Foundation Stones for Collaboration Between Religion and The Literary Imagination

Abstract

Following the counsel of St. Ignatius, this paper begins with composition of place,in this instance the focus of the mind, the heart, and the imagination on two images: (1) Orestes in the Oresteia and (2) the image of the good man which The Republic of Plato seeks to construct. These instances are chosen to illustrate that images can have massive content and be full of and ontological teachings. Because images think and are pathways to existence, they enable theology and literature to cooperate. This collaboration requires that theology and literature (1) have common problems, (2) both be cognitive, and (3) both be ontological. Cognitive here does not mean a conceptual search for generality, for such narrow definition of divides artists from thinkers and ignores the power of thought in poetry as well as the power of images in theology. Unfortunately, this narrow notion of cognition is now all too popular, with disastrous results. To the modern theologian, the image often remains on the outside of the idea, functioning merely as rhetoric of thought. The consequence of this separation of image from idea is that the theologian thus remains unaffected by the order of culture and its images, since for him they are merely images. As the theologian is content to leave imagining to the artist, so the artist is content to leave thinking to the theologian. What is needed is collaboration between theological imagination and literary imagination. This in turn requires the recognition by both parties to the debate: (1) that great images are great representations of human thought, and (2) that they are ontological and so delve into existence. Plato exemplifies this because his image of the good man required the building of whole political structure to make the content of that image manifest. Aeschylus is theologian among playwrights. He teaches in the Oresteia that the human imagination cannot simply impose theological idea upon existence; rejecting neither light nor darkness, he transforms the one by the other to bring about, at the end of the trilogy, human mixture based on new theology, new description of existence.