Literature in the human life

The letter from Pope Francis on “The Role of Literature in Formation”, addressed to priests and all “those engaged in pastoral work” — and indeed to “all Christians” — is a rich text, filled with insights and content that deserve to be thoroughly addressed and developed. According to the Pope, anyone who has a role in education must engage with literature and acquire a taste for reading. There is an urgency in the tone of the letter because it touches on a problem — one among many — that is close to Francis’ heart: the issue of “sensibilities.”

On a first reading, it is worthwhile focusing on this point, which is the central theme of the papal text — a theme related to the difficult relationship between contemporary men and women and Christianity. 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. Here we see the importance of working to healing and enrich our responsiveness”. Pope Francis cites two poets, T.S. Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges, both great though distant from one another, to clarify the terms of this problem, which the first describes as “emotional incapacity” and which the Pope refers to, in the light of the second, as a kind of “spiritual deafness”. There is a third author, not mentioned in the text, but who expresses the same urgency with his unmistakable style: Franz Kafka. In the face of this “torpor” of today’s man, there is indeed a need to read those books that, according to Kafka, “bite and sting” so as to receive “deep wounds” that allow the conscience to become more sensitive. The Prague novelist, in a letter to Oskar Pollak from November 1903, uses harsh, violent images: “If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? [...] A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”. This intense, blunt experience ensures that readers, according to the Pope, become “more sensitive to the full humanity of the Lord Jesus”.

The letter on the role of literature was released on August 4, the day after the 60th anniversary of the death of Flannery O’Connor, who advocated literature as the “most incarnational” of all arts. The critical point is this: the evaporation of faith in the incarnation. Today’s concern is the same that the Pope expressed in 2013 in Evangelii Gaudium, which warned against a “form of spiritual consumerism”, another face of an “unhealthy individualism”, because, “Today, our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing of us with regard to others” (eg 89). Against disincarnate spiritual consumerism, the antidote is literature. In his 1899 Tales of the Antichrist, Vladimir Soloviev had Starets John — the only Christian able to resist the seductions of the Antichrist, who proposed a church that was “good” and “humanitarian”, but without Christ — say: “What we hold most dear in Christianity is Christ Himself, Himself and everything that comes from Him, for we know that in Him dwells bodily the fullness of divinity”.

But how can reading a narrative text accomplish this resistance to the elimination of the human and therefore the Christian? First, it must be remembered that reading a book is equivalent to an immersion in reality because, as Guardini said, a book is “a small object rich in the world”. Moreover, citing a reflection by C.S. Lewis, the Pope notes that “reading a literary text places us in the position of ‘seeing through the eyes of others, thus gaining a breadth of perspective that broadens our humanity. We 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. In reading, we discover that our feelings are not simply our own; they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone”.

A training ground for sensitivity, for mercy, for discernment that does not lead to summary and “stylized” judgments, literature refines and humanizes first and foremost our view of reality, of the world and of human beings, toppling “the idols of a self-referential, falsely self-sufficient and statically conventional language that at times also risks polluting our ecclesial discourse, imprisoning the freedom of the Word”. It is a matter, once again, of perspective, of the cultivation of our gaze, which is the great benefit of literature; the Pope concludes: “The wisdom born of literature instils in the reader greater perspective, a sense of limits, the ability to value experience over cognitive and critical thinking, and to embrace a poverty that brings extraordinary riches. By acknowledging the futility and perhaps even the impossibility of reducing the mystery of the world and humanity to a dualistic polarity of true vs false or right vs wrong, the reader accepts the responsibility of passing judgement, not as a means of domination, but rather as an impetus towards greater listening. And at the same time, a readiness to partake in the extraordinary richness of a history which is due to the presence of the Spirit, but is also given as a grace, an unpredictable and incomprehensible event that does not depend on human activity, but redefines our humanity in terms of hope for salvation”. (Andrea Monda)

By Andrea Monda