The Importance of the Imagination in Life, Faith and Art
- London Catholic Worker
- Sep 20
- 4 min read
James Catterson is a current community member in the London Catholic Worker house.
When we imagine something, we picture it; the very word image is located within the word imagination. Art W. Lindsley articulates that to truly understand the meaning of a concept or word, we must have “a clear image that we can connect with it.” Forming images in our minds is therefore essential to comprehending the complex world we live in. Stephen Hawking states that the world’s “age, size, violence and beauty require extraordinary imagination to appreciate it.” Without using our imagination to form pictures of and bring understanding to what we encounter, we can jeopardise truly seeing things and invite the deadening of our enchantment towards what surrounds us.
Using the imagination in art makes sense, art often being a tool of explorative sense-making. Let’s begin this exploration by traversing the nature of the first artist, the first to imagine.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a famous statement in his Biographia Literaria, identifies human imagination as “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” In saying this, he alludes to the possibility that prior to initiating the creation of the world, God may first have imagined the world, picturing what He would create and the love He wanted to share, bringing to life the words of Ephesians 1:4, “for He chose us in Him before the creation of the world.” Through His imagination and creativity, in human beings God chose to imagine Himself, creating us in His image, and then later imagined Himself in the image of His Son Jesus in human form, revealing through Jesus “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). However, even as He reveals Himself through Jesus and human beings, God ultimately chooses to convey only the likeness of His appearance (for example, Ezekiel 1:28), leaving much of what He looks like—His being—to our imagination. Yet He gives us descriptions that help us to build a picture of Him and His nature, as Father (Matthew 5:48), compassionate (Exodus 34:6), and shepherd (Psalm 23:1), feeding the imagination that He gave us.
Jesus Himself even relied on imagination, teaching in parables, stories and metaphors, calling His listeners to picture the images He cast. As such, the imagination is pivotal in helping us to comprehend and behold “the mystery of God” and faith, and therefore aids us to grow spiritually. It is vital for us to imagine and form an image or concept of God, as how we picture God to be is intrinsic to our belief, and to the intimacy of our relationship with Him.
Because of the significance this carries, it is key that we have ways of expressing and fathoming our imaginings. This is often why people turn to art—making to “attempt to grasp the ineffable and transcendent.” For Christians or those exploring faith, this may derive from a desire to explore and fathom the glory of God, but this concept also applies to the use of art-making to understand the meaning of life and existentialism more widely.
But let’s dig into what the imagination is a little more. Berys Gaut usefully recognises that imagining is “entertaining a proposition.” As we think and ideas arrive, we can either entertain them or let them pass by, and if entertained, this does not necessitate that we are committed to their truth; we are merely exploring them. This means that through the imagination we can play with concepts and experiment with different ways of thinking about and realising them. This is central to creativity and artistry; the mind is acting as sketch paper, a vehicle to progress ideas. Lev S. Vygotsky identifies that “every act of the imagination has a very long history,” suggesting that ideas grow through the collection of thoughts and realisations, resulting in the birth of a creative act (whether artwork, statement, or a piece of writing) that has internally undergone a significant period of gestation or formulation.
The imagination also allows a person to broaden their personal perspective by venturing out from the boundaries of what they themselves have experienced, to conceive how another might experience a situation. We see this in the empathetic phrase “I can imagine how hard that must be”. A creative work allows the imagination of an artist to work alongside a viewer’s, as a viewer receives and interacts with an artwork from their own unique imaginations and experiences. The ultimate expression and example of this is humans interacting with God’s creation of the world. God even invites us to imagine what might be beyond the earth, a place of “no more night” (Revelation 22:5), and restoration (Acts 3:21).
Many think that the imagination solely belongs to childhood. Children tend to freely express creative ideas and narratives, leading adults to believe that children have a greater ability to imagine than they do. Vygotsky points that this is not the case, as one’s creative ability is based on what one has previously experienced, thus the more experience a person has had, the more life they have lived, the greater is the nuance and complexity of the stimulus the imagination can draw from. However, there are logical reasons as to why adults believe this. Loris Malaguzzi in his poem “No Way. The Hundred is There” articulates that as we grow up, we are taught that things like reality and fantasy, science and imagination, or work and play do not go together. This kind of teaching shuns the imagination, and instead instils in us that life is to be taken practically and intelligently, based on the concrete, and that one’s uninhibited creativity belongs in childhood alone.
Artists who have been able to follow a different narrative, who have followed their imagination, point to the need to slow down and truly take note of the world. Mary Oliver in her poem “Evidence” calls us back to enchantment of the everyday, echoing the encouragement of Matthew 6:26 to consider the natural rhythms and processes of renewal that surround us, reminding us to “keep some room in [our] heart for the unimaginable”. Oliver alludes to the reality that we have lost space for our imaginings, wonder, and active engagement with our senses, which ultimately inhibits us from enjoying the intricate and sensual world that God created for us.
