V. Imagination and Mythic Discovery

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico was a bit odd, especially for someone living in an age that venerated enlightenment versions of reason. Vico’s greatest work was The New Science.

Vico was suspicious of the way binary logic categorizes everything as true or not true without remainder. He cared about truth, but he was also captivated by verisimilia—things that appear true or that are apparently true. Such things populate the sensus communis, which he thought should be formed in the young as soon as possible. His concept of common sense differed from that of Aristotle, Descartes, or Locke. He identified it with the idea of commune as a mental property that stands over and above understanding, and which derives from the imagination. Though the sensus communis is not governed by the abstractions of binary logic, it has a deep relationship to logic embedded in a rhetorical context.

Vico’s ideas about this relationship were influenced by Peter of Spain. Peter (who was from Portugal, not Spain) appeared in the Divine Comedy.

Enthymemes are incomplete syllogisms with only two terms. An enthymeme is translated into a complete syllogism, which has three terms, by making the middle term explicit. In Aristotelian logic, the middle term of an argument allows us to reason from a major premise and a minor premise to a conclusion. A complete syllogism has this form, with M as the middle term:

Every M is A (major premise)

Every B is M (minor premise)

_________________________

Every B is A (conclusion)

Peter did not restrict his concept of the middle to the abstraction of the middle term, M. An argument is a reason producing a belief regarding a matter that is doubtful. An argument is abstract, whereas argumentation is an argument that is made more concrete. A question is a proposition that is subject to doubt. A conclusion is a proposition that is confirmed by reasoning. But the middle, in Peter’s sense, is the relation between the middle term and the extremes. Relations have context, require insight, and can be more or less fuzzy at the edges. They confirm conclusions, though they do not provide certainty in the absence of context.

An enthymeme lacks a minor premise. Rather than having the structure of a complete syllogism, an enthymeme has this form:

Every M is A (major premise)

________________________

Every B is A (conclusion)

In an enthymeme, all three terms (A, B, and M) are present, but B is used only once. Here is a concrete example:

A mortal rational animal runs.

________________________

A human runs.

Peter’s theory of enthymemes was part of the larger idea of place logic. Maxims take the form of enthymemes. To make a maxim into a proper syllogism, the syllogism must be reconstructed with a minor premise, which means that one must discover the middle term. To find the right argument, one must find the middle term that makes the connection. We convert questions into conclusions by finding the right argument. A place is where one goes to find the right argument.

Place logic allows us to make sense among ourselves. Places are part of the sensus communus, occupying the realms of memory, language, and culture. Our discovery of the grammar and syntax of place logic depends upon what Vico called poetic wisdom.

Topics is the art of connecting concepts and showing links between ideas. It is an art intimately related to the discovery of metaphors, which cannot be broken into their individual elements and analyzed without losing the connections they reveal. Vico develops the principle of the verum/factum—the centerpiece of his philosophical method—to shine light on these arts of connection and on the fluid power of the middle term. The principle of the verum/factum is a medium of thought that identifies the true with the made. Donald Verene, the great Vico scholar, described the verum as an intelligibility made by a mind engaged in the process of discovering a middle term.² Vico’s principle enables us to grasp metaphysical intelligibility in the world, which is to see “the daylight of the divine through the opacity of the bodies of the world.”³

Vico calls the over-arching rubric of his project poetic wisdom, but this is a wisdom of the whole with a reach that goes far beyond what we usually think of as poetry. It refers to the wisdom arising in various forms of human poesis, the made that Vico identifies with the true in his principle of the verum/factum. Poetic wisdom includes history, politics, metaphysics, and even geography and astronomy. He uses a sort of grappling-hook principle of philosophical imagination.

Philosophical work often begins in metaphor. In a created universe, we can reasonably use a kind of poetic logic to analyze the ontology of metaphor and analogy. Place logic transforms the imaginative reach of philosophy into an adventure in deep realism: when we add to the world under the creative pressure of providence, we discover true things about the res (the stuff that is, the things that are), including our created minds and imaginations.

Primal truth belongs to the creator. Only God fully knows creation, because the condition for knowing a thing fully is to make it. We can grasp parts of reality, but we cannot gather these parts into a vision of the whole in the way God can. We make observations and often, we guess. But we never have the creator’s direct understanding of the whole. Humanity cannot define the things of creation but only the names of those things. The names humanity assigns to the things of creation arise from the imagination. When we name things that occur in human history, the objects of knowledge are inseparably connected to the subjects who know them. We name such things with an authority that resists dispute, even from God. This includes the history of our efforts to imagine God and to respond to what God reveals through the shaping forces of providence in history, though God is not simply one among the other actors in the story of human history.

Aquinas conceived of the natural world as an order we grasp through contemplation, while the artifacts of human activity constitute an order we create through contemplation.

Languages evolve as we name things in the moral world. The history of language is inextricably intertwined with the history of law, custom, war, and peace. This history of the evolution of language is the rich sense Vico gives to the idea of philology. Philology embraces the history of language and literature, along with philosophy and politics. In Vico’s sense of the idea, philology is philosophy, since the contours of all that we say about history come from meaningful human thought, disclosing the truth of what it is to be human. But thinking can never be equated with logical precision: when truth first dawns, the human mind initially responds with a kind of abandon and wild enthusiasm, and it is quick to dismiss difficulties and to justify faults as negligible. We would have a difficult problem if we had to choose between a faulty but enlightening excess of love and faith or a closed coldness of indifferent, if precise, analysis. Vico offered a third way we can remain focused on the light without hiding the shadows, a way that Benedetto Croce described as “always endeavoring to play the part of a free but not fanciful interpreter, a warm lover, but not a blind one.”⁵

The master key to Vico’s work is the idea that primitive humanity was made up of poets who thought in poetic images and whose minds were animated by concrete, vivid, intuitive forces. The human mind first reached toward the world in myths, songs, and verse. Words were living metaphors revealing the structures and interconnections of things, and they were spoken with vibrant urgency, not because of some theory about metaphor, but because this was the manner in which the human mind dwelled among the things of creation. Poetic creation was a necessity for these poets, not an ornament. Their myths were experienced as truth. But eventually the human mind developed the ability to stand back from itself, and the force of the myths tapered as they were transformed into fables and allegories. Under the force of philosophy, the imaginative universals of the poetic imagination gave way to intelligible universals. Socrates was an important figure in this shift, as he introduced irony into human thought and crushed the work of the theological poets, fundamentally changing the ways the mind perceives its relationship to history, myth, and the natural world.

The vibrancy of imagination shrank as the power of abstraction became dominant in the life of the mind. But the primal force of poetic wisdom did not disappear: after lying fallow for centuries, it emerged through the works of a second Homer—Dante. Dante’s poetic sublimity broke from the numbness induced by forces that silenced the sensuous aspects of the mind and the wildness of imagination. He marshalled the rough and vigorous images of wrath and merciless punishment in the Inferno, the endurance of severely patient moral heroism in the Purgatorio, and the intensity of joyful bliss in the Paradiso. He stoked the flames of imagination, and he tossed metaphysical abstractions onto the fire of his great poem. His new, primal song was directed to the same God humanity once met on the mountaintop, who spoke in thunder and lightning to the quaking and responsive imaginations of the theological poets.

Vico’s most valuable insight is the idea that imagination can be a mode of philosophical thought. Images growing out of the imagination are not merely decorative flourishes for abstract ideas but are the substance of philosophical wisdom and reveal the nature of the minds from which they emerge. In an analogous way, institutions that arise in human history manifest and give substance to humanity’s sensus communis, the foundation of all society. These institutions are the places, the topoi, constituting the middle term between the divine and the natural. They arise as providence works in time, and they can only be grasped by metaphysical vision.⁶

Human rationality grew within these institutions made by humans and permeated by providential structures. It did not begin with the reflective intellect that we see in later stages but rather with the more primal powers of memory and imagination, from which imaginative universals arose. Imaginative universals ordered experience for the original minds of humanity. Vico calls this idea of experience ordered by imaginative universals la chiave maestra, the master key of his new science. To understand how human intelligibility grew when the human mind’s activity dawned, we must understand how imagination created the fables that gave form to human experience, the imaginative universals that first allowed intelligibility. For the original poetic mind, these fables did not function as analogies: reality was constituted by these fables and imaginative universals, which have “univocal, non-analogical, meanings for various particulars under their poetic genera.”⁷ Among these particulars, mythic thought discerned identities, rather than mere similarities. Metaphor allowed them to perceive these identities. By metaphor the poetic mind came to know the truth of the world.

We grasp the way that God enters history by understanding and mastering these fundamental metaphors. This is a form of prudence. Generally speaking, prudence is the capacity to see the truth of things. Vico extends the idea: prudence is the ability to read the signs of history and thereby understand the universal law that is the foundation of all societies. Prudence, wisdom, and perception make the intelligibility of the human world possible through the principle of the verum/factum. The physical sciences and the social sciences approach their objects from outside. Vico’s science begins within human reality. It is a science of the philosophical imagination and the metaphysical fable. It tells the story of ideal eternal history—la storia ideale eterna.

This idea sounded strange to Vico’s contemporaries, and it certainly sounds strange to many of us today. But part of the reason it sounds strange to us is that we often approach ideas as though they are objective specimens to be analyzed on the intellectual dissecting table. For Vico, the act of philosophical imagination is something we ourselves must perform to understand. In the New Science, he trains our imaginations to carry out this performance as we participate in his work. We begin to experience the necessary metaphysical illumination through our own imaginative exploration of the meaning of the world. If we follow his lead, our imaginative formation allows us to recapitulate the original speech. We gain access to the imaginative universals that make sense of the human world by revealing the invisible—the work of providence in the history of the human mind’s creation of language and institutions. This history of imaginative human creation through which first things are revealed is the poetic apriori.

The human mind moves among the languages, institutions, and histories of nations. Vico’s New Science is a story-telling science that trains us to see the topoi of the human community, the places of the sensus communis. This is why Vico says that “the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables.”⁸ The mental language we discover in such work begins in imagination, which is itself a form of thought. This mental language is the solution to the Tower of Babel. The sensus communis is itself the imaginative act that yields the mental dictionary from which the diversity of articulated languages originates. The connection to the unspeakable first language of imagination, which is the ultimate object of place logic, is reached through the particulars of individual languages. That first language expresses the community of mind, the common wisdom of humanity shaped by an invisible providence, the vocabolario mentale that lies below the surface of all particular languages.⁹

Storytelling is not merely a pleasant leisure time diversion. It is the primary way that philosophical imagination grounds itself in memory, which is the root of common humanity. Storytelling is how the philosophical imagination reaches past discrete concepts that are isolated from the truth of the whole. Through the stories it tells, philosophical imagination restores the mind to its proper relationship with both humanity and the divine. This is the deep art of place logic, the power to see the middle term linking the topoi. Even when this power is atrophied, it is still present in our minds. To recover this art, the human imagination must be nourished by memory, the home of what was, what is, and what is to come—the true house of being.

When we form images, we imitate the divine power that makes the invisible visible. The forms we bring into the world are lit up by the same power that lights up the world with beauty. The distinction between the visible and the invisible is philosophically interesting. It prods our imaginations to reach past stunted appraisals of reality that only acknowledge whatever can be measured and to discover how the visible reveals the reality of the invisible and how the invisible reveals the significance of the visible. Certain Platonic strains of thought value the invisible over the visible, as if the surface of a thing exists merely to point beyond itself. But this seems to miss the musical reciprocity between the visible and invisible aspects of reality. Harmony requires both the notes and the silences between the notes. Neither a naturalistic reductionism that eliminates the silences from music nor a misguided Gnosticism that eliminates the notes will ever be adequate to the whole story the philosophical imagination evolved to discover.

The relationship between the imagination and the divine transforms our understanding of imagination’s role in the act of compositing the forms of music, painting, dance, and storytelling. The imagination enables active memory not merely to collect past facts about experience but to relate these facts to each other within a meaningful scaffolding. The scaffolding is revealed through the emergent relationship of these facts, as artistic form is revealed through the arrangement of colors, musical notes, or words. The structures of memory and imagination are mutually illuminating, cooperative, and interdependent, and they are revealed through memory’s use of images. This art of memory—sister to the art of philosophical imagination—provides maps for the mind that are guides to significance in the natural, magical, and supernatural patterns of human life.

Raymon Lull, Giullo Camillo, and Giordano Bruno were all luminaries in this art. Each of them discovered links between imagination and memory, and each argued for the art of memory as a means of investigating reality. The act of thinking shapes thoughts that are signified by images and held together in memory. Images give form to thought. A camera approaches the things in the visible world, one after another, without registering the significance of connection. But the act of thinking is fundamentally about connecting thoughts that would lose their full significance by themselves. Connection requires the structures of memory. Memory holds the images that give thought its form. Lull, Camillo, and Bruno each made discoveries about this matrix of memory and its relationship to human thought, human imagination, and the primal reality preserved in works of art, myths, and the institutions that emerge from the collective memory of communities.

Raymon Lull was a decade younger than Thomas Aquinas. He was born in 1235, spent his youth as a troubadour, and died in 1316. Francis Yates described the illumination Lull experienced on Mount Randa, an island in Majorca, where he grasped that creation’s deepest reality is its infusion with God’s attributes.¹⁰ He saw that an art based on these attributes would be universally valid, and he wrote about it in several versions of a book that ultimately found its mature form in his Ars Magna. This art of discovery and investigation into reality and truth allowed memory to go beyond its ancient role of merely recollecting facts. It made use of abstractions rather than visual images, like a geometry of the cosmos. In the final version of his work, which eventually became known as the Ars Ramundi, he showed how to gather not only what is given in the senses and imagination but also what is beyond either of these in speculation. His art allowed the comprehension of much in little.

There was an interesting quirk in another of Lull’s books, Liber ad memorum confirmandam, in which he hinted that anyone who wanted to strengthen memory would find the crucial clues to the effort in another essential work of his called The Book of the Seven Planets. Unfortunately, Lull never wrote a book by that title. He did, however, write a book called Tractatus de Astronomia in which he argued that memory must be based on the celestial seven, which became the organizing force of the Theater of Memory created by Giullo Camillo.

Camillo was famous throughout Italy and France for his Theater of Memory. The theater originally existed only in his mind, but with a patron’s help he eventually built a wooden version filled with images that, used rightly, allowed a person to see everything hidden in the human mind. Or at least that was Camillo’s intention in building the theater. Unfortunately, after Camillo’s death in 1544, no trace of the actual theater could be found, and all that remained were stories from his contemporaries, along with a little book called L’Idea del Theatro published after his death. The theater rose in seven grades or steps. These were divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. Like many things in the world of imagination, the theater was topsy-turvy. There were no seats where the audience might be expected to sit. Instead, spectators sat where the stage would normally be, and they looked out toward seven tiers, which represented the seven gates holding the images that constituted the memory places. In the lower places, Camillo arranged the seven planets—those essential measures upon which all earthly things depend. A spectator’s mind was supposed to grasp these first, before moving toward the super-celestial world of the Ideas, which he associated with Angels and the Sephiroth. The mind could also move downward, toward the elemental world. In any case, once the mind grasped the method of the theater, the spectator was supposed to be able to make a speech about the whole.

Written speeches based on the writings of Cicero assisted one in the making of a speech encompassing every subject. The speeches were placed in drawers beneath each of the images. There is a bit of vagueness to the whole thing that is made worse by the fact that the theater was lost after Camillo’s death (possibly, some said, taken up whole into the heavens) and by the fact that the big book Camillo intended to write never quite found its way onto paper. We only have his short book, which is not much more than a pamphlet. Francis Yates’s description of the theater is very generous to Camillo’s sketch of the project. She observes that “when one thinks of all these drawers or coffers in the theater, it begins to look like a highly ornamental filing cabinet.”¹¹ But she also notes that reducing it to a filing cabinet distracts from the grandeur of his idea that memory can be “organically geared to the universe.”

Camillo was a Christian Hermetist who tried to combine the classical part of memory with the Hermetic and Cabalist strains that were beginning to flourish in the Renaissance—especially the ideas of Marsilio Ficino, whose work pervaded the memory theater. Both Camillo and Ficino venerated Hermes Trismegistus as a prophet who foretold the coming of the Son of God. Ficino used magical rules to confer the status of talismans upon images. His images were made from astralized myths that shape the imagination. As these images are lodged in memory, a divine power is fostered so that when a person moves about in the world, the external appearances are unified through the inward image, which is itself drawn from the divine world. He believed his poetic and musical incantations, along with his magicized images, could train the imagination to receive celestial influences, changing the way in which we behold the cosmos. This is the poetic apriori.

Camillo borrowed Ficino’s solar magic to animate the inward significance of his memory images. Camillo’s theater transformed the art of memory through Hermetic magic so that the imagination itself could grasp the meaning of the cosmos, not as a mere mortal mired in earthly muck, constructing meaning piecemeal from below but instead as a mind gathering meaning from above: “The mind and memory of man is now ‘divine,’ having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination.”¹² This bordered on heresy in his culture. But Camillo was not condemned, and he supposedly died in Italy with two women in his bed. Unfortunately, not everyone faired so well in sixteenth-century Italy. Giordano Bruno had a much harder time as his mind flamed toward the heavens (literally, alas) in his attempts to show us the wildness of imagination in search of its creator.

The Inquisition reasonably thought of Giordano Bruno as a dangerous man. He wanted to embrace all of reality through imagination and memory. His own memory was stunning in a classical way. When he visited Pope Pius V in Rome, he recited Psalm 86 in Hebrew and then recited it in Hebrew backwards. But his art went far beyond such performances. He associated the development of his memory with divine inspiration. He did not divide the mind into parts but thought the mind as a whole was suffused with the power of the imagination. Like Plotinus he recognized various powers of the mind such as sense, imagination, reason, and intellect, but he thought of them as permeable and fluid, unified by images of variable potency. Imagination’s ordering of these images in the human mind reflects the universal presence of divine mind in the world. It is powered emotionally by love, giving it a capacity to reach deeply into the truth of the world as it appears within us and outside of us. The master of memory and imagination draws on both love and magic to grasp the ever-changing forms within the universe, always moving toward unity in imitation of the divine mind. Though Bruno deeply admired Thomas Aquinas, he refused to be restrained by Thomas’s rejection of magical arts, and he was daring with his use of magical images in the art of memory.

Bruno’s mind and imagination were complex and strange. Like Camillo and Ficino, Bruno leaned toward the magical in his use of star images to achieve a unified vision, aligning inward things to the whole of reality. In De umbris idearum, he referred to the magic statues of the Asclepius, and he included a list of 150 magic images of the stars. He believed the images of the stars were shadows of ideas, intermediaries between the elemental world and ideas in the super-celestial world. He wanted to see the universe with divine eyes, and to grasp the pattern of the world as it appears through a mind shaped and conditioned by the higher celestial spheres of influence that came from the mind of God. Because the lower things are contained in the higher things, we can achieve a truer vision of relationships among the lower things of the world by arranging the celestial images in our memories. Aquinas had given the imagination an important role, but it was limited to corporeal things in the world. Bruno exalted it to a power by which images are used to grasp the intelligible world that resides beyond the appearances. Imaginative investigation of this sort seemed like a form of magic, because magic taps into invisible forces accessible to the mind of one who is open to the idea of a living universe. But Bruno was not merely interested in understanding these forces. He wanted to know how to condition a person’s inner world in such a way that these forces could be recapitulated in the mind and made accessible to the thinker. He believed the imagination’s conformation to magical forces in the universe could be achieved through his memory systems, and he did not shun the incantations of the sorcerer as he pursued this strange power.

Power to do what? The power to organize the mind from above by gaining access to cosmic forces. Planetary images expressed the powers of planetary deities. If the images were appropriated by memory, the celestial powers would enter the mind, linking the world of the imagination to the stars. Bruno’s ideas about this power were influenced by Cornelius Agrippa’s De philosophia occulta from 1533, but he did not limit himself to Agrippa’s astral images. He invented his own images as his imagination discerned the secrets of the cosmic motions that influenced the celestial and sub-celestial world. The power Bruno was pursuing was much more than a challenge to other forms of knowing and ways of organizing one’s mind. His images functioned as intermediaries between the super-celestial and sub-celestial worlds. By conforming ourselves to the astral images, we conform ourselves to superior agents. If we understand the images well, they can be manipulated, giving us the power to effect change in lower worlds. Bruno’s memory system of magic images, far beyond improving our memory for mere facts and patterns in the universe, is essentially a portal into the deification of a human being. Bruno’s memory images grew from his hermetic philosophy, a tradition that believed in humanity’s divine origin, connecting us to the celestial powers that govern the world. The images become transformers of the soul, where the archetypal images exist in a confused chaos until the magic images restore order and return divine powers to a person. The Inquisition’s displeasure with Bruno’s theory of philosophical imagination is not surprising.

Bruno’s theory of imagination was specifically philosophical because however much magicians wanted power over the world of things and people, Bruno was most interested in recapitulating the systems of magical images and celestial forces within his own mind, much like mathematics in a physicist’s mind. There is beauty in the idea that we can gain access to the order of astral forces by systematizing such images: our vision can be conditioned by the order of the higher worlds, so that we acquire wisdom about the powers governing the machinery of the lower world. There is a thrilling beauty in the idea that there is an order of divine form beyond the celestial world, for which the mind is prepared through mastering the magical images of the memory system. By ordering our minds, we can go beyond the universe itself and reach toward the One whom we desire and in whose shadows we play, work, and think. Order works upon order. The One lends the cosmos a harmony that we reach through imagination, using our discoveries to order ourselves in love and to orient our minds and wills toward the truth of the whole. For Bruno, the truth of the whole, illuminated by the light of the One, was the pearl of great price, and he pursued it with the vigor of a lover.

Bruno’s world seems strange. But it is not so much stranger than any other supernatural accounts of the world. The history of all supernatural worldviews begins with a theological interpretation of magic—fairytale worlds in which people sometimes act beyond their own natures, and in which nature itself is made up of beings who can act on their own volition.¹³ Stories of magic and fairytales elevate humanity to what exists above it. They draw on our longing to know the mysteries of an invisible creator who can love and be loved. The imagination drapes the veils of its images over invisible ideas that arise from a place beyond the visible machine of the universe. The divine communicates supernatural realities through inspired thoughts that come in the form of images signifying these realities. The images are not themselves the reality, although they indicate the reality. Within the soul an image is marked by a feeling, a glimpse, or a taste of the holy, allowing us to recognize its significance without conflating it with the reality toward which it points. The imagination is both enlivened by and humbled by the distance and disproportion between transcendent reality and the images we are capable of receiving or creating through imagination and intellect. Our awareness of this leads to happiness and to acts of worship, because we know the images are only trickles seeping through a dam, behind which is something of incomprehensible magnitude. This is the fundamental work of imaginative philosophy that we call metaphysics.

There is no end to the metaphysical work of the philosophical imagination in a created world, but it is very different from the productive problem solving we usually associate with work. Austin Farrar has argued that there are no metaphysical problems and solutions, only metaphysical mysteries of existence. The philosopher’s job is not to solve these mysteries but to describe them, and our descriptions will always fall short. Nonetheless, as we refine our descriptions, our apprehension of the mysteries improves.¹⁴ The philosophical imagination meets the mystery itself in the image, even though the form of the image does not exhaust the reality of the mystery. Different philosophical imaginations give different, and even contradictory, metaphysical accounts of reality that can be read with delight and benefit. They can also be read with hope, because the work of metaphysics is a kind of training that grows the philosophical imagination’s capacity to refine, revise, and tentatively accept or reject theories. Along the way, we discover a sense of what is truly illuminating and what is a distraction from the reality toward which an image, metaphor, or analogy is pointing. Our images, metaphors, and analogies always fall short of the reality. Recognizing this is important to the art of the poetic apriori. A metaphysical account might be closer to reality in some ways while farther from it in other ways. And often the work of philosophy brings us to thresholds where the most authentic responses we can make are love, happiness, and worship.

Bruno unfortunately ended his life covered in pitch, diving headlong into the Inquisitors’ fire, much to the sadness of the Inquisitors who wanted him to conform to their views and rejoin the fellowship. In a deep sense, Bruno and his Inquisitors were not at philosophical cross-purposes. They both hungered for truth in their own ways. But humility matters in metaphysical dispute.

We can remain humble about our own fallibility, even as we passionately seek a common metaphysical language to express the whole of reality. A truly animated metaphysics is suffused with eros. It is also imbued with a sense of our mortality, because every metaphysical account is the work of a dying philosopher, trying to express one last time, in the fullest possible way, whatever wonders have appeared in the course of a short life. Summas create conventions that allow philosophical play to continue or else they provide the foil for rebellion, as revolution is sometimes a condition for revelation. Giordano Bruno, stoked by a fiery imagination, devoted his life to a revolution in the way we view memory. He was in love with a very great mystery, and he wanted to see the truth.

The subject of a great mystery can be loved, even if the appearance of the mystery is analogous to how we appear to our pets: we are present to them in a genuine way that is consistent with the remainder of our reality, but we cannot show them the whole of our reality. This is not because we withhold anything from them and is simply because they are not capable of receiving it. Of course, anyone who has loved a pet knows that an animal can grow into a larger view of who we are. The same is true for our relationship to God. Some forms of divine manifestation may require us to grow to be able to see. And some may go beyond any of our languages, though we will still feel compelled to talk about the experience anyway. We are imaginative, speculative, truth loving, storytelling creatures.

Anyone can see the images in imagination, but faith discerns the meaning of the images. The images are not incidental to a life of faith. They are how meaning becomes accessible to us. The imagination is not a distraction, merely to be endured until we come to rest statically in an imageless heaven of bodiless ideas. Truth emerges through philosophical imagination as we try to grasp the significance of images arising from creation and seen through faith. We cannot give a full account of creation’s significance, any more than my dog can give an account of what I am doing right now with pen and paper. But life in this variegated tangle of a universe is the wild adventure of imaginative discovery.

Bruno was a memory artist and a poet whose images, animated by love, approached God’s threshold with a divine furor. He knew the limits of abstract thinking, not because such thinking was beyond him but because he was a master of it. He wanted poets and philosophers to become adept at using images that nurture a kind of ontological wonder, to see the significance of forms in the universe where the dull mind sees only shapes. In his own search for truth, he reached deeply into the past for a dark and pagan magic that embraced the One, and for this he was burned in Campo de Fiori on February 17, 1600, before the Theater of Pompey.

As we become more deeply acquainted with the shadows cast in this strange universe, we must also reach toward the light behind them, shaping our imaginations and intellects so that we learn to see “a world in a grain of sand … Eternity in an hour.”¹⁵ As we learn to contemplate the luminous nature of things through imagination and to perceive God as a light shining through our intelligence, we can discover a joyful piety in the act of seeing personality within being itself.

¹  From a letter Vico sent to his friend Giacchi, November 25, 1725. Quoted in Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, Cornell University Press, New York (1944), 14.

² Donald Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, Cornell University Press, New York (1981), 48. In his discussions of Vico’s theory of the imagination, Verene has discussed extensively an important distinction Vico makes in The New Science between two powers of the imagination, both of which he uses in the development of his phiilosophy, but to different purposes. The first is fantasia, which is a primordial faculty through which something is made into an object for human consciousness. The second is immaginazione, by means of which something that is already an object for consciousness is formed as an image leading to its conceptualization, its intendimento or concezione.

³ Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, trans. L.M. Palmer, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (1988), 77.

⁴  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. i. 14–15.

⁵  Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giamattista Vico, trans. R.G. Collingwood, H. Lattimer, London (1913), 42.

⁶ Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 56.

⁷ Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, Cornell University Press, New York (1994), 210.

⁸ Vico, New Science, 51.

⁹ In addition to the term vocabolario mentale, Vico uses the terms dizionario mentale and lingua mentale commune. For a deeper sense of the richness of this dizionario see the glossary in Donald Verene, Vico’s New Science: A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, New York (2015).

¹⁰  Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, Illinois (1966), 174.

¹¹  Yates, Art of Memory, 145.

¹²  Yates, Art of Memory, 157.

¹³  Farrer, The Glass of Vision, 13.

¹⁴  Farrer, The Glass of Vision, 63.

¹⁵ William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,“ The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Doubleday, New York (1988), 490.