MichaelJ on Nostr: What is the way we ought to live? This question takes on particular importance to me ...

What is the way we ought to live? This question takes on particular importance to me as a Catholic. Christ prayed for his disciples, that we should be “not of the world, even as I am not of the world”¹. This call presents an apparently impossible challenge. Certainly, within the framework of our secular world, it is impossible, even incomprehensible. Yet, the call remains. To live it out, we must abandon the limitations of secular worldview we have all inherited and adopt a distinctly Catholic worldview. This project, I believe, begins with the imagination.

The Ideological Trap

The trap we must avoid when trying to adopt a Catholic worldview is that of confusing “worldview” with “ideology.” At first glance, a “worldview” seems to be synonymous with “a system of beliefs.” Under that definition, “worldview” and “ideology” appear to identify more or less the same concept. Conflating the two, however, is itself a symptom of the secular worldview. Thus, if we wish to adopt a Catholic worldview merely as a system of beliefs, we have already failed. The project has to go deeper.

To explain the difference, I will introduce a concept from the philosopher Charles Taylor. In his seminal work, A Secular Age², Taylor introduces the concept of the “social imaginary” to describe the way we implicitly imagine the world. The social imaginary precedes and underlies thought. It imbues art and culture. It emerges in the most basic idioms of speech.

A prime example of the social imaginary is the analogy of the brain as computer. It is not uncommon to hear people mention their “mental bandwidth” and “memory banks,” or to refer to having free time to think as having “spare cycles.” Conversely, we often talk about computers as “thinking” while they take time to process. Such figures of speech betray an implicit assumption that the brain and a computer are, on some fundamental level, doing the same thing. Thus, the brain-computer analogy is part of our social imaginary.

Intellectually, the social imaginary is the ground we stand upon and the air we breath. It is the landscape within which our conscious mind operates, and as such, it defines the horizons of thought. A concept beyond this horizon becomes effectively unthinkable.

The term “worldview” in its more complete sense contains both the pre-thought realm of the social imaginary and the explicit systems of conscious thought. Charles Taylor perceptively suggests that the social imaginary of our modern world is distinctively secular, and that this secular imaginary sets the boundary conditions of belief, religious or otherwise. Within this secular frame, the immanent material world is the fundamental reality, the supernatural is nowhere to be found in our day-to-day experience, and God, if he is necessary at all, is little more than a Deistic watchmaker.

Any attempt to construct a Catholic worldview that does not shift these foundational assumptions will inevitably be trapped by the secular social imaginary. Within the secular framework, Catholicism becomes just one of many ideologies that offer a way of understanding and interpreting our immanent reality. As such, it may offer some explanatory or interpretive power, but it leave us unable to really grasp transcendent spiritual realities; the secular imaginary simply doesn’t admit them.

Shifting the Ground

How, then, do we escape this mental trap? We must change the very ground upon which we stand, the very air that we breathe. Perhaps, standing upon different ground, we will be able to see new horizons. Perhaps, from a different vantage, the heavens will be closer, close enough for us to reach out and touch them—or for them to reach down and touch us. Looking to the past, it is apparent that we once stood upon such heights, before modernity and secularization; and maybe, by learning from the past, we can find such vantages anew.

Stepping into the great churches and cathedrals of antiquity, it is apparent that their builders saw the world in a wholly different way than the one we know. In the Romanesque churches of Italy, glittering mosaics reflect candlelight under majestic arches while shafts of sunlight from above illuminate the interior with heavenly rays. In the Gothic cathedrals of France and Germany, we find ourselves “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses”³ in colorful stained glass glowing with God’s own radiance.

Implicit in this Medieval architecture is a distinctly theological social imaginary from the one we have today. Every stone, every pane of glass, every paintbrush-stroke, is arranged to point to a supernatural reality, indicating a belief that the material reality we can sense is suffused with a more fundamental spiritual reality. The mosaics and stained-glass windows haunt us with the presences of the saints who have come before. The very shape and dimensions of the buildings draws the eye to the altar, where the drama of the death and resurrection of God incarnate is liturgically reenacted. The church is the crossroads of Heaven and Earth.⁴

Amid this sacred architecture and the liturgical activity that took place therein, it was atheism that was unthinkable. To the Medievals, God was in their midst, on the altars and in the tabernacles. In Charles Taylor’s words, the world was “porous” to the transcendent; spiritual realities touched every dimension of human life.

Restoring Enchantment

Whatever the Medievals may have gotten right, we should not merely long for a return. Return is impossible. History has moved on; we cannot simply retrace our steps. I highlight the Medieval churches to show the importance of art, architecture, and imagination in shaping our social imaginary. I think that if we wish to truly live lives of faith, we must reorient our imaginative vision to recognize a world suffused with supernatural reality, a world in which God is present and active. In short, we must cultivate a Liturgical Imagination.

I will attempt to explore in detail what the Liturgical Imagination is in a future essay, but suffice for now to say that it must be specifically liturgical because the liturgy is the means by which we encounter God in our daily lived experience. Liturgy surrounds and enacts the Sacraments as visible signs of invisible reality.⁵ An imagination sensitive to the liturgy can perceive with a double sight both the ordinary, material reality that we sense and the transcendent, spiritual reality that moves therein.

How can we begin to form this liturgical vision? The answer, I believe, lies in Art. To once again invoke Charles Taylor, the path from the Medieval world to our secular age involved a shift of art from mimesis to poeisis.⁶ Mimesis imitates nature, while poeisis creates its own world. Medieval art is primarily mimetic; the depictions of the saints in stained glass are meant to imitate the unseen, yet very real presence of a “great cloud of witnesses” present at the Mass, where the great drama of salvation is daily re-presented. Over time, however, art has shifted in the direction of poeisis. The Epic, which seeks to tell a story that truly happened in some real sense (think of the Iliad), gives way to the Novel, which creates its own little world of setting, characters, and plot in which a wholly fictional drama can play out.

Thus, the way we receive art has changed. No longer do we turn to art seeking a deeper reality. Instead, in art we escape for a moment into a self-sufficient little tapestry of imagination that may or may not bear on the “real world.” This is not all bad, however. The way forward is through. Within these little tapestries we can, I think, learn to see once more with a spiritual vision back in the “real world.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy-Stories,⁷ calls this act of poeisis “sub-creation,” and the little tapestries “secondary worlds.” Successful art, he says, Enchants us by creating a secondary world with “the internal consistency of reality” into which our minds can enter and roam freely. Within the secondary world, strange and fantastic things may be both possible and perfectly reasonable. When we return, we may at times find ourselves seeing the mundane in a new light. As Tolkien puts it:

We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses— and wolves.

Art can shake us out of our mundane, materialistic vision of the world and re-enchant the ordinary things of daily life. Indeed, in Liturgy, our primary world is enchanted by the action of grace, if only we can perceive it. This is the role of poeisis. I believe art, story, and song are the schools in which we may retrain the imagination to be receptive to transcendent realities, for they are uniquely situation to expand our imaginative horizons. Once we first guess that the horizon may be broader than we thought, that the heavens may reach down to touch the earth; when we can see the grass and trees and sky with new wonder, then we open ourselves to an encounter with the Divine that sustains them all.

Notes