I've been reading about the Fathers' views about the imagination in terms of mysticism and I find it interesting because I finally have an explanation for why my sense of fantasy went completely kaput right when I became a Christian. I used to be into role playing games and Harry Potter - ya know, the usual - but they became completely uninteresting to me after I came to Christ. As someone who has experienced contemplation it seems I'm called to this. But I want to know 1) how far are we meant to go, 2) what about the West (I know that even their mystics teach that the imagination is an aspect of meditation that gets left behind after sufficient purgation, but yeah) and 3) what becomes of art and creativity should one take this path?

Also, what about the different attitudes toward visions and ecstasies? Or is that just one of those polemical over-exaggerations? I know even the Western mystical tradition warns all against craving and seeking them lest they be deceived by Satan... but if one knows God can give good ones doesn't that kind of leave a person open?

I'm fascinated by this subject but in order to make sure we are on the same page could you offer a citation or two?

Mental Imagery in Orthodox Prayer

A huge article about Hesychasm



It seems from my limited understanding that the imagination is the faculty that was originally engaged with contemplation of the spiritual. Now whether that means that we're called to abandon all forms of it, or merely more "fantastical" forms, I don't know.

I would have to say my journey into Eastern Catholicism has been coupled by exactly the opposite effect, depending on how we define and use "imagination".

I am well aware of the hesychastic prohibition against imagination in contemplation, by which my quite limited knowledge and experience leads my to understand them as prohibiting the type of mystical visions of, say, St. Francis of Assisi. Indeed, I remember reading a rather blunt article by an Orthodox priest who accused St. Francis of being mislead by demons precisely because his mysticism was so focused on imagination as an experience of visual images, for example. I also am aware of a similar prohibition in such Western strains of contemplation as that expressed in The Cloud of Unknowing. Not that my opinion matters, given my exceedingly limited spiritual development relatively speaking, but I do see great wisdom in these prohibitions, even if I wonder to what extent the advice is culturally-mediated (was St. Francis really deceived by demons??)

I wonder if this prohibition against or growing-beyond-of imagination is quite so broad as to completely negate imagination's role in the spiritual life. There is certainly something very Platonic in Eastern thought. We think of Plato's Republic and its celebrated attack on artists, but when we look at what Plato was actually doing, we see that he was distinguishing between two types of art, or what perhaps we (inappropriately) call "art" and "craft" today. For Plato, "art" such as painting was that which aimed at a 3rd-order imitation of the Real. For example, let us say I paint a tree. The tree is itself a copy of the Tree, and the painting is a copy of the copy of the Tree, that nevertheless presents itself as a true representation. For Plato, then, this "art" leads us away from the "Real", very much in the same way as (especially) TV or video games would nowadays with my generation (I don't say this to be condescending, as these are weaknesses I indulge way too much myself).

Techne, or what one might call "true art", however, leads one to the Real. It is, to be overly-simplistic, art aimed at Truth rather than "art-for-art's-sake". I said my experience in converting to Eastern Catholicism had the exact opposite effect as the one you describe. I have come to greatly embrace imaginative fantasy, particularly the works of Lewis, Chesterton, and (most of all) Tolkien as avenues to religious truth. Perhaps these are only starting points for "laymen's" contemplation, and need to be shed as one progresses up the spiritual ladder, and I understand that the hesychasts prohibit images at least in part because God is beyond every image we can apply. However, for the vast majority of us, imagination and symbolism are powerful means of experiencing and growing in the divine. Icons are one obvious example, and fantasy literature of the kind spoken of in Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" is another.

For Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis (yes, clearly all Western thinkers), art in general and fantasy literature specifically (I mean good, deep fantasy literature like The Silmarillion, The Chronicles of Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet, and The Lord of the Rings) are the only tools capable of expressing certain truths about the world--truths that have been lost in modern day scientism, for example. They are doorways to a "re-enchantment" of the world precisely by allowing us to see the "old" as "new" again, as Tolkien allows us to see something as prosaic as trees anew as "Ents".

All that being said, there seem to be two different understandings of the imagination and its uses here. The use of imagination in fantasy literature is totally different than the imagination that hesychasm speaks of in its works. One aims at uncovering hidden or forgotten truth. The other itself deceives us by leading us away from truth. One is used at a more "popular" level, while the other is used in advanced spiritual contemplation. I would say that we are all called to advanced spiritual contemplation, and the overcoming of images that distract us from the real, but at the same time, our imagination in Fantasy, for example, is itself revelatory and spiritually-therapeutic. We always "know" that the "Secondary World" of Fantasy is not this world, and we thus avoid the error of perhaps even St. Francis in imaginatively-seeing the Divine, but the "Secondary World" is also True in that, via it do we come to realize the reality of the Real--a reality that is beyond "seeing". We look at a tree and now understand it as alive with the voice and depth and intrinsic worth of Treebeard. Perhaps in this way, the imagination of Fantasy leads us beyond itself, to that which cannot be seen, and should not be concretely conceptualized. But, at the very least, it is a rung on the ladder to that unseen and unseeable Reality.