Dr. Travis Cooper’s Opening Lecture for 2024-25

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by Dr. Travis Cooper
Tutor
Thomas Aquinas College, California
Opening Lecture
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series
August 30, 2024

 

The What and Why of Literature

 

I. Introduction

I’m excited to be giving this lecture tonight, which I dedicate propter pietatem to my first mentor and the founder of my alma mater, the late Dr. James Patrick, and to the late Dr. Thomas Howard. As the Good Book says, “Giants were upon the earth in those days.” Indeed. I also dedicate this lecture to my college literature professor, Dr. Judith Shank, who showed me what it means to listen, to people and to literature.

Literature — what it is, how best to read it, what its relationship to the higher sciences is — is something I’ve been mulling over and discussing, something that’s been wonderfully haunting me, since my junior year of college. It’s a subject that is dear to my heart, so I’m happy to have the opportunity to more clearly order my thoughts and present them to you for your consideration. I very much look forward to your thoughts in the Q&A, which I hope will be a barn-burner.

A. Character of this Lecture

This lecture is a proposal. It is an argument, drawing upon our experience and proceeding at least dialectically (though, in some parts perhaps, by quia-demonstration). But the subject — literature — seems to me to admit a fairly limited degree of certainty, because literature is an artifact and therefore, to some extent, fluid in nature. Furthermore, there are several long-standing schools of thought about literature, just as there are about the principal disciplines of our curriculum (theology, metaphysics, etc.) — but unlike those principal disciplines, literature (as far as I can tell) rarely received an extended treatment among the ancients and medievals. There is no identifiable, substantive “perennial literary theory”. This is, I presume, one reason (though likely not the principal one) why our College’s founding document has very little to say about literature and its role in our curriculum — the founders speak at some length about theology and the human sciences, but not about literature. What I wish to do tonight is to propose an account of the what and why of literature — what it is and does — and, on that basis, briefly elaborate why and how it is a part of Catholic liberal education. This is an initial offering to the College community, both to my fellow tutors and to you our dear students, an offering that I hope re-energizes the long-standing but intermittent conversation we have had about this topic. I do not pretend or presume to settle the matter.

B. Order of this Lecture

Two years ago, early in the fall semester, as I was leaving the coffee shop, flat white in hand, I stopped briefly to speak to a group of freshman ladies sitting at one of the outside tables. Either they were discussing the Iliad, or I brought it up out of the blue (probably the latter), and after a brief exchange, as I began to walk away, I said: “Well, I don’t think the Iliad, or great literature in general, has a message.” I’m pretty sure they were scandalized. Tonight, in laying out what literature is and does, I’m going to redress that scandal, giving a justification for that admittedly hyperbolic parting remark by showing that literature does not, as such, aim to convey a message but, rather, carries and expresses meaning through its emotional power, in order to please.

Once I have established and clarified the what and why of literature, which will take up most of the lecture, I will briefly elaborate why and how literature is a part of Catholic liberal education, indicating the principal relations among literature and the higher disciplines.

C. Clarification of the Subject

I must begin by clarifying my subject-matter. First, in speaking about “literature”, I am considering imaginative literature, as opposed to historical works or speeches. Second, not only does imaginative literature have many genres with significant differences among them (epics, plays, ballads, poems, historical novels, operas, and movies, to name only some), but also many works of imaginative literature partake also in non-imaginative literature. Seniors, what is War and Peace? Imaginative literature, in some sense surely, but more than that, as Tolstoy himself insisted (and you undoubtedly experienced!). The Song of Songs is imaginative literature, but not merely that; it is divine revelation. Homer’s epics were not clearly distinguished from theological utterances by the ancient Greeks, for, at least from the time of Hesiod, the ancient Greeks considered poetic works as divinely-inspired revelations of the order of things.[1] Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is surely imaginative literature, but it just as surely isn’t merely that. Over time, the Western tradition more and more distinguished these disciplines — history, literature, rhetoric, theology — but, again, we still produce works of many colors, so to speak. So, the point here is this: categorizing works as imaginative literature isn’t always easy, and definitely isn’t clean-cut. (And this is how it should be. Human utterances don’t come in pre-set, clearly-delineated species but, rather, often partake in several.) So, we must abstract from those non-literary aspects of the works in question; that is, what I am proposing literature to be will not apply univocally to all the works we would or could call “imaginative literature”, at least to the extent that these works partake in several different arts or disciplines.

One final clarification. In this lecture, I have in mind imaginative literature generally but especially great imaginative literature, since I wish to conclude this lecture with a brief elaboration of imaginative literature’s relationship to Catholic liberal education and I am assuming, along with our College’s founding document, that the imaginative literature principally included in a Catholic liberal education is great. Still, the main part of my proposal is about imaginative literature generally, even that which is merely good.[2]

 

II. The What & Why of Literature

A. The Goal of Literature

Consider our experience of literature, and attend first to the goal of literature. What do we seek from it, which, having received, we are contént?[3] It seems clear that we want to be drawn into the work of literature to be moved by it, i.e., to feel its emotional force. Our words for this are suggestive: we are “satisfied” or “unsatisfied” with literature, “moved” by it, whether horrified or overjoyed or pitying or awestruck. We want to take part in the story — to sail down the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, to traverse Middle-Earth with the hobbits, to tag along with Odysseus and his men around the Mediterranean. But not only that: we are moved, and want to be moved, by the story. We root for some characters and outcomes, and hope against others. We become “invested” in the story. We want Bigwig and Fiver to survive and establish their new rabbit warren (Watership Down is a splendid book; read it, if you haven’t); with Achilles, we are angry at Agamemnon and hope for restitution (or, perhaps some are frustrated at both of them!); we rest content when Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett are married, convinced that that is right and wonderful; we are distraught and despondent at the conclusion of The Old Man and the Sea. We are horrified at what Macbeth becomes; we find Thorin Oakenshield maddeningly stubborn and are impressed, and perhaps in awe, at Bilbo’s stratagem with the Arkenstone. If we are not drawn into the story, or if we are not moved by it (and the same goes for non-narrative poems), we do not consider the literary work a success; rather, we think either that we “missed the boat” somehow, or the work was a failure. So, the object or goal of literature is to move our emotions (not in any ol’ way, but more about that later). And, moreover, in a way that I will clarify later, literature aims to please us in moving us: even sad stories, rightly told, are pleasant to read (otherwise who would read them?). Literature is emotionally satisfying, whether or not it is fear or hope or joy that we principally feel. Feeling these emotions during and/or at the end of the story is pleasant to us, for which reason we are “satisfied” with a story (or, lacking this, find it unsatisfying).

Here a distinction is in order. In literature we feel not only the emotions of the characters themselves (or, at least, many of them) but also, and importantly, other, subsequent emotions. Aristotle implies this in his account of catharsis: in a tragedy (when successful) we feel the characters’ emotions over the course of the story (Oedipus’ anger, Lear’s suffering, etc.), but what is proper to tragedy is that we feel pity and fear. Oedipus’ and Lear’s emotions we feel as “entering” the characters, so to speak; we feel pity and fear as reacting to the characters and their actions and emotions.

At this point, I find myself compelled to acknowledge an objection. There is a longstanding tradition of identifying teaching or instruction as the goal (or one of the principal goals) of literature. Rooted in ancient Greek beliefs, made explicit in Horace, dominant in Renaissance literary theory (e.g., Boccaccio) and in the famous Defence of Poetry by Sir Philip Sidney, this position persists in various forms and with differing emphases to the present day.

But, rather than addressing this now, it will be more fruitful and satisfying to elaborate an account of what literature is, through which I intend to show whether, and if so in what sense, literature teaches.

B. The Matter and Form of Literature

Let us attend now to the content of literature. It is something we read or hear; sometimes we watch it, but it’s only literature if we also hear or see words. So literature — performed or narrated or read silently — is something verbal (whence the name “literature”, from the Latin litterae — “letters”).

But literature is also make-believe: unfortunately, none of us can smoke a pipe with Gandalf and the hobbits in the Shire, no Englishman could converse with Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, no Russian could watch the young Natasha Rostov dance with pure joy, no opera-lover could employ the services of Figaro, the clever Barber of Seville. To the extent that the characters and stories are real, we are in the realm of biography and thus history, not literature. Even poetry that lacks (or seems to lack) a plot or story very often presents us with an unknown narrator and his or her reflections, an inner monologue. Such poetry is a window into — a “statement” of — what someone (i.e., the narrator) is thinking and feeling. Literature, then, creates particular characters and their particular world (sub-creation, to borrow Tolkien’s term) — literature is the work of creative human imagination (rather than of memory, as history is[4]).

Let us consider this a little longer. Often we are presented with a story — Aeneas leaves his burning city and seeks a place to found a new Troy; several dozen Englishmen and a brazen, self-assured Wife of Bath go on pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. Sometimes we experience not a story but a monologue, with or without an addressee. But sometimes it isn’t clear that we have even a monologue; what we nowadays call “poetry” is often like this. Here’s one of my favorites, by Robert Frost:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flow’r;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

This poem, and many in our English poetic tradition, as well as our folk music and popular music insofar as these have lyrics, share the general goal of literature: they are, or are meant to be, emotionally powerful. But are they imaginative? A little reflection will show that these poems make use of metaphors, images in which something is compared to — described as — something else, as some material thing. This joining that is metaphor is an act proper to the imagination; the poet has to “hit upon” (perhaps stumble upon?) the perfect, or at least an apt, metaphor. Shakespeare sees love as a fixéd mark (a lighthouse) and a guiding star; Frost sees gold in nature’s initial green, and sees the Fall from Eden in the movement from the brilliant green of young leaves to the duller green of mature ones. It is the poet’s imagination, and in virtue of that the reader’s, that joins these two things. Savvy upperclassmen might be thinking, “Well, yeah, but our imagination is at work whenever we think and speak, so what’s so special about metaphor that allows us to call poetry imaginative, unlike philosophy or theology or any other human speech or writing?” What’s special about it is that as readers of literature we rest in the metaphor rather than move past or through it: the imaginative character of the metaphor cannot be discarded without loss of the emotional force of the poem. So even poetry without a clear plot or story is fundamentally imaginative at least insofar as it makes use of and rests in metaphors.

Thus, our account is that, in most of its typical forms, literature is properly the work of creative imagination insofar as it creates a character or characters and a world in which they exist, and in its other forms it is imaginative at least to the extent that the imagination brings forth and rests in an image to describe something and, ultimately, to move our emotions.

What is the relationship of these characters and this world to real human persons and our real world? In a word: imitation. The characters and the world they inhabit mimic us and our world. Again, because it is imaginative, literature is not history: note, then, that “mimic” doesn’t mean “recount” but, rather, “use as a pattern”. The characters and their world are not real, but they are realistic. Why? Because of the purpose of literature: if we are to be moved — i.e., to be drawn into the story, to follow along with the characters, and to react emotionally to their thoughts, actions, and sufferings over the course of the story — the characters must be recognizably human (not actually humans, indeed — they can be animals or mythical creatures — but they must have recognizably human traits). If we are to be emotionally moved, we have to sympathize with the characters, i.e., “identify with” them, feel what they feel, which means we must implicitly or explicitly think of them as like us, as human, for whom we want happiness and fear misery. More broadly, if we are to be emotionally moved, we must recognize the moral world of the characters — the intelligibility of life, happiness and misery, good and bad — as patterned after our own. If it is too unlike our own, the story is a curiosity, a thought-experiment, perhaps delightfully creative or thought-provoking: but we will “withdraw” from the story, seeing it as too alien for us to remain emotionally engaged.

Let us dwell a bit longer on why the world of the story must be patterned after our own. I have been arguing that without this the story cannot be successful because it will not engage us emotionally. Put more abstractly: we undergo emotion only in such a world as ours, i.e., a “moral world”. As Mr. Nieto noted in a tutor talk he gave several years ago,[5] it is through our natural desire for happiness that we bring forth every other desire; so our emotions (passions) are brought forth through our desire for happiness. Therefore, when we feel these emotions, we feel them in their ordination to happiness or misery — their very intelligibility and power comes from this ordination. For example: we fear losing our sanity or being imprisoned because these threaten our happiness; we feel hope when we have a powerful advocate because this makes our happiness more likely; we pity those who lost their homes in the Maui fire because this has left them homeless and, to that extent, impaired their happiness. So, the upshot is that there must be not only recognizably human characters but also a recognizably human world, in which we seek happiness and avoid misery and recognize various kinds of goods as ordered to happiness (hierarchically ordered, to be sure) and corresponding evils. If an author created a world in which only brunettes were happy and everyone else were miserable — and being brunette were a mere matter of genetics (or accident) — or any other world in which free will and happiness were unobtainable, we couldn’t feel anything other than pity for the characters, and that pity would be on the basis of the moral pattern or shape or principles of the real world, and therefore extrinsic to the world of the story. And we’d probably resent the author.

C. Relationship of Form/Matter and Goal of Literature

Earlier, I briefly argued that the goal of literature is to please us in moving us, i.e., that when successful we find ourselves moved, and pleased at being moved, by a work of literature, even if the principal emotion of the story is fear or pity or the like. This is a noteworthy, even remarkable, phenomenon. We are now in a position to understand it better and, thus, to understand better what literature is (including whether, and in what sense, literature teaches) by considering its relationship to literature precisely as imitative. As both the late Mr. Paietta, a long-time tutor here at the College, and Mr. Nieto have argued for in lectures they have given here, it is precisely as imitative that literature has the power not only to move us but to please us by moving us. As an imitation, a work of literature is not real and, thus, not something that calls for us to act in a certain way (unlike the news, possibly, or political speeches); rather, it is merely something to be contemplated, something to rest in. We need not plead to Zeus for Achilles, nor need we hurry off to the British Isles to help with the post-Macbeth reconstruction. Iago is not a menace roaming around threatening the fragility of human relationships. When we read literature, we give ourselves to the characters and their world as imitations and not as historically real, for which reason we can rest in our emotions as reactions to the story rather than being impelled by them to a course of action.[6] To the extent that the story ceases to be a story and becomes real, this is not so. This is most obvious for us in movies: if, or if we thought, Agent Smith had really shot Neo multiple times in the chest, we’d be horrified — we’d be shaken out of the story as story and brought into real life. It would be sickening, not pleasant; we’d be observing a crime, not enjoying imaginative literature.

Furthermore, the poet, in creating a work of literature that imitates, has the freedom to choose what he includes in the story; this is a power that enables him or her to draw our attention to something that we might easily miss were it occurring in real life, with all of the messiness and confusion of life and the distraction caused by urgent, or even everyday, concerns. Shakespeare shows us, clearly, the natural development of Macbeth’s crime from its first thoughts to its ultimate outcome; as poet, he can “zero in” on this slice, this part of Macbeth’s life, leaving aside Macbeth’s unrelated thoughts and feelings and actions (his discomfort after a long journey, say, or his receiving a letter from an old friend, or any number of irrelevant details that would occur during his life). This allows — even impels — the reader to maintain a constant focus on the subject; it is a kind of spotlight trained on the relevant events whereby we can see them and, therefore, feel more clearly and powerfully. In addition, the freedom of the poet allows him to present an entire life in a matter of minutes or hours. That is, the reader can see the full development of an experience, from its beginnings to its aftermath, without distraction.[7]

So: we readers vicariously undergo the experience of the characters, observing and emotionally responding (again: in a contemplative attitude, rather than planning and acting and reacting as we do in real life), undistracted by the thousand irrelevances in the lives of these characters, in some cases traversing years or decades of their lives — all in the time it takes to watch the play or read the book.

If you’re following me rather than nodding off, you are likely thinking — “Steady now, old chap. Your thesis is that literature reveals human experience, but now you’re saying that it streamlines that experience by leaving aside whole swaths of details and, thus, simplifies rather than complicates. It would seem simplistic rather than revelatory.” So it would seem. But respóndeo: a work of literature doesn’t reveal the complexity or messiness of life as a whole; I am arguing, rather, that literature, being in a privileged position as imitative, sheds light on one or several actions of a number of characters, allowing us to see them more deeply than we ordinarily can amidst the complexity and distraction of real life. It leaves out in order to zero in.

Now, it isn’t merely leaving some events or thoughts out and putting others in that gives literature this power to heighten our attention to some experience. Metaphor also contributes to this power.[8] Metaphors — i.e., images — give concreteness and color to what is imitated in literature, and in doing so they, of course, please the reader but they also channel our attention to some aspect of the experience being imitated. Richard Wilbur’s famous and comic use of laundry, in his poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”, does precisely this.

But very often image or metaphor does more than channel our attention: along with plot, with which it is often inextricably intertwined, it can be one of the prime bearers of meaning in a work of literature, joining within itself various aspects of the experience being imitated, and doing so in compact, concrete fashion. When image or metaphor is one of the prime meaning-bearers in a work of literature, it is a central element in the emotional power of that work of literature — again, along with plot — helping provide the reader with an emotional engagement with the realities being imitated. For example: listening to Homer’s Iliad we experience military prowess as fire, i.e., as both a resplendent, divine-like glory and a horrifying, destructive power. Sophocles’ use of the image cluster of blindness/sight/light in Oedipus Rex powerfully captures, in the paradoxical mode, the course of Oedipus’ gradual self-recognition. For another example, listen to John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14”:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
|Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

In describing the thoroughgoingness of our slavery to sin and the intensity but impotence of our desire for God through the central image of a treacherous town turned into a fortress against God, and in imploring the Lord to lay siege to the town, defeat it, and enthrall us to himself, Donne’s poem paints a powerful picture of our moral state: it gives an emotional intensity that matches the true situation, an intensity that would be permanent, were we constantly and thoroughly cognizant of our wretchedness and weakness and of our need and desire for God. This poem captures something of our moral state — the impotence, desperation, and yearning — that even true theological statements about our sinfulness and the need for grace cannot, or do not, regularly express (often because the true import and meaning of these statements are blunted by repetition and superficial familiarity).[9]

Let us take stock. Literature’s goal, I have argued, is to please the audience or readers through moving them. Literature is a verbal and imaginative imitation of us humans and our world, of our experience of the world (our thoughts, feelings, actions, sufferings, consequences, etc.); this is literature’s inner character or, so to speak, its nature. As imitating us humans and our world, literature makes it possible for us to feel with the characters and be moved by the story. But as free from the constraints of mere chronicling, literature frees our emotional response from practical action and, aided by the power of metaphor or image, allows us to attend contemplatively and undistractedly to the experience being imitated so as to accomplish an emotional engagement with that experience.

D. Does Literature Teach?

Having articulated this account of literature, we can now return to the objection I raised earlier — that literature’s goal is, or one of its principal goals is, to teach or instruct. Is this so? Put another way: do we learn when we read literature?

Given what I have proposed, literature has the power to bring about in us readers (1) a sympathy for one’s fellow humans, in whose shoes we as readers have walked, through which (2) we get a fuller picture of the shapes or contours that human experience can take, leading to (3) a deeper, richer valuation of and insight into human experience. In the Odyssey, the central image of sea-faring instantiates, and thus expresses, human life as toil and travail threatened by oblivion, by being forgotten, but worthy of being crowned in lasting memory. Virgil’s Aeneas shows us the arduous demands piety can make and the nobility of submitting to those demands; Gabriel in Joyce’s The Dead, one of my two or three favorite short stories, displays how charm and a sanguine personality can subtly hide insecurity and vanity, even egotism — the powerful ending brings upon us the horror of tragic self-understanding. What am I getting at here? This: that in being moved, we gain a new, or deeper, vision of what is being imitated.[10] What these authors bring about in us is not merely a tickling of our emotional fancy: they bring us to see more deeply and in so seeing to be moved. This might be even clearer in non-narrative poetry, which opens up fresh insights and appreciation for love, art, or even the sub-human creation: Frost, in the 40 words constituting the poem I read earlier, makes us grasp and cherish the initial vigor of life and lament its loss; Hopkins gives us new eyes for kingfishers and dragonflies and dappled things, and we, like him, learn to revel in them. This seeing, to be sure, is in its immediacy concrete, particular; it belongs to the cogitative power as its natural locus or seat. But in virtue of the power of literature, this seeing has universal character: in recognizing the authenticity and depth of Cordelia’s love for Lear, and the speciousness of her sisters’ protestations of love, and, consequently, loving Cordelia and being repulsed by her sisters, we see something about true human love, for such a recognition is impossible without an implicit universal.[11] From another angle: the characters act and speak in certain ways, and the fact that we find these realistic — i.e., find ourselves or other humans capable of such actions and words — means that what we see and emotionally respond to in a story is not utterly particular but, indeed, universalizable. As Robert Frost puts it: poetry “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”[12] Learning, indeed.

It seems to me that this seeing and being moved through the imaginative imitation so as to acquire a valuation of human experience, or a deepening of that valuation, is what St. Thomas refers to when, in the proemium to his Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, he states both that “it belongs to the poet to lead people to something virtuous through a fitting representation”[13] and that poetry belongs to reason and “rational philosophy”.[14] That is, poetry leads the reader to experience vicariously the moral meaning of a human experience insofar as it moves our emotions and will with respect to the good and the bad.

I should reiterate, though, that pleasing us in moving us is the immediate, literary goal. Here, seeing is part of being moved, indeed a necessary part, for we have to see what is happening and something of its moral import in order to be moved. We must see that Job is righteous, that his suffering is humanly inexplicable, in order to feel the piercingly tragic effect of the story.

It is in this sense, I propose, that literature as such can be said to teach or instruct: not that it asks us to discover a moral message that the story, through its characters and plot, exists to proclaim, much less that it functions merely as matter (fodder?) for us to engage in moral judgment of the characters on the basis of our prior moral principles; but, rather, that in living the story vicariously (whether it’s a narrative or a poem’s single narrator-character engaged in solitary reflection) we are led to see the possibilities of human experience and to experience its moral meaning — good and bad — and in so being led we react emotionally. We feel pity for Oedipus, a properly tragic horror, and we also fear that his lot is potentially ours rather than a mere cosmic throw of the dice. We are overjoyed with the young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, seeing that now love and reason keep company, their loves now correspond, through the mysterious agency of the forest powers, with the matches that are fitting and right (wonderfully, this happens at least in part through the four lovers undergoing a vicarious experience of one of their counterparts’ love-plight). Any purported “moral message” is the fruit of later analysis: an abstraction from the story, possibly helpful in clarifying our experience but incapable of capturing either the power or the meaning of the work and, for this reason, always requiring qualification.[15] In the words of Nick Bottom: “Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.”[16]

Historical evidence seems to suggest that literary authors resist characterizing their works as “having a message”, as being a moral prose statement gussied up in flowery language. T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and Flannery O’Connor give excellent rejoinders to such a characterization. As O’Connor says: “The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.”[17]

To summarize: literature can be said to teach or instruct us insofar as our being moved, in a way that pleases us, presupposes and includes seeing and apprehending a universalizable human experience and its moral meaning. On this proposal, then, literature is the verbal, imaginative imitation of human experience (whatever the object: ourselves, the world, God) in undergoing which, vicariously, we are moved emotionally, and thereby pleased, because we behold and experience the moral meaning of that universalizable human experience and acquire a richer valuation of it.

III. Literature in Catholic Liberal Education

I will now briefly suggest why and how literature is a part of Catholic liberal education, in outline (as Aristotle would say).

If what I have concluded in the first and principal part of this lecture is true, literature provides vicarious moral experience, forming or developing our emotional and volitional relationship to the good (through the power of the beautiful, I would add). Catholic liberal education, according to our College’s founding document, aims to form the truly free — i.e., good — human being (doing so not all on its own, to be sure, but as a part of a broader community including parents). It seeks to do so through knowledge: above all, through knowledge that is desirable in itself (“theoretical”), but also and importantly through knowledge of the end of human life — ethics and political philosophy (which are kinds of “practical” knowledge).[18] Such an education requires that the learner already have a basic moral formation, but it also, in various ways, aids in reinforcing or developing this formation. Reading literature seems to be a part of both of these. What literature accomplishes bears on the moral formation of the learner before he or she undertakes a liberal education: it extends our awareness of human experience and provides a vicarious experience of it that moves the emotions in a pleasing way and, thus, forms them, well or ill. This happens, too, within liberal education, and so reading literature is one way that liberal education directly encourages the formation of virtue, which is necessary if one is to be truly free (liberal education encourages virtue directly in other ways: through the example and method of one’s teachers, and through the habituation that study of the sciences inculcates[19]). Let me put this another way. Unlike God and the angels, we are bodily beings, with sense-powers and emotions that are ways of relating to what is real, ways that in us are distinct from intellect. We are not called by God to transcend our corporeality, to leave behind or abandon our emotions and bodily powers in a purely intellectual grasp of reality, because we are not purely intellectual creatures. Rather, we have been made so as to be ordered to the true and the good not only through our intellects but through all of our powers, and so when we order these powers to the good and the true aright, we have a fuller, more complete grasp of and response to the good and the true, so that we are more like God and the angels (not in our mode of grasping or ordering but in the breadth and depth of it). Now, to be truly free, the aim of liberal education, these powers and emotions must be ordered to the true and good rightly. So, we ought to aim to form our emotions as part of our striving to achieve freedom, not just in life generally but specifically in our undertaking a liberal education. And what literature accomplishes in us furthers this aim, and note that it does so in the mode of contemplation (remember, in literature we engage with human experience removed from its practical urgency and concerns, beholding it vicariously). I think this is one reason why our founding document states that literature “irreplaceably assist[s] and complement[s] the intellectual life”.[20]

As I said earlier in this talk, literature broadens and deepens our human experience. This constitutes another good that literature provides within liberal education, viz., it offers a superior wealth of experience from which to draw in undertaking the practical sciences of ethics and political philosophy. Duane Berquist notes this function of literature for philosophy with respect to the phenomenon of love: the poet stands midway between the lover and the philosopher, between the individual experience of love and the universal consideration of it.[21] In the same way, it seems to me, universal considerations of happiness, the virtues, friendship, and the political common good are aided, greatly aided I think, by the broader and deeper experience of these realities that is provided vicariously by reading literature. It would be extremely difficult to satisfactorily grasp what true courage is, for example, without any experience, real or vicarious, of war or martyrdom. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Macbeth, War and Peace, Murder in the Cathedral, The Lord of the Rings, and The Robe, to name a few, constitute a rich panoply of concentrated images of men and women, young and old, forced to act with their lives at stake; reading these works provides a breadth and depth of experience, inaccessible in real life to any one individual, that is of great value in forming our notions of what is noble and ignoble in the face of death and in developing our love of the former and hatred for the latter.

I have been speaking about literature aiding practical philosophy; but practical philosophy also provides something for literature. The power of literature to move us is dangerous: we can be moved in a way that malforms our emotions. A common instance of this is sentimentalism, pitying a character’s situation or rooting for their success or actions when these, in fact, merit a different reaction. The TV show “The Mentalist” is a clear example of this: we should not be hoping for the main character to be successful in his principal endeavor, but we find ourselves hoping for that and, on reflection, we realize that the artistic powers at the disposal of the filmmaker and writer have been wielded precisely to move us in that direction. Literature moves us and can thereby be deeply formative, but it does not provide its own justification or grounding. Rather, it belongs to practical philosophy to judge literature, i.e., to determine whether how we are moved by a work of literature is, in fact, conducive to the perfection of our emotions and wills.

But this is incomplete: it belongs not merely to practical philosophy but to theology, the queen of the sciences, to exercise this judgment. Moral theology is the ultimate arbiter, the final and external judge of whether a work of literature properly forms or malforms us. Should we rejoice, and be pleased in rejoicing, at Rolf’s exoneration of his father through the Viking bow? Should we laugh at the denouement of “The Miller’s Tale”? (C.S. Lewis thought we should.) These works of literature do not answer this question; ethics and, ultimately, moral theology do. That being said, their role is subsequent to our reading of, or listening to, literature: we have to start by giving ourselves to the literary work we are reading or hearing or watching, being open to its working upon us, for without this we have not experienced literature as literature. (For anyone worried about the danger of this openness, I will for now just say this: the Lord has given us parents, a culture, and a tradition, and these guide our choices of the literary works to submit ourselves to.)

I would be remiss not to point out one more way that literature resolves to theology (by “resolves” I don’t mean “dissolves into” or “is reducible to” but, rather, “finds its grounding in”). Divine revelation, principally as expressed in Sacred Scripture, reveals the deepest patterns or contours of human existence. These patterns are the basic paths that define human life: (1) the establishment or re-establishment of a people through the actions of a hero who leads (Exodus, Joshua, the Book of Revelation); (2) the inevitable fall of the high and mighty, those blinded by pride or the illusion of self-sufficiency who aim to escape man’s inherent limitations, in which fall they will acquire self-knowledge and have the choice to embrace humility or to despair in their pride (Adam and Eve, Pharaoh, Saul, the Israelites in exile, Nebuchadnezzar, the Pharisees, Paul, and all of us sinners!); (3) the happiness and joy of the lowly-at-heart, whose faith and patience and acknowledgement of self-insufficiency is rewarded by things turning out not just right but better than they deserve (Abraham, Jacob, Tobias, the Blessed Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and all who are or will be saints!). These patterns or movements suffuse Scripture, because they are the possible paths of human existence: history is God slowly establishing His people, His Mystical Body, in security through the action of Christ; the unrepentant sinner will fall in his blindness and end in despair; the faithful and patient and humble will be rewarded. These are the ultimate realities, and they are the ultimate grounds for the literary genres: epic, tragic, and comic. Epic: the re-establishing of Odysseus’ house (in fire and brimstone, I note) or of Hrothgar’s hall and kingdom is a faint glimmer of the final securing of the one perfect society, the blessed. Tragic: Achilles, Oedipus, Dr. Faustus, Lear, Macbeth, Captain Ahab, Raskolnikov, Michael Corleone, and Anakin Skywalker illustrate, because they live out, the wages of sin; like Paul, Achilles and Oedipus and Lear achieve a wisdom-through-suffering, coming to self-knowledge, whereas Macbeth and Ahab, like Pharaoh and Saul, stubbornly embrace their destruction. Comic: Odysseus, Dante the pilgrim, Sir Gawain, and any of the couples at the end of Shakespeare’s comedies, through patient suffering and help from others, are given their reward, an earthly image of the final wedding feast of the Lamb. Divine revelation, then, provides the basic patterns of human life that are operative at the heart of the created world and that found and ground the epic, tragic, and comic genres of Western literature.

IV. Conclusion

As is usual, there is more to say but not time to say it. I will conclude with an exhortation. Occasionally I hear whispers that some of our students treat literature as purely subjective (“touchy-feely”) and consider it unimportant, merely a pleasant respite from real education. I hope that what I have said tonight will help in discarding such an attitude. To steal Socrates’ hortatory style in the Meno: We will be better people, and better readers of literature, if we believe that literature brings us to behold and experience moral meaning and acquire a richer valuation of human experience in being moved emotionally and, thereby, being pleased, changing us in powerful and salutary ways, rather than if we believe literature is merely a way for us to pass the time with a distracting or edifying story or if we believe literature is merely an occasion for exercising our already-established moral judgment. This I will defend to the hilt, as long as I am able, in theory and in practice.

Thank you for your kind attention.

 

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