Imagination as Enlargement

As a high school senior in the Panhandle of Texas, my life could not be further removed from that of a poor, Victorian woman.  But as I read Tess of the D’urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and began to inhabit the world of this fallen woman, I experienced what C.S. Lewis called, “an enlargement of my being.”   Her isolation and sorrow gave shape to my own sense of isolation and sorrow, and more than that brought more than a little perspective to my narrow teenage understandings of isolation and sorrow.  That reading experience, along with others such as Hamlet and The Grapes of Wrath, convinced me of the power of the imagination to take us out of ourselves and then bring us back to ourselves changed.  This I would suggest is  one of the main purposes of the Christian imagination in our experience of art.

By taking us out of ourselves, so that we might inhabit novel places, people, and ideas, imaginative works become a vehicle for enlargement. The art of another reminds us of the world in its fulness, not simply the world as we experience it in the snatches and glimpses of our limited experience. More than that, the art of another reminds us of the flesh and blood existence of our flesh and blood brothers and sisters and reminds us of the their often joyous, often horrific flesh and blood lives. This is only to say that the Christian imagination must experience imaginative works through the lenses of creation, fall, and redemption. Such a view takes creation seriously, by remembering that the world and the fulness thereof was created good. It also takes the fall seriously, remembering that we live in a sin-shattered world. But it also takes redemption seriously, not only believing but proclaiming that there is a God who came to rescue us and who will rescue all of creation.

 
Such a view also protects against us consuming art simply as a means of escape. When we read literature well, when we view a film well, when we view art well, we can escape the often narcissistic prison of our own minds and dwell in the mind and experience of another. But if this escape from ourselves serves only as escapism, then what we are really running from is ourselves and brute facts of our lives. Art reminds us to attend to the world, not merely to occupy it. It is something like a dose of smelling salts for souls, keening our sense to the shape of the world around us, in all of its beauty and its depravity.