Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God

Author: Malcolm Guite

Date finished: 11/29/23

How strongly I recommend it: 8/10

This book had a lot of build up from others. I enjoy listening to Malcolm Guite a little more than reading him. That said, I enjoyed his many nuggets about the imagination.

My Highlights

1. Imagination and the Kingdom of God

The whole purpose of the arts…is to awaken the mind’s attention to remove “the film of familiarity",” to “cleanse the doors of perception” as Blake put it. The power which art deploys to do these things is the power of imagination. (12)

The power of the imagination does not just come into play when we are making up stories, it is the imagination which allows us to grasp the whole, the meaning, the pattern in what w perceive, to draw the lines that connect the dots, to glimpse the pattern that suddenly makes sense of disparate and apparently random things. It is by the forming and perceiving power of imagination that the constant stream of data flowing into us through our senses is shaped into a tree, a mountain, a sunset, the face of our beloved. (13)

The purpose of this book is to explore the awe-inspiring consequences of that insight, and to show how there may be an encouragement and, more than that, a wake-up call to Christian artists. (13, main point)

The Enlightenment ushered in a mustrust and marginalisation of imaginative and poetic vision and a particular suspicion of the ambivalent or multivalent language of poetry…Some philosophers of the Enlightenment thought that image and imagination simply clouded and obscured the pure dry knowledge which they were after. (14)

The entire realm of “objective” truth was to be the exclusive terrain of Reason at its narrowest: analytic, reductive, atomising, and the faculties of Imagination and Intuition, those very faculties which alone were capable of integrating, synthesising, and making sense of our atomised factual knowledge were relegated to a purely private and “subjective” truth. (14)

So, we were left torn between anincreasingly bleak reductionism which gave us data but no meaning, and an increasingly dislocated and orphaned imaginative and intuitive life crying endlessly for meaning but finding no actualy purchase on the facts. (15)

“The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that. I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless” (C.S. Lewis quote, Surprised by Joy, 209-210) (16)

In this book I want to make the case for a recovery and reintegration of the imagination together with the reason as modes of knowing, and further, I want to affirm that the healing of that split, the reconciliation of that division, is to be found in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (16, main point)

In Christ, Lewis found a reconciliation of reason and imagination and therefore found he could trust the imagination as well as the reason as truth-bearing faculty or, as Lewis more precisely put it later, as the organ of meaning: “Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” (Lewis quote from Selected Literary Essays, 265) (19)

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name

(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1) (18)

Whichever end of this divine axis between heaven and earth an artist starts from, her only means of seeing and establishing that connection between heaven and earth in her art is imagination. (20)

The work of imagination is a kind of birthing, a gift of living imaginative form, the making of something that will have its own life and growth and history after the artist has passed on. (21)

The artist makes a home in which that glimpse can root and grow, be found again and again, made knowable and available to us. (21)

[Shakespeare] says that imagination “apprehends” more than cool reason ever “comprehends,” and again that if imagination “would but comprehend some joy it apprehends some bringer of that joy.” The artist in her imaginative “bodying forth” is building a bridge between apprehension and comprehension. All great art is a bridge with one foot in the world of comprehension, the visible, the earth, and one in the realm of apprehension, the invisible, heaven. (21)

It is the special gift of the imagination arts to renew that awe in us, to help us see how any place might suddenly become the very gate of heaven. (26)

Now if it really is the case that the capacity of the imaginative arts to body forth meaning is patterned on and indeed made possible by Christ’s incarnation, and that it completes and fulfills more partial ways of knowing, then it should be the case that artists not only help us see God’s world more clearly but can also help us to penetrate more deeply into the mystery of Christ, give us a fuller understanding of his mission and meaning. (27)

2. Christ and the Artistic Imagination

The artistic imagination can remove the film of familiarity from some of the deepest mysteries of our faith. (29)

3. Christ and the Moral imagination

…there is a creative or imaginative element, even agency, in all perception—in other words there is already a deep imaginative shaping in the way we see the world. (56)

And because the Logos is himself meaning, then the more we bring our imagination consciously to Christ and allow it to be baptised, the more we perceive all things in and through Christ, the more even the most ordinary things are transfigured and glimmer into symbol. (57)

What is the moral imagination? I would say it is particularly that exercise of imagination which enables you to stand in another person’s shoes, to go out from your life and place and into theirs, to imagine and even re-imagine the world from their perspective. (65)

All the parables of Jesus are of course a hugely generative gift to other artists and writers as well as to poets, and this is precisely because the parables work with image, story, and emblem: the very stuff of the creative arts. There is always a parallel in a parable, always some sense in which the outward and visible story translates the inward and spiritual into new and imaginately and generous terms. (71)

[Re: parables and stories] Their episodes and images medial Gospel truths to us in fresh and surprising ways because, through the medium of story, their authors have lifted the veil, removed the film of familiarity, and allowed an ancient truth to strike us in a fresh and immediate way. We certainly need new imaginative artists to take up afresh that task of unveiling and renewal through daring acts of re-imagination. (72)

Jesus simply initiates for us a whole new way of being with each other. He asks us to live and look at the world as though this new approach were the most natural thing in the world. (75)

I felt there was a contradiction at the heart of Lennon’s song and, indeed, even in its opening words: “Imagine there’s no heaven.” In fact, what Lennon is asking us to do in that song is precisely to imagine a kind of heaven, to exercise our moral imaginations, to conjure up the vision of a way of living, which we cannot actually see in action, but which we know should exist. (77)

4. Christ and the Prophetic Imagination

The imagination unveils hidden reality, clarifies vision, and gives substance to hope. (79)

Christ is constantly inviting us to imagine, and so to encounter, the Kingdom of God. (79)

To imagine the Kingdom is always a prophetic act, always a critique of this world, always a call to hope and action. (79)

But in “The Kingdom” the mirrors are…for the blind to see themselves at last, as God sees them. (84)

To proclaim the Kingdom as the place where the bent and fractured people, the losers and victims of an industrial society, which uses people up and spits them out, are finally valued, welcomed home, and shown that they belong. (85)

Thomas takes us to a central paradox of the Kingdom itself: on the one hand it is sheer gift, sheer grace, all achieved for us, and, if we will let him, achieved in us by Christ— “admission is free”; on the other hand to find it, to recognise it, to yearn for it, is to let go of everything else. (87)

When a prophet is called by God to remind Israel of a covenant, which they have abandoned, or to call for a return to that covenant which has not yet been enacted, the prophets avail themselves of the poetic imagination and offer image after image to try and body forth the form of things unknown. So it is that a vineyard, an olive grove, a wine press, a wedding, a feast, a flowering branch of almond, and a tree planted by the waters are all pressed into service that they might express for us the otherwise inexpressible. But there is more to prophecy than the embodiment of truth in symbol. When Isaiah prophesies (Isaiah 25:6-8) that “…[God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations, he will swallow up death forever.” Here he offers us an image that goes to the heart of prophecy itself: the image of unveiling, revealing, taking away the shroud and lifting off the sheet. When such unveiling happens there is revelation…a vision which is, itself, both a critique of the present and a source of hope. (88)

Prophetic imagination…we can see in Christ Jesus the extraordinary and surprising fulfillment of so much Old Testament prophecy (89)…But also the wielder and kindler of the prophetic imagination. (90)