Literature does not make you a better person: that’s the perennial false promise to reject at the start.

The fact of literature is in general a human good, in the sense that it is a sign of an advanced culture: symbol, narrative, myth, technology, writing, literacy, communication—these are to be celebrated, granting their capacity to be bent to any number of ends. But the act of wide reading in literature in and of itself entails nothing at all about a person. The voracious reader may be either selfish or selfless, vain or humble, vicious or virtuous, religious or secular, joyful or melancholy, full of life or obsessed with death, a treasured friend or a despised enemy, a cosmopolitan or a provincial, a sage or a boor. Hitler and Stalin may not have been men of letters, but they had men of letters for followers and apologists. The list of wicked writers and artists—who abused women, abandoned children, and passed in silence over the suffering of countless victims—is too long to recount.

It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. More of one does not necessarily lead to more of the other. They are neither directly nor inversely related. The desire for a cleaner, clearer correspondence between them is understandable, but utterly belied by the facts. Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?

Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?

Christians, after all, are not called to be learned but to be holy. Heaven is full of illiterate souls, and hell is replete with scholars. Erudition is irrelevant to salvation.

Suspicion of learning in Christian history should therefore not come as a surprise to us. There is precedent in Scripture, for example when Acts portrays the Apostles as “unlettered men” (4:13). It is not the rabble but the philosophers of Athens who laugh Saint Paul off the stage (17:16–34). As for Jesus, he never founded a school or wrote a word (except, perhaps, in the dust). The gospel is foolishness to the wise; its eager recipients are the rejected and despised, not the renowned and the celebrated.

Often enough those who are least sanguine about the benefits of learning are those with the most of it. Saint Augustine saw danger in secular poetry. His teacher, Saint Ambrose, hailed the humble verbiage of the sacred page. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus disclaimed the ornaments of rhetoric altogether. Yet none of these men would be known to us today had their parents and patrons skimped on their education. The Confessions could not echo the Aeneid had Augustine not committed Virgil to memory; the sermons of Ambrose could not convert Augustine had his allegorizing been second-rate; Gregory could not persuade his hearers of the sophistry of his opponents had he not been so thoroughly schooled in classical rhetoric.

In short, it takes a good deal of learning to cast shade on learning. This essay is a case in point.

Not that I want to discourage Christians from reading: far from it. But facile encouragement—high claims built on false promises—are nearly as bad as earnest suspicion. At least suspicion is warranted; spiritual temptations really do accompany scholarship. Whereas simplistic optimism leads at best to disappointment. At worst, it confirms the intelligent in their priors: namely, that smarts and learning are keys to the kingdom.

So: Given their reticence, when and why did Christians come around on the value of learning? And what might that mean for pastors’ reading habits today?

The first reason the church didn’t adopt a full-blown anti-intellectual stance is that someone needed to be able to read the Bible on behalf of the community. Bishops like those named above were often forced or fast-tracked into their episcopal office for no other reason than that they were well-educated, well-spoken Christians: such a rare breed had to be bum-rushed into ordination on the spot regardless of the unwitting ordinand’s feelings on the matter.

The first reason the church didn’t adopt a full-blown anti-intellectual stance is that someone needed to be able to read the Bible on behalf of the community.

Second, Christians were aware from the beginning that from the world’s perspective their faith was a scandal. The scandal was moral but also intellectual. The gospel required defending, not so much for its own sake as for the sake of the common believer and of the church’s mission to make disciples. Disciples will not be forthcoming if the church’s claims are little more than a laughingstock.

Hence: literacy, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy all became tools in the hands of apologists, bishops, evangelists, and preachers. The church fought fire with fire. And it didn’t hurt when former pagans converted, since they brought their learning with them into the faith.

(Here we should pause and remember that, for most of the church’s history, most Christians have been illiterate. The role of learning in ministry is not a new one; besides proclaiming the gospel in word and sacrament, the act of reading has always been the most basic task of the church’s pastors. Literacy began expanding to large portions of the flock only in the past few centuries, and primarily in Europe and North America. In other words, the question of reading’s role in the Christian life has traditionally been limited to clergy, and that is the question I am attending to. What role it should play for the laity is not in my purview.)

Simone Weil, the twentieth century French mystic, argued that “studies” work to discipline one’s attention on one’s subject matter and that this training, ascetic in nature, has salutary effects for the spiritual life. Why? Because “prayer consists of attention,” and “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951). Learning to focus while memorizing poetry, studying history, practicing equations, or parsing verbs strengthens the eyes of the heart and prepares them to resist distraction when turning to God.

The temptation for proponents of Weil’s view is a purely instrumental approach to any mental or cultural activity that isn’t explicitly God-directed. Yes, studies can train the mind, and the fallen mind needs all the help it can get: as Pascal writes, “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Is there anything more, though?

Pope Francis believes there is. In his letter “on the role of literature in formation,” he presents a case for the role of literature, specifically fiction and poetry, in the life and training of all who are engaged in ministry, pastors in particular. Opening the letter, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was worried it would be trite or banal. It is anything but. When is the last time you saw Proust, Borges, Celan, de Certeau, Eliot, and C. S. Lewis all quoted in the same papal document?

I lack the space to rehearse the letter’s details; those interested should read it for themselves. Indeed, it would behoove seminarians of all kinds to read it before they begin their studies. Instead of summarizing Francis, I want to offer a set of comments running in parallel, occasionally intersecting but in every case complementary.

Lovers of literature and of the humanities more generally tend to stub their toes on the question of the goods or ends of learning the liberal arts. If they are good in themselves, then they need no extrinsic justification; if they are ordered to some higher end, then they are merely instrumental to greater goods, and are thereby rendered subordinate, secondary, a ladder to kick down once one has reached the heights. I would like to avoid this false choice. According to Augustine, nothing is truly or ultimately good in itself, an end in itself, except for God. All else we are to use or love in him, that is, indexed to its source and goal. If we don’t, we will find that we have made an idol. The gold of the calf comes from melted rings. An idol is a transmutation of some relative good into an ultimate love.

An idol is a transmutation of some relative good into an ultimate love.

This does not mean there are no goods but God, nothing to love but the Lord. Nor does it mean we are wasting our time every second we are not lost in praise or prayer. It does mean that every created good—though perhaps an end in itself relatively speaking—must be loved and enjoyed always in reference to Christ, as though emanating from the penumbra of his glory (which, if it is truly a good, it does). Otherwise we are bound to misconstrue and thus to mishandle the genuinely good gifts our generous God would give us.

Among these gifts is the written word. Francis writes that “the Word is God, and all our human words bear traces of an intrinsic longing for God, a tending towards that Word.” In this way “the truly poetic word participates analogically in the Word of God.”Pope Francis, “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation,” 24. Language and literature are all to some extent words of the Word, echoes of the divine fiat, intimations of a Creator who speaks a cosmos into being. Even failed words carry traces of their origin, just as no human being, however evil, has the power to efface entirely the image of God she bears for life. From this it follows that working with words, in one way or another, is a fundamental human activity. No wonder it lies at the heart of liturgy, ministry, and mission.

Reading literature requires leisure, and leisure is a corollary of the Sabbath. No one could read Proust without time on his hands. Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Sabbath the sanctification of time: what the temple is to space, the Sabbath is to time. It is “eternity in disguise.” It is set aside “to mend our tattered lives; to collect rather than to dissipate time.”Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951). The Sabbath is God’s solution to Pascal’s problem. Pascal again:

What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture . . .

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.

Josef Pieper saw this proclivity for diversion, this restless inability to sit still, alone with oneself, as an incapacity for leisure. In his words, “man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.” With Heschel, he sees the leisure of Sabbath as “a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.” Such silence is not inactivity or impotence. Rather, it means “that the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Random House, 1963).

Let us say this, then: Reading literature in the stillness of leisure is an occasion for pastors to steep themselves in the whole of creation. How so?

First, because they are quiet. Second, because they are still. Third, because they are listening, not speaking. Fourth, because they are attending to beauty. And finally, because they are consecrating the time God has given them to sit with the written human word, and this act simultaneously demands and fosters remarkable powers of attention without the expectation of a product when it is completed.

In a word, reading partakes of the Sabbath because reading is non-utilitarian. Like poetry, in Auden’s line, it “makes nothing happen.” It is the opposite of activism. It is a mortal threat to the anxious soul of the busybody, the savior of his parish, the CEO of his congregation, the leader without whom the world would fall to pieces.

It won’t. The world will keep spinning long after you’re dead, and it will keep spinning now, while you sit in your study and make your way through Dante. In fact, both your faith and your church will benefit far more from your having journeyed through hell and up the mountain into paradise than from your having responded to every email in your inbox. (In writing this, you understand I am chiefly addressing myself.)

The closer one’s reading habits are to the utilitarian—mining for sermon illustrations, shoring up biblical backgrounds, cribbing ideas for self-help—the further they are from the Sabbath. Pastors should already be in the ninety-ninth percentile of readers, setting aside multiple hours per day. That goes without saying: it’s right there in the job description. The question is what their diet should consist of. Francis is right that it should include fiction and poetry, the uselessness of which is precisely the uselessness of the seventh day.

The uselessness of fiction and poetry is precisely the uselessness of the seventh day.

Besides, we know what the addition of literature to pastors’ leisure time would be replacing: screen time. But screen time is not leisure time. Screen time is wasted time. Streaming shows and scrolling social media are a corruption of the Sabbath rest God intends for us. In a time when the besetting challenge for churches, families, and children is the Pascalian spiral of boredom and diversion created by our devices—Eliot’s line, “Distracted from distraction by distraction,” might as well be the mission statement of Silicon Valley—pastors cannot help anyone if they themselves are caught in it. Physician, heal thyself: “if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit” (Matt 15:14).

If I may be so bold as to gloss Jesus’s command with a view to our theme: Pastor, put down your phone and pick up a poem. It may take some time, but once you realize it’s a pleasure, not a punishment, you won’t want to stop. The life you save may be your own.