A Christian Imagination?

I do not believe in beginning a post with the pronoun ‘I.’ It grates against years of formal training. If my 9th grade English teacher, who once dressed me up as a girl with balloon boobs and ribbons in my hair, would have found out while dressing me that one day i'd commit a grammatical schism like the one above, she'd unhesitatingly pop my perky plastic. But since my fear of her swift retribution has long since subsided, and especially since i have created this example of rebellion on purpose, i will keep it.

Breaking the rules is a longstanding, American tradition. If you like, you may consider my recalcitrance here an act of patriotism. Yet it is not for my country that I say what follows, but for my faith. Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are little else besides revolutionary institutions. Nevertheless, I like the idea—given certain provisos— of rebelling against rebels.

Only where we find the most severe kinds of naivety, in the carbuncle regions of lower Mississippi or upper Amish country, do we still see that breed of Christian who manages to think the fiction of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien evil. Contemporary psychologists will not let me get away with sweeping generalizations, so I mention these folk and their intellectual kin only so that I do not have to mention them later. I do not concern myself with blockheads for the same reason i do not concern myself with blocks: they're boring and bad listeners. But moving beyond this group, Evangelical Christians in general suffer from a poor view of the imagination.

There is an orthodox principle concerning the well ordered man that should, I think, be applied to the imagination. Moreover, one that could, if employed much like Lewis or Tolkien do, change lives. In City of God Augustine combines a little of the Stoic, Academic, and Peripatetic traditions under a Christian heading--Christianity in general may have a knack for intellectual conflation. I will not go into great detail of how he goes about this (mostly because I do not understand it myself), but the gist of it may be explained best in an example: If a child shoots me with a squirt gun, soaking me in water, I may be tempted to return the favor by throwing the rascal into the sea. On Augustine’s model, reason should control my desire to retaliate. In other words, the head dominates the impulses; it rules over them. And reason should rule because this is how God originally intended things to be. Let’s call this, as the ancients, did Justice.

This Justice principle, this ‘the way things are intended to be’ should be, i repeat, applied to the use of imagination. Pascal warns that the imagination is both the most powerful and wayward of human faculties. Chesterton recapitulates saying “we do not know why the imagination accepts an image before reason can reject it.” I think in my next post I will enter into the grittier parts of the psyche to give examples of just what happens with both proper and improper uses of the imagination. My desire at present is merely to communicate the possibility that contemporary Christianity fails to recognize the dangers and wonders of the imagination, the horror and beauty it can create. More importantly, i think Christianity has neglected the formulation of a just view of the imagination, of its proper or improper action.

It is the one faculty that can dominate the psyche more effectively than the mind. Like other parts of us, it should sometimes be kept in a cage, and sometimes set loose. When and where and how are wholly different questions. My point is simply that, yes, “the head rules the belly through the chest, indeed.” But like Plato’s Republic, like Plato’s whole theory of art, Christians have no satisfying account of the imagination, and it's time we come up with something a little systematic.

the K.H.