By way of introduction, I’ll explain some of the relevance of this suggested project to a Christian poetics. This explanation is necessary because it is not immediately obvious what bearing empirical studies may have on the theoretical business of Christian poetics. Many scholars may express doubt about how an empirical approach to literature can actually advance the kind of understanding that literary studies is after. Do not empirical studies of literary reception merely reflect the subjective experiences of readers? Do not empirical studies of literary texts simply reiterate what we can already tell from shrewd, educated reading? These are fair questions, and they remind us that an empirical literary studies should always be content to remain a species of literary studies and not strive to be its replacement. But this does not mean there are no substantive benefits to measuring how literary texts impact readers. On the contrary, the value of empirical studies of literature lies in their ability to foreground intriguing patterns and unexpected data points.

  For instance, an empirical study of how texts mediate spiritual or religious understanding could show that “realism” correlates negatively (or positively) with increases of spiritual/religious understanding, a phenomenon which would then have to be analyzed and explained theoretically. Similar studies could isolate the factors most commonly involved in promoting understanding, perhaps apt metaphors or striking descriptions, which lead the reader to see things in new ways and make better connections between things. These data points would produce fresh insights into subjects of study like figures of speech, which have otherwise been exhausted theoretically. These are only a few examples, but they demonstrate the point that empirical studies of literature provide new, interesting lines of research for theory-oriented scholars, including scholars of Christian poetics. I’ll now turn to the two arguments which, if they are successful, will establish the possibility of conducting empirical studies such as these in a reliable and fruitful way.

  The value of understanding is also its problem, however. Understanding is defined by many proponents of aesthetic cognitivism as an objectual knowledge, a knowledge of a thing, instead of a fact; the sort of knowledge we have of people or places, which is perhaps not less than but is certainly more than a collection of propositions mentally assented to. Baumberger classifies several kinds of cognitive achievements that count as understanding: (1) grasping new categories, (2) gaining new perspectives, (3) raising new questions, (4) obtaining phenomenal knowledge, (5) contriving thought experiments, (6) grasping new connections, and (7) gaining/improving cognitive skills and abilities.² Literature scholar Michael Wood presents a similar list of kinds of understanding potentially mediated by literature: (1) self-understanding through contemplation of characters’ thoughts, (2) intimate understanding of other people, and (3) understanding of the structure and meaning of life.³ Many other such lists could be cited, which present a variety of distinct outcomes that apparently have nothing in common other than failing to count as knowledge proper. It is this complexity and subjectivity inherent in the construct of understanding that leads aesthetic cognitivist Jukka Mikkonen to say:

If we construe understanding from the point of view of the reader’s phenomenological experience of the work, it is difficult to see how the actual cognitive benefits of literature could ever be quantified and measured. How could we test, for instance, how literature helps us to see the significance of things or gives meaning to our experiences or helps us to make our lifeworld? Such things can be evaluated only from the perspective of the subject, who gives the work a meaning, not outside him or her.⁴

If understanding is an experiential sort of cognitive achievement, Mikkonen says, it is too subjective to be measured. Gibson echoes this view: “since the kind of insight art offers is not propositional, not expressible in terms of an acquired truth, one will have a rough time telling one’s peers precisely what he has learnt from an artwork. It does not, in other words, seem like a particularly quantifiable kind of information or insight …”⁵

  In keeping with best practices for psychological scale development,⁶ the first step in developing a measure of understanding would be to define its components in sufficiently granulated terms. At this stage a literature review of sources in both aesthetic cognitivism and the philosophy of understanding would be conducted, with the goal of sieving through overlapping components to determine the core cognitive outcomes associated with understanding. Once isolated, these outcomes would need to be defined and distinguished from one another as clearly as possible.

  In my preliminary literature review I found at least three distinct types of cognitive outcomes said to be linked to understanding: phenomenological, imaginative, and skill-based. Under each of these three categories are a variety of particular cognitive outcomes, such as gaining a new way of seeing something; gaining phenomenal knowledge of a situation or experience; developing increased attention toward something; asking new questions; considering possibilities; considering implications of actions or experiences; and being able to discern patterns and apply new concepts, or old concepts in new ways. Once the literature review has been conducted and redundancies in the different outcomes have been eliminated, a team of experts across philosophy and psychology would need to think carefully about each outcome and locate it in relation to established cognitive, affective, and conative processes, detailing (1) what mediates the outcome, (2) what temporal processes are involved in producing the outcome, and (3) how the outcome might manifest itself behaviorally. After each outcome has been defined and the outcomes have been grouped into distinct categories, a pool of items should be put together for each outcome. Table 1 provides a rough example of items for three possible outcomes.

  I realize there might be a worry about such an approach relying on self-report. But because understanding is a cognitive-affective experience and not just a mental change (like gaining knowledge of new facts is), self-report is the only way to measure understanding accurately, just as self-report is the only way to measure emotion. The subject will just have to be trusted, and researchers will have to accept that there will always be some degree of uncertainty in the results of their measurements.

  A person can see something in a new way regardless of whether the object is fictional, imagined, represented, or presented experientially. Similarly, someone can relate things in new ways, or relate aspects of something in new ways, without having to believe in the facticity or truth of that thing. One can understand a hoax or a conspiracy theory just as one can understand a phenomenon in physics or biology. Understanding takes the same form regardless of its object because understanding, unlike knowledge, doesn’t require justification. Its only condition (if it has one) is that it should reflect the structural form of its object, which is a non-veridical condition.

  Therefore, understanding of religious concepts or spiritual entities will take the same form as any other kind of understanding; it will have the same phenomenological structure. Of course, as a Christian, I believe spiritual/religious understanding can also be an understanding of something real, true, factual, and valuable. But understanding’s object doesn’t have to be real in order for it to be real understanding. So, if understanding can be reliably measured using a shotgun approach, and if spiritual/religious understanding has the same phenomenological structure as understanding in general, then spiritual/religious understanding, too, can be measured.

  My suggestion is that spiritual/religious understanding in particular can be measured by modifying ‘understanding’ items to reflect elements of literary texts. Here is a short quotation from “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert, in which a humble woman lives a quiet life of service and love and dies a peaceful death. Throughout the story she develops a religious fascination with her parrot, which she treats as an embodiment of the Holy Spirit. This is the last paragraph of the story:

A blue cloud of incense was wafted up into Félicité’s room. She opened her nostrils wide and breathed it in with a mystical, sensuous fervour. Then she closed her eyes. Her lips smiled. Her heart-beats grew slower and slower, each a little fainter and gentler, like a fountain running dry, an echo fading away. And as she breathed her last, she thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.⁷

Table 2 provides an example of an item designed to measure one form of SUL mediated by this text.

  In sum, my suggestion is that while measuring understanding, and SUL specifically, may not be easy, it is nevertheless possible and is a worthy object of pursuit. By no means should my suggestion be taken as a theory on its own or as a falsifiable, scientific claim about how understanding can be measured. It’s simply been my goal to offer some thoughts and suggestions which may prompt more qualified researchers to engage in the actual development of these sorts of measurements.

  So, perhaps understanding can be quantified after all. Perhaps SUL can be measured. But how does all this relate to a Christian poetics? It is not my claim in suggesting this line of research that texts ought to be judged by their cognitive effects on readers, which would amount to no more than an updated reader-response criticism. Nor do I claim that poetics should take an empirical turn and shore itself up with statistics and psychological data. Rather, I think empirical research into literature’s cognitive effects on readers, and specifically literature’s capacity to mediate spiritual/religious understanding can act as a healthy and fruitful supplement to theoretical inquiry into Christian poetics.

  An SUL scale would have the most relevance to what David Mahan terms the “literary creation” aspect of poetics, which studies the work of literature itself, including its “formal elements” and the “effects it works on us,” its readers.⁸ From studies using SUL measurements would emerge patterns, such as which species of understanding are especially related to religious and spiritual change, which formal features of texts are most statistically relevant to increases in understanding, how length or medium (digital, auditory, physical) influence understanding, and to what degree particular texts or authors or genres lead to increases in spiritual/religious understanding. As these patterns surface, they will provide fodder for future research into certain rhetorical devices, genres, and perhaps unexpected authors or works, with the aim of exploring their role in mediating spiritual/religious understanding. Significant differences will also surely appear between fiction and poetry (and perhaps even drama) in terms of their capacity to produce different kinds of understanding, which will call for new and interesting interdisciplinary studies.

¹ Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
² Christoph Baumberger, “Art and Understanding: In Defence of Aesthetic Cognitivism,” in Bilder sehen: Perspektiven der Bildwissenschaft, ed. Mark Greenlee, 1. Auflage, Regensburger Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, Bd. 10 (Regensburg: Schnell + Steiner, 2013), 10–17.
³ Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17–20.
⁴ Jukka Mikkonen, “On Studying the Cognitive Value of Literature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73, no. 3 (July 2015): 273–82, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12172, 277. Emphasis added.
⁵ John Gibson, “Cognitivism and the Arts,” Philosophy Compass 3, no. 4 (July 2008): 573–89, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00144.x, 14.
⁶ Following Lee Anna Clark and David Watson, “Constructing Validity: New Developments in Creating Objective Measuring Instruments.,” Psychological Assessment 31, no. 12 (December 2019): 1412–27, https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000626.
⁷ Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 56.
⁸ David Mahan, “The Critical Task of a Christian Poetics,” Among Winter Cranes 6, no. 1 (Winter 2023).