Many have heard the story of young Ignatius of Loyola wounded in battle and recovering with nothing to read except the lives of the saints, which inspired him to renounce his worldly ways and found the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). We might think the literary moral of the story is that the stories of the saints are the best stories. Certainly no one would dispute the power of saint stories in religious and moral formation. Human beings learn through imitation. The lives of the saints give us a playbook of how to be a Catholic, and each page unveils the surprising ways “Christ plays in ten thousand places”, as the Jesuit poet Hopkins puts it.
A tiny detail of the Ignatius story is also surprising. In the Office of Readings, Luis Gonzalez (writing for Ignatius) remarks, “Ignatius was passionately fond of reading worldly books of fiction and tales of knight-errantry.” It is no wonder that the boy in love with romance literature would grow up to be a gallant soldier. Is it a stretch to imagine these reading habits also prepared Ignatius for the great romance of God and man? Francis, another failed-knight-turned-Catholic-hero, was similarly imbued with the poetry of courtly love and chivalry. Turning away from worldly goods, he nonetheless expressed his mission and experience in courtly terms: lady poverty, brother sun, sister moon. Ignatius later discovered in Francis a model for nobility in Christ, which arises from humble service to the glory of God.
The scholars and schools that blossomed in the Jesuit order, as well as the curriculum outlined in the Ratio Studiorum, show that the Ignatian viewpoint included literature within the ken of Christian formation. Reading the lives of the saints did not tear down, as C.S. Lewis terms it, the “castle-building” of literary imagination in the mind of Ignatius. They rather illumined the hidden path to the city “whose architect and builder is God.”
Being generous with our storytelling to young boys and girls, then, is part of the Ignatian spirit. Stories of the saints, knights, talking beavers, pioneers, orphan girls, runaway slaves, monster slayers, toads with a need for speed, all work together for the greater glory of God—chiefly by showing that the truth is more than what meets the eye. Returning to Hopkins, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Story unveils, through a glass darkly, the inner heart of reality. This is the vision we need constantly renewed and restored in the life of grace, or as Ignatius might put it, through the discernment of spirits. The reading of literature, even among the very young, can begin to sensitize us to distinguishing sadness and joy, dryness and life, the allure of the world and the call of God.