And the attentive animals are already aware
that we are not quite reliably at home
in the interpreted world.
Finding and Making
This book is about how to imagine the world theologically. By this I do not intend to say that theological thought is imaginative, let alone imaginary, more markedly than any other kind of thought. Rather, I take all our orientation in the world to be, to some extent, imaginative. ‘Imagination’, as I use the term, is not primarily the capacity to picture absent or fictional things. Rather, it is first and foremost the power to make the continuous stream of sense perception meaningful by integrating discrete data points into forms or wholes (what the Germans would call Gestalt).1 In Mary Warnock’s classic summary of this definition, drawing on the tradition of Hume, Kant, and many others,
we use imagination in our ordinary perception of the world. This perception cannot be separated from interpretation. Interpretation can be common to everyone, and in this sense ordinary, or it can be inventive, personal and revolutionary. So imagination is necessary … to enable us to recognise things in the world as familiar, to take for granted features of the world which we need to take for granted and rely on, if we are to go about our ordinary business; but it is also necessary if we are to see the world as significant of something unfamiliar, if we are ever to treat the objects of perception as symbolising or suggesting things other than themselves.2
To put it differently, ordinary seeing – the ability to organize the sensory field into discrete objects – involves imaginative acts, which are no less active for remaining unnoticed. Seeing involves the assimilation of data points to perceptual patterns that we have inherited or acquired, and which we continue to update in response to ongoing experience. These integrative processes are not, for the most part, subject to conscious inspection: they form part of the very act of seeing and understanding, and so usually occur unconsciously. Both Hume and Kant were enduringly bewildered by them. Hume marvels that ‘ideas are thus collected by a kind of magical faculty of the soul, which … is inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding’.3 And Kant describes the imagination as a kind of wizard behind a curtain, ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze’.4
What is true of ordinary perception is intensified in the perception of created images, of pictures. The ability to see these strokes as a cube (Fig. 1), these blotches as lilies (Fig. 2), or these lines as a smile (Fig. 3) involves active projection and completion, by matching lines and colours whose meaning is not fully determined by their two-dimensional appearance to memories of spatial and psychological depth, and thus completing the appearance in front of us. These acts of seeing are not guaranteed by either the images or our memories and patterns: they are co-creative and exceed the calculus of correspondence.
Fig. 1 Necker’s Cube, 2006. Digital illustration.
Fig. 2 Claude Monet, Water Lilies in Giverny, 1917. Oil on canvas, 100.3 × 200.5 cm; Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Nantes, France.
Fig. 3 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–1506. Oil on poplar panel, 77.0 × 53.2 cm; Louvre, Paris, France.
But images are not the only objects which we see only by perceiving in them a depth that is not fully contained in their lines and colours. It is not only the mystery of the Mona Lisa, but also the mood and character of the people around us that we grasp imaginatively by attending to their faces. Like Mona Lisa’s, a baby’s smile (Fig. 4) is at once a matter of immediate seeing and one of imaginative projection. Of course, there is often a truth of the matter – but not always. Like our appreciation of artworks, our perception of faces can never fully evade the risk of mis- or overinterpretation; on the contrary, such vulnerability to deception is integral to what it means to see a face at all.5 This ambiguity is refracted in our ability to appreciate actors on stage or see expressive faces even where there are none (Fig. 5).
Fig. 4 Ruizluquepaz, Portrait of a One-Year-Old Boy at Sunset, undated.
Fig. 5 Matt Anderson Photography, Valley of Fire Hillside Ghosts, undated.
And if we cannot see images or faces without imaginatively projecting the spatial and psychological depth that makes sense of them, then the same is true in more subtle and intricate ways of our ability imaginatively to grasp actions and even entire lives. To see in a finger movement a crime against humanity (Fig. 6), and in a step forward an act of bravery (Fig. 7), requires imaginative projection, informed by memories, expectations, myths, values, and fears. We do not overlay these meanings as belated, optional interpretations on a more basic, neutral perception of component elements: rather, we take in an action and divine its meaning in a single movement. This means that our way of seeing the world is at once immediate and mediating, not merely a matter of finding but always also one of making. This holds both danger and promise. On the one hand, as Pascal observed in his critique of the imagination, it lifts experience from the safe ground of reason: ‘The imagination holds sway over everything. It creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is the entirety of the world.’6 On the other, as the Romantics realized, it makes us capable of being co-creators with God. In Coleridge’s famous line, ‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.’7
Fig. 6 Rogistok, Push the Red Button, undated. Digital illustration.
Fig. 7 Conrad Schmitt Studios, Martyrdom of St Maximillian Kolbe, 2014. Stained glass window; Pope St. John Paul II Chapel, University of the Lake, Mundelein, IL.
You will notice the analogical structure of this concept of imagination. It claims that analogous things go on in our perception of everyday objects and images (as in Figs. 1 and 2), our perception of persons and their actions (as in Figs. 4, 6, and 7), our understanding of our own and others’ lives, and our way of seeing the world as a whole, our worldview. These include habitual misperceptions (as in Fig. 5) and perceptions to which the terms ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ cannot easily be applied. On each of these levels, there is a constant interplay of finding and making: a confrontation with disparate data points which our minds integrate into wholes – into objects, persons, and narratives, and into a whole world with depth and continuity.
In saying this, I am not advancing a radically constructivist view of perception, but rather, to use art historian Ernst Gombrich’s term, talking about ‘the beholder’s share’.8 In other words, I am taking a broadly phenomenological approach, investigating how phenomena are constituted for us. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘Phenomenology … is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne – by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.’9
Neither is it the primary objective of my account to construct a model of the imagination, much less to defend an ontological account of a human faculty called ‘imagination’ distinct from reason, faith, will, or other putative faculties. If I sometimes reify the imagination, it is only heuristically, not in the sense of a faculty psychology. Many philosophers and psychologists have developed related accounts of human perception using different terms: Wertheimer’s ‘Gestalt theory’, Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘seeing-as’, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologically dense concept of ‘perception’.10 By using the term ‘imagination’, I am not constructing a model but bringing a pattern into view (which of course means that I am, in my own terms, doing imaginative work).
The risk remains that I am speaking at a level of generalization or abstraction which, from a psychological point of view, seems nonsensical. Contemporary psychology typically approaches perception and cognition functionally rather than ontologically: it describes perceptual and cognitive processes that involve a range of bodily systems, identifying the environments and factors that activate such types of processing, their variations and interrelations, and their typical failure modes.11 Such functional approaches challenge the tendency of philosophers and theologians to ontologize human powers or faculties. At the same time, philosophical concepts such as ‘imagination’ can serve as focusing lenses, bundling certain processes and phenomena without necessarily adjudicating their ontological status, and can thus direct psychologists towards new questions and investigations.12 Conversely, some psychological theories strengthen philosophical conjectures. As I have argued elsewhere, the theory of predictive processing (or predictive coding) concretizes some of my phenomenological observations by describing perception as a constant negotiation between ‘bottom-up’ input and ‘top-down’ priors, which is operative at all levels of engagement with the world.13 It is not decisive for the arguments of this book whether we describe the imagination as a faculty, a power or a pattern of processing, or (ultimately) whether we use the term ‘imagination’ at all. What is decisive are observable patterns of what Heidegger calls our being-in-the-world: the ever-dynamic interplay, at all levels of this being-in-the-world, of discovery and construction.
Hiddenness and Malleability
This book starts from the intuition that our distinctive interplay of finding and making cannot be reduced to either pole: that we live neither in the naïvely realist universe of many theologians nor in the anti-realist one of postmodernists. Rather, finding and making are inseparable, and this inseparability means that there are real stakes, real risks, and no easy solutions. The ambiguities of invention in its double sense of discovery and creation pervade our self-understanding, our understanding of other people, and our ‘metaphysical dreams’, including our faith.14 Faith, indeed, it turns out, plays a pivotal role in our understanding of imagination because it is both a species of imaginative integration and a challenge to our need and capacity for it.
Before embarking on specific studies, I want to highlight and discuss two aspects of the human imagination that are central to its existential and intellectual challenge. The first is that the activity of our imaginative integration of data into patterns or wholes is for the most part hidden from ourselves. It forms part of the processes of perception and understanding, and can therefore be inspected at best indirectly. In Kant’s memorable phrase, the imagination is ‘a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are seldom even conscious’.15
This hiddenness tends to create the illusion that there is no creative process at all: that what we perceive is straightforwardly found. Hume was deeply troubled by this systematic self-concealment. By operating habitually, he thought, the imagination was (in Warnock’s succinct paraphrase) ‘not only [a] helpful assistant [but a] deceiver, who gives us an altogether unwarranted sense of security …. It is like a drug without which we could not bear to inhabit the world.’16
It is a strong claim but one grounded in experience that we cannot ordinarily function without such self-concealment. When we come face to face with our own imaginative participation in the construal of things, it can propel a crisis of trust in the world: a small crisis if a leaf we picked up turned out in fact to be a bug (the inverse of Fig. 17, Chapter 3); a more profound one if we no longer trust our ability to ‘read’ the behaviour of those around us, as Shakespeare’s Othello and Leontes find to their great cost; or worse, if we realize we might have imagined our very worldview. We usually manage these crises by immediately re-inscribing the contrast between fact and fiction: ‘I was deluded, and the actual fact of the matter is different.’ Doing so, we immediately mask our own imaginative work again.
But we need, instead, to come to terms with our irreducibly constructive, imaginative participation in the world. This is not the same as to argue, with Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Butler and others, for the endless plasticity of reality within a free play of pleasure or desire.17 Nor is it to say, with Yuval Harari and others, that our past flourishing as humans has been a function of our ability to imagine realities bigger than ourselves – gods, nations, money – which have allowed us to cooperate, but that we must now emancipate ourselves from a belief in our own imaginings and turn what used to be metaphysical beliefs into technical projects.18 My argument is different: I affirm that we cannot neatly separate out finding from making, seeing from construing, perceiving from interpreting. But I deny that the solution is to attempt either a reduction to certainty or an emancipation into sheer construction. Our task, rather, is to learn to live in their stress field and shoulder the work of the imagination: to recognize its limits and expand its possibilities. This task is both a perpetual and a theological one, and this book is intended above all as a series of ‘formal indications’ (as Heidegger would call them): as ways of helping us undertake that work.19
The second notable aspect is the multiplicity of ways in which our imagination is conditioned. To construe objects imaginatively is to match sense impressions or other data to existing mental patterns. Philosophers from Locke and Descartes to Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre, as well as psychologists of various schools, have debated the extent to which these patterns or schemata are innate or acquired and the extent to which, therefore, they are fixed or malleable. The most convincing approach, I think, is a Bayesian one in which the expectations we bring to our perceptions range from the very engrained and normative to the very flexible and ad hoc.20 How habitually and confidently we match a set of sense impressions or data points to a mental pattern depends on how sure we are of the stability and relevance of that pattern. When we see a piece of abstract art (e.g. Fig. 8), we might be ready to believe it to depict anything or nothing, because we have no stable expectations of what sort of things an abstract painting might depict. (That said, most of us have fairly engrained opinions about the value of modern art, and thus whether or not we think there is anything to which to pay attention here in the first place.21) By contrast, when we see a room laid out in tiles, it is nearly impossible for us to see the room as anything but rectangular and the tiles as anything but regular because our expectations about rooms are so fixed. The Ames Room (Fig. 9) powerfully shows this force of expectation, which persists even when it forces us to see the figures as growing and shrinking.22
Fig. 8 Jackson Pollock, White Light, 1954. Oil, enamel, and aluminium paint on canvas, 122.4 × 96.9 cm; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA.
Fig. 9 Maksim Popov, Alice Is Looking for a Black Cat in a Warped Room, 2023.
The relevant point is that most of our imaginative work is hidden from us because most of it is not original but inherited. The patterns to which we match things are not, for the most part, ones that we individually create. Rather, our imaginations are shaped by our families, communities, and societies, whether through long-term exposure to consistent patterns or through acute and persistent reinforcement, for example by social media, political propaganda, or advertisements. Some of our convictions about the shape of things great and small, therefore, are fairly fixed, especially those that are physically grounded or deeply culturally embedded (such as the shape of rooms). Others, however, are extremely fluid; and part of what our imagination hides from itself is precisely its own malleability. We ensconce ourselves in echo chambers partly in order to constantly reinforce the hidden work of the imagination that is required to uphold a certain way of seeing the world. Once we step out of them, this way of seeing – the patterns into which we have arranged the world – may suddenly seem much less plausible. Stop watching your particular news outlet and the political scene may shift. Stop being at university and your cultural sensibilities may change. Stop going to church and the world may start to seem devoid of God.
This malleability of the imagination – of the habitual ways in which we arrange objects, people, events, and the world into patterns – does not itself make these arrangements arbitrary or deniable. It is an inalienable feature of our way of being in the world; there is no anti-sceptical cure that will guarantee accurate perception because that is not how perception works. However, the malleability of our sense of the world, on the one hand, and its habituated, largely unconscious operation – its hiddenness – on the other, do mean that there is a real precariousness to our ways of inhabiting the world and orienting ourselves within it. ‘Knowledge’ can never conclusively be insulated from ‘conspiracy theory’ (Fig. 10). And this risk is endlessly exploited by economic and political players, whose advertisements and propaganda are, above all, exercises in moulding our ways of imagining the world: associating a car with freedom (or worse, freedom with a car) or a particular political party with evil (Fig. 11). In all these cases, our associations might be as strong as they are arbitrary (Fig. 12).
Fig. 10 Gapingvoid Culture Design Group, Information, Knowledge, & Conspiracy Theories, 2023. Digital illustration.
Fig. 11 Barron Collier, Chums, c. 1918. Photomechanical print, 27.9 × 53.3 cm; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, United States of America.
Fig. 12 Paul Noth, An Army Lines Up for Battle, 2014. Cartoon; New Yorker.
What motivates this book is the dual fact that imagination is both constitutive of life in the world and irreducibly risky. We cannot but construct what we see, and this construction is always fraught with the danger of error, overreach, avoidance, delusion. Stanley Cavell says that ‘the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art’.23 They are also essential to the experience of life.
Art and Faith
The habituated process of imagining is disrupted in experiences with art. As Chapters 2, 3, and 5 will argue, works of art, literature, and music enable us to become aware of our imaginative work, and thereby expand its possibilities, loosening its rigid and restrictive habits. In this capacity, experiences with art are akin to religious experiences. Theology and religion are often seen as paradigm cases of imposing illusory patterns on the world and on people: of people pretending to find truths where they are merely imagining things, and of insisting that all phenomena fit into these supposed truths, whether or not this does violence to them. I think the opposite is true.
As Chapter 4 will argue, Christian faith is, among other things, a mode of seeing the world which beholds in that world an unseen depth of goodness, significance, and love which we do not make but in which we can participate. For the Christian faith, in other words, the human imagination is in important ways adequate to the nature of reality because our world is poetic, both in the sense that it is God’s work or craft and in the sense that we do not merely apprehend but also make the world.24
At the same time, Christian faith also suggests that the human imagination always remains inadequate to God and the world: God exceeds our imagining, and the world, other people, and we ourselves have depths and complexities that remain hidden in God. To believe in God demands a commitment to not reducing the complexity of the data points before us, even at the cost of not being able to fully make sense of the world. Such commitment rests on trust that beyond any order we can impose on the world imaginatively, it is and will be held together by God. Chapters 4 and 5 will explore this dialectic of cataphasis and apophasis more fully and illuminate ways in which art, literature, and music can help sustain it.
Interdisciplinarity and Theology
The book proceeds by examining the ways we both discover and constitute the world in individual and communal life, in relation to language and vision, and in our life with art and with faith. The chapters of this book are interrelated, such that what remains unexplained or parenthetical in one is sometimes foregrounded and analyzed in another, and the arguments of all five are mutually informative. All five are also cross-disciplinary, keeping theology, philosophy, history, psychology, art history, and literary criticism in continuous conversation. Their intention is not to master these fields but to get into focus shared concerns and anxieties, confront challenges they pose to each other, unearth resources they lend each other, and formulate questions that can arise only through their dialogue. A certain lightness of tone is necessary to sustain such a conversation, and the book is mostly written in the tone – or the many tones – of the spoken voice. The text sometimes conducts quiet syntheses or takes unannounced positions within contested fields. Those interested in particular or discipline-specific discussions can find references to relevant debates and texts in the endnotes.
Despite its interdisciplinarity, the conversation staged here is at heart a theological one and is intended, among other things, to model a form of theology, one that is driven by a particular understanding of the Thomist definition of theology as the study of God and of all things in relation to God.25 Theology, on this definition, seeks to understand a shared whole; and to do so means both to abide by its own principles and to pursue open, critical, and constructive conversations with those from other disciplines and backgrounds. Because theology relates people and fields to each other, it must be responsive to their questions, discoveries, and challenges. Being true to these challenges without thereby giving up the unique vantage point, truth claims, and intellectual and spiritual resources of theology is one of the responsibilities of contemporary theologians.
This responsibility may be realized in a variety of ways, and this book exemplifies only one of them. I want to make explicit some of the guiding intuitions of my approach, so that the arguments of this book do not appear as more, or less, or different than they are. Whether academic arguments convince us, after all, depends not only on their cogency. Rather, their cogency depends on what strikes us as plausible in the first place: what kinds of arguments can be made to count for us. And that in turn depends on our deepest intuitions of life and faith: on what trade-offs we can accept, on what we can bear, on where we think meaning should be discoverable, and on what should count as meaningless noise.26
Precisely because this is so, my own approach is shaped mainly by the questions arising between a Platonically inflected Thomism on the one hand and phenomenology and hermeneutics on the other. On the one hand, my approach is grounded in an ontology with realist depth, which enables certain modes of enquiry: I believe that in God all things hold together, and can therefore be investigated with courage and tenacity; that humans and all created things have dignity, and can therefore be approached with humility and empathy; and that creation is not yet finished, and can therefore be engaged with openness and creativity. On the other hand, the nature of this enquiry, in my case, is not primarily metaphysical, doctrinal, or textual. The questions asked in this book about the imagination do not begin with a metaphysical account of the world (‘What metaphysical structures underlie this experience?’), with a doctrine (‘What is the trinitarian or Christological shape or grounding of this experience?’), or with a text (‘What does Barth say about this?’). Rather, they begin with a sustained focus on the conditions, qualities, and implications of the experience.
This is a phenomenological and hermeneutical habit. Phenomenology and hermeneutics ask about the ways experience is constituted: how we identify and relate to the objects of our enquiry, how they affect us and we them, and how these relationships change and interact with others.27 Theology, it seems to me, both demands and complicates such questions because God is not simply an object of enquiry. As Kierkegaard showed so meticulously, humans’ relations with God are necessarily subjective and personal because God defies objectification.28 On the one hand, therefore, to assume an ‘objective’, disengaged standpoint from which to investigate God’s existence and character misses an essential part of what one seeks to understand, namely that there is no such standpoint. On the other, asking these questions in relation to God reveals God as a transformative subject matter which directly affects our vision not only of the world, but of ourselves, our modes of knowledge, and how we are to live, act, and speak in the world. This does not leave phenomenology or hermeneutics untouched. The aim of this book, therefore, is neither a pure phenomenology nor a systematic theology, but a mixed account that reflects the depth, breadth, and complexity of ordinary and intellectual life, especially a life of faith.
The Plan of This Book
The work of this book unfolds in five chapters. Following the introductory Chapter 1, Chapter 2 begins by interrogating the modern ideal of authenticity, which has arisen in partial response to the loss of inherited confidence in objective metaphysical and moral frameworks. I argue that by assuming an unmediated access to an ‘authentic’ self, this ideal fails to acknowledge the ways in which even our self-understanding is mediated by imaginative projections that are never purely personal but always inherited and constructed. These complex, communal dynamics of our imaginative construal of selfhood are not to be evaded but, rather, engaged. I therefore discuss role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – as indispensable for forming authentic relationships to oneself and others. Such role-playing exemplifies both the risks and the possibilities of imaginative finding and making, and though it does not solve the problem of self-understanding, it elucidates its limits. Drawing on meta-theatrical examples from William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, I argue for a creative and open-ended life with roles.
Chapter 3 extends the argument of Chapter 2 by describing language itself as an inherited practice of imaginative gestalt formation, shaping an inarticulate ‘mess of imprecision of feeling’ (T. S. Eliot) into inherited forms of verbal sense-making. This practice is always necessarily fraught with ambiguity. The underdetermination of the stuff that is shaped into language is neither conclusively resolved by articulation nor available in more direct, unmediated form. The patterns into which it is cast are neither fully stable nor fully shared among conversation partners. The resulting ambiguity of all our speaking is constitutive of our common life with language; yet we inhabit it, for the most part, unaware of our own role in it. I argue that the verbal experiments of poetry bring this dynamic to consciousness and create new possibilities of inhabiting the world in language.
I then widen this argument to other forms of art, showing how visual artists loosen our habituated ways of encountering the visible world by bringing to consciousness our own imaginative work of seeing. In doing so, artists do not impose an alternative picture of the world (as if making could, after all, be reduced to finding) but rather grant us a double vision that allows us to see the world in new ways, consciously participating in its utterance. The chapter concludes by discussing ways in which the Christian liturgy and Scriptures enable such renewals of perception in more existentially demanding ways.
Chapter 4 investigates this theological claim critically by examining the imaginative work that goes into a life with God. I draw on psychological research and on the spiritual senses tradition to discuss the malleability of the human sense of God, suggesting both the power of spiritual formation and the unavoidable risk of projection and self-deception. I then discuss how, in the case of spiritual realities that are acknowledged to be beyond material presence, it is possible to speak about ‘perception’ at all: whether there can be signs or criteria. Drawing on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, and on the foregoing discussion of art, I discuss ways in which an imaginative perception of a ‘metaphysical depth’ beyond the physical order might be possible. I conclude by emphasizing the centrality of an experience of divine absence, and of the nonsensicality rather than merely the meaningfulness of the world, to such spiritual vision.
The end of Chapter 4 moves from phenomenological to theological argument, and Chapter 5 concludes that turn, laying out a theological account of eschatology and arguing for ways in which the human experience of finding and making is consonant and can be lived in light of it. Christian eschatology affirms a divine purpose for creation, which invites humans into creative co-creation. At the same time, it promises the consummation of this purpose not as the actualization of latent potential but as a divine gift of new creation. This promise is both an invitation to imagine the world differently and a declaration of the limits of all imaginative construction. Drawing again on Shakespeare and Beckett, I outline a form of theatre that exhibits what I call an eschatological imagination. The concluding Chapter 6 suggests the significance of such an eschatological imagination within ordinary life.
Together, these chapters argue that if the Christian faith is a way of making sense of the world, it does not do so merely by laying out a metaphysical or doctrinal pattern to which to adjust our perception. Rather, it makes sense of the world by enabling us to hold open horizons that we always rush to foreclose, and to sustain uncertainty in the light of a divine promise. To realize this capacity, however, requires a deep faith in a God whom we cannot grasp and take full hold of: a God who is not simply available and who does not simply enable the fulfilment of our ambitions, though he holds out the gift of eternal life. Such faith engenders, among other things, a self-abnegating theological imagination: a realization of both the adequacy and inadequacy of our ways of sense-making to the mystery of creation. Yes, theology constructs. It constructs metaphysical accounts of the world; it constructs theories and images to guide us. But they are light, tentative, humble, because when we construct theologically, we are not building towers; we are building boats. And we trust the sea.
