Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation
Becoming by Beholding is a retrieval project. Reaching back into the Christian tradition, Davis invites her readers on an “archeological dig into the historic Christian imaginative tradition” in order to recover the central role of the imagination in spiritual formation (x). Her ultimate aim in recovering and retrieving is to restore the readers’ vision, such that our imaginations are re-formed through encountering the imaginative Christian tradition. Davis contends that the foundational role of the imagination (stories, sacred spaces, and art) has been lost—particularly in North American Protestant traditions—resulting in malformed souls. However, it is the power of the imagination in spiritual formation that Davis seeks to recover, inviting her readers into the weird and wonderful world of Christian art and architecture in order to challenge, disarm, and reshape them. Davis does this by introducing readers to the concept of the imagination and its role in spiritual formation and then organizing her archeological dig into the Christian tradition around a triad of spiritual formation: orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy.
Defining imagination broadly as the “images, stories, significant spaces, and heroes that shape our sense of identity” (x), Davis argues that “for most of the history of the Christian church . . . the imagination was the very heart—the essential core—of spiritual formation” (xi). Why? Because the imagination is “inherently connected to our perception of reality” (x). The imagination forms and shapes the lens through which we see the world. And, as Davis points out, the imagination is formed in communities by the stories they tell and the images they produce. These stories, images, spaces, etc., shape those who encounter them because they inform our identities. Human beings “become what [we] behold” (x). Decentering the imagination from spiritual formation, which Davis attributes to the Reformation, does not diminish its role in the formation of souls. Rather, it creates a dangerous space within which Christians are unconsciously formed by the stories, images, and spaces they inhabit. Inattentive to the power of the imagination, Christians are susceptible to “competing imaginative frameworks,” some of which “distort our imaginative lens and malform our visions of God and reality” (xvii). Thus, recovering the Christian imaginative tradition is not just an academic exercise for Davis but an act of re-formation so that Christians can re-imagine their understandings of God and reality.
After identifying the centrality of the imagination in her introduction and before engaging specific elements of the Christian historic imagination, Davis situates her readers by giving them a brief orientation to the ensuing chapters. The orientation is a crucial element of her book, because it invites the reader to allow the contents of the book to challenge, disarm, and reshape their own imaginations. In this orientation, she establishes the primary posture of her book: encounter and engagement. The goal of her book is not a critique or in-depth analysis of the variegated theological traditions within which the architectural and Christian cultural artifacts are situated. Rather, she seeks to help the reader understand these gifts from the Christian imaginative tradition from within, in terms of what they are supposed to form in the life of the beholder. And she seeks to do so from a broadly ecumenical and irenic position. Rooting the unity of the church in the affirmation that we are “all one in Christ,” Davis presents the gifts of the historic Christian church as gifts that belong to the whole body of believers (xxiv).
This orientation is vital when she turns from her preliminary discussion to the first two works of the Christian imagination, both of which she identifies as helping to form right belief (orthodoxy): icons and medieval bestiaries. According to Davis, icons offer “orthodoxy for the eyes” (14). Before exploring how icons help us see, Davis identifies the way contemporary images of Christ have stamped the souls of believers. Famous images of Christ, such as Warner Sallman’s Jesus, Jesus as a buddy, or American Warrior Jesus, have shaped North American Christian imaginations. These images, Davis argues, make Christ into a messiah who simply reflects and sanctions cultural norms. The icon of Christ the Pantocrator (Christ the Almighty)—one of the oldest surviving icons in the Christian tradition—does the exact opposite. The icon invites the beholder to behold the breadth and depth of Christ’s life and work while maintaining his strangeness, otherness, and mysteriousness. For Davis, in beholding the depiction of Christ in Christ the Pantocrator, Christians are invited to leave behind their malformed visions of Christ and be transformed by one who is depicted as the Almighty One who comes, not as a political mascot or sponsor, but to found a Kingdom that “transcends country and cultural borders” (25). Throughout the chapter, Davis shows that the question is not whether one agrees with the use of icons or not, but rather which images of Christ are you beholding and what Christ do they present: the Christ of Scripture or the Christ of your own making?
As icons offer orthodoxy for the eyes, so medieval bestiaries invite readers to “pay attention to the extraordinary in the ordinary” and learn theological, moral, and spiritual lessons by seeing the world as God’s creation (47). The medieval bestiary, as Davis describes, “spiritually chronicles the natural world by interpreting every bird, beast, and fish as a living symbol of god’s goodness” (41). Containing real and imaginative creatures, the bestiaries were meant to help Christians read the world theologically, seeing it as declaring God’s glory and identifying their place in it as caretakers. The bestiaries, argues Davis, are an imaginative way of fulfilling humanity’s calling to care for the earth. In naming and categorizing the beasts, the bestiaries train humanity’s attention to care for the earth and see themselves as an integral part of creation.
As icons and bestiaries train right belief (orthodoxy), so the shape of worship spaces and the way Scripture is read train right praxis (orthopraxy). In this section, Davis unpacks the formative power of spaces and design, taking the reader on a tour of the catacombs and Chartres Cathedral. In the catacombs, Christians designed their spaces to represent new life (baptism) and depict light in the face of death and darkness. In Chartres Cathedral, every architectural detail invites believers to imagine themselves as living stones in the story of God’s redemption. Similarly, Davis suggests that reading Scripture and praying imaginatively through Ignatian practices invites the imagination to be trained as it engages slowly and attends to the story, which “opens the mind and heart to the possibility of transformation” (108).
In the final section, Davis turns from orthodoxy and orthopraxy to a lesser-known element of Christian formation: orthopathy. For Davis, while orthodoxy teaches Christians what to believe and orthopraxy directs how Christians should act, orthopathy connects desire and action by aligning “emotions and moral character with purpose” (109). Resting at the level of desire, Davis draws on the Christian tradition of virtues and vices. However, she does not merely describe the virtues and vices. True to her premise that humans become what they behold, she welcomes readers into the world of Dante and artistic renderings of the virtues as they offer “visual maps,” outlining what it looks like to live a good life (172).
Overall, Davis’s book is extraordinary. Her work integrates the growing body of literature attending to the importance of the imagination with the renewed interest in spiritual formation. However, she does so by masterfully retrieving not primarily practices but stories, images, sacred spaces, and art. Her goal is not simply to present the imaginative Christian tradition as if it were a museum to be studied but a tradition to be inhabited. Throughout the book, she invites the reader in, seeking to re-orient and re-form malformed imaginations. This approach is one of the main strengths of the book. In seeking to explore the imaginative tradition from within—by what these pieces are supposed to do in the soul of the beholder—Davis does not succumb to the pitfall of critiquing something before understanding it from within. In this sense, the orientation she gives to readers at the beginning of the book is invaluable; it directs the readers to enter the imaginative tradition she presents with a similar kind of engagement. Thus, even if one ultimately disagrees with the theological position or tradition within which the icon or sacred space was formed, one cannot dismiss the formative role images or spaces play in forming our understanding of Christ and faith. Moreover, her approach invites readers to explore what images and sacred spaces have formed their imaginations, to weigh and test what they have beheld and what, in turn, they have become. This invitation is what makes the book so powerful. Davis is not only a master guide through the imaginative tradition, but the way she presents it does not allow for passive reception or dismissive critique.
Two final things should be noted. First, Davis never claims that re-engaging the imaginative tradition offers a quick fix to contemporary ills. She does, however, rightly claim that those who follow John Calvin’s prohibition against images often forget that he did so because of his incisive understanding of the power of the imagination (to use Davis’s language). To ignore the stories, art, images, and spaces that form us is to be unconsciously shaped, often by a distinctly different story than the one found within the pages of Scripture. Thus, she rightly calls the church to attend to the power of the imagination and offers wisdom and guidance from the best of the tradition to help the church attend to the imagination. Second, attending to the power of the imagination does not negate but ignites the place of words. As Davis notes in her chapter on bestiaries, in naming the animals, humanity promises to care for them. In a similar, but not equivalent way, language helps illuminate what is beheld and gives voice to how what is beheld shapes the soul. Part of the reason why Davis’s book is so powerful is her ability to give voice and articulation to the imaginative Christian tradition. In naming what it is doing, she invites the reader to care for the tradition, tend to it, and inhabit it.
