The Sacramental Imagination

The sacramental imagination must not be an exercise in the imaginary. It must traffic in images of reality that include the startlingly beautiful, the ugly, and the outwardly disagreeable but inwardly luminous.

Writing in the early 1840s, the then-Anglican John Henry Newman proposed to a friend that a good article could be written with the thesis “that nothing but Apostolicity is poetical—that religious poets are forced to go out of their religion, (e.g. into domestic matters etc.) for poetry when their religion is Peculiarity etc.”

This needs a bit of translation. What Newman meant by “Apostolicity” was catholic Christianity that proclaimed a visible, hierarchical Church and sacraments that did not merely symbolize invisible grace but actually conveyed it. What he meant by “Peculiarity” was non-sacramental Protestantism of the sort found not only among Baptists and other “non-conforming” groups but also low church Anglicans. In the latter, he would observe, some priests would, when baptizing children, only put the water on the little cap and not let it touch the skin of the baptizands lest people get the wrong idea: that baptism itself effects anything in the child. The only true divine actions possible are spiritual—affecting the thoughts or emotions of people directly. Matter itself cannot be the medium of spiritual change in any way, even if it is matter that has been prayed over or blessed.

Newman’s point is that in such a religion, poets don’t have much to write about since they deal in the visible and the concrete. If religion is only about soul and not body, about spirit and not matter, there is really not much to write about since soul and spirit have neither color nor shape. If, however, religion involves the concrete and the material as spiritual realities, then religion can indeed be poetical.

A religion in which there are sacraments—not merely “institutions” or rituals that we must deny actually have any spiritual power—is one in which the imagination can be sacramental and poetry religious.

This might seem to be a rather obvious point, but I think it is important to make. Many people ignore the fact that much of our poetic language is derived specifically from the sacraments themselves. Think of a phrase such as “breaking bread together.” Many people understand it as obviously meaning to share a meal. But its origin is itself liturgical, the breaking of the bread that happens in the Eucharist. We would never say “break bread together” absent that sacrament known in the book of Acts as “the breaking of bread and the prayers.” And, I might add, we would likely never say it if the original understanding of that sacrament had not been one of real spiritual power.

A sacramental imagination understands that God works through matter generally only because it understands that God works through matter specifically and regularly at certain times. And the fate of the sacramental imagination depends upon whether there are enough people who believe in the sacraments themselves and the source of the sacraments—the Incarnation, in which the Eternal Son of the Father, who is pure spirit takes on himself flesh through which he acts to effect things spiritually. Many serious and sincere Christians believe in Christ the one mediator between God and men but understand this to mean that Christ alone conveys grace to the mind and heart and does not use water, bread and wine, oil, or the words of a man and woman at an altar or whispered in a confessional.

Yet many Christians who do believe in sacraments want, ironically, to preach about a generalized sacramental imagination without bringing up those actual sacraments or Jesus who is the source of all sacramental power. While it might be legitimate to speak in general terms in certain circumstances, it is ultimately a mistake to talk about a principle of seeing the spiritual being mediated by the material without naming the time in which it happened once and for all in a man from Galilee and still happens on altars and in baptismal fonts around the world. Some would say, “It goes without saying.” But as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus always wondered, will it actually go if no one says it? That’s a sacramental question: did the proper words get said? It is only a real, catholic (and Catholic in this case) believer such as the priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who can really believe that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” for he knows the divine lightning from which that charge is emitted.

Yet once one has understood that the marriage of heaven and earth has been accomplished in Jesus Christ and that it is celebrated in seven distinct ways all over this world, then one will indeed see that it is the world itself that is charged. It is then that one will be confused, as C. S. Lewis was after his conversion, about what the difference between God’s action is in the everyday and what it is in those particular sacraments. One will see that though much of the world is profane, the sacred cannot help bubbling up all over, even in the midst of tragedy and sin, for love conquers all and God’s love, which has redeemed the world—has bought it back—is in the process of taking it into his possession.

The sacramental imagination will indeed see that God is working at all times in the midst of even the worst situations because it will see the ultimate reality at the depths of this concrete world. Some will object that such a view will inevitably lead one to a kind of blindness to the real power of evil. In her essay “Novelist and Believer,” Flannery O’Connor responded to this objection by noting that the perception of God at the heart of reality “in no way hinders [the artist’s] perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.”

Indeed, the task of the artist is to paint pictures of our world in words, images, and sounds that show both the beauty and the order at the heart of reality even amid the destruction that is present. Speaking of novels, O’Connor writes that this is no easy task because it involves seeing both with one’s own natural eyes and with the eyes of the Church. Too many writers often decide that the Christian vision of ultimate reality is much easier to deal with than the messiness of everyday life where God’s grandeur, like God himself, is too often hidden amid the rubble. “The Sorry religious novel,” she writes, “comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible.”

The sacramental imagination must be one that sees reality as it is—both the often hidden hand of God and the visible, obviously not fully restored world in which we live, groaning as it is for the fullness of its redemption. That means depicting sin. As Newman would write in the Idea of a University, “[I]f Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature.” By “Christian literature” here he meant something close to what O’Connor meant by a “Sorry religious novel,” in this case one that makes the patterns satisfying by not dealing with the ugliness of rebellion against God. He clarifies, “It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of a sinful man.” Truly Christian and sacramental literature must depict that reality in such a way that it does not cut corners or shy away from ugliness, but also in such a way that it does not support or promote the lie that the morally and spiritually ugly is really possessed of glamor. It must depict sin but in a true fashion as an action of sundering men and women from God and each other. It must depict it as an action that is not an excess of some good passion (“I loved too much!”) but a privation (“I did not actually love enough. . .”).

So, too, the sacramental imagination must see goodness for what it is and how incomplete it is in frail human beings in this world. Newman observed in a sermon titled “The Dangers of Accomplishments” how that failure O’Connor spoke about happens when depicting not evil but virtue and religion.

In books, everything is made beautiful in its way. Pictures are drawn of complete virtue; little is said about failures, and little or nothing of the drudgery of ordinary, every-day obedience, which is neither poetical or interesting. True faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake, to bear petty annoyances, which we find written down in no book.  In most books Christian conduct is made grand, elevated, and splendid; so that any one, who only knows of true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious, is sure to be offended at religion when he actually comes upon it, from the roughness and humbleness of its duties, and his necessary deficiencies in doing them. It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples’ feet; but the sands of the real desert have no luster in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation.

A truly sacramental imagination sees the power of God made manifest in the world. It also sees how that power is made manifest in weakness, in fits and starts, and over long periods of time as it transforms human wills in conjunction with disagreeable, small, and numberless acts of obedience.

In other words, the sacramental imagination must not be an exercise in the imaginary. It must traffic in images of reality that include the startlingly beautiful, the ugly, and the outwardly disagreeable but inwardly luminous.

How do we develop such an imagination? The obvious answer is to believe in Christ and his sacraments and to relate to him by participating in them. Secondly, we ought to nourish our own imaginations by looking through the lenses of, as O’Connor suggested, the Bible, Christian teaching, and even theology, as well as our own natural eyes. Yet belief, participation, and reading all require a number of traits, among which we might consider four very important.

Attention. We have eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear. That is not because they do not work but because we do not work to use them. It is easy to blame technology and the internet for our inability to concentrate on what is in front of us. After all, they don’t help us and they do hinder us in this regard. But the human condition has, since the unfortunate afternoon in the garden, been one in which we cannot, as T. S. Eliot put it, bear too much reality. And yet that is what is necessary to develop the capacity to see and hear the goodness of the world and its badness. To see the image of Christ requires close attention to all parts of the world, which reflect their creator in diverse ways, and especially to the men and women who bear the startling image of their creator and indeed of Christ, albeit in strange and sometimes distressing disguises. “Open your eyes,” says Chesterton’s character Innocent Smith, “and you will see the New Jerusalem.”

Wonder. Yet to see the New Jerusalem, we have to look not with the eye of the critic who feels cheated that the world is not as he would make it if he were God, but instead with the eye of the child who realizes that this world is strange and more than it seems and the eye of the slightly older child who suddenly realizes the contingency of it all. This world did not have to be here at all. This beauty did not have to be here at all. And I did not have to be here at all to rejoice in it or to lament its destruction. The older child recognizes the fact that seeing the New Jerusalem seems to require not merely opening one’s eyes but occasionally a good deal of squinting. Even the fact of evil bearing down on us can be a powerful stimulus to our sacramental imaginations when we see how it bears witness to a goodness without which we cannot detect it and one that is still evident below the surface.

Gratitude. To say it did not have to be is to say that it was gratuitous on the part of God—freely given!—and demands gratitude on the part of us. “What have you that you did not receive?” St. Paul asks the Corinthians. The answer, as the cheerleaders will tell us, is nothing. And yet we are so constituted as to focus much more on the two birds in the bush rather than the one beautiful one that rests in our hand. Yet when we do focus on that which we do have even though it was not owed to us, we start to see the beauty in that which we do not have. We start to imagine how it might function in somebody else’s life in some mysterious way to reveal God. We start to see even amid great evil how there are sprouts of goodness that God might grow into trees whose leaves might bring shade and whose fruits might give delight and nourishment to future generations. Seeing and giving thanks for what may have developed amid past evils nourishes our imagination for what glory God might draw out of our present discontents.    

Asceticism. A final characteristic that is needed to develop the foregoing is an ascetical bent—one that struggles against the tendency to not pay attention, wonder, or give thanks. Quite often the rule is that we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. The ascetical struggle is one that voluntarily foregoes some of the good in the world in order to focus on the giver of good. And one way it does that is by taking away the distraction of the many unappreciated wonders of the world in our lives so that we might recover wonder with less. We are focused when we give up certain obvious goods in our lives to see less obvious goods, ponder how good they are, and perhaps ask why we have not been thankful for them in the first place. By taking away some of the goods we force ourselves to pay attention to the good as it shines forth in what Hopkins tells us are

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

And when we see these things aright, we will see, to complete his stanza, that:

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him!

A version of this essay was presented as a talk to the Duc in Altum group at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

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