Living Forms of the Imagination
Douglas Hedley
T. & T. Clark £24.99
(978-0-567-03295-9)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
THIS is a book wide, learned, and challenging in scope. Were I to choose an epigraph for it, I would be tempted to quote the medieval Cistercian, William of St Thierry, who speaks of “the understanding of the thinker becoming the contemplation of the lover” — not least because it arrives at a discussion of contemplation as not only the highest good of the classical philosophical tradition, but as “the transforming vision that poets, priests and seers trace to the love of God”.
Douglas Hedley is a Senior Lec-turer in the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, and in this significant work he builds on his earlier work on Coleridge’s seminal Aids to Reflection. It was Coleridge who said that “words are not things, they are the living educts of the imagina-tion.” In an unfashionable, and to some extent counter-cultural, way, Hedley explores the significance of the imagination, endeavouring to set out for our own day “a robustly Romantic theory of religion” inspired by Coleridge and Schelling.
This leads him to grapple with issues in the philosophy of mind, and the nature of the self, challenging the reductive sense of reason, and exploring “those indirect apprehensions of transcendent reality: the forms of the imagination”.
It is, Hedley reminds us, “the irreducible creativity of human beings that distinguishes them from the rest of the animal kingdom”. Myth, symbol, and poetry provide us with gateways to the apprehen-sion of God; and although Hedley unashamedly draws on Plato, and
on those who took up his insights
in the Christian tradition — most notably, here in England, the Cambridge Platonists, and William Wordsworth — he wrestles also with German idealist philosophy, with Donald MacKinnon’s engage-ment with the problem of meta-physics, with Jung on dreams and the archetypes, with the nature of poetry, with the literary work and reflections of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis on “fairy story”, and with the power of the imagination.
Shakespeare and Heidegger, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard find their place in a book that challenges reductionist, behaviourist, and determinist accounts of human knowing and creativity.
Hedley’s knowledge of German philosophy enables him to have a wider perspective on the issues he discusses, although some readers will find parts of this book demanding. It is in a proper sense an apologia for a philosophy that takes the imagination seriously. For, as Hedley puts it, “a major obstacle to reflective faith is a failure of imagination.” As he reminds us: “the challenge of the Enlightenment inspires three responses. One is the broad acceptance of the illusion theory, e.g. Hume; another is the rejection of the Enlightenment challenge tout court, e.g. Karl Barth; and the third is the Romantic attempt to answer the Enlighten-ment critique, while accepting the seriousness of its challenge.”
In this deep, and at times densely argued, book, Hedley reminds us of important and unduly neglected resources with which we may engage the cultured despisers of religion. Even if some remain unpersuaded, what we have been given is an immensely stimulating and intellectually engaged apologetic from which we can all learn.
Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe.
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