Imagination

Eschatology or sin?

We assume that children are innocent, that they possess dignity, that their lives carry an intrinsic worth which demands protection. This assumption is completely natural to us, but it was anything but natural in the ancient world. In Rome, the child stood at the lowest rung of the social order. The paterfamilias held absolute authority; an unwanted infant could be exposed to die without scandal. The child was not yet a subject, not yet fully someone, but an extension of the father’s will—property. Into this world comes Christ, who does not merely defend children but elevates them into an icon of what we are called to become. The child becomes paradigmatic of the Kingdom—“Unless you become like little children…”

One of the defining characteristics of children is their capacity to imagine. I remember, in the first grade, convincing my best friend Ryan that I was a Kung-Fu master who had studied the ancient ways. He was my disciple. There was, surely for some cosmically significant reason, a portal to the spiritual realm in his basement. I knew perfectly well that I was not, in fact, initiated into any esoteric lineage—and I suspect Ryan knew this too. That was never the point. The point was the shared act of believing-together, the tacit agreement to treat the world as enchanted and charged with possibility. Our imagination did not deceive us; it created a space in which friendship could take on depth and drama, where we were no longer merely small boys subject to the will of bigger people, but participants in a story that gave form, meaning, and a strange kind of freedom to our otherwise narrow horizons.

While reflecting upon these memories, I found myself pressed by a tension that would not dissolve. I know that children possess a far greater power of imagining worlds and dwelling within them than we adults ever permit ourselves. I also know—as a Christian—that the child stands before us as a paradigm of the Kingdom, an image of what we are called to become. And yet the tradition speaks with caution about the imagination. The fathers warn that it is through the imagination that “demons enter into human souls and turn them into habitations for evil and God-defying thoughts.”¹ The Theotokos herself sings that God “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Luke 1:51). What, then, are we to make of this faculty that seems at once luminous and perilous—so native to the child, so cautioned against in the spiritual life?

I suggest that the difference is, in our terms, one of communion and self-relation. The imagination of an adult is self-relational in character, born out of pride. The child’s imagination is communal in character, born out of wonder. The adult seeks to build a world that confirms to his self-will, the child seeks to enter into a world that so greatly surpasses the confines of selfhood. Children imagine a world where they are mere participants in a greater story, open to every other to join. Adults imagine a world where they are lords, where others are reduced to means towards satisfying their self-imposed ends. Childlike imagination is an organic manifestation of the natural and God-given desire to access the beyond, a desire for life and life in abundance. Adult imagination is an unnatural desire to close the world into the confines of one’s own will, a self-enclosure that tends toward death. We speak generally, of course. There remain adults who preserve this childlike wonder—Lewis comes readily to mind—who imagine in innocence rather than in self-enclosure. And even our children’s imagination—wounded, as we all are, by the ancestral curse—do not remain untouched by distortion. One can already discern the first stirrings of self-assertion within their imaginative worlds: the subtle desire to control the narrative, to dominate the play, to bend the story toward themselves. What typically begins as wonder can, if untended, congeal into egoism. The same faculty that once opened outward toward communion gradually tightens into pride. The germs are there—small, almost imperceptible—but given time, they harden into the stubborn self-enclosure that so often characterizes adult life. That is, until Christ reverses this inevitable descent.

Despite these distortions, I cannot accept that the imaginary worlds of children are reducible to sin. We are commanded to become like children, which means there is something in their way of seeing that belongs to the Kingdom. There is an imagination born of wonder, and it is this imagination that stands behind every true work of art. Perhaps we must speak, then, of an eschatological imagination—a heavenly mode of imagining. Not the self’s arbitrary projection of its own desires, but a gift given by God for the exercise of freedom: a participation in His creative power, through which what is “not” may come to “be” in communion with what eternally is. Such imagination does not fabricate worlds in isolation; it cooperates in the glorification of the world, drawing forth the infinite possibilities already inscribed within creation by the Wisdom of God.

1. https://orthochristian.com/149888.html