiful to the good and finally to the true. . . . There is something unthreatening about the beautiful” that invites contemplation and eventually, as Pope Francis might say, dialogue.

It would also have been good for the head of the Roman Catholic Church to praise specifically Catholic literature. He’s certainly right to say that the faithful can benefit from non-Christian art. But many Christians, including priests, are unaware of the great literature that takes their faith seriously and can help them understand it more fully. This past Easter season, I spoke to a group of priests about literature and found that they were not only receptive to my points about how fiction and poetry could improve their spiritual lives and pastoral abilities, but also eager for recommendations about specific works.

Despite these and other shortcomings, it’s significant that the Vicar of Christ is making the case for literature at all. Pope Francis has done an important service not only to priests and Christians but to literature by sketching some of the reasons we should all immerse ourselves in fiction and poetry.