Theology and Form: Reflections on the Spaces of the Imagination

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Abstract
Historically the arts have been one of the primal and basic energies of human experience. They have found no real place in theology because theology has understood man to be essentially knowledge, reason and will simply inhabiting a body. Modern physical theory makes this view impossible. Matter is energy held by relation into a particular structure of tension, all “reality” is an interlocking hierarchy of rhythmically interacting structures of energy. One of these structures has the unique property of being aware of itself and so of the other structures. Being self-conscious, its place in the order of things is disturbed Trapped, it wants to escape from or return to the lost unity and so generates new structures to place itself in the order of experience according to purpose. Self-consciousness is an awareness of the self, here, and the other, there, so the first coordinate of these structures is spatial. Awareness of the self and the other is awareness of relation so the other coordinate is dramatic. Schematically (not experientially) the spatial coordinate is in the custody of art, the dramatic in the custody of the myth/ritual. These new structures are true structures, as all the structures of matter, and so are real (“reality” is no longer exhaused in tangible substance but in structures of relation). As real, they are not opinions heu about the world by a discrete and separate individual; they are the world of the people who made them. Whatever is postulated about the invisible structures within the forms, they are known only in the forms generated by persons in their experience of their world. All human making produces forms of the basic structure and so reveals that structure. Thus a world, our own as others, is known only by the analysis of forms, and the purpose of studying forms is to know the structured world that engendered the forms. Theology as a rational discipline is not a description of divine reality. It is first of all one of the forms of the world. Beyond its constructive stage, it reflects on and describes, not God, but the content and activity of a particular symbolic structure. All theologies are “true” as being structures of experience; beyond that truth is adequacy to the unknowable. Art, being one of the clearest embodiments or manifestations of the symbolic structure that is the world of those who make it, is a primary mode of theological thought.

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