To Imagine Realistically

Joseph Schwartz To Imagine Realistically Francesca Aran Murphy's new book Christ the Form ofBeauty is about the Christological imagination. It makes the argument that our ability to enter into the Incarnation is in proportion to our willingness "to imagine realistically."' The book is valuable in that it brings together some ofthe important ideas regarding aesthetics by Jacques Maritain, William Lynch, Allen Tate, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.' Since the book, however, is organized around persons rather than ideas, it is sometimes clumsy where it should be clear and lengthy where it should be brief. Further, since these writers are very alike in essential matters, the amount of needless repetition becomes wearying. At the same time essential material that might have been helpful in developing the subject is excluded. Maritain, central to our understanding of this topic, is, of course, included, but Etienne Gilson, felt by some to be the neo-Thomist who has written best on this topic, is not.Why include Caroline Gordon but omit G. K. Chesterton? I recognize that studies like this must have Logos 1:1 1997 20 Logos arbitrary boundaries, but some boundaries are more arbitrary than others. In any event, the problem would not exist had the book been arranged according to the constituent ideas of the topic (imagination , realism, beauty) which finally are Murphy's real interest. On the other hand, the book is of great value in encouraging a re-thinking ofwhat"to imagine realistically"means. It is a topic that will repay richly critical analysis.What do we mean by the imagination ?What do we mean by realism?What is the precise relationship between the imagination and reality? Why is the concept of beauty embedded only in philosophical realism? What is the ultimate secret ofthe beautiful? Such questions will guide me in thinking about what it means to imagine realistically. They will lead to the heart ofthe Incarnation in a particularly profound way. No word has received more attention from literary critics in this century than "imagination," and justly so.What the senses feed the mind must be shaped by the imagination, and it must also give form to the emotions. It functions, as Victor Hamm put it, "as the very heart ofthe literary organism."2 In essence it is creative, using experience to make something new. The image-making power is "essentially vital"in the words of Coleridge.The sense images created are of all kinds, though primarily visual. In creating literature the imagination is more than playful, although it can also be that. It takes only the fancy to write "In a Station ofthe Metro,"winningly perfect drapery as it is: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Serious, radiant literature, however, gives the reader an intensional vision of reality because intellect, feeling, and imagination work creatively together. Denise Levertov defined the imagination as "the power of perceiving analogies and extending this power from the observed to the To Imagine Realistically21 surmised. . . .The poet sees and reveals in language what is present but hidden—what Goethe called 'the open secret.'The imagination, she continued, is creative in that 'it combines analogies and "open secrets'"—it perceives and fashions from them new works."3 Her comment is a fine introduction to what is perhaps the most famous passage written about the imagination, that by Coleridge: The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination ofits faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit that blends, and (as it were)fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination.This power, first put in action by the will and understanding , and retained under their irremisive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul, . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea, widi the image; the individual, with representative ; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order;judgment...