the operation of
grace
Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery
Gregory Wolfe
THE OPERATION OF GRACE
Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery
Copyright © 2015 Gregory Wolfe. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-057-4
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7354-1
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Wolfe, Gregory.
The operation of grace : further essays on art, faith, and mystery / Gregory Wolfe.
xiv + 208 p.; 23 cm.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-057-4
1. Religion and the arts. 2. Humanity. 3. Culture. 4. Criticism, interpretation. I. Title.
MLCS 2015/02436 (B)
Manufactured in the USA.
“Greg Wolfe has done something very remarkable for both the Christian community and the fractured, fractious culture we inhabit in the North Atlantic world. In his work as editor of the most energizing and imaginative periodical we have in the field of faith and the arts, he has continually reminded us all of why Christianity still draws the attention of the most imaginative spirits, orthodox and not-so-orthodox. These essays amply show how a theologically informed perspective can generate a serious, adult, joyful inhabiting of creation. They go well beyond journalistic polarities and never fail to give fresh light on our condition. A joy and an enrichment.”
—Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury
“Greg Wolfe’s essays in Image—the latest batch having been collected here in The Operation of Grace—have a knack for getting the head and the heart in tune. Each of these essays is an invocation—an act of summoning, a preparation for transfigurations yet to come.”
—Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“It’s tempting to read Greg Wolfe as a voice speaking to us from an earlier age, when faith and culture were not antagonists, but two sides to the same coin. This would be a mistake: the humane, intelligent essays in The Operation of Grace exist to remind us that that time isn’t past at all.”
—Christopher Beha, author of What Happened to Sophie Wilder
“These ‘occasional pieces’ in fact add up to a marvelous whole—an erudite, provocative whole, at times winsome and at times bracing. They are abundant with wisdom about the pursuit of art, faith, and mystery (our pursuit of them, or, sometimes more properly, their pursuit of us). They are, in short, a gift.”
—Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Still
“For over a quarter-century, Gregory Wolfe has been illuminating and fostering the sometimes overlooked but vital matrix upon which religion and art encounter one another, not just as belief and creative work but as a singular manifestation of ‘real presence’ in which God and beauty body forth as grace. This new collection of essays—wise, acute, and compelling—is a bold and necessary dispatch from an essential writer.”
—Robert Clark, author of Mr. White’s Confession and Dark Water
“Gregory Wolfe is to the burgeoning art and faith movement what Camille Pissarro was to the Impressionist movement—a central pillar, a wise teacher, an irreplaceable presence. One simply cannot imagine today’s art and faith conversation without his voice. Here in The Operation of Grace, his eloquent, challenging writing invites us to a feast—the very feast that Image journal has been serving up for nearly three decades.”
—Makoto Fujimura, Artist, Director, Brehm Center
For Mary Kenagy Mitchell
Preface: A Metaphorical God
“My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art also . . . a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.”
—John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
The essays gathered in this volume were originally published as editorial statements, each beginning an issue of the literary quarterly Image. They seek to explore the trinity of terms we’ve set forth in the journal’s subtitle, “art, faith, mystery.” Whether these words strike you as intriguing or pretentious may depend on your personal tastes, but anyone proposing them for consideration ought to have an explanation or two handy for the curious.
In the early days of Image the subtitle was the more prosaic and scholarly sounding “A Journal of the Arts and Religion.” It was serviceable enough, but for a literary quarterly featuring original creative work rather than scholarship, it gave the wrong impression. Not to mention that it lacked something in the way of connotative richness. And since art works its magic through that sort of suggestiveness, we felt the need to make a change. Then we noticed some publications using individual words, staccato fashion, as subtitles to suggest a whole realm of interrelated interests, and we pondered what words might work for Image.
“Art” was a given, and once again it needed to come first. For all its power—and no doubt because of its power—art through the centuries has often been harnessed to powerful interests, religious as well as political. The cornerstone of Image’s vision has been the conviction that art can explore religious experience in ways that are neither didactic nor moralistic. To paraphrase Walker Percy, we believe that art is cognitive—that it is a way of knowing and embodying, in dramatic form, an encounter with reality. Art is not beholden to some other language or discipline for its capacity to discover and convey meaning.
We chose “faith” instead of “religion” because it felt like a more active and immersive word—more existential, less like a philosophical category. However dogged by doubt one’s faith may be, it is ultimately a verb as much as a noun—an ongoing (if fraught and daunting) act rather than something static and settled. And to the extent that faith sounds like a verb, it reverberates, so to speak, with the word art, reminding us of the importance of art as making, an ongoing creative act.
As you might imagine, the third term proved the trickiest. After all, the first two words establish a trajectory, lines of convergence. What might the common endpoint be? It didn’t take us long to set aside “spirituality,” not only because it is a term so watered down and anodyne as to have become meaningless, but also because it denied art’s cognitive power and threatened to strap it back into the harness again, reducing art to therapy.
We settled on “mystery,” though we’re aware that to some ears it might sound like little more than mystification. But in the past half-century Flannery O’Connor and a number of leading modern philosophers and theologians rescued the concept of mystery from near oblivion, demonstrating that it has deep roots in nearly all of the world’s religious traditions.