Pope’s letter offers surprise ode to humanities in education

The publication in mid-July of a letter from the Pope on the value of literature as part of one’s path to “personal maturity” has been welcomed by some academics as an unexpected invitation to reflect on the importance of literature and humanities in education around the world.

Described by Father Professor Andrea Spatafora, who teaches theology at St Paul’s University in Ottawa, Canada, as a “bit of a bombshell”, the “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation” started out as guidance to seminaries but was reworked into a pastoral letter.

Its contents also surprised Peter Kilpatrick, president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. “The whole Catholic world was [asking]: ‘Where did this come from?’”, he noted, before calling the letter an “unexpected treasure”, which he underscored has caught the attention of the secular Chronicle of Higher Education and of these pages.

Neither St Paul’s University, which is a pontifical university, meaning the Vatican evaluates its programmes and the rector is confirmed by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, nor the Catholic University of America, which was a pontifical university but since the 1970s has been a private university, is bound by the letter in the way that the almost 7,000 Catholic seminaries (in which seminarians earn a “licentiate”, roughly equivalent to an MA) are.

Yet, the letter “invites us to reflect on the place, the importance of literature, of the humanities in education”, said Father Andrea.

Accordingly, he and Kilpatrick expect their universities and the other 1,360 pontifical and Catholic universities around the world will interrogate their curriculum in the light of the Pope’s letter about the role of literature in a fulsome education for Catholics as well as those outside the orbit of the Catholic Church.

With 11 million students worldwide, the network of Catholic colleges and universities is the world’s largest.

The decline of humanities

The letter comes at a critical time for literary studies and, as readers of these pages know, for the humanities in general. In the past two years, the proportion of liberal arts majors in the United States has fallen dramatically.

At Ohio State (Columbus, Ohio), for instance, between 2012 and 2020, the number of students who graduated with humanities degrees fell by 46% while Boston University recorded a 42% drop.

From a high of 17.2% of all BA graduates in 1967, the percent of students graduating in the humanities in the US fell to 3.3% in 2020. This past summer, Delta State University in Mississippi eliminated 21 degree programmes, including history and English.

In the summer of 2022 in Britain, both Roehampton and Wolverhampton universities announced drastic cuts to their humanities departments. Other countries too have seen cuts to their humanities programmes.

The letter has several theological sections. It opens, however, with the Pope laying down his marker on a surprising square: he speaks of the all-too-human experience of “moments of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer does not help us find inner security” (emphasis added).

In these times of stress, he continues, “a good book can help us weather the storm until we find peace of mind”.

Reading opens, Francis continues, “new interior spaces that help us avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts that can stand in the way of our personal growth”.

A common experience

Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church’s 1.3 billion adherents, is, by definition, a moralist. But he is hardly a stereotypical one, like the evangelical ministers who condemned the Harry Potter series for its positive description of magic. Nor does the letter rail against the less salubrious parts of the internet.

As befits the Jesuit who cut his theological teeth on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola written in the early 1520s, the Pope points his finger at the “obsession with ‘screens’ and with toxic, superficial and violent fake news”.

This problem is so prevalent in some seminaries, Francis writes, that they have set aside “time for tranquil reading and for discussing books, new and old, that continue to have much to say to us”.

In an almost elegiac tone that is both personal and in line with the Jesuits’ history as the most intellectual of the Church’s holy orders, he continues: “Before our present unremitting exposure to social media, mobile phones and other devices, reading was a common experience, and those who went through it know what I mean. It is not something completely outdated.”

Francis’ favourite authors include the ancients (suitably baptised, he shows), the 17th century Spanish play El Cid and TS Eliot (the author of “The Wasteland” and a convert to Catholicism). He especially loves the tragedians (presumably playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare) “because we can all embrace their works as our own, as expressions of our own personal drama. In weeping for the fate of the characters, we are essentially weeping for ourselves, for our own emptiness, shortcomings and loneliness”.

The letter also recommends several modern writers who can hardly be said to conform to what might be called the Church’s literary catechism.

These include the Pope’s fellow Argentine (and friend) Jorge Louis Borges, the Jewish French novelist Marcel Proust, Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (both of whom are now considered to be gay writers while Lorca was a leftist murdered in 1930 by Franco’s fascists).

Wider points of interest

Parts of the letter speak directly to doctrinal questions that, while familiar to the millions of Catholic university students, are obscure and, perhaps, even off-putting, to others. Yet, even in these sections, such as parts two and three of the 12-page missive, there are points of interest for non-Catholics.

For many, phrases like “her [the Church’s] missionary experience” evoke a colonialist project. In Canada, from where I write, these words evoke the horrors of the Residential School system imposed on Canada’s First Nations and Inuit with the intent of erasing their indigenous ways of living and beliefs.

Francis attempts to work his way around this doleful history by seeking to honour the “beauty, freshness and novelty in her encounter – often through literature – with the different cultures in which her faith has taken root, without hesitating to engage with and draw upon the best of what she has found in each culture.

“This approach has freed her from the temptation to a blinkered, fundamentalist self-referentiality that would consider a particular cultural-historical ‘grammar’ as capable of expressing the entire richness and depth of the Gospel”.

He further states: “Contact with different literary and grammatical styles will always allow us to explore more deeply the polyphony of divine revelation without impoverishing it or reducing it to our own needs or ways of thinking.”

Later, Francis challenges the seminary curriculum and seminarians glued to their smartphones by declaring: “Literature helps readers to topple the idols of self-referential, falsely self-sufficient and statistically conventional language that at times risks polluting our ecclesial discourse, imprisoning the freedom of the Word”.

The capitalisation of “Word” makes it double duty: meaning both the Gospel and “Jesus Christ made flesh”, as Francis puts it in a gloss on John 1:14.

Close encounters

Throughout his letter, the Pope makes an extended argument that reading literature both individually and in academe – where this encounter is discussed under the guidance of professors who draw out life’s complexities – is important because doing so involves a close encounter with another “person” or other “persons”.

It is perhaps the most personal because it takes place in the theatre of the mind, as what the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar called a “Theodrama” as opposed to an “ego drama”.

Translating Von Balthasar’s religious argument into secular terms, Kilpatrick told University World News: “The Holy Father is saying that good art creates a picture in our mind of the struggle that we as human persons engage to pursue goodness. Look, if you don’t engage your imagination, if you don’t engage your heart, if you don’t enter into a story so that you begin to formulate in your own mind, ‘How do I lead a good life?’ you’re missing something.”

Francis’ argument, therefore, does not focus on the various “isms” that have washed over literature departments over the past decades: questions about authorial intention, structuralism, Roland Barthes’s dictum about the “death of the author”, Michele Foucault’s “the author function”, deconstructionism, postmodernism or biography. Nor does Francis cite any reader-response critics, who focus on how the reader co-creates the text.

Yet, as Father Andrea suggested by naming the late Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose Truth and Method (1960) is the foundational text in reader-response theory – Francis edges into this territory.

In the letter’s most difficult paragraph, Francis moves quickly from dismissing the idea that that the reader is “simply the recipient of an edifying message” to saying the reader is “challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct.” (While literary theorists no longer hold completely to this distinction, it should be noted in passing that Francis’ distinction here divides the scientific from literary writing.)

Reading (literature), the Pontiff continues, is a complex act of “discernment” that does not admit of being easily mapped. Borrowing terminology from the philosopher Georg William Friedrich Hegel, Francis writes that reading “directly involves the reader as both the ‘subject’ [or individual consciousness] that reads and as the ‘object’ of what is being read”.

What Francis means is that in reading literature, the reader goes beyond deciphering the marks on the page and becomes enmeshed in the creation of the story (signalled by the text); the reader becomes a part of it because it exists as an interaction of humans, animals, robots or ideas because the reader is thinking.

At the same time, the reader maintains some distance from it in the sense that they cannot only judge characters but react to them emotionally by, for example, crying or fearing for the life of their favourite character.

“In reading a novel or work of poetry, the reader actually experiences ‘being read’ by the words that he or she is reading.” To help visualise this, the Pope adds: “Readers can thus be compared to players on a field; they play the game, but the game is also played through them, in the sense that they are totally caught up in the action.”

Or, as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats asked rhetorically at the end of the poem “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Hearing another person’s voice

Stripped of the philosophical technical terms, the value Francis assigns to reading literature is that the very act of reading literature means that you are hearing “another person’s voice” – indeed, in some real way you are voicing it. And, the purpose of paideia, the Greek term that in Latin is humanitas, the root of “humanities”, is to help students hear the voices more truly.

It’s noticeable that the list of voices of the ‘people’ Francis entreats us to hear and respond to with empathy, tenderness and understanding is hardly drawn from the lives of the saints.

“We can see before our eyes the weeping of an abandoned girl, an elderly woman pulling the covers over her sleeping grandson, the struggles of a shopkeeper trying to eke out a living, the shame of one who bears the brunt of constant criticism, the boy who takes refuge in dreams as his only escape from a wretched and violent life.

“As these stories awaken faint echoes of our own inner experiences, we become more sensitive to the experiences of others. We step out of ourselves to enter into their lives, we sympathise with their struggles and desires, we see things through their eyes and eventually we become companions on their journey.

“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,” writes the Pope.

Adapting the curriculum

Both Kilpatrick and Father Andrea were eager to discuss the practical question of how to incorporate the Pope’s thoughts into curricula that are already quite full.

At the Catholic University of America, the introduction to philosophy and theology courses are, essentially, Great Books courses, with generous helpings of Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Cicero, Dante, Fyodor Dostoevsky, TS Eliot, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Friedrich Nietzsche.

“What the Holy Father helps me understand,” Kilpatrick explained, “is that it would be good to try to take a lot of the specific points that he’s making [about the reader’s moral response, for example] and make sure that gets woven into the curriculum through readings that the students and professors reflect on” in addition to the factual aspects of these books in a Catholic educational setting.

Father Andrea cautioned that in his 12-week course on the New Testament, he doesn’t have the time to undertake a dialogue between faith and culture. Therefore, at first, he suggested that the Pope’s letter would have more impact on electives.

As we spoke, however, we began to discuss how and what the Pope wrote about literature applies, more broadly, to the humanities. Accordingly, he said, one way of incorporating the essence of the letter would be to use the visual arts.

“You could show iconography, how for example, Flemish artists depicted Jesus as looking like a man from 14th and 15th century Flanders rather than as a 1st century Jewish person.

“For centuries artists have interpreted biblical scenes and how that influences us when we read them. And it shows how we appropriate Jesus and we bring him into our own historical context,” he said.