C. S. Lewis: The Professional Scholar
Stephen Schuler, offers this review of Part I: Scholar (chapters 2-5). John V. Fleming, “Literary Critic,” 15-28; Stephen Logan, “Literary Theorist,” 29-42; Dennis Danielson, “Intellectual Historian,” 43-57; and Mark Edwards, “Classicist,” 58-74 from Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, ed. Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2010.
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C. S. Lewis belongs to that class of writers, like Oscar Wilde and G. K. Chesterton, whose writings are immeasurably more interesting than anything that could ever be written about them. Thus it is difficult for the contributors to the new Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis to express Lewis’s ideas more clearly and succinctly than Lewis himself did. Furthermore, they face the challenge of introducing their readers to Lewis’s lesser-known works and of providing fresh insights into the widely-read works. Overall, the first few chapters of this book succeed in acquainting readers with Lewis’s professional life.
However, the chapter by John V. Fleming on Lewis’s literary criticism is a weak start to the volume. Fleming duly offers an assessment of each of Lewis’s four scholarly books, The Allegory of Love, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Discarded Image, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, but it seems that he is more interested in telling us how important each book is than in telling us what it said, or how it reflects on other aspects of Lewis’s thought. The chapter makes no connections to Lewis’s other works, even though Lewis’s work on Milton had a great deal to do with his writing of both Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters, neither of which Fleming even mentions in connection with Preface. Although Fleming states that “all aspects of Lewis’s voluminous writings were influenced by the conditions and associations of the academic world in which he worked” (15), a naive reader is bound to get the opposite impression: that Lewis’s day-job had little bearing on the work for which he is best known.
If the following chapter by Stephen Logan, on Lewis’s literary theory, makes few connections with Lewis’s popular books, he at least offers a fresh assessment of a neglected aspect of Lewis’s work. Logan begins by distinguishing between two senses of the term “literary theory,” the first being “the practice of reflecting philosophically on the nature and function of literature” in the tradition of Aristotle, Sidney, Coleridge, and T. S. Eliot (29), and the second being theory as it is now practiced in all its hermeneutic, political, and cultural permutations.
Lewis undoubtedly contributed to the field of literary theory in the first sense, but not in the second, and that is why his philosophical works on literature, such as An Experiment in Criticism and “Christianity and Literature” have been largely overlooked in surveys of literary theory in the twentieth century. Logan is doubtful about the validity of Lewis’s argument in Experiment, but nevertheless treats it sympathetically. Logan proceeds to trace Lewis’s underlying Romantic tendencies, by which he means Lewis’s insistence that “there is more to reality than what our senses can get at,” and that “there is more to the mind than ratiocination” (38).
Best of all, Logan has something to say about the contemporary theoretical landscape: “the significance of the contrast between the traditional and contemporary forms of literary theory is ultimately moral and metaphysical” (30). Thus, Logan contends that Lewis’s literary theory is important because he “incisively and insistently comments on the moral and metaphysical infrastructure of literary and critical art,” while also “having the most exuberantly appreciative appetite for literary artistry” (40). Metaphysics is back.
Chapter four, Dennis Danielson’s essay on Lewis as an intellectual historian, is the best of the early chapters. Danielson begins with Lewis’s little-known but seminal essay “De Descriptione Temporum,” in which he divides history into three epochs, the pre-Christian, the Christian, and the post-Christian. Lewis thought that there was significant continuity between the pre-Christian and the Christian periods, but that there was a “Great Divide” somewhere in the nineteenth century, which exhibited an emerging belief in progress and upward mobility, and a new premium on novelty.
Danielson then explains how Lewis’s account of these three periods underpins works as such as A Preface to Paradise Lost and The Discarded Image, both of which treat literature from the Christian epoch. Lewis devotes much space in both works to explaining how the assumptions, values, and thought patterns of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries are different from our own. It is disappointing that Danielson does not make more links between these works and Lewis’s fiction, which seems to have much in common with the pre-Christian era as described by Lewis. To Danielson’s credit, he shows how Lewis’s theology was shaped by his understanding of the history of ideas.
But Danielson doubts that modern readers will be able to take seriously Lewis’s account of intellectual history. Lewis is plainly critical of modernity, and Danielson suspects that Lewis’s preference for the pre-modern will alienate a modern audience. On the contrary, the growing popularity of authors such as G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Wendell Berry indicate that Lewis’s own critique of modernity has more currency than Danielson allows.
The last chapter in this section is on Lewis as a classicist, by Mark Edwards. Ironically, Edwards’s essay implies that Lewis was not really a classicist at all, and that while he knew more classical texts than did many of his colleagues, his understanding of the classical world was incomplete and therefore reductive. Edwards quibbles with Lewis’s assessment of the Oedipus myth in Experiment, and he corrects Lewis’s simplistic understanding of ancient Greek historiography, but he also emphasizes the extent to which Lewis’s literary imagination was shaped by Greek and Latin works. He concisely unpacks Till We Have Faces in light of its mythical sources in Apuleius, and remarks knowledgeably on the use of classical material in Pilgrim’s Regress and Narnia. For example, Edwards notes the Professor’s exclamation at the end of The Last Battle that “It’s all in Plato!”, explaining that Lewis has in mind specifically the Platonic ideas of the translation of souls after death and the intimation of the numinous beyond the sensate world. It is for these kinds of insights that the student as well as the teacher will turn to a Cambridge Companion on Lewis.
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Stephen Schuler holds a Ph.D. in English from Baylor University and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mobile in Mobile, Alabama. He is currently working on a book about the theology of W. H. Auden.
This coming week will see Transpositions devote its posts to the review of The 
Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward. Part of the Cambridge Companions to Religion series, this companion has twenty-one wide ranging essays grouped together under three aspects of Lewis’ career and his legacy:
- Part I: Scholar
- Part II: Thinker
- Part II: Writer
Editors Robert MacSwain (University of the South, USA) and Michael Ward (University of Oxford, UK), reasonably suggest American Evangelicals have a tendency to adore Lewis uncritically, whereas British literature professors and theologians tend to dismiss his work out of hand, in part because of its popular appeal. As a panacea to this critical morass, MacSwain and Ward gather together an international cast of contributors and seek to take a holistic and critically even handed approach to Lewis and his work.
They set themselves an unenviable but valuable scholarly task, especially given that from the outset this companion is part of the Companions to Religion series as opposed to the Literature series. The editors admirably defend the inclusion of this companion in the Religion series. Either option (religion/literature), inevitably affects the way the volume is shaped. A literature volume would have the literary criticism and fiction at the centre, with theology and apologetics at the periphery, whereas this volume reverses that. Since Lewis is known equally well for his fiction and for his apologetics, there was no perfect fit, short of starting a Cambridge Companion Series of Authors-Who-Don’t-Quite-Fit-the-Current-Cambridge-Companion-Categories.
This is a fine collection of essays, and the sheer weight of scholarly reputation and prowess is enough to give one pause as we consider the list of contributors, including (but not limited to): Mark Edwards, Dennis Danielson, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Ann Loades, Charles Taliaferro, Judith Wolfe, Paul S. Fiddes, Stanley Hauerwas, David Jasper, Michael Ward, Peter Schakel, Alan Jacobs, T.A. Shippey, Jerry Walls, and Malcolm Guite.
The publisher’s description for the volume is as follows:
A distinguished academic, influential Christian apologist, and best-selling author of children’s literature, C. S. Lewis is a controversial and enigmatic figure who continues to fascinate, fifty years after his death. This Companion is the first comprehensive single-volume study written by an international team of scholars to survey Lewis’s career as a literary historian, popular theologian, and creative writer. Twenty-one expert voices from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and Wheaton, among many other places of learning, analyze Lewis’s work from theological, philosophical, and literary perspectives. Some chapters consider his professional contribution to fields such as critical theory and intellectual history, while others assess his views on issues including moral knowledge, gender, prayer, war, love, suffering, and Scripture. The final chapters investigate his work as a writer of fiction and poetry. Original in its approach and unique in its scope, this Companion shows that C. S. Lewis was much more than merely the man behind Narnia.
As you will see over the week, each of the reviewers offer robust criticism in the midst of seeking to read charitably. It has been quite a challenge to give each essay its due and offer points of discussion that we felt would best benefit Transpositions readers. I do not envy any book reviewer tasked with considering and attempting a review of the entirety of the companion in less than 1800 words.
One other brief point that made the reading of this book challenging for the purposes of review was the use of endnotes rather than footnotes. Quite a few of the reviewers remarked that they found it particularly inconvenient that endnotes were used given that many of the chapters cover quite a lot of detail of Lewis’ work and move between other works. While not quite resulting in the weeping and gnashing of teeth, it is worth noting. Nonetheless, it is an irritant most likely outside the control of MacSwain and Ward, given that this is a series-wide matter of style.
Finally, we were honoured to be invited to review the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, in no small part because Drs MacSwain and Ward are fellow graduates of the Institute of Theology, Imagination, and the Arts, and because this truly is a Companion of note. It remains to be seen how much the Companion will change the landscape of Lewis scholarship, but it certainly opens avenues of enquiry and draws together threads that enable a much more nuanced reading of Lewis as man, scholar, thinker, and writer. And for that, anyone who enjoys Lewis can be extremely grateful.
By Jim McCullough
Over the past several months, in a series of articles written for Transpositions, Wes Vander Lugt and I presented three crucial dynamics constituting art, seeking to render these dynamics in a way that advances educational and pastoral agendas within the sphere of theological aesthetics. Communication lies at the heart of these dynamics, which we articulated in our first post as follows:
In our perspective, the arts most fundamentally involve a person seeking through some means to communicate something to someone, somewhere and at sometime. In other words, art involves a particular craft that communicates some content in a particular context.
We then introduced a working diagram, a heuristic model, to illustrate these three dynamics:
In this article, I want to outline what to me are some key theological implications of this model.
First, theological engagement with the craft of art addresses the core of human making and the process of reflecting God’s image as creators. Engaging with craft means evaluating learned skills, practiced techniques, and the use and often ingenious manipulation of forms, patterns, and conventions. Theological engagement with craft, therefore, will seek to find theologically relevant ways to evaluate the skills, techniques and styles that constitute a work of art, and discern how this craft corresponds to the content and context.
Second, theological engagement with the content of art means, among other things, asking what story a work of art expresses or symbolizes and how this perhaps illuminates or obscures revealed truths about God and his relationship with the world. For some, this might relate to what is referred to as “worldview” analysis, which I believe are the narrative-shaped perspectives that determine how we understand, experience, and live in the world. As such, art inevitably reflects the assumptions and aspirations of such storied perceptions of life. To engage with art theologically is to ask what story it tells, to what story it belongs, and how this relates to God’s Story.
Third, theological engagement with the context of art is to acknowledge that human activity and understanding are historically conditioned and situationally shaped. It is also, I believe, an approach to art that takes seriously the implications of the Incarnation. God communicates Himself not in a timeless “once upon a time” but in historical and cultural particularity. God takes the risks involved in cross-cultural communication, and by the Spirit tranposes truth into every culture. Similarly, theological engagement with the context of art will seek to appreciate the contextually salient aspects of each work while recognizing the features that resonate across time and place.
I share with Wes the desire to explicate a theology of the arts that enhances practical “traction” in the spiritual lives of Christian laity. In this regard, I’m appreciative of the recent work of William Dyrness, who articulates in his Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Eerdmans 2011) a perspective on the arts in relation to communication and spiritual formation that reflects the heart of our project. Dyrness writes:
Art enables the world to take meaningful form; the world and its structures speak “words” in the arts. This echoes [Johann Georg] Hamann’s (and Augustine’s) suggestion that our sense perception, when it is grounded in faith, allows us to see the world as signs of a deeper reality. The Gospel as the greatest dramatic story helps us see that truth and beauty take shape not by escaping from the world but by acting within it to bring about shalom. (148-49)
Displacedness and Home-making
This past weekend, my husband and I moved to a new house in St. Andrews. Seeing our lives boxed up and moved about made me think about my desire to be settled, to be at home, and to just stay somewhere. Feeling displaced from my native Georgia for the past three years has affected me more than I ever could have imagined. So while this current move came as a relief and much-needed change, it also came with the knowledge that it too is impermanent—next year when our time has run out here, we’ll pack up and move again.
The more displaced we become as a culture, the more we come to see the effects that a sense of homelessness, literal or metaphorical, can have on us emotionally and spiritually. My desire for home is not uncommon. In our global society where most people move every few years, the significance of home and the way that we make and identify with places has become an important issue. In such a culture, we should acknowledge the primary importance of home-making, that is the actions we take to “make a place” where we are. Doing this, we can be spiritually rejuvenated through that connection to place.
Being “at home” or “in place” is a primary issue in Christian scripture. The Israelites suffered with this same feeling of displacedness. Being exiled from their land and losing their primary place of worship, the Israelites had to reevaluate their relationship to God and to each other. Their method of being-at-home in the land was not what God had envisioned for them, and so he uprooted them in order that they may learn the actual significance of home and home-making (among other things).
But Jeremiah tells the Israelites while they are in exile: “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce …multiply there, and do not decrease” (Jer. 29.5,6). What is interesting about this is that even though their exile is impermanent, they are stilled called to make a place there: building gardens and homes, starting families, making all the things necessary to properly dwell somewhere for a period of time.
Part of this place-making involves remembering. Psalm 137 calls the Israelites to sing songs of home while in a foreign land: “How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.” But it also involves building new memories: “digging in” and “becoming native” as Wes Jackson describes in his discussion on land and homecoming. [1]
So what are some of the ways that we can engage in this action of home-making, or place-making? Lots of things will obviously fall under this category, but I believe artistic actions—actions of physical making—are often a primary way that people do this. Whether it is building a house or garden shed, making curtains, or arranging flowers, creative and imaginative engagement with a space can help settle the spirit and fulfill a desire for settledness that may be missing.
When we moved this time, I made a new duvet cover for our bedroom. It’s simple, made from some corduroy fabric in a favorite color. And even though it doesn’t seem like it would change that much, it helps me feel at home in a foreign place. It helps me make the space into our place for a little while.
If we are going to combat our postmodern condition of placelessness, we need to heed the word of the Lord spoken through Jeremiah: we need to build, make, do something that connects us to the land and to the places around us. We need to understand the spiritual significance of our relationship to places and realize that something is missing when we are unsettled.
The arts may be one way of helping in this area. What are some of the ways you participate in home-making or making place?
Photo credit: http://www.facebook.com/Goannatree. Used with permission
[1] Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996).
Memorabilia: Just a cheap marketing trick?
As a resident of St Andrews, one could not escape the Royal Wedding celebrations of this past weekend. The multiple parties happening in St Andrews were replicated a hundredfold across all of Great Britain. In unprecedented amounts, there was a great show of patriotism as the Union Jack was displayed in multiple formats — flags, hats, pins, mugs, and shirts just to name a few. A national newspaper on Saturday ran with the headline ‘A Great Day to be British’ and one couldn’t help but be impressed by the display of tradition in Friday’s ceremony.
Separate from demonstrations of Britishness, memorabilia of the Royal Wedding has been vast — scarves, knitting patterns, plates, tea cups, gnomes — anything with Will and Kate was consumed by the public as a way to remember this historic event (or, ironically, as a way to signify non-interest in the event). What was on offer ranged from the beautiful to the banal. We could dismiss this as good marketers playing on the heightened emotions of the moment. Or see it as bad taste. However, is there something more going on? Is there more to be considered for the place of memorabilia in our lives? Does this action of remembering have a place within Christian practice? A few thoughts to that end.
I start with the obvious. Memorabilia primarily serves as an aid to remembering. I start here because memorabilia is often judged as being aesthetically deficient, which then levies judgment upon the person who purchased the item. Rather, an item’s capacity to call up memories of an event, a shared moment, or a life-changing experience is surely its purpose and how it should be considered. For example, the screen-printed tea towel that I now own will not only remind me of the day of the Royal Wedding in years to come. It will also serve to conjure up memories of friends and my overall experience of being at St Andrews. Secondly, memorabilia provides a means by which we can intentionally make a claim on a particular memory or experience. The decision to purchase memorabilia is an intentional decision to remember the moment attached to the item. Perhaps we are just victims of good marketing in our purchasing. Or perhaps good marketers realise that we want to remember our good experiences and they have capitalised on those moments.
Christianity is not without its ‘memorabilia’, much of which is (perhaps rightly) disparaged for its banality. However, is there something more there? Do Christians just inherently have undeveloped and therefore bad taste when it comes to what they choose to remind them of their faith? Or have we stopped at the aesthetic assessment and missed how the objects could act as a visual reminder of a deeper truth? Could the accessibility of the ‘memorabilia’ be a means by which deeper reflection is given to the complexity and mystery of the Gospel?
Image Credit – Goannatree: Limited Edition Cups by Tea People
Synoptic Imagination
Wesley Vander Lugt is editor of Transpositions and a PhD candidate at the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts, researching the relationship between preparation and performance in the Christian life, looking to theatre for an imaginative model.
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In the introduction to the Imagination Symposium, I mentioned that I would be writing on synthetic imagination. Recent conversations with colleagues, however, persuaded me that the term ‘synthetic’ unfortunately connotes either artificiality (e.g. synthetic leather vs. real leather) or Hegelian philosophy, where thesis and antithesis converge in synthesis. To avoid these connotations, I have settled on a comparable but less contentious phrase: synoptic imagination. I didn’t make up this phrase, first encountering it when reading The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vanhoozer. So hopefully I can expand a bit on his original insights.
The synoptic imagination is our ability to see things as a comprehensive whole (syn-optics). As such, we rely on synoptic imagination every time we construct unified order out of disunity, envision disparate parts as a comprehensive whole, or create connections between things that may otherwise be disconnected. The synoptic imagination enables us to read a book, construct a worldview, obtain a holistic understanding of an individual person, and makes narrative sense of our lives. There are a plethora of ways in which the synoptic imagination affects theology and the life of faith, but I will merely mention a few in what follows.
First, synoptic imagination enables us to read Scripture as a unified drama. What does Genesis have to do with Revelation? Is Numbers actually connected in some way to Nehemiah? Answering these questions in the affirmative is an act of synoptic imagination. On the one hand, Scripture has an inherent unity out of which the church recognized it as biblical canon. But on the other hand, each time we relate parts of Scripture as a unified whole, we are using our synoptic imagination, often uniting the biblical drama under a common theme, such as covenant, kingdom, or redemption. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because they give us different yet complementary views of Jesus’ life and ministry. Putting these perspectives together requires good exegesis, but it also takes synoptic imagination.
Second, synoptic imagination facilitates the construction of a comprehensive Christian worldview. How is cooking connected to Christ’s work of new creation? Do sports have anything to do with my salvation in Christ? Through the synoptic imagination, we are able to create a comprehensive vision that connects everything to Christ and his lordship. Some might argue that worldview construction is more a function of reason than imagination, but I maintain that we need to blur these all-too-often bifurcated intellectual functions. In real life, we employ reasonable imagination and imaginative reason to make sense of the world around us.
Third, synoptic imagination helps us realize our roles in the divine drama. Just as constructing a worldview takes imagination, so does living in line with that worldview. Placing our particular lives and actions within the plot of the overarching divine drama is an act of imagination whereby we seek congruence with the ways of Abraham, David, Moses, Jesus, Paul, and the people of God throughout the centuries. Through the synoptic imagination, we re-incorporate what has gone before and pre-incorporate what is yet to come for the sake of faithful improvisation in the present.
Fourth, synoptic imagination brings the invisible, God-saturated reality to bear on the visible. Here, imagination is a very close kin to faith; but again, we must resist tearing apart what belongs together. With a faith-full, synoptic imagination, we can see/believe that Christ really is present in Communion, suffering really is Spirit-filled sanctification, and the church really is the body of Christ.
In sum, Christians constantly rely on synoptic imagination. As I hope this Imagination Symposium has demonstrated, imagination is not an optional luxury for creative types; it is an essential part of existence and the life of faith.
Eschatological Imagination
Trevor Hart is Professor of Divinity and the Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. He is author of many books and essays dealing with eschatology and imagination, including “Imagination for the Kingdom of God? Hope, Promise, and the Transformation of an Imagined Future” in God Will Be All in All.
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“In root distinction from leaf, from the animal, man alone can construct and parse the grammar of hope.” ~George Steiner, Real Presences
Christian faith is fundamentally expectant, forward looking and forward moving, and theology in all its departments, therefore, is and must always be spes quaerens intellectum – hope seeking understanding. Faith’s grasp on eschatological realities is, though, inherently and inevitably of a highly imaginative sort, having to do with some putative state of affairs more or less remote from our experience of the given present. Indeed, the larger part of eschatological belief has to do precisely with another world lying beyond the limits of this one and its history, beyond the range of any historical human experience, and thus beyond the normal working reach of the words and concepts we use to make sense of that experience.
Here our mundane words and ideas are stretched beyond the limits of any elasticity they naturally possess, and the most they can do is to guide the trajectories of our imagining in the right direction. If our eschatology is to be theologically responsible, therefore, we must resist any literalizing tendency while yet refusing to underestimate the epistemic status of the imaginative as a respectable form of ‘knowledge’ in the broader sense. Knowledge of a ‘scientific’ sort (so valued in the various milieu of the modern world) is not the only sort of knowledge we enjoy as human beings, and rarely the most profound.
Again, (and this needs to be heard loudly and clearly) to insist upon the imaginative form such knowing takes does in no way undercut or contradict the claim that it is revealed, unless we suppose that all divine revealing occurs in and through epistemic forms of one particular (unimaginative) type. But those who grant the text of Christian Scripture a primary place as the authoritative locus of God’s self-revealing can hardly suppose this. On the contrary, the Old and New Testaments alike are rich repositories of divinely inspired imagining, full to the brim with poetry, parable and story, and telling of a God who draws his people forward precisely by enabling them to see visions and dream dreams.
In matters of eschatology, as elsewhere, God makes himself and his purposes and promises known not by downloading a body of digitised factual data, but by taking our imaginations captive, lifting us up through Spirit-filled reading to ‘see’ and ‘taste’ the substance of things lying way beyond our proper purview and calling us in turn responsibly to imagine further, allowing our extrapolations and ornamentations (which duly take a dynamic ‘lived’ form) to be guided and tested by the trajectories of divinely furnished prototypes. The trajectories along which Christian eschatological imagining travels are indeed set securely in Scripture itself, which encourages it to extrapolate both positively and negatively from features of life in the here-and-now.
We cannot know what life in God’s new creation will look like; but the vision of the prophets urges us to imagine a world in which all that is good and worthwhile and fulfilling in human life will be taken up and transfigured and handed back to us with unprecedented, unimaginable value added (‘all this, and much more besides’), while all that is evil and distorts or destroys human life in this world will be notable only by its absence. Concomitantly, images of what it might mean to be excluded from God’s presence for eternity are ones drawn from the very darkest of human experiences – images of misery, pain, decay and destruction. Thus eschatological thinking, though it may be done in a very precise and disciplined manner, will nonetheless always be, in Jürgen Moltmann’s phrase, ‘imagination for the kingdom of God’.
Apocalyptic Imagination
Samuel V. Adams is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at St Andrews, working on contemporary apocalyptic theology and the doctrine of creation. Married with three kids, Sam is ordained in the Mennonite Church USA, and most recently called Bend, Oregon home.
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Apocalyptic theology is theology in an unsettling mode. Like trying to nap while waiting for the phone to ring, the apocalyptic theological imagination cannot rest without expecting disruption. This is the apocalyptic sense of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s claim that, “Christian revelation cannot be understood when it is perceived as something existing, in the sense of something available at one’s convenience.”[1] Revelation comes from outside and cannot be possessed; for the apocalyptic imagination the claim to possess truth “as something existing” is always subject to an act from outside that interrupts and unsettles that which has been made “convenient.”
One way to begin thinking of the apocalyptic imagination is to think of the images conjured by the uses of “apocalypse” in popular discourse, Christian or otherwise. Cataclysmic scenes of barren post-nuclear wastelands, charts of fantastical end-time speculation, video of people jumping from the World Trade Center, or photographs of a Japanese coastline devastated by a tsunami; all these invoke the term “apocalyptic.” Such images awaken us to the real contingency that characterizes both our own existence and the structures of security that we suppose keep us from similar catastrophes. Some of us, consciously or subconsciously, long for such disruption to free us from mundane existence. This is perhaps why post-apocalyptic films and even the book of Revelation lure so many with a promise of that which, in a freeing way, comes suddenly as something new (even with wandering bands of cannibals, smoke monsters, and beasts with seven heads…).
Apocalyptic as a genre—literary or cinematic—follows from the apocalyptic imagination with its focus on a disruptive or disclosive cataclysm. Whether a nuclear or ecological disaster, or the unsealing of a scroll, something happens to our world that disrupts its course forever. Most of the time, and this is especially true of post-apocalyptic cinema, the cataclysmic event has a ghostly presence, being rooted in a past occurrence, but haunting the present landscape in a very real and tangible sense (think, Mad Max, The Road, and The Book of Eli). But this can be the ghost of a future event as well (think, 2012).
The linguistic association of apocalypse with cataclysm suggests that the apocalyptic trope deploys its power through the imaginative evocation of a particular event. For apocalyptic theology, this is exactly right. At the heart of the Christian apocalyptic imagination lies the event, the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. Truth, in this Christian apocalyptic sense, “is evental….It is neither structural, nor axiomatic, nor legal.”[2] There is something new, something unprecedented that is added to existence and knowledge in the event that makes its singularity apocalyptic, making it able to disrupt and unsettle our convenient possession of truth.
There is more to an apocalyptic theology than can be contained by propositions or truth claims, which is why it makes sense, and is even necessary, to speak of the apocalyptic imagination. It is the imagination that allows us to be subject to a space from which comes an in-breaking. It is the imagination that permits the present to be haunted by the event. It is the imagination that preserves space, that even opens up space, for the present to be invaded by the truth of the event.
But now the Christian message comes: entirely from outside of the world of sin God himself came in Jesus Christ, he breaks as the holy Ghost into the circle of man, not as a new idea, a new value by virtue of which man could save himself, but in concreteness as judgment and forgiveness of sin, as the promise of eschatological salvation….The whole existence of man in his egocentric world has to be shaken (erschüttert) before man can see God as really outside himself.[3]
The apocalyptic imagination is a way of seeing the world, but it is a world-view that is, at the same time, not a world-view. Because the apocalyptic event does not come from this world but disrupts the world, because it comes from outside, and shakes us with its critique of the way the world sees, the apocalyptic imagination is always unsettled and unsettling, haunted, as it were, by the event of the apocalypse of Jesus Christ.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 107.
[2] Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. by Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 14.
[3] Bonhoeffer, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931, vol. 10 (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2008), 473.
Whimsical Imagination
Danny Gabelman is a PhD candidate in ITIA working on the fairytale levity of George MacDonald. Originally from Colorado, Danny is marrying a beautiful English girl this summer and has plans to remain in the UK for the foreseeable future.
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In the spirit of whimsy, I shall present this post through a series of inter- and un-related sketches or doodles rather than linear argumentation.
Whimsy is the gamesome servant of the imagination.
Generally speaking, whimsy is related to Aristotle’s principle of association or what Coleridge terms ‘fancy’. It is a frolicsome cousin of memory, the power by which the mind makes connections with the past. Instead of associating the obvious and the similar, however, whimsy combines the unexpected and the disparate. Whimsy does not connect flies with moths but with children’s toys as in Lewis Carroll’s rocking-horse-fly.
‘Good poets’, says W. H. Auden, ‘have a weakness for bad puns’. Puns are whimsical because they harness together ideas or images through the very thin tendril of auditory similarity. The best puns (or by another reckoning the worst ones) have the thinnest threads drawing together the most unexpected of elements. ‘Atheism is non-prophet’.
Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a good metaphor of whimsy. He is the ‘merry wanderer of the night’ that delights in creating mischief. He traverses traditional boundaries and facilitates the meeting and intermingling of different worlds and perspectives. He comically disorients the lovers, and he brings the ass-headed Bottom into contact with the ethereally beautiful Titania. Perhaps because he is a servant and vassal of Oberon, however, Puck is ultimately benevolent. He does not wish to offend but desires to make friends and amends. A malevolent Puck would be a nightmare rather than a dream.
If the imagination more generally is the faculty of mind that selects, shapes, and forms, then whimsy is the faculty that discovers, fetches and carries. It is the finder rather than the maker. It is like a playful golden retriever. This faculty of finding unexpected connections necessarily precedes and continuously supplies the more grand and glorious primary imagination.
A famous example of the whimsical imagination: C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories began as a series of images—‘a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion’. These images just ‘bubbled up’ and the association of the images with Christian meaning was part of the bubbling. These whimsical bubbles were the seeds that grew and blossomed into mature works of art.
Whimsy is the froth that rises to the surface. Like bubbles joining together air and water, whimsy unites two distinct elements into a new form that plays between the borders of different realms.
Whimsy is sometimes denigrated because of its lack of seriousness. Yet perhaps it is fairer to say that whimsy seriously (though by necessity not gravely) calls seriousness itself into question. To the extent that ‘seriousness’ is associated with pride (taking the self too seriously), whimsy is herein aligned with a core Christian teaching. As Chesterton observes, ‘angels can fly because they take themselves lightly’. Whimsy can help loosen the bonds of seriousness that bind the self within itself.
Wisdom’s Play in Proverbs 8 is a good description of whimsy: ‘I was beside the master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere on his earth, delighting to be with the children of men.’ Not the master craftsman but the frolicsome spirit that sports and plays everywhere and with everything.
Whimsy as the master of the imagination is a potentially terrifying prospect, but without whimsy as its servant the imagination would likely be crippled. A Christian aesthetics—given Jesus’ claim that in the kingdom the last shall be first—should be particularly sensitive to servant faculties like whimsy, no matter how low or frivolous they might at first appear.
Metaphorical Imagination
Jim Watkins is the featured artist editor of, and a regular contributor to, Transpositions. His PhD research at the University of St Andrews explores a comparison between divine and artistic creativity. He lives in St Andrews with his wife and two sons.
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“The theologian … is no different from the poet or dramatist. All of them must write in blood.”[1] Human experience is an indispensable aspect of our language about and knowledge of God. Christians often use metaphors to bring their relatively known experience to bear upon the relatively unknown nature, character and actions of God. For example, we say things like ‘God is a father,’ ‘God is my rock,’ and ‘the Lord is my shepherd.’ We do the same thing when we talk about other aspects of reality, but sometimes Christians become uncomfortable when we use metaphors to talk about God. At some level, however, metaphors are unavoidable. Dorothy Sayers puts it bluntly: “To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.”[2]
And yet we still might want a more positive assessment of why Christians should use metaphors when they talk about God, or anything for that matter. I can see at least two important reasons why the metaphorical imagination is an important component of Christian devotion.
- Metaphors avoid reduction to a single propositional statement. Metaphors are indirect and recognize that God is beyond human categories because they contain the whisper “and it is not.”[3] God both is and is not a rock. God both is and is not a father. For this reason, interpretations of metaphors are often rich and multivalent.
- Metaphors are often rich in unforeseen insights and suggest new questions for consideration. For example, the metaphor “God is a father” is complex, and so a host of questions about love, discipline, adoption, etc. are raised that in turn enrich our understanding of scripture, tradition, and ultimately, of God himself. It is important not to literalize metaphors because, as Vincent Brümmer argues, we need metaphors that “break down our mental set and thus enable us to see those features of the world which we have been conditioned to overlook.”[4]
At this point, we might raise an objection. If metaphors are always tentative, and if they lead to multiple interpretations, how do we know that metaphors refer to something real? In response to this objection, it is tempting to retreat and say that the metaphorical imagination is merely icing on the cake; we only need it until we find a more straightforward way of talking about God. Or it is tempting to give up any claims upon an external reality, and to look at metaphors pragmatically, as merely a means by which we orient our values and lives.
Both of these responses are deeply unsatisfying. There is another way to respond to this objection that has been called critical realism. In this response, we let go of absolute certainty about the object described with metaphors. Instead, we recognize that all knowing involves an essential element of trust. On this view, Christians can claim that metaphors about God are aiming at something real because their use of metaphors is, in part, dependent upon their trust in the wider Christian community who have come before them, and who have worshipped God with the bodies, souls, minds and even their metaphorical imaginations.[5] It might be said that when Christians speak of God using metaphors through their trust in the Christian community, they are “indwelling” their religious tradition.[6] It is by standing or dwelling in the Christian tradition—by exercising responsible commitment to and trust in other Christians—that the Christian’s metaphorical imagination can make claims that truly and truthfully speak of God.
[1] H. A. Williams, “Forward,” in W. H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977) xi.
[2] The Mind of the Maker 4th Ed. (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1941), 19.
[3] See Janet Soskice, “Knowledge and Experience in Science and Religion: Can We Be Realists?” Physics, Philosophy and Theology, eds. Robert J. Russell et al (Vatican City : Vatican Observatory, 1988), 173-183; Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1982).
[4] The Model of Love, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10.
[5] See Janet Soskice’s “social theory” of metaphor in Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).
[6] The term “indwelling” is borrowed from Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (The University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Transpositions 