A good story is like Belgian chocolate. Everybody likes it. And, further, most everyone can agree it’s worthwhile. True, there are nay-sayers out there whose dads never read The Lord of the Rings to them, but enjoyment (and endorsement) of stories is a fairly universal thing.

Many different people have a lot of things to say about why, exactly, we should read stories. They improve our language skills; they’re educational; they let us learn morality in a safe environment; they form our souls.

None of these are wrong, but they’re often argued for as if they were the best (or the only) reason for stories to exist. True, there’s no single reason for their existence. But there’s a highest end, an ultimate telos, if you will, that both includes and transcends all of these.

To discover this end, we need to organize all the preexisting opinions: while not comprehensive, six general ideas emerge. Here, they’re listed from least to greatest, starting with the most trivial, and ending with the ultimate. Within the six, the first three are ones you might hear in mainstream genre fiction and public-school literature classes; the final three are more characteristic of serious classical and literary fiction.

6. Stories are Entertaining and Relaxing

When I was about thirteen, I got into the Percy Jackson books. Percy Jackson is a mid-grade series about a teenage boy from New York who gets thrown into the chaotic world of modern-day Greek Mythology. While there are some good moments, it’s mostly humor, action, and adventure—but they’re extraordinarily entertaining. The overarching series is fifteen books long, and I ate those things up like cheddar popcorn.

I’ll admit it: the only reason I read them was to be entertained. This, probably, is the most widespread reason for engaging in stories, especially cinematic ones. They’re fun, interesting, and action-packed; they provide leisure and a bit of escape from the humdrum of our lives.

Everybody likes to pick up an entertaining story in their down-time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, because stories are capable of doing higher things alongside entertainment, using them for leisure is a good idea. Much better than scrolling Instagram or playing Call of Duty.

Two things must be noted here. First, and obviously, it’s a problem when stories are merely used for entertainment. Most pulp fiction (I’m thinking cheap romance) comes to mind. True, it’s not bad for a story to be fun and exciting, but when all it’s trying to do is keep me turning the pages, that’s deeply superficial and probably a waste of my time. There’s a higher way, as we’ll see.

Second, the entertainment factor within stories often grows into something deeper. This is what we might call “escapism.” Escapism is when we use stories to depart from our lived experience and enter into the experience of another. It can be both noble or base, but either way, it’s tapping into the transcendent desire within us. Escapism is still entertainment—technically—but it’s reaching beyond. Remember this idea; we’ll return to it.

5. Stories Hone Our Language Skills

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is about an English butler, Stevens, who lives through a period of cultural change in the mid-twentieth century. In it, there’s a scene where Stevens defends himself for reading pulp romance (not unlike the cheap entertaining fiction we were just talking about). He reads these books, he says, merely because he wants to improve his mastery over the English language.

Ishiguro is making a joke, but about a month later, I was reading an Agatha Christie murder mystery. The story was superficial, but Christie’s prose is polished and her vocabulary is extensive. And I thought, Stevens is right. This is cheap pulp, but I think I actually am getting better at English by reading it.

This is a line of thought you might hear in a normal American English classroom. We read The Wizard of Oz and Of Mice and Men because they teach us how to use English efficiently and elegantly. And, indeed, they do. By reading frequently, diversely, and deeply, we can improve our writing, speaking, and even thinking. These stories give us mastery over the English language better than any grammar textbook could.

True, well-written nonfiction might do the same, but it’s a bit more difficult to get excited about The Origin of Species than The Outsiders.

And yet that’s an important point. Improving our language skills isn’t something unique to stories. It might (might) be the best way, but it’s not the only way, and it’s not a sufficient reason to wrestle with deep, existential stories all throughout our lives.

4. Stories are Holistic Educational Tools

Imagine you’re a middle-school history teacher, and you’re trying to teach your twelve-year-olds about the Civil War. You can stand in front of a chalkboard and lecture to them out of a moldy, boring textbook while they stare at the clock and draw smiley-faces on their knuckles. Or you can have them read Across Five Aprils and Rifles for Watie.

I think it goes without saying which will stick in their minds. Here, we’re building on the idea that appealing to the imagination leads to lasting education. This is especially, but not exclusively, true in children. Stories can teach us (and our students) about history, culture, ethics, even religion and philosophy. Unlike textbooks, stories allow for nuance, empathy, and a sense of living presence and relevance.

Many educators, especially classical educators, are big on this idea. The education of the textbook is dead; the education of the novel is a very promising alternative. Of course, it can’t do everything in education, but it can be an effective tool.

But this, like the previous point, while good, falls short. Yes, it’s a valuable benefit of stories, but it doesn’t cut to their heart. There’s a still deeper way.

3. Stories Provide a Moral Shooting Range

In The Iliad, there’s a famous, deadly argument between the heroes Agamemnon and Achilles. Sure, we have to decide who we’re going to root for. (Go Achilles.) But, if we’re reading attentively, we’re also led to think about who’s in the right.

This type of pondering forms our moral senses. It gives us an opportunity to think about real-life, often messy morality, but without any harm to ourselves.

A famous example of this is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In Anna Karenina, we can witness the intricacies, motivations, and effects of marital infidelity. We’re invited to enter into and understand this moral situation, but without, obviously, actually committing the fault. Thus, when we encounter something like this in the real world, we’re prepared. Maybe not entirely, but much more so than we would be if we hadn’t read Anna Karenina.

Two more examples are worth nothing. The first is the deeply moral fiction of Dickens. In Dickens’ stories, we find all shades of morality, from thoroughly vicious to perfectly virtuous. Studying his characters leads to a great deal of moral understanding.

The second is the relationship-focused fiction of Jane Austen. While much less epic than Dickens and Tolstoy, in her stories, we witness complex social situations, with acts of both nobility and baseness. It’s not hard to wonder, “What would I do in this situation?” and this is precisely the shooting range we’ve been talking about.

Stories as moral explorations are very good things; many people would like us to believe that this is the final end of storytelling. However, stories which are merely moral fall short. It’s common to hear writers and readers express a dislike for “preachy” fiction. Moral fiction doesn’t have to be preachy, but both types can suffer from the same shortcoming: they’re not bad, but they could reach higher.

2. Stories Encourage Poetic Encounter

Flannery O’Connor is a giant in American Catholic literature. Her goal in writing, she said, was to portray the action of grace on characters in a way that could be understood by her contemporary Southern audience.

To accomplish this, she doesn’t insert Sunday homilies into her stories. (Thank goodness.) Instead, she embodies this action of grace in bracingly human situations. Her reason: if she tried to overtly explain theological ideas to her readers, she’d fail. Nobody would listen to her. Instead, these ideas had to be communicated through the senses, through the tangible details of the plot.

This is a powerful and mystical aspect of storytelling, one which we might call “poetic encounter.” There are certain ideas that cannot be communicated through the intellect. Or, if they are communicated that way, they become flat and lifeless. These ideas must be communicated by means of poetic knowledge; that is, through the senses.

Stories give poetic ideas a powerful and effective medium. They embody dynamics and realities, bringing them home and giving them an impact in a way no work of nonfiction ever could.

This relates to point #4, about stories being effective teaching tools. However, poetic encounter reaches beyond mere education. It’s precisely that: an encounter, a gaze at the world, a quest to understand reality in a way that transcends arguments and syllogisms.

This idea has found its way into modern fiction through journalistic fiction, or literary stories about contemporary events. Perhaps the greatest work of this journalistic fiction I’m aware of is The Grapes of Wrath. In it, Steinbeck presents the situation of displaced Oklahoma tenant farmers migrating to California during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

If Steinbeck had written a magazine article about these things, that would’ve been fine and good. But by writing a deeply touching novel, he invites us to a poetic encounter with the situation of these people, understanding and learning about them not through statements of fact, but through our senses.

Poetic encounter is an invaluable thing, because it leads to contemplation. This is what brings us to the final, highest purpose of stories.

1. Stories are Beautiful

A single idea has been haunting these diverse opinions without being fully brought out: a story is a work of art. Madame Bovary is just as much a work of art as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

What defines art is that its purpose is to be beautiful. That sounds trite; what, then, is beauty?

Beauty is when a thing (a person, an object, a reality) perfectly and unobstructedly communicates its essence to someone else. A sunset is beautiful because the essence of the natural factors at play (the sun, the sky, the clouds) is communicated to us in an unhindered way. A person is beautiful, physically or spiritually, when their essence is perfectly communicated to us, either through our eyes or our mind.

And, finally, a story is beautiful when the ideas and realities contained in it are unobstructedly communicated to us. This is related to what we said above about poetic encounter: if a story leads us to encounter true reality, it’s beautiful.

But the beauty of stories goes beyond mere encounter. The response beauty is always meant to elicit is love. Sunsets lead us to love nature; the physical (or spiritual) beauty of a person leads us to love them.

In stories, this love manifests itself through contemplation. If a story successfully gives rise to the encounter we discussed above, it leads us to contemplate what we’ve encountered. This contemplation, in turn, leads us to love: to love the world and to love humanity in their beauty and their brokenness, and, rising above these, to love God. Fiction’s highest purpose is to lead us to contemplation: this contemplation unites our being to true reality, which, ultimately, is God himself.

The Catholic novelist Joshua Hren recently published a book called Contemplative Realism. In it, he highlights a form of fiction (contemplative realism) which, contrary to other “realisms,” sacramentally grasps at the presence of the supernatural in the world. The purpose: to look at the world (natural and supernatural) as it is, and by this means to open ourselves to true reality.

A story that accomplishes this contemplative realism (and I hope Dr. Hren would agree with me) is The Idiot. The Idiot, more so than many other works of literature, is a beautiful story. It, in Dostoevsky’s own words, is about “a perfectly beautiful man,” Prince Myshkin, at once naïve and wise, and his encounter with the chaotic world of Petersburg high society. It looks at its world and at its characters with a piercing gaze that unveils both the physical and spiritual dynamics at play.

By the end of the work, we’re given the opportunity to contemplate the realities presented to us: beauty, love, hatred, innocence, longing. And this contemplation enables us to ascend beyond the world of the story, to encounter and draw closer to the grand scheme, the loving author, present above and within all these dynamics.

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There are a lot of reasons to read stories, but not all reasons are equal. Yes, they’re entertaining. Yes, they’re educating. And there’s nothing wrong with using them for entertainment or education, or for suggesting these as valuable reasons to participate in them.

But a story is not a trivial thing. It’s not a linguistic exercise; it’s not a pick-me-up diversion. A story is a matter of life and death, of reality and illusion. Stories have the capacity to open the eyes of our being in a unique way. Reading, watching, and writing are all serious endeavors, ones we should treat seriously, always keeping in mind the end towards which they’re directed: beauty, contemplation, and love.