Tensions in Religion and Literature II: Empathy

In my last post, I promised to try to answer a long-neglected question: what are the tension points between religion and literature? In this post, I’ll begin by discussing a tension point that I’ll call “the problem of empathy.”

Reading or writing a work of literature is, fundamentally, an exercise in empathy. One of my English professors first suggested this idea to me when she opened my freshmen survey of literature class by saying grandiosely, “If you don’t learn anything else in this class, or for that matter in your liberal arts education as a whole, I hope you learn the art of empathy.” At the time, my professor’s words puzzled me, but as I’ve thought more about them over the years, I think I’ve worked out what they meant. And, I’ve decided, my professor was spot on. As I’ve studied literature, I’ve learned that reading a text well requires walking around in the shoes of the author for a while. I have to live in the world the author lived in, think the thoughts the author thought, and believe the beliefs the author believed. Only after I’ve “been” the author for a while, after I’ve truly empathized with him or her, can I offer a true and persuasive reading of the text. The same principle applies for writing literature. In order to create persuasive fictional characters or make insightful poetic claims, an author has to get inside the mind of humanity and attentively look out of its eyes. The best authors are those who do this best, those who have mastered the art of empathy.

Here’s the rub: while reading and writing literature requires empathy, religion requires just the opposite. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. It’s not that religious people are cold, unfeeling ogres; in fact, I would be the first to argue that religious belief has made for some of the most warmhearted and caring people our planet has seen. However, while religion encourages empathy in some things–like in caring for the sick, the elderly, and the poor–it restricts empathy, whether implicitly or explicitly, in other things. Within Christianity, a taboo list might include witchcraft, alternative sexual practices, and acts of violence. Such things are not to be empathized with, and doing so is succumbing to temptation.

The restrictions imposed on literature by religion routinely create quandaries for religious writers and readers of literature. C. S. Lewis, for one, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters–a book which takes the form of a series of letters written from the perspective of a senior demon to a junior demon–says he won’t write anything else from a demon’s perspective because doing so gives him, as he puts it memorably, “spiritual cramp”:

I was often asked or advised to add to the original Letters, but for many years I felt not the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment….Though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

While Lewis’ literary sensibilities enabled and encouraged him to compose an astonishingly empathetic work from a demon’s point of view, his religious sensibilities made him think better of it. Even though most Christians would argue that The Screwtape Letters is a very tame and well-intentioned trek into the demonic, Lewis felt the urge to rein himself in.

The problem of empathy gets even stickier when we deal with other works. Consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel written from the perspective of a man sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl. Is this the sort of text the religious person should be reading? How about J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, in which the teenage narrator repeatedly swears blue streaks so blue they’re almost purple? Or what about Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, in which various women, one of whom is a lesbian prostitute, talk candidly about their vaginas? For Catholics at the University of Notre Dame, the question of whether to perform The Vagina Monologues on campus has spurred many heated debates over the last several years. Is The Vagina Monologues the sort of play the religious person should watch? What about the woman who plays–that is, who empathetically pretends to be–the lesbian prostitute? Is this a fitting role for a religious person?

I don’t have definitive answers to any of these questions, though maybe I should say that I have chosen to read Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye and go to a showing of The Vagina Monologues. At least for these works, empathizing with great literature was more important to me than adhering to religious teaching. I decided these classics were classics for a reason and that their positive messages outweighed their negative ones. What I want to point out, though, is that I’m not sure my decision was the “religious” one. That is, I think many in the religious community would disagree with my choice. In the end, then, the gap between what I and many religious people think is right in the realm of literary empathy suggests, if nothing else, a need for more dialogue about the problem of empathy. Empathy is a tricky business, and I think students of literature and religion alike could benefit from thinking and talking about it more than they do.