James K.A. Smith - Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works

Novelists often attest that their characters take on a life of their own. So while the writer begins with a plana story line, character sketches, a sense of the ending to which all of it is headedthe creative process is full of surprises. Not until the novelist is mired in the mess of production could she have known that the protagonist should go there , should meet him , should say that . Creators are not masters of the universe they create; they, too, are recipients of that world and need to follow the path on which they are taken, even if they might have invented it to begin with.

In my preface to Desiring the Kingdom , I sketched a program for the Cultural Liturgies trilogy in which volumes 2 and 3 would be scholarly monographs aimed at a narrower, more specialized audience of scholars. The idea was for volume 1 to provide an accessible overview of the model and argument, and then for volumes 2 and 3 to be narrow, deep explorations of particular aspects of the argument (philosophical anthropology in volume 2 and politics in volume 3). In the three years since I completed Desiring the Kingdom , during which I have had a number of opportunities to share and discuss my core argument with a wide range of audiences, I have decided to revise that original plan for a couple of related reasons.

First, as it turns out, Desiring the Kingdom was not as accessible as I thought it was! While that first volume may have seemed to me like a relatively popular sketch, as is often the case, scholars are not very good judges of what counts as accessibility. Many of the readers of Desiring the Kingdom perceived it as a challenging academic book, though obviously scholarly colleagues in philosophy and theology saw it differentlya bit whimsical in places, a little imprecise in others. Such is the fate of a hybrid book: too many footnotes and references to German philosophers to qualify as popular; not enough footnotes and too many creative asides to be properly academic. Nonetheless, Ive decided to live in that between spaceto inhabit that hybridityand ultimately to continue in that vein for all of the volumes of the Cultural Liturgies trilogy.

I recognize that there is a sense in which Desiring the Kingdom is a hypocritical book, or at least a book at risk of performative contradiction. On the one hand, the book argues that we are, primarily and at root, affective animals whose worlds are made more by the imagination than by the intellectthat humans are those desiring creatures who live off of stories, narratives, images, and the stuff of poiesis . On the other hand, the book tries to make this case in a didactic way, on a theoretical register, articulating a philosophical anthropology. Desiring the Kingdom recognized the limits of such a project and tried to navigate its internal tensions by including a number of forays into the arts and literature, with long digressions in which all of this is pictured in novels, films, and poetry. But still.

While it might seem ludicrous to even breathe about this in the same sentence with Marcel Proust, I was intrigued to discover that the young Proust faced a similar challenge. In one of his earliest writing projects, before la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ), Proust was up against a similar challenge in terms of genre, working in the cracks between them. In his notebooks around the time he was working on the manuscript that we now know as Contre Sainte-Beuve , Proust would write: Should I make it a novel, or a philosophical studyam I a novelist? While it is hard for us to imagine him as anything but a novelist (indeed, Proust is perhaps the quintessential novelist), its interesting to see Prousts vacillation in this regard. He was a writer in search of a form .