C.S. Lewis
I didn’t mean that a “bright blur” is my only idea of God. I meant that something of that sort tends to be there when I start praying, and would remain if I made no effort to do better. And “bright blur” is not a very good description. In fact you can’t have a good description of anything so vague. If the description became good it would become false.
Betty’s recipe—“use images as the rest of us do”—doesn’t help me much. And which does she mean? Images in the outer world, things made of wood or plaster? Or mental images?
As regards the first kind, I am not, as she suggests, suffering from a phobia about “idolatry”. I don’t think people of our type are in any danger of that. We shall always be aware that the image is only a bit of matter. But its use, for me, is very limited. I think the mere fact of keeping one’s eyes focused on something—almost any object will do—is some help towards concentration. The visual concentration symbolises, and promotes, the mental. That’s one of the ways the body teaches the soul. The lines of a well designed church, free from stunts, drawing one’s eyes to the altar, have something of the same effect.
But I think that is all an image does for me. If I tried to get more out of it, I think it would get in the way. For one thing, it will have some artistic merits or (more probably) demerits. Both are a distraction. Again, since there can be no plausible images of the Father or the Spirit, it will usually be an image of Our Lord. The continual and exclusive addressing our prayers to Him surely tends to what has been called “Jesus-worship”? A religion which has its value; but not, in isolation, the religion Jesus taught.
Mental images may have the same defect, but they give rise to another problem as well.
St. Ignatius Loyola (I think it was) advised his pupils to begin their meditations with what he called a compositio loci. The Nativity or the Marriage At Cana, or whatever the theme might be, was to be visualised in the fullest possible detail. One of his English followers would even have us look up “what good Authors write of those places” so as to get the topography, “the height of the hills and the situation of the townes”, correct. Now for two different reasons this is not “addressed to my condition.”
One is that I live in an archaeological age. We can no longer, as St. Ignatius could, believingly introduce the clothes, furniture, and utensils of our age into ancient Palestine. I’d know I wasn’t getting them right. I’d know that the very sky and sunlight of those latitudes were different from any my northern imagination could supply. I could no doubt pretend to myself a naïveté I don’t really possess; but that would cast an unreality over the whole exercise.
The second reason is more important. St. Ignatius was a great master, and I am sure he knew what his pupils needed. I conclude that they were people whose visual imagination was weak and needed to be stimulated. But the trouble with people like ourselves is the exact reverse. We can say this to one another because, in our mouths, it is not a boast but a confession. We are agreed that the power—indeed, the compulsion—to visualise is not “Imagination” in the higher sense, not the Imagination which makes a man either a great author or a sensitive reader. Ridden on a very tight rein, this visualising power can sometimes serve true Imagination; very often it merely gets in the way.
If I started with a compositio loci I should never reach the meditation. The picture would go on elaborating itself indefinitely and becoming every moment of less spiritual relevance.
There is indeed one mental image which does not lure me away into trivial elaborations. I mean the Crucifixion itself; not seen in terms of all the pictures and crucifixes, but as we must suppose it to have been in its raw, historical reality. But even this is of less spiritual value than one might expect. Compunction, compassion, gratitude—all the fruitful emotions—are strangled. Sheer physical horror leaves no room for them. Nightmare. Even so, the image ought to be periodically faced. But no-one could live with it. It did not become a frequent motif of Christian art until the generations which had seen real crucifixions were all dead. As for many hymns and sermons on the subject—endlessly harping on blood, as if that were all that mattered—they must be the work either of people so far above me that they can’t reach me, or else of people with no imagination at all. (Some might be cut off from me by both these gulfs.)
Yet mental images play an important part in my prayers. I doubt if any act of will or thought or emotion occurs in me without them. But they seem to help me most when they are most fugitive and fragmentary—rising and bursting like bubbles in champagne or wheeling like rooks in a windy sky: contradicting one another (in logic) as the crowded metaphors of a swift poet may do. Fix on any one, and it goes dead. You must do as Blake would do with a joy; kiss it as it flies. And then, in their total effect, they do mediate to me something very important. It is always something qualitative—more like an adjective than a noun. That, for me, gives it the impact of reality. For I think we respect nouns (and what we think they stand for) too much. All my deepest, and certainly all my earliest, experiences seem to be of sheer quality. The terrible and the lovely are older and solider than terrible and lovely things. If a musical phrase could be translated into words at all it would become an adjective. A great lyric is very like a long, utterly adequate, adjective. Plato was not so silly as the Moderns think when he elevated abstract nouns—that is, adjectives disguised as nouns—into the supreme realities—the Forms.
I know very well that in logic God is a “substance”. Yet my thirst for quality is authorised even here: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.” He is this glory. What He is (the quality) is no abstraction from Him. A personal God, to be sure; but so much more than personal. To speak more soberly, our whole distinction between “things” and “qualities”, “substances” and “attitudes”, has no application to Him. Perhaps it has much less than we suppose even to the created universe. Perhaps it is only part of the stage set.
The wave of images, thrown off like a spray from the prayer, all momentary, all correcting, refining, “interanimating” one another, and giving a kind of spiritual body to the unimaginable, occurs more, I find, in acts of worship than in petitionary prayers. Of which, perhaps, we have written enough. But I don’t regret it. They are the right starting point. They raise all the problems. If anyone attempted to practise, or to discuss, the higher forms without going through this turnstile, I should distrust him. “The higher does not stand without the lower.” An omission or disdain of petitionary prayer can sometimes, I think, spring not from superior sanctity but from a lack of faith and a consequent preference for levels where the question: “Am I only doing things to myself?” does not jut out in such apparent crudity.