I’m a philosopher. We can’t think our way out of this mess. I'm throwing in my lot with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters.
What does it look like to bear witness to the truth in a way that is a tractor beam of the heart rather than a conqueror of the intellect? To write with allure rather than acuity? Writing that is revelatory not because it discloses but because it draws—pulling, enticing, inviting souls that are feeling their way in the dark to grab hold of the hand of grace? I have the sneaky suspicion this looks more like poetry than philosophy, that such work is accomplished more by novelists than theologians. ...
I’ve abandoned all hope that we can think our way out of the mess we’ve made of the world. The pathology that besets us in this cultural moment is a failure of imagination, specifically the failure to imagine the other as neighbor. Empathy is ultimately a feat of the imagination, and arguments are no therapy for a failed, shriveled imagination. It will be the arts that resuscitate the imagination.
So I’m back to Proust and literature. If love alone is credible, literature is truer than philosophy. Which is also why I left my post as editor in chief of Comment magazine and assumed my role as editor in chief of Image journal, a community of writers and artists bearing witness at the intersection of art, faith, and mystery. In the spirit of tikkun olam, Judaism’s endeavor to repair the world, I’m throwing in my lot with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters. While Plato would exile them from his ideal city, these artists are the unacknowledged legislators of the city of God.
“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.” This insight from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead has never left me since I first read it. Indeed, the Rev. John Ames, narrator of the novel, looms large in my change of mind. Along with the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and the country priest in Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, Ames is the literary embodiment of a pastoral relation to truth.
There are layers to this: it’s not so much that I learned new information from this fictional minister, but that Robinson’s invention was more true for me than all my philosophical disquisitions. Her art found a way to say love; her words found a mode of incarnating the grace at the heart of the gospel. The novel, I was realizing, is a better match for the mysteries of mercy embodied in the crucified one now risen.
Somehow this is poignantly captured for me in this passage from Gilead, in which Ames, anticipating his death, writes to his young son:
I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
The mystery, of course, is that it is precisely the novelist who has found the words. She has found them and sculpted them into a world that now captivates us. The novelist’s prose is its own poetry of allure, akin to Augustine’s “chain of the heart,” drawing us, pulling us, to imagine this world once again as what it is: “a hurtling planet,” as the poet Rod Jellema puts it, “swung from a thread / of light and saved by nothing but grace.”
“Lovers are the ones who know most about God,” von Balthasar writes; “the theologian must listen to them.” Such listening best happens, I’ve concluded, in art. God’s profligate grace for prodigals both whispers and shouts in Rembrandt. God’s mystery radiates in the Provençal light of Van Gogh’s painting (and echoes in Julian Schnabel’s film about Vincent, At Eternity’s Gate). God’s mercy for us crooked image bearers is witnessed in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison. A longing for God’s justice is the fire that fuels Coltrane’s Love Supreme and even the prodigal passion of James Baldwin. No textbook on practical theology could ever rival the searing picture of the priest’s calling, and humanity’s complexity, in Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Such art doesn’t try to change our mind, doesn’t try to convince us, but rather effects a subtle conversion of the imagination. I need to see differently before I’ll ever think differently.
There’s a fascinating observation in Oliver O’Donovan’s seminal work The Desire of the Nations that suggests an analogy. Commenting on the societal and systemic effects of Christianity on Western political life, he notes that there were “two frontiers within the Gentile mission: the church addressed society, and it addressed rulers. Its success with the first was the basis for its great confidence in confronting the second.” If Christianity gradually came to make a dent on the institutions of political life, transforming the very dynamics of rule, it was because “Christ has conquered the rulers from below, by drawing their subjects out from under their authority.”
This notion of conquering from below resonates with a philosopher in a unique way. After millennia, it remains hard to shake the baseline Platonic picture of the human person in which reason rules the passions and emotions. The rational person is ruled from above, as it were—something on which philosophers have agreed from Plato through Kant. That’s why changing people, changing society, was always taken to be an endeavor of changing people’s minds—to convert them from above.
I’m skeptical (and the behavioral economists will back me up). Instead, I think we will convert people from below, from the imagination up. Philosophy doesn’t “speak” imagination. The logician speaks a tongue that’s foreign to the heart. Poetry and literature and painting are a glossolalia that the imagination hears in its own language. And in our imagining, we may learn how to be human again, learn how to be empathetic and live with one another, just to the extent that we see one another again, in all our fractured complexity and mixed motives and dogged hopes.
