God and the Imagination

Paul Mariani

The following essay was presented on August 10, 1996 as the keynote address at the second annual Glen Workshop: A Milton Center Writing Conference, which was co-sponsored by Image. Dr. Mariani served as dean of the week-long conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

HOW SEDUCTIVE the promptings of the gnostic imagination for the artist: the old temptation to think one sees the world as God sees it. It’s tempting to think of such a radical displacement of the divine as a peculiarly American heresy, Emerson being its headwater, archangel and high priest, but we have no monopoly on such palace revolutions, as Mallarmé‚ Rilke, and Joyce, among others, remind us.

Still, we Americans do have our own version of this desire to be at the still point of the revolving circle. Here is Wallace Stevens, a poet who bumped his head often enough against the glass pane of the mystery, a mortal as eager to punch through to the mystery as ever Melville’s Ahab was, the executive eager to read tomorrow’s Wall Street numbers today, though at least Stevens had the humility to mock his desire to hold the world on his nose like some circus seal twirling a ball:

He held the world upon his nose
And this-a-way he gave a fling.

His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi—
And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

But as he reached the end of a lifetime’s preoccupation with the insistencies of the symbolist imagination, Stevens reapproached the mystery of existence by attempting to empty himself of his own central importance. His new goal: not meaning, finally, he realized, since definitions always remained elusive and accidental, but merely being in the midst of a Being vastly other than himself:

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

In their context these late lines of Stevens constitute something like an act of self-humbling before the Sublime. And yet even here the linguistic counters remain slippery, the situation more complicated than one might think at first, for Stevens’s words imply that it is still the human mind which imagines and which must therefore give existence to God. Having shifted back and forth all his life between the poles of the imagination and reality, Stevens offers a final axiom. It is one which begins as all modernist axioms do: ironically, in this instance with a subtle qualifier and an ambiguous we: “We say God and the imagination are one.”

This is a philosophical position Stevens seems to have been long in arriving at. “Let us say,” he suggests, “that God and the imagination are in fact one. In the very act of affirming the two to be one, a light is lit, an order established, a single candle set blazing against the encroaching evening. It is the light, let us say, of Genesis, the same light therefore that emanates from the Mind of God. But it is also the light of the human imagination, an imaginative space, sustained by God himself, who (even if God is only imagined) underwrites this light and gives it ground and authority. Having arrived at this place, construct though it may be, it will be enough to find oneself in the company of one’s Beloved, even if the Beloved is finally no more than a reflection of oneself.”

Voilà! Stevens has managed to create out of nothing a palpable imaginative space, an interiority without material dimensions, replete with its own achieved and accomplished music. And in truth, in a world of Heisenbergian uncertainties and shifting star masses, it may be enough for the dizzying, ever-shifting merry-go-round of the Faustian mind simply to slow down and let itself come to rest, at least for the moment.

Notice too that Stevens’s article of faith might satisfy the veriest skeptic, since his mode of proceeding still gives precedence to the human imagination. There is, after all, a conditional to this divinely infused space, one which resides in those linguistic counters which initiate the argument: “We say the imagination and God are one.” This is the clairvoyant eye, the central mind of the artist, which leads us on to assume—like Walt Whitman, Stevens’s other great precursor—what the writer’s mind assumes, in a willing suspension of disbelief. We say, Stevens tells us, but it is an argument built as much on old myopias and on exhaustion as much as on desire.

Consider, too, Rainer Maria Rilke’s massive imaginative displacements. Here, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, is the opening movement of Rilke’s magnificent Duino Elegies, in which Rilke summons the necessary angel of the imagination. Since Rilke’s angel has the dazzling power and beauty to confront the very imagination which created it, we are in a universe very much like Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan, realizing for the first time that he has a voice of his own, refuses to form part of the choir of heavenly praise and decides to sing now only for himself, even if this means he will be master merely of the anti-world we call Hell. Now consider Rilke confronting the angel of the self, summoned from the depths of his own soul:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

But if Rilke’s imagination quails before the Sublime, does it then turn back to a world it can understand, a world of people, birds, trees, stones, and landscapes—the world of creation—to sustain it? Rilke, inveterate romantic that he was, would seem to say no. For, having obliterated time and human contact as both messy and transmutable, Rilke understands—as that other word magician, Mallarmé‚before him—that there is for the imperious, all-consuming, and (alas) self-lacerating imagination no place on earth to call home.

“Every angel is terrifying,” Rilke writes,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And yet, alas,
I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,
knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door,
slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling....
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars
took even one step toward us: our own heart, beating
higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?

Just who is this new angel of the imagination, summoned from the tombs at Karnak and the Koran as much as from the Bible? Whatever else this angel is, it is most certainly a powerful composite, rising from the pool of Narcissus, heady in its power, seductive in its beauty, and beyond the limitations of human history. If you listen to it, you will hear it calling you, as it called to Rilke, to give yourself over to an imaginative freedom which will end with the self gazing into the dizzying Abyss of a language cut loose from the Logos and with reference only to its own sound.

It seems axiomatic among many of the major Western writers of the past two centuries that everything should be grist for the imagination. All systems—political, philosophical, and theological—are like so many ruined estates and roofless churches, empty of their former authority, and now there only for the plundering. Even the Bible—The Book—which Matthew Arnold shunted from the domain of the sacred to the literary 150 years ago, is no exception. So Yeats rewrote the story of the Magi, figures of the living dead “in their stiff, painted clothes.” Or later and more boldly rewrote the story of the Annunciation, in which God’s love, as Yeats has the Virgin say, “makes my heart’s blood stop / Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones / And bids my hair stand up.” These biblical scenes are of course familiar territory, but Yeats remakes them into something strange and forbidding, figures more Egyptian than Christian in their monumentality and stiffness, porcelain dolls suddenly come to unblinking life and dwarfing their human counterparts.

In the world of the gnostic imagination, even the Scriptures—especially the Scriptures—are there to be rewritten so that the old Hebrew and Christian “myths,” exhausted now, might be broken up and reconstituted in the hope of revitalizing a drowsy emperor, bored with the “given,” and in endless search of the new. In the hands of a Rilke, a Yeats, a Joyce, a Pound, the single-minded devotion to art means—as one critic recently wrote of Rilke—nothing less than “cannibalizing every basis for human relations,” including religion itself, in order that we might nourish the primary faculty of the aesthetic. Art over all.

It should be no surprise to us this late in the second millennium to find the weight of modern literary and critical tradition on the side of the gnostics, with their championing of self-referentiality and the kind of language play we find among those who call themselves—among other things—deconstructionists of the text. So at least it seems to me, after thirty-five years in the classroom teaching modern and contemporary literature. If there are special cases of orthodoxy of one shade or another in figures like Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, the late John Berryman and the early Robert Lowell, in Walker Percy and Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor, there are against these figures the looming and attractive presences of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé‚Joyce, Conrad, James, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Richard Wright, Pound, Williams, and Hart Crane.

Was it not Keats who spoke so eloquently of the artist’s giving up of the incessant search for that sense of certitude which dogs us all? Better, he thought, to rest in uncertainties, to give over any attempt to follow what he called—disparagingly—the egotistical sublime which he had found in such world orderers as Milton and Wordsworth. What Keats was offering was not God’s self-emptying, which St. Paul describes in his epistles, but an emptying instead of the self so that all other selves—“The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse...and have about them an unchangeable attribute”—might fill that void. Keats’s aesthetic, which would displace both theology and philosophy in favor of the imagination, has for its main attraction the simplifying of the moral dilemma we are all faced with by the simple act of erasing this concern altogether as being of little concern to the artist. But is riding the crest of a perpetual incertitude finally workable? Gerard Manley Hopkins, though his own poetics were shaped by Keats, thought not, and insisted that if Keats had lived long enough he—like most of us—would have arrived at a more balanced position which would have admitted both the philosophical and the moral domain.

“We have borrowed, traded upon, made small change of the reserves of transcendent authority,” the eminent critic George Steiner noted a decade ago in a strategic response to the nay-saying critical climate of our time. “Very few of us have made any return deposit. At its key points of discourse and inference, hermeneutics [the science of meanings and interpretation] and aesthetics in our secular, agnostic civilization are a more or less conscious, a more or less embarrassed act of larceny.” We are like guests at a party who, having eaten our fill, not only fail to thank our host, but act as if there were no host to thank. This essay is a halting attempt to try to pay back part of the debt we owe that Authority.

It has been my own experience to have been fed by a religious and literary tradition which has at times seemed robust and at other times faded and irrelevant. I refer to my sacramental sense of the divine in the tradition with which I am most familiar: Catholic Christianity, American style. To feed this felt presence (and pressure) in my own life, I have come over the years to turn back to the Scriptures as to a wellhead, and—since I share this world with others—to participate in the communal liturgy I have known since childhood which we call the Eucharist. These are the food on which I must continually nourish myself, branch grafted to vine. There is also the fact that this I who is writing has wished his enemies harm, acted both the bully and the fool, while also trying to learn from failure and make amends. Considering the price millions of other like-minded witnesses have paid, mine has been a light-enough yoke in return for what the Scriptures tell us God has freely offered us.

Writing to the small Christian community at Corinth, Paul spoke of a great mystery: that he and they were growing “brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect.” He meant the image of the glorified Christ as a real presence moving through the community, turning them year by year into more incandescent flames. The Jesuit paleontologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin had much the same idea in mind when he spoke of all things rising through time towards the end point of the Spirit.

It is a great mystery which these figures separated by two thousand years share, but it is also true that real progress in living the spiritual life—and Christianity in particular—often comes slowly and painfully. I don’t mean that there aren’t moments in each of our lives filled with a sort of electric clarity and enthusiasm, transformative moments even, when—like Peter—we would happily set up tent and stay where we are and let the traveling circus of the wider world go by. But always, because it is the necessary counterbalance of our human lives, we learn to trek back down the mountain to take up our dailiness and work once more.

Flannery O’Connor, for one, was much taken with the ideas of the Jesuit paleontologist. But if she was fascinated by the concept that we were actually evolving towards a more spiritual nature, and that everything—humanity and nature—was indeed rising towards the Omega point of God, she also understood that things sure were taking their sweet time getting there. So, in the afterword to the anthology Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, Dana Gioia reminds us of the terrible truth that our present century, following in the wake of the so-called Age of Progress, “has tragically demonstrated that moral progress is neither linear nor inevitable.” If the dialectic of history pushes forward, we must never forget that it does so slowly and painfully.

Likewise, those who speak of a Christian imagination often speak of ours as a post-Christian moment, as if the twentieth century had actually left Christianity behind. And yet most of my own life has been spent trying to better understand—like Hopkins and O’Connor before me—the meaning of God’s Incarnation. For if the Good News is really the Good News and God really did enter into human history in human form, if indeed he emptied himself of his Godhead to enter this speck of a planet—in one among some fifty billion galaxies in an ever-expanding universe that makes Galileo’s discoveries look like some preschooler attempting his first shaky alpha—if Jesus Christ actually came as the new prototype to replace the fallen old, emptying himself on the cross so that he might lift not only the human species but all groaning nature after him into a new and more spiritual condition, then where is the evidence of that central event not only in the world but—for me as potential witness—in the work of my own life and in the work of my imagination? For in truth I sometimes find myself by proclivity and education between two worlds, watching under some moonlit sky as two parties progress under two separate tents, Sappho and Horace at one, Dante and Hildegard at the other, while I have danced at neither.

If Christ is who he said he was in his seven great I ams—that is, if he is the Word of God made flesh—then, as the Jesuit scholar and critic William Lynch noted, Christ has turned “the whole order of the old imagination” on its head. Moreover, Christ has done this not by canceling or negating the old, but—as St. Paul understood—by illuminating the things of this world and raising them to a new order. Lynch says of this new order that it is “identical in structure with, but higher in energy than, every form or possibility of the old.”

This sacred energy ought, logically speaking, inhabit everything, from trees and thistles to insects and human beings, and—by extension—our human constructs as well. The new order of the Word should then apply to our own words as well, by which I mean our fictive forms. For if the Incarnation and the Atonement really did occur, in history—as Christians believe, then how does one tap into this transformative reality? How does one know, for instance, when one is in the presence of an enhanced metaphor, much less an enhanced nature? If every artist, by dint of his or her calling, is—as Andrew Greeley maintains—a sacrament maker, “someone who sees the hints of grace in the world and in human life and illumines them for the rest of us,” where is the evidence of that in the world? Moreover, if all true artists participate in the sacramental, then what of the Christian artist who takes that insight and tries to enhance all human transactions, not by erasing nature or remaking it in one’s image, but by seeing the fullness and incredible lightness of God’s real presence in everything?

Consider Hopkins, for whom the real presence of Christ in the sacraments and by analogy in the things of this world was the main reason for his own conversion. Hopkins saw beauty everywhere: in the shadow play of sunlight breaking through trees, in the night stars, in bluebells, even in the complex pattern of ice spray on the slate urinals he was sent one winter day as a Jesuit novice to clean. Conversely, Hopkins could also be deeply distressed by the refusal of humankind to offer adequate thanks to the Creator of all that beauty. As a young priest, he wrote a sermon on the fall of God’s first kingdom. Having thought long and hard on the fallen, wounded world into which he was being sent as God’s messenger, he found himself returning again and again to the question of a fallen creation.

It is Paul himself who is behind much of Hopkins’s thinking on creation, especially on the fallout from the fall itself. “The whole creation,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans,

is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons. It was not for any fault on the part of creation that it was made unable to attain its purpose. It was made so by God; but creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning until now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free.

Paul was aware of how life seems to reach after light, a phenomenon which Hopkins—poet that he was—observed in the outstretched limbs of trees groping heavenward. Another of Paul’s images was aural: nature’s groaning after solace and consolation, a groaning one also hears in the Psalms, in the plainchant of Benedictines and Cistercians at their office, as well as in the existential loneliness of gospel, blues, and country music. This groping after the light is long and difficult, Paul added, which meant we would have to learn a difficult patience, something we as writers have surely had to learn.

“Counter, original, spare, strange.” These words of Gerard Manley Hopkins are the theme of our conference, and point to the qualities which writers in the Judeo-Christian tradition seek as they search for words which will touch the Mystery of the world. Is it that we are writers who happen to be Christian? Or Christians who happen to be writers? Or isn’t it rather that we are both at once, that we are aware of both realities, and must continually heed both pressures, both upwelling streams within us? Which of us, like Hopkins, has not at some point tasted the world in its incredible beauty—in sweet violets, mountain range, sunrise, sunset—knowing all of it somehow to be “charged with the grandeur of God”? The stars, Hopkins wrote, flaring out in the night heavens like “fire-folk sitting in the air... / bright boroughs, the circle citadels.” And dappled things, “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow,” “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,” “finches’ wings,” “silk-sack clouds.”

Despite murder and greed and slanders, how many of us have not experienced at some point a kind of natural goodness in people who by their very being create a “cordial air” (in the words of Hopkins) which seems to nest over everything, the way a “mothering wing” nests over its “bevy of eggs.” A sacred space, as Hopkins put it, “where all were good / To me, God knows, deserving no such thing.” As at the Benedictine Abbey at Weltenburg at a bend on the Danube this past July, on the very spot where a Roman garrison once guarded the river passes against German barbarians, and where the gentle priest made a group of tired strangers welcome with his smile alone, and took us in, and fed us, making all luminous and quieting our tired spirits by his very presence. It is the way we imagine things might be, even ought to be, in the great scheme of things.

But Hopkins knew that things are often not like that. There is something perverse in the way we turn away from such peace, preferring our own restlessness. At moments the eye beholds the might-have-been, only to have it suddenly replaced by harsh dissonance, a turning away or a dimming of possibility, a gesture which adversely affects humankind, and which in turn affects the way humans treat not only each other but nature itself.

So, Hopkins saw, nature could only appeal to us mutely to treat it more kindly, that we might stop our fouling of rivers, air, and soil by dumping waste—everything from raw sewage pumped into the Hudson to radioactive effluents into the North Sea, the Siberian tundra, and the coral reefs of once-splendid Caribbean islands. Looking from his window at the landscape outside his room at Ribblesdale—a landscape unchanged from the Bronze Age down to his own day, when strip mining tore deep brows into the hills—Hopkins could only cry out on behalf of the dumb earth:

And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man? Ah, the heir
To his own self bent so bound, so tied to his turn,
To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare
And none reck of world after, this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.

Who else, if not ourselves, can speak for the earth, an earth which after all means something, means giving praise back to the Author of all beauty, the very praise, Hopkins noted, which Satan had refused with his great non serviam. Consider humankind, so turned in on itself, so dogged, so gasping, so often not seeing anything beyond its own concerns, so willing to eat up as much of the world as it can, depleting its oils and ores and rain forests, its lakes and rivers and oceans, thinking neither of its own children nor of their children’s children, and surely not of the world after this one, in both of which accountings will surely be made. Something of this, Hopkins wrote, one might make out in the deep furrows and brows etched into the land itself, as if the face of nature, mute and misshapen, could only turn her eyes toward the raging, inchoate figure bent on destroying her.

How little it takes, really, to destroy the inherent symmetry and beauty of a thing, what Hopkins called a thing’s “inscape.” A gouge across an oak tabletop, poor restoration work with shoddy materials, graffiti on the face of a public building, the limbs of Binsey poplars which had danced for generations along a river suddenly lopped and bundled like so many amputated arms: beauty long in the making gone in a single afternoon.

Trees. Consider a passage from Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” A family of six travels south on vacation, though by day’s end all will have died at the hands of a psychopath named The Misfit. The central figure in the story is the grandmother, a silly person not unlike most of us at moments, narrow-minded, selfish, self-absorbed. As they drive south toward their destination with fate, she is at pains to point out what she takes to be

interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.... They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island.

“The meanest of them sparkled.” O’Connor’s syntax here points to the trees, “full of silver-white sunlight,” but it also refers to each of us. Each of us, O’Connor reminds us, including even this undistinguished family, are “full of silver-white sunlight” and—given the chance—are capable, like Dante’s souls ascending sparklike into the night sky, of giving off light.

The same point is made at the end of the story. Just before her death, the grandmother looks up into The Misfit’s face at the twisted features of a wounded child who, realizing that he has resolutely turned from the Light, looks as if he were about to cry. “Why you’re one of my babies,” the grandmother says, reaching out to the man who has ordered her family’s executions and who now wears her dead son’s sport shirt. “You’re one of my own children.” As she touches him, The Misfit fires three bullets into her chest. Damned like Satan by his own free will, he is still the story’s most astute theologian, and it is he who remarks as he stands over the woman’s body that she “would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Here’s O’Connor again, in another short story called “The Enduring Chill.” A callow young intellectual has left New York City to return home to the rural South to die. As he steps off the train he sees his mother, and behind her the vast dawn sky. The sky is “a chill gray,” with a

startling white-gold sun, like some strange potentate from the east...rising beyond the black woods which surrounded Timberboro. It cast a strange light over the single block of one-story brick and wooden shacks. [He] felt that he was about to witness a majestic transformation, that the flat of roofs might at any moment turn into the mounting turrets of some exotic temple for a god he didn’t know. The illusion lasted only a moment before his attention was drawn back to his mother.

The imagery here prefigures the water stain on the ceiling of the young man’s bedroom, a stain which has been there as long as he can remember. The water stain has the form of “a fierce bird with spread wings” with an icicle in its beak. O’Connor’s cold young intellectual is possessed of that peculiar, gruel-thin liberal sensibility that O’Connor so distrusted, a sensibility made up of ignorance and overweening pride and which makes him believe he is really too good for rural Georgia and for the uneducated mother who has raised him by herself. But after he has been cut down to size by a no-nonsense, crusty, old, hard-of-hearing Jesuit who has never even heard of James Joyce much less understood the subtleties of Ulysses—in short, after the young man has been shorn of his illusions—he is at last ready to see himself as he is.

To be stripped of one’s illusions is not necessarily, of course, to come to a fresh sense of God. That revelation will have to come in due course if it is to come at all. But at least the young man is ready to see that Something has been patiently waiting there in his room all these years for the old illusions to be stripped away, so that there can be room for the Spirit to enter. “The old life in him was exhausted,” O’Connor writes.

He awaited the coming of the new. It was then that he felt the beginning of a chill, a chill so peculiar, so light, that it was like a warm ripple across a deeper sea of cold. His breath came short. The fierce bird which through the years of his childhood and the days of his illness had been poised over his head, waiting mysteriously, appeared all at once to be in motion.... He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.

O’Connor’s descent of the Spirit is different from Hopkins’s image of the dove descending “over the bent world” and brooding “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Different too from Eliot’s dark dove descending in “Little Gidding” over war-ravaged London in the shape of a German Stuka dive-bomber dropping on its target, breaking the air

With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
. . Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
. . To be redeemed from fire by fire.

But whether figured as brooding dove or tongue of fire or implacable Paraclete, the Spirit, like Proteus, will take on the shape it chooses in order to meet us. This is metaphor chiming with a reality beyond the self. And each of these writers has found a metaphor to best represent that reality.

There are of course other forms which the sacramental imagination can use. Consider the fictive structures of Reynolds Price, Walker Percy, Andre Dubus, Doris Betts, or Ron Hansen. Hansen, who perhaps comes closest to the crossover between poetry and fiction, is particularly instructive in this regard. In his novel Mariette in Ecstasy, Hansen presents a young nun living in a convent in upstate New York at the turn of the century who finds herself suddenly visited with the stigmata. As her doubting physician father and her religious community of sisters attempt to deal with the disturbing phenomenon of Christ’s lovescape imprinted in the young woman’s hands, Hansen’s prose, sinewy and delicate by turns, likewise reveals another reality: the incredible miracle of a sacramental existence unfolding everywhere around one in all seasons and times, though we may be too self-bent and preoccupied to give it a local habitation and a name.

Here is a passage from Mariette in Ecstasy, Whitmanesque in its breadth, in which the quotidian is suddenly alchemized into a verb-charged dynamic stasis by the simple act of the convent bells summoning all within hearing distance to a moment of prayer in the midst of their daily rounds. Laborare est orare, the ancient communal maxim goes: To work is to pray:

White sunlight and a wide green hayfield that languidly undulates under the wind. Eight sisters in gray habits surge through high timothy grass that suddenly folds against the ringing blades of their scythes. Mother Céline stoops and shocks the hay with twine and sun-pinked hands.
. . . Four novices stand taciturnly at a great scullery table plucking tan feathers from twenty wild quail shot by a Catholic men’s club just yesterday. Horseflies are alighting and tasting the skins, or tracing signatures in the hot air....
. . . [A nun] is still huffing breathlessly in the campanile as she grins up at the pigeons shuffling along the rafters and frantically jerking their heads toward her. She gets a handful of sweet-corn kernels from her gray habit’s pocket and scatters them on the flooring, and the pigeons heavily flap down and trundle around her sandals.

I could name other writers who share this sense of a world larger than ourselves; their writing provides a field in which something like a sacramental imagination is clearly at play. One thinks of the poetry of Whitman and Williams and Philip Levine—a poetry filled with the things of this world, each proclaiming in his own way the splendid luminosity of things. Or one thinks of Dubus, Percy, Merton and O’Connor, as well as Hopkins, Berryman, and swatches of Wilbur and Lowell, where something more—perhaps a sense of the sacramentality of things, a sense of the abiding presence of God residing in the things of this world—is also made manifest. Dante and Chaucer certainly had this sense, and even the tortured convict Villon, like Baudelaire, could not altogether escape it.

Ours is a fallen literature, John Henry Newman once noted, because we are a fallen people. Still, as Newman’s splendid prose rhythms and images remind us, even a fallen people can be graced with creative insight into a mysterious, awe-filled world they did not create. It is a matter, after all, of raising the quotidian to the level of spirit, of correcting an imbalance by learning to see the Spirit as it lifts everything into the light of that graced imagination of which Paul—taking his clue from an itinerant preacher who walked the Galilean hill country two thousand years ago—spoke so compellingly.

Visit Paul Mariani as Image Artist of the Month for June 2000

Issue #18 • Winter '97-'98