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Art and the Art of Theology
By Mary McDermott Shideler

"The most concrete manifestations of a theology, apart from words, occur in worship and ethics. How deeply any particular theologian should engage in such concrete affairs must, of course, be left to his individual decision. The artist can teach him., however, that the effort toward concreteness-incarnation-will infuse his work with a vitality that cannot be obtained in any other way, and will test its validity more severely than any other form of examination."

FROM its inception, Christian theology has been conspicuously influenced by philosophy and science. Its relations with art, however, have been for the most part disappointingly superficial. Works of art have indeed reflected the doctrines of man, nature, and God which characterized their periods, and sometimes have presaged changes in the theological climate. Christian dogmas and traditions have been used as critical principles in evaluating television, stage, cinema, and other dramatic productions, as well as literature, painting, and sculpture. Students of religion and the arts have sought to discern what the artist's view of the world can reveal to the Christian about his faith and how it can nourish his life. Among artists and theologians, and occasionally between them, there has been much talk of imagery and the imaginative functions.

Without decrying these labors or their fruits, I wish to propose that theologians should search farther in the realm of the artist, to explore what differentiates art from theology at the level not only of method and technique, but also of primary approach to their work. It can be agreed at once, I believe, that art and theology

Mary McDermott Shideler has written extensively on theology and the arts and is particularly known for her work on Charles Williams, The Theology of Romantic Love; A Study in the Writings of Charles Williams (1966) and Charles Williams: A Critical Study (1966). Her most recent book is Consciousness of Battle (1970).

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share the same material: both take the whole world for their domain. Nothing-even nothingness or chaos-is by definition exempt from their concern. Both exhibit the normal impulses toward self-expression and communication, and, at their best, employ reason and imagination together. Yet the differences between them are sufficiently marked that profound interchange between the artist and the theologian is likely to be rare and difficult, though also, when it does occur, immensely rewarding.

The theologian who is seeking to understand the peculiar character of the genus Artist will do well to start with creative writers who happen to have a firm philosophical or theological bent, such as the five English authors who will be quoted extensively in this paper. In alphabetical order, they are: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Charles Morgan, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams. If the theologian is fortunate enough to have among his close friends a painter or sculptor or musician-any artist whose métier is not words-he will glean many things that cannot be contained in books, not least of which the indefinable feeling for what is happening that is a prerequisite for accurately interpreting the artist's words.

The discussion here will be limited to three distinctive marks of the artist which I believe to be especially valuable for theologians and the theological community today. First, I shall consider the nature of artistic creativity; second, the place of intuition in artistic creation; and third, the significance of the artist's urge toward concreteness. A brief concluding section will examine how artists evaluate each others' work and their own. Obviously, all artists will not necessarily subscribe to the positions of those whom I quote, any more than all theologians can, or should, attempt to develop the art of theology, in contrast (though not in opposition) to speculative, historical, dogmatic, and practical theology.

I

Most of us living today in western culture were brought up in a problem-solving atmosphere. The mother and the nursery-school teacher visualize the three-year-old as facing the "problem" of getting along with other children. We commonly speak of the "problems" of racism, overpopulation, social justice, and war. A widespread reproach of the young to their elders has been, "You

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bequeathed us these problems, damn you." To define a situation as a problem, however, is to encourage if not to generate the expectation that it can be "solved" like a mathematical equation or a murder mystery: by accumulating and organizing data, or channeling human responses, to reach a solution that satisfies the conditions we laid down in advance.

The basic question for the problem-solver is, "What is the right answer to this question, the right solution to this problem?" whether it be to explain the anomalous behavior of certain electrons or build a perfect society out of imperfect human beings. But the artist's primary question is, "How can I use this material?" There is no "right answer" to what he should do with his paints and canvas, or whether he should work out an idea as a novel or lyric or essay. Here he is not using the problem-solving approach or techniques, any more than the physical or social scientist is when, thinking creatively, he determines what can be done with his laboratory data or his assembly of weak and sinful persons. Further, the artist respects his materials. He does not expect stone to behave like bronze, or musical notes like words, and he uses their limitations as if they were opportunities. Shakespeare, for example, on the evidence of his plays, knew more about verse forms than poets since have plumbed, yet he chose for some of his most intense expressions one of the stiffest of all English patterns: the sonnet.

The material of the theologian consists of human experience in all its complexity and range: persons and things, institutions and traditions, passions and ideas. What can be done with those materials? What are they capable and not capable of becoming? What can he do with them, given his special abilities and the particular world he lives in? If his materials are Christianity and racism, and he comes to the situation as an artist rather than as a problem-solver, he will not begin by asking how racists can be made to behave as Christians, or whether Christianity can be adapted to racism. Instead, he will start by considering the nature of his material. The racist, whatever his color, is like the novice in art who thinks wholly in terms of hue, brightness, and saturation. The experienced artist, however, wants first to know what vehicle is carrying the pigments: oil, water, acrylic, egg white, or some other. He asks what tools he will need: a brush is ineffectual for carving stone; a chisel is not the

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proper instrument for water-color painting. Conversely, what tools does the theologian have? So if he is concerned with interracial situations, he will ask: am I dealing with persons or pigments? If persons, are they all creations of one God, or were part of them created by some power incompatible with God so that the colors are immiscible? His tools of tradition, intelligence, information, compassion, and imagination are designed for different functions. Which ones is he skilled in using? Which are suitable for his intention?

Racism is not only a sin to be repented and redeemed, but also a freezing of the imagination to be liberated. If we are to approach racial conflict as an artist would, as providing the materials by which he manifests his creativity and enables others to become creative, we must be willing to accept a variety of methods as valid-as there are a tremendous number of good ways to paint a landscape. Physicists have long accepted that condition. They recognize, for example, that neither the wave nor the particle theory of light alone is adequate for studying the whole range of optical phenomena, but that both are needed. Similarly, in philosophy sometimes it is useful to define entities as functions and sometimes as essences, although philosophers seem to be less patient than physicists with the need (so far) to handle the same phenomena in different ways. Theologians are often still less patient with such dual-or multiple-requirements. The definitive word has been spoken: who now dares to transgress it? God must not be imagined anthropomorphically, even if Jesus be the best image we have for him. God must be conceived as being "in here" and not "out there"; we cannot use one image to correct and supplement another. Children must be taught that Christianity is a problem-solving formula; their imaginations must not be fired with stories of saints, and legends of heroes, and myths of creation and paradise.

But life does not constitute a "problem" except as we cramp ourselves into that category. Dorothy Sayers provides an illustration: "In order to persuade ourselves that we can 'solve' life, we have only to define it in terms which admit of solution. Unless we do this, not only the solution but the problem itself is unintelligible. Take any phenomenon you like: take a rose. How will you proceed to solve a rose? … Has that expression any meaning? Only if you first define the rose in terms which presuppose the answer." The geometrician can describe how its planes are formed and related.

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The geneticist can explain the source of its color by its heredity. The chemist can analyze its chemical components. None of these, however, is a creative approach to roses, like distilling their fragrance or growing them or putting them in vases or painting them. "Yet, she concludes, "the perfumer, the gardener, the woman [arranging the flowers], and the painter, being occupied with the rose itself and not with its solution, can all present the world with new manifestations of the rose, and by so doing communicate the rose to one another in power."¹

Certainly life-and theology-do contain problems, and the problem-solving techniques in which we are so highly skilled are not to be neglected or scorned. But we need consistently, habitually, to raise the question of whether a particular situation should be interpreted as constituting a problem, or as providing us with materials for creative effort, and so whether it can be handled better in the scientist's or philosopher's manner, or in the artist's.

II

A second characteristic of the artist is that in matters decisive for his art, his mind works intuitively rather than discursively. He is not likely to be a system-builder, constructing patterns of thought step by inferential step, or distinguishing one element from another by delicate analyses. Nor is he closely concerned with demonstrations and proofs leading to a conviction of truth. The artist's understanding of the world may be as highly organized as any Barthian's or Thomist's, but ordinarily he reaches it by vision instead of by rational argument, and tries to express it integrally, rather than in separate parts to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. A striking case in point is the poet and novelist Charles Williams, whose work in its entirety is grounded in a remarkably coherent epistemology and metaphysics, and marked by a most elegant lucidity of definition and organization. Yet he exhibited it principally in poetry and novels, each book displaying the whole vision but filling in a quite different set of its component parts. Only when one has read widely in his works does it become clear that the glory he depicts is not "a kind of mazy bright blur,"² but a design as precisely

¹ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York, 1941), pp. 209-210.
² Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven (London, 1938), p. 33.

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articulated as a mathematical demonstration, and as vital as a healthy human body.

The chains of reasoning in Williams' theological works do not constitute support for his vision. The vision-for him-needs no support. Though not self-evident, it is self-justifying, and he formulates it intellectually less for persuasion than for the delight in discovering and exhibiting the structure of the vision. Similarly, the systematic character of Augustine's and Kierkegaard's thought-and perhaps Luther's-seems almost accidental, compared with their urgency to communicate the glory they have seen.

In the sense I am using the word here, "vision" is a product of intuition. It is something seen clearly and as a whole by immediate apprehension. Because vision is usually received and expressed with images, its association with the imaginative functions is so close that they cannot be distinguished without a close examination of the sources of intuition, vision, and imagination, their nurture, and their relations with logical, discursive rationality.

We look to the artist for guidance in understanding intuition because he speaks (and paints and composes) primarily from that level in himself, and to the corresponding level in others. He illumines with shapes and symbols, a function essentially different from illustrating with models and defining with concepts. Thus Jesus' parables of the Kingdom of God are apparently designed to evoke an image, rather than to explain an idea or to describe a state of existence. The difference lies partly in the antithesis between denotation and connotation, and partly in the contrast between the conscious and the unconscious minds.

We know very little, as yet, about intuition and imagination as the bridges connecting those two regions of the self, and about the elemental energies of the unconscious as they affect and are affected by reason and will, producing creation or destruction. We do know, by centuries of observation, that the unconscious energies are neither wholly chaotic nor wholly ordered, but that the unconscious is fed and disciplined mainly, if not solely, by images; that stifling imagery -as most of our education is designed to do-fosters the chaotic elements; and that if those images are principally of impotence or evil or despair, the unconscious springs of our mental and spiritual lives will be poisoned-as they have been on some occasions by the cult of the anti-hero.

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Our predicament is not new. Sixty-odd years ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote that we are "face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good…. The human race, according to [Christian] religion, fell once, and in falling gained the knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us."³ For years we went to great lengths in understanding why and how men become violent and perverted, until now we have little notion of how and why they become saints and heroes, or simply sane and good. One reason why our freedom appears to be so limited today is that yesterday, in malice or sloth or cowardice, we threw away our images of glory and holiness and joy. Our imaginations were frozen in an ugly mold. In theology as in art, our visions became fragile and cold, and where they have now begun to return, they are often confused or fantastic or coarse.

As cause or effect of the freezing of the imagination, many men and women of our time are afraid of life and of themselves, afraid to see visions or dream dreams lest the actualities of life disappoint them, afraid of being ridiculed for their faith. Who among us is not afraid of the inner forces we have not learned to use or control, and of the powers outside us that keep escaping from our mastery? Because we have not been taught to discriminate between vision and fantasy, or between imagination and illusion, we are afraid of seeming or being childish. Fear makes us cynics, and cynicism blinds us to whole continents of human experience. We will not investigate them because we deny their validity, and we will not grant them validity because we are afraid of what may intrude if once we set foot on those territories. The result, as Charles Morgan writes, is "a barren cleverness-poems conceived in political hatred, novels by men who are hasty to despise their characters lest we laugh because they have admired so faulty a thing as man or have loved so imperfect a thing as woman. Yet men and women, their folly, their suffering, their aspiration, the God in them, are the material of our art, and an artist must submit to them as he submits to all else. An artist is not in the world to crucify humanity, but to wash its feet."⁴

Elsewhere, Morgan asserts that the primary purpose of art is to

³ G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York, 1905), p. 32.
⁴ Charles Morgan, Reflections in a Mirror, Second Series (London, 1947), p. 93.

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fluidify the imagination, so that we are enabled to see "a vision of truth." "A vision," he writes, not the vision. When an artist becomes a totalitarian committed to an ideology, he forfeits his artistic integrity. And since art does not claim a monopoly on truth or vision, works of art do not supersede or cancel each other out as, for example, the Einsteinian world view superseded the Newtonian, and Kant refuted Descartes. The work of Mozart does not have to be destroyed, to provide the stuff for Bartók's compositions, and our enjoyment of Picasso does not preclude our enjoying the Wyeths and Jackson Pollock as well.

Therefore, works of art are not competitors for our allegiance. The statue, painting, oratorio does not say, in effect, "I reveal the best--or the only true-vision of the world," but "Let me enrich your life by showing you a vision that is different from your own." Concretely, as Charles Morgan wrote of Thomas Hardy: "He did not fix upon a favorite view and say: 'This is Truth. There is no other.' He surveyed the whole landscape of experience with what eyes he had, and said to us: 'Look: what do you see with your different eyes?' And we looked, and, though we did not see what he had seen, we saw what we had not seen before and might never have seen but for his visionary flash."⁵

Theological systems, however, are likely to be considered as competitors. If one is accepted as true, the others are taken to be more or less in error. But suppose we were to change our usual question about them from: "Which is true?" to "Which of them reveals God in Christ to men?" The answer is obviously that many of them do. As one person responds more -readily to music and another to architecture, so one man comes to God through Tillich and another through Barth. It is unfortunate that sometimes our personal commitment to one way of approaching God will seduce us into refusing the enlargement which is offered in other ways, so that we find ourselves urging our fellows to convert from Barth to Tillich as if from sculpture to poetry.

This is not to say that theologians of different commitments will have nothing to say to one another. On the contrary, like the sculptor and poet, they can learn much by discussing together their respective visions and styles, with no effort to convert and every effort to understand and learn. Here, magnificently, can be found

⁵ Charles Morgan, The Writer and His World (London, 1961), p. 13.

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mutual enrichment and discipline of a kind that is not common these days, and perhaps has never been.

Is it not a full half of the Christian's business to tear down evil and untruth? Are we not under the exact command to preach the truth as we see it, to press for the acceptance of solutions we believe to be right, to exalt our own vision over contradictory visions? Not, certainly, as holding a monopoly on truth or right solutions or divine visions. We are not gods. We know only what we know and see only what we see. What we have is authentic but not universal. We can therefore be absolute in our commitments without being totalitarian in our attitudes and pronouncements. The truth spoken to us, the vision granted to us, can be offered to others but must not be imposed upon them. Their truth, their visions are to be welcomed as supplementing, enhancing, criticizing ours, but not taken as ultimately authoritative over us' or ours over them.

Before condemning this as a form of relativism, we should look for a moment at what "the truth" means. Conceptual truths, as in mathematics and philosophy, are understood in the same way by everyone, or not at all. The truth about a person is less uniform, not only because persons are continually changing, but because they function differently in different contexts. The whole truth about a man is not known to his wife, his children, his colleagues, his doctor, or even his confessor, and putting all those truths together would still not give us the complete truth about him. Still less constant is truth-in-relationship, the truth we have when we are related with each other in ways that fulfill our true natures, because the interactions themselves generate a new life.

Conceptual truth has a noble place in Christianity, but that place is not supreme. The Christian does not have the truth; he abides in it, or it abides in him, as he is appropriately related to the Person who said, "I am the truth." Whatever the developmental sequence in our learning, actual acquaintance with a person gives us a more profound truth than knowing about him, which in turn is prior to abstractions concerning him. No two of us will know any third person in exactly the same way, and-which is more to the point-he knows each of us differently, yet from the single core of his own self-hood, and his knowledge of us significantly determines our knowledge of him.

How do we know that the Lord whom we worship is Christ

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Jesus? On the intellectual level, by whether our ideas conform to a standard ruling; who shall set the standard is debatable. On the behavioral level, by whether we follow the ways that he has prepared for us to walk in. On the personal level, by how he knows us, and therefore how our knowledge of our selves is changed. But knowledge that we are selves is visionary, not intellectual; it is imaginative, not conceptual. Neither is it detached, formal, precisely defined, immutable. And if we ask, "How does the God revealed in Christ know us?" we cannot answer without defining ourselves as well as him. Like a grandfather doting on a little grandchild? Like a computer "knowing" the data which has been fed into it? Like a judge confronting a habitual criminal? Like a doctor knowing a patient? When we have replied, then scholarship can enter to check and modify our images, relating them to the portrait of Jesus in the Gospels, to the letters of the apostles, to Christian history. Imagination needs scholarship, but also, scholarship needs imagination, intuition, and vision.

III

The third characteristic of the artist which is of prime importance to theologians is his urge toward concrete expression. The vision, intuitively received, consists of more than formal propositions, and demands for its fulfillment more than a sequence of statements or a diagram. Again to quote Charles Morgan: "If he [the artist] is to communicate his total vision, he must communicate his spell as well as his thought."⁶ So he composes a symphony or scribbles a poem, and vigorously insists that his vision is incommunicable by the kind of exposition which is found in theological, aesthetic, or scientific treatises. He is right, of course, because the content of his vision is inseparable from its incarnate form. And the spell that it casts is at one with its meaning, because the spell determines the level of experience where the vision is received, and thereby establishes what its meaning is.

Moreover, the artist's incarnation of his vision constitutes a test of the vision's substance, its clarity, its viability, as well as of his craftsmanship. Failures of that test may be especially instructive. There are the skillfully drawn characters in fiction who never quite "come alive," the plays that "don't hold together," the impassioned

⁶ Ibid., p. 51.

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films that evoke from their audiences only boredom, witnessing that the original idea was tenuous or confused or prematurely born. But what turns a person into an artist-good or bad-is not his vision, but the act of putting his ideas to the test of incarnation, instead of leaving them within the realm of abstractions or visionary perceptions. A painter once remarked to me that perhaps many people could-as they claim-"paint as well as these modern artists." The difference is that the artist does lay paint on canvas. He gives his idea substance and form in the attempt to communicate "the spell as well as the thought."

Generally, the theologian's urge toward communicating the spell by an incarnation is less insistent than the artist's. Notable exceptions range from parts of St. Paul's letters to the sermons of Paul Tillich, but the trend is there. Even so, the primary medium for incarnating theologies is propositional statements which are tested by their coherence with each other-insubstantial indeed compared with actors on a stage, or sheets of metal, or the surprising density of stories like those of Orpheus or the good Samaritan, that can survive many variations without loss of integrity and power. For precision and subtlety in communication, language has no peer when it is handled well, and it is no accident that from time immemorial, words have been conceived as possessing an almost-if not genuinely-supernatural efficacy. The question for the theologian is not, therefore, whether words are capable of expressing his vision. That depends upon his skill with them. It is instead whether any verbal formulation is adequate if it does not communicate the spell which gives life to the thought.

Granting at once that the spell-binder may be trying to conceal the logical and evidential poverty of his thought, we can dismiss that ploy as so clearly a corruption that it needs no further mention, and go on to ask whether spell-binding may be legitimate in theology. To begin with, we must note that spells are of widely varying kinds, and that such unlikely works as the Summa Theologica and the Critique of Pure Reason cast spells that numb the personal responses of the susceptible, and intensify their purely intellectual faculties. In those masterpieces, mind speaks only to mind. But are we, as theologians, content with meeting one another, and the world, on an exclusively intellectual basis? Increasingly, theologians are answering: No. In theology as elsewhere, the movement is

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toward persons speaking with persons, except in the rarefied atmosphere of professional meetings. And that means spell-binding, not as concealment of faults but as demonstrations of rightful power.

Let us play around for a moment with how a logically impeccable system could be expressed and tested by its incarnations. One way would be by seeing what happens when it is taken as the basis for a liturgy. Or we could ask what we might learn about Tillich's definition of God as "the Ground of Being," for example, from examining the various human potential movements, from Esalen and gestalt therapy to the groups experimenting with psychedelic phenomena. We need not posit any causal derivations in either direction. We can refute the claim that this is what Tillich meant. Common to both, however, is an inward thrust, a faith and hope in what lies within man as opposed to what is available outside him. On the evidence so far, is deity whom we know by seeking within ourselves any more satisfactory than one whom we know by looking outward? Is the catharsis of guilt during encounter marathons more liberating than the forgiveness of sins in the confessional? And do these secular activities in any way constitute a legitimate or profitable critique of the theological system that shares certain features with them? Any easy answers will be, as the poster tells us, "Neat.. . plausible … and wrong."

If the objection be raised that spell-binding is the proper task of preaching, worship, and ethics, not of theology, I would respectfully suggest that such a separation debilitates both "pure" and "practical" theology. What Charles Williams once wrote about poetry is equally true of the theological enterprise. It is a good game, and it is also liberty and power.⁷ So far as theology is held on the level of intellect speaking to intellect, no matter how seriously, it is an intellectual game, and one that is well worth playing. But when person speaks to person in liberty and power, it becomes more than a game, not less. The rules of intellectual rigor are not suspended; the topics studied do not necessarily change. Whatever is done will be referred beyond itself to the vision on one hand, and to human life on the other. The energy of that interplay impregnates the intellect with imagination and compassion, and from the triple union grows naturally the spell which dissolves the barriers between persons, enabling them to speak together with understanding even

⁷ Charles Williams, The English Poetic Mind (London, 1932), p. vii.

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when they do not agree. To borrow an illustration from C. S. Lewis: "Who … would try to decide between the claims of materialism and theism by reading Lucretius and Dante? But who … would not delightedly learn from them a great deal about what it is like to be a materialist or theist?"⁸ - and so deepen his sympathies as well as equip himself better to choose between them.

It has long been taken for granted that imagination and intuition, unlike reason and will, flourish best when allowed to run wild. But the seer's eye, like the artist's, requires cultivation for its maturing, and cultivation of a kind that will neither cramp it into forms which are alien to its nature, nor bestow upon it an authority it is unfit to wield. This is not the place to discuss how those mediators of vision can be trained. Neither can we do more, at this time, than note the presence of another factor in communicating both the thought and the spell: craftsmanship in using language, the chief tool with which the theologian works. To speak and write with grace as well as precision, to be clear as well as profound, are not decorative luxuries, but enablements of the vision itself, and stringent tests of the mind which is attempting to communicate it. Some wit has said that in German it is possible to be profound but impossible to be clear, and in French, impossible to be profound but also impossible to be unclear. In English, whose roots are in both, clarity and profundity are possible at once, but only in the hands of one who cares enough about his craft to learn to use it competently.

The most concrete manifestations of a theology, apart from words, occur in worship and ethics. How deeply any particular theologian should engage in such concrete affairs must, of course, be left to his individual decision. The artist can teach him, however, that the effort toward concreteness-incarnation-will infuse his work with a vitality that cannot be obtained in any other way, and will test its validity more severely than any other form of examination.

IV

The art of theology, as I have sketched it here, is not to be understood as a rival of philosophical theology or (save the mark!) the "science" of theology, any more than sculpture is a rival of music. But because the adversary system of criticism is firmly established in

⁸ C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961), p. 86.

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the theological community, I should like in conclusion to examine how artists whom I have been privileged to know respond to one another's work.

Invariably, these friends of mine begin their discussion of an exhibit or a colleague's current projects with the question, "What is he trying to do?"-taking it for granted that each artist will have a different vision. Is he sharing his anger or his amusement? Is he defining negative shapes or exploring the effects of color? Is he blowing off steam for his own sake or reaching out to touch and heal for others' sakes? The vision is not sacrosanct. One can properly ask whether the vision of a particular artist clarifies, intensifies, or liberates our own. One can legitimately condemn a work because it shows no sign of being informed by any vision but is hack work done solely for pay or to attract attention, or because the vision has no artistic impetus, like recording a pretty view to remind one of a happy afternoon, which is a valid purpose in itself, but not animated with the intention of creating a work of art.

When criticism is based on "the harmony of Style with Subject, of Form with Vision,"⁹ it becomes at once more sympathetic and more strict than when it is judged by external criteria. More sympathetic because the artist's intention is respected, more strict because he is not being directly compared with others. Instead, his vision is tested for its inherent clarity and power, and his technique for its adequacy to incarnate his vision. Therefore he can depend upon his fellow artists not only for reassurance, but also for the relentless questioning, argument, attack, which protect him from sloth and conceit, stimulate him to fresh effort, and restore his direction when he is tempted to follow a light other than his own. Such a community of mutual trust and discipline only arises, however, when the arts of appreciation have been developed as assiduously as the arts of contention.

In contrast, what theologian has not been reproached by his professional colleagues for logical inconsistency although his stated purpose was-let us say-to trace the lines of psychological unity? How often has an apocalyptic vision been measured (and naturally, found wanting) by the criteria of systematic completeness? What book for laymen has escaped censure by a reviewer because it contributed nothing new to the technical specialist? C. S. Lewis voices the warn-

⁹ Morgan, The Writer and His World, p. 39.

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ing: "To take a man up very sharp, to demand sternly that he shall explain himself, to dodge to and fro with your questions, to pounce on every inconsistency, may be a good way of exposing a false witness or a malingerer. Unfortunately, it is also the way of making sure that if a shy or tongue-tied man has a true and difficult tale to tell you will never learn it."¹⁰ The adversary mood in criticism not only undercuts creativity except in the bravest or most obstinate individual, but also disintegrates community, and so deprives all the workers in that field of the interactions which make possible the supreme achievements.

Christian theologians have always to some degree practiced the creative approach, employed intuition, taken account of the ethical and devotional implications of doctrine, and supported one another in their individual enterprises. But these functions have not, as a rule, been deliberately taught or promoted. They are not used as skillfully as they might be, and those few theologians who have done most to develop them are not being conspicuously encouraged by the professional community of theologians. But now, more than ever before, we need the style of art in our theologies. The resurgence of charismatic and enthusiastic forms of Christianity, the popularity of the Cursillo and other similar movements, the zeal for liturgical changes, call for creative rather than problem-solving theologies, for intuition and imagination in our system-building, and for an incarnational concern within our speculative activities.

Having begun by proposing that we examine theology as an art, I should like to conclude by asserting that because theologians are problem-solvers and system-builders, they need to be creative, intuitive, and incarnational. Ultimately, systems carry conviction by virtue of the vision they enshrine, and the major human problems-individual and social alike-are never finally solved, although they can always be used imaginatively as materials for continuing creations. There is no question of substituting vision for reason and morality. It is instead a matter of raising creative and appreciative imagination in theology to the high level which philosophical and ethical reason have already attained. We must not lower our standards, but we need badly to raise our sights and strengthen our foundations, that we may serve more effectively the need of men for God, and the will of God for men.

¹⁰ Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, p. 128.