Flashback Friday
Imagination, Suffering, and God: some Lenten reflections
Last year I was honored to give two talks as part of a Lenten retreat for a Catholic parish in Texas. The topic was, “The Imagination as a Spiritual Tool.” I’ve never published them, but I thought perhaps you all would like to read them. I haven’t edited them, so pardon any little quirks that come from speaking.
Here’s Part I. (Part two coming next week.)
The Imagination as a Spiritual Tool
Over these two talks, I want to examine one of the elements of Catholicism that I find to be richest and most surprising: the idea that suffering has meaning. Catholicism proclaims that we don’t have to shrug our shoulders and claim confusion in the face of suffering, even the suffering of the righteous.
Tonight we’re going to look at what the Church says about suffering. We’re also going to dig deeply into what the Church says about our ultimate purpose–about what we are made for. We’re going to examine one of the most interesting facets of God’s character that is revealed to us in Scripture and Tradition, and we are going to begin developing a new approach–an imaginative approach–to the problem of suffering in the world.
Before we begin, I want to offer a caveat: I do not consider myself an expert in suffering. I haven’t had to do as much of it as many people have, and I’m certain that many of you in this room have a lot of wisdom to offer on this topic that I don’t have. I am a poet and a scholar of literature; what I’m here to offer is what I hope is a helpful new way to approach suffering–great and small–in our own lives and in the lives of others. I will say that in my own limited experience, I have found that God can, and does, transform suffering into joy. What I am trying to work out, both through these talks and through much of my other writing, is how we can best prepare ourselves in advance to receive suffering as a gift.
With that said, let’s begin.
What is suffering, after all?
I grew up Protestant, and part of a particularly rigorous and systematic branch of Protestantism. My church was deeply intellectual and sought to create a truly thorough understanding of reality in light of the Gospel. But when I started learning about Catholicism, I was struck by how Catholicism fills a gap that I’d felt in my Protestant upbringing: the gap of why does God allow suffering?
Many people—Christian and secular, Catholic and Protestant alike—find the existence of suffering to be a major challenge to their ability to accept that God is loving and all-powerful. There are several approaches to answering this question: the first is what I call the “pain is punishment” approach, in which we try to understand suffering as a natural consequence of evil. This approach frames suffering as God’s way of punishing evil, either individual evil or corporate evil. Suffering, in other words, somehow “balances the scales.”
Scripture indicates that there is something to this view: God does seem to bring suffering against individuals and groups who are particularly evil, wayward, or belligerent. Consider, for example, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis, or the cycle of suffering throughout the Old Testament that the Israelites experience as they repeatedly fall away from God: famine, drought, plagues, and ultimately, defeat, captivity, and exile in Babylon. The prophets tell us over and over that the suffering of the people of Israel is a direct result of their rebellion against God.
There is also plenty of evidence throughout Scripture that suffering entered the world at the Fall, when Adam and Eve sinned. Our sin is closely bound up with suffering, and there is a natural cause-and-effect relationship between the two. Our sin leads to the ultimate suffering–separation from God–and it also often correlates with physical, social, emotional, and mental suffering.
But is that the whole picture? The question arises: if pain is just for punishment, why do the righteous suffer? Even in the story of the captivity and exile of Israel, we know that some of the Israelites were righteous; Daniel, for example, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, from the book of Daniel. These men suffered greatly, and sometimes as a direct result of their righteousness. So the “pain is punishment” approach is clearly not the whole picture.
The second common approach to suffering is the “pain gets our attention” approach. Theologian and writer C.S. Lewis expresses this beautifully when he says, while mourning the suffering and death of his beloved wife, that “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” We are deafened by our sin, distracted by our excessive love of things of the world. What Lewis is saying here is that God is able to use sufferings to turn our hearts away from the things of this world and towards Him.
There is certainly an element of truth there. But again, this approach leaves open a massive question: if pain is an instrument to turn our hearts and minds towards God, why do people who are already attentive to God suffer so much? For example, why did Our Lady—a human being whose entire being was already turned towards God—experience the incredible suffering we commemorate in the Seven Sorrows?
In the face of these questions, Catholicism makes a profound and bold claim. It’s that claim I want to examine over the next few evenings.
Catholicism tells us that our suffering does more than simply balance the cosmic scales; it does more than simply remind us of God. Suffering, the Church says, is a means of grace—it is a way to enter more fully into the life of God, and to literally and meaningfully participate in the salvation of all things.
When we suffer, or when we come face-to-face with suffering, we are being given a chance to join in God’s redemptive work—and, an even more incredible thought, to join with God’s very nature.
Sometimes we draw back from the astonishing reality of what God intends for us. We struggle to accept that God’s plan of redemption goes beyond merely “fixing us” or “making us our best selves.” God intends not just to make us perfect humans, but to actually make us part of Himself. He is working to draw all things—including us—into Himself, where we will be able to at last be what we were meant to be.
St. Athanasius put it this way: “the Son of God became man so that men might become God.” This is a provocative expression of the story of salvation—so provocative, in fact, that sometimes we struggle to hear it. But it is part of the Catechism; section 460 says:
The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (CCC 460).
Next time Catholicism starts to seem drab or boring to you, just remember this passage! Not only did God become a human, but each and every one of us has the potential to become God.
Now, St. Athanasius was a great theologian; he understood that there is an infinite divide between God and humanity. God is, simply, something else entirely. So what could he possibly have meant by saying that “we might become God”?
He means that we, through Christ, are able to participate in God’s Divine nature.
We tend to focus on the “God becoming man” part—Christ, through the Incarnation, takes on our human nature so that we can, as the writer of Hebrews says, have “a great high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.” But sometimes we forget the second part: “that men might become gods.”
To get a little technical here for a moment, we will participate in God’s communicable attributes, or the attributes or characteristics he has that we can share in. These are attributes like wisdom, goodness, and love—things that humans, through our nature, are able to participate in. We will not become “like God” in the way the Devil strove to—we will not take part in the uniquely Divine, or incommunicable, attributes like simplicity, omniscience (all knowing ness), and omnipotence (all powerful ness). But we will become “like God” in a distinct and meaningful way.
This quote from St. Athanasius reveals just how transformative the Incarnation of Christ was. When Christ became man, He brought humanity into the very Godhead. Christ’s human nature exists forever alongside his eternal Divine nature—which means that for all of us, our human nature no longer bars us from Divine participation, but instead makes this participation possible. That is the very definition of Heaven: eternal participation in God’s nature—and the very definition of Hell is exclusion from that nature.
So that is what Scripture tells us the Incarnation changed for us after we die. Now, we are able to spend eternity with God. But does the Incarnation change anything for our lives here and now? Does St. Athanasius’ idea that “we might become God” affect us on this side of death?
Yes, it does—and it works through the reality of suffering.
God and suffering
God’s nature includes suffering. This might sound very strange, but we know this from Scripture and tradition. We know that Christ was fully God and fully Man; in Him, the two natures become one Person. What Christ experienced as Man, He experienced as God; there was no shutting down of his God-nature while he was on earth, and there is no suspending of his Man-nature now that He is in heaven. He is, now and forever, fully God and fully Man. And while he was on earth, he suffered.
He experienced, as Scripture tells us, all the suffering that goes along with human nature. He did not only suffer in his Passion; he suffered throughout his life. He watched his father-on-earth, Joseph, die. He saw his mother suffer through that loss. He worked hard, endured poverty and scorn and alienation. His life was one of trial and suffering. During his 40 days in the wilderness, he was hungry and weak. When his friend Lazarus died, he wept. The scorn and betrayal of his beloved people wounded his heart. Christ suffered deeply in his life on earth, and as he did this, it was not just his Man-nature suffering; it was his God-nature too.
But this is not the only indication we have that God suffers. We see it throughout the Old Testament, when God begs his beloved Israel to return to him. Consider these verses from Jeremiah 2:
This is what the Lord says: “I remember how you loved Me when you were young. Your love was as a bride. I remember how you followed Me in the desert, through a land that had not been planted. 3 Israel was holy to the Lord, the first-fruits of His gathering. All who ate of it (Israel) were guilty, and trouble came upon them,” says the Lord.’”
The Lord says, “What wrong did your fathers find in Me, that they turned so far from Me and followed false gods?”
These verses, spoken by God through his prophet Jeremiah, are marked by suffering. They are words of someone who has been rejected by a beloved, and who is grieved by that rejection. Beyond that, God grieves for the pain that they experience as a result of their treachery.
Now, the Bible does not say this explicitly, but think about what we know of God, and go all the way back to the Garden, to the moment after Adam eats the fruit, when God is walking in the Garden and Adam hides from him. Knowing God’s heart as He reveals it later in the Scripture, it’s impossible to imagine that God was not suffering as he passed through the Garden and sought Adam, and knew that Adam and Eve had sinned, and knew all the horror that would be unleashed because of that sin, and knew too that his own Son would have to come and die because of it.
The story in Genesis does not let us into God’s mind, but we can imagine from what other parts of Scripture reveal, and I think we are safe in saying that God has, in some sense, known suffering since at least the Fall of Adam (though of course it is difficult to talk about God in terms of time).
Some of the great men and women of the Church also give us insights into this often-overlooked element of God’s character. Dame Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English anchoress (and, incidentally, the first named female writer in English), reminds us in Revelations of Divine Love of Christ’s intense suffering on the Cross. Dame Julian suffered greatly in her life; during her life, half the population of her city died of the Black Plague. In addition, the Peasants’ Revolt roiled her country, and many people were killed.
But Julian asked God for even more suffering; she asked to be sick unto death. During that experience, she received searing visions of the Crucifixion, which she describes in gruesome detail in ehr writings. But that is not all; she goes on to tell us that when we suffer, “Christ suffers with us.” Here’s what she wrote:
For as much as He was most tender and pure, right so He was most strong and mighty to suffer. And for every man's sin that shall be saved He suffered: and every man's sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed for Kindness and love. [...] For as long as He was passible He suffered for us and sorrowed for us; and now He is uprisen and no more passible, yet He suffereth with us.
Julian draws out the connection between love and suffering–when we love, we are “oned,” as she says.
This suffering—this joining in the pain of others and becoming one with them—is a part of God’s character.
When once we begin to think of suffering as a part of God’s character, it transforms our understanding both of God and of the possible meaning of suffering. Suffering is now not merely a tool being used to “fix” the world or to get our attention, but rather a window into God’s own heart.
This also transforms our approach to suffering, both our own and that of others. To understand that, I’d like to take a look at an under-appreciated part of human nature—the part of ourselves that we call “the imagination”—and explore how it can play a powerful role in equipping us to suffer as God does.
Salvation and imagination
I’d like to begin this section of the evening with a story:
In 1914, a young Oxford student stood in the train station at Leatherhead, blowing on his hands against the chilly morning air. On his way to the station, he had ducked into a book shop to get something to read. Despite his staunch atheism, he’d chosen a slim volume by a Christian writer—a fairy tale. The book was now wrapped in a parcel and tucked under his arm. Little did the young man know that within two hours, this small, strange book would overturn his whole life, setting him on a path towards becoming one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th century, author of theological and fictional classics that would help define the modern understanding of Christianity across the Western world. The student’s name was Clive Staples Lewis, the future author of such Christian classics as Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. The book was George MacDonald’s Phantastes.
Lewis wrote later that when he first read Phantastes, “[The book] did nothing to my intellect nor to my conscience, [but] what it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize… my imagination.”
This is an unusual way to describe a conversion experience. Lewis attributed the beginning of her turn away from atheism towards Christianity not to a rational argument, but to a fairy tale that offered him a series of images—symbols—that completely changed his way of thinking.
This kind of conversion—a conversion of the imagination that becomes a conversion of the mind, heart, will, and life—would have made a lot more sense to medieval Catholics than to 21st century Christians, because of how people in Christendom thought about the imagination and its role in a person’s life.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, is perhaps the strongest advocate of “converting the imagination.” We will look more closely at his specific story and practice in our talk tomorrow, but St. Ignatius’ spirituality was grounded in what he called “imaginative prayer”: The spiritual practice of placing oneself imaginatively in a scene from Scripture, usually the life of Christ, to draw closer to the mysteries of the Gospel.
What does this mean, to use our imaginations as spiritual weapons in the pursuit of holiness?
Allow me a very brief digression into the nature of knowledge. This might seem abstract, but it actually has profound implications for how we can come to know God.
Today, we have a much less nuanced understanding of knowledge and how we acquire knowledge than people had during the Middle Ages. People used to understand that within our “reason,” there are two elements: one called ratio and one called intellectus. Ratio encompassed what we usually think of as “reason”: logical analysis, decision-making, etc. Intellectus, on the other hand, referred to a more contemplative, complete kind of knowledge, knowledge that consisted of simply knowing.
To give an example, ratio works like listening to this talk: over time, your ratio gathers the different pieces of information that I’m sharing and tries to analyze out some kind of whole from the various parts. Intellectus, on the other hand, is like viewing a painting (indicate Martyrs of Gorkum), where the whole thing is present to you all at once, and you behold it. We will spend more time with this painting tomorrow, but for now, just take a moment to look at it. (pause)
Obviously you can study a painting and get to know it better through ratio, but you’ve encountered the entire thing in a breath, and whether you fully understand it or not, it’s already entered your mind and is affecting you. This painting, even though you may not know anything about the historical context, caused you to feel and think. It gave you, in a flash, a whole sense of reality, one that you now must wrestle with, consciously or unconsciously. You must bring into unity with the all other senses of reality you’ve received throughout your life.
This, basically, is the imagination.
Today when we use the word “imagination,” we usually mean “making things up.” We mean something far-fetched, inventive, out of this world. But when we limit imagination to make-believe, we lose a great spiritual tool, one that Catholics from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross to St. Theresa Benedicta and Pope St. John Paul II: the tool of receiving God’s truth through contemplation of images.
It’s interesting how much this has left our parlance. In older translations of the Bible like the King James (the most influential translation even for Catholics in giving language to our religion), the words “imagine” or “imagination” appear dozens of times. In the New American Standard, they appear only four times. In the ESV, a commonly used translation in Catholic parishes, the words appear five times.
Whereas the New King James gives us such lovely translations as this from 1 Chronicles 29:18,
The NASB replaces imagination of the thoughts with the word intention. The ESV gives us purposes. What we lose here is the sense of image, of keeping before us the robust, sense-based outward signs of God’s presence and faithfulness. These more contemporary translations tend to make the verse much more about reasoning and action; by eliminating the idea of imagination, they put the emphasis on decision, not knowing.
I am not a Hebrew scholar, so I cannot say which translation is more accurate. I am, however, a scholar of English, and it is noteworthy that as our understanding of human nature became more strictly rational during the Enlightenment, losing much of the nuance of the Medieval, our translations of Holy Writ have stripped out the idea of imagination. The way we think about ourselves today–and our suffering–is less nuanced and holistic than it was for many generations that came before us. So I want to try to walk backwards and recreate, as best we can, that older, deeper understanding of the human person.
Here's the amazing thing about human beings: all of our knowledge starts as a sensory perception—it starts by coming through one of our five senses into our bodies so that our minds can work on it. Knowledge, in other words, starts with the body. It starts with images. We receive things from outside of ourselves—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings—and we take those into our imaginations, where they become the stuff of our interior lives.
All too often, we think of ourselves as primarily rational—analytic—when really, we are primarily imaginative. We do reason, of course, but we can only reason with what we have received through our imaginations.
So what does this have to do with God? How does this carry over to the pursuit of holiness?
It means, frankly, that we cannot get away with ignoring our imaginations in our pursuit of holiness.
This is what C.S. Lewis meant when he said that Phantastes had “baptized his imagination.” Lewis was a decided atheist at this point in his life. He had, using reason, determined that he could not believe that God existed. Looking at what he knew of reality, he reasoned that he had no compelling evidence that there was a God or that any divine powers cared at all about human activity. Then he read Phantastes, and through MacDonald’s tale, he received new images—images of an entirely new shape and scale, images that opened up an entirely new way to reason about reality. He discovered new landscapes, heights and depths to the created order that he had never encountered before. And though Phantastes makes no rational argument in favor of the existence of God or the necessity of Christ’s Incarnation for salvation, the images of the fairy tale indicated a universe in which those things were absolutely true. The images of the tale were so compelling that Lewis was thrust from his tightly reasoned God-less world into another, both wilder and warmer than any he had encountered before. Long before he acquiesced rationally to the premises of Christianity, he had given way imaginatively.
Suffering and salvation
So what does this have to do with suffering?
Suffering is one of the great conundrums of the faith. The simple logical premises around the problem stump many a college freshman—how can a good God tolerate suffering? How can an all-powerful God permit pain?—but they also torment many of us who are much farther along in our journey.
The logical path followed by many people, even people with good formation, is this:
- A good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering.
- There is suffering in the world.
- Therefore God is either not good or not all-powerful.
Logically, this is inarguable. Rationally, it is water-tight. Working with the established premises—that a good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering, and that there is suffering in the world—we must come to the conclusion that God is either not good or not all-powerful.
The problem here is not with our logic. It is with our starting point, our premises. It is with the information we begin with. It is, ultimately, with our imaginations.
Full disclosure: this example comes from a logic course I was blessed to take with Dr. Peter Kreeft, the Catholic philosopher and apologist. Dr. Kreeft, in keeping with the Catholic tradition, constantly emphasized checking our premises. We cannot assume that the knowledge we begin with is complete. So we must check the premises of this logical syllogism. Those premises are:
[First Premise] A good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering, AND
[Second Premise] There is suffering in the world.
Our Second Premise, that there is suffering in the world, is clearly true. For us to reject that premise, we would have to deny the evidence of all of human history; we would have to say that the anguish experienced by every single one of us is not actually suffering, and therefore, suffering does not exist in the world. That claim does not line up with reality. Logic must align with reality–otherwise, it is merely a mental exercise that has no bearing on our lives. The premise that there is suffering in the world is undeniably true.
So we must turn our attention to the first premise: that a good and all-powerful God would not allow suffering. Is that true?
Rationally it seems true. Surely a good God would not want bad things for people, and surely an all-powerful God could stop suffering from happening. Right?
This is where our imagination must come into play. And this is where things get interesting. Remember: in modern usage, imagination means making things up. But in the language of Christendom, of the great minds and hearts of the Catholic Middle Ages, imagination means a different, more profound way of reasoning.
To begin using our imaginations, the first thing we must do is look. The root of imagination is image. Our imaginations are the collected mass of images–not just sight-images, but sound, taste, scent, and feeling images–we have gathered over our lives. Stories, games, songs, jokes–these are all part of our imaginative hoard, our collected stock of images. These, as well as rational calculations, make up the landscape of our souls.
Our responsibility is to make our imaginative landscapes–our souls–as close to God’s reality as we can. So we must look. Not merely at things we want to see, but at things we don’t. Not merely at things that are easy to look at, but at things that are hard. We must look closely into all that God has made, done, revealed, concealed, everything that could give us a new–and accurate–image in our landscape. We do not need to reason yet; we do not need to try to create syllogisms and answer logical problems. To begin, we only look.
Now, there is a caveat here. Everything we look at enters our soul. Everything we turn our sensory attention to becomes part of our imaginative landscape, and shapes the way we can reason. So if we fill our imaginations with trivial things, specious things, forbidden things, ugly things, our imaginative landscapes become trivial and ugly–and our ability to reason truly, to come to true conclusions about the world, is stunted and perhaps ruined.
In the King James Bible translation we mentioned earlier, many of the references to imagination are warnings not to imagine deceit or evil, and cautions that those whose imaginations are given over to evil will not see God.
But the imagination is also a tool for sanctification. St. Augustine, following the tradition of Scripture, connects imagination with memory. When, throughout the Old Testament, God calls his people to “remember” their past, particularly the exodus from slavery in Egypt, he is calling them to set up a story of his faithfulness in their imaginations. Stories do not appeal primarily to our analytic minds, but to our imaginations. They offer us pictures, characters, symbols, which shape our understanding of the world.
The imagination even has the power to change our memories; by overlaying a story of redemption over a story of suffering, like God did when he took his people out of slavery and through the desert, suffering itself can be transformed in memory into a purgative–and triumphant–thing.
The strange logic of suffering
So here we are back at our topic of suffering. Let me close this evening with an example of how imagination allows us to approach the mystery of suffering in a new and powerful way, and gives us new tools to examine the premises in the logical syllogism we examined before. As a reminder, that syllogism goes like this:
- A good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering.
- There is suffering in the world.
- Therefore God is either not good or not all-powerful.
It’s logically sound. So if we’re going to disprove it–if we are going to find a way to argue that God is all-powerful and good despite the existence of suffering–we have to show that one of the premises is false. Obviously there is suffering in the world. So what can we do? Are we doomed to live in a logical contradiction? Or is there another way?
We’re coming to the end of our time tonight. We’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve talked about how suffering is a huge challenge for people, religious and non-religious alike. Suffering makes us question how we think about God, and ask ourselves how God could allow terrible things to happen. The reality that we’ve explored tonight is that we cannot only address those questions through analyzing and reasoning. We must also approach them imaginatively, and be willing to have our horizons broadened through images. We considered the big picture of what God has planned for his people, which is so much bigger than simply a good time in heaven. God wants us to be like him, to participate in his very nature.
Tomorrow we are going to turn our attention to that first premise: that a good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering. We’re going to test it against Scripture and see what revelations we can discover.
I also am a big believer in practicality; the Faith is not a bunch of ideas, but rather it is conviction that turns into practice. We learn about God by thinking about him, yes, but we also learn about him by living. So tomorrow we will dig into how we should live, by exploring examples from literature, art, and religious tradition.
Suffering is one of the great conundrums of the faith. The simple logical premises around the problem stump many a college freshman—how can a good God tolerate suffering? How can an all-powerful God permit pain?—but they also torment many of us who are much farther along in our journey.
The logical path followed by many people, even people with good formation, is this:
- A good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering.
- There is suffering in the world.
- Therefore God is either not good or not all-powerful.
Logically, this is inarguable. Rationally, it is water-tight. Working with the established premises—that a good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering, and that there is suffering in the world—we must come to the conclusion that God is either not good or not all-powerful.
The problem here is not with our logic. It is with our starting point, our premises. It is with the information we begin with. It is, ultimately, with our imaginations.
Full disclosure: this example comes from a logic course I was blessed to take with Dr. Peter Kreeft, the Catholic philosopher and apologist. Dr. Kreeft, in keeping with the Catholic tradition, constantly emphasized checking our premises. We cannot assume that the knowledge we begin with is complete. So we must check the premises of this logical syllogism. Those premises are:
[First Premise] A good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering, AND
[Second Premise] There is suffering in the world.
Our Second Premise, that there is suffering in the world, is clearly true. For us to reject that premise, we would have to deny the evidence of all of human history; we would have to say that the anguish experienced by every single one of us is not actually suffering, and therefore, suffering does not exist in the world. That claim does not line up with reality. Logic must align with reality–otherwise, it is merely a mental exercise that has no bearing on our lives. The premise that there is suffering in the world is undeniably true.
So we must turn our attention to the first premise: that a good and all-powerful God would not allow suffering. Is that true?
Rationally it seems true. Surely a good God would not want bad things for people, and surely an all-powerful God could stop suffering from happening. Right?
This is where our imagination must come into play. And this is where things get interesting. Remember: in modern usage, imagination means making things up. But in the language of Christendom, of the great minds and hearts of the Catholic Middle Ages, imagination means a different, more profound way of reasoning.
To begin using our imaginations, the first thing we must do is look. The root of imagination is image. Our imaginations are the collected mass of images–not just sight-images, but sound, taste, scent, and feeling images–we have gathered over our lives. Stories, games, songs, jokes–these are all part of our imaginative hoard, our collected stock of images. These, as well as rational calculations, make up the landscape of our souls.
Our responsibility is to make our imaginative landscapes–our souls–as close to God’s reality as we can. So we must look. Not merely at things we want to see, but at things we don’t. Not merely at things that are easy to look at, but at things that are hard. We must look closely into all that God has made, done, revealed, concealed, everything that could give us a new–and accurate–image in our landscape. We do not need to reason yet; we do not need to try to create syllogisms and answer logical problems. To begin, we only look.
Now, there is a caveat here. Everything we look at enters our soul. Everything we turn our sensory attention to becomes part of our imaginative landscape, and shapes the way we can reason. So if we fill our imaginations with trivial things, specious things, forbidden things, ugly things, our imaginative landscapes become trivial and ugly–and our ability to reason truly, to come to true conclusions about the world, is stunted and perhaps ruined.
In the King James Bible translation we mentioned earlier, many of the references to imagination are warnings not to imagine deceit or evil, and cautions that those whose imaginations are given over to evil will not see God.
But the imagination is also a tool for sanctification. St. Augustine, following the tradition of Scripture, connects imagination with memory. When, throughout the Old Testament, God calls his people to “remember” their past, particularly the exodus from slavery in Egypt, he is calling them to set up a story of his faithfulness in their imaginations. Stories do not appeal primarily to our analytic minds, but to our imaginations. They offer us pictures, characters, symbols, which shape our understanding of the world.
The imagination even has the power to change our memories; by overlaying a story of redemption over a story of suffering, like God did when he took his people out of slavery and through the desert, suffering itself can be transformed in memory into a purgative–and triumphant–thing.
Conclusion to Part I
So here we are back at our topic of suffering. Let me close this evening with an example of how imagination allows us to approach the mystery of suffering in a new and powerful way, and gives us new tools to examine the premises in the logical syllogism we examined before. As a reminder, that syllogism goes like this:
- A good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering.
- There is suffering in the world.
- Therefore God is either not good or not all-powerful.
It’s logically sound. So if we’re going to disprove it–if we are going to find a way to argue that God is all-powerful and good despite the existence of suffering–we have to show that one of the premises is false. Obviously there is suffering in the world. So what can we do? Are we doomed to live in a logical contradiction? Or is there another way?
We’re coming to the end of our time tonight. We’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve talked about how suffering is a huge challenge for people, religious and non-religious alike. Suffering makes us question how we think about God, and ask ourselves how God could allow terrible things to happen. The reality that we’ve explored tonight is that we cannot only address those questions through analyzing and reasoning. We must also approach them imaginatively, and be willing to have our horizons broadened through images. We considered the big picture of what God has planned for his people, which is so much bigger than simply a good time in heaven. God wants us to be like him, to participate in his very nature.
Tomorrow we are going to turn our attention to that first premise: that a good, all-powerful God would not allow suffering. We’re going to test it against Scripture and see what revelations we can discover.
I also am a big believer in practicality; the Faith is not a bunch of ideas, but rather it is conviction that turns into practice. We learn about God by thinking about him, yes, but we also learn about him by living. So tomorrow we will dig into how we should live, by exploring examples from literature, art, and religious tradition.