Great Literature Is Inherently Moral

For over a century, post-modern critics have insisted that literature must be liberated from the stifling realm of moralism in order to become truly authentic in its artistic approach. The various platitudes in this vein have been prolific: “Morality ruins creativity,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or the proposition of “art for art’s sake,” which all seem less as genuine insights into the faculty of human creativity and more as rhetorical shields against difficult questions relating to the nature of truth.

In our own contemporary age, the argument has at least partially mutated, but it has never fully disappeared. Contemporary critics often regard moral themes as oppressive or, more commonly, as aesthetically naïve. The highest forms of literature, we are told, do not teach us anything. Or, in the phrasing of another great therapeutic cliché of our time, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

However, this postulation of what artistic expression is does not say much of anything. This seems particularly true in our literary canons, where the greatest works of literature have done more than just entertain or experiment. Through their prose, they illuminate the moral structure of reality and offer insight into our humanity. For this reason, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy have endured the centuries, precisely because they confront the permanent moral and, at times, bitter questions of human existence and our relationship to society. Some of these questions forge the perennial philosophy of our civilization: What is justice? What is courage? What is love? What destroys a soul? What will ultimately redeem one?

Despite this, literature does not share the same core message. It is inherently moral, but it is so because it tells the truth about our anthropology by holding up the narrative mirror. This distinction matters. Moral literature is not propaganda. A novel can devolve into propaganda when its cast of characters exists solely as mouthpieces for ideological conclusions. Such works often flatten reality into a series of headless slogans and tell us nothing about the life of interiority that works as a catalyst to our own natural insight. The famed Soviet realist novels of the 1930s and the contemporary novel suffer from the same fatal narrative defect: they know the conclusion before the story begins. Real literature does the opposite. It reveals moral truth through rising dramatic conflict, through situational ambiguity, and temptation. 

Fundamentally, behaviors have meaningful consequences that are not negated by psychological context, and their themes are nuanced and understated. Shakespeare never paused Macbeth to lecture the audience on the dangers of ambition. He simply allowed the hubris of ambition to unfold to its natural, terrible conclusion. Dostoevsky did not reduce Raskolnikov to a political thesis in Crime and Punishment. He intentionally plunges us into the spiritual agony of a man filled with Faustian arrogance, attempting to transcend the proposition of morality altogether. 

Just the same, Jane Austen’s novels are often praised for their sharp wit and keen social observations. However, beneath the elegance of the prose lies a principled vision of humanity in which vanity, pride, and selfishness distort our natural perception. These writers understood what many post-modern critics have forgotten or largely ignored. Morality is not an external framework imposed upon life. It is the fabric that is woven into all of our social institutions and into the challenge of human existence. In the Augustinian sense of the Ordo Amoris, every one of our choices reveals a hierarchy of loves. Every one of our actions further forms our character and the person we are becoming. Just as the continued practice of vice darkens our perception, the liberal practice of virtue clarifies it. Literature that ignores this simple truth becomes psychologically shallow, as it ceases to understand that human beings are inherently moral creatures.

This is why nihilistic art and literature eventually exhaust themselves. Historically, this was particularly evident in the Dadaist movement of the early 20th century, which sought to destroy every aesthetic rule. However, after demolishing all of the rules governing beauty, it had nothing else to say. Such a perspective is parasitic, as it contributes nothing to our psychical understanding of the world. A civilization may indeed celebrate transgression or anti-heroes for a time, but an endless catalog of transgression is dramatically sterile. Shock and iconoclasm cannot sustain narrative meaning indefinitely. The idea of the post-modern antihero, from the decadent aesthetes of the fin de siècle to the morally vacant protagonists who inhabit most of contemporary fiction, often fascinates precisely because readers instinctively search for a state of moral orientation. The reader longs to know the truth about the characters. A purely amoral universe cannot satisfy this directive because human beings are not amoral creatures.

Even literature that depicts evil with extraordinary intensity usually presupposes a moral order. In Joseph Conrad’s 19th-century novel Heart of Darkness, the emotional resonance of the work is not derived from the claims of moral relativism, but from the horrifying recognition that Kurtz has abandoned all restraint and descended into a state of spiritual ruin. Just the same, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is often described as nihilistic in its narrative approach. Yet, Judge Holden terrifies readers precisely because he represents evil.

If there were no moral reality beneath the violence, the novel would be inane and lose the force of its emotional dread. Contemporary criticism often resists this moral evaluation because morality implies objective standards, and in turn, standards imply the utility of judgment. This is all the more puzzling and perverse in its resistance as all criticism inevitably makes judgments. To praise a novel as being profound rather than shallow is to invoke a standard of content, and by extension, the utility of specific virtues. Even the contemporary claim that literature should “subvert norms” assumes that subversion is a preferable virtue to stability. In this sense, moral neutrality proves impossible.

Ironically, the contemporary insistence upon morally neutral art has coincided with an explosion of ideological conformity in English departments and more broadly in publishing houses. John Ruskin, the 19th-century Victorian critic who openly praised the virtues of the age, admitted the obvious: that literature shapes souls. Contemporary institutions have fully embraced the double-bind-deny literature’s valid moral influence while simultaneously policing older novels for political and social correctness. The contradiction is glaring and overtly hypocritical. If literature possesses no intended moral dimension, why demand ideological purity from authors at all?

The older humanistic tradition was far wiser than the pretentious usurpers of the Western canon. From Aristotle to T. S. Eliot, it has long been known and recognized that literature participates in moral formation because narrative itself trains our affective sympathies. We become attached to certain characters, repulsed by the actions of others, moved toward pity or admiration by the unfolding of the imagined world. The stories that we tell habituate emotional responses. Even some twenty-four centuries ago, Aristotle understood the value of tragedy as catharsis. The High Medieval readers saw literature as moral instruction through personal delight. And, in the 20th century, T.S. Eliot believed culture depended upon a shared moral imagination rooted in religious inheritance.

None of this requires reducing literature to an ethical didactic. In fact, overt moralizing frequently weakens art because genuine moral understanding emerges through complexity, and at times ambiguity. Flannery O’Connor once remarked that the novelist with Christian concerns will often seem “hard of hearing” to modern audiences because modernity has lost the language necessary to perceive grace. Yet O’Connor’s stories endure because she dramatized sin and redemption through grotesque realism rather than pious abstraction. Her fiction legitimately shocks precisely because it takes morality seriously.

The enduring greatness of literature depends upon the idea of moral seriousness. The Iliad has not been remembered across time and culture for battle scenes, but for its meditation on pain and mortality. Dante’s magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, remains inexhaustible because it unites poetic beauty with Thomism, the moral architecture of the Catholic world. Shakespeare’s various tragedies survive and are still performed because they reveal eternal truths about who we are as social creatures. Remove the moral vision from these works, and they are effectively hollowed out, with some small stylistic prose detached from human meaning.

A civilization’s literary canon reveals what that civilization categorically believes about human nature. If man is only an economic animal or a bundle of appetites, literature will collapse into either cheap political propaganda or erotic distraction for the masses. However, if man possesses a soul capable of virtue, sin, sacrifice, and redemption, then literature becomes one of the great instruments for understanding the state of our own psychological interiority.

Dr. D.P. Curtin is an Irish-American psychologist, author, and theologian. He holds degrees from Villanova University, Chestnut Hill College, and Chatham University. His work has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, VoegelinView, Public Orthodoxy, Law & Liberty, and Providence Magazine. He is scholar-in-residence for the Third Order of St. Augustine, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Scriptorium Project.