Lanta Davis is Professor of Honors Humanities and Literature at the John Wesley Honors College of Indiana Wesleyan University. She is also the author of a new book on how we read and how we behold—art, the world around us, each other: Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation.
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Books like this one, filled with so much research and depth, clearly germinate for a while. I’d love to know more about your process here. What is your story of arriving at this book? When and how did you know that this is the book you wanted to write?
It was indeed a meandering, slow journey. The long story involves years of developing my class on the sacramental imagination and teaching Dante. The short story is that I fell in love with Rome. When I visited the catacombs, I saw fresco after fresco that not only made the space more beautiful, but also formed a clear vision of how to interpret death in light of the Christian story. They used all sorts of symbols and visual stories to communicate that visitors stood among the sleeping, not the dead, because these bodies would on day rise from their tombs. It just really hit me that art wasn’t just about decoration, but was doing something. In the catacombs, the art decorating the spaces of the dead was actually helping to form beliefs about death.
And it wasn’t just catacombs. There were glittering mosaics that had been there since the fourth century; churches named for saintly women I had never heard about; and images on ceilings and walls and doors. While I was gazing at this array of images, it felt like some of them gripped my heart and pulled me towards them. I couldn’t stop researching and talking about them. I was shocked at how much meaning was packed into some of these seemingly simple works. And it wasn’t just Rome that was packed with treasures: they were in Turkey, Ethiopia, Ireland. I felt so astonished by what I was discovering, almost as if I were uncovering a rich inheritance I’d always had, but that I’d left buried and forgotten.
I had been in the church all my life. How did I not know about some of these beautiful, incredible works? So the book came about because I wanted to share what I’d discovered, to help more people see the rich inheritance our brothers and sisters of the past have passed down to us. And I wanted more people to encounter their strange beauty and experience the mysterious, wonderful tug of the heart it prompted in me.
Your argument is simple yet powerful–that just like our bodies are what we eat, so our souls are what we consume by reading and beholding. We are always being formed by what we experience–art, reading, other media, etc. And I appreciated your use of some examples that I would not have necessarily thought of in this book (but also quite a few that I did think of, and thought they were perfect–like Prudentius’s under-appreciated masterpiece, Psychomachia! But I’d love to hear more about this from you. What are the main couple of takeaways that you would like your readers to get from this book? And in what ways did you feel that you were being formed in the process of writing this book and making these powerful arguments yourself?
I mainly want people to think about how their imaginations are being formed, and how they might be more active in forming them in healthy ways. I grew up largely fearing the imagination and worrying about what to avoid. But what the imagination really needs is for us to exercise it, intentionally and regularly. We need to shape our imaginations so that we don’t need to fear it. The imagination is powerful, and if we don’t work at actively forming it, it will still be formed by something. We need, as Christians, to be active, rather than passive, about shaping our imaginations, and that means deliberately seeking out stories and images that ignite and renew our imaginations in ways that are consistent with the Gospel. Similar to how a prism “bends” light to reveal its true colors, images and stories help us see the fullness of truth. I’m hoping this book helps us begin to move from an imagination shaped largely by fear to one shaped by awe, hope, and love.
What is your favorite work of art or literature of all the examples you discuss in this book, and why?
My chapter on the virtues is easily my favorite section of the book, and I particularly love Michel Colombe’s sculpture of Prudence. Prudence means practical wisdom, and his sculpture of Prudence has all sorts of rich symbolism that teaches us what it means to be wise. My favorite of its many details is that the sculpture has two faces. One side is a young woman, and the other is a bearded, old man. It symbolizes our need to consult the wisdom of the past. In our present moment, we only see with our own eyes and thus have a very limited view. But if we look to the past, we see with many eyes. The sculpture literally has eyes looking forward and backward: they remind us that in making a decision today, looking backward helps give us the perspective we need to prevent ruining our tomorrow.
What fascinates you in your broader thinking, reading, and writing?
So many things! I think my gift and my curse as a scholar is that I’m constantly encountering new things that stir my sense of wonder and leave me gaping in awe at their beauty. There’s so many people to learn from, and so many works to admire.
I suppose what I really love about what I study is that it gives us very concrete ways to look at abstract, complicated realities. We love to use all sorts of words and ideals that we may not actually understand, or at least be able to define, very clearly. Take something like love—our most important word and ideal. We really have a tough time defining, describing, or understanding love outside our own specific examples. What I know of love has been shaped by particular, concrete examples: my parents, my husband, my brothers, my friends, my faith community. Or, since I just mentioned the prudence sculpture, art and stories can help me better understand what it really means to be wise. What literature and art can give us, I think, are concrete ways and particular experiences to help us enter into a deeper understanding of the deepest, most important truths about life. And I’m especially fascinated to see how our Christian brothers and sisters from the past have created and used art and stories to show us the deep truths about our faith.
It always feels a bit aggressive to ask this in an interview that celebrates a book launch, but I promise, I’m asking this in the spirit of celebration: What are you working on next?
In Becoming by Beholding, we gaze mostly at the strange and beautiful works of the Christian imagination. I also want to grapple with how to gaze at the strange and ugly (yet still kind beautiful) works of the Christian imagination. I’m particularly thinking about how art and stories can help train our imaginations to face death and grief. A Christian theology of beauty doesn’t necessarily exclude what might otherwise be called “ugly,” in part because it acknowledges that no life is without pain, struggle, and loss. So how can the imagination be shaped so that we can cope with these things better and learn to navigate the dark moments of our life faithfully? I have an article about chapels that have been decorated with bones coming out this fall in Christian Century, and a long list of other weird and wonderful things I hope to cover. So the work of what and how to behold will continue!