The Sacramental Imagination and Catholic Literature

The Sacramental Imagination and Catholic Literature
Nina Butorac
Excerpt:
Analogical Imagination
I first came across the expression "Sacramental Imagination" in Andrew Greeley's book, The Catholic Myth, which is a sociological study of American Catholic culture, behavior and beliefs. ¹ In the third chapter of his book, Greeley poses this question to his readers: "Do Catholics Imagine Differently?" He then proceeds to explain that, yes, indeed they do.

"Religion... is imagination before it's anything else. The Catholic imagination is different from the Protestant imagination. You know that: Flannery O'Connor is not John Updike." ²

This piqued my interest. "How is the Catholic Imagination different?" I wondered, and "Why might this be so?" Greeley writes:

"The central symbol (of religion) is God. One's "picture" of God is in fact a metaphorical narrative of God's relationship with the world and the self as part of the world... The Catholic "classics" assume a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world, and who discloses (Himself) only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him crucified). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God." ³

Greeley defines this difference this way:

"(T)he Catholic imagination is 'analogical' and the Protestant imagination is 'dialectical.'" ⁴

.......
My Note:
I became interested in the 'imagination' after delving into the poetry and life of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the concept of hacceity. [don Scotus] I continue to collide with 'imagination'. Personally, after a lot of reading, thinking (yes, Martha, I do try!), and pondering I offer a 'tender' description. The imagination is that aspect of our being that is the vehicle for hope. Don't crush me, please, in your mad dash to discredit that. I only posted the above article because it is well-written. I am not a fan of Andrew Greeley. It makes me nervous to hear the word 'myth' bandied about when discussing the sacramental nature of being. Bultmann has done enough damage to the 'mystery' of God and His Creation, not counting what it has done to the Church. The Romantics haven't helped in this fraying of perception either.

There are quite a few people, many who are not Christian, who have taken up this banner of 'imagination.' Some nominal Christians are working very hard to re-define it in more, I'll be nice!, 'secular' terms which should be very disturbing to Christians and Catholics. I find it to be pivotal in the 'culture war.' [Hopkins 'began' here with the German 'kulturkampf', BTW. This onslaught has only ramped up with each passing day.]
Its mystery is haunting, isn't it?!!!!! I will share my present list of 'imagination' descriptors I have found and am reading about to allow your perusal of this great part of our being. I hope you will guard it well: with heart, mind, soul and body.

On Landscapes

Imagination List

Sacramental Imagination [O’Connor, Hopkins(Scotist)]

Analogical Imagination [Greeley(liberal)]

Moral Imagination [Realism: Yvor Winters]

Penetrative Imagination [Coleridge, Ruskin]

Questing Imagination [Stafford]

Emotive Imagination [Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford]

Symbolic Imagination [Walker Percy, Allan Tate]

Angelic Imagination [Walker Percy, Allan Tate]

Liberal Imagination [ Lionel Trilling] [Perceptive Factor {Javier Marias]

Utopian Imagination  (Marxist) [Judith Brown]

Imaginative Empathy [Joseph W. Meeker]

Surreal Imagination [Dali, Bunuel, Lorca]

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Recently,

Imagination in the Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats

Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imaginations [Grace Mazur]

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American Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor also illustrates the sacramental understanding of the world in her work Novelist and Believer:

"St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things. To the person who believes this - as the western world did up until a few centuries ago - this physical sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source... The aim of the artist is to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe... The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality."

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There are others to add to the above list but I am not ready to add them until I read about each of them. You know what Simone Weil said: You must pay close 'attention.'