II. Imagination and Our Knowledge of Creation and God

The poetic apriori emerges from acts of philosophical imagination in minds disposed toward what Giambattista Vico called sapienza poetica—discovery of truth and significance through artifacts made by the imagination in a universe that is meaningful as a whole.

This is why metaphor is not merely a literary device but is constitutive of part of the mind’s experience in a created world. It reveals cognitive structures, along with deep patterns of order in other parts of created reality. It orients us toward the world as meaningful and toward nature as created—as originating from, and grounded in, an act of God. In a created universe, imagination is not opposed to reason but instead works with reason to spy out meaning in the world. A connection grasped through metaphor—seeing this in that—is more than a superficial comparison. It provides insight into creation as a whole, which is to say the universe as a cosmos.

Because our knowledge is always provisional, one function of the imagination is to frame and explore the possible meanings of a thing, a fact, or an event.

The relationship of the imagination to the soul and body is central to Thomas’s theological anthropology. In the body, we come to know the things of the world through the imagination. But there is also a role for images as we begin to know God, including the dim likeness to God within humans: “The image of God exists in man as in an alien nature, as the image of the King is in the coin.”⁵ God as the exemplar infinitely exceeds the likeness within us. But the image of God is more perfect in humans than in angels, because whole human soul is in the whole human body, and God has an analogous relation to the whole world. The Trinity is found in the acts of the human soul. From the knowledge that we possess, we form an internal word (a kind of naming) through thought, and this breaks forth into love. Analogy is the path to knowledge of God’s causes, because God is the creator of the harmony in the universe. It shows us how causality functions among parts of the whole and the ways in which the whole leads our minds toward the cause of everything. The different parts of reality are linked by knowledge we discover through analogy.

In a created universe of the sort Thomas inhabits, the imagination’s relationship to the world is inseparable from the idea that we are made the image of God.

We experience nature through our senses, either directly or through the instrumental extension of our senses in experimentation. If the world is created, the meaning of creation can only be explored in light of the creator. Natural theology of this sort lights up the world and leads to joy in experience, because there is no idea of a thing that is not in some way related the idea of God. This is why Nicholas of Cusa believed that we taste eternal wisdom in everything that can be tasted, because it is itself the beauty in everything beautiful and the desire in everything for which we long.¹⁰ For a theist, there is a fragrance of eternal wisdom in every part of creation. Daily life becomes a philosophical adventure and an act of worship that enlivens, and is enlivened by, imagination’s reach toward what is not yet fully known or seen.

We name the things we find in the world, and we long for the name of God.

Imagination changes our conscious experience of the world. Because we are limited creatures, there are things we cannot yet consciously experience. But everything that can be consciously experienced can be imagined. This is how the imagination grows. And as imagination grows, conscious perception of reality grows. Imagination stretches into reality, and our ever-expanding conscious experience follows. In a created universe, the possibilities for such a faculty are infinite. But the imagination requires the intellect to discern truth since the imagination deals with what is possible, but not everything that is possible exists. This is one of the mysteries of imagination and its relationship to the conundrums of existence: possibilities are real even when they do not exist. Imagination shows us that reality is not exhausted by existence, which is why we need humility, however optimistic our epistemology might be.

What we experience inwardly though contemplation, prayer, and thought, we express outwardly in painting, music, writing, and anything else we make to appeal to the minds of others. For people of faith, Scripture is a uniquely important reservoir of imaginative expression. The images in Scripture can move the heart toward a hope, goal, act, or disposition. Where we experience spiritual darkness as veil or pall, clarity can emerge.

We begin with sensible effects experienced in creation. Through analogical imagination we ascend to knowledge of the transcendent, including knowledge that God is the first cause, rather than one of the effects of creation. We come to know about God’s infinity, and from this we learn about God’s omnipresence. We come to know both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence in created things. These names for God’s characteristics fundamentally depend on analogy as part of the solution to how our experience of this finite and imminent creation, from which we derive all names, can meaningfully refer to the transcendent.

We use language to conceive of reality and to express what we find of reality. We know how to use the word “blue” to talk about the color blue. But once we begin to analyze the relationship between the unity of a thing and its name, as Ludwig Wittgenstein taught us, we see how difficult it is to keep a thing and its name together. This is especially true for names we attribute to God. Because our minds evolved within a universe of determinate objects, the idea that God is not a being among beings is difficult to grasp. The analogia entis provides a philosophical frame for exploring this concept of God. It does so in a way that also leads to discoveries about our own created natures. Because we are made in the image of God, our imaginations and intellects confront clues about God as we grow in understanding of ourselves and of the ways we experience the universe in which we exist. We are changed by discoveries that clarify themselves through our attempts to say or show what we have found.

When we use analogy to hold things together in our minds—things that somehow also hold together in reality—we are borrowing words about one kind of thing and using them to talk about another kind of thing. Within creation, analogy opens our minds to relationships among finite things. But when we use analogy to imagine God, we are reaching from the sphere of the immanent to that of the transcendent, from the finite to the infinite. We are pointing to an effect in the created world and reaching for a cause that is different from other causes within creation, but that must also be the same in some way. The scientific imagination can move from the appearance of experimental phenomena to theories about relations that hold in a quantum world to which we have no direct access. The philosophical imagination moves in a comparable way. In the case of scientific imagination, there are many layers of theory between the squiggle that registers scatter-patterns of energy on the monitor and the conclusions about what reality lies beneath the phenomenon. Likewise, the speculative enterprise of philosophical imagination in a created world begins with effects in the world and then reaches for the unseen reality that is the source of intellectual and imaginative light enabling us to see the significance of things that appear in the world. Our imaginations and intellects must be trained to be able to see the world lit up in this way. It is a light to which we can certainly close our eyes.

The creator’s light casts shadows across the surface of the world. We learn about both God and creation by the way things mingle with God’s light. To my ear, Austin Farrar is describing the analogia entis when he writes, “Perhaps our awareness of the infinite Act depends on the materials for a shadow of them presented by finite existence.”¹¹ Such a metaphor provokes us to ask about the reality revealed through the shadow, rather than merely measuring the dimensions and gradations of light and gray in the shadow itself. For a philosophical imagination open to possibilities in a created universe, the figure of the shadow is the figure of everything that shows up in the cosmos. If the Apostle Paul is right that in God we live and move and have our being, our entire existence is lived in the shadow of God. There is no inside or outside to the shadow. There is only the inward shift of the one who perceives the shadow, and who sees, or fails to see, its significance. Seeing is always seeing as. If we want to perceive existence rightly, we must learn the deep structures of existence, the calculus of being. We must become the kind of people who can see. There is no end to the variety of what shows up and no end to the conversion of our imaginations and intellects as we grow into the act of seeing as. The poetic apriori is grounded in this experience of conversion, a kind of baptism of the imagination.

We can learn to contemplate luminous things. As we do, metaphysical reality registers in our minds as pleasure. This pleasure is kin to ecstasy, because it is the imprint of the very great in the very small, of heaven’s truth in the human mind, of tracks left in the imagination by a passing presence. The smallest leaf can be the crack in the dam through which the joy of this experience seeps. The joy can also come through contemplative focus on an idea, such as Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God, suddenly lighting up the mind. In either case, the living form playing in the theater of the philosophical mind awakens us to something that is not ourselves, something that helps us become better witnesses in a strange universe. Our minds grow past the pursuit of familiar distractions and the universe becomes less strange as the distensible gift of the imagination locks onto the abundant clues pointing beyond the gaudy, frill-draped world that would have us pass time to keep us from noticing that time is passing. Delight beckons to us from everywhere.

Adam Zagajewski wrote a wonderful little poem that is just such a moment of noticing:

Auto Mirror

In the rear-view mirror suddenly

I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;

great things dwell in small ones

for a moment¹²

In one sense, anyone who looks in that rear-view mirror can see the Beauvais Cathedral. But not everyone will look. Among those who glance not everyone will see the cathedral, perhaps because they were deciding whether or not there was room for a lane change. Among those who notice the cathedral, not everyone will make the leap to the insight that Zagajewski had, seeing great things dwell in small ones for a moment. Our minds need a contemplative pause to register the image in this way, or to allow our imaginative lives to be stretched by the poem, this small thing within which a great thing dwells for a moment. The same is true for our experience of the cathedral itself. Some people will see no more than a big incomplete building that was started in 1225, demonstrating innovations in Gothic architecture while embroiled in the usual financial and political struggles that accompany so many substantial human endeavors. But others will see the cathedral as another small thing within which a greatness dwells for the moment, before it is turned back into dust by time or war. Seeing of this sort requires a kind of faith. Faith is how the imagination sees the structures of transcendence in things so small as a poem, a cathedral, or any other created being.

The experience of God is another example of something that must be believed to be seen. The same experiences interpreted as encounters with God by theists can be interpreted in a naturalistic or humanistic way by non-theists. Things occur in the imagination of the one who sees with faith, which cannot occur in the imagination of one who does not see with faith, simply because the faith and the seeing are the same thing. We would not criticize a blind person for not seeing the cathedral, nor would we criticize a person incapable of doing mathematics for not seeing the beauty of the calculations needed to construct a cathedral that does not fall under its own weight. But on the other hand, what if we believe we see something that is not actually there? Though blindness can prevent a person from seeing what is clearly there for someone with eyes to see, delusion can make a person see something a non-delusional person will not see, because it does not exist. How does the deluded person move beyond delusion, and how does the blind person move beyond blindness? All of us can hope for new ways of seeing, whether through the healing of damaged eyes, as with the blind, or through teaching, as with the beauty of mathematics. We can reach into the experience of other minds using the tools of the imagination. Images, stories, arguments, and poetry made by one person can teach another person to see differently. But can we deepen our apprehension of reality through creative expansion of the imagination?

Anselm provided a profound thought experiment to answer this question. He wanted to construct a single argument for the existence of God, and this led him to prescribe an imaginative act that he claimed was ontologically revealing. In the Monologion he had created a series of arguments to show how through reason alone, one can discover that God exists, that God is omnipotent, that God is the creator of everything that exists, and so forth. But this was an unsatisfying approach, because it required independent arguments for God’s existence and for each of God’s characteristics. Anselm wanted a single, elegant argument that would do the work of all the separate arguments he constructed in the Monologion. He did not doubt the chained-together arguments he made, but he did not like their complexity. He wanted one argument that would do it all, a master argument. According to stories about Anselm, he became obsessed with this philosophical preoccupation. He lost sleep over it, and he found himself unable to concentrate in church, which is an occupational liability for a monk. But eventually he hit upon the argument. Because of Immanuel Kant, it has become known as the ontological argument for the existence of God, even though Kant was not familiar with Anselm. Medieval thinkers simply called it Anselm’s argument. He made the argument in the Proslogion. If it works, it demonstrates the existence of God, as well as the various characteristics of God.

Anselm’s guiding motto was faith seeking understanding. He thought of faith as a love for God leading to a desire for deeper knowledge of God. Because Anselm wrote for other monks, he was not primarily concerned with belief in God. Nonetheless, he constructed the argument in such a way that even non-theists would be convinced of the existence of God if they truly understood it. Because his devoted search for this master argument began to seem perilously similar to a temptation, he tried to stop thinking about it. One day during Matins, when his mind was wandering back to the argument, he suddenly saw it.

This is what he saw: God is that than which nothing greater can be thought. Anyone willing to do the necessary imaginative work can grasp this idea, regardless of his or her faith or lack of faith. The definition simply refers to a being that is so great that a greater being cannot even be conceived. Once the idea is conceived, that than which nothing greater can be thought exists in the understanding. This means it must also exist in reality, because something that exists in reality is greater than something that exists only in understanding. If that than which nothing greater can be thought only exists in understanding, then it is not that than which nothing greater can be thought, because we can imagine it existing in reality. This is a contradiction. The only way to escape the contradiction is to see that that than which nothing greater can be thought actually exists. And this is God.

Little time passed before critics responded to Anselm’s argument. The most famous early criticism came from another monk named Gaunilo, in a piece he called Reply on behalf of the fool (since one target of Anselm’s argument was the fool who, according to the psalmist, says in his heart that there is no God). Gaunilo offered an alternative imaginative experiment. Instead of imagining that than which nothing greater can be thought, try to imagine that island than which no greater can be thought. Once we have grasped this idea, it exists in our understanding. But, by Anselm’s reasoning it must also exist in reality, because the island existing in reality is greater than the island existing only in our understanding. If it does not exist, we have the same contradiction: that island than which no greater can be thought is not that island than which no greater can be thought. But it is ridiculous to believe that such an island actually exists. For the same reason, Anselm’s argument for the existence of God fails—or at least the argument as Gaunilo conceived it fails.

How did Anselm answer Gaunilo? He said the argument works for God but not for the island. Unfortunately, in his reply he did not say why it works for God but not for the island. Instead, he offered a clearer exposition of his original argument. He thought Gaunilo raised two important points. First, Gaunilo objected to the existence in our understanding of that than which nothing greater can be thought—we cannot form the idea required to get the argument going. Second, even if we can form the idea of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought, there is nothing in the idea that guarantees God’s existence. Anselm’s clarification of his own argument depended on showing, first, that the idea of that than which nothing greater can be thought can actually be thought, and second, that thinking this thought will lead one to just see that it must exist in reality. This is why it is an ontologically revealing imaginative act.

What are we doing when we think of God? We are either thinking of something that exists, or thinking of something that might exist but probably does not, or thinking of a purely imaginary thing that does not exist. We can bring each of these possibilities into our minds and examine them. But we cannot bring something that is impossible into our minds. We cannot bring a round square into the gaze of our thought. Anselm’s point is this: that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot be thought not to exist. To think of that than which nothing greater can be thought as not existing, is to think an impossible contradiction, and this the mind cannot do. If you attempt to think of that than which nothing greater can be thought, but you think of it as not existing, you have not yet actually grasped the thought. It is a very difficult thought to achieve, and those who deny the existence of God have simply not yet had the thought. Furthermore, there is no other thought like this thought. Other thoughts might vaguely take the form of this thought, but they are not actually like this thought, because there is nothing that can be compared to God. The move that Gaunilo made was to use something less than God to address an argument that is about something utterly different, higher, and singular—namely, God.

What about the second point? God has no beginning, because a being with no beginning is greater than one that begins to exist. If we do the work required to think that than which nothing greater can be thought, we must think of God as a possible being. We cannot think of God as beginning to exist, because that is to think of a possible being that is not that than which nothing greater can be thought, and so we are not thinking of God. That than which nothing greater can be thought, therefore, is a necessary being. One who does not see this has not yet grasped that than which nothing greater can be thought. All Anselm meant to claim was that if you are thinking of that than which nothing greater can be thought as not existing, you have not yet thought the thought. Keep trying.

The Proslogion is offered as a prayer. The prayer produces a change in a mind. It moves the mind to sift through images and words until it comes to the threshold of something that we either see or fail to see. Even if we have not yet seen it, we still have to decide whether or not to believe that Anselm saw it. Criticisms such as Gaunilo’s might seem initially persuasive, but Anselm talks past Gaunilo’s objections and provokes us to try again. The work is imaginative and contemplative. In this, it is similar to the work required to grasp Leibniz’s central philosophical question, Why is there something rather than nothing? Theories that locate the beginning of the universe in conditions called “nothing,” but that nonetheless use metaphors of vacuums, laws, and other force-like entities, fail to acknowledge how difficult it is to truly imagine nothing. By nothing, Leibniz meant nothing—no space, no vacuum, no laws, no forces. Nothing. Getting to the actual thought of nothing is imaginatively difficult. But, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, once we achieve the idea of nothing, we just see the power of Leibniz’s question as we imagine something—anything—and then imagine this something coming from nothing. Anselm’s argument requires the same kind of work.

This kind of seeing is not merely an imaginative act of mind. Anselm thought it revealed something important about who God is. This is faith seeking understanding. Once Anselm saw his great argument, he responded with worship. If we are able to see what Anselm would have us see, our imaginative organization of reality will change. The complete reality of God is not contained in the idea, but rather the world is opened up and illuminated once this insight alters the mind. A mind changed in this way becomes aware of unspeakable reality, and the change also compels us to make something out of words, musical notes, colors, or bodily movements as we try to say what cannot be said. This resonates with Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher returns to the darkness of the cave to share a glimmer of what is real, using tools that are not themselves the reality but a means of provoking, changing, shaping, and growing the imaginations of others for whom reality is limited to familiar shadows on the wall.

The imagination is a symbolizing power that draws on the structural force of analogy. At one level analogy shows what is similar among disparate things. But at a deeper level, closer to the threshold of what is most primordial—the ultimate apriori—it reveals an utterly different reality, for which we do not have adequate language. Such an act of imagination is not only a refinement of the vision natural to us but also a conversion to possibilities that first show up as glimmers and echoes in the hidden parts of our minds, a radically vast expansion on the idea of re-membering.

When we have an idea in our mind, that idea is the meaning of the words we use to show it to another mind. Words do not comprehensively contain the idea present to our mind. But our words (or other ways of saying a thing) nonetheless evoke the fullness of the thing in other minds. Words have the power to show us how to see what we would not otherwise have seen, to be receptive to reality in ways we might not otherwise have been. Anselm wanted to show what is accessible to reason without revelation. That is a severe restraint, if imagination is leading the mind toward a God who is incomprehensible by reason. Once a poet or philosopher grasps that toward which Anselm’s argument gestures, they must draw on something more than philosophy and poetry to go deeper into the reality they have glimpsed. This is where the prophet comes on the stage.

The prophet’s acts are different than the imaginative acts of the philosopher or the poet. Poetic and philosophical works can register patterns in existence that derive from a force transcending our existence. But prophecy claims to come from within the transcendent force itself, speaking into the very patterns of existence traced by the poets and the philosophers. If prophecy is sometimes also poetry, it is a very different kind of poetry and a very different use of the analogical bridge across the chasm between creation and creator. Jeremiah was a prophet-poet who, in Austin Farrar’s description, “sets images moving by musical incantation, and allows them to arrange and express themselves as they ought.” Farrar goes on to ask, “What are we to say about this ought? … If it is not ‘just life’ which presses Jeremiah, then what is it that presses him, and constrains his images?”¹³ The constraint on Jeremiah’s images is nothing other than the will of God who impacts creation, history, and the prophet’s own inspired mind. Jeremiah’s work can only be understood in relation to the larger pattern of divine will that emerges through his words as he addresses the people of Israel, people who are inextricably bound to forces in a world that came from an eternal source through the act of creation. If we cannot imagine any force beyond the political and economic realities Israel encountered and rebelled against, we will not be able to hear Jeremiah’s words as prophecy or great poetry. We can truly hear Jeremiah only if our imagination is shaped by faith.

With enough intellectual and imaginative work, anyone can grasp Anselm’s argument. But to go farther than seeing the existence and characteristics of a necessary being, faith seeking understanding must make leaps and take risks. We are fallible, and our stories about the world, even if they are inspired, are limited by the one through whom they come, the one who hears them, and cultural circumstances of the teller and the listener. Our stories, like our metaphysics, will always be creaturely, for what else could they be? That said, if we are open to the possibility of prophecy, faith seeking understanding must acknowledge the difference between what the poets and the prophets are doing. Poets make poems, using imagination to mold pieces taken from history, nature, and human experience. They show us new possibilities that we might play with and test to learn a novel way of seeing or thinking. But the true prophet does not make prophecy in the same sense. Prophets respond to the will of an eternal other, and they proclaim the demands of that will. They are not trying to evoke contemplation but to change action and to shape the character of a people in a way that conforms more deeply to the will of God. For the prophet, the inspired poem is merely one way in which a divine message is delivered. The metaphors and forms of the prophet’s poems signal the fiery force of the Divine moving in the prophet’s mind, pushing aside the prophet’s own motives and thoughts.

Another way to say this is to acknowledge that every poet works under the pressure of some force—every poet has a muse. When Dante writes a love poem about Beatrice, he certainly borrows the words and syntax from the same Italian the cobbler uses, weaving dialects into an Italian that had never been heard before, but the force of his love for the young woman is his own, and we have no reason to doubt the substance of that force. In the same way, faith seeking understanding opens us to the poetry of a prophet, whose gift is to listen for the mysterious force of the divine, and it prepares us to be taught things that are beyond our own minds. But neither the words nor the syntax, which we use all day for other purposes of our own, contain the mystery of the prophet’s poem. The force of the poem itself is not magic. The poem is not an incantation. It contains no power apart from the movement of the divine that inspires the prophet’s mind.

The images created in Dante’s imagination signified the force of his love for Beatrice, a love evoked by her alone. The images in the poems of a prophet are likewise evoked by the divine. They point beyond themselves, existing in service to the one who made the prophet’s mind move in a particular way. Such images cannot be translated into metaphysical propositions without remainder. But because they point toward a reality beyond images and creaturely metaphysics, they bridge the gap between the reality of the God who moves the prophet’s mind and the work of the devoted metaphysician who, in faith, is seeking to understand. Images from the inspired imagination of a prophet improve our metaphysics. Likewise, the work of philosophy prepares us to receive the reality toward which the prophet’s images point. These acts of the imagination constitute one whole in the human mind at its best, and the mind is at its best when life is lived in the rhythm of the holy.

¹  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q3 a1; q84, a7. [Throughout this book, citations of the Summa Theologica—including volume, question, and article—are from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros., New York, NY (1981).]

²  Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2-2 q180, a5.

³  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II q3, a2.

⁴  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q79, a4.

⁵ Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q93, a1.

⁶ Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q3, a8.

⁷ Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q84, aa6,7.

⁸ Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q12, a3.

⁹  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II q32 a8.

¹⁰  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, V, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McMeil, John Saward, and Rowan Williams, Ignatius Press, California (1991), 228.

¹¹  Austin Farrar, The Glass of Vision, Glasgow University Press, Glasgow (1948), 84.

¹²  Adam Zagajewski, „Auto Mirror” in A Book of Luminous Things, ed. Czeslaw Milosz, Harcourt, New York (1996), 128.

¹³ Farrar, The Glass of Vision, 125.