The pope does not assume that the encounter literature enables happens without effort, or that one can always “listen” to the literary text without specific kinds of training and mental discipline. Although he does not talk in any detail about specific literary forms, his defense of literature is explicitly formalist. “Literature,” he writes, “sensitizes us to the relationship between forms of expression and meaning. It offers a training in discernment, honing the capacity of the future priest to gain insight into his own interiority and into the world around him.” Discernment, for the pope, is discernment first of all of another’s expression, but finally of one’s own soul. Or indeed, of one’s ensouled body; my favorite passage in the letter compares the reader to a thoughtfully chewing cow:
Another striking image for the role of literature comes from the activity of the human body, and specifically the act of digestion. The eleventh-century monk William of Saint-Thierry and the seventeenth-century Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin developed the image of a cow chewing her cud — ruminatio — as an image of contemplative reading. Surin referred to the “stomach of the soul,” while the Jesuit Michel De Certeau has spoken of an authentic “physiology of digestive reading.” Literature helps us to reflect on the meaning of our presence in this world, to “digest” and assimilate it, and to grasp what lies beneath the surface of our experience. Literature, in a word, serves to interpret life, to discern its deeper meaning and its essential tensions.
Since Matthew Arnold, theorists of culture have made the case that literature shares ground with religion. The Arnoldian form of the argument, a species of secularization thesis, insists that the waning authority of religion can be compensated for by literature and art. In the 1920s, the literary critic I.A. Richards expanded on Arnold’s insight. Under the aegis of scientific modernity, Richards wrote, ideas “about God, about the universe, about human nature, about the soul” — ideas that are “pivotal points in the organization of the mind, vital to its well-being” — are now “for sincere, honest, and informed minds, impossible to believe as for centuries they have been believed.” Like Arnold before him, Richards counseled literature as a substitute, since, “as poetry conclusively shows, even the most important among our attitudes can be aroused and maintained without any believing of a factual or verifiable order entering in at all.” Literature becomes a vehicle for the sustenance of humanly indispensable but scientifically illegitimate concepts and feelings.
For the pope, of course, the matter stands somewhat differently, though the terrain is the same. I have sometimes wondered whether religious colleges will become repositories for areas of humanistic study in terminal decline across the the broader educational landscape. If so, the pope’s letter on literature offers some theoretical justifications.
