Compelling Art
In Search of the Baptism of the Imagination
My subtitle might seem a bit puzzling, and potentially hazardous. Whenever one borrows a sacramental concept, such as baptism, and starts playing around with it, using it in an imprecise or fanciful way, attempting to appropriate some of its mystique and luster for the sake of a rhetorical flourish, well, one may be making trouble for oneself.
But it may mitigate the feeling of risk if I point out that I got the idea from C. S. Lewis. He was devoted to the work of the imagination and described its indispensable role in his own conversion to Christianity from a fashionable and rather light and mindless form of atheism heavily tinged with late Romanticism. He depicts that transformation as beginning with the unexpected effects of a chance reading of George MacDonald’s book Phantastes on a train ride. Lewis had snatched up a copy at the train station, “an Everyman edition in a dirty jacket,” to serve as a distraction for the ride ahead. How appropriate of him, to choose a lowly popular version of a book clad in humble garments to be his initiating Christian preceptor.
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Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is the author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina) and A Student's Guide to U.S. History (ISI Books). He is a member of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
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more on C. S. Lewis from the online archives
19.6—July/August 2006
The Three-Fold Cord of Imagination, Reason & Will in C. S. Lewis by Michael Ward
22.5—June 2009
C. S. Lewis on Civilization & the Natural Order by Timothy L. Hall
more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
on the Congregation as a Wilderness by Paul Gregory Alms
33.1—January/February 2020
on a Saint's Charism That Cures Toxic Perfectionism by Colleen Carroll Campbell
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