Abstract
The Iconic Imagination is the third of a trilogy by Dr. Hedley, in which he seeks to reestablish the imagination as a chief organ for cognition of the divine. His reflection on this theme owes much to his admiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). That Romantic poet probably gave us the English term ‘scientist’, but what commends him to Hedley is his defence of the imagination as a form of knowledge distinct from science, but of equal value. Hedley’s first volume, Living Forms of the Imagination, argued that God is known through the imagination rather than through reasoned argument or brute awareness as of the empirical world. Sacrifice Imagined defended sacrificial imagery in aesthetics and ethics today. The Iconic Imagination now seeks to interrogate the link between image and imagination. Hedley aims to show that the image itself can be a site for mediating transcendence. He pits this against ‘abstraction and cold asceticism’, for the imagination affirms the world as an image through which God is known and experienced.
The argument is presented in eight chapters. First, Hedley defends a Plotinian account of the necessity of the image for the transcendent. Subsequent chapters examine the character of the image that defines the human as the imago dei; how beauty can play an anagogic role in leading to contemplation of the transcendent; the morality of the narrative imagination in fiction; the importance of recognising symbol in places where we have sometimes observed only metaphor; the iconoclastic dimension of political religion; the imaginative intersection between myth and history; and the way the book of Revelation invites us to encounter the divine through images in the natural world.
Characteristic of Hedley’s style is a rich blend of erudition and eloquence. His own literary form reflects the approach to cognition that he wishes to defend. He rejects the structure of positivistic argument or apodeictic proof typical of much modern academic scholarship. Reading his work is a bit like being invited into a gallery of portraits, and guided through at speed by a person to whom each one is a familiar face. Within a single page one can be led through the book of Revelation, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, A. N. Whitehead, Pericles, and Henry More; a mere half a page provides enough scope to draw together Wilfrid Owen, Abraham, Horace, J. R. R. Tolkein, Hugo Dyson, C. S. Lewis, Balder, Adonis, Bacchus, Fox, and Priest, with a footnote that adds Charles Williams and Dante. Hedley rarely introduces his conversation partners at any length: either he assumes that his readers are as aware of them as he, or he trusts that the glittering mosaic of erudition will work anagogically, as every imaginative encounter with transcendence ought to do. There is something of ancient Alexandria in this profuse combination of philosophical and the literary muses. It is a rich work, and an important affirmation that imagination is more than mere ‘fancy’, and matters as much as ‘science’.