{"id":1824,"date":"2020-12-15T21:58:05","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T21:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=1824"},"modified":"2020-12-15T21:58:09","modified_gmt":"2020-12-15T21:58:09","slug":"interview-gregory-wolfe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/15\/interview-gregory-wolfe\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Gregory Wolfe"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Interview: Gregory Wolfe<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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As the editor of Image<\/em>, Gregory Wolfe has earned a national reputation as a leading thinker on the intersection of art, culture, and faith. He has written four books, the most recent of which is Beauty Will Save the World<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Fare Forward:<\/strong> In your book Beauty Will Save the World<\/em>, you recount your personal story of transitioning from a political foot solider to an artist and cultivator. Can you recount a little of that here?<\/p>

Gregory Wolfe:<\/strong> As a young man and person of faith, I was trained to see the world in adversarial terms. And like a lot of young people, I wanted to go to war. There\u2019s something romantic about fighting for a cause, and you can\u2019t fight unless you have an enemy. For me, that enemy was Secular Liberalism\u2014with capital letters. I really thought that the world had divided into two camps. That was the world I grew up in. I went through a series of shocks to my system that led me to believe that the world doesn\u2019t really divide that neatly, that that\u2019s not where the action really is. That was a bit of a personal, vocational crisis for me. Being a kind of a witty conservative literary critic putting down the latest books of secular liberal novelists couldn\u2019t sustain my life. I really had to cast around to find what to do.<\/p>

What I discovered was I felt that I had to build rather to destroy; I had to nurture rather than criticize. Intuitively, I understood the argument that Andy Crouch makes in Culture Making<\/em>: that the best way to change culture is not to critique it or mimic it or stick messages inside it, but to create world-class, life-changing new culture, to put good new stuff into circulation. I could not have possibly have understood that idea 10 or 15 years into my vocation\u2014which was eventually founding the Image<\/em> journal. But nevertheless, it was a turning point for me, that intuition, and also that personal crisis in what I felt capable of doing.<\/p>

I don\u2019t believe that criticism and judgment and discernment aren\u2019t of value in public intellectual discourse\u2014they are. But I realized that A) they weren\u2019t ultimately my greatest skills, and B) they do have severe limitations. I felt that the history of, for lack of a better word, traditionalist religious enterprises of the last 50 years, had skewed excessively to rational, apologetical, and political discourse. As much as I believe in the importance of reason and reasoned exposition and defense of the faith, I felt that there was a massive imbalance\u2014not so much in the direction of faith versus reason, which you and others have said is an important consideration. But reason versus imagination was for me the deeper dichotomy or imbalance that was present in the religious culture. And so for me, the language of imagination was very much part of the vocational decision, that it had to be fostered to balance and leaven the power of reason, which is noble, but left unchecked tends to abstraction and a kind of totalitarian smugness that is dangerous for the church and culture.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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I began to feel that I had a kinship with thinkers from other eras that were struggling with this same issue of a religion that had become overly politicized and rationalized, and who saw the imagination and the beautiful as attempts at balance and fullness.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Q: It seems that a big part of your personal perspective on these questions, which based on what you have just said informs Image<\/em> a lot as well, is the concept of Christian Humanism. In Beauty will Save the World<\/em>, you talk at length about Christian Humanism and how it relates to cultural production. Can you explain what Christian Humanism is and how that informs the vision of redeeming culture through creation?<\/p>

A: Absolutely. People have told me from Day One that I was an idiot to invoke the term \u201chumanism\u201d at all, because in the last 30 to 40 years, the word \u201chumanism\u201d has primarily only been modified by one other word, and that\u2019s \u201csecular,\u201d which I found to be a travesty for a number of reasons. Humanism is ultimately the same word and concept as the humanities, the very core of the traditional liberal arts education as it evolved out of a kind of classical Christian synthesis in our cultural history. Humanism, in my view, is a way of looking at the world that cares deeply about how human beings are made.<\/p>

I began to feel that I had a kinship with thinkers from other eras that were struggling with this same issue of a religion that had become overly politicized and rationalized, and who saw the imagination and the beautiful as attempts at balance and fullness so that faith can be more real for human beings and more deeply grounded in their lives and experiences. In particular, I found that the Renaissance thinkers who sought to synthesize the best of classical culture with the best of Christian theology really felt like blood brothers to me. My heroes are people like Erasmus and Thomas More, who understood the dangers of an excessively dry and legalistic faith. They fought a rather third rate scholasticism of their time. They felt that literature\u2014and at their time that meant quintessentially classical Pagan literature\u2014was important because it grounded the big ideas in human experience. It actually tested them out in people\u2019s lives and made them tangible.<\/p>

Any religious discourse that drifted from human experience was liable to get into trouble. I felt a great kinship and subsequently discovered that the myth that I grew up with, the myth that the Renaissance was an explosion of prideful, human-centered secularity against the pious beauty of the Middle Ages, was in fact just that, a myth that\u2019s been debunked by one of the most important historiographical efforts of the last hundred years. So the humanists was the humanities, was the role of literature and philosophy and language and history, the concrete, and beliefs that it\u2019s important to think honestly about the lives of people. We\u2019re not just brains; the heart and the head are integrated in the humanist view, and that to me is really important.<\/p>

Q: One of the things I was struck by in Beauty<\/em> is your frustration with blanket condemnations of modern art. You came to this by way of T.S. Eliot, who you mention used a modernist style in a way you found compelling. How did your transition to appreciating contemporary art happen, and where are some places you see good work being done in art today?<\/p>

A: I originally loved Eliot because I thought Eliot was a political opponent of my political opponents. When I read beyond his essays to his poetry, I began to what have what they call a cognitive dissonance. I began to have a kind of tickle at the back of my brain which said, wait a minute, this man is working in and through the very art forms that I supposedly was dead set against. The steam started coming out of my ears like the robot who says, \u201cI cannot compute.\u201d<\/p>

And then in very short order I had a similar experience with Flannery O\u2019Connor, who uses violence and the grotesque. I had Eliot using fragmentation and allusion, and O\u2019Connor using violence and the grotesque, and none the less they were deeply traditional people. It finally dawned on me that the nature of artistic change is stylistic change. You don\u2019t have to equate stylistic change with content or conviction. But in fact, change is precisely the way that as a culture we try to keep alive that which has become too calcified or rote in a certain kind of language that has been overdone. Cultural aesthetic change is not only consonant with conserving the ancient, but in fact necessary to it.<\/p>

So when we started Image<\/em>, we decided we would look for the new Eliots and O\u2019Connors. We actually didn\u2019t know how much we would find. We were half-convinced by the narrative of decline, that it was all downhill, and we didn\u2019t know what to expect. But one of the miracles of life is that sometimes when you seek, you find. And we found artists who were interested in this, and we found people coming out of the woodwork.<\/p>

We were one of many who were questioning these separations that people thought were eternal. We just dared to question and dared to look, and we found a lot of work that\u2019s out there. We don\u2019t expect everybody to like every single thing we\u2019ve published, but I think what we\u2019ve demonstrated is that deeply religious questions can be embodied in almost every imaginable art form and style that exists over the world, and that faith doesn\u2019t reduce itself to some little clique or single eccentric mannerism, but that it\u2019s capable and stimulating of every possible form of human imagination.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Faith and reason, while two of the most crucial human faculties, are only two of the true trinity\u2014which are faith, reason, and imagination. I don\u2019t think you can live a life of faith without imagination.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Q: Who are some of the people that you didn\u2019t know when you got started but you\u2019ve found since then, who\u2019ve you\u2019ve been the most impressed with and you think Christians could benefit the most from studying?<\/p>

A: Oh man, that\u2019s a tough one. The roster is so long these days. When we started, we didn\u2019t know who Rob Hanson was or Marilynne Robinson or Richard Rodriguez or Annie Dillard or Mary Karr. The list could go on. That\u2019s what, to me, is what is so amazing. The word \u201cRenaissance\u201d in terms of the present day may strike some people as absurd, but the sheer volume of writers, artists, composers who are grappling with the most concrete Judeo-Christian beliefs, experiences, convictions, and symbols is amazing. It\u2019s absolutely stunning in its size and scope.<\/p>

Simply conveying that message to people who are addicted to the narrative of decline has been one of the biggest challenges of my time. I don\u2019t mean to say that this is some third Great Awakening that will sweep the world for Christ and his Church, but the sheer scale and diversity in contemporary artists and writers engaging in these questions is staggering. There are many other questions that have to be dealt with once that\u2019s identified, but if that alone could be totally carried to the heart of millions of people who care about these issues, that would get us to another place in the conversation than we are in right now.<\/p>

FF: This is a question we at Fare Forward<\/em> have heard a lot of people ask: What are some practical ways Christians who aren\u2019t directly engaged in cultural production as artists or writers might be able to help steward culture and renew the role of the imagination in the church and the wider society?<\/p>

GW: Not everyone makes art, obviously. Though we have spoken about prioritizing the creative voice in Image<\/em>, it may seem like we can\u2019t necessarily address those who don\u2019t make things. But that begs a simple question: maybe you can\u2019t make, but you can receive. There are people who are neither literary critics on the one hand nor literary artists on the other for whom literature can become a life-changing experience and a mainstay of their lives.<\/p>

Faith and reason, while two of the most crucial human faculties, are only two of the true trinity\u2014which are faith, reason, and imagination. I don\u2019t think you can live a life of faith without imagination. Christ calls us to place ourselves in the experience of the other, to substitute the other for ourselves, to de-center our experience\u2014and this is precisely what imagination does. It de-centers us, places us inside the heart and mind of another. It enlarges our heart and expands our vision. It\u2019s hard to see how human beings can live a full, civilized life without art or literature playing some role in it. So as far the vision of the journal is concerned, we know that not every reader is a maker, but every reader is a human being who can be enlarged and deepened and changed by what they encounter in our pages.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the editor of Image, Gregory Wolfe has earned a national reputation as a leading thinker on the intersection of art, culture, and faith. He has written four books, the most recent of which is Beauty Will Save the World. 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