Abstract
Most British readers of Theology may, one suspects, be unfamiliar with both Gregory Wolfe and the Seattle-based quarterly Image, which he founded in 1989, and has published and edited ever since. Subtitled ‘art, faith, mystery’, the journal has long sustained a wide ranging, vigorous and open-ended conversation between art and faith. The continuing goal, for Wolfe, has been ‘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’ (p. xii). That tradition, as articulated here, is broadly Judaeo-Christian, drawing more explicitly upon both Christian Humanism and Catholic Modernism, while also carrying trace elements of Communion and Liberation, the now international Catholic movement of which Wolfe remains a lay member. Yet this formidable intellectual provenance never blunts the sheer attractiveness and accessibility of these dazzling essays. Originally published as editorials for Image, they are, almost without exception, models of stylistic clarity, original thinking and deep reflection, often laced with gentle humour and arresting paradox. For example, in an essay on Trollope’s The Warden, he presents Septimus Harding to us firstly as ‘a man who resigns his position (against the wishes of his clerical colleagues) as much because of an aversion to publicity as from a newly awakened conscience about social justice’ (p. 54), and then, again, as ‘a liturgist’ for whom ‘the quintessential activity of a religious community is not the purveying of doctrines and ideas but the worship of the presence that has called the community into being … Liturgy is where art and community life meet’ (p. 57). Finally, he draws not upon Trollope, but upon Ingmar Bergman, to remind us that ‘Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself’ (p. 57). All this in under five pages! Other topics receive equally brief, but searching, appraisal. Geoffrey Hill ‘clearly asks more of contemporary readers than they are willing to give’ (p. 90), Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is ‘a daring recovery of iconographic and theological language that has all but disappeared from the public realm’ (p. 69), Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall ‘may be an overrated novel, but the problem it illustrates – the contemporary inability to understand the modern reduction of our humanity to autonomous individualism – remains’ (p. 134), while ‘you cannot look at a single painting by Giotto, however vibrant with colour and the warmth of human love, and not sense the tragedy of sin in the shadows. Without that tragic sense we could not see the poignance and sweetness in his paintings’ (p. 124).
However, such insights as these (and there are many others throughout the book) are far more than self-evident testimony to Wolfe’s very acute, and finely tuned, cultural sensibilities. They also articulate a powerful theological aesthetic, which reaffirms (with more than echo of Jacques Maritain) ‘the role of art as an indispensable medium through which the transcendent can be known’ (p. 129). Whether art can continue to function in this way in the West’s consumer-oriented, over-commodified and normatively postmodern culture, where artists, their teachers, critics and public alike are now rarely, and decreasingly, grounded in faith communities of any kind, surely remains at best problematic, and at worst ‘mission impossible’?