Imagination and Transfiguration

Michael C. Jordan Imagination and Transfiguration The logos may lead, but die imagination is always the crux. Eva T. H. Brann There are many good reasons TO believe that there are serious hindrances to the intellectuaUy and spirituaUy fruitful exercise of the imagination in contemporary Ufe. Madeleine L'Engle draws out this observation by noting that a major and startling moment presented by the Gospels, theTransfiguration, is largely ignored by contemporary Christians, probably, she speculates,"because we are afraid": We are afraid of theTransfiguration for much the same reason that people are afraid that theatre is a "lie," diat a story isn't "true," diat art is somehow immoral, carnal and not spiritual.1 Such fear, surely, derives from our basic distrust of the imagination 's ability to convey something other than projections of our own desires. We distrust and so fail to recognize the mediating Logos 1:1 1997 146 Logos function of the imagination as it extends our perceptual and responsive powers beyond the limited range required for successful functioning in our practical activities. The depiction oftheTransfiguration in the gospels ofMatthew, Mark, and Luke, serves well as an exemplar of the indispensability ofthe imagination in our effort to encounter the mystery ofthe divinity of Jesus Christ, and serves also as a model of the nature and importance of the power of the imagination itself. The term "transfiguration" (metemorphôthê, "he was transfigured") in Matthew and Mark (but not in Luke) points to the central action ofimagination, the action ofgrasping one subject in two essentially different states simultaneously, in this case by witnessing the metamorphosis from one state to another, in a manner that illuminates our understanding ofthe subject.The theophanic moment of the transfiguration takes place when the divinity of Jesus radiates from and through his human form, so that we encounter a visible manifestation of the glory of the Lord, a concept developed profoundly as the basis of the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar.2 It would be fair to say also that the transfiguration carries us to the roots ofmetaphor in imagination, and can be conveyed only through figurative language: "and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light,"in Matthew's gospel. The gospel accounts of the transfiguration demand of us a great and integral exercise ofthe imagination, and ifthese texts have lost their resonance in much contemporary Christian experience, as L'Engle suggests they have, one cause is arguably the inadequacy of our attenuated power ofimagination. The opinion that we suffer from some general attenuation of the power of imagination probably does not go far enough to capture the particular difficulty of the contemporary situation in this regard. A bolder argument can be made that the contemporary intellectual condition in general terms suffers from an overt hostility toward the imagination, that we in fact suffer from a rejec- Imagination and Transfiguration tion ofthe category ofthe aesthetic in which contemplative vision empowered by the imagination sets before us a horizon within which our full capacity as human persons can unfold. This rejection has been studied insightfully from several surprisingly different directions in recent years, so that we can glance briefly at the problem as it shows itselfin a theological context, in a philosophical context, and in the anti-metaphysical context of postmodernist thought. In Seeing the Form, von Balthasar devotes a long introduction to tracing what he calls the "elimination ofaesthetics from theology" in both a Protestant and Catholic version ofthat elimination. "The word 'aesthetic' automatically flows from the pens of both Protestant and Catholic writers when they want to describe an attitude which, in the last analysis, they find to be frivolous, merely curious and self-indulgent,"von Balthasar observes, while he goes on to note also that writers who advocate an "aesthetic world-view" regard that which is Christian as destructive of a true aesthetic stance toward life.3 Von Balthasar identifies as the fundamental deficiency of a Protestant aesthetics a deeply flawed concept ofbeauty: "The assumption throughout is that the world of the beautiful belongs originally to man, and that it is he who determines its content and boundaries."4 Beauty, according to this view...