Could I visit the Narnia Exhibition & miss Christ?

I must confess I am a bit of a Narnia fan. Naturally, I am really looking forward to visiting the Narnia Exhibition which will be at the Powerhouse museum for the next few months. Whilst preparing for my visit to the exhibition I have visited the promoters website, and it left me slightly confused. The promoters detail a myriad of themes they believe C.S Lewis covers in his novels, they tell of the mythology and his imaginative narrative. Yet not a mention of Lewis' faith, or hint that the Narnia Series is a Christian allegory.  

Cogitating on this apparent oversight, I was reminded of Michael Ward’s article entitled 'C.S Lewis on imagination and story apologetics', which appeared in our last edition of Case Magazine issue #30. 

Ward reminds the reader that C.S Lewis is

………the most influential practitioner of Christian apologetics over the last hundred years. Works such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves, and Surprised by Joy have been read by millions of people round the world……..

Yet as I join the throngs of crowds descending upon the museum to view the exhibition depicting Lewis’ imaginative works, I will be experiencing in person Ward’s proposition that it is indeed Lewis’

…seven Chronicles of Narnia which have been read most widely and exerted the greatest influence.

Michael Wards article analyses imagination, in theory and in practice, and describes how his narratives have influenced countless readers.   The article also suggests

….the Narnia stories reveal Lewis’s personal religion more profoundly than any of his more theological works.

I encourage you to pull out your copy of Case #30 and revisit Dr Michael Wards interesting article which dissects C S Lewis’ fantastic narratives. CASE Associates receive Case magazine 4 times per year as part of their benefits. For blog followers who are yet to be CASE Associates you can sign up HERE or order a single copy HERE. As for me, I will put aside my initial disappointment that the exhibition promoters seem to have ignored an obvious component of 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. I am sure the exhibition will spur on a new generation of C.S Lewis readers and the CASE article reminds me that  

…..these books where his imagination has full scope he presents the Christian faith in a more eloquent and probing way than ever his more straightforward books of apologetics could…..

And with that pleasing thought, I best be off….. I have an exhibition to visit!!!!!

(Details for the Powerhouse and the Exhibition can be found at the links provided) 

The importance of the imagination for flourishing and faith

I write regularly about developing the imagination of children on my blog 'Literacy, Families & Learning' and have written from time to time on the CASE blog about the imagination, play and creativity. This post is a modified version of one I wrote early in 2011. It was based on a book by Anthony Esolen, professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island.  The central thesis of his book - 'Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child' - is that the way we raise, care for and educate our children is increasingly destroying the imaginations and creative capacities of our children. He draws heavily on the writers of classical and modern literature to reinforce his point.

Underlying Esolen's argument is his belief that God made us to imagine and that it is at least partly through our imaginations and longings that we seek him and experience all that he intended for us.

Esolen uses a wonderful cross section of literature, music and even art to make his simple points about the nature of imagination, its ultimate purpose, and the dangers of shutting it down in our children. The writing is ironic in style as the title suggests. At times this seems a little forced but overall, it works powerfully.

His 10 'Methods' that will destroy the imagination of children, bring into focus that which can stifle learning and close down the possibilities for the imaginings of children. Throughout his chapters he argues that if we do shut down children's imaginations, that we also reduce their ability to solve problems, write with voice and effectiveness, and be transformed (or at least shaped) by the language and power of literature.   

Esolen's 10 Methods to destroy the imagination

1. Begin by rearing children almost exclusively indoors - give in to the threats of the outdoors; don't risk allowing them to have unbridled experiences out of our observable space. Lock them up in classes and organised instruction and avoid giving them opportunities to run free.

2. Never allow children to organise their own worlds of exploration of that which is interesting or challenging - replace the spontaneous and child initiated and replace it with 7 days of structured activities controlled by others and a timetable that leaves no scope for exploration, time wasting and contemplation.

3. Don't risk allowing children to explore machines or encounter those who know and use them - privilege safety above all things, cut craftsmen from the child's world, despise practical and craft knowledge, forget about the challenge and fascination of maps, diagrams and the like.

4. Replace fairy tales with clichés and fads - water down stories to remove the evil and violent, look for tales that 'flatten' and homogenise, replace fundamental truths with clichés and ideological manifestos.

Odysseus

5. Denigrate or discard the heroic and patriotic - remove fathers who are heroes, men who are warriors, lose sight of the 'piety' of a place like the Welsh uplands and coal mines of Richard Llewellyn's 'How Green was My Valley'. Ignore the dignity of simple people and their ways.

6. Cut down all heroes to size - don't allow a sentimental admiration of a hero, dismiss courage, beat from our boys any hint of hero worship. Instead grow men 'without chests' who spend hours on violent video games but never rumble in the back yard.

7. Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex - replace the music and tenderness of love in the Odyssey, or the poetry of Stephen Foster for a lost love, with a reduction of love to the mechanics of sex; "reduce eros to the itch of lust or vanity". Replace the first pangs of curiosity of a boy for a girl, or a girl for a boy, with a bombardment of images of what love isn't.

8. Level all distinctions between man and woman - just as individual personalities are washed from our classrooms, so too, reduce all differences of gender, and convince children that boys and girls are just the same.

Paintings at Lascaux (Wiki Commons)

9. Distract the child with the shallow or unreal - fail to encourage the child to hear and sharpen the senses before creating, and abolish solitude and silence. Instead, fill the child's life with the 'noise' of television, video games and other forms of banality. Don't just allow 'noise' to get in the way, but more importantly, allow mental and spiritual interference. Separate the child from the relationship of family, neighbours and friends and place them in after school care, preschools etc.

10. Deny the transcendent - deny the idea of God, ignore the mystery of faith and religion, ensure that unlike the ancients in the caves of Lascaux there is little opportunity to contemplate and create a veritable cathedral born of their imaginings. Do everything possible to erase any opportunity for your child to search out the inscriptions of praise on each human heart.

Summing Up

Esolen has put his finger on something important. He isn't the first person to write about imagination and, as he suggests himself, he's probably not the best-qualified person to do so either. But his book reminds us that imagination is not just a cognitive state to be prodded and used for the banal or even the practical. In fact, it has moral dimensions that can be seen in a biblical anthropology of personhood. A view of the person that sees the ability and desire to imagine as part of God's blueprint for his people.

Esolen also offers a useful social commentary on the tendency to seek the banal rather than that, which is rich and complex. His ironic commentary on approaches to teaching and child rearing that value the tangible and measurable, rather than the whimsical and creative is helpful, although in places a touch too simplistic. One example of this is that in dismissing technology and in rightly pointing to the abuses of gaming and television and their ability to distract from friends, play, exploration etc, he fails to acknowledge that technology can expand the imagination too. Technology can open up a world of new facts that trigger exploration, or offering opportunities to create images, videos and complex texts that expand the imagination.

Some won't like Esolen's ironic style, for there is a danger in its over-use. At times it tends to give the sense that Esolen is trivialising the issues and ignoring complexity and ambiguity.  This might lead some not take Esolen's arguments seriously. This would be a pity for there is much wise advice in this book.  

Esolen offers a timely and beautifully written analysis of pop-culture and a world where we 'flatten' the view of what it means to be men and women, we lose a vital focus on moral centring and values, we accept an impoverished view of childhood, and we replace love for lust, the thirst for the deep with the shallow and flood children's lives with banality instead of richness. This book will have non-Christian detractors, but it will also stimulate discussions concerning the loss of childhood and the place of the imagination not just in life but also in grasping something of the transcendental and an existence beyond this life. As Esolen reminds us:

The imagination opens out not principally to what it knows and finds familiar, but to what it does not know, what it finds strange, half hidden, robed with inaccessible light. The familiar too can be an object of wonder, but not by its familiarity... 

Some Other Practical Posts for Parents and Teachers Interested in the Imagination

1. 'The Importance of Simple Play' (HERE)

2. 'Place, Folklore & Play' (HERE)

3. 'The Role of Adults in Children's Play' (HERE)

4. 'The Dangerous Book for Boys' (HERE)

5. 'Understanding and Developing Creativity' (HERE)

6. Posts on Esolen's book on my daughter's blog (HERE)

7. Raising boys' sights above the gross and the violent (HERE)

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

I write regularly about developing the imagination of children on my blog 'Literacy, Families & Learning' and have written from time to time on the CASE blog about the imagination, play and creativity. A new book by Anthony Esolen has motivated me to post on this topic again. Esolen is professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He has written the book 'Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child'. Esolen's thesis, with which I concur, is that the way we raise, care for and educate our children, is increasingly destroying the imaginations and creative capacities of our children. He writes well, as you'd expect being an English professor, and draws heavily on the writers of classical and modern literature to reinforce his point.

The old alchemists of the early Renaissance sought the secret philosopher's stone, which would, in the right recipe, transform lead into gold. You can only transform gold into lead. This book is written to show you how to do that. The gold is nothing other than the child's imagination, which if it is not gold itself, can still work the miracle of old King Midas. "Nature only provides us with a leaden world," wrote the poet Philip Sidney, "but it is the poet that makes for us a golden one." If we can deaden the imagination, then, we can settle the child down, and make of him that solid, dependable, and inert space-filler in school and, later, a block of the great state pyramid.

Underlying Esolen's thesis is his belief that it is God himself who made us to imagine and that it is at least partly through our imaginations and longings that we seek him and experience all that he intended for us.

Some readers who love language and literature less than I do, will find his constant use of literature, and in particular the classics, distracting and maybe even a little pretentious. But this is his passion and interest and language and literature are major foundations for imagination and creativity. Even as one not educated at school with Homer, Aristotle, Dickens, Chaucer, the poetry of Philip Sidney and the music of Bach, I was swept along by his use of the great texts. Esolen uses a wonderful cross section of literature, music and even art to make his simple points about the nature of imagination, its ultimate purpose, and the dangers of shutting it down in our children. The writing is ironic in style as the title suggests. At times this seems a little forced but overall, for me, it works powerfully.

In my view, as an educator, his 10 'Methods' that will destroy the imagination of children, do bring into focus that which can stifle learning and close down the possibilities for the imaginings of children. As we do this, we also reduce their ability to solve problems, write with voice and effectiveness, and be transformed (or at least shaped) by the language and power of literature.

Esolen's 10 Methods to destroy the imagination

1. Begin by rearing children almost exclusively indoors - give in to the threats of the outdoors, don't risk allowing them to have unbridled experiences out of our observable space. Lock them up in classes and organised instruction and avoid giving them opportunities to run free.

2. Never allow children to organise their own worlds of exploration of that which is interesting or challenging - replace the spontaneous and child initiated and replace it with 7 days of structured activities controlled by others and a timetable that leaves no scope for exploration, time wasting and contemplation.

3. Don't risk allowing children to explore machines or encounter those who know and use them - privilege safety above all things, cut craftsmen from the child's world, despise practical and craft knowledge, forget about the challenge and fascination of maps, diagrams and the like.

4. Replace fairy tales with cliches and fads - water down stories to remove the evil and violent, look for tales that 'flatten' and homogenise, replace fundamental truths with cliches and ideological manifestos.

Odysseus

5. Denigrate or discard the heroic and patriotic - remove fathers who are heroes, men who are warriors, lose sight of the 'piety' of a place like the Welsh uplands and coal mines of Richard Llewellyn's 'How Green was My Valley'. Ignore the dignity of simple people and their ways.

6. Cut down all heroes to size - don't allow a sentimental admiration of a hero, dismiss courage, beat from our boys any hint of hero worship. Instead grow men 'without chests' who spend hours on violent video games but never rumble in the back yard.

7. Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex - replace the music and tenderness of love in the Odyssey, or the poetry of Stephen Foster for a lost love, with a reduction of love to the mechanics of sex, "reduce eros to the itch of lust or vanity". Replace the first pangs of curiosity of a boy for a girl, or a girl for a boy, with a bombardment of images of what love isn't.

8. Level all distinctions between man and woman - just as individual personalities are washed from our classrooms, so too, reduce all differences of gender, and convince children that boys and girls are just the same.

9. Distract the child with the shallow or unreal - fail to encourage the child to hear and sharpen the senses before creating, abolish solitude and silence, fill the child's life with the 'noise' of television, video games and other forms of banality. Don't just give decibels of noise but rather, more importantly, mental and spiritual interference. Separate the child from the relationship of family, neighbours and friends and place them in after school care, preschools etc.

10. Deny the transcendent - deny the idea of God, ignore the mystery of faith and religion, ensure that unlike the ancients in the caves of Lascaux there is little opportunity to contemplate and create a veritable cathedral born of their imaginings. Do everything possible to erase any opportunity for your child to search out the inscriptions of praise on each human heart.

Summing Up

Esolen has put his finger on something important. He isn't the first person to write about imagination and as he suggests himself, he's probably not the best-qualified person to do so either. But his book reminds us that imagination is not just a cognitive state to be prodded and used for the banal or even the practical. In fact, it has moral dimensions that can be seen in a biblical anthropology of personhood. A view of the person that sees the ability and desire to imagine as part of God's blueprint for his people.

Esolen also offers a useful social commentary on the tendency to seek the banal rather than that, which is rich and complex. His ironic commentary on approaches to teaching and child rearing that value the tangible and measurable, rather than the whimsical and creative is helpful, although in places a touch too simplistic. One example of this is that in dismissing technology and in rightly pointing to the abuses of gaming and television and their ability to distract from friends, play, exploration etc, he fails to acknowledge that technology can expand the imagination too. Technology can open up a world of new facts that trigger exploration, or offering opportunities to create images, videos and complex texts that expand the imagination.

Some won't like Esolen's ironic style, for there is a danger in its over-use. At times it tends to give the sense that Esolen is trivialising the issues and ignoring complexity and ambiguity.  This might lead some not take Esolen's arguments seriously. This would be a pity for there is much wise advice in this book.  

Esolen offers a timely and beautifully written analysis of pop-culture and a world where we 'flatten' the view of what it means to be men and women, we lose a vital focus on moral centring and values, we accept an impoverished view of childhood, and we replace love for lust, the thirst for the deep with the shallow and flood children's lives with banality instead of richness. This book will have non-Christian detractors, but it will also stimulate discussions concerning the loss of childhood and the place of the imagination not just in life but also in grasping something of the transcendental and an existence beyond this life. As Esolen reminds us:

The imagination opens out not principally to what it knows and finds familiar, but to what it does not know, what it finds strange, half hidden, robed with inaccessible light. The familiar too can be an object of wonder, but not by its familiarity... 

Some Other Practical Posts for Parents and Teachers Interested in the Imagination

1. 'The Importance of Simple Play' (HERE)

2. 'The Role of Adults in Children's Play' (HERE)

3. 'The Dangerous Book for Boys' (HERE)

4. 'Understanding and Developing Creativity' (HERE)

God and the Artist - Part 2

New College (which established CASE) has an annual public lecture series each year, which I convene. The Lectures are in their 22nd year and are on each evening (2-5 September 2008). Their purpose is to bring together the college residents, University, Church and wider community to discuss significant issues of common concern. This year the theme is God and the Artist: Human creativity in theological perspective and our lecture is Professor Trevor Hart from the University of St Andrews, Scotland.


The second lecture delivered last night was titled"

The ‘heart of man’ and the ‘mind of the maker’: Tolkien and Sayers on imagination and human artistry

This post is my summary of what Professor had to say. While I have tried to faithfully report the summary of the lecture, and present his views (not necessarily mine), and I have used many direct quotes, any inaccuracies are my responsibility not those of Professor Hart.

Sayers work

Last night he focussed our attention on the work of two writers Tolkien and Sayers in his attempt to advance his theology of artistic creativity and imagination. He started his analysis on Sayers with her play “The Zeal of Thy House” that she wrote for the Canterbury Festival in 1937 – a work that was to be a celebration of artists and craftsmen. In her writing of this play centred on the rebuilding of the church’s choir in the late 12th century - and using the French architect William of Sens (chosen to undertake the work) as the protagonist - she “paints a picture of human artistry and craftsmanship as at the very least a spiritual vocation equivalent to others, and at best something much more significant than that.” Much of his discussion centred on a final speech to the audience by the Archangel Michael in “The Zeal of Thy House” and Sayers popular wartime classic “The Mind of the Maker” (1941).


Sayers like others before her used the doctrine of the Trinity as a metaphor to create a conception of the place of the artist relative to their creator. She described the book as ‘three books’ – the ‘idea’ of the book, the ‘energy’ or birth of the idea, and the ‘Power’ or the impact of the work as it is read. This is a work of skilled apologetics that goes much further. Hart suggested that what her work offers is a “distinctive theology of the creation of human beings in the image and likeness of God. To be human, to correspond to God humanly, is above all else to be creative and thereby to ‘image’ God’s won Trinitarian being.” “Creativeness… was for Sayers the secret to the Cosmos, the fundamental pattern of personal existence…to be human according to Sayers was not only to be homo sapiens, but homo faber – man the maker”.

Professor Hart offered a brief and partial critique of the problems with Sayers theology and aesthetics. First, as C.S. Lewis reminder her, “there is an unbridgeable gulf of sorts between God and the world he has made, between the ‘created’ and the ‘uncreated’. He reminded Sayers that any analogies we use to think and speak of God must therefore tremble at the temerity of their own approach to what is finally a holy mystery and must remain so. Second, Sayers picture of God’s eternal Trinitarian being is of a specific sort, (which Hart suggests is probably influenced by St Augustine and Karl Barth); one that does not view the Trinity as three divine ‘persons’ in relation to one another, but aspects or modes of existence of one divine person. Third, Sayers’ premise that the creative act can occur wholly within the mind of the maker is problematic (even for literature), but moreso for music and art. Fourth, Sayers offers, “a highly individualist account overlooking the importance of social and communal factors vital to the facilitation of creativity” - as Nicholas Wolterstorff has reminded us. Finally, it needs to be noted that Sayers’ own rendering of Trinitarian notion of “Idea, Energy and Power’ is developed (as Hart points out) with virtually no reference to Christian Scripture.

Sayers view on Creativity

Before moving to Tolkien Hart finished with an analysis of how Sayers defined the hallmarks of creativity. What does creativity look like? He offered three insights from her work. First, “being creative involves bringing something new into the world God has made, something which was not there before. At the level of the materials used she accepts that there is a finite amount, we don’t add to God’s creation. But at the level of imagination, “she insists that there is no such finite constraint – pattern, form and meaning do not belong to the inventory of the flesh.” For Sayers the artist comes closest to the creation ‘out of nothing’ that the Bible teaches is the prerogative of God himself.

Second, “to be creative is to exercise God-given freedom, refusing to be constrained by the apparent limits of givenness….pushing beyond the thresholds of the familiar….”. It is a freedom within rather from the divinely ordained potentialities and constraints of the world.

Third, “creativity adds value to the world. It enhances and enriches, taking the world as it finds it, and handing it back transformed for the better through a supererogatory surplus of care and attention.”

Tolkien

Professor Hart then turned to Tolkien. Using Tolkien’s literature and writing about literature as backdrop he unpacked Tolkien’s concept of artistry as ‘sub-creation’. Tolkien’s first foray into myth was his work “The Music of the Ainur” in which a recount is given of how God created first a race of angelic beings (the Ainur or Valar) as participants in fashioning of Middle-earth. Unlike the biblical creation myth, “The music of the Ainur” is not just about God’s creativity, but equally ours’. The Ainur are “….‘sub-creators’ not co-creators. There is a subordinate modality of creative action, yet one that is nonetheless, thoroughly creative.” Tolkien suggests that “the ‘many hues’ which adorn the world and render it beautiful….must be refracted through our sub-creative act” for his myth is concerned with human artistry.

Professor Hart suggested, “…human art is in some sense a matter of assisting in our turn, in making our world.” Drawing on Tolkien he suggests that the desire that drives creativity (and which can be corrupted as we see in William of See) is a “sort of insatiability”, but one which has the good and the free flourishing of its object (Tolkien calls this ‘Primary Reality’) as its chief concern. “The artist is no slave to reality, but her lover.” If art is born out of unsatisfied desire it is kindled and sustained by a God-given imagination. For Tolkien, “..to be human is to be (and called to be) creative with respect to God’s world.”

Building on Tolkien’s thesis Professor Hart unpacked the concept of a “secondary” or alternative world (or Sidney’s “Another nature” as discussed in Lecture 1). When authors like me use titles like “Other Worlds: The endless possibilities of literature” what is implied and how does a theology of the arts offer explanatory help. Hart points out that Tolkien does not mean an entirely alternative cosmos (though Middle-earth seems to go close to this), he means instead the particular object or ‘work’ which the artist fashions. Tolkien does not seek to blur the boundaries between reality and unreality. He draws a clear distinction between the “Primary World” and the world of the story, “….something the artist expects us to take for granted.” While being expected to be citizens of the Primary World “…we are expected to permit ourselves to be drawn imaginatively across the threshold between fact and fiction, and to become temporary indwellers of another world….”

Secondary belief is appropriate and expected with respect to a Secondary World “…of which we become, temporarily, citizens by virtue of some sub-creator’s art. The capacity to engender it, indeed, is, for Tolkien, what differentiates art from mere ‘imagination’ at all.”

Hart’s last interesting twist to his explanation of Tolkien’s work comes with his discussion of ownership of the these secondary worlds and secondary belief within them, a point at which there is clear diversion from Sayers. Tolkien had a particular view of the status of an artistic world, he knew that “…he wasn’t the creator of Middle-earth in any absolute sense.” There are many things “…about this literary world and about any work and world of art, about which the artist was and would and would never be in any position to declaim with absolute authority…..the work…always comes to the artist as something given and received, and in one sense, therefore, not ‘created’ by him or her at all.” Readers and observers of art will find all sorts of things in the work that the artist was not aware they had placed within it.


“For the sub-creator, the making of other worlds is no act of defiance or contradiction of the prima divine ‘Let there be…’. On the contrary, the artist’s Secondary Reality enjoys a positive relationship to the Primary Reality which, ordinarily, we indwell, and is always glad to acknowledge its subordinate state.”

Tolkien insists that artistic vision does not seek to supersede our world, but instead seeks to glimpse the richest possibilities latent within the creative vision of God. And he presents an underlying concept. Our art is not so much about things are, but of what they are capable of becoming, and “how things may be and will be when God is finally all in all (this) …is the source of that joy which aesthetic experience grants us. Beauty – genuine beauty – is finally an eschatological phenomenon.” Art “…does not compete with the world but in a profound sense for Tolkien makes the world new.”

The third and final lecture will be presented tonight with the title “Givenness, grace, and gratitude: creation, artistry and eucharist”.

Please note that the full text of the lectures plus MP3 files will be posted by the end of next week.

God and the artist - Part 1

New College (which established CASE) has an annual public lecture series each year which I convene. The Lectures are in their 22nd year and are on each evening (2-5 September 2008). Their purpose is to bring together the college residents, University, Church and wider community to discuss significant issues of common concern. This year the theme is God and the Artist: Human creativity in theological perspective and our lecture is Professor Trevor Hart from the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Last night 200 people gathered at the University of New South Wales (where New College and CASE live) to engage in the first lecture. The title was ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet’: divine copyright and the dangers of ‘strong imagination’.

This post is my summary of what Professor had to say. While I have tried to faithfully report the summary of the lecture, and present his views (not necessarily mine), and I have used many direct quotes, any inaccuracies are my responsibility not those of Professor Hart.

Starting at the beginning

Professor Hart commenced the lecture series with the opening words of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. He reminded us that the Hebrew word translated “created” is “bara’ has an aura of holiness to it, being set aside exclusively for his divine use; “there is and can be no corresponding human analogy to this divine action, because it has to do with God’s unique relationship to the world as the one who, by virtue of his sovereign Lordship, brings a world forth into existence where previously there was not only nothing but no potential for anything.” While there are other words used in the Bible that describe man’s activity of doing and making, none should be confused with God’s creation as encapsulated in the Hebrew word “bara”.

But he suggested that there is a changeability of language that has led to a loss of appreciation of God’s place as creator as against mankind’s creativity. Hart suggested that words are “sticky” and “have the habit of picking up words and associations” – words are used and used again until the initial core connotation is lost.

Hart pointed out that the careless use of the word “creativity” – creative play, creative problem solving, creative accounting etc – is a long way from Genesis and “its sublime vision of ultimate origination”. Interestingly, he made the point that such complaints come primarily from artists, not worried about God’s dignity being lost, but their’s and that of their work. The canons of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are no longer theological but aesthetic.

He argued that to some extent the use of the word “created” was meant to imply that the artist had created “new worlds of meanings to be set alongside those of God”. However, while we can make sense of this even within a Christian framework it lends itself “to other impulses”.

What Hart sets out to do in these lectures is to examine the place of artistic creation. A theology of human artistry – an account “that takes seriously Christian Scripture and Creeds”. Can we hold together talk of human creativity and “God’s unique identity as the originator and gracious giver of being and life to the world”? This he suggests is not a question of if but of how? We need he suggested to disentangle from one another both ‘modalities of creativity’ both of which are to do with God’s relationship to the world, but only one of which incorporates human agency.

Cosmos and cosmetics

Citing Abrams (1954), in the monograph “The mirror and the lamp”, he argued that the most primitive and enduring aesthetic was that of “holding a mirror to the world”, art imitating life, an aesthetic consistent with Plato’s somewhat negative view of art and Aristotle’s more positive view. He used Leonardo da Vinci as an example, who almost 2 millennia later, expressed the view (and demonstrated it) that art should not try to improve on the things of nature. Art in effect was seen as allowing due emphasis to be given to the world God has given us to inhabit. But even in this earliest view of the place of art there was a distortion of the notion of the mirror as artists sought to paint out (so to speak) the “warts, the blemishes and the bulges”. The artist was not just seeking to render a true likeness, but was seeking to add beauty to what they see (e.g. Michelangelo and Rembrandt). Artists were seeking to catch “the best of the thing”. This view reflected the belief that in a sense the artist’s soul was seen as having access to Nature’s blueprint in the mind of God, and their role was to add some cosmetic enhancement, adding value to what they found in nature.

These ideas he suggested were reborn in the Renaissance offering an exalted place to human artistry. By the Renaissance “the artist sits in judgement rather than as a skilled apprentice in the workshop of a divine master”. The desire was not for what God has purposed “but something that improves upon and competes with it.”

Breach of Copyright

In citing Abrams again, Hart suggested that there was then a shift from mimetic notions of art to one that assumed that the illumination of the human mind was essential to the process of “murky reality”. Art was then seen not as a mirror reflecting the light but of shining a lamp on what was observed to illuminate it further. The artist moved from a view of a world naturally rich in beauty and goodness to a world needing to be enriched “by the projections of the human imagination”. This Hart suggested was the source of Kant’s claim that we can only ever experience phenomena as they appear to us rather than as they appear to other creatures or perhaps to God.

Hart suggested that we can see how easy it is to move from the position to “half create” the world to a position of seeing the world us unacceptable and in need of offering an alternative view of Nature. A position that George Steiner suggested reached its height in Modernism where the artist sought to call into being objects and creations as totally unlike nature as possible, “begetting their own creations”. Here the artist is offering a challenge to the givenness of God’s creation and his prerogatives as Creator. It is this Hart suggests that “lies behind an ancient Hebraic nervousness about the imagination”. “Creative imagination, then, paradoxically lies at the core of all that is worst and all that is best in our humanity”.


But modernism is not where we are in 2008. Postmodern aesthetics have been the dominant influence. Hart cites Richard Kearney who observes that artistic imagination is less like a mirror than a labyrinth of mirrors each in turn reflected in “seemingly endless refractive play of light and none standing apart as the apparent source of it all”. Art scavenges its materials from “the sites of prior acts of imaginative construction, pre-owned and part-used serviceable, and fraught with the semantic instability of the merely human.” “If Modernism threatened to supplant the source of aesthetic meaning by usurping the throne of the cosmos, post-modernity does so just as effectively by refusing to bend the knee to any authority whatever, be it human or divine.”

But Hart suggested that any “self-deluded attempts to supplant that Word by instigating new moments of origination cannot succeed”. Such attempts he suggested lead to despairing shadow chasing; a version of the cosmos as “turbulent chaos”. Both Modernism and Postmodernism deny transcendence. He cited George Steiner to point to the folly of such efforts, “art is and must properly be a dialogue with a meaningful presence which does not depend on us for its being”. Steiner goes further to suggest that where God’s presence is no longer tenable and where his absence is no longer a felt and overwhelming weight “that certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.”

Pathologies of the poetic eye

Hart then took the audience back to the 16th century to the work of Shakespeare, and specifically “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Cervantes great novel “Don Quixote”. Both he suggested raise serious questions about the place of the imaginative in human life. Shakespeare in this work both directly (through the plot) and indirectly through its use of comedy and irony, looks at the chaos that is created when the boundaries between reality and artifice are blurred deliberately or accidentally. The play poses the question, are we as humans in danger of confusing the real and the imaginary. Similarly, Hart suggested that Cervantes in the imaginative premises of the novel there is a critical take on the possibility of over-indulgence in the imaginary. Quixote loses his grip on the distinction between reality fiction as he tries to reconfigure his life according to the books that he loves; he transforms the everyday to a knightly quest. The comedy comes from the collision between Quixote’s illusory and real worlds.


Hart suggested that both these works caution against the “vices and devices of the imagination”. Both do this by driving a wedge of irony between imagination and reason, with each leaving us with a sense that the final verdict on imagination is complex. Both texts Hart suggests remind us that the status of reality itself is the subject of dispute and negotiation, and that “every attempt to make sense of the world is finally poetic, a making as well as a finding of sense in the world.”

Hart concluded the lecture by drawing on the work of Sir Phillip Sidney’s “Apologie for Poetrie”. Sidney argued for the development of poetry in which he saw that with the “divine breath of God” the poet could bring forth new things through the work far beyond their capabilities. The artist, far from challenging God can be God’s instrument and faithful servant. Sidney’s understanding of the need to keep man in his rightful place is seen in his unwillingness to use the term ‘creator’ of the human artist at all. The artist is seen as gaining access to the essential character of things, “that which we are capable of coming and should become, the potentiality built into them by God”. Hart paraphrased Sidney to argue that in a sense what the artist sees and represents in his/her work is “not the way the world is now, but the world bathed in the light of eschatological perspective, as, in God’s purposes and the grace of God’s new creation, it can be and finally may be. And the ‘final end’ according to Sidney of such vision is not titillation, nor an Oedipal bid to ‘un-Nature nature’, but to lead and draw us to so high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.”

The lecture generated some good questions and some equally good answers: “Could not modernity also seek to celebrate God?” “What of music, do his ideas extend to music?” etc

Professor Trevor Hart will return to the eschatological theme in lecture three on Thursday, but tomorrow night (3rd September) he will look at the work of Sayers and Tolkien and the light their work shines on the place of the human artist in a theological perspective.

Please note that the full text of the lectures plus MP3 files will be posted by the end of next week.

God and the artist

In an article for the upcoming Case magazine with the theme "God, Creativity and Creators", Professor Trevor Hart challenges readers to "recognise artistic imagination among the greatest gifts of God". He suggests that:

"The artist has not....always been a figure whose contribution to human life has been valued, or towards whom any great appreciation has been shown. On the contrary, imagination in general and ‘creative’ or artistic imagination in particular, has often been treated with great suspicion, not least in Christian circles. The products of human imagining have regularly been viewed as at best a frivolous distraction from serious engagement with things (whether that be scientific, economic, political, religious or some other form of engagement). At worst they have been thought of as a dangerous hindrance to such engagement, weaving a skein of falsehoods that distance us further from truth rather than facilitating any meaningful contact with it." (Trevor Hart, 2008, Case, No. 16, p.9)

Professor Hart will take up this issue as part of his exploration of the theology of the arts and creativity at the annual New College Lectures. It should be a stimulating and thought provoking series of talks.

Trevor Hart is Professor of Divinity and Director of the Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He teaches and publishes in Christian doctrine and systematic theology, with particular interest in the engagement of Christian theology with philosophy and literature. He has been brought to Australia by New College and CASE for the sole purpose of presenting the 2008 New College Lectures.

His series of three lectures is titled God and the Artist: Human creativity in theological perspective.


The details of these free public lectures are as follows:

Tuesday 2 September
The lunatic, the lover and the poet': divine copyright and the dangers of 'strong imagination'

Wednesday 3 September
The 'heart of man' and the 'mind of the maker': Tolkien and Sayers on imagination and human artistry

Thursday 4 September
Givenness, grace, and gratitude: creation, artistry and eucharist

For more information on the lectures and how to RSVP (which is essential) consult the New College website here.