1980 Imagination: aesthetic and religious

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord’ (Rev. 1.8). Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, said ‘All our knowledge of God is symbolic’ and he added that anyone who took it to be literal or demonstrative would ‘fall into anthropomorphism’. Cranmer wrote: ‘And so the bread and wine be called by the name of the body and blood of Christ as the sign, token and figure is called by the name of the very thing which it showeth and signifieth.’

What is common to these three quotations is the belief embodied in them that religion must consist in the interpretation of meanings. Symbols, signs, tokens, all have to be interpreted, their meanings discovered. I want to argue that this is true. If religion is concerned with the relation between man and nature, or between man and God, if it must explore the difference between time and eternity, between goodness and badness, between the helplessness and the power of human beings, between their deep solitude and their superficial sociability, then knowledge of such things must come from the significance we find in our sensory experience, in what we actually see and hear.

Now the faculty by which we are capable of discovering significance in things, of interpreting our experience or of finding one thing significant of another is the faculty of imagination. Kant would not dissent from this, and it would probably be generally agreed. But it is often held that aesthetic imagination is a quite distinct thing, separable from the imagination as employed in ordinary life, or indeed in religious matters. I want to suggest that no such separation is possible, and in particular that no sharp line can be drawn between imagination employed in the religious mode and the aesthetic imagination.

To demonstrate this, I must expand a little on the aesthetic imagination. Such imagination presents us with aesthetic ideas, which, to quote Kant again, constantly ‘strain after something lying outside the limits of experience’. Language, he says, can ‘never get on level terms with an aesthetic idea’. But imagination is able, from time to time, to sense, in visual or auditory experience, a significance which goes beyond the immediate sense data presented. There is a continuum of imagination. At its most humdrum, it is that by which we interpret sense experience in accordance with the ordinary presuppositions we need and use in everyday life, by which I interpret a red light not just as a coloured light but as a prohibition, or I interpret someone’s stance as indicating misery or fatigue. Children who are described as ‘imaginative’ are those who readily see the tree as a house, or the chest as a ship. In its highest function, the imagination of the creative artist enables him to see, and present to others, the particular significance of a place or an event or a pattern of colour or sound. Somewhere along this continuum comes the aesthetic imagination by which those who are not themselves creative artists are enabled to enjoy and to feel that they understand the creative works of others. And closely allied to this is the imagination by which in the experience of nature (and not necessarily only rural nature) people may sometimes feel that what is before them speaks of something urgent, but something which words or other symbols are necessarily inadequate to express. It is not stretching the term ‘aesthetic’ too far to include such phenomena, such feelings with regard to the natural or man-made environment, under the heading of aesthetic imagination. For often those who experience these intimations of urgent significance in what they see or hear also experience a compulsion at least to attempt to communicate what they have discovered, though they may also realize their inability totally or successfully to do so. But if they did succeed, even partially, then what they produced, whether in words, in painting or in music, would precisely be a work of art.

The imagination, then, ranges from the very ordinary, by which we see a tree as a tree, and not a vague mess of shapes and colours, by which we hear a series of sounds as a melody, to the most exalted, by which people can formulate and pass on to others, though perhaps not by the use of literal words, the vision or understanding they have. Such a concept of imagination is of course Wordsworthian. But it is not for that reason less timelessly true. Wordsworth speaks, perhaps portentously, of those possessed of creative imagination as souls ‘of more than mortal privilege’. But he also fully understands the effect on the less privileged of the exercise of such high imaginative powers. Crucially, too, he understands and expounds the relation between the imagination and the sensory, the particular, the here and now. Of the imaginative, he says

Like angels stopped upon the wing by sound

Of harmony from heaven’s remotest spheres

Them the enduring and the transient, both

Serve to exalt; they build up greatest things

From least suggestions … 

It is the failure of the imagination which for Coleridge spelt the fatal failure of ‘joy’, and for Wordsworth meant that one would ‘inhabit a universe of death’.

If this is the aesthetic imagination, then, how does it work? Let us move rather nearer to the Christian religion. One feature of Christianity, which I suppose no one would deny, is that it is based on, and essentially arises out of, a story. The nature of this story, its relation to history on the one hand and to myth on the other, the development of the New Testament story from the Old … these are doubtless matters for experts to dispute. But for churchgoers, for all who are aware of the unfolding of the Christian year, the story aspect of the Christian religion is central. Now a story is more than a mere account of what happened, one thing after another; it is more than just narrative. A story is essentially something with a point, which embodies an idea in the narrative. To say this is not to pretend that all stories are allegories. And it is certainly not to say that one could always detach the idea from the plot, and state the one without the other. It is rather that in understanding the plot the reader, or hearer, grasps the idea, and cannot in the end think of the one without thinking of the other. That relation between idea and plot is explored by C. S. Lewis, in an essay, not about the Bible, but about children’s books. Writing, for example, about the concept of fear, he argues that there are certain stories, such as Jack the Giant Killer, which appeal to the imagination essentially by embodying fear, and fear of a particular kind … in this case the fear of the gigantic, its heaviness, monstrosity, uncouthness. ‘Nature,’ he says, ‘has that in her which compels us to invent giants, and only giants will do.’ The whole quality of the imaginative response to this particular story is determined by the fact that the enemy are giants. Lewis argues that the test of whether a reader’s deeper imagination has been touched by the idea within a story is how often he re-reads it or asks for it to be told again. Mere excitement, the mere tension of waiting to find out what happens next, as the plot unfolds for the first time, is not identical with the deep imaginative effect; indeed it may be an obstacle to it. Understanding the idea of the gospels could not come to someone reading them for the first time. Lewis writes ‘Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust has been given its sop and laid to sleep are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then it is like wasting a great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.’ Surprise or paradox or tragedy or truth in a story is better if you know it is coming. Free from the shock of actual surprise, you can attend to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia. The whole aim of a story, whether true or invented, is to catch an idea, and somehow convey it in terms of the concrete, the temporal and the transitory. Lewis says ‘In life and in art, both, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.’ It is imagination which searches the story, which interprets it so that its successive moments yield the nonsuccessive truth.

Lewis himself, in a famous part of his autobiography, recounts how it feels when, at a particular moment, one grasps such a nonsuccessive, permanent idea in a story. His example is not elevated, not like the story told in the great Homeric epics, still less the story of the gospel: it is the story of Squirrel Nutkin. Of this story he wrote: ‘Though I loved all Beatrix Potter books, this one … administered the shock; it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season, but that is something like what happened, and the experience was one of intense desire.’ Now Lewis himself held that this kind of imaginative shock for which he used the same word as Coleridge did, ‘joy’, was not religious, though it might be a kind of introduction to religious experiences, which might share some features in common with this joy. But he offered no convincing reason to separate this kind of imagination in the understanding of a story from the capacity to approach religious understanding; and the more seriously one takes the basis of Christianity as the Christian story, the more plausible it becomes to identify the two imaginative experiences.

For in the story it is the aesthetic imagination which is at work; and as the story is repeated, or read again and again, it becomes an institution, its reading a ritual, its words almost a liturgy. The concept of an institution is here central. For an institution is, or is designed so that it may one day be, a continuous entity. Like a person, its essence is to exist at more than one time, for more than an instant, the same. And one of the great stimuli to the imagination is the sense of antiquity, of continuity through time. Many people have had and recorded the experience of sudden illumination, a realization of a whole dimension of life, which has come to them from the sudden sense of continuity, whether the continuity of the stars, or of the earth’s rocks, of animal life or of antique buildings or other human artifacts. The church is of course just such an antique and continuing institution, and it is essentially within the church that the specifically religious employment of the aesthetic imagination must flourish. In particular, the music of the Anglican Church has just such a long and continuous history as to make it a source of imaginative ‘joy’, in Lewis’s sense. The great tradition of Anglican chants, of services, of anthems is a tradition on which the aesthetic imagination feeds. But from the standpoint of Christianity, this tradition cannot be thought of simply as musical. It is impossible to separate the music from the words of which it is the setting. The imperative for the earliest composers of Anglican church music was precisely to make the newly translated words intelligible. The settings of the mass by, for example, Taverner had become so fantastically elaborate, so many whole melodic elements were introduced to be sung on a single syllable of a word, that, whether the words were Latin, English or any other language, the sense had been sacrificed to the sound. The meaning inevitably fell apart in the interests of the music. And so the revolution of the Anglican Church was as much musical as linguistic. The rough guide for the composers who were to set the new prayer book was a note to every syllable. Between the moment when alert composers realized what was going to happen and Pentecost 1549, when the services were due to be sung in English, there was an incredibly short length of time; but it was long enough for the birth of an entirely new style. And this style, gradually modified and becoming more relaxed, is the great style of the Anglican Church, of Byrd, Gibbons, and, later, Purcell and even of Handel. This tradition of church music is the result of an amazingly happy flowering of imaginative genius, confronted by a particular challenge. The challenge was theological, and so the foundation of the tradition must be seen as essentially part of a religious, not just an artistic, renaissance. Centrally, and informing it all, was the idea of the Christian story, now to be rendered immediate and direct through that most purely imaginative of the arts, music. The consequence is that the music as much as the words is the bearer of meaning, is symbolic, as the words are. If this is doubted, let someone try to think of the purely musical impact of that greatest of all verse anthems, Gibbons’s This is the record of John. No one could fully grasp the significance of such music without at least temporarily giving himself up to the meanings of the words. In the enjoyment of such music as this the aesthetic and the religious imagination demonstrate themselves as the same.

But it may be thought that it is a dangerous and subversive doctrine, to assert that Christianity is a story, or a story set to music, or that we come to such religious knowledge as we may aspire to through the imagination. For is this not tantamount to saying not only that Christianity is a story but that it is a fairy story? Consider the words of David Hume. He, like Lewis in the passage I quoted just now, was considering our response to fear. ‘In the common affairs of life where we feel and are penetrated with the solidity of the subject, nothing can be more disagreeable than fear and terror, and ‘tis only in a dramatic performance and in religious discourses that they ever give pleasure. In these latter cases the imagination reposes itself indolently upon the idea; and the passion, being softened by want of belief in the subject, has no more than the agreeable effect of enlivening the mind and fixing the attention.’ Is not this what religious knowledge is reduced to, if it is dependent on the imagination? I do not think so. Hume indeed is in contradiction with himself. For he knows, none better, that for all knowledge of what is beyond our immediate fleeting sensations, we are dependent on imagination. But to say this is not to say that we are free to make up the world as we go along, according to some whim of the fancy, nor that mere sentimentality can be the basis of our claims to knowledge. In the sense in which it can give us insight into the nature of things, the imagination is the source not merely of passing pleasures or frissons (though it is the source of these as well) but of truth. Keats said ‘The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream. He awoke and found it truth.’ And if my argument that the aesthetic cannot be totally separated from the religious imagination is accepted; if it is this undifferentiated imagination which works in the interpretation of symbols, and in the understanding of the present as significant of the timeless and the true, then those who accuse Christians of caring for the Church only for aesthetic reasons, of being in it, as it were, for the beauty, not the truth, are mistaken in their criticisms. For they are seeking to distinguish two things which cannot be wholly separated. If the imagination forms the sort of continuum of interpretation which I have suggested; if it is the unified capacity for seeing, in Coleridge’s words ‘into the heart of things’ and cannot be compartmentalized, then we should not fear that imaginative responses to the Christian story, to Christian ritual, music and liturgy will necessarily be transitory or superficial. Those who believe that such religion as they understand must be contained in symbols, whether the natural symbols of the world, or the symbols of convention and tradition, are not simply seeking a kind of pleasurable experience, a thrill of euphoria such as is alleged sometimes to be derived from mescalin or other drugs. Of course pleasure cannot be eliminated; but the pleasures of the imagination may be more than ephemeral, and they may have a permanent effect on the life, even the character, of the person who experiences them (though equally they may not). It is very difficult in any case to place a value on such efforts of imagination, such ‘straining after things which lie beyond the boundaries of experience’ whether they are ostensibly religious or otherwise. What is certain is that people who make use of symbolism, or who try to interpret their experience as symbolic of something else, feel often that they must do so, that they need both to express and to understand, and could have no other mode of understanding.

It follows then that the Church has an obligation to preserve itself as an institution, and to defend its institutional character. For it is its continuity which, embodied in its liturgy and its music, constitutes that symbolic truth which must be our only access to religion. The Church as an institution does not exist simply to perpetuate itself, nor to form a permanent and socially respectable hierarchy, nor even to dispense charity. It exists as a continuing institution because it is the repository of the word of God, of that symbolism which it must both teach and help us to interpret. ‘Being like eagles in this life,’ Cranmer wrote, ‘we should fly up to heaven in our hearts.’ It is only on the wings of interpretative imagination that we can possibly embark on this flight.

The article originally appeared in Theology 83 (696): 403–9. The full text can be found at <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X8008300602>.