As will often be noted in the materials found here, many Christians harbor great suspicions about the imagination. Their suspicions, expressed in a variety of ways both vulgar and sophisticated, cluster around two of the most important theological truths of our Faith: special revelation and general revelation. These two are covered in their own articles on this site, so referring you to those I here move straight to the topic of the pitfalls and prospects of the imagination for Christians. I begin with a bold assertion:
At its root, an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality.
Now this remark may seem contradictory at first. Aren’t the two items listed, imagination and reality, simply opposites? The real is, well, that which is the case, while the imagination, as its etymology shows, consists of an image. And isn’t an image at its best only an artificial imitation of something real and at its worst an attempt to copy something real which ends in falsification of the real?
What can it mean, then, to assert that an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality?
I would begin to explain it by making an important distinction: (1) the imagination as such and (2) the imagination as application.
The former category picks out the thing itself, our God-given ability to mentally image things in the world (just as we ourselves most essentially image God Himself) and think about, manipulate, and communicate those images. It’s difficult to see how this category of imagination could be intrinsically a bad thing, since it’s just part of our created nature itself.
We can no more avoid imaging things in the world than we can avoid thought itself.
In this sense, then, an attack on the imagination as such is an attack on the reality that God made and into which He has put us and commanded us to live for Him. This seems an odd thing to say since we so often associate the imagination with fiction, which we (falsely) think means “that which is not true.” Since we are Christians, we think that we must shun whatever is not true. And so many of us are tempted to shun the imagination because we think it stands in opposition to Truth – either the truth found in the pages of the Bible or the truth found in the “pages” of general revelation.
One thinks here of well-meaning Christians who think it their Stoical duty to inform other people’s children that, for Really Reals and In Real-Not-Fake Reality, there just absolutely aren’t any such beings anywhere in all of creation as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Alas, such well-meaning Christians have probably never carried out the quite illuminating exercise of taking seriously the title of that book on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf which Lucy saw on her first night in Narnia: Is Man A Myth?
What I mean is just this: one of the chief values of the imagination for Christians is how it enables us to come at our own personal views, which are so comfortable and “obvious” to us, from a vantage point that is so different it makes us aware that we might just be assuming too much, or at least assuming some things that aren’t accurate.
What if those among us who vehemently contend that there cannot possibly be any such thing in God’s universe as fauns (either “Because the Bible doesn’t mention them” or “Because weird creatures like that violate the Nature which God gave us to look at so we could know His truth clearly”) found themselves the topic of a learned book in another world questioning whether there could be any such thing as human beings in God’s universe?
Maybe there is no answer to this sort of question. Maybe it will turn out to be a ridiculous question after we’ve examined it thoroughly from every angle we can. But just the activity of asking it exposes as merely an assumption – and quite an overconfident one! – that we already have the answers to any questions about possibilities that could be thought of to be asked.
Which attitude amounts, really, to just simple arrogance. God has not deigned to tell us everything about His creation, nor is He obligated to do so. He has told us just what we need to know to accurately know Him and seek salvation from our sins.
Other inferences we may wish to draw about what can or can’t or does or doesn’t exist somewhere else than our small world at some other time than our own limited lifespan are just that – personal inferences or prejudices that we should never hold with the sort of dogged temerity we would actual Articles of the Faith.
And yet, to try to be fair to the multiple types of Christian detractors of the imagination, surely one can see through their pious zeal for a hyper-literal concept of “Truth” (whether appealing to the Bible or to Nature) to the more general and quite real danger it is trying to recall: the danger of idolatry.
And this brings me to the second part of the distinction above: imagination as application.
It doesn’t take much reflection on Scripture to realize that thanks to sin breaking the world, our God-given and good ability to make images – indeed, our very desire to make images – has itself become fundamentally skewed. What is the Second Commandment, after all?
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.
Exodus 20:2
And from there, of course, we must never forget the powerful lesson of Israel’s history which were “written for our instruction” (Rom. 15:4, 1 Cor. 10:11), that a major source of God’s own people departing from His clear instructions was, precisely, chasing after images that they had set up in idolatrous competition with God – sometimes even culpably confusing those very images with God.
Whether with Aaron (Ex. 32:1-35) or with Jeroboam (1 Kgs. 12), the people confused images made by hands with God Himself. Hezekiah had to destroy the brazen serpent that Moses himself had made, for it, too, had become an object of sinful worship (2 Kgs. 18:4).
But if we need a crowning biblical proof of the great danger that attends the human tendency not just to be interested in images but to actively pursue them in spite of God Himself, the Apostle Paul condemns the whole human race because they had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom. 1:23).
So here is another bold assertion to offset the one with which I began:
The use of the imagination in terms of making non-physical images is an inherently dangerous thing, not to be done without first engaging in serious reflection about the substance of God’s revelation to us in Nature and in Scripture.
Having said that, I still maintain that when we reject the imagination outright, we do so at a terrible price. Wanting rightly to avoid the idolatry-snare to which our fallen capacity for imaging is prone, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Although many among us, operating with a constricted understanding of “truth” as consisting only of literal statements, are dogmatically convinced that such things as myth and magic are evil and have nothing to do with “true spirituality,” I think we can find and defend a positive vision of the imagination in the Christian’s life.
In the sense that I want to defend it here, imagination should be seen as a creative reconfiguration of the things we find at hand in God’s world, an activity undertaken first to glorify Him by expressing the creative ability He Himself built into us as His image bearers, and second to explore points of contact we as believers can and do have with unbelievers.
Writing of just this activity, Tolkien explained that “sub-creating” worlds by taking actual things God has made and imagining them in different modes or forms is, contrary to a kneejerk polemic about idolatry, rather to be seen as:
“a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which it indeed is exhibited…I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic—there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones—that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!
Letters, pp. 188-189
Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote similarly of what he did in his Narnia books:
“[Aslan] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’
The Letters of C.S. Lewis, pg. 283
Although much more needs to be said on this topic, I will close this article by reiterating – with Tolkien and Lewis at my back! – that attacking imaginative work in any “totalizing” manner, as if the thing itself is wrong rather than just abuses of it, amounts to fighting against the goodness and beauty of the real world that God Himself has made.