of art as making, an ongoing creative act.
As you might imagine, the third term proved the trickiest. After all, the first two words establish a trajectory, lines of convergence. What might the common endpoint be? It didn’t take us long to set aside “spirituality,” not only because it is a term so watered down and anodyne as to have become meaningless, but also because it denied art’s cognitive power and threatened to strap it back into the harness again, reducing art to therapy.
We settled on “mystery,” though we’re aware that to some ears it might sound like little more than mystification. But in the past half-century Flannery O’Connor and a number of leading modern philosophers and theologians rescued the concept of mystery from near oblivion, demonstrating that it has deep roots in nearly all of the world’s religious traditions.
What appealed to us was that mystery simultaneously conveys an adumbration of transcendence—Rudolph Otto’s mysterium tremendum—and a form of knowing. The Greek mysterion derives from a word meaning “to shut” or “to close,” but in most of the ancient religions one could undergo a series of rituals and practices that would, in time, nudge the door open just enough to allow in a little light.
Thus mystery lies in the borderland between the knowable and the unknowable. “For we know in part,” as Saint Paul put it. Through the glass, darkly.
It would be easy (and lazy) to simply say that mystery is suprarational and leave it at that. But that does a disservice to reason, which is just another way of saying that we have an inbuilt desire for the world to make sense. Mystery thus lies at the intersection where reason, intuition, and imagination meet and only the both/and language of paradox seems capable of uniting everything that otherwise seems hopelessly either/or. We are body and soul, bound and free, fallen and godlike.
In Real Presences the critic George Steiner likened this place of mystery to Holy Saturday, another emblem of in-betweenness, after the crucifixion but before the resurrection:
But ours is a long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savor of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?
In some ways, mystery is perhaps the boldest term, the one most out of touch with our times. It is true that secular artists and writers regularly speak of navigating the uncertainties and ambiguities in the world. But in their embrace of post-Enlightenment thought, they tacitly accept various determinisms that attempt to explain reality with reference to biology, psychology, sociology, or any of the modernist replacements for ultimate reality. Most secular writers and artists simply live with the contradiction and avoid dealing with it. Though there occasionally arise writers like David Foster Wallace who are more open and anguished about these conflicts, a tendency toward evasion and complacency remains the norm.
At the same time it is no exaggeration to say that much of the contemporary hostility toward mystery comes from those who enthusiastically embrace religion. The relentless literalism and pragmatism of the fundamentalist stem from a fear of mystery, of the ambiguity of living on Holy Saturday. In the decades since Image was founded there have been salutary changes among believers who have awakened to the severe limitations of politics and polemics and embraced the need to make culture, not war. But there is still a long, long way to go.
In the preface to my first collection of Image essays, Intruding upon the Timeless, I focused largely on one aspect of the journal’s mission: the ambition to prove that the encounter between art and faith was far from extinct, that it continued in our own time and all over the globe. That desire to find a place at the table in the larger cultural conversation was, indeed, central to the founding of the journal. The goal was not to engage secularism and fundamentalism in a new culture war, but to demonstrate that an ancient and still vital alternative tradition remains worthy of engagement.
More than a quarter century into the experiment, I think it’s fair to say that we’re only just beginning that conversation.
But it’s also fair to say that those of us who started the journal sensed in a dim and inchoate way that we were after something larger than a place at the table. At some level we realized that placing art and faith in dialogue would produce powerful resonances.
It’s turned out to be one hell of a tuning fork. Each of those resonances is really an analogy—a comparison that, while acknowledging differences, still finds illuminating resemblances. For example, what might the literary device known as ambiguity have to say about the life of faith? Is tragedy compatible with the ways that Western religions imagine the deity? How might reading Scripture influence the way we read novels, or paintings for that matter?
Art and faith use narrative, language, image, and symbol like probes sent out to take readings and return with reports of meaning. They share a need to initiate acts of making and discovery that, far from knowing in advance what they will encounter, must proceed in fear and trembling.
Analogy is a complex subject. In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas considers whether poetic analogy can tell us anything true about God, given the utter disparity between human and divine minds:
The science of poetry is about things which because of their deficiency of truth cannot be laid hold of by reason. Hence reason has to be drawn off to the side by means of certain similitudes. But then, theology is also about things which lie beyond reason. Thus the symbolic method is common to both, since neither is accommodated [to human reason].
The specific question that Aquinas grapples with is the way in which Scripture employs metaphors—which are, after all, analogies. He concludes that:
the beam of divine revelation is not extinguished by the sense imagery that veils it; its truth does not flicker out; because the minds of those to whom the revelation is given are not allowed to remain arrested by the images but are lifted up to their meaning.
I take these quotations from Denis Donoghue’s dense but rewarding book Metaphor. There he considers the famous definition of metaphor by I. A. Richards as something divided into “tenor” and “vehicle.” For example, in Shakespeare’s phrase “all the world’s a stage,” world is the tenor and stage is the vehicle. The best metaphors, Donoghue suggests, set up a tension of likeness and unlikeness between tenor and vehicle: “Metaphor is the mutual relation of tenor and vehicle, a relation achieved by holding the two simultaneously in one’s mind.”
Donoghue notes that in the Christian tradition some thinkers seemed to believe that the vehicle takes over and extinguishes the tenor, as in those theologians who argued that the New Testament made the Old Testament obsolete and irrelevant. But he goes on to show that the deepest and widest tradition in the church rejected this form of reductionism, cherishing both terms equally. He cites Erich Auerbach, who points out in Mimesis that Tertullian spoke for the majority of theologians:
He [Tertullian] was definitely hostile to spiritualism and refused to consider the Old Testament as mere allegory; according to him, it had real, literal meaning throughout, and even where there was figural prophecy, the figure had just as much historical reality as what it prophesied. The prophetic figure, he believed, is a concrete historical fact, and it is fulfilled by concrete historical facts.
For Auerbach, figurative language “establishes a connection between two
