III. Imagination and the Holy

In a created universe, certain philosophical acts, such as the work of thinking Anselm’s that than which nothing greater can be thought, are simultaneously acts of reason, imagination, and contemplative prayer.

Our understanding of the philosophical imagination depends upon our anthropology. Kelly embraced the analogical idea of a central holy place within us where we hear the voice of God, encounter light, and touch eternity. This inward reality shows us how to view God, the world, other people, and ourselves. It is the Shekinah, a sense of the presence of God, not in some ethereal nether-region reserved for a few prophets or saints—but inside all of us. It calls us to reorient ourselves toward deepest reality, even as we go about our daily tasks. Engaging with the divine does not lead us out of the world but instead lights up everything that is taken for granted, showing the true wonder of something as common as the face of a friend or a stranger. This requires humility. Because there is so much distraction in life, we have to practice to remain aware of the multiple orders and operations of the mind that register radiance in the world and in ourselves.

A kind of holy play occurs at the level of mind where the transcendent and immanent meet, and we experience the presence of God. Out of this play come the mystic’s metaphors and the philosopher’s tools for reflective thought. The life of God, in which we are invited to share, is always new, creative, and energizing. We most fully live this reality through our commitments and acts of worship, not through our theories. Our theologies, doctrines, and creeds are useful, but they are also transient. If the universe is created, all being is oriented toward God, irrespective of the metaphors we use to express the meaning and purpose we discover in the world. The central reality of God’s enlivening presence reaches across the surface differences of our cultures and makes us one. This is the always-present heavenly hum of reality, the light that changes the way we see and care about the world with all its mess and strife and beauty.

This light illuminates imagination, reality’s gateway into our hearts. The light is not an incremental and laborious lure toward yet more tasks. It is a complete change in our vision of the world, leading to a new way of being, or to say something equally true, a new way of being that leads to a new way of seeing. This transformative change in our posture toward reality is most fully expressed in the word “worship.” We become new creatures when we worship in this light. We are astonished by our spontaneous responses to the world and to other people that arise from the love of God, a love so deeply valuable that the world’s greatest treasures appear drab by comparison. This change does not occur because of abstractions we chart on a map of knowledge. It occurs because we act in faithfulness to the goodness, truth, and beauty we have so far encountered.

We lose ourselves in the course of the journey.

Once we taste this presence and understand the role of imagination in our discovery of reality, we also learn that our imaginations are not our own. We share imagination with others, as their voices and ideas set up shop in our memories, shaping the philosophical lenses with which we see the world, each other, and ourselves. We are freed as we relinquish the illusion of the sharply inscribed boundaries that constitute our individual selves, rather than laboring to strengthen and protect them. We discover a new humility toward the frailty of our own self-originated intentions, because our true value rests upon the unmovable love and grace of God. Our experience of God’s love corrects our sense of genuine worth in the world and in our lives: “Only the inner vision of God, only the God-blindness of unreservedly dedicated souls, only the utterly humble ones can bow and break the raging pride of a power-mad world.”²

The virtues of patience, self-control, gentleness, and honesty grow within this lit-up serenity, the fruit of imaginative peace rather than laborious accomplishment. But a new acquaintance with suffering also arises. We see the struggles of other people more clearly, and growth in holy obedience leads us to engage with the world in all its sorrow and brokenness.

If imagination is reality’s holy gateway into our hearts, love is the true transparency that we lay on the world to see it well, meeting it in the moment. The act of love releases us from self-centeredness and from our burdensome efforts in the world. It allows us to become aware of the eternal, which is always breaking into our measured, urgency-filled time. In an eternity-brightened now, we come to know the divine as a fountain of love, a presence that is both the background of the cosmos and the condition for paying attention to the smallest life that shows up in our foreground. We learn to love and love again. By learning to love we learn to see, discovering the deep ontological homology between imaginative growth and the act of love.

As our imaginations grow, we learn more about divine presence in the act of love. We also learn the power of peace in our relation to the world and to others. We are pursued by love. This brings both peace and serenity. As our awareness of the Shekinah deepens, so does our faith that love can overcome anything in the world, including the grief of the sufferer. The converted imagination, grounded in faith, transforms seeing into a true act of love, which is a power much deeper than pity: “There is a tendering of the soul, toward everything in creation, from the sparrow’s fall to the slave under the lash.

Holiness, obedience, presence, and love are the deepest powers of philosophical imagination in a created universe. They lead to participation in the world, where our making is in harmony with reality. This is the poetic apriori. The phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, glimpsed it in his idea that there is an enormous apriori in our minds, an inexhaustible infinity of apriori, and that through this, we approach the unapproachable. The mystics and the saints likewise have much to say about this apriori. Thomas Kelly was a witness to it. Occasionally, prophets of the imagination show up and remind us of the governing idea for the poetic apriori, the analogia entis. One such prophet was George MacDonald, a holy man who lived the fullness of the imagination in a created universe.

C. S. Lewis called George MacDonald his master. Lewis claimed that his own imagination was baptized when he first read MacDonald’s book Phantastes. MacDonald was a novelist and a pastor committed to the work of tending souls. MacDonald read the world, human action, and the language of the mind from the perspective Kelly wrote about, infused with love and a sense of divine presence. He thought all words begin as poetry, originating in the imagination and populating the mind. But they grow dim and lose some of their poetic quality as they are put to common use with no mindfulness of their origins. What was once experienced as a symbol turns into a mere sign through forgetfulness. The imagination loses its responsiveness to the radiance of the created world and the mystery of naming in a world that is a gift: “Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose.

Nature matters in a peculiar and wonderful way for MacDonald, a way that is possible only if nature is created. The words that populate our minds clothe the things of the world. This reveals something about minds, words, and the world. We discover part of the truth of our own minds through the ways the world appears to us. By paying attention to the way our minds form words that connect to, and symbolize, the appearances, we also discover something about the truth of the world. This connection is not merely between facts and words as placeholders for facts (a bit of blue here referred to as a bit of blue here), but it also extends to feeling, giving metaphor its power as a poetic revelation of the true nature of minds and of the world. The imagination inhabits every form of thought. By persisting in mindful attentiveness, it seeks out the contours of the original divine imagination from which everything comes. From within this contemplative orientation toward the world as created, we see that the highest reality of a thing’s form appears on its surface. All the depth of formal reality is discoverable by the imagination. The work of the intellect is to understand connections among forms on which the imagination shines its light. The harmony encountered in the play of forms on the surface of reality suggests to the intellect the operations of discoverable laws: “The poetic relations themselves in the phenomena may suggest to the imagination the law that rules its scientific life. Yea, more than this: we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself insight into the very nature of things.”⁵

Francis Bacon believed that the excellent question is half of knowledge. MacDonald agreed, and he added that the source of the excellent question is the imagination. The imagination is the origin of any hypothesis that leads to discovery, because the imagination first glimpses the discoverable law, extending the reach of the intellect into new territory and shining light into areas that are as-yet dark to our understanding. When points of information appear in the world, the imagination apprehends the invisible connections that make a whole from the pieces. We must use the lenses of both science and imagination if we are going to reach into the darkness of ancient Earth, consolidating a story that allows us to move from the incompleteness of data to a vision of the whole connected with our present story.

MacDonald’s robust sense of the world as created in love allows him to view the forms of nature as approximate representations of the human mind, not because the forms are imposed by our minds but because the outward material world is informed by immaterial thought, which also constitutes the gift of our minds: “The forms of nature are the representations of human thought by virtue of their being the embodiment of God’s thought.”⁶ This makes nature readable by human beings. The exploration of nature’s order and harmony is an exploration of the things of God. Our discovery is only partial and our imaginations must continue to reach. But the journey is filled with hope. When we discover harmony in one part of nature, our imaginations search for harmony in the rest of the cosmos, and the labor of science follows. Science grows because of its faith in the harmony of the whole, a faith that extrapolates from the harmony that we have already discovered. This faith, this hope, is a different order of human experience than our collection of mere facts. The imagination reveals the connection and harmony among reality’s forms by gathering them around a higher thought that is itself revealed through the order of the artifacts the imagination creates. This is the central idea of the poetic apriori. The light of our minds, which derives from the creator of all life, allows our minds to reach into darkness, trusting not merely in the light we carry within us but also in the wisdom, truth, and beauty of an in-form-ed creation, which awaits our journey into its endless variety.

This faith provokes our continued imaginative reach and our sharing of discovery. It fills our experience with joy and hope along with terror and awe as we hold our candle in the dark, wondering what lies beyond the horizon. An imagination tuned to the divine order moves toward its highest end, which is a responsiveness to the harmony present in creation. As our imperfect imaginations align with the divine order of things, we learn to see beauty in even the most common task. Right imagination leads not only to a truer view of reality but also to a truer manner of service. The creator’s love establishes the order of our minds in line with the grain of the universe, the wisdom and beauty of creation. Acts of the imagination that resonate with the divine are acts of love.

Thomas Kelly taught that obedience is central to the growth of the holy imagination as a portal of light. MacDonald likewise discovered that life educates the imagination, but we must live in accord with divine harmony if our growth is to continue. To grow into this divine harmony is to grow into harmony with our true nature. By relinquishing the concretions that accumulate in our lives and by losing what we call self, we enter the divine light that reveals our true selves. Our intellects and imaginations become truer by being good, which is not a matter of following some formula or creed but learning to see and to act in love. As we learn to love, our work reveals the harmony of creation in a clear and luminous way. Whether we write a great poem or provide a humble service to an ill friend, we overcome the dimness of a fog-strewn world. Artifacts of our imagination show forth the goodness of creation. That goodness shines through the windows of what we make in the world—faithfulness in love, a story, a piece of music, a system of laws, or a better way to cobble our neighbor’s worn shoes. Light breaks into the world through all forms of making that arise from our experience of the Shekinah, bursting forth from every part of immanent creation.

MacDonald’s enchanted understanding of the imagination contrasts with the views of philosophers who suggest that the universe is mostly dead, that what we call life is a transient anomaly on the face of mindless and purposeless matter, and that our minds are reducible to the same stuff—transient and accidental puffs sweeping across the otherwise inanimate, mindless, purposeless stuff of which the universe is made. This philosophical view has its own starting points and assumptions, like any other view. Some have argued that that science compels us to accept such a position, but that argument is probably incoherent because science arises from the very minds that disappear into purposeless matter: we would need a good reason to trust the output of such an accidental mass of molecules. For those of us who hold that there is more to the world, the position seems like a failure to penetrate to the inner sanctuary of life and meaning, refusing every indication that a deeper natural order gives a better account of the surfaces, of what appears in the world through our minds.

Embracing a starting point is always an act of faith. We are guided by what we believe the story of the whole to be. If the reality of minds, love, and the rest is a clue to a deeper reality, then poetry, history, philosophy, and science become holy inquiries. The ability to see the world in this way does not result from sterile attempts to believe a set of propositions. Rather, it follows from the whole of our lived experience, once we let go of the difficult-to-maintain belief that the really real is what remains when we dismantle all forms in the world of appearance. That is like tearing down a building until it is a pile of bricks and then insisting that only the bricks are really real, while the form of the building was an illusion created by the architect’s mind. The growth of our ability to see reality depends on our honesty in handling the truth we already have: “Let the man who would rise to the height of his being, be persuaded to test the truth by the deed—the highest and only test that can be applied to the loftiest of all assertions. To every man I say, ‘Do the truth you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.’”⁷

We want to know where we are, why we are here, and what we ought to do. The answers to these questions depend upon how we view the universe. If we are transient, accidental, purposeless aggregations of dead matter, our minds are anomalies in the universe, which, far from feeling like home, is a continual threat to the aberrant appearance of meaning-hungry minds in a meaningless world. But in a created universe, a mind is a very different thing. It is not an aberration that improbably showed up on the surface of dead matter. Instead, it is evidence of the deepest truth of the universe that lends glory to the world and to our images of the world. Our imaginations are at home as they reach in every direction—inward, outward, downward, upward. Love is the way into such a universe, love that is patient, forgiving, and all-embracing in its responsiveness to the unfamiliar, overcoming alienation and disorder with goodness: “We must wait patiently for the completion of God’s great harmony, and meantime love everywhere and as we can.”⁸ Such a view of the universe is suffused with a profound hope.

This same hope became the ground of Charles Peguy’s theological aesthetics, formed within a poetry that addressed humanity’s condition with its sweeping trajectory of innocence, fall, and endurance of time leading toward death and redemption. Hope, rather than theoretical frames, governed the rhythm, pattern, and goal of his poetry. He did not philosophize abstractly, nor did he tarry moment by moment with the delight of seeing one sunset here, one cuckoo there. No, he created an entire poetic state for the actors in a drama of the human soul responding to the terrible strangeness of waking up to the reality of God and the reality of our own radical contingency—the reality that we are literally nothing, apart from this mysterious creator who is our source and sustenance.

On Peguy’s poetic stage the driving force is hope, and the terror of our situation is utterly subsumed by the reality of love. Reciprocity is at the heart of this love. Far from being some self-subsistent transcendent reality in a lonely universe, God’s word and God’s being have been entrusted to creation in a way that allows people to respond in love. God also risks the possibility that we will not respond in love, but without this risk, everything would be in vain. There are no transcendent verities or eternal powers that can remove the risk inherent in God’s creation of a genuine possibility for love. There is only hope.

Central to Peguy’s poetry is the image of the heart that beats and throbs with love for the fallen, sleeping, dull beloved. Risk and terror are part of the true nature of love. We can experience love’s disconsolation, once we realize that safety and preservation are not the ends God seeks for us. God prods us toward deeper adventures in creation by nurturing true freedom, the condition for the reality of love. Terror is genuine terror in Peguy’s theater, but it is transformed into hope by the awakening of love, with all its disorienting and risky freedom. His great poem, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, begins, “The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope.”⁹

Every day is a drama with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is the surprise of waking up, and the end is the curtain falling on the drama so that we can renew the strength spent in the day. It is unclear whether the drama of the day interrupts the repose of night or if falling into sleep interrupts the work, images, and adventures of the day. Night is the reservoir from which children draw strength, replenishing what they gave during the day and preparing them for the next joyful dive into the gift of life. Night is an abyss, but insofar as it renews, it is an abyss of grace. The reason for drawing strength from the night is to play in the day. Of course, the drama of the day is not always play, and night, as St. John of the Cross taught us, is not always repose for the soul. Our control over both is negligible. We fall into sleep. We awaken and cannot sleep any more. Day and night interrupt each other, but they are also necessary for each other. Hope gives us the sense that we can safely fall into sleep, knowing that night is not the end of the story, and it allows us to walk into the risks of love, work, and play when we awaken. At a cosmic level, Peguy’s images of interruption are more complex, as all of creation is portrayed as a kind of interruption of God’s eternity but an interruption that is invited, because it is the creation of God.

Invitation is a form of speech that is meant to be heard. Rather than focusing on abstract truth, Peguy’s poetry focuses on speech among people. Invitation can come in forms other than words. Beauty speaks to us through a thing’s completed form, but it also speaks to us when something is only on its way toward being fully formed. Beauty, like truth, is not an abstraction separated from our daily lives but appears through our creative acts. Making art is an act of worship. The aesthetic is rooted entirely in the religious for Peguy, but he has a broad concept of religious art, which is an act of worship. Art as worship is religious, not in terms of its explicit content or form but in the Catholic sense that to speak truly about reality is to speak religiously about it. The music erupting on Earth can transport the faith-formed imagination to the sounds and experiences of heaven. The phrases, notes, forms, and harmony are fully human, but because humans are created, even the meager offerings of the frail singers in worn robes become a portal for grace. From a religious perspective, such imperfect music points toward a divine hope, however incompletely it is expressed in our songs and poems.

Peguy reserves his most vigorous and searing wit for the forces that denigrate the imperfect budding of radiance for the sake of expedience. He derides efforts to make humans more productive and more useful to a commercial world that morphs our finitude into a transient contribution to the avaricious cataloging of profit. But his derision arises from his tender attention to the living heart that risks itself in singing its small song. He prefers the off-key ogle of a faithful heart calling out to God in response to the invitation of beauty, rather than the desiccating effects of commodity-driven economics that abstract the person from the community. Though Peguy is a thoroughly Catholic poet, he generalizes his points about religious art to all art expressing something religious in the human heart. He often expresses this through the children who show up in his poetry, not as an idolatrous framing of childhood but as a glimpse into the ways that play can teach us how to lose our false selves and learn to worship. Play resists mere utility that is deaf to song, blind to beauty, and cold to the tragedy of eliding the only portal for love and consciousness in this world—the mortal person.

Peguy sought to remedy the sickness of endless consumption by renewing the deep but faltering relationship between faith and culture. This relationship was the foundation of his understanding of religious art. The stakes could not be higher. Our terror of death’s mystery, our obsession with money, and our labor to avoid risk and uncertainty diminish our ability to love well. They distract us from the adventure of living in the strange and wonderful gift of God’s creation. Our worry drives us to become obsessed with the future, while our present slips into the past without our notice. Hans Urs von Balthasar described this risk-averse modern world as, “a monstrous old people’s home, and institution for pensioners. The glorious insecurity of the present is always sacrificed to the security of the moment immediately following.”¹⁰

We lose so much when imagination is made to serve powers that discard people for the sake of concepts and commodities. But the religious imagination has hope in the middle of such sadness. This hope is expressed in the seriousness of play. Play is a political activity for the imagination, resisting the efficiencies of the concentration camp and dispelling market coopts of the world’s inherently superfluous beauty. The journey is full of risk, but the risk is the condition for all love, whether it is erotic love for another person or the love that drives us toward God—two forms of love that are in no way at odds with each other. Socrates taught that erotic love is central to our search for the divine, but one of the most sustained portrayals of erotic love leading to a deeper love for God is Dante’s The Divine Comedy—an imaginative adventure that recapitulates the arc of conversion and the full engagement of imagination in a created world.

¹  Thomas Kelly, Testament of Devotion, HarperOne, New York (1996), 33.

²  Kelly, Testament of Devotion, 37.

³ Kelly, Testament of Devotion, 81.

⁴ George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, Forgotten Books, London (2012), 2.

⁵  MacDonald, Orts, 7.

⁶ MacDonald, Orts, 9.

⁷ MacDonald, Orts, 43.

⁸  MacDonald, Orts, 127.

⁹  Charles Peguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, trans. David Louis Schindler, Jr. and William B. Eerdmans, Michigan (1996), 3.

¹⁰  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, III, Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McMeil, John Saward, and Rowan Williams, Ignatius Press, California (1986), 477–78.