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Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts

Wednesday, 31 August 2022

Artlyst: Holiday Snaps – End Of Summer Art Diary

My latest diary article for Artlyst is an additional summer diary based on a trip to Mallorca :

‘At the end of the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, art and economic development through the growth of tourism went hand-in-hand in Mallorca; one way, among many, in which reason and art became co-terminus. Art and land have had a longstanding symbiotic relation here, whether documenting Mallorcan life or marvelling at natural beauty. Yet despite the broadening of art in media and concept that began in the twentieth century and continues into the present, as these current exhibitions show art retains its connection with the land – never more urgently than in our climate emergency – and also continues to explore personal and societal reasons for existence creating spaces for contemplation, challenge and change.'

For other posts on my Mallorcan visits, past and present, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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James MacMillan - O Radiant Dawn. 
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 14:12 0 comments
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Tuesday, 1 March 2022

Artlyst: Surrealism Outside The Usual Story – Tate Modern

My latest review for Artlyst is on Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern:

'Surrealism rejects oppressive rationalism by seeking to liberate the mind from outdated modes of thought and behaviour. As poet Urkhan Muyassar explained, the Surrealists sought to free the ‘mysterious moments’ of human creativity from a ‘superimposed’ reasoning to reach repressed thoughts, or ‘what lies behind reality. Surrealism aims to travel beyond reason and therefore contains a substantive body of work exploring spirituality, mysticism and religion in all their many and varied forms ...

These works – fascinating in their own right and profoundly absorbing when brought together – demonstrate that a deep dive into the spirituality of Surrealism would prove to be a revelatory exhibition, particularly when one also remembers the spiritual imagery and influences in the work of others included here, such Jean Arp, Joseph Cornell and Salvador Dalí.'

Check out also my Artlyst piece on Salvador Dalí The Enigma of Faith.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Articles -
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Francis Poulenc - 5 poèmes de Max Jacob.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:31 0 comments
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Friday, 22 November 2013

C. S. Lewis: Reconciling reason and imagination

For the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis, Westminster Abbey Institute is hosting a series of events marking his career as one of the 20th century's most notable Christian writers and thinkers. As well as celebrating Lewis's remarkable achievements as a writer of fiction, apologetics and scholarship, the series looks at the question of how, in the 21st century, his example may be emulated and his legacy continued.

Yesterday, Alister McGrath and Malcolm Guite delivered lectures examining Lewis's philosophical and fictional approaches to communicating the Christian faith.

McGrath explored the way in which Lewis integrated reason and imagination into his apologetic enabling his writings to connect with both modern and postmodern audiences:

"For Lewis, truth is about seeing things rightly, grasping their deep interconnection. Truth is something that we see, rather than something we express primarily in logical or conceptual terms.

The basic idea is found in Dante's Paradiso (XXIII, 55-6), where the great Florentine poet and theologian expresses the idea that Christianity provides a vision of things - something wonderful that can be seen, yet proves resistant to verbal expression:

From that moment onwards my power of sight exceeded
That of speech, which fails at such a vision.

Hints of such an approach are also found in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, whom Lewis admired considerably. For Chesterton, a good theory allows us to see things properly: "We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass." Thus, for Chesterton, a good theory is to be judged by the amount of illumination it offers, and its capacity to accommodate what we see in the world around us and experience within us: "With this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them." In the same way, Chesterton argued, Christianity validates itself by its ability to make sense of our observations of the world: "The phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon."

For Lewis, the Christian faith offers us a means of seeing things properly - as they really are, despite their outward appearances. Christianity provides an intellectually capacious and imaginatively satisfying way of seeing things, and grasping their interconnectedness, even if we find it difficult to express this in words. Lewis's affirmation of the reasonableness of the Christian faith rests on his own quite distinct way of seeing the rationality of the created order, and its ultimate grounding in God. Using a powerful visual image, Lewis invites us to see God as both the ground of the rationality of the world, and the one who enables us to grasp that rationality: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else." Lewis invites us to see Christianity as offering us a standpoint from which we may survey things, and grasp their intrinsic coherence. We see how things connect together."

Guite read Lewis' poem entitled 'Reason' by Walter Hooper which pre-conversion pleads for the reconciliation of reason and imagination that was achieved for him when he understood the incarnation to be true myth:

Set on the soul's acropolis the reason stands
A virgin, arm'd, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason. But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded, and her pains are long, and her delight.
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination's dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say, and not deceive,
Then wholly say, that I BELIEVE.

Guite related the prescience of this poem to Coleridge's image in the Biographia Literaria of the chrysalis of the horned fly leaving room in its involucrum for antenna yet to come:

"They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them!"

Lewis' imagination creates similar intuitions as conversion and incarnation are explored in and through other worlds, visiting which enable us to see our own with fresh vision as Guite unpacks for us in his own sonnet for C. S. Lewis:

From ‘beer and Beowulf’ to the seven heavens,
Whose music you conduct from sphere to sphere,
You are our portal to those hidden havens
Whence we return to bless our being here.
Scribe of the Kingdom, keeper of the door
Which opens on to all we might have lost,
Ward of a word-hoard in the deep hearts core,
Telling the tale of Love from first to last.
Generous, capacious, open, free,
Your wardrobe-mind has furnished us with worlds
Through which to travel, whence we learn to see
Along the beam, and hear at last the heralds
Sounding their summons, through the stars that sing,
Whose call at sunrise brings us to our King

Today, a memorial to Lewis will be unveiled in Poets' Corner during a service of thanksgiving for his life and work. The preacher will be Rowan Williams and the Abbey choir will sing a newly commissioned anthem, a setting of Lewis’s poem “Love’s As Warm As Tears”.

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Mina Cho - As the Ruin Falls Mvt 1: Always End Where I Begin.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 00:06 0 comments
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Sunday, 20 April 2008

Religion & rationality

Sam Norton flagged up an interesting post by Chris Dillow on the Left, Religion and Rationality. Dillow makes some helpful observations that feed in to the debate about the place of religion in public life (see, for example, the following posts - 1, 2, 3, 4). These include the need for "an institutional framework in order to direct the fallible human mind towards the proper growth of knowledge"; the legitimation of power through appeals to reason; the need for shared presuppositions in reasoned debate; and the inability of reason to answer the question, "What is a good life?"

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Big Audio Dynamite - E = MC2.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 23:23 0 comments
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