The Buried Imagination - Part II - Is Our Imagination Reliable?
Sixty years ago, J.R.R. Tolkien argued against critics who said his fantasy works led people into escapism. Critics remarked that, at their best, his books were an excursion from reality, and at its worst a lie that created self-deception.
Tolkien said in response,
“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls…. If we value the freedom of mind and soul…then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
No one would disagree with the longing of a prisoner escaping into a greater hope.
As Christians, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.[i] And, in a broken world, it is the most natural thing for the imagination to escape into a more-real one, a heavenly one.[ii] And this hope can become a source to beckon people onward.[iii]
In fact, some scholars speak of the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty.[iv] Of course, not all we imagine in our minds is the truth-in-full. Sometimes our imagination can create anxiety, disillusion, or error.[v]
But, no matter what, the objective truth always arrives in our minds by means of the imagination.
The Christian imagination isn’t a flight of fancy or self-deception or even mere child’s play—it’s following after our Father—using our minds to follow after the patterns he’s created.[vi]
“But while the imagination of man has thus the divine function of putting thought into form, it has a duty altogether human, which is paramount to that function—the duty, namely, which springs from his immediate relation to the Father, that of following and finding out the divine imagination in whose image it was made. To do this, the man must watch its signs, its manifestations. He must contemplate what the Hebrew poets call the works of His hands.” – George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
Further, as those redeemed by Jesus, we worship the One who is called, “The image of the invisible God,” and “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” We know imagination has led us astray in the Genesis account, but we also believe our imagination is being repaired and restored by the Holy Spirit.[vii]
Even the fear of being deceived by our imaginations, is putting the image of our deception over God’s ability to counsel us.
It’s actually having more faith in our deception that in the power of truth.
It’s faith in vain imaginings, rather than faith in the image of God. And I mean that both in God’s potent design in us, and in Jesus, The Image of the Invisible God, who we draw near to mainly through the beautiful, image-rich nexus of our minds.
Because of Jesus, the action of imaging is not only central in Scripture, but it is in the nature of the gospel and a significant capacity by which we are able to be transformed “into the same image.”[viii] Because of Jesus, we have full permission to engage our imaginations in perceiving, receiving, dreaming, and healing in this Kingdom.
It would be near impossible to separate the imagery responsible for the good news from the arrival of the good news in our hearts and minds.
It hits us at our core: The image of a cross. An innocent man suffering in our stead. A Savior who is God, life lain down. Naked. Ashamed…all these images resonate with the imagery of our broken world and our broken hearts.
These are potent images that strike us at a primal level. And the ache moves us from our sterile and trapped imaginings, to the imagination of God who thinks and dreams in terms of eternity.
To throw suspicion on the imagination, is to remove it from center in our human identity.
To gather to it, is to warm ourselves on the shared fire of God and man.
When we attempt to uproot the imagination, we uproot the language of our heart.
When we throw out the imagine, we lose access to the deepest places in us.
When we trust God’s presence in our imaginations, the image in us re-lights with a thousand-fold flame.
And we cannot help but become ourselves.
We’ve been considering this God-given capacity called the imagination in a series of posts (Click here to check out the first post in the series)
I invite you to talk to the Lord even now:
Lord, what has been my experience with imagination?
Do I think of my imagination as a place to connect with you, God? To find out more about myself?
Am I concerned about being deceived?
What would it be like to find you in the midst of my imaginings?
What images come to mind most often for me?
What comes up when I consider that I’m made in the image of God? And that You, Jesus, are the Image of the Invisible God? What might that mean for me as an image of God now?
Footnotes
[i] Galatians 5:1
[ii] “Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think, is just what we find….If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy….In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. – C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
[iii] A great example is Tolkien’s relationship with C.S. Lewis, who was a deeply committed atheist, but couldn’t reconcile the deep longings he felt in stories and imaginative works with the dreary and empty landscape of atheism. Tolkien’s conversations with Lewis centered around mythopoeia or a myth/story becoming real—Tolkien said that our imagination points to a reality and that reality is a Person and that person is Jesus, and that real Myth is the life, death, and resurrection that the Church celebrates. It was through conversations about longings that awoke in his imagination that Lewis was eventually led into Christianity and became one of its greatest voices in the 20th century.
[iv] Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God
[v] Likely you will find great imaginations in those dealing with mental health issues, and sometimes the more prevelant or extreme imaginations are in those presenting with paranoia or delusion. Our minds can create very backward expressions of imagination as well. However, in Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton says, “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain.… Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health….. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite….To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
[vi] “But while the imagination of man has thus the divine function of putting thought into form, it has a duty altogether human, which is paramount to that function—the duty, namely, which springs from his immediate relation to the Father, that of following and finding out the divine imagination in whose image it was made. To do this, the man must watch its signs, its manifestations. He must contemplate what the Hebrew poets call the works of His hands.” – George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
[vii] Colossians 1:15 (ESV) and Hebrews 1:3 (ESV)
[viii] “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another,” (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV)