The Operation of Grace. Gregory Wolfe

and I believe the last twenty years of Image journal contain much of the evidence I need to make my case. In an earlier editorial in these pages I made my own distinction between religious writers of O’Connor’s generation and our own. Alluding to O’Connor’s statement that “for the hard of hearing you have to shout,” I contrasted “shouts” with the “whispers” of the current generation of writers. It is possible to be nostalgic for shouts, as many of my conservative friends are, but for a religious tradition based on the wisdom of the “still, small voice” I think it unwise to say that one mode is clearly better than the other.

      Appealing as big concepts like “creative” and “critical” ages may be, they tend to break down under examination. Both impulses are at work at any given time; both are necessary for a healthy culture—or church, for that matter.

      One of the editorial policies Image has followed from the beginning is the belief that our pages should contain both artists and writers who are grounded in faith communities and those who remain outside. Moreover, we’ve been interested in work that seems to us to grapple with religious questions even when their makers profess no faith at all.

      This hasn’t always been the easiest course to steer. Some would like Image to become little more than a highbrow outpost of the culture wars. And I suspect that certain artists have refrained from contributing to our pages because they fear being co-opted into a community that makes them uneasy.

      Image is not a thesis-driven publication, unless creating a space for a perennial set of questions—stalkings, as it were—constitutes a thesis. That is also why we have refrained from backing a single artistic style as salvific—or a particular political agenda or religious subculture. After twenty years, it can be argued that the sheer diversity of work that Image has published demonstrates the persistence of the religious sense among those who make art—an ongoing struggle to integrate faith, reason, and imagination.

      Elie is right to point out that many “critical” writers have turned to nonfiction to work out their agonistic relationship to church and belief. But he misses the most prominent themes of this nonfiction writing: stories of recovered faith, faith clung to despite the odds, and new conversion stories. What makes these narratives so compelling is that they are hard won, precisely because they seek to “see the object as in itself it really is.” Needless to say, our pages have shown this to be true of all the art forms.

      Where the editors of Image have come close to a thesis is our conviction that the effort to be fully human cannot ultimately be undertaken in solitude. Though there are many forces in our culture that lead us, willingly or unwillingly, to reduce religion to a merely private experience—to “spirituality”—this is to rob it of meaning and to surrender to solipsism. We believe that the Jewish and Christian roots of our culture, though tainted by terrible sins of omission and commission, can and should be renewed by reason and imagination. As any artist should know, you cannot have content without a form. To reject institutions, to refuse to reform them and be formed by them, is a counsel of despair.

      In the two decades that Image has been publishing, the gatekeepers of culture have become less aggressively secular, but the myth that enduring art inspired by faith is a thing of the past has not gone out of circulation. It is still possible for a reviewer in the New Republic to write: “the absence of God from our literature feels so normal, so self-evident, that one realizes with a shock how complete it is.” That is the sort of blinkered view that occurs when people begin to believe their own propaganda.

      In Tarkovsky’s film the professor and the writer are not held up for vilification; they speak for pathways to truth that we can never abandon. They may enter the Zone with mixed motives, but they go anyway. Whatever their heads may tell them, their hearts’ desire is to draw close to mystery. The religious sense is part of what it means to be fully human. Image will continue to present the best writing and art that speak to this ineradicable desire of the human heart.

Faith Speaks to Art