On a day you come upon your boy reading a novel, and you say, “What — reading stories again?  You always have your head in those novels.  Why don’t you read something useful, something improving, something edifying?”

I understand you, I think.  I understand your concern when you say that you want him to read something useful.  You are yourself a working man.  You have a job to do and are called to do it.  You find that life is a practical affair.  Subduing the earth and having dominion over it did not come easily for Adam, does not come easily for you.  You honor the virtues of industry and thrift.  Now you come home, tired by the labor of your calloused hand, and you find your boy sunk in an easy chair with his head in a book.  It is all a little disturbing.  And such a book!  Fiction, of course.  Another novel.  Just a story.  I understand you.  If he must read, why can’t he read something useful?

Or something improving?  There too you are rightly concerned.  Your interest in the boy’s character is a real, almost an anxious, interest.  You have been busy with the nurture and discipline of it these many years.  You hoped he would be intelligent, but you could do without that.  You hoped he would be efficient, able to get things done.  But you could do without that also, that is, if he were not lazy.  Laziness would be something else.  It would be a fault in character.  And for his character you have an anxious concern.  For his Christian morality you have a deep-seated, heart-felt concern.  For this you have prayed, though you had not prayed for those other things.  So I understand you when you wish that your boy would read something improving, something that will count in his character.

Again, I understand you, I think, when you use that other word — edifying.  It is a good word, the word you use there: edifying has the idea of edifice in it, and it seems to me that the edifice behind your use of the word is a church.  Good.  You want the boy to read something constructive, something uplifting, especially in a spiritual, a religious sense.  The spiritual and religious come first with you.  You have a concern, consequently, for his devotional reading, for books that will assist him in worship, draw him nearer to God.  You have not missed that emphasis of the Bible: “Seek ye first the Kingdom … sell all that thou hast … if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.”  You want him to have a care for this above all.  The spiritual, the religious, is first.  It stands higher with you than even the practical and the moral.  And it ought to.

So I understand why it is that you should be zealous for and even jealous of the religious and spiritual development, and thence for practical and moral concerns.  What I wonder at is that this should make for indifference to the artistic concern.  Something in your remark at least suggests that if only you could make fiction serve practical, or moral, or religious purposes you could honor it, but that since you cannot you wish your boy would read something useful, improving, or edifying.  You suspect that novels, when they are innocent, are trivial.  At best, you feel, they constitute mere entertainment.

I wonder at this because I know that you are not Catholic in your insistence on the primacy of the spiritual.  You do not cultivate the esoterically religious in isolation from life.  The saint in you is not developed at the expense of the man; it is indeed the man renewed who is the saint.  And it is that man, the religious man, if you will, who finds himself called upon to be moral, social, scientific, philosophical — yes, and artistic also.

When you come to think of it, you will perhaps acknowledge that the aesthetic, the artistic, although interdependent with them, has a claim upon you distinct in kind from the practical, the moral, or, in the narrower sense only now, the religious claim.  Then you will perhaps acknowledge also that the artistic need in you can be satisfied only by art and not by some other thing.  The practical, the moral, the scientific, and those other worlds, do not exhaust God’s reality as it is revealed in himself, in life, and in you.  There is the artistic world also.  You can look at a tree and reckon how useful it would be to build a house with.  You are then being practical about the tree.  You can look at a flower and discover that it consists of stem, stamen, petals, and the rest.  You are then being scientific about the flower.  But you can also look at a tree or a flower without a deliberate practical or scientific thought, see it as it is, and simply enjoy it.  You may call this mere entertainment if you want to.  But it is not trivial.  It is important.

Now, it is the artistic in him, the aesthetic, that your boy responds to when he finds that the novel he is reading is delightful.  It satisfies a need in himself, corresponds to a world and life, that is, a God’s reality, outside of himself, and pleases him.  Fiction makes this possible for him.  In a way, the novelist is doing what Adam did in Paradise.  I do not mean the pruning and the trimming.  I mean the naming of created things.  Words are poems really.  This name-giving is artistic work.  Adam was called to it.  The artist in you, in all of us, is called to at least the appreciation of it.  To see God’s reality in the real world and beyond it, to see the ideal in and behind the actual, and so to reproduce it that all may look and enjoy, that is what happens in fiction.  Art — the art of fiction also — is man’s acknowledgement and reflection of the divine beauty revealed in and beyond nature and life.  That is what fiction is for.  Its function is in its own aesthetic way, not in a deliberately practical, or moral, or esoterically religious way, to disclose God’s glory for God’s and man’s delight.

When you come to think of it, therefore, you will not so far want to deny your humanity, created and renewed in you, as not to give this world of art, of fiction it due.  It has a claim on you distinct from any other.  No practical bias, or moral anxiousness, or religious exclusiveness should lead you to neglect this world, or to belittle it.  That would be unbecoming to the confident Christian in you.

I see that you let the boy go on with his novel.  What I hope is that you read one too.  A good one, of course—there are so many bad ones.  And a real novel, I mean, not just a fable, or a parable, or an allegory, indirectly again doing practical, or moral, or religious work.  I hope that you get one for Christmas.  I hope you will read it, and not for mere entertainment, although a good novel is, of course, very entertaining.  I hope that you will read it also to discover God and life in it.  So that you may enjoy Him forever.