Reverend Rowan William refers to “the theology of imagination”
Malcom Guite
Well in some ways the phrase ‘theology of imagination’ goes right to the heart of what I was doing in Faith, Hope and Poetry. If I was to defend Imagination as a truth-bearing faculty I had to answer the questions, “Where does it come from?” “Why, and under what circumstances should it be trusted?” “What kind of truth is it telling us?” And to answer those questions required deep reflection on the doctrine of creation, on God as our maker, on what it means to say that we are made in his image, in the image of a maker, a creative artist. Reflecting on these led me from Creation to Incarnation, to what it means to say ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’. I began to see strong parallels between the urge to make and shape and create which is in our hearts and what the Bible tells us about God as a creator. And when I began to examine the accounts that poet’s give about what is going on in the act of imaginative creation I found that they all used essentially theological language. The key insight came when I realized that Shakespeare’s great description of the poetic imagination at work, (you remember the passage: ‘the poets eye …doth glance from heaven to earth from earth to heaven and as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown the poets pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name’) I realized that this passage is in fact a description of incarnation, of a ‘word’, an ‘apprehension’ being ‘made flesh’ ‘bodied forth’ as Shakespeare says.
And so I came to see that the artist’s desire to incarnate a meaning in a particular embodied form is something that comes from God, something that is only possible because God has already done it and has made a universe in which it can be done, and that all successful artistic, imaginative embodiment of ‘the true the good and the beautiful’ involves participation in some degree in this primal act of God.
So that is something of what I mean by a theology of Imagination. Now the question of whether or not we have a ‘baptised imagination’, as Lewis used that term, is distinct, but not unrelated. Our imagination is, I believe, part of the ‘imago dei’, the image of God in us. But like every other part of us it is both God-given and at the same time shadowed and fallen. We can and do have what the Bible calls ‘vain imaginations’; false or empty shapings of the fantasy which merely serve the fallen isolated ego and do not participate, as imagination should, in the deep well springs that make and shape God’s good creation. So imagination needs to be cleansed and redeemed. And it seems to be that our own individual imagination is at least partly cleansed and redeemed when we enter into and enjoy the works of someone else’s redeemed imagination. That’s part of the good that good reading does for us and in us. So Lewis says that reading the great imaginative works of George Macdonald, and reading Milton and Spenser, had the effect of cleansing or ‘baptising’ his imagination! Even before the rest of his conscious and rational self was ready to acknowledge the truths of the gospel his imagination already apprehended in advance. In fact I came to realize that Lewis’s personal experience and the eventual healing and integration of the split between imagination and reason in his life was a symptom of the same split in the wider society of the modern age and therefore his healing and integration was also a tremendous and prophetic sign of hope that this deep split could also be healed in the wider society, that the baptized imagination could in the end bring the whole person, in all their faculties to baptism and renewal in Christ. In that sense just as the imagination is sometimes the forerunner of reason in our journey to faith, so I think Lewis, and the Inklings more generally are forerunners, showing in their lives and work how our wider culture can be healed and return to faith.
