Reading a good book helps us read ourselves

Ryan Service helps us unpack a new document, surprisingly by a pope, which encourages reading not just the Word of God but also the profane word of secular literature.

Popes always write letters. Yet, few popes produce letters during their summer holiday, and even fewer write letters that are originally meant for an ‘in-house’ audience before considering the content so meaningful that it requires a greater reach. 

Released on 4th August 2024, Pope Francis’ Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation is such an exception, where he stresses the significance of reading literature, particularly novels and poetry, in the lives of trainee priests, ‘all those engaged in pastoral work, indeed of all Christians’. 

The Pope’s text is intriguing because even as popes have addressed artists, film directors, and more recently comedians, Pope Francis turns his attention to the ‘consumer’ themselves to study the act of reading and how it relates to personal development.

While this letter is not an encyclical – where a pope writes to worldwide Christians and all people of good will – the decision to reflect on literature as the ‘path to personal maturity’ that touches on universal human experience is a powerful attempt to speak into global society and draw attention to words on a page. Perhaps it is not right to speak of quick takeaways, reflecting on a letter that calls for attentive and personally engaged reading, but I present here some key ideas from the Pope’s summer musings.

A boring read is still a good read

There is almost the smell of sunscreen and sweat as Pope Francis opens his letter with a hint of nostalgia to remember ‘periods of boredom on holiday, in the heat and quiet of some deserted neighbourhood, [where] finding a good book to read can provide an oasis that keeps us from other choices that are less wholesome’. 

It is not that reading helps preserve some moral integrity (à la devil finds work for idle hands), but that the act of reading is a meeting of the self in time and space that also represents something of a ‘common experience’. 

Francis makes the case for literature as a medium that is never ‘self-contained’, as other ‘audio-visual media’ are, because the confines of the text meet the confines of the reader and the two worlds collapse and collide.

Even ‘unsuccessful’ attempts at reading are formative because where we find a book tedious or difficult we are in the process of discernment whereby the reader is themselves ‘being read’. 

Some would suggest that we give up on a bad novel because we have a limited number of possible books that we can read in life, and yet Pope Francis encourages us to ask why we find the book difficult or tedious: to ask this question before we move forwards because a reader is a ‘person challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct’. There are reasons why texts produce certain emotional responses within us, and being attentive to that is personally responsible and spiritually satisfying.

Here the Pope leans into his personal experience of teaching literature in Santa Fe, where he was challenged by students who did not want to read El Cid. Proving creative with the curriculum, he asked them to read the core text at home so that they could study preferred texts in class. He muses that:

‘[t]here is nothing more counterproductive than reading something out of a sense of duty, making considerable effort simply because others have said it is essential. On the contrary, while always being open to guidance, we should select our reading with an open mind, a willingness to be surprised, a certain flexibility and readiness to learn, trying to discover what we need at every point of our lives.’

Many literature teachers and parents will find this a refreshingly familiar reflection, and perhaps we have memories of texts that were forced upon us to which we could not relate. In contrast, we might recall teachers and individuals who presented literature as an open doorway rather than a closed canon, encouraging interest, and using the curriculum as a stimulus for wider engagement.

Reclaiming leisure

A key principle that emerges is the need for an approach to literature that is not measured by outcomes or ‘short-term objectives’, such that we might ask if it is an outcome to even finish a book. 

Pope Francis radically reclaims reading as a leisure activity that is a ‘privileged, albeit not exclusive, form of expression’ that demands our freedom. 

In this way, the pope regards reading as utterly and wonderfully ‘inefficient’. 

To make this point he borrows Marcel Proust’s image of the telescope that enables us to position ourselves in relation to objects, which contrasts to a vision of the world that is ‘telescoped’, driven by goals, in a way that narrows perspective.

Reading as leisure is not to suggest that it belongs to a leisured class, or to imply that those with more freedom or time for leisure have a greater advantage, rather Pope Francis regards literature as human effort that is removed from measurable outcomes and objectives. He attributes to the act of reading a ‘surplus of meaning’: something that overflows and cannot be contained; an exciting form of discernment that flexes the muscle of sensitivity and thickens our understanding of complexity.

Words as exposure to difference

Given the limitation of human experience, literature also offers us life lessons and insight that can never be our own such that we are ‘caught up in the lives of the fruit seller, the prostitute, the orphaned child, the bricklayer’s wife, the old crone who still believes she will someday find her prince charming’. 

Exposure to the variety of lived experience, even artistically presented, is not only pastorally advantageous – helping future ministers conceive of imagined circumstances that provide people with moral principles – it commits us to the task of being lovingly attentive to ourselves and our neighbour. 

Pope Francis is clear that reading literature, opening to other views, can never be relativistic because there is within literature itself the possibility of ‘moral judgement’, and the scope of literature ‘prevents us from blind or superficial condemnation’.

Hearing these words from a papal letter is remarkable given the history of an institution that had an index of banned books until the 1960s and, in recent decades, struggled with the Harry Potter series and Dan Brown novels. Yet, in a world where journalists and political representatives are physically attacked, a prized author survives assassination, and words are used to incite violence, reading as leisure has never sounded as urgent.

This is a very slightly edited version of an article which was first published on the LSE Religion and Global Society blog. For the original article click here. It is republished in Adamah with permission.

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