Curtis Gruenler
Delivered Sept. 29, 2005, in the Department of Philosophy’s series on the Liberal Arts
First I want to say what an honor and a pleasure it is to be asked to give a lecture in a series sponsored by a department of colleagues for which I have such great respect and affection.
Prof. Allis showed up at my office last semester after I had given a couple of lectures in our IDS 171 Cultural Heritage class on the theme of imagination in Dante. He said he’d been talking with one of his classes about the descriptions in Hope’s catalog of our educational goals and philosophy, and had noticed that they don’t say anything about imagination. I think that’s how he got the idea to ask me to give this lecture, and I’ve found it really stimulating to pull together some thoughts about imagination in the liberal arts, and in particular at Hope College with its mission of offering an education in the liberal arts in the context of the historic Christian faith. In fact, I’ve become more and more convinced that a focus on imagination can help the different disciplines of the liberal arts work better in leading people to fuller humanity, and that this focus is especially valuable at Hope because can help us see how the Christian and liberal arts components of our mission work together.
I’d like to begin with Dante, since he’s the one who got me here. It may tell you all you need to know about me if I say that I see his Divine Comedy, in so far as I even understand it, as the supreme example of teaching the liberal arts within the historic Christian faith and as the greatest work of imagination produced in the Western tradition. Dante pulls all of the liberal arts learning available in his time—not just literary, historical, and philosophical, but scientific as well—into a comprehensive theological vision. And not only does he give each discipline a place in his grand synthesis, but he draws from each discipline ways of imagining the spiritual reality that is his highest object. He fashions metaphors from astronomy and music just as much as from mythology and history. [Image: Doré’s engraving of the sphere of the sun from Paradiso: metaphor of dancing.] Moreover, he would claim, I think, that he was not making these metaphors up so much as finding them built into the structure of reality, or what medieval folks liked to call the book of nature. At the summit of his vision, in the final canto, he writes that, gazing on the Eternal Light, he “saw how it contains within its depths / all things bound in a single book by love / of which creation is the scattered leaves” (Par 33.85-87). I would suggest that the project of the liberal arts is learning to read these scattered leaves and stitch them back together in a larger book, which, in the context of Christian faith, can be seen to be a revelation of God. And, as Dante also shows us, the essential faculty we need for the further steps of this education, as well as for seeing how to act in response to it, is imagination, for reasons that I would like to try to develop.
Before leaving Dante, though, I want to draw from his poem an image of what imagination does for us. Dante develops a symbolism of light in relation to knowledge throughout the Divine Comedy. In the Inferno all is dim, and Dante as the main character in the poem is unable to see or understand very well what is right in front of him, much less how it fits into a larger whole. In the Purgatorio and Paradiso, the light steadily grows as he understands not just the particular part of the vision he is facing, but how it is part of a larger order, until at the end, in the passage I just quoted, he is able to see the whole, how everything is fundamentally related to everything else in God. [Same image: light symbolism.] Developing imagination is like slowly turning up the light, or even better, like a never-completed sunrise.
[Next slide.] I’ll proceed by first trying to work out an understanding of what imagination is, from both a philosophical and theological perspective, which will also involve discussing some misunderstandings of imagination. Then I’ll discuss how and why imagination is important to the liberal arts and to Hope’s larger mission. And finally I’ll attempt some suggestions for how to cultivate imagination, both in college and beyond.
George MacDonald, the 19th-century British writer, in a classic essay called “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture,” gives a definition of imagination that is a good place to start:
The word itself means an imaging or making of likenesses. The imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought—not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or in any mode on which the senses can lay hold. It is, therefore, that faculty in man [sic] which is likest to the prime operation of the power of God, and has, therefore, been called the creative faculty, and its exercise creation.
I want to dwell on several aspects of this definition. The relationship between the word imagination and the word image can tend to restrict our use of the word to the visual, but I mean to talk about the way that we clothe thought in forms derived from all our senses, including hearing, touch, taste, smell, and even those that aren’t among the cardinal five such as our awareness of our own bodies. I suppose that it is the leading role often assigned to vision, as when we say “I see” to mean “I understand,” that is at work in the word imagination. Vision seems to be especially important in our knowledge of the world in an objectively distanced fashion, apart from our own immediate, subjective experience of it, and this makes it especially apt to the notion of imagination, but imagination involves much more than visual images.
Indeed, MacDonald makes a close connection between imagination and language by saying that the forms it gives to thought are capable of being uttered. Here again, imagination is not restricted to the forms of spoken language but involves any kind of language, any kind of sensible signs that refer to something other than themselves, which also includes, for example, visual images and music. But spoken language is the most highly developed kind of language and helps us see the central function of imagination in our knowledge. Just as all language for what we can’t directly sense depends on metaphors based on what we can sense, so all understanding of reality depends on imagination. Perhaps this analogy risks explaining the unfamiliar in terms of what is also unfamiliar, but let me briefly develop the first part of it and then return to the second. If you look far enough back in the history of a word that now has a purely abstract meaning, you will find a metaphor based on concrete, sense experience. The word “abstract” itself is a good example: it comes from the Latin prefix ab- meaning away or from and the verb trahere, meaning to drag or pull out. So the metaphor buried in the word “abstract” refers to this very process of pulling a nonmaterial meaning out of material experience by imagination. When we look at the history of words in this way, its easy to imagine that the earliest speakers were not very imaginative and used language to refer only to sensible experience, but a closer attention to the evidence suggests instead that imagination was at work from the beginning but that at first most words had to do double duty, referring at once to what we would call abstract and concrete kinds of meaning. Only over time, with the development of civilization and especially of the intellectual disciplines, do most words come to be restricted to primarily abstract or concrete meanings, with the job of recharging concrete words with metaphorical meaning left largely to poets and others who use language with conscious imagination. A good example of the original semantic unity between concrete and abstract survives in the third chapter of the gospel of John when Jesus, in dialogue with Nicodemus, plays with the Greek word pneuma, which means wind, breath, and spirit. English translators have to choose one of these English words in each instance, and so lose some of the charge of the metaphor. Jesus draws attention to the metaphor in order to teach something, and at the same time draws attention to the fact that all of our understanding of spirit in what we might call the spiritual sense is based on this kind of metaphoric thinking from sense experience, or what I am calling imagination. Of course what we now mean by spirit is informed by a lot of other thinking besides a metaphor from breath or wind, but all that thinking has metaphoric imagination behind it too.
To repeat to my analogy, just as all language for what we can’t directly sense depends on metaphors based on what we can sense, so all understanding of reality depends on imagination. As embodied creatures, humans, like all other animals are endowed with senses that allow us to know the world around us. But unlike other animals, humans are not limited to knowledge only of what we are able to sense directly, but rather are capable of understanding the world in a way that transcends our biological constitution. Imagination is the gateway to this understanding. By imagination we can conceive of the objects of our senses as evidence of things whose existence apart from our own senses we can imagine, that is, manipulate in our mental theater and begin to wonder what is up with them beyond what we can sense. Where does the sun go when it sets? Where is my wife when I can’t see her? What makes seeds grow? From this capacity comes the ability to formulate concepts and explanations and devise ways of testing them, refining them, and teaching them. As Aquinas puts it,
It is impossible for the human mind...actually to understand anything except by the use of models in the imagination.... This is something that anyone can experience for themselves, namely, the fact that when one tries to understand something, one forms for the purpose some imaginary model to provide examples in which one can, as it were, inspect that which one desires to understand. And thence it is that even when we wish to make someone else understand something, we propose for that person examples on the basis of which he or she can form a model for understanding. (ST I-I.84.7 as quoted in Deely 659)
All our intellectual disciplines are particular extensions from this basic capacity, though they also bring to bear other aspects of intellect that develop and test the validity of our imaginations. Imagination can conceive models that are true and models that are false, but we can’t begin to understand the truth of anything without it.
Further, it is in imagination that the products of all the disciplines come back together. It is a curious feature of our imagination of the world that, even though we know our own ignorance, know that we know a little about chemistry and a little about geology, a little about Michigan and a little about California, with a lot of gaps in between, nonetheless the world seems whole. Imagination puts together what we know and fills in the gaps. More important for the idea of the liberal arts, imagination includes within this whole the possibility of multiple perspectives on the same features of reality, the different ways of imagining we get from each discipline. Here perhaps the best example is how we imagine the substructure of material reality below what we can directly perceive. I didn’t study chemistry beyond high school, and I don’t remember the numerical value of Avogadro’s number, but I do remember that it’s really big and that it allows you to calculate how many molecules of a given atomic weight are in a certain mass of a compound. And this has helped give me a chemical imagination of matter, alongside my everyday imagination of it, as being made up of lots and lots, like trillions of trillions, of particles of whatever something is made of. Yet alongside this is the imagination one gets from physics in, say, the Bohr model of the atom that tells you that even the molecules of chemistry are actually mostly empty space. Subatomic physics is great because it’s always consciously playing with different models, so along with the particle view you have the wave view, which leads, in something like David Bohm’s quantum theory of the implicate order, to the idea that, since each particle can also be described as a wave function with no spatial boundaries, every point in space contains information about everything in the material universe. This way of imagining matter and space at least provides another nifty metaphor for what I’m saying imagination does, join every part of our knowledge to a coherent whole. Each of us is the source of an imagination of the whole of reality, created and uncreated. Thus imagination both opens the way to human understanding and completes or synthesizes it.
Now, this may all seem obvious and you may be wondering what the point is. Or maybe it seems rather loopy. Or perhaps you have reservations about the importance I’m attaching to imagination. In any case it might help to consider for a moment two misunderstandings that we need to attend to also because they help explain why imagination is not usually given the place in our educational thought that it deserves. We can call them Rationalism and Romanticism. Basically, Rationalism doesn’t place enough importance on imagination, and Romanticism places too much, but we need to be more precise about how and why.
The kind of imagination denigrated by Rationalism and elevated by Romanticism is most memorably and influentially described by Shakespeare’s Theseus in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy
rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Now, this passage could be interpreted as describing the same imagination as defined by MacDonald, but associating it with poetic frenzy tends to suggest a more freewheeling use of this faculty to make fictions that are more likely to delude that to enlighten. Modern, Enlightenment Rationalism elevates a Cartesian, analytic reason over against this kind of fantastic imagination. Romanticism, on the other hand, elevates this kind of imagination to the point that it displaces the more fundamental kind from view and disregards the other forms of reason necessary to ascertain the truth of imagination’s inventions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge tried to sort this out in a notorious passage that is, after the one from Shakespeare I just quoted, probably the second most famous description of imagination in English letters. In order to show what Rationalism and Romanticism both miss, he distinguishes between primary and secondary imagination. Primary imagination is what I’ve mostly been talking about so far, which Coleridge describes as “the living Power and Prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.” Secondary imagination is what we associate more particularly with artists, or as Coleridge writes, “an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the former in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.” Now, we needn’t pull this apart. Rationalism, I think, tends to recognize only secondary imagination, what we associate with the making of various kinds of fictions and fine art, but which it sees as separate from more real, objective, scientific knowledge. It doesn’t admit, that is, how deeply any knowledge at all depends on the same faculty at a deeper, unconscious level. Romanticism too focuses only on secondary imagination, but then elevates it over scientific reasoning as a way of knowledge. By ignoring primary imagination, Romanticism can overlook the deep kinship between artistic and scientific knowledge and the vigorous imagination of even the least artistic person. These are just the kind of divides that liberal arts education can overcome, as I’ll discuss in a moment.
First, though, I want to return to the theological claim that MacDonald makes about imagination, which we can now see he was developing from Coleridge: that imagination is the human faculty that “is likest to the prime operation of the power of God.” MacDonald goes on to insist on the importance of the distinction between divine imagination that creates from nothing and human imagination that creates with what it has been given. Indeed, he writes, “It is better to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker.” Human imagination, we might say, is a sort of participation in the divine imagination, first unconsciously in Coleridge’s primary imagination, and then consciously in secondary imagination.
To elaborate this basic theology is no doubt to rush in where angels fear to tread, but here goes. Establishing a biblical basis for a view of imagination is tricky because, as far as I can tell, there is no word in Hebrew or Greek that corresponds closely to the meaning I am giving to imagination. Yet I think the concept is there—indeed, this is a prime instance of biblical theology being way out ahead of the languages in which it was revealed. MacDonald draws on the creation story in Genesis chapter 1, which tells us that we are made in the image of God after mainly showing us God as creator or, as our Dean of the Chapel likes to say, as artist. I’m inclined to see in the beginning of the creation story, “God said ‘Let there be light,’” a metaphor of divine imagination that draws on human experience of primary imagination in language and vision. Part of what God creates first is the conditions that make possible our participation in divine imagination. When the Gospel of John identifies this creative act with the second person of the Trinity as Logos, or word, it anchors a notion of divine imagination more firmly in the theology of the Trinity and quickly pulls in the metaphor of light as well. “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” Of course there is much more in these metaphors than a theory of imagination, but I think it is there, and that we can trace it further through its close association with language. Genesis 2 tells us that God brought all the animals before Adam so that he could name them. This is humanity’s first act of cooperation with God, and we might see here the basic work of primary imagination, mediated by language, that allows us to relate to the creation outside of ourselves as something with a life of its own, something we can think about, more than just the source of stimuli to which we respond according to our animal instincts. Language becomes an explicit theme again in the story of the tower of Babel, and I don’t think it is a stretch to see here a story of imagination, of humanity using to the full its capacities of imagination in order to build a tower and, as the text has the Babellers say, “make a name for ourselves.” Here we have the first Romantics, the first artists who assert their imaginations in rivalry with God, who elevate secondary imagination over primary and try to recreate themselves. God seems to be concerned that the power of collective imagination made possible by shared language will be too great, and so confuses their tongues. And that explains the origin of the liberal arts disciplines.
Well not exactly. The story of Babel does, though, suggest a surprising place to look in the New Testament for a notion of imagination. The story of Pentecost is commonly taken as a sort of reversal of the story of Babel: the gift of tongues overcomes the divide imposed by God and sets up the story, told in the rest of the book of Acts, of how the gospel spreads across cultural barriers. But what if the gift of tongues here also suggests a gift of imagination? Crossing cultural divides requires more than just knowledge of another language; indeed, knowing someone’s language is the key to the larger work of getting inside their imagination of themselves and their world, and this work of imagination in turn makes real love across differences possible. What the Pentecost story can point us to about a theology of imagination, I think, is its ultimate purpose. Pentecost is the beginning of the fulfillment of Christ’s prayer to the Father in Acts 17, “that they may become perfectly one.” As MacDonald puts it, “the end of imagination is harmony.” The purpose of imagination is unity across difference, peace that embraces all of the splendid variety of nature and culture, the biblical vision of shalom that Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued should be the goal of Christian liberal arts education. To envision shalom as a unity that preserves difference, that doesn’t assimilate everyone to a homogeneous identity but grows a community enriched by the greatest diversity, requires imagination. And to live out such a unity requires virtues that in turn depend on imagination.
The theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, that is, all involve a kind of knowledge for which imagination is our best word. Love, most obviously, requires empathetically projecting oneself into someone else’s situation. Faith is more than just knowledge, but the kind of knowledge it is, what we sometimes call belief, encompasses a theological vision of the whole of life that is prior to and greater than what can be known or expressed with more precise certainty. Even our creeds need to be read poetically, as flights of imagination. And hope reaches beyond what we know to what we desire, but avoids becoming mere optimistic delusion by holding itself open to the divine imagination in the way that distinguishes human imagination from fantasy. This distinction between hopeful imagination and fantasy would be worth dwelling on, but I had better press on to try to bring this all back around to the liberal arts.
Why, then, is imagination important to education in the liberal arts, especially in the context of the historic Christian faith? My overall answer would be to embrace Wolterstorff’s proposal that we ought to learn and teach for shalom and then I would add that nurturing imagination is crucial to that task. But under that canopy, let me suggest a few more particular things that attention to imagination can do for us.
First, the importance of imagination within each discipline. As I’ve already said, each discipline develops a way of knowing that depends on and develops primary imagination. And I think it is already a familiar idea to practitioners of the arts, humanities, and even the sciences, that each discipline is most powerful when brings imagination consciously into play. I needn’t belabor the importance of, say, historical imagination in history, or the magnitude of Einstein’s feats of imagination, or even the imaginative feat required to understand his theories of relativity. I like to go back to physics because, since Einstein, physicists have been so good at keeping themselves conscious of role of imagination in their work by talking about models and using terms for physical properties like charm and strangeness that don’t let them be taken too literally. C. S. Lewis makes a strong case that academics especially need to remain conscious of the metaphoric dimensions of our technical vocabularies in order to keep them from getting stale, unimaginative, and less meaningful, and at the same time to keep us from thinking we understand better than we do. To pick on my own discipline, seeing the metaphor within the word metaphor itself, which comes from parts meaning to carry across, reminds me that the point is to see how language carries meaning across from the sensory to the nonsensory rather than to promulgate a mystifying professional vocabulary.
Such attention to imagination in keeping our disciplines lively also helps us see that an important product of studying a discipline is, in a profound sense, living in a new world. Each discipline builds a way of seeing the world. Part of what we mean by learning to think like a chemist or a psychologist or a philosopher or a musician is acquiring a particular, disciplined imagination. Of course there are particular skills and mental equipment involved in each, but each calls on the same faculty to pull these together as an approach to reality and a way of seeing that allows certain aspects of reality to appear more clearly and become objects of further study. It also allows a discipline to become a basis for action. Imagination connects theory and practice, not just within the development of a discipline’s own body of knowledge, but, more important, beyond it to the common life of the world. It enables a certain echo of the Incarnation, making the word of a discipline become flesh by applying it to real human needs.
Across the disciplines, to see the common role of imagination helps us some things about how they work together in a common educational project. Of course there are other things that are common across the disciplines, such as communication and critical thinking, and I don’t mean to devalue them, but I think we tend to talk about them more because they suit the Rationalism of modernity. Just as imagination synthesizes the training involved in each discipline, so it can synthesize the learning that students gain in their whole curriculum. Thus, if each discipline cultivates a different way of imagining the world, a student tastes several of these worlds and gains the ability to move between them and even keep them in mind at the same time. The result is both a richer grasp of a reality with infinite facets and a greater, more conscious ability to shift between them as needed. And just as imagination guides the application of each discipline, so a student imagines how to live out his or her education, the more creatively the better. Here I think the context of the Christian story as an open framework for integrating the disciplines and giving them purpose is especially valuable and shows how Christian faith and the liberal arts can be mutually reinforcing. For instance, if building communities of shalom is part of our purpose, we need to draw on the creativity of many disciplines in order to imagine our way there, from political science to sociology to theater to history, and this purpose in turn empowers a culminating work of imagination in those disciplines. Imagining healthy models of community that embrace difference peacefully, by the way, is one of the main things I see Dante doing in the Paradiso, the final part of the Divine Comedy. [Picture: disciplines joined in image of the celestial rose at the summit of Paradiso.]
Finally, cultivating imagination is important because, as MacDonald points out, people’s imaginations are powerful, and if that power does not work for good it will work for evil; “if not for truth, then for falsehood; if not for life, then for death.” To put it this way also emphasizes what we are up against. The liberal arts and Christian worship are, together, the best way we know to discipline and nurture healthy imagination. But they compete in our culture with forces whose shaping influence on the imagination can seem overwhelming. Augustine in the fourth century wrote already of his struggle, both imaginative and emotional, against decadent theater, peer pressure, and gnostic religion. All these and more are still with us, and electronic media have only amplified their seductive appeal.
What then can we do to better cultivate imagination? Here I am especially conscious of my need to learn from others, especially from many in this room. But I’ll close with a few thoughts.
Here again, the essential, overarching practice is simply the practice of virtue. Not only does imagination enable the virtues but virtue also cultivates imagination. And here again we see the mutual reinforcement of faith and learning.
Further, I think there is a particular call to obedience in how we cultivate our imaginations, a call to try to bring them into harmony with the divine imagination. In the face of our current media environment, we need to acknowledge the power of our imaginations and of the influences upon them and take responsibility for them. Our imaginations begin taking shape at birth, or even before, and formal education is only a small part of that. But perhaps college in particular can be a place where we become aware of this power and choose to be responsible for it.
If so, the first thing we need is some silence. We need space in which true imagination can take root and begin to grow without being eaten by birds or choked by thorns or growing too quickly and being scorched by the sun. Not that we need to unplug completely or demonize video games or whatever we see as the most egregious influences—though I do like the question that Herb Dershem from the computer science faculty asked me recently: “What if Hope decided to be the least wired campus in the country?” But we need to encourage and make room for contemplation, for reading slowly, for sabbaths, for dreaming, for sleep, for prayer.
What else makes good soil for imagination? Leaving aside worship and other religious disciplines, perhaps the next thing to think about is interpersonal relationships. Imagination grows in personal encounters. In our academic program, Hope does a remarkable job, I think, of making education as richly relational as it can be. Outside the classroom, I think we could work on making the rich relational environment better serve the cultivation of imagination. I’d like to see a stronger culture of intellectual leisure, the kind of thing I associate with coffee-house culture, and places for it to happen. And outside the classroom is also where we need to develop a stronger culture of diversity. This is where the most powerful encounters across difference will happen, and we need not just the diversity that makes them possible but a culture that knows what it wants to happen in these encounters and helps make that happen. The value of cultivating imagination takes us a ways toward seeing why diversity is so important and how to make it work for us.
Within our teaching and learning of the disciplines themselves, my suggestions have mostly to do with the role of imagination in grasping the whole of things. It’s easy in studying anything to lose the forest for the trees. One of the reasons is that you just can’t see the forest all at once, and so knowledge of it doesn’t have the same sense of clarity and certainty. But recognizing the importance of imagination underscores the importance of trying to see the whole even if it is a bit sketchy. We need to work at placing whatever particular problem or topic we are studying in the context of a larger whole in order to give it proper meaning and purpose. Indeed, we need, I think, to work at understanding a sense of the whole of a discipline, and even beyond that a larger whole in which each discipline finds a place. Here I think interdisciplinary work might be especially valuable. Our imaginations are inevitably interdisciplinary, but in a mostly random and haphazard way, so that it seems worthwhile to try to do this explicitly in order to learn to do it better. And real interdisciplinary work will then happen by imagining the disciplines in the context of a larger whole rather than just placing them side by side. To me the most obvious way to do this would be to focus attention on a problem or question that transcends any one discipline and then come at it from the approach of more than one. I’m trying to think of exactly what this might mean for the cultural heritage requirement, but I’ll save that for discussion.
A grasp of the whole also involves attention to beauty. Beauty involves contemplating the form of the whole of a thing. Certainly beauty nurtures imagination, and not just giving our attention to beautiful works of art, but taking an aesthetic approach to whatever is the object of our study. Perhaps the quickest road to a sense of the whole of a discipline is appreciating the beauty of the perspective on reality it gives us. In interpreting a work of literature, I need to connect the analysis of any part with some grasp of the coherence of the whole—just the kind of thing that might be making a comeback in literary studies after a long absence. And this might be a helpful model for other disciplines too. Grasping our experience in terms of stories is perhaps our most imaginatively fertile way of understanding things in the light of a meaningful whole. Perhaps, then, it helps to conceive of an academic course, say, in terms of a story that it follows.
[Image: medieval illustration of Dante’s sphere of the sun.] That might seem too playful an approach for some disciplines, but my last suggestion is that imagination grows through play. We need to let ourselves play with those things that are most meaningful to us, and to recognize even that their purposes, and ours, might be best accomplished if we, to quote Thomas Merton, “forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join the general dance.” Thank you.