On Catholic Imagination, Part 7: The Theological Imagination

Episode Topic: The Theological Imagination

Is our imagination merely a retreat into fiction, or is it the very mechanism by which we perceive the truth? Join Judith Wolfe as she explores how we navigate the world’s unseen depths. Discover how faith and art unveil the “wholes” of reality, transforming our vision through the theological imagination.

Featured Speakers:

• Jennifer Newsome Martin '07 M.T.S., '12 Ph.D., University of Notre Dame
• Judith Wolfe, University of St. Andrews’ School of Divinity

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/1587f7.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled On Catholic Imagination.

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Transcript

Welcome and Introduction

1 0:05

Welcome, friends. If you could find your seats. Thank you so much. It is such a genuine pleasure to see you all assembled here tonight. Thank you for coming, and it is a genuine delight for me to introduce our speaker for this evening, who is an absolute force in the theological world and a friend of mine, someone that I've admired for many, many years and now I'm glad to call a friend. Um, so we have the great pleasure this evening of hearing from Judith Wolfe from the University of St. Andrews. Judith is a professor of philosophical theology at the University of St. Andrews School of Divinity, where she works in systematic theology, philosophical theology, the European tradition, and theology in the arts. She joined the School of Divinity in 2014 after previous appointments as Director of Studies in Theology at St. John's College, Oxford, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin. Professor Wolfe has written and edited many books, books on Martin Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, and 19th and 20th century theology. Her latest monograph, and the subject of our conversation this evening, is The Theological Imagination, which is recently out through Cambridge University Press. She is also the founding editor of the Journal of Inkling Studies and the general editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophical Theology. Professor Wolfe is not just very scholarly, she also has a very public-facing career. She has spoken on BBC's Radio 4 In Our Time, PBS's Closer to Truth, as well as festivals, museums, and many conferences, seminars, and workshops across the United States, Europe, and in the Middle East. A very short documentary on her work has been filmed for the series At the Threshold, and I got a sneak peek of that, so I encourage you to look that up as well. Uh, what is not on this formal introduction is the incredible generosity of mind and heart that Dr. Wolfe has, the way that she extends herself for the theological guild and is so generous to the rest of us, and we're so happy to have you here. Thank you.

Speaker 2 2:36

Thank you very much for this very, very kind introduction. I'm delighted to be here. Um, if you can make sure to see one of the screens, there are lots of images. It is Friday evening. Um, so make sure you can see the screens. This, uh, lecture, as Jenny says, uh, is, uh, is a prospectus in some way of a book of mine that's coming out later this month, uh, called The Theological Imagination. Let me double-check that these slides are working. Yes, perfect. All right.

What Is Theological Imagination

Speaker 2 3:06

This lecture is about how to imagine the world theologically. By this, I don't intend to say that theological thought is imaginative, let alone imaginary, more markedly than any other form of thought. Rather, I take it that all our orientation in the world is, to some extent, imaginative. To live in the world, we have to imagine it. Imagination, as I use the term, is not primarily the capacity to picture absent or fictional things. Rather, it is first and foremost the power to make the continuous stream of sense perception meaningful by integrating discrete data points into forms or wholes, what the Germans call gestalt. In Mary Warnock's classic summary of this definition, drawing on the tradition of Hume, Kant, and many others, she says, "We use imagination in our ordinary perception of the world. This perception cannot be separated from interpretation. Interpretation can be common to everyone, and in this sense ordinary, or it can be inventive, personal, and revolutionary. So imagination is necessary to enable us to recognize things in the world as familiar, to take for granted features of the world which we need to take for granted and rely on if we are to go on about our ordinary business. But it is also necessary if we are to see the world as significant of something unfamiliar, if we are ever to treat the objects of perception as symbolizing or suggesting things other than themselves." To put it differently, ordinary seeing, the ability to organize the sensory field into discrete objects, involves imaginative acts which are no less active for remaining unnoticed. Seeing involves the assimilation of data points to perceptual patterns that we have inherited or acquired, and which we continue to update in response to ongoing experience. These integrative processes are not, for the most part, subject to conscious inspection. They form part of the very act of seeing and understanding, and so usually occur unconsciously.

Imagination in Seeing and Meaning

Speaker 2 5:20

The work of the imagination is especially marked in the perception of created images, of pictures. The ability to see in these strokes a cube, in these blotches lilies, or in these lines a smile, involves active projection and completion by matching lines and colors whose meaning is not fully determined by themselves by their two-dimensional appearance to memories of spatial and psychological depth, and thus completing the appearance in front of us. These acts of seeing are not guaranteed by either the image or our memories and patterns. They are co-creative and exceed the calculus of correspondence. But pictures are not the only objects which we see only by perceiving in them a depth that is not fully contained in their lines and colors. It is not only the mystery of Mona Lisa's smile, but also the mood and character of people around us, which we grasp imaginatively by attending to their faces. Like Mona Lisa's, a baby's smile is at once a matter of immediate seeing and one of imaginative projection. Of course, there is often a truth of the matter, but not always. Like our appreciation of artworks, our perception of faces can never fully evade the risk of mis or over-interpretation. On the contrary, such vulnerability to deception is integral to what it means to see a face at all. This ambiguity is refracted in our ability to appreciate actors on stage or to see expressive faces even where there are none. And if we cannot see images or faces without imaginatively projecting the spatial and psychological depth which alone makes sense of them, then the same is true in more subtle and intricate ways of our ability imaginatively to grasp actions or even entire lives. To see in a finger movement a crime against humanity or in a step forward an act of bravery both require imaginative projection informed by memories, expectations, myths, values, and fears. We do not overlay these meanings as belated optional interpretations on a more basic neutral perception of com-component elements. Rather, we take in an action and divine its meaning in a single movement. This means that our way of seeing the world is at once immediate and mediating, not merely a matter of finding, but also always one of making. This holds both danger and promise. On the one hand, as Pascal observed in his critique of the imagination, it lifts experience from the safe ground of reason. I quote, "The imagination holds sway over everything. It creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is the entirety of the world." Unquote. On the other, as the Romantics realized, it makes us capable of being co-creators with God. In Coleridge's famous line, quote, "The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I am." Unquote. Now, you will notice the analogical structure of this concept of imagination. It claims that analogous things go on in our perception of everyday objects and images, such as figures one and two, our perception of persons and their actions, our understanding of our own and other people's lives, and our way of seeing the world as a whole, our worldview. These include habitual misperceptions, as in the image of the, um, mountains here, and perceptions to which the terms correct and incorrect cannot easily be applied. On each of these levels, there is a constant interplay of finding and of making, a confrontation with disparate data points which our minds integrate into wholes, into objects, into persons, into narratives, and into a whole world with depth and continuity. One of my main claims is that the distinctive interplay of finding and making cannot be reduced to either pole, that we live neither in the naively realist universe of many theologians nor in the anti-realist one of the postmodernists. Rather, finding and making are inseparable, and this inseparability means that there are real stakes, real risks, and no easy solutions. The ambiguities of invention in its double sense of discovery and creation pervade our self-understanding, our understanding of other people, and, and our metaphysical dreams, as Richard Weaver called them, including our faith. Faith indeed, it turns out, plays a pivotal role in our understanding of imagination because it is both a species of imaginative integration and a challenge to our need and capacity for it. I want to point out briefly two aspects of the human imagination that make it especially powerful and especially volatile: its hiddenness and its malleability. The first is that the activity of our imaginative integration of data into patterns or wholes is, for the most part, hidden from ourselves. It forms part of the process of perception and of understanding and cannot therefore be inspected directly. In Kant's memorable phrase, the imagination is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are seldom even conscious. This hiddenness tends to create the illusion that there is no creative process at all, that what we perceive is straightforwardly found. It is a strong claim, but one grounded in experience, I think, that we cannot ordinarily function without this self-concealment of our own imaginative co-creativity. When we come face to face with our own imaginative participation in the construal of things, it can propel a crisis of trust. I'm going the wrong direction here Um, a small crisis if a leaf that we picked up turned out in fact to be a bug. A more profound one if we no longer trust our ability to read the behavior of those around us, as Shakespeare's Othello and Leontes find to their doom, or worse, if we realize that we might have imagined our very worldview. We usually manage these crises by immediately reinscribing the contrast between fact and fiction. I was deluded, but the actual matter of the fact is this. Doing so, we immediately mask the work of the imagination again. But we need instead to come to terms with our irreducibly constructive imaginative participation in the world. The solution is neither to attempt a reduction to certainty nor to emancipate ourselves into sheer constructivism. Our task rather is to learn to live in the stress field between both of them, to shoulder the work of the imagination, to recognize its limits, and to expand its possibilities. This task is both a th- perpetual and to some extent a theological one, and neither we nor the church can shirk it The second noteworthy characteristic of the imagination is its malleability or plasticity. Our imaginations are shaped by our families, communities, and societies, whether through long-term exposure to consistent patterns or through acute and persistent reinforcement, for example, by social media, political propaganda, or advertisements. Some of our convictions about the shape of things great and small, therefore, are fairly fixed, especially those that are physically grounded or deeply culturally embedded. Others, however, are extremely fluid, and part of what our imagination hides from itself is precisely its own malleability, its own changeability. We ensconce ourselves in echo chambers partly in order to constantly reinforce the hidden work of the imagination that is required to uphold a certain way of seeing the world. Once we step out of them, this way of seeing, the patterns into which we have arranged our world may suddenly seem much less plausible. Stop watching your particular news outlet, and the political scene suddenly shifts. Stop being at university, and your cultural sensibilities change. Stop going to church, and the world may seem to start, may start to seem devoid of God. This malleability or changeability of the imagination of the habitual ways in which we arrange objects, people, events, and the world into patterns does not itself make those arrangements arbitrary or deniable. It is an inalienable feature of our way of being in the world. There is no anti-skeptical cure that will guarantee accurate perception because that is not how perception works. However, the malleability of our senses of the world on the one hand and its habituated, largely unconscious operation, its hiddenness on the other, does mean that there is an unavoidable riskiness to our ways of inhabiting the world and orienting ourselves within it. Knowledge can never conclusively be insulated from conspiracy theory, and this risk is endlessly exploited by economic and political players whose advertisements and propaganda are above all exercises in molding our ways of imagining the world. Associating a car with freedom or worse, freedom with a car or a particular political party with evil. In all these cases, our associations might be as strong as they are arbitrary

Art as Imagination Training

Speaker 2 15:53

The habituated process of imagining is disrupted in experiences of art. Works of art, literature, and music enable us to become aware of our imaginative work and thereby expand its possibilities, loosening its rigid and restrictive habits. In this capacity, experiences with art are akin to religious experience. Theology and religion are often seen as paradigm cases of imposing illusory patterns on the world and on people, of pretending to find truths where we merely imagine them, and of insisting that all phenomena fit into these supposed truths, whether or not this does justice to them. But I think the opposite is true. The Christian faith is, among other things, a way of seeing the world, which beholds in that world an unseen depth of goodness, significance, and love, which we do not make, but in which we can participate. For the Christian faith, in other words, the human imagination is in important ways adequate to the nature of reality because our world is poetic, both in the sense that it is God's work or craft and in the sense that we do not merely apprehend but also make it. At the same time, Christian faith also suggests that the human imagination always remains inadequate to God and to the world. God exceeds our imagining and the world. Other people and we ourselves have depths and complexities which remain forever hidden in God. To believe in God demands a commitment to not reducing the complexity of the data points before us, even at the cost of not being able to fully make sense of the world. Such commitment rests on a trust that beyond any order that we can impose on the world imaginatively, it is and will be held together by God. Now, before turning again to this claim about religious faith, I want to talk a little bit more in depth about art since we are at a conference full of artists, which is wonderful. The ability to pattern match, which goes on in everyday life, also underlies our ability to understand visual art in which sensory data is always incomplete. Sometimes artists merely exploit this ability, especially in creating optical illusions. But more typically, artists deliberately abstain from making their illusions complete. This is because, as the art historian Ernst Gombrich observes, our pleasure in illusion rests precisely in the mind's effort in bridging the difference between art and reality. This very pleasure is destroyed when the illusion is too complete. When the painter packs a vast expanse into a narrow space, when he leads me across the depths of the infinite on a flat surface and makes the air circulate, I love to abandon myself to his illusions. But I want the frame to be there. I want to know that what I see is actually nothing but a ca- nothing but a canvas or a simple plane. Or in Michael Polanyi's words, "The factual in- information content, content of art is slight, its main purpose being to evoke our participation in its utterance." The history of modern painting can in part be told as a history of the changing directions of this purpose.

Modern Art Movements

Speaker 2 19:38

Impressionism, flourishing in the second half of the 19th century, strove to capture the visual experience of a scene in all its dynamism and ephemerality precisely by enlisting the beholder's participation in the act of seeing. By avoiding familiar schematisms, impressionist paintings remind us that if we did not already know that these were horses and these lilies, we wouldn't see them as such. The remarkable vitality of these paintings come fr- comes from a creative collaboration between the artist's detailed observations and the beholder's imagination, the living dynamism of our imaginative impression of a gestalt, of a form on this riot of colors Expressionism, flourishing in the first half of the 20th century, radicalized this dynamic. Where impressionism still aimed for a collaboration between unstructured sense impression and schema or gestalt, expressionism deliberately set the two at odds with each other. The elements of an expressionist painting resist being integrated straightforwardly into a form or a whole such as we might encounter in the real world. They gesture in that direction, but they do not allow us to complete the gesture. Where in space is Kokoschka's Still Life with Mutton and Hyacinths synth arranged? Or how do the elements of Picasso's Still Life relate to themselves, to each other, and to space? These paintings bring to consciousness the perpetual and usually unconscious endeavor to read or to see elements according to a whole precisely by frustrating that endeavor. Sometimes, such as in Picasso's Weeping Woman, incoherence on the sensory level can be resolved into sense on a semantic level or a figurative one. In other words, this woman appears broken because she is broken on the inside. Her pictorial disjointedness is not incidental but precisely expressionistic. Similarly, Salvador Dali's phantasmagorical shapes are expressive of the sometimes threatening uncanniness of the world that we encounter with the senses Modern and postmodern art flourishing in the second half of the se-- 20th century and beyond explored endless variations of this ability to create a conflict between immediate sensory data and imaginatively projected gestalt, uh, imaginative expectation aimed not at a single effect, but at a deliberate multiplicity of responses. Readymades remove everyday objects from the contexts within which they ordinarily make sense and create a jarring interpretative context through tilting, uh, and titling, and spatial positioning. Indeterminate art and abstract art stimulate the beholder's attempt to see form or meaning only to frustrate the attempt, uh, on the pictorial level. The effect of this interruption of the interpretative process is purposely left to the viewer. Some feel excited at a seeming endlessness of possibilities. Some are frustrated by the thwarting of an aim-directed faculty. Some feel bored because there is no sense to be found. That's me. Some are moved to reflect on the processes that the encounter triggers in them, and some people relax because no goal-directedness is necessary here or any number of responses. But in all these cases, the anxiety of interpretation common to all art interpretation, am I just making this up, is not neutralized, but deliberately sustained

Poetry and Metaphor

Speaker 2 24:00

Now something similar I think goes on in the poetic tradition. The poetic tradition has its own version of the experiments in visual art that I've just recounted. Now however, I want not so much to re-narrate the history of poetry's evocation of our participation in its utterance, but to attend to one of its basic forms. Like visual art, poetry elicits and plays with our capacity to lend form to data that is disparate, incongruous, or incomplete. This aesthetic play is not frivolous, but in some sense necessary because the world as we encounter it is always, in a sense, in need of it. Rowan Williams says about the poet, quote, "That the reality before him is obscurely incomplete. It proposes to the poet the task of making it significant, which does not mean imposing upon it an alien structure of explanation." Similarly, Jacques Maritain sees poetry as the recomposition of a world more real than the reality offered to the senses. These dynamics of making the words complete somehow, and not only by reference to them, but to something in our own imagination, are at work at all levels of poetry I think, but especially its simplest and its most essential form, namely figurative language. Consider this small handful of metaphors in poetry. "Soundlessly they go, the herons passing by, arrows of snow filling the sky," from the 15th century. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Like heavy fragrance, snowflakes settle. Lilies on rocks The apparition of these faces in the crowd: petals on a wet, black bough. Or slightly longer from the 20th century, And how dismayed is any womb-born thing that has to fly. As though it were afraid of its own self, it zigzags through the air like crack through cup. Thus the track of a bat rends through the evening's porcelain. Or finally from Seamus Heaney, The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. Each of these images rouses their reader's imagination to see in ways that at once attenuate and intensify ordinary perception. They hold before our mental eye two distinct realities or objects and invite us, by the exercise of our integrative power of imagination, to see them together, to see one in and through the other, to see as through a stereoscope a double or a depth vision in the conjunction of digging and writing, of the zigzag of a bat's flight and a crack in porcelain, of faces and petals, snow and lilies, herons and arrows. This brings our own imagination to consciousness precisely as a search for meaning that is to be found not only in the poetic text, but in the world at large. For the search is, in a sense, for a depth of world at which these different things are related to each other. Just as we project a space within which the lines on a canvas can make sense, so we project a space in which these two images can be held in a single vision None of these projections comes with any truth claims. Neither poet nor reader claims that writing and digging are in fact the same. Rather, what truth they have depends on the acts of seeing, thinking, and acting that they make possible for us. Metaphors are, in Heidegger's sense, formal indications, not truths to be learned, but paths to be walked. This is why the risk of over-interpreting poetry is ineradicable. We can never know whether a certain meaning is really there, but it's not deleterious because the responsibility rests, in any case, with us. The question is not so much what meanings are unambiguously present, but what possibilities are opened and closed by certain ways of seeing. Adjudicating and making sense of these possibilities is the responsibility of the reader. This is also why good literary criticism can be a participation in the work of a poem or a text. It can be an extension of its imaginative reach and an interrogation of its presuppositions, limits, chances, and dangers. Yet, as I have suggested, the imaginative engagement of metaphors is not merely playful or wholly subjective. The possibility and pleasure of such metaphorical seeing as depends on a deep, innate desire of ours to connect things to each other, to trace patterns through different layers and domains of existence. Aristotle observed that to metaphorize well implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of dissimilars. And this is not a marginal human ability, but a central one. As we have said, all perception to some extent depends on it. We must be capable of seeing similarities or patterns in vastly different disparate sense impressions in order to recognize objects at all. The capacity to see metaphors, to imagine one thing in and as another, and to imagine the world as connected in this way foregrounds the remarkable intertwining of finding and making in this ordinary human capacity. As Paul Ricœur puts it, "Metaphor invents both in s-- in both senses of the word. What it creates, it discovers. What it discovers, it makes." Ricœur himself derives a striking claim from this dynamic. I quote, "My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation in or belonging to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject. Hence, the function of poetic discourse is to bring about this emergence of a depth structure of belonging to amid the ruins of descriptive discourse." Unquote. For Ricœur, in other words, the human ability to create and to understand metaphors reveals a profound truth not only about our cognitive apparatus, but about the world in which such depth and breadth of connections is to be found. Just as the ability to create scientific models and mathematical formulae reveals a profound truth about the deep knowability, and therefore the potential meaningfulness of the world. In order to be able to see metaphors, there must be a depth structure, a world in which they make sense. The suggestion that our imaginative capacity may, in some sense, be adequate to the world beyond it or reveal something about its structure opens a theological horizon to the theme of this lecture. Indeed, the Christian faith has at its heart a belief that the human capacity and need to imagine is in significant ways fitting, in the scholastic sense convenient, to the nature of the reality, that the world is poetic, as I've said before, both in the sense that it is the work or poema of God, and in the sense that it is realized through co-creation. The two are not in competition with each other. As many spiritual writers have observed, time and love are genuinely there to be found, but they cannot be found without being made. Christian faith therefore manifests itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively or inspiredly with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. It brings to things in general some of the attitudes that people ordinarily bring to works of art, an expectation that there is something here to be found, and a willingness to participate in its utterance. This is an important aspect of the work of the Bible, which is now habitually taught as literature, though not necessarily in this sense. Paul Ricoeur calls the Bible a poem, and this is true among other ways in the sense that the Bible elicits our imaginative participation. This participation is even more existential and serious than in an ordinary poem. The Bible's images are, for those of us who believe in them, uniquely load-bearing. They invite readers to pour themselves into them unreservedly, though never without risk As Rowan Williams puts it, revelation on such an account is essentially to do with what is generative in our experience. Events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life, unquote. Consequently, one of the primary ways that the biblical narratives inspire and teach is by engendering perceptual shifts, shifts from perceiving one whole or form in one's world to perceiving another. This is the case both for the characters within the stories and for us as their readers. Many biblical stories turn on their characters' sudden ability to see their world or lives no longer as one thing, but as another, to perceive them as forming a gestalt or a whole that they did not previously see. This is especially striking in the prophetic and the wisdom literature. In the Book of Jonah, God raises up a gourd tree so that his prophet may learn to see the Ninevites anew, um, eliciting God's concern as the grou- as the gourd tree elicits Jonah's. More expansively in the Book of Job, Job ultimately does not find explanations, but experiences a radical perspectival shift. In God's self-manifestation, his perception of the shape of the world and his own place in it change. In the Gospels and the Book of Acts, Jesus encourages Martha to see the world afresh when he urges that Mary has chosen the better part. After his resurrection, he enables Mary of Magdala, Thomas Didymus, the disciples on the road of Emma- to Emmaus, and his persecutor Paul to see him, and with him the entire story of which they are part, anew. These conversions comprise not so much deliberate decisions on the parts of these characters as sudden shifts of perspective. His disciples come to see Jesus as my Lord and my God. To see him thus transforms their vision not only of him, but with him also of the world, themselves, and how they are to act, speak, and live. Biblical stories not only recount experiences of gestalt shifts, but as importantly aim to inspire such experiences in their readers. John's Gospel is immediate- uh, immediately commends Thomas' realization to his readers: "Blessed are those that do not see and yet believe." Many of the scripture's parables likewise inspire new ways of seeing ordinary circumstances. Thus, 1 Corinthians 12 trains its readers to see the people of Christ as a body conjoined, and Matthew 25 to see the stranger and the prisoner as, in some sense, Christ. The mental transformations engendered here are aptly described by the Greek term metanoia, conversion or renewal of the mind.

Eucharist and Literal Metaphor

Speaker 2 36:55

And like metanoia, they imply not only a passive change of perception or even an active reimagination, but also the responsibility to enact these in life without any ultimate guarantees We can go further than this and say that metaphor is at the very heart of the Christian imagination. The painter David Jones said that it would be unthinkable that at the redemption of the world, anything should have been done which committed man to any activity not utterly inalienable from his nature. In such a context, the extraneous is inconceivable. The Lord's choice on the night before he was betrayed to take bread and wine and declare them his body and blood was not an artificial illustration of his work of redemption or a mechanical mechanism for its transmission. Rather, it named and transformed a mystery that lies near the heart of human existence. The Last Supper made into fact what can usually only exist as a poetic invention. In identifying bread and wine with body and blood, it is what we might call a literal metaphor, carrying something over from one form of reality to another. It is an instance of seeing as which in imagining truly finds. This carrying over or metaphora remains a continual task of faith and of theology. Much of the Christian faith is centered on metaphors whose truth is both found and made real beyond our imagining, and yet ours to make. The body of Christ is perhaps the most striking example of this. While in some sense already localized in the Eucharist, and after an earthly sojourn at the Father's right hand, it is also a designation of the Church. The Church is the body of Christ, whose shape will not be known fully until the eschaton. The body is itself constituted through the Eucharistic image-- liturgy, and the dynamic interrelation between the Eucharist and the Church as the body of God, as the body of Christ, reveals a complexity, seriousness, and depth of imaginative exchange that exceeds any engagement with art One vital dimension of this exchange in the Eucharist is the experience of time which it enables and reveals, and the commerce between event, ordinary life, and ultimate horizon. The Eucharistic liturgy understands itself as a living image of the eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb, in which worshipers are enabled to participate proleptically in body, spirit, and imagination. This spiritual participation is not merely anticipatory but also formative. It helps itself to transform the worshipers into the body and the bride who will one day sit at the wedding feast of the new creation. This alchemy requires that worshipers identify with the broken body of Christ in a way that's not an arrogation but a confession, to confess that they are internally broken and need both to receive and to be taken into the body of Christ. This is what happens at the Eucharist. As Martin Luther puts it, quote, "When the body eats it physically, this food digests the body's flesh and transforms it so that it too becomes spiritual." Unquote. But it is equally significant to this existential exchange that the Mass takes its name not from its consummation but from its dissolution. "Ite, missa est," go, a sending has taken place. To grow into the body of Christ, worshipers cannot remain at the liturgy. They must go out and do likewise. They must return to their ordinary lives in the light of this event. And this leads me to one last thing to say which returns to the beginning of the lecture and also points us forward We make and follow metaphors, we search for spiritual depth partly because life and the world show themselves to us as incomplete within their own dimensions, and therefore as indicative of more than meets the eye. If this is the case, then one way of suggesting that we, others, and the world have unseen depth is by pointing out things that remain incomplete or incoherent within a merely material or even a merely psychological or sociological context. This is a basic impetus of both art and religion. It is one dimension of Rowan Williams' observation that the reality that we encounter is obscurely incomplete, that it proposes to us the task of making it significant. Williams, like Maritain, notes an incompleteness to our merely physical experience of the world, which both art and faith register and respond to faithfully and creatively. However, returning to our opening, this unseen depth is mediated by our imagination and our desire, which are fallible. This is as true of the interpretation of art, which is perpetually fraught, as we've said, with the anxiety of over-interpretation, as it is of the experience of the divine. In striving to perceive God, we cannot cancel or circumvent the burden of interpretative responsibility and its endemic risk of error. We can do this neither by relying, like Plantingas' sensus divinitatis suggests, on a special mechanism which is insulated against the vagaries of our imagination, nor by relying simply on the experience of saturated phenomena, phenomena which, as in Jean-Luc Marion's vision, overwhelm us from outside of our own imaginative and intentional movements. Such experiences do exist, but they must nevertheless be assimilated into ordinary life through ourself, through our conscious self-orientation and interpretation. And because experience of the divine in our own selves and the world relies on this imaginative investment of ours, it is impossible categorically to avoid its over- or misinterpretation. Perceptions of God, even for those who firmly believe in the divine, is always vulnerable to over-narration. Think of the convalescent who, in disregard of all those who have died of the same illness, declares that God's healing has proved his love for me, which can be true, of course, um, to, is liable to disconfirmation. Think of the disillusioned charismatic who bitterly reports that what he thought was plenitude was really manipulation and is liable to repeated re-narration. Think of anyone who has experienced a failed vocation or a relationship. And this raises with painful force the question what it is that spiritual vision sees. On the one hand, it takes the form of an enriched depth perception, an apprehension of a depth of intention, significance, beauty or connection in and among ordinary things. These forms of awareness are mediated by a trained imagination and by trained desire. On the other hand, it may confront us with incompleteness and disjunction, which are not easily resolved at any depth accessible to us. Contradictions in the world and in experience which drive us beyond any attempt to make sense of life within its own dimensions and cannot be made coherent even by the depth projection of divine providence, or not yet anyway. Death is one of those contradictions, however firmly we believe in the resurrection A life of faith, therefore, I believe, is not merely a way of making sense of the world. It is also a way of acknowledging the nonsensicality of the world, neither to deny nor prematurely to resolve it. Engaging this dimension of faith requires a self-abnegating imagination, that is, an imagination that knows itself to be at once necessary and constitutively inadequate. Such imagination is trained on an intentional attention to the things that are odd, to the gaps in human experience that do not and will not make sense. The experience of God, of glory, of art, or of love suggest that our imaginative sense-making is in some sense a prolapsis, a leaping forward to a wholeness that we can glimpse but we c- which we cannot yet capture And this is because the world and we are not yet finished. The human vocation is to be drawn at the last into the triune life of God, that love between Father, Son, and Spirit, which defines the divine nature or life and overflows into the creation of a non-divine world. However, such deification is not a calling that is attainable by human capacities or fully in this life. It is ultimately an eschatological promise. As Paul puts it, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known." Or the first letter of John, which we heard at church today, "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is." This vision, this ultimately eschatological vision in which none of our imagination is adequate yet, calls for a way both of affirmation and of negation, of kataphasis and apophasis, of finding, making, and relinquishing. Poetry and art cannot guarantee the fulfillment of our glimpses of wholeness, but they can awaken a courage to hope for it. They can be, in Heidegger's term, formal indications to a path that can only be walked and not affirmed. Our vocation, as I have said, is to be drawn ever more fully into that love of God which binds, as Dante puts it, in a single volume that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe. We move through the wor- we move through the world, and here T.S. Eliot, with the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling, and as long as they draw us, we shall not cease from exploration. Thank you.

Audience Questions and Discussion

Speaker 2 49:08

I think there's about 10 minutes for questions if anybody would like to ask one Let's switch this

Speaker 3 49:17

Thank you so much for your talk. It was both beautiful and stimulating. Uh, I found, uh, uh, affirmation of metaphor so helpful. Uh, I think we're very accustomed to discounting metaphor and to thinking that when we speak in metaphorical terms, we're not really talking about the real world.

Speaker 2 49:35

Right.

Speaker 3 49:37

And your talk helped us to see that, in fact, we may be most close to thinking about the real when we use metaphor. I, I wonder, uh, if we could go further in terms of how important it is to the Christian imagination with regard to God as one who makes patterns and who forms a world through metaphor, perhaps in some way, uh, to name God as a one who makes metaphors, conceives metaphors, such that our metaphorizing then is a participation, uh, in the way that God constructs the world. Uh, and I see that in particular in a couple thinkers. Uh, one, a poet, uh, Paul Claudel, where he writes in the poetic art about the nature of reality and affirms moving in a metaphorical direction, but comes to a place very similar to David Jones in terms of the coincidence of the literal and the metaphorical. And Nicholas of Cusa, who thinks of the coincidence of opposites, which is, again, something you, I think, brought up in a variety of points in your, of your talk. So my question, I think, is, uh, would you agree, uh, that we can in fact go further and describe God as one who forms the world through metaphor of the reconciliation of the dissimilar, uh, the drawing together of that which is opposite?

Speaker 2 51:05

I do, and I don't actually have to say very much because you've said it so beautifully.

Speaker 3 51:09

Please say, say something more.

Speaker 2 51:10

But yes. No, no, certainly, I think so, and I do think that it is, that it is striking that so much of the Christian life is to be formed through metaphors given us by God in the Bible. I mean, that something like the body of Christ is a metaphor given to us for our growth, where again, what matters is not so much what it depicts is already there as what it, what it, what space it opens for us to grow into. Um, and yes, certainly, I think the coincidence of opposites is a slightly different thing. But this, uh, this vocation of our, ours not to resolve dissimilars or tensions or even opposites, but somehow to live in the tension of them in the hope that they are somehow beyond our imagination reconciled in God, I think that is a key aspect of the Christian life. So thank you for that.

Speaker 4 52:06

Thank you. Thank you again so very much for this. Um, I think especially what I appreciate is the way in which you introduce at a conference that's devoted to the celebration of the Catholic imagination, also the limitations of the imagination, um, because we're likely to get carried away at these sorts of things. Um, and I think there are kind of two competing traditions. I mean, certainly there are more than two, uh, within the Catholic imagination. On the one hand, you have St. Ignatius of Loyola's spiritual exercises, where he advises composition of place. Uh, even if you don't know what the Sea of Galilee looks like historically, you ought to imagine its dimensions and the way the sun glints off of the, the waves. Um, e- you know, you imagine the way that the cliff looks as the Gerasene swine are falling over it, for example. But then, on the other hand, you have St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, uh, where she strongly advises against using the imagination. And I wonder if you have any thoughts as to what could justify such an ascetical kind of resistance to the imagination, um, and how... Because in, in your presentation, it seems as if, you know, our capacity for metaphor is a means of unification with God. But for St- St. Teresa of Avila, it seems as if the possibility of metaphor is maybe, it's not that she thinks in a Manichaeistic way that the imagination is evil, but there are some sorts of, some, some, there's some kind of limitation there that seems like it gets in the way with our unification with God, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 53:59

Thank you. Yeah, and that's a really good question. It's a complicated question. Um, I think to some extent, what plays in here is, um, C.S. Lewis's, uh, note about that, you know, that for the most part in our culture, we don't have to cut down jungles, we have to irrigate deserts. And I think Ignatius's exercises are partly there for those who need to irrigate deserts. We need to be able to put ourselves in this place. Whereas in some ways, uh, Teresa of Avila's advice is there for those who need to cut down jungles, and I think that she in herself experienced such a, such a strong working of the imagination that she was worried partly about this danger of the hiddenness of the imagination's own work from itself, uh, and the sort of overconfidence in the deliverances of the imagination- Mm-hmm which we do need to curb, um, when we come to God. But I think we're very lucky that we have both of them as masters in our tradition because really both, both are necessary and both need to be held in tension, as we heard just earlier. Thank you.

Speaker 5 55:05

first of all, thank you. Um, also, I wanted to clarify, is this an excerpt from your upcoming book?

Speaker 2 55:13

Uh, it's a sort of prospectus of some of the arguments in the book,

Speaker 5 55:16

yeah. Oh, okay, 'cause I'd like something to tattoo on my back and If you could just print this out for me, that... Um...

Speaker 2 55:25

Yeah, you can even have a discount code for the book. It's out later this month, but if you use JWOLFF24 at cambridge.org, you can get 20% off. It's cheap anyway, actually.

Speaker 5 55:36

Uh, thank you. Um, so my question is, there's a, a writer that I follow who, um, he's not exactly religious, but he made a reference to religions as ar- works of art-

Speaker 3 55:51

Mm that

Speaker 5 55:52

really resonated with me because I'm, I'm very interested in, uh, comparative religion and learning about different cultures and how they navigate the world that we all have to deal with. And, um, this talk was really illum- sorry, illuminating in that way, where it was viewing even the perceptions that we have as works of art, which was really fascinating. Thank you. I guess my question to you is, uh, not only comparatively across religions, but even throughout the history of the Catholic religion, what do... what are your thoughts on that, uh, that fact of these perceptions and cultures and systems of, of seeing, um, and how do you see them as, as being useful to us? Mm. And, and, uh, what are your thoughts on that broad sense?

Speaker 2 56:45

Man, these are difficult questions. Okay, so I mean, very briefly, I, I think, I mainly think of metaphysics, and this is partly also religious metaphysics, as particular images of the structure of the world. Uh, and those images can be very, can be very truthful, obviously, and we should strive for truthfulness. But, um, w- nevertheless, what they mainly do is they allow us to navigate the world in certain ways. They give us a certain structure that allows us, that makes possible for us certain kinds of action in the world. And I think that, that, that different religions can be seen in this way of what kinds of inhabitation of the world do they make possible, and what is obscured by those and what is enabled by those. Um, and if we approach religions in that way, as in, in that sense, works of art of arranging the world in a particular way in which we can then inhabit it, then actually that gives us, in some ways, a more productive basis of, uh, interreligious dialogue because we can try to imagine ourselves into each other's ways of inhabiting the world, uh, rather than, or complementary to interreligious dialogue in which we discuss the truth of the matter, if that makes sense. Jenny, stop us at any point, but I think we have time for at least one more.

Speaker 6 58:04

My question is easier than O.E. Parker's question.

Speaker 2 58:07

Thank you

Speaker 6 58:10

And it may even be a yes or no question, and I really hope it's a yes because it will fulfill the American male's deep-seated need for validation from women with beautiful accents.

Speaker 2 58:22

No.

Speaker 6 58:30

You've only imagined my question though.

Speaker 7 58:32

Hmm.

Speaker 6 58:32

I haven't asked it yet. Um, if, if the imagination is this, albeit pre-conscious effort of creating wholes, is every imagination at least small C catholic?

Speaker 2 58:49

Yes. I mean Yes, insofar as Catholic counts as towards the whole or according to the whole, we can have that word play possibly even productively.

Speaker 7 59:10

One more Good evening. Thank you for your beautiful remarks. Uh, I was wondering more about that tension between, um, finding and making that you talked about in the arts, um, in particular with Impressionism and Expressionism, um, that it seems that we can tend too far in one direction, um, in this, this world that is before us, but that we also, um, make as we, as we see it and find it. Um, but that Expressionism kind of interrupts that process, as you were talking about. Is there one art form or period that you think helps us to best live in that tension without completely resolving it prematurely, um, but, uh, seeing kind of both sides living both of those pieces?

Speaker 2 1:00:02

I th-- I think it really depends on your tolerance levels. Um, I mean, for some people, abstract art is that. Um, for other people, impressionism is that. I think, you know, there are m-m-- there are just different levels of the congruence between what we see on the canvas and how we can, how we can make sense of it. Um, and I do think that the important thing, in a sense, is that it brings us to consciousness of, of this interplay. But how, you know, how congruent those things should be, how collaborative, um, that's so much a, a matter of temperament and of the other questions that we bring to the world. And of course, you know, some, some of the expressionist painters in particular thought that they were living in a world in which the ability or the wish to make sense simply is constantly frustrated. Um, and so much of contemporary art is precisely about the breaking down of illusory confidence in our ability to make sense of the world. So in some ways, this is-- ends up being a metaphysical question about what kind of world you think you live in, and therefore what the, um, task of art is in relation to our attempts to make sense. Thank you.

1 1:01:40

Thank you, friends. Uh, you can see, um, just how luminous and lovely our friend Judith Wolfe is, and thank you for your attention. I apologize to those of you who still had burning questions, but perhaps you can find her, um, in the reception to which I very warmly invite you. As you recall, they are down on either side of the wings here, so feel free to enjoy food and drink. Uh, we made it to the second day, so I think we've all earned, earned a drink. Um, I'd also like to, um, remind you all if, um, if you would like golf cart assistance when you leave this space, we do have staff members who are available to assist with that to take you where you need to go. Thank you very much for a lovely evening. Enjoy the reception, and we'll see you all tomorrow morning.

Speaker 6 1:02:27

Thank you