The Review: Can the pope save the humanities?

Francis on the importance of literature. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Last month, Pope Francis celebrated “the value of reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity.” That sentence appeared in a papal letter, “[On the Role of Literature in Formation]( meaning in the spiritual training of priests and others called to holy orders in the Catholic Church. But right away, the pope expanded his target audience to include “all Christians.” One suspects that, if he could, he would address non-Christians as well, as signaled by his choice to close his letter with a quotation from the Jewish poet Paul Celan: “Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen.” He intends a universalist case for the spiritual and moral value of literature. Embattled university humanists, rejoice? Like so many professors today, Francis fears that students are rapidly losing the capacity, cognitive and emotional, for deep literary reading — but the students he has in mind are seminarians. He laments that “a sufficient grounding in literature is not generally part of programmes of formation for the ordained ministry;" too often, literature is “considered merely a form of entertainment.” And he praises those seminaries that “have reacted to the obsession with ‘screens’ and with toxic, superficial, and violent fake news by devoting time and attention to literature.” Francis’s case will be largely familiar to readers of The Chronicle, though naturally he places a heavier accent on the spiritual than is typical in our pages, and virtues that in a secular context would be framed in terms of citizenship or some other secular abstraction are here understood in terms of Christian vocation. Literature, the pope says, offers access to realms of experience otherwise inaccessible, an access with special relevance to missionary work: “How can we reach the core of cultures ancient and new if we are unfamiliar with, disregard, or dismiss their symbols, messages, artistic expressions, and the stories with which they have captured and evoked their loftiest ideals and aspirations, as well as their deepest sufferings, fears and passions?” This more or less anthropological value is complemented by another, individualized one: authentically encountering a literary text entails “listening to another person’s voice,” an ethical imperative: “We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us! We immediately fall into self-isolation; we enter into a kind of ‘spiritual deafness,’ which has a negative effect on our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with God, no matter how much theology or psychology we may have studied.” Literature here appears as an intimate supplement to other, more objective kinds of knowledge. In a corollary argument about literary reading’s promotion of empathy reminiscent of Martha Nussbaum’s, the pope asserts that literature “enables us to identify with how others see, experience and respond to reality. Without such empathy, there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, mercy.” SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. 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. ADVERTISEMENT Upcoming Workshop [The Chronicle's Crash Course in Academic Leadership | August 2024] If you’re curious about becoming an academic administrator, we’re once again offering The Chronicle’s Academic Leadership Crash Course, a four-hour virtual workshop designed for faculty aspiring to administrative roles. Join us in August to gain essential insights, practical tips, and valuable resources that will help you pursue your next professional step. [Learn more and register!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Promises and Pitfalls of a ‘Global Humanities’]( By Eric Adler [STORY IMAGE]( Multiculturalism alone won’t save us. ADVERTISEMENT [The Promises and Pitfalls of a ‘Global Humanities’]( THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Fernand Braudel and the Audacity of Scope]( By Robert Zaretsky [STORY IMAGE]( Remembering the great historian of the Mediterranean world. 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This changed my politics, certainly, but at a deeper level it changed my sense of myself and the world I inhabit.” In The New York Times Magazine, Phil Klay [writes about]( art, activism, and war. - “It’s not merely that bandying around these neon words—abuse, coercion—dilutes their power; it’s that these words are being deployed to foreclose thought and impose silences of their own.” In The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal [reviews]( Sarah Manguso’s new novel. - “The process of reading them one after another, without the intervening joys of the fiction, is a bit like being forced to eat a roll of linoleum thickly spread with jam (to make it a little more digestible), while being overseen by a nostalgic nanny who repeatedly attempts to recall the precise origins of each splodge of jam, and of the fruit from which it was, meticulously and with much boiling and concentration, originally confected.” In the London Review of Books, Colin Burrow [on reading]( all of Henry James’s prefaces in one place. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Graduate Education - The Chronicle Store]( [The Future of Graduate Education]( Graduate education has enjoyed a jump in enrollment over the past five years, but it faces a host of challenges. [Order this report]( for insights on the opportunities and pitfalls that graduate-program administrators must navigate. JOB OPPORTUNITIES [Search jobs on The Chronicle job board]( [Find Your Next Role Today]( Whether you are actively or passively searching for your next career opportunity, The Chronicle is here to support you throughout your job search. Get started now by [exploring 30,000+ openings]( or [signing up for job alerts](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. 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