This summer, Pope Francis published a letter to the faithful on “the role of literature in formation.”¹ He started writing it with specifically priestly formation in mind, before deciding that what would help clergy grow and develop into spiritually mature and well-rounded Christians could be useful for other believers too, especially in an age when screens have begun to consume so much of our leisure time.

   “Time spent reading may well open up new interior spaces,” he begins, which “can help us to avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts that can stand in the way of personal growth.”² After winding his way through considerations of the role of the reader in interpreting texts, the peculiar multivalency of meanings made possible by literary fiction, and the relationship between words and the Incarnate Word at the center of the Christian faith, Pope Francis concludes by offering a picture of what a mature, fiction-inflected faith might look like: “a ministry that becomes a service born of listening and compassion, a charism that becomes responsibility, a vision of the true and the good that discloses itself as beauty.”³

  His full letter is likely to resonate with readers of Among Winter Cranes, given our shared interest in Christian poetics. It certainly resonated with me personally, as a fairly recent convert to Catholicism and the author of a forthcoming book entitled A Theology of Fiction, which will be available from Wiseblood Books in early 2025. Indeed, I could not have imagined a more providential way to be “scooped” than to have Pope Francis take up the cause of encouraging Christians to read more fiction and to read it more carefully just as my own primer on the same subject was preparing to make its way into the world.

  That literature can provide not only entertainment, but also moral edification seems incontrovertible to me. Lived experience has shown it to be true. But the question of how exactly fiction can—under the right conditions—bring about a process of inner transformation in the reader, and what exactly that transformation entails, is more complicated. In this essay, we will look at two approaches to this question—one ancient and pagan, the other modern and Catholic, and yet compatible—to explain how it is that fiction, which is in one sense little more than a gossamer web of invention, could possibly bring about invisible but real change in flesh-and-blood readers and their invisible but (we trust) also real souls.

  Aristotle, who lived three centuries before Jesus, was not a Christian. But he was immensely concerned with ethical formation and with souls, writing a book on each subject (The Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima, respectively). A brief overview of his views on ethical formation will be helpful before turning to his understanding of poetics.

  For Aristotle, excellence and virtue overlap to a large extent in the realm of human affairs. In other words, to excel as a person is necessarily also to behave virtuously, in accordance with moral and ethical norms that Aristotle viewed as ontological realities, not subjective or social constructs (so that when the just man acts justly, his understanding of how to proceed is, according to Aristotle, not only right but also “true”). We acquire excellence only slowly and with effort, by means of imitating others and through constant repetition. “We become just by doing just actions,” the late British philosopher Sarah Broadie explains in her introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics, “and also by being encouraged to feel as a just person feels.”⁴ Over time, this iterative and self-reinforcing process of acting and feeling—ideally in ways aligned with what a virtuous person would do—creates in us a more fixed disposition, called hexis in Greek.⁵ Under ideal conditions, we develop a firm and unchanging disposition to act in accordance with what excellence demands of us in every particular situation.

  The process by which hexis develops is somewhat opaque. “The process of incrementation is not something we are aware of in its particulars,” writes Aristotle; it remains ever a little out of our sight.⁶ But what we can see more clearly—and thus learn to control more closely—are our own individual decisions and the concrete actions we perform as a result of those decisions.

  Decision, too, is a crucial ethical concept for Aristotle. Virtue, or excellence, takes place exclusively within the realm of decision—that is, the realm of what it is possible to deliberate and ultimately to decide about. We can make decisions only about matters that pertain to us and that present us with what Aristotle calls “practical immediacy,” that is, the imminent ability to act.⁷ A wish is not a decision (although if we, through deliberation, work out a series of concrete actions we may take to achieve the wished-for result, we will then enter the realm of decision and thus virtue). A judgment of another’s behavior is not a decision either (unless we are a parent or teacher and work out what concrete steps we can take to help them develop a sounder hexis). Ultimately, excellent decisions are—and here again is Broadie’s gloss—“prescriptions” of reason.⁸ They are what reason, after all things have been considered, would prescribe for us to do in a given situation.

  Decision, then, requires two things. First, the rational part of the soul must work out precisely what reason demands of us. Second, another part of the soul—“a potentially obedient and in itself non-rational part” (namely, the will)—must then obey and comply with that judgment.⁹ This non-rational element of the soul is “a matter of character” (that is, of disposition or hexis)—“and is built up by habituation.”¹⁰ Both parts of the soul, Aristotle suggests in the Poetics, stand to gain much from literature.

  Poetics to us (with our modern ears) suggests poetry, and poetry (to modern minds) is sometimes thought to be synonymous with rhyme. But what Aristotle meant by poetics is something quite different, and—like Pope Francis’s letter—his definition of poetics comes as good news for me personally, as a reader and teacher primarily of novels and short stories.

  The Poetics is really concerned with all forms of literary representation, whether narrative or dramatic, rhyming or in prose—all the ways in which a writer can make for us a little diorama of the world, and thus re-present to us some aspect of human experience. But because, in Aristotle’s day as in ours, there is “no name” for this broad “art of representation” in words, Aristotle chooses to call it poetry (47a28).¹¹ Given that the word comes from the Greek poiein, meaning “to create,” the poet might be more usefully thought of as a maker or creator (of worlds in words) more generally.

  Ultimately, the essence of a poet’s skill, according to Aristotle, has less to do with rhyme or diction or any other matters of style, and more to do with plot. “A poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses,” he writes, “insofar as he is a poet according to representation, and represents actions” (51b25). The character of a protagonist—that is to say, his disposition or hexis—always remains somewhat opaque, just as it does with real people in real life. What we can see concretely, by contrast, particularly in a play performed by actors in a theater, are his or her actions. And by the end of a work, we can see where those actions have led the protagonist, whether from good fortune to misfortune or the reverse.

  In the case of tragedy, according to Aristotle (whose views on comedy are less well known because they have survived only in fragments), the best plot is one in which the protagonist is “a person who neither is superior [to us] in virtue and justice, nor undergoes a change to misfortunate because of vice and wickedness, but because of some error” (53a1). This arrangement is the best because it moves us to pity and terror. We are led by the plot to feel what a virtuous man or woman would feel observing the same situation: pity for “a person undeserving of his misfortune” and terror when that person is relatable—not unfathomably good or evil but decent and foolish in a measure we ourselves might sometimes be—as when his mistake is one we could easily imagine making ourselves (53a1). After vicariously and temporarily experiencing these emotions of pity and terror, we are left with a feeling of relief when they dissipate at the conclusion of a play or novel. This sensation of relief Aristotle calls catharsis (from kathairein, meaning “to cleanse”). By means of catharsis, tragedy provides an opportunity for us to practice feeling as the just man feels, that is, aligning our emotions with what excellence and virtue would prescribe them to be. In its appeal to feelings, it is poised to guide and form the non-rational but potentially obedient element of the soul.

  Plot also aids the rational part of the soul, the intellect, in that a well-crafted plot (according to Aristotle) should provide us with some kind of wisdom or insight into the world of human affairs. Unlike the historian, who must relay faithfully the “particulars” of things that really happened in real life, the poet can arrange the actions which compose his or her plot in such a way as to bring out what Aristotle calls “universals”—that is, laws revealing what probability or necessity demand in particular situations (51b1). If X takes place, then Y is either sure to (as a result of necessity) or likely to (as a result of probability) follow. Real life, by contrast, is not a well-controlled experiment: it is too complex, too complicated, and too chaotic to easily distill such universals, and it can take years to watch different variables unfold and to untangle which causes led to which effects. Even the most sprawling novel is wildly circumscribed in comparison to the rich complexity of lived experience, and is thus able to impart useful lessons to the reader with a clarity and concision that life rarely supplies overtly, if at all.

  A good poem, then—or at any rate a finely constructed tragedy—is thus capable, according to Aristotle, of strengthening those elements of the soul which lead us to virtue and excellence. As an added bonus, it does so unobtrusively, without risk to the reader or viewer, and even pleasantly.

  Here we come at last to the final Greek word of the day, telos, which is the ultimate aim or goal toward which something tends or after which it strives. The literal meaning of the word telos is “end” or “terminus.” The telos of a poem is to depict universals and to prompt catharsis. In doing so, a poem can aid in the development of virtue, and thus also aid in the achievement of that broader telos toward which all human existence is oriented. This ultimate end of human life Aristotle calls eudaimonia, a word often translated into English as “flourishing” but that more literally means “good spirit.”

  It would be anachronistic to interpret that richly suggestive phrase—eudaimonia as “good spirit” or “good deity”—to mean that Aristotle is implying that making (and following through) on one right and true decision after another over the course of a lifetime will lead us to the living, triune God. But leaping forward two millennia to the middle of the twentieth century and crossing an ocean to arrive at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, we meet Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B., who believed exactly that.

  Sister Mariella was born Mary Margaret Gable in 1898. She entered religious life at the age of seventeen and, after earning three degrees in English literature (including a PhD from Cornell University), chaired the English department at the College of St. Benedict for decades. She also wrote literary criticism, edited several influential anthologies, and, through her dogged efforts to champion and encourage young Catholic writers, did as much as anyone to lay the groundwork for the mid–20th-century renaissance in Catholic fiction in the United States epitomized by the work of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and J. F. Powers. The story of Sister Mariella’s life, criticism, and legacy is told more fully in A Theology of Fiction, but for now we will jump straight to two ideas central to her understanding of Catholic fiction.

  The first is that Catholic fiction is eschatological. That is, it includes an awareness of the ultimate end toward which every human individual is believed (in the Christian worldview) to be heading: the Last Judgment and the life of the world to come. To the extent that literary realism has mostly been content to “deal with the reality of a material world,” including its “psychological and social” dimensions, Sister Mariella argues, it has “projected a fiction of one dimension.”¹² But for the Catholic writer, “there is another reality” to contend with. In both life and in fictional settings, she explains, “every person present is either in a state of grace or of damnation. In other words, heaven and hell are present in the room. A fiction which extends its boundaries to include this reality is eschatological” (qtd in Nelson 27). She was delighted when Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter provided a popular case study in eschatological fiction. “People cared tremendously whether Scobie was damned or saved,” she writes, and presumably she hoped that debating Henry Scobie’s ultimate fate would prompt at least some of those readers to ponder the trajectory of their own lives, whether toward eudaimonia (“good spirit”) or kakodaimonia (“evil spirit”) in this world and the next (qtd in Nelson 27).

  For Sister Mariella as for Aristotle, the path toward our ultimate end is arrived at step by humble step—by means of making one concrete decision after another. For Aristotle, excellent decisions are (again, in Broadie’s words) “prescriptions” of reason. For Sister Mariella, decisions leading us toward salvation are what we might call “prescriptions of value.” Like Aristotle, Sister Mariella took for granted the existence of a normative moral reality—in her case, the “great chain of being,” which ascribes to all matter and life a hierarchical structure. At the top is God, followed by the angels and then mankind, and then by animals, plants, and minerals. The lower an object (or a subject in possession of an intellect and will) falls in this hierarchy, the less value it possesses.

  A mature, well-formed Christian, according to Sister Mariella (who leaned heavily on theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Liturgy and Personality in formulating her claims), is a person who “habitually endeavors to make an appropriate response to value. Appropriate—that which in the hierarchy of being this particular thing deserves” (qtd in Nelson 23). Nature, for instance, is clearly good. But it is not the ultimate good and nor, therefore, is it a perfect and unchanging good; there are tempests as well as idylls. The same is true of friendship. If we make idols of even these lesser goods (and certainly if we make idols of what has no intrinsic metaphysical worth at all) by, as Sister Mariella writes, giving “more than an appropriate response” to any particular value, then “the value itself betrays us” (qtd in Nelson 23). So, too, if we give less than an appropriate response.

  Fiction, by showing us what effects follow from an overestimation or underestimation of value, can help bring about a recalibration in the reader’s mind to more closely align with the ontological reality of God’s hierarchical world. Any story that truthfully represents value in this way, according to Sister Mariella, qualifies as Catholic fiction and therefore as potentially edifying, regardless of its subject matter or the religious beliefs espoused by characters or the author (who may even lack faith entirely).

  In her third anthology, Many-Colored Fleece (1950), Sister Mariella included a short story by Tess Slesinger entitled “Missis Flinders,” which is based on the author’s own experience of having had an abortion. It is a hard story to read even today, disorienting and devastating as the woman’s mind turns in on itself—now angry, now remorseful, now bitterly and ironically nonchalant about what has happened; at once envying and despising the other mothers who share her room at the maternity hospital; silently seething with hatred for her husband. Her loves and wraths alike are disordered and intermixed. Whatever the protagonist has valued—freedom, convenience, an attempt to preserve the status quo in her marriage or material conditions—has betrayed her. Such a “story of failure” Sister Mariella writes, “is often like the hole in the wall, without which we could not see the thickness, strength, and solidity of the masonry” (qtd in Nelson 25). Not all stone walls a prison make; some are there to protect, to hold up.

  How often do we now speak with young people about value? Or decision? Or telos? Or mortality, heaven, and hell? When I attended a public high school twenty-five years ago, my language arts teacher was unusually committed to literature. She read us poems about her fiancé, Norman, who had died decades before in the Vietnam War; she had once met Maya Angelou at some kind of professional development seminar and seemed able to conjure up Maya Angelou’s mental company in pleasant retrospection at will; she gave the impression that she might read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie over and over voluntarily, turning the last page back to the first, until the end of her natural life and never once be bored. She also coached academic competition, a nerdy “quiz bowl”–type extracurricular that I participated in, and—in a moment permanently seared into my memory—once lowered her head in frustration onto a lectern when none of us could identify the line of poetry which followed, Tyger, tyger, burning bright. Miss Bryant’s passion embarrassed me terribly at the time. But her visceral anger at our ignorance of William Blake’s “The Tyger” stayed with me, and the lingering sense I had wasn’t that she was aghast at our teenaged stupidity but rather that she was livid that a pearl of great price had been withheld from us.

  Now I know “The Tyger” by heart, the first stanza anyway, and my five-year-old daughter does too. I’ve seen in my own classroom what it looks like for human judgment to be removed from the equation (seemingly on the grounds that individual human judgment is too labor-intensive, too fallible, and altogether too likely to cause accidental offense to be safely exercised or because students have not previously been asked to exercise their own capacity for judgment). But, after initial befuddlement, most students respond eagerly to any opportunity that fiction opens up for considerations of value, rightness, and truth to be restored. Elsewhere in his letter on literature, Pope Francis recounts telling a journalist in 2019, on a flight back to Rome from Japan, “I think the West lacks a bit of poetry.” I have my doubts that even a widespread revival of Christian poetics could turn around the present youth mental health crisis or save our splintering democracy, but perhaps it can, in small but concrete ways, make those of us who teach and those whom we teach just a little more ready to be, as Pope Francis put it, “moved in the face of God, his creation and other human beings.”

¹ Pope Francis, “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation,” July 17, 2024. Available online at https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240717-lettera-ruolo-letteratura-formazione.html.
² Pope Francis, “Role of Literature,” paragraph 2.
³ Pope Francis, “Role of Literature,” paragraph 44.
⁴ Sarah Broadie, “Philosophical Introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics,” in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 18.
⁵ I am indebted to Dr. Mark Bullio of Brookfield Academy and Dr. Aaron Ebert of the St. Irenaeus Institute for Catholic Thought for guiding me to the importance of hexis specifically in formulating this argument.
⁶ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 132.
⁷ See Broadie, “Introduction,” 42.
⁸ Broadie, “Introduction,” 44.
⁹ Broadie, “Introduction,” 43.
¹⁰ Broadie, “Introduction,” 43.
¹¹ Aristotle, Poetics, trans. and with notes by Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 2. All subsequent in-text citations refer to this translation.
¹² Sister Mariella Gable, “Introduction to Many-Colored Fleece,” 33. Quoted in Cassandra Nelson, A Theology of Fiction (Menomonee Falls, WI: Wiseblood Books, 2025), 26.