Theology & Imagination
From an article published in Christian Higher Education 5 (2006), 83-96.
ÒTheology and Imagination: from theory to practiceÓ
Imagination is a word with ambiguous reverberations. As Paul Tillich
once remarked about its companion term ÒsymbolÓ, it is often shadowed by an
accusing adjective - ÒmereÓ- which implies illusion or false fantasy. Such a
suspicion haunts our Christian history.
The early centuries were full of warnings about the spiritual deceptions
caused by imagination, often viewed as an unruly and licentious source of
trouble. In the second millennium
it was marginalised for more philosophical reasons: as long as a certain kind
of rationality ruled the roost of truth, imagination was treated as a
dim-witted Cinderella to be kept in the poverty of her kitchen. To continue the
same analogy, her Fairy Godmother appeared at the outset of the
nineteenth-century in the shape of a Romanticism influencing both artists and
thinkers, who retrieved imagination as the key to a knowledge deeper than the
dominant logic. And, as will be seen, this recognition of the hidden beauty of
Cinderella had its impact also in theology.
It would be wrong to give the
impression that the long story of pre-Romantic theology had not sometimes
valued the role of imagination. Thomas Aquinas more than once voiced his
hesitations about the reduction of theology if it were to take poetry or
parable as its main models. However, on at least one occasion he offered a surprisingly
strong defence of the need for an imaginative strand within theology. In the prologue to his commentary on
the Sentences, he poses the question whether theology should be ÒartificialisÓ. If we translate
him liberally, has it anything to learn from the world of the arts? His answer
is not as black and white as one might expect. Predictably he defends the
primary role of reason in theology as a science, but with some fascinating
qualifications. Clear and coherent arguments are needed, he claims, in order to
obey the famous injunction of the first letter of Peter to offer an apologia
for hope, and especially in order to overcome error. But then he broadens the
agenda and suggests that confronting intellectual difficulties is not the only
or even the principal purpose of theology. Insofar as theology invites us
towards the Òcontemplation of truthÓ, we need to forge not just a rational but
a symbolic theology (symbolica teologia). Pushing further in the same
direction, he argues that since Christian faith is grounded in a Ònarrative of
signsÓ, reflection on faith will require Òmetaphorical, symbolical and
parabolicalÓ approaches. Answering his own objection that poetry is lacking in
rational truth and hence not a fit paradigm for theology, he proposes that
since reflection on revelation is called to explore beyond the narrowly
rational, theology and poetry can be seen to share a symbolic method (modus
symbolicus utrique comunis est).[1]
This
subtle reflection would have pleased the post-romantic thinkers who sought to
rescue humanity from the prisons of cold rationalism, by exploring the
centrality of an imaginative dimension in religious consciousness. Previous
thinkers such as Locke had spoken of imagination as perception or as
Òre-conceptionÓ. Kant allowed for its being both reproductive and productive.
But the early nineteenth century witnessed a minor revolution in interpreting
imagination: where previously it was portrayed in largely passive terms, as a
vehicle to recapture something past or absent, now it was crowned with the
epithet ÒcreativeÓ. One thinks of
the tradition born from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, himself both an outstanding
poet and theologian, who rejected theories of the passivity of the mind in
knowledge and stressed instead the special capacity of imagination to fuse or
synthesise contraries into a powerful new unity.
In his
footsteps, in a certain sense, one can situate John Henry Newman. NewmanÕs
early tendency was to echo the long tradition of scepticism about the dangers
of imagination: in a university sermon of 1832 he argued that the values of the
world assault us through our imagination. But some three decades later, while
composing the Grammar of Assent, he reached a much more positive and
sophisticated interpretation. In some of the notebooks he used to prepare that
book, he remarked that certitude does not depend on reasoning but on the
capacity to imagine and this new evaluation of imagination finds many echoes in
the pages of the Grammar (a topic too detailed for present purposes).[2]
Suffice it to mention his view that a ÒrealÓ faith commitment, as opposed to a
merely notional adherence, will be characterised by an inflamed power of
imagination, capable of piercing the heart: the truth explored in theology
always needs to be Òappropriated as a reality, by the religious imaginationÓ.[3]
It is highly significant that on the final page of this long work Newman
summarises his argument simply by saying that Christianity appeals to the human
mind Òboth through the intellect and through the imaginationÓ.
Of course there were other
distinguished explorers in this field before the new explosion of interest
witnessed in the last forty years. There is no space here to consider the
fascinating essays of George MacDonald (1824-1905) on the embodying imagination
as characteristic of Christian faith. Nor can we do anything but mention the
more recent work of William Lynch (1908-1987), notable for his insistence that
imagination is more an ordinary human gift for reading reality than a special
power for poets and artists, and that in this light Òfaith is a form of imagining and experiencing the
world.[4]
(IF 5)
Rosemary HaughtonÕs still
exciting book The Passionate God can serve as an witness for
more recent retrievals of the imaginative or poetic dimension of theology.[5]
She holds that due to a tired theology Òwe have lost the language, and our
ideas are tangled and dulledÓ and that Òtrue answers to fundamental human
questions must have the nature of poetryÓ.[6]
Hence if theology is not to stagnate into clichŽ and rhetoric, it needs a new
imaginative language. Why? Because faith seeks to transfigure us, to point us
beyond quotidian externals. Because for the surprise of Incarnation a poetry of
passionate love is theologyÕs least inaccurate language. In short Haughton
calls us to retrieve passion and poetry together and thus to transcend the
inherited abstractions that pass for theological essentials. Like many other
commentators in recent decades, she points out that the primary language of
religion is narrative and symbolic, and that systematic or doctrinal discourse
is secondary. Hence the propositional approach that so dominated theology in
its rationalist moments should never monopolise the field. By the very
participative nature of religious experience, a different level of expression
is also necessary.
Why am I convinced personally that we have to retrieve imagination
within theology? For many reasons and on many levels.
Philosophically, many thinkers today have come
to recognise the cognitive capacity of imagination (including its crucial role
in scientific discovery). It is also seen as constitutive of human meaning and
culture.
Spiritually, (echoing Johann Baptist
Metz) our post-modern life-styles and assumptions cause massive damage to our
capacity for religious perception; if so, then an awakening of imagination is
both an act of counter-cultural liberation and an essential gateway towards the
threshold of faith. In other words imagination is a key element in any pre-evangelisation
– which means the preparing of the receptive disposition for the word of
God. Moreover, the core of faith is more a matter of transformed imagination
than of correct ideas. As Karl Rahner famously argued, the believer of tomorrow
will have to be an everyday ÒmysticÓ, in the sense of glimpsing grace in the
conversions of oneÕs own experience. This entails a quality of spiritual
sensibility marked by imaginative perception.
Theologically, the ÒobjectÓ of faith
remains shrouded in mystery: God is not a direct object of our usual modes of
cognition. Hence we need to acknowledge the role of imagination as an
alternative wavelength of knowing, a mode of alert wonder, more receptive than
analytical in its method. Besides, the theology of the late twentieth century
is marked by a courageous retrieval of sense of God as beauty or glory, a
dimension previously left to the marginal field of spiritual writing. One
thinks of the immense achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar in proposing a
theological aesthetics focussed on the disclosure of God as overwhelming beauty
in the figure of Christ.
Religiously, our awareness of
transcendent mystery is necessarily imaginative. It is widely acknowledged that
our images of God can provide a field of positive gospel vision or else limit
our adventure of faith within cramping straightjackets.
To echo Newman again, imagination
translates what is inevitably unreachable into what is existential and
energizing. Imagination can also liberate us to be more receptive of mystery
and through narrative and poetic forms to enter into the symbolic mediations of
revelation. The art encounter is increasingly viewed as a prime spiritual
analogy for the disclosure of vision at the heart of all religion.
Pastorally, narrative and poetic modes of discourse
are crucial for embodying religious traditions and for communicating the core
invitation of all genuine religion to transformed consciousness. One has only
to think of the perennial power of the parables of Jesus, or more specifically
of his option for this genre as one of his basic vehicles of preaching.
Pedagogically, the teaching of theology has
suffered on the one hand from excessively academic system-thinking and on the
other hand from excessive professionalism concerning ministry. Where can
teachers and students do justice to the uniqueness of the vision of revelation
and to the power of the Spirit except through some imaginative space of
exploration? Without some creativity in this respect theology courses can
reduce themselves to historical information and psychological strategies of
communication. From a specifically Christian perspective, imagination is in
tune with the Incarnation of God in Christ. It has also a long and rich history
in Christian art through the centuries and lies at the root of the sacramental
sensibility of much Christian worship.
In short, from many different
perspectives attention to imagination is crucial for the teaching of theology
today. Since theology seeks to deal with the depths of both revelation and the
human adventure, imagination offers a privileged wavelength for this encounter.
The priority that it allows for the intuitive, creative, exploratory and
receptive modes of consciousness means that imagination can serve various
functions within the teaching of theology.
[1] S. Tommaso dÕAquino, Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro Lombardo, [Prologus q.1, a 5] Vol. I, Bologna, 2001, pp. 150-155.
[2] See my
article ÒNewman on Imagination and FaithÓ, Milltown Studies 49 (2002), 84-101.
[3] J. H. Newman, An Essay in aid of A Grammar of Assent, London, 1909, p. 98.
[4] William F. Lynch, Images of Faith, Notre Dame, 1973, p. 5.
[5] Other authors that could be placed here include Sallie TeSelle, John Navone, Andrew Louth, Kieran Egan, Richard Viladesau and Kathleen Fischer.
[6] Rosemary Haughton, The Passionate God, London, 1981, pp. 16, 3.