Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven. Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment in God’s future. What role will imagination play in this fulfillment?
Have you heard of the “Imagination Age”? I hadn’t myself until recently, but I have a feeling we will all be hearing a lot more about it. The term “Imagination Age” is being used by some particularly in the field of technology to denote a hypothetical era after the Industrial Age and the Information (or Digital) Age. According to the theorists, each of these epochs of modern history brought forth a new kind of production and a new knowledge base. The Industrial Revolution emphasized factory and machine production, while the digital revolution prioritized the collection of data or information. With the prospect of automation handling much of the data collection and more routine tasks of life, we are now (according to the theory) entering in a new age in which Imagination is to the fore. The mere manipulation of data is no longer the determining factor of life; rather, the important thing is what we do to creatively shape that information and knowledge. Hence the importance of things like storytelling, art, and the force of imagination generally, including with the aid of the same technology.
Second, it is claimed that by relegating digital technology to the background (though how this would occur is beyond my knowledge), we can reestablish human connection and the kind of life we had before technology came to dominance. As one tech writer puts it, “Technology will be invisible and always present, allowing us to go back to a simpler world where we can be people again.”
What is being expressed here, it seems to me, is the paradoxical idea that technology itself can be used to make technology scarce and less prominent in our lives. Technology can perhaps mitigate itself and thus become a humble servant of humanity instead of dominating over it. Technology can be an instrument for true creativity instead of a source of distraction and busyness. A tool, not an idol.
Here is the paradox: we are used to the idea that an overbearing technology tends to destroy imagination, but here we are being invited to ponder whether technology, properly used, can facilitate imagination. I suppose it all depends whether technology can be subordinated to the human will and imagination.
The concept of the Imagination Age has, as far as I know, mainly been used in the spheres of technology and economics; I would like now to extend it into the realms of theology (especially eschatology) and culture. Here is my reaction: I think that an Age of Imagination could be taking shape, but I see it in a more eschatological and spiritual light than perhaps the tech people do. Following current trends in society has never been my thing, and I have always been detached from contemporary life. The model of the Imagination Age appeals to me because it harmonizes with my faith, my strong belief in eschatology, my emphasis on solitude, and my conservative cultural path—particularly where it concerns building an appreciation for the past.
Another reason I am endeavoring to connect the Imagination Age with theology is that the idea overlaps significantly with the idea of the “Fourth Industrial Age” evoked by the new pope, Leo XIV, in his speeches about artificial intelligence. Specifically, the pope has warned of potential harm to human well-being in the new revolution of automation—an environment in which the very definition of what it means to be human is put in question.
Perhaps the cure lies in reactivating the power of the imagination, the unique part of us that machines can never imitate. This is in part because, in the midst of what Gleaves Whitney has called “the breakdown of any shared cultural vision,” we are being forced to define our beliefs and identity ever more sharply, thrown back on our own resources and our faith in God to seek and express truth. In such an environment, culture and creative thinking become all-important. It is no longer possible to ground our beliefs in purely tribal or formal criteria (e.g., I am a Catholic because I am Italian, because my parents and grandparents were Catholics, etc.).
And this new emphasis on creativity and imagination relates to another theme, namely the central place of narrative. Because we no longer have the same cultural supports, we need to articulate basic truths in a compelling form. And that involves calling forth the imaginative force of narrative, of storytelling. That can express itself in art, surely, but also in personal witness to the faith and in daily spiritual practice. As it happens, our faith is itself a narrative, a true story of fall and redemption, which needs to be articulated and expressed ceaselessly in new forms.
Keeping an authentic Christian eschatological angle on these developments will save us from a mindless techno-utopianism while allowing us to welcome any positive developments that do happen in the world of technology as genuine gifts of God and possibly advance notices of the advent of his kingdom.
In this respect, it seems to me that an Imagination Age has the potential to reestablish a proper relationship between humanity and the digital, using the latter creatively to explore and propound truth in all its forms. One can imagine, for example, the Gospel being propounded in creative and artistic ways. This corresponds in a significant way with reality as we experience it; all around the world people are using digital platforms to produce all sorts of creative “content.” Besides the Gospel, there are countless opportunities to interpret and recollect the past creatively, to bring it alive in the present. I find this exciting, the prospect of exercising the imagination artistically and intellectually upon the recollection of the riches of the past.
In this respect, the Imagination Age as I envision it will not be characterized, as in progressive ideology, by a spirit of triumphalist victory over the past, but by a spirit that gathers up and includes all of the best of the past as a prelude to eternity. All imaginative thinkers of the past will be enlisted in a new intellectual and creative synthesis. Our job, whether we be creative artists or laborers in other fields, is to act as heralds of God’s future making a synthesis of the past and the present.
Perhaps it would be of use to pause and review what we believe as Christians about eschatology. The whole field is full of difficulties, quite mysterious, and little understood by the average believer on the street. Here are the bare outlines, to the best of my understanding. As the Kingdom of God grows on earth there is a concomitant growth of the spirit of antichrist; the biblical parable of the wheat and the tares applies here. The two opposing forces reach an ultimate clash (which may have already happened, is happening now, or may happen in the future), after which Christ will return and impose a purifying judgment on the world and bring his kingdom to full realization. Now endowed with glorified resurrected bodies and no longer subject to the tendency to sin, the faithful will live with God and Christ in a renewed creation in which heaven and earth have become as one.
What we should get out of our heads at once is the idea, widely assumed, that God is going to annihilate the space-time-matter universe. God does not destroy; he transforms, elevates, and brings to fulfillment. The final state of our universe will consist of a spiritualized materiality as suggested by Christ’s glorified resurrected body. In fact, one of the concomitants of traditional resurrection faith has been the belief that God is gradually healing both the material and moral universe (a process decisively launched by Christ’s healings while on earth).
Accordingly, I believe that we will begin to see definite anticipations or foreshadowings of life in the future age, in which through the power of Christ sickness and death will be destroyed, as per the revelations of St. John.
Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven (the Platonic idea). Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. What we hope for as Christians is not an “afterlife,” in the sense of something tacked on to the present life which is tacitly conceived of as the “real thing.” We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment in God’s future. There is continuity between heaven and earth and between the present world and the future world. What role will imagination play in this fulfillment?
In the future world, we will experience time in a new way: no longer a seasonal cycle leading at last to the grave, but a continuous being-present, being-alive, to God.
What all these musings are leading to is this. I suggest that we are indeed entering an Imagination Age, but that this is not simply another item on the historical timeline, but an anticipation of eternity itself and the prelude to the final clash between good and evil that will usher in the completion of God’s kingdom.
This is the basic scenario, though I’m sure my language is poor and that it could be stated differently or better.
Utopia or dystopia, then? The best way I can answer this is “both and neither.” It seems that there are in our world signs pointing in two different directions: toward catastrophe and toward salvation. We must choose which path to follow. Artificial intelligence, though I understand it only dimly, seems to have both good and evil potentialities. Like any human instrument it can be directed to a particular end that we choose: either toward demonic manipulation or toward the flourishing of truth and imagination.
Either way, the new age will surely be an age of imagination to the max: we will be called upon to exercise our imagination upon a future-related scenario with both hopeful and dystopian aspects. Since this is an apocalyptic age, it will perforce be an imaginative age in which we reflect on it with the eyes of faith and hope. We can fit ourselves for eternity by activating our imaginative faculties.
Our modern scientific worldview has bred in all of us, whether believers or not, an insensitivity to mystery and paradox. We want everything clear-cut, rational, and compartmentalized. What happens when we adopt a more imaginative view of reality?
I suggest that this will be, not just an interesting option, but a necessity as we go forward. In the coming age we will need to search our hearts, search history and tradition, and define clearly where we stand on the great questions of life. We will need to define our beliefs sharply. At a time when the credibility and competence of institutions is at such a low ebb, we need to join ourselves to something less external, more essential. We will need to fill our lives with substantive meaning, and that will require imagination.
In the old days we expressed ourselves with a moral and spiritual language; nowadays our language tends to be technocratic, scientific, and business-minded. But who is to say that technology cannot itself be imbued with moral imagination, and that it cannot be used to promote goodness, truth, and beauty?
Here as always, the solution to the problems of time and culture can only come from above. The future is ultimately God’s and therefore requires a divine intervention. It is not simply a matter of us running on our own resources without God’s aid—the mistake made by secular utopians in every age.
Yet we must be opposed not only to an unimaginative, technocratic secularism but also to an etiolated, unimaginative Christianity that has lost sight of the resurrection faith of the apostles. What will give us hope is to recover the sense of what the theologians call “inaugurated eschatology”—the idea that God’s kingdom is gradually breaking into the present world and that God’s future is coming to meet us in the here and now. Grasping this requires nothing less than a renewed imagination, at the service of faith and hope.
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The featured image is ‘And I saw an angel standing in the sun’ (Rev. 19-17) [1910], by Henry John Stock, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Catholics hope for an age of faith. The nineteenth century demonstrated the severe limits of imagination. Of course, once people have a basis in truth provided by the faith, then it’s possible and productive to stimulate the imagination using the resources of art, etc. Imagination and art alone reached its limits amid despair in late classical paganism. Once faith and reason were in control, we had the glory of the Christian West.
“The nineteenth century demonstrated the severe limits of imagination”-Actually I think the forming of the Christian imagination, at least in the English-speaking world, barely got started in the nineteenth century, and indeed was distracted and sidetracked by the industrial revolution and imperialism, and by the new “scientific” ideas of the era. But the nineteenth century did lay foundations for the rebirth of the imagination, and the embodiments of this rebirth, of course are Coleridge, Newman, Dickens, and MacDonald. Of course the projects of Coleridge and Newman, especially, were not near completed in their lifetimes, they never got to finish them, but they were picked up by others, like Chesterton, Tolkien, Sayers, and Lewis, and others still who also pointed the way forward without, I think, exhausting the limits of a new kind of imaginative Christian art. That story, I am convinced, is still being told today, and indeed I think very few other nineteenth-century writers or thinkers have the influence or the following today that these guys have. They are still influential, indeed, I think their vision of reality is the most compelling of any nineteenth-writers except perhaps for Marx and Comte (whose adherents of Marx and Comte tend to be less inspired by them than accepted as articulators of a grim and inescapable reality.) All the other distractions and the sideroads of the nineteenth century have by and large played themselves out, even Millian liberalism, hardly any of them remain particularly compelling to the average person today, the disillusioned postmodern no longer believe their false promises. But it is not so with the likes of Newman, MacDonald, Coleridge, Tolkien, Lewis, ect, for they are still making converts and bringing them into the faith, and they are doing so primarily in an imaginative way and artistic way.
I didn’t feel too comforted by your reply. Coleridge, a romantic who talked religion a lot more than most, exchanged orthodoxy for fashionable nineteenth-century ideas on core issues. He made little or no distinction between intuition/imagination, and inspiration of God. He also ridiculed the scholastic method. If one asserts, as he did, that true reason is the imagination and whatever one’s intuition feels like on a given day, we are left with a profound scepticism regarding religion. It’s very destructive of faith. The best nineteenth-century type minds, even in our century, eventually have to abandon the outdated fads and recover faith, dogma and reason, in order to be happy, and Christian, if one speaks of their belief.
Well, first of all the scholastic method that Coleridge would have been familiar with was at this time pretty much completely desiccated and useless, no one was reading it, so there was probably some fairness to his criticism in his own context. Most likely he was not reading Aquinas, I don’t think anyone in England was at his time.
However, I think I find a problem primarily with the opposition that you maintain exists between intuition/imagination and reason, dogma, and faith. This is a false dichotomy, and I think a false understanding of “reason”. Intuition, for me, is an aspect of reason, and in some sense the highest form of reason. And I am not alone in this assertion, but echo insights that already exist in Boethius, Aquinas, Pascal, and Newman, to name a few. The Catholic tradition has always understood “Reason” to be a broader thing than modernity has regarded it, as in the traditional Catholic sense Reason is dependent upon a purified imagination and intuition in order to reach its full powers. By imagination and intuition, I mean not a syllogistic linear form of reasoning, but the intellect in its capacity to perceive at once the whole of a thing, which is the aspect of the intellect that is most akin to God. God and the Angels do not think linearly, obviously, they simply perceive the whole of a thing at once.
The idea of the Imagination should immediately conjure in your mind an association of human imagination with the idea of “The Image of God”, and what exactly is meant by this phrase, both in its sense as a noun and as a verb, as God constantly “images” Himself through the Logos, through the Person of Christ, through human persons, and through the rest of creation. This is an idea that you can see played out in the writings of St. Athanasius, which Newman was very familiar with. In fact, I think one of Newman’s longstanding preoccupations, perhaps most fully expressed in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, is the question of where does faith, dogma, reason, conscience and imagination meet and intersect in the individual person, and what exactly is the proper relationship between these different concepts and human faculties. How do we come to assent to Truths of Faith, how do we come to assent to religious dogmas, how do we come to trust our reason, these questions, for Newman, are often pre-rational considerations for the average person, in the same way our love of our parents and family are prerational considerations, formed not by analytical thought but rather shaped by experience and imagination.
If you have ever actually really conversed with the “nones” of today, You will find it is useless to speak of “reason”, because what you’ll usually find is your conception of “reason” and what is “reasonable” and their conception of “reason” and what is “reasonable” is not the same. Your use of language, the meaning that you associate with certain words, like freedom, or dogma, will not be the same, and this is because you are two people who are operating in completely different “social imaginaries,” and thus you are completely unable to “reason” with each other. In other words, our reason is couched in our imagination, and dependent upon it. Any conversion of someone, (just read any conversion story ever) will necessarily entail a deep re-orientation of both the heart and the imagination, and will not be accomplished through rational dialectic, and it is this insight that is given to us by the British Romantics and their Christian successors which is absolutely necessary for anyone who seeks to evangelize in today’s world. The Dialectic mode of scholasticism can perhaps teach and clarify, but on its own, it will not change and convert hearts to Christ. For that we must look to the wisdom of Newman, that “the heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.”
One may suspect that the “Age of Imagination” will be no more than a rehash of Pico della Mirandola’s “new humanism” from the 1840s the high dreams and playground of speculative theology of sophistry….the idea that theologians can infer more by extrapolating from Scripture and reason that Scripture provides or reason permits however permissible but not necessarily possible.
This merges well with my all but constant musing on the apostle’s pericope in Rm 8:18-25. Our groaning and labor, with all Creation…are characterized by earnest perseverance.