The Moral Imagination, Part 3: Competing Desires
Part 1A society which rejects a moral imagination (the artistic aspiration toward right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth) will not necessarily abandon imagination altogether (though the way modernism has treated the fairy tale, that has sadly happened to some extent in our culture). Instead, we will turn toward what Russell Kirk called “the idyllic imagination” - “the imagination which rejects old dogmas and old manners and rejoices in the notion of emancipation from duty and convention.” It’s the false freedom that rejects the very need for “right order” in the soul and commonwealth. It’s the liberty we sinners think we have when we try to live free of God’s loving law.
But we quickly get bored and disillusioned with the idyllic imagination, Kirk says. This makes sense: we weren’t made for that kind of freedom, which is no freedom at all; so its promises are false. “You will be happy apart from right order in your soul. You will be miserable having to obey God. You are your own, and you will be happier as the captain of your own destiny.” All lies; all false promises.
But having been convinced and then disillusioned, we’re more likely to turn to an even darker form of imagination - what T.S. Eliot called “the diabolic imagination” - “that kind of imagination which delights in the perverse and subhuman.” Eliot writes:
The number of people in possession of any criteria for discriminating between good and evil is very small, the number of the half-alive hungry for any form of spiritual experience, or for what offers itself as spiritual experience, high or low, good or bad, is considerable. My own generation has not served them very well. Never has the printing press been so busy, and never have such varieties of buncombe and false doctrine come from it. Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing!
Not the most encouraging words you’ve ever read.
“Right order in the soul” is an important phrase, especially when paralleled with the definition of the diabolic imagination: it delights in the “subhuman.” There are a lot of ways to define evil, but one of the most potent and oft-used in imaginative fiction is that of dehumanization. Evil is turning away from created intent. Aslan told the talking beasts of Narnia that if they behaved like the beasts that do not talk, they would become like them:
The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return. Do not so. (The Magician’s Nephew 140)
George MacDonald’s goblins and humans-turned-creatures in The Princess and Curdie fit the same picture of dehumanization. Gothic literature portrays evil in the same way: distorted humanity. Think Jeckyll and Hyde, or Frankenstein’s monster.
Eugene Peterson writes:
When we say “soul” we are calling attention to the God-origins, God-intentions, God-operations that make us what we are. It is the most personal and most comprehensive term for what we are – man, woman, and child…. “Soul” is a word reverberating with relationships: God-relationships, human-relationships, earth relationships…. “Soul” gets beneath the fragmented surface appearances and experiences and affirms an at-homeness, an affinity with whoever and whatever is at hand. (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places 37)
Hence, right order in the soul and in the commonweatlth (society/relationships) is vital, and they are related to one another. (The next two entries in this series on moral imagination will explore how.) And a society which abandons a moral imagination for the idyllic and diabolic will distort both the soul and the commonwealth.
Forthcoming - Part 4: Ancient Desires; Part 5: The Golden Rule
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
Travis: thanks for this series, I’m loving it.
Right order has to do with boundaries. There is no such thing as freedom in a vacuum, the freedom to be continually free to be free. To reject one thing (for instance, marriage) is to embrace another (”not-marriage”). Freedom, as Norman Grubb once put it, is really the freedom to choose our bondage. The Christian chooses his bondage - slavery to Christ; the world chooses its bondages: materialism, hedonism, food, drink, sex. To be enslaved to that which is above us (God) is to be free from all other bondages.
To be free in our imaginations as the world thinks of “free” (think of the abuse of the phrase “freedom of speech”) is to go on a downward spiral. Think of pornography, a downward staircase of ever deepening depravity and deception; it is not freedom, but a prison that locks the man up, dehumanizing him and dehumanizing other humans in the man’s eyes. That’s the power of imagination on the dark side - the abuse of imaginative freedom.
“Right order in the soul and in the commonwealth” frees us in the other direction.
Real freedom is the ability to do what is right, no matter what our emotions or circumstances are doing. When we’re cut loose from “dogma” (a much abused, good word) and “convention” and everything else that makes us human and very nearly godlike, we slide willy-nilly into the Pit of dehumanization.