If only one could bottle up the “it” factor that goes into writing that best-selling novel, that multi-platinum single, the Academy Award winning film, and sell it. Countless products have been sold to the public promising just this very thing in various forms. One need not look far for books, videos, games, exercises on increasing one’s, or one’s child’s, creativity. I’d suggest you search online for them but be forewarned that it will throw off your algorithm for a couple of weeks.
Though humanity spent the last 150 or so years trying to make the world, and then the universe, smaller and smaller, we discovered that there was an emptiness inside of us, partially by our own doing, that was becoming larger and larger. In more positive moments, one might think that we have hit “rock bottom” when it comes to the inner emptiness that an over-reliance on the material and technological, at the neglect and rejection of the spiritual, has created. There are certainly moments of hope, and a hope that is founded on faith is all a Christian is really supposed to expect in this life anyway.
Well, hope is really about looking ahead. Similar to faith, it is about “things not seen” (Heb 11:1). When Abraham was promised descendants as numerous as the stars, he obviously could not see the descendants yet, and the text indicates he couldn’t even see the stars in that moment. (God tells him to count the stars in Genesis 15:5, but then it says “the sun was about to set” in verse 12.) In order to hope, Abraham had to see beyond what was initially presented to him in that moment. This was not just a matter of wishing something to be true. Abraham knew stars were there even during the times he couldn’t see them. They were beyond the world being presented to him in that moment. This same principle applies in one’s development of the “Catholic imagination.”
The Catholic imagination is not simply an ability to find symbolism in certain names or images in a story, though that’s not a bad start. A Catholic imagination is a seeing beyond what is initially presented, when our human senses fail. This “beyond” is not only looking outward in one direction but looking inward at the interior castle of the soul as well (an image borrowed from the classic of spiritual theology by St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle).
A Catholic imagination is able to see because one has already spent time contemplating it in themselves, the truths of the faith that lie hidden in the material world. These truths lie closer to us than we are to ourselves because they participate more deeply in the nature of God, who is Being itself. These truths are those which we seek to discover in the Catholic Imagination. Once these seeds of truth are identified, you can contemplate them more deeply and cultivate the lens by which we can see behind the veil more clearly at the transcendent truths present in good literature.
Take the example of those who either never became Catholic in this life or were perhaps raised Catholic but either lapsed or rejected it in adulthood. There are “seeds” in the words of these authors because despite never intending to point their readers to the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ, they often did in spite of themselves. While Jesus certainly warned about the danger of seeds falling on rocky soil, sometimes a resilient plant breaks through.
Examples of non-Catholic authors with a Catholic imagination are Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, and Robert Jordan, the man behind the Wheel of Time universe. Furthermore, there’s Robert Louis Stevenson, author of the classics Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and his treatment of sin, as well as the nods to the Catholic faith in the imagery of Bram Stoker’s Dracula . . . and so many more.
We can discover these “card-carrying Catholic” authors in many unexpected places, each who have reflected and contributed greatly to the Catholic imagination. What makes these examples so valuable are often not the explicit references to the faith within the work itself, but how the faith can be so infused into the story or the character. This organic presence carries more evangelical weight to the non-Christian reader than overt mentions of God, the Church, or the sacraments because it presents the Faith as less of an imposition and more of a proposal.
Abraham had this imagination when he was first told by God to count the stars, but he also saw it in the moment that required his greatest faith and sacrifice. Many ancient commentators, Jewish and Christian, saw in the akedah or the binding of Isaac, a seed of the Resurrection. It took great faith, as the text itself says, and hope built upon that faith to see beyond the situation that was being presented. Similarly, it took and still takes great faith and hope, spiritual vision, to see beyond the image presented before us of a Man dying on a cross to the redemption in which we hope. It takes a similar spiritual vision to see beyond the simple circular host presented to us and see that same Man, and that same sacrifice, given to us for our own resurrection.
As tempting as it might be sometimes to buy those “creativity boosting” products of whatever medium, they always seem to leave the user disappointed. This is probably why they have to keep being updated and re-branded so often. What they ultimately do is try to inorganically mechanize the imagination process. As much as humanity continues to learn about the switches and gears of the brain itself, it can never be a replacement for the soul, that organizing principle of the self that is only seen in its effects, but in whose existence our hope of survival rests.
Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from a chapter in Unexpectedly Catholic: Seeds of the Gospel in 20 Popular Stories, available from Voyage.
Photo by Hamid Khaleghi on Unsplash
