Several years ago the latest work from a contemporary philosopher was recommended to me. As the request came from someone I hold dear, I obliged. While the arguments were being celebrated for their prescient insight, from the start I could not but feel I was reading something rather old, specifically David Hume. The technical vocabulary was different, somewhat. The arguments, however, were simply eighteenth-century British empiricism réchauffé. They were of life desperately literal, full of practicalities, desiccating of anything that touched upon imagination.
The exercise of this forum has been to facilitate the viability of Christianity in an era of transition. If one claims the goal of life is to become a fully integrated person to the end that by, in, and through that wholistic personhood one can contribute to the development of a more vibrant and open society in harmony not only within itself but its environment, its terrestrial reality, or if one claims the goal of life is to become a holy person, a person capable of healthily balancing the dynamic of “at once sinner and saved,” that in, by, and through that gravity of soul one’s society is seeded with the co-redemptive grace to grow together in the familial bond of devoted care for man and the world such that there is made manifest, to some degree, the sovereignty of Creativity Itself, then one is saying the same thing, admittedly in two varying forms. In the first case it is said in the language of modern psychology. In the second case it is placed in a more ancient language, that of the soul-science, the psychology, of the Christian religion. That does not mean one language is superior to the other, or that the one being older, it is obsolete. They are simply two different languages. That with which they deal is the same item—the psyche, the soul, of man.
If one pays attention to the newer language of psychology, one finds the more ancient language of religion holds within it the essence of its examination, of its logos, its “ology.” They that would dismiss religion and its spirituality as a fabrication of the archaic mind, the superstitious remnants of a primitive state dismiss the very item that creates man worthy of carrying the cognomen sapiens: imagination. Imagination, the ability to imagine, to picture, to project the not-yet, the not-conceptual, is the very print of the power that not only reveals reality, but makes it, gives it space and time to happen, develop, grow.
The modern world with its propensity toward the pseudo-pragmatics of materialism is wont to understand that power of imagination muchly in terms of ego-glorification and financial gain. The imagination that spins out dreams, the internal narratives of meditation, the movements of ritual, the sacred stories of religious vision, the yearning words of prayer, the sighs of the spirit—all such as these are discounted as fantasies of the unrealistic, the unsophisticated, the unthinking mind, as if imagination, that child of the soul, were a power of the mind, a rational thing, when it is imagination that stretches out the groundwork upon which the world becomes experiential and only therein open to rational analysis. Imagination searches out the meaningfulness of life and world, the fullness within which reason can have a basis for its domain. But the modern mind has sunk into viewing everything through the lens of a materialistic utilitarianism, condensed into considering everything material, reduced to a subservience to the wishes of an ego ever seeking gratification, bodily thrill, and worldly status. The height of its questioning is about status and money. “Where do you imagine yourself in five or in ten years?” is about power and gain. Such lapidification, such concretization of life cannot be endured. Thus are conjured up games of escape from reality, games of distraction. They–as contrary by nature to the thrust of our nature–must be games of danger and violence. They are the new entertainment, the new social “containment.” And this entertainment trains an entire society into its delusive and anti-social energy of self-promotion and adulation.
These insanities are escapes from reality, then truth, then duty, and finally, care. The great symbol-productions of the creative imagination are by such displaced, denounced, degraded. In ancient tales the hero battled the dragon that all knew was the beast within. Today one plays at battling dragons–in compensation—for having become the dragon scorching the earth in its thirst for personal power and prestige, for having ignored the reality of the Earth and the world in the quest for ego-mollification. In this “game-world” of personal satisfaction and gain, in this galvanizing, this addictive pretention of reality, to sit in meditation upon some ancient sacred text is to waste time and energy. Humanity herein spins away from reality, and out of control, out of its capacity for soul, for soulfulness, and into an abyss of phantoms, fantasies, falsities. It collapses into a neurosis wherein eventually the social cohesiveness that is democracy, that ever needs the demos to imagine the equitable, the progressive, the intelligent society, falters, and is incrementally replaced by autocracy wherein everyone is reduced to a stupefied and anonymous mass idling away life while hallucinating engagement and vitality. Here the potent-most neurotic takes the reins, herds the mass as he wills, and plays the game-master of state–and of the world, if only that were possible. The craziest of the crazies rules. That which ought to be an integral and integrated society becomes schizophrenic or simply frantic. Nothing happens. Nothing “really” happens except for the silent scream within and the too vociferous scream without. The game goes on, but no one is being entertained or satisfied. Satisfaction, fulfillment, cannot come from a world imagined merely material. Imagination is not a whiteboard upon which one can chart out ambition and action. Ambition and action are not to be dismissed from life, but if these energies that seek to propel us to be in the world for the world are to be authentic, realistic, “natural,” of our nature, they need something more than a graph to be realized. If they are to be truly human, vital, vitalizing, they need vista, an internal spaciousness, soul. They require a depth of and for meaningfulness above the acquisition of material status and security. They need the creative imagination, an imagination free to explore, not the surface needs, but the depths of us. They need soul, need to acknowledge soul. They need re-cognize life as depth, not as a thing, not as a promotional product quantifiable, advertisable, marketable, sellable. They need to know soul as the essential quality of vitalizing scope, and therein action.
The mythopoetic nature of soul reveals the depths of soul, that sheer creativity, that freedom of creativity, resident as the essence of psyche/soul. That grace, that Creator’s print, is at the core of the being of each and all. The images anciently encoded in narrative forms of myth, the more concrete mediums of stone and paint, or the more fleeting platforms of song, music, rhythm, dance still speak to us. Their ancient origin, their extraordinariness, is not a reason for dismissal from the halls of modern consideration. On the contrary, such points to the archetypal elan of inspiration, its affectivity, its evocation. The psyche wants ever to speak to us about life and its meaning and it does so in its own language of symbol, story, and sacral gesture. It speaks in the sense-timbred tones, the feeling-tinged colours of imagination.
To immerse oneself in these potent items, be it in the therapeutics of the analyst’s office or in the therapeutic drama of religious ritual is to step away from the press of the everyday world and its burden, and to allow oneself to feel, to intuit, to sense oneself connected to something more vital than that world of quotidian cares and concerns with its confusion of rationality as the sole extroverted attitude and function proper to humanity, than the ego-driven world of power and prestige. Imagination opens in us the depth for under-standing self.
Genesis speaks of man as imago Dei, as the image of the Creator-God. Creativity is in the heart of us. It is the purpose of us. It acts as the salvific, the fulfilling dynamic of us each and all. Call that Creativity grace. Name that Creativity the psychic power of integration. It is a matter of languages. Neither religion nor psychology functions for healing and growth unless its therapeutics, its caring and care, its dynamic give and take, its tug of war between sin and salvation, guilt and relative blame are entered into in surrender, in sacrifice of ego-concern, and in bowing before the omnipotent power of creative imagining that seeks ever to pulse outward from the depths of us toward wholeness, toward the integration of self as being in the world for the sake of this world, this world known in Christianity as that which God so loves as to empty his-Self into it, the world we too painfully today need to know is the very matrix of our sociality, our viability. It is this very world, this world spiritualized, psychologized in its Creator, that today reacts to our obsessive materialism by turning against us as if we are become an invasive species rather than the care-taker species. We read: “God put man in the garden to tend to it.” Ever since the paradisiac fall we have not been tending, and so the groaning of Earth for its fulfillment [Romans 8:22] has become before us a protesting roar.
Ego has its place in the evolution of the individual but only a place, a station. If one is to become one, is to move healthily toward oneness, ego must step aside, and in turn, in a sense, the individual itself must step aside. One needs an active, a creative imagination in order to step aside and bow before the depths and scope of one’s origins. The spirituality of religious action rightly administered and applied allows the space for that, a space to discern the Spirit at the root of life—individual, terrestrial. Religious ritual rightly done allows the time and space for one to continuously turn toward, continuously move toward, continuously be transformed by the archaic, abiogenic power which is Creativity Itself—eternal, undepletable—”the Deathless One, Holy One” of divine service.
The churches have muchly abandoned the all transcending to an all-consuming practicality, to the prattle of the ego-driven mass anonymity with its desire to placate itself. But it was not always so. Sacred things, unspeakable things, were once handled with fear and trembling, with awe and respect, with a reverence and a gravity of gesture and geometry that could rightly express the solemnity of the moment. Today, under the pressures of the masses materialized and thus made soul-less and therein anonymous too many forget that without solemnity and gravity en-ritualized there can be no movement of transcending power toward the moment of self-revelation, no act of inspiration to inform the ego that thinks itself a solidly in this world that it is in fact but a transient movement within the psyche. We are cheated of the inspiration to perform the miraculous, to trans-value, and so to transform the very human ego-man into soulful-man. Thus, wanting of soul we turn to endless distractions from reality, to denials of reality, to self-promoting pretentions, and to ego-stroking products and parties. We fill up our mortal lives rather than fulfill them.
This forum has been an exercise in imagination, an exercise to re-imagine how the gospel truth might be made palatable to a post-Christian society. That does involve looking to the history of dogmas, to past forms of transmission, and it does involve experimentations into finding a new vocabulary to express the truth. I do not disparage the traditional language of ritual, but that tongue is not the same language one needs to convey the truth of gospel to a foreign world, a world disinterested in the notions of ancient and mediaeval philosophy that formed the mode of transmission of gospel in ages past. Ritual language is the language of faith, the sacred tongue of the believing community. It is not the language for apostatising. Indeed, using it outside the confines of sacred time-space is a sacrilege, a profanation of the sacred, the “reserved.”
Because language and culture are intimately conjoined it must be admitted that relatively few words are metaphrastic. Even in the Romance languages certain words may sound alike, be spelled alike, but the meanings differ, if but slightly. A slight variance of perspective can, when extended to a distance, yield a quite distinct vision. Ask a hundred souls to picture a circle and one hundred very personal, feeling-toned images will emerge—wholeness, tranquility, portal, abyss, geometrics, aperture, sun-disc, balloon, confinement, orifice, boundary, compression, etc. No circle is just a circle in the human soul. The soul endlessly makes images out of itself and, so every image encoded in a word is tinged with fragments of thinking, of feeling, of sensing. In their polyphony the images generated by the psyche give ground for geometry to emerge, for science and for art to emerge, for the civilized man to emerge. Those myriad images each carry a history, a history which is not only individual, but social, cultural, terrestrial. Every experience of life lies behind every image. Creativity itself lies behind and within every image. Every word set out as objectively as possible in a lexicon has a history not only of usage, of origin, but of feeling. Every word a psyche, a soul, uses to express itself—internally and externally—has a history personal and cosmic. And history is ever more than facts; it is ever the telling of experiences, of feelings at once a commixture of the personal, terrestrial, and ultimately the cosmic.
That complexity of meaning does not mean realistic communication is unachievable, be that a realistic communion of the internal voices of the psyche, or a realistic communion of peoples and souls. It does mean communication is always arising from myriad fields, dredging up histories. The transmittal of ideas and the palatability of communication rest on an ancient sea, a sometime very turbulent sea, a seemingly infinite depth of feeling-toned images. Their creative aim is to form a person attuned within and to the world—a wholistic being, a being in touch with the inexhaustible depths of self and the reality of the world about that self. The palatability of communication rests in our very sociality and our terrestriality. The artistry of communication, the virtuousness, the humbleness of communication resides in acknowledging the uniqueness of the experiences of every individual, and the respect for every encultured individual within the dynamic of any attempted coming together of individuals. Yet there is, to borrow from ritual, no Communion without first the confessions of fault and faith, without first each sincerely acknowledging one’s past with its prejudices, preoccupations, and presumptions about self and other, without also acclaiming its hopes and aspirations. Communication, like the Holy Communion, is an exercise in open and creative imagination. We need thus to bare the soul, believe the vision, and hope after it. There ought to be neither hesitancy nor fear here, for we need remember the soul is naturally bare. It is we who want to hide from it, hide from Creativity, and cover our doubts and anxieties behind masks of ego and persona. Only when we bare our souls do we find imagination can run free, and create wonders.
Lest anyone misread my argumentations, I am not reducing God to soul/psyche or to any thing or any power. God is the mystery ever receding from understanding and any level of the conceptualization of experience. Thus, it is said the Father is greater than the Son, and that God is ever more than the Christ. God is the inconceivable. Even the reverential name “Power” is a concession to our finitude. There might be a finite moment one feels the touch of the divine, but the divine and sacred–in its infinity–is always touching the created. God remains always the above and the beyond us, the ungraspable elan out of which arises the mystery that is being and life. In the immensity of unknowing one must not flee into denial and disbelief, but stand one’s ground, stand dumb-founded, shaken, and bowed in awe. God within us is where imagination truly resides because we are imago Dei.
Imago Dei has its own logos, its own logic. It is the logic of the creative imagination. It is the primal and eternal logos of creation itself. It is not rational. It is contrary to the logos of reason with its mathematical, syllogistic, and deductive properties. That “reasonable” logic belongs to post-paradisiac man, to the man who can analyze, to the man who seeks to differentiate right and wrong, to man the sinner. It is, thus, the logic of wrath and justice, of good and evil, of “an eye for an eye.” It is about making judgements, and under its weight we labour to live out the practicalities of our life together. But, we are “sinner and saved.” There still resides within that primordial logos, the logos of inspiration and communication, the logos that gives spirit, the logos that convenes the community of man and nature, the commune of the all-in-all. Only that primal logos of creative imagining, being the true image of creativity [Colossians 1:15], can bring all things forth and all things together. Only the logos of the eternally creative imagination can bring to resolution the psychic antagonisms of wrath and love, judgement and freedom. Only the logos that contains the eternality of the past and the eternality of the future defines all communication, stands the alpha and omega, the parameters of all internal and external communication. Only in the logos of the primal creative imagination can we “know” of God, and find the “sense” to experience, to re-cognize, God incarnate.
Mid-last century, in a quest to define us, stary-eyed young people sang “We are stardust.” No. That is but a step along the way. It is a step that carries a danger for stardust is material. We are more than stardust. We are imagination in search of communication. For all the missteps and misconceptions within and without, for all the frustrations and false steps, for all the circuitous routes and blind alleys we continue on seeking to invent ourselves, to pre-sent ourselves, to communicate. And what is communication but ultimately to find that rarest and most precious moment of community from which every soul begins and in which every soul seeks its end: love.
We have each and all a “saving grace;” we want to be loved. Many simply know not how that works. Within the soul, that print divine, resides the memory of its first and greatest command: “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and soul, all thy mind and being.” Too many have forgotten how to love that God, that grace, that spirit, that Self that dwells within. We cannot discern what that means. We brush upon it, and it seems a phantom, and so we ignore it. We cannot free this Deus absconditus, this “Hidden God,” from the suffocating masks we devise, the idols of self we make in the hope of making the world love us. And thus, we disconnect and dissociate from our primal imprint and being. We depauperate ourselves. We fail to embrace the singular-most resource, to incarnate it, to offer ourselves as vessels of love for love. Frustrated, we subsist in pretentions and a pretended reality. We invented religion to assist us in holding onto the greater vision of ourselves, but we too often have allowed religion to be sterilized in action, concretized in thought. Priests and psychotherapist cannot meet the need. We need to again turn within to find that print divine, to free imagination from materialism, to know ourselves in our origins and depths such that our innate vitality and sociality can be made realized, made manifest. Before the beginning Creativity imagined a communication of itself. From that comes the print that resides within that seeks to empower soul and world if we will but to pause, to feel, to hear, to ourselves imagine ourselves—the abiogenic in replication.