Gregory Wolfe does the most recent Think podcast at Cardus on "The Wound of Beauty". I love this piece.
Greg talks about the nature of knowledge, as it was understood in the early medieval period, resting on three pillars: beauty, faith and reason. The traditional corresponding fields of inquiry are: imagination, goodness and truth. But - unlike in my thinking - one does not prefigure the next, until ultimately we are left with reason. Allow me to explain: linear thinkers such as myself suffer from a tendency to over simplify processes. Thus, we think of faith as preceding reason (reason within the bounds of religion) - if faith is properly grounded, reason is oriented correctly and can thus function as needed. Faith is a pre-requisite in this picture, but not necessarily continuously in need of attention. Like building a house, I've thought of faith as a foundation that once in place, can be somewhat taken for granted (I am caricaturing my own thinking here for the point of emphasis).
This concept of faith does not even work in the postie cannon. Faith in this setting becomes a leap of faith - an act of human imagination - which we must continuously sustain, on which we predicate all subsequent reasonable inquiry. Thus my own religious conception of faith falls short of what is offered by more cosmopolitan philosophy. But the real critical difference is not merely between my rediscovery of faith as being continuously sustained (surely the Ignatian practices I cherish emphasize this daily), but that in the postie philosophy the root of faith is the human imagination - the self. In the Christian picture imagination, faith and reason are all rooted in the person of God, who - I was reminded Sunday at an excellent Canadian Reformed service - alone, by His Holy Spirit, is capable of rendering faith in the hearts of human kind.
Yet how important imagination is in this rendering! Surely the Spirit does not cultivate faith within in dull, abstract statements of belief - as though all of life were a philosophers contest. No, instead the Spirit uses both faith and reason (yes!), but ultimately also imagination with which to capture our hearts and minds.
The academic and policy process, I worry, anchors itself too much on mere statements of faith and practices of reason. How can beauty and imagination reenter the process of cultivating knowledge and wisdom within and without?
Monday, March 30, 2009
Beauty and Imagination
Posted by Adunare at 9:15 AM
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3 comments:
This makes me think of a talk Al Wolters did at Redeemer a while ago in which he spoke of the different ways God reveals himself or is spoken of in the prophets, particularly as a mother. It seems to me in much of the Old Testament that when God is named or names himself, it is an imaginative and indeed truly creative process.
On a bit of a different note but still pertaining to Greg Wolfe's lecture, Annie Dillard in "Holy the Firm" writes this: "Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split." A poetic observation that seems to me must come from somewhere beyond the self.
My ruminations on a good article about a good lecture. So much goodness!
Or this from a friend after hearing of my apartment's chaotic state: every item in your home carries a piece of God's character in it. Try picking up some of the things you've thrown on the ground and asking what they say to you of God.
This is possibly why cleaning my house with my wife frustrates her so much, because I get distracted by thinking about each object and asking such questions. Though I have caught her doing the same thing.
After our stuff was nearly all burned on our move out east, and when we were sorting through what could be salvaged and what had to be thrown away, we had similar moments of epiphany: the hardest thing, I think, for my wife was throwing out her soot-stained wedding shoes. Sometimes the absence of items from a home can also carry pieces of God's character in that they are remembered much more vividly than if they were still in a box in the closet.
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