Keeping the Faith, Keeping the Feast

The Operation of GraceBy Gregory Wolfe In the world of letters, overt religiosity can seem an offense against taste. Gone are the days of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Reinhold Niebuhr; in their place have stepped artists, writers, and intellectuals of faith who, in the words of novelist Doris Betts, “whisper” rather than “shout.” Faith is a private affair; its public mandate for the individual believer is discomfiting, especially to those who have no truck with it. Ours is an age of pronounced religious anxieties.It’s refreshing, then, to find someone whose personal faith is an aesthetic and intellectual enablement rather than an encumbrance. Gregory Wolfe, editor of the quarterly journal Image, is unabashedly Catholic, but ideologically nonpartisan. (Though he came of age under the tutelage of William F. Buckley at the National Review, he left a career in political commentary behind during the Reagan administration to dedicate himself to culture and the arts.) His book The Operation of Grace contains editorial statements for issues of the journal as well as essays and public addresses; their historically and culturally wide-ranging reflections are focused through Image’s guiding themes of art, faith, and mystery.The pieces collected here are loosely arranged by topic; the six groupings of chapters include headings such as “Art Speaks to Faith,” “Christian Humanism: Then and Now,” and “Scenes from a Literary Life.” A portrait of Wolfe emerges in his treatments of current events, historically diverse literary figures, and theology. He is no mystic longing for another world; nor is he a staid cleric with his collar starched. In a review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ—a movie that Wolfe appreciates, knowing full well that to do so is unfashionable—he takes on the otherworldly and ethereal approach to religion that aims to turn believers against materiality itself:

The religion scholar Stephen Prothero has criticized what he calls Gibson’s “blood and guts sacramentality.” But what other kind is there? If God cannot become present in blood, guts, shit, piss, semen, saliva—he vanishes into the ether.

Here is religion grounded in the things of this world, and thereby prepared for aesthetic cultivation through the imagination: Wolfe would have the faithful remember that they serve “a Metaphorical God,” as he titles one of his essays, though this isn’t to oppose a literal deity so much as deepen and complicate our understanding of one. John Donne is the originator of the phrase, and Wolfe quotes him to open the book:

My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a god that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art also . . . a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors…

There is a backbone of unbroken faith in this passage, but also an openness to much that is beyond propositional understanding; the mixture tempers firm belief with humility, and restores the imagination to a place of priority.The life of faith and the life of aesthetic contemplation are entwined here. In a retrospective piece on his decision to opt out of the American “culture wars,” Wolfe describes faith as “openness to divine mystery, an openness that requires humility and a vivid awareness of the fragility and contingency of our human formulations.” This characterization is fascinating for its passivity. There is no assent to a theological proposition; there is instead a kind of waiting in expectation for something that resists articulation or even comprehension. This is big-tent ecumenism, postmodern spiritual aspiration, and a capital-R Romantic grasping after the sublime, all rolled into one.Wolfe’s reflections tend to move on the general level of culture, history, and the sensibilities that help us to interpret these, but there are a number of fine passages of literary criticism as well. A chapter on the poet Dunstan Thompson concludes with the suggestion that “On a Crucifix” is a pattern poem, in spite of its left-alignment in collections of Thompson’s work. Given the text of the poem, the suggestion is apt:

SeeHere at lastIsLove

Wolfe provides detailed riffs on Geoffrey Hill and Anthony Trollope, whose book The Warden receives attentive treatment as a model for understanding, through the chief character’s occupation as a liturgist, the way in which “the quintessential activity of a religious community is not the purveying of doctrines and ideas but the worship of the presence that has called the community into being.” The ongoing calendar of little events, the daily routines of an ecclesial community, are as resolutely material—and therefore malleable and useful for creative purposes—as they are, in a sense, timeless.These excerpts are useful in triangulating Wolfe’s area of special interest and expertise, which is the life of the imagination unbound by the strictures of materialism. Though Wolfe evinces a deeply-rooted fondness for Renaissance humanism, he refuses to advocate a return to pre-modern times, as he writes:

Here’s the problem. Modernity happened. There can be no going back. What is needed is a new synthesis, a vision that can encompass the subjective individual with divine being.

The way forward, in Wolfe’s mind, is to draw from deep historical and cultural wells while nourishing a distinctly modern sensibility. He models the approach himself; the pieces collected in The Operation of Grace contain musings on historical figures like Hans Urs von Balthasar, Euripides, Erasmus, Thomas More, and Samuel Johnson, but also more contemporary ones such as Orhan Pamuk, Annie Dillard, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Hitchens, and Malcolm Muggeridge. The conservatism that animated Wolfe’s early career remains traceable in his long reach back through the centuries for sources and points of reference, but he has an ample lateral grasp as well.Most of the essays contained in the book were originally penned as editorial statements to preface issues of the journal, and this results in a feeling of intense compression. One wishes that some of these pieces were allowed to stretch and grow into full-length treatments; Wolfe’s topics certainly merit far more words than they’re given. But the insights, though real, are less important than the calm and unpretentious voice that resonates throughout the book.For a quarter century, Wolfe has curated Image to represent some of the best work being done by artists interested in faith. In its pages have appeared luminaries like Joy Williams, Scott Cairns, Denise Levertov, Christian Wiman, Luci Shaw, Franz Wright, Sufjan Stevens, Casey N. Cep, G.C. Waldrep, and Garrett Keizer, to name a handful. Wolfe is a center of gravity in the universe these figures share: he gathers and publishes them, introduces them to one another, and creates both the audience and the donor group that will sustain their culture. The Operation of Grace is a reassurance as much as it is an essay collection, and Wolfe is a patriarch guiding a clan through uncertain terrain as much as he is an editor. In the pages of Image, believers and unbelievers of all kinds have a free pass to explore late modernity’s religious DMZ.A glance through a copy of the anthology Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image yields ready examples of artists doing fruitful work in this area. Scott Cairns shows us how ancient concepts can inform contemporary life in his poem “Adventures in New Testament Greek,” which is about the word for “repentance” used in Christian scripture: 


The heart’s metanoia,on the other hand, turnswithout regret, turns notso much away, as toward,as if the slow pilgrimhas been surprised to findthat sin is not so badas it is a waste of time.

Robert Cording’s “The Parable of the Moth” is another example. As Cairns exposits the notions of sin and repentance in modern vernacular, Cording conveys a natural epiphany that occurs when a moth, trapped inside a man’s ear, finally makes an escape and leaves the man in peace:

… His eyesare wet. He feels as if he’s suddenly a pilgrimon the shore of an unexpected world.When he lies back in the grass, he is a boyagain. His wife is shining the flashlightinto the sky and there is only the silencehe has never heard, and the small roadof light going somewhere he has never been.

This is the sacramental materiality that provides Wolfe’s frame for both the imagination and the in-breaking of the divine. Cairns, Cording, and other artists are members of an arts and faith movement that Wolfe helped to build and continues working to maintain. The Operation of Grace is, in part, a record of respiration. No one fits a whole song into a single exhale, and Wolfe can only get so far with a single editorial statement for Image. But the accumulation of breaths comes to account for a whole life.In the autobiographical piece that ends the collection, Wolfe recounts an experience of reciting the Lord’s Prayer with a fellow high school basketball player while running at night in wintry New England. Breath becomes sacramental, and the presence of the divine makes itself felt:

So there, along a back road in Duxbury, Massachusetts, we two boys loped along under starlight, inspired—taking huge lungfuls of air that seemed to fill every corner of our bodies, pumping adrenaline that was entirely natural, returning glory to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in plumes of air that came from a world without end.

Breath is recursive; the encounter is ongoing. May it continue at Image for many years to come.____Martyn Wendell Jones has written for The Puritan, Books & Culture, The University Bookman, and numerous other publications. He tweets.