The Imagination as Key to Transformation
We only change when something speaks to our heart, and the language of the heart is imaginative vision.
Personal growth is impossible without first imagining the growth you want to achieve.
The better the imaginative vision, the sharper the appeal to the senses. The sharper the appeal to the senses, the more likely you are to be emotionally gripped by the vision. The more you are emotionally gripped by the vision, the more you are inclined to pursue it.
We only change when something speaks to our heart, and the language of the heart is imaginative vision.
John Henry Newman once said:
“I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God…but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice.”
It was the language of the heart, the imaginative vision of a new understanding of God, that touched Newman—that changed his life and made of it a very different story.
And so it can be with us.
Becoming What We Love
As we enter into what philosopher Robert Sokolowski calls the “simulation” of an imaginative experience, we also experience the pull of our affections, that is, our emotions.
For example, when I watch the video clips of my baby grandson that my daughter sends me, or look at a photograph of my wife or my children, an image has been prepared for me that moves me emotionally. I feel various shades of pleasure: laughter, wonderment, the pleasures of memory and gratitude.
Our emotional “draw” toward the image makes us, to use St. Thomas Aquinas’s technical term, connatural with the object pictured in the image. This simply means that we become, in a sense, “one” with it. Conformed to it.
A commentator on Aquinas once observed: Amor transit in conditionem objecti. Love changes into the condition of its object. In other words: We become what we love. (Without restricting “love” to its romantic sense, though “love” includes that, too.)
This is why Newman said that philosophical proofs for God did not move him. However valid and true such proofs were, they did not make Newman fall in love with God: “they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice.”
Of course, our emotional “draw” toward an image is not a falling in love with pixels or paper or celluloid. An image makes some object in the world truly present before us.
Even an imaginary character from a movie or novel brings the reality of human nature truly before us through the image of that make-believe character.
Art as Moral Simulation Training
Our emotional conformity to a work of art can be counted as a kind of moral simulation training. For what else is moral training but an education of the emotions, bringing them into line with reason?
Granted, because there is no act of the will inside the simulation of the imagination, our imaginative immersion in works of art is not, strictly speaking, a moral act—as there is no real-world choice involved. (I am setting aside pornography and morally offensive works of art that it is wrong to become immersed in.)
But a good novel or drama or film, by helping us conform to the good made truly present in the image, inspires and beguiles and prepares us for the real training of the emotions that occurs when we leave the simulation and re-enter the real world.
This is why Plato in his Republic, a dialogue on the best form of political community, spent so much time having Socrates and his interlocutors discuss works of art. Because he knew how powerful art is in transforming us.
P.S. Below is the latest 5-Star Amazon review for my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair:
“A few preliminary comments: firstly, it has been quite a long time since I sat down with a book and basically could not put it down until I finished the whole thing. This book was impossible to put down and I had all but forgotten how amazing it feels to find a book like that.
Secondly, I found myself completely lost in this novel. Kate Montclair became so real to me in the hours I was reading it that I found myself thinking about her, caring about her, even when I put it down. That, too, is quite rare.
This novel was a thrilling, goose-bump raising mix of a moving cancer memoir (though a very a-typical one), the classic story of a group of young friends, thirsty for life, and their struggle to find balance in a world without direction, and a mystery story (believe it or not - it surprised me, but it definitely fit). At times, I found myself feeling as though I were reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited or Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, two works that differ drastically in tone and yet somehow find an easy harmony in The Good Death of Kate Montclair. I can't recommend the book enough. It's one of those books as well that I wish I could write more about, but I think I need to chew on in my mind for a long while before I can put its full impact into words.
Click here to order your copy of The Good Death of Kate Montclair from Amazon.