The Catholic Sacramental Imagination and the Access/Excess of Grace

Abstract

What better way to begin a discussion of the Catholic sacramental imagination than with a nod to images? The art historian and cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell has famously and provocatively asked, “What do pictures want?” (Mitchell 1996, 2005). One answer, it turns out, is that they want “not to be interpreted, decoded, worshiped, smashed, exposed, or demystified by their beholders, or to enthrall their beholders” (Mitchell 2005, 48). In other words, they do not want to be reduced to texts and analyzed like them. Mitchell concedes that semiotic, hermeneutic, and rhetorical methods provide some help in disclosing the meaning of images. But, he asks, is the “meaning” the most fundamental thing that matters when we encounter a picture? We create a problem when we merely use some literary or political hermeneutic to “decode” images and thereby discover the desires of their producers and consumers, the intentions that lurk in the background and foreground of these pictures. By treating pictures as signs and symbols that need decoding, we end up ignoring the images themselves and focus more on those behind-the-scenes intentions that