Growing up, my parents had a wooden plaque engraved with the phrase “Imagination is evidence of the divine” hanging above one of the windows in their bedroom. I have always thought this was an inspiring statement, and it is one that still fills me with hopeful sentiment. Yet, while only in my mid-twenties and still innocent of much, I’ve come to realize that the days I live in while not without imagination, are rife with moral amnesia and thus diabolic fantasy. Imagination is not gone—as always, it is pervasive and powerful—but its purpose has been forgotten and left to the wolves of amorality. If today’s world is suffering from moral amnesia, and if men no longer seek truth in traditional religion, where shall we find a cure?
While evil thoughts and deeds have always existed, there is a place in which evil is held at bay in the mind and soul (the front lines of the raging spiritual war), what Edmund Burke calls “The Moral Imagination,” and which the American political theorist Russell Kirk further describes as that “power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events.”[1] In other words, man is capable of breaking free from his own limited time, place, and experience to perceive greater things than his own personal musings, which are vulnerable to selfishness as well as legions of misgivings and errors. “Drawn from centuries of human consciousness,” writes Kirk, “these concepts of the moral imagination…are expressed afresh from age to age.” The Moral Imagination tempers and informs the spirit of man in such a way that not only is he able to become good by way of first forming his moral vision, but he is also able to envision great moral acts and, God willing, to act them out.
Of course, man can also envision immoral acts—even great immoral acts—as byproducts of what T.S. Eliot calls the “diabolical imagination,” which is an imagination that not only thinks evil things, but as Kirk puts it, “delights in the perverse and subhuman” (emphasis added). The existence of the diabolical imagination should not be taken to mean that the imagination is value neutral; I firmly believe that it is a positive good, but a good that is constantly prey to corruption should one not remain vigilant in its formation. Like much of Creation, the imagination has a natural propensity towards corruption, and, like a garden, is always in need of weeding, watering, and pruning.
No one is born in possession of a Moral or Diabolical Imagination. We are born, and the implicit sense of goodness and innocence found in the imagination of our youth is either explicated and developed through moral formation (which at a young age is found especially in stories) or deformed as we grow older. Doubtlessly, many people vacillate between the two throughout their lives, at times purifying their Moral Imagination through tasteful films, good books, and beautiful music, while at other times feeding their Diabolical Imagination through excessively gory and macabre horror films, porn, or other less-than-wholesome content.
Both Kirk and the American literary critic Irving Babbitt posit an additional imagination, which they call the “Idyllic Imagination,” and define as “the imagination which rejects old dogmas and old manners and rejoices in the notion of emancipation from duty and convention.” According to Kirk, “The idyllic imagination ordinarily terminates in disillusion and boredom,” which of course opens the gates to sinful thoughts, which themselves often terminate in sinful deeds. The Idyllic Imagination, in a sense, is not an active imagination but instead a passive one, and it is passive to dangerous forces which it has little or no strength to resist.
How then are we to inform and develop—with what tools do we cultivate—the Moral Imagination? I am no lonely voice in the desert when I say that it is through good fiction and literature, (what Kirk calls “humane letters” and what I will simply call fiction) that we develop our moral imagination. In the words of Kirk, “the end of great books is ethical—to teach us what it means to be genuinely human.” The end of fiction is not simply to explicate some high moral code, however true that moral code might be; such efforts at storytelling fail to grasp us at an existential level and are at best pedantic and sanctimonious. A good story necessarily entails moral drama so there is no need to beleaguer the reader with sugar-coated sermons. Even so, man seems to have a natural instinct that senses when a sermon is dressed up in the sheep’s wool of storytelling. Fiction is ultimately a means of understanding ourselves as moral animals through the varied expressions of the human condition. In the process, we become more human, and not merely in some anthropocentric way.
In both subtle and blatant ways, much of contemporary fiction presupposes moral relativity and an anthropocentric worldview. In such fiction, each character’s viewpoint seems justifiable when viewed in light of each one’s circumstances; in each case, evil can be reasoned away according to some kernel of apparent good. There is no clear good and no clear evil, only agents playing whack-a-mole morality.
Meanwhile, “good” fiction, while illustrating the nuanced moral scenarios that face men, also presupposes some objective schema of morality to which men must conform their actions. In this case, morality is not beholden to the character’s rationale, but the latter is beholden to the former. This kind of fiction presupposes the above while also entertaining, enlightening, stretching, forming—and even shocking at times—our imaginations in such a way that we come to know the world as it is, we transcend the limits of personal experience, and we are able to transform it into what it could and should be (not that I posit any sort of utopian vision of the world).
If the Moral Imagination is excluded from this dynamic between morality and imagination, then either the Idyllic or Diabolic Imagination will likely fill the vacuum in our minds and souls and deform them with visions of utopia. Once that has happened, we will inevitably deform the world into a dystopia. While men may shun the proclamations of the Church and her warnings against utopian endeavors, they seldom fail to fall for a good story. Through a good story, through fiction, we are able to rediscover the greater story about who man is. When we begin to understand who man is only then can we begin to ask where he is going. Once we do that, we begin to understand a little more what the Church is doing—preserving the story and proclaiming it anew to every age.
[1] Russell Kirk, "The Moral imagination," in Literature and Belief Vol. 1 (1981), 37–49.