The clearer the imaginative vision, the more light enters the soul. The imaginative lens stays clearer when we live virtuously. Every virtue has its roots in one of three essential virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love. Faith, Hope, and Love are essential to the good life because they are essentially imaginative. Doug Jones (fellow of philosophy at New St. Andrews College) first introduced me to the idea that the three superior sisters of virtue were imaginative at their core. Indeed, Faith is belief in what we cannot see; Hope is longing for what we cannot see; and Love is desiring what we cannot see. They are also impossible to separate. We cannot believe one whom we do not love or long to see. Neither can we love one in whom we do not believe.
Faith, Hope, and Love are also dynamic and effectively shape the stories we conceive “because the role of these three [faith, hope, love] is to withdraw the soul from all that is less than God, consequently they unite her with God” (John of the Cross). Our conceived stories will be better aligned with the divine author’s version when we pursue these three virtues. So let us explore them.
Faith is not simply belief, but where, “the looking and believing are the same thing” (A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God). Faith is the same as looking and looking is the same as belief. We see this exhibited in the book of Numbers when God’s people were swarmed by vipers and God told Moses to build a serpent so that people might look up and be saved from the vipers at their feet. We, too, have vipers. They are the sins and distractions that keep entangling our feet, slithering between our toes, and tripping us. Only an imagination focused on Christ will save us from those vipers.
A.W. Tozer once described the relationship between faith and sight this way: “Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves—blessed riddance…Faith looks out instead of in.” Since faith is a matter of looking, and of looking away, it can be done anywhere at any time. The imagination is not bound by location or by season. Neither is faith. Faith is not dependent on weather, mood, or time of day. It is to be had whether in church or in the garden, the alley or the highway, because our spiritual vision is wherever we are. Some places and some seasons better nourish our spiritual vision than others, but the vision is a gift. The health of that spiritual vision is directly connected to the health of the imagination. By looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), the biting distractions of this wasteland lose their power. The more a basin is filled with one thing, the less room there is for anything else; thus, the more our imagination is filled with the beauty of the Lord, less room remains for petty imitations. The more we gaze at God, the more distractions lose their charm.
While faith is a cognitive belief in what one cannot see, hope is the memory longing for what cannot be seen. We often think that memory works in only one direction: backward. It certainly has that important job. Indeed, God has woven remembering into the very fabric of manhood. The Hebrew word for male, zakar, means “remembering one” or “to remember.” It is as though the Hebrew people knew that if a man failed to remember, then he failed in his very core being. To be a man is to remember the past, for it is a large part of our narrative identity and the identity of a people.
Much of our memory is taken up in remembering the past, but we are also able to anticipate in our minds some aspects of the future. I may anticipate a good day tomorrow and I may hope for a good day tomorrow, but that hope is based on the memory that tomorrow is my birthday. So “memory gives me my place vis-a-vis the past, but also with a view to the present or to the future. It is what lets me be myself in time” (Iain Matthew, The Impact of God).
Unfortunately, most of us know only one kind of hope: a vague wish for happiness on the morrow. This hope certainly holds great power in our lives as expressed by Victor Frankl. Like Corrie Ten Boom, he was a victim of Nazi cruelty and his life was subsumed by fear. One day he decided he was tired of the wearying whirl of fearful thoughts and so he imagined himself speaking publicly at a podium and this hope gave him courage to live through trial.
Victor Frankl recounts: “I felt that I needed some kind of mental lifeboat, to help me cross the great ocean of time that lay before me, aiming for that almost unimaginable moment far beyond my horizon when I might somehow go free. And so I took all the positive thoughts I could muster and lashed them together in my mind, like planks in a psychological raft that I hoped would buoy me up. And so in some ways it did. It was one of several mental devices, or tricks, or props, that helped me get through. In this way, I fought what was the psychological battle of my life.”
Even the body’s immune system recognized the power of this hope. Between Christmas of 1944 and New Year’s Day, 1945, there was an unexpected number of deaths in the prison camps. Though the prison camp conditions were no different, prisoners who had hoped on being delivered by the Allies and home for the holidays found that living with dashed hopes was literally unbearable.
There is no denying the human power to hope in this way, but the Scriptures speak of another and more lasting hope, a more potent hope; not a hope in tomorrow or a hope in the past, but a hope in God who was, and is, and is to come. The psalmist says, “Mark my teaching O my people, listen to the words I am to speak. I will tell you a story with meaning, I will expound the riddle of things past, things that we have heard and know, and our fathers have repeated to us…He charged them to put their hope in God, to remember his great acts and to obey his commands” (Psalm 78). In this psalm are conjoined not only story (nourishment for the imagination) and remembering the past, but also hope and obedience. We have hope in God because we recall his faithfulness in the past. People who do not remember God’s faithfulness in the past are unable to hope in God for the future. An individual’s inability to remember God’s faithfulness in the past is a poor guarantee for his hope in God tomorrow.
Without the virtue of hope, many of us dedicate our imaginative memory of the past in such a way that God is marginalized altogether from those memories. We remember the pain, the shame, the scars, but we remember them disconnected from the authorial hand of God. Those memories, then, are warped and no longer have the accuracy of a memory bathed in the faithfulness of God. A hope based on memories void of God is a malnourished hope infected by diseased pictures of the past. Such is the hope of those stranded in the wasteland. Their hope is of the meager, half starved variety: a conceptual hope only, that will soon dissipate in a storm of distraction or pain. True hope, however, “pulls memory off the suction pads of yesterday and tomorrow and cups it upwards [toward God] in the present” (Iain Matthew).
Love, like faith and hope, is also an imaginative virtue. When we love someone else, we love not simply what is before our eyes, but the hidden, mysterious, and beautiful soul inside. In many cases, we love even the potential, the maybe, the what if. Love is desiring that which is not seen, but is also that which most essentially forms us as human beings. Marilynne Robinson is right to suggest that “there is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”
For this reason, it has become a commonplace to say that you are what you love and, likewise, “where your treasure is, there is your heart also” (Matthew 6:21). What we love forms us because what we love drives what we do. There is no doubt that those desires drive our habits and we are largely defined by those habits. While faith is a cognitive faculty and hope is a faculty of the memory, love is a faculty of the will: love is seen in what we do. As Simone Weil has suggested, love is not so much a state of the soul as desire directed toward an object. While sin is desire pointed away from God, love proper is desire directed toward God. When we love God, we love him whom we cannot see before our eyes and are thereby raised to life. Weil wrote that “Love is a direction” and “desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul.” For this reason, love is the great imaginative virtue: the greatest virtue of them all.
We find our lives expanding, like balloons, when we zealously pursue faith, hope, and love. Give me more faith, more hope, and more love and I will know more abundant life. Christ did not say that he came to give a limited new life. He did not tell the woman at the well that she could only have a taste of the eternal water. The word eternal does not understand the word some. The words limited and abundant belong in different sentences. We cannot reach the end of God’s love, and we cannot have too much abundant life. At no point does God turn off the electricity or shut off the water supply. God does not seem to understand the word balance and thank God for that!
