Why Protestants can't write / Christian imagination

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2016/01/why-protestants-cant-write-i

First, of all as a Lutheran, I am not a "Protestant", and I have never called myself that.  I will happily go by Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical.  Anyways, our understanding is very much not like Zwingli's.  So, yes, Marburg is definitely the place to see the spirits dividing.


With that clarified, let's see what the writer of the article comes down to at the end.

Quote article:

O'Connor once expressed her desire to write stories that would sound “like the Old Testament would sound if it were being written today.” Her sense of what that meant was indebted to the Jesuit scholar William F. Lynch, who argued in his Christ and Apollo that “The opposition here is between Christ, Who stands for reality in all its definiteness, and Apollo, who stands for the indefinite, the romantic, the endless. It is again the opposition between the Hebraic imagination, always concrete, and the agnostic imagination, which is dream-like.”
Approaching the infinite “directly without the mediation of matter”—it describes the “modern spirit” perhaps, but equally and perhaps better it describes the spirit of Zwingli, the Zwinglian spirit that Luther could not recognize as his own. Insofar as Protestantism is infected with various strains of the Manichean virus, to that extent modern evangelicals are incapable of discerning the theophanies that surround us on every hand.
Hence: contemporary Protestants can't write. Blame it on Marburg.

For some reason, we always come to Flannery O'Connor.  It does baffle me a bit. She is said to be indebted to Jesuit scholar William F. Lynch, of whom I have not heard.  My guess is that he is an American.

From the internet:

Secondly, Lynch was suspicious of the Romantic exaltation of aesthetic imagination as something special or as a rare capacity for the privileged few, such as poets and others. Instead, he viewed imagination as incarnational: it is ordinary and universal, indeed our daily way of encountering and creating our lives. He often quoted Martin Buber as saying that the vocation of the imagination is to imagine reality, both disclosing and creating it.

Thirdly, Lynch had little patience with a tendency of imagination that he described as ‘angelic’ or ‘gnostic’. Here the danger was to cultivate unreal fantasies that avoid the drama of life. In Lynch’s words, Christ himself did not ‘march too quickly’ into ‘beauty, the infinite, the dream’, and a genuinely ‘Catholic imagination does not force me to imagine that I must free myself from all human society to unite myself with God’. In the introduction to his 1960 book, Christ and Apollo, Lynch remarked that he had three abiding friends from whom he had learned: Plato, St Ignatius and Newman. They nourished in him a certain compassionate realism. They taught him to distrust any escapist idealism in life or literature or spirituality, tendencies that he symbolised in the figure of Apollo.

Lynch wrote eloquently about Christ as ‘the Lord of the imagination’ and as having ‘subverted the whole order of the old imagination’ that imprisons us. Contemplation of Christ should give us freedom from distorted images of ourselves, whether induced by superficial culture or part of our personal woundedness.  http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20120410_1.htm

Martin Buber, I know.  

The aversion to gnosticism, I share.

A compassionate realism is a good thing.  Plato, St. Ignatius and Newman, I don't count as close friends.

So much for now.  It's a good subject matter.

The Grand requires General Theories / Chesterton

The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes.  They are free to produce anything they like.  They are free to write a "Paradise Lost" in which Satan shall conquer God.  They are free to write a "Divine Comedy" in which heavens shall be under the floor of hell.  And what have they done?  Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmasters?  We know that they have produced only a few roundels.  Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence.  In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's.  ... Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction.  Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it.  If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.  I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.  (Chesterton, Heretics.  Introductory Remarks)

I have to admit to not knowing a lot about what he is all aluding to.  But it seems like an excellent paragraph.  I wish I would get around to reading Milton and Dante, etc., but I may not make it.  I don't even have time today to look up "Ghibbeline" and "roundel".

But the part about proper blasphemy needing some sort of belief makes sense. And hence, we know that Chesterton is right about it all.  There is no "unmorality of art".


 

Apparently, this sort of thing, below, is a "roundel".  Well, lacking art about as much as the abstract above.

"Sensibility"

"It's possible to listen to non-Christian music and watch non-Christian movies through the eyes of faith and through a Christian sensibility and a Christian imagination."

(Gene Veith in the Canadian Lutheran)

I have been wondering what is "sensibility."  It's not a word I use actively, nor does anyone I know personally.  In the German language, we say about someone that they might be "sensibel", which would mean often that they are touchy, moody, or possibly depressive.  In the best sense of the word it would mean that they have capacity to feel deeply and broadly.  It would be the opposite to being a clod. To me, the most common meaning of "sensibel" would be "touchy".





The Internet gives these definitions for "sensibility":  The ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences;  sensitivity.  Or synonyms:  finer feelings, delicacy, taste, discrimination, discernment.  A Person's delicate sensitivity that makes them readily offended or shocked.

Wikipedia, has this sort of detailed thing:

Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. It also became associated with sentimental moral philosophy.

One of the first of such texts would be John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), where he says, "I conceive that Ideas in the Understanding, are coeval with Sensation; which is such an Impression or Motion, made in some part of the Body, as makes it be taken notice of in the Understanding."^[1] George Cheyne and other medical writers wrote of "The English Malady," also called "hysteria" in women or "hypochondria" in men, a condition with symptoms that closely resemble the modern diagnosis of clinical depression. Cheyne considered this malady to be the result of over-taxed nerves. At the same time, theorists asserted that individuals who had ultra-sensitive nerves would have keener senses, and thus be more aware of beauty and moral truth. Thus, while it was considered a physical and/or emotional fragility, sensibility was also widely perceived as a virtue.

Originating in philosophical and scientific writings, sensibility became an English-language literary movement, particularly in the then-new genre of the novel. Such works, called sentimental novels, featured individuals who were prone to sensibility, often weeping, fainting, feeling weak, or having fits in reaction to an emotionally moving experience. If one were especially sensible, one might react this way to scenes or objects that appear insignificant to others. This reactivity was considered an indication of a sensible person's ability to perceive something intellectually or emotionally stirring in the world around them. However, the popular sentimental genre soon met with a strong backlash, as anti-sensibility readers and writers contended that such extreme behavior was mere histrionics, and such an emphasis on one's own feelings and reactions a sign of narcissism. Samuel Johnson, in his portrait of Miss Gentle, articulated this criticism:

She daily exercises her benevolence by pitying every misfortune that happens to every family within her circle of notice; she is in hourly terrors lest one should catch cold in the rain, and another be frighted by the high wind. Her charity she shews by lamenting that so many poor wretches should languish in the streets, and by wondering what the great can think on that they do so little good with such large estates.^[2]

Objections to sensibility emerged on other fronts. For one, some conservative thinkers believed in a priori concepts, that is, knowledge that exists independent of experience, such as innate knowledge believed to be imparted by God. Theorists of the a priori distrusted sensibility because of its over-reliance on experience for knowledge. Also, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, anti-sensibility thinkers often associated the emotional volatility of sensibility with the exuberant violence of the French Revolution, and in response to fears of revolution coming to Britain, sensible figures were coded as anti-patriotic or even politically subversive. Maria Edgeworth's Leonora, for example, depicts the "sensible" Olivia as a villainess who contrives her passions or at least bends them to suit her selfish wants; the text also makes a point to say that Olivia has lived in France and thus adopted "French" manners. In addition, the effusive nature of most sentimental heroes, such as Harley in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, was often decried by literary critics as weak effeminacy, helping to discredit sentimental novels, and to a lesser extent, all novels, as unmanly works.

------------------

Aha, we see. 

What then is a Christian sensibility or imagination?  How do we choose what we let in or out of our heads and hearts?

Nowadays, it seem that the sensibility of our age expects us to be shocked at nothing, and then call everything "love." Everything seems rendered meaningless.  How is a Christian sensibility counter to this trend?--Love is more defined.  The Bible tells us what kinds of things are loving and which not.  It is an understanding that needs cultivating.  It does not happen entirely on its own.  There may be the innate--as the natural law demands--but that can easily be dulled or manipulated.  Chesterton would say that Orthodoxy helps us find a way while everyone else leaves us stranded at the crossroads.  There is a certain direction in the Christian sensibility;  it is not afloat. 

I find that also life events really change a person's "sensibility", much more so than art.  When we have been through a type of situation, we can understand it, we have certain feelings about it, we have developed a certain sensibility about it.  Novels can let us enter into situations we don't face ourselves, and thus we can learn empathy through this channel.  It still is not at all the same kind of thing as experiencing something yourself.  

The Bible lets us enter into various kinds of situations and trials, exercising our imagination and sensibility.  The trials, foibles and  faith of Israel, the patriarchs, and so on, are also my own.  King David's faithful courage inspires our own.  Plenty of not so inspiring events occur in the Bible, too, but the Christian "sensibility" is able to put these things to use, too.  None of us are any better than another.  We are all dependent on God's grace. He gives and takes away.  We have nothing from ourselves. 

The essence of the Christian sensibility is that things come from the outside, we need not stir the pot on the inside.  It is already boiling over.  Rather we find a way to think and feel and proceed. 

Contrast:

"Without love.  I like it rough.  Because I'd rather feel pain than nothing, at all."

t

Gene Veith / Christian Imagination 3

From an interview with Matthew Block.  Something I was missing from my own summary:

God has given us a book that's filled with description, stories, symbols, images, true history, and parables.  We often read Scripture fairly quickly, just to get ideas from it--to extract doctrine from it.  But another way of reading Scripture is to read it in a way that really lets it sink in.  Part of that is reading it not only with the intellect and will, but also with the imagination.  In our forthcoming book, Rev. Ristuccia and I talk about different ways of meditating on the Word of God.  It involves the intellect and thinking about what we're reading, of course, but is also involves picturing what we're reading.  And it also affects the will, so that it ends in prayer and a refocusing of the heart.  I think intentionally reading Scriptures so that it feeds the imagination is a good counter to what we normally feed our imaginations with from the pop-culture around us. 

Finally, Christians can also be careful about what they take into their imaginations.  I think the Christian faith liberates us;  we have great freedom in the Gospel.  So I'm not saying 'Only listen to Christian music' or 'Only watch Christian movies.'  It's possible to listen to non-Christian music and watch non-Christian movies through the eyes of faith and through a Christian sensibility and a Christian imagination.  When we do so, we can find valuable things.  A violent film might make us more compassionate--might make us less violent.  But another film might encourage us to revel in the violence--to enjoy it and fantasize about what it would be like to take revenge and kill someone.  That's harmful.  As Christians, we need to be better stewards and more discerning about what we take into our imaginations. 

A passage from Philippians puts it well:  'Whatever is true, whatever is honest, whatever is of good report... Think on such things' (Philippians 4:8).  That's a great guide that gives us principles of discernment.  It's liberating, not narrow either;  the key part of the text is 'whatever.'  Whatever is excellent.  There are excellent works by non-Christians that have a good report;  they have a great reputation.  And typically, the great works are also honest:  they will not portray reality in a distorted way, as if sin were something good (you won't find many great works teaching 'it is good to reject your family'.  That's not what you find.  The great works are honest.  They're lovely.  And St. Paul tells us to 'think on such things.'  Thinking on such 'excellent and praiseworthy' things, imagining such things, is very helpful for the Christian life.  

(Canadian Lutheran, March/April 2014)

Chesterton, Early Childhood, the Church as Mother

Lately, in discussing art and how it can contribute to a "defamiliarizing" which can shake us out of a slumber, even a spiritual slumber, it has been said that women have contributed to this slumber and the "familiarizing", so to speak.  It was even mentioned somewhere that "dragons" kept the door to mystery, and these "dragons" sounded to me something like Sunday School teachers.

I think nowadays, when fewer children are raised in the faith, in the church, by mothers who are at home... that the emphasis on early childhood training should not be minimized. It is quite so that my own mother's piety, as well as my grandparents' piety were not dragons and gate-keepers--they were the very gates themselves.  In childhood everything is magical.  Everything is new.  Everything is unfamiliar at first.  We learn, we lay down the neurons, we are shaped into a trust and hope... and piety.  Every day we prayed:  "Lord make me pious, so that I will go to heaven."  (Lieber Gott, mach mich fromm, dass ich in den Himmel komm.)

It is the jaded, faded, the disappointed, the skeptic...  I don't know who else, who needs to be "defamiliarized".  I don't know.  It has not happened to me much, personally.  I just need to pick up a Bible and it hits me between the eyes.  It is quite enough.  Really.  I find.

Chesterton has this interesting thing to say about authority.  He means to accept the authority of Rome with this and I can't follow him there, but otherwise there is much good in the analogy.

"You believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you;  a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day.  And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother;  at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated.  Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile:  for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything.  The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women.  Every man is womanized, merely by being born.  They talk of the masculine woman;  but every man is a feminised man.  And if ever men walk to Westminister to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their procession.

For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact;  that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority, I was most full of flame and adventure.  Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said);  therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfillments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true.  I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it;  if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame.  A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive.  But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn."

(Chesterton, Orthodoxy, last chapter)

I like it that Chesterton does not despise his early and feminine training and dedicated "Orthodoxy" to his mother. Certainly, he was "defamiliarized" through his grown-up adventures in politics, literature, art, philosophy and debates, but he always discovered the old truths over again through his own life experiences. In a way we are all "defamiliarized" by adult life, finding our own clues and then in turn becoming teachers of the young. 

Reflections

Since it is my week off, I managed to write the preceding lecture notes and finish G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy"-- at the same time.  In fact, I finished Orthodoxy lying in bed this morning.  It concluded with that famous paragraph about the "mirth" of God.  How happy to see all the well-known quotes in context.

What am I taking away from all of it?  Chesterton was a very original and logical thinker, as well as a lover of fairy tales and mysteries.  Tales and myths stand in for that which is larger than us, the artful, the supernatural, the just, the special and simultanously the real.  It is the rustic, the coarse man, the fisherman, the farmer... who knew and told these tales.  Humanity knows many things instinctively.  All these clues led Chesterton to Orthodoxy, or Rome, synonymously speaking.

Dr. Veith takes off somewhat in the same direction.  We are startled by tales, by art, and thereby "defamiliarized", able to see old things in a new light, returning thereby to faith and orthodoxy.

Fine.  Gentlemen.  Fine.  The imagination is a wonderful thing, and it can bring us back to knowing ourselves and God anew.

Which leaves me somewhat to ponder my own route along those lines.  They involve the imagination as far as that I believe the sacraments to be real (or imagine them to be real), in that I have from infancy been acquainted with scripture and with fairy tales, as well as Bach cantatas and Schubert songs. In a way faith could be a function of the imagination.

And nothing matters to me like right doctrine.  Because I have suffered under false doctrine.  Chesterton understood this.  Veith understands it.  Many artists don't.

Chesterton gave a powerful defense of dogma and doctrine.  He finds it right in the fairy tale because the tale comes right from human consciousness.  He is not at heart, however, a dogmatician.  He is an adventurer.  He just happens to discover dogma where ever he goes on his adventures.  Every day he discovers something that has been known for ages.  It is the revelation of revelations to him.  I suppose that Dr. Veith is aiming at the same thing.

But something like this, to me, just has to happen.  I am perhaps not with Chesterton's Freedom of the Will.  These revelations, the stories, the events, the ideas, they come from somewhere.  We did not make them.  We did not even imagine them.  Maybe I am more "deterministic".  Again, we have probably hit a paradox, two flames that burn side by side.  We perceive to invent it, see it, imagine it, produce it.  Yet, a true inspiration comes from a Spirit without, not within.  Chesterton hints at that when he critiques those who follow the "inner light".  There is nothing as despondent and dull as this "inner light".  The Quakers he says are nothing but a "club".

A true inspiration always comes from the truth.  And truth is outside of us.

A doctrine is a truth.  A doctrine and a faith can inspire. An idea is the most powerful thing.  What we seek is the true idea, since there are many bad ones;  and they are abundant, not leading to human happiness.

What bothers me, when as a not so artistically creative person I begin reading and hearing about art, is that it sounds often like this circle Chesterton mentions in the beginning and the end. It is an circle of infinite  points but it is a very small circle.  It seems to be spinning around itself, a lot, actually.  At least half of what you read is about the artist himself or about the artistic process.  In the end art is only about art, a self-flattering, introspective hamster wheel.

Chesterton stresses that the rubber hits the road always at the crossroads, when you have to make a choice and take a road.  In most systems, all roads are either good or bad, and it leaves you where you are:  stuck at the crossroads.  Hardly any system, neither Eastern religion or modern philosophy, will help you make a right choice or take a course of action.  I am afraid that much of what goes as "art" leaves you at the same cross-roads, stuck, going in circles.  As Veith says, the imagination needs to be redeemed and baptized, otherwise it will turn into another idol.

We make a little art and then we bow down to it.

We make a little discussion and then we bow down to it.  What smart people we are. Or even, what fools we are in the great tradition of the great prophets and philosophers.

I know only one thing and this is my song:  Christ crucified for me and you.  We don't find him in the myths, in the fairy tales, in our art.  He came to us from outside.  We love him with our lives as he loved us with his. We don't even quite find him in Chesterton's musings.  His thinking does not take him as far as justification.  And this is the very thing that moves me to faith.




Chesterton makes the point that Western, or Christian saints are always looking out.  Their eyes are wide open.  But Eastern mystics are always looking in, eyes closed. This is why Christianity has always worked at transforming the world, while Eastern thought does not go there.  (Stuck at cross-roads.  It's all good, or else, all evil.  Nothing really matters anyhow.  What is real?  Anything?)






This is just always the question:  does peace come from within or from without.  Eyes open.  Eyes closed.  Whom will we have:  the Christ or the Buddha.

The Buddha sits there, contemplating compassion, all by himself over there.  What will he be like when he rises?  Will he do the world good?  Christ is always in relationship, even within the Godhead, even asking questions within it:  Why have you forsaken me?  Is there no other way?

The Buddha accepts everything.

We do, too, when we say "Your will be done."  But this is not resignation.  It is an honoring of God, even after valiant struggle.  And Christ struggled, too.

Art, perhaps, is supposed to be a struggle, lead us into struggle.

Alright.  I'll give it that.

A temporary struggle, though, not an eternal struggle, not a never-ending struggle. In the end, peace comes from outside of us. Extra Nos.

Lecture Notes 2 / Veith

Christian Imagination and Apologetics

(My notes from lecture by Dr. G. Veith.  March 2014.  Video to be posted to internet, hopefully.)

It is currently being said that people believe in nothing whatsoever.  Not only this, they are also skeptical  about reason. -- This is, among other things, a failure of the imagination.  People are unable to imagine a spiritual reality.

In enjoying a piece, as we did from Hildegard von Bingen, we note a yearning for goodness, a yearning for the virtuous, the beauty of the virtues.   There is such a thing as moral beauty.  There is repugnance of evil. -- Now we often portray the opposite.

This is a problem for apologetics. We are to imagine "eternal life", and unseen realm, eternity, God, but we can't imagine such a being.  These are mysteries.

A mystery is not something to be solved by getting back to the intellect.  It is not something for us to "figure out." A mystery opens up the imagination and sends it reeling.

The opposite is boredom--a lifeless, mechanistic universe, where nothing satisfies.

It is the task of art to "re-enchant" the world, so that we see that there is mystery in it.

The church needs re-enchanting.  It is the place where supernatural gifts are given.  The apologetic task is to change the bleak and negative outlook.  Reason, also, needs to be re-enchanted.  It is something glorious.  There is a rational basis for Christianity.  There is also an emotional basis, as emotional experiences reach people.

Again, the "imagination" is often neglected. It has a lot of potential. The imagination is an important way to reach people with the Gospel.

In the 20th century, rationalism's appealed to reason was the focus.  But you can give all the answers and it seems that none of them have impact on people.  For example, he lent out C.S. Lewis' books to a young woman and all she could say was "But he uses sexist language."  -- In post-modern times even reason is minimized.

Emotionalism can be used by promising happiness through pop-psychology or prosperity gospel.  But what about suffering and sickness?  When it strikes there is disillusionment and a fall from faith.  Obviously, there is no God after all.

The Will can be used to replace the intellect.  It becomes important whether or not a choice was involved.  You chose what to believe.  You have a private reality.  What happens, though, is that the private reality conflicts with the actual reality.  You can end with despair.

T.S.Eliot, was THE modernist artist.  There is a "dissociation of sensibility", of thinking and feeling.  Thinking, feeling and imagination are going in all different directions.  Thinking and feeling are seen as opposites.  But John Donne feels his thoughts and thinks his feelings.

But in the Christian faith there is a Wholeness.  When T.S.Eliot embraced the orthodox Christian faith, it pushed his style further and further, centered on the Image, evocative images, orchestrated together, cultivating the imagination.  (e.g. "April is the cruelest month.")

C.S. Lewis also appeals to imagination.  When he speaks about the choice between Lord, liar, lunatic, he gives a logical alternative but with lots of imagination.  He is very descriptive.  ("Poached egg...")  He appeals to the will, and the fact that it needs to make a choice, but he connects to us by means of the imagination.

In a variety of writers we can find a baptized imagination.  There is dazzling fantasy.  Lewis himself began finding what he yearned for in imaginative Christian writers.  He also had been speaking with Tolkien, who explained to him that in Christianity the myths had become fact.  We do have to come back to the facts.

Today, we can engage and bring people along.  Their imagination can be baptized.

Again, defamiliarizing can make us pay attention. All of a sudden, we are paying attention. Some of the art defamiliarizes the message of Christianity; it does not seem the same old thing and we miss how mind-blowing the stories really are.  We get beyond the associations so that the matter is now seen in its full potency.  The Chronicles of Narnia defamiliarize the gospel.  We bypass reverence and piety.  Things can be seen in a fresh way, awakening the imagination to the transcendent, breaking open the mind to realities beyond, to mystery, to the things we cannot understand, to supernatural grace.

It has been labeled "escapism".

Eliot works in modernist idiom.  Hemingway, Joyce go into the human psyche... but not making something up.

Tolkien wrote an essay on Fairy tales, to help get a glimpse of something beyond those prison walls.  The idea is to make Christianity "strange."

Our world deadens desire and people don't know what they are missing.  Presenting the faith convincingly is aimed at opening this desire, a yearning for something more.

Reason needs rescuing, too.  Christianity gives us the range and the wholeness.

Some people hate religion.  They have a deeply flawed picture, which is a function of the imagination.  For example, they say "What kind of God can will and allow all this suffering.  And what kind of God, kills his son;  this is child-abuse..."  We have here a situation where God is imagined as above the suffering, beyond it.  This would be a deist picture, or Muslim.  But imagine the God who enters this world.  We have the incarnation.  The central image is the cross.  He took evil into himself.  He become sin for us.  This is the central aspect of atonement.  Isaiah:  "He has borne our griefs and sorrows."

Atheism has an imagination problem.  Atheist imagination has been tried.  Someone died and the body rotted in the grave, all the molecules go on... -- It is not very successful.

Instead of man with the beard we might talk about God being infinite, in the infinite spaces of the cosmos.  He does not know why Christians do not do more Pascal [?].   People could imagine different things in terns of the incarnation and the infinite.

Lecture Notes: Christianity, Imagination and the Arts / 1

Lecture Notes:  Gene Veith on the Imagination

Edmonton, March 2014
Taken down and summarized by me, Brigitte.
The video will be available on-line, at some point.

Cognition is most commonly discussed in terms of the mind and feelings.  Others want to bring in the will, emphasizing our choosing and moral agency.  However, the imagination, has been neglected in relation to speaking about cognition.  The imagination is the ability to picture things in the mind.

With this imagination we are able to make present things that happened in the past, are current or in the future.  We can picture events that have not happened yet.  We are able to conjure things up by the power of the mind.  They can be daydreams, memories, revelries, the reliving of an experience.  It is really quite incredible.  It can help us with planning and goal setting.

The imagination has been neglected because we have associated with special people, as if regular people did not have any.  But NO.  The imagination may be more prevalent overall with all of us than the intellect.  Imagination takes up more of our lives.  Much of what goes on in the mind is imagination.  Also when we speak to others we often appeal to their imagination.  We address the imagination of the audience.

This is precisely the point where Luther picks up against the iconoclasts.  This very thing brought him out of seclusion on the Wartburg.  When we read the Bible, we are always forming mental images.  We are always picturing it.  This is the basis of the defense of images.  If we are forming images in the mind, why can we not look at art?  Art comes from the imagination.  The iconoclasts are wrong.

Art and the imagination is often marginalized or glamorized.  But no. The liberal arts have freed human creativity.  It comes from the creative part of the mind. It contributes to free people. They do not exist primarily for financial rewards.  It is not servile in this way.  It is free.

The mechanical arts and physical labor also involve creativity, but fine arts are seen to exist for their own sake. This is a focus of this present conference “Christianity and the Fine Arts.”  We plan, make and create things.

Art addresses all the parts of the cognition.  It addressed the intellect:  “What does it mean”, etc. It addresses the will.  “What will be the moral response?”  But also:  “What is it doing to me?”  The imagination sinks things deep, deep into the heart, interacting with our personal identity and our social identity.  Our worldview interacts with what we imagine.  It acts as a lens.  What we believe shapes what we imagine.  And the reverse also happens.  The books we read, the movies we watch... all have a profound influence on us.  What we take in can make us more compassionate, increase our empathy.  It can also hurt us and increase our anxieties and worries. Only one thing can really happen, at most, in the end, but in our imagination we see all the possible outcomes and can worry about everything.  It can lead to paralysis. We imagine things and react with fear and misery. 

In Genesis, with the account of Noah, we hear that wickedness had greatly increased and that the imagination of man’s heart was wicked continually.  We have such a thing as an evil imagination.  Jesus talks about this in the Sermon on the Mount.  It is an offense to be angry, to despise and to hate your neighbor.  This is the soul’s state of a murderer.  We are responsible for this.  It is sin.  He makes it clear.  Then there is the lustful fantasy...

The Gospel also repairs our inner lives.  It redeems also our imagination.

There was the idolatry on the Aeropagus.  We are God’s offspring, but not like the image.  God makes us.  We don’t make him from our imagination. He is not ours to control and manipulate.

Ideologies are false idols.  We want to get our own way.

Neither is art going to save you.  The sooner you realize it, the better for you, artist.  Isaiah speaks about the craftsman who with his skill fashions a “god”.  He makes it with his hand and then prays to it “Deliver me!”  Artists can come to this point.  But it leads to despair and even suicide at the height of artistic achievement.  This is a danger for the artist.  The sooner he realizes the danger, the better.

Christ redeems the imagination, and also the tangible. Christ is God as human being.  Redemption by Christ is also for the tangible.  Somehow he took this to the cross.  The atonement is physical.  The sacraments are physical. 

Bread.

Wine.

Simple water.

To proclaim. To reach us. To apply to us.  He gives us his Word.--Reading is the best exercise of the imagination. It is a wonderful training for forming the images oneself---stories, parables, descriptions, symbols, visions.

 

In addition, God ordained the art that went into the tabernacle, and calls by name the artist who was to make it.  This is not just given to anyone.  He was filled with the Spirit of God, with skill, intelligence, knowledge of craftsmanship.

There is so much art in the church.  The Christian imagination is so big.  Christianity has expressed itself in any possible style that ever came along. Singing is practiced more in church than anywhere else.  There is the liturgically rich language.  There are the rich gestures.  There is the full range of emotions:  sorrow, joy, recognition of evil and goodness, law and gospel.  This can all nurture you and the imagination.

If, on the contrary, all you are taking in is nihilistic, it is going to make you a nihilist.  If you are going to take in the hateful, it will make you hateful, if you don’t watch it, if you are not careful.

A great thing about art is that it can make us notice things we normally neglect.  It can defamiliarize our experience.  

Familiarity can lead to boredom.  It can go so far that we care about nothing and no one.  Our marriage can die.   It can be a hellish condition. – Art can counter that.  Art can break through that. It can make us aware of our world, our relationships and ourselves.  It can help us bring out the capacity to love.  We may learn to weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh.  There is a healthy spiritual discipline.  It is the vocation of the artist to always love the neighbor. He does not practice his vocation to corrupt the neighbor.

There is great freedom in the Gospel.  Art can revive faith, compassion and love. 

How are things

Dear Blog:

I have a week off work...

The reading of Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" is almost completed.  The snail's pace I can afford right now is suitable to this booki, since there are so many beautiful and interesting things in it.  Chesterton is forever spying out a mystery, picking up clues and finishing with a surprise.  His life is an endless adventure even in relation to what we consider most mundane.  He's a funny and sweet guy, as well as a lion tamer of all the wild and woolly ideas out there.

The image of the "lion tamer" is fitting.  Chesterton introduces it when he talks about the beginner who first gets inflamed with an idea or ideology;  he is like a tea teetotaler on his first drink gone to his head.  But others deal with ideas like a "lion tamer".  I would suggest we can say that he is such a man.  He brings them all to heel and obey and into the right place. He is in control.




Secondly, I want to say that I squeezed in two lectures by Dr. Gene Veith when he was in Edmonton last weekend.  His talks dealt with "Christianity and the Arts and the Imagination", also in relationship to Christian Apologetics.

A summary of these lectures, by moi, will be the next post, probably by Monday.  That's the plan.

Dr. GeneVeith blogs here:    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/
Also find his excellent books on amazon.com.

Everything he writes is timely and profound, as well as deeply Christian in the Lutheran tradition, carefully distinguishing Law and Gospel, always Christ and cross-centered; excellent stuff.  He is also a very kind man and deeply in awe of the mysteries of God; -- no mere dogmatician here.  He also is a lion tamer and in love with life in the right way.

Both he and Chesterton can help us see things straight, intellectually, emotionally and imaginatively.