BASED on the 2022 Cambridge Hulsean Lectures, this short book (c.50,000 words) is a finely argued text that successfully covers a wide range of issues. Imagination is seen at work in ordinary, everyday perception in the interaction between what we suppose ourselves to see and how this is modified and restructured by more social determinants such as wider inherited assumptions and presumed roles. This is to reject the existentialist search for an internal, self-sufficient authenticity, and instead to find “Christian faith . . . as a mode of seeing the world which beholds in that world an unseen depth of goodness, significance and love which we do not make but in which we can participate”.
In the next chapter, the late plays of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett are then used to illustrate how we can be challenged to revise those roles, sometimes in a more explicitly Christian direction, while, in the subsequent chapter, the way in which the visual artist or poet encourages new ways of perceiving (depth perception) is explored, and the parallel drawn with Christian faith in its capacity to “invest that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance”.
In further reflection, however, Wolfe challenges the modern tendency to view such an analysis as a project from inter-world relations. No, she says: direct experience of God is too firmly embedded within the Christian tradition to be altogether abandoned — not that such experience brings certainty. Rather, it is a matter of openness to hope, towards a not fully defined eschaton, as suggested by Shakespeare, Rilke, and Eliot among others. But, for Wolfe, such an idea is most powerfully portrayed in Karen Blixen’s Babette’s Feast, in which the French refugee cook transforms the lives of the Danish pietists with whom she lives when her splendid feast allows the psalmist’s words (85.10) to become a reality, as mercy and truth meet together.
The brevity and clarity of the book mean that it is likely to be widely used in discussions of the part played by the imagination in Christian faith. Thirty-five colour images assist the argument, mostly well-known paintings, but occasionally illustrations of ambiguity in perception, such as the warped room and the duck-rabbit illusion (also in an amusing cartoon version, fig. 12 and 15). There is also a very full bibliography.
The only point at which I think some readers may have difficulty is with Wolfe’s use of Shakespeare. She is so absorbed in disagreement with the American philosopher Stanley Cavell that she assumes a universal knowledge of the plots of Shakespeare’s plays, which I think unlikely. None the less, there are many other areas where readers may find themselves challenged to move in a somewhat different direction. For example, are roles quite as important in present culture as they once were in earlier centuries? Defining oneself can be more a matter of idiosyncratic preferences. Again, apocalyptic visual images are dismissed as less effective, as static and without development, in contrast to the sense of story and movement offered by related images in novels and music. But is this not to ignore the way in which visual images can also invite a story? It is just that more work in that direction is left to the imagination of spectators, for example in providing a supplicatory role for the Virgin at Christ’s side in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.
My point is not that Wolfe is necessarily wrong on such issues, but only to emphasise the effectiveness of her writing in encouraging readers to reflect on what precisely might be meant by assigning such a position to imagination in creating faith. Indeed, Wolfe’s own metaphors invite just such a response; for she sees theology not as creating solid towers, but boats that we “trust to the sea”, as we travel out into the future.
The Revd Dr David Brown is Emeritus Wardlow Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews.
The Theological Imagination: Perception and interpretation in life, art, and faith
Judith Wolfe
Cambridge University Press £24.99
(978-1-009-51986-1)
Church Times Bookshop £22.49
