This article is republished from Science and Culture.

The Catholic poet and essayist James Matthew Wilson said something to this effect when I heard from him on a humid June evening in Houston, Texas, last year. It related to another idea developed by my Wheaton professor, Dr. Christina Bieber Lake, who argues in her book Beyond the Story that fiction is theological in its aims because it requires the literary artist to bestow loving attention on the fictional world and its characters. Whether the artist knows it or not, she’s embarking on a dialogue with the divine. 

Literature, then, even in its most nihilistic forms, is trying to sort out some kind of definition for life, a semblance of meaning, an entry point into the ambiguous, into the mysterious terrain of human life and human nature. For the same reason that AI can never truly write, though, a materialistic conception of the universe fails to uphold a real purpose for literature. 

Losing the Plot

Maybe it’s no coincidence that the more culture saw the human person as a machine, and the mind as a stew of chemical exchanges, the more literature lost the plot, settled for political signaling, resorted to vagueness, offered unmoored characters, and failed to envision any kind of transcendent hope. Our anthropology became impoverished; therefore, our arts and culture scene did, too. 

Image Credit: Goffkein - Adobe Stock

Literature is ultimately about people. If it’s about aliens in a galaxy far, far away, it’s still about people. Even The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, though its pages are populated by talking animals, offers portraits of various types of Englishmen. So, if fiction is an exploration of human beings, broadly speaking, our cultural anthropology matters a great deal; the way we think about ourselves will inevitably shape the stories we tell. How does a materialistic understanding of the world and humanity affect narrative art? Negatively, surely, but this framework also handicaps the role literature has in complicating our assumptions about the world, about ourselves. There are some philosophies that are open to human complexity. Materialism, I submit, isn’t one of them. 

Open Minded to the Beyond 

We all know what it’s like for familiarity to breed, if not contempt, indifference. Our routines become stale, the places we live get too ordinary to bear, and especially the sedentary kind of person feels locked in sameness. Life gets dull. And of course, we find all sorts of methods of escape. Movies, TV shows, social media, pornography — the ways to flee the grating ordinariness of daily life are legion. Art, too, is a form of escape, but it’s not the same as mindless entertainment. Thinkers and writers have long explored the similarities and differences between art and entertainment. Some assume humanity’s longstanding appreciation for art, be it literary, visual, or musical, has evolutionary groundings. Others, like philosopher Roger Scruton, believed that our appetite for the beautiful can’t be so brashly reduced. Art can entertain, certainly, but at its best, it renews vision. It disrupts the familiar and ordinary and helps us see the world with new eyes. It helps us see a little better. 

Death and Reproduction

If we are nothing more than machine-like creatures, evolved to reproduce and die, then art and literature are misnomers. There’s no mystery or complexity left to plumb or explore. Scientism came and conquered. Every story ends the same: with death and nonexistence. Literature informed by this kind of anthropology offers only one drab destiny for everyone. 

However, if materialism is false, if there is at least something at work beyond the material realm, then stories just got interesting again. Love, betrayal, duty, honor, adventure, romance, death — these perennial aspects of story have the potential to mean something. Literature, I think, isn’t supposed to give us neat answers about everything. But one of its powers is its ability to open us up to the new, to represent life in such a way that reminds us of its preciousness, beauty, and inherent meaning.