There may be intellects capable of pure “contemplation” but most of us must envision just to think. Plotinus describes an eidetic experience, which means that the mental form is not attributionally transcendent but actually so. We are, for that moment, theophorai, “godbearers,” possessed by immortals. I’ll begin by asking your indulgence for speaking to you [...]
The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself. “A post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche might conceivably show us the [...]
I propose to address the question, how does one survive—and I mean survive as something—in a world that may not? How does one remain sane in a world that is insane; how does one live without fear in a world in which the only certainty is that nothing is certain? As the new year arrives, [...]
If literature is not in any sense a mode of description, then what does it really communicate but feeling? In 1961 the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch published an essay in Encounter entitled, “Against Dryness.” In it, she laments the way in which our “scientific, anti-metaphysical age” has left us with “far too shallow and [...]
Christian humility is clearly what Flannery O'Connor's protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, by George A. Kilcourse, [...]
The “beautiful violence” of Old Masters painting—a magnificence rooted in the study of Light and Dark as technique, as style, but most of all as a symbolic representation of the very essence of life on earth—remains timeless for its sublime understanding of that which for each human soul cannot be explained. “To define art is [...]
What’s “imaginative?” What’s “conservative?” And how does the adjective modify the noun and the noun support its adjective? My first and last care is not politics but education. Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. But education is also inherently imaginative. [...]
The film “Field of Dreams” beautifully portrays in a contemporary idiom the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but even more so, the grand cosmic drama to which that Parable points: that of Paradise lost and Paradise regained. In view of the beginning of baseball season, and as the father of two Little Leaguers, I thought [...]
Here is a sonnet for Ascension Day, the glorious finale of the Easter Season. In the mystery of the Ascension we reflect on the way in which, in one sense, Christ ‘leaves’ us and is taken away into Heaven, but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more [...]
Absent joy, absent the vision and expectation of eternal happiness, we lose ourselves in the immediate. When we forget about our final end, we become absorbed in the means, in technique, in minutia.It is necessary to find our way back to joy, to rekindle that flame. Much ink has been spilled in distinguishing among the [...]
The sacramental imagination must not be an exercise in the imaginary. It must traffic in images of reality that include the startlingly beautiful, the ugly, and the outwardly disagreeable but inwardly luminous. Writing in the early 1840s, the then-Anglican John Henry Newman proposed to a friend that a good article could be written with the [...]
By viewing Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” as a type of saintly hagiography, and Quixote’s actions and motives as following the example of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Don Quixote turns into San Quixote, a knight who fights not on the plains of Spain but on a spiritual plane, by means of his illuminating imagination. Gallivanting through the [...]
Graham Greene classified his 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana" as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments,” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance. “The moral imagination is… man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events.” –Russell Kirk In his book The Catholic Writer [...]
The apologist should appeal not only to one’s reason and intellect but also to one’s imagination, wooing the unbeliever—or a believer who has only granted intellectual consent rather than full-heart surrender—to Christ. In answer to the question “[w]hy did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about [...]
