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January 29, 2003
Hello everyone,
This Friday, a friend and I went to the Waffle House restaurant to grab a bite to eat. We were both in surprisingly amiable moods and on the return trip home, our conversation drifted to spiritual matters, talking of the existence of God, intimacy with him, and the use of imagination in spiritual discipline. Though I had thought to write along the line of linguistics or semantics and may yet for an upcoming send, I decided instead to address the topic of the role of the imagination in worship. As with many of my topics of discussion, I kick ideas around in my mind months in advance, often returning to a subject previously addressed to examine it more closely and from different angles. The use of the Christian imagination was a topic that has been stewing for months now, and my conversation confirmed that the time was ripe.
What do you think of when you think of the imagination? Do you think of fantastic ideas that have no basis in fact, but are nonetheless often quite entertaining? Do you think of wishful thinking? What do you think of when you think of the imagination? Or, let me ask a question that is perhaps more pertinent: what is the imagination? For our purposes today, we are not speaking of our ability to use our imagination or the final results of this process per se (as in, after reading a particularly poignant novel, we say that the author has a wonderful imagination), but are rather interested in the thing itself which is being used: we are referring to a particular part of our consciousness that encompasses our capacity to make meaning and apprehend things internally, however this would translate—or even if it would—in physiological terms. Therefore, we are broadly speaking, not so much in a scientific sense as in an abstraction about this mysterious “other side” of our persons. Remember also, as William James points out (see third paragraph following), that even our outer sense organs—our eyes, ears, tastebuds, etc.—necessarily transmit their nerve signals inward to the mind for interpretation and processing. The imagination, as its meaning is portrayed here, plays no little role in this process. In and of themselves, the outer sense organs are, for the sake of our conceptual understanding, merely biomechanical machinery that allows this body to interface with the physical world around it. It is the mind within that does the real processing, understanding, and interpreting, the imagination actively involved in this process.
In Selected Literary Essays, Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare, C.S. Lewis writes this about our imagination:
It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself. (Qtd. in “Lewis, Tolkien, and Myth, Part I.”)
In other words, Lewis is saying that our imagination is what gives life or body to our thoughts and our understanding of concepts. It is what provides us with the sense of meaning, for, as Synesius of Cyrene says, “The imagination comprehends our spiritual nature, because it moves on the border between reason and unreason, between matter and that which has no body, between the divine and the demonic.” It is our “inner eye”—the “mind’s eye”—that fleshes out abstractions into concrete thoughts (and, I might add, is also capable of reversing this process as well). In writing, for instance, it is important to use examples, “word pictures,” and illustrations to aid one’s readers to better grasp concepts that are more abstract. I treat the imagination in some depth at the conclusion of my March 4, 2002, newsletter Faith, Doubt, and Suchnot:
I said I would mention imagination for a moment. What is the imagination? We often think of the imagination in terms of a person’s fantasy world of fanciful ideas. But if all things were created by God, what are we to make of the reality of the imagination? Is there a place for such a thing? What of Lewis’ admission that MacDonald “baptized” his imagination? Could there be more to this too than meets the eye? (Or should I say “than meets the visual cortex,” since the eye is rendered largely inoperative in the imaginative process?)
Let’s take a look at what generations gone by have referred to as “the sense organ of the soul”—literally the “mind’s eye,” if you will. (You might be interested in pausing for a moment and taking a quick second look at what eminent psychologist William James has to say on the subject, told through the pen of Evelyn Underhill.) One such figure was Synesius of Cyrene, a bishop and hymn writer who lived somewhere between 300–400 AD in the North African province of Cyrenaica. He offers a number of insights fascinating and rather peculiar to the ear of the modern reader in Excerpts from Synesius of Cyrene Concerning Dreams. Augustine Fitzgerald translated the text, presumably from Latin, and parts of it appear to be his own commentary. Most of his comments are more succinct than those of Synesius, so I will pull my quotations from these summarizations:
. . . It is the greatest good to look upon God by the imagination, for the imaginative spirit is the most widely shared organ of sensation, the first body of the soul. About it nature has constructed all of the functions of the brain. Sense-perception through the outer organs remains only animal in character, no perception at all, until it comes into contact with the imagination. This is the divine faculty which sees with its whole spirit and has power over all the remaining senses. . . .
The imagination comprehends our spiritual nature, because it moves on the border between reason and unreason, between matter and that which has no body, between the divine and the demonic. It borrows from each extreme, thus imaging in one nature things that dwell far apart. This is difficult for philosophy to comprehend. . . . Thus, man’s imaginative spirit obtains true impressions of the life of the soul. It also influences that life, and can even draw the soul towards God; or, if the imagination is empty and inactive, it leaves a vacuum into which an evil spirit enters. . . . The imagination does not act like matter, putting together images one body after another out of elements which one logically expects to find associated together. Instead the imaginative spirit associates the most dissimilar things.
In essence, Synesius saw the imagination as the bridge that joins the two seemingly disparate natures in mankind: the gateway between the physical and the spiritual world. This could explain the mysterious nature of the creative impulse so well known to poets, artists, mystics and other intuits. We say they have vivid imaginations, but perhaps we say more than we know when we express such sentiments.
Let’s take another look at the imagination—the sense organ of the soul—through the eyes of Saint Augustine (?–604), one of the most influential early Church fathers of all time. He wrote a letter to his dear friend Evodius, the Bishop of Uzala, in reply to his friend’s question about the certainty of life after death. Gennadius, a physician well known in Rome for his compassion and faith doubted the idea of life after death when he was a young man. One night he had a dream in which “a youth of remarkable appearance and commanding presence” appeared to him and revealed heavenly sights of such beauty and music of such exquisite delight it made his soul well nigh burst forth within him. Though deeply affected, he thought it was only a pleasant dream until the following evening:
On a second night, however, the same youth appeared to Gennadius, and asked whether he recognised him, to which he replied that he knew him well, without the slightest uncertainty. Thereupon he asked Gennadius where he had become acquainted with him. There also his memory failed him not as to the proper reply: he narrated the whole vision, and the hymns of the saints which, under his guidance, he had been taken to hear, with all the readiness natural to recollection of some very recent experience. On this the youth inquired whether it was in sleep or when awake that he had seen what he had just narrated. Gennadius answered: “In sleep.” The youth then said: “You remember it well; it is true that you saw these things in sleep, but I would have you know that even now you are seeing in sleep.” Hearing this, Gennadius was persuaded of its truth, and in his reply declared that he believed it. Then his teacher went on to say: “Where is your body now?” He answered: “In my bed.” “Do you know,” said the youth, “that the eyes in this body of yours are now bound and closed, and at rest, and that with these eyes you are seeing nothing?” He answered: “I know it.” “What, then,” said the youth, “are the eyes with which you see me?” He, unable to discover what to answer to this, was silent. While he hesitated, the youth unfolded to him what he was endeavoring to teach him by these questions, and forthwith said: “As while you are asleep and lying on your bed these eyes of your body are now unemployed and doing nothing, and yet you have eyes with which you behold me, and enjoy this vision, so, after your death, while your bodily eyes shall be wholly inactive, there shall be in you a life by which you shall still live, and a faculty of perception by which you shall still perceive. Beware, therefore, after this of harbouring doubts as to whether the life of man shall continue after death.” This believer says that by this means all doubts as to this matter were removed from him. By whom was he taught this but by the merciful, providential care of God? (St. Augustine: Between Two Worlds)
Moving away from dreams, the power of metaphor has the ability to move the human heart by engaging our imaginations, as is evidenced in stories. Stories, of all forms of communication, come closest to simulating the flow of everyday life around us. This is, of course, what gives them their great power to speak to the depths of the human heart, even when at times they leave our conscious apprehension in their wake. Anyone who has ever spent much time listening to or reading stories can surely relate: can recall times they were unsure what it was that moved them or why, yet they were strangely moved nonetheless.
Stories are only one avenue of the imagination. In a short study guide (Master Collection V.I: The Quiet Side) accompanying his musical ministry, Christian and Catholic John Michael Talbot, “Troubadour for the Lord,” and man of many hats—musician, author, and founder and General Minister of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion Hermitage in Arkansas—speaks of the various classical aspects of the spiritual life. These disciplines included (but were not limited to): Solitude, Poverty, Community, Silence, Music, Positive Meditation, Apophatic Meditation (Mystical Theology), and in particular for today’s purposes, Visualization. Talbot writes:
Visualization: This involves some creative use of our imagination. It is a creative visualization of the actual life of Christ. This is taught by an entire mystical school of meditation, especially in the Christian west. As St. Bonaventure said in the 13th century, “Contemplate with vivid representation, penetrating intelligence, and loving will—the labors, the suffering, the love of Jesus crucified.” And elsewhere he said, “Imagination assists understanding.”
This meditation on the life of Christ is far more than a practical tool to help us become more Christ-like in our external lives. God is not interested in programming us like robots. He is interested in a love relationship. Because neither God nor love can be totally understood by the mind, they enter into the realms of paradise and mystery. Yet we know through the Spirit that they are true.
St. Bonaventure alludes to the great mystery and paradox of meditation on the life of Christ as Incarnation when he says that in Jesus we see “our own humanity so wonderfully exalted and ineffably present in Him, and when we thus behold in one and the same Being both the first and the last, the highest and the lowest, the circumference and the center, the Alpha and Omega, the caused and the cause, the Creator and the creature . . . then our mind at last reaches a perfect object . . . Nothing more is to come but the day of quiet, on which, in ecstatic intuition, the human mind rests after all its labors.
There are many times I feel consumed with the pressures of my day, choked by the worries and concerns that pervade my world. I often feel the desire to turn these things over to the Lord, but how? I began to realize visualization would greatly aid me. As I am praying, I simply imagine my hands held out in front of me, palms open and turned upward, held together as though I were about to receive a handful of coins. Rather than receiving, however, I imagine myself holding my those things that concern me, cupped carefully in these same outstretched hands, and then I picture myself handing this bundle to God in humble submission, and releasing it, my hands returning empty to my side, saying, if not in so many words: “Here, Lord. You take this. I cannot handle it myself.” Sometimes I repeat this process again and again before my mind fully engages, but eventually I begin to feel the love of God flowing over me and I know that he is pleased that I have “cast my cares upon him.”
The power of visualization is not found in the imagery itself. Rather, it is found in the reality it helps connect me with beyond, as well as the motive of my heart. My Father, who knows my heart, sees that this is an act of surrender and worship and is pleased by the pleasant aroma wafting from the golden bowl, the prayer and sweet incense rising up to greet his nostrils.).
Yes, there is a reason behind every created thing that we find in this world: “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it (Psalm 24:1).” In this world which God created, we find that we have imaginations and we know that for everything God does, there is a purpose. Indeed, there is a reason he gave to us our imaginations, and it is to this end we do well to seek if we are at all interested in loving God with all our heart, soul, and strength—with all that is within us: with our entire being. It is my hope and prayer that I have challenged you to think more deeply and carefully about this mysterious “mind’s eye” and how it can be brought into proper focus to bear upon the realities of “things above.” Yes, visualization and meditation are useful tools in our spiritual pursuits. Be creative. Be imaginative. Make use of this sacred gift God has given you.
God bless,
Eric
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