“Art, Imagination & Revelation”

Excerpts from Valentin Gerlier’s Lecture at the Prince’s Foundation School of the Traditional Arts, 29 November 2023

Tonight I want to speak to you about the imagination and hold the thesis that visionary imagination and its revelations are actually real. It’s a real faculty. It’s a faculty that we share amongst each other and with other things and beings of the universe.

Now, in order to make these audacious claims, I have to make a move or a couple of moves which are going to take us away from the way that we are used to talking about the imagination. And I think it’s a really interesting time for us because it’s a time when we seem to be so thirsty for imaginative thinking and original thinking. And yet less and less, we seem to know what some of these words mean. I think, oftentimes, I notice when people say, Oh, that’s a very imaginative move, very imaginative thinking. Usually what is meant is, it’s a nice association of ideas. ‘I hadn’t thought about that before’, but that’s not the imagination that we’re talking about today. I’m going to talk about the relationship between the creative arts, the creative imagination, and attempt to say that the function of the creative imagination is to reveal an extraordinary surplus to reality that in a way only artists can reveal.

One of the reasons why the imagination gets such bad press nowadays (apart from the fact that we no longer really understand what it is aside from this internal, mental association of ideas) is because there is a tacit understanding among many of us in our culture that only the brute material is the truth. There’s a sense in which ‘when you get down to it’, truth is something that isn’t very visionary or revelatory: rather, it’s something that is probably quite ugly and discordant and maybe even cruel and violent. We feel safe in the knowledge that the arts and the humanities can reveal to us the ’naked truth’ and the ‘brutal honesty’. However, the pre-modern tradition, or set of traditions that I want to speak about, holds the precise opposite. To see things in that way is in fact to see their untruth. If they are in a primal state of violence, what we are seeing is not the truth at all but its opposite. To get at the truth I am talking about, we need the mediation of the imagination.

To illustrate this pre-modern way of thinking, we’re going to think about three-fold ways of thinking and of being. So there are three parts to this story, and there are three realms to reality.

Since the 17th century, we have really subsided within two realms of reality. One is the sensory realm - i.e the material realm, the realm of time and space and change and also decay and eventually death. And the other realm that we’re familiar with is the mental realm, which is thought. But as I’m sure you all know, since the 17th century, the connection between the two has been really complex to reestablish. The reason is not that this is a difficult logical puzzle, but rather that there has been a really strange cosmological break: we are aware that there is an intelligible plane in which we begin to think there are things of the mind. And on the other hand, we are aware that we seem to be embodied and we exist in a physical plane. But the connection between the two is nowadays very tenuous and quite difficult. So the argument that I’m making, and I’m really going back to these pre-modern traditions to make it, is that imagination is the middle voice between the two. It moves between the sensory and the mental. It’s just that in a premodern sense, what is mindful, the intelligible plane, is not in our heads, but it’s actually the deep structure of existence itself, it’s the deep material of the real. The imagination I am talking about uses sensory images to voyage into this deep structure of the real. And conversely, it brings a sense of these deep structures into material reality – through artistic creation: through what we sing, what we write and what we make.

Before the 17th century, what was intelligible, what was mind or intelligence was as real as the tangible world that we know now, but it was real in a totally different way. It was real in a ‘mind’ way, but it was held to be a plane of reality. The head is a receptor and a co-creator of that mindful plane. But it’s not just in the head, it’s everywhere. You have to imagine a world that’s saturated with intelligence. When you think in a good way, in a healthy way, in a wholesome way, you are in some way connecting to this wider reality which is deeper and bigger than our own thinking, and goes on well beyond our own thinking. This is what used to be meant by the intellect. That used to mean something like ‘discerning comprehension’. A kind of embrace that also sees.

This is William Blake’s “Jacob’s dream”.  If you’re familiar with the stories of the Bible, Jacob falls asleep on a pillow of stone, and then he dreams of this imaginary staircase that goes all the way up to heaven with angels going up and down. I think that’s an excellent picture of the kind of imagination I’m talking about as the middle voice of the universe, as this partly active, partly passive capability that we have in ourselves, which connects the two realms. The sensory and the intelligent, the heavenly and the earthly. So imagination is in the middle.

Short detour through art history    How does that all connect to art I hear you ask? In accordance with my threefold focus, I’m going to speak very briefly about three phases of art: the mimetic, the romantic and the formalist. Up until the 17th century, the focus of art was on mimesis, that is imaging or manifesting ‘nature’ in all its internal principles or its outer energies.  But after the 17th century, reality itself lost its power as a locus of meaning – so then there was no point to mimetic art anymore. Art moved from faithful reproduction of outer reality to inner expression of the artist’s feelings in their heart, mind and soul. This is the romantic phase. The focus is no longer on outer reality but on how the individual receives and reshapes it. This classic romantic painting by Friedrich gives you this example: the focus is on the expressive imaging of a powerful internal experience, maybe one with a transcendental power to it.

Painting by William Blake, “Jacob’s Ladder”, 1799-1806. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blake_jacobsladder.jpg

But by the late 19th, early 20th century this contrast between inner and outer reality fell apart. The power of personal expression when then no longer seen as a gateway into reality. The third phase of art, which we could call a ‘formalist’ phase, begins to be about art and its internal logic. The focus is on the object for itself without an external reference to reality or life of the artist. This gradual abstraction occurs because reality itself is no longer the vehicle of artists, creative, and ultimately, spiritual meaning. That is the big crisis that the artists are facing. If reality, in all of its planes is no longer seen to be the vehicle of meaning, the locus of meaning, then there is no longer a reality illuminated by creative and spiritual principles; it just becomes mere reality. So, in pre-modern times, nature was seen to be a visible expression of reality, a visible expression that ultimately leads you all the way back to God. When that synthesis between the divine and the earthly, between the spiritual and the natural, begins to break down reality or nature no longer has the same meaning. So mimesis of nature, the creative re-manifestation of reality no longer has a spiritual meaning at all because reality is now divorced from its spiritual ground. This is really what has happened over the last 300 years. So, in light of all this, where do we find meaning? For the romantics the answer was in the intuitive feeling, in the genius, in the prophetic vision of the artist. For the formalists, it’s in the thing in itself, abstracted from artists and from reality. The locus of meaning can’t be reality itself, since that is now understood to be an immanent physical plane with no ‘beyond’.

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, 1818

Let me turn to one of the great thinkers about reality or ‘nature’ via the Irish mystic and philosopher John Scotus Eriugena who defines nature as ‘all the things that are, and all the things that are not’. How do we get a sense, how do we grasp this expanded sense of ‘nature’ as all the things that are and all the things that are not, with imagination mediating? Here’s another threefold, which I take from the philosophy of Boethius. Boethius speaks about three kinds of music: instrumental music, human music, and cosmic music. Human music is, very simply, the music that we create with our bodies. The voice, for example, expresses the relationship or proportion between the body and soul. When we sing, whether verses of poetry, or a simple song, or even just the rhythms of everyday life, we express this. Then, instrumental music is very simply music made with ‘tools’, plucking a string, blowing – we have made tools to make music. As well as the natural, direct, embodied thing, there is an added thing, a cultural artifact, which is used to expand upon and re-create human music. And finally there is cosmic music. You might have heard of the music of the Spheres. This is a silent music, a music we cannot quite hear because it’s so refined (that of the stars, the celestial bodies), and ultimately the movement of the whole universe. So that’s the biggest part, the biggest frame of music, this cosmic universal frame. Look up to the skies tonight. If it’s a clear night, you may see some of that music at work, since it is that which makes the stars move or be still. These three forms are related, and each of the three is part of the other one.

Okay, so we’ve got this threefold thing, from the body all the way to the universe.

These three natures are: the body (nature), the tools or instruments (art, or culture), and the universal nature - the deep structure of the cosmos which grounds the other two and to which they are related. To get back to this pre-modern idea of the imagination, you have to imagine artworks as having a relationship with all three planes.

As a classic example - this is a Cezanne still life where I posit that you can see matter, soul, body or, nature, culture, and the universal plane all compounded at the human level. Each of the realms spills over into the other. We’re not talking about three separate components of being. We’re talking about three aspects of reality articulating one another: each of the realms is saying something about the other realms. It’s not just the apple (in the painting). It’s also the ultimate mystery of the fruitfulness (or barrenness) of the earth. It’s not just a wine glass and a wine bottle. It’s also the fact that there were friends around the table that shared this bottle of wine, that drank together, spoke together, laughed or cried together and maybe celebrated something important. And finally, it’s not just a still life: it is also the ultimate mystery of the poise and presence of being that a still life so singularly brings to light.

Painting by Paul Cézanne, “Still Life: Flask, Glass, and Jug”, 1877

In addition to the three natures of reality, Aristotelian philosophers talk about the three activities proper to the soul. I’m going to give you the Greek words: techne, phronesis, and theoria. Techne, from which we get our word technology, simply means arts in the sense of any crafting, any making. Phronesis, the second level of the soul, is about where my action comes from, what the ground of my action is. What is good, right, nourishing action? And finally theoria from which we get our word theory, means contemplating or knowing, but knowing in the good sense. So making, doing, contemplating: nature, culture, God or ultimate reality, or cosmic reality. These are the three-fold levels of reality over and over again. What I want to think about here is an art that speaks to those three levels of our soul: to the making, to the doing, to the action, and to the contemplating, which has to do ultimately with the divine (theoria means ‘god-seeing’). And again, each of the realms speak to each other because our contemplation goes back to the first level: it informs our making. And our making rouses the faculties to action, as William Blake says. So the making feeds into the doing and the doing leads to the contemplating, and the contemplating leads back to the making.

One interesting thing I think about our culture is that one of them has overtaken the other two. The techne has overtaken the phronesis and theoria. The making has overtaken the doing and contemplating. We have the dominion of tool-making and of instrumental reason without any other referent but itself. And now we think of doing and we think of contemplating as though they were the same as making and producing. Everything’s about production, outputs, and quantification. We think about moral actions as a kind of moral calculus and delegate our ethical decisions to impersonal, equational procedures that are supposed to be objective. And we think about knowledge as just data to analyse, to control, to quantify, to parcel out. So our obsession with technology is a cancelling-out of two aspects of the soul. A cancelling-out of two aspects of being.     So these things are deeply connected. I’m just suggesting some of the ways in which the arts are in a trifle of confusion because our consideration of these realms is severely lacking. And I’m going to tell you right now, the philosophers, the scientists, the politicians, (and I belong to at least one of those), they haven’t got a clue. We’re all running around trying to act, trying to sort things out, using techne for everything. But in fact nobody knows how to reconnect those three realms. Everybody feels that that is quite important, but nobody knows how to. So it’s up to the artists. It’s only the artists that are going to take us there.

And this is where the imagination comes in.    Now, let’s think about those three activities of the soul. sensory plane: making; mental plane: contemplation, the middle plane and which also corresponds to the soul. That’s where the imagination lives in the middle, in the heart, right? The imagination mediates, as it were, up and down. There is the idea of ascending up to the intelligence or going down to the wondrous world of matter. The ‘up-down’ scheme is not a hierarchy but refers to a pre-modern, pre-Cartesian way of picturing the cosmos.

Imagination: the Middle Voice of the Universe   There is this wonderful expression in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: seeing things with a ‘parted eye’. Shakespeare wants to suggest that imagination is a kind of double vision. This works in an everyday sense. Let me give you a very simple example, not from art but from life. You’re on a train from Cambridge to Ely, if you’ve ever been there. When you are approaching Ely, you start to see the cathedral in the distance. As the train moves closer and closer, the cathedral reveals more and more of itself. But even as it does, your imagination is already at work seeing things that are not ‘there’, in a sense, because you can’t actually see the whole cathedral. But your imagination is participating with you, already completing the sense of a cathedral. Your imagination is already completing it for you, giving you the sense of the cathedral: there’s the back of the cathedral which you can’t see but can imagine and sense, the nave, the buttresses, the richness of the architecture. All those features are unseen, but they are intuited, imagined, to comprehend what it is you do see.

But there is also a more exalted sense. Shakespeare’s play is all about the imagination, but paradoxically it’s filled with characters who don’t believe in the imagination at all. And then precisely because they don’t believe in the imagination, the otherworld, the world of fairies and spirits and all sorts of interesting things, plays with them over and over again. In fact, Shakespeare uses the most rationalistic character in the play, the Duke of Athens, Theseus, to unfold these marvellous mysteries about the imagination whilst not believing a single word of what they’re saying. Theseus represents the rationalistic ‘gentlemen’ of Shakespeare’s day, those who believed in enlightened self-interest and did not have much respect for the imagination.

In this passage, Theseus talks about poets and the Greek word for poetry is poesis. Poesis is just making, in the sense of ‘creating’. So all of you, whatever craft you have, whatever art you have, you’re all ‘poets’ in that sense. He says, “The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. Theseus doesn’t believe in the ‘intelligible plane’, and doesn’t think the world is shot through with intelligence or that it’s actually teeming with mindful reality. So he talks about this, but he says poets (artists) just make it up out of nothing, out of thin air. They come up with fanciful stuff, with this nonsense. But he puts it so beautifully as the imagination ‘bodies forth’ the forms of things that are. ‘Things unknown’ are revealed, ‘bodied forth’, in the imagination, which makes ‘unknown’ things into sensory things, and so partly knowable. It’s the business of the poets/artists to give these things a ‘local habitation’, an actual dwelling in the world.

And here I’m going to refer to the scholar, Henri Corbin, which I’m sure some of you have heard of, and his idea of the mundus imaginalis of the imaginal. Henri Corbin, he was writing in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And his whole study was really Sufi philosophy, Sufi mysticism. It’s Persian, close to Ibn Arabi and an extraordinary and rich tradition and literature that in his day, very few people were really looking at. And he made this incredible discovery: he saw that the Sufis had understood this middle realm.. And we’re speaking very clearly about this middle realm between the material and the intelligible, which does ‘body things forth’. When you use your imagination, or rather when the imagination uses you, things that appear are bodies. They are objects. They are things or beings that come before you. This could be when you’re creating, when you’re working, you’re thinking through something that you’re making, or you’re having a dream, or a moment of revelation. I don’t know if you’ve ever had any of those, but I’m told that they happen. So you see something, but not with your eyes. You see something with your being, at once sensed and apprehended in the mind.

And we can continue to think of three-fold reality, through this image of Dante’s cosmological map in his Divine comedy. You may think this is culture-hopping, but there are so many incredible crossovers between Persian and Western culture in the middle ages – in fact, western culture got some of its own ancient culture – philosophy, science, medicine, maths – back from an encounter with Arabic sources. One of the things they have in common is a very similar cosmological map.

The geometry of Creation in the Divine Comedy (not to scale) with Hell inside the Earth and heaven outside the final sphere in a Ptolemaic universe.

And one of them is that cosmological map. So if you see this – it’s a map of the inverse. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like, this is what it looks like. So what telescopes show you is not this. The way that Dante forms it is that at this level, there are different skies. He divides the sky up there into different astral planes. I’m not going to go into that today – rather I want to show the 10th heaven, as it were, which ceases to be in time and space, and yet is in between the material universe and the ‘spiritual’ one. Corbin’s realization is that the Sufis were talking about this all the time, but there’s this 10th level up here where time and space get totally reversed. This tenth level is in no place and in no time but it embraces and contains all times and all places. Very subtly, because it touches time and space and speaks by means of it, but also is a threshold to the timeless and the spaceless. The visions of the imagination are in no place but speak to us of the ground of every place; and are in no time but speak to us of the eternity that grounds all time. But the way it speaks about the timeless time and the placeless place is paradoxically, by finding a ‘local habitation’, by showing us the deeper aspects of this time and this place. The way the imagination speaks of this ‘higher’ world is by making this world more rich, more dense, more meaningful. It’s not about flying away to somewhere else, it’s firstly about inhabiting this world more deeply.

So for Corbin, the ‘imaginal’, which he reads in Ibn Arabi and others, is this subtle realm which is between the intelligible world and the sensible and belongs to both whilst being neither. It is sensible, yet you can’t see it with your sensible eyes. You’re seeing it with your internal eyes. But it is also intelligible because the things you see are immaterial, and yet bring you into this world. This is what I mean when I speak about the imagination as this middle voice of the universe.  By symbolically pointing to the other realms it also points to this realm, it enriches it. So as you see it can take you up as well as down. It really mediates. It goes between the two. So one of the wonderful ways that it does that - because it’s a power that is sensible and intelligent - is that it responds to where you are. Because according to this way of looking, part of your soul is deeply enfolded within your body, and part of your body is an extension of your soul. Of course, to live a bodily life is to live a life of passion, emotions, and contradictions, sorrows and difficulties. The imagination does not take you away from that. In fact it meets you there. It meets you there, like a friend meets you. This is the idea from this ancient world that I’ve been representing. It provides you with the kinds of vision that can deepen your vision with insight that arise from a plane of intelligence, from the deeper structure of the real.

Conclusion: Kentsugi Cosmology

Art depends on that visionary cosmology. Art really has this metaphysical or cosmic realm.  It doesn’t really matter what you believe - the God of Dante or the God of the Sufis, or neither– that’s now irrelevant. The challenge today from an artistic perspective is to become open to the possibility of that age-old cosmology revealing itself. To sense that art deals with ‘all the things that are, and all the things that are not’ and that each has its own mode of revelation. It is not about the solipsistic artist, or the infernal chatter of continuous cultural commentary. It’s not about this or that ideology – all that stuff is dead. All those things divide us from each other and from the other things and beings of this world. There’s of course no point in sentimentalizing the past – I am not interested in that. What we have is this world in all its vibrant and terrible messiness. And it is in the encounter with this world and other, more ancient traditions that some things can be revealed. In a productive conversation, not a hostile critique, between where we are and where ‘they’ once were. Befriending a strange ancient world also can make our contemporary familiar world into a stranger, but hopefully in the process of making the contemporary strange and making the strange familiar, we can open a space for new currents of imaginative vitality to come through. Equally, that cosmology is an ancestor of what we have today and in that mysterious family relationship there is a depth of listening, learning and healing that demands to be attended to.   Of course ‘ancient’ cosmology is, in the eyes of many today, no longer credible. But it’s equally true that today, we have a broken cosmology. And in a sense, it’s worth staying with the broken pieces. There’s this beautiful traditional Japanese art (kentsugi) about tea making. When a tea vessel breaks, the family to which this happens keeps the broken bits of the vessel, and then eventually the master puts it back together again after having stayed with the broken bits and contemplated them. And the repaired broken vessel is then held to be of more worth and value than how it originally was. And there’s something really powerful in that tradition. So we’re at the level at which the cosmology is broken, but, as Leonard Cohen would say, that’s how the light gets in.     So - what cosmology is going to claim us?  I think the imagination is alive and real and waiting to be summoned. And we’ve got to have to imagine our way out of this mess. We can’t think our way out of this mess. The imagination is our way forward here. And this is why artists play such an important part. So this moment of brokenness is a good moment. It’s a good moment for us to contemplate and to see what creative, visionary insights are going to come to us. It’s a good moment for the imagination to speak and to ‘body forth’ its revelations and give to the intelligence of the real ‘a local habitation and a name’.