“Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited “upgrades,” in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people’s wounds. As a result, while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities.”
One of the most compelling recent observations on creativity and writing comes from Pope Leo XIV.
I am not Catholic or particularly religious in any flavor. I grew up Evangelical– complete with international mission trips and “Bible” being one of my high school’s core subjects– but that’s a traumatic story for another day.
The point I wanted to make before going on that diatribe is that I am not approaching Leo’s teachings through the lens of personal faith, but rather through the lens of curiosity about the cultural critique they offer.
Use that handy-dandy reply button if you want to chat about religious trauma.
So, anyway, Pope Leo– Chicago’s own papal papi– gave an address to a group of writers on the 100th anniversary of the Vatican publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Writing, as you know, is an act of truth, of revelation, for it reveals who we are, what we believe and hope for, the world we strive toward and the future of which we dream. In this pursuit of truth, we sense that truth is subtle, revealing itself to us in our inner dialogue with God and in our open and respectful dialogue with our neighbors.
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Literature, then, encompasses the full spectrum of human experience, so much so that Pope Francis highlighted its formative value: “Reading a literary text places us in the position of ‘seeing through the eyes of others’ [C.S. Lewis] thus gaining a breadth of perspective that broadens our humanity. We develop an imaginative empathy that enables us to identify with how others see, experience and respond to reality. Without such empathy, there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, or mercy.
When you write stories and develop your characters, you identify with them; you grasp their points of view, their emotions, their feelings, their attitudes. This is the great training ground of humanity that you allow your readers to experience, because, in a sense, readers “live” many lives in addition to their own. This helps us to discover different perspectives, to avoid treating our own views as absolute and to piece together, as in a mosaic, the outline of that truth which always transcends us.
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When we delve into the very depths of our humanity, we are not far from God; for there, in the midst of very human stories, God reveals himself.
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That is why I repeat to you, who are writers, what Saint Paul VI said to all artists: “We need you” (Homily, Mass with Artists, 7 May 1964). We need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound. I thank you for every time you have sown seeds of reconciliation, of encounter and of friendship.
Pope Leo manages to capture the cultural gravity of the written word better than most liberal arts institutions (but, hey, Leo isn’t looking for excuses to cut a department’s funding, so maybe that’s why).
He frames literature as an act of truth and revelation, which encompasses the full spectrum of human experiences. By engaging with literature in this way, we facilitate the development of empathy for both the writer and the reader, and it is this same empathy that underpins our potential to thrive as a society. The gravity of this act isn’t lost on the Pope, and he doesn’t conclude by saying that creativity is a great pastime for when you’re done creating shareholder value for the day or that writing is an act that needs to be more efficient and automated and broken down into strings of prompts and tokens. No! He says that the world needs writers. Needs our imaginations.
If we zoom out beyond the remit of writers and consider the implications of the Pope’s address more broadly, especially in light of his encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which offered a strong critique of the AI industry and the economic machinery behind it, we see a cultural, political, and religious leader calling for a celebration of our humanity at both the shared and individual level.
What is it that makes us human? A few Google searches and it seems that this is a thorny philosophical question that is still up for debate. From an evolutionary perspective, our upright posture, large prefrontal cortices, and our use of creating and adapting tools are a large part of it. Sociologically and anthropologically, we look at our ability to use symbolic and abstract language, engage in a cumulative culture in which knowledge and norms pass from one generation to the next, and the ways in which we reshape and influence the natural world. Psychologically, empathy, altruism, imagination, and future planning all coalesce into a way of navigating the world that are uniquely human.
I think what the pope is saying weaves each of these paradigms together in a clear and succinct way: the activities that lead us to reflect on our own worldviews, develop empathy for others, and engage with the broader world are the ones that matter.
(On that third point, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi makes the case in his book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention that creativity only exists when there is a degree of externality. What is done for oneself and not shared broadly cannot be creative because it cannot influence the zeitgeist. Expect a deep dive once I finish the book.)
When I started writing a newsletter for burned-out knowledge workers who wanted to reconnect with their creativity, I didn’t anticipate the Pope beating me to the punch in articulating why creative acts aren’t trivial or a nice-to-have, but rather a non-negotiable if we are to be fully human. But, he did. And he did it well.
Cheers, Leo. I’ll have some Malort and a hot dog just for you.
-Blake
Until next time,
Reflection is resistance