Those eagerly awaiting this book from Judith Wolfe, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews, may well have been anticipating something rather different. Arising from the Hulsean Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, published by Cambridge University Press, and with a title invoking immense and weighty themes – all this might intimate a lengthy volume, with a dense and strongly defended argument. In fact, the book is disarmingly short, pellucid, and carries a tone that is more suggestive than assertive, tentative and exploratory, though certainly not lacking in conviction. On the back cover, Sarah Coakley calls it a ‘creative meditation’; that, I think, is a fair description.

Wolfe’s text joins a burgeoning swell of writing on the theological dimensions of the human imagination. She is not especially worried about defending the term ‘imagination’ itself, nor defining it precisely; her concern is rather with what it has often been used to evoke, namely, the interplay active in all human perception and understanding – indeed, all our engagement with the world – between finding and making, discovery and construction. We bump into the world, but what we bump into is never encountered ‘raw’; to some extent, it will always be the product of our construal. Wolfe is thus no anti-realist: there is a world ‘out there’ to be found. But, in that finding, she insists, our ability to integrate discrete data into meaningful wholes is inevitably at work, even if typically ‘under the radar’. The two activities, the receptive and the constructive, are inseparably intertwined: ‘we cannot neatly separate out finding from making, seeing from construing, perceiving from interpreting’ (p. 12).

Wolfe believes the arts play a critically important role in relation to this interplay, for they ‘enable us to become aware of our imaginative work, and thereby expand its possibilities’ (p. 19). She demonstrates this by attending to a range of artworks (especially pieces of visual and literary art), slipping with consummate ease between different genres and historical periods. Among the literary giants, Shakespeare receives an especially close and illuminating reading. C. S. Lewis is also clearly one of Wolfe’s favourites: indeed, it is not hard to sense the Lewisian stress on the truth-disclosing power of the imagination. Throughout, Wolfe also invites a wide variety of interlocutors to her table (she is interdisciplinary by nature), not least leading figures in the psychology of perception: I found her account of illusion in visual art particularly instructive.

As we would expect from a philosophical theologian, Wolfe seeks to weave this material on the arts and imagination together with the dynamics of Christian belief. Through the eyes of faith, she believes, we find the world redolent of an ‘unseen depth of goodness, significance, and love which we do not make but in which we participate’ (p. 19). All the same, she is keen to underscore the limitations and inadequacies of our imaginative powers, not only in apprehending the created world but also in our engagement with God. This issues in a lengthy discussion of the integral importance of the apophatic in all theological thought and speech. Here too, the arts have a crucial part to play: for they serve to remind us with singular potency of the incompleteness of the world we inhabit and especially of the finitude and fallibility of human perception. Eschatology thus figures prominently in the book, and in this context, she makes much of the ability of the arts to make the familiar unfamiliar, to reconfigure this world in the light of the one to come.

Wolfe tells us that her book is intended ‘to model a form of theology’ (p. 21), one informed by a ‘Platonically inflected Thomism’ and by ‘hermeneutics and phenomenology’ (p. 22). These two correspond roughly to her realist, theological-ontological convictions on the one hand, and her desire to do full justice to the ‘conditions, qualities and implications’ (p. 22) of human experience on the other. Inevitably, some will be surprised by her apparent reluctance to engage more thoroughly with the doctrinal traditions she obviously respects and frequently brushes alongside. She alludes to how these traditions bear upon the material she so ably expounds, yet the traditions themselves are not probed or developed at any great length. As I indicated at the start, the ethos of the book is consistently cautious, allusive and evocative – I’m tempted to say risk-free (it would be hard to find anything that a reasonably well-informed Christian would want to disagree with here). She is clearly keen to avoid any hint of over-confident dogmatic pronouncement – apophatic qualifiers are always close at hand. Towards the end of one chapter, she reflects: ‘Yes, theology constructs. It constructs metaphysical accounts of the world; it constructs theories and images to guide us. But they are light, tentative, humble because when we construct theologically, we are not building towers; we are building boats. And we trust the sea’ (p. 26). The metaphor is memorable and apt. Yet, it conjures up a fairly restricted view of what the theological enterprise involves. What happens when the sea gets rough and hostile? Then, the question of what or who we trust becomes rather more pointed. To press this a little further: if the Christian theological imagination finds its uniqueness and power in being grounded in some manner in the person of Christ and what has been secured in him, in order to furnish even an outline of an account of the theological imagination, might we need rather more in the way of Christological reflection than is offered here?

Perhaps moves of this sort will be included in a future, less provisional publication. In the meantime, we can be thankful for a book so carefully (indeed, eloquently) crafted, and one that is bound to be of enduring value to any who traverse the ever-expanding literature on these crucially important themes.