Bearing the Image 1 comments

IN THE ten years since Image began publication we’ve never reflected publicly on our name. Since this issue marks our tenth anniversary, it seems appropriate to revisit the impulse that launched—and named—the journal.

We chose Image for the same reason that anyone selects a good name or title, because it has multiple levels of meaning and connotation, most of which speak directly to our central purpose. Our name alludes not only to the image-making capacity of the artist, but also to the biblical depiction of the God who made man and woman in his own image and likeness. Given our focus on the intersection between art and religious faith—a faith that emerges out of story and symbol, myth and metaphor—Image seemed an obvious choice.

And yet we live in an age that is image-saturated and image-driven: our high-tech media and feverish consumerism constantly threaten to empty images of their resonance and depth, leaving us in the no-man’s-land between cynicism and despair. We’ve come a long way from the culture of the Second Commandment, which recognized the human tendency to turn images into idols, but which also dignified man by depicting him as the image of God-the-Maker. At present, the image is being reduced to a few, second-rate modes—the commercial, the sentimental, the ironic. So, as the millennium approaches, it seems reasonable to ask how our culture’s images might be revitalized.

In his illuminating contribution to the symposium on “The State of the Arts” in this issue, Scott Cairns outlines an aesthetic that sounds a note of hope—a note that we believe has sounded in the pages of Image for the past ten years. Cairns argues that we are experiencing a renaissance of sacramental poetry (though his words apply to all of the arts). The word “sacramental” is bandied about rather vaguely these days, but Cairns’s use of the analogy is precise: a sacrament, he notes, is not merely a symbol or remembrance of something absent, but actually effects what it represents. In Cairns’s words: “The new poetry, a poetry which employs language as agency and power rather than merely as name for another and prior thing, demands that it be read and re-read, and poked, and puzzled over as an event of its own. The new poem is not about a thing; it is a thing.”

Cairns, along with a growing number of writers and scholars, believes that postmodern thought, for all its flaws and dead-ends, has had a salutary effect in shattering many of the brittle certainties of a Christendom that had lost touch with its spiritual roots. Many postmodernists have argued that we cannot really know anything, that we can never experience “presence,” only the “absence” of a meaning that forever eludes us. But Cairns sees good coming out of this postmodern “troubling” because it has encouraged artists to create art that respects the fleeting nature of presence. Sacramental art, with its stress on agency, on artist and audience coming together in an act of joint discovery, enables us to experience presence, if only in what T.S. Eliot called “hints and guesses.” The poet and critic Allen Tate called this aesthetic the “symbolic imagination” and rightly pointed to Dante as one of its greatest exemplars.

It is important, however, that we approach the idea of presence in a paradoxical, rather than a literal, sense. The paradox lies in this: we can experience presence—one could just as easily say grace—when art approximates the leap of faith, when it dares to place us directly inside an act of discovery. The risk of imagination, like the risk of faith, instills fear in those who believe we can only be saved by rational propositions. But the paradoxical truth is that unless we learn how to live in that risk-taking leap of faith, we will lose touch with the meaning of those propositions. Of course, the opposite danger is that when we abandon the concrete particulars—of history or theology or human experience—we float off into a vagueness that lacks an anchor in reality. As I’ve argued elsewhere, religious dogma are not really propositions, but symbolic mysteries. They should neither be explained to death nor left behind as merely “repressive” stumbling blocks. Only when we maintain such a balanced perspective—a perspective I’ve called religious humanism—can we go about the task of renewing our culture.

Art, at its highest pitch, always aspires to a condition of sacramental agency. After a century of secularism, in which art sought to find a grounding in science, whether that be psychology or economics or biology, a growing number of artists in the West are turning back to faith as the proper grounding and analogy for the imagination’s work. Image was founded in order to provide a forum for these artists and writers. Along with our annual conferences, summer workshops, and—we hope—an artists’ colony, Image will continue its mission of renewal.

Over the last ten years Image has received a tremendous amount of support and encouragement. And so I’d like to conclude with a word of thanks: to Harold Fickett and Luci Shaw, who did so much to help bring Image into existence; to Kathy Burrows, for a beautiful, and durable, graphic design; to two outstanding managing editors, Richard Wilkinson and Bill Coleman, who have labored mightily to keep Image alive and well; to our readers (including the hundreds who have written letters of encouragement); to our generous donors; to the writers and artists who have graced our pages; to our board of editorial advisors; to my long-suffering children; and, most of all, to my wife Suzanne, who is not only a first-rate editor, but who has made more sacrifices than anyone on this planet to ensure that Image would reach its tenth birthday.