The recent follies in Washington D.C., and the ongoing culture wars across the land might cause some souls to keep searching for the ever elusive “still point in the turning world,” as T.S. Eliot put it.
Image magazine, published from the Seattle Pacific University campus, is a “still point.” Or a life ring in a rising tide of cultural inanition — however you want to look at it
Editor Gregory Wolfe, who founded the magazine more than two decades ago, directs the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at SPU.
Image explores matters of art and faith through a lens of what Wolfe terms Christian humanism. The Oxford-educated American is a Roman Catholic convert. While his magazine rests on the underpinnings of Catholic culture and aesthetics, Wolfe’s view is expansive. Image’s advisory board counts the likes of Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Patricia Hampl, Mark Helprin and Thomas Lynch.
Wolfe’s new book of essays, “Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age” reflects the thrust of his magazine. (By the way, “Beauty will save the world” is a line of Dostoevsky’s).
Wolfe, a Queen Anne resident, has elsewhere described himself as a “conscientious objector” in the culture wars.
“At a time when goodness and truth, faith and reason, were being so roundly abused,” he recalled of his earlier years in his new book, “I found myself drawn to…beauty and the imagination, which shun ideological abstractions for the realm of flesh and blood.”
The realm of flesh and blood contains paradise, of course, as well as hell and purgatory along the road we have to go. Dante, along with Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Aquinas – all intellectually rigorous Catholics or Anglo-Catholics— are critical markers in his firmament.
In “Beauty Will Save the World” Wolfe’s subjects range from the formidable English poet Geoffrey Hill to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Wendell Berry to an appreciation of Evelyn Waugh.
Wolfe recounts Waugh’s “flair for offensiveness” in a rare, 1960 BBC interview.
Waugh flummoxed the ill-equipped interviewer with a combination of terse answers and “mixed fantasy and truth.” The novelist finally admitted, in what seemed a moment of candor, that he hoped people would ignore him. “Then why are you appearing on this programme?” he’s asked. “Poverty,” came the reply. “We’ve both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.”
Wolfe does that rare thing: He addresses the better angels of our nature with intelligence and grace.
Beauty Will Save the World, Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age,” by Gregory Wolfe, hardcover, ISI Books, 29.95.
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