ABSTRACT
Literature and theology are two domains in which, historically, it has been safe – safe because necessary – to imagine we know. In the first, the poem, the narrative, or the myth places us in an imaginary state of knowing. We come to know the world created in the text through imagination, both the text’s and our own as reader. And what we know is imaginary. In the second, a theological tradition imagines that our knowledge of the unseen can be firmly grounded, even if there is no empirical basis for the grounding. It is not that God is a mere product of our imagination. It is that our knowledge of God becomes imagined and imaged as real – God as the Real. What we know is an image of the Real. This is the whole tradition of the Imago Dei, our own creative worlds reflecting God’s. Coleridge famously tried to re-imagine the Imago when he posited the ideas of primary and secondary imaginations: the first as ‘the living power or prime agent of all human perception,
and as a repetition of the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’, the second ‘as an echo of the former … differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation’.2 But the ‘esemplastic power’ of imagination, which moulds elements into a unity, received little attention outside of literary theory, and of a few philosophers beholden to the Kantian tradition (no one nowadays, in any field, uses the term ‘esemplastic’). This would suggest both that imagination had little or no role to play in our disciplines of knowledge after Kant and Coleridge, and that theology never could make much use of literary theory. But as we hope to show, this cannot be entirely the case.
