“The Lord of Heaven changes not, and even when our view’s most dark, he’s there above us fair and golden as the sun. God’s never gone…It’s only men go blind.”
-Frederick Buechner
by Ben Palpant
by Ben Palpant
Prophetic proclamation is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH–the creator of the world, the deliverer of Israel, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians come to name as Father, Son, and Spirit–were a real character and an effective agent in the world…The key term in my thesis is “imagine,” that is, to utter, entertain, describe, and construe a world other than the one that is manifest in front of us, for that present world is readily and commonly taken without such agency or character for YHWH. Thus the offer of prophetic imagination is one that contradicts the taken-for-granted world around us…Prophetic proclamation is the staging and performance of a contest between two narrative accounts of the world and an effort to show that the YHWH account of reality is more adequate and finally more reliable than the dominant narrative account that is cast among us as though it were true and beyond critique. This performed contestation between narratives is modeled in narrative simplicity and directness in Elijah’s contest at Mt. Carmel in which he defiantly requires a decision between narratives and so between gods: “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him” (I Kgs. 18:21). This dramatic utterance is in fact a summary of a long, vigorous contestation between two narratives and two consequent construals of reality.
(from The Prophetic Imagination, by Walter Brueggeman)
by Ben Palpant
The following quote from Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor illustrates the power of embodied practices that not only inform the imagination, but also direct its desires. His quote reinforces James KA Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom.
“A great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the power of liturgy in forming identity and the shaping effect of narrative in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The way we learn something is more influential than the something that we learn. No content comes into our lives free-floating: it is always embedded in a form of some kind. For the basic and integrative realities of God and faith, the forms must also be basic and integrative. If they are not, the truths themselves will be peripheral and unassimilated. It was with a kind of glad surprise that I realized that long before the academicians got hold of this and wrote their books, I had been enrolled in a school of song and story, God songs and God stories, said and sung by my God-passionate mother. Virtually everything I received in those impressionable years of my childhood had arrived in teh containers of song and story, carried by a singer and storyteller mother–everything about God, but also about being human, growing up to adulthood, becoming a pastor” (The Pastor, p. 34)
by Ben Palpant
How do we find meaning in life? We find meaning by conceiving a story out of the building blocks that we see around us and by measuring that story against our picture of “the good life”. That formulated story is fed by images that we presently perceive and images that we do not immediately perceive except through memory. Where is this picture of the good life formulated? It is formulated in and by the imagination. This process infiltrates all areas of our lives. For example, my synthesis of advertisements takes place in the imagination and, therefore, naturally places me in relation to the thing advertised. Whatever it might be, whether cell phone or new car, I imagine my life—if only for a moment—with that object. The power of those images is undeniable. They are surrounded by the colors and sounds of my life and set directly in the narrative path. I quickly and perhaps unthinkingly reconstruct my story around the attainment of that object and I deftly defend the cost accordingly.
Because we are searching for a purposeful story and because it has largely eluded us, we perpetually ask questions, often subconsciously, like “So what? What’s in it for me?” Those in the advertising industry are highly attuned to this reality. They know that every effective advertisement will provide an answer to this question with promises that are actually impossible to fulfill.
According to commercials, beer is no longer simply a beverage and technology is no longer simply a time saver. Now, beer is a magnet that attracts happy and beautiful people into our lives. Technology now serves as a social networking tool that will, like beer, attract happy and beautiful people into our lives. Both will apparently banish the loneliness and unhappiness.
A Superbowl commercial for Monster.com. Various kids—pudgy, short, dynamic, eccentric, skinny—speak to the camera, some with vigor, some with bland expressions of opaque hopelessness.
“When I grow up,” says the first kid, “I want to file all day long.”
“I want to climb my way up to middle management!”
Cue the background choir music.
“…Be replaced on a whim.”
“I want to have a brown nose.”
“I want to be a yes man…”
“A yes woman!”
“Yes, sir, coming, sir.”
“Anything for a raise, sir.”
“When I grow up…”
“Grow up…”
“I want to be under-appreciated.”
“Be paid less for doing the same job.”
“I want to be forced into early retirement.”
Cue the tag line: “What do you want to be?”
Monster.com’s current motto? “There’s a better job out there.”
In thirty seconds or less, this advertisement for a career matchmaker resonates with the incredibly common desire we share for change. With change, we assume, will come more personal happiness. It taps immediately into our collective longing to be something more. What do you want to be? Well, I don’t want to be doing this meaningless job forever. By making the spoken dreams of the children ridiculous and yet eerily similar to the day-to-day mutterings of our heart, the advertisers convince us that being under-appreciated or being obedient or being middle-management is simply not good enough—not worth valuing.
How is the ad industry so effective in selling its imaginative message? How has it significantly defined, even for those of us who are wary, what life is all about and who we are? Advertisers have not made all these promises conceptually, in propositions; instead, they have presented a picture to us. They have appealed directly to the interpreting and storying faculty of the mind: the imagination. Our interpretations and the subsequent story we construct is grounded in our deepest desires. Advertisers do not appeal to reason per se; they appeal primarily to our desires because, as St. Augustine said, we are fundamentally desiring beings. What we tend to desire most is “the good life,” which we consciously or unconsciously call happiness or meaning.
So, what will make us happy and what will give us meaning? Whoever has the power to answer those questions, whoever has the power to define the good life, will not only control culture but will sway the masses. As things currently stand, that power usually lies in the hands of the advertising agency and the music industry. How do they define the good life? They define it as the gratification of pleasure and they do so quite tantalizingly with images that draw us into their descriptive definition.
Advertisers have effectively redefined both “good” and “life” by presenting to our imaginations a picture of the possible. They know that we are constantly—every minute of every day—synthesizing events in a hunt for the possibility of the good life. We are longing and looking, always looking, for what will provide happiness and meaning.
Imagine this:
I spent my teen years on a river so small that there was some debate amongst the boys as to whether it should be called a creek or a river. It was a moody tributary, lofty and high spirited during the Spring melt off but crestfallen, mumbling, and melancholy during the late Summer. Much of the Summer was spent wandering up and down the river with a fishing pole and a stringer looped over my shoulder. My mother was frustrated by all the tinfoil wrapped trout clogging her freezer. She understood that my soul was soothed by the gurgling and giggling of the water around my legs and the distant sighing of the cotton wood trees, but she didn’t like the results. I don’t blame her, but nothing made me happier than the sudden grab and fight of a trout at the end of my line.
In the early mornings, as the mist sagged and brooded over the waters, I often saw the graceful deer or the rotund raccoon in the back yard. The deer always struck me as stately creatures, fluid and agile, and I was inspired by the ease with which they hurdled the high fences. Raccoons, on the other hand, amazed me with their waddle and stealth. They appeared out of nowhere, slipping in and out of the mist. They stooped beneath large packs, masked offenders of a bygone era who refused to outgrow their secret identity. They skirted the bank of the river and forded the waters like derelicts: furtive, quick-tempered, and lonely.
Perhaps inspired by Where the Red Fern Grows, a favorite by Wilson Rawls, I entertained the idea of catching a raccoon on my own. I talked it over with Dad one evening.
“I’m thinking of catching one of those raccoons, Dad,” I said. I thought about calling it a coon, just to see how authentically wonderful it felt rolling off the tongue, but I thought better of it.
“Really? How do you plan on doing that?” he asked.
“Just like Billy does in the book,” I said.
“You don’t have any coonhounds, son,” replied my Dad with all the sensitivity of a scientist. I glanced at our cocker spaniel who slept by the door. We named her Little Ann after one of the greatest dogs in literature, subconsciously hoping that she would live up to that high title. No such luck. We loved her, but she never treed a coon and dad’s comment goaded my discontent.
“I don’t need a coonhound. I just need to set a trap.”
Dad nodded and so I continued, trying to recapture what I had read in Where the Red Fern Grows. “I’ll find a strong log and drill a hole in it about six inches deep. I’ll drop a piece of shiny tin in the bottom and lay it flat so that it catches the sun and draws the raccoon’s attention. Then I’ll drive some nails at an angle into the log so that they stick downward into the drilled hole. Each nail point will have another nail point opposite it in the log, see. That will leave enough room for the raccoon’s paw to enter, of course, but it won’t be able to pull out.”
“Why not?” asked my brother.
“Because when the raccoon balls up its paw into a fist around the tin, his fist won’t fit back through between the nails.”
“He could just let go and slide back out,” suggested my brother.
“That’s true,” said Dad, “but he won’t let it go. He’s a greedy little bugger.”
I reminded my brother of what we’d learned in the book: raccoons are the preeminent thieves of shiny trash. They are junk collectors whose eye is easily taken by the flash of something bright and pretty. No matter how painful the trap or how imminent the danger, the raccoon will not let go of his prize.
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” said my Dad. “What will you do when you’ve got him trapped? How do you plan on bagging him?”
This was rain on my parade. I hadn’t thought through the plan to the very end. I had no gun. I did have a fish bonker. Maybe I could club him to death. But then I remembered the fury of the trapped raccoon described in the book. I remembered the slashing claws and the bared teeth.
A whirling dervish with enormous claws and a black mask haunted my dreams. It thrashed my mind all that night: reason enough for not following through on building the trap. My idea of building a coon trap never actualized, but I remembered the coon and his silly stooping tendencies whenever I was tempted to spend my hard-earned money on a new tape cassette. Why I have boxes of tape cassettes piled in the basement is difficult for me to explain without losing my dignity. Why I’m willing to pay a thousand dollars for something that will end up on the scrap heap in three years is likewise difficult to explain.
Here we are stranded in a spiritual wasteland and brazenly snatching at whatever shiny objects catch the eye. Like raccoons, we skirt the neighbors and ford the spiritual shallows like derelicts: furtive, quick-tempered, and lonely. We have sold our souls for nothing and garnered our lives with tin. God’s question to his people in Isaiah 55:2 is the same question he asks of us: “Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?” Our answers, if we offer any, are hardly satisfactory. We know something’s wrong. We know, deep down, that something needs to change, but we keep stuffing our mouths with air and wiping the tears prompted by hunger.
Even from a very young age, we observe various sources of happiness—the cookie jar, mom’s lap, the sandbox—and pursue them. Even children imagine the happiness they will find if only they can reach the cookie jar. That formative power to envision ourselves in the good life only magnifies with age. Instead of the sandbox, we envision Maui. Instead of the cookie jar, we envision a fat bank account full of cash and then we act to bring those imaginings into reality.
It is fair to say, then, that how we live is based on desires conceived in the imagination. And if our current imaginations are myopic, then we are in bigger trouble than we know. Like Jill and her traveling companions, we scramble angrily over the very objects that God wants us to see. For all our huffing and puffing, we cannot see what God has given us to see.
We have forgotten what Aslan said at the outset: “Whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs…Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly; I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.”
But we are confused. The Holy Spirit is not in our eyes1 and we have wide-spread rupture. What we are looking for is wholeness: the abundant life. Christ came to give life and to give life abundantly (John 10:10), so it must be possible to have. Christ made it clear in Matthew 13 that we refuse to turn and be healed by him because we cannot see. What we need is transformation, and meaningful life transformation only happens by way of spiritual eye surgery. If so, we should take great pains to keep the imaginative eye, the spiritual eye, healthy.
Sophocles has been credited with saying that “a wise doctor does not mutter incantations over a sore that needs the knife.” Let’s stop the insane muttering. Let’s go under the knife.
by Ben Palpant
In order to reclaim the imagination, we need to know what it is. In order to understand what the imagination is, we need to do some rather heavy weeding of our tangled understanding. We have grown up in a world where the word “imagination” has come to mean simply anything fictional. The Calvin and Hobbes comic is the quintessential emblem of that escapist view of the imagination. Calvin, usually desiring to be somewhere other than in his current reality, spends most of his weekdays as Spaceman Spiff or a raging dinosaur.
Since we equate things fanciful or fictional with falsehood, the imagination is practically irrelevant, a mere flight of fancy. I agree with Thomas Howard when he suggests that “imagination is a commonplace of our experience, and that is probably why we do not spend much time thinking about it, any more than we think about eyesight.” But the imagination is as central to life as breathing, perhaps even more central, because while breathing is not a capacity that informs and enlightens the mind with meaning, the imagination does. The imagination not only sees beyond our natural vision, but it also interprets life and constructs a meaningful story.
You and I are composites of many parts. At any given moment, we express emotion, make decisions, reason, perceive with our senses, and utilize simultaneously many of the gifts God has given us. I am not simply “emotional” or “rational” or “perceptive” because none of those attributes or activities stands in isolation. The imagination takes every part of who we are—our emotions, our reason, our sense perceptions, our memories—and synthesizes them into a coherent story.
Reason constructs a comprehensive ideology from various gathered ideas. It always learns, always gathers new information to process into that ideology. That’s what it does all day, every day, and that’s what God made it to do. The imagination, however, effortlessly and perpetually forges an embodied, complex, and imaged narrative expression of that ideology and our lives are the lived expression of that imagined narrative. The imagination is in the business of constructing meaningful narratives. We can’t help but imagine and we can’t help but imagine a life of meaning.
The imagination actively conceives a story with meaning because God has built it to do so. For this reason, we keep waking up in the morning, working to accomplish something, and loving our families. Our daily choices are based on the belief that life is not the plaything of Chance, but rarely are those choices the sum of logical deduction. We live faithfully according to the story of which we see our selves a part. We wake up every morning and tackle the daily grind with a determination only possible for those living with purpose. Unfortunately, we’re often not sure what that purpose is and we’re not sure what the meaning of life might be. The imagination is nonetheless actively constructing a story that we cannot see, out of the things we experience: the things we can see.
by Ben Palpant
I remember finding some old black and white photos of my parents. They were just kids in the photos. In one, Mom leans over a rail, bright-eyed and eager, flanked by a batch of other kids. In another, Dad poses by his model train set, clearly feeling the imposition of having his picture taken. He rests on the carpet in a white tee shirt, his chin on his hands, and tries to smile. I remember filing through picture after picture and assuming that my parents grew up in a flat, black and white world. My parents had difficulty convincing me that their world was as bright and translucent as my own.
My childhood perception did not match reality, but the consequences were benign. The consequences for two disciples on their way to Emmaus, however, was immediate and unfortunate. Bedraggled, huddled, and grieving, they were unable to see past their present circumstances. The eyes of their souls were darkened by grief and bewilderment. When Christ joined them on their walk, they could not see him for who he was. Even though they heard Mary and Joanna exclaiming that the tomb was empty that very morning and even though they heard Peter verify the facts, still they conversed and reasoned on these things and were sad. Christ bemoaned their stunted spiritual vision, saying to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!” He then “expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27), beginning at Moses and the prophets.
Still, would you believe it, they did not see him for who he was. Even when Christ untangled the Scriptures for them, they did not see until he blessed and broke the bread just as he had done a few nights before. Then Luke says, “their eyes were opened and they knew him.” These two disciples knew the Scriptures and they loved Christ, but their spiritual vision was unhealthy. We also have difficulty seeing beyond our vision and in this way, the disciples are our modern predecessors.
The revelation of Christ, as prefigured in the Old Testament and incarnated in the New Testament, was and is a matter of spiritual sight. The word “revealed” carries with it a sense of unveiling, of peeling open the eyelids to see. The two disciples walking to Emmaus could see but their spiritual sight was restrained (Luke 24:16) and so Christ remained unrevealed until he snapped their imaginative stupor by breaking the bread. Until that moment, they could not perceive reality.
Imagine this:
Jill, poor Jill. Stranded in a hard land with hard companions, she remembered what Aslan told her: “Whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs…Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly; I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.”
Well, here she was hungry, lost, and confused. Her companions, Eustace and Puddleglum, were irritable and irritating. She missed Aslan’s warmth and strength and clarity. She missed his thick main and hot breath. His words, though dim, still wandered the hallways of her mind: “And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances.”
Pay no attention to appearances.
Signs? “You must journey out of Narnia to the north till you come to the ruined city of the ancient giants.” That was the second sign. The third: “You shall find writing on a stone in that ruined city, and you must do what the writing tells you.”
Whatever.
The north wind slapped their cold cheeks. The road led through narrow valleys that channeled the wind straight into them. Their feet were raw because the ground was stony, and they woke up sore after sleeping all night on lumps of frozen earth. Puddleglum was tired of Eustace, Eustace was tired of Puddleglum, and Jill was tired of them both.
Finally, when hopelessness had rooted out all their resolve to remember the signs that Aslan gave, they stumbled out of a gorge and onto a desolate plain. Behind them rose the mountains through which they had wandered. Beyond the rocky plain rose snow-capped mountains. In the middle of the plain was a low hill with a strange flat top and on top of that hill winked welcoming lights.
They camped within sight of the hill that night and set off for it in the morning. Mid-morning, however, snow started to fall. They had to pick their way through rubble and between boulders. The snow by now was thick like a veil over their eyes, and they had to squint just to see a few paces ahead. When they reached the foot of the hill, they thought they saw squarish rocks on either side, but a four-foot-tall wall blocked their path and they had to scramble over its snow-covered ledge. After that ledge, they stumbled onto another and then another and another: four ledges all told and each ledge at quite irregular intervals. The top of the hill was filled with more strange shapes and ruts. They were soaked to the bone when Jill fell down a small ravine and found herself in a channel tucked beneath the blowing wind and snow. Eustace followed her down and out of the storm. The pair wandered straight, took a right, then another right, but that right came to a dead end. They retraced their steps to the last turn and took a right which led to another right turn. Finally, after much slipping and passing through similar channels, they found themselves before an enormous castle: the source of the winking lights.
Those who know this story remember the castle of the Gentle Giants and all that transpired there. We will focus on what they saw the next morning when they looked out one of the windows high up in the castle. The sun was shining, the snow melted by a night of rainfall, and they saw stretched out before them a ruined city still paved rather flat. Over that pavement was etched the words UNDER ME.
Revelation.
“What I don’t quite understand,” said Jill, “is how we didn’t see the lettering ? Or could it have come there since last night. Could he—Aslan—have put it there in the night?”
“Why you chump!” said Eustace. “We did see it. We got into the lettering. Don’t you see? We got into the letter E in ME. That was your sunk lane. We walked along the bottom stroke of the E, due north.” He turned to Jill. “I know what you were thinking because I was thinking the same. You were thinking how nice it would have been if Aslan hadn’t put the instructions on the stone of the Ruined City till after we’d passed it. And then it would have been his fault, not ours. So likely, isn’t it? No. We must just own up.”
Yes, we must simply own up. This portion of the The Silver Chair illustrates a spiritual state many of us recognize. Many of us are cold, tired, and bewildered. The winds slap our cheeks and we have nothing with which to stay warm—nothing lasting at least. Our feet are sore and we sleep restlessly, tossing and turning on the hard lumpy surface of our thoughts. Worst of all—worse than being muddled and confused—is the tiring effort required to push each other over all of these life barriers.
The story also exposes our spiritual myopia. We squint through the storms of life but lack the imaginative power to see anything more than what is right in front of us. We seem unable to see even the present for what it is. In our haste to pass through the present trial, we lack the awareness to see what God is telling us right now. We stand neck deep in the ravines of God’s fingerprint, but lack the imaginative vision to see it. As a result, our spiritual lives are truncated, our souls are calcified, and our vision is murky at best. “We, who are too blind to read what we have written, or what faith has written for us, do not understand; we only blink, and wonder” (Edwin Arlington Robinson).
Our current spiritual journeys are short, cautious stints because our spiritual myopia hinders our progress. What Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum lacked, we also lack. We lack a healthy imagination. Their journey might have met with greater success had they seen the barriers for what they were: the letters of a divine message. We also might meet greater success if we could align our spiritual vision, our imagination, with God’s ability to see the barriers in our lives.
by Ben Palpant
Josef Pieper wrote, “Certain things can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life. If we are not ready to do that, we give up all claim to saying anything significant” (In Tune with the World, p. 3). Imagination is one of those things. If we plan on talking about the imagination, then we should probably plan on talking about everything else in the world and in life. After all, what is more worthy of our contemplations and our conversations than a topic that touches everything?
Metaphors to describe the metaphor maker, imagination:
Perhaps light would serve as an apt metaphor to help us understand better the role of the imagination: If we set ourselves in a dark room where no light can creep in under the door or through the blinds then we have no ability to judge. We have no ability to move with any confidence because we are unsure of just about everything. Our insecurity is relieved, however, by any light, even the meager light offered by a match. The smallish light from that match is enough to provide an image for reason to judge. Reason sees a form that appears hard and, therefore, reasons that moving around that object would be wise. What if we had a lantern instead of a match. Obviously, sight would be greatly increased by a lantern. What if we cut a bank of windows out of the wall? More visibility? Better ability to judge? Now what if we took the entire ceiling and roof off so that the room is flooded with sunshine? We are more secure in our judgments beneath the sun at noontime than we are in a dark room with only a match. Light is necessary for orientation and this is a fact made clear from the beginning when God organized the deep by speaking. “Let there be light,” he said. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:3-4).
Let’s run this light metaphor a little further. What if we only have a flashlight to give illumination in the dark room? Our perception depends very much on how we shine that flashlight. A flashlight aimed directly under the chin casts shadows that transform a friend’s face into something eerie. Likewise, a flashlight aimed directly above the head or at varying angles evokes a different feeling altogether of the same object. We might have something as familiar as our best friend in front of us, but that flashlight provides very different takes on the same object.
What if we replace the glass at the end of the flashlight with different colored lenses? What if we use infrared or black light? We see the same object but it looks very different once again. The metaphor illustrates that proper judgment depends not only on the volume or quality of light in the room, but on the kind of light. The smaller the light, the more the angle of that light transforms an object. Likewise, the imagination is the light that images forth, illumines, what remains dark to the mind without it. Without the imagination, all of existence is so much chaos requiring arrangement. It is the light by which the reason functions. It is the condition, the prerequisite for any judgment. I see an object in front of me, but even that language is deceptive. I don’t really see the object, I see light bouncing off the object and providing an image very much dependent upon that light. In our day to day existence, light goes unnoticed and unappreciated, like breathing, even though it is essential and defining. This kind of imagination that serves as light, providing meaning to our lives, is what Coleridge called Primary Imagination. This is the imaginative power that is creative, but synthesizing, a power that organizes life into meaning.
Defining the imagination:
The imagination is the imaging, orienting, meaning making faculty of the mind. How’s that for a short definition? To fill it out a bit, let’s remember that it is the imaging and orienting faculty of the mind because it mediates sensory information to reason, conceiving what is perceived into a narrative that provides the context for reason’s work. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be frustrated by applying such univocal language to something so difficult to pin down. How much better to just use a metaphor and say that the imagination is like light: it makes meaning out of meaninglessness.
Narrative as light:
Here’s where we should extend the metaphor out of necessity. What form does that light take? In other words, what structures the meaninglessness into a meaningful “light” by which we make decisions and otherwise interact with reality? The form of that light is narrative in shape. Almost everything in life is made meaningful using narrative categories: first this happened, then this happened, and that’s why I kicked my brother in the shin. Meaning is found narratively in mathematics as well. The equation 2+3=5 is a plot sequence. Chemical equations function similarly. The overlap of imagination with the sciences is worthy of its own study, but for now let’s just suggest that narrative is the framework of both the micro and macro levels of our lives.
The imagination is the imaging, orienting, meaning making function of the mind, stringing all sorts of images together into a meaningful narrative that becomes the lens or light or world perception (worldview) by which or through which I see everything. The imagination is “the implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions through which we view reality.”
While it is difficult to talk about Christian reason, it is not only possible, but essential to discuss the Christian imagination. The imagination does not function according to some transcendental principles like reason does with logic. It simply functions as light does, orienting us toward something imaged. The unbelieving imagination conceives a narrative that orients in one directions while the believing imagination, the Christian imagination, conceives a narrative that orients in another direction entirely.
Informing our implicit narrative with Scriptural narrative:
The imagination is the imaging and orienting light of the mind. Scripture says that those who do not believe “live in darkness” (Psalm 82:5), “they meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noontime as in the night,” (Job 5:14) but Christ is the light of the world and those who follow him shall not walk in darkness anymore, but have the light of life (John 3:19). God “uncovers deep things out of darkness, and brings the shadow of death to light” (Job 12:22). We echo with all those who have walked by faith that “The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light” (Rom. 13:12) for “it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Cor. 4:6). It is, indeed, Christ who will bring “to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of of the hearts. Then each one’s praise will come from God” (I Cor. 4:5).
The more we submit our imaginations to the work of Christ, the more we grow in sanctification, proving that we are all “sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness” (I Th. 5:5). And yet we live in a time very much like the Egyptians under God’s judgement: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, darkness which may even be felt. So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They did not see one another; nor did anyone rise from his place for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings” (Exodus 10:2-23). The Christian imagination images and orients in a different direction from the unbelieving imagination because the Lord is our lamp and he shall enlighten our darkness” (II Sam. 22:29) and so we have light in our dwellings.
Reclaiming and reorienting the imagination under Christ:
Because the imagination is this important, it deserves more attention than it casually gets from Christians who claim the lordship of Jesus Christ over all creation. We have forgotten that the imagination is the lamp of mind, the vision that orients how we think, what we think, and ultimately what we do. It would behoove us to remember, especially in this context, Matthew 6:22-23. “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in you is darkness, how dark is that darkness!”
Our job is to reclaim the imagination from its unbelieving masters and reorient it towards its source, God’s imagination, so that we can follow it to its source as was God’s intention from the beginning. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Pilgrim’s Regress, “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live.” And here we find ourselves back where we started this conversation. Josef Pieper was right. “Certain things can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life. If we are not ready to do that, we give up all claim to saying anything significant.” What is more worthy of our contemplations and our conversations than a topic that touches everything?
by Ben Palpant
If you asked any Joe on the street to define “imagination”, what might he say? Thomas Howard humorously captured the popular view of imagination this way: “Imagination is often treated as the country cousin, frolicking about in a flowered chicken-feedbag jumper, gathering dandelions and ragwort and supposing them to be orchids and birds-of-paradise flowers. When you want a recess from wearisome reality, you summon the foxfire of imagination” (The Night Is Far Spent, p. 46). This view articulates the common misconception that humanity can basically be broken into two groups: the irresponsible and impractical imaginative dreamers called “artsy folks,” and the rest of us who have our feet planted firmly on the ground. It takes only a hop, skip, and a jump to reach the conclusion that the imaginative and the rational don’t play well together. Now this dichotomy might be oversimplified, but from a young age we breathe it in to some degree or another. My aim in this article is to rethink this dichotomy and reconstruct a new way of seeing that embraces the absolute necessity of both imagination and reason working in tandem.
The essential need for and purpose of reason:
Reason and imagination are God’s gifts and both are marks of God’s image in us, crowning humanity with glory (Hebrews 2:7). Both have an essential function in the life of the mind, and both impact not only what we do, but who we become. So, let’s address each in their turn, beginning with reason.
Reason is the judgment faculty of the mind. By reason we judge whether something is true or false, right or wrong. It has the capacity to censor ideas. Peter Kreeft says that reason has a little old man at its door who censors what is welcome and dismisses what is unwelcome. This metaphor is one way of showing that reason is the organ of Truth, as Samuel Johnson has said and others have echoed. Rational argument traffics in definitions, logic, and univocal (unambiguous) language. Reason functions well when it is precise and careful, as evidenced across all the disciplines, from theology to genetics.
It’s worth noting the difference between reason and reason’s assumptions, so let’s take two scientists as examples. The first scientist is a Naturalist. The assumption upon which he bases all his careful reason might be simplified down to a metaphor: “The universe is a self-contained machine.” His reason functions upon this premise and his conclusions play out accordingly. The “little old man” at the door of his reason welcomes any data that supports his premise and rejects any that does not fit with it. The second scientist in our example is a Supernaturalist and the assumption upon which he bases all his careful reason might also be simplified down to a metaphor: “The universe is the spoken word of God.” His reason functions upon this premise and his conclusions play out accordingly. We would call this reigning metaphor, this underlying premise, a worldview,”The implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions through which we view reality” (Martin Cothran). Sound important?
The faculty of reason functions the same both for the Christian and non-Christian. Both have either weak or strong inductive and deductive reasoning, but the measurement of weak or strong is based on transcendental principles not especially belonging to the Christian. Like measures of beauty, strong logic is available to both the Christian and non-Christian alike. Can one defend something like “Christian reason”? I think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to do so. Reason can function more biblically or unbiblically not so much in its careful definitions, logic, or univocal language but in its assumptions, its premises.
Stark examples of this implicit and mostly unconscious presupposition abound in life and in Scripture. Two immediately come to mind: Gideon cowering in the corner of his threshing floor had one view of the world (his weltanshauung) and of himself that had no room for the way God actually saw him: “And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, and said to him, ‘the Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor!'” And then there is Moses who saw himself as an exiled stutterer incapable of the task to which God had called him. Exodus 3 and 4 are a litany of excuses refuted one by one by God himself, but even after Moses performs multiple miracles through the power of God, he offers one last gem: “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). His worldview, his implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions gave little room to accept the way God saw him. If a worldview is an implicit and mostly unconscious presupposition, then it functions at a precognitive, intuitive level as it did with Gideon and Moses. So the senses provide information that passes through this weltanshauung (world perception) before it ever reaches the old man waiting at the door of reason. He bases his censorship, his judgement, upon the way that sensory information or ideas has been mediated by that worldview. For both Moses and Gideon, and many others, the old man at the door rejected God’s vision because it did not align with his own.
God is fond of doing this sort of thing. In Isaiah 41, he addresses Jacob in this way: “Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel. I will help you” (v. 14) How will he help? “Behold, I will make you into a new threshing sledge with sharp teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and beat them small, and make the hills like chaff” (v. 15). Worms don’t do that sort of thing, but God’s vision is rarely our own.
It’s right about now that you’re asking what all this has to do with imagination and it’s right about now that I attempt an answer. Any kind of perception is the ability to become aware of something and so requires vision. The same is true of worldview perception. Every worldview requires a vision that constructs a meaningful metaphor (worldview) through which we view all of reality? I have become convinced that the imagination performs this crucial role in our lives.
The essential need for and purpose of imagination:
Although the word “imagination” has a messy philosophical history, philosophers have agreed on one thing from the beginning: the imagination serves as a crucial bridge between the senses and reason. Aristotle wrote, “every time one thinks one must at the same time contemplate some image” (De Anima, 432a). Imagination, therefore, plays a constant role in perception and contributes necessary material for rational thought.
The imagination mediates between the data pulled from our senses and what is finally judged by our reason. The imagination translates what is perceived by the senses into some image or string of images that reason can understand. It traffics in images of various kinds, particularly metaphor and narrative. It is a combiner, gluing various images together to create a new image entirely. We see this in the common notion of imagination as a faculty of unwieldy fancy as when it concocts a Chimera, a myth, by combining a lion, a serpent, and a goat. Or we see this gluing ability when it combines an eagle with a horse called Pegasus. This fancy is, indeed, one function of the imagination, but not the sole function, and for this reason Coleridge called it Secondary Imagination.
Another way that the imagination glues images together is when it takes moments from memory (what happened yesterday) and combines them with what is happening right now so that it can anticipate what will happen later. The imagination images the sensory world and strings those images together to form a kind of movie, a visual narrative. It is the imagination’s task to take sensory information and translate it into a usable narrative for the reason, imaging the sensory information so that it fits into what is already known in the narrative conceived thus far. It takes the chaos of our lives and arranges all of it into something recognizable, meaningful.
Thomas Howard put it this way: “Imagination, far from being an unfortunate inclination in us mortals that leads us down the garden path toward illusion and a region that is nothing but wish fulfillment, may, rather, be the faculty in us corresponding in a unique way to reality. We cannot pit it over or against intellect and will and affection. All of these properties rightly crown our humanness, and each, after its own mode, enables us to respond to reality” (The Night Is Far Spent, p. 46). That last line is critical for rethinking false dichotomies set up between reason and imagination. Both reason and imagination enable us to respond to reality, but let us recognize that reason functions by the light of the imagination.
C.S. Lewis agreed, “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.”
In the final line of this quote, Lewis says that the imagination is not the cause of truth, but its condition. As light is the condition for the perception of any object, so imagination is the condition for the perception of any truth. We even say, “Let me shed a little light on the subject” as a metaphor for understanding. Reason is the organ of truth, judging what is true so that the old man at the door can reject that which is false. Imagination, on the other hand, is the organ of meaning, the light without which everything would be nonsense or meaninglessness. In other words, reason cannot trump the imagination, but the imagination usually dictates what we reason. .
Now, if only it were all that easy to make such delineations. Unfortunately, imagination resists categorizing. For this reason it becomes difficult if not impossible to talk of “the imagination” as though it were a single and simple function of the mind: a noun. In some respects, our talk of “the imagination” is deceptive. Reason is more like a noun, something that holds still long enough for me to point at it and say, “Look kids, that is a thing.” Imagination, however, is more like a verb, even a state of being verb that just is. I never really turn on the light in a room, the light just is. I switch a circuit, a noun, but I don’t turn on the light. Light is and does. Imagination is and does; hence the complications of talking about “the imagination” as if it is a static function of the mind waiting to be turned on. We’ll be more effective in reclaiming the imagination when we recognize the potency of its power as a perpetually revved and orienting function.