The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature
In his recent letter on the role of literature in formation, Pope Francis commends literature as a remedy for the “unremitting exposure to social media,” an enslavement that is fast wearing away at our capacity to read. Dizzied, we can easily grow addicted to those habits and technologies that thrive on an economy of self-assertion, envy, and rage. Like desperate addicts ready to do anything for the next hit, we wander down back alleys of distraction, veering away from the calmer, quieter, more capacious ethos offered by the libraries of liberality—those good and great books whose satisfactions are more subtle and whose moral imaginings are (if sometimes less instantly gratifying) more lucid and lasting.
It may well be the case that literature “improves [the reader’s] ability to concentrate, reduces levels of cognitive decline, and calms stress anxiety,” but this list of therapeutic uses, found in Pope Francis’s letter, cannot satisfactorily justify the study of literature. Keenly aware of this problem, the pope explains the “most important reasons for encouraging a renewed love of reading.”
Whereas catechetical categories are sure guides to our salvation, didactic truths can be warped when applied to “some abstract humanity” in an inhuman moralism that grates against the mystery of the Incarnation. Divine though he was, Jesus Christ, made flesh, was “made of passions, emotions, and feelings,” could heal with a touch as much as a word, and could give “looks that liberate.”
Just as Christ descended into the messiness of mortal frailty, “the reader is not simply the recipient of an edifying message, but a person challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct.” Because by its nature literature immerses the reader in this complex and mysterious three-dimensional reality, it offers occasions for carefully cultivating prudence, sharpening our capacity for “discernment.” This is precisely why Newman, in The Idea of a University, insists that poetry and fiction be preserved as part of a young person’s formation. If literature were cut from a curriculum in favor of the safer fare of pure theology and philosophy—because “the old Adam smelt rank” in poems, plays, and novels that dramatize human rebellion—the pupil would be bereft of “the honest indulgence of wit and humour,” the elevating pleasures of “fastidiousness of taste.” Still more, he would have no “rule given him for discriminating ‘the precious and the vile,’ beauty from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what is innocent from what is poison.”
To counter the risk of “incidental corruption,” a school can cut literature from the classroom, but it cannot eliminate the fact that these “broad manifestations of the natural man” will be waiting, unmediated, at the classroom door “in living and breathing substance,” and “it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them.” Literature is a mediating moral force, a staging area where we can confront the riches and challenges of reality at second hand in a way that deepens our ability to wrestle with them, and respond rightly, when we meet them in actuality.
One thing that champions of literature too often leave out, though, is that there are literary waters so troubled that no lessons could keep the student from drowning in them, just as there are some “occasions of sin” that so incline the will toward evil that the only right answer to them is a saving avoidance. Pope Francis insists that “literature is not relativistic; it does not strip us of values,” but there are innumerable novels that are like houses whose windows and doors are open to competing visions of the real: their claims are undifferentiated by artful accentuation, acclimating the reader to endless ambiguities more than manifesting legitimate mysteries.
Here lies the tension, an extension of what Plato called the “ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy”: some literature does foster a relativistic spirit, and it can be difficult, if not impossible, to really encounter a work of poetry or fiction without letting the book arrest your attention and shape your affections (rather than standing above the work in steadfastly detached judgment). There are certain books that will deform the soul. On the other hand, moral and theological categories and catechetical truths are blessed lodestars, but they cannot, in themselves, give us prudence. Similarly, literature’s multiplicities, its parade of particularity, demand judgment. As Pope Francis puts it, “the symbolic representation of good and evil, of truth and falsehood . . . does not dispense from moral judgment.” Rather, good literature “prevents us from a blind or superficial condemnation,” a knee-jerk moralism. It cultivates patience and deliberation and teaches us meekness in our efforts to understand others and ourselves: that we ought to make judgments marked by a heightened sense of human brokenness and beauty, a sober confrontation with the mystery of evil, and great gratitude for God’s grandeur.
However, this ability to make judgments at all (and not merely to have our judgments determined or decided for us by works of literature) requires us to make some sort of a priori ethical or spiritual commitment, and a priori principles can be alternately rooted in truth or riddled with errors.
Literature can compel us to feel attracted to goodness, but it can also compel us to feel attracted to evil. It cannot make us do good or evil things, but it can make us more likely to think good or evil thoughts or harbor right or wrong feelings toward something or someone. The untethered taste for aesthetical nuance can make a virtue of imprecision—and indecision. But when we approach literature attended by a complete ethics, its goodness can begin to take specific shapes. As Josef Pieper puts it in The Four Cardinal Virtues, man is “at all times and places . . . under the obligation to be just and brave and temperate,” but “the specific ways of accomplishing this unchanging obligation may take a thousand different forms.”
If we come to a good narrative poem with erroneous moral assumptions, that poem can purify and persuade us toward the fullness of truth. If we come to a short story convinced by an account of the good that is coherent and true—and yet incomplete insofar as it remains only reasoned—our encounter with the arc of characters’ complications, reversals, and recognitions can educate our sentiments by wedding feeling and form, appetite and intellect. By inviting us to pass through innumerable dilemmas involving a vast cast of characters, literature teaches us to match our principles with prudence; without prudence, without practical wisdom, our principles remain beautiful islands cut off from reality.
While immediate experience, deliberately weighed, can sharpen prudence, literature expands our exposure to a range of places and times. Pope Francis invokes Proust’s famous celebration of the novel’s capacity to “unleash ‘in us, in the space of an hour, all the possible joys and misfortunes that, in life, it would take us entire years to know even slightly, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them.’” Because literature does justice to imagined realities that transcend the blinding limits of our lot, our judgments can become more complete, more just.
Good literature is also especially good at educating our emotions. Drawing on T. S. Eliot’s contention that today’s religious crisis comes out of a “widespread emotional incapacity,” the pope suggests that “the problem for today is not primarily that of believing more or believing less with regard to particular doctrines,” but the widespread inability to be moved by the appeals of pathos extended by both God and . . . poems. This either/or risks oversimplification. Today’s religious crisis involves, in part, a relativistic resistance to particular doctrines, but also, the problems of emotivism, “the doctrine,” as Alasdair MacIntyre defines it in After Virtue, “that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”
But we are body and soul, conjunctions of intellect and appetite, which means that the solution to an endemic emotivism is another compromise—between our passions and intellect. Instead of categorically condemning or bracketing our emotions, we ought to be open to what they have to teach us. This art of being attuned to our feelings, of learning how to recognize and reckon with them, of listening to them without letting them lord over us, is called a sentimental education—and literature is a prime school for the lessons of the sentiments. In this comic (in the classical sense) marriage plot meant to mend the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, truths metaphysically and logically sound but in need of proving can be tested and tempered, purified and clarified when philosophy inhabits the house of fiction.
This is precisely where the “moral imagination” reveals its utter indispensability. As popularized by Russell Kirk, the “moral imagination” is “a term of humane letters and politics implying that men and women are moral beings and that the power of the imagination enables them to perceive, beyond mere appearances, a hierarchy of worth and certain enduring truths.” He traces the term to Reflections on the Revolution in France, where Edmund Burke worries that through the French Revolution’s
conquering empire of light and reason, . . . all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
Yes, sometimes our imaginations can falsify reality, leading us astray from reason’s right way. Our imaginations can misrepresent past sins or merits (ours or others’), discoloring what happened with shades of nostalgia, scrupulosity, or misguided mercy. But frigid reason, even when it is morally sound, can be awfully, fearfully, diabolically inhumane. We are not pure spirits; as Pope Francis maintains, imagination tethers us to our incarnate state, and reason must purify our passions’ excesses and errors; but reason ought never to obliterate imagination in the name of conceptual exactitude or ideological purity.
In “A Sentimental Education,” Alan Jacobs persists in honoring the literary art of feeling rightly, because a too-quick degradation of emotions
is incurious about what feelings are—and how they may change. The disparagement of feeling is based on the belief that they simply happen . . . but . . . feelings can develop—can “mature[.]”
By this he means that feelings can become “more capable, more adequate to what they encounter.”
C. S. Lewis extends this insight in The Abolition of Man, where he vows that “a good education should build some sentiments while destroying others.” We can gain clarity on this problem through a consideration of the place of thymos in human life. As the Oxford Classical Dictionary helpfully demonstrates:
As an internal substance, space, entity, or agent associated with processes of cognition, affectivity, volition, and motivation, the thymos is not a scandalous miscellany of capacities that should be kept separate, but a concept that links “reason” and “passion,” mind and body, intentional and phenomenal in ways that implicitly recognize the unity of cognition and affectivity as functions of an organism whose mental functions are fundamentally and thoroughly embodied.
There is no question that bad art can malform thymos, and readers can ignore the self-transcendent persuasions of a good play, bending the emotional appeals in a solipsistic inward turn. Early in his Letter, the pope seems to indulge such a mode when he argues that “in weeping for the fate of [tragic characters], we are essentially weeping for ourselves, for our own emptiness, shortcomings, weaknesses.” Later, he remedies this defense of self-indulgence, suggesting that, although the sufferings of a story’s characters may first “awaken faint echoes of our own inner experiences,” through them we “step out of ourselves and enter into their lives,” and, by extension, the lives their doubles who exist in reality.
By educating our sentiments—by wedding feeling and form, appetite and intellect—good literature moves us to love and hate what we ought to love and hate. Demanding but delightful stories and poems can flex the lazy parts of our souls, strengthening our ability to sort between the specious and the precious, to wrestle through the layered, complex admixture of good and evil inclinations and actions as they exist—enfleshed. Literature lends a fullness to our necessary categories, inviting us to recognize, on our knees, those saving truths we’ve not yet found in real life.
Literature, lit with a good moral spirit, can make our duty attractive, even if it can’t force us to do it. Precisely insofar as they lack any explicit moralistic elements, truly good books persuade us with their palpable images into a posture of co-suffering. These stories can even bring us to the brink of conversion, the threshold of knowing Who we ought to worship and how, even as they help us locate our current position on the continuum from self-deceit to wisdom.
Image by Jelena Stanojkovic and licensed via Adobe Stock.