“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth wrote over 200 years ago, and we certainly understand what he means—but perhaps we do not understand well enough what the recourse might be.
During their junior and senior years, students at Wyoming Catholic College move from a solid grounding in ancient thought into the complexities of the contemporary world, and the novel emerges as the major form in the Humanities curriculum. Second-semester juniors, for example, begin with Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and the grand depiction of Satan, prototype of self-serving power and sophistic rhetoric, but by semester’s end, they encounter modernity in Dostoevsky’s Russia, where bad ideas do the devil’s work for him in the quotidian St. Petersburg of Crime and Punishment. In addition to Dostoevsky, our students read Flaubert, Faulkner, Melville, Joyce, and Morrison.
If there is one overriding theme that unifies these books and makes them important to “live through,” so to speak, it is the encounter between an older, more traditional way of life and the “new modes and orders” (to use a famous phrase of Machiavelli’s) that disrupt it. Novels give the reader time to dwell in the “life-world” of a particular individual or family in a particular time and place.
Why do particulars matter? Surely ideas are more important, some would say. St. Thomas Aquinas writes in the Compendium (174), that “man’s ultimate happiness, as regards his intellect, consists in the unobstructed vision of God. And as regards man’s affective life, happiness consists in the immovable repose of his will in the first Good.” On the way to the “unobstructed vision of God” and the “immovable repose” of the will, however, is this life, constituted by the many persons and opinions and complex problems we encounter with more or less understanding and with more or less certainty about what the good might be. Philosophy clarifies what is at stake; theology gives reasoned guidance toward the truths of faith. But in reading a great novel, a reader can see in action the effects of ideas and choices upon real human relations. Perhaps even more importantly, the reader’s affections, crucial to the movement of the will toward the good, can be directed—or redirected—by imaginative participation in the story, whose truth must be lived through, as I said above, rather than reduced to a set of tidy concepts.
It is one thing to understand that a bad man will someday be punished for his arrogance and insolence, but it is another thing altogether to witness it imaginatively from within the man’s own perspective. During Lent, I read Alessandro Manzoni’s great 19th century novel The Betrothed (a new translation by Michael Moore), which provides an example. Don Rodrigo, one of the worst villains of the book, returns home from a riotous bout of drinking during an outbreak of the black plague in Milan and lies down, not feeling well. He has terrifying dreams from which he finally wakes:
He recognized his bed and his room, and realized it had all been a dream. The church, the people, the friar—all had vanished. All except for one thing: the pain in his left side. In that same moment, he felt a violent, labored palpitation of the heart, a buzzing, a constant whistling in his ears, a burning inside, and the heaviness in his limbs, worse than when he had turned in for the night. He hesitated for a moment or two before daring to examine the spot that was hurting. When he finally found it, he took an anxious look. And there it was: a filthy swollen purple bubo.
He knew he was lost.
In his casual lust for Lucia, the fiancée of Renzo, Don Rodrigo has been directly responsible for the misery of this couple and many people who care for them. But this onset of the disease does not have the worldly relish of revenge. Why not is a long story—a great and deeply moving story with the power to change its reader.
We have the impression, I think, that our world is uniquely busy, uniquely beset by forces that make it impossible for us to sit still and read a long book. There is so much to worry about. It seems irresponsible not to be agitated about the latest North Korean missile—or the probable timeline for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—or what the federal appeals court said about mifepristone. No question, these are crucial matters, but how do we put them in perspective? The best way is a full, four-year education in the greatest works of the tradition, which (among many other experiences) we offer at Wyoming Catholic College. But novels, while drawing deeply upon the cultural tradition, can give form to life stories and take us deeply into an intellectual, emotional, and ultimately spiritual engagement with the world that we enter through the imagination. The effects of reading can make us wiser about our own day. What is our situation, for example, next to what happened in Italy in 1628-30? Manzoni writes about the complete social and political collapse of Milan when the region was afflicted first by famine and then by plague. The only source of order was the presence of priests willing to sacrifice their lives to care for the dying and the dead (not that his portrait of the clergy is unfailingly sunny).
I don’t think we have begun to really understand what happens when one’s soul enters the world of great fiction. The work of the imagination goes a long way toward establishing a habitus of compassion by letting us enter the lives of others.
Republished with gracious permission from the Wyoming Catholic College Weekly Bulletin.
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The featured image is “Accusing the anointers in the great plague of Milan in 1630; a scene from Manzoni’s ‘I promessi sposi’. Lithograph by G. Gallina after A. Manzon,” and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.