Imagination, Education, and Faith

Corpus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali, 1954

Imagine a square on a piece of paper.  Now, imagine stretching that square upward from the surface of the paper.  You would have a cube, right?  Try, if you can, to imagine expanding that cube into four spatial dimensions.  You can't really do it, because we our brains only think in three spatial dimensions (length, width, height), but if you could, you would be imagining a tesseract or a hypercube.  Dali painted one of his crucifixion works showing Christ on a hypercube.  Pretty imaginative, huh?

The Wonder of Imagination

In an age in which I can pull from my pocket a device that allows me both to see and hear a friend halfway around the world as we converse in real time, we may be losing our sense of amazement at imagination itself.  What was, not too many years ago, the province of science fiction is now mundane science.  We can certainly imagine amazing things, and we do on a regular basis, both in the design of products and in our entertainment, but then again, it is not that hard to do so.  We have split the atom and walked on the moon.  We have taken images of far-flung space and helped a 3,000 -year-old mummy speak.  Should it be surprising that we have imagined the Marvel universe onto the silver screen?  To see how amazing human imagination truly is, consider some of what we imagined when we didn't have technological marvels on every corner.

In Book IV of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid told the story of Venus and Mars.  It was an adulterous affair between the goddess of love and the god of war, and to get revenge, Vulcan, the husband of Venus and blacksmith of the gods, crafted a net of bronze in which to trap them.  Ovid wrote that the strands of the net lumina fallere possent.  They could deceive the human eye.  The net was so finely woven that it would move with the slightest touch and was unlike anything that a weaver or even a spider could spin.  Ovid, writing at the beginning of the first century A.D., imagined this adulterer's trap at a time when it could not have been produced in reality.  There were many excellent craftsman of that day, to be sure, but none that could have crafted what Ovid conceived in his mind.

Or take Lucian of Samosata, the second century A.D. satirist who wrote what some consider the first science fiction novel, A True Story, with its wild plot describing travel to the moon and interstellar war.  Lucian died sometime around 180 A.D., which is a long time before Neil Armstrong or Star Wars.  Such a tale from a time when there was no electricity or telescopes is, well, quite imaginative, and knowing the circumstances in which it was written, we likely experience a little wonder, if not jaw-dropping amazement, at the very act of Lucian's imagination.

The Necessity of Imagination

Imagination is a critical and foundational component of literacy, something I was discussing recently with a former student now at a major university preparing to become an English teacher.  As our Zoom conversation wound its way through many ideas, I recalled the story of one my of homeroom students years ago as he took our statewide assessment.  One part of the test asked the students to write to a prompt that said something like, "You and your class went on trip to a dairy farm.  Write about what happened on that trip."  This young man raised his hand, and when I went to his desk, quietly said, "I didn't go on that trip."  I replied that this was pretend, that he should imagine what it would have been like and to write about that.  He accepted the advice, and as I walked away, I noticed the ankle bracelet that this sophomore was required to wear while on house arrest.

Since he was in my homeroom, which only met once a week, I did not know him well, and I never learned all of his circumstances, but I was shaken deeply that day, and the ripples of that interaction are with me still.  I did not know what had warranted his house arrest, but I did know that he lacked a skill necessary for learning, imagination.  Whether that had anything to do with his legal trouble, I could not say, but it was heartbreaking to think that a high school sophomore did not recognize an imaginative assignment for what it was or, worse still, lacked the capacity to fulfill it.

The Treachery of Images, René Magritte, 1929

Imagination is at the heart of metaphor, and it is possible to see all language as metaphoric.  When I look at an object sitting on my desk and tell a friend, "That is my stapler," I have made a comparison, a reference.  I have uttered the two syllable word "stapler," perhaps even written its five consonants and two vowels on a piece of paper, and have asked my friend to connect those sounds and letters with the object on my desk and think of them as the same.  It is, when you think about it, an extraordinary act of imagination to think that seven distinct shapes on a piece of paper are the same as a metal and plastic, rectangular device capable of puncturing an object with a slender bit of metal and then bending that metal so that what has been punctured by it cannot readily escape from it.  It takes even greater imagination to suppose that an act of exhalation and vocal cord-vibration is equivalent to that metal and plastic, rectangular device.  If such imagination is required for the identification of a simple office item, how much do we need to understand math or physics or poetry?

Imagination's Raw Materials

Much goes into the making of imagination, both in terms of the material by which imagination works and the working of that material into what we call imagination.  In a similar way, a painting is the product both of physical elements such as paint, brushes, and canvas, along with the training and practice and work of the painter.  What, then, are the materials and the working that go into the formation of imagination?  The answers, of course, far exceed what can be explored here, but there are some basics that can be considered.

Experience, along with the realization that things can be other than they are, is one of the key elements of imagination.  When once I have experienced a coffee cup and have come to understand that its shaped may be varied, I can imagine a cup that will ride without spilling in my car, and so is born the travel mug.  One of the best ways for me to expand rapidly my experience of the world is through reading.  My grandmother used to say that she could go anywhere in a book, and she was right.  Faster than in a Star Trek transporter, I can be whisked by a book to any place in the universe and at any point in history, and this is one of the reasons why reading is crucial, especially in early childhood.  Maryanne Wolf, whose background is in neuroscience and psycholinguistics, has written much about this, and the point is quite simple.  Children need to be read to when they are young and need as much experience with reading as they can get once they are able to read for themselves.  I will never forget when one of my students asked if I had read Seamus Heaney's then new translation of Beowulf.  When I said that I had not, he offered to bring it to me when his dad had finished reading it.  As excited as I was to see the new Beowulf, I was more struck by the comment about his father's reading habits.  Reading was clearly a part of this family's life, not only engaged in with and for the children, but by the adults as well, thus modeling the look of literacy for the younger members.

If reading is a source of experience, one of the necessary ingredients for imagination, how is that experience kneaded and worked into imagination itself?  In no small part this happens through imaginative play among children.  When my son was little, we ran around the backyard in endless re-enactments of the Trojan War.  He was always the victorious Achilles, and I the doomed Hector, and there can be no doubt that the imaginative play of his youth, which included adventures with toy knights and kingdoms built of Legos, shaped the imagination that he now uses as an industrial design major.  Whether it is retelling a story through a classroom play complete with cardboard props and costumes cobbled together from the rummage sale to drawing pictures of a favorite story in a notebook, this sort of creative and recreative work is essential for developing the skill of imagining.

Imagining God

St. Anselm (1033-1109) is famous for putting forth his ontological proof for the existence of God.  In Proslogion 2 he says that God is aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, that than which no greater can be imagined.  He is the very limit of our imagination because He is the source of our imagination, and it certainly takes imagination on our part even to attempt to get our minds around how John described the Incarnation in his gospel when he wrote that the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Our word "imagination" is derived from the Latin word imago, which we find in Colossians 1:15 where Jesus is described as the imago Dei, the image of God.  Just a few lines later in verse 19 we read that all the fullness of God dwelled in Him.  Once again, Jesus, Who is God, is the very limit of our imagination.  He is the fullness of God.  He is that than which no greater can be imagined.

Imagination is necessary not only for attempting to grasp theological concepts, but for the living out of our faith as well.  We live in the world of already-but-not-yet.  Christ is already victorious over all things, and yet we await His return and the renewal of all things.  This is why His description in Revelation 4:8 as the One Who was, Who is, and Who is to come, while seemingly illogical, makes sense, but it does take a stretching of our imagination to get there.  What does it mean, then, to live in such a reality?  We are everyday imagining new ways of doing just that.

Why We Read

Much more can be and has been written about imagination, but I want to close by revisiting the idea of reading.  Not only do books quickly broaden our experiences, the raw material of our imagination, but they allow us to see how others imagine.  For most of human history, people have learned skills through apprenticing, by seeing how others have done something, and this applies well to developing our imagination.  When we see how master authors, both of fiction and nonfiction, have imagined the tale they have to tell, we see yet another way for us to imagine our own tale, a way that we can follow or that will inspire us to imagine something new yet again.

Collaboration and Communication

 

At a recent professional development meeting at our school, we talked about the importance of collaboration and communication among students.  It was one of those PD sessions that prompted me to think more after the meeting, and I began to realize why collaboration and communication are not just important but vital to students and what the prerequisites are for them to work well.

Christians know that God is eternally existent in three persons.  He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...three persons, one God.  It is one of the delightful mysteries of our faith.  This truth reveals, as has often been said, that community is at the heart of God, and since we were created in His image, it stands to reason that collaboration, a word whose Latin roots literally mean "to work together," should be part of our nature.  We were created for collaboration with God Himself and with others.

We also should expect to be highly communicative creatures, for, as we read in the first chapter of Genesis, God spoke reality into existence, and in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we read, "In the beginning was the word."  Think about it.  The God in Whose image we are made spoke, and subatomic particles began to exist.  He uttered a word and the number 17 came into being, to say nothing of planets and rabbits and gravity and us.  Our God is a supremely communicative being, and as creatures made in His image, so are we.

Collaboration and communication, while natural to humans, must also be developed, just as our abilities to run and jump, paint and do math, and all other things must be, and just as we would no more expect a person who had never touched a football to show up for practice and run a complex offense, so we should not expect to shape high school students into master collaborators and communicators without some foundation having been laid.

When it comes to collaboration, docility is a key requirement.  Unfortunately, too many people think docility refers to a nearly catatonic state.  Again, the Latin root helps us here by showing that docility simply means the quality of being able to be taught, and folded into that quality are the abilities to respect others, to listen, and to exhibit self control.  Students who lack these abilities cannot suddenly be turned loose to work in small groups, at least not unless the teacher is looking for chaos to ensue.  Ideally, these abilities will have been nurtured by families and by earlier levels of schooling.  If they are present, then the high school teacher can build on them, helping students grow in their natural calling to collaboration.  If not, then these prerequisites must be established.

As for communication, there is no better preparation for the mature development of all this entails than early childhood reading.  A quick Google search will produce more evidence for this than you can possibly process, so a good place to start may be the work of Maryanne Wolf, a child literacy expert with a background in cognitive science and psycholinguistics.  Children who have experienced books, both by having them read to them from an early age and by reading on their own, not only gain linguistic fluency that helps them with the massively complex tasks of mature written, read, and oral communication, but they also gain exposure to and awareness of a vastly broader world of ideas and emotions and experiences than they could have simply through their direct, physical relationships.  Seeing how characters respond to situations, both good and bad, in stories, develops in them a rich palette from which to draw in their own responses to the world.

As a Christian who is an educator, I want to help my students become who God has called them to be, and this clearly involves helping them develop their skills in collaboration and communication.  I invite all those who work with younger children, especially parents and other family members, to help prepare their children for the levels of mature development that will come as they grow older.

Atomic Language

 

In her book Proust and The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf writes about the power of an alphabet.  In particular she focuses on the ancient Greek alphabet and observes, "Young Greek pupils were given an almost perfect alphabet with almost perfect rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence.  As a result, these pupils could gain fluency in literacy far sooner than their Sumerian, Akkadian, or Egyptian counterparts." (p. 68)

Put another way, there is incredible power in an alphabet, which allows for unending combinations, as opposed to a pictographic language in which whole ideas are represented by images.  Even today, you can communicate with greater sophistication, greater depth, and greater novelty with a 26-letter alphabet than you can with a hundred emojis.

The Roman poet Lucretius noted this as well in his work De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the first century B.C. didactic poem that explored the world of atoms.  In Book 2 we find the following.

quin etiam refert nostris in versibus ipsis
cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata;
namque eadem caelum mare terras flumina solem     1015
significant, eadem fruges arbusta animantis;
si non omnia sunt, at multo maxima pars est
consimilis; verum positura discrepitant res.  (DRN 2.1013-1018)

Why, it even matters in our very own verses
With what and in what order the elements have been placed;
For the same letters indicate the sky, the sea, the lands, the rivers

The sun, and the same indicate grains, trees, and living things.

If not entirely, they are for the very most part very

Similar, but they distinguish things by their position.

Lucretius was pointing out the atomic nature of an alphabetic language, for just as atoms combine in endless arrangements to create new things, so the letters of a language function in a similar way.  If we combine three English letters we get "tap," if we combine them in a different order we get "apt," and if we rearrange them yet again we get "pat."

When I taught classes called Critical Thinking and Theory of Knowledge, my students would often discuss an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Darmok."  In that episode, Captain Picard interacts with a being whose people only speak in allegories that reference their own mytho-historical past.  One question that inevitably came up was how such a race could have engineered the space ships that they used.  It seemed that their allegory-based language was ill-suited to the kind of scientific specificity that could only be expressed through an infinitely flexible, alphabetic language.

Yes, we language teachers teach people how to speak and write in other languages and how to understand the written and spoken word.  Yet it is worth the pause every once in a while to marvel at the beauty, the power, and even the limitations of human languages, for with words we speak ideas into existence.