The Christian Imagination

William Dyrness

There is creation in the eye.
—William Wordsworth

A few years ago at the Carnegie International Exhibition in New York, French conceptualist artist Christian Boltanski mounted an installation in the form of a basement room. There were dozens of shelves lined with identical plain paper boxes, each bearing the name of one of the artists who had appeared in one of the previous fifty Carnegie exhibits. There they were—the famous and the forgotten, the dead and the living—all lined up together.

Boltanski’s exhibit displays the irony bedeviling contemporary artists. In striving so intently for individuality and novelty, they have become indistinguishable—at least to an incredulous public. While they assert their radical independence from society, they end up conforming to rigid standards of what counts as creative—the quality that Robert Hughes has called the shock of the new. But the very fact that this wry comment on modern art appeared in a major exhibition indicates that things are changing. As Boltanski implies, the very values which sustained modernism and created the avant-garde are being called into question. These and many other indicators suggest we are entering uncharted territory in the history of art, something that has come to be called postmodernism.

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona has defined this period as the “the visualization of the new figuralism within the context of a religious sensibility and with the allusion to earlier work.” In contrast to an imagination that sought the minimal or most novel statement, artists today seek to reconnect with the world, the past, and most importantly, with the religious quest that throughout its history art has embodied. Many examples could be given of all three of these connections, but let me here quote one of the major artists of the 1980s, Julian Schnabel:

Duccio and Giotto were painting in a society in which there was actually faith in God. People had religious experiences in front of paintings. The painters were connecting people to something bigger than life, something bigger than their individual existences. I think people still have religious experiences in front of paintings. The only difference today is that the religion isn’t organized or prescribed—it’s consciousness. To get religion now is to become conscious, to feel those human feelings.

We might debate the romantic conceit that medieval believers had religious experiences in front of paintings, but we can readily agree that without these feelings of connection “to something bigger than life,” art has no meaning and creativity becomes impossible. But can consciousness become a suitable substitute for the role that religion played in art?

As Suzi Gablik has argued in her provocative book Has Modernism Failed?, if anything goes, genuine innovation becomes impossible. We might put matters this way: If I have only me and my vision of the world, I have no leverage, no footing to make any statement of significance that will affect others. And so lacking any leverage artists see their work like Sisyphus: they roll the rock up the hill, and just as it reaches the top they are condemned to watch it roll back down.

Art is about becoming conscious of human feelings, Schnabel believes. To speak of artistic consciousness is another way of speaking about the imagination of the artist. Just here, I am going to argue, the Christian artist has something important to offer. Christians bring a perspective that offers a new angle of vision at just the moment the world longs for a deeper level of consciousness—what goes these days under the name of spirituality. But as Schnabel’s quote implies, the modern artist sometimes lacks the imagination to put human consciousness into any larger framework. But what is this thing we call imagination? And what in particular might a Christian imagination contribute to the work of the artist?

Imagination shapes our world. David Hume and John Locke tried to tell us more than two hundred years ago that this process was entirely passive. We opened our eyes and all the objects in the world implanted their images on our mind and gave us our fixed fund of ideas. Thinking then was simply the process of sorting out the ideas that accumulated in our mind. Ever since another philosopher however, Immanuel Kant, we have been persuaded that our imagination plays a more creative role in our seeing and thinking. It is now clear to us that every image is dependent on some particular point of view. In fact there would be no human world at all, in the broadest sense of that concept, if our imagination did not interpret our present experience in the light of the past and future, or in relation to what is physically absent. This creative faculty not only enables us to relate the present to the past, but it allows us to actually project ourselves into other places and times.

But imagination also gives us the power to create a world that does not exist. It is not by accident that fantasy and dreaming have always been closely related to art. For these faculties open windows in our everyday world and show us other dimensions and depths that delight or disturb us. Notice how deep feelings are always associated with great works of art. Samuel Coleridge helped us understand that imagination is not a matter of form only, but of form endowed with universal feelings as well as profound thought. So what is new in the world created for us by the artist is not primarily the landscape—this is often very familiar—but the emotional impact that is expressed. As a result the limits of our experience are pushed back and we “see” something for the first time. An image becomes a window that opens onto new worlds.

Speaking as a Christian, I do not imply that art can really transform me or my world. The best artists and aestheticians know this. Dr. Albert Rothenberg, about whom I will have more to say presently, concluded a study of aesthetics by admitting that while creativity engages “healthy” processes, and “while working in creative areas is gratifying, it doesn’t change your life.” We may, in other words, dream of another life, imagine another world, but dreaming alone cannot make it so. We must still live in the sometimes sordid or painful circumstances that we are in; we must bear the consequences of the mistakes we—and others around us—have made and will continue to make.

But here is where the Christian faith decisively determines our understanding of creativity. For in the biblical account it is God who is the absolutely creative one, who shaped the world in the beginning, and who intervened decisively in the life and death of Jesus Christ and has empowered his people through the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the teaching of Scripture, moreover, that in the death and resurrection of Christ something was altered in the creative order that has opened up new worlds of human possibility. Theologians call this event redemption, and it is important that we understand exactly what this means—for I believe it provides the key to the Christian imagination. Redemption is the divine process whereby the created order is restored and renewed according to the original creative purpose of God. More precisely, in Jeremy Begbie’s words, it is the revelation of the triune God’s “reconstitution of humanity’s [or we might say the creature’s] life into communion with himself through the life of Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.” The New Testament sees the potential that is now opened up for mankind as something so astonishing that it dares call what Christ has done a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). Moreover, it is clear that this new order will one day include the whole universe in its purview (Eph. 1:10). To accomplish this, of course, God will have to intervene one final time to finish what was begun with Christ’s death and resurrection. But clearly this new reality is already present in the world—the Resurrection itself and the gift of the Holy Spirit are evidences for this—and we can share in this transforming reality by repentance and faith in Christ. People dream of changing the world; in Christ God gives us the model and motive for such change.

How then do we specify the contour of a Christian imagination? We have granted first that imagination and its emotive power are not illusions but facts which function every day of our lives, and function in a particular way in artistic creation. Second, we saw that the fundamental source of change and renewal in the created order relates not to artistic creation, but to the progressive renewing work of God in history, climaxing in the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, which one day will lead to a new heaven and earth. We will want to go further and specify that applying redemption for the Christian artist involves a process of seeing the world in which we live in the light of—as it is illuminated by—the events of God’s renewing work.

I.

Let me now speak of the work of the Christian artist under three words that might define the contours of the Christian imagination. The first word is vision. We have noted already that one of the roles art plays is to open windows in our experience and show us other worlds. That is, imagination functions in artists by allowing them to transcend their everyday world and see something unique in and beyond this world. This imagination, or image-forming faculty, involves a particular way of “seeing” things that puts them in a broader and deeper context. This involves both detaching things from their ordinary settings and attaching—or reforming—them in new and striking ways. In art in particular, as Mary Warnock puts it, “Both artist and spectator have to detach themselves from the world in order to think of certain objects in the world in a new way, as signifying something else.” In other words this process of detachment and reattachment is at the heart of the artist’s ability to make something into a symbol or a metaphor.

The best artists have always demonstrated this particular gift of detachment and reattachment. Consider this example from Arthur Waley’s translation of T’ao Ch’ien, a Chinese poet who died in A.D. 427:

I built my hut in a zone of human habitation.
Yet near me there sounds no noise of horse or coach;
Would you know how that is possible?
A heart that is distant creates a wilderness around it.
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.

Without leaving his world, this fourth-century Chinese poet is able to “see” another world. Without losing sight of his setting—indeed his description of it is deeply moving—he is able to detach himself from it so that he can create a critical distance from what he is describing. He refers to this capacity as having a “distant heart,” and—this is the crucial point—this “distant heart” is what gives the picture of his actual world its depth and pathos.

William Wordsworth, the nineteenth-century English poet, gives another example of this function of art in this famous section from “Tintern Abbey”:

... Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky....
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration.

Though dwelling in the midst of “lonely rooms” or the “din of towns and cities” he is able to detach himself from this and reexperience these “sensations sweet” which were no longer present. Notice something else about this use of the imagination. These forms of beauty which were no longer literally present have become so charged that they impact the whole person—they are “felt in the blood and felt along the heart.” This implies that the symbolic reattachment can become a powerful motive for change.

Between these two examples there is an important difference, of course. For the Chinese poet the meaning is found within—there in the depth of things “there lies a deep meaning” which words fail to capture—while for Wordsworth the meaning is located somewhere else (it is an “absent form of beauty”). But the imagination for T’ao Ch’ien and Wordsworth has facilitated both the detachment from the commonplace and the reconnection with something else which is believed to be more real.

What we are describing here as vision then is an imaginative process—a detachment from the order of things we see before us under the influence of a larger and more compelling image of things, and then a reattachment under the controlling influence of that other image. When we reflect on the biblical record with this process in mind we find that something like this is central to God’s revelation of himself. The biblical record is charged with unsettling images that disrupt and move us. In fact, in the Old Testament, prophets were called literally “seers of visions,” and an important purpose of their vision was to detach the Israelites from the fallen habits which controlled them and to reattach them to an alternative world, which in Scripture is called the Kingdom of God. The prophet Joel, for example, “sees” that in the latter days (when the Kingdom becomes visible) that God promises to “pour out My spirit on all flesh”:

Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams
and your young men shall see visions.

The New Testament implies that in some mysterious way, by our participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, we can already experience those latter days which Joel imagined, but that doing so necessitates a fundamental dislocation from the established order of things. The Apostle Peter, in fact, explicitly quotes these words in connection with the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2. The earthshaking reality of the infusion of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts and fruit of that infusion, has become the larger image that reconnects us with the world around us —which is seen again and in a new way as the creation of God. As in the earlier examples, this larger reattachment—what we are calling vision—controls our view of what is, literally, before our eyes. But in the biblical account—unlike the other examples we have looked at—what the imagination sees, and therefore what shapes our lives, is a matter of eternal significance.

But what in particular is to be the content of the dreams and visions that our old men and children will see? The New Testament gives us some hints in its description of the people who call Christ their Lord. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul says:

If you have been raised with Christ seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.... Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Any deep reflection on this deceptively simple passage reveals the possibility of imagining another way of being human than any of us have experienced before. This act of imagination is critical to the process whereby we detach ourselves from (“put to death” v. 5) what Paul here calls “earthly,” and reattach ourselves to (clothe ourselves with, v. 12) the higher view of things that is the new creation. This new creation gives the Christian artist the imaginative leverage to see our world differently, and, by God’s grace, even to remake it in the image of this higher reality.

In the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, the Apostle John receives a vision that goes beyond these hints to shower us with a series of visions of the future. Try to imagine a world where:

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun shall not strike them nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Or imagine this city:

Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There shall no more be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall worship him; they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

These two examples could be multiplied; they show us that the Christian artist is not lacking for a vision of the life we yearn to live and the world we long to see, of the ultimate and final reconnection with God’s purposes.

II.

But, alas, we do not see this life and this world. Most of the time we do not see healing, we see the pain and suffering of someone near us; we do not see fullness, we see hunger; we do not see forgiveness, we see vengeance and bitterness. This brings me to the second word I wish to discuss: reality.

Whatever the novelty of the world artists dream of, the raw materials of their dreams must be the real world in which they live. For the human artist there is no question of creating as God created the world, ex nihilo (out of nothing). The artist must begin with what is actual in order to create what is imaginary. This is true in the first place on the most basic level of the materials that are used. No matter how great the artist, he or she must buy paint and canvas at the local supplier or choose words and tones from a common human stock.

But beyond this an artist must begin on the normal level of human experience. In fact, if you had to describe what is significant about, say, the art of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, or Anselm Kiefer you would have to begin with their strong sense of ordinariness; an old woman, a family of peasants eating a common meal, even an old pair of shoes or a broken plate can be the subject of a masterpiece. But this is true only if, in and through this reality, something extraordinary is communicated. That is, though these artists begin with the ordinary they are able to remake it after the image of their vision of reality. No doubt Henri Matisse knew how sad and tragic life often is, but he chose to focus on its brightness and its color in his famous series of cutouts. It is as though he has taken our fleeting moments of delight, and magnified them into overwhelming images of joy and simplicity. This is his vision.

Successful art then is that which is able to fuse a vision of what might be, or in some fundamental sense what ought to be, onto a keen sense of what really is. In recognizing the creative capacity of the imagination, Samuel Coleridge spoke of the imagination’s ability to fuse opposites together into a single image. Recently in a scientific study of creativity, Dr. Albert Rothenberg, whom I mentioned earlier, has confirmed the nature and importance of this process. In his study, Rothenberg has sought to isolate the essential elements of human creativity. What is there about artists that makes them able to produce something unique? The results of his almost fifteen years of original research was published in 1980 by the University of Chicago Press as The Emerging Goddess. In this book he isolates two processes which he calls the building blocks of creativity. The first he calls “Janusian” and defines it as the ability to conceive of two or more opposite abstractions simultaneously. The blending of life and death in still lifes (called in French “dead nature”); the light and dark of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro; the pop and classic images of pop art—all show the ability to pursue two kinds of images at the same time. The second related process is the ability to “actively conceive [of] two or more discrete entities occupying the same space.” This process he calls “homospatial thinking.”

As a way of showing the importance of such a process, Rothenberg divided a number of art students into two groups. To both groups he showed two slides and then asked them to paint their impressions of the slides in the form of a pastel painting. To one group the two slides were shown side by side on the screen; for the other group the two slides were superimposed over one another to give a single image. An independent panel of experts were then asked to judge the creativity of the two groups of paintings that resulted. The judges rated as significantly more creative the paintings done by the group that had seen the superimposed slides.

So creativity has something to do with seeing two images and being able to put them together into one picture and into one space. In terms of our argument, the creative person is one who has a vision of an alternative or deeper world, a keen eye for what is, and the imagination to blend these factors into a single perspective.

To understand how this may apply to the Christian artist let us briefly consider Aristotle’s classic discussion of drama in his Poetics. There he defined tragedy as the imitation of action in the form of action. That is, the genius of a play is its dramatic movement. So important is this movement, in fact, that even the character of the players must be subsidiary to it. Any reader of stories understands the boredom that results when the development of character is allowed to obscure the movement of the plot. This action then must reproduce what is possible on the basis of our human experience. Interestingly for the Christian, Aristotle explains this further by saying that what has happened in history is credible, thus what God has done with Israel and in Christ can be one standard of possible action. Moreover, the movement of the play must have a particular plot or unity of action. This usually involves cumulative development involving a person and events combined with some reversal invoking fear or pity. But what is significant for our purposes is that all the elements of the play—prologue, episode, exode and choric song—must make a single whole, “one action.” That is, though there is reversal and surprise—a rich person brought low, an unknown one made famous—all the events of the play together make a single image—they are fused.

We are now in a position to tie these remarks together and show their relevance for the Christian imagination. The artist must have some vision of what might be, indeed of what all the world longs for. We have noted that the biblical revelation of God’s desire for the world provides an ample stock of this kind of vision. But the artist cannot live in that world because, as the Apostle John says, “It does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3:2). So we must have insight into the way things are in the mundane world, even if we do not allow ourselves to be captive to this reality (remember the detachment that is necessary). We cannot spare ourselves the time or trouble of knowing the pain and sorrow (as well as the joy) of our neighbors; we dare not erect whitewashed walls (either literally or figuratively) around our poor neighborhoods. This is our world, we are a product of it and, more importantly, in some inscrutable way we are responsible for it. We cannot live without our dreams, but we dare not allow them to obscure our view of what is before our eyes. For reality that is hidden waits for us in ambush.

III.

But now we must ask: how are vision and reality related? If all we had were these two elements—what is and what might be—we would be frustrated rather than creative. We have been suggesting that the Christian imagination is one that is able to take these two opposing realities and bring them together into a single image and a single action.

Can this happen? Beyond the specific examples that we are able to point to in the history of art, I would like to suggest a single reason for its possibility, which rests in the third word I want to emphasize: hope. In the New Testament, hope is one of the great Christian virtues that is placed alongside faith and love. The reason that it is given such importance is that hope takes faith seriously enough to put it into practice as love. It fuses the future that God promises his people with the sordid present that we must live in, and sees the one in terms of the other. It takes God at his word and expects—insists on—the fulfillment of his promises.

The importance of this element for artists is all too easy to illustrate. A friend of mine who is an artist and a Christian once described to me the situation in his art school, located in the western United States. In painting class many of his classmates would sit for hours, even days, in front of their empty canvases trying to begin. There seemed to be nothing large or compelling enough to motivate them to paint. Perhaps their sense of reality and its anguish overshadowed any vision they might have had. In any case they lacked all hope and therefore all motivation.

Dr. Rothenberg’s homospatial thinking involved placing two discrete entities in the same physical space. Because the Christian knows that her vision of the future is as real and palpable as her experience of reality, she is able to put the two together. But notice that she does this not by a sleight of hand of creativity, but because her hope has already convinced her that these images belong together. This is because redemption is not in the first instance a matter of some other world, but of this world which God created and endowed with his eternal purposes. It was this world that Christ came to save, it is our history that has been transmuted by the glory of resurrection, and it is here in my experience that the power of death has actually been broken (though Christians have sometimes not acted accordingly, perhaps because they did not believe strongly enough). The Bible is very clear that God has only one history in mind, and we are working on it with him. And though there is great reversal in this history, featured in those marvelous words forgiveness or repentance, it all together makes only one action, one plot. This gives perspective to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s wonderful description of the artist as a “worker in fittingness.”

Let us think concretely what this might mean for the Christian artist. He or she will have to begin with their own city, their own Jerusalem, and their experiences there, or the experiences that brought them there. They will have to see this world as it is, but they must also be able to detach themselves from it and see it as God sees it and wills it (for remember that we believe this is the operative reality). They will see and feel the turmoil of their own inner-city neighborhoods and remember the loving community God intends for humanity. Then they will seek to bring these images together. As in the paintings of Joel Sheesley, they will see the anomie of suburbia and recognize in it the excitement of the biblical story. That is, they will see through the world to what it could be and what, God tells us, it will one day become. They will see the neighbor in terms of the child of God they may become. And if they have the gifts, they will manage to put the saint and the sinner, the new Jerusalem and their own Los Angeles, together into a single image. Like Rembrandt they will be able to see a supper of seventeenth-century peasants in terms of the magical supper of Jesus with his disciples at Emmaus; like Georges Rouault they will be able to see the prostitutes in the red-light district in terms of God’s purposes in creating Eve.

The image and voices that result will leave no doubt in anyone’s mind as to their origin. They will be authentic pictures and tones echoing the melody of everyday life. They will make our neighbors smile or sigh by their familiarity. But they will never idealize or romanticize. For they must fix the neighbors’ hearts in the truth of what is there, even as they throb with the hint of what might be there. These friends must leave wondering whether the world might not be like this after all and turn away hoping desperately that it is.

I would like to believe that Christian artists can play a transformative role by the imagination they bring to their work. The real question people are asking is: Can you imagine another world? Christian art not only insists, as does our evangelism, that the answer to this question is “yes,” but it also shows this answer. Christian artists like Ed Knippers, Joel Sheesley, and many others featured in the pages of this journal testify to the presence of a Christian imagination. But much remains to be done in this image-saturated world. Anthropologist Victor Turner has argued that ritual practices can play a transformative role as “transforming performance” and become the generating source of culture. It is clear to us that not only our neighbors, but our culture, is in desperate need of the touch of God. For those of us who serve the creating and sustaining Christ, can we shrink from supposing that our Christian imagination and the Christian practice it spawns might be a source of renewal not only in our churches, but beyond in the world for which Christ died?

Visit William Dyrness, Image Artist of the Month for June '01

Issue #15 • Fall 1996