A Love for Reading and Reading for Love

Lina Bolzoni. A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023. $39.95, 256 pp.

How does a person become capable of love? Answering this question fully is obviously beyond the scope of a book review, but I want to pose it at the outset in order to suggest the real stakes of what may seem a scholarly, specialized book. Lina Bolzoni’s A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe explicitly addresses a somewhat narrower question: How do you cultivate a spacious soul, one capable of friendship with others and perhaps even with God? As this way of framing the question suggests, such soul formation involves both intense self-cultivation and sustained relationships with others. A similar tension can be seen in the formulation of the second great commandment: my capacity to know and love my neighbor is connected to my capacity to know and love myself. And there is one activity that uniquely combines solitary self-formation with social engagement: reading. 

The core paradox of reading is that it is often an isolated, contemplative activity and yet the books we encounter in this place of quiet speak to us and become our friends. Hence reading is both private and social: it “is a shared experience but at the same time something absolutely intimate and personal.” As Proust puts it, the “wonderful miracle of reading . . . is communication in the heart of solitude,” and the result is a kind of self-cultivation: “we are driven by another on our own ways.” In a manner that isn’t true of embodied conversation, the other’s voice remains always under the reader’s control: I can disagree vehemently with a book, or scrawl my complaints in the margin, or even throw the offending book across the room. When dealing with real people, politeness demands more temperate behavior. Yet these possible reactions to a book also show how the personalized, tailored-to-me encounter with others that books provide can easily be a perversion of friendship rather than its handmaiden. They can serve self-love rather than a neighbor-love rooted in a well-formed soul. In fact, some of the benefits that Bolzoni’s protagonists ascribe to reading sound surprisingly similar to the perks that AI bots promise today: bringing dead voices to life, enjoying customizable companions, accessing useful information.

In articulating the goal that reading should serve, Bolzoni cites the inscription that accompanies a portrait of Sir Thomas Bodley, who organized and greatly expanded Oxford’s library: “This image portrays the mortal Thomas Bodley, but the library his vast soul.” The implication is that by gathering and internalizing many wise books, Bodley developed a capacious soul, and while a painting may convey his physical appearance, the character of his soul can be better glimpsed through the many book-friends he gathered in the Bodleian Library. 

But reading doesn’t necessarily produce a vast soul; this pursuit can be corrupted in a myriad of ways. As a means of exploring the benefits and dangers of reading, Bolzoni, a professor of Italian literature, turns to a set of readers she knows quite well: protagonists of the Italian renaissance from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The result is a sort of commonplace book, in which Bolzoni gathers examples from letters, essays, and paintings where men such as Petrarch, Boccacio, Machiavelli, and Federico da Montefeltro describe what they think they are doing when they read. Her inclusion of Montaigne, Erasmus, and a few others justifies the title’s claim to be a survey of reading in Europe, but the book’s focus remains relatively tight. Yet this isn’t a detriment; it allows Bolzoni to probe the ways that this particular community mythologized the pleasures—both edifying and depraved—of reading. If the goal is soul formation and, in particular, the formation of a soul capable of deep friendship with others, there are many ways that the practice of reading can be corrupted and fail to serve this end. 

If reading is a dialogue with absent authors, it is often a dialogue with the dead, and Bolzoni describes several readers who see it explicitly as a “necromantic rite.” Bolzoni cites Poliziano and others who view libraries by analogy to the Greek god Aesculapius, who could restore dead people to life. Through a well-stocked library, Poliziano writes, we can overcome Lethe—a river of the underworld that causes forgetfulness: “Fortunate the one who can recall to the light of life so many of the dead monuments of ancient men! Fortunate the one who can rescue from the flames of the pyre the lost names of the sacred poets!” Summarizing this trope, Bolzoni notes that reading is often described as a “means to converse with the dead; it is equivalent to carrying out what could be termed a necromantic ritual, a descent into Hades, where encounters not otherwise possible take place.” Some readers, like Federico, even commissioned author portraits to hang in their libraries and facilitate this imaginative summoning of the dead. 

It may be hard in some cases to discern the line between listening to the wisdom of the past, on the one hand, and trying to overcome time and death, on the other, but several new AI-powered tools are doing their best to demonstrate the dangers of this latter endeavor. To meet the contemporary demand for necromancy, companies have begun offering “thanabots,” LLM-powered chatbots that are trained on a person’s digital data trail so that after an individual dies, people can continue conversing with a digital version of their loved one. No longer can we only resuscitate a dead person through intently reading their works of literature. Now we can text back and forth with anyone who left behind words—or other data—that can be used to train an AI. And such thanabots will only become more convincing when they are housed in silicon bodies that evoke the person they imitate: Who needs two-dimensional author portraits when you can interact with a robot? The dangers of such necromantic efforts seem obvious with AI bots: These will short circuit healthy grieving and contribute to the isolation and loneliness experienced by those who rely on poor substitutes for human community. A bot may provide one with the feeling of being loved, but if love involves willing and choosing another’s good, a bot can neither love nor be loved. And insofar as readers are likewise using the voices of the dead for their own intellectual and emotional lives—the kids these days might call this “main character energy”—reading too can be a moral hazard.

This temptation to use books and bots to instrumentalize others is a recurring theme in Bolzoni’s account. For instance, she explains that Petrarch views the library as a “magical site par excellence” because it can bring the dead to life. And in book form, the dead are more conveniently available to readers than they were in life: “book-friends are able not only to furnish all that is needed in the various fields of knowledge but also to provide psychological comfort and moral instruction; they have one important advantage over flesh-and-blood friends: they are entirely subjected to the needs of their host, always ready and eager to answer his many questions.” Petrarch puts it this way in a letter describing his library as a peculiar assortment of friends: “I gather them from every land and every age in this narrow valley, conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive because they see traces of their stale breath in the frosty air. I thus wander free and unconcerned, alone with such companions.”

As Bolzoni points out, “the complete availability of” bookish friends makes them superior to “physical people.” And in addition, the books don’t have bad breath. Petrarch makes such favorable comparisons repeatedly, and it is his books’ willingness to obey his every wish that makes him prefer them to people: “Books are ready to be seen in public or go back into the drawer at your command, and are always willing to be silent or speak, to stay at home or accompany you into the woods, to travel, to spend time in the country, to chat, joke, encourage, comfort, advise, reprimand or take care of you. . . . With them there is no tedium, no expense, no complaints, no murmurs, no envy, no deceit.” What is more, he goes on to point out, they don’t require any food or drink, and they are content with “the smallest room in your house.” 

A marketer for bot-companions would be hard pressed to come up with more effusive praise for the pleasures of your own private AI-powered friend. Alan Noble aptly summarizes the powerful appeal of one such product:

Consider the advantages of using Character.AI if you’re a lonely young person. You have a companion you can safely talk to about anything, whenever and wherever you want. They’ll never judge you. They’ll never shame you. Just the opposite: They’ll show care and concern for you. They’ll talk with you as long as you want. They’ll make you feel desired, important, and interesting by asking questions about your life. They can create a story of a relationship that gives significance and direction to your life. You feel your life is going somewhere because your relationship is evolving. (Even though the chatbots don’t remember your previous chats, users can and do easily fill in the blanks with their imaginations). And all these benefits can be yours in private. No one has to know you have this “friend.” Your classmates and parents can be utterly oblivious to what’s absorbing your heart, so they can’t make fun of you for falling in love with a chatbot. Character.AI is the perfect isolated “solution” to isolation.

Yet among other dangers, interacting with AI-companions makes us less capable of genuine love because it habituates us to valuing others only for how they benefit me. Yuval Noah Harari articulates how bots will make us feel heard in ways that humans rarely can. AI, Harari claims, “will be so good at understanding human emotions, and reacting in a way which is exactly calibrated to your personality at this particular moment, that we might become exasperated with the human beings who don't have this capacity to understand our emotions, and to react in such a calibrated way.” Montaigne makes a similar point with regard to reading, noting that books “do not rebel at seeing that I seek them out only for want of those other pleasures, that are more real, lively, and natural; they always receive me with the same expression.” Whereas a real friend might, justly, be hurt if we explicitly tell them that we’d rather be spending the evening with someone else, book and bot companions are utterly compliant and impossible to offend. Treating them as replacement friends, then, stunts our capacity for friendship.

And if I treat persons as mere means to meet my own emotional or intellectual needs, I’ll tend to view everything through this instrumental lens. People who read in this fashion want to extract usable information with the least amount of time and effort. Petrarch sings the praises of his De remediis utriusque fortunae by promising the reader that “you will no longer have to consult a whole library whenever you suspect the presence and imminent thrust of the enemy, since now you have ad manum—within easy reach—as they say, and before your eyes in all places and at all times, a quick remedy for every trouble or hurtful good.”

Much like an internet-trained AI bot, this reference work appeals to readers by telling them that they don’t need to wrestle with difficult texts or be formed by wisdom themselves; they can simply access whatever bit of information they happen to need at any given moment. Yet authors such as Montaigne also recognized the danger inherent in this approach. He warns readers against those who can regurgitate facts without having their understanding and conscience formed by them: “Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.” Reference works and search tools can certainly be useful aids, but if we use them to avoid the work of chewing and digesting difficult ideas, our souls will shrivel.

Despite these dangers, reading can also offer different sorts of encounters, ones more conducive to genuine soul-transformation. And a soul so developed might be able to enter into dialogue with others and with God, to know and be known. To this end, Bolzoni emphasizes those readers who weren’t after summonable, usable data but wisdom about how to lead a good life. Poggio Bracciolini, for instance, describes the elevating pleasures of sustained reading: “There exists nothing sweeter or more agreeable . . . than to . . . converse with those who in their writings have bequeathed to us the precepts for a proper way of life. No passion arises from them, no lust, no vice; rather, they teach us how to despise what is fleeting and fix our gaze on what is eternal.” Similarly Giovanni di Paolo Morelli advises young boys to spend at least an hour a day reading and studying “the great writers of the past, such as Virgil, Boethius, and Seneca. . . . If such an exercise may appear exacting, Morelli assures his readers that its benefits will be felt in old age,” as they enjoy the benefits of genuine wisdom:

You can be with Boethius, with Dante and the other poets, with Cicero, who will teach you perfect diction; with Aristotle, who will teach you philosophy. You shall know the reason for things, and every little thing shall give you the greatest pleasure. You shall be with the blessed prophets in the Holy Scripture, you shall read and study the Bible, you shall learn the great acts of those holy prophets, you shall be fully instructed in the faith and the advent of the Son of God, your soul shall have great consolation, great joy and great sweetness.

Reading for wisdom explicitly aims at transforming your loves; the goal here is not access to the information that you can use to get what you want, but a soul that is fed and shaped by the wisdom of those who have gone before.

In the same vein, Bolzoni returns often to readers who sought book friends not as convenient replacements for human friends but as aids to help us become capable of genuine friendship with others. As Bessarion writes in a letter, “There is no object more precious, no treasure more useful and beautiful than a book. Books are full of the voices of the wise; they live, dialogue and converse with us, inform, educate and console us; they show us that things belonging to the remotest past are in fact present—they place them before our very eyes. Without books, we should all be brutes.” Ideally, sustained conversation with the wise voices found in books forms souls in the virtues needed to befriend others. When we encounter the best articulations of different perspectives, when we imaginatively inhabit the lives of people from distant places or the distant past, our souls are stretched and deepened. As we have seen, reading can be a corrupting replacement for the difficult work of loving others, but it can also be medicine for expanding narrow souls. And the whole point of cultivating a vast and wise soul is to become capable of giving ourselves in loving service to others.

One way we might think of this distinction between reading as a replacement for friendship and reading as formation for friendship comes via the contrasting ways that Machiavelli and Erasmus imagine books as granting us access to others. Machiavelli views books as akin to relics or even the Eucharistic host: They make another person present. Hence Machiavelli treats books like persons—dressing up in fine clothes to read them—because he views them in an almost magical sense.

Erasmus, however, takes a view influenced by Protestant concerns and emphasizes the need to receive another person through the intermediary of a book. He cautions against obsessing over relics that promise nearness to a biblical author or Jesus himself and reminds readers that the point of reading the Bible is to encounter “the living presence of its author.” As he writes about the Scriptures, “Let us desire these books eagerly; let us embrace them; let us live with them constantly; let us admire them greatly; let us die in them; let us be transformed into them, since ‘our preoccupations affect our character.’” But in doing so, he warns, we must never forget who these books point us toward: “these books show you the living image of his holy mind and Christ himself, speaking, healing, dying, rising to life again. In short, they restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes.” Erasmus may overstate things in the enthusiasm of his rhetorical flourishes, but his point is that the Bible is not a relic to be valued for itself but as a means to intimate encounters with the mind of Christ.

If we are to enjoy such bookish encounters with Christ and other authors, we need visions of reading—and the accompanying practices and institutions—that help us avoid the more self-serving tendencies described above. As Bolzoni’s book makes clear, there are many ways in which the activity of reading can be corrupted and deform our souls, worsening the incurvatus in se to which fallen humans are prone. And many AI tools seem likely to only make these temptations more acute.

Further, reading, especially solitary reading, is neither necessary nor sufficient to the process of soul maturation, of growing into the kind of persons capable of love. Yet as these authors demonstrate, it can provide remarkable, transformative encounters with people we could otherwise never listen to, and if we ruminate well on their wisdom, we may cultivate souls capable of better loving both our neighbors and God.

Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.