Imagination, Myth and Meaning (Part 3)…

In Out of the Silent Planet (the first book in C.S. Lewis’s stunning Cosmic Trilogy) the philologist Elwin Ransom is abducted by the scientist Dr Western and his entrepreneur accomplice Dick Devine, and is whisked away on an interplanetary journey to the world of Malacandra (Mars). Unaware that Western and Devine have singled him out as a suitable (i.e. unwitting and compliant) human sacrifice – to be offered up to the sorns of Malacandra – Ransom’s initial challenge is simply adjusting to life in outer space.

While the journey to Malacandra is not a comfortable one, it affords Ransom many a spectacle and plenty of time for contemplation, during which he finds certain of his most worldly preconceptions falling short of the lived reality of traversing the cosmos. Indeed, his very notion of the wider universe as ‘space’ is one of the main images to be found wanting. Here is how Lewis describes Ransom’s imaginative awakening:

‘A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment.’

Imagination, Myth and Meaning (Part 2)…

Cave painting – Lascaux (France) c15,000 BC

In Part 1 we started to think about the working of the imagination, of how it is an especially active faculty in children, and how rather than inevitably leading to illusion or falsehood, the imagination can lead us instead to a deeper and richer appreciation of the meaning of things. Here in Part 2 I want to explore in greater depth the power and potency of our imaginative faculty, including the way in which image and metaphor turn out to be ubiquitous features of the human quest for knowledge and understanding.

 

That our imaginative response to the world, even in works of deliberate fantasy, can lead to a truer – more realistic – grasp of what things are like, might at first seem counterintuitive; but it is a point made repeatedly by Tolkien, who argued that the value of all good fantasy and fairy stories lies precisely in their power of Recovery – i.e. their ability to help us recover a fresh sense of the true significance and meaning of the familiar or the mundane. Tolkien says, ‘It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.’

Imagination, Myth and Meaning (Part 1)…

The Story Teller – by Michael Vincent Manalo

C.S. Lewis suggests that while reason is the natural organ of truth, the imagination is the natural organ of meaning. Together, reason and imagination work to provide us with a full and meaningful picture of what the world is like. But what is the imagination and why is it so important to human knowledge and understanding?  In particular, what role if any does the imagination play in the cultivation of Christian hearts and minds? This is the first in a 3 part essay based on a presentation given by Tabor Adelaide’s Dr James Cooper at the recent School of Humanities & Social Sciences Symposium of Ideas.

 

Imagination, Myth and Meaning – Part 1

Some time ago, my wife and children and I drove to the Victorian High Country from our home in South Australia. To break up the journey, we stopped half-way at Echuca, a picturesque country town located just where the Murray River traverses the Victoria­—New South Wales border. It’s a beautiful spot, and the caravan park at which we stayed was also right by the river, just a little way out of town in an attractive bush setting. With such a pleasant place to layover, making the trip in two days instead of one seemed eminently worthwhile.