Attentive readers will have noticed that Pope Francis’ recent letter on why Catholics should read imaginative literature contains texts that closely overlap and even recapitulate his encyclical Dilexit Nos on the human heart and the Sacred Heart. This, I am sure, is no error. The proper territory of the literary artist is the human heart. Written words can map this territory with such fidelity that, while they do not substitute for direct experience, they can still mysteriously infuse, color, and even reshape that experience.
This profound power of verbal art to influence the mind and heart has made some Catholics and Christians hesitant to embrace imaginative literature, lest it affect them for ill and not for good. That hesitation in turn has unfortunately left room in recent decades for a metastatic incursion of commercialized, sanitized, “safe” pabulum that has diminished Christians’ once-sterling literary reputation and stained the honor of our intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual traditions. The poet Paul Pastor has described the state of affairs well in his recent clarion call for a revival of the Christian arts, particularly the Christian literary arts—a renewal, for Christians, to the embrace of that art which, as Jacques Maritain says, “God wants for himself” and that still has “all its teeth.” As Pastor goes on positively to reveal, that revival is already well underway.
In the so-far fruitful effort to revive a distinctively and meaningfully Catholic contribution to the culture of arts and letters, one necessity—to which Pope Francis implicitly calls attention—is that we should set up no false oppositions between heart and mind, intellect and emotion. They are a unity. While some passages of Dilexit Nos and the letter on literature may seem to take their opposition for granted on a first cursory reading, I believe this would be a misreading of the whole. Francis acknowledges the mind/heart split as a thing that exists nominally and discursively, but does not necessarily endorse it as a thing that exists ontologically. The ancients, even at their most highly educated, knew nothing of such violent incisions. Nor did our Lord, who “needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone” (John 2:25).
As we are a body/soul unity, so we are also a mind/heart unity, and our capacity for language affects us on every level: body, mind, heart, soul.
Readers and writers of literature would do well, then, to embrace an older description of the mind: One that makes it out to be, first and foremost, simply the place where we are able to have contact with God. This description, often applied to the heart, is just as valid for the mind. As we are a body/soul unity, so we are also a mind/heart unity, and our capacity for language affects us on every level: body, mind, heart, soul. Therefore, what makes for strong thought also makes for strong feeling, and the converse is also true: “All human reason stands in an ineluctable relation to narrative,” writes James Matthew Wilson. Everything we believe, know, and understand to be true, we believe, know, and understand because we were first present, awake, and engaged in certain events of our own lives that brought those truths to light.
Without immersion in such stories—our own and those of others—we cannot reason. This is why Aristotle thought philosophy should be pursued not by the callow, but by the mature: those who understand how life goes because they have lived it. For the same reason that they need to pursue abstract truth, mature thinkers also need to continue to dwell within stories that not only divert their minds but track to their experience.
This does not mean that such stories will confirm everything a reader already thinks. A good story may overturn many illusions and smash many idols. But stories that can nourish us will carry a certain persuasiveness: the evidence of things seen. Without such evidence, a story cannot hope to persuade anyone of things hoped for.
Catholics should be realists—and as Dostoevsky put it, “Realists do not fear the results of their study.” Catholics need not fear narrative art’s persuasiveness, because Catholics should not endorse the Puritan sensibility that following the story of someone with whom we disagree may lead us to potentially repugnant conclusions. Our confidence in the risen Lord, in whose light we see light and in whose truth all our own truths are rooted, sets us free not for indifference but for excellence. In this freedom we can find ways to recognize and account for characters’ errors, and even to feel for them in the ways they arrived at false conclusions, without agreeing with those false conclusions. We need not demand, as the fearful do, that erring characters not give voice to their errors. A wise author will provide dialogic counterbalances that strengthen the reader’s ability to perceive, to sift, and to discern what is present in the scenario as a whole. A wise reader will know how to pick up the author’s cues.
We can manage all this, too, without cutting off the flow of the story in order to supply overdetermined explanations or premature conclusions. This is good practice for encountering and responding to real human events in our real world. A sanitized cosmos is not the cosmos God actually created. It is therefore not the cosmos the thinking Catholic will experience—or the thinking Catholic author will describe. But like the real cosmos, it can and will include characters who center themselves on Christ, affirm all that he stands for, celebrate his beauty in all of creation, create community around him, bring him to others—including into places he is not often or easily found—and fly to his Real Presence in the Eucharist as the one thing necessary for life.
Like the real cosmos, this described cosmos also can and will include those who sometimes, often, or always fall short (which at some point includes almost all of us). Unlike young children, adult readers are equipped to realize that not every story ends happily for the good guys and sadly for the bad; that not every sin is immediately or obviously punished, or will even meet with a visible or external consequence in this life; and that most of us who walk along the way to eternity with Christ will nevertheless experience uncertainty, perplexity, and pain whose meanings may take decades to unfold or may never be fully known to us.
How will we make sense of it all? We need nothing less than total metanoia, a turning of the mind and heart to God in love. Imaginative literature cannot do this all alone, not by a long shot. Literature, like all art, improves our vision but still falls far short of the beatific. That does not make art meaningless. Art can still play its part in metanoia.
This is the hope driving the foundation of Luminor, a literary imprint of Word on Fire Publishing. In my work as editor of Luminor’s titles, I hope to provide you with beautifully rendered prose, verse, and narrative—“art with all its teeth.” At the same time, I hope that together we can throw greater light on the complex, unpredictable, and irreducible human experience, with stories of and for our time that illuminate and are illuminated by a Catholic vision of reality. Joy and sorrow are mingled in this vision, yet without confusion and without forgetting the time when every tear will be wiped away. Truth and error grow together in the world like weeds and wheat: Yet for this very reason, to tell and to hear how it happens is to be on the side of truth.
Walk a mile with us. Follow Christ into places he is not often or easily found, so that in his light, we may see light.