The Uses of the Imagine for Imagination in Preaching the Gospel

The Uses of the Imagine for Imagination in Preaching the Gospel
The Third Warren Carr Lecture on Preaching
Ralph C. Wood

II have contended in the first two lectures that we are suffering from a terrible famine of the Word that God has sent on our churches. He has hardened our hearing–even as he hardened Pharoah’s heart–because our noisyness and our busyness make us unable to hear. Yet the unbelief of our preachers has also caused God to stop their mouths, or rather to fill them with assorted and sorry substitutes for the Gospel, so that the more they talk the less they have to say. If this were all I had to argue, I would have brought only the counsel of despair. Thus have I also argued that God will relent from this theological starvation-program and feed us again on “the sincere milk of his Word” (I Peter 2:2) by making us learn to listen and thus to hear amidst this overwhelmingly visual age, by making the heard Word of the sermon once again the center of Baptist worship, and by making our proclaimers of that Word the leaders of our churches in becoming faithful witnesses to the Gospel. Now I will seek to make the case that God will also overcome the famine and restore his people to the hearing of his Word through a recovery of imagination in preaching. I will begin by dealing with the Bible’s justified suspicion of the imagination. Next I will maintain that God’s decision to image himself in Jesus Christ not only permits but demands that we give primacy to the imagination in our understanding and our preaching of the Faith. And finally I will seek to illustrate such an imagination-enlivened Faith by recourse to the final scene from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial Nigger” as well as to a passage from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.

Nearly everyone knows that Plato regarded the works of imagination as not once but twice removed from Reality. They imitate the shadowy world that in turn reflects the divine world of the Forms: thus are they but an image of an image. It is much less noticed that the King James Bible also uses the word “imagination” in an almost uniformly pejorative way. In Genesis 5:6 we read that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Again in 8:21 we hear that “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Such evil-producing imagination makes God so sorry for even creating man that it prompts him to drown virtually his whole creation. Moses makes a similar use of the word in Deuteronomy 31:21 when he predicts the forthcoming unfaithfulness of Israel once they arrive in the long-awaited Canaan: “for I know their imagination, which they go about, even now, before I have brought them into the land which I sware.”

So does Jeremiah warn his people against walking “after the imagination” of their own hearts (23:17). Again in the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah beseeches God to take vengeance on the prophet’s enemies for “all their imaginations against me” (3:60). In his condemnation of pagans who make a false god of the good creation, Paul declares that they “became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21). In his second letter to Corinth, Paul urges his fellow believers to engage in spiritual warfare against the enemy strongholds of unbelief that we erect within the human mind: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Finally, the Virgin Mary declares in her Magnificat that God puts down the mighty and scatters “the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Luke 1:51).

Most modern versions of the Bible use terms like “stubbornness”–the deliberate plotting or devising of evil–to translate the various Hebrew and Greek words that the KJV renders uniformly as “imagination.” Yet I wonder if the old Jacobean divines were not religiously right, even if they were linguistically wrong, to link imagination with both the conceiving and the doing of evil. We cannot commit sin without first justifying it. And we cannot justify sin unless we have first imagined it not as evil but as good. Indeed, it is human fantasizing–the mental picture-making of the evils that we can justify as good–that prompts nearly all of our wanting and seizing of sinfully desired things. How well the advertisers know this sorry truth! The imagination is indeed a faculty deeply linked to the corrupted human heart and its selfish longings. Calvin called the heart a factory for the perpetual making of idols. So is the fallen imagination a workshop for the infinite fabrication of self-serving fantasies.

Yet surely we must also argue the opposite case as well. As Reinhold Niebuhr taught us, all created things are characterized by a deep ambivalence. They have immense capacities for both good and evil. The imagination is capable not only of evil fantasizing but also of redemptive creativity. This is the true function of imagination that the Romantic poets sought to restore. They sought to recover the lost unity between the perceiver and the perceived. Rather than simply knowing about things through the processes of calculating reason, they wanted to get us inside the created world, to know things as they are, to appreciate the natural order in all of its wonder and glory. One hardly thinks of George Eliot as a Romantic, yet she has their positive regard for the imagination when she declares that “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

I would argue, in more mundane fashion, that all doing of good is also prompted by the imagination. Just as we sin first in pictorial thought, then in activating word, and finally in deadly deed, so must we first of all imagine the good before we can speak and do it. In order to counsel the troubled, to feed the hungry, to care for the neglected, we must first have a vision of their inherent worth, their true potential–indeed, we must learn to see the very image of God becoming fulfilled in such acts. What would these people look and act like if they were made truly whole–if they had the health and truth of God in them? It might be argued that the failure of theology in our time is a failure of imagination. The detective novelist P. D. James observes that most charitable acts are decidedly undramatic–caring for a dying person, befriending a lonely soul, even grading a set of exams. The good inherent in such actions is so quiet and unspectacular that it is ever so hard to make them artistically interesting. Murder and countless other deeds of destruction, Baroness James adds, require little facility of imagination to conceive and to gestate and finally to deliver in fictional form. No wonder that violence and pornography are so tempting to the artist as well as to the rest of us who have fallen imaginations.

Yet there is a far more substantial reason for the Biblical suspicion of imagination than its moral corruptibility: Images that fertilize the mind and make it fecund with both good and evil serve, far more dangerously, to place a terrible limit on God. A god who is bound by our imaging of him is no God at all. Thus does the Second Commandment explicitly forbid the making of any image or likeness of Yahweh. God wants Israel to have no picture or statue of Him for the same reason that He will not permit his people to provide him his name: He is the God who will not be controlled and manipulated by human images and titles. God insists on his freedom to redeem humanity utterly on his own terms, never ours. The angel at the Jabbok rightly refuses Jacob’s demand that the divine being reveal his name: God gives us our name and identity, not we his. As Moses has to learn, God’s name is unlike any other: “I am who I am, I will be who I will be.” Any god whom we humans could name or image would not be God but a projection of our own desires, an idol. As usual, John Calvin puts the matter most succinctly: “God rejects without exception all shapes and pictures, and other symbols by which the superstitious imagine they can bring God near to them. These images defile and insult the majesty of God” (Institutes I, xi, i).

Nowhere is the strangeness of the unimaged God made more remarkable than in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. As they razed the Temple, the Romans eagerly entered the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the place where the pagans hoped at last to find the image of the Hebrew God and to smash it in triumphant glee. To their huge disappointment, they found no such statue or figure, but the Ark of the Covenant: a box containing mere scrolls. This bizarre religion without an imaged god was like unto nothing they had ever encountered! To the good pagan, a god who cannot be cast into bronze or carved from marble or wood is not worthy to be called a god. The early Christians encountered similar complaints. Their refusal to worship any other god than the God of Jesus Christ caused them to be branded as atheists. And on the one occasion, in the sermon at Mars Hill, when Paul sought to appeal to pagan images of the gods, he most notably failed to make many converts.

Yet Scripture’s rightful suspicion of the imagination is neither permanent nor absolute. Precisely in order to correct our many false images of him, God has revealed his own true image in Jesus Christ. In him the imagination can at last be redeemed to do its proper work. Christians claim, in fact, that the ancient Hebrew prohibition against images of God has been lifted by God himself. We are now free to seize everything in creation in order to make analogies and parables, to find echoes and images, of this one True Image which God has made of himself. Because God has shown himself to us in Christ, our own images can become the vehicles of the divine presence itself. This is a remarkable thing and not a thing to be taken for granted. As Calvin teaches us, God graciously accommodates his otherness and mystery to our finite categories of speech and image. It is chiefly through the sacraments of bread and wine, as well as the baptismal waters, that God sanctifies our imaginations. There, said Calvin, God reveals to our eyes what the preached Word declares to our ears.

God’s imaging of himself in Scripture and in Christ contains its own inherent safeguards against abuse and idolatry. The Cross is not an image of power but of weakness, not an emblem of triumph but of defeat, not a thing of beauty but of supreme ugliness. The Old Testament signs of salvation are also strange–the life-producing genitals circumcised, the green bush set aflame, the boat built in a desert, the creation drowned by the Creator, the deliverance from slavery through a wilderness wandering, the temple no sooner built than blasted, the people given a homeland and then exiled from it. The New Testament signs are no less odd: foot washings, baptismal burials, even resurrection from the dead. We should not be surprised at Chesterton’s declaration that we cannot comprehend the God of the Gospel apart from radical paradox. Paradox, he explained, is truth standing on its head and waving its legs to get our attention.

The unexpectedness of the Gospel means that our own imaginative work will need to have a surprising strangeness and an equally surprising restraint. Just as God’s own controlling image of self-identification is disharmonic and unsettling, so must our own imagination in preaching be cruciform rather than prettifying. Which is to say, of course, that it must be both inspired and limited by the Cross. An imagination cut loose from Calvary is even deadlier than an ethics thus severed, as we can witness in the terrible sacrilege at work in much contemporary worship. Flannery O’Connor was right to insist that sentimentality is to Christianity as pornography is to art. Much of what happens in our churches is but the religious equivalent of the fantasy-fed pornography and violence that are devouring our dying culture. Among the horrors of the Fort Worth church massacre not often noted is that the young people had seen so many church skits that they thought the gunman was another impersonator of the devil. They could not recognize a killer when they saw one.

George Macdonald, the 19th century Scots writer who inspired C. S. Lewis and the other members of the Oxford Inklings, defined imagination quite simply as “an imaging or a making of likenesses. The imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought-not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or in any mode upon which the senses can lay hold.” Imagination gives concrete and sensible form to abstract and disembodied thought: it makes ideas incarnate. Macdonald thus regarded imagination as the highest and holiest of human powers, the faculty whose operations are nearest to the power of God. It is indeed the creative faculty. Just as God creates the universe out of nothing prior to or other than himself, and just as He sustains its on-going life by giving its physical existence constant spiritual sustenance, so does the imagination reshape the physical and spiritual realities of the earth into forms either divine or demonic. Poet means maker in both the Greek and Celtic languages: poetés and makar. Poets fashion new worlds of terror and delight out of God’s primary creation, even as preachers create similar worlds–either dead or alive, either faithful or false–out of God’s primary act of re-creation in Christ.

C. S. Lewis looked upon the imagination as a higher power than reason itself. “Reason is the faculty of truth,” said Lewis, “while imagination is the faculty of reality.” Lewis had no desire to demean truth; indeed, he was himself a rationalist. But there are varieties of truth. “Two plus two equals four” and “the boiling point of water at sea level is 212 degrees” are truths discerned by the calculating and collating powers of raw reason. Without such elemental truths to order and regulate our lives, we would dwell amidst chaos and cacophony. For most of our physical life, we utterly depend on such truthful deductions. As the beneficiary of the deductive science that produced hearing aids, I have the greatest regard for the truths of reason in this restricted sense of the word. Yet reality is a much greater thing than truth in this narrow sense. Reality is truth made personal and concrete and moral. It is the sphere where we live and move and have our being as creatures before God and our neighbors. Reality can be discerned only by the imagination through likenesses that give form to thought, not through propositions that make thought ever more abstract and lifeless.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer of the 19th century, must have had something like Lewis’ distinction in mind when he declared that, “Even if it were proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really so that the truth were outside Christ, then I would still prefer to stay with Christ rather than with the truth.” What Dostoevsky meant by this seemingly bizarre claim is that Christ is God embodied in all of his paradoxical mystery. Christ incarnates the divine Reality which (to borrow a metaphor from C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces) is thick and dark like blood. Truth, by contrast, is often a disembodied thing whose consistency is thin and clear like water. This explains why Harvard University impoverished itself when it altered its original motto, Christo et Ecclesiae, to the banal generality of bare Veritas. The church’s Gospel gives truth its signifying shape and direction and critique. Harvard now has truth alone and sufficing merely unto itself–a small and unimaginative thing indeed. Stanley Hauerwas has declared, however, that if Baylor University ever secularizes its own motto (Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana), it will not be nearly so impoverished. For any right-minded person, says Hauerwas, will always take Texas over the truth!

Truth is never abstract and disembodied for Christians. God in Christ is the truth made incarnate and living and real. As the God who has embodied himself in finite form, Jesus Christ can be known only in imagination, the embodied form of thought and experience. If we don’t know Christ imaginatively, we don’t know him at all. If we can’t image who he is and how he works in the world, our faith will be in vain. I suspect that we live in an imaginatively flaccid time chiefly because our belief in Christ has also slackened. Walker Percy claimed that nearly all of the essential Christian words have been worn slick and faceless with unimaginative use. They are coins that no longer have value. Terms like salvation and damnation have largely ceased to register. Thomas Merton once declared that the command “Love God” has come to have as little spiritual force as “Eat Wheaties.” It is just another slogan.

To many evangelicals and fundamentalists, the great sacred words of Scripture are often reduced to the bland notion that we are “going to heaven” because of some momentary decision or some highly emotional experience we have had. The equally innocuous notion follows that we are “going to hell” because we have not had such an experience after autonomously deciding to “get saved.” The Gospel is accordingly reduced to a gnostic self-interest that leaves both us and the world unconformed to Christ. Ken Myers, the editor of Mars Hill Tapes, has acidly observed that most conservative Christians are “of the world but not in it.” Theirs is indeed a worldly gospel of good feelings and untroubled success that in fact makes no real contact with the deepest desires and needs of the world. Thus do I tell my students that the real aim of the Gospel is not to get us into heaven but to get heaven into us–and thus to get the hell out! The popular Christianity of our time is sappy and sentimental, in short, because it lacks the imagination of the Cross.

Liberal Christians are right to reject the cheap grace of this crossless gospel. Yet in their revulsion against the easy-believism of the comfortable right, leftist Christians make their own deadly errors. Their first error lies in their obsessive need to be identified with a larger group. Embarrassed at the outrages of the fundamentalists who now control the Southern Baptist Convention, and unwilling to celebrate the glories of the local church and association, they must find some greater group to join. Rather than retrieving such a good name as “Baptist Christians,” they seek to give themselves a more satisfying title. Thus do they forget that Baptists and Methodists and most other Christian groups have rarely chosen their own names. They have been named by our enemies and then turned snide opprobrium into terms of praise.

Surely it is a failure of imagination that certain Baptists are now labeling themselves as moderates. Moderation is usually a political virtue, even a necessity, but it is also often a theological vice. Even St. Thomas, the most restrained and circumspect of all theologians, confesses that there is no moderation in the love of God. Many evils spring from an immoderate love of earthly things, says Aquinas, but the love of God in Christ is by nature radical, drastic, excessive, indeed immoderate. Warren Carr reminds us that moderates are members of the church of Laodicea–the church which God promises to “spew” out of his mouth because of its lukewarmness, its blandness, its neither-this-nor-thatness, its very moderation. Perhaps he remembers Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and its scorching use of the term “moderate.” There King charged that white moderates, in their insistence on going slow and playing safe, were far greater enemies of racial justice and reconciliation than such hate-groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens councils. King imaginatively discerned that true enemies are better than false friends.

In allowing their enemies to determine their entire agenda, moderates are in danger of becoming reverse and negative fundamentalists, remaining ever so much clearer about who they are not than who they are. Worse still, liberals often let fundamentalists rob them of the Gospel. Recoiling from the fundamentalists’ unctuous use of Zion-language, moderates seek to avoid the slick and defaced terms altogether. I have noticed, for example, that the very word “salvation” is not often used in many old-line churches. Hence also the contemporary vogue for spirituality rather than religion, for vague notions of “faith communities” rather than concrete commitments to the church as the unique body of Christ. Surely we should recognize that Wicca worshippers and the Aryan Nation also constitute “faith communities.” We cannot abandon the biblical words and metaphors without abandoning the Gospel itself. Our task is to revivify such indispensable images and doctrines as justification by grace alone and sanctification through faith alone. “Liberation” and “empowerment” are poor substitutes. So is the word “dysfunctional” a pathetic psychological surrogate for describing our sin and alienation from God. Such unimaginative recoil from traditional theological language among liberals reveals, as the late Walker Percy ceaselessly iterated, that they the mirror image of conservatives. Bishop Spong and Doctor Falwell are twins without knowing it.

Two Examples of Theological Imagination at Work

Our remaining task is to illustrate the Gospel-discerning, sermon-strengthening power of imagination at work in two 20th century Christian authors, Flannery O’Connor and G. K. Chesterton. It should be evident that I regard written works of imagination as theologically more fruitful than films. W. H. Auden once observed that there is a link between violence and the movies that is not found in novels. He argued that a novel is not likely to incite readers to deeds of terror or lust, chiefly because the action of a novel unfolds so slowly. Fictional carnage and mayhem are usually committed with a deliberation and a moral complexity that enables readers to deepen and complicate their own moral lives. In films, and especially television, action is usually swift and often unconnected to moral reality. Thus do they coarsen our imagination and corrupt our spiritual life.

This explains why I long to hear preachers take their sermon analogies from novels and poetry rather than television programs. To the objection that preachers must engage their television-watching congregations “where they are,” I reply that they also are responsible to call their members to a higher plane of cultural and thus of theological life. If parishioners find out that their pastors are serious readers, they will be likely to follow suit themselves. We will all become deeper Christians when sermons are more deeply rooted in the imaginative life that reveals how the Gospel engages the world. The task of the preacher lies very considerably in the search for synonyms: in the quest for fresh ways of defamiliarizing the familiar, of reminding us that the Gospel we take as ordinary is in fact Extraordinary.

The late Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler was asked, not long before his death, to give his advice to the church. Rather than coming forth with some high-sounding theological pronouncement, Sittler offered this remarkable caveat: “Watch your language.” He was not making a call to eloquence, I suspect, so much as to imagination and precision and care in our use of the words that God can turn into his Word. Since Christ is the Word incarnate, we must be ever so vigilant about our words. Mark Twain once declared that the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug! It is the failure of preachers to “watch their words”-to make vigorous and imaginative proclamation of the Gospel-that accounts, I suspect, for the nearly complete triumph of music over the sermon in most Baptist churches.

At the end of the story called “The Artificial Nigger,” her two protagonists, the boy Nelson and his grandfather Mr. Head, have come to a seemingly awful end. They have committed sins of rejection and betrayal and vengeance that make their racist deeds seem minor evils indeed. The young boy and the old man are physically lost in a city that resembles Atlanta, they are morally lost in their alienation from each other, and they are theologically lost in their total obliviousness to God’s grace. Yet as always in her work, O’Connor offers her characters drastic images of divine grace that could transform their lives. Twice already, Nelson and Mr. Head have encountered Negroes who could have been instruments of their salvation. But they fail to perceive the grace that is pursuing them until they stumble upon a broken-down lawn jockey, a miserable Sambo-statue who looks more like the crucified Christ than a happy watermelon eater. This plaster Negro has one eye chipped out, the mouth seems to be grimacing rather than grinning, and the statue itself has tilted away from its base at a strange angle. Though neither of these country characters has ever been inside a Catholic church, they both recognize a crucifix when they see it. There at the foot of this “artificial nigger”–as they call it, though the narrator does not–they encounter what eye has not seen nor ear heard, what has not entered into the human heart by its own devising:

The two of them stood there with their necks forward almost at the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets. Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now….

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that [mercy] grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood that [mercy] was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly he burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought of himself as a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

Here O’Connor brilliantly perceives a common Southern artifact, an object of racial pride and hatred and domination, as an image of the Cross. In it she descries a surprising earthly analogue of our divine redemption. Without a whit of sentimentality, she shows us the Mercy and the Judgment that unite everyone–old man and young boy, rich and poor, male and female, red and yellow and brown and black and white–in a commonality that no humanism can approach. The “artificial nigger” was meant, of course, to declare the white triumph over blacks. As David Smiley points out, the South won the second civil war, as the Jim Crow segregation laws at the turn of the century enabled Southerners to be racially victorious in the battle that they had militarily lost. This Sambo statue thus becomes an emblem of God’s own defeat at the hands of human evil: every sin against man is always an even greater sin against God. Yet the great mystery of the Cross is that God defeats our sin with the sacrifice of his own defeated Son.

No longer do this grandfather and grandson believe that they are too good to deserve mercy. On the contrary, the old man sees that their sin has been hidden from them lest it destroy them in its very hideousness. O’Connor has him discern that, from the very beginning, our lives are conceived in sin: as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we bring evil into the world with our very existence. Sin precedes us, even though we make it fully our own. Yet we are allowed to behold our monstrous evil only in the mirror of the Cross, an act of sacrifice conceived even prior to Edenic sin, a redemption determined from the foundation of the world. This redemption alone can disclose our sin without devastating us.

As Martin Luther taught, it is a hard and difficult thing to discern oneself a sinner. We will mistake a thousand other things for sin if we apprehend it apart from the Cross. Sin is not theft and cheating, not adultery and fraud, not racism and sexism and narcissism, not even murder and genocide. These are dreadful sins in the plural. Sin in the singular is disclosed only in the Cross and thus in this broken Sambo. The singular Sin which gives rise to all sins great and small is the distrust of God, the refusal to live and move and have our being in his Being, the desire to be our own lords and gods. We learn the meaning of this true and terrible Sin only in this one place called Golgotha, the place where our alienation from God is at once disclosed and overcome. There, as in the case of Nelson and Mr. Head, we are indicted by our pardon. As Karl Barth liked to say, we are sentenced by being declared free. We are imprisoned as God flings wide the cell door.

It is always God’s mercy that prompts our repentance, as John Calvin declared, and never the other way around. If mercy were acquired only at the price of our regret and sorrow for sin, then salvation would be strangely dependent on us rather than God. Instead, it is nothing other than this unmerited gift of mercy, never our so-called good works, that we take to our Maker. The Cross is the only place where we can truly take our stand, the one and only Grace which we can both live and die by. Our real shame lies not in our sin, therefore, but in our obliviousness to the Agony which purchased our redemption. We should burn with embarrassment at having availed ourselves so little of it. And when we see that our lives depend utterly upon such Mercy, we have already entered Paradise. What is Heaven but the reign of God’s grace, as He at last becomes “all in all”? Flannery O’Connor gets this Truth this brilliantly right and clear in images that arrest and convince and bring the reader Home in both the literary and theological sense.

Our images of God’s grace need not always be so somber, though neither may they ever be silly. Consider, then, an example, of the Gospel’s sheer joyfulness and delight from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern ‘force’ that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile and full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further: a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly…..Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise into a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study [an act of grave inquiry and investigation]; he reaches up to the blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. [Seriousness] is really a natural trend or lapse into taking oneself gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times [editorial] than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by force of gravity.

Chesterton is no less original and discerning than O’Connor, but in quite a different way. Here he is resisting the grim Nietzschean gospel of hard self-sufficiency, the anti-gospel of power and force. He likens such brute power to a dead stone that may be cast upward but must always fall downward. A living bird, by contrast, looks like the weakest and most fragile of things. Yet its very softness and airiness enable it to fly skyward rather than fall earthward. Here Chesterton gives us a fresh and vigorous way of imaging St. Paul’s declaration that “my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Lest we grow falsely pious about such a sentiment–thus turning it into something sentimental–Chesterton links the lightness of true power with the levitation which has been credited in certain saints. When Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross met in her tiny monastic cell in northern Spain, they were seen to be hovering slightly above the ground–levitating. Yet Chesterton had the remarkable imaginative power to espy not only the etymological but also the theological link between levitation and levity, and thus between gravity and sin. Sin is revealed in our heaviness, he saw, as we take ourselves all too seriously. Ever since the heavy-handed Tempter lured our aboriginal parents into becoming ever so serious about themselves, sin has flowed from us easily and naturally, like the seepage of a fetid pool. Salvation, by contrast, is something surprising like laughter. It springs forward with a transcendent leap, with a huge jump that takes us out of ourselves. It launches us into the flight of true freedom: into the life of the God who in Jesus Christ refuses to take our sin with any final seriousness, and who thus frees our imaginations to be put in the service of his Gospel.

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