Things Literature and Art Help Us See

Every few years a variation on this theme can be found in a new study: reading great literature increases empathy; it stimulates sympathies that would otherwise remain dormant, and the novel’s lost significance (and the reading public’s shrinking size) is alarming because we are in dire need of empathy in a polarized age. I want to stake a different claim: that literature, like other arts, helps us only to the extent that it first helps us to see. Any moral or emotional effect of literature (and a fully moral response is both rational and emotional) is secondary to, and consequent upon, literature’s great gift: before they bring us into ethical deliberations, novels and short stories coax us into the realm of natural contemplation.

Joseph Conrad puts it in a preface, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” Stories are an especially capacious vehicle for this, because (as Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics) through literature we can sometimes witness “that which endures forever.”

Yes, literature immerses us in character and plot: the engine of drama is change. But change without measure is no source of wonder – it can be, rather, an occasion of horror – so the novelist strives “to snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life.” This fierce commitment to really see and fully say what is worth preserving out of what is passing is, continues Conrad, only the beginning: “The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth – disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment.”

Illustration from the Russian satirical journal Gamayun, 1906. Gado Images / Alamy Stock Photo.

Crucially, Conrad sympathetically sees that readers come to books for other reasons – “encouragement, consolation, fear, charm” – and grants that a good storyteller ought to deliver on these desires, but the real reader will also find “that glimpse of truth for which [they] have forgotten to ask.”

Conrad’s point corresponds with Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper’s reminder that “Being precedes Truth and that Truth precedes the Good.” Put differently, “the realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is.” Literature, which trades in the tangible and textured, which delivers a higher vision through a patient and painstaking representation of the real, is especially well suited to increase the depth perception of our souls – to enhance our vision beyond the empirical.

Early in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, when the preternaturally “good” (I’ll not involve you in that debate just now) Prince Myshkin arrives, awkwardly, in the Yepanchina living room, one of the daughters asks him to find her a fit subject for a painting. “I don’t know how to look,” she confesses. Her mother Madame Yepanchina is maddened: “What d’you mean, ‘I don’t know how to look’? You’ve got eyes, use them.”

Relating how he learned to see, Myshkin remembers a moment of joyful recovery that came, unexpectedly, after a time of terrible illness that had sent him far away to a doctor in Switzerland. He ascended a mountain, “pine trees all around me, ancient, tall, resinous; up there on the rock an old castle, medieval and ruinous; our village far away below, barely visible; the sun bright in the blue sky, a fearful silence.” Alone there, but maybe not so alone, Myshkin “used to sense a something that kept calling me elsewhere, and it seemed that if I walked straight ahead for a long time, past the line, that line where sky and earth meet, the whole puzzle would be resolved and I should see a new life, a thousand times more vital and tumultuous than ours.”

Reckoning with the relationship between extreme situations and heightened contemplation, Myshkin tells the story of a prisoner who, like Dostoyevsky himself, was “led along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him,” before, in a matter of minutes, the capital punishment was commuted and replaced by a far less severe sentence. But during that awful interval, when the prisoner was absolutely convinced that he would soon die, “it seemed that in those five minutes he could live through so many lives, that there could be no thinking now of that last instant.” The convict, in a passage that parallels Myshkin’s mountaintop epiphany, remembers seeing a church nearby and “staring with awful intensity at that roof and the sunlight lancing from it; he couldn’t drag his eyes away,” as “it occurred to him that those rays were his new state of being.” Given this remarkable, rich perception, the prisoner realized that if he did not have to die, “if life was returned to me – what an eternity it would be! And it would be all mine! I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for, nothing would be frittered away.”

Somewhat cynically (but in this case not entirely inaccurately), Alexandra Yepanchina remarks that the prince is simply telling them a moralistic parable to prove that “one shouldn’t value a single instant in mere kopeks, and that sometimes five minutes can outweigh a fortune.” But, she asks critically, did the friend really account for every minute afterward? Did he realize his eternity on earth? “Oh no,” Myshkin admits, “I asked him about that; he didn’t live like that at all and wasted an awful lot of minutes.” Myshkin refuses to concede that the prisoner’s planned pursuit is impossible, wishing that wise living may yet result from heightened perception, but he bolsters Pieper’s point that “so-called ‘good intention’ and so-called ‘meaning well’ by no means suffice. Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation, that is to the concrete realities” that form our environs.

Admirable as the intense visions of Myshkin and the prisoner are, they suggest that the kind of contemplation cultivated by heightened consciousness of the real can bring us closer to the truth – can even charm us to want what’s good – but that in itself does not make us morally better.

This is not to say that there is no relationship between seeing and being and doing. Borrowing a bit from Thomas Aquinas, Pieper writes: “‘Reason perfected in the cognition of truth’ shall inwardly shape and imprint his volition and action.” When, through stories, we receive a heightened dose of truth, so long as our wills don’t protest under the glorious weight, literature might become the midwife of justice. As Conrad writes, “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”

Marrying political justice to the justice of seeing, Prince Myshkin goes on to propose a subject for the picture that Adelaida Yepanchin had asked him to give: “Draw the face of a condemned man in the minute before the guillotine falls.” In Lyon, he witnessed such a death, and when the man in his last moments chanced to glance in Myshkin’s direction: “I looked into his face and understood it all.” In spite of his opposition to capital punishment, he grants that the criminal who is brought to eternity’s threshold can embody the drama all of us must face as we come ever closer to death.

Although the proposition of such a drawing subject violates the manners of polite society, and though he grows ashamed at his own suggestion, the prince is surely right: a picture painted by someone who has empathetically imagined the excruciating hours that preceded the guillotine could bring us closer to the “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4–5) when God became man and took on the humiliations of human punishment. For with an overwhelming acuity of perception the sentenced soul perks up, impassioned, when a priest offers him a cross to kiss: “He kept putting it to his lips every minute. And as soon as the cross touched his lips he would open his eyes and come to life again.” To preserve the mystery of the passage without paraphrase or further analysis, I can only leave you with the final image by which Dostoyevsky’s “idiot” tries to “make you see” how close you are to eternity:

And to think, this goes on till the last quarter of a second when your head is lying on the block and waiting and … knowing, and all at once it hears the iron sliding above! You would certainly hear that! … And just imagine, people still argue that perhaps the head when it flies off knows for a second that it has done so – what an idea! And what if it were five seconds! … Draw the scaffold so that the very last rung only can be seen clearly and close to; the felon has placed his foot on it: the head and face as white as a sheet, the priest is holding out the cross, while the other greedily protrudes his blue lips and stares, and knows everything. The cross and the head – that’s the picture.

Prince Myshkin stakes his idiotic claim: “the picture would do a lot of good,” but it can only do good if those who behold its terrifying beauty have eyes to see. As Flannery O’Connor would have it, knowing deepens our being, and really seeing is really knowing. Art demands “at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.” To start to see the unseen mysterious we must first see the seen right before us.

Later in The Idiot, Myshkin passes under a doorway over which hangs Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, and he says, startled, that a man could lose his faith looking at that painting. Still later, Ippolit, a tubercular nihilist who is (in his own mind) condemned to die young, , uses the same image as justification not only for his own lack of faith but for his deep belief in the force of nothingness. Looking at the picture, he finds

the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, dumb beast, or more precisely, much more precisely, strange as it may seem – in the guise of a vast modern machine which has pointlessly seized, dismembered, and devoured, in its blind and insensible fashion, a great and priceless being, a being worth all of nature and all her laws, worth the entire earth – which indeed was perhaps created solely to prepare for the advent of that being! The picture is, as it were, the medium through which this notion of some dark, insolent, senselessly infinite force to which everything is subordinated is unwittingly conveyed.

For Ippolit, a “strange feeling of disquiet” follows contemplation of this hideous creation. Most painters of Christ’s corpse still retain “a trace of extraordinary beauty in the face; they seek to preserve this beauty in him, even during the most terrible agonies.” But, Ippolit argues, Holbein’s vision is entirely bereft of beauty.

Hans Holbein, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521, oil on wood.

Myshkin may be right that a man could lose his faith looking at that picture. But in such a case we might rightly wonder whether that person possessed the gift of faith to begin with. Ippolit asks whether Christ’s disciples would have been able to believe that “the martyr would rise again,” for “the compulsion would be to think that if death was so dreadful, and nature’s laws so powerful, how could they possibly be overcome?”

Here is precisely where faith must persist, tested by the furnace of this absurd disfigurement of God, whose body made ugly manifests the beauty of his absolute sacrifice. Writing of an artist, O’Connor insists, “If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look” and render realistically the truths he is given to bear witness to. Myshkin’s implicit demand for censorship for the sake of faith’s preservation should be read via negativa. When he wonders “if the Master himself, on the eve of his execution, could have seen his image, would he have mounted the cross as he did, and died as he did,” he both reveals the transcendent power of art and draws out de profundis the total transcendence of Christ’s saving death, for the Master himself saw beforehand that terrible execution, looked into his disfigurement fully and deeply as he sweated in the garden on the eve of his death, and, seeing, he still said yes.

Abridged from Joshua Hren’s forthcoming book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature (Word on Fire, 2026).