You might imagine, consulting some eminent minds, that the whole point of imagination is happiness. “Imagination cannot make fools wise,” wrote Pascal, “but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason, who can only make her friends miserable.” Samuel Johnson took the point but drew a different moral: “Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.”
Then there’s what might be termed the higher imagination, whose role, through revealing truth, is not so much to make us happy as to make us free. This species of imagination—along with its fickle sidekick, inspiration—is what is at work in genuine artistic creation. Where it comes from and how to get your fair share are the stuff of countless books and blogs, with answers ranging from reductionist left-brain/right-brain formulations to daffy quasi-mystical murk. Another view, perennial, is that imagination is a gift, divine at that: In the words of the Anglican theologian-philosopher Austin Farrer, “noble inspiration . . . belongs to what is most godlike in the natural man.”
Here, at last, we crawl out of the happy-talk brainwave swamp. We need not share Farrer’s religious premises (though I do) to feel that he has discovered a reclusive creature among the roots and teased it out for all to study.
Austin Farrer (1904-1968) is regarded by many as the most brilliant Anglican thinker of the 20th century. A priest, he was warden of Keble College, Oxford, a redoubt of Anglo-Catholicism, and of his many books the most esteemed was The Glass of Vision, first presented at Oxford as the Bampton Lectures of 1948.
If Farrer ever enjoys a lusty revival, he’ll owe his posthumous thanks to Robert MacSwain, an associate professor of theology at Sewanee, who has published two previous books on Farrer and who, in 2013, edited Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary (Routledge, 234 pp., $54.95), which gathered lectures, helpfully annotated, and six essays by various scholars. The lectures take in a lot of territory, but the theme is imagination—the reasonless vistas of prophets, post-Renaissance poets, and the rest of us.
Imagination, in Farrer’s view, is not simply the formation of images but of images that function as metaphors, pointing to something else, both reflecting it and shedding new light on it. (Arguably, any image that comes to mind has metaphorical undertones, however minor, but Farrer is looking at a larger canvas, the essences of life.) The image tells us not what something is, directly; it reveals what something is like. A kiss might be described in terms of the chemistry of saliva, but if anyone asks, we compare it to a night-blooming jasmine.
Farrer discerns a category of “primary images” in the Bible that reveal (as far as we can understand them) the essential truths about God, man, and nature. Among these primary images are Son of Man; Father, Son, Holy Spirit; and Kingdom of Heaven. In light of these we are, then, to interpret lesser images—for example, Farrer’s title The Glass of Vision. As MacSwain notes, this alludes not only to a pane, as usually understood by Paul’s “Now we see through a glass, darkly,” but originally to a mirror, what Paul’s word meant when he wrote. Either way, it points to man’s inability to perceive spiritual truth directly. Metaphor is the only means.
Life, for Farrer, is a “two-sided fact.” The travail of imagination—lonely though it may seem under a lamp at midnight—is a kind of collaboration. In the act of imagining we are a “second cause.” But the divine First Cause also engages in our act, whether we are aware of it or not. To the extent that we see as the First Cause himself sees, our “mind performs a supernatural act; and this cannot happen by [our] exertion, but by God’s supernaturalising action.”
We know the mind best, says Farrer, by its “luminous apex” where reason shines. We are only dimly aware of the mind’s depths, but memories move us even when we’re not remembering, and desires beckon even when thoughts are elsewhere. All this—yet we’re able to imagine, to form metaphoric images, only by “inspired wit.” Without it, “we can do nothing but work out sums and syllogisms.” Inspiration comes not in reply to passive waiting but to a relaxation of the mind after a period of intellectual work: “a throwing of the reins on the horse’s neck.”
Wit—that is, inventiveness, not humor—is given by grace, a manifestation of divine love. In the prophet, it calls up “a process of images which live as it were by their own life and impose themselves with authority.” The poet feels something similar:
All great poetry must once have been religious, Farrer says. The Olympian gods, dead to theology, were now, in the mid-20th century, dying a poetical death. No longer were they invoked to represent the essences of love, war, and wisdom. Could poets find a continuity, or was “poetry, like football, just what it happens at any time to be”? Would they move to prose, nursery rhymes, even “true religion”? MacSwain suggests that this last was a reference to Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets. Farrer may not have known Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” which reflected the turning-away from faith that poetry (and society) had already taken. Its closing lines, in essence a rewrite of the ending of Keats’s “To Autumn,” seem to offer a naturalistic substitute for the descent of the Holy Spirit as a dove:
Austin Farrer would have insisted, persuasively, that the First Cause had a hand with Stevens, the second cause, “in the trifling act of stringing together words, or the imaged ghosts of words,” whether Stevens knew it or not.
Parker Bauer is a writer in Florida.
