Pope Francis offers an idealistic, anti-utilitarian approach to reading literature

There is a lot to like about Pope Francis’ recent letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation”.

Originally conceived as an encouragement for seminarians to include fiction and poetry as part of their education, Pope Francis ultimately decided to offer his remarks to “all Christians.” The big-picture perspective he offers is in sympathy with many of his writings and speeches throughout his pontificate, to the delight and consternation of his audience, depending on the topic. That perspective is thoroughly anti-utilitarian—a most welcome emphasis when it comes to questions of art. Thus, we begin analyzing the letter with the assurance that reading is valuable, even holy, in its own right. To read a novel or a poem is, according to Pope Francis, “part of one’s path to personal maturity” (§1).

Hear, hear.

The Holy Father’s idealistic perspective on reading becomes apparent in his contrast between literature and “our present unremitting exposure to social media” (§2). Our imaginations need the rich protein of prose and poetry instead of the soul-fattening empty calories of information, news, and propaganda. Moreover, Pope Francis warns us not to think of literature as “merely a form of entertainment” (§4). He rightly praises “some seminaries” for counterbalancing the widespread “obsession with screens” by insisting on assigning real books. He might also have mentioned classical schools and Catholic liberal arts colleges.

The Pope also reminds us that we need to tame our attention spans. Some of us are old enough to remember sitting in a room with a book in an era before the smartphone, or even the computer. The dead silence was, for some of us, a welcome and necessary condition for contemplation with a book in hand. I recall as a young man being given permission to ignore the distractions of the world when one of my favorite French professors in college counseled our class to take the phone off the hook when we sat down with a text.

Reading anything—but particularly a novel or a poem—demands commitment. And while reading is still a common practice for most of us, it is nearly impossible to do it with the same focus we were able to cultivate more easily in the past. Our devices could buzz at any moment. Pope Francis therefore advocates a return to real reading as a counter-cultural activity:

We desperately need to counterbalance this inevitable temptation to a frenetic and uncritical lifestyle by stepping back, slowing down, taking time to look and listen. This can happen when a person simply stops to read a book. (§31)

As the first section of the letter closes, Pope Francis offers a personal anecdote from his days as a high school teacher in Argentina in the 1960s. Displaying pastoral wisdom, he relates how students were reluctant to read El Cid, so he compromised and let them study Garcia Lorca in the classroom instead, trusting that any exposure to good literature had the potential to drive his young pupils up the intellectual ladder to something higher.

But it is in this context that we also find our first of a few inconsistencies in the Pope’s letter. He notes, “there is nothing more counterproductive than reading something out of a sense of duty” (§7). And yet, surely we have a duty to face the difficulties of the great literary canon, as is likewise our duty to Scripture. The Pope later acknowledges as much, partly contradicting his earlier remarks by saying, “the difficulty or tedium that we feel in reading certain texts is not necessarily bad or useless” (§28). Perhaps the unstated point is that context matters. Some of us can only manage to drink milk. Others have sharp teeth and a strong stomach, and we will remain spiritually weak if we refuse to put in the effort to chew meat.

Now on to the major questions on the Pope’s mind: How do we read? What does reading do to us?

First, Pope Francis implicitly advocates a “reader response” theory of literature, and for this emphasis, we should be grateful, but also a little cautious. Reader response proposes for the modern world what ancient and medieval people completely took for granted about any text—namely, establishing meaning in a literary work is a duty that rests on the shoulders of the reader as well as the writer. As C.S. Lewis noted in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), “a poem unread is not a poem at all.” Pope Francis puts it thus: “Readers in some sense rewrite a text, enlarging its scope through their imagination” (§3).

Unfortunately, the Pope does not elaborate on the social parameters within which a person reads. For example, he does not mention the famous proponent of reader response theory, Stanley Fish, who theorized about making meaning of texts within groups that he called “interpretive communities.” Accordingly, Pope Francis does not specifically talk about how his own flock, Catholics, ought to read a given novel or poem or even mention the formation in supernatural virtues that should accompany a Catholic in any endeavor.

That said, reader response theory bears a certain resemblance to the Ignatian spiritual practice of contemplation, and to some extent of the practice of lectio divina. Not surprising for our Jesuit pontiff, Pope Francis helpfully refers to St. Ignatius several times in the letter, relating the reading of fiction to a process of discernment, in which the reader brings to the text a certain “desolation” (§26, §27). That is, the reader of a novel or a poem, desiring God yet feeling separated from him by sin, brings to the text an openness to the transforming power of God’s Word through words. In this way, the Pope transitions from our active role as textual interpreters to our passive role as recipients of wisdom. He quotes Fr. Antonio Spadaro (more on him anon), who describes the phenomenon of “being read” by a text. He notes, “readers can thus be compared to players on a field: they play the game, but the game is also played through them, in the sense that they are totally caught up in the action” (§29).

In the eighth paragraph, Pope Francis invites us to think of reading literature as a form of “dialogue with the culture,” and I could not be in deeper agreement with this sentiment on its face. Good Catholic or more generally Christian literature is most welcome, but we should not limit ourselves to these literary marketing categories. Instead, in paragraph 12, Pope Francis delivers us into the familiar territory of St. Paul’s speech on the Aeropagus in Athens, where the Apostle states his case in reference to the ancient pagan poets Epimenides and Aratus of Soli—textbook engagement with literature for the sake of “praeparatio evangelica.” (Annoyingly, the Pope dates the two Greek writers as living B.C.E. instead of B.C. Surely of anyone on earth, the Pope should insist on dating everything in history in relation to Christ!)

But, at times, Pope Francis’ concise teaching on the topic of dialogue is muddled by vague jargon. At one point he expresses concern about “fundamentalist self-referentiality,” (§10) and elsewhere he worries—unduly, I think—that a certain kind of reader could be overly critical and “fall into self-isolation” while suffering from “spiritual deafness” (§20). Most striking of all, the Pope promotes reading literature as a means to grow in empathy (no problem there), but the implication in paragraph 35 is that the typical pew-dweller fails to be sufficiently empathetic and clings to a small, judgmental worldview. This sentence is meant as a corrective to our (my!) narrow-mindedness, but I admit, it completely stumps me: “The marvelous diversity of humanity, and the diachronic and synchronic plurality of cultures and fields of learning, become, in literature, a language capable of respecting and expressing all their variety.”

On these points, I wonder somewhat about the influence of the aforementioned Father Spadaro, Emeritus Editor of La Civiltà Cattolica and current Undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. A fellow Jesuit and close ally of Pope Francis, Spadaro’s work is referenced six times in the letter, and he may be familiar to Americans as the author of a 2017 article which was highly critical of former President Trump and American Christianity. I worry that, in some parts of the letter, literature may be a cipher for an anti-dogmatic Catholic sensibility that contrasts with a brutish, stereotypically American traditionalism recently compromised by bad bed-fellowship with populists.

Here we must note the shadow side of reader response theory, which allows for the possibility of interpreting any text in any way one chooses. With Spadaro’s fingerprints on the document, turns of phrases such as “renew and expand our worldview” (§3), “the polyphony of divine revelation,” (§10) and “essential tension” (§33) stand out. And on a separate note, in three paragraphd, the Pope relies on the work of Karl Rahner in a somewhat esoteric description of the priesthood as a poetic calling. (I say this, incidentally, as someone who has more time for Rahner than some of my friends do.) Pope Francis might have made a better point about cultivating the priestly imagination by simply highlighting a few of the many priest-poets in the Catholic tradition.

I said above that vague jargon only “occasionally” gets in the way because thankfully one finds elsewhere in the text a strong expression of literature as a portal to the deeper mystery that doctrine simply seeks to describe. For example, Pope Francis refers to the great Anglican poet T.S. Eliot, noting that “the problem for faith today is not primarily that of believing more or believing less with regard to particular doctrines. Rather, it is the inability of so many of our contemporaries to be profoundly moved in the face of God, his creation and other human beings” (§22).

Crystal clear.

And in the best passage of the whole letter, Pope Francis again sounds the anti-utilitarian alarm, not naming but nonetheless evoking ideas found in the likes of De Lubac, Giussani, Pieper, and even Ratzinger: “We need to rediscover ways of relating to reality that are more welcoming, not merely strategic and aimed purely at results,” where “leisure and freedom are the marks of an approach to reality that finds in literature a privileged, albeit not exclusive, form of expression…a mystery charged with a surplus of meaning” (§32).

It is a high-level passage, I grant you, but close examination yields a simple meaning: With enough space and a well-formed conscience, real literary art comes from God and opens the door to God.

Finally, we return to the marvelous effect that the gift of literature may have on readers. In a word, it humanizes us. Pope Francis makes passing references to the practical benefits of reading, which develops our “ability to concentrate, reduces levels of cognitive decline, and calms stress and anxiety” (§16). Reading may also provide an avenue of personal growth and interior exploration. On this point, Pope Francis quotes a different passage from the previously mentioned book by C.S. Lewis: “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself” (§17).

Nonetheless, Pope Francis does not rest in the realm of the self-help for long. Reading, as a gift from God, is something we do for Him and for each other. The Pope adduces Marcel Proust’s familiar image of literature as a telescope, along with the somewhat less illustrative image from Spadaro of a “photo lab” (§30). The point is literature helps us look up and out—again, to see details of reality that we would not otherwise be able to glimpse.

What we see can be convicting, and on this topic, Pope Francis finally steers us away from pure subjectivism, stating, “literature is not relativistic; it does not strip us of values” (§38). Rather, encountering depictions of brokenness reminds us of our own need for redemption, of our own duty to help others, and of the one faith to which all are called. Imagining foretastes of glory in fiction, we are buoyed by the promise of the full blast of glory that awaits us in the Resurrection life. In the bittersweet manner of great literature, the letter ends with a powerful quote from the unfortunate Paul Celan: “Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen” (44).

In reading Pope Francis’ mostly excellent letter on literature, each of us should feel moved to pick up a book, prepare our imaginations for expansion, and seek the Lord anew.