The Imagination

 I have been immersed in homeschool planning for 3 different grades (12th, 5th, and a grade I am calling Special Needs Primary Level) so I haven't had much time to write.   But I wanted to note this morning's listening:

Peter Kreeft on The Imagination.  (this link breaks up the talk into sections since it's long, 1.5 hours).

You can find Peter Kreeft's podcast series at ITunes here, with a link where you can download the whole podcast.

Here is an interview with Peter Kreeft on the Baptized Imagination.

The other day I listened to his talk on Ten Lessons from Lord of the Rings, which was also very good, but I think the Imagination talk was more pivotal for me since more at the outside edge of my understanding.  Lots to think about.

One of the points he made was that our current world isn't so much wickeder than past times, nor is our moral reasoning that much worse, but our moral imagination has drastically failed.

From the direction of his later words, one of the causes seems to be that our schools are failing to teach this, and that is really their main job -- the transmission of moral culture.

He also points to the ambivalence about Beauty in the history of Christianity.    Wonder is the beginning of wisdom, Plato says, and wisdom ends up in wonder (I propose).  CS Lewis talks about this in Surprised by Joy.

Augustine struggled with the idea of Beauty in the Confessions.    When I read "Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ancient and ever new!  Late have I loved Thee!" it summed up something I had never really understood before.  I grew up thinking of God as Good and True, but not Beautiful.  Yet it was often the beauty of things that made me realize God's goodness and truth, thought I did not realize it until much later.     Getting back to Augustine, Kreeft said that though what makes the Confessions "sing" is the beautiful use of words and images, Augustine was suspicious of beauty because of evil's tendency to wrap itself in seemingly beautiful things.

Kreeft points out that beauty is both the most transcendent of the "trinity" of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and the most particular and immediate.   This is probably one of the reasons for this traditional Christian tension of ideas about Beauty.

Kreeft talks about the sensible Imagination (the way our memory recreates what we have experienced), the creative Imagination (our act of detaching adjectives from nouns and recombining them in different ways to make things that are in a sense new) and the contemplative imagination, which is the sort of philosopher's intuition.

He talks about Jesus's use of analogy, metaphor and parable, to the point where you can hardly think of a teaching of Christ that is not associated with an image or story.    Lewis and Chesterton are two 20th century apologists he mentions who are exemplary in using analogies in vivid ways.

One of Lewis's themes was the idea of the evangelium of Beauty, which he described from the interior as Joy.   His sense of Joy was evoked by something beautiful but by nature, seemingly, beyond complete grasp.   "Baldur the beautiful is dead, is dead!" woke in him something beyond the words, a kind of longing.    I felt somewhat the same when I read "Late have I loved Thee!" for the first time.

I think this has educational implications because I think one of the reasons education nowadays passes through the brain of the student and into nothingness is because it lacks beauty.    Most people blame modern media for ugliness (Kreeft mentioned that there has been an ancient tradition of suspicion towards drama and plays not just in content but as media, which I thought was interesting).   Though for amusement I prefer books,  I find modern movies and internet much more beautiful and in a way true than modern academics.  In fact, one reason I regularly dabble in unschooling is because of the ugliness of the current educational alternatives much of the time.   One of my thought projects for this year is rehabilitating and resacramentalizing the idea and practice of "teaching" and "instruction" for myself.   There is a lot of good work being done out there in aid of this personal project.

Anyway, Kreeft's talk was more like a series of 3-4 talks, and I sort of telescoped them, so if you have read this and find it scattered, the problem is mine, not Kreeft's.