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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