you can talk about the topic of the moral imagination is what's meant by it but more than that Catholic moral imagination. And actually, the way Tony and I are dividing it up today is the title of the course I think was something like the Catholic moral imagination and then there's like a subtype I don't remember what it was. But, I'm specifically and then I'll talk about the topic just the moral imagination and then Tony's gonna talk about what is the Catholic moral imagination. And in some ways, if the two ways we get to know truth are through reason or like philosophy and revelation or theology that this topic actually divides up kind of nicely that what I'm gonna talk about just the moral imagination is how is it just as every human being whether Catholic or not can through the imagination better understand and know the truth.
Tony is gonna come from behind with a revelation aspect especially maybe I don't know but the two combined we got now where this topic came from specifically um what I want Tony and I want to do this as a course is that we are both third-ordered Dominicans and our third-ordered Dominican group in the upstate that we read different things once a month and we talked about them and last year we booked well it's a very good book but it's called Theology and Samedy by Frank Sheed and for the most part it's very good he's Frank Sheed was an Englishman who's actually GK Chesterton's editor but there was this extremely unsatisfying chapter that led to a lot of internal arguments within the third world Dominican group where Frank Sheed started talking about how one of the biggest obstacles for right thinking was the imagination and Tony and I were a little affronted by this because we argued like no the imagination is actually oftentimes the means by which one comes to know and love the truth rather than an obstacle and part of the problem was that the guy I mean she had sort of a very limited view of the imagination that he was arguing from in that he was disarguing like using the term for simply to daydreaming so if you're trying to do the work of thinking about theology and you keep getting distracted because in your imagination you start thinking about low at your unique for dinner that okay it's going to be an obstacle that's such a very limited understanding and so this led to what I was talking about wanted to do a course on what is the imagination properly understood and how does it actually help us and part of that is that I want to start a little bit with is Thomas Aquinas that Thomas Aquinas this guy looks he talked about how one of the main things he talked about is as human beings how we come to know truth there's a fancy term for that philosophy epistemology how do we come to know things and the project means by which we have to know things is through the use of our senses God gave us senses and it's through our senses that we interact with reality and then we interpret that reality now we all know when we think of the term our senses we all think immediately of our five external senses of touch, taste, hearing, sight, smell but what we often forget is that we don't just have external senses we also have internal senses and the internal senses include things like memory and they also include the imagination which in the simplest sense we can say the imagination is the ability to make images in our minds to from reality from our interpretation of reality and how we experience we take that reality and we can make images in our minds and if you want to know well ultimately we can say what distinguishes human beings from your animals that animals have senses they have the external senses they have some very limited internal senses but they're being able to abstractly think in this like deep way in using a properly ordered imagination is actually one of the things that only a human being properly properly did that's why it's a very important thing to understand as human being to be truly human is a very important have a proper understanding of the role of the imagination now the term the moral imagination that was specifically mean by a moral imagination or another way to say actually anyways it's a properly ordered imagination that this has been something that human beings have been thinking about and striving towards and writing about and working on for time and memorial that Plato was fascinated by the concept of the moral imagination even though he never used the term moral imagination if you ever heard the term the divine madness that this was Plato's trying to search after like what the moral imagination is but the term itself for instance the first place that I could ever made its appearance putting together a moral imagination came from the English statesmen at the time of sort of the American revolution into the 1700s and 1800s and then Burke. Evan Burke one of the greatest members of our element statesmen of all time and he had a great it's a little bit longer quote but he had a great quote where he talked about the French revolution and why what exactly they were doing on top of just the general evil just killing evil but why it was so sort of perverse in what they were in that project and most of what I'm talking about the moral imagination the best explanation of it ever written or is short essay by Russell Kirk American mid-20th century Catholic writer wrote a lot of tends to be more toward political philosophy so his books if you ever want to probably understand the American founding etc his books the Roots of American Order his one most famous ones the conservative mind is particularly good too he had put his lots of good good things but his essays are especially good but one of the moral imagination is where everything I don't come up with a reasonable thought ever I just find people to go to original thoughts and rip them off so it's from him that I'm ripping them off and he is ripped his eye goes off from T.S. Eliot in his famous essay based on a series of lectures he gave at Virginia he received Virginia called After Strange Gods which are hard to find because they were put out of print because in the beginning of it he talks about religious pluralism and how no society in history of the world has ever lasted very long while being religiously pluralistic and so but what there's a phrase in there that has been sort of misinterpreted over in years Duke's sort of say oh look he's being a racist because he said the phrase in there that no society can last long with a large amount of free thinking Jews and what he meant by it back at that time was there was a stereotype of that the free thinking Jew was a stereotype of sort of the secular atheist because of the fact that Freud marks they were all they were both atheist Jews and so that was what he was referring to he was not talking about the race of people he's not but he's referring to secular atheists that if there's a large amount of secular atheism that dominates the philosophy in the thinking of a society it's not going to last long but because people don't think through things properly there's I think there's only one copy or printing of it you can find anymore so anyway but those were most sort of getting everything from but Edmund Burke's quote I can't go too long but anyway talking about the French Revolution he says all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off so think about what they're doing the French Revolution and the guillotaine's chopping people's heads off including the king and the queen but he thought that the worst thing that they ever did wasn't necessarily even chopping the king's head off but chopping the queen's head off so all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off all the super added ideas furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation are to be exploded as a ridiculous absurd and antiquated fashion on this scheme of things a king is but a man a queen is but a woman a woman is but an animal and an animal not of the highest order all homage paid to the sex in general as such and without just infused is to be regarded as romance and folly and on the scheme of this barbarous barbarous philosophy which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understanding in which is as void of solid wisdom as its destitute of all tastes and elegance laws are to be supported by their own tears and by the concern which individuals may find in them from their own private speculations nongestop for going to be farther that without a moral imagination a proper understanding of things like there's a reason why the end result is the French Revolution let me explain why that is by explaining what the moral imagination actually properly is um so when i like i said tom's Aquinas talked about become the no truth and things to the use of the senses and this also includes the internal senses such as imagination now it's important to start with the idea that is that the humanly the reality is something that is received god is like so when he says i am and he's revealed himself to Moses in a burning bush that the ultimate definition of god the logos is that he is reality itself now as human beings we stand passively before that reality um so god is but we try to come to know what is so we try to learn what truth is and we call like truth is something that corresponds that reality we try to know what goodness is goodness is something that corresponds to the way god created it to actually work and we try to come to know beauty which is harder to describe but it's that there's something about reality that is attractive like a giant magnet that brings us forward to them and we call like this attractive nature of reality we ends up like evidenceing itself is beauty um now because as human beings we have this natural desire towards god to know him and to love him etc that god built into our very nature like i said this sort of this magnet that sort of pulls us towards it now but we're passive before remember that we aren't deciding what the reality is we are ultimately receiving it now so what the moral imagination is that anytime we say that our imagination you through the use of creativity and thought and everything is able to draw us towards what things actually are now there's a important part for understanding imagination is we have to understand first of all what creation actually is so god we say ultimately when we look at it in the bible with the the act of creation when god creates the heavens and the earth there's two parts to creation there's the bringing something out of nothing and then there's the bringing order to that something so god there's nothing and then he says like let there be and boom there's something um that say god created something ex-neelove he brought something out of nothing but then what does god do after he brings that something out of nothing well when he creates man so the exeel that brings him on the first part that when you bring creates man he gives man the job to bring order to participate in the bringing order to that thing that was created so what is Adam given the job of doing naming the animals like so he's because remember man being made in god's image that god is a creator so just like a five-year-old wants to do things just like the the the parent they want the make the cookies like the parents they want to participate in the projects that parents are working on god from the very beginning he lets man participate within his projects to be a creator like him so from the very beginning Adam's given the job named the animals um be like god um and name the animals is is Adam gonna do a better job than god if god come up with the name so no god could come up with cooler names um he's got but he lets a name participate from me so when in his blessing is a sub creator that god gives man the ability to use our reason and our god given abilities to bring order to creation to remake that more beautiful what does he not allow man to do from the beginning to create an exeel meaning that god when he talked about reality being received god gives the stuff a reality um but there are confines we should say to what we can do in bringing order so for instance like think about the fact was it the was it the first law for the dynamics that energy is needed created or destroyed but simply transformed second law there you go thinking we need an engineer um i obviously did not study science but anyway like we can't create matter like you can't scientists can't go in a lab and just like make something exist that wasn't there before um like there are natural boundaries to the universe we can't create matter we um we can't think of something purely original um and actually this is one of the proofs of god's existence you can't close your eyes and think up a new color that doesn't exist anywhere like we can't like there are confines to reality that we have to work within just because you don't like gravity you can't just like think gravity away um it's going to be there so there are confines to our bringing or create order to create about here out of creation so with the moral imagination and i have lots of people but i don't have time to go through tons of them um as we can say that it is um anytime within literature especially because that's we're going to focus that you have a writer that understands what his proper role of creation is and that is he is really ordered but more than that he is using his creativity his imagination his means of bringing order to teach us something more about what actually is and the thing about the author is there's a lot of room within the created order for quote unquote creativity um so there's um like i said we can't come up with a new color but there's that quote i put at the top of your page of from jr. token which is i think key for understanding the moral imagination when he says why for instance should the sun be golden in the grass green in fairy they may be sometimes entirely different combination and when we return from a fairy tale wherein the sun is perhaps blue in the grass violet we notice as if for the first time the very peculiarity of our own gilded star and the deep verter of our grasses we once again see them for what they are rather than for what uncle fred tells us and what they are is magical meaning that by you by coming up with creative stories coming up with creative things they are able to actually help us better understand what ksl is called the permanent things that there's certain permanent things that they can't change and by using the the what they can change they can help us better understand those permanent things you cannot change so what are the permanent things that cannot change they cannot change what good and evil are um so good is always good because god it good is defined by that which is sort of corresponding to god like the way it is god can't tomorrow become evil if he wanted and good if become evil he can't even god himself can't change that because they are defined by what is um so likewise an author not being able to get evil he cannot change but also so an author teaches us about those permanent things we cannot change including especially human nature um that if you ever did they say the standard of a good author with a properly ordered moral imagination is one that teaches a proper understanding of human nature and that's why when Edinburgh talked about them lacking a moral imagination what you meant is that they have this false understanding of human nature um that they were saying that the reason why we can have a treat mariente when that as a queen is because if you have a proper understanding of human nature of everyone being made in the image and likeness of god ultimately everyone is a queen or every woman is a queen um and but it would be impractical to treat every single woman in the world with the reverence due to them as a queen um and thus we have he would say we have one example to be like a shining example like this is what everyone is supposed to be um it's this proper understanding of the moral imagination we understand the dignity of human person we understand what a human being is supposed to be now there are other types of imagination so if a proper imagination moral imagination is one that both then declines a reality that is not trying to increase the new rights we need order so we better understand what actually is that um there are other types of imaginations that try to do the opposite that an opposed to a poor imagination most of her talked about you know like um two else he talked about people and i'm still imagining an ideal imagination is an imagination that fancies itself that it can actually create out of nothing that it doesn't this is actually this is a going back all the way to what the original sin it's the idea that hey there's no or not it is a great order but rather to try to create out of nothing the art the tree of the knowledge of good and evil what is the knowledge of the evil that in Hebrew when he talks about the knowledge of something it means an experiential knowledge not just like intellectual knowledge so the experience is good and evil the ultimately the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the idea that god tells us reveals to us what is good and evil but we don't get to decide for ourselves it's good and evil what Adam and Eve when they want to be like god they want to be side good and evil for themselves they want to be with this part they want to be able to create something out of nothing and this is our prime temptation all the time we want to create reality for ourselves we want to decide what's true for ourselves um and this is what an ideal imagination does it's like well let's reject human nature as we've come to know it through both reason and revelation and instead we will write things where that are just contrary to nature as it actually is and he used the example of John Jacques Rousseau which actually there's a great quote in there he calls him the insane Socrates of the National Assembly that he was the philosopher behind the ideas of the French Revolution that he used that he first and foremost taught like a backwards view of human nature that there's no such thing as original sin that you are like this empty vessel on in which you could decide sort of truth and goodness for yourself use the sort of original relativists decide reality for yourself this is the ideal imagination and actually I think a great example if you want to understand the difference between the ideal imagination and the moral imagination is within two different television shows after use this analogy between that of Seinfeld and friends that Seinfeld is the moral imagination and the reason why is in Seinfeld you have characters and I assume most people have only seen the episode that do wicked things they live as repurvets they live lives that they shouldn't be living but every time they do reality reasserts itself against them in that their lives it makes them miserable their choices make them miserable and ultimately even the very final episode that they try to live these complete lives of selfishness and self-determination the result ends up with them all in prison because like you can try but reality will reassert itself morally as well as physically so just like if you decide that the physical reality isn't real you want to jump off the roof the physical reality of gravity like you will hit the ground and same with morally as opposed to friends where they live the exact same lives as the characters in Seinfeld where the end result is that they are happy and that it sort of fulfills all their desires which is a lie because it won't so you can see that that is also the ideal imagination now the thing about the ideal imagination though is that it ultimately leads to like a literal or term would be on on we and we am I pronouncing that your former English teacher back there you can pronounce it but it leads towards oh here you go this is Edmund Burke's put it that that it terminates in disillusion and boredom that because reality ultimately asserts itself that an ideal imagination always ends in this sort of this boredom this disillusion realizing oh wait this isn't actually true this doesn't actually fulfill etc and you can in when you're reading different works you can tell like um I don't know if you're reading a Lawrence Stern not Lawrence Stern is or whatever um there's different authors you can say like oh these characters that is not how human nature actually works um and see and they don't have to be consciously christian necessarily be more of that actually usually the more subtle the the artist like the more subtle they are in the preaching like sometimes you read something like oh this is so heavy-handed talking about human nature etc but sometimes you're like oh this is actually very subtle better proper understanding of like a human person and how reality works how sin works um I mean you can see this in movies you can see this books you can see this in stores um but this boredom of the ideal imagination what it results ultimately in is because what people is doing is it's happening to create our nothing it's like well can you create ourselves create ourselves and this is why we ever wonder like modern art modern books like what do they have to do is they try to create they look for a new reality they don't find it and so they go to the next place and look for a new reality and they don't find it and so ultimately all that's left is basically they end up finding the perverse and so that's why um the third form of imagination is the diabolic imagination that usually is the end result of the ideal imagination it's well if god is reality we're trying to create for ourselves we can't because it's impossible so we will try to shock we'll try to create new emotions um by shocking people and you ends up sort of resulting into a well we'll just sort of settle into the anti-reality that of evil um in the diabolic and these are you'll come across things and this is the works where like not only is present like a false view of human nature but it will fall a perverse view of human nature perverse and I say the ultimate example of this of the diabolic imagination is actually one of the most famous novels of all time but that is of Ulysses by James Joyce which is like the quintessential example of the diabolic imagination though interestingly I did recently learned that despite writing perverse and diabolic books he actually became returned to the church and died as a good catholic but all right so that's with the moral imagination in general sorry I'm gonna try to make this your time Tony the Catholic imagination comes from a term comes from a Catholic priest in Chicago Father Andrew Greeley you're familiar with Father Greeley it's rather notorious not that time notorious priest but you run some risque novels and mysteries and things but his phrase Catholic imagination Father Greeley coin is uh it's just basic Catholic philosophy is uh is that God reveals himself to us through his creation through this world what's why Father Newman calls us sacramental realism that grace uh grace comes to us through stuff things that's why in a catholic church we have incense and candles and statues and stained glass and priest dressed up and festments and we have sacraments grace comes through sacraments we baptize a child we don't just say you're baptized we actually pour water on in some cases duct of an arver some we actually do things when we take the eucharist we actually take the body and blood the true presence of Christ under the auspices of bread and wine we don't we don't call it we don't call it a symbol what Protestants do I used to be a Methodist for many years so I can talk about Protestants I've got street created and so but we don't just call it a symbol we think it's real we believe it's real flannel oconor we get the flannel oconor you know flannel oconor from Georgia great southern catholic rider the famous story about oconor when she was really young probably in early 20s was at a dinner in New York with a bunch of famous riders Mary McCarthy is very well known at that time but we would call it leeches now and the discussion got around to the the the sector the church somehow anyway uh somebody may have heard it's a famous story a flannel oconor she was at that dinner and the discussion got around to the church and one of the riders a very sophisticated rider said I think that the that the Eucharist is a beautiful symbol and flannel oconor popped up and said if it's just a symbol the hell with it he sort of shot there by there but being uh about the solidly grounded Catholic who's ever existed probably uh or her objection was if it's not real don't bother with it don't bother with it so anyway the moral imagination of the really is that grace is channeled to us through God's creation so in tz talked about God created the world he infused creation with his grace so the great distinction is always in theology between nature and grace so it's not as up here as creation is here it's what the emergence is called a horizontal and the vertical aspects of reality that we live on a horizontal plane of nature of creation of themes and stuff of time and space and everything around us we live on a material plane right in matter as a as a physicist would say a world of matter colliding atoms whatever by God who made it good remember in Genesis God created the world and called it good so it's also a world it's a world of beauty and truth and goodness it's a world of beautiful blue skies and green grass and mountains and trees and rivers and and in estalable beauty because God created it and found it good and and when he created man he created him in the image of God in my Joe dated image of God so he created man mean women uh good so in that sense of creation is like the psalmist says this is Psalm 119 the heavens declare the glory of God the firmament shows forth his hand you work day and today other speech talks to us night and tonight shows knowledge there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard their line is going out to all the earth he had set a tabernacle for the sun it's just so vision of the world as as almost an Eden which it was an Eden a paradise but what happened what happened what happened was a concept called the fall original sin we messed it up that's what it's we mess we mess things up so if you turn that was Psalm 19 if you just turn over to Psalm 22 the Psalmist says my God why have you forsaken me why are you so far from helping me I am a worm and no man I am a reproach despised on them they that see me left me the scorn they shake their head I am a worm all of a sudden what happened to this beautiful idyllic creation it's just two Psalms apart and if you read the Psalms this constant constant interplay between praise the Lord oh man where's God I'm coming straight in this mess out you got the detention so we talk about the the Catholic imagination in art of course the imagination is the root of all art all great art poetry philosophy poetry painting sculpture architecture what we call the liberal arts the arts that exist only for the purpose of finding truth as opposed to the practical art like engineering and science and so forth the hell whose aim is to make something the purpose of liberal arts is just to find truth so this is a beautiful world that is also other it's also there's truth here and it's also lives there's beauty here there's horrible ugliest and there's goodness here but there's egregious sins we didn't know that before we certainly know that after last few weeks there's some really nasty sins in this world among God's creation so how does the artist deal with it the purpose of art is to lead us towards God then the artist is sort of is sort of the great artist we're gonna talk about DJ's Vincent Jane Austen Chesterton Flannery O'Connor T.S.
Eliot Bob Dylan at the great what the great artists have in common is this search for ultimate truth beauty and goodness through the imagination it's what Flannery O'Connor talks about the effort to hold race and nature together we're not separating them see if we see if we if we if we only look at what's here then we we we fall into materialism we just which is the common viewpoint of modern society this is all there is this is all there is it's what's here it just we're just matter we're just creatures of matter we just add them's there's no ultimate meaning we're just here by accident that is the dominant position of western civilization has been for 100 years there's no ultimate meaning to life we just colliding atoms and we die we're gone and that's all there is to it it's essentially it's essentially nihilism because we live in a I think it was Flannery O'Connor who said we breathe nihilism with the air we live in because that's we live in a post Christian society stuff that's simply the world we the world we inherit is a world of nihilism there's no ultimate meaning so it's ultimately nihilistic you know what nihilism philosophy nothing really nothing really means anything there's no ultimate meaning it's a logical extension of atheist if you reject god you have to eventually reject all ultimate meaning you can't have one without the other you can't say there's no god god's dead and say oh yeah it's a meaningful beautiful world can't do that it's just making you see it great German atheist Nietzsche had to have their fortitude to say yes god is dead and it's all meaningless so do whatever you want to do it with power but it's a topic you reject creation and you become a spiritualist a theosophist a new age you if you reject the reality of god's creation then you're desperately float off into spiritualism so that what the great artist does is hold those two in tension it's a T.S. Eliot called the time of tension between birth and dying it's always that creative tension between a world of shadows and light so to speak because although god reveals himself through his creation he doesn't he also remains hidden there's a thing it's like called a hidden god god never reveals himself fully except through Jesus and since Jesus ain't here right here in this room that was in the new place so god god is god is able to be perceived but not there's an old quote that says god reveals enough of himself to enable us to believe but not too much to destroy our free will does that make sense because we are free that's that's the other part is freedom it's freedom got the great swish the illusion bounces our call man's existential freedom man is free we are creatures of free will we can't do whatever we want to do it would be consequences if you read some of these words we're going to talk about you read flannel connor there's a lot of people that live in really really uh unhealthy things and so we can't do just about whatever although we'll be consequences like teaching mention we can pretend or we can't pretend to give you a check god's creation and reinvent it you can reinvent we live at a time now where it's it's almost become commonplace to reinvent reality to reinvent yourself to reimagine yourself you know sometimes identifies so Roger federal doesn't help so that's something to tell me about but we're the time to insanity really because uh we have uh say well all this doesn't matter yet you got these two extreme please okay flannel connor says your jet reality you you want it with cinnamon cinnamon cowlity because you forget the reality of evil but if you take god you end up with this obscenity just an obscene view of evil so the great artist posed those two intentions and uses of the the words of the imagination to apprehend god's truth and the three great transcendentals or truths goodness and beauty the artist deals in all three because ultimately all three are the same all three are the same there's only one god was it keet's true this beauty beauty's truth that's all you know in earth and all you need to know you left out goodness but the three of those are transcendentals so the great artist through the medium that that he or she is working in painting music poetry literature novels leads us to apt to perceive at least partially those ultimate truths but TJ mentioned the permanent things truth beauty and goodness which which our attributes of god does that make sense so what I'm trying to get at is the greatness of the artist is depends upon his or her ability to hold those two things intention and to use the the material around him to lead us to an apprehension of beauty and goodness even though the story might be ugly because the artist never rejects the great artist never rejects which which is if he did simply cinnamon towel would be very tips would be wouldn't be great art the same tell me what art today the vertical dimensions reject god so it just becomes who is it said just one damn thing after another that's what I mean it's after a point is that why bother why bother with with the artist that simply uh i'll make my sister mom that here but the artist is simply just gross paying on the canvas and calls it art that's the assistant laws of modern artists she went like that but you know the late work of Picasso who takes the human form and twists it all around makes it ugly makes it almost uh you like it human human form anyone the other good example of this if the artist the final counter talks about is the incarnation Jesus is both of these that's a great mystery of christian christianity Jesus Christ God in me and to hold those two truths in tension is a great mystery and that's that's what distinguishes christianity from any other any other religion even remotely close there's no other much when people saying that's a silly there is no other religion that claims that god who created the universe came into it and walked around and died and rose again there's no other alternative either either that's true or or it's not but that the ultimate reality is the incarnation it's what's called not too many she's a hypostatic union between god and god that Jesus is true god and true man hand and working to be both can you figure that out can you imagine that not really that's but that's the truth we have to accept that that Christ is god in man so where these two come together with divine creation penetrates human reality reality is uh what the sla called the steel point of the turning world is a great concept at the steel point in the turning world where where god penetrates his reality constantly so if you did this constantly turn into a spinning wheel into the very point of that spin the very steel point of that wheel is where we exist in the present moment because it's passing the future don't mean anything anyway think about it we exist in the in the present moment where god penetrates reality and this is what the great artist shows through poetry or works or songs or music that's what uh it's a paradox that's the last word i'll leave you with the paradox all truth in a sense is a paradox you know what a paradox is an apparent contradiction that contains a truth contains exactly true god is man and jesus man and god that's a contradiction but it's true we have free will and gods in charge god is three and god is one those paradoxes what the great artist there's a line in one of my villain songs it says i'm a stranger in a strange land but i know this is where i belong so what's that man there's no other place i am other than right here and even though i can't ever feel holy at home here you've done my ultimate home ultimate truth is god i am here right now this is where i'm gonna make my art from not not somewhere that doesn't exist so anyway that's what if we look at tsl then glenry o'conner and rob dillon jane austin we're gonna see how um how they create works that that lead us out of ourselves into uh into ultimate reality