Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas

IMAGINATION

IMAGINATION

A study in the history of ideas

J.M.CockingEdited with an introduction by Penelope Murray

London and New York

First published 1991by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’scollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge

a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1991 J.M.Cocking; introduction and notes © 1991 PenelopeMurray

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any information

storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing fromthe publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cocking, J.M. (John Martin) 1914–86

Imagination: a study in the history of ideas

1. Imagination. Theories, history

I. Title II. Murray, Penelope

153.309

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataCocking, J.M.

Imagination: a study in the history of ideas/J.M.Cocking;edired with an introduction by Penelope Murray.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references (p.).

1. Imagination (Philosophy)—History. I. Murray, Penelope.II. Title.

B105.I49C63 1991128′.3–dc2091–17491

ISBN 0-415-05807-4 (Print Edition)ISBN 0-203-98081-6 Master e-book ISBN

Contents

Editor’s introduction v

Acknowledgements xi

1 The Greek Rationalists: Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics 1

2 Imagination begins to be recognized: Literary theorists and Neopythagoreans in the earlycenturies AD

16

3 The Neoplatonists: Imagination as the ‘vehicle of the soul’ 29

4 Neoplatonism in Christian guise: The mystic way as the affirmation and negation of images 42

5 Holy images 55

6 Imagination in Islam 62

7 The Western Middle Ages 86

8 Ficino 103

9 Ideas about poetry and painting in the Italian Renaissance 119

10 The French Renaissance and after 139

Epilogue. The imagination as messenger: From Plato to Kristeva 163

Notes 172

Bibliography 178

Index 182

Editor’s introduction

‘Reason is to imagination as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance’ (A Defence of Poetry,1821). With these words Shelley overturns the priorities of centuries of European thought. Imagination,once regarded at best as a useful intermediary between sensation and reason, at worst as a dangerous anddelusive power, has now become the prime faculty of the human mind. Darwin summarizes the prevailingnineteenth-century view when he characterizes imagination as ‘one of the highest prerogatives of man. Bythis faculty he unites, independently of the will, former images and ideas, and thus creates brilliant andnovel results’ (Darwin 1871: I.45). The Romantic worship of that power which Blake describes as the‘Divine Body in Every Man’1 reaches its zenith in Yeats’s passionate declaration ‘By reason and logic wedie hourly, by imagination we live!’ How did this transformation in the status of imagination come about?

It is a commonplace to say that the eighteenth century marks a turning point in the history of Westernaesthetics. M.H.Abrams (1953) has shown how this was the period when the predominant metaphor of themind as a mirror reflecting external reality began to give way to that of the mind as a lamp which radiatesits own inner light on to the objects it perceives. The artist is no longer seen as a craftsman-like imitator ofnature, but as an inspired genius who brings new worlds into being, spontaneously generating originalcreations out of the depths of his own mind. With Kant and the German Idealists imagination becomescentral to human understanding: the very possibility of knowledge depends on the synthesizing power ofimagination which at some subconscious level orders and classifies our experiences according to ruleswhich exist in the mind independently of the external world. ‘Synthesis’, according to Kant, ‘is the mereresult of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we shouldhave no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious’ (1933:112). Imagination is nolonger simply a ‘reproductive’ faculty which forms images from pre-existing phenomena, but a productiveor creative power which autonomously frames and constructs its own image of reality. ‘The order andregularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them inappearances, had not we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there’ (1933:147). Muchhas been written on the problems involved in interpreting Kant’s theory of the transcendental imagination,but there can be no doubt about its impact.2 From the end of the eighteenth century onwards imaginationassumes a central role in theories of knowledge as well as in theories of art, and creative imagination becomesthe hall-mark of original genius. For the Romantic poets and their successors imagination is, in Baudelaire’swords, ‘la reine des facultés’, ‘la reine du vrai’ (‘the queen of the faculties’, ‘the queen of truth’).

The concept of creative imagination is undoubtedly a modern invention, but imagination nevertheless hasa history before the eighteenth century. Indeed its creative potential was clearly recognized long before theformulation of philosophical theories about the constructive role of imagination in the acquisition ofknowledge and in the production of works of art. In the rationalist tradition which dominated Europeanthought from Aristotle up until the time of Kant, imagination is primarily regarded as a faculty which

translates sense impressions received from the outside world into mental images. Imagination is seen as akind of messenger between sensation and reason, as Bacon puts it in The Advancement of Learning, and hasa necessary part to play in our acquisition of empirical knowledge and understanding. But, as Bacon goes onto make clear, imagination has a habit of usurping its proper role and getting out of control:

Neither is the imagination simply and only a messenger; but is invested with or at leastwise usurpethno small authority in itself, beside the duty of the message. For it was well said by Aristotle, that themind hath over the body that commandment, which the lord hath over a bondman; but that reason hathover the imagination that commandment which a magistrate hath over a free citizen; who may alsocome to rule in his turn.

(1889–92: III.382)

For, as well as reproducing mental images of sensible appearances, imagination is also capable of playingabout with sense impressions, chopping them up and combining them to produce images of non-existentthings. We can form images of fantastic and unreal creatures such as centaurs, unicorns and flying assesbecause imagination ‘being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hathsevered, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things’(1889–92: III.343). Unless firmly controlled by reason imagination can thus become the source of fantasiesand delusions, a dangerous power which distorts reality and leads us astray. Bacon’s suspicion of the unrealproducts of imagination is typical of Elizabethan attitudes, and indeed of the Aristotelian tradition as awhole.

But the sphere in which imagination can become a free citizen without harm is poetry, for poetry is‘rather a pleasure or play of imagination, than a work or duty thereof’ (1889–92: III.382). Here Bacon partscompany with Aristotle, who assigned no role to imagination in the poetic process. In the Elizabethanperiod imagination becomes an essential attribute of the poet. Shakespeare provides the classic illustration ofthis view in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

The lunatic, the lover and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.

(V.i.7–17)

Imagination here is no mere reproductive mechanism, but a wayward and uncontrollable power, capable ofchanging our perceptions of the world. Commentators point out that in the context of the play these lines,spoken by the prosaic Theseus, are a critique of the delusive power of imagination, as the introductoryexchange with Hippolyta suggests:Hippolyta: ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

vi

Theseus: More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Loversand madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than coolreason comprehends.

(V.i.1–6)Theseus may be suspicious of the ‘tricks’ that ‘strong imagination’ can perform, but could Shakespeare

himself have so easily dismissed the products of imagination as worthless? For Shakespeare’s contemporaryaudience imagination was the source of strange and incredible fantasies rather than the well-spring ofcreative genius, but its inventive powers were clearly recognized.

Indeed in Renaissance poetics imagination became an essential component in literary creation through itsassociation with invention.3 In the rhetorical theory of the Middle Ages the first stage of composition wasinventio, the process of ‘finding’ or ‘discovering’ one’s material, which had little to do with invention in themodern sense of creating something new. But in the literary theory of the Renaissance the vocabulary ofmedieval rhetoric gradually took on different connotations. The poet’s inventions came to be thought of asfictions, and because fictions are imaginary, invention came to be associated with imagination. Sir PhilipSidney, for example, like the Italian literary critics of the sixteenth century, praises the poet’s inventive powersin contrast with practitioners of the other arts and sciences:

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his owninvention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringethforth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops,Chimeras, furies and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within thenarrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never setforth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitfultrees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much lovely earth more lovely.Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.

(1966:23–4)

The poet has the power to transform the world because the essence of poetry is no longer imitation, butfeigning: indeed ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’, as Touchstone says in As You Like It (III.iii. 19–20).The ancients were therefore right, says Sidney, to call the poet a maker ‘considering that where all other artsretain themselves within their subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet only bringeth hisown stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit’ (1966:48). Thepoet’s feigning depends on his imagination, but imagination itself remains subject to the higher power ofreason. The controlled imagination of the poet, which produces verisimilar imitations of life withoutreplicating the external world in exact detail is thus carefully distinguished from the traditionally false anddistorting imagination of popular psychology.

Sidney’s Defence of Poetry summarizes the standard arguments developed by the Italian literary critics tocounter the charge that poets are liars, a charge that goes back far beyond the Renaissance almost to thebeginnings of Greek literature. Already in the Odyssey poetry is associated with untruth. Odysseus himself,several times likened to a bard, enchants his audience with fictitious tales and ‘made his many falsehoodsseem like truth’ (Odyssey 19.203). Hesiod’s Muses on Mount Helicon ‘know how to tell many lies thatresemble the truth’ (Theogony 27). And Solon states quite bluntly that ‘poets tell many lies’ (1971–2:fragment 29). Plato endorses that view, giving it philosophical weight, with his claim that poetry is a form

vii

of mimesis which stands at third remove from reality. Aristotle’s response in Chapter 9 of the Poetics iswell known:

The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse….The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For thisreason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to givegeneral truths while history gives particular facts. By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that acertain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily. That is what poetry aims at…. A‘particular fact’ is what Alcibiades did or what was done to him.4

Here we see for the first time a distinction being made between historical fact and plausible fiction.5 Thepoet’s statements may not be true in the sense of being historically accurate, but neither are they false.Aristotle himself is not interested in the question of how the poet should invent his plausible fictions. Thenearest he gets to any discussion of imagination in the Poetics is in Chapter 17 where he stresses the poet’sneed to visualize the scenes he describes in order to make them convincing. But his definition of theessential difference between the historian and the poet paves the way for those later apologists for poetry,such as Mazzoni, Tasso, Sidney and Ronsard, who discussed the poet’s task in terms of verisimilitude ratherthan truth or falsehood. ‘The poet’, says Sidney,

never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes…in truth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be. And therefore,though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not.

(1966:53)

Imagination has a positive role to play in the labour of poetic invention, as Ronsard clearly states:

Invention is nothing else but the natural good of an imagination, conceiving the ideas and forms ofeverything that can be imagined, heavenly as well as earthly, animate or inanimate, in orderafterwards to represent, describe and imitate them. For just as the purpose of the orator is to persuade,that of the poet is to imitate, invent, and represent things which exist, or which may exist, i.e. theverisimilar.

(quoted in Bundy 1930:541–2)

The development of the notion of poetic imagination is but one aspect of the history of imagination as awhole. No general studies of that history have been written, perhaps not surprisingly in view of the vastnature of the subject and the problems involved in defining it. The history of imagination is the history notsimply of a word, but of a category of mental activity whose definition and interpretation has varied verygreatly from age to age and from author to author. At its most basic, the term ‘imagination’ and its linguisticequivalents, phantasia and eikasia in Greek, phantasia and imaginatio in Latin refer to the image-makingcapacity of human beings. But that capacity manifests itself in a whole range of human experiences: in ourability to picture things which are absent, for instance, in dreams, fantasies and illusions, in artisticcreativity and invention, in the ordinary person’s power to envisage the possibility of a better world or toimagine other lives, as much as in the mystic’s vision of a higher reality beyond the world of the senses. Inmodern usage to imagine is not necessarily to visualize, and many of the connotations of the modern word,for example the notion that imagination can provide us with some special insight into the nature of truth,

viii

would have been unthinkable in the mainstream of European thought before the eighteenth century. Thevocabulary of imagination is slippery and difficult to pin down at the best of times, but has been furthercomplicated by the problems involved in distinguishing between imagination and fantasy, which began withtranslation from Greek into Latin. As J.M.Cocking explains:

The important nodal point here is Augustine, who used both the transliterated word phantasia and thetranslated word imaginatio. This dual usage continued in all the vernaculars of Europe. And alreadybefore Augustine there was a tendency to distinguish two aspects or uses of imagination. Images cancorrespond to truth or falsity; they can be seriously or lightly entertained. As time went on, thisduality of meaning tended to correspond to Augustine’s dual vocabulary, particularly in thevernaculars; imagination became the important activity, and fancy the light, airy playful activity of themind in its freedom. But this distinction was never fixed, and rarely observed in the vocabulary ofphilosophy, until through Paracelsus, Boehme, Schelling and Coleridge it became a commonplace inthe aesthetic ideas of European Romanticism.

(1984:47)

J.M.Cocking’s interest in imagination is evident in his earliest published work on Proust, and even beforethat in his MA dissertation on Mallarmé. It was the variety and complexity of notions of imagination in theaesthetic ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which inspired him to go back to the beginnings ofEuropean thought in search of their origins. This was the start of a vast exploration of the history ofimagination; Soundings for a History of Imagination was his original title for a book which was to havestretched from Plato and Aristotle, through medieval and Renaissance Europe to Romanticism and thetwentieth century. But he did not live to complete his project. The manuscript that he left ended with theseventeenth century, so that he had not in fact reached the point at which many of the most influentialtheories about imagination in the modern world began to take shape. The masterly comprehensiveness,learning and clarity of his exposition make it all the more regrettable that we do not have his thoughts onKant and Schelling, on Wordsworth and Coleridge, on Baudelaire, Proust and Valéry. But much has beenwritten on the development of concepts of imagination since the eighteenth century. It is the long andcomplex history of the idea before this period which is virtually unknown. When Cocking began his study hewas entering uncharted territory. There were, of course, specialist works on specific areas of the tradition,and there was also the pioneering work of M.W.Bundy on The Theory of Imagination in Classical andMediaeval Thought, published in 1927. But there was nothing to compare with the lucid and wide rangingsynthesis which Cocking himself offers. His book is more than just a chapter in the history of ideas; it is theproduct of a lifetime’s study, the exploration of a huge and almost boundless theme whose richness andresonance is described by the author in the following words:

Imagination is not a concept which sustains art, even post-Romantic art, but a myth which sustains it:a myth rich in possible interpretations. In general, it embodies the intuitions of artists that humanconsciousness has been impoverished by the abstractions of rationalism and particularly of science. Itcan spur the artist to escape from Aristotelian logic into the logic of mysticism or of the unconscious;from analytical thinking into synthetic experience where the coherence may imply a claim to insightinto features of the perceptual world or autonomous form from which the perceptual is as far aspossible excluded. It can insist that sensations are not merely the bases for conceptual recognition butimportant elements of experience in their own right; and that the richness and lyricism and drama ofevery inner experience depends on the myths we build up for ourselves, the images we invest with

ix

particular meanings and the way the images cluster— myths and images which usually include someof the rags of the tattered but still surviving collective myths of our cultural past.

(1973:267–8)

Since Cocking’s death several studies have been published which have a bearing on his overall theme,notably a collection of papers on Fantasy and Imagination, edited by Marta Fattori (1988), RichardKearney’s book The Wake of Imagination (1988) and Alan White’s study, The Language of Imagination(1990). Kearney’s analysis of the state of imagination in the contemporary world insists on the importanceof exploring the historical development of Western concepts of imagination. Postmodernism proclaims thedeath of imagination along with the death of God, the author, the individual subject and all the other staplesof Western civilization. But such nihilism has to be resisted. It is only through imagination that we are ableto escape from the tyranny of the present, it is only through an awareness of the past that we can imaginethe possibility of a future. ‘The story of imagination needs to be told’, says Kearney; ‘we need to recallwhat imagination was then in order to understand imagination now’ (1988:6, 17). That story is told in all itsdetail and richness in the pages of this book.

In ordering the huge quantity of material which Cocking left I have concentrated on the period fromantiquity to the Renaissance, to form a book which is relatively self-contained, but which also explores theorigins of ideas which are influential in later times. As well as highlighting certain key stages in therationalist tradition the book investigates in considerable detail alternative views, derived ultimately fromNeoplatonism and Islam, which emphasize the magical and alchemical powers of imagination, and whichculminate in the occult movements of Renaissance and post-Renaissance mysticism. This was the traditionto which Baudelaire looked back when he declared in The Salon of 1859: ‘Imagination is the queen of truth,and the possible is one of the provinces of truth. It has a positive relationship with the infinite’ (1955:233).And this was the tradition by which J.M.Cocking was most fascinated. He did not leave an introduction tohis book; but a public lecture which he gave in the department of French at King’s College, London in 1983summarizes some of its main themes and gives an indication of the lines of thought he would have pursuedif he had lived to complete his long-cherished study. That lecture is printed here as a fitting epilogue to aremarkable book, the fruits of a life-long investigation into the nature and meaning of one of the mostinfluential ideas in the history of Western thought.

Penelope MurrayWarwick, 1990

x

Acknowledgements

My late husband was grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding him an Emeritus Fellowship inResearch. Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich and Professor Alison Fairlie, knowing of his desire to investigatethe history of the concept of imagination, had kindly recommended him for this.

As his work progressed he was fortunate in being able to discuss the classical chapters with Professor MylesBurnyeat and Professor Gregory Vlastos, the section on imagination in Islam with Professor A.I.Fabra, andattitudes to imagination in Renaissance France with the late Professor Odette de Mourgues.

I am greatly indebted to many who gave practical help when, after my husband’s death, I sought to getthe work ready for publication.

My daughter-in-law Alice Dickens did sterling work on latter parts of the manuscript. Professor Sir ErnstGombrich, Professor Myles Burnyeat and Professor Malcolm Bowie gave invaluable advice. DrM.E.Atkins, Mr Peter Burke, Professor Cecil Grayson, Professor I.D.McFarlane and ProfessorL.Montgomery generously gave a great deal of time to reading and commenting on the proposed book.

Throughout the years Mr John Sturrock guided and helped. Without his encouragement I doubt if Ishould have been able to get to the point where Dr Penelope Murray could undertake to edit the work. Thisshe has done with expertise and sympathy.

Becky CockingCambridge, 1990

1The Greek Rationalists

Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics

Writers and thinkers who have seen art as a way to truth with imagination as means have often claimed theauthority of Plato. For art he can be made to provide some support; for imagination none.

That poets who linked their art with some praeternatural reality —Coleridge being the supreme example—should have seen themselves as Platonists is not surprising. The ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’ of Plato’spraeternatural realm—a world in the mind more ‘real’ to him than the world perceived by the senses—included moral and aesthetic values as well as logical relations. There is no ‘form’ of mud, Socratesconfessed to Parmenides; human artefacts are sometimes allowed corresponding forms and sometimes not(Parmenides 130 c–d). But there are forms of everything that has ever exalted the soul or excited the mindof man, thought of as having their plenitude of being in another world than this. Plato has been not only thesource of philosophical idealism and the touchstone for its critics, but an inspiration for those idealists in aless philosophical sense who, seeing certain things as good, dream dreams in which those same things areeven better, projecting images towards some notion of perfection.

But contemplation of perfection—the ‘form’ of good that is also beauty and truth—is to be achieved,according to Plato, through philosophy, not through art; through intellect under the discipline of the‘dialectic’ rather than through any kind of ‘inspiration’. The ‘inspired’—poets, seers, rhetoricians—mayhave some approximate apprehension of the good, or of forms related to the good; but so may statesmen andordinary citizens. Only the philosopher, thinking dialectically, can approach true knowledge. The ‘inspired’may express ‘true opinion’ in their discourse, but what they utter needs to be interpreted; most truly by thephilosopher who is in closer touch with truth. Visions, dreams, images of all kinds, even if they have theirorigin in some kind of truth, transmit their message through the lower reaches of the soul, where intellectcan be confused by emotion and the carnal appetites. More trustworthy is the ‘true opinion’ of the statesmanor the good citizen who has absorbed it through tradition and practical experience.

Yet Plato’s attitude to art—or to those activities that we now subsume under the notion of ‘art’ in a waywhich never occurred to him or to any thinker before the Renaissance—is neither simple nor obviouslyconsistent. It is perhaps not so much ambiguous as ambivalent, which is why some Romantics could see himas the generator of their own myth of art and some scholars could point to the scandal of a great artist whoexcluded poets from his ideal state and poured contempt on painting.

A striking example of Plato misread in terms of post-Kantian notions of art is to be found in an articlepublished in the Revue Philosophique as late as 1934 by Hugo Perls: ‘Mousa: a study of Plato’saesthetics’.1 Interpreters of Plato, Perls maintains, have been wrong to emphasize the association of art withtechne (skill or technique) and to present the making of music, poetry and paintings mainly as a craft.Plato’s reference-point in the important passage about these arts is the Muse, says Perls; the arts have theirown mode of access to beauty, independent of discursive thought. So far so good; it is true that for Platopoetry is a matter of inspiration, not of techne. But Perls interprets the many texts about the inspired poet

with little regard for the context and none for the tone of Plato’s discourse. Where Plato, to the unprejudicedreader, appears to be separating inspiration from techne to the disadvantage of the former Perls takes him tobe establishing the autonomy of art. Where Plato shows Socrates as ironical or teasing Perls takes hisutterances literally and seriously. Where Plato uses sight as a metaphor—seeing the forms with the eyes ofthe soul —Perls interprets Plato’s text as praise of the sense of sight, so that the sensible world, alwayssubordinated to the intelligible by Plato in the sphere of the dialectic, is said to be promoted to greatimportance in the sphere of the aesthetic: the Muse communicates through privileged sensations. The artistas maker, Perls makes Plato insist, relies less on craft as a set of describable principles than on stochastike—a skill like that of the javelin-thrower whose actions appear to be simply hit-or-miss but which succeedthrough a kind of judgement that is unanalysed and indeed unconscious. Plato, says Perls, sees stochastikeas a divine gift and therefore, though it does not qualify as knowledge or as a means to knowledge, places itamong the highest values.

These preconceptions lead Perls to read parts of Plato’s actual language very differently from translatorswith no axe to grind. From the Republic (403c) he quotes: ‘The Logos of art must have for us an end and anaim. Where it must end, there it does end. The end and aim of art must be the love of the beautiful’ (Perls1934:268). Paul Shorey renders this same passage: ‘Do you not agree, then, that our discourse on music hascome to an end? It has certainly made a fitting end, for surely the end and consummation of culture is thelove of the beautiful.’2 Socrates has been talking about the part to be played by music and poetry in theeducation of the guardians who are to rule the ideal state and insisting that only the right kinds of music andpoetry must be allowed.

Another awkward text in the Laws is disposed of in a similar way by Perls who virtually re-writes it. TheAthenian who, in the absence of Socrates, is the leader of the discussion in the Laws, is talking of pleasureand following a line very close to Socrates’s conclusions about the psychology and ethics of pleasure inPhilebus. Education, he says, should aim to make a child ‘feel’ pleasure and pain in the right way before heis old enough to make reasoned judgments; to prefer spontaneously the best kind of pleasures, conceived asSocrates defined them. The very best pleasure of all comes, of course, from the insights of the philosopher’sdialectic; but this is reserved for the age of reason. At 667d ‘the various arts of imitation’, and particularlymusic, come into the discussion; by what criterion are we to judge the goodness or badness of art, andtherefore its goodness or badness as emotional training? Not by the pleasure it gives. The degree of pleasureis an appropriate standard of judgment only of a ‘performance which provides us with neither utility, nor truth,nor resemblance’. Clinias asks: ‘You refer only to harmless pleasure?’ ‘Yes,’ answers the Athenian, ‘and Ialso use the name play for it in cases where it does neither harm nor good worth taking into seriousaccount.’ Art of the right kind, he goes on to make clear, is to be judged right not because it gives pleasurebut because it properly fulfils its function of imitating what it should imitate and ‘retains its likeness to themodel of the noble’. The implication here, as elsewhere in Plato, is that only the dialectic can approach trueknowledge; but the artist is a good artist to the extent that his art somehow expresses ‘right opinion’—thephilosopher being the eventual judge of its rightness.

Perls however reads this passage in a quite other way. He makes Plato say that ‘disinterested pleasure’—the pleasure unconcerned with utility, truth or resemblance—is of the essence of art. A.E. Taylor translatesthe Athenian’s conclusions (668a–b): ‘Consequently, when a man tells us that in music pleasure is thestandard of judgment, we must refuse to accept his statement. It is not this type of music, if indeed there couldbe such a type, which we should make our serious object, but that other which retains its likeness to themodel of the noble.’ Perls gives, for this same text: ‘If someone claims to judge mousike with reference topleasure, the logos cannot in any case be used as a justification; so that mousike must not be scrutinized as aserious occupation, but only in so far as it shows a resemblance to something through imitation of the

2 IMAGINATION

beautiful’ (1934:271). Art is thus given its autonomy by Perls and rescued from the censorious judgments ofthe philosopher-critic.

Even the Greekless student, reading the various translations and interpretations of Plato, particularlythose which give the Greek words for key concepts, becomes aware of the pitfalls of vocabulary. Only thecontext and the coherence of the argument can determine which of the possible Greek senses of a word isrelevant; some of the key-words offer widely varying possibilities in general usage, and even when Platohas given his own meanings to some of them these seem to be not always precisely consistent. Logos canmean ‘rational principle’ or ‘discourse’, ‘utterance’. Mousike can mean music, poetry, or any activityinfluenced by the Muses. Perls takes Plato’s use of mousike to include painting, and reads it much as thenineteenth century understood ‘art’. But Perls’s interpretations simply do not fit in with the general tenor ofPlato’s dialogues.

Few interpreters can have gone so far in distortion, but others have made Plato say what, from the pointof view of Kantian or Romantic aesthetic, they think he should have meant. The emphasis on inspiration, onthe ‘divine’ element in art, can at least help to save us from the opposite error of interpretation, summed upby Collingwood in the form of a syllogism: ‘imitation is bad; all art is imitative; therefore all art is bad’.Collingwood himself (1925) attributed this view to Plato at one time, but recanted in his Principles of Art(1938). The notion is still put forward by writers on aesthetics, and Collingwood is oftener cited assupporting than as refuting it, though his chapter in the Principles, written after his detailed scrutiny of theGreek text of the relevant section of the Republic, takes us further towards an understanding of Plato’sdistinctions between good and bad art than most commentaries.

‘The facts are’, he wrote,

(i) that ‘Socrates’ in Plato’s Republic divides poetry into two kinds, one representative and the othernot (392d); (ii) that he regards certain kinds of representative poetry as amusing…but for variousreasons undesirable, and banishes these kinds only of representative poetry not merely from theschoolroom of his young guardians but from the entire city (398a); (iii) that later in the dialogue heexpresses satisfaction with his original division (595a); (iv) reinforces his attack, this time extended tothe entire field of representative poetry, with new arguments (595c–606d); (v) and banishes allrepresentative poetry, but retains certain specified kinds of poetry as not representative (607a).

(1938:46–7)

It is at 607a, of course, that Socrates ‘can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and thepraises of good men’; tragedy and comedy are banned as ‘representative’ or ‘mimetic’; even Homer is toomimetic to be admissible.

This reading of the Republic’s treatment of poetry is precise and coherent and no doubt takes us veryclose to Plato’s meaning. But it takes no account of the corresponding passages in the Laws where the roleof music and poetry in education is again discussed, particularly the Athenian’s statement at 668a–b,already quoted: music is one of the arts of imitation and is nevertheless to be used to educate the young.Imitation for the sake of pleasure is bad. The music we should make our serious object is that which ‘retainsits likeness to the model of the noble’. The Laws, then, recognizes a kind of art that is both mimetic andacceptable.

Collingwood tried to make Plato’s distinctions clear by assimilating them, as far as possible, to his own.He had his own notion of ‘art proper’, derived through Croce from the Romantic tradition and centred onimagination. This he did not attempt to father on to Plato as some of the early Romantics did theirs. Besides

THE GREEK RATIONALISTS 3

‘art proper’ Collingwood distinguished six pseudo-arts in which the artist’s gifts are used as a craft to bringabout specific ends—‘art proper’, for Collingwood as for Kant, has no end other than itself:

Let us give the six their right names. Where an emotion is aroused for its own sake, as an enjoyableexperience, the craft of arousing it is amusement; where for the sake of its practical value, magic….Where intellectual faculties are stimulated for the mere sake of their exercise, the work designed tostimulate them is a puzzle; where for the sake of knowing this or that thing, it is instruction. Where acertain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which stimulates it is advertisement or (in thecurrent modern sense, not the old sense) propaganda; where it is stimulated as right, exhortation.

(1938:32)

Art proper, says Collingwood, may do any of these things by the way, but doing them is not what makes itart. As for ‘magical’ art, this is explained later as the arousal of emotion not for the pleasure of experiencingit or the aim of discharging it but in order to canalize and direct it upon practical life; magical art worksthrough representation of the socially appropriate emotions and becomes

a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it.Hence magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthysociety. A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is eithermistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its ownmaintenance.

(1938:69)

Plato, said Collingwood, wanted magical art for his Republic, but not amusement art; he identifiedamusement art with representation, and did not realize that magical art is also representative.

But Laws 668, with its acceptable music that ‘retains its likeness to the model of the noble’ suggests thatsocially useful art, whether we call it ‘magical’ or not, could be representative according to Plato. Perhapsthe difficulty of getting to the heart of the matter arises from Plato’s use of mimesis for different kinds anddegrees of ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’ which could usefully be distinguished by different names. Nodoubt the key to his meaning is to be found, as Collingwood maintained, in the distinction which sets off thediscussion in the Republic at 392d. Poets, says Socrates, can tell a story by describing what happened fromthe outside or by getting inside the skins of their characters, making us feel their emotions through directspeech. Direct speech stands between pure narrative and dramatic impersonation. Homer uses a great dealof direct speech and is therefore the father of tragedy.

Now, when this distinction is considered together with what Plato says elsewhere about poetry and truth,and about music and emotion, what suggests itself is that Plato is not ruling out mimetic art because it ismimetic, as Collingwood put it, but because the more art aims at being mimetic, ‘naturalistic’, faithfullyspecific to situations as they might arise in real life, the lower it will sink in the sublunary realm of thesensible and the emotional. The sense of mimesis at Plato’s starting-point in the Republic is not so much‘representative’ or ‘representational’ distinguished from ‘non-representational’ as ‘mimicry’, or‘impersonation’ distinguished from ‘detached judgment’. For ‘pure narrative’, Plato implies, allows theattitudes and judgments of the narrator to come through directly; it moves us away from the dangers ofextreme mimesis. Tragedy involves us in emotions of which the very violence may swamp our judgment,tempts us to give ourselves up to the thrill of the violent feeling itself and limits our judgment to admiration

4 IMAGINATION

for the skill of the mimic—author or actor. This last pleasure is comparatively harmless perhaps butirrelevant to the good life of the Republic and a distraction from its serious pursuits.

For Plato, art improves in status as it moves away from naked feeling to moral judgment and uses itsspell-binding power to promote virtue rather than to awaken thrills. The poetry, music and painting ofPlato’s own day seemed to him to be aiming at the crudest, most naturalistic kind of mimesis—mimicry orimpersonation of ordinary mortals in stagecraft, undisciplined feeling in music, illusionism in painting. Theevolution of tragedy, music and painting in Plato’s day was indeed from the stylized to the naturalistic.Aeschylus conveys the sense of the sacred, Sophocles of the heroic, Euripides of the humane—thesecommonplaces are simplistic but not unserviceable. Fourth-century Greek painting followed the sculptors’humanizing of the rigid, hieratic poses inherited from Egypt with the discovery of foreshortening and theillusion of three-dimensionality through shading and colour, culminating in the legendary trompes-l’oeil ofZeuxis and Parrhasios. In music, the type of performance called the nomos (meaning ‘law, custom,tradition’) was becoming less traditional and more marked by the individuality of the composer; a new style,‘characterized by freedom of modulation and of rhythm, and perhaps by floridity’ was deplored bymoralists as ‘popular’ or ‘theatrical’ (Winnington-Ingram 1954:77). These tendencies were, in Plato’s view,symptoms of the decadence of Athens. To him it seemed that the arts of archaic Greece, still grounded inreligion, had helped to maintain ethical and political traditions built up by right-thinking practical Greeks, meninspired with true opinion if not knowledge. But in the decadent climate of contemporary Athens theseconditions no longer pertained. As Plato saw it the right way of life could only be restored on the basis ofknowledge; the criteria for judgments in every sphere, including poetry, music and the plastic arts, were tobe furnished by the philosopher reaching truth through the dialectic.

In arriving at these conclusions Plato was allowing his intellect to dominate his own spontaneous feelingsabout poetry, and indulging, in compensation, his feelings of the superiority of the philosopher over thepoet:

If the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, wewould gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell. But all the same it wouldbe impious to betray what we believe to be the truth.

(Republic 607c)

Plato seems to see poetry as Jerome was later to see Latin literature —a sinful love to be abjured. Aristotle,of course, was to take up Plato’s challenge as far as tragedy was concerned and to show its usefulness inpurging the violent feelings that Plato said it encouraged; Plato’s complaint against tragedy was much likethe complaints in our own time about television violence, and the arguments about incitement and catharsisstill go on; though Greek tragedy has for so long been canonized as ‘high art’ that we may be astonished tofind Plato viewing it with the same suspicion that moralists today have for the cruder images of television.

All Plato’s scattered comments about poetry, music and painting have in common this tendency to movefrom the natural to the civilized, from the spontaneous to the disciplined, the ritualistic, the liturgical; fromcrude emotion to feelings of moral or aesthetic satisfaction underwritten by values which he believes to bein the last issue intelligible and not simply intuitive.

Book II of the Laws takes us to the heart of the matter with its discussion of the role of music and dancingin educating the young:

No young creature whatsoever, as we may fairly assert, can keep its body or its voice still; all areperpetually trying to make movements and noises. They leap and bound, they dance and frolic, as it were


with glee, and again, they utter cries of all sorts. Now animals at large have no perception of the orderor disorder in these motions, no sense of what we call rhythm or melody. But in our own case, thegods of whom we spoke as given us for companions in our revels [the Muses, Apollo and Dionysus,mentioned earlier] have likewise given us the power to perceive and enjoy rhythm and melody.Through this sense they stir us to movements and become our choir leaders.

(Laws 653d–e)

Dancing imposes order and pattern on the randomness of natural movement. But the order and pattern are tohave a moral purpose; movements and poses can correspond to good or bad states of mind:

Then is it conceivable that anywhere where there are, or may hereafter be, sound laws in forcetouching this educative-playful function of the Muses, men of poetic gifts should be free to takewhatever in the way of rhythm, melody, or diction tickles the composer’s fancy in the act ofcomposition and teach it through the choirs to the boys and lads of a law-respecting society, leaving itto chance whether the result prove virtue or vice?

(Laws 656c)

This is just what Plato believes to have gone wrong with the mores of decadent Athens. The old traditions,born of the true opinion of the Ancients and forming the right opinion of the young have broken down. TheRepublic founded on the true knowledge demonstrated by philosophers through the dialectic has not comeabout, and the Plato of the Laws perhaps no longer believes it will. All change is dangerous; how right theEgyptians are, he says, to stereotype the forms of their music and their painting in order to stabilize thevalues of their civilization:

That nation, it would seem, long enough ago recognized the truth we are now affirming, that posesand melodies must be good, if they are to be habitually practised by the youthful generation ofcitizens. So they drew up the inventory of all the standard types, and consecrated specimens of themin their temples. Painters and practitioners of other arts of design were forbidden to innovate on thesemodels or entertain any but the traditional standards, and the prohibition still persists, both for thesearts and for music in all its branches. If you inspect their paintings and reliefs on the spot, you willfind that the work of ten thousand years ago —I mean the expression not loosely but in all precision—is neither better nor worse than that of today; both exhibit an identical artistry.

(Laws 656d)

The increasing pessimism of the ageing Plato tempts him often to overstate his own reservations aboutdemocracy in terms which repel modern readers on their guard against totalitarianisn. Like the Bergson of Lesdeux sources de la morale et de la religion he treats ethical questions on two levels—the level oftranscendental values and the level of society’s need for self-preservation. Like Rousseau he can switch hismind from the Utopian to the pragmatic. The ideal state would be one in which citizens of high intelligencewould freely reason their way towards the good. But the power of reasoning develops slowly and isunevenly distributed among mankind; conditioning is an essential part of education, and the morepessimistic Plato becomes, the more stringent and conservative is the conditioning he recommends.

Even the earlier Plato and his more life-size Socrates has no doubt where he stands in the ‘old quarrelbetween philosophy and poetry’ referred to in the Republic (607b). Plato breathes reverence for Apollo andthe Muses when their inspiration is embodied in traditional forms and rituals; but when he asserts that poets

6 IMAGINATION

achieve their results through inspiration rather than techne, professional skill, and that their works are mostpoetic when they are most frenzied, such admissions of other-worldliness carry with them no respect for thepoet’s message.3 Plato has great respect for the practical knowledge acquired through observation,experience and apprenticeship in the world of solid things—direct acquaintance with the sensible. But hisreverence and deep feeling are for knowledge of the intelligible through thought. Poetry, music, painting asthey are practised in Plato’s Athens fall uncomfortably between these two; poets may talk sense, mayhappen upon ‘right opinion’—but they may not. They may ‘imitate’ or ‘represent’ the wrong things, or gowrong in their attempts to imitate the right. When they depict their heroes at war they must parade theirknowledge of generalship—but what is the worth of their ‘inspiration’ here compared with the real soldier’sknowledge through experience? What can they tell us about the tending of the wounded that a doctor willnot find wanting? When the poet says something that is good or true he has himself no means ofrecognizing the goodness or truth of what he says: he asserts but cannot defend.

All extant poetry is therefore set below or against philosophy. Did Plato mean to suggest in the Republicthat the ideal poet might write truth and beauty in his poetry, imitating not the sensible world but the idealforms themselves? Not in any Keatsian sense, for the word ‘beauty’ did not have the ‘aesthetic’connotations for the Greeks that it had for the Romantics. Since the forms belong to the pure intellect theycan never be sensibly rendered. Could the logos of the philosopher’s intellect be expressed with the‘charm’, or ‘spell’ of the poet’s rhythms and images? If Plato meant this he never said it. It was left to hislater followers to claim that poets, painters, sculptors, musicians could copy the ideal forms themselves andreveal them in sensible guise. Could Plato’s own myths be taken as examples of the kind of poetry hisRepublic might tolerate? But how seriously did Plato himself take them? They are hardly myths in the sensethat they add any intuitions of profundity to Plato’s ideas as they are put forward in the dialogues; theunsolved philosophical problems of the dialogues remain unsolved in the myths—for instance the way inwhich the sensible world ‘participates’ in the forms is left as an insoluble problem in Parmenides; and theTimaeus, for all its vivid images, neither throws light on it nor suggests any profound and unilluminablemystery. The myths illustrate, decorate and exalt, but add little if anything to meanings elsewhereintelligibly conveyed. Did Plato mean them to give more than pleasure?

He was undoubtedly as great a writer as he was thinker; it is mainly, though not entirely, on the strengthof the myths that he has been called a great ‘imaginative’ writer. The epithet, though by no meansmeaningless, is a post-Romantic one and would never have occurred to Plato. And there is surely one mainsense of ‘imaginative’ that he would have rejected. Writers are often called ‘imaginative’ in the post-Romantic world because they succeed in capturing our imagination, making our consciousness live in afiction, provoking a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, making an illusion seem real. Any technique forproducing illusions is suspect to Plato and smacks of deceit. In his view we should be clear about what oursenses tell us and think clearly about it. When our senses mislead us, for instance when they show us thestick partly submerged in water as bent, ‘measuring and numbering and weighing’ will ‘straighten’ ourknowledge (Republic 602c–d). But sculptors and painters introduce deceit into the sensible world as theSophists introduce deceit into thought. Philosophy should keep clear of all such tricks (Sophist 235a).

If we imagine ourselves looking backwards from the Romantic age we can see that Plato could seem tobe on the side of imaginative art because he is so starkly against realism. But the art of which Plato mostapproves, because it comes nearest to the truths the philosopher knows, at best stumbles on someapproximation to truth and can never be sure it has done so until the philosopher —or traditional rightthinking—approves. The truths art is allowed to convey in the Republic and the Laws are moral truths;beauty is primarily the beauty of right conduct, not the object of what was later to be called imaginativecontemplation.


There is no conception of the ‘truth of imagination’ in Plato, and no role in his world for ‘imaginative art’as it was later conceived by those who considered themselves his followers. Nor does imagination itself takeon any particular shape or precision as a concept—certainly nothing of the prestige that later ‘Platonic’theories of art were to accord it.

As a matter of vocabulary Plato’s phantasia4 has not yet taken on any of the characteristics that‘imagination’ has in ordinary usage today, chief of which is no doubt the distinction of imagination fromperception. According to this usage we perceive the real world through the senses; we imagine unreal thingsor disembodied copies of real things without direct stimulus from sensation. Perceptions are ‘real’appearances in consciousness; images are ‘unreal’ appearances in consciousness. Plato’s aesthesis, which isthe word often translated as ‘perception’, can include awareness of dreams as well as of waking reality. Theverb phainesthai can refer to what appears to the mind in what modern usage calls perception or inimagination. Phantasia, the noun corresponding to the verb, is used where Plato is discussing the nature ofperception in terms of ‘judgments’ made by the mind about sensation; the awareness of the sensation assuch cannot be called true or false, but we may ‘judge’ or ‘interpret’ the sensation rightly or wrongly,mistaking, for example, the person we see in the distance for another. In Philebus Plato discussesdaydreaming; our imaginations about the future are here called phantasmata and are said to be the work of akind of painter in the soul. But this painter is represented by Plato as an illustrator rather than a creator.Before the pictures come the thoughts; before the ‘painter’ comes the ‘scribe’. In perception, daydreams andthe dreams and visions of seers, ‘appearances’ or ‘presentations’ may be true or false; and only the thinkingmind can pronounce on their truth or falsity.

When M.W.Bundy wrote his splendid book on imagination (1927) he was himself under the spell of theRomantics and anxious to give Plato credit for the Romantic belief in imagination as a means to truth. Partof his strategy is to read the Greek word eikasia as imagination, and to suggest that the distinction betweeneikasia and phantasia foreshadows Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy. But eikasia andits associates have to do with copies and copying, just as phantasia and its associates have to do withappearances and appearing. Bundy puts a great deal of weight on the much interpreted passage on the‘divided line’ in the Republic, where eikasia is awareness of shadows, and reflections. In the Sophist God issaid to make shadows and reflections in water or polished surfaces as images of sensible realities, much as apainter or actor makes copies or images of things or people. In the passage on the divided line, theseshadows and reflections are one degree further from truth than the sensible world itself. Eikasia therefore is,in a sense, ‘imagination’, but in the sense of ‘accepting unreal appearances as real’; some translators renderthe word here as ‘illusion’. Its use, and the whole context of the ‘divided line’ give little hope of creditingPlato with even the germ of a theory of transcendent truth through symbols.5

Bundy’s knowledge of Plato’s texts is impressive and his pleading able; but it is very special pleading.He comes at his object from any number of directions and leads his reader through some very tortuousintellectual mazes; but has to confess, in the end, that Plato did not say what Bundy would have liked him tomean. To bring Plato nearer the Romantics he has to use chiefly the texts the Romantics themselves likedbest—the Symposium and the myths of Timaeus and Phaedrus, with vision and creativity ascribed to thepoet and artist. At last Bundy feels able to conclude that, for the Plato of the myths, ‘the poet and the seerhave truer insight than the thinker—and the statesman. And, Plato would add, the poetry of the Dialogues isnearer to Truth than the processes of discursive thought’ (Bundy 1927:58). This is hard to reconcile withwhat is said about literature in the Phaedrus itself. The written word, says Socrates, cannot answer thereader’s questions and is likely to be misinterpreted. The philosopher will therefore, when he writes, nottake writing very seriously:

8 IMAGINATION

he will sow his seed in literary gardens, I take it, and write when he does write by way of pastime…but far more excellent, I think, is the serious treatment (of justice and other topics), which employs theart of dialectic.

(Phaedrus 276d–e)

The Seventh Letter says much the same thing. The Romantic theorists of imagination with whom Bundysympathized derived more from Plotinus than from Plato. Plotinus himself quoted most frequently from thePlato of the myths, and his own dialectic is of a very different kind from that of the dialogues.

Aristotle is much more interested than Plato in the different kinds of phantasiai that can occur in the lifeof the mind and not entirely satisfied with Plato’s account of them, particularly in perception. We saw earlierthat in Philebus Plato writes of ‘a sort of painter in the mind’ producing pictures of our thoughts; but the‘painter’ follows the ‘scribe’ responsible for the discourse, the logos, the train of thought (39b). The‘pictures’ seem to be incidental for Plato even when we are—as we should say now—‘fantasizing’ or tryingto imagine how things will go for us in the future. Similarly in Plato’s most characteristic accounts ofperception the ‘appearance’ of the person or thing we recognize seems to come after the process ofrecognition. It is true that ‘appearance’ seems to refer to different parts of the process of perception indifferent contexts; sometimes it is how a simple sensation ‘appears’—the whiteness of a white object. BothPlato and Aristotle are prepared to concede that the senses do not lie, that the ‘appearances’ of the variousbits of sensation that come into the mind can be trusted —whiteness, sweetness and so forth. But how do thebits combine into the appearance of a recognized object—a man distinguished from a scarecrow, Tom Jonesfrom Peter Robinson—about whose identity we can make a mistake?Socrates: Now is it not always memory and perception that give rise to opinion and to the attempts we

make to reach a judgment?Protarchus: Certainly.Socrates: Let me suggest what we must believe to occur in this connection.Protarchus: Well?Socrates: If a man sees objects that come into his view from a distance and indistinctly, would you agree

that he commonly wants to decide about what he sees?Protarchus: I should.Socrates: Then the next step will be that he puts a question to himself.Protarchus: What question?Socrates: ‘What is that object which catches my eye there beside the rock under a tree?” Don’t you think

that is what he would say to himself, if he had caught sight of some appearance of the sort?Protarchus: Of course.Socrates: And then he would answer his own question and say, if he got it right, ‘It is a man.’Protarchus: Certainly.Socrates: Or again, if he went astray and thought what he was looking at was something made by

shepherds, he might very likely call it an image.Protarchus: He might quite well.Socrates: And if he had someone with him, he would put what he said to himself into actual speech

addressed to his companion, audibly uttering those same thoughts, so that what before wecalled opinion has now become assertion.

Protarchus: Of course.Socrates: Whereas if he is alone he continues thinking the same thing by himself, going on his way

maybe for a considerable time with the thought in his mind.


Protarchus: Undoubtedly.Socrates: Well now, I wonder whether you share my view on these matters.Protarchus: What is it?Socrates: It seems to me that at such times our soul is like a book.Protarchus: How so?Socrates: It appears to me that the conjunction of memory with sensations, together with the feelings

consequent upon memory and sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our souls.And when this experience writes what is true, the result is that true opinion and true assertionsspring up in us, while when the internal scribe that I have suggested writes what is false we getthe opposite sort of opinions and assertions.

Protarchus: That certainly seems to me right, and I approve of the way you put it.Socrates: Then please give your approval to the presence of a second artist in our souls at such a time.Protarchus: Who is that?Socrates: A painter, who comes after the writer and paints in the soul pictures of these assertions that we

make.Protarchus: How do we make out that he in his turn acts, and when?Socrates: When we have got those opinions and assertions clear of the act of sight, or other sense, and as

it were see in ourselves pictures or images of what we previously opined or asserted. That doeshappen with us, doesn’t it?

Protarchus: Indeed it does.Socrates: Then are the pictures of true opinions and assertions true, and the pictures of false ones false? Protarchus: Unquestionably.

(Philebus 38b–9c)Taken metaphorically, this account of recognition might seem to be an intuition of modern, scientific

theories of perception— bits of sensory information fed into a computer-brain which hunts for acorresponding pattern, offers itself a possible solution, checks the hypothesis against the sensory facts,comes to a conclusion and presents the corresponding total picture to consciousness. Taken as a literalaccount of how perception seems to us to happen Plato’s account can seem acceptable for some sets ofcircumstances; if we are uncertain whether we are seeing a man or a scarecrow because of distance orfading light or interrupted view we may well reflect upon the context and reasonably assess the likelihoodof one or other answer to our uncertainty. But Aristotle the scientific observer questions everygeneralization against the variety of experience, and is puzzled and intrigued by a particular class ofexamples of dubious ‘pictures in the mind’. Plato says that when the mind has made its ‘judgment’ aboutthe identity of what we are looking at it stamps that identity upon our picture of it. No doubt this doessometimes occur; having decided we are looking at a man and not a scarecrow we may then see the patternof sensations as a man—our perception may itself become more distinct. But Aristotle thinks of instancesfor which this is no explanation.

The motion of a comet, Aristotle reflects, produces the appearance of a tail; we ‘see’ it as occupyingmore space than we know it does. The correct ‘opinion’ about what we are seeing does not make theapparent tail disappear from our mental picture, our sight, but the sight does not affect the opinion(Meteorologica 342b). The sun ‘looks’ to be a foot in diameter ‘though we are convinced that it is largerthan the inhabited part of the earth’ (De anima 428b). So Plato’s account of phantasia in Philebus, twicerepeated in Theaetetus, is not acceptable to Aristotle, who uses Plato’s vocabulary to assert his own difference:imagination, phantasia, he says, is not ‘opinion plus sensation’ nor ‘opinion mediated by sensation’, nor a

10 IMAGINATION

‘blend of opinion and sensation’ (De anima 428a). What, then, is it? For Aristotle it is a puzzling, intriguingaspect of mental life, hard to relate to the other parts of the soul—neither sensation nor thought, butsomewhere between the two (De anima 432b). There Aristotle consistently puts it; and there it was to stay,in the rationalist West, until the Renaissance changed both its nature and its status.

If we look for something in Plato that may correspond to this placing of phantasia between the lower andthe higher parts of the soul we may find it in what seems to be an ironical and whimsical discussion ofdreams in the Timaeus. Dreams are said to arise from man’s lower nature, the part of the soul ‘bound downlike a wild animal’, ‘between the midriff and the boundary of the navel’. These dreams upset the liver anddisturb our sleep. But God made the liver the meeting-place of higher and lower influences—not only bitterwith bile but ‘solid and smooth, and bright and sweet’, so that images coming downward from the mind canbe reflected as in a mirror and overwhelm the disturbing images from the lower nature; making ‘the portionof the soul which resides about the liver happy and joyful, enabling it to pass the night in peace, and topractise divination in sleep, inasmuch as it has no share in mind and reason’ (70d–71d).

The other Platonic text in which mental images come between sensation and pure thought is the passageon the ‘divided line’ in the Republic. This line is divided into four sections, two corresponding to thesensible world and two to the intelligible. The two sections of the sensible world are (1) shadows andreflected images and (2) the solid objects of sense which cast shadows and make reflections. The twosections of the intelligible world are (3) the images that occur when we are thinking and (4) the forms, orconcepts. The images in (3) are the mental replicas of the sensible objects in (2). Thinking in images is alower kind of thinking. The geometer who thinks in images of squares and triangles is really intent upon theabstract square and triangle, upon the forms; the dialectic of the philosopher moves entirely within section(4) of the divided line, ‘making no use whatever of any object of sense but only of pure ideas moving onthrough ideas to ideas and ending with ideas’ (Republic 511c).

Aristotle too believes that reasoning is the manipulation of pure ideas; but since, for him, ideas are notderived from a supersensible realm, either by direct intuition or through the soul’s reminiscences of theideas it knew in heaven before its incarnation, but by abstraction from the sensible world itself, imagesbecome the essential intermediary between perception and conception. The best thinking rises aboveimages, as it were, but can only do so by rising through them:

Since it seems that there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatialmagnitudes, the objects of thought are in the sensible forms, viz. both the abstract objects and all thestates and affections of sensible things. Hence no one can learn or understand anything in the absenceof sense, and when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with animage; for images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter.

(De anima 432a)

Concepts are not images, ‘though they necessarily involve them’.Aristotle, then, gives phantasia a definite part to play in the various motions of the soul; but it belongs to

the brute part of the soul, not its distinctively human part. In Aristotle’s biology plants have a nutritive soul,animals have sensation. Most animals also have imagination.6 What distinguishes the soul of man, of course,is nous, mind. Imagination is given its place in psychology, but very much kept in its place. Aristotle ismore interested in all the manifestations of imagination than Plato was, but he is just as suspicious ofwishful fantasy and goal-seeking outside the control of reasonable judgment. Men are sometimes guided byimagination ‘because of the temporary eclipse in them of thought by feeling or disease or sleep’ (De anima429a). ‘When imagination originates movement, it necessarily involves appetite…. Now thought is always


right, but appetite and imagination may be either right or wrong—the object may be the real or the apparentgood…. Many men follow their imaginations contrary to knowledge’ (De anima 433a).

The De anima is one of Aristotle’s more desultory and enigmatic texts—one of those that read rather likelecture notes, where the links between the separate notions, the steps in the exposition, are to be supplied bythe lecturer. It seems possible that Aristotle was thinking in terms of a distinction found explicitly orimplicitly in later philosophers—a distinction between two phases in perception; the first being theuninterpreted, unrecognized but unified sensory ‘appearance’ of our world, the second being ourunderstanding of it as a recognizable environment made up of separately recognizable features. In the firstphase, all the various bits of our sensations—what Aristotle calls the special sensibles—merge into a totalsensation, a total appear ance. The messages coming from the special sensibles are related together andcompared by the common sense, the sensus communis, which introduces temporal and spatial relations intothe total appearance. This total appearance is the phantasia. The second phase of perception involves theanalysis and recognition of this appearance in terms of the forms or concepts—which is Plato’s kind ofphantasia in Philebus and Theaetetus. In Plato phantasia is simply a word to refer to our awareness of thesensible world when our mind has taken it in, in Aristotle phantasia becomes the handmaid of nous—anelusive and intriguing power of the mind mediating between sensation and thought. ‘Even in ordinaryspeech’, writes Aristotle, ‘we do not, when sense functions precisely with regard to its object, say that weimagine it to be a man, but rather when there is some failure of accuracy in its exercise’ (De anima 428a).

In thought there are both receptive and active elements, the work of nous pathetikos or of nous poietikos.Phantasia can be receptive and reproductive, as in perception, or creative and productive as in fantasies orthe kind of ‘thinking out’ that uses images. But whereas the work of nous poietikos leads to true perceptionsand true opinions, imagination can most mislead when it is most independently creative, as in hallucinationsand some kinds of dreams.7

Aristotle distinguishes imagination not only from perceiving and discursive thinking but from the kind of‘judgment’ that gives rise to a state of feeling with regard to the object. We can imagine, in the sense ofcalling up pictures in the mind, whenever we wish. To the extent that we merely imagine, the images calledup leave us ‘as unaffected as persons who are looking at a painting of some dreadful or encouraging scene’(De anima 427b). It is only when we think something to be fearful or threatening that the thought isaccompanied by emotion. Painting seems to have been for Aristotle, as for Plato, a more trivial—at least amore detached —art than poetry, since painting is said here not to move us and tragedy, in the Poetics, mustmove us to purge us of emotion. But if imagination is a necessary part of tragedy’s power to move us, it isnot, according to the psychoiogy of De anima, sufficient in itself; judgment of some kind there must alsobe. Judgment is involved in knowing, in opining and in attitudes of confidence or wariness with regard tothe objects of our imagining.

But Aristotle gives us no direct help in relating his psychology to the composition of poetry or to thelistener’s or spectator’s reactions to poetry; phantasia plays no part in the Poetics, another desultory andenigmatic text. When phantasia does become linked with art in later Greek texts it is often in connectionwith inspiration and ‘vision’; the Aristotle of the Poetics minimizes inspiration. The poet’s ‘enthusiasm’ orinspiration was part of the ‘inherited conglomerate’ and Aristotle nods in its direction without genuflecting;the Poetics invites any would-be poet to establish his purposes clearly and to think how best to carry themout.

The aims and the means considered in the Poetics involve what a modern vocabulary would callimagination in some of its aspects. Poetry, for Aristotle, is mimesis, as it was for Plato. But whereas Plato inthe Republic caricatured mimesis as mere copying of sensible particulars, likening the ‘impersonations’ oftragedy to painting conceived as the copying of something as trivial as a bed, Aristotle elevates mimesis into

12 IMAGINATION

the ‘representation of universals’. One part of his rejoinder to Plato is to put poetry on the plane of intellectrather than sensation; hence the comparison with history, which is a record of happenings in the sensible world:

Poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give generaltruths while history gives particular facts. By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that a certaintype of man will do or say either probably or necessarily…. A ‘particular fact’ is what Alcibiades didor what was done to him.

(Poetics 1451b)8

General truths obviously cannot be copied as a bed, or the recorded actions of an historical person, can becopied, unless they are ‘seen’ in some metaphorical sense of ‘vision’. Later Greeks will suggest that theartist’s ‘universals’ are seen in a kind of vision, a phantasia. Modern criticism does not find it odd to speakof the ‘vision’ of Balzac without necessarily implying anything metaphysical. But phantasia with ametaphysical, psychological or metaphorical meaning is not explicitly recognized in Aristotle’s writingabout poetry.

Later senses of imagination can be read back into the various kinds of mimesis briefly referred to by Platoand Aristotle. And various these kinds are. There is obviously a world of difference between a painting thatsets out to copy a bed and a melody that expresses feeling. Even in trompe-l’oeil there must be atechnique of illusion, not just a detail by detail copying. A technique has to be worked out, has to be‘invented’; ‘invention’ nowadays is often said to imply the use of imagination. It does not occur to Aristotleto use the word phantasia even in connection with the poet’s ability to identify with the feelings of hischaracters, as Quintilian and Longinus were to do. His discussion of the kind of action most likely to provecredible to the listener and spectator, ending in the assertion that a ‘probable impossibility’ is more effectivethan an ‘improbable possibility’ might be re-phrased nowadays in terms of the need to ‘capture theimagination’ of the spectator, seizing it away from his rational judgments and beliefs. The idea of ‘capturingthe imagination’ is nowhere explicit in Aristotle.

There is a sketchy notion of it in Plato, where, in the Sophist, he is comparing the false reasonings ofSophists to the pseudo-copies of those makers of colossal statues who distort their figures in order to makethem appear to have the right proportions when seen from ground level. But this ‘capturing of theimagination’ of the onlooker, this art of illusion called by Plato phantastike, the fabrication of appearances,is not well thought of. He distinguishes it from eikastike, the making of ‘icons’ or true copies—but, ofcourse, in other contexts he has no admiration for even the less deceitful, the more nearly ‘copying’ kind ofrepresentation to be found in some paintings and statues (Sophist 235a ff.).

In the third century BC, the age of the greatest triumphs of Greek rationalism, the Stoics, like Plato,accepted inspiration, astrology and the possibly religious meaning of dreams, yet they were moreintransigently rationalist in their attitude to knowledge than either Plato or Aristotle. What particularlyinterested Zeno and the first generation of Stoics was the problem of sure or unsure perception of thesensible world. We know when we are doubtful about what we may be perceiving; how sure can we bewhen we think we are being sure? Later Sceptics like Sextus Empiricus seized on the doubtful instances toassert that there can never be absolute certainty that we are perceiving what we think we perceive; and sinceall reasoning begins with the observable ‘truths’ of perception, doubt about this ‘truth’ undermines allthinking. There is nothing, said the Sceptics, we can surely know. The Stoics were determined to validateperception. According to Cicero, Zeno introduced the notion of ‘grasping’ truth; a true or cognitiveperception, phantasia kataleptike, is like a ‘grasp’ of what is really there to be perceived. Zeno, wroteCicero, held out his open hand with fingers outstretched, and said that ‘a presentation [phantasia] is like that’.


Then he contracted his fingers and said ‘assent is like that’. Then he closed his hand entirely, to stand forapprehension or cognition, to which he gave a new name —katalepsis. Finally he brought up his left hand,clasped his first with it, and said that knowledge was like this grasp (Sandbach 1975:87). But whatguarantees the sureness of our ‘grasp’ of the true state of affairs through perception? The later StoicPosidonius in the first century BC said that the criterion for many of the older Stoics had been ‘uprightlogos’. We are back at what was implied by Plato’s and Aristotle’s references to perception; the soundnessof the mind’s reason is the prerequisite of true cognition.

In Stoic thought phantasiai can be the appearances of things in consciousness as we perceive the things,the images as we imagine the things and the concepts by which we think discursively of them. The Stoicsare mainly interested in phantasiai as perceptions, but the term extends to dreams and visions and to any‘movement’ of consciousness; all the ‘goings-on’ in the mind are phantasiai and the mind’s attention tothese ‘goings-on’ is thought. Thinking means applying reason to the presentations in the mind, and apresentation when processed by reason becomes a phantasia logike, one that can be expressed in speech.

Sound reason must also govern fantasy in the moral life, an idea which became central in the ethics ofEpictetus: reason arises out of fantasies yet judges fantasies—particularly, in moral life, the fantasies arisingfrom our lower nature:

Now reason, for what purpose has it been given by nature? For the right use of phantasies. What is itthen itself? A system (combination) of certain phantasies. So by its nature it has the faculty ofcontemplating itself also…it is the chief and the first work of a philosopher to examine phantasies,and to distinguish them, and to admit none without examination.

(quoted in Bundy 1927:94)

It is not surprising that the Stoics had no great respect for or concern with poetry. Cleanthes, himself a poet,was not so far from Plato in holding that ‘metre and song and rhythm come nearest to the truth in contemplationof the divine’ (Sikes 1931: 170); for the most part the Stoics tended to slight poetry as a kind of hit-or-missphilosophy for popular consumption. Posidonius, it seems, believed in the beneficent psychic power ofpoetry; the pleasure it brings, and particularly the emotional satisfaction through vicarious experience aregood for us (Edelstein 1966:57). Such a view of poetry is more typical of Hellenistic thought than of therationalism of the early Stoics.

From some of Aristotle’s comments on phantasia it is clear that he was hard put to it to give a unifiedaccount of it and to link the various kinds of ‘presentations’ or ‘appearances’ in consciousness— includingthe pseudo-consciousness of dreams—with the other operations of the mind.9 He fits it neatly into hisbiological hierarchy, with nutrition for the vegetable soul, sensation and imagination for the animal,sensation, imagination and intelligence for the human. But he is obviously puzzled himself by the variedfunctions and natures of the different kinds of ‘appearances’ in perception, discursive thought, wakingfantasies and dreams. These different kinds go on being discussed separately by later thinkers. Even whenthe influence of Galen joined to that of Plato and Aristotle produced the ‘faculty psychology’ with eachmental faculty located in one of the ‘ventricles’ situated from the front to the back of the head, there wassome hesitation about crediting all the aspects of all kinds of phantasiai to one faculty; some thinkers usedthe Latin imaginatio, originally a translation of phantasia, to distinguish two faculties or functions under theLatin and Greek names.

But it is astonishing to see how firmly the triad sensation-imagination-intelligence established itself as thepattern for accounts of perception; from Aristotle to Kant there is a continuous tradition of discussion in itsterms. It can be embroidered upon or in some new way ‘explained’—in terms of movements of the animal

14 IMAGINATION

spirit, for instance, in medieval psycho-physiology; what persists is the basic notion that phantasiacombines the different sensations into a ‘presentation’ which is interpreted by mind or intelligence, thehighest power of the psyche. Imagination quite clearly takes second place as the handmaid of reason.

Similarly in discussions of how we think our way through problems imagination is said to be at most asupport for our reasoning power. Thinkers differ as to whether it is a support at all and, if so, to what extent,and their differences are often indicators of their leaning towards Plato or towards Aristotle. Overperception it was easy enough to combine these two authorities; although Aristotle directly contradictedPlato, the difference could be seen as a matter of terminology. Plato used phantasia for the perception whenit is already judged to be certainly or possibly a perception of this or that; Aristotle used it for the combinedsensations before they begin to be identified as belonging to specific objects in a defined situation.Aristotle’s account could be seen as a refinement of Plato’s, with both according sovereignty to reason. Overdiscursive thinking Platonists and Aristotelians tend to draw apart. For the Plato of the divided line imagethe mind’s clearest thought has left sensation and imagination behind and operates with pure concepts; forAristotle concepts have to be abstracted from the sensible world through the intermediary of images—images are half-way between the world of the senses and the world of mind. Platonists therefore eitherminimize the usefulness of images in thinking or deny that there is true thinking while images persist;Aristotelians either defend the usefulness of images or maintain that there can be no thinking without them.In thinking as in perception phantasia has at most a subordinate role.

Fantasizing, either as fictional day-dreaming or as the imagining of possibilities leading to action becamean important topic in ethics. Both Plato and Aristotle had emphasized the moral indifference of phantasia,which can be directed towards good or bad ends. Though both are aware of the irrational elements in thehuman soul—the demands of appetite and the disturbing effects of emotion—they both, whether or not theyentirely accept the Socratic precept reported by Plato that virtue is knowledge, assert unequivocally that thegood life is dependent on the dominance of reason. This notion, like the perceptual triad of sensation-imagination-reason, goes right through to Kant. Reason can be variously interpreted; can be seen as mainlythe result of proper education or, from Augustine onwards, as the exercise of will enlightened by grace. Butthe basic notion is that phantasia may be well- or ill-used, and judgment of ‘well’ or ‘ill’ is somehowreasonable judgment.

Where phantasia tends to gain ground in the Greek thought of the centuries after Plato and Aristotle is inthe sphere of the mantic —dreams and visions believed to convey supernatural insight and knowledge of thefuture; prophecy in its widest sense. The rationalism of Plato’s day played down this part of the ‘inheritedconglomerate’ of Greek ideas and beliefs. Plato was more concerned to point out its possibilities of errorand confusion than to recommend it as of much use even in the lower realm of belief and practical decision;just as the poet cannot tell you the meaning of his own utterance even when it is inspired, so the visionarydoes not know the sense of his own vision. These have to be interpreted, and the reasonable interpreter,rather than the dreamer, is the true prophet. Aristotle connected all unwilled or uncontrolled fantasies as faras possible with physical causes. Plato separated the rational elements of Pythagoreanism away from itssuperstitions; Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism developed in an age when the irrational was regainingground and giving credit to more primitive ways of thinking inherited from the East, notably Babylon andEgypt. From the first century BC the happenings in the mind that are associated with phantasies or with amental faculty distinguished from other mental faculties and called phantasia take on more and moreimportance in such philosophical writings as have come down to us; and there are occasional hints thatphantasia is coming to be associated with the visual arts and with poetry.


2Imagination begins to be recognized

Literary theorists and Neopythagoreans in the early centuries AD

Before Aristotle the Sophist Gorgias had narrowed the gap between poetry and rhetoric; in the dialoguecalled Gorgias Plato’s Socrates seizes on the notion that both are arts of persuasion to deprecate them bothas ignoble appeals to feeling rather than thought. For Aristotle poetry is a thing of the spirit, and some aspectsof its techne cannot be learned: but a great many can, and Aristotle discusses them. From Aristotle onwardsGreek and Roman critics, writing about literature without Aristotle’s genius, perhaps without muchreference to Aristotle’s texts, have little to contribute to theory other than conventional arguments about therelative importance of nature and art, physis and techne. For the rest, criticism is assessment of the merits ofthe writers discussed, mostly in terms of the right or wrong use of the figures of speech. The debate aboutnature and art carries with it no questioning of the principle of mimesis; and since techne can be learned, tothe imitation of nature is added the imitation of the ancients. Interesting as the criticism of the four centuriesor so after Aristotle may be for the student of classical literature, for the history of phantasia it is theexceptional writers, expressing ideas diverging from the mainstream of Hellenistic and Graeco-Romancritical comment, who begin to signpost the road from mimesis to phantasia.

These rogue notions begin to appear in the first century AD, suggesting new life for the old idea ofinspiration as ‘enthusiasm’. The hero of the Satyricon, Encolpius, bitterly attacks the pedantic teachers ofrhetoric as the perpetuaters of the academic misunderstandings of the nature of eloquence that have broughtabout its decadence. He strays into a picture-gallery and meets the old poet Eumolpus, who explains that thedecline of all the liberal arts is due to the decadence of a pleasure-loving, loose-living age. Poetry, saysEumolpus, is not a matter of skill in versifying and in the use of the figures of rhetoric; the language ofpoetry should be elevated above the commonplace but without affectation or striving for effect. So far thereis little in Eumolpus’ contention that cannot be read in terms of the old debate between art and nature, withthe emphasis here on the need for freshness and spontaneity combined with critical good taste. But the morestriking assertions of Eumolpus, picked up later with approval by Dryden (Essay of Heroic Plays) and Pope(Essay on Criticism), and interpreted as sound Romantic doctrine by Coleridge, are made about the epic.

Lucan’s Pharsalia, an epic on the Roman civil wars, had abandoned the Homeric tradition of divineintervention. Eumolpus disapproves of the historical subject and the loss of the mythical and marvellouselements of the epic tradition. ‘Public events’, he contends,

are not to be related in verse-form; for the historians perform that task more effectively than poets. Onthe contrary, the poetic spirit, freed from the trammels of fact, must be urged forward in oblique andindirect fashion, with the gods intervening and with invention on the rack for poetic ornament; so thatthe result may seem the prophetic utterance of a soul aflame rather than a scrupulous statement of facttestified to by witnesses.

(Satyricon 118, trans. Atkins 1934: II.16.3)

Classical scholars have disputed whether Eumolpus’ views were those of Petronius himself. It seems likelythat they were; in any case this is a striking recognition of the old inspirational doctrine of the ‘fine frenzy’that had been played down by the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle.

The other outburst of enthusiasm that belongs at least probably to this first century AD is better known.Longinus on the Sublime has been given various dates and authors in the past, but the text now exists in a sortof limbo, with ignorance as to its author, a no more than probable guess about its date and speculation as tohow the Greek word hupsos could be better translated than by ‘sublime’. E.E.Sikes suggested that ‘On greatwriting’ would be a better title, and that Longinus was a ‘modern’ critic in asking questions about therelative value of different writers in terms of ‘that “height and excellence” which is not merely a matter oflogic or persuasion, but produces transport and ecstasy’ (1931:208).

Longinus was not to figure in the Renaissance; Robortello published the text in 1554, and though it wasrepublished and translated in Italy, Switzerland and England during the next hundred years, it was not untilBoileau translated it in 1674 that it became widely known and acclaimed as one of the touchstones of Neo-classicism.

Longinus makes no claims for poetry as the pursuit of a truth alongside or above the truths of philosophyand does not argue against Plato’s mistrust of the art; but he writes of Plato as of a poet, and transfers to poetrythe seriousness and depth of feeling that in Plato was intent upon the pursuit of intellectual truth. ‘Truly,beautiful words are the very light of thought’ (30, 1). This critic’s passion for great writing is the light thatilluminates his own thought; his topics and his approach are not otherwise very different from those of themainstream of Greek critical writing. These topics are nature and art; inspiration and self-criticism; theparticular beauties to be found in the use of the figures of speech. His judgments are intuitive rather thanlogical, his admirations passionate. Gibbon’s praise is well-known: ‘he tells me his own feelings uponreading [literature], and tells them with such energy that he communicates them’ (quoted in Sikes 1931:211).

Longinus has a little more to say about phantasia than his predecessors. Whether he came later thanQuintilian or no, he extends to poetry what Quintilian says of the effectiveness of phantasia in oratory. Theorator who wishes to move his listeners must be moved himself, said Quintilian:

How are we to generate these emotions in ourselves, since emotion is not in our own power?… Thereare certain experiences which the Greeks call phantasiai, and the Romans visions [nos sane visionesappellamus], whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness thatthey seem actually to be before our very eyes. It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressionswho will have the greatest power over the emotions. Some writers describe the possessor of thispower of vivid imagination, whereby things, words and actions are presented in the most realisticmanner, by the Greek word EUPHANTASIOTOS; and it is a power which all may readily acquire ifthey will. When the mind is unoccupied or is absorbed by fantastic hopes or daydreams, we arehaunted by these visions of which I am speaking to such an extent that we imagine we are travellingabroad, crossing the sea, fighting, addressing the people, or enjoying the use of wealth that we do notactually possess, and seem to ourselves not to be dreaming but acting. Surely, then, it may be possibleto turn this form of hallucination to some profit…[Quintilian here gives the example of imagining thecircumstances of an assassination]… From such impressions arises that ENARGEIA which Cicerocalls illumination and actuality [illustratio et evidentia], which makes us seem not so much to narrateas to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we werepresent at the actual occurrence.

(1921: VI.2.29–32)

IMAGINATION BEGINS TO BE RECOGNIZED 17

Quintilian goes on to say that the orator must identify with the persons for whom he is pleading and livethrough his troubles. The effective orator may, like some actors in tragedy and comedy, conclude hisperformance in tears.

Longinus says more or less the same things about phantasia as Quintilian but separates poetry fromrhetoric:

Weight, grandeur and energy in writing are very largely produced, dear pupil, by the use of ‘images’.(That at least is what some people call the actual mental pictures.) For the term Imagination is appliedin general to an idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech, but the word hasnow come to be used predominantly of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to seewhat you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience. That imagination means onething in oratory and another in poetry you will yourself detect, and also that the object of poetry is toenthral, of prose writing to present things vividly, though both indeed aim at this latter and at excitedfeeling.

(15)

Fyfe glosses in a note the word he translates as ‘enthral’; ‘ekplesis means startling people out of their wits,emotional illusion’ (Loginus 1960:171).

What is particularly interesting here is that the phantasia of Quintilian and Longinus produces the kind of‘mimicry’ or ‘impersonation’ that, for Plato, was the extreme form of mimesis. Phantasia is thepsychological means towards mimesis; and this can put us on our guard against superficial distinctionsbetween views of art made in terms of ‘imitation’ and ‘imagination’. Longinus (15) says that ‘sublimity’ inwriting can come from nobility of mind or imitation (mimesis) or imagination (phantasia); but ‘mimesis’ forhim means ‘imitation of the ancients’:

For many are carried away by the inspiration of another, just as the story runs that the Pythianpriestess on approaching the tripod where there is, they say, ‘a rift in the earth upbreathing steamdivine’, becomes thereby impregnated with the divine power and is at once inspired to utter oracles;so, too, from the natural genius of those old writers there flows into the hearts of their admirers as it werean emanation from the mouth of holiness. Inspired by this, even those who are not easily moved bythe divine afflatus share the enthusiasm of these others’ grandeur.

(13)

In painting, too, the various references to Theon of Samos can make us wary about vocabulary. Quintilianrefers to him as a painter of phantasiai: ‘Protogenes was renowned for accuracy, Pamphilus and Melanthiusfor soundness of taste, Antiphilus for facility, Theon of Samos for his depiction of imaginary scenes, knownas phantasiai [concipiendis visionibus, quas phantasias vocant], and Apelles for genius and grace’ (1921: XII.10.6). C.M. Robertson describes examples of Theon’s ‘fantasies’. The figure of a soldier is painted in anattitude that evokes the circumstances and emotions of the enemy attack; in The madness of Orestes thesingle figure is made to suggest the whole drama. ‘From phrases used by our authorities it appears that thistype of picture, known as phantasia from its appeal to the imagination, became a fashion in the Hellenisticage’ (1975: I.496–7). But any tendency to make a radical distinction between the mimesis of Zeuxis and thephantasia of Theon is arrested by the story told by Aelianus and quoted by E.H.Gombrich: ‘The painterTheon revealed his painting of a soldier to the accompaniment of a blast of trumpets, and we are assured thatthe illusion was greatly increased. Those of us who still remember the first talking films can imagine

18 IMAGINATION

something of the effect’ (1972a: 174). Phantasia in the service of mimesis, mimesis to heighten phantasia;either formulation will do, and neither seems more meaningful than the other. So D.A.Russell suggests thatLonginus’ phantasia is better translated by ‘visualization’ than by ‘fantasy’, ‘vision’ or ‘imagination’ withtheir modern associations (1964:120).

It is true that Longinus suggests, without making quite clear, an extended sense of phantasia. ‘For theterm Imagination [phantasia] is applied in general to an idea which enters the mind from any source andengenders speech…’ (15). In later centuries the idea which enters the mind as phantasia and engenders thespeech of the poet was to be seen as a correspondence with a supernatural order, as it was in times longbefore Plato, and the belief in inspiration through phantasia was to be put forward in Plato’s name. It ispossible, but by no means certain, that Longinus had something like this idea in mind.

The Greek of Longinus’ text in chapter 15 has puzzled scholars and translators, but the statement inquestion is usually taken to be a reference to some Stoic or Stoicizing text. Russell translates: ‘The termphantasia is used generally for anything which in any way suggests a thought productive of speech’ (1964:120). According to Sextus Empiricus, the Stoics held a ‘rational’ presentation to be one in which thephantasthen (that which is presented) can be conveyed by discourse (logos) (Mates 1961:15). It seems atleast possible that Longinus is extending the source of meaningful speech from the noetic to the imaginative.The Stoic term was logike phantasia; ‘what Longinus is talking about’, says Russell, ‘is naturally logikephantasia’ (1964:120). But Longinus omits logike, which may or may not signify a widening of the kind ofphantasia that can stimulate meaningful utterance.

As far as can be seen from texts often fragmentary or obscure phantasia is less firmly depressed belownous by the Neopythagoreans, from the first century BC, and later by the Neoplatonists, than by Plato andAristotle; and this could possibly represent a tendency to go back to pre-Platonic notions about inspirationin music, poetry and sculpture as the arts most closely associated with religion. Sikes, Atkins and RosemaryHarriott have shown how uncertain we must be as to what the Greeks from Homer onwards meant byinspiration in poetry.1 Was the poet supposed to be inspired by nature, gifted in such a way that his everyutterance in verse transmitted something of the divine? Or did inspiration come only on particularoccasions? Did the Muses impart information, or fill the mind with pictures, or suggest metaphors or actualwords? How far was the notion of inspiration a matter of profound conviction, how far a conventionalacknowledgment of part of the ‘inherited conglomerate’, as Gilbert Murray called it, of beliefsautomatically repeated without question or profoundly felt assent?

If some Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists in the six centuries before Justinian closed the schools ofAthens in 529 AD attached more importance than philosophers had done before to phantasia, the gapbetween phantasia and nous, though narrowed, is often maintained. Phantasia is that by which the artistbodies forth or substantiates, in somewhat degraded fashion, truths acquired by nous and more purelyentertained, by the mind capable of doing so, as ideas or forms. The thinkers who stay closest to Plato assertthis most unequivocally, and the hierarchy that puts nous above phantasia is still in Plotinus, who has oftenbeen credited with the establishment of phantasia against mimesis as the mainspring of art. But there arethinkers less careful and more prepared to re-establish the mantic—in terms of poetic utterance, divination,prophecy, oracles; and though such references to phantasia as have come down to us are hardly more thanstraws in the wind, it looks very much as if the most typically new trends in Hellenistic thought take moreaccount of it than hitherto.

Proclus, defending myth and phantasia in the fifth century AD called on the authority of ancienttradition: ‘of the ancients some say that phantasia and nous are identical; while others, making a distinction,say that there is not a single notion without its phantasy.’2 The ‘others’ referred to are evidently those whothink like Aristotle; which ancients did Proclus have in mind as identifying phantasia and nous? Possibly


the Stoics, for whom all movements of the mind were phantasiai; but the Stoics reserved judgment for thelogos and were interested in rational cognition and logical proof, not poetic or mythical wisdom. PerhapsProclus was thinking of the Pythagoreans. Whatever he meant, some of the earliest traceable claims that artembodies supernatural knowledge acquired and transmitted through phantasia have probable or even certainconnections with Neopythagorean philosophy.

It is impossible to disentangle the notions of Pythagoras himself from those of his colleagues andsuccessors, but it can be said that the whole Pythagorean tradition is based on the explanation of the sensiblein mathematical terms; all differences of quality can be resolved into differences of quantity and relationsof quantities. The secret of the universe is number. The appeal of this doctrine for the lover of the plasticarts and of music was summed up by Léon Brunschvicg: in the number-games of the Pythagoreans the eyecould see as pattern what the intelligence understood as mathematical truths, and in music as theyunderstood it the simplest, most fundamental mathematical relationships can be heard as harmonies. Someof these correspondences between eye and mind, ear and mind were rationally explained; but many of thePythagoreans went far beyond what could conceivably be demonstrated or theoretically accounted for andmoved from mathematics proper into a mysticism and magic of number with no kind of rational basis. Tobecome aware of harmony, or, more widely, of beauty, is to have an intuition of some mathematical truththat, if the intelligence could grasp it also, would be expressible as number. As Brunschvicg points out(1937), this doctrine brings together not just eyes and mind or ears and mind, but imagination andintelligence as two different modes of awareness of a fundamental structuring of the universe.

The legend was that Pythagoras recognized the most perfect musical intervals in the tappings ofblacksmiths on their anvils. He associated the different pitches with the different weights of the hammers,tested his theory with strings stretched taut by different weights, and concluded that the most perfectconsonances —octave, fifth and fourth—correspond to the ratios 1:2, 2:3, 3:4. Stopping a string along halfits length produces the octave; a third of its length gives a note a fifth above the octave (3:2) and a quarterof its length gives the double octave of the fundamental note, that is a fourth above the note produced byone third of the length of the string (4:3). In Sextus Empiricus and Iamblichus this gives rise to the claimthat four is the number basic in the soul as well as in the sensible world. In the geometry of solids, four pointsare the minimum needed to define the space of a solid, in the shape of a pyramid. The soul is perfectharmony; the number which includes the three perfect musical consonances is four. Four ‘corresponds to’both body and soul; Pythagoreanism begins in reason and ends in arbitrary numerology and superstition.

In their number-games as well as music the sensible and the intelligible were brought together; forinstance the mathematical law that the succession of square numbers is formed by the addition of successiveodd numbers can be represented as a visual pattern.

1+3=4 1+3+5=9 1+3+5+7=16 etc.can be imagined as:

The Pythagoreans delighted in numbers with peculiar characteristics. They called ‘perfect’ those numbersthat are equal to the sum of their integral factors. The integral factors of 28 are 1, 2, 4, 7, 14. Add these and

20 IMAGINATION

you have 28. 496=1+2+4+8+ 16+31+62+124+248. Six is even more perfect; 6=1+ 2+3=1×2×3. Numberswhich are not perfect in themselves but which exchange the characteristics of perfection were called‘kindred’ numbers. The integral factors of 284 add up to 220 (1 +2+4+71+142); the integral factors of 220add up to 284 (1+2+4+5+10+11+20+22+44+55+110). The Pythagoreans found the proof of the so-calledtheorem of Pythagoras, known though not proved before the Greeks in India, Egypt and possibly in China.They defined the three kinds of mean—arithmetic, geometric and harmonic. So they proclaimed that numberis the explanation of all the different kinds of things to be observed by the senses. Differences aredifferences of number and mathematical form.

Legend also has it that Pythagoras himself was driven to despair and suicide by the discovery that reasondid not entirely hold good even in mathematics. The very theorem that bears his name showed an apparentdivorce between the sensible and the intelligible; the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle isincommensurable with the other two sides. Its length cannot be expressed in the same units as these, eitheras an integer or as a vulgar fraction. In an isosceles triangle with two sides equal to unity, the hypotenuse isequal to √2, which is one of those numbers still called ‘irrational’ by mathematicians. But if Pythagoras himselfdespaired, the doctrine of number as the secret of all things lived on.

According to Aristotle (Metaphysics 985b–6a), the Pythagoreans supposed the elements of number to bethe elements of all things; it seems they went further and maintained that things are numbers. Variouspossible explanations of what they meant have been put forward, none of them certain. One possibility isthat they assumed that, just as the numbers can be imaged as patterns of points, all objects in the sensibleworld are resolvable into patterns and numbers of points. A line is made up of a number of points, a planesurface by a number of lines, a solid by a number of planes. If this was how they thought, their thinking wasfrom the start inadmissible to the modern mathematician who sees the line as the continuous locus of apoint but not as a collection of points; but at least there was in it some attempt at rational consequence andcoherence. In other assertions it is hard to find any kind of reason. The sacredness of the tetraktys has a sortof plausibility in which imagination and reason meet; it shows ten to be the sum of the first four integers whichfigure so importantly in the numerical patterns of musical intervals:

Hence the claim of Moderatus that the soul is the number four. More fanciful are the alleged identities ofideas with numbers— justice with four, marriage with five because five unites the feminine two with themasculine three, animation with six, parthenogenesis with seven because of the first ten integers seven is theonly one which is not produced by another number and does not produce any.

Just as it is difficult to disentangle the notions of Pythagoras from those of his contemporaries andsuccessors, it is difficult to see where Plato stands with respect to these doctrines of number. Aristotleascribes to Plato notions about the relations of ideas to numbers which are not easy to marry with what issaid about ideas in the dialogues. One view used to be that Aristotle was reporting the teaching of an ageingPlato who had moved away from his own most characteristic and original thought. A more recent view isthat Plato’s most characteristic thought was nearer that of the Neoplatonists than used to be assumed, andowed more to the Pythagoreans. For, according to Aristotle, Plato’s most characteristic division of reality


was not dual—intelligibles and sensibles—but triple: intelligibles, mathematicals, sensibles. Mathematicalsmediate between ideas and sensibles in that they share changelessness with the former, multiplicity with thelatter.3 Proclus saw geometrical shapes mediating between Platonic ideas and their sensible embodiments. Theidea of the circle as understood (dianoia) is one; as imagined (phantasia) it is many. Every representation ofa circle, imagined or drawn, is of some particular circle; but it may be imagined as a perfect circle, not theapproximate circles we find in the round objects of the sensible world (Whittaker 1918:227–8).A.E.Taylor’s chapter on ‘Plato in the Academy’ (1966:503–16) is a brilliant analysis of such evidence ascan be adduced and offers a highly probable explanation of what Plato meant. He sees Plato moving awayfrom the Pythagorean assumption that a point is a minimum volume and towards the modern notion of thepoint as zero rather than unity; he also finds in Plato the concept of integers as a series and of the realnumbers as a continuum.

According to Aristotle Plato actually called the forms numbers —which brings him closer to thePythagoreans. The outcome of Taylor’s argument is that Plato’s Pythagoreanism was closely reasoned andshowed a sound mathematical instinct; Aristotle himself pointed to differences between the Pythagoreansand Plato, among them that Plato put ‘mathematicals’ between numbers and sensible things instead ofsaying that the numbers are the things. The Timaeus may show the drift of Plato’s thought about one aspectat least of the intermediate role of ‘mathematicals’ —matter is there said to be made up of ‘atoms’ ofvarious geometrical shapes; and Taylor accepts the view that for Plato and for Aristotle the term‘mathematicals’ refers not to numbers but to geometrical figures. In Middle Platonism a parallelism seemsto be set up between the three hierarchies involving the intelligible and the sensible; intelligible-mathematical-sensible, intelligible-soul-sensible, intelligible-image-sensible. And there seems also to be anassociation between the middle terms of the three hierarchies.

Posidonius, the Stoic of the first century BC, and Moderatus, the Neopythagorean of the first century AD,are reported to have equated the soul with mathematicals. According to Iamblichus, Moderatus maintainedthat the soul ‘is’ in some way the number four. Four, as we saw, is the privileged number of the octave andits harmonies; the soul ‘contains’ all the ratios fundamental to music, which would account for thetherapeutic effects of music on the soul.

There is no historical or logical link between the cosmic geometry of the Pythagoreans, Plato’s Timaeusand the geometric patterns of the decorators of early Greek vases, yet the two phenomena do come togetherin the mind. Pythagoras himself belonged to the sixth century BC; the geometric style of vase-painting wasestablished a few centuries earlier, developing the tendency to repetitive, rhythmical pattern inscribed withregularizing tools such as compasses and multiple, comb-like brushes that asserted itself as the first artisticimpulse after the break with the Mycenaean styles of the Bronze Age. From the still lively disputes aboutthe relations between Mycenaeans and Minoans there emerges nowadays the probability that these BronzeAge styles originated in Crete and were shared by mainland artists; they were based on natural forms,stylized but easily recognizable. At the end of the Mycenaean age, about 1000 BC, there was a completestylistic break, with the possible exception of Athens where the destruction of Mycenaean civilization wasless devastating. The style called protogeometric, in which stylized natural forms break up into theircomponents and become regular, rhythmical curves —circles and semicircles—is found in tenth-centurypottery; the full geometric style using a greater variety of regular geometric elements—triangles, lozengesand rectangles as well as circles— and covering the whole surface of the pot, flourishes in the ninth andeighth centuries. When, in the middle of the eighth century, human forms and mythical narrative elementscome into the patterns, the natural tends at first to be assimilated to the geometric; the human torso, forinstance, has broad shoulders and a wasp waist and becomes a triangle. By Plato’s time naturalism was

22 IMAGINATION

triumphing; vase-painting and painting in general were moving towards the representationalism associatedwith Zeuxis and Apelles.

But Plato himself clearly preferred geometry to naturalism. In the Philebus the contemplation of ‘figures’is classed among the true pleasures, together with ‘single series of pure notes’, some pure colours, someodours—though their pleasure is less sublime —and the pleasures of learning. All these are ‘unmixed’pleasures because they are not relative to something else, like health to sickness, or scratching to itching.Socrates explains what he means by ‘figures’:

The beauty of figures which I am now trying to indicate is not what most people would understand assuch, not the beauty of a living creature or a picture; what I mean, what the argument points to, issomething straight, or round, and the surfaces and solids which a lathe, or a carpenter’s rule andsquare, produces from the straight and the round. I wonder if you understand. Things like that, Imaintain, are beautiful not, like most things, in a relative sense; they are always beautiful in their verynature, and they carry pleasures peculiar to themselves which are quite unlike the pleasures ofscratching. And there are colours too which have this characteristic.

(Philebus 51c–d)

Plato had reproached the poets for diverting their public with superficial excitement, stirring their emotionsfor the sake of a demoralizing kind of pleasure; Aristotle had countered with his theory of catharsis—emotion stirred for the sake of escape from emotion. It might be expected that other followers of Plato whowere also admirers of the liberal arts would look for other escapes from Plato’s strictures. In Phaedrus Platoallowed that when the body is in a proper state the mind may project its truths in dream-images, which acompetent interpreter can translate back into the intelligible. Substitute the images created by the sculptorfor dream-images and you have a theory of art as the sensible projection of intelligible beauty.

For Cicero the pursuit of perfection in oratory as in sculpture puts the orator or sculptor in parallel withPlato’s demiurge or artificer creating the sensible world; the aim is dictated by the Platonic forms, and thefirst qualification for success in an art is a more or less clear awareness of the forms. And just as theartificer in Timaeus could not perfectly equate the sensible he was creating with the intelligible, so thehuman artist must fall short of perfection. But his mimesis now is imitation of the transcendent forms, not ofthe changing shapes of the sensible world:

Consequently in delineating the perfect orator I shall be portraying such a one as perhaps has neverexisted. Indeed I am not inquiring who was the perfect orator, but what is that unsurpassable idealwhich seldom if ever appears throughout a whole speech but does shine forth at some times and insome places, more frequently in some speakers, more rarely perhaps in others. But I am firmly of theopinion that nothing of any kind is so beautiful as not to be excelled in beauty by that of which it is acopy, as a mask is a copy of a face. This ideal cannot be perceived by the eye or ear, nor by any of thesenses, but we can nevertheless grasp it by the mind and the imagination. For example, in the case ofthe statues of Phidias, the most perfect of their kind that we have ever seen, and in the case of thepaintings I have mentioned, we can, in spite of their beauty, imagine something more beautiful. Surelythat great sculptor, while making the image of Jupiter or Minerva, did not look at any person whom hewas using as a model, but in his own mind there dwelt a surpassing vision of beauty; at this he gazedand all intent on this he guided his artist’s hand to produce the likeness of the god. Accordingly, asthere is something perfect and surpassing in the case of sculpture and painting —an intellectual idealby reference to which the artist represents those objects which do not themselves appear to the eye, so


with our minds we conceive the ideal of perfect eloquence, but with our ears we catch only the copy.These patterns of things are called or ideas by Plato, that eminent master and teacher both of style andof thought; these, he says, do not ‘become’; they exist for ever, and depend on intellect and reason;other things come into being and cease to be, they are in flux and do not remain long in the samestate. Whatever, then, is to be discussed rationally and methodically, must be reduced to the ultimateform and type of its class.

(Orator II.7–III.10)

According to Merlan (CH 1967:48) Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s theory of transcendent forms waseffective enough to have pushed the theory into the background. Merlan further suggests that Antiochus, aPlatonist of the Later Academy in the first century BC, may have initiated the belief so dear to laterChristian Platonists that Plato’s forms are God’s thoughts;4 Cicero’s thoughts about art as the copying offorms may have been derived from Antiochus (CH 1967:48 and 55). Un-Platonic as this theory is, it seemsto the modern, post-Romantic mind a fairly obvious way round the Platonic strictures on mimesis. Thinkerswho knew Aristotle’s poetics, connecting poetry with universals or ‘forms’ as general truths about humanbehaviour, could easily transfer the connection into Platonic terms and extend the supposed noetics of thearts as Cicero did. The transfer could the more easily be made in Greek thought which did not distinguish aswe do abstract and purely cognitive ideas from ideas of beauty and goodness with their powerful affects.

In the first century AD Dio Chrysostom’s view of the nature and social function of art is not far removedfrom Plato’s; he shows more interest than Plato did in sculpture and painting, but for him, too, poetry is atonce more comprehensive and effective than the plastic arts and less reliable than philosophy as a guarantorof values. Like Plato, Dio accepts that poets are inspired, but holds that inspiration is relative, and mosttrustworthy when most primitive. The bards are ‘divine’ and “instructed by the Muses’; what they say ofsacred things is no doubt not too wide of the mark:

On the other hand it is not likely that they have received a real initiation according to the rites andregulations of true initiates, or that with reference to the universe they know anything, if I may say so,which is true and clear. But we may think of them as merely like the attendants at the rites, who standoutside at the doors, decking portals and the altars which are in full view and attending to the otherpreparations of that kind but never passing within. Indeed that is the very reason why the poets callthemselves ‘attendants of the Muses’, not initiates or any other august name. So, as I was saying, it isreasonable to suppose that not only do those who busy themselves near some ritual, hard by theentrance to the sanctuary, gain some inkling of what is going on within, when either a lone mysticphrase rings out loudly, or fire appears above the enclosure, but also that there comes sometimes tothe poets—I mean the very ancient poets— some utterance from the Muses, however brief, someinspiration of divine nature and of divine truth, like a flash of fire from the invisible. This is whathappened to Homer and Hesiod when they were possessed by the Muses. But the poets who cameafter them in later days, bringing to stage and theatre naught but their own wisdom, uninitiateaddressing uninitiate, have ofttimes disclosed imperfect patterns of holy rites; but, being applauded bythe multitude, they tried in their own right to initiate the mob, actually, as we might say, building openbooths for Bacchic rites at tragic cross-roads.

(Dio Chrysostom, Discourse 36.33–5)

Dio is as suspicious of the theatre as Plato was, though he seems to credit it with a vestige of religiouspurpose rather than the mere desire to flatter the debased tastes of a degenerate public. In Dio, as in Plato, we

24 IMAGINATION

find the thought that traditional art-forms are nearer to religious truth than are more recent products, andthat the validity of the latter can best be judged by philosophers. Dio’s twelfth discourse enumerates fivesources of man’s conception of the divine being. All men have an innate sense of the divine, which wasstrongest and truest in the first men; Dio evokes a golden age in which humanity was initiated into religionby the gods themselves, made conscious of the beauties of the firmament and grateful for the fruits of the earthprovided for their sustenance. Belief in the divine is ‘a common and general endowment of rational beings’.The second source of religious truth is the poets, who act upon us through persuasion; the third is the law-givers, who act through compulsion; the fourth is ‘the work of skilled craftsmen who make statues andlikenesses of the gods’, sculpture and painting. Eventually we reach the philosopher, ‘the one who by meansof reason interprets and proclaims the divine nature, most truly, perhaps, and most perfectly’ (Discourse 12.47).

Dio puts into the mouth of Phidias a defence of the sculptor’s portrayal of Zeus at Olympia. Phidias ismade to admit that no sculptor or painter can represent mind and intelligence in sensible form,

for all men are utterly incapable of observing such attributes with their eyes or of learning of them byinquiry. But as for that in which this intelligence manifests itself, men, having no mere inkling thereofbut actual knowledge, fly to it for refuge, attributing to God a human body as a vessel to containintelligence and rationality, in their lack of a better illustration, and in their perplexity seeking toindicate that which is invisible and unportrayable by means of something portrayable and visible,using the function of a symbol and doing so better than certain barbarians, who are said to representthe divine by animals—using as his starting-point symbols which are trivial and absurd.

(Discourse 12.59)

Moreover Phidias is made to claim that his portrayal of Zeus owes a good deal to Homer’s descriptions ofthe god and to admit that Homer could convey more aspects of the divine than any sculptor could:

For an extravagant thing is poetry and in every respect resourceful and a law unto itself, and by theassistance of the tongue and a multitude of words is able all by itself to express all the devisings of theheart, and whatever conception it may arrive at concerning any shape or action or emotion ormagnitude, it can never be at a loss…. Very great indeed is the ability and power of man to express inwords any idea that comes into his mind.

(Discourse 12.64–5)

The whole comparison of the expressive powers of poetry and the plastic arts assumes that poet andsculptor are striving to make sensible what they know to be the attributes of the divine, and the most trustworthyknowledge is that which has been handed down by tradition.

It is in a work belonging probably to the third century AD that we find the first claim that phantasia canmake the artist vividly aware not only of what has been or might be experienced in the sensible world—asin Quintilian and Longinus—but of the unseen, spiritual world that true Platonists call ‘intelligible’. FlaviusPhilostratus shows, in his life of the first-century Neopythagorean sage, Apollonius of Tyana, as keen anappreciation of painting and sculpture as Longinus has of literature, and a similar intellectual curiosityabout how these arts achieve their effects.

Apollonius asks the Egyptian Thespesion why the gods of his country are represented as animals andthereby brought into ridicule, whereas Greek statues convey reverence, decency and beauty. Thespesion


sarcastically enquires whether the Greek representations were copies made by Phidias and Praxiteles on avisit to heaven;

‘or was there any other influence which presided over and guided their moulding?’ ‘There was’, saidApollonius, ‘and an influence pregnant with wisdom and genius’. ‘What was that?’ said the other, ‘forI do not think you can adduce any except imitation [mimesis]’. ‘Imagination [phantasia]’, saidApollonius, ‘wrought these works, a wiser and subtler artist by far than imitation; for imitation canonly create as its handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it has not seen…’

(Philostratus 1912: VI.19)

Yet when Apollonius goes on to say how imagination works, knowledge of the traditional attributes of whatis to be portrayed seems to be as important as any fresh and original vision of formal beauty:

‘When you entertain a notion of Zeus you must, I suppose, envisage him along with heaven andseasons and stars, as Phidias in his day endeavoured to do, and if you would fashion an image ofAthene you must image in your mind armies and cunning, and handicrafts, and how she leapt out of Zeushimself. But if you make a hawk or an owl or a wolf or a dog, and put it in your temples instead of Hermesor Athene or Apollo, your animals and your birds may be esteemed and of much price as likenesses,but the gods will be very much lowered in their dignity.’ ‘I think’, said the other, ‘that you criticise ourreligion very superficially; for if the Egyptians have any wisdom, they show it by their deep respectand reverence in the representation of the gods, and by the circumstance that they fashion their formsas symbols of a profound inner meaning, so as to enhance their solemnity and august character.’

(Philostratus 1912: VI.19)

But Apollonius’ conception of phantasia does not include symbolism. The Egyptian gods, he maintains,would have been better served if religion were restricted to liturgies and rites in temples with no images atall. The clash here is perhaps not between two different psychologies of art, but between Greek humanismand the Egyptian sense of the sacred, a religion of optimism and a religion with an admixture of dread.

There is an even more interesting passage earlier in the book, a Socratic dialogue in which Apollonius ismade to teach his companion Damis about the nature of painting and to move the notion of representationaway from the assumption that it involves mere copying (Philostratus 1912:II.22). Damis is led to assertthat painting is imitation (mimesis). Then, asks Apollonius, when we see pictures of things in cloudformations, is that imitation? It seems so, says Damis. So God is a painter and amuses himself by drawingpictures in the clouds? Damis is embarrassed. Apollonius proposes a better way of putting the matter:

‘But I am sure, Damis, you did not mean that; rather that these figures flit through the heaven not onlywithout meaning, but, so far as providence is concerned, by mere chance; while we who by nature areprone to imitation [mimetikon] rearrange and create them in these regular figures.’

(Philostratus 1912:II.22)

The conclusion of this part of the exchange is that ‘man owes his mimetic faculty to nature, but his power ofpainting to art’. The ‘power of painting’, we can say, is the ability to delineate in such a way that thespectator will read the painter’s intention, and it is a technique to be learned.

But what, here, is the ‘mimetic faculty’? Philostratus, for the modern reader, raises any number ofquestions which he does not begin to answer. He seems to imply that the human mind naturally tends to re-

26 IMAGINATION

represent of its own accord, in its own terms, what it finds represented to perception in the natural world,and that in default of the ability to create the forms necessary to do this it will make use of naturalapproximations to the painter’s formal means—in this case, cloud-shapes. Philostratus does not seem to bethinking of the kind of subjective projection that the modern reader, aware of depth psychology andRorschach ink-blots, will think of at first, but rather of cases where, by pure chance, the clouds approximateso closely to the features a painter would use to represent an animal that the animal image is apparent to anyobserver. In everybody’s experience there is a scale along which such chance-made shapes fall; the rockwhich has seemed to so many generations to ‘be’ a lion that it is called the Lion Rock, the ‘face’ in themarks on the cliff-side that appears to A, but not to B until A has pointed out what can be read as the eyes,what the nose and the mouth and so forth; and finally the apparently featureless ink-blot into which weproject our fantasies with a great degree of freedom and consequent variety from one individual to another.Philostratus seems to think only of cases where we would all agree that the cloud looks like a wolf or ahorse as unhesitatingly as if we were looking at a competent painter’s representation. So far he seemssimply to be making in his own way Aristotle’s points at the beginning of the fourth chapter of the Poetics—that man is naturally imitative and delights in imitations. And this may seem to imply in turn the naïve viewof representation as ‘copying’ which is sometimes attributed to the Greeks.

But Philostratus also shows his awareness of what the mind of the spectator contributes in the realizationof the image. The contribution as he describes it falls into both of the traditionally distinguished categoriesof the cognitive and the imaginative. Cognitive, in that recognition of what the represented object isdepends on the presence of the ‘form’ or ‘idea’ of the object, or at least some sort of ‘replica’ or ‘imitation’in the mind of the observer. Philostratus does not seem to be anxious to maintain the distinction betweennous and phantasia, ideas and images. ‘Those who look at works of painting and drawing require a mimeticfaculty; for no one could appreciate or admire a picture of a horse or of a bull, unless he had formed an ideaof the creature represented’ (Philostratus 1912:II.22). To recognize a horse we must know what a horse lookslike. Moreover, if the painter gives us the necessary minimum of clues as to what he is representing, ourmind—from knowledge and imagination—can supply more information:

‘But, methinks, you would not confine painting itself to the mere use of colours, for a single colourwas often found sufficient for this purpose by our older painters; and as the art advanced, it employedfour, and later, yet more; but we must also concede the name of a painting to an outline drawnwithout any colour at all, and composed merely of shadow and light. For in such designs we see aresemblance, we see form and expression, and modesty and bravery, although they are altogetherdevoid of colour; and neither blood is represented, nor the colour of a man’s hair or beard;nevertheless these compositions in monochrome are likenesses of people either tawny or white, andeven if we drew one of these Indians with a white pencil, yet he would seem black, for there would behis flat nose, and his stiff curling locks and prominent jaw, and a certain gleam about his eyes, to givea black look to the picture and depict an Indian to the eyes of all those who have intelligence.’


Through a combination of what thinkers before and after Philostratus distinguished as knowledge andimagination a representation can be invested with feeling; Philostratus gives an example that reminds us ofthe phantasiai of painters like Theon as described by Quintilian:

‘Nor again could one admire a picture of Ajax, by the painter Timomachus, which represents him in astate of madness, unless one had conceived in one’s mind first an idea or notion of Ajax, and had


entertained the probability that after killing the flocks in Troy he would sit down exhausted andmeditate suicide.’


Philostratus is thinking in terms of ‘literary’ painting, and implying what Sartre was to say clearly inL’Imaginaire about the mind’s response to literature; when we read a story, says Sartre, we create theimaginary world of the story in our consciousness through a savoir imageant—knowledge and imaginationcombined. The novelist perhaps begins by situating his story; if he gives us a minimum of information, ourimagination supplies the rest, and is free to choose or speculate. The more information we are given, themore ‘tied’ is our image of what is described. But Sartre’s theory of imagination keeps perceiving andimagining quite separate, and Philostratus does not; his cloud example interestingly blurs or puts intoquestion the distinction we usually make so confidently between ‘objective’ recognition and ‘subjective’projection. His use of ‘mimesis’ reminds us that the human mind not only delights in imitations andimitating, but strives always to read meanings into shapes and forms.

Another Philostratus had something to say about phantasia in poetry and painting that reminds us ofQuintilian and Longinus. This was Philostratus the Younger, grandson of Philostratus of Nervianus, writinghis Imagines, accounts of paintings real or imaginary, in about 300 AD. A painter, he says, can interpretexpressions of emotion without seeing a model, just as a poet can aptly imagine the attributes of gods:

And the deception inherent in his work is pleasurable and involves no reproach; for to confrontobjects which do not exist as though they existed and to be influenced by them, to believe that they doexist, is not this, since no harm can come of it, a suitable and irreproachable means of providingentertainment?

(Prooemium to Imagines 3–4)

A painter can therefore interpret expressions of emotion without seeing a model:

If one reflects upon the matter, however, one finds that the art of painting has a certain kinship withpoetry, and that an element of imagination [phantasia] is common to both. For instance, the poetsintroduce the gods upon their stage as actually present, and with them all the accessories that make fordignity and grandeur and power to charm the mind; and so in like manner does the art of painting,indicating in the lines of the figures what the poets are able to describe in words.

(Prooemium to Imagines 6)

28 IMAGINATION

3The Neoplatonists

Imagination as the ‘vehicle of the soul’

In Cicero and in Dio Chrysostom the ‘knowledge’ the artist expresses in sensible form can be thought of inaccordance with Plato’s rationalism. But there is an ambiguity in Plato’s theory of knowledge which theNeoplatonists were to use to split off intuitive from discursive reason. Knowledge for Plato is knowledge ofwhat is true and cannot be otherwise. Belief may be true or false; but true belief is not knowledge simplybecause it happens to be true. Does it become knowledge when a valid account can be given of the reasonswhy it is held to be true? Or is there such a great divide between the flux of the sensible world and thefixities of the Platonic forms that beliefs about the flux can never turn into knowledge, but at most set offthose direct intuitions of the eternal world of forms of which true knowledge consists? And, if so, does Platothink of knowledge in terms of propositions in which the forms are related together, or in terms of a quasi-mystical direct intuition of forms or patterns of forms?1

His story of Socrates’ rapture has given credit to the notion that Plato was a kind of mystic, to bedistinguished from the hard-headed Aristotle as head-in-air from feet-on-ground. Against this notion mostmodern interpreters of Plato protest; and if the dialogues as dialectical exercises are meant to guide ustowards the rapturous contemplation of the eternal world of forms, what we are most aware of in readingthem is the delight in the exercise itself, the skill of the complex intellectual gymnastics ending always in aprovisionally stable, though by no means final, state of thought. It was the Neoplatonists who split off thecontemplative side of Plato’s thought from the dialectical, argumentative, proposition-building side and setup a vocabulary to distinguish them—reason and intellect, or intellect and intelligence; the terms are notconsistently used, but the distinction becomes established. For Plato and the Neoplatonists all thought,discursive or no, is noetic; for some Neoplatonists phantasia can come very close to the noetic, as we shallsee. What happens in the Romantic aesthetics of imagination is that phantasia is proclaimed as theinstrument of transcendent knowledge distinguished from discursive reasoning; imagination becomes‘reason in her most exalted mood’ (Wordsworth The Prelude, XIV. 192). For this there is no warrantwhatever in Plato himself. Nineteenth-century aesthetics was more in tune with the Neoplatonists than withPlato, and with the spirit rather than the letter of their philosophies. Neoplatonist interpretation of noesis canseem to the modern mind to be more or less irrational. And though in its purest and clearest form, in Plotinus,noesis is above the realm of magic, Neoplatonists all admit the powers of magic, and some are prepared, intheir methods of achieving the contemplative state to compromise more or less with it.

E.R.Dodds has written of the growing interest in astrology and in the kind of alchemy that rests on thebelief in occult properties or forces immanent in certain animals, plants and precious stones, which tookplace in the first century BC, when the tide of rationalism finally began to turn (1951:247–8). Astrologypretends to understand the likely effects of astral forces, alchemy to usurp and control the powers of thestars through understanding of the occult sympathies between heavenly bodies and earthly substances.Theurgy is a kind of magical control of the supernatural through ritual; instead of waiting upon the chance

incidence of divine possession, theurgy offers techniques for bringing it about. In all this there are degrees ofthe irrational. The Stoics had thought of the cosmos ‘as an organism whose parts had community ofexperience [sympatheia]’;2 the new irrationalism encouraged their followers to dabble in magic. Plotinusmistrusted astrology and warned of its dangers. He seems to have had little if any truck with theurgy proper,yet his explanation of the effects of prayer presupposes the Stoic notion of an organic cosmos with all itsparts interconnected—otherwise than by the links of Plato’s dialectic or Aristotle’s logic.

Theurgy comes into our picture because of its association with imagination later on.3 The RenaissancePlatonists were to make much of the so-called Chaldaean Oracles, believed to contain a wisdom derivedfrom man’s earliest religious experience. These were probably put together by the founder of theurgy, oneJulianus who lived under Marcus Aurelius and claimed to have received them from the gods (Dodds 1951:284). These ‘Oracles’ gave rise to a particular kind of magic with religious purposes— techniques forapplying compulsion to the gods in order to bring about divine possession. The presence of the gods mightbe compelled into statues—idols supposed to be images of the gods— or into human beings who fell into atrance described as very much like the trances of spiritualist mediums today. Sympathetic magic played agreat part in the ritual. The idols, as images, were ‘sympathetic’; and each god had sympathies in the naturalworld —animal, vegetable and mineral—so that the sympathic creatures and things were regarded as‘symbols’ of the god, powerful in the evocative magical ritual. The names of the symbols might be writtenor spoken, and the right way of doing this was part of the secret lore which had to be orally transmitted.Once present, the god provided supernatural knowledge of past or future, or some kind of divine protectionagainst dangers. Where human mediums were used, the spiritual presences might be visible as luminous orectoplasmic apparitions.

Theurgy was sometimes in and sometimes out of fashion in the centuries after Julianus. Plotinus, itseems, had no use for it. But Proclus wrote a long commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles; Porphyryadmitted the possible effectiveness of theurgy while warning of its dangers; Iamblichus wrote a commentaryon the Oracles and a treatise De mysteriis. ‘The De mysteriis’, wrote Dodds,

is a manifesto of irrationalism, an assertion that the road to salvation is found not in reason but inritual. ‘It is not thought that links the theurgists with the gods: else what should hinder theoreticalphilosophers from enjoying theurgic union with them? The case is not so. Theurgic union is attainedonly by the efficacy of the unspeakable acts performed in the appropriate manner, acts which arebeyond all comprehension, and by the potency of the unutterable symbols which are comprehendedonly by the gods…. Without intellectual effort on our part the tokens [synthemata] by their own virtueaccomplish their proper work’ [De mysteriis 96.13].

(1951:287)

Later Neoplatonism was as much concerned with theurgy and divine possession as with speculativethought:

Proclus grandiloquently defines theurgy as ‘a power higher than all human wisdom, embracing theblessings of divination, the purifying powers of initiation, and in a word all the operations of divinepossession’… It may be described more simply as magic applied to a religious purpose and resting ona supposed revelation of a religious character. Whereas vulgar magic used names and formulae ofreligious origin to profane ends, theurgy used the procedures of vulgar magic primarily to a religiousend.

(Dodds 1951:291)

30 IMAGINATION

Of the novelties introduced into the Platonic scheme of things by Neoplatonist speculation, the mostimportant for the metaphysical promotion of phantasia was no doubt the theology of creation throughsuccessive emanations of the divine substance—God, or the One, radiating outwards in waves reachingfurther and further away from the original perfection and creating the hierarchy of substances from purespirit down to base matter. Plato’s demiurge in the Timaeus myth created the sensible world byincorporating the forms into a somehow recalcitrant matter. But the ‘participation’ of sensible objects in theforms was never explained by Plato. In Parmenides Socrates is cross-questioned on the problem andprovides no satisfactory answer; for once the logic of his interlocutors, the Eleatic philosophers, is allowedto drive him into a corner. Aristotle’s main criticism of Plato was just this, that Plato had failed to bringforms and sensible things into an intelligible relationship. Aristotle’s schemes involved the transmission offorms not from the praeternatural to the natural but from the natural to the natural, on the analogy of thefather handing on the form of the human to the son.

We saw earlier that between Plato and Plotinus a number of Platonists speculated about a mediating termbetween the intelligible and the sensible. In the divided line Plato put mental images between the ideas andsensible things, and explained what he meant in terms of a mathematician having in mind images ofgeometrical shapes when he was really intent upon the pure mathematical notions behind the shapes—their‘forms’ in Plato’s sense. The traditional interpretation of the divided line image is that for Plato the‘mathematicals’ were the mediating terms between intelligibles and sensibles; and a number of authorities—A.E. Taylor among them—believe that by ‘mathematicals’ Plato meant not numbers but generalizedgeometrical forms like triangle, square, rectangle, circle. As Merlan points out (CH 1967:18), the derivationof sensibles from intelligibles by way of mathematicals is a step on the way towards the Neoplatonic notionof emanation. Already in the first century BC, the late Stoic Posidonius equates the paradigm intelligibles-mathematicals-sensibles with the paradigm intelligibles-soul-sensibles.

The theology of emanation, characteristic of Neoplatonism, preserves the superiority of the intelligibleover the sensible; but as it is itself an image of the process of creation it brings them closer. And since, inthe psychological tradition springing from Aristotle, phantasia is the intermediary between sensation andmind, in the theology of emanation it becomes the intermediary in the reverse process; the divine mind,creating, changes from pure Intelligence through imagination into sensible substance. Among theNeoplatonists there is renewed interest in the psychology of images, no doubt for this reason, and in thepossibility of transcendent knowledge through images in dreams, prophecy and divination. Aristotle hademphasized the connections between involuntary images and bodily states, with the effect of divorcing suchimages from knowledge of anything other than the bodily states which give rise to them. The relationsbetween the imaginative and the physical take on a new interest in the context of divine emanation.

One cannot read far in Plotinus without becoming aware of a tension, amounting at times almost to acontradiction, between the other-worldliness of his mysticism and his delight in the world about him sensedas a harmony imaging the perfection of the Supreme Principle—called the One or the Good. But hisrecognition of the beauty of images in perceptions of the real world or in reflections about it always carrieswith it the warning that this beauty is derived from the higher realm of intellect and must be referred, by thesage, back towards its source; beauty that is revered as it is perceived or imaged leads to idolatry. He usesAristotle’s psychology as far as it can be adapted to a metaphysic recognizably Platonic, but with an un-Platonic emphasis on the ultimate unknowability of the One. His thinking is dialectical like Plato’s ratherthan syllogistic; it is in this sense that he is a rationalist as well as a mystic, relating every element of hisexperience to every other element and building a system which reflects his sense of the harmony andinterrelatedness of the cosmos. But the tension between mysticism and sensuous appreciation no doubtbrought changes of mind from time to time which explain some of the apparent contradictions.

THE NEOPLATONISTS 31

In his psychology he accords less importance to phantasia than does Aristotle. Thinking may or may notbe accompanied by images. The best kind of intellectual activity is not discursive but intuitive—communingthrough the universal intellect with the One may be not only image-less but unconscious. Phantasia imagesthe higher mental states for the embodied soul, but the higher mental states do not depend on images orconsciousness and may be ‘purer’ without either. The sage is the man in whom nous is active even when hedoes not realize it. In Enneads I.4.10 Plotinus adapts from the Timaeus the image of phantasia as a mirrorof mind: peace in the soul makes body reflect mind, so that consciousness images the activity of theintellect; in such a state we think consciously and think in images. But when this peace of soul is broken,thought and intellect may still operate without images or consciousness; pure intuition of the divine iswithout either. The mystical experience for Plotinus involves the suppression of consciousness:

One can find a great many valuable activities theoretical and practical, which we carry on both in ourcontemplative and active life even when we are fully conscious, which do not make us aware of them.The reader is not necessarily aware that he is reading, least of all when he is really concentrating: northe man who is being brave that he is being brave and that his action conforms to the virtue ofcourage…. Conscious awareness, in fact, is likely to enfeeble the very activities of which there isconsciousness; only when they are alone are they pure and more genuinely active and living; andwhen good men are in this state their life is increased, when it is not spilt out into perception, butgathered together in one in itself.

(Enneads I.4.10)

The mystical union with the One, though independent of images and consciousness, is itself imaged not bydarkness but by light; not the light the eye receives from the sensible world but an inner light, generatedwithin the soul. Here we have Wordsworth’s

strengthOf usurpation, when the light of senseGoes out, but with a flash that has revealedThe invisible world

though Wordsworth credits this to imagination,

the Power so calledThrough sad incompetence of human speech

(Prelude VI.592 ff.)

thus producing a further paradox. For Plotinus vision is intellect which

veiling itself from other things and drawing itself inward, when it is not looking at anything will see alight, not a distinct light in something different from itself, but suddenly appearing alone by itself inindependent purity, so that Intellect is at a loss to know whence it has appeared, whether it has comefrom outside or within, and after it has gone away will say ‘It was within, and yet it was not within’.

(Enneads V.5.7)

32 IMAGINATION

In Plotinus’ theoretical psychology, images are not a means to thinking, as in Aristotle; they are, rather, asin Plato, an inessential and inferior expression of thought. But Plotinus is well aware of Aristotle’shierarchical psychology, with its three rungs of sensation, imagination and intellect. At Enneads IV.4.13 hediscusses the unreasoning creativity of nature, which ‘does not know, but only makes’:

For this reason nature does not have an imaging faculty [phantasia] either; but intellect is higher thanthe power of imaging: the imaging faculty is between the impression of nature and intellect. Naturehas no grasp or consciousness of anything, but the imaging faculty has consciousness of what comesfrom outside; for it gives to the one who has the image the power to know what he has experienced;but intellect itself is origin and activity which comes from the active principle itself.

The image is the point of transition, from physical to mental, from the lower to the higher soul. But thepower of judging the information coming in from the sensible world through perception is vested not inphantasia but in reason—here Plotinus sides with Aristotle against Plato. And like the Stoics he emphasizesthat when our imagination proposes objects for our desire the judgment as to whether they are good or badobjects is a function of reason. ‘Self-disposal’ or freedom depends on the exercise of reason (I.1.8–9).

Yet if the mind’s whole effort according to Plotinus is an ascent away from the sensible, fewphilosophers have felt sensuous beauty as keenly as he did. It is true that the praise which carries thephilosopher’s full assent is always for ‘intelligible beauty’, the subject of the eighth tractate of the fifthEnnead. The thesis is that any beautiful thing is an attempt to realize an idea, a form in Plato’s sense; andthe act of ‘informing’ is always—as in the case of Plato’s demiurge—only partially successful. Plato usedthe image of the artificer for the creator of the cosmos; Plotinus uses the more particular example of thesculptor. The sculptor’s block of stone is analogous to the matter of Plato’s demiurge; the form is in thesculptor’s mind before he carves the stone into an imperfect realization of his idea. Moreover Plotinus sideswith Cicero, Dio Chrysostom and Philostratus against Plato; the idea the human sculptor sets out with is notthe copy of some part of the sensible world, and thus a copy of the world of forms at two removes, but adirect intuition of the world of forms itself:

But if anyone despises the arts because they produce their works by imitating nature, we must tell him,first, that natural things are imitations too. Then he must know that the arts do not simply imitate whatthey see, but they run back up to the forming principles from which nature derives; then also that theydo a great deal by themselves and, since they possess beauty, they make up what is defective in things.For Pheidias too did not make his Zeus from any model perceived by the senses, but understood whatZeus would look like if he wanted to make himself visible.

(Enneads V.8.1)

The best kind of statue of a human being is not a portrait, but a creation which the sculptor’s art has madeup ‘out of every sort of human beauty’.

Beauty is not symmetry, proportion, harmony of form, colour and so on, but what is perceived throughthem: what is perceived is behind and beyond these impressions, the principle that bestows beauty onmaterial things:

So let us…state what the primary beauty in bodies really is. It is something which we become awareof even at the first glance; the soul speaks of it as if it understood it, recognises and welcomes it andas it were adapts itself to it.


(Enneads I.6.2)

But beauty is a wider concept for Plotinus than it became for some of his post-Romantic disciples. As in Plato’sSymposium, awareness of sensuous beauty is a step towards love of the Good:

So much, then, for the beauties in the realm of sense, images and shadows which, so to speak, sallyout and come into matter and adorn it and excite us when they appear. But about the beauties beyond,which it is no more the part of sense to see, but the soul sees them and speaks of them without instruments—we must go up to them and contemplate them and leave sense to stay down below.

(Enneads I.6.3–4)

So the sage is to know the beauty of ‘justice and moral order’ and the ‘splendour of virtue’. Those who seethis beauty ‘must be delighted and overwhelmed and excited much more than by those beauties we spoke ofbefore, since now it is true beauty they are grasping’ (Enneads I.6.4).

In another passage the superiority of the Good over the Beautiful is unequivocally maintained: theexclusive pursuit of Beauty is an error:

The cause of the error is that both participate in the same and the One is before both, and that in thehigher world also, the Good itself does not need beauty, though beauty needs it. The Good is gentleand kindly and gracious and present to anyone when he wishes. Beauty brings wonder and shock andpleasure mingled with pain. It even draws those who do not know what is happening away from theGood, as the beloved draws a child away from its father; for Beauty is younger.

(Enneads V.5.12)

According to Porphyry Plotinus wrote this treatise on the Good late in life. The way towards union with the Supreme is through contemplation, and there are hints that discursive

thinking is part of the discipline which persuades the soul towards its mindfulness, towards noesis, thecontemplative state (e.g. I.3.4). But Plotinus offers no detailed techniques of contemplation.

Prayer for Plotinus is magical, though the exercise of magic in prayer is control over the philosopher’sown state of mind, rather than an attempt at compulsion over star-gods or natural processes. Although thereis evidence that he once attended a theurgic seance at which a god was called up, he seems to have had littleuse for theurgy or for the cruder, more irrational and superstitious kinds of magic. Nor does he seem to haveattached much importance to religious ritual. Prayer itself, being magical, is below true contemplation, formagic is chiefly effective in the sublunary realm and in the lower soul. In Enneads IV.4 the concept ofmagic is widened to include everything in the sublunary order that fascinates and beguiles and awakensdesire—thus tempting the higher soul to surrender its impetus to the lower:

For everything which is directed to something else is enchanted by something else; for that to which itis directed enchants and draws it; but only that which is self-directed is free from enchantment. Forthis reason all practical action is under enchantment, and the whole life of the practical man: for he ismoved to that which charms him…. Contemplation alone remains incapable of enchantment becauseno-one who is self-directed is subject to enchantment.

(Enneads IV.4.43–4)

34 IMAGINATION

Music, according to this tractate, acts upon the ‘irrational soul’; it might seem that Plotinus thinks musicinferior to sculpture, since the sculptor was said to copy not a sensible model but an ideal form. The twotractates concerned belong to the middle group written, according to Porphyry, between the ages of 59 and65. Enneads V.9, written at an earlier period, puts the plastic arts nearer the sensible and elevates music:

As for all the imitative arts, painting and sculpture, dancing and mime, which are in some waycomposed of elements from this world and use a model perceived by sense and imitate the forms andmovements and transpose into their own terms the proportions which they see, it would notbe reasonable to trace them back to the intelligible world except as included in the forming principleof man. But if any artistic skill starts from the proportions of individual living things and goes on fromthere to consider the proportions of living things in general, it would be a part of the power which alsoin the higher world considers and contemplates universal proportion in the intelligible. And certainlyall music, since the ideas which it has are concerned with rhythm and melody, would be of the samekind, just like the art which is concerned with intelligible number.

Beauty as we become aware of it in sensuous terms seems to be a kind of magic; yet through magic, itappears, the soul can be directed towards the contemplation which rises above the sensuous and henceabove the magical. So, in Enneads I.3.1 Plotinus discusses the musician:

We must consider him as easily moved and excited by beauty, but not quite capable of being movedby absolute beauty; he is however quick to respond to its images when he comes upon them, and justas nervous people react readily to noises, so does he to articulate sounds and the beauty in them…. Soin leading him on, these sounds and rhythms and forms perceived by the senses must be made thestarting-point. He must be led and taught to make abstraction of the material element in them and cometo the principles from which their proportions and ordering forces derive and to the beauty which is inthese principles,4 and learn that this was what excited him, the intelligible harmony and the beauty init, and beauty universal, not just some particular beauty, and he must have the doctrines of philosophyimplanted in him.

So the tension between other-worldliness and the beguiling beauties of the world we live in is feltthroughout the Enneads; and among the fascinations of this world painting, sculpture and music have aprivileged place. Many of those aspects of experience which so many nineteenth-century minds were toassociate with imagination are important in Plotinus’ thinking; and the language he uses to convey histhoughts relies largely on richly evocative images of the kind that Coleridge ascribed to imagination ratherthan fancy. This was the great attraction of Plotinus’ discourse for Camus, whose reflections upon it in thethesis he wrote as a philosophy student for the Diplôme d’études supérieures (1965: 1224–1313) areparticularly interesting as one index of how Plotinus could stimulate a literary sensibility formed in theRomantic tradition.

Camus read the tensions in Plotinus as pulls between the rationalist and the mystic, and projected his ownintellectual anguish into the Enneads: The particular fragrance of the Plotinian landscape comes from thestruggle, which has its tragic aspect, to mould feeling in the logical forms of Greek idealism’ (1965:1270).But if he was more bothered than Plotinus himself appears to have been by the tensions, he saw clearly thatreason for Plotinus is as much a matter of feeling allied to dogmatic conviction as of thought and freespeculation. As Camus wittily puts it, the Plotinian account of the One and the Many is like psychoanalysisin that the diagnosis is the cure. He quotes Enneads I.3.1:


What art is there, what method or practice, which will take us up there where we must go? Where thatis, that is to the Good, the First Principle, we can take as agreed and established by manydemonstrations; and the demonstrations themselves were a kind of leading up on our way.

(1965:1270)

We saw that in Plotinus’ theoretical psychology images are an inferior kind of thought, the intellect’s partlysuccessful but incomplete means of expression. Camus brings out very clearly that in practice the discourseof Plotinus himself relies at least as much on images as on concepts. ‘His conception of Reason, based oncontemplation, is inscribed within an aesthetic: Plotinus is not only a religious thinker—his viewpoint isthat of an artist. Things can be explained in so far as they are beautiful’ (1965:1271).

Camus quotes Enneads VI.7.12 on the universal living being, the source of universal life, universal Souland universal Intellect:

there is no poverty or lack of resource there but all things are filled full of life, and we may say,boiling with life. They all flow…from a single spring, not like one particular breath or one warmth,but as if there was one quality which held and kept intact all the qualities in itself, of sweetness alongwith fragrance, and was at once the quality of wine and the characters of all tastes, the sights ofcolours and all the awareness of touch and all that hearings hear, all tunes and every rhythm.

(1965:1271)

Camus lists a good many of the images Plotinus uses to turn paradox into felt truth: the One as both Oneand Many imaged as the tree, as a light-source with its rays, as fire radiating heat, as a river-system; theuniversal Intellect as an infinitely subdivided space.5

By the early fifth century we find a pupil of Iamblichus, Plutarch of Athens, putting forward the beliefthat nous can be apprehended by the soul as images as well as in the form of ‘reasonable’ knowledge; it canbe directly ‘seen’ as symbolic truth. The cognitive ‘grasp’ of the Stoics was, in the last event, an intuitivecertainty that a true perception was a true perception, the judgment of ‘upright logos’. It is as if some laterGreek thinkers, drawn back from the rationalist mainstream into more primitive tributaries of Greekthought, were seeking to establish the rights of ‘upright phantasia’. For such thinkers there could be asoundness of imagination, bringing intuitive conviction, as there was for the Stoics a soundness of reason. Theground of both kinds remains nous; but nous becomes less exclusively intellectual or, in the usual sense,‘abstract’, than in the classical Greek tradition.

So Iamblichus, when he in turn adapts the lesson of Plato’s Timaeus about the relation between reasonand phantasy in dreams and visions, is concerned not so much to warn against the uncertain validity of suchimages as to claim importance for those that are divinely inspired. There are two kinds of fantasy, he maintainsin his De mysteriis; prophecy is made possible by the higher kind, which

illuminates with divine light the ethereal and shining support surrounding the soul. Issuing from thisdivine light, divine phantasies take possession of the phantastic faculty within us, these beingstimulated by the will of the Gods…. The attentive power and the reason [merely] attend to what istaking place, since the divine light does not come in contact with these; but the faculty of phantasy isdivinely possessed, being excited to types of phantasies not by its own power but by the Gods. Thiskind of phantasy is wholly different from the human type.

(3.14, quoted in Bundy 1927:136)

36 IMAGINATION

For Iamblichus the higher fantasy works through ‘the ethereal and shining support surrounding the soul’.This ‘vehicle of the soul’ is the ‘astral body’ of theosophy, the half-incorporated soul which belongs, likeimages, to the half-way realm between idea and sensible substance, a spiritual world intermediary betweenpure intellect and sensory perception.

According to the Chaldaean Oracles the soul, in its descent into the phenomenal world, gathers particlesof the planets and the elements, which become its semi-corporeal ‘vehicle’. The Pythagoreans seem to haveheld a similar notion. Many variations of the theme are found in the Neoplatonist tradition, in which theconception is foisted on to Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics through a few scattered comments in Plato’smyths and the doctrine of pneuma, which has very different connotations in Aristotle and the Stoics. SomeNeoplatonists hold that the vehicle is indestructible like the soul it carries, others that when the soul returnsto its origin the vehicle is destroyed like the physical body proper. Some hold that the astral body becomesmore and more ‘physical’ as it descends, and eventually becomes visible as a misty apparition or a colouredaura. Iamblichus and Proclus teach that through the ritual practices of theurgy the pneuma can be purified tomake the soul readier to receive supernatural visions.6

There is a great difference, then, between the Plato of the Timaeus affirming the warning against theprobable failures and deceits of phantasia while rather grudgingly conceding its possible prophetic truth,and the entirely reversed emphasis of Iamblichus and Proclus. This growing confidence in phantasia isevident in the Neoplatonist Synesius of Cyrene (378–c. 430), who wrote his De insomniis before he becamea Christian and a bishop. Synesius admits that phantasia belongs to the world of becoming and can onlyrepresent the true world of being as if in a more or less distorting mirror; images are of three kinds—perceptions of the sensible world, visions of the supra-sensible world and vague intimations of the future.Synesius maintains that phantasia can, when the soul is in a healthy state, be as reliable in its visionary as inits perceptual workings. If we have mistaken visions we sometimes have mistaken perceptions; but weshould learn to trust the visions that carry their own conviction as we trust our most confident perceptions.In both spheres imagination is the mediator between the supra-sensible and the sensible:

We cannot form conceptions save through phantasy, unless in a moment, perchance, one hasimmediate contact with immaterial form. To surmount phantasy is a thing as difficult as it isdesirable. Blessed is he whom Reason and Prudence bring to old age, says Plato, speaking of a statedevoid of phantasy. But the usual life is one of phantasy, or of phantasy in the service of reason.

Through it we have union many times with the gods, who warn us, respond to us, and counsel us.(quoted in Bundy 1927:150–1)

Imagination may not be a goal, but it is a way.

Since, then, there is disclosed to the soul, making no effort on its own part, a way to the mostcomplete view of reality, concerning which it had never before conceived even the desire, or to whichit had never meditated ascent, is it not a more marvellous thing to lift oneself above nature, bringoneself nearer to the Intelligible, after having wandered so far that one does not know whence onecame?

(quoted in Bundy 1927:150–1)

For Synesius, then, if perfect union with the divine is still through pure mind, a degree of union—andperhaps the best that most humans can hope for—is achieved through imagination. Imagination as a part ofmind becomes identified with the ‘vehicle of the soul’, and Synesius has a number of different names for it


— phantastikon pneuma, pneumatike psyche, eidolike physis, somatike ousia, phantastike physis and soforth.

Synesius distinguishes the truths of philosophy, and presumably the glimpses of truth achieved throughvision, from the myths or allegories of exoteric religion: after his conversion he writes to his brotherdenying the literal truth of the doctrine of the resurrection:

The resurrection…which is an object of common belief, is nothing to me but a sacred and mysteriousallegory and I am free from sharing the views of the vulgar crowd therein. The philosophical mindalbeit the discerner of truth, admits the employment of fiction: for light is to the eye what truth is tothe mind. Just as the eye would be injured by excess of light, and just as darkness is more helpful tothose of weak eyesight, even so do I consider that fiction may be beneficial to the populace, and thetruth injurious to those not strong enough to gaze steadfastly on the radiance of real being. Ifconsiderations of this kind and the rules of my priesthood grant me this, I might be a priest, beingfond of wisdom at home and being fond of myths outdoors.

(quoted in Walzer 1945:180)

It seems that although Synesius accepts the traditional Greek view that nous must always be valued abovephantasia, when he thinks of the actual workings of his own mind phantasia comes to the fore and is raisedin his estimation. It looks also as though phantasia means for him not only images in the proper sense—dreams, visions and the use of figures in thinking, quasi-sensuous presentations, but what we might nowcall unconscious mental processes. Phantasia is the power—coming, he believes, from the intermediatespiritual world into our own minds—that solves problems while we are asleep. It is also the source ofliterary inspiration, thought of not as any kind of furor or prophetic frenzy but as what the rhetoricaltradition called ‘invention’—the finding of the matter of discourse—and as ‘judgment’, the acceptance bythe writer of what is relevant and proper to the argument and to the language for its expression. Inspirationso considered is allied by Synesius to divination:

Certainly no other thing is so well calculated to join in man’s pursuit of wisdom; and of many of thethings which present difficulties to us awake, some of these it makes completely clear while we areasleep, and others it helps us to explain…. It has frequently helped me to write books, for it hasprepared the mind and made the diction appropriate to the thought.

(1930: II.349)

So literature is given an importance it never had for Plato. Writing about Dio Chrysostom Synesius refers toPhaedrus 237a:

Now if you understand the nature of these discussions on love between Aspasia and Socrates, youwill not doubt that philosophy, when she has beheld the last degree of initiation, will recognize beautyeverywhere, will welcome it, will praise rhetoric, and will cling to Aspasia and the art of poetry.

(1930: I.177)

This may seem to prefigure Keats. The late Neoplatonists’ interpretation of ‘correspondences’ foreshadowsSwedenborg and Baudelaire. Iamblichus and Proclus, like Synesius, attach importance to poetry, and thebelief that everything in the cosmos is mysteriously connected to everything else, and thus to the divineprinciple, had its effect on their interpretations of what they considered to be canonical texts as well as of

38 IMAGINATION

traditional mythology. Homer had often been defended against Plato’s accusations of philosophical falsityand lack of respect for the Gods on the basis of allegorical interpretations of his narratives. TheNeoplatonists differed from one another in their detailed accounts of the way in which, for instance, thehuman soul mirrors the whole of the cosmos, or each successive level of emanation mirrors the level aboveas intellect becomes image; but Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus extend the principle to the interpretationof myths and of the mythical elements in Homer and in Plato’s dialogues.

Of Porphyry’s allegorical interpretations all that survives is his essay on the Cave of the Nymphsdescribed by Homer in Odyssey XIII. The cave, he says, stands for the material world—rock is matter’srecalcitrance, the flowing waters are flux, darkness is intellectual obscurity. But darkness is also invisiblepowers and inaccessibility to the senses, and the rock is indestructability; so the cave is a symbol not onlyof the material but of the intelligible world. These readings are presented as alternatives, not assimultaneous truths to be reconciled in paradox. Iamblichus was much more systematic; each of Plato’sdialogues, he maintained, had only one theme, but the same theme could be considered from a number ofperspectives—for instance physics, theology, politics. Through far-fetched allegory Iamblichus finds anynumber of Neoplatonist implications in the most unlikely parts of Plato’s texts.

Proclus wrote commentaries on many of Plato’s dialogues and had a good deal to say about Homer. Platoconstantly emphasized the superiority of philosophy to poetry; Proclus sees Plato as a poetic philosopherand defends Homer against Plato’s strictures. Inspired poetry (entheos poiesis) is to be found, says Proclus,in Plato and in Homer. He takes the fourfold hierarchy of mind as Plato sets it out in the sixth book of theRepublic—intelligence (noesis), discursive thinking (dianoia), belief (pistis) and imagination (eikasia), andclaims that Homer participates in all four realms:

Whenever, possessed by God and informed by the Muses, he utters mystical ideas about the gods,then he may be said to indulge in that which is about thought, noesis. Whenever he discusses the lifeof the soul, differences in nature, and political affairs, then he is concerned with conceptualknowledge, or, in Plato’s classification, dianoia. When he renders appropriate copies, imitations, ofthings and human faces, then he gives us an imaginative imitation [mimesin eikastiken].7

When he gives an account of things not as they really are but as they appear—the sun rising from a lake—the poet displays his power of fantasy.

Homer’s intuitions of the divine world are still attributed by Proclus to intelligence, not phantasy. ButProclus points to the usefulness of myths in conveying truth to the unphilosophical many and enshrining itin traditions that perpetuate right values:

Against those who would extrude myths altogether, Proclus argues that they are fitting for theinstructions of souls like ours that are imaginative as well as intellectual. So much is it the nature ofour souls to be imaginative that some of the ancient thinkers treated phantasy and intellect as thesame, and some even who distinguished them denied the existence of any thought without imagery.The mind that is inseparable from phantasy is not indeed the mind that we are, but it is the mind thatwe put on, and through this we take pleasure in myths as akin to it. Myths are not themselvesspeculative truth, but they keep the soul in contact with truth. And they have an effect on the many.Else how is it that with the ancient myths and mysteries all places on earth were full of all kinds ofgood, whereas now without them all is devoid of the breath of life and of divine illumination?

(Whittaker 1918:303–4)


When Proclus discusses the role of imagination in mathematical thinking his attitude is not so muchconcessive as laudatory. Plato had spoken of dreams and visions as reflecting the noetic activity of the soulor projecting the base appetites of the lower self, according to whether the liver is or is not in a state properto mantic experience. Proclus uses the image of the mirror; but the images he speaks of the soul seeing in itsown mirror are not said to be ambiguous or untrustworthy, and are not so much incidental to thought asessential means by which the soul comes to know itself. Imagining for Proclus comes to be related to soulas creation is to the One:

The soul, acting in accordance with its power of knowing, projects in imagination, as in a mirror, theideas of (mathematical) figures; imagination receives these as images, and contains the imprints of theinner forms; by virtue of which it allows the soul to turn towards its inwardness and to direct itsactivity from the images towards itself.8

The soul thus becomes both seer and seen, and the activity of the soul in mathematical thinking appears inProclus to be a paradigm of the soul’s every kind of knowledge of itself and of the world of forms. By thefifth century imagination is no longer simply a transition between sense and intellect, but an essential partof emanation, in the creation of the sensible world, and of intellectual effort as the human soul attempts tothink the world and itself.

To Proclus also can be traced the paradox of the negation and affirmation of images which later becameinfluential in the Christian world through the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius. The ‘negative theology’which Neoplatonists—perhaps chiefly Proclus —derived from Plato’s Parmenides asserts that the One isbeyond all being and that nothing can be predicated of the One. With Proclus appears the paradox that theOne is simultaneously nothing and everything. As Whittaker puts it:

For him…as for his school, the highest truth is in what has since been called the ‘negative theology’.Not only is the One unknowable to us, but we do not even know that it is knowable to itself. Thus it isproperly nameless. Yet it undoubtedly is. The meaning of the negations is that, since it is the cause ofall, it is not distinctively any of the things that it produces. On the other hand, all the affirmations ofreal existences that are not the One have for their causes the negations applied to it; for it is above alldeterminate being, as matter, or bare possibility, is below all determinate being.

(1918:26)

A.C.Lloyd points to what in Neoplatonism moves away from the rationalism of the European tradition. Inmany respects the fifth-century Neoplatonists, as he explains, were rationalists and idealists:

But there is a tendency which runs counter to all this and could be called romantic because it was anti-intellectual and because it imposed the language of poetry and religion on that of abstract philosophy.Even when Porphyry had rejected the Aristotelian view of God or the highest principle as thought andits object united, it was possible for him to suppose that the One above thought was the unity whichwas not thought but was attained in thought. But the next generation of Iamblichus and Theodorusruled that out: it was one of the functions of the new term ‘imparticipable’ to do so. It is very difficult,though it had to be done in Neoplatonism, to call the ‘single-mindedness’ attributed to Intellectintellectual. But about the mystical union with the One there can be no question; it is not onlyineffable, it is the negation of thought; more than that it is the negation of consciousness—

40 IMAGINATION

Neoplatonists were quite clear about this. And this seems to belong to some Indian mysticism but tohave no place in what counts as philosophy in Europe.

(CH 1967:324)


4Neoplatonism in Christian guise

The mystic way as the affirmation and negation of images

In Christian adaptations of Greek philosophy the One beyond all being became God, and the Platonic formsbecame God’s thoughts, The Logos, or rational principle of all forms, was identified with the Son, thesecond person of the Trinity. Since the dominant Christian doctrine asserted the consubstantiality of Fatherand Son, the two Neoplatonist realms of the One beyond being and being itself were brought closertogether. The relation of Father and Son corresponds to the relation of the One to Intellect (Markus, CH1967:334). The Son ‘manifests’ the Father. The later Neoplatonists carefully distinguished the three‘hypostases’ of emanation—being, life and thought; the fourth-century Christian theologian MariusVictorinus is near to Plotinus who emphasized their unity. ‘The effects of telescoping the Neoplatonichypostases are far-reaching: on the one hand absolute transcendence is brought into the realm of being; onthe other being as such is removed from the realm of rationality’ (Markus, CH 1967: 336). AlthoughChristian thinkers show rather less interest than the Neoplatonists in the various workings of the mindspecifically connected with phantasia, the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and of redemptionencourage the view that creation, seen with the illumination of grace, is itself a glorious manifestation of thedivine, as it was for Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom. The idea that the created world images the glory of itscreator was, of course, always in the background for thinkers of a religious turn of mind, with the emphasissometimes on sensuous splendour and sometimes on intellectual order. Plutarch alludes to it quite naturally,without having to assert it as a principle—for instance in his tract ‘To an untrained ruler’: ‘Just as God setthe sun and the moon in the sky to be a splendid likeness of himself, so in the cities of men the Ruler is acopy of him, and a Great Light…’ (quoted in Barrow 1967:139). As Barrow points out, there is nothing newin Plutarch’s idea or its expression; in Plutarch’s contemporary Dio Chrysostom ‘parallels could be quotedfor every sentence of Plutarch, even the figure of the sun and the moon’ (1967:141). It used to be said thatPlutarch and Dio were friends; Barrow maintains there is no evidence that they knew each other. If not, thecoincidence of ideas and images may mean that the age-old notion of creation as symbolic of God wascoming increasingly into attention at that time:

There is one divine mind which keeps the universe in order and one providence which governs it. Thenames given to this supreme God differ; he is worshipped in different ways in different religions; thereligious symbols used in them vary, and their qualities are different, sometimes they are rathervague, and sometimes more distinct.

(Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 67, quoted in Walzer, CH 1967:656)

But Plutarch, according to Walzer, was wary of symbols as representing truth—they can lead to superstition,agnosticism or atheism. We saw that both Dio and Flavius Philostratus contrasted the immediately sensible‘divinity’ of Phidias’ statues with the dangerously inhuman symbolism of Egyptian religion.

Marius Victorinus and, following him, Augustine were more interested in what can be known about Godthan in the negative theology and the mystique of the unknowable One above all being. Augustine thoughtPlato’s theory of body and soul more acceptable than that of the Manichees who regarded them as totallyalien to each other; but eventually he found Plato’s view unacceptable because it makes the nature of theflesh responsible for all moral faults (City XIV.6). In this respect Augustine is less of a dualist than Plato,but this does not imply any greater faith in imagination; the true way of looking at things still comes fromreason, and evil is a real enough danger.

Augustine says we recognize in our own human soul the image of God; but we do not recognize this withimagination. Knowledge for Augustine is always above imagination, and abstract knowledge is repeatedlydistinguished from mental images. What the mind presents to itself in the form of images is as ethicallysuspect to Augustine as it was to Epictetus and the later Stoic moralists (City XI.26). Augustine seems tohave helped to establish the view of imagination which, according to Sartre, vitiated all subsequentphilosophical discussions of it; the commonsense view that an image is the ghostly replica of a sensation.Augustine distinguished three kinds of seeing—bodily seeing, which is sensation together withconsciousness of sensation, the mental representation or ‘spiritual seeing’; ‘spiritual seeing’ on its own,without sensation, which includes what we now call imagining and dreaming; and ‘intellectual seeing’ orunderstanding. Sartre’s theory of imagination depends on a much more radical distinction betweenperceiving and imagining as two separate modes of consciousness, one mainly passive, the other active. Butas far as discursive thinking is concerned, both Augustine and Sartre go back to Aristotle and his tripartitehierarchy of sensation-imagination-reason, and to Plato with his emphasis on the conceptual and hisimplication that thinking in images is a lesser or ‘degraded’ kind of thinking as compared with thinking inconcepts.

In Augustine’s letter to Nebridius we find an interesting inventory of kinds of images and of differentways of imagining. First comes the image (or ‘spiritual seeing’) corresponding to what we directly perceivethrough sensation:

Under the second class come all things which we imagine to have been, or to be so and so…or whenwe call up to our own minds a lively conception of the things described while we read history, orhear, or compose, or refuse to believe fabulous narrations. Thus, according to my own phantasy, andas it may occur to my own mind, I picture to myself the appearance of Aeneas, or of Medea with herteam of winged dragons, or of Chremes, or Parmeno. To this class belong also those things whichhave been brought forward as true, either by wise men wrapping up some truth in the folds of suchinventions, or by foolish men building up various kinds of superstition; e.g. the Phlegethon ofTartarus, and the five caves of the nation of darkness, and the North Pole supporting the heavens, anda thousand other prodigies of poets and of heretics. Moreover, we often say, when carrying on adiscussion, ‘Suppose that three worlds, such as the one which we inhabit, were placed one aboveanother’; or, ‘Suppose the earth to be enclosed within a four-sided figure’, and so on: for all suchthings we picture to ourselves, and imagine according to the mood and direction of our thoughts. Asfor the third class of images, it has to do chiefly with numbers and measure; which are found partly inthe nature of things, as when the figure of the entire world is discovered, and an image consequentupon this discovery is formed in the mind of one thinking upon it; and partly in sciences, as ingeometrical figures and musical harmonies, and in the infinite variety of materials: which, although theyare, as I think, true in themselves as objects of the understanding, are nevertheless the causes ofillusive exercises of the imagination, the misleading tendency of which reason itself can only withdifficulty withstand; although it is not easy to preserve even the science of reasoning free from this

NEOPLATONISM IN CHRISTIAN GUISE 43

evil, since in our logical divisions and conclusions we form to ourselves, so to speak, calculi orcounters to facilitate the process of reasoning.

(Epistola VII, quoted in Bundy 1927:159)

Bundy did his best to detect subtle differences of attitude in Augustine to the various kinds of images hediscusses, and to link these with Augustine’s vocabulary. What Bundy hoped to establish was thatAugustine, though he was no Coleridgean, at least prized the mind’s ability to present its own self-generatedimages above its capacity to make a perceptual image out of passively experienced sensation. Augustine,Bundy pointed out, is the first author we know to have used the Latin word imaginatio as the equivalent ofphantasia. Cicero had invented visum as the Latin equivalent of the Stoics’ phantasia kataleptike;Quintilian had used the Greek word phantasiai for fictional images in the mind, saying that the Latinequivalent was visiones. In Augustine imaginatio makes its first known appearance, and he does seemsometimes to be distinguishing perception from imagination, and the more ‘unreal’ kinds of images fromthose closest to perception. In some contexts a perception is a visio, an impressio or a sensus. Sometimes theimage corresponding to no sensible reality is called a phantasma—this would apply to images ‘created’ bythe mind from elements remembered from perceptions—a four-footed bird, for instance. But Augustine’susage is not consistent. Sometimes he seems to want to establish imaginatio in place of the transliteratedphantasia, but he often uses phantasia in ways corresponding to the usage of earlier Greek thinkers.Augustine’s inconsistent use of impressio and phantasia or imaginatio corresponds to Plato’s inconsistentuse of aesthesis and phantasia; his tendency to attach phantasia to imagination rather than perceptioncorresponds to Aristotle’s observation that we use phantasia mostly when we are not sure that it is a trueperception. From Aristotle to Albertus Magnus can be traced a tendency to separate images closelyconnected with the sensible world from those that are not, and to use different terms for the two kinds.1 Butthe two kinds are only vaguely differentiated and no consistent vocabulary ever seems to have establisheditself even within the usage of individual thinkers. The long-term result is the use of ‘fancy’, ‘fantasy’ andthe associates of these in a number of European languages for the freer, more subjective and more vaporouscreations of the mind; to dissociate ‘imagination’ and ‘perception’, and to keep ‘imagination’ as the moreinclusive term, not in itself implying praise or blame, truth or falsehood, reality or fiction.

Some Stoics appear to have made a distinction recorded by Aetius between imagination (phantasia),imaginable (phantaston), fancy (phantastikon) and phantom (phantasma). ‘Fancy’, writes Aetius,

is a vain impulse upon the mind of man, proceeding from nothing which is really imaginable; this isexperienced in those that whirl about their idle hands and fight with shadows; for to the imaginationthere is always some real imaginable thing presented, which is the efficient cause of it; but to thefancy nothing. A phantom is that to which we are led by such a fanciful and vain attraction; this is tobe seen in melancholy and distracted persons.2

Aetius cites the example of Orestes, thinking that he sees his dead mother.No distinction of this kind is to be found in Epictetus, but it, or something like it, reappears in the De

Natura Hominis of Nemesius of Emesa, a Syrian bishop who lived at the end of the fourth century, in StGregory of Nyssa (335–95) and in St John Damascene (died c. 754). Albertus Magnus refers to the twolatter theologians; Gregory, he writes,

says that the Stoics taught that this faculty comprehends four, namely, imaginationem, imaginabile,imaginativum, and phantasiam. Imagination is excited by something imaginable; the imaginable is

44 IMAGINATION

something which produces the effect; imaginativum is the power which draws images for itself;phantasy results when according to the power called imaginativa we draw an unsubstantial figment,as in the cases of the diseased and melancholy.3

Nemesius, reporting the distinction to be found in some early Stoics, concludes that the difference betweenthe two pairs of terms—phantasiam/phantaston and phantastikon/phantasma—is only one of the names.The difference implied by the traditional use of ‘fancy/fantasy’ and ‘imagination’ is neither precise norconsistent; an ‘idle fancy’ is also a ‘vain imagination’. But it is not quite meaningless; fancies are a sub-class of images, and fancy on the whole a light-hearted and irresponsible use of imagination. Coleridge’sdistinction was far more rigid, but did not do too much violence to ordinary usage; and it was close to thedistinction made by Paracelsus, which we shall come across later.

Augustine recognizes that what we see depends to some extent on what we are looking for, and that if weare looking for something with enough force of desire, or ‘vehemence’, we shall mistake our self-createdimage for the real thing, and give rise to hallucinations or to bodily reactions identical with those that wouldtake place if the image were real and not fictional. He sees that one element of our awareness of our worldis what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages and the phenomenologists of our own century were to call‘intentionality’—the way we bring our own attention to bear on the objects of consciousness.

Augustine, for all his debt to the Neoplatonists, seems himself to be moving back towards the stricterrationalism of Plato and, in some respects, Aristotle. His attitude to prophecy—which he had more reasonthan Plato to admit as valid, given the traditions of his adopted religion—is guarded in the same way asPlato’s was. Imagination is a means to insight but not insight itself:

Even though signs have been shown to our spiritual natures through certain likenesses of bodilythings, unless the mind has done its part, so that these signs are not merely seen but known, prophecyhas not taken place. For the prophet is not so much the one who has seen, but one who has interpretedwhat another has seen.

(De genesi XII.9.20, quoted in Bundy 1927:168)

Joseph was more of a prophet than Pharaoh, whose dream he interpreted. Augustine said of the latePlatonists that they either moved across to Christianity or down to theurgy and magic; the more irrationalthe claim, the more Augustine mistrusted it. Nor had he any use for poetry, in spite of his early love forVirgil; poetry, he wrote more than once, disseminates falsehood, and pagan poetry encourages paganthoughts and values (Confessions I.13; City XVIII.13, II.14, VII.13). There is one characteristic emphasis inAugustine that is particularly interesting in view of later developments. Greek ethics—in Socrates, Plato andPlotinus —centred on the belief that virtue is knowledge. The Confessions of Augustine add to the problemof discovering the right way the effort needed to follow it; virtue is knowledge as right choice, but also thewill to overcome base impulses which do not necessarily lose their force with the advent of knowledge andthe making of the choice:

Where the Christian sees tragic contradiction, the Neoplatonist diagnoses a weakness or incapacity. Itis significant that Plotinian mysticism, although so negative and so demanding, acknowledges neitherdisquiet nor anguish nor ‘the darkness’ nor the ‘night of the spirit’ of Paul, of Gregory of Nyssa, ofAugustine, of Teresa of Avila, of John of the Cross. Denudation is not sacrifice.

(Henry 1969:xxxviii)


The distinction is observable later on in the new sense given by Christian theorists of tragedy to Aristotle’shamartia—error for the Greeks, sin for the Christians. Dualism has shifted from epistemology to ethics.

Augustine is not prepared to accept Plato’s contention that we recognize the truth of the world of formsthrough anamnesis— the soul’s memory of the transcendent world from which it came. In his later works atleast he explicitly rejects this. In the Retractiones he says that those who, like Plato’s slave-boy in theMeno, achieve understanding beyond what they have been explicitly taught do so not because they once hadsuch understanding in another realm of being but through the exercise of reason. The mind’s potential is notits inherent memories but its power of intellectual discovery. In this context, at least, the discursive thinkingthat the Neoplatonists subordinated to direct illumination comes into its own.

To believe, wrote Augustine in one of his last works, On the Predestination of the Saints, is ‘to think withassent’. Faith and understanding are interdependent, and understanding depends on reason. ‘Let us then onno account make our belief a pretext for ceasing to welcome and to pursue reason: for we could not evenbelieve, if we had not rational souls’ (Epistola 120.3, quoted in CH 1967:351–2). Augustine usedphilosophy as an instrument; the kingpin in Augustine, as in his Greek predecessors and especially Plato, isreason. But in the context of Christian belief, it may be added, reason becomes analytical and interpretativerather than speculative; knowledge is primarily knowledge through authority and a steadily hardening bodyof fundamental doctrine. Access to the divine mind is ultimately not through any personal illumination orindependent vision, but through belief and understanding within an accepted tradition.

Augustine marks the point at which the ancient world shades into the Western Middle Ages, and thebeginning of a new rationalist tradition which was to have little use for imagination until the Renaissancereconnected the intellectual West with the partly orientalized Greek thought of the Neoplatonists, theirsuccessors in Christian Byzantium and the compound of religion, Neoplatonism and a Platonized Aristotlecreated by the subtlest minds of the Arab world.

The Christian Fathers most influenced by the kind of Neoplatonism that Augustine mistrusts pay far moreattention than he did to the notion of images—mental images, the images seen about us in the sensibleworld of nature and images made by the hand of man. Plato’s conceptual framework—the sensible worldparticipating in the transcendent world of the forms—becomes conflated with the account of creation inGenesis, with man made in the image of God. Plato, as Aristotle complained, had left unanswered thequestions that arose about the ‘participation’ of the sensible world in the forms, questions to which the mythof the demiurge provided no intellectually satisfactory answer. The Neoplatonist account of genesis bymeans of successive emanations through a descending hierarchy of being and becoming implied that entitiesat each level of the hierarchy had a face turned upwards towards the immediate source of their own beingand a face turned downwards towards the level below. And eventually this ambivalence became equatedwith intellect and imagination—nous and phantasia. Nous is the mind turned towards the divine andproviding that awareness of the divine which is true knowledge; intellect realizes itself as sensibles throughthe intermediary of images. Plato had accorded that sensibles are somehow ‘copies’ of intelligibles butemphasized ‘copies’. The Christian notion of the image narrows the gap between God and his creation, andbetween mind or soul and body. The emphasis is less on the inferiority of the cosmos as a copy than on itssplendour as a potential theophany.

Philo of Alexandria in the first half of the first century AD had tried to translate his own Jewish theologyinto Platonic terms. In doing so, he provided the basis for a Christian theology or philosophy which couldadapt the Old and New Testaments, or more particularly the New Testament, into a conceptual frameworkderived from the Greek tradition. It is in Philo that the notion of the Logos as the Christians were to attach itto the person of Christ first takes shape, with some ambiguity about its semantic relationship to the Word ofGod uttered in the act of creation and to the intelligible world of Plato’s forms. Philo seems to have Plato

46 IMAGINATION

more in mind; he calls the Logos, which is the pleroma (or total collection) of the forms, the ‘Image ofGod’ and the archetype of all that is to be found in creation.

Philo, says Henry Chadwick,

takes for granted the broad Platonic picture of this sensible world as an uneven reflection of theintelligible order; and he also looks beyond Plato to Pythagoras, the mystique of whose name hadbeen steadily growing during the previous century. Pythagoreanism was particularly liked by Philofor its cryptic symbolisn), its allegorical interpretations of poetic myth, its gnomic morality, itsadvocacy of self-discipline as a preparation for immortality, and above all its speculations about themysterious significance of numbers, notably the number seven which played so important a role insabbatarian Judaism…. Accordingly, Philo sets out to unite the personalist language of much of theBible with the more impersonal and abstract terminology of the Platonists and Pythagoreans.

(CH 1967:141)

For Origen, too, the Son-Logos stands midway between Creator and creation, as a high priest and mediator.In later Christian writers there is some discussion, not always leading to the same conclusions, about theexact meaning of the Genesis text’s ‘image’ and ‘likeness’—in the Septuagint, eikon and homoiosis; StGregory of Nyssa sees ‘image’ as the subsisting correspondence between Creator and created, ‘likeness’ thecontinuing creative effort to preserve it. St Maximus the Confessor sees ‘image’ as what is given us and‘likeness’ the perfection of correspondence we may achieve through spiritual life. But the implication rightthrough this particular Christian tradition is optimistic and ennobling for man and the nature he inhabits.

As language and concepts become personalized the stages of the creative emanation of the divineprinciple become personalized also; Plato’s forms became Intelligences for the Neoplatonists and angels forthe Christian Platonists. Correspondingly the attributes of transcendence become anthropomorphized. Philocalls the Logos an ‘archangel’ and says that the two chief powers of God, creative goodness and kingly power,are symbolized by the Cherubim. For the fourth-century Cappadocian Christian Platonist St Basil ofCaesarea,

the intelligible world is only accessible to reason in its function of substantiating the sensible. Byrevelation it is known as the angelic world, outside time…, not with the absolute eternity of God butwith that eternity which is consistent with its being a creature; for aion4 is a limit which precludeseven the intellectual activity of man from being infinite. The angels are substantial and occupy asubstantial world, but one which does not share a common matter with the sensible world. It has anintelligible matter, which Basil identifies with the light which illuminates the material world, and istherefore the common ground of the whole universe, intelligible and sensible.

(CH 1967:435)

Though the vocabulary here is Platonic, and this intermediate realm between God and man, ideal and sensible,belongs to ‘intelligence’, its features correspond to the substantial intermediate world of the theosophicaltradition; ‘intelligible matter’ seems very like the substance of the ‘vehicle of the soul’ or ‘astral body’which is also the substance of imagination for the theosophical Neoplatonists.

Another of the fourth-century Cappadocians, St Gregory Nazianzen, presents the angels as the means ofman’s return to God. Man is to polish his soul like a mirror to reflect the light from above and move inincrease of light towards God; ‘light is added to light, our darkness opens up to brightness, awaiting the


moment when we attain the Source of the reflections here below, the Beatific Vision where images dissolveinto Truth’ (quoted in CH 1967:443).

St Gregory of Nyssa, who was also a Cappadocian, describes the soul’s ascent into the company of theangels in a journey towards the Third Heaven:

The soul rises again and…goes about the intelligible and hypercosmic world…where thePrincipalities dwell, and the Dominations, and the Thrones assigned to the Powers; she frequents theassemblies of the celestial beings…and mingles with the numberless throng, seeking her Belovedthere….

(CH 1967:454)

Intellect, gnosis is not enough for the final ascent to the Third Heaven of St Paul; after hauling herself up byher own efforts the soul must accept to be lifted by faith to super-intelligible unification, for ‘the end of loveis physical union with the beloved’ (CH 1967:454). Christ as light brings gnosis, Christ as faith bringsconsummation in union. Light, in this tradition, is not just a symbol of intellect but a substance, the basicsubstance of all things: God is to the intelligible world what the sun is to the sensible, says St GregoryNazianzen. Between the intelligible and sensible worlds, says St Basil, the Firmament acts as a barrier, butlight can pass through the barrier. And St Gregory of Nyssa:

Created light, the first physical manifestation of the Divine Will, inheres from the beginning in theparticles of matter, from which it naturally flows out (where it is not hindered by those elementswhich, because of their opacity, will not receive it) to the Firmament or First Heaven which dividesthe sensible from the intelligible world. Hence it is reflected back again, and this dilation and illationof light is the cause of the cycle of days and nights.

(CH 1967:448)

Within Christian thought, these tendencies towards envisioning rather than understanding, feelingrelationships between ideas rather than analysing them in terms of empirically supported caus ality andstrict logic or systematic dialectic in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, are to be found in thinkers whoseformation has more to do with Alexandria than with Rome and who are more open than Marius Victorinusand Augustine to percolations from the East. The thinking of Marius Victorinus and Augustine, deeplyinfluenced as it is by Neoplatonism, pushes negative theology into the background and is far more interestedin what of Christian doctrine can be rationally explained and understood.

Augustine is a great conceptualist and a considerable logician. In the current which runs from aChristianized Gnosticism through Origen and the Cappadocians to the Pseudo-Dionysius, and eventuallytrickles rather feebly into the rationalist West of the Middle Ages through John Scotus Erigena, the negativetheology is of continual importance and the discursive intellect, rational thinking, is only a step—howeverimportant—on the way to a unitive mysticism going beyond conceptual thought and even beyondconsciousness. Images, like concepts, are also but steps on the way, crutches for the imperfect humanintellect; but in the Gnostic-centred current of religious thinking images come to be more important thanconcepts, and the thought of, say St Gregory of Nyssa, is expressed in a structure of which the elements aremore often images and less often abstract ideas than in Augustine’s writing. The language of theCappadocians is closer to Plato’s myths than to his dialogues.

The Cappadocians can be called Christian Gnostics, but they were careful to distinguish their beliefs fromthose of the pagan Gnostics, whether the latter belonged to the pessimistic, extreme dualist current or to the

48 IMAGINATION

more optimistic Greek variety, and from the numerous and various sects within Christianity that hadadopted Gnostic beliefs to the point of heresy. Two kinds of Gnosticism are to be found in the collection oftreatises known as the Hermetica, as Festugière showed (1944–54). For the pessimist Gnostic the sensibleworld is irredeemably evil and the aim of gnosis is to escape from the sublunary world governed by thefatalities of the stars. For the optimist Gnostic the divine is immanent in everything and gnosis is awarenessof theophany. One variety corresponds with the dualism of Zoroaster and, in its extreme form, gives overthe sensible world entirely to the power of darkness; creation has somehow been irreversibly damaged. Theother variety is nearer the feeling of Plato’s Timaeus; creation is the work of a demiurge who has done his bestand not too badly. The most famous of the Hermetic texts, the Poimander, conveys this kind of hopefulattitude about the nature of the sensible.

The origins of Gnosticism are obscure—scholars in the past have connected it with Egypt, Babylon,Persia, the Mediterranean mystery religions, Greece and India. The varieties it assumed make it impossibleto define in rational, philosophical terms any common core of doctrine; yet there is a common attitude, acommon feeling about the purpose of the life of the mind, which Serge Hutin attempted to define. ‘Gnosis’means ‘knowledge’, but knowledge experienced in a particular way as ‘illumination’ and as ‘salvation’:

Gnosis—symbolized by an enlightening and generating fire —rouses the soul of the elect from theheavy ‘sleep’ in which it was sunk; hence the use of methods of spiritual training with the purpose ofgiving rise to special states of consciousness and hyper-consciousness. The ‘gnosis’, however, onceachieved, is a total, immediate knowledge which the individual has wholly or not at all; it is‘knowledge’ in itself, absolute, embracing Man, the Cosmos and the Divinity. Only by this knowledge—and not by faith or works—can the individual be saved.

(Hutin 1963:14–15, my translation)

Gnosticism is less a matter of doctrines than of rites. In and outside Christianity it is closely associated withalchemy and magic, and especially with the religious use of magic in theurgy. One difference betweenGnostic and orthodox Christians is the former’s belief that ritual is effective through magic. The differencebetween the magical and sacramental attitudes to ritual is hard to define. One view is that in magic theoperator is using his esoteric knowledge to impose his own will, appropriating the divine power, while thereligious operator subjects himself humbly to a power beyond himself. Another is that the ‘magic’ of thesacraments operates because the transcendent power has been vested in them once and for all by God orChrist. The main difference perhaps between the Gnostic priest and the orthodox is that the magicalpractices of the former stray outside the ritual accepted by Christians as peculiar to Christianity andsanctioned by a hardening tradition. One index of possible Gnostic influence is the degree of mystery thatattaches to the redeeming ‘knowledge’. Gnosticism is esoteric; illuminating power depends on initiation intosecrets reserved for the elect. Some heretical Christians believed that Christ had taught the secret sense ofhis message to a few disciples after the Ascension. The rites of baptism and communion take on a newimportance in a Gnostic context, and other fantastic rituals having no connection with the Gospels wereadded by some sects, using symbols and natural objects in the tradition of the mystery religions of theMediterranean and the East.

Apart from radical dualisms like that of Zoroaster and the Manichees there are degrees of disapproval ofthe sensible as compared with the intelligible, or, in more specifically religious terms, of the sublunaryworld as compared with the world of pure spirit. Plato thinks of the sensible world with a degree ofintellectual fastidiousness, not to say snobbery, but by no means rejects it entirely. He recognizes that it


manifests a good deal of beauty, truth and goodness and is the trigger that fires off in the soul memories ofthe soul’s origin and true habitation in the noetic.

Parts of the Hermetica, under Gnostic influence, infuse a greater degree of contempt for the sensibleworld into a vaguely Platonic framework:

All things on earth then, my son, are unreal; but some of them,—not all, but some few only,—arecopies of reality. The rest are illusion and deceit, my son; for they consist of mere appearance[phantasias]. When the appearance flows in from above, it becomes an imitation of reality. But apartfrom the working of power from above, it remains an illusion; just as a painted portrait presents to usin appearance the body of the man we see in it, but is not itself a human body.

(Scott 1924:383)

Appearances (phantasiai) convey truth when they are directly inspired from the supernatural; no doubt thisrefers to dreams and visions of the right kind. But most appearances—including our perceptions of thesensible world—are illusory.

The Hermetica represents a move backwards in the history of ideas from Plato towards Parmenides;movement and becoming are illusory and true being is unity and stasis:

God is ever-existent; and He makes manifest all else, but He himself is hidden, because He is ever-existent. He manifests all things, but is not manifested. He is not himself brought into being in imagespresented through our senses, but He presents all things to us in such images. It is only things whichare brought into being that are presented through sense. It is evident then that He who alone has notcome into being cannot be presented through sense….

(Scott 1924:157–9)

Everything that changes is illusory, because it does not stay in the state in which it is, but presentsappearances that vary.

(Scott 1924:385)

Man is not real, but is only an appearance. We ought then to call men ‘appearances’, my son, if wename them rightly. We ought to call a child ‘the appearance of a child’, and a youth ‘the appearanceof a youth’.

(Scott 1924:387–9)

These quotations come from the branch of the Hermetica that treats of philosophical and religious ideas;similar notions are to be found in the traditionally less respectable branch concerned with alchemy andmagic, often in the more optimistic form that appreciates the beauty and interest of the phenomenal world:

I call upon thee, most powerful of gods, who has created all things; thou, born of thyself, who seestall things but canst not be seen. Thou gavest glory and power to the sun. Thou didst manifest thyselfand the world existed and there was light. To thee all is subject, yet no god can see thy form, becausethou art transformed into all forms….

(Berthelot and Ruelle 1888:I.18, my translation)

50 IMAGINATION

Plotinus utterly rejects the pessimism of the dualist Gnostics. The experience of union with the One is theexperience of perfect blessedness, but more modest degrees of blessedness are to be experienced in thecontemplation of natural beauty, as long as the mind is fixed on the beauty itself and not on the beautifulthings of the sensible world.

St Gregory Nazianzen and St Gregory of Nyssa appear to be saying much the same thing about the senseof beauty. The former says that a man can admire the beautiful things of the world in their own right

or else, through the beauty and ordered hierarchy of the visible things, he gets to know God, using hispower of vision to ascend to that which is beyond vision…careful not to defraud God of hisexcellence by attributing it to things seen.

(quoted in CH 1967:444)

To admire things in themselves is idolatry. And St Gregory of Nyssa:

When, in search of the Beautiful, the uninstructed mind sees something in which there is anappearance of beauty he supposes that this…is beautiful in itself, and sees no need to search further.But he who has purified the eye of his soul…dismisses the matter in which the Form of Beautymanifests itself, and makes of the visible object a vantage-point from which to contemplate thatintelligible Beauty by participation in which all beautiful things are beautiful.


These two statements are very close indeed to Plotinus; but the Christian current influenced by what iscalled the Alexandrian Gnosis puts even more emphasis on contemplation as an escape from theshortcomings and evils of life in this world. The total pattern of creation is optimistic—God’s descent isfollowed by the soul’s return, and the spiritual life properly understood and conducted can ensure theeventual success of the return. But descent is a constant danger; ascent means overcoming a sort of spiritualforce of gravity inherent in the sensible world. For St Basil

the philosopher’s task is to reverse this trend, converting the descent into an ascent, first by apurification of the carnal passions, which leads to the First Heaven, the Firmament; then by theacquisition of wisdom to which the soul, no longer clouded by these obscurities, now has access, andby which she rises, illumined, to the summit of the intelligible world, which is the Second Heaven;from which she is finally drawn up to the Third Heaven of deification.


The Christian pattern of fall and redemption was conflated with the Neoplatonist triad of First Principle,procession through the forms into the sensible, return through the forms to the First Principle. Yahweh wasidentified by some Christians with Plato’s demiurge, since the Old Testament God—jealous, irascible,passionate—was held to be not entirely assimilable to Christian ideas of perfection; and the Old Testamentitself was said by some to be related to the New as the sensible was thought to be related to the intelligible.

God uses earthly symbols to help us to rise to spiritual reality; some thinkers hold that illuminated mancan raise the sensible world with him to the spiritual level. The Firmament, or First Heaven, sets the limitbetween the intelligible and sensible worlds —a limit which is to varying degrees seen as a barrier; the mosttypical Gnostics, the radical dualists, see it as a total separation of the two worlds. Sometimes the limit betweenthe two worlds is symbolized by Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth; and, according to the


degree of dualism, the serpent can symbolize either the evil powers imprisoning the soul away from thedivine or the wisdom through which the embodied soul can return to its transcendent home. The theologiansof light hold that the divine light passes through the barrier into the sensible world and is symbolized by thesun and by the intellect of man; conversely, the light of human intellect can pass through the barrier in thedirection of the return. Man is a microcosm—the idea is found in ancient Persia and among the Gnostics—imaging within himself all the elements of creation; spirit and matter, intelligible and sensible. According toSt Gregory of Nyssa, therefore, ‘it is man’s duty and destiny to be the agent by which the whole universe, inhimself, is restored to its pristine nature, and to present it in him as a unity to the One’ (quoted in CH 1967:449). Claudel’s Art poétique was to define the duty of the poet in similar terms.

It is in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius that Christian Platonism draws nearest to the Neoplatonismof Proclus, with its emphasis on symbolism and theurgy, meaning here the use of sensible objects in ritualdesigned to lift the soul towards gnosis. Descent and return are more systematized and ritualized inDionysius than in earlier thinkers. The Christian Platonists saw descent and return under the threefoldaspect of mone, proodos, epistrophe, which terms later gave way to ousia, dunamis and energeia:corresponding to the First Principle, the procession through the forms into their effects, and a return of theeffects through the forms to their First Principle. So every element in the system can be seen in threeaspects, and this triadic structure is the basic principle of the Pseudo-Dionysius and the late Neoplatonists(CH 1967:459).

The Symbolic Theology of Dionysius ascends to God as epistrophe or Final Cause through sensible andintelligible symbols; for the sensible world, to the enlightened mind, is impregnated with logoi and thusbecomes a world of symbols. The Symbolic Theology discards the materiality of the symbol in order tobring out its significance. Every affirmation must be balanced by a negation and vice versa. God is ‘king’and ‘Lord’, but the anthropomorphic element must be denied—God is not these as we know them. Everyaffirmation of the divine can only be a metaphor; but only by metaphors can we affirm. The MysticalTheology is the science of the unknowable God and discards even the affirmations of the SymbolicTheology. Truth is paradoxical. ‘The negative theology ends with the negation that God is, and requires theaffirmation that God is the Cause of all being and therefore cannot simply not be. Even the negation that Heis, is the affirmation that He is not’ (CH 1967:468). The paradox was elaborated in the seventh century bySt Maximus the Confessor in his Ambigua (CH 1967:493). The triadic structure appears in yet another way;the Pseudo-Dionysius writes of three levels of symbols—the Legal Hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical, and theCelestial, corresponding to things, men and angels. In the Legal Hierarchy ritual is mechanical; the sensiblesymbols are enigmatic theophanies. The Scriptures are read according to their literal meaning. In theEcclesiastical Hierarchy the symbols begin to be seen as symbols; theurgy reveals the intelligiblesignificance of the rites and the anagogic interpretation of the Scriptures. The Eucharist admits to theintelligible world, which is the highest of creatures and the purest of theophanies. In the intelligible worldare the Seraphim, the source of light; the Cherubim transmitting light; the Thrones, receiving light—and soon through Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, to Archangels and Angels.

This angelology was transmitted to Scholasticism; but the theurgy was eventually filtered out; among thelater Christian Platonists theurgy tended to replace ethics, and, in the eyes of later Western theologians, cametoo close to pantheism. The Pseudo-Dionysius, however, attributes the effectiveness of theurgic rites tosacramental grace, not to magical powers inherent in the created world. And, of course, interpretation ofsymbols is not an affair of the individual imagination but of the authority of those who are considered to beinitiated into the truth symbolically revealed in the Scriptures. The sensible world conveys the messages,only reason (nous) can decode them; and until the final experience of mystic union is achieved, reason isguided to the proper interpretation of the symbols by the authority of a tradition which can itself only be

52 IMAGINATION

absorbed and transmuted into understanding through a disciplined initiation. Such a doctrine, transposedfrom the collective liturgy of a church to the spontaneous imagination of a creative artist, was to be thecentre of that French Symbolist aesthetic which Baudelaire first put into theory and into poetry: ‘O mysticmetamorphosis of all my senses fused into one.’

The Pseudo-Dionysius himself has no use for what we should now call imaginative writing. In a letter toSaint Polycarp he says he has been accused of a kind of spiritual parricide, using against the Greekphilosophers what he has learned from them. But, says the Pseudo-Dionysius, the Greeks have abusedGod’s gifts against God, destroying his true worship by the wisdom he gave them. ‘And I do not onlystigmatize the errors of the multitude addicted in their vulgarity and cupidity to the fictions of the poets,worshipping the creature rather than the Creator…’ (Pseudo-Dionysius 1845:489, my translation). Greekphilosophy is just as undesirable in its effects as Greek literature. The Greek poetry of his day was, ofcourse, hardly edifying.

Idolatry comes from failure to negate the materiality of the symbol in favour of its spiritual meaning; thesymbol is then worshipped in itself. This danger is greatest in the case of symbols that are themselvesnearest ideality, and least in the case of symbols which are furthest from the spiritual world. Hence theparadox that

the dissimilar symbol is a more dependable guide than the similar, and the more dissimilar the moredependable. Things which belong to the lower or grosser or even monstrous and disordered levels ofbeing are those which it is easiest to understand that God is not.

(CH 1967:467)

Not-being is therefore the least deceptive symbol for the Divine Nature, though the Good includes bothbeing and not-being.

This same current of Christian Platonism encourages the allegorical or symbolic interpretation ofreligious texts. With Origen begins the tradition of three-fold interpretation that was to persist into theMiddle Ages—the belief that religious narratives could be understood on three separate levels; there was aliteral, historical meaning, an ethical meaning, and an anagogical or mystical level of interpretation liftingthe soul towards spiritual insight. The determination to find hidden moralities could, of course, lower ratherthan heighten the imaginative pitch of interpretation; according to Henry Chadwick, Philo’s allegoricalreadings of the Pentateuch reduce great writing to platitudes (CH 1967:155). But St Gregory of Nyssa ‘willdevote pages of mystical interpretation to an event [e.g. in his Life of Moses], to a book [e.g. hiscommentary on the Song of Songs], or to a symbol [e.g. the symbolism of the Cross]’. And St Gregory ofNazianzen ‘believed that all interpretations of the Scriptures are equally true, and that this showed theirsuperiority over the books of the pagans’ (CH 1967: 438). Claudel resembled the Cappadocians not only inhis view of poetry as lifting the sensible towards the unity and perfection of God but in his confidentlyimaginative interpretations of Biblical texts.

Augustine and the Alexandrians and Cappadocians all recognize the spiritual influence of music. The Bibleitself could encourage them to agree with the Neoplatonists in that particular matter, though they might notalways accept without question all the Neoplatonist explanations of music’s effects on the soul. Clement ofAlexandria connects his version of the Pythagorean harmony of the universe with David rather thanOrpheus. For Ambrose, too, David was an Orphic figure; in his psalms, said Ambrose, David was inspiredby the harmony of the universe. Augustine wrote a book about music and claimed, in the Confessions, thatevery human feeling has its appropriate equivalent in song; but, typically, he was wary of the use of musicin religious worship just because its power over the states of the soul could be so great.


All the Christian Fathers had a mistrust of the effects of music when it was not associated with thesteadying effect of religious words, as it was in the Psalms of David, or, in the case of Ambrose, hymnscomposed in the spirit of David’s. Words and music, therefore, but no instruments. Instruments wereassociated with heathen magic and theurgy and with aspects of the common life that lay outside religioneither heathen or Christian—the theatre and the tavern. The Bible, it is true, referred to the instruments usedby the Jews in worship without condemning them; the Christian Fathers explained this away as aconcession, like the practice of blood sacrifice, to the primitive spiritual state of the Jews of the OldTestament. Implicit in this explanation is a recognition that music can produce effects at levels below thatof pure spirituality; but also that such effects are not due to any magical power other than what is permittedby God and flows directly from his will.

In this respect, and exceptionally, the Christian West made greater concessions than the East in its liturgyto the sensory element; from the fourth to the seventh century the use of musical instruments began to beencouraged, and in the fifth century the organ appeared.

Much more in doubt, over a very long period, was the legitimacy of the effects of painting and statues.The debate about this we must look at in the next chapter.

54 IMAGINATION

5Holy images

The second commandment given to Moses forbade the making of images of any living thing, withoutspecifying that this was meant only to apply to images in religious worship. In the Muslim world thisprohibition was to be given its full force, and to make of Muslim art a rich exploration of pattern and designwith the minimum of representation. Early Christian writers were cautious, but not always bound by thestrictest interpretation of the commandment, which was taken to forbid idolatry rather than secular image-making. Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria disapproved of images altogether; others drew the line atimages of Christ. Some of the early Christian rules may seem to exclude painters and sculptors from Churchmembership; but it may well be that these refer only to the makers of pagan pictures and images.

It was natural that in currents of Christianity so strongly marked by Greek thought the question of theplace of graven images in worship should arise. On the one hand the Greek notion of plastic beauty in theform of statues was associated with religious veneration—the Gods the sculptors carved for the templeswere not primarily for aesthetic enjoyment but were objects of worship. On the other hand, the OldTestament tradition was strongly against idolatry, and the more extreme practices of Neoplatonist theurgywould show the dangers of superstition leading into heresy. And so a debate was engaged withinChristianity, involving a comparison between divine and human image-making which foreshadowed someof the discussions of the Renaissance and some of the aesthetic attitudes of the nineteenth century.

The assumption was firmly grounded among Platonists that anything made is based on the Platonic formsas patterns. The sensible world is patterned on the forms; the human craftsman begins with a pattern or‘form’ in his mind of what he intends to make. The parallel between the making of the sensible world andthe making of human artefacts is more clearly drawn and discussed when, from Philo onwards, the Platonicforms are assumed to be ideas in the mind of God.

One reason why Clement of Alexandria disapproved of all image-making was that painters and sculptors,as he claimed, ‘robbed’ God by usurping the divine prerogative of creation. For Clement and Origen Plato’scontempt for pictures as copies of copies no doubt reinforced the prohibition of the second commandment.Visible man, says Clement, is but an image of God. ‘But an image of the image, the statues made in thelikeness of men and far removed from the truth, appear only as a fleeting impression. I could see thereforelittle but madness in a life which was occupied so earnestly with matter’—meaning the life of the sculptoror painter (quoted in Bevan 1940:87). Clement is stricter than the Muslims were to be, and disapproves ofthe representation of plants as well as animals and humans. He cannot believe that Moses ‘made arepresentation in human form’ of the Cherubim. Plotinus, according to his biographer Porphyry, refused tohave his portrait painted because, following Plato, he despised likenesses as copies of copies; but laterNeoplatonists were more favourable to images than Plato had been.

We have seen that in Neoplatonism and Christian Platonism the forms are said to be realized as images;and in thinking derived from this tradition the forms are often thought of as ideas becoming shapes, as

intellectual essences or ideas taking on spatial forms. The Platonic forms are not only precognitions of whatis to appear as sensible, but, as it were, sketches for its plastic realization; not only, in terms used forexample by St John Damascene (c. 675–749), ‘things known beforehand’ but ‘things marked outbeforehand’. We can perhaps translate this distinction into ‘concepts’, and ‘archetypes’.

The latter ‘are analogous’, writes Sheldon-Williams,

to the line drawn by the artist to delimit and thus create the shape of his artefact. According toMethodius of Olympus, c. 300, Christ assumed a human body in order that man might the betterimitate him, as though he had painted his picture for us so that we could liken ourselves to the Painter.The notion of Christ the Iconographer is at least as old as the second century, but by the early GreekFathers it was interpreted in the spiritual sense in which the Platonists understood the image-archetyperelationship of the sensible to the intelligible world.

(CH 1967:508)

Greek influence went against the traditional mistrust of image-worship inherited by Christianity from theJews, and in the early Christian centuries images of Biblical events are to be found in synagogues,catacombs and basilicas, though Christ and the events of the Passion are not represented. Crucifixes dateonly from the seventh century. In 305 the Council of Elvira, in Spain, found it necessary to forbidrepresentation of objects of worship by paintings in churches. The wording of the prohibition is interesting:‘There ought to be no pictures in a church (or in the Christian Church), lest the holy thing should bedepicted on walls.’ The motive here appears to be still the Platonic mistrust of the sensible, translated intoChristian terms; walls are perishable matter unsuitable for the representation of the spiritual. Augustine hadno use for images, but their use became very general in the succeeding centuries, particularly in the Easterntradition. Objections were raised from time to time, but they were ineffectual until 726 when an imperialedict was issued for the destruction of icons. A long and bitter controversy followed.

Some of the Christians who mistrusted the use of images were willing to concede that they might have adidactic use as ‘the books of the unlettered’. In the fourth century the notion is found in a text of the monkNilus of the Eastern Church. An imperial official had planned to decorate the walls of a church with scenesof hunting and fishing and with a thousand crosses. Nilus recommended a single cross with scenes from theOld and New Testaments competently painted

in order that those who do not know letters and cannot read the Holy Scriptures may by gazing on thepictures have recalled to their minds the brave endurance of those who were sincere servants of thetrue God and be roused to emulation of their glorious and ever-to-be-praised exploits.

(quoted in Bevan 1940:127)

At the end of the sixth century Gregory the Great made the same point. Bishop Serenus of Marseilles hadfound his flock offering homage to pictures in a church and had destroyed these images. Gregory wrote fromRome:

It has come to our ears that, fired with inconsiderate zeal, you have broken up the pictures (or images)of the saints on the ground that they ought not to be worshipped. That you forbade them to beworshipped, we altogether approve: but that you broke them up we pronounce to have been wrong. Itis one thing to offer homage to [adorare] a picture, and quite another thing to learn, by a story told ina picture, to what homage ought to be offered. For that which a written document is to those who can

56 HOLY IMAGES

read that a picture is to the unlettered who look at it. Even the unlearned see in that what course theyought to follow, even those who do not know the alphabet can read there. When, for the heathenespecially, a picture takes the place of a book…. If anyone desires to make images [i.e. here probablypictures], do not forbid him; only prohibit by all the means in your power the worshipping of images.I would have you, my brother, earnestly admonish your flock that from the sight of the story describedthey should conceive a more ardent sorrow for sin, and humbly prostrate themselves in homage to thealmighty holy Trinity alone.

(quoted in Bevan 1940:126)

In the East St John Damascene repeated this argument in favour of images as ‘books of the unlettered’ inhis treatise on holy images. But he, and in general the Eastern defenders of images, went much further thanGregory and claimed that images could legitimately—and with spiritual profit—be objects of veneration,provided that such veneration does not go beyond its proper bounds and become latreia, the kind of worshipthat is due to God and God only.

St John Damascene was the most thoroughgoing and enthusiastic defender of images. Others wereprepared to compromise, to distinguish, for instance, Christian images from pagan idols on the ground thatthe former represented historical persons, which was legitimate, and not invisible powers, which wassacrilegious. This argument focussed controversy on images of Christ, as both an historical person and aninvisible power. Some held that the attempt to represent spiritual realities was bound to fail; pigmentsarranged in shapes can produce the illusion of the sensible but not of the ideal. Plastic art can record beauty,as it were, but not goodness or sacramental meaning. Such an attitude implies ignorance or rejection of thesymbolist thesis of the Pseudo-Dionysius and his like; it belongs to the more truly Platonic currentrepresented by Clement and Origen.

What, then, was positively claimed by St John Damascene and the believers in images for their spiritualefficacy, beyond their use as the ‘books of the unlettered’? Not only, it was said, could images do duty forwords where words were not understood; they might do better than words in presenting experience moreconcretely, with more immediacy of sensation and feeling than language could easily convey. They have,moreover, a symbolic value and magical power. They can serve to focus the attention of the worshipper onwhat is symbolized. They can transmit a lower kind of knowledge which is a step towards the higher kind.The Pseudo-Dionysius could be quoted in support of such a thesis:

The substance and orders above us [the Celestial Hierarchy]…are incorporeal and their hierarchy isintelligible and hypercosmic: but…our own Hierarchy [the Ecclesiastical] is filled with a variety ofsensible symbols appropriate to our condition, by which symbols we ascend through the hierarchies tothe uniformity of deification… They, as intelligence, have intelligible knowledge as of right: weascend to the contemplation of the Holy Mysteries through sensible images [eikones] as best we may.

(Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, quoted in CH 1967:514)

The Pseudo-Dionysius, to illustrate the work of the intellect separating out the transcendent meaning of asymbol from its materiality uses, as Plotinus did before him, the image of the sculptor; image-making itselfbecomes a symbol of symbolic interpretation. Sculptors, says the Pseudo-Dionysius, strip the block ofmarble of all the superfluous matter obstructing the view of the beautiful form hidden within it (Roques1954:105).

The claim that goes further than all this, and beyond reason into magic, is that what is imaged is there, inthe image, as a real presence during the act of worship; this is a belief that draws close to the theurgy of the

IMAGINATION 57

later Neoplatonists. Some such images had a physical relationship with what they imaged—relics, forinstance, or clay tablets made with sweat and dirt scraped off the bodies of the Stylites. But veneration wasaccorded also to images which were simply artefacts; and thereby imagination became a less humble handmaidto intellect as a means of apprehension of the divine. Imagination, magic and illumination were broughttogether.

St John Damascene found arguments to minimize the dangers of the use of images. Christians, he said,know exactly what is meant to be forbidden and are capable of distinguishing between veneration andworship (latreia). The Old Testament itself, said St John, offers instances of permissible veneration ofsacred objects, which are not idols in the forbidden sense:

These injunctions were given to the Jews on account of their proneness to idolatry. Now we, on thecontrary, are no longer in leading strings. Speaking theologically, it is given to us to avoidsuperstitious error, to be with God in the knowledge of the truth, to worship God alone, to enjoy thefulness of His knowledge. We have passed the stage of infancy, and reached the perfection ofmanhood. We receive our habit of mind from God, and know what may be imaged and what may not.

(1898:8)

The Damascene’s justification is that Christ is the image of God, and that this is a privileged instance of ageneral truth; that in God’s creative acts there is a stage, between the form or idea and the realization, whenthe ideal form moves towards sensible form as an image of what is to become sensible. A world of images,in effect, takes its place in God’s mind, beside the world of Platonic forms. ‘In God, too, there arerepresentations and images of His future acts,—that is to say, His counsel from all eternity, which is everunchangeable.’ Images, which for Plato belonged always to becoming, are now moving into the realm ofbeing:

Gregory, who is so eloquent about God, says that the mind which is set upon getting beyondcorporeal things, is incapable of doing it. For the invisible things of God since the creation of theworld are made visible through images. We see images in creation which remind us faintly of God, aswhen, for instance, we speak of the holy and adorable Trinity, imaged by the sun, or light, or burningrays, or by a running fountain, or a full river, or by the mind, speech, or the spirit within us, or by arose tree, or a sprouting flower, or a sweet fragrance.

(1898:11–12)

I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned toinhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honouring thatmatter which works my salvation…. Was not the thrice happy and thrice blessed wood of the Crossmatter? Was not the sacred and holy mountain of Calvary matter? What of the life-giving rock, theHoly Sepulchre, the source of our resurrection: was it not matter…. Do not despise matter, for it is notdespicable. Nothing is that which God has made. This is the Manichean heresy.

(1898:15–17)

The way in which images are interpreted and felt is determined, says the Damascene, by tradition; if‘intellectual things are understood through sensible ones’, it is with the help of ‘the veiled language ofScripture’ and of oral tradition (1898:31–2). St John Damascene finds much to support his thesis inDionysius; he quotes also from St Basil, St Gregory of Nyssa and a good many others of the ancient fathers.

58 HOLY IMAGES

From a passage in St Basil’s sermon on the martyr St Barlam comes the argument that paintings can have adramatic impact beyond that of words:

Arise, you renowned painters of brave deeds…. My praise of the laurel-crowned victor is faintcompared to the colours of your brush. I will give up writing on the excellences of the martyr whomyou have crowned…. I contemplate the hand put out to the flames, more powerfully dealt with by you.I see the struggle more clearly depicted on your statue…. May Christ our Lord, the supreme Judge ofthe warfare, appear in picture.

(1898:33–4)

From St Gregory of Nyssa is quoted another tribute to the spiritual effectiveness of painting through itsvivid representation of dramatic moments of religious experience—in this case Abraham’s sacrifice:

I have often seen paintings of this touching scene, and could not look at it with dry eyes, art setting itforth so vividly. Isaac is lying before the altar, his legs bound, his hands tied behind his back. Thefather approaching the victim, clasping his hair with the left hand, stoops over the face so piteouslyturned towards him, and holds in his right hand the sword, ready to strike. Already the point of thesword is on the body when the divine voice is heard, forbidding the consummation.

(1898:42–3)

One wonders what sort of religious picture Gregory can have seen. His description suggests the kind ofHellenistic naturalism, dramatic and emotional, that we associate with the Laocoon rather than any knownconvention within the early Christian styles of painting.

St John Damascene, commenting on another quotation from St Basil, goes further in defence of theimage. St Basil argues that the image of the king is also called the king, ‘and there are not two kings inconsequence’. St John comments: ‘If the image of the king is the king, the image of Christ is Christ…’(1898: 34–5). This need not be read as implying any doctrine of the real presence of the subject in theimage, or of any magical effect. But it does imply a way of looking at paintings, a particular expectation ofthe effect of the painting on the observer.

The iconoclasts were finally defeated at the second Council of Nicaea (787), which accepted the principlethat ‘honour rendered to the image passes to the prototype’ as applied to both natural and artificial images.By the middle of the ninth century the controversy had ended, and Christians were free to use icons on thebasis of the distinction, made much of by St John Damascene, between veneration and worship proper.1

But if Byzantium consecrated images, the Frankish Church warned against their abuse. The Libri Carolini,written by one or more unknown hands about 790, probably at the instigation of Charlemagne who had notbeen consulted by the Empress Irene of Byzantium about the restoration of the cult of images, stands as asymbol of Western rationalism in its mistrust of the more imaginative excursions of Byzantine theology.The different attitudes of East and West are to some extent reflected in their liturgies:

In the East there is a richer amplification and suggestiveness of rite and ceremony than in the West; thecompleteness of the dramatic movement requires a longer time for the performance of the rite; andthere is a fine poetic and devotional flavour about the language used.

(Hardman 1937:61)

IMAGINATION 59

The West had little use for symbolism and imaginative interpretations. Images need not be destroyed, as theearlier Eastern Iconoclasts had maintained, but they must not be worshipped, says the Libri Carolini. Theycan have a didactic use; but their symbolic and quasi-magical powers, which the Christian Platonists of theEast had made so much of, are flatly denied here by a rationalism which takes no account of imaginationwhatever. An image, it is said, is a clever imitation, but the matter of which it is made cannot accommodateany real spirituality; there is no magical presence of the imaged in the image. Imitation does not bringidentity. Pictures can convey historical facts; but only language can convey abstract meanings, the messagesof the prophets, the exhortations of the Gospels, the teaching of the Apostles. A distinction is drawnbetween the artist’s skill and spiritual insight; the pleasure arising from the beauty of the painting is not tobe confused with true religious devotion. As for the saying in Genesis that man was created in the image ofGod, the argument of the Libri Carolini is that the similarity to God is in the qualities of the soul and has nophysical or sensuous implication; the authorities for this view are St Ambrose and St Augustine. AsLiebeschütz puts it:

The Fathers’ teaching fitted in well with the spirit in which the Carolingian authors fought thiscontroversy. The characterization of the Eastern mentality as a revival of pagan superstition createdthe right background for the representation of the Frankish monarchy as both orthodox and rational.

(CH 1967:570)

The Frankish attitude to images harks back, like so much in Augustine’s thinking, from Neoplatonism to therationalized religion of Plato himself.

What is particularly interesting about the way in which the distinction between West and East isformulated is the implicit claim to political as well as theological righteousness. Eastern supporters ofimage-worship had used the analogy of the public honouring of secular rulers. The argument of the LibriCarolini is that such an attitude of mind belongs to an outmoded notion of empire inherited from Babylonand Rome; the empress Irene is said to invoke God as someone who reigns with her and to confuse spiritualwith secular power, the eternal with the transient. The Frankish monarchy is said to observe the borderlinebetween God and ruler, spirit and matter. The king must not be honoured in such a way as to separate himfrom his people and reduce his distance from God. The Carolingian world is a world for human action, andeffective action depends on a hard-headed sense of reality and a clearly argued set of principles for dealingwith the elements of the real world. The world for the Byzantines was a sacred cosmos of images, the divinemade sensible; for the Carolingian West it was a non-sacred material environment, a neutral setting forhuman activities.

How the Western Church came to tolerate a kind of image-worship is not clear. What is clear is that theWest at first rejected the Eastern distinction between a lower kind of worship—veneration—proper toimages as images, and a higher kind (latreia) proper to the spiritual beings themselves—Christ, the Virgin,the Apostles. When we come to Aquinas, we find that he establishes quite firmly that when images are usedin worship, the worship they evoke is latreia—worship in the full sense, but in no sense directed at theimage itself, only through it at what is imaged:

As the Philosopher [Aristotle] says, the movement of soul towards the image is of a double character.It implies, for one thing, a movement towards the image, in so far as the image is a thing (a particularobject) itself; it implies also a movement towards the image in so far as it is representative of a realityother than itself. Between these two movements there is this difference: the first kind of movementdirected to the image as a particular thing, is distinct from the movement towards the reality

60 HOLY IMAGES

represented, whereas the second movement, directed to the image as the representation of a reality notitself, is identical with the movement directed to the reality. Thus one must say that to an image ofChrist, in so far as it is itself a particular thing (let us say, a carved bit of wood or a painted board), noveneration at all is offered, because veneration is owed to a rational being alone. It remains thatveneration is exhibited towards the image, only in so far as it is an image (of something else); andthus it follows that the veneration exhibited to an image of Christ and the veneration exhibited toChrist Himself is one and the same. Since, therefore, Christ is adored with the worship of latria, itfollows that the adoration directed to His image is an act of latria.

(Summa, Pars III, Quaest. XXV, Art. 3, quoted in Bevan, 1940:150–1)

When Neoplatonism once again became a threat to Orthodoxy at the time of the Renaissance, the Councilof Trent reaffirmed the Western position. Holy Images are to be kept in churches and to have theappropriate ‘honour and veneration’. But there must be no belief in a divinity or a supernatural powerresiding in them; they are not to be prayed to or trusted in. Aquinas’ doctrine of latreia passing through theimage to the imaged is reasserted. The Council of Trent does use the word veneratio for the attitude that isproper to images, but true belief is kept at a great distance from theurgy.

IMAGINATION 61

6Imagination in Islam*

Islam was not only a great creative upsurge, but a spiritual melting-pot, the more effective because it was somuch more tolerant than the Christian West of wide varieties of religious views, including Christians andJews. The growth of Christian theology was regulated by Church Councils; the Arabs of the Muslim faith weresubject to no comparable authority. Ali Mansur al-Hukim’s rule marked an exception; from his successionin 996 he persecuted Christians and Jews. But tolerance and intellectual receptiveness were very general,and medieval Islam awakened and kept alive a knowledge of Greek philosophy based on texts which theWest, and even the Byzantines, had lost or put out of sight and forgotten. There was as much intellectualcuriosity and enterprise as in the Europe of the Renaissance; and Islam was less bound than Europe by itsown past.

The spread of the Muslim faith dates from the Hegira in 622 when Mohammed moved from a hostileMecca to a sympathetic and receptive Medina. The new religion, imposing discipline and unity on afragmented society that had lived by tribal violence and blood vengeance, fostered a spirit of confidence andconquest. Within a century of Mohammed’s death in 632 the Arab Empire had reached the Atlantic and theborders of India and China; victories had been achieved against the Byzantine Empire and Persia. Egyptwas conquered. Attempts to take Constantinople repeatedly failed, but close contact with Europe wasestablished through the conquest of Spain. The Arabs were in touch with the established Christianorthodoxy of the West as well as the Christian heresies tinged with Gnosticism which the orthodoxtraditions of Byzantium and Abyssinia had expelled to the Middle East; and having moved beyond Persiato Bukhara and Samarkand they were also in touch with Buddhism. The advance on the mainland of Europewas halted by Charles Martel in 732, a century after Mohammed’s death; but by 878 Sicily was in Muslimhands. Arab influence in Sicily persisted after its capture by the Norman Roger I in 1060 and the islandbecame a centre of Arab learning and an exemplar of Arab customs, since the Muslim way of life continuedunchanged side by side with the Norman. There were many possible channels between the Muslim worldand a wide variety of cultures and intellectual traditions.

The new Muslim religion and the possibilities of learning opened up by conquest had little effect incivilizing the first Caliphs. Those of the Umayyad dynasty became symbols of uncultured oppression.Schooled in the Syrian desert, they learned a pure Arabic but had no respect for surrounding cultures.Intellectual communication was opened up under the succeeding dynasty of the Abbasids; their removal ofthe capital from Damascus to the newly-built city of Baghdad put the centre of Islam in closer touch withPersia at the beginning of the ninth century, and Hārūn al-Rachīd and his son al-Ma‘mūn encouraged thetranslation and commentary of Greek texts. Al-Ma‘mūn established a ‘House of Wisdom’ in Baghdad that

* I am grateful to Dr Oliver Leaman for reading and commenting on this chapter —Penelope Murray.

combined a library, an academy and a translation bureau. From the middle of the ninth century the politicalunity of the Arab Empire was disrupted; minor dynasties arose, the power of the Caliphs declined. But thepower of the religious impulse of Islam and the cultural influence of the quick-flowering Arab civilizationwas maintained until the Mongol invasions and the capture of Baghdad in the thirteenth century.

The motives of the Abbasid Caliphs who encouraged the translation and study of the Greeks areunknown; but when their encouragement and support came to an end in the middle of the ninth century thework of intellectual exploration went on and showed the kind of curiosity and speculative enterprise that weassociate with the European Renaissance. Richard Walzer praises the philological competence and scholarlyconscientiousness of the Arab translators and philosophers; their knowledge of Greek thought—though notof Greek poetry, in which they showed no interest—appears to have been more comprehensive than that ofthe Renaissance. Perhaps also in some cases more objective, in the sense that they were bent on discoveringand minutely dissecting what the Greeks themselves really meant. It is true that syncretism, the mixingtogether of elements from different cultures and traditions, always means some degree of selection,compromise and distortion, and there was syncretism in Arab philosophy. On the one hand theirphilosophical tools had to be borrowed from outside their own culture—from classical Greece, fromdifferent moments in Hellenistic thought, from varieties of Neoplatonism recognizably different from Plato,from Jewish and Christian ideas which had themselves been influenced in various degrees and at differenttimes by Greek thought; and this meant syncretism. But although their thinking had to take account of thetenets of Islam, they had no powerful theological tradition to reckon with, as Ficino had Scholasticism totake into account in the Renaissance. Their speculation was freer, less haunted by the dangers of hereticalthinking.

The nature of Islam allowed them to draw on a wide spectrum of religious attitudes—Judaism,Christianity, Zoroastrianism and possibly Buddhism; the particular importance attached to prophecy andvision encouraged them to create, with the help of Greek notions, a psychology which could give a detailedaccount of the workings of the mind in prophecy and vision. But within Islam itself attitudes to the nature ofprophecy could vary widely. Among the religious, there is at one extreme a legalistic attitude whichinterprets the Qur‘ān and the Hadīth1 as literally as possible; at the other, from the beginning of the ninthcentury, a strain of mysticism which pays little attention to literal readings of the sacred texts andclaims independent, direct awareness of esoteric meaning. Sufism itself appears to bring together in varyingproportions religious notions going back through Persia to India and what can be called a ‘mysticism ofreason’, an association of mystical illumination with nous, stemming from Gnosticism and perhaps from theGreek Hermetica, the supposed writings of Hermes Trismegistus in which mysticism is expressed as therapture of an insight achieved by pure intelligence. Among the philosophers and theologians, explanations ofreligious experience vary from rational psychology using Aristotelian concepts and methods to a theosophywhich defies rational reduction. We find, too, the notion that each of the dogmatic religions is a set ofapproximations to fundamental, universal truth; with philosophers holding that the truth transcending allparticular religions is to be found in rational philosophy, and mystics that it is an esoteric knowledgeachieved through vision and communicated through symbols and images.

The Arabs found Greek scholarship still alive in a continuous tradition in Egypt, Palestine, Syria andMesopotamia, and even in the capital, Baghdad itself. They did not sharply distinguish Plato and Aristotlebut, following the tendencies of Hellenistic thought, tried to define a wisdom derived from both. Thissyncretism was encouraged by confused attributions of texts. The work known to the Arabs as the Theologyof Aristotle was a collection of excerpts from the Enneads of Plotinus. The text later translated into Latin asthe Liber de causis and thought at first to be Aristotle’s was in fact the Theology of Proclus.

IMAGINATION IN ISLAM 63

The influence received by Muslim religion from Jews and Christians was transformed by Greek thought,alive and operative in Islam much later than in the West, but itself subject to influences from further East;and eventually it was fed back by Muslim philosophers into the still developing theologies of the olderreligions.

The Arabs, then, had their rationalists, their orthodox theologians and their more independent andheterodox mystics, and one way of grouping the more able and influential thinkers would be to assess theirregard for legalistic Islam, tending to secularism and the stressing of observances, the importance theyattach to esoteric knowledge and mystical awareness, and the degree of their assimilation of Greek thought,and particularly of the scientific, empirical and analytical sides of Aristotle’s speculation. Broadly speaking,religion means in the first place prophecy and vision; and where these are examined and explained inpsychological terms, the faculty made responsible is imagination.

Arab philosophy from al-Kindī (ninth century) to Averroes (1126–98) is influenced by the Neoplatonicview of reality as

a chain of spiritual forces emanating from the One in timeless cosmic reproduction like the rays fromthe sun…. Another feature shared by almost all the Islamic philosophers, but not yet traced in anyGreek work, is the description of the active intellect, the nous poietikos of Aristotle, as a separatemetaphysical entity, a kind of intermediary between the spiritual world above the moon and thehuman mind, through which both the human mind and the human imagination are linked with thedivine.

(Walzer 1962:9)

The psychology of intellect and imagination to be found in alFārābī (about 870–950) and Avicenna (980–1037) Richard Walzer believes to have been based upon a Greek text now lost. It is, he writes, ‘a naturaloffshoot of Neoplatonic speculation’ (1962:206); it seems indeed to represent a splitting of the nous ofNeoplatonism and the Hermetica into two components, the rational and the imaginative. The notion of theactive intellect was brought within the rigid monotheism of Islam by identifying it with Gabriel, the angelof revelation and Spirit of Holiness of the Qur‘ān.

When the Western Schoolmen used Arab thought for their own Christian purposes they filtered out whatthe Roman West had already minimized as compared with the Byzantines—ways of thinking and feelingconnected with the Neoplatonist doctrines of emanation, theurgy and illumination. Muslims could acceptthe personalized Active Intellect as the angel of revelation, Gabriel. The Scholastics, on the whole, playeddown the mediating role of the angelic hierarchy in creation. Very few Western thinkers accepted the notionof the Active Intellect as a separate entity at all; some were prepared to concede that the illumination it wassupposed to provide came directly from God and to accept the rest of the details of Arab psychology withthat substitution. Aquinas and the most influential Schoolmen would have nothing to do with illuminationcoming directly from a superhuman source, except as Augustinian grace enlightening judgment, and firmlyfixed the principle of intellectual understanding and insight in the human mind itself. But among the Arabphilosophers Aristotle’s separate intellects moving the heavenly bodies are angels—a fusion which hadstarted when Judaism began to be Hellenized and the Persian-Jewish concept of an angel began to beexplained in Greek terms, as it already is in Philo Judaeus in the first century AD. Philo identifies the angelswith Plato’s forms and with the logoi of the Stoics. Western Christians mistrusted supernatural hierarchiesthat went beyond the picturesque and assumed a functional importance, bringing the risk of the polytheismassociated with pagan Neoplatonism. Ficino and Pico were to bring back some of the supernatural forcesand magical effects that Scholasticism had eliminated.

64 IMAGINATION

The Arab philosophers’ notion of a personalized Active Intellect developed out of previous attempts tointerpret Aristotle’s obscure distinction of nous poietikos, active intellect or intellect which ‘makes’, fromnous pathetikos, passive intellect or intellect which ‘becomes’. Aristotle nowhere explains the status andrelationship of these two aspects of mind, and the commentators of antiquity —Theophrastus, Alexander ofAphrodisias and Themistius were intrigued and puzzled by it. They differed as to whether the active intellectis part of the mind itself or a power acting in the mind from outside. Alexander of Aphrodisias, much usedby the Arabs, distinguished a material intellect—corresponding to the passive intellect regarded asdependent on the body—and an intellect in habitu. The material intellect is the mere aptitude for thinking; itreceives intelligible form from the active intellect, present in the human mind but not belonging to it as thematerial intellect does. The active intellect is wholly immaterial, energy devoid of all matter andpotentiality. It always is, even when it is not thought by men; it is an eternal, imperishable, self-existentsubstance. Alexander argues that such a substance must be identified with the deity. When the activeintellect has transmitted awareness of the forms to the material intellect the mind has intellect in habitu,actual knowledge distinguished from the potential knowledge of the material intellect. Conflated withNeoplatonist emanation, Alexander’s theory results in an Active Intellect identified not with the deity as theOne or the First but with an intermediate phase in the process of emanation. The possibilities of a directtheoretical link between the human mind and the supernatural are nevertheless increased, and the Arabthinkers exploited those possibilities.

In al-Kindī and al-Fārābī Alexander’s three modes of intellect become four. Al-Fārābī discusses thevarious ways in which the term ‘intellect’ is used, and says ‘the intellect which Aristotle mentions in thebook on the soul [De anima], he makes of four modes, an intellect in potentia, another in actu, an acquiredintellect, and an active intellect’ (quoted in Afnan 1958:29). Avicenna was to develop the notion in an evenmore complex way.

Arabists have been a good deal puzzled by this move from the three modes of Alexander to the fourmodes of al-Kindī and al-Fārābī. Perhaps the fourth mode arose from the distinction between knowledgethrough perception (intellect in habitu) and knowledge through dialectic or rational argument (intellectin actu), but if so this distinction is not consistently maintained. Basic to Aristotle, his early commentatorsand the Arabs is the notion of a capacity for knowledge which only becomes knowledge through the activityof an intellect outside the human soul. Between potentiality and pure intellect the Arab terms for the meansand kinds of knowledge resulting in the soul remain obscure—intellect in habitu, in actu and acquisitus.

Al-Fārābī was known among the Muslims as ‘The Second Teacher’, Aristotle being the first; he was saidto be master of seventy languages and wrote on mathematics, medicine, physics as well as metaphysics,psychology and logic. Philosophy, he held, was the way to universal truth; religious doctrines and symbolicrepresentations can be more or less near the same truth. Even fictions can convey aspects of truth, anddifferent communities with different beliefs, values and customs can provide men with the same happinessand the same good life. The ideal education of the ideal ruler would begin with the religion and traditions ofhis own community and continue with philosophy, and one of his accomplishments must be the kind oforatory that will reach his subjects’ imagination.

The most complete expression of al-Fārābī’s philosophy is in the work called by Walzer The Views of thePeople of the Best State and translated into French as Idées des habitants de la cité vertueuse; what followsis based on the French version and quotations are re-translated from it.

The verb used by al-Fārābī for the ‘knowing’ activity which results in the creation of the world isrendered by the French translators as a neologism: intelliger—‘to intelligize’. God, the origin of all things,the One of Plotinus, is known as The First’. From the First issues the second, an incorporeal substancewhich ‘intelligizes’ its own being and ‘intelligizes’ the First. From the second’s intellection of the First


results a further incorporeal substance, the third; the third ‘intelligizes’ its own being, and by ‘intelligizing’also the First gives rise to the fourth—and so on through the hierarchy of the ten angels, corresponding topure intelligence, the first heaven, the fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury and themoon. Ten intelligences, nine heavenly spheres. The tenth intelligence is the last to be incorporeal,independent of physical generation and corruption; it gives rise to the sublunary realm in which men live. Wethus have a cosmogony which combines Aristotle’s notion of concentric spheres composed of incorruptible‘quintessence’ and moved by souls, Plotinus’ version of the Neoplatonist theory of emanation, and theseven ‘governors’ of astrology; it is the type of cosmogony to be found later in Gemisthus Plethon andFicino, though the Renaissance view propagated by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola brings it into closerrelationship with Plato’s own thought by putting the seven governors, the moving heavenly bodies, into onesphere, the sphere of soul, and the higher powers into the sphere of pure intellect—giving three levels forhuman consciousness to move up or down in; body, soul and mind.

In al-Farābī, intellection at every level is also felicity, enjoyment, admiration and love; and each of theseelements of beatitude has two aspects, an immediate and a transcendent; love of the intelligized self and thehigher and more satisfactory love of the One intelligized in the self. This notion, too, corresponds to anelement of Renaissance sensibility, the belief that the human soul can be helped to rise towards thetranscendent realm of pure intellect by cultivating and fostering the nobler emotions to the supreme degreeof furor.

The detail of al-Fārābī’s account of the hierarchy of the heavenly beings, then of the hierarchy ofsublunary substances, need not concern us until we come to man and the human soul. Here the concepts arederived from Aristotle’s psychology, but with an interesting difference, at least of emphasis. What is saidabout the association of imagination with appetite, its power in man to divide and combine senseimpressions, to present to the soul true or false images accompanied by desire—all this is recognizablyAristotelian. So is the association of imagination with memory, as the preserver of sense-impressions whenthe sense-data themselves are no longer present. But al-Fārābī is not perplexed, like Aristotle, about how todefine and place imagination in the structure of the soul. He puts it among the faculties, which are now ahierarchy of four instead of three;2 nutrition, sensation, imagination, intellect. Imagination is stillsubordinate to intellect, and it is still the function of intellect not only to ‘intelligize intelligibles’ but todistinguish between the beautiful and the ugly and to acquire the arts and sciences;3 but imagination itself isno longer a puzzling epiphenomenon of sensation without habitation or status. Desire, or appetition is alsolisted on its own, but associated and put on a level with sensation.

Under the heading of sensation al-Fārābī speaks of the equivalent of Aristotle’s sensus communis. InAristotle the sensus communis detects movement and spatial relations and is not said to be a function ofimagination. It is in the Arab philosophers that the notion of a synthesizing power combining sensations intoa totalized perception gains ground and becomes associated with imagination. Al-Fārābī calls it the‘dominant’ in the power of sensation and compares it to a king collating the scraps of intelligence coming infrom all his informers. He does not yet ascribe this synthesizing power to imagination, as we shall find itcredited in later thinkers; but he goes straight on to say that imagination preserves sense impressions and‘by its nature judges and arranges the sensibles, separating them out and combining them together invarious ways, some in conformity with the sensible and some contrary to it’ (1949:56).

But, as Richard Walzer pointed out, the most interesting chapters in al-Fārābī’s treatise are those ondreams and on prophecy and vision,4 in which imagination breaks free of the traditional Aristoteliansystem. In dreams imagination can show powers later to be attributed to the creative artist. Al-Fārābī doesnot associate imagination in this context with poetry or with visual art; but he credits it with a capacity for‘imitation’, the equivalent of the Greek mimesis. This ‘imitation’ includes the composition of images into

66 IMAGINATION

episodes which could happen in real life, the transformation of bodily states into imagery and translation ofdream-images into unconscious and involuntary action. In all this there can be an element of play, onceimagination is absolved by sleep from its normal responsibilities in action and thought. But there can alsobe an element of supernatural vision, of direct representation, through images, of transcendent nous. Platohad accepted this rather grudgingly: al-Fārābī explores the psychology of it with interest:

In sleep, the imaginative power is isolated and cleared of the forms of sensible things which thesenses constantly renew in it [i.e. in the waking state]. It leaves the service of the reasonable andappetitive powers and returns to the forms of sensible things which it finds preserved and maintainedin itself. It acts upon these forms, combining them together and separating them out. Besidespreserving and combining the forms of sensible things, it has a third function: imitation. Indeed, of allthe powers of the soul, only it (the imaginative power) is capable of imitating those things preservedin itself. It imitates sometimes the data of the five senses, combining the analogous sensiblespreserved in itself, sometimes the intelligibles, sometimes the nutritive power, sometimes theappetitive; it imitates also (at times) the present temperament of the body.

(1949:70–1)

Imagination can therefore produce a replica of real experience with all its aspects, like Proust’s involuntarymemory. And it can as it were express, through images, what is primarily a physical state:

Thus, when the temperament of the body is humid, it imitates humidity by composing sensibles whichimitate humidity, such as water and swimming. (Similarly) when the body’s temperament is dry, itimitates this dryness through sensibles apt to imitate dryness…. If this imaginative power were adisposition and a form in the body, the latter having a given temperament, could communicate thistemperament to it. But since it is psychic, it receives the action of the body only in accordance with itsown nature and not in accordance with the nature of bodies to receive (all) temperaments; thus when awet body acts upon another body, the latter undergoes wetness and becomes wet in its turn. Whenwetness acts upon or approaches the (imaginative) power, this power does not become wet: it receiveswetness through the sensibles which imitate the latter. As the reasonable power, receiving humidityreceives only the essence which it intelligizes and not wetness itself, so when an agent acts on this(imaginative) power, the latter receives the action according to its own substance and disposition.

What all this amounts to is that what we now call the mind can abstract from the complexity of realexperience in two ways— through intellect and through imagination. For Aristotle and the Scholasticphilosophers of the medieval West thinking is carried out by means of images, and the images have to beprovided by imagination. But the actual processes of thought, the ways of combining and manipulatingthoughts are rational. Al-Fārābī seems to be recognizing here that imagination has its own ways ofcombining images into meanings—the symbolic meanings of prophecy and divination which he considersin the following chapter.

It is to be noted also that the body has, as it were, its own life when conscious life and reason aresuspended during sleep. Al-Fārābī does not at all put it in such terms; but when he speaks of imaginationimitating sensibles which express the present temperament of the body he goes on to consider‘temperament’ as giving rise to images of desires, and to consider the images as producing in their turnbodily reactions equivalent to the satisfaction of such desires in real life:


Thus, when the body’s temperament is such as to produce in the appetitive power carnal desire, (theimaginative power) imitates this temperament by carnal actions. The organs of these actions makeready to accomplish them, not under the influence of a desire existing at that moment, but because theimaginative power imitates this desire by the relevant acts.

(1949:72)

Imagination can also ‘imitate’ the intelligible. As we saw, beauty and goodness belong to the realm of theintelligibles. The imagination can realize the perfection of the intelligible as the most excellent sensibles.Al-Fārābī seems to be thinking of the apprehension of beauty in nature rather than the making of artefacts;in imagination this sense of beauty can be concentrated and intensified through a kind of ‘imitation’corresponding to what will later be called ‘aesthetic contemplation’. Imagination can body forth orsubstantiate pure reason, ‘theoretical reason’, as sensibles. It can also body forth practical reason—goodness—in terms of the best actions. Reason operates through reflection; imagination operates without reflection.Here we have the distinction between discursive thinking and what is later called intuition, or inspiration, orvision, stated in terms of imagination.

The following chapter (‘Of inspiration and the vision of the Angel’) goes on to state that in particularlyprivileged imaginations vision can be achieved in the waking state. The ‘vision’ al-Farābī is concerned withhere is entirely a matter of translating knowledge of the higher spiritual world into sense-data. Putting thematter in terms of a later psychology more familiar to the modern mind, instead of imagination ‘abstracting’images from concrete representations, perceptions of real objects, we have imagination expressingabstractions in concrete terms and presenting ‘visions’ which appear to the mind to be as real asperceptions. Its ‘imitation’ here amounts to creating experiences which carry as much conviction of realityas direct sense-experience. We are in the mental region which Ibn ‘Arabī, two centuries later, will call ‘ālamal-mithāl, ‘the world of imagination or similitudes’. The normal process of perception, in which sense-dataare judged by the sensus communis, common sense, and transmitted to imagination and to reason, is put intoreverse; transcendent reason communicated, presumably, by the tenth angel in its aspect of nous poietikos,directly to the human imagination, is passed through the common sense to the separate senses—thoughsight is the only sense here mentioned specifically. It is then as if the ‘vision’ were seen as sensibly real:

When the imaginative power imitates these data (of the active intelligence or nous poietikos) throughsensibles of ultimate beauty and perfection, he who sees this will say that God possesses a majesticand admirable grandeur;5 he will see prodigious things quite impossible to find in other beings. It isnot impossible that the man in whom imaginative power reaches its final perfection should receivefrom the active intellect in a waking state present and future particulars (meaning events in real life)or the sensibles which imitate these, as well as imitations of the separate intelligibles (meaning theangels of the spiritual hierarchy) and of all other superior beings, and that he should see them. He willthen have, through the intelligibles so received, prophecy of divine things.

(Then come in succession) in descending order: he who sees all these things partly in the wakingstate and partly during sleep; he who imagines these things without actually seeing them with his eyes;he who sees them only during sleep. The terms in which these (people) will express themselves willbe imitative terms, symbols, enigmas, substitutions, comparisons.

(1949:74–5)6

These symbols which arise in the soul to represent or ‘imitate’ the abstract truths of philosophy may be,according to Walzer’s reading of the text, ‘verbal or visual symbols or symbols of any other conceivable

68 IMAGINATION

kind—and not merely artistic symbols’. The notion of ‘symbol’ includes imaginative language as well asimages of sensuous experience (Walzer, CH 1967:655).

Varieties of gifts will produce varieties of visions. Particulars or intelligibles will be seen or imaginedsleeping or waking, in various combinations. At the end of the chapter al-Fārābī acknowledges that thevisionary power of imagination may be corrupted, and this corruption seems to derive from a corrupted‘temperament’. ‘Such is the case with hypochondriacs, madmen and the like’ (1949:75). Paraphrasing, wecan say that for al-Fārābī true vision depends on soundness of imagination in the same way as, for theStoics, true perception, phantasia kataleptike depended on ‘upright Logos’ or soundness of reason.

The notion of ‘imitation’ extends in later chapters to all aspects of life in the Best State. All those thingswhich make it a good society—religion, laws, ethics, conventions and customs—all those things in factwhich define it as a particular form of culture —are ‘imitations’, in the modes of the sensible world, ofaspects of transcendent wisdom. And transcendent wisdom, though to reason always the same, can betranslated into human images and sensible realities in different ways. Thus goodness and true happiness canbe achieved in societies of widely different ways of life. Imagination can translate truth into differentsystems of images; but it is always the same divine truth. The insights of prophets inform traditions, andtraditions support the fresh insights of new generations of prophets.

In the Best State there are those who ‘live’ truth without knowing it, those who know truth symbolically,through imagination, and those who know truth through the demonstrative propositions of philosophy. Theideal ruler, the imām, combines perfection of imagination with perfection of intellect. Al-Fārābī states quiteclearly that there are those two modes of knowledge. And though, formally, he follows the Greek traditionin maintaining the primacy of reason, which often becomes clearly the primacy of discursive reason, inspirit the world of imagination and symbolism is just as important in the life of the Best State and in theconsciousness of its inhabitants.

Nevertheless in this world of imagination there are possibilities of ambiguity and apparent contradiction.The supremely wise soul becomes aware of contradictions, and rises by resolving them. The immoral soulseizes on apparent contradictions and corrupts the representations of truth by sophistry and falsification.The sceptical soul emphasizes the contradictions and holds that knowledge of truth is impossible. Only inthe spiritual sphere above the moon can all the apparent contradictions in the sensible world be resolved;but al-Fārābī ascribes to the Cities of Error the belief that might seem to follow logically from thePythagorean view of souls exiled in sublunary life, the doctrine that the ending of exile by voluntary deathis good. Like the Greeks, he is content to see the divine manifested in the most excellent sensibles. He is noadmirer of Gnosticism or of the Hermetica, and has no use for unitive mysticism.

Avicenna’s cosmogony, like al-Fārābī’s, depends on emanation through a ten-fold hierarchy of intellects;but some of his angels have imagination as well. Like those of the later Neoplatonists they look up, as itwere, through intellect and work down through imagination and sensation. The tenth angel, Gabriel or theActive Intellect, can illuminate the souls of men through imagination as well as through intellect proper.

Avicenna was well aware of the problems involved in tying together Aristotle’s movers of the celestialspheres, Neoplatonist star-gods and the angels of religion. How many are there to be? Aristotle and Ptolemyaccepted eight spheres, corresponding to the seven planets (including the sun and the moon) and the fixedstars. In the De caelo Aristotle criticized the Pythagoreans for inventing a ‘counter-earth’—unseen bymortals because the inhabited earth was always turned away from it—to make a total of ten bodiesincluding earth itself, ten being their sacred number (De caelo, 293a, quoted in Butler 1970:6). Ptolemyeventually proposed a ninth sphere to account for an apparent movement in the sphere of the fixed starswhich was unknown to Aristotle. Both Aristotle and Ptolemy realized that the complicated motions of theheavenly bodies could not be accounted for by movements on the peripheries of perfect spheres. Aristotle


posited spheres within spheres and arrived at a total of over fifty—each, presumably, needing a soul, a celestialmover. Is each star-god to be associated with a heavenly body? Or with one of the several spheres needed toaccount for the movement of each heavenly body? And what about the stars, which are neither one spherenor one body? The passage in which Avicenna tackles the problem head-on is inconclusive; but in otherparts of his works dealing with emanation and the role of the angels he assumes that nine spheres are to beaccounted for by means of ten intelligences. So did al-Fārābī, and the decad is the standard pattern in all theArab philosophers, possibly because it could marry Ptolemy’s nine spheres with the decimal notation ofmathematics or the sacred number of the Pythagoreans. But Avicenna is out of line with the purerAristotelians in awarding imagination to some of his angels —and thereby bringing phantasia closer tonous.

Some Stoics and Neoplatonists had given the star-gods sense-perception as well as reason. Al-Kindīdiscussed the question and put forward the opinion that the star-gods might have the two ‘noble’ senses,sight and hearing. In this al-Kindī was no doubt following Proclus, who based his belief on the observationthat the man in the moon has eyes and ears but no nose or mouth. Avicenna does not specify sensation forhis angels; some of them, however, are not pure intelligences but souls, and to these he ascribes‘takhayyul’, the Arabic equivalent of the Greek phantasia, translated into English as ‘imagination’ or‘representation’.

At each stage of the tenfold hierarchy a pure intelligence gives rise to the soul of its heavenly sphere, thebody of that sphere and another pure intelligence which repeats the process at the next stage of emanation.Both the intelligences and the souls are angels. The tenth intelligence is the angel Gabriel or ActiveIntelligence which gives rise to the sublunary realm and illuminates the souls of men. Human imagination,when illuminated by the angel, becomes prophecy. The Greek superiority of reason over imagination ismaintained; the intelligent angels are nearer to God than the soulful ones, and the souls are arranged indescending order of spiritual perfection. But imagination is clearly established in the supernatural world toaccount for the revelation of the prophets.

In his psychology, too, Avicenna preserves the Greek emphasis on intellectual transcendence, with theimplication that intellect is somehow distinct from sensation and imagination and superior to them, butmanages at the same time to promote imagination in importance and power.

Like earlier Alexandrian psychologists, he combines Aristotle with Galen and localizes the variousfaculties of the soul from the front to the rear of the head. Details may vary from one text to another—theearly Concerning the Soul and the later Book of the Deliverance and Canon of Medicine—but the mainscheme is consistent enough throughout.

His account of the senses follows the well-established pattern, except that he differentiates touch into anumber of separate sensations—probably four, he says, registering respectively hot and cold, dry and moist,hard and soft, rough and smooth. ‘But their coexistence in the same organ gives the false impression thatthey are essentially one.’ Thus ‘the external senses are five or eight senses’ (Rahman 1952:27).

Some animals have all five senses, some not. Taste and touch are essential and touch is especiallyimportant to animals; but some lack smell, hearing or sight. As in Aristotle, animals have sensation andimagination but not reason. They appear to be able to recognize the objects of their world withoutconceptualizing their recognitions; they act through what their imagination puts in their souls but cannotreflect upon their course of action. So the sheep, though it has no concept of the wolf, internally sensesdanger in the presence of external wolf-sensations and acts accordingly. The sense of danger is the‘meaning’ of the wolf for the sheep; the Arabic word for the internal sense which registers it is wahm. Thisis a component of psychology not to be found in Aristotle; it may have been suggested to Avicenna by the Stoicnotion of the lekton, which is the meaning of a word or proposition distinguished from the sound of the

70 IMAGINATION

utterance, from the word or words as physical entities. The notion was to appear in the Scholastics of theWest as the ‘first intention’ of a perceived object. In his logic Avicenna distinguished the ‘intention of firstunderstanding’, being that in the perception which affects our impulses to action towards the objectperceived, and the ‘intention of second understanding’ which is its meaning as ‘form’, as ‘universal’. Wahmbecame vis aestimativa in Scholastic Latin.

There is disagreement among scholars as to what wahm can be equated to in the Greek philosophicalvocabulary. One theory equates it with Aristotle’s doxa, the ‘true opinion’ or correct interpretation of sense-data which tells us, for instance, that the sun is larger than the inhabited world although it appears tomeasure only a foot across. But Avicenna’s wahm clearly has, in his account of the internal senses, acomponent of feeling-judgment as well as cognitive judgment. Another theory is that the concept wahm isderived from Aristotle’s concept of physis, and corresponds to our later notion of instinct. Rahman pointsout that in common Arabic usage, as confirmed by dictionaries, wahm can mean either imagination(dictionary equivalent takhayyul) or opinion, belief (dictionary equivalent zann). He also points to anotherpassage in Avicenna which explains these effective reactions in terms of memory of past experience:

If an animal has experienced pleasure or pain or any sensual good or evil associated with a sensible form,the imagination preserves an imprint of the form and memory conserves the association of good orevil with this sensible form…so that when the same form is presented again to the imagination fromwithout, it stirs in the imagination and so the idea of good or evil associated with it is also moved.

(Rahman 1952:81)7

The sensations come into the soul from outside and are then interpreted and acted on through the internalsenses, and there are more of these in Avicenna than there are faculties in Aristotle. We saw earlier howmany ambiguities arise from the early use of phantasia for both perception-pictures and internally generated‘pictures in the mind’. Avicenna speaks of three separate internal senses concerned with images. Phantasiaknits up separate sensations into a total perception; ‘representation’ fixes, as it were, these perceptions in akind of memory—it adds retentiveness to the perception so that it can later reappear as a mental image.‘Imagination’ separates and/or combines mental images. Avicenna tidies up some of the odd ends ofAristotle’s account by equating the first operation, phantasia, with Aristotle’s sensus communis. Commonsense now is not just perception of the common sensibles indicating motion and spatial relations, but thesynthesizer of all the elements of sensation received by the soul. Here is a distinction between fancy andimagination which has nothing in common with the one we noted earlier implying nearness to or distancefrom the objective sensible world. Translation can confuse the issue; in the Latin of Albertus Magnus‘representation’ is imaginatio and ‘imagination’ is phantasia.

Just as perceptions need ‘representation’ to preserve them as potential images, the estimative faculty iseducated through the experiences of pleasure or pain associated with particular perceptions and so needsmemory to record the associations. Thus we have a total of five internal senses: fantasy or sensus communisin the forepart of the front ventricle of the brain, representation in the rear part of the same ventricle;imagination—‘sensitive’ only in animals, ‘rational’ or ‘deliberative’ in man—located in the middleventricle of the brain near the vermiform process; the estimative faculty in the far end of the middleventricle; recollection of the intentions sensed by the estimative faculty is located in the rear ventricle of thebrain.

Avicenna explains at one point how the sensus communis may be distorted by a strong intentionalreaction to some particular quality of the object which is before the senses and result in a false perception;yellow may be so strongly associated with the sweet taste of honey that a yellow object may be seen as


honey when it is something else. The example is perhaps crude, but the principle is interesting enough—that our reading of the sensible world may be distorted by strong preconceptions.

Avicenna has interesting things to say about the way in which the soul abstracts its knowledge fromsensory experience. In the Greek tradition, abstraction is a function of nous and tends to mean theproduction of concepts—the concepts we use in what we call ‘abstract thought’. But, as I.A.Richardspointed out, whatever the mind deals with, in so-called abstract thought or in responding to what Proustcalled ‘impressions’, is somehow abstracted from experience; there is abstraction other than conceptual—which gave rise later to a great deal of ambiguity in the use of the word ‘idea’ by idealist philosophers andSymbolist poets. In Plato and Aristotle, knowledge means abstracting the forms of the sensible world fromits matter. Avicenna separates the process of abstraction into stages; sensation is awareness of form in matter,imagination begins to abstract the form but conveys it with some of its material (and therefore sensory)attachments, its ‘accidental’ qualities;8 wahm or the estimative faculty comprehends intentions, which arestill particular; finally reason abstracts the concept. Imagination is intermediary here, and the concept ismore perfect than the image with its vestiges of particularity. According to Rahman (1952:96–7) this notionof degrees of abstraction was derived from Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Aristotelian commentator wholived about 200 AD. But it can take on added significance in the context of Avicenna’s theory of revelation.Once degrees—and kinds—of abstraction are recognized, they can be held to operate in reverse order when,in the visionary, directly intuited intelligibles are manifested as visions. The symbols through which thevisionary ‘sees’ the intelligible will be universals, or ‘forms’, that have taken on some of the qualitiesusually perceived by the senses in real things; they will exhibit an intermediate degree of ‘abstraction’.

The notion of angelic imagination is discussed by Averroes, who finds it un-Aristotelian and thereforesuspect. In his Incoherence of the Incoherence he criticizes passages from al-Ghazālī’s Incoherence of thePhilosophers, at once correcting al-Ghazālī’s generalization about what the philosophers maintain andpointing out where Avicenna—who is the philosopher mainly in al-Ghazālī’s mind—is unfaithful toAristotle’s views:

What al-Ghazālī mentions here is, to my knowledge, not said by any philosopher except Avicenna,namely that the heavenly bodies have representations, not to speak of the fact that theserepresentations should be infinite; and Alexander of Aphrodisias explains in his book called ThePrinciples of the Universe that these bodies have no representations, because representations existonly in living beings because of their conservation,9 and these bodies do not fear corruption, and withrespect to them representations would be valueless (and likewise sensations). If they hadrepresentations they would also have sensations, since sensations are the condition for representationsand every being which has representations necessarily has sensations although the reverse is not true.

(quoted in Walzer 1962:204)10

Averroes quotes a further passage from al-Ghazālī in which the latter sets out a rather confused set ofnotions, ascribed to ‘the philosophers’, about prophecy. Al-Ghazālī is represented as saying:

And therefore they say that the man who dreams sees in his dreams what will happen in the futurethrough being in contact with the indelible tablet and observing it.11 And when he observes a thing itremains often in his memory as it really was, but sometimes his imagination hastens to symbolize it,for it is of the nature of this faculty to represent things through things which, in some way or another,are related to them, or to transfer things to their opposites; and the thing that was perceived is theneffaced in his memory, but the image belonging to his imagination remains there. Then it is necessary

72 IMAGINATION

to interpret what his imagination symbolizes, e.g. a man by means of a tree, a woman by means of ashoe, a servant by means of some household vessels, and a man who observes the paying of the legalalms and the poor-tax by means of linseed oil, for the linseed in the lamp is the cause of theillumination; it is on this principle that the interpretation of dreams is based.

And they assert that contact with these souls takes place in a state of languor, since then there is noobstacle; for when we are awake we are occupied with what the senses and our passions convey to us,and occupation with those sensual things keeps us away from this contact, but when in sleep some ofthese occupations are obliterated, the disposition for this contact appears. And they assert that theprophet Muhammed perceived the hidden universe in this way; however, the spiritual faculty of aprophet has such power that it cannot be overwhelmed by the external senses, and therefore he sees ina waking condition what other people perceive in their sleep. But his imagination also pictures to himwhat he sees, and although sometimes the thing he sees remains in his memory exactly as it was,sometimes only its representation remains, and such an inspiration is just as much in need ofinterpretation as such dreams are. And if all events were not eternally inscribed on the indelible tablet,the prophets would not know the hidden world either awake or asleep; but the pen had indelibly fixedwhat shall be till the day of resurrection, and the meaning of this we have explained. And this wewanted to impart to make their doctrine understood.

(Averroes 1954:303)

Averroes comments:

We have already said that we do not know of anyone who holds this theory but Avicenna. And theproof which Ghazālī relates rests on very weak premisses, although it is persuasive and dialectical.For it is assumed that every particular effect proceeds from an animate being through the particularrepresentation of this effect and of the particular movements through which this effect is realized. Tothis major premiss a minor premiss is joined, that heaven is an animate being from which particularacts proceed. From these premisses it is concluded that the particular effects, and the particular actswhich proceed from heaven, occur through a particular representation which is called imagin ation;and that this is not only apparent from the different sciences, but also from many animals whichperform particular acts, like the bees and the spider.

But the objection to these premisses is that no particular act proceeds from beings endowed withintellect, except when this act is represented through a universal representation, and then endlessindividual things proceed from it— for instance the form of a cupboard proceeds from a carpenteronly through a universal representation which does not distinguish one particular cupboard fromanother. And the same thing happens when the works of animals proceed by nature from them. Andthese representations are an intermediary between the universal and the particular perceptions; that is,they are an intermediary between the definition of a thing and its particular representation. But if theheavenly bodies have representations, then they must have representations that are of the nature of theuniversal, not of the nature of the particular representation which is acquired through the sense. And itis not possible that our acts should proceed from particular representations, and therefore thephilosophers believe that the represented forms from which the definite acts of animals proceed arelike an intermediary between the intelligibles and the individual forms represented, e.g. the form byreason of which non-carnivorous birds flee from birds of prey, and the form by reason of which beesbuild their cells. The only artisan who needs an individual sensible image is the one who does notpossess this universal representation, which is necessary for the origination of the individual things…


And if it followed from the nature of the heavenly bodies that they think sublunary things by wayof imagination, they must do this through universal imaginations which are the results of definition,not through particular imaginations which are the results of sense-impressions. And it seems quiteclear that they cannot think sublunary things through individual representations especially when it issaid that what proceeds from them proceeds from them by second intention. However, the doctrine ofthe philosophers is that the heavenly bodies think themselves and think the sublunary world, andwhether they think the sublunary world as something different from themselves is a problem thatmust be examined in places specially reserved for this problem; and in general, if the heavens know,the term ‘knowledge’ is attributed to our knowledge of theirs in an equivocal way.

As to the theory he gives here about the cause of revelation and dreams, this is the theory ofAvicenna alone, and the opinions of the ancient philosophers differ from his. For the existence of aknowledge of individuals actually infinite, in so far as it is an individual knowledge, is impossible,and I understand by individual knowledge that kind of apprehension which is called representation.But there is no reason to introduce here the question of dreams and revelation, for this leads to muchcontroversy, and such an act is an act of sophistry, not of dialectics. My statement, however, that theimaginations of the heavenly bodies are imaginations intermediary between individual and universalrepresentations is a dialectical argument; for what results from the principle of the philosophers is thatthe heavenly bodies have no imagination whatever, for these imaginations, as we have said already,whether they are universal or particular, aim only at conservation and protection; and they are also acondition for our intellectual representation, which therefore is transitory, but the intellectualrepresentation of the heavenly bodies, since it is not transitory, cannot be accompanied byimagination, for otherwise it would depend in one way or another on imagination. Therefore theirapprehension is neither universal nor individual, but these two kinds of knowledge, universal andindividual, are here unified, and because of this they can only be distinguished by their matters. Andin this way knowledge of the occult and of dreams and the like can be acquired, and this will beexplained perfectly in its proper place.

(Averroes 1954: I.303–6)

Averroes seems to conceive of a kind of representation which is nevertheless intellectual; he gives his half-way house in abstraction a label which removes it from the domain of imagination, while recognizing it as atrue mental experience. His ‘universal representations’ no doubt correspond to Plato’s ‘mathematicals’ andto the Neoplatonists’ ‘figures’; but he stays as close as he can to Aristotle.

Avicenna not only tries to separate out the internal operations of the mind with more consistency andsystem than Aristotle; he also realizes, as did al-Fārābī, that nous is a very wide concept indeed, and makessome attempt to discriminate aspects of it. The distinction between theoretical and practical reason wasalready well established in Neoplatonism; and Avicenna’s chapter on The rational soul’ begins with thestatement that it is ‘divisible into a practical and a theoretical faculty, both of which are equivocally calledintelligence’ (Rahman 1952:32). Practical reason controls behaviour and makes moral judgments.Theoretical reason is concerned with knowledge of intelligibles, and is considered at four levels, beginningwith intellect as pure potentiality and rising through learning, experience and reflection to pure actuality(intellectus acquisitus), in which degree knowledge becomes an exact reproduction of the intelligible world.Although Avicenna uses terms inherited from al-Fārābī rather than Aristotle, this part of his discussion is inthe spirit of Greek rationalism.

But in the next chapter, ‘How the rational soul acquires knowledge’, intuition and imagination acquire animportance which seems to shift the philosophical perspective from the Greek tradition towards the

74 IMAGINATION

inspiration of the . Avicenna attempts to fit these elements into a Greek framework, the irrational intothe rational; but the role of the irrational, or of those operations of the soul which in the Greek and Plotinianways of thinking are subordinated to reason, becomes more important. There is a direct line to thetranscendent world in which imagination can play an important part; the soul can receive intelligiblesdirectly from the spiritual world and represent them, through imagination, as sensibles.

When reason becomes participation in divine truth through inspiration without the effort of dialectic thedistinction between reason and imagination becomes blurred. Intuition, according to Avicenna, can be sucha close, direct yoking of concepts without articulation of conceptual links, without discursive structure, thatthe meaning can conceivably reach consciousness as images. Avicenna calls one kind of intuition ‘quickwit’, adapting, as he often does, an Aristotelian notion to the Neoplatonist notion of the Active Intelligence.

Aristotle’s ‘quick wit’ or ‘acumen’ is the ability to think logically without consciously tracing all thelogical steps:

Acumen is a talent for hitting upon the middle term in an imperceptible time; e.g. if someone sees thatthe moon always holds its bright side toward the sun and quickly grasps why this is—because it getslight from the sun; or he is aware that someone is talking to a rich man because he is borrowing fromhim; or why they are friends—because they are enemies of the same man. For seeing the extremes hebecomes familiar with all the explanatory middle terms.

The bright side’s being toward the sun, A; getting light from the sun, B; the moon, C.Well, B,getting light from the sun, belongs to C, the moon; and A, the bright side’s being toward that fromwhich it gets light, to B; hence A belongs to C, through B.

(Analytica Posteriora 89b.10 ff.)

For Avicenna the wit is quickened by the direct inspiration of the Active Intelligence, and if Aristotle’sexamples are trivial Avicenna’s praise of intuitive insight is lyrically expressed:

The acquisition of knowledge, whether from someone else or from within oneself, is of variousdegrees. Some people who acquire knowledge come very near to immediate perception, since theirpotential intellect which precedes the capacity we have mentioned is the most powerful. If a personcan acquire knowledge from within himself, this strong capacity is called ‘intuition’. It is so strong incertain people that they do not need great effort, or instruction and actualization, in order to makecontact with the active intelligence. But the primary capacity of such a person for this is so powerfulthat he might also be said to possess the second capacity; indeed, it seems as though he knows everythingfrom within himself. This is the highest degree of this capacity. In this state the material intelligencemust be called ‘Divine Spirit’. It belongs to the genus of intellectus in habitu, but is so lofty that notall people share it. It is not unlikely, indeed, that some of these actions attributed to the ‘DivineIntelligence’ because of their powerful and lofty nature overflow into the imagination whichsymbolizes them in sense-imagery and words in the way which we have previously indicated.

What proves this is the evident fact that the intelligible truths are acquired only when the middleterm of a syllogism is obtained. This may be done in two ways: sometimes through intuition, which isan act of mind by which the mind itself immediately perceives the middle term. This power ofintuition is quickness of apprehension. But sometimes the middle term is acquired throughinstruction, although even the first principles of instruction are obtained through intuition, since allknowledge can be reduced ultimately to certain intuitive principles handed down by those who firstaccepted them to their students.


It is possible that a man may find the truth within himself, and that the syllogism may be effected inhis mind without any teacher. This varies both quantitatively and qualitatively; quantitatively, becausesome people possess a greater number of middle terms which they have discovered themselves; andqualitatively, because some people find the term more quickly than others. Now since thesedifferences are unlimited and always vary in degrees of intensity, and since their lowest point isreached in men who are wholly without intuition, so their highest point must be reached in peoplewho possess intuition regarding all or most problems, or in people who have intuition in the shortestpossible time. Thus there might be a man whose soul has such an intense purity and is so firmly linkedto the rational principles that he blazes with intuition, i.e. with the receptivity of inspiration comingfrom the active intelligence concerning everything. So the forms of all things contained in the activeintelligence are imprinted on his soul either all at once or nearly so, not that he accepts them merelyon authority but on account of their logical order which encompasses all the middle terms. For beliefsaccepted on authority concerning those things which are known only through their causes possess norational certainty. This is a kind of prophetic inspiration, indeed its highest form and the one mostfitted to be called Divine Power; and it is the highest human faculty.

(Rahman 1952:35–7)

The power of imagination in the prophet is also a magical power, a power over matter which can accountfor some kinds of miracles. Aristotle had had a good deal to say about the links between imagination andthe body and the part it can play in bringing bodily states to consciousness, directly or symbolically. TheNeoplatonists had often reflected on this as a two-way relationship—thirst giving rise to images of drinking,daydreams stimulating bodily reactions. A recurrent topic was the physiological effects of sexual images.Avicenna fastens on the idea of the soul affecting the body, thinks of it in terms of a voluntary rather than aninvoluntary effect and extends it to other bodies. Al-Ghazālī thus sums up the resultant doctrine:imagination is

a practical psychological faculty which can reach such a pitch as to influence and subject the things ofnature: for instance, when our soul imagines something the limbs and the potencies in these limbsobey it and move in the required direction which we imagine, so that when a man imagines somethingsweet of taste the corners of his mouth begin to water, and the potency which brings forth the salivafrom the places where it is springs into action, and when coitus is imagined the copulative potencysprings into action, and the penis extends; indeed, when a man walks on a plank between two wallsover an empty space, his imagination is stirred by the possibility of falling and his body is impressedby this imagination and in fact he falls, but when this plank is on the earth, he walks over it withoutfalling. This happens because the body and the bodily faculties are created to be subservient andsubordinate to the soul, and there is a difference here according to the purity and the power of thesouls. And it is not impossible that the power of the soul should reach such a degree that also thenatural power of things outside a man’s body obeys it, since the soul of man is not impressed on hisbody although there is created in man’s nature a certain impulse and desire to govern his body. And ifit is possible that the limbs of his body should obey him, it is not impossible that other things besideshis body should obey him and that his soul should control the blasts of the wind or the downpour ofrain, or the striking of a thunder-bolt or the trembling of the earth, which causes a land to beswallowed up with its inhabitants. The same is the case with his influence in producing cold orwarmth or a movement in the air; this warmth or cold comes about through his soul, all these thingsoccur without any apparent physical cause, and such a thing will be a miracle brought about by a

76 IMAGINATION

prophet. But this only happens in matters disposed to receive it, and cannot attain such a scale thatwood could be changed into an animal or that the moon, which cannot undergo cleavage, could becloven. This is their theory of miracles, and we do not deny anything they have mentioned, and thatsuch things happen to prophets; we are only opposed to their limiting themselves to this, and to theirdenial of the possibility that a stick might change into a serpent, and of the resurrection of the deadand other things.

(Averroes 1954: I.314)

Al-Ghazālī complains only that such a theory of miracles does not go far enough.Avicenna shared more interest in rational explanation than in the mysteries of magic for their own sake;

but some interest in magic is present in Arab philosophers from the time of al-Kindī, and even more in anumber of writers who are not part of the main philosophical tradition. In his treatise on The Theory of theMagic Art, sometimes called On Stellar Rays, al-Kindī discusses first of all the influences radiating from thestars, then the influences which can radiate from the human mind through the exercise of the power ofimagination. The image of a physical object emitted by the mind can have, he says, the same physicaleffects as the physical object itself; it has often been demonstrated that words, uttered in exact accordance withimagination and intention, with due solemnity, firm faith and strong desire can bring about effectsmagically, especially if the stars are favourable (Thorndike 1923: I.645).

Like Plotinus, al-Kindī puts prayer under the heading of magic, but makes much greater claims for itsmagical efficacy, which goes far beyond pacifying the mind of the person praying. Figures and charactersinscribed on various materials can emit influences derived from the stars and cause motion in external objects,or cause or cure diseases in men and animals. Animal sacrifice can also be efficacious in a magical way.But al-Kindī does not believe in the transmutation of base metals into gold by alchemists.

Thorndike discusses other Arab writers on magic in the ninth and tenth centuries—Albumasar, Costa benLuca, Thebit ben Corat and Rasis as they were called when they became known in the Christian West; theirbeliefs vary from notions that still seem reasonable and acceptable, about the psychological effects of beliefin magic and their psychosomatic consequences, to extremes of superstitious nonsense. Rasis did believe inalchemical transmutation. Avicenna’s prophet has perfect imagination as well as perfect intellect and cancommand the matter of the world as the minds of lesser men command their bodies. He is a magician andalchemist as well as seer; perfection of the practical as well as the theoretical intellect means that he is aleader of men and a director of morals and religious observances as well as a philosophical teacher. He is aMagus of the kind that Victor Hugo was later to take as the image of the poet:

Not only is the prophet’s intellect illuminated by the Tenth Intelligence but his imaginative power alsoreceives illumination so that what he perceives abstractly and universally in the intellect appears asconcrete and particular, sensible and verbal, images in the imagination. His mission likewise has twoaspects, one theoretical and the other practical. The first orients the soul of man toward its eternalfelicity by teaching it the basic tenets of belief in the existence of God, the reality of revelation andprophecy and the after life; and the second teaches such practical aspects of religion as the ritual actsto be performed by the believers. The prophet is thereby distinguished from sages and saints first,because his reception of knowledge from the Divine Intellect is complete and perfect and theirspartial, and, second, because he brings a law into the world and directs the practical lives of men andsocieties while the saints seek after knowledge and inner perfection and have no law-bringingfunction.

(Nasr 1964:42–3)


There is yet another side to Avicenna which has separated his modern commentators into the cautiouslypuzzled and the theosophically triumphant; towards the end of his life he wrote texts which, as now known,are incomplete and enigmatic; difficult to reconcile with the strain of Aristotelian rationalism in his better-known writings and pointing to an increased interest in a gnosticism like that of the . Did he become amystic? Did he develop a theosophy like that of the later Suhrawardī and Ibn ‘Arabī? When he claimed thesuperiority of the Oriental over the Occidental, was he distinguishing the mystical from the discursive, ordid he mean two different strains of formal logic, claiming that his own development of Aristotelian andStoic logic was better than some other kind, more slavishly copied from Aristotle?

In his last work on logic, the Logic of the Orientals, he makes some strange statements. If he deviatesfrom the Greeks, he writes, it is by no means through ignorance or lack of understanding;

it is not improbable that certain sciences may have reached us from elsewhere than the side of theGreeks…we then compared all these with that variety of science which the Greeks call logic—and itis not improbable that it may have a different name among the Orientals.

(Afnan 1958:89)

It is now assumed by some that this Logic of the Orientals was part of a much larger book called ThePhilosophy of the Orientals. In other late works—the Ishārāt or Book of Directives and Remarks, or Bookof Indications and Hints, and in a work written in Persian, the Book of Knowledge, Avicenna moves awayfrom Aristotle, and the final pages of the Ishārāt are about the Gnostic experience, which seems to be thetheme also of the allegories (or as some commentators call them, the ‘visionary recitals’) written also late inlife: The Living Son of the Awake, The Recital of the Bird and Salāmān and Absāl. The Ishrārāt shows asympathetic understanding of the gnosis and gives a detailed and subtle account of the mystic way.

What is particularly interesting here is that Avicenna had recourse to imaginative writing at this time ofhis life to convey what he understood by gnosis; and his three allegorical narratives embody the paradoxoften noted in later Western literature of mysticism —the use of fictional images to convey an experienceheld to be beyond and above sensation and imagination, with the implication nevertheless that, whatever theultimate relationship between nous and phantasia, the latter can fill the mind with experiences nearer to theultimate mystical experience than discursive thinking can ever be. The narratives are basically allegorical,and the correspondences with Avicenna’s philosophical writings are made clear in a contemporary Persiancommentary; but in what A.E.Affifi calls ‘a peculiar mixture of mythology, natural philosophy,metaphysics, religion and mysticism’ (1939:847) there are aspects which remain doubtful or obscure—andwhich are interpreted in the symbol-reading style of Jung or Mircea Eliade by commentators sympathetic totheosophy, chief of whom is Henry Corbin. The main features of the Gnostic ascent are clear enough.

‘The Master’ who is the narrator meets a sage, old and venerable yet shining with youth, who callshimself the ‘Living Son of the Awake’ and is obviously the Active Intelligence. The soul must divest itselfof all sensible ties, all ‘evil companions’—one of which is to be interpreted as imagination; the Persiancommentary enlarges on the implications of Avicenna’s positional psychology:

In the middle of the brain there is a passageway from the anterior to the posterior cavity; it is calledthe intermediate cavity. There another faculty, called the ‘active Imagination’, has its seat. It has theright to inspect the two treasuries [i.e. the ‘anterior treasury’ of memory-images and the ‘posteriortreasury’ of recollected ‘intentions’ or ‘significances’]; it mingles, co-ordinates, and recomposesforms and significances. Sometimes it seizes a fragment of these, and it is in this state that our soulthen comes to know them. Sometimes what reaches the soul is true, sometimes it is false. Thus the

78 IMAGINATION

Master says: ‘The companion who walks before thee is mendacious and frivolous; nevertheless, he isthine emissary and enlightener’, for it is through his channel that Knowledge reaches the soul. We canseparate true from false by seeking for proofs and indications.

(Corbin 1960:302)

But this last injunction to check imagination by philosophy belongs to the commentary and not the text,which says simply:

It may happen that sometimes divine aid will lead thee by the hand and rescue thee from the strayingthat leads nowhere, and that sometimes thou wilt remain in perplexity and stupor; and sometimes itmay happen that false testimony will seduce thee.

(Corbin 1960:299)

The same message is repeated in the next chapter: the soul is to mistrust imagination

unless it befall that he bring thee some weighty testimony from God. In that case, yes, rely upon hiswords, receive what he tells thee. Beware, that is, of systematically suspecting all his words, turning adeaf ear to the news he brings thee, even though he mingle true with false therein, for, in it all, therecannot but be something to be received and investigated, something whose truth it is worth while torealize.

(Corbin 1960:305)

The allegory is pursued in terms of matter and spirit—the Western and the Eastern aspects of the sensibleworld; the Active Intelligence is the very spirit of the Orient and shows the narrator’s soul how to risethrough the nine spheres to the First Active Intellect, king and father of all intellects, manifestation of theOne with all the traditional attributes of God. ‘Whoever perceives a trace of this beauty fixes hiscontemplation upon it forever’ (Corbin 1960:373).

After Avicenna the shift towards mysticism among Arab religious thinkers was more pronounced. ThePeripatic tradition moved its centre into Andalusia and reached its greatest faithfulness to Aristotle inAverroes; at the centre of the Muslim world Illuminism and Gnosis took on greater importance. Al-Ghazālī,who was saved from religious doubt and spiritual sickness by mysticism in a way which makes onethink of Claudel’s religious inspiration fired by Rimbaud’s Illuminations, wrote first a summary of the ideasof the Arab Aristotelians in The Purposes of the Philosophers, then a refutation of what he considered to betheir irreligious elements in The Incoherence of the Philosophers,12 which provoked Averroes’s rebuttal inthe famous Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes criticizes not only the thorough-going anti-philosophical -inspired religion of al-Ghazālī, but the Avicennian compromise. Aristotle, cleared ofNeoplatonism, moved from the centre of Islam to Spain; the Andalusian theosophist Ibn ‘Arabī, born in Spain,moved in the opposite direction; symbolically, one might say, Illuminism moved back with him towards itsorigins, through Morocco and Syria into Persia.

Suhrawardī, born in Persia in 1153, is an Illuminist in the full sense; his cosmology is expressed in termsof light. Behind him is the tradition of the mystics, who first appeared about 800 AD, which had alsoinfluenced Avicenna; and all these are Gnostics, Illuminists in a more general and partly metaphorical sense.The emphasis the place on love is often attributed to Christian influence. Orthodox Islam and the Quran have a place for love and an even greater place for compassion, but the emphasis in the relation of man toGod is rather on God’s power and man’s submission; on God’s absolute unity and transcendence. The


’ attitude to God is one of passionate love; God is the Beloved. His immanence in the sensible world is asimportant for them as his transcendence; God can be seen in all things. A recurring image in writingsis the mirror; the world is the mirror of God. The Persian Bāyazīd of Bistām, claimed as one of the great teachers by Suhrawardī, was the first great exponent of the notion of fanā, the passing away of theindividual self into God.13 But God is Universal Being as well as transcendent unity, and the feelingexpressed by the is sometimes decried as pantheism for that reason. Their feeling for God as theBeloved is expressed in the language of sensual ecstasy, and to the uninitiated reader is as ambiguous as themost sensual poems of Baudelaire.

The view of intuitive wisdom which Gemisthus Plethon grafted on to the Greek tradition—a viewsupposedly derived from Zoroaster and the Magi through the Chaldaean oracles and the Hermetica andtransmitted to the Florence of the Rennaisance— has a good deal in common with that of the .Suhrawardī believed his wisdom to be derived through two chains of descent from Hermes andAgathedemon, identified with Seth; one chain went from Agathedemon through a series of mythical Persianwise men and kings, the other through Asclepius, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato and the Neoplatonists andtwo earlier . In a dream he saw the author of the so-called Theology of Aristotle —which was really aparaphrase of parts of Plotinus—and asked him if the Peripatetics like al-Fārābī and Avicenna were the realphilosophers in Islam. Aristotle answered, ‘Not a degree in a thousand. Rather, the and Tustān are thereal philosophers.’ Suhrawardī saw Aristotle as the man who distorted the traditional wisdom derivedthrough Plato from the philosophia perennis et universalis by limiting nous to its rationalistic aspect. Hedefined his own Ishrāqī wisdom as follows:

Although before the composition of this book I composed several summary treatises on Aristotelianphilosophy, this book differs from them and has a method peculiar to itself. All of its material has notbeen assembled by thought and reasoning; rather, intellectual intuition, contemplation and asceticpractices have played a large role in it. Since our sayings have not come by means of rationaldemonstration but by inner vision and contemplation, they cannot be destroyed by the doubts andtemptations of the skeptics. Whoever is a traveler on the road to Truth is my companion and aid onthis path. The procedure of the master of philosophy and imām of wisdom, the Divine Plato, was thesame, and the sages who preceded Plato in time like Hermes, the father of philosophy, followed thesame path. Since sages of the past, because of the ignorance of the masses, expressed their sayings insecret symbols, the refutations which have been made against them have concerned the exterior ofthese sayings not their real intentions. And the Ishrāqī wisdom, whose foundation and basis are the twoprinciples of light and darkness as established by the Persian sages, like Jāmāsp, Farshādshūr andBūzarjumihr, is among these hidden, secret symbols.

(Nasr 1964:63)

Al-Fārābī and Avicenna had established imagination as a link between perception, the reason of nous andtheophanic vision. Suhrawardī’s link is light; not only theophanic vision, but the sight of everyday things isillumination of the soul by angels. He rejects—as Avicenna had done—the view that the eye projects a raywhich is reflected from the seen object; but also the Aristotelian view that light is emitted by the object andreceived by the eye. For him, the soul of the observer surrounds a lighted object and is illuminated by itslight; in a universe made entirely of divine light, where shadows are only the obstruction of light, the soulcan receive the divine through every act of consciousness, whether of perception or of inner contemplation.

In these writings theophanic vision takes precedence over the systematic theorizing, based on Aristotelianscience and logic, of al-Fārābī and Avicenna. These had, as we should say now, imagined their hierarchies

80 IMAGINATION

of angels, but fitted them into basically conceptual orders. Suhrawardī’s order is one of feeling rather thanthought, and his symbolism is governed by his feeling for light. His patterns are primarily patterns ofimages. The angels proliferate; everything in the universe is a ‘theurgy’ or ‘icon’ of an angelic archetype—all of Plato’s forms become angels, the light in every aspect of the sensible world. Some parts of thesensible world are more directly symbolic of their origin in light than others. Precious stones, for instance, areparticularly akin to the light in the human soul. In the vertical hierarchy of angels, each dominates the onebelow and loves the one above; nous is becoming sexualized into masculine and feminine poles, correspondingto the animus and anima of the medieval mystics whose conception of personality captivated Claudel.Logic, cause and effect give way to affect: the angels move the heavens through love. Each human soul hasits magic counterpart in the transcendent world and longs to be united with it; in life it is a lost child in themaze of the cosmic labyrinth.14

We saw how Avicenna introduced souls into his angelic hierarchy and gave these angelic soulsimagination. With the Illuminists we draw near to the angelism of the Pseudo-Dionysius and St JohnDamascene, to the Proclus-inspired current of Christian Neoplatonism in which the spiritual world includesnot only the Platonic forms as the intellectual archetypes of all created things but sketches for their plasticrealization—as St John Damascene put it, not only ‘things known beforehand’ but ‘things marked outbeforehand’. The Arab Illuminists offer to imagination an intermediate world between the ideal and thesensible. The theosophy which provided some late Neoplatonists with the doctrine of the ‘vehicle of thesoul’ or the astral body, which they superimposed upon the Greek rational tradition, here becomes centraland dominant. Besides the cosmic intelligence there is a cosmic imagination; and as far as spiritualexperience in the sublunary world is concerned, imagination is as important as thought.

The after-life is arranged in a hierarchy like the cosmos. The sages and theosophers, the ‘illuminated’ascend above the angelic world to the realm of pure light. Those who have lived in darkness and ignoranceremain in the intermediary world of the cosmic imagination, the habitat of jinns (corresponding to Plato’sdaemons). Those who have reached some measure of spiritual awareness go to the world of archetypes,where the agreeable sensations of the sensible world are experienced in their perfection. This corresponds tothe later mystical world of Boehme, perhaps to Schopenhauer’s world of aesthetic ideas. It is the kind ofheaven likely to appeal to artists whose aim is to achieve transcendence through images and sensible forms.In such a vision, however high the soul mounts in the spiritual world, the delights of the sensible world arepresent in a rarefied and perfected awareness.

With Ibn ‘Arabī the pantheistic tendencies in Neoplatonism and mysticism became even morepronounced and explicit; but although the emphasis is on the immanence of the divine in the sensible worldthe transcendence of God is maintained. To know God is somehow to transcend our everyday phenomenalexperience, and to know God is to know the unity of all things in God. God is all and all is God. Ibn‘Arabī’s thinking is as complex, obscure and full of paradox as that of the Pseudo- Dionysius, but whereasin the latter the paradox arises mainly from the simultaneous awareness of God-as-all-being and God-as-beyond-all-being, a good many of the apparent contradictions in Ibn ‘Arabī’s ideas arise out of the switch ofperspective to and fro between the metaphysical and the phenomenal.15

From the metaphysical point of view all is unity, so that it makes no sense to ask whether the soul is aunity, or whether the soul is united with the body. From the phenomenal point of view Ibn ‘Arabī does asksuch questions, and investigates like his rationalist predecessors the structure and functioning of thephenomenal world. There is little doubt that his main interest is in the metaphysical. Imagination is given arole in perception very like the now familiar one derived from Aristotle, intermediary between sensation andtrue knowledge; but Ibn ‘Arabī’s true knowledge is as much a matter of imagination as of conceptual clarityand logical relations. True knowledge must be, for him, more comprehensive than the kind of reason


implied by the Greek tradition; it involves awareness of God not simply as the Platonic forms, but as theforms realizing themselves in the coming-into-actuality of the created world, all the elements of which areeternally in potential in the being of God. The idea we have found already in Avicenna and Suhrawardī, thatthe spiritual world is made up of souls as well as pure intelligences, images as well as forms, takes on a newimportance in Ibn ‘Arabī.

Between the world of forms and the sensible world is the world of ‘similitudes’. Through intelligence andimagination working together the human mind achieves the balance between transcendence and immanencenecessary for a proper awareness of the divine. Intelligence makes for transcendence: imagination isawareness of the form already dressed in quasi-sensible garb and joins immanence and transcendence. Ibn‘Arabī’s Perfect Man, like the prophet as described by al-Fārābī and Avicenna, knows through perfectintellect and perfect imagination working together; Ibn ‘Arabī goes further than his predecessors and giveshis Perfect Man a better knowledge of God than the angels can have. The old idea of man as microcosm re-surfaces here; the Perfect Man sums up in himself all that is manifested in the universe. Idris, identified by aJewish tradition and then by some Muslims as Hermes, is said by Ibn ‘Arabī to have exaggerated puretranscendence and therefore to have been ignorant of half the truth. The Platonic dualism, which sees thesensible world as transcendent forms imperfectly realized in recalcitrant matter gives way to a monism inwhich everything that ever becomes in the sensible world already is—matter and all, so to speak—in the divinebeing. The coming-into-existence of divine potentiality takes place at every instant of phenomenal time.

Affifi points out that Ibn ‘Arabī’s whole attitude is summed up in these verses of his summa, the Gems ofPhilosophy or Bezels of Wisdom:

If you assert (pure) transcendence you limit God,And if you assert (pure) immanence you define Him.But if you assert both things, you follow the right course,And you are a leader and a master in gnosis.He who asserts duality is a polytheist,And he who asserts oneness is a unitarian.Beware of tashbíh if you couple (i.e. God and universe),And beware of tanzíh if you assert oneness.You are not He, nay, you are He, and you see Him inThe a‘yān of things, absolute and limited.

(Affifi 1939:21)

Roughly speaking, tashbíh is anthropomorphism, tanzíh is transcendence beyond all definition. The a’yānof things is their potentiality in God, determinate forms of the divine essence.

Ibn ‘Arabī uses ‘images’ and ‘imagination’ (khayāl) in as a great a variety of contexts and with as manyspecific meanings as any of the thinkers we have met; images as perception-pictures, pictures in the mindarising spontaneously or summoned at will, dream-pictures, visions, reflections in a mirror. Dreams may besimply pointless combinations of images recalled from daily life, associated with objects of desire andmagnified. Or they may convey truth in symbols which need to be interpreted. Or they may present truthdirectly, without symbolic transformation or need for interpretation. But what is characteristic of his way ofthinking is that images are hypostasized, independently of any particular thinking mind, as beings in anintermediary spirit world.

82 IMAGINATION

It is through these ‘similitudes’ of the intermediary world that the mystic can exercise his will-power, alhimmah, summoning up spirits and even creating objects in the external world. One of Ibn ‘Arabī’sdisciples claimed that the master

had the power to meet the spirit of any dead Prophet or Saint, either by causing the spirit to descend tothis world and seeing it incorporated in a ‘similitudinary form’ [sûra mithāliyyah] resembling thesensible form of the person wanted, or by causing the spirit to appear in his dreams, or bydisembodying himself and meeting the spirit.

(Affifi 1939:133)

The plane of similitudes and the plane of the sensible are two out of five planes of being which are seen asdistinct kinds by the individuated subjectivity living in the everyday world but are metaphysically one.Things can be preserved by God in one or other of these five planes, and since the heart of the Perfect Manis the centre of all divine activities (the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm) the mystic can concentrateactivity in the plane of similitudes and even in the plane of the sensible. He can actualize any potentialities,since all that can ever happen is already potentially in being. Creation, whether by God or man, is makingthe latent manifest. The Perfect Man is ‘to God as the eye-pupil is to the eye…and through him Godbeholds His creatures’ ( 19, quoted in Landau 1959:58).

This includes the inanimate: sticks and stones are also God and possess the divine rationality, but nomeans of knowing any divinity other than their own stick-ness or stone-ness. Only man can know all thingsin God.

The motive force in this pantheistic system is love of beauty. The Perfect Man loves God’s beauty, and Godloves the created world because his own latent beauty is reflected in it. There is no question here, as inPlotinus, of the eventual primacy of the Good over the Beautiful. For Ibn ‘Arabī, as for Keats, beauty istruth and truth is beauty. Beauty is manifest through light; all kinds of knowledge—perceptual, intuitive,contemplative—come through light. Hearing and touching, as well as seeing, are a kind of light.

Imagination has as important a part to play in the spiritual world of Ibn ‘Arabī as in that of the Pseudo-Dionysius and is not subject to the direction of any ecclesiastical tradition, any clearly defined embodimentof divine reason. The symbolic literature that reveals truth to the initiates of Dionysius’s church is the Bible,interpreted by authority. The have their personal interpretations of the Qur’an and supplement it withtheir own religious poetry. Ibn ‘Arabī makes large claims for personal inspiration:

In what I have written I have never had a set purpose, as other writers. Flashes of divine inspirationused to come upon me and almost overwhelm me, so that I could only put them from my mind bycommitting to paper what they revealed to me. If my works evince any form of composition, that formwas unintentional. Some works I wrote at the command of God, sent to me in sleep or through amystical revelation.

(1971:48)

It is in the Muslim world that we find for the first time a theory of inspiration centred on imagination toexplain and justify not simply the past literature of a religious tradition but a new, spontaneous literaturecreated by individual minds choosing their own symbolic vehicles for what they have to express. This doesnot, of course, mean that their practice bears out their theory or that they are freed from the conventions oftheir own literary tradition.


In the Greek literary tradition the Muslims showed no interest; dramatic poetry was so foreign to themthat translators completely failed to understand Aristotle’s Poetics and even to realize that tragedy andcomedy were acted on a stage. But there was a long tradition of lyric poetry in Arabic going back tocenturies before Mohammed; and poetry came to play an important part in the mystic life, both as astimulus to mystical experience—the equivalent of Dionysius’s liturgy—and as an expression of mysticalinsight. Some of the poems are immediately recognizable as religious hymns, in which the name of‘Beloved’ applied to God occasions no great surprise; but in others the sensuous and more particularlyerotic imagery shocked the less mystical and more legalistic minds of contemporaries and invests the poemswith a strange ambiguity of feeling. What can be called the Beatrice theme in poetry—spiritualascension through the inspiration of a woman beautiful in soul or body—can take on the rich sensuality ofthe Song of Solomon. Ibn ‘Arabī’s Dīwān or collection of mystical odes called the Tarjumān Al-Ashwāqwas read by some as erotic poetry, so that he felt obliged to write a commentary to bring out the mysticalsignificance; as best he could, he wrote, for he was not always sure of the true meaning himself. Hiscomments are not always much clearer than the poems, but they do claim that some ‘higher’ meaning isthere.16

In the early days of the the use of ritual song and dance as means to mystical experience had beensharply criticized by some, but the practice had become established. So, too, had the contemplation ofbeautiful young men and boys. This was supposed to be totally divorced from sexuality; to enjoy a boy’sbeauty, said al-Ghazālī, is like ‘gazing at a ruddy apple or blossom’. The consolation so derived ‘may be ofthe same kind as one gets from [looking at] water, or green pastures, or blossom, or a beautiful picture, andthere can be no harm in this’ (quoted in Zaehner 1960:179). But by the twelfth century love and lust wereconfused by a good many .

The Proclean current in Eastern Christianity had led to the promotion and the reasoned defence of theliturgical use of images.

Mohammed’s ban on the making of statues or images was observed in the Muslim world; there is noreligious art and very little painting. Muslim philosophers could understand and appreciate the symbolicfunction of image-worship in other religions— Ibn ‘Arabī in particular makes a great point of the genuinethough partial validity of every religion’s approach to the divine; but there was no iconoclastic crisis tostimulate discussion of the function of images. Ibn ‘Arabī has one intriguing if not very illuminatingreference to painting in his Meccan Revelations:

It is from the divine Name, the Creator…that there derives the inspiration to painters in bringingbeauty and proper balance to their pictures. In this connection I witnessed an amazing thing in Konyain the land of the Greeks. There was a certain painter whom we proved and assisted in his art inrespect of a proper artistic imagination, which he lacked. One day he painted a picture of a partridgeand concealed in it an almost imperceptible fault. He then brought it to me to test my artistic acumen.He had painted it on a large board, so that its size was true to life. There was in the house a falconwhich, when it saw the painting, attacked it, thinking it to be a real partridge with its plumage in fullcolour. Indeed all present were amazed at the beauty of the picture. The painter, having taken theothers into his confidence, asked for my opinion on his work. I told him I thought the picture wasperfect, but for one small defect. When he asked what it was, I told him that the length of its legs wasout of proportion very slightly. Then he came and kissed my head.

(1971:40–1)

84 IMAGINATION

The aesthetic lesson here is not very clear; it seems to be that true representation, the ability to produce aperfect illusion, depends on divine inspiration. The other lesson is that Ibn ‘Arabī’s judgment of the prefectillusion was not only better than the falcon’s— which is perhaps not very surprising—but the best of allthose present; the sort of superiority that he frequently claims for himself.

There are any number of claims, too, to miraculous powers, in himself or the of his acquaintance:levitation, walking on water, healing, miraculous provision of figs and honey for the family of thepreoccupied philosopher and handling fire without pain or harm. With Ibn ‘Arabī the vis imaginativa reallycame into its own; he is said to have had a tremendous influence on the who came after him—not onlyon the way they understood gnosis but on their whole way of life.


7The Western Middle Ages

Of the two components of nous obscurely related in Plato and clearly distinguished by Neoplatonists,contemplation, direct intuition was emphasized by Eastern Christianity and discursive thinking, dialecticalor logical reasoning from clearly defined concepts was emphasized by the medieval West. In the earlyAugustine-dominated phase there is still some recognition of the difference between the two modes ofknowledge; and in the twelfth century we find Dominicus Gundisalvi or Gundissalinus, Archbishop ofSegovia, distinguishing in his treatise On the Soul between intelligentia and intellectus, the former acquiringwisdom through mystical knowledge, the latter arriving at ‘science’. The influences here are Augustine andAvicenna; Avicenna’s ‘active intelligence’ is interpreted as the equivalent of Augustine’s ‘illumination’coming not from an angel but directly from God. But Aquinas does his best to bring what Gundissalinuscalls intelligentia into line with intellectus and ratio. The ‘higher reason’ (ratio Superior) through whicheternal things are known is not, according to Aquinas, a different faculty from the ratio inferior which is themeans of temporal knowledge. Nor is there any real difference between theoretical and practical reason. Themind is one, and works through its natural intellectual power, God-given but not directly inspired from anysupernatural agent, even God.

Even in Augustine, as we saw earlier, ‘illumination’ means some-thing recognizably different from that ofthe Gnostic tradition and that of the Gnostic-influenced Greek Fathers. There is no more than a vestigialsuggestion in the most typical Western theology of the idea of initiation into a special insight which carrieswith it the means to re-ascend the ladder of emanation. Emanation almost disappears from the main streamof Western thinking, always suspicious of any tendency to polytheism or pantheism. The pre-ScholasticAugustinian phase, we are often told, is Platoinfluenced: the rise of Scholasticism is said to mark theascendency of Aristotle over Plato. But although Augustine was influenced by Plotinus and is thereforecredited with the more spiritual or ‘mystical’ elements in Western Christianity, his reservations aboutPlotinus bring him nearer to the Plato of the dialectic, the reasoning Plato, with Platonic reservations aboutthe visionary sides of the human mind and an Aristotelian psychology. Anselm’s credo ut intelligam is notfar from Augustine’s position and is typical of even the earlier phase of medieval Western thought:

I do not attempt, O Lord, to penetrate Thy profundity, for I deem my intellect in no way sufficientthereunto, but I desire to understand in some degree Thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. ForI do not seek to understand, in order that I may believe; but I believe, that I may understand. For Ibelieve this too, that unless I believed, I should not understand.

(quoted in Copleston 1950–3:II.156)

The greatest exception to all this is the thought of John Scotus Erigena, an Irish offshoot of the so-called‘Carolingian Renaissance’. The gap between Erigena’s attitudes of mind and Augustine’s is far wider than

that between Augustine’s and the Scholastics’. If Augustine brought to the West something of the spirit of aPlotinian Neoplatonism shorn of its paganism and retracted towards the classical Plato, Erigena offered theWest a revival of the kind of Christian theology inspired by Proclean Neoplatonism and found his offerrejected by most, chiefly because it smacked of pantheism.

Erigena must have been one of the few Western thinkers of his time to have any knowledge of Greek,which had persisted later among Irish scholars of the early Middle Ages than elsewhere, but must have hadparticular rarity value at the beginning of the ninth century. Louis the Fair had been presented with theworks of the Pseudo-Dionysius, and wanted them translated into Latin. A monk or group of monks of theAbbaye de Saint-Denis made a translation which was revised by Erigena, who added translations of worksby St Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. The texts of these Eastern Christians inspired Erigenato work out his own detailed philosophical system in his De divisione naturae, probably between 862 and866.

Erigena’s system avoids the crudest sort of pantheism by providing a supernatural status for God, butmakes this status ambiguous by using the term ‘Nature’ for the supernatural as well as the sensible world.The first of his four divisions of Nature, ‘Nature which creates and is not created’ corresponds to theCreator-God of orthodoxy; yet his God only comes to be completely God in what he creates. This leads tothe same set of paradoxes as is found in the Pseudo-Dionysius. God is, and is not, everything that appears tobe. The sensible world is a theophany, a manifestation of God; yet we can only move from observationsabout the sensible world to some kind of awareness of God through metaphor. For instance, God is what weknow from our own experience as wisdom, yet he is not wisdom as we know it. He is super-wisdom, whichis also not-our-wisdom. Awareness of God results from a balancing of affirmation and negation. God is seeneverywhere in created Nature, but he is not as he is so seen.

Erigena’s four divisions of Nature—that which creates but is not created, that which is created andcreates (the domain of forms considered as archetypes manifesting the Word), that which is created anddoes not create (the creatures of the sensible world), and that which neither creates nor is created (God asthe final cause towards which all creation tends)—translate into new terms the Dionysian version of processionand return, but with even greater emphasis on the real and observable presence of God in creation;Erigena’s emphasis on the immediacy of this presence leads him constantly into statements that seemclearly pantheistic. Though he repeatedly asserts that God is originally transcendent, he writes as if creationwere a continuous process, an eternal process, vested as it were in the nature of God which is to actualizethe divine potential (see e.g. Copleston 1950–3: II.127).

Man is the microcosm of creation, the link between the material and the spiritual; the human soul, as itwere, lives in itself the procession and the return. Though Erigena says that only in Christ is human naturesubstantially united with the Godhead, a more pantheistic tendency sometimes shows itself: ‘For God willbe all in all, where nothing will exist but God alone.’ All creation returns to its cause through man, and therecan be no eternal damnation, though only the ‘elect’ among men will enjoy what Erigena calls deificatiothrough the free gift of God’s grace.

An earlier work of Erigena’s on predestination had incurred suspicion of heresy and been condemned bytwo Church Councils; the Archbishop of Reims, to whom it was dedicated, complained that he was beingfed with Irish (or Scots) porridge. St Jerome had made the same joke about Pelagius, and Erigena wasthought by the more orthodox to be sailing very close to the wind of Pelagianism, that is the denial oforiginal sin, and pantheism. His doctrines had a continuing minority influence, which united in the latetwelfth century with Arab ideas to bring to the surface a new current of pantheistic thinking. Amaury deBènes, a Sorbonne professor who died early in the thirteenth century, was among those accused of pantheist

THE WESTERN MIDDLE AGES 87

heresy. He was condemned, together with the doctrines of Erigena, in 1210, after his death, and in 1225Pope Honorius III ordered all copies of Erigena’s De divisione naturae to be officially burned.

What exactly does ‘theophany’ mean for Erigena? Something more, evidently, than the Psalmist’scontention that ‘the heavens declare the glory of God’. His discussion of the principle of affirmationbalanced by negation suggests that the human mind can reason its way, by metaphor and analogy based onexperience in this world, to some notion of the divine. But there also seems to be, in Erigena’s notion oftheophany, an element of gnosis, of what might be called ‘unreasoning reason’.

In his book on Erigena Henry Bett remarked that the sense attached by Erigena to ‘theophany’ is notclear or consistent:

It seems generally to mean every manifestation of God through the medium of his creation. But it isonly the devout soul that is prepared to receive the higher manifestations, and it is only to such soulsthat these are given. The words of Maximus are quoted as a definition of Theophany in the narrowersense. ‘As far as the human mind ascends in love, so far the divine wisdom descends in mercy.’Theophany, therefore, in this more restricted sense is, on the part of man, an ascent to God in whichevery good desire and deed is a step, and on the part of God, a revelation of Himself to the humanspirit in such fashion as our intelligence can understand.

(1925:24)

The ‘intelligence’ to which such understanding is vouchsafed is evidently not reasoning power, but themystical insight of the Neoplatonists.

In the twelfth century there are signs of renewed interest in the Greeks. The School of Chartres re-injected a little Platonism into the Augustinian tradition from the study of the only Platonic text they hadavailable, which was an incomplete translation of the Timaeus; Bernard of Chartres adopted Aristotle’sdoctrine that natural objects are constituted of form and matter, but combined this with Plato’s notion offorms as the patterns from which the sensible world is made. William of Conches got himself into sometrouble by identifying Plato’s World-Soul with the Holy Ghost. Of Neoplatonism there is little to be foundamong the scholars of Chartres. Theodoric of Chartres used formulae that can be construed as pantheistic—‘all forms are one form; the divine form is all forms’; but the vagueness of such statements keeps themsafely within the general idea of creation as the one becoming the many, which is not particular enough tolean either towards creation as a free and decisive act of God or emanation flowing from divine necessityand putting more of God Himself into Nature.

There are a few more signs of interest not only in the classical Greeks but in the Greek Fathers among theAugustinian Canons of the Abbey of St Victor near Paris. Peter Lombard, who attempted a systematicexposition of dogma in his very influential books of Sentences, was educated at the School of St Victor,taught at the Cathedral School of Paris and eventually became bishop of Paris between 1150 and 1152; heuses mainly Augustine and the Latin Fathers, but mentions St John Damascene, though he seems to haveknown little of Damascene’s writings.

Another great systematizer of knowledge was Hugh of St Victor, who was in charge of the school from1133 until his death in 1141. He used Erigena’s Latin translation of the PseudoDionysius to write acommentary on the Celestial Hierarchy. There is perhaps a faint reflection of the Gnostics in his account ofthe relationship between knowledge and faith; but his view of knowledge implies clarity rather than agnosisand insight rather than blinding dazzle. The mysteries of religion are ‘above’ reason (supra rationem) butthey are in accord with reason (secundum rationem, not contra rationem); faith is essential in our sin-darkened existence, but knowledge is above faith. The supreme knowledge is, of course, the beatific vision

88 IMAGINATION

and is a knowing love, as in all the Christian mystics; but in Hugh of St Victor it carries with it no lack ofreverence for dialectic and logic in the spiritual ascent.

But, as Bundy was quick to point out, Hugh of St Victor gives imagination more credit than mostmedieval thinking (1927: 200–1). His psychology is still basically Aristotelian—sensation servingimagination which in turn serves reason; but, like Plutarch of Athens, Proclus and other late Neoplatonists,Hugh emphasizes the spirituality rather than the materiality of the world of images in the mind. In histreatise On the Union of Body and Spirit he uses terms that can remind the reader of Keats, though he neverprefers sensation to thought. Before the lower reason can ascend to the higher, dialectic to contemplation,body must be united with mind; though sensuous awareness seems to be in the final account a means ratherthan an integral part of the total awareness of the divine. The proper relation between spirit and body Hughcalls sensualitas and contemplatio; contemplation of the divine depends on revelation as sensualitas dependson the senses. As in the late Neoplatonists, the Aristotelian hierarchy is maintained, but imagination ispromoted for special regard within it:

Nothing in the body is higher or nearer to the spiritual nature than what the force of imagination,coming after sense, and beyond the reach of the sense, conceives. What is more sublime than this isreason. The igneous force, at any rate, which, when extrinsically formed, is termed ‘sense’ is called‘imagination’ when brought within in the same form.1

Imagination is presented here less as subordinate than as intermediary, the intercessor between the naturaland the spiritual. There comes the familiar warning of the ambiguity of imagination, however:

Rational substance is corporeal light; imagination, which is a similitude of body, is shade. Imaginationascends to reason as shadow comes to light; sometimes it is made manifest, sometimes it obscures.Reason uses imagination as a vestment outside and around it; if reason becomes too pleased with itsdress, imagination, this imagination adheres to it like a skin; separation is effected only with greatpain… The mind delighted with body in this wise is deformed by the phantasies of corporealimagination, and impressed deeply with these, it is not able to sever its union with the body.

(Bundy 1927:201–2)

In Hugh of St Victor we find the tendency, typical of the Neoplatonists, to express thought through imagesrather than concepts; in Richard of St Victor we find the role of imagination developed in a full-scaleallegory. This is the Benjamin Minor, in which Rachel, who is reason, keeps in touch with the outside worldthrough her faithful handmaid, Bilhah, representing imagination. Again comes the familiar warning:Bilhah’s services are essential but sometimes over-zealous:

But Bilhah is garrulous and loquacious. Nor can Rachel rule even in her own house; with suchpersistence does Bilhah din in the ears of the heart that Rachel cannot live with her. So it is that oftenwhen we sing and pray, we ought to remove from the eyes of the heart the phantasies of thought, orwhat might be called the images of things. The heart, though unwilling, is perpetually calling upimages of memory.

(Bundy 1927:203)

Yet Rachel


has children first by her handmaid, Bilhah. For sweet it is in imagination at least to retain a memoryof that which intelligence cannot yet apprehend by the force of reason… Therefore reason persuadesherself the more easily to think of true good and to raise the mind to desire for these by a certainimaginary beauty, rather than to fix thought upon false and deceptive goods. And this is the reasonwhy Rachel wishes her handmaid to go to her husband. There is no one who does not know that this isthe first way to the contemplation of the invisible.

(Bundy 1927:204)

Richard wrote elsewhere of six stages of contemplation: contemplation through the imagination but,according to reason, ‘in the reason’ but according to the imagination, ‘in the reason’ but according to reason,above but not contrary to reason and, finally, pure contemplation above and beyond reason in which allthose things which are self-contradictory to reason are resolved. Imagination provides a way into boththeoretical and practical reason, reason in its gnostic and its ethical aspects. The Bible represents thingsinvisible through the forms of the visible; and Richard refers specifically to the most obscurely symbolic ofthe Scriptures, the Apocalypse.

The two aspects of imagination are allegorized as the two sons of Bilhah:

Dan knows nothing save through the corporeal; but Naphtulim rises through visible forms to theintelligence of the invisible. Dan can bring before the eyes of our hearts infernal torments…throughimagination; but he does not dwell on the signification of these torments by means of spiritualintelligence. But when one reads of the walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem made of precious stones,what sensible man is able to accept the bare literal meaning? A mystical meaning is sought.

(Bundy 1927:205)

So the main sense of Hugh’s analogy becomes clear: if contemplation is to revelation as sensualitas is to thesense, it is because imagination in its higher function interprets the revelation of the Scriptures as, in itshumbler function, it interprets the information provided by the senses. Did Richard believe that his ownallegory of Rachel and Bilhah was a ‘mystical’ insight into the meaning of the Biblical story? This is notclear. We remember that St Gregory of Nazianzen taught that all interpretations of the Scriptures are equallytrue. Nor can one be sure whether the unusual word sensualitas in this context has any special significance.Contemplation, as Richard uses it, is the knowledge of the divine that is above discursive thought; doessensualitas imply a kind of awareness of the sensible world that is not purely cognitive? A direct awarenessof it as theophany? This can be no more than a question in Richard’s case.

The apparent chronological gap between Erigena and the Victorines does not, of course, necessarily meanthat the ideas of Erigena and Dionysius were completely forgotten; often such currents can run undergrounduntil a new shift in the cultural structure favours their re-emergence. The ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ wasmainly Latin; the recovery through Erigena of a Greek source appears to have been accidental and wascertainly exceptional. But the century of the Victorine mystics is that of the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’ inwhich the recovery of Greek thinking, mainly that of Aristotle and his commentators but including someNeoplatonists, was stimulated and accelerated by translations from the Arabs, who had profited from a lessinterrupted transmission of Greek ideas and one that was far less thinned and distorted by assimilation anddigestion. How far the manifold curiosities of the twelfth century were due to political and social factors,and how far stimulated by the inflow of Arab ideas is a matter for speculation. But just as the Renaissanceproper owed a good deal of its impetus to sheer spontaneous admiration for a novel and recognizably highcivilization, so those Europeans who knew the Arabs through living with them in Spain or reading them in

90 IMAGINATION

Latin translation realized that the Arab way of life and intellectual achievements offered a good deal fromwhich the West could profit. But also—and this feeling went back earlier than the recognition of Arabvirtues—the Muslim religion was a danger, and in the intellectually sophisticated forms provided by itsphilosophers was a formidable rival to its parent religions whose dogmas were perhaps at that stage lesscogently defended.

It may well be that the dissemination of Arab learning encouraged a revival of interest in the ideasassociated with Erigena and Dionysius; one of the texts translated from the Arabic was the Liber de causis,which the Arabs had taken to be a work of Aristotle but was in fact the Theology of Proclus himself, theNeoplatonist who seems to have been the chief inspirer of the Pseudo-Dionysius. The intellects of thetwelfth century are alive in every sphere—philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology,science, alchemy—with ideas derived from the Muslim thinkers. The list of translations is impressive, and,with further research, still growing; and though the century saw also a few translations direct from Greektexts transmitted through Byzantium, the main stimulus came from the translation of Arab works into Latin;because these provided not only the thought of the Greeks themselves, but attempts to interpret and explainthem.

This new situation intensified the problems that must always attend the use of instruments derived fromone culture to further the interests of another. In the early phase of the Western Christian world Latin wasneeded as the lingua franca for the dissemination of Christian values, yet Latin was the language of textsexpressing the world-view from which Christianity was moving away. The irruption of Greek thought—andparticularly of Aristotle—brought back a great deal that had been digested or rejected in earlier ages andconveniently forgotten. From the religious point of view, the Arabs’ presentation of the Greeks had theadvantage that it already bent the speculations of Neoplatonism—and more importantly Aristotle—towardsthe dogmas of revealed religion; it had, however, the major disadvantages that it was a rival and immenselypowerful and prestigious religion which claimed to swallow up Christianity and supersede it.

Moreover the bent of Greek philosophy towards religion—even the Muslim religion—was not withoutstrain. Reference was made earlier to al-Ghazālī’s refutation of ‘the philosophers’ in the name of revealedreligion, and Averroes’ refutation of the refutation which pointed out frequently that ‘the philosophers’referred to by al-Ghazālī were mainly one philosopher, namely Avicenna, and that refutation of Avicennadid not necessarily carry with it refutation of the philosopher—Aristotle—because Avicenna did not alwaysinterpret Aristotle quite accurately. The enormous influence of Avicenna in the West seems to have beendue not only to his intellectual brilliance and encyclopedic learning but to his midway position betweenIslamic orthodoxy and the religion of Aristotle with its dubious doctrine of the soul and its impersonal God.But even Avicenna’s thinking had to be shorn of its unacceptable features—some Muslim, some Greek—before it could provide, as it eventually did, a great deal of the actual substance of the Thomist synthesis.Which does not mean that those features unacceptable to orthodoxy were not of interest and effect in mindsless firm—or less rigid—and less systematic than that of Aquinas. Aquinas leant heavily but cautiously onthe Arab philosophers al-Farābī, al-Ghazālī and Averroes as well as Avicenna; the Franciscans wereprepared to be a little more adventurous. A few were prepared to swallow Avicenna almost whole, and therewere even some who carried the notion of the ‘double truth’ of reason and revelation to the extent ofaccepting the demonstrably un-Christian doctrines of Aristotle as interpreted or —as was claimed—strippedof unwarranted interpretations and accretions by Averroes.2 And so we find the Church authorities —andparticularly the authoritative and conservative Sorbonne— alternately checking and using the variousmanifestations of the new Arab-derived impetus.

It is not always easy to distinguish the syncretism resulting from open-minded interest in a wide varietyof ideas and that which implies acceptance and belief. Aquinas’s revered teacher, Albertus Magnus, so


admired the Arab philosophers that it grieved him to dissent from them even over doctrines essential to hisfaith, and he maintained that the Arabs understood Aristotle better than the Latin scholars. Their mixture ofAristotle and Neoplatonism particularly appealed to him, and emanation comes into his account of creation.Aquinas occasionally used the vocabulary of emanation himself, but changed its meaning; his solid,concrete natural world is as far removed as possible from the Hermetic view that the sensible is a fantasy ofthe divine mind, and a long way from the Neoplatonist idea of emanation as a procession of essences. Whenhe adapts the negative theology of the Pseudo-Dionysius into his own system his affirmations, negationsand comparisons are all conceptual, not metaphorical or in the Dionysian sense ‘symbolic’. What claims tobe knowledge of God through analogy is suspect to Aquinas unless the analogy can be conceptuallyanalysed.

What is constant throughout the Middle Ages is the three-fold Aristotelian pattern as the basis of facultypsychology—sensation, imagination, reason. It appears as a theme with many variations, usually combinedwith the Galenic notion of a particular location for each faculty in the brain. One sign of Avicenna’spervasive influence is the presence in so many Western thinkers of his particular account of the faculties, ofwhich the hallmark is the inclusion of aestimatio or vis aestimativa; this is generally accepted by thethirteenth century. It is found in Bonaventura as well as in Albert and Aquinas, though the names used forthe faculties vary from one thinker to another.

Aquinas’s account, though clearly based on Avicenna’s, modifies it to the disadvantage of imagination.Avicenna’s sequence was of five faculties—fantasy or common sense combining the components ofsensation into an image, ‘representation’ as a storehouse of images in memory, ‘imagination’ freelyseparating and combining these images, ‘estimation’ reading the significance of things perceived as objectsto be feared or desired and ‘memory’ which records the ‘intention’ or ‘significances’ of objects as noted bythe estimative faculty. Aquinas maintains that the separating and combining faculty is superfluous.Animals, he asserts, cannot do such things; in men, there is no need to suppose an imaginative faculty otherthan those which combine sensations into images in the first place and then store them for future use.

There seems to be little doubt that Aquinas wants to assign the manipulation of images to the reasoningpower of the human mind; here, as always, he is the intellectualist, and his account of the process ofabstracting concepts from percepts heavily underlines the superiority of the abstract idea over the image forthe purposes of thinking. Aquinas is prepared to allow that images can be useful for some—by implicationinferior—minds; in religion, as the language of the illiterate. But even when it is a question of aids tomemory his attitude is concessive rather than approving. The imagery of Scripture itself is, for Aquinas, arather regrettable necessity, as he shows in the ninth article of the first part of the Summa question 1.

The following article carries the discussion of the figurative language of the Scriptures further anddefends it against the charge of falsity that had dogged the imaginative use of language since Plato’s day:nothing could be more commonsensical than Aquinas’ view of the function of metaphor:

When Scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but onlywhat is signified by this member, namely, operative power. Hence it is plain that nothing false canever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ.

Aquinas at once defends the ambiguity of scriptural images and warns against it:

It is not due to deficient authority that no compelling argument can be derived from the spiritual sense,this lies rather in the nature of similitude in which the spiritual sense is founded. For one thing mayhave similitude to many; for which reason it is impossible to proceed from any thing mentioned in the

92 IMAGINATION

Scriptures to an unambiguous meaning. For instance the lion may mean the Lord because of onesimilitude and the Devil because of another.3

Poets, on the other hand, invent lies for pleasure, and use metaphors ‘to produce a representation, for it isnatural to man to be pleased with representations’. Aristotle’s Poetics are, as it were, reduced to a singlesentence as dealing with a trivial mode of human expression. In other contexts Aquinas shows clearly thathe has no use for poets and poetry. Metaphors are well below the abstract ideas of dialectic.

What, then, is the status of these ‘abstract’ ideas, and how does the mind abstract them?The debate about this had been going on since the time of Boethius. If, as Plato-influenced theologians

from Philo onwards had maintained, ‘forms’, universals, concepts, abstract notions were primarily ideas inthe mind of God (universalia ante res), do they exist, or subsist, when they are not thought, either by Godor man? And is the concept of the horse really in horses, (universalia in rebus) or just a name applied tocreatures resembling each other closely enough to be called horses (universalia post res)? The Realists heldthat concepts exist as it were in themselves, like angels and human souls, in the world of pure spirit, and goon existing independently of any kind of mind. The Nominalists held that concepts are only names forclasses of things. The study of Aristotle revived the distinction between ‘forms’ subsisting in a Platonic,transcendent world and ‘forms’ inhering in the objects of the sensible world. Aquinas followed Avicenna inadopting a midway position; universals do not subsist—they have no being of their own so to speak. Butthey begin in God’s mind as patterns (universalia ante res); they are present in the things of the sensibleworld (universalia in rebus); and they can be abstracted from sensible objects and be present in the humanmind (universalia post res).

How then does the mind abstract? Plato had said that the ‘forms’ are innate in the soul but unconsciousuntil the soul’s contact with the sensible world reactivates them; through ‘reminiscences’ the soul retrievesthe kind of knowledge which belongs to its proper, transcendent world, which it inhabited before itsincarnation. Aristotle’s doctrine, as we saw earlier, was obscure; the ‘passive intelligence’ is enlightenedthrough the ‘active intelligence’, but subsequent commentators were baffled by the notion of the ‘activeintelligence’. The Arabs, following a Neoplatonist interpretation, identified the personalized ‘ActiveIntelligence’ with a supernatural power. Aquinas will have none of this; what most clearly separates notonly Aquinas but nearly all his Western contemporaries from Avicenna and the Arabs is this disagreementover the notion of the ‘active intelligence’. Among the Franciscans some attempted a reconciliation,suggesting that the ‘Active Intelligence’ of the Arabs meant much the same as Augustine’s ‘illumination’coming directly from God; this involves not only an inaccurate equivalence but a probable misreading ofAugustine’s notion. Aquinas is unequivocal; the ‘active intelligence’ of Aristotle, the power ofconceptualizing and rationally thinking is vested in the human mind itself—part of its natural power.

Aquinas was anxious to demonstrate that the truths of revealed religion—though not its ‘mysteries’, forinstance the doctrine of the Trinity—could be arrived at by the proper exercise of human reason. Butrevelation itself had come not only through the Incarnation but through the prophets; and, as we saw,imagination had a most important part to play in the psychology of prophecy which al-Fārābī and Avicennadeveloped out of Neoplatonist speculations. It was impossible for either the Jewish or the Christiantheologians to repudiate the validity of prophecy, and difficult to reject a philosophical account of it whichcould be fitted so well into the Aristotle-based scheme of things—provided, of course, that Aristotle’s ownscepticism about the mantic was ignored or conveniently forgotten. But Aquinas’s acceptance of this part ofAvicenna’s thinking is cautious and grudging; it is interesting to compare it with that of his Jewishcounterpart, Maimonides.


Maimonides belongs to the century before Aquinas (1135–1204). Born in Cordova, he wrote his treatisein Arabic, but with Hebrew characters. He called it the Guide of the Perplexed, to help ‘the thinker whosestudies have brought him into collision with religion’, and ‘those who have studied philosophy and haveacquired sound knowledge, and who while firm in religious matters are perplexed and bewildered onaccount of the ambiguous and figurative expressions employed in the holy writings’ (1904: 1.21 and 13).The direction of his interpretation of the Bible is from images to concepts; the narrative of creation inGenesis is explained in the terms of Neoplatonist emanation.

His distinction between image and concept is the familiar one. Intellect analyses, abstracts, generalizes,classifies; imagination reproduces individual percepts either as perceived, or split up and recombined intofictions and phantasms. The possession of imagination is due to the fall of man; imagination was the serpentin the garden of Eden. The work of the imagination is identical with ‘evil inclination’, ‘for all our defects inspeech or in character are either the direct or the indirect work of imagination’ (1904: 11.60).

To accommodate prophecy Maimonides accepts the account provided by the Arabs, and, unlike theChristian theologians of the thirteenth century he makes no difficulties about the Active Intellect. Prophecybecomes possible when perfect intellect combines with perfect imagination in a healthy body after rigorousspiritual training. But Maimonides makes two important reservations. Not every man who has the requisitenatural faculties properly trained can achieve prophecy; in the last issue whether he prophesies or notdepends on the will of God, who can allow or prevent the inspiration of the Active Intellect. And, thoughMaimonides is prepared to classify the Old Testament prophets according to their particular combinationsof gifts within the Avicennian scheme, Moses is excepted; to Moses God spoke directly and intelligibly inthe waking state. In weaker spirits prophetic visions may occur only as dreams, when the soul is freed bysleep from the solicitations of the senses; then the angel of imagination and the cherub of intelligence bothspeak to the soul. Music and song can help to awaken the prophetic power in the waking state.

Aquinas has more reservations than Maimonides about the account of prophecy to be found in al-Fārābīand Avicenna. True prophecy, ‘divine’ prophecy—which includes spiritual insight as well as knowledge offuture events—is vouchsafed by God to whomever God chooses for the purpose, regardless of naturalcapacities and intellectual training. The supreme example of the prophet for Aquinas, as for Maimonides,was Moses, who spoke directly to God and was unique among the prophets in that he saw God in Hisessence. This rare vision of the very essence of God was seen also by St Paul, who thus becomes forAquinas the Christian equivalent of the Old Testament prophet.

Aquinas allows an inferior kind of prophecy which he calls ‘natural’; it corresponds to prophecy asdescribed by the Arabs, except that the communication of knowledge is not through the Active Intellect but,in a much more general way, through angels —angels who are intellects, not souls as are some ofAvicenna’s.

Aquinas’s notions on prophecy go back to Augustine and the Platonic rather than to the Arabs and theNeoplatonic. ‘As Augustine says [Gen. ad lit. XII.9], prophetic knowledge pertains most of all to theintellect (2.2 Q. 173, 2). Prophecy is indeed often communicated through images, through visions;

And yet a man will be a prophet, if his intellect be enlightened merely for the purpose of judging ofthings seen in imagination by others as in the case of Joseph who interpreted Pharaoh’s dream. But, asAugustine says [Gen. ad lit. XII.9], especially is he a prophet who excels in both respects, so, to wit,as to see in spirit likenesses significant of things corporeal, and understand them by the quickness ofhis intellect.

(2.2 Q. 173, 2)

94 IMAGINATION

Dante might conceivably have seen himself fitting into the Thomist scheme as a poet-prophet unitingimagination and intellect in the communication of divine truth; yet Aquinas’s bias towards the translation ofimages into concepts hardly seems to validate the poet’s effort to move in the reverse direction and, as wesaw, Aquinas has little use for poets. Dante could have found rather more encouragement in AlbertusMagnus, who had said much the same things as Aquinas about the relationship of figurative language totruth but with an entirely different emphasis and a humbler acceptance of the human mind’s need of thelanguage of imagination. ‘For the poet, as Alpharabius says in his Division of Sciences, anticipatesunderstanding and reason by certain fictions. But Holy Scripture uses such sacredly, that is, in order to leadthrough them to sacred things.’4 Poets and prophets may not be true philosophers, but they are not, forAlbertus, merely liars and creators of gewgaws. Dante might have found even more encouragement, ofcourse, in the ideas of the Arabs themselves.

The traditional view that Dante presents a vision corresponding to Aristotle’s philosophy as interpretedby Aquinas obviously has a great deal of truth, but from the nineteenth century on many of his readers feltthat there was more in Dante’s world-view, and particularly in his view of imagination, than can beaccounted for by Aristotle and St Thomas. So it came to be said by many that there is a Franciscan as wellas a Dominican side to his sensibility; that Neoplatonism plays a larger part in his ways of thinking than itdoes in those of Aquinas. Whittaker, in his book on Neoplatonism, traced Dante’s variety back to Plotinusand Proclus through Pseudo-Dionysius (1918:191–2). But not only does Dante reflect as major a way ofthinking that is minor in Aquinas, he places in heaven at Aquinas’ side Albertus Magnus on the right—which is not surprising, and Siger de Brabant on the left—which is. For Siger was the purest Averroist ofthe Christian West and anathema to St Thomas. Various explanations have been offered to exculpate Dantefrom any suspicion of Averroism in his own view of life; one is that Siger renounced Averroism towards theend of his life, another is that Dante did not know what Siger’s Averroism, meant, and yet another is thatSiger is merely the symbol of philosophy, wedded to revelation by Aquinas. That Avicenna appears withthe classical philosophers in Limbo, which was as high as pagans could rise in Dante’s after-life, mightreflect only Dante’s recognition of the use made of Avicenna’s ideas by the Christians. But Averroesappears by Avicenna’s side.

Bruno Nardi was the critic who first emphatically asserted that Thomism does not explain anything likethe whole of Dante’s world-view, and that Dante was evidently far more willing to follow Muslimspeculation outside Christian orthodoxy than was St Thomas himself. From the Arabs, Nardi claimed, Dantemust have derived his doctrine of God as light, his theory of Intelligences, the influence of the celestialspheres, the special nature of the intellectual element in the soul. Stated in such general terms, all theseideas can be said to be traceable within the Christian West; Bruno Nardi argued in terms of their detailedapplication, and found parallel details in the Arabs and in Dante. Others have gone further and suggestedthat Dante had knowledge of esoteric doctrines—perhaps those of the Knights Templar—which went backoutside the particular doctrines of exoteric religion to a Gnostic source. Much can be made of anotherastonishing pairing in Dante’s ‘Paradise’, this time of St Bonaventura with Joachim of Fiore, whoseteaching on the Trinity was explicitly rejected by the saint.

Joachim (1132–1202) was the son of a rich Calabrian family who began his career as a page at the courtof Roger II of Sicily, where he was immersed in the mixture of Christian, Jewish and Muslim culturepeculiar to that island. After travelling with a great retinue to Constantinople and Syria he spent some timein Jerusalem, then returned to Calabria to become a Cistercian monk. At this second monastery he waselected Abbot, and tried to escape his promotion; but when he was threatened with excommunication, hegave in and accepted his charge.


Eventually he founded a new community of the Universal Gospel. He and his followers spurned formaltheology and the organized Church and maintained that religious truth is reserved for simple souls and purehearts. Joachim divided the history of the world into three phases, corresponding to Father, Son and HolyGhost. The first phase corresponded to the Old Testament —the reign of the flesh, with Moses as precursor.The second went from the Incarnation to Joachim’s own time; this was the reign of flesh and spirit together,with John the Baptist as precursor. Soon to come was the Apocalypse, the millennium—the age of the HolyGhost, of pure spirit; the forerunner was to be Elijah, due to come back a second time to earth. With thefulfilment of the Holy Ghost, the letter of morality would give way to the spirit; moral discipline would nolonger be needed since all men’s actions would spontaneously be good. The Universal Gospel preached areturn to the pre-lapsarian state.

Joachim developed number-symbolism to a fantastic degree. Marjorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich(1972) have shown how he based it on two pairs of numbers—twos and threes, fives and sevens. These areused to establish his pattern of history— the two Testaments and the Three Ages, for instance; but, moreinterestingly from our point of view, they influence the patterns of the visual figures he constructs to bodyforth the mysteries of theology as he interprets them.

For instance, he bases a diagram of the Trinity on an image he probably took over from a convertedSpanish Cabalist, Moses Sephardi, known after baptism as Petrus Alphonsi. Sephardi was the author of acollection of Oriental fables, the Disciplina dericalis, and a knowledgeable purveyor of Arab science to theWest. The image as Joachim eventually modified it consists of three interlinked circles, intersecting in sucha way that there is an area in the middle belonging to all three circles, and other areas which belong either toone circle alone or to two out of the three.

Into these circles Joachim fits the four letters of the sacred Hebrew name of God—the Hebrewconsonants J H V H becoming the vowels I E U E. The area common to all three circles symbolizes thedivine Unity indwelling in all three Persons of the Trinity. This is a translation into visual terms of John 14vv. 10 ff., quoted in Joachim’s Expositio in apocalypsium. The psaltery, according to Joachim, was aparticularly sacred instrument because of its shape—a capital A with a flattened top and a circular hole —symbolizing Trinity and Unity. The ten horizontal strings stood for the ninefold hierarchy of angels withman as the tenth element —surprisingly placed by Joachim above the angelic rungs.

Some scholars hold that Dante must have known Joachim’s Book of Figures, and that these explain howsome of Dante’s more obscure images arose in his mind. Joachim has curious shapes of trees with beaksadded at their base to form eagles standing on their heads: these, it has been suggested, may have been inDante’s mind when he wrote the obviously symbolic but very obscure passage in Canto xviii of ‘Paradise’where the stars move and form writing, fix on the letter M at the end of their message (‘Diligite Justitiam quijudicatis terram’), entwine it with lilies and transform themselves into an eagle. Dante’s ‘one-two-three…three-twoone’ in his reference to the Godhead in ‘Paradise’ XIV.28–33 can be linked with the overlappingareas in Joachim’s circles, which follow the same sequence. Finally, it has been held, ‘Paradise’ XXXIII.

96 IMAGINATION

115–20 closely follows in its shape and colours the most intricate of the three-circle figures of Joachim’sdevising. These examples are inconclusive; the fact remains that Dante paired Joachim with StBonaventura.

In 1919 Asín Palacios startled Dante scholars with his contention that Dante must have taken theimaginative substance of the Commedia itself from Arab sources—not only the narrative of a spiritual ascentto the beatific vision but the topography of the supernatural world and many of the images through which thatworld is presented. He drew his detailed parallels from the corpus of Arab legends that had grown intoconventional patterns out of the brief account in the Qur’ān (ch. XVII v. 1) of Mohammed’s nocturnaljourney from Mecca to Jerusalem. In the legends this became Mohammed’s ascent to the spheres of theafter-life. Asín showed close resemblances between Dante’s descriptions of hell, purgatory and paradise andthose of the Arab legends, and brought out similarities of allegorical meaning. He went on to compare theCommedia with other Muslim legends on the after-life and built up an impressive edifice of detailedcorrelations. He found a whole pattern of analogies between Ibn ‘Arabī’s Book of the Nocturnal Journeyand the Commedia.

But the weak part of his thesis was Part IV, entitled ‘Probability of the transmission of Islamic models toChristian Europe and particularly to Dante’. The ‘probability’ amounted in reality only to ‘possibility’. Asíncould show the open channels between the two cultures, Muslim and Christian, but no channel leading directlyto Dante and no translations of the Arabic texts on which his demonstration depended. Translations of thephilosophical and technical works of the Arabs there were in abundance, but little poetry, none of the‘Oriental’ works of Avicenna, nothing of Ibn ‘Arabī. The situation changed about 1950, when researchersrevealed new links between Arab and European cultures, including two versions, in Latin and Old French, ofone of the popular religious texts describing Mohammed’s journey to the other world. Asín’s theory becamea much more solid possibility, and met with less resistance than before. The Arab element in Dante’sinspiration was only part of it; but it may well have been a significant part, accounting for a good deal ofwhat Nardi and others have seen as un-Aristotelian and un-Scholastic.

There may indeed have been more knowledge of Arab poetry and mystical writing than there isdocumentary evidence for. Who would have thought that Petrarch could have known anything of Arabpoetry had he not said so himself? That he should know the thought of his arch-enemy Averroes is in noway surprising; but he wrote to one of his doctors that he hoped the latter would take no account of theArabs: ‘I hate the whole race… I know their poets; you cannot imagine anything flabbier, more enervated,more obscene… I shall not easily be persuaded that anything good can come out of Arabia.’5

How would Petrarch get to know the Arab poets? He never acquired enough Greek to read his own collectionof manuscripts, so it is unlikely he had more Arabic. He may have been exaggerating his acquaintance, buthe evidently knew something; and if he could pick up such knowledge indirectly so may Dante have donebefore him.

Whatever the sources of his visual inspiration, it has often been pointed out that throughout theCommedia a vivid visual imagination is at work and is largely responsible for the poem’s grip on thereader’s attention. Philip McNair summed it up: ‘The Comedy opens with an image and closes with an image,and from end to end it enchants the eye like some encyclopaedic picture-book. Indeed, for visual imageryDante has no equal’ (quoted in Limentani 1965:39). Some of these images are directly part of the scene thatthe poet is putting before the reader’s eyes; some of them are similes to suggest qualities of apprehension orfeeling. Whether they are borrowed from other poets—as many of them undoubtedly are—or observed in theordinary life of the world around him, Dante sees vividly, picks out the features of the imagined object thatmake for precision and vividness, and communicates them as exactly as he sees them. Apart from the carefullystructured presentation of Hell and Purgatory and the commentary pointing the moral, much of what goes


on in these regions is directly transferred from the familiar world of everyday. And, as critics have oftenpointed out, this is double-edged; it makes for a gripping realism yet detracts from the sense of supernaturalwonder. In ‘Paradise’ the sense of wonder and splendour results from the careful build-up and concentrationof images of light; yet even here the natural image reinforces the satisfactions of the supernatural:

In form then of a pure white rose the saintly host was shown to me, which with His own blood Christmade His bride. But the other host—who, as it flies, sees and sings His glory who enamors it and thegoodness which made it so great— like a swarm of bees which one moment enflower themselves, andthe next return to where their work acquires savor—was descending into the great flower which isadorned with so many petals, and thence reascending to where its love abides forever. They had theirfaces all of living flame, and their wings of gold, and the rest so white that no snow reaches such a limit.When they descended into the flower, from rank to rank they proffered of the peace and the ardorwhich they had acquired as they fanned their sides.

Nor did the interposing of so great a flying plenitude, between what was above and the flower,impede the vision or the splendor; for the divine light so penetrates through the universe, in measure ofits worthiness, that naught can be an obstacle to it. This secure and joyful kingdom, thronged with ancientand with modern folk, had look and love all directed on one mark.

O threefold Light, which, in a single star sparkling on their sight, does so satisfy them, look downupon our tempest here below!

(‘Paradise’ XXXI.1–30)

Most of what Dante says about imagination, from the Vita nuova right through to the Commedia, fits in withthe familiar notions of the faculty psychology;6 imagination combines sensations into a presentation, it stampspresentations on the memory —so vividly, when Beatrice appears in the Vita nuova that her single imagedominates the poet’s mind—and it separates and combines images or parts of images. It can offer amistaken presentation, as when the fictional Dante of the Commedia mistakes a group of giants for acollection of towers (‘Hell’ XXXI.22–4); it can present a foul Syren as lovely (‘Purgatory’ XIX.7 ff). Asusual imagination is a useful but wayward informer and stimulator always needing the validation—andsometimes the curb—of reason.

But the revelatory possibilities of the higher imagination are also recognized; Dante calls it l’alta fantasia.To this a supernatural source of knowledge directly communicates significant images. Thus in ‘Purgatory’XVII Dante has a succession of visions of characters who sinned through impious anger—Procne who slewher child, Haman from the book of Esther and Amata the mother of Lavinia who killed herself on hearingthat her daughter’s favoured suitor, Turnus, had been killed: Dante invokes l’alta fantasia:

O imagination, that do sometimes so snatch us from outward things that we give no heed, though athousand trumpets sound around us, who moves you if the sense affords you naught? A light movesyou which takes form in heaven, of itself, or by a will that downward guides it.

Of her impious deed who changes her form into the bird that most delights to sing, the impressappeared in my imagination, and at this my mind was so restrained within itself, that from outsidecame naught that was then received by it. Then rained down within the high fantasy one crucified,scornful and fierce in his mien, and so was he dying. Round about him were the great Ahasuerus,Esther his wife, and the just Mordecai who was in speech and deed so blameless. And when thisimagination burst of itself, like a bubble for which the water fails beneath which it was made, thererose in my vision a maiden, weeping sorely, and she was saying, ‘O Queen, why through anger have

98 IMAGINATION

you willed to be naught? You have killed yourself in order not to lose Lavinia: now you have lost me!I am she who mourns, mother, at yours, before another’s ruin.’

(‘Purgatory’ XVII.13–39)

The appearance of an angel generates a light that outshines and quenches the light of l’alta fantasia:

As sleep is broken, when on a sudden new light strikes on the closed eyes, and being broken, quiversbefore it wholly dies away, so my imagining fell down from me as soon as a light, brighter by far thanthat to which we are accustomed, smote on my face. I was turning to see where I was when a voicesaid, ‘Here is the ascent,’ which removed me from every other intent; and it gave to my desire to beholdwho it was that spoke such eagerness as never rests till it sees face to face.

(‘Purgatory’ XVII.40–51)

Eventually the direct radiance of the beatific vision is to outshine every earlier light. The clarity of the worldof pure intelligence and love is beyond all thought and all imagining. Yet an image must serve to express it.In the final lines of the poem:

Here power failed the lofty phantasy; but already my desireand my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved,by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

(‘Paradise’ XXXIII.142–5)

Dante invokes l’alto ingegno, variously translated as genius, wit or ability, as often as he refers to l’altafantasia, and in at least one context writes as if it is his own innate ingegno which enables him to awakenthe imagination of his reader—or fails to do so when the truth of which he speaks is beyond imagining:

How shining in itself must have been that which was within the sun where I entered it, showing not bycolor but by light! Though I should call on genius, art and practice, I could not tell it so that it couldever be imagined; but one may believe it—and let him long to see it. And if our fantasies are low forsuch a loftiness, it is no marvel, for our eyes never knew a light brighter than the sun.

(‘Paradise’ X.40 ff.)

Dante’s balancing of alto ingegno and alta fantasia corresponds in a way to the combination of intellect andimagination needed for the full exercise of prophetic insight according to Avicenna. At the outset inspirationis invoked as alto ingegno:

O Muses, O high genius, help me now! O memory thatwrote down what I saw, here shall your worthiness appear.

(‘Hell’ II. 7ff.)

Again, at the beginning of ‘Purgatory’:

To course over better waters the little bark of my geniusnow hoists her sails, leaving behind her a sea so cruel; and


I will sing of that second realm where the human spirit ispurged and becomes fit to ascend to Heaven. But here letdead poetry rise again, O holy Muses, since I am yours…

(‘Purgatory’ I.1 ff.)

And in ‘Paradise’:

O glorious stars, O light impregnated with mighty power,from which I derive all my genius, whatsoever it may be…To you my soul now devoutly sighs, that it may acquirevirtue for the hard pass which draws it to itself.

(‘Paradise’ XXII.112 ff.)

At one level ingegno no doubt meant for Dante pleasurable awareness of his own skill and effectiveness asa poet. In ‘Hell’ he draws attention to his own inventiveness, and his occasional expression of fear ofinadequacy to his increasingly exacting theme imply his confidence in previous success. But at anotherlevel it means not only awareness of his skill in imparting his truth but conviction as to what the truth is;Dante believes he is holding to his truth through reason, and in the poem as a whole there is as muchcommunication through didactic exposition as through imaginative fiction. In his letter to Can Grandeexplaining the purpose and nature of the Commedia he said that language must be both rational andimaginative: it must be ‘poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive; and likewise proceeding bydefinition, division, proof, refutation, and setting forth of examples’ (quoted in Fergusson 1966:91).

It is almost as if Dante is translating knowledge into images and expecting his reader to translate it backagain through effortful interpretation. Dante had given an example of the different possible levels ofinterpretation of imaginative writing in the Convivio, where he provides his own keys to the figurativesenses of each of the three odes that make up this unfinished work. In the letter to Can Grande he applies tohis poem the fourfold scheme of interpretation which was familiar to the Middle Ages as a method ofbringing out the spiritual sense of Holy Scripture. Dante’s example is taken from Exodus: ‘When Israel wentout of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary and Israel hisdomain.’ Literally, Dante explains, this refers to the historical exodus. The allegorical meaning is ourredemption through Christ. The moral meaning is the conversion of the soul from sin to a state of grace, andthe anagogical or mystical meaning is the freeing of the soul from corruption to glory. So Dante writes ofhis own poem—putting it on a par with the writings of the prophets—

The subject of the whole work, then, taken only in the literal sense, is the state of souls after death,pure and simple, for on and about that turns the drift of the whole work. If the work is takenallegorically, however, the subject is Man as by his merits or demerits in exercising free will hedeserves to be rewarded or punished by Justice.

The sense of the poem is premeditated and so also—as critic after critic has emphasized—is the structureor, as it is often called, the architectonic. One aspect of structure is the quasi-geometrical patterning of thethree spheres—the funnel-shaped Hell, the sugar-loaf Purgatory and the concentric circles and radiatingpetals of the rose of Heaven. Another aspect is the coinherence of all the details of Dante’s fictionalexperience, the cross-referencing through allusion and recollection, the building-up of a totally integrated

100 IMAGINATION

hierarchy in which the spiritual significance of the world of human affairs, personal and political, enters intoan analogical and metaphorical relationship with the spiritual symbolism of the cosmos. Ingegno is incharge of the operation; Dante’s inspiration speaks to his reason at least as much as to his imagination in thegreater part of the poem. Yet when it is a matter of generating the beatific vision, for all Dante’s protests ofthe inadequacy of l’alta fantasia, it is mainly to images that he has recourse. For another important aspectof his structure is the constant concentration and intensifying of images of light; and these are made at lastto suggest a brightness beyond anything that can be directly conveyed. It is no doubt because of the power ofthis simple, familiar imagery so cunningly organized that the Commedia loses less in translation than mostgreat poetry.

We noted earlier that the visual realism of ‘Hell’ and ‘Purgatory’ can be double-edged—that it may atonce grip the reader’s attention and curb his sense of the supernatural; yet when Dante comes to his‘Paradise’ he is able to exploit what has previously been a vagueness—perhaps consciously and deliberatelybuilt into the narrative—of what might be called imaginative distancing; the fictional happenings can beclose to the possibilities of our reality or far removed from them, and we are never quite sure, once we beginto analyse, how they are to be read. No reader, presumably, has ever assumed that the poem was meant tobe an account of what happened to the real Dante in his real life. But some early commentators assumedthat the whole poem was the account of a divinely vouchsafed dream that Dante had actually had, in whichcase the visions of l’alta fantasia become dreams within the dream. But the dark and perilous wood ispresented at the outset as a real wood and Virgil as a real apparition; in ‘Hell’ and ‘Purgatory’ the peopleare shades, as Virgil points out to one who tries to embrace him, but their surroundings are good and solidand eminently sensible and the shade of Virgil is as solidly real as any human being in fiction. Yet the senseof allegory is also present from the outset—the threatening animals in the dark wood are more like heraldicbeasts than real creatures. We alternate between the realistic and the visionary—seeing with the eyes andseeing with l’alta fantasia; in the latter part of ‘Purgatory’ the visionary begins to take over, and in‘Paradise’ takes over almost—though never quite—completely. ‘See the whole vision be made manifest’,says Cacciaguida to Dante in Canto XVII of ‘Paradise’, directing him to write the poem that will be theCommedia. There can be no further narrative after the beatific vision: the metaphorical transfer from the mostblissful characteristics of the natural world to the concentrated more-than-blissful experience of the beatificvision is as complete as language can make it. And, of course, the reader who lends his imaginationwillingly and spontaneously to Dante’s language asks no awkward and disconcerting questions about theontology of the events in the narrative—whether they are dream, fictional reality or fictional vision. Onceassimilated by the mind willingly lost in the maze of words they all become what Dante himself would callmotions of the spirit; temporarily absolved, in the reader’s spontaneous experience, from the responsibilityof deciding what is real and what is not. Images there must be:

It is needful to speak thus to your faculty, since only through sense perception does it apprehend thatwhich it afterwards makes fit for the intellect. For this reason Scripture condescends to your capacity,and attributes hands and feet to God, having other meaning; and Holy Church represents to you withhuman aspect Gabriel and Michael and the other who made Tobit whole again.

(‘Paradise’ IV. 40ff.)

This is doctrine according to Dionysius and Aquinas. But in Dante’s poetry the transfer from things sensibleto things intellectual, to motions of the spirit, is not from the concrete to the abstract, from percept toconcept. His metaphors work rather in the way described by Richard of St Victor in the Benjamin Minor:


Thus do the Divine Scriptures allude to contemplation and condescend to human weakness. For theydescribe invisible things through the forms of visible things, and impress the memory of them uponour minds through the beauty of some desirable semblances. It is for this that they promise us now aland flowing with milk and honey; now mention flowers, now fragrance: signify the harmony ofheavenly joys now by the songs of men, now by the minstrelsy of birds. Read the Apocalypse ofJohn, and you will find the heavenly Jerusalem copiously described as adorned with gold and silver,with pearls and all manner of precious stones. And we know, indeed, that none of all these things is there,where nevertheless nothing whatever can be lacking. For of such things nothing is there specifically,where, notwithstanding, the whole is by similitude. In all these things hath Bilhah power to serve hermistress usefully, since indeed, where and when she will, she represents the memory of all these toher for her desire. For we can at once imagine these things when we choose. Never could theimagination be more useful to reason, than when it serves it in such obedience.

(quoted in Gardner 1913:41)

102 IMAGINATION

8Ficino

The Arabs of Spain imported into Europe ideas derived from the Neoplatonist fusion of Aristotle, Plato andany number of others bringing philosophy nearer to religion, mysticism and magic. The Arab fusion wasmade easier by confusion about widely-used texts like the Theology of Aristotle, which was really Plotinus,and the Liber de causis derived, probably through an Arab adaptation, from Proclus. Aquinas realized thatthe Liber de causis was not by Aristotle, but the thought was hardly disturbing since Christian theology,with the independence and assurance of revelation, had already assimilated and digested whatever met itsneeds from a variety of sources.

But there were those among professed Christians who, like Siger de Brabant, were attracted to thepurified if—as Pomponazzi and others were later to claim—not perfectly authentic Aristotle of Averroes,with its dangerous doctrines of the impersonal mind and the corruptible human soul. These extremists, inrisk of heresy, shocked more spiritually-minded Christians like Petrarch, who set up the ‘divine Plato’ againstthe heretical Aristotelianism of the Averroists. Thus was set up a polarization which is reflected in many,though by no means all, of the Humanists of the Renaissance. But if the Averroists were in risk of one kindof heresy, the more extreme Platonists of the Florentine Renaissance were sometimes accused of another; theirGreek texts led their minds back through Byzantine Christianity to its Neoplatonist sources, and to ideas andpractices which more orthodox Christians—and particularly those wedded through Scholasticism toAristotle— saw as shockingly pagan.

The separation of Aristotle and Plato became more distinct when the Byzantine George Gemisthus, whocalled himself Plethon and was the spiritual father of the new Platonic Academy, wrote for his Florentinehosts an essay ‘On the difference between the doctrine of Aristotle and of Plato’, perhaps at the request ofCosimo de Medici. ‘The Ancients’, he wrote,

both Greeks and Romans preferred Plato to Aristotle. But in our time there are some, particularlyamong those who live in the West and think themselves wiser than the Ancients, who admire Aristotleabove Plato, having been convinced of this superiority by an Arab, Averroes by name, who thinks ofAristotle as the unique and perfect triumph of nature in his sphere.

(quoted in Marcel 1958:155 ff.)

But Averroes, Plethon concludes, shows his complete ignorance in matters touching the soul when heclaims that the soul is corruptible; moreover such a doctrine does not seem to Plethon to correspond to whatAristotle himself believed. In any case Aristotle, Plethon maintains, is inferior to Plato, and this his essaypretends to show. But the Platonism of the Florentines was nourished from many other sources besidesPlato. George of Trebizond called Plethon ‘another Mahomet’, and some scholars have guessed that helearned about Zoroaster while he was at the court of the Sultan Bajazet.

His Zoroastrianism and all the rest of the notions he grafted on to Plato can be traced to Greek sources;but the direction of Plethon’s interest in the thought of the ancients was backwards towards the primitiverather than forwards towards Christian orthodoxy. From these obscure and almost forgotten currents ofthought Plethon purposed to derive a new polytheism which would supersede both Christianity andMohammedanism. Byzantine revivals of classical learning had more than once brought a threat of heresy; inthe eleventh century a canonical enquiry into the doctrines of John Italus, a philosophical Humanist andauthority on Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, resulted in the condemnation of a number of articles which arestill included in the collection of anathema read aloud in the Eastern Orthodox Church during the first weekof Lent (see Setton 1956:11 ff.). The Byzantines who looked back towards the ancients were fascinated, likeErigena in the West, by the elements of pantheism and panpsychism or animism that they found, mainlythrough Neoplatonism, and these elements were just what the official Church mistrusted as pagan. Notwithout reason; one follower of John Italus threw himself from a headland into the sea screaming ‘Receiveme, Poseidon!’ Plethon went a good deal further into paganism than his predecessors, and took his planetarypolytheism seriously. The Aristotelian George of Trebizond wrote of him: ‘I have seen, I myself have seen,I have seen and I have read prayers of his to the sun, hymns in which he extolled and adored the sun ascreator of all things…’ (Walker 1958:61).

Ficino drew from the same sources as Plethon and was no doubt deeply influenced by Plethon’s thought.He often pinned himself to orthodoxy with word-for-word, though not always acknowledged, quotationsfrom Aquinas, particularly the Summa contra gentiles; but where Aquinas founded his contentions on thescriptures, Ficino substituted fragments of Zoroaster or verses from the Orphic hymns. Often the ideas heaccepted from the Scholastic tradition have a quite different resonance in Ficino’s language. He had twoways of protecting himself from the suspicion that the ideas he was recording were fantastic and improbableor, more particularly, heretical. He writes sometimes as if he is asserting convictions he has been persuadedinto by his Greek sources, sometimes as if he is merely their expositor, and often ends a chapter with theremark that ‘the Platonists’ think this or that but that he does not wish to support any beliefs that may becontrary to Christian theology. This is his public insurance against such accusations of wrong thinking aslanded Pico della Mirandola in prison for heresy. His private protection is the confession—made more thanonce—that he is not sure whether in elaborating his own view of the cosmos he has not strayed over fromphilosophy into poetry—by which he means fictions pleasing to his mind, a kind of spiritual self-indulgence. Indeed his thinking does often fray out into threads of fancy that make pretty patterns but haveno structural function in the main conceptual fabric. ‘In the Treatises De Vita’, he wrote in a letter, ‘as inthose De sole et lumine where poetic elements are joined to philosophical propositions I allowed myself agood deal of freedom, sometimes perhaps rather too much….’ And in another letter, referring to the divinityof the sun: ‘As for this Orphic mystery, if we will not admit its truth, let us at least do as if it were true andlook upon the sun as a mirror wherein we might discover the supercelestial sun who has placed histabernacle in the sun we know as real’ (quoted in Chastel 1954:46).

He was no doubt sincere enough in his main aim, which was to weave the newly-discovered Greek ideasinto the more compatible strands within Western Christianity.

The Pseudo-Dionysian current had run on through the thought of Nicholas of Cusa and the fourteenth-century mystics. After the ninth-century translation made at Saint-Denis came one by Jean Sarrazin in 1107and another by Robert Grosseteste in 1235. The Florentine Ambrogio Traversari undertook yet anothertranslation in 1431; this was the version published by Lefèvre d’Etaples in France at the very end of thecentury, not before Lefèvre had checked it with the Saint-Denis manuscript. In the meantime Ficino hadproduced his own translation of the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names.

104 FICINO

But among Ficino’s translations and in the exchanges of the Platonic Academy of Florence Dionysiusfound himself in new— or renewed—contacts. The (presumably) fifth or early sixth-century Dionysius had,as E.R.Dodds put it, borrowed his ideas from Proclus and dressed them in Christian clothes; here he wasonce more cheek by jowl with Proclus himself. In Ficino’s Platonic Theology, likewise, Augustine theChristian adaptor of Plotinus finds himself modified by the unadapted Plotinus later to be translated byFicino. Behind Christian ritual is seen once more the theurgy of the later Neoplatonists, linked with themysteries of the Hermetica, the Chaldaean Oracles and the pseudo-Orphic hymns.1 Ficino’s Plato is the Platoof the myths rather than the dialogues, but the Plato of the myths is often obscured rather than illuminatedby the phosphorescence of his less rational for-bears and descendants.2 Plato entered the Italian Renaissancein strange company. Much of the Platonic Theology takes us back a thousand years in time and some waytowards the East, into a mentality that the more rational Christianity of the West had put between bracketsand referred to only with caution and some suspicion. Ficino’s professions of orthodoxy and of a purpose tomake the Platonic mysteries serve the Christian faith were no doubt sincere enough; but in his writingsexoticism outshines orthodoxy.

In Ficino’s writings we can find any number of elements that are later to be combined into or associatedwith the notion of imagination as the artist’s creative faculty. He set up no aesthetic system and did notdirectly associate all these elements with imagination or imagination with art; but in bringing themtogether in a more or less unified vision of the world, a more or less consistent way of feeling and valuingthe various aspects of human experience, he made it easy for poets and painters to see themselves asexercising through imagination a creative potential reflecting the creativity of God. Through the notion ofimagination aesthetics was eventually to appropriate for painting, sculpture, literature and music, grouped asthey had not previously been under a general notion of ‘art’, the creativity that Ficino attributed to all thearts of man—‘arts’ in his case including all that the Greeks understood by techne; technology and crafts ofall kinds as well as intellectual disciplines, everything that can be thought of as a skill to be learned.

The often quoted third chapter of Book XIII of the Platonic Theology is very heady stuff indeed. Man’ssuperiority to the animal world is said to be shown by his invention and exercise of innumerable arts.Painters like Zeuxis and Apelles, sculptors like Praxiteles, inventors of automata like Archytas of Tarentumwho made a wooden pigeon that could fly and the Egyptians reported by Hermes Trismegistus who madetalking and walking statues—‘not to mention the pyramids of the Egyptians, the buildings of the Greeks andRomans, the workshops where metal work and glass are made’—all these show man as the rival of nature;imitating all the works of the divine nature, improving the works of the lower nature. Human creativityprovides for pleasure as well as necessity; it ‘aims at manifold delights of the senses, as at some food forour imagination’. It can soothe imagination in a kind of play, or act seriously and reasonably in producingtextiles, pictures, sculptures and buildings. It can act through sheer pleasure in its own power rather than forany particular purpose. Man is the lord of the world, the vicar of God. Through the intellectual arts—mathematics, music, science, history, eloquence, poetry—he rises above dependence on the body, living asmind without the body’s help. Man understands the movement of the heavens, and so possesses, as it were,‘almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens’. If he had God’s resources he could make theheavens by himself.

Ficino does not pick out what was later called ‘art’—painting, sculpture, poetry, music and so forth—as aspecially privileged kind of human creativity, though he makes it easy for later thinkers to do so. And,though he does not credit human creativity to the faculty of imagination, he has things to say aboutimagination that will help towards its later promotion. Creativity in general is ingenium, just as poeticinventiveness was ingegno, and more specifically alto ingegno, for Dante. Imagination has much the samedual role in Ficino as in the Neoplatonists, and more particularly as in Avicenna’s systematization of

IMAGINATION 105

Neoplatonist ideas. It plays an important but subordinate part in perception; and it can be the vehiclethrough which the angelic world transmits insights in the form of images—insights which are by no meansas inferior to direct intellectual apprehensions as they were for Plato.

Basically the grades of knowledge are sensation, fantasy and reason, and the purpose of knowledge is toraise the soul’s awareness from the world of the senses through the world of intelligible forms to what inPlato is the form of all forms and in Plotinus the One, the deified nous or ‘intellectual principle’. To theextent that Ficino provides what we should call a psychological account of how this can come about he usesthe traditional notions derived from Aristotle and developed by Neoplatonists and Arabs. The human soulmoves away from sensation proper to awareness of the world ‘out there’, the identification of objects in thatworld, the recognition of the species to which they belong and of the genera through which the species areinterrelated; and so on towards apprehension of the One who at once is everything and transcendseverything. In this process fantasy takes over from sensation, reason takes over from fantasy; in somecontexts reason is itself divided into discursive reason and the unifying, transcendent reason which is nolonger knitting up separate threads through analogies and empirically observed or logically inferredrelationships but contemplating the integrated totality of its inner experience, saturated with meaning and nolonger needful of anything outside itself.

The role of fantasy in this view of knowledge is thus intermediary, and ancillary to reason; the aim ofreason is to rise above fantasy and to contemplate the pure forms without the stimulus of images. The formsthemselves are not abstracted as the common elements of a number of perceived objects belonging to thesame species, as in Aquinas and the later empirical psychology the concept ‘tree’ is said to be abstracted asthe collection of features common to oaks, elms, beeches and so forth; the mind, which is the higher part ofthe soul, already has in its own nature, its own substance, all possible concepts or forms in potency, ready tobe actualized or brought to conscious knowledge by images; and images are the reflections of real,individual objects in the intermediary part of the soul which is fantasy. These potential forms, or‘formulae’, pass from potentiality to actual consciousness in each act of thought. Thought begins withperceptual knowledge of the world outside the mind. Sensation is translated into mental substance. Thedistinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘fantasy’ in this process is not always made, and not very clear whenit is. Where it is made, it seems that imagination at once translates sensations into mental entities andcombines their fragments into a unity; fantasy goes a stage further, and ‘anticipates’ (as Kristeller puts it)the recognition of the substance and quality of what is perceived. But the recognition is not complete until‘thought’ actualizes a form corresponding to the image proposed by fantasy.

In Chapter 9 of Book II of the Platonic Theology we find the original Aristotelian pattern of sense,fantasy and reason, with the addition of the synthesizing power of fantasy which combines the separatesensations into a total presentation. In VI.2 fantasy is again half-way between sensation and abstractthought. But in VIII.1 imagination comes into the picture: Avicenna’s five inner senses are reduced here tofour; sensation is made to include the bringing together of the various sensory messages into a totalpresentation, the synthesis which medieval accounts credit to sensus communis, fantasy or imagination.Ficino’s ‘imagination’ is the ability to reproduce a perception, to see the man Plato in the mind when Platois not there; it is ‘above’ sensation because independent of physical presence. Fantasy, in turn, is ‘above’imagination; it is exercised by Socrates as soon as he recognizes that what he perceives is his friend Platoand ascribes certain qualities to him. In this context Ficino’s ‘fantasy’ seems to correspond to the wahm ofAvicenna and the vis aestimativa of the Scholastics. Finally the soul divests its consciousness of matterentirely, but only when it abstracts the universal from the particular and sees humanity in Plato. Ficino takesno account of the fact that often, when thin or distorted sensory information makes our perception dubious,we see a man before recognizing that the man is someone we know.

106 FICINO

At IX.5 once more imagination synthesizes, fantasy recognizes and intelligence (intellectum) understands;later in the same chapter the false presentations of madness are ‘the violent illusions of fantasy’. At XI.4fantasy is the prelude to action in animals as reason is in man; the beast ‘sees’ what it intends to do infantasy before doing it, but is not aware of its own intention in the same way as is the conscious and self-conscious human mind. Thenceforward the distinction between imagination and fantasy almost disappearsfrom view, and fantasy is the word most often used whether it is a case of perception of the sensible world,images in the mind, dreams or hallucinations. On all these topics Ficino has nothing to add to the traditionalviews of the Neoplatonists, the Arabs and the Scholastics; nor does he favour any one particular scheme ofthings rather than another—he simply adopts the common features of all such accounts of the mind and itsfaculties and the kinds of experience involving images. Over the question that divided Aristotle from Plato—the mind’s need of images to think at all—Ficino acts as peacemaker; intelligence and fantasy ‘see’ theobject each in its own way. ‘And while fantasy thinks of such a man, intelligence thinks of man in generaland vice-versa. In this way they collaborate naturally.’ Thus Ficino sides with Aristotle without offendingPlato, then moves towards Plato with the statement that ‘the soul can, moreover, when it considers itself,look upon its act, its potency and its essence without the image of fantasy’.

For Ficino the Platonic ascent is equated to the redemption of a fallen world in which the forms havebecome contaminated with matter:

Who will help? Not the Souls of animals that look only at individual images. Not intellects superior toours…because they do not have bodies subjected to all the impulses of all bodies, and they do notreceive the particular passions and forms of the particular bodies. Nothing is left but the Soul of man,which is affected by the individual impulses of individual bodies through its earthly body, receivesthese images of the Ideas maculated by the matter of the universe through perception, but collectsthem through fantasy, cleans and refines them through reason, and connects them at last with theuniversal Ideas of the mind. So the celestial ray that had descended to the lowest things returns to thehigher beings, because the images of Ideas, formerly dispersed in matter, are collected in the fantasy,and, formerly impure, they are purified in reason, and, formerly particular, they are lifted in the mindto universality. In this way the Soul of man restores the world that had already been shaken[iam labefactatum restituit mundum]. For by its gift the world that was formerly spiritual and hadbecome corporeal is continuously being purified and daily becomes spiritual [evadit quotidiespiritalis].

(quoted in Kristeller 1943:110)

The aim of the ascent he describes in terms borrowed from Plotinus’ account of the mind in a state ofblessedness: the terms we shall find recurring in post-Romantic accounts of the blessedness of the aestheticstate achieved through imagination, notably in Baudelaire and Proust. In Ficino the key-word is still‘intellect’:

This shows the excellency of the mind that it conceives as true that which is in a certain sense false inmatter…. What in matter is impure, the mind distinguishes as pure…. What in itself is multiple, the mindconsiders as simple…. What in itself is mobile, the mind contemplates as quiet…. What in itself isdivided, the mind sees as united…the dead as alive…the transitory as stable…. From all this it may beconcluded that the intellect…is neither impure nor infected, dispersed, mutable, or corruptible, sinceby its power it frees from such characteristics even those things that are of like quality.


IMAGINATION 107

Fantasy thus has its essential but comparatively humble part to play; and far from praising it as a highpower of the mind Ficino often rails against it as a temptation to fall below rational thought instead of usingreason in the difficult but exhilarating ascent towards the One.

Plato’s dialectic moves constantly up and down between the sensible and the intelligible to explore theways in which the forms are related together; each intuitive ‘climb’ from the sensible towards theintelligible is followed by a descent to understand how the higher forms are separated out into the lowerforms. There is no concept in Plato of will struggling against weakness or corruption; this appeared laterwith Augustine. Plato comes nearer than Socrates to the idea of the desire for the Good conflicting with theattractions of worldliness; he is eventually less sure than Socrates that virtue is knowledge. But he does notdwell as the Pythagoreans did and as later Neoplatonists were to do, on the misfortune and degradation ofthe soul’s imprisonment in the body. There is stress in his moral system, but there is also the fundamentalnotion of the necessary function of every part of the personality, the possibility of harmony achievedthrough the rule of reason.

Not only is it difficult to reconcile conceptually Plato, the varieties of Neoplatonism and Christiantheology, as Ficino tried to do; these different systems of thought correspond to differences of moralattitude, aesthetic sensibility and life-style generally. They can correspond to different moments within acultural tradition, to different temperaments and personalities at some particular moment, and to varyingmoods in the particularly unstable consciousness of sensitive and mercurial individuals—as so manyRomantic artists were. Ficino tries to maintain consistently the Plotinian notion of the eventual goodness ofeverything—everything is God, though God is everything and more, immanent and yet transcendent. Headmits no positive evil; evil is failure to see the good, as darkness is merely the absence of light. And so alldesire is eventually the desire for God. To deal with evil, and to reconcile Platonic optimism with theminatory elements in Christianity Ficino has to wriggle a good deal. The ambiguities and logicalcontradictions we find in Ficino are just those to be found later on in Baudelaire, though Baudelaire makesimagination, not intellect, fulfil the functions ascribed by Ficino to transcendent reason. The naturaltendency of the soul, writes Ficino, is upwards towards God, and man can never really counteract thisnatural appetite. But he can follow a straight and right way or an indirect and wrong way. The wrong way isdescribed in terms consonant with the Christian doctrine of reward and punishment; and in other passagesthe soul has two natural appetites, one towards God and the other towards the body.3

In his more optimistic frame of mind, Ficino expresses the attitudes most typical of Renaissance thought;man is the measure of all things, the microcosm which potentially includes the macrocosm, and man’s mindcan extend from the lowest in creation through the highest in creation to the One. Ficino links this notionwith the Christian doctrines of incarnation and of the resurrection of the body. In his more pessimisticthinking, the mind is in danger from the lower parts of the soul; it can be fascinated by the sensible, andfantasy (or imagination) is part of the downward pull. The clarity of the mind is obscured by the ‘clouds ofimagination’ resulting from the soul’s preoccupation with the gross world of the senses. Some concern withmaterial things is essential to life, but concern with the sensual for its own sake leads to damnation,conceived as the permanent separation from God, the soul eternally looking down instead of up (Kristeller1943:360–1).

When the soul is turned in the wrong direction by one fascination, recourse may be had to another; magicis the power of imagination, the vis imaginativa, captured by the mind, brought under control, and re-directed upwards. Notions about magic had never disappeared during the early Middle Ages. There were thediscussions in the writings of the Christian Fathers. They disapproved of its more superstitious beliefs, butthe beliefs themselves had never entirely been thrust out of reckoning by religious faith increasinglycodified in theology. Magic, like philosophy, became a matter of burning interest in the twelfth century

108 FICINO

under the influence of the multiplying translations from Arabic; but for centuries before the twelfth there isevidence of quite considerable knowledge among Western thinkers of Arab ideas about astrology and magicas well as about topics which are now considered to be properly scientific. Ficino’s translations ofNeoplatonist texts no doubt helped to bring magic into a closer relationship with religion in the minds ofsome Humanists; to give exciting superstitions some kind of intellectual respectability and to provide anexcuse for investigating them. And it is highly probable that ideas derived from the Arabs helped to focusFicino’s interests in the Greek texts and to influence his interpretation of them. The importance attached toimagination as a magical force is a case in point; imagination was much respected by the GreekNeoplatonists, as we saw, but never so overtly recognized as a supernatural power as it was by theNeoplatonist-influenced Arabs.

Ficino and the members of the Academy of Florence were themselves fascinated by astrology and magic,and hard put to it to indulge their exotic interests without falling into religious heresy. Ficino himself wasparticularly careful. The vis imaginativa is a power which affects the imagination, and through theimagination alters the conditions in which mind operates; but it does not deprive the mind of its freedom.The stars and magical rituals can help or hinder but not finally determine. Recourse to the power of demonsis possible but wrong; ‘natural’ magic is legitimate. It means using esoteric knowledge of the inner natureof the sensible world to change the situation in which mind operates and to favour the use of its inalienablefreedom.4

This kind of speculation takes us away from the main tradition of Western thought—Plato, Aristotle,Plotinus and the Scholastics. Plotinus is a bridge. What Ficino calls the vis imaginativa Plotinus shows atwork in the acceptable self-fascination of prayer; his account of the efficacy of prayer is rooted in the samePythagorean area as the magic of the alchemists. Throughout the history of Neoplatonism, and right throughto where it enters Romanticism, we find this tendency to go back to the roots of the philosophical tradition,to recover what the more characteristic strains of Western thought had rejected and left behind, and to re-interpret in new ways. The process results partly from a kind of Romantic exoticism, the cult of the strangefor the sake of intellectual thrills; but partly also from the need to explore aspects of mental experience feltto be important but minimized or left out of account by orthodox philosophy—a groping after new kinds ofinsights and a search for new kinds of reassurance in a changing world.

Ficino attached himself to the One through prayer, but had recourse as well to magic rites. Born underSaturn, he ascribed to this astrological influence his own fits of melancholy and inertia but also the power ofintellectual concentration that made him a philosopher and a scholar.5 His concern with harmony was notonly aesthetic but psychological, his magic mainly an attempt to control the states of his own mind.D.P.Walker has reconstructed Ficino’s private theurgy:

He is playing a lira da braccio or a lute, decorated with a picture of Orpheus charming animals, treesand rocks; he is singing…the Orphic Hymn of the Sun; he is burning frankincense, and at times hedrinks wine; perhaps he contemplates a talisman; in day-time he is in sunlight, and at night he‘represents the sun by fire’. He is, in fact, performing a religious or magical rite—‘a sacramentprofane in mystery of wine’.

(Walker 1958:30)

Ficino’s use of the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘imagination’ is not entirely consistent, but he tends to use ‘fantasy’when he is setting out his more orthodox theory of knowledge, in which both reason as conceptual thought,or reasoning, and reason as the direct intellectual apprehension of the forms are placed above it; and to use‘imagination’ when he moves away from Plato, Aristotle and Scholasticism into the more exotic realms of

IMAGINATION 109

Neoplatonism and alchemy. Ficino knew al-Fārābī and Avicenna, and recommends them for their Platonictendency. Like them he recognizes that supernatural knowledge can be achieved through dreams andvisions. He does not always credit these to imagination, as alFārābī credits them to phantasia; the innerspiritual elevation of the soul, when it is not connected with transcendent reason, is discussed in terms ofdirect inspiration. He usually implies that reason is eventually superior to other ways of apprehending thedivine, and he warns that imagination can generate false dreams as well as true visions; but vision throughimagination is sometimes as well thought of as intellectual contemplation through the rational exercise ofmind. Ficino translated the De insomniis of Synesius who, as we saw, was one of the early promoters ofimagination as vision.

And he has another way of describing the parts of the soul, not always consistent within itself and noteasily reconciled with the more frequently quoted trio of sensation, fantasy and reason. In this we havemind, idolum and nature, with mind sometimes divided into mens and ratio, and idolum into fantasy, senseperception and nutritive power. The ambiguous nature of fantasy —sometimes pulling the mind down,sometimes, through the influence upon it of the vis imaginativa helping the mind to look up—reappears inFicino’s equivocal attitude to the idolum. Sometimes this is the soul’s involvement in the lower world, theworld of Plato’s cave, the world which Ficino sometimes says is only a dream compared with the truereality of the forms; sometimes it is dream as the possibility of vision, the ‘idol’ which represents the highertruth, the ‘image of the rational Soul’. This implies that the higher truth can be imagined as well asintellectually apprehended, and the implication is confirmed when Ficino puts side by side as ‘inner acts’ ofthe soul ‘the visions of imagination and the discursive procedures of reason’.6

Ficino is particularly fascinated by the theosophical beliefs to be found within Neoplatonism and a gooddeal of what he has to say about the astral or ethereal body corresponds fairly closely to the doctrines of Ibn‘Arabī. He, too, envisages a third world between the sensible and the intelligible. This third world is therealm of the world-soul in which, as in Plotinus, all individual souls are immersed. And, just as on theintelligible plane the active intellect within the mind is in touch with the super-sensible realm of pure nous,in this intermediary world communication between human souls and world-soul is through imagination.Images are virtually hypostasized. They become substantial, having the same substance as the astral bodyand the heavenly bodies, and are the mediators through which mind can act on matter by bringing to bear onthem the vis imaginativa. The astral body can detach itself from the material body, carrying with it the souland the sensible qualities of the material body—in levitation, for instance, or in recognizable appearances faraway from where the material body is in space or time. In thought about perception and knowledge we arelooking upward from the grossness and solidity of the sensible world towards the immaterial, mentalsubstance that can be abstracted from it—and this is the viewpoint that is typical of Aristotle, and centralbut not exclusive in Aquinas. It is only half the story in Plato, the Neoplatonists and Avicenna, the otherhalf in these being the downward look from the noetic through creative emanation to the sensible. In Platothe sensible world seen from this perspective loses its solidity and becomes a mere reflection of the realworld of ideas comparable to the reflections of the so-called ‘real’, sensible world in water. In theHermetica the being of the sensible world is clearly undermined to an extent that Plato avoids; ourapparently solid world is really illusion, like Prospero’s. It is created, as it were, not only through but out ofimagination; and this is what Ficino, when he writes in his theosophical mode, calls the realm of theidolum:

The soul, since it has been created on the borderline between intelligences and bodies, not only yearnsafter the divine realities, but also by a natural providence and love is united with matter and posits inmatter the body that it (the soul) animates, giving it as it were a shadow of its own life.

110 FICINO

(Platonic Theology XVI.7, my italics)

Thus the solid world and the illusory world are brought together; the body is solidly material and needssolidly material sustenance which the soul has to guide it towards; but its real nature, its form, only seems tobe embodied in it and is really a projection of soul.

‘Whence comes the soul when it descends into the body?’ is the title of Chapter 4 of Book XVIII. Not aproper question to ask, says Ficino, since the soul comes from God, who is everywhere and nowhere, like aray from the sun; ‘but, in this matter, I am pleased to speculate along with the Ancients. Thus, if we are tobelieve Zoroaster and Hermes…’ and we are off on Ficino’s theosophical account of the matter.

The Magi speak, says Ficino, of a vehicle of the soul, given a round shape by the ether but taking onhuman shape in a body and returning to the round shape when released. This ‘vehicle’ is of course the astralor ethereal body, and according to Ficino it becomes an individual as long as the soul ‘animates’ it, so that itis an idolum of the soul. In the opinion of many, says Ficino, the idolum would cease to be if the ‘vehicle’ceased to be. Just as the moon is surrounded by a pale nimbus, the soul projects its idolum, like the tail of acomet, in the ethereal body. If the body were to disappear, the idolum would disappear, like the moon’snimbus when the clouds clear. But Zoroaster says that the idolum has its place in the realm of light, andPlotinus that the soul is immortal even if the vehicle is removed.

These theosophical speculations fill two chapters, ending with the typical lightning-conductor: Ficinowill assert nothing that conflicts with the Christian theologians.

The theme of the idolum runs like a thread throughout the Platonic Theology, and it is in Book XIII thatsome of the consequences are drawn under the headings of poetry, religion, prophecy and divination. Ficinosets out first the belief found in the Stoics and discussed at length by Plotinus that every part of the cosmosis linked to every other part, and that any movement in one part sets up sympathetic vibrations throughoutthe system. Through this interlinking there is communication between intelligences, superhuman andhuman. Ficino calls this ‘providence’:

But leave aside for a while the intelligences; let us think of the ‘idola’, that is the simulacra of souls.Let the ‘idolum’ of the world-soul be at their head; to it are connected the twelve ‘idola’ of the twelvesouls that animate the twelve spheres. But as there are several souls in each sphere, their ‘idola’ mustbe connected to the one ‘idolum’ of the one common soul that governs the whole of the sphere.

(Platonic Theology XIII.2)

This complicated interlinking on the plane of imagination Ficino calls destiny.Ficino then draws a similar picture on the level of the physical body and concludes that man is tied in to

the cosmos, microcosm to macrocosm, on all three levels. And on all three levels influences can betransmitted and contact can be made with the cosmos in all its parts. Reason can eventually control the totaleffects of all these influences; but it sometimes seems as if the most frequently operative plane ofcommunication is the imaginative, because it participates in both the rational and the sensible worlds, andalso, perhaps, ‘because we most often live by it’. At any rate Ficino’s angels, like Avicenna’s, are of twosorts, intelligences and souls, and each kind speaks with its own kind of voice; to the mind, in rapture or inrational thought, to the imagination in the inspiration of poetry or of prophecy and divination.

In the De vita Ficino links the seven stages of contemplation to the seven planets; in ascending order,stones and metals are associated with the moon, the vegetable and animal realms with Mercury, subtlepowdery substances, smells, tastes and perfumes with Venus, words, sounds and songs with Apollo, the‘violent conceptions of imagination’ with Mars, discourse of reason with Jupiter, pure intelligence with

IMAGINATION 111

Saturn. The true magician understands the relations between these different levels and works towardshuman well-being by adapting the things of the sublunary world to the action of higher influences; ‘as eggsare given to the hen to be hatched, he submits earthly things at the right time to the incubation of heaven’(quoted in Chastel 1954:73).

Talismans, emblems, images in general not only sum up ideas but attract the magical influence of thepowers the ideas refer to. Thus the cross is said to have had a magical significance before Christianity; theEgyptians saw in it the four cardinal points and the radiation of the stars. Zodiacal talismans attractastrological influences, for ‘the figure attracts the figure; when a cithara sounds, does not another citharagive echo?…and what allows it to react to the effect of the first cithara unless it is its position and theanalogy of the figure’ (quoted in Chastel 1954:74). The use of the word ‘figure’ here suggests that Ficinohas in mind the Hermetic vocabulary in which the ‘figure’ is intermediary between the pure Platonic formand the sensible, individuated object—the equivalent no doubt of Plato’s ‘mathematicals’. In the case of thecithara, the ‘figure’ might be thought of as the mathematics of the pitch of its strings. It is not easy to seehow the notion of mathematical correspondences could be extended to the relations between a cross, thepoints of the compass and the stars. But the less rational Pythagoreans could attach numbers to anything;and, for them, Plato’s ideas were basically numbers.

Ficino was a little uneasy about talismans; he must have known that Aquinas, though he recognized somekinds of magic, specifically disapproved of the use of magically contrived objects. The use of one’sknowledge of the magical properties of the natural world to manipulate the natural world—this did notshock Aquinas. But any kind of magic that sought to attract supernatural influences was to be avoided as un-Christian. The only legitimate supernatural magic was that of the liturgy, which of course Aquinas wouldnot call magic at all.

Ficino’s theory of talismans is derived from the less rational, more superstitious beliefs of theNeoplatonists, but the basic notion of magical attraction through imitation is to be found in Plotinus in thecontext of religion:

And I think that the wise men of old, who made temples and statues in the wish that the gods should bepresent to them, looking to the nature of the All, had in mind that the nature of soul is everywhereeasy to attract, but that if someone were to construct something sympathetic to it and able to receive apart of it, it would of all things receive soul most easily. That which is sympathetic to it is whatimitates it in some way, like a mirror able to catch the reflection of a form.

(Enneads IV.3.11)

In Plotinus Ficino thought also that he found authority for the notion that images can convey a kind ofawareness that is synthetic rather than analytical, and therefore nearer to the divine knowledge thandiscursive statement can be. Ficino’s reading of Plotinus was important because of the way it was read inturn by makers and interpreters of emblems and also, no doubt, by poets and painters; but it was probably acase of creative misunderstanding, for it is very doubtful whether Plotinus meant what Ficino took him tomean. And Ficino’s reading seems to have been taken by later thinkers to mean far more than Ficinohimself intended.

The text in Plotinus is obscure, and different translations hint towards various shades of interpretation.Here is MacKenna’s version:

The true Wisdom, then (found to be identical with the Intellectual-Principle), is Real Being; and RealBeing is Wisdom; it is wisdom that gives value to Real Being; and Being is Real in virtue of its origin

112 FICINO

in wisdom. It follows that all forms of existence not possessing wisdom are, indeed, Beings in right ofthe wisdom which went to their forming, but, as not in themselves possessing it, are not Real Beings.

We cannot, therefore, think that the divine Beings of that sphere, or the other supremely blessedThere, need look to our apparatus of science: all of that realm (the very Beings themselves), all isnoble image, such images as we may conceive to lie within the soul of the wise—but There not asinscription but as authentic existence. The ancients had this in mind when they declared the Ideas(Forms) to be Beings, Essentials.

Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt—whether in precise knowledge or by a promptingof nature—indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left asidethe writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences—those characters that representsounds and convey the propositions of reasoning—and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple-inscriptions a separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the absence ofdiscursiveness in the Intellectual Realm. For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is adistinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not an aggregate of discursive reasoning anddetailed willing. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of being, an image,already less compact, which announces the original in terms of discourse and seeks the causes bywhich things are such that the wonder rises how a generated world can be so excellent.

(Enneads V.8.5)7

Now it is very doubtful whether Plotinus meant that hieroglyphs can convey any kind of supernaturalwisdom, or that the divine Beings ‘see’ Real Being in the form of images. Plotinus often uses paintings,statues and the various modes of imaging as illustrative analogies; mystical awareness is like an image,rather than like discursive thinking, to the extent that it is whole, total, synthetic, rather than dispersed,fragmented and analytical. But there is no text of Plotinus other than this obscure statement abouthieroglyphs to encourage the belief that the beatific vision is literally vision, that it takes the form of animage. On the contrary, there are many statements dissociating it from both imagination and discursivethinking. His reference to hieroglyphs seems to be by way of illustration by analogy, and not to be takenliterally. The Egyptians may not have had the ‘precise knowledge’ of Plotinus himself; but in choosing amethod of writing that was synthetic rather than analytical they were obeying a true instinct, a dimawareness of how true knowledge ought to be. To the extent that a ‘manifestation of knowledge and wisdomis a distinct image’, it is not an image as we know images in the sublunary world, in ‘another form of being’in which discourse, rather than immediate intuition, is the normal mode of knowing.8 The question arises, ofcourse, as to the sense in which hieroglyphs can be seen as ‘synthetic’. They were, of course, pictograms,and it may well be that Plotinus was close enough to Egypt to know this, and that he had in mind not somuch individual hieroglyphs as the groups of symbols—which do image sets of relations—to be found onthe walls of tombs.

Ficino, of course, would not have known how hieroglyphs were really used. He supplemented Plotinuswith the only work on hieroglyphs available in his day, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo. There he found theEgyptians credited with a symbol that is not a hieroglyph, but the emblem of the alchemists—Ouroboros,the serpent devouring its own tail. In the Hieroglypbica this serpent is explained as a symbol of the universe.Its scales are the stars, its weight earth, its smoothness water. The serpent sheds its skin, which stands forrejuvenation; Ouroboros devours itself, which means that what is divinely created is received back into thedivinity. Although Ficino refers to Horapollo by name, he does not reproduce the latter’s account of theserpent’s meaning; he calls it a winged serpent—though the Hieroglyphica says nothing about wings—andsees it as a symbol of time (Boas 1950:28). The apparent discrepancy between the serpent of the

IMAGINATION 113

Hieroglyphica and Ficino’s is no doubt due to the conflation in Ficino’s mind between what he rememberedof Horapollo and what he had learned about Ouroboros directly from the alchemical tradition, which theauthor of the Hieroglypbica must also have drawn on. In the Greek alchemical texts Ouroboros issometimes winged, sometimes not; sometimes studded with stars, sometimes not. But there is no basicdiscrepancy between Ficino’s interpretation of the serpent and the Hieroglyphica’s. The alchemicalOuroboros symbolizes at once the sensible world, the circularity of the cycle of generation and destructionin time, which is the soul’s incarnate destiny, and the means of escape through illumination—through thatother circularity which is the procession and return of the Neoplatonist theology of emanation. Ficino putsthe emphasis on one part of the symbol, the Hieroglyphica on another.

Ficino’s text makes no claims for images other than hieroglyphs, among which, following Horapollo, hewrongly includes the supreme alchemical symbol. But it would be natural enough for his readers toassociate his solitary statement about hieroglyphs with his much more numerous statements abouttalismans, and to associate this notice of images as symbols, as synthetic and supernatural apprehensions,with magic and with imagination. The association would be made easier through the kind of analogy that istypical of ‘magical’ thinking; if imagination is the faculty that knits up sensations into the total pattern of ourperceptual world, why should it not also knit up images of perceptions into the significant whole that is‘vision’, the higher, inward perception that moves back from the multiplicity of the sensible towards theOne? It may well have been through this kind of analogical thinking that poets and painters with a vestedinterest in imagination could claim for it the powers that the Neoplatonists had always, even when they madetheir maximum concessions to imagination, claimed for intellect, for nous. Once this transition is made,imagination is no longer merely receptive, waiting for supernatural pictures to be flashed onto it as Dante’svisions ‘rained down’ into his alta fantasia; it is putting the pieces of the sensible world significantlytogether on its own account. It is creative, but with a creativity that is the mirror-image of the divinecreativity; reversed, moving not down through the Neoplatonic procession but upward through the return. Itbecomes the equivalent of the liturgy of the Pseudo-Dionysius, but on a do-it-yourself basis.

Such a view of the creative imagination of the artist was not put forward by Ficino himself, but it fits inwell enough with the spirit of his chapter on the divine genius of man. And with the spirit of an age that hadnot waited for philosophical sanction to admire works of art that, as Ficino put it when he made his list ofhuman achievements, soothe imagination, meet civilized needs and exemplify the sheer power of the humanmind.

Not only did this text contribute to the growing prestige of imagination; it helped also to add a newdimension to the concept of the symbol through which imagination was thought to express its particularkind of awareness of truth. The tradition stemming from the Pseudo-Dionysius had established the notion ofmetaphorical transfer from perception of the sensible to knowledge of the super-sensible, throughsimultaneous affirmation and negation. In theory, this was to separate the spiritual in things, which isaffirmed, from the material in things, which is negated. In practice, it amounted to picking out the qualitiesof the sensible world that were spiritually acceptable—beauty, nobility, grandeur, lordship and so forth—and attributing these to God. We noted that in Aquinas the transfers are mainly conceptual, and that inDante they carry complex feeling as well as conceptual recognition. But the Ouroboros example is a symbolof another kind, corresponding to the symbols of the liturgy in the Dionysian scheme.

The simplest and most rational explanation of the theurgic effects of religious symbols is that the mind ofthe worshipper is conditioned, by the processes of initiation, into the appropriate reactions. Similarly thealchemical adept would learn from transmitted lore the whole pattern of meaning associated with theOuroboros symbol—though the pattern might vary in detail from one particular alchemical tradition toanother while maintaining the basic gnosticism common to all such traditions. Would such symbols—do

114 FICINO

such symbols—convey anything to minds into which the meaning has not already been implanted by somekind of instruction or experience? Jung came to the conclusion that they do awaken affects, howeverdifficult to define, and that they have become established in traditions not as arbitrary bearers of meaningbut because of the meaning they already bore by their very nature. Renaissance Platonism, discovering somuch intriguing obscurity in esoteric texts and rejoicing in the sense of supernatural revelation that theyawakened, encouraged the view that all imaginative discourse is an invitation to the imagination to decipher.And some Platonists outdid the ingenuities of the Neopythagoreans in their willingness to pursue analogiesbeyond the understanding of reason and outside any possibility of verification, creating sometimesinterpretations that are, on the face of it, quite fantastic.

One such interpreter was Pico della Mirandola. He knew some Hebrew and some Arabic as well as someGreek, and added elements of the Jewish Cabala to the Neoplatonist brew.

The Cabala is an esoteric mystical tradition within the Jewish religion. Like the Greek Hermetica, itclaims to be a continuation of ancient wisdom and is recorded in texts of uncertain but probably not veryancient origin, which seem to be very much influenced by Neoplatonism and Hermetic ideas. God is said tobe unknowable and unattainable. He created by a series of radiating emanations followed by withdrawals ofthe divine substance so that created substances might subsist in their own qualities. Creation is thus a kindof degradation of God; the soul, which is a spark of the divine fire, must aim at reintegration into theoriginal flame. As in the Neoplatonist tradition, the sensible world is at once the veil and the revelation ofthe divine nature, a collection of symbols to be interpreted, or to be ‘seen through’ in the mysticalexperience of oneness with the divine.

Ficino himself was interested in interpreting the cosmos rather than texts, and saw everywhere images ofwhat the Pythagoreans had called harmonia, meaning not harmony as we now understand it but the way inwhich the parts fit together in a complex thing, then especially the tuning of an instrument and the resultingmusical scale. This Pythagorean notion of the harmonia of the cosmos is referred to by Socrates in the Gorgias(507e) and, as we noted earlier, it goes on through the Stoics and into Neoplatonism where it becomes amagical interdependence of all the parts, so that a movement in one part affects all the others and alters thetotal pattern. All the parts are reflected in the human soul, the microcosm; the soul stands between theintelligible and the sensible and has the responsibility of lifting the spiritual part of the sensible back to theintelligible plane.

We saw how this doctrine is applied to perception and recognition. In abstract thought forms in thePlatonic sense are detached from matter. But the kind of abstraction that is more characteristic ofNeoplatonism and of Ficino is symbolic in the Pseudo-Dionysian sense. How does the symbol in this sensediffer from metaphor in its most general meaning? The symbol works through metaphor, but what ispeculiar in the way that it does so?

The nature and effect of metaphor depend largely on the nature and extent of abstraction from the objectused as the illustration of an idea or as a ‘symbol’—in the sense we are investigating— of sometranscendent meaning. It is a commonplace that analogies can be misleading. The illustrative analogy needsto select and abstract some features of the object used for illustration while irrelevant features are pushed outof mind; it is not always easy to keep the borderline between relevant and irrelevant features hard and fast.Abstraction may be not simply of a conceptual element—the humanity of Plato in Ficino’s example ofperception (see p. 174)—but of ‘intention’ in the Scholastic sense; the awareness resulting from whatAvicenna called wahm and the Scholastics the estimative faculty—what the object means to us in terms ofvalue, with components of feeling. In Ficino’s example, this ‘meaning’ is read by fantasy before intellectabstracts the form, when Socrates recognizes Plato and ascribes certain qualities to him. This is the aspectof human experience on which the twentieth-century phenomenologists were to base their philosophizing; a

IMAGINATION 115

kind of knowledge of the object which is not simply recognition of what it is, not simply emotion caused byit in terms of love or hate, appetition or revulsion—terms suggested by Avicenna’s discussion of wahm—butwhat can be called the existential meaning of the object, involving the subject’s response to it at all levels, withall ‘faculties’ and in respect of all the shades of conscious experience which psychology, or psychologies,have distinguished. Awareness of sensuous pleasure is part of the experience.

Plato’s forms are a mixed bag; they vary from the purest concepts we can think of—the concepts ofmathematics—to what can be called ‘existential’ meanings. Courage is a concept, but not in quite the samesense as a circle is. Between the concept of the circle and the image of a particular round thing comes whatPlato called the ‘mathematical’—half concept, half image; a notion of circularity that can present itself tothe consciousness as the image of any old circle, varying perhaps in diameter as one images it. In the caseof a moral form the situation is not quite the same. Can there be the equivalent here of a ‘mathematical’ or ofa ‘figure’, the other word used by Neoplatonists for what is intermediate between form and sensiblerealization of form? Courage is a notion less easy to abstract from particular manifestations of courage. Itinvolves, for instance, a good deal of feeling, a different kind of meaning from the meaning of the circle.Renaissance emblematics constructed ‘figures’ to symbolize such concepts.

The instances the Pseudo-Dionysius gives of knowledge of the divine attributes by metaphorical transferare all of this ambiguous kind of abstraction. The kingship and lordship of God have to be separated offfrom the kings and lords we know of; anthropomorphism is a constant danger. Goodness, intelligence aslight, beauty, love, life itself must, as symbols of their supernatural equivalents, be separated off from theirsensible manifestations; idolatry is the danger here. But what of sensuous pleasure itself; has that a spiritualequivalent?

The Dionysian view of symbolism involves keeping the right elements of abstraction and rejecting thewrong. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are to be chosen in accordance with Neoplatonist metaphysics read in terms ofChristian theology, and the Christian initiate will be formed so that he will intuitively respond to thesymbolism of the liturgy in the right way. But when a theology like that of Dionysius is transferred outsideits historical context, in terms of ideas separated from the richer transmissions of catechism, liturgy and thegeneral life of a religious community, ambiguities arise. Attitudes to the sensuous may vary as we saw themvarying between Plato’s dialogues, the Hermetic writings, optimistic and pessimistic Gnosticism and thevarious shades of Christianity more or less influenced by these earlier tendencies.

Erigena, as we noted, shifted the Dionysian system towards pantheism, which means narrowing the gap orblurring the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible. Before Ficino there was a tendency withinScholastic philosophy to recognize that conceptual thought has not quite the unique importance that theearly Greeks and the medieval West were inclined to give it. Duns Scotus maintained that we have aprimary intuition of individual objects as individual, not simply as manifestations of a form, though he didnot deny the reality of universals. Ockham again emphasized the primary intuition of particulars, and wentfurther than Scotus in that he was a Nominalist and held that concepts are creations of the mind, not realitiesin themselves. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body gave scope to thinkers who wanted tobring the equivalents of sensation into heaven, and the Muslims took full advantage of the possibility withtheir celestial houris. In the early Renaissance there were Christian Epicureans who held that pleasure is thetrue good, and though Valla, for instance, distinguished between the uncertain and passing pleasures ofearth and the eternal pleasures of heaven, the latter seem not to exclude some celestial correspondence ofthe pleasures of the senses.

The Pseudo-Dionysius had warned against the dangers of symbols of likeness—that is, experiences in thesensible world that are highly valued and, therefore thought to be closer to the divine attributes than‘symbols of unlikeness’, meaning what we experience as ugly and disgusting. Symbols of likeness—things

116 FICINO

that seem beautiful and good in themselves—can lead to idolatry. It is difficult to see how we are meant todiscover the divine symbolism of the ugly and the disgusting. Baudelaire was to believe that the poet couldmake us aware of this, and that evil could be made to yield beauty. But the tendency in the Renaissance is togo for the ‘symbols of likeness’ and risk the dangers of idolatry and pantheism.

Ficino makes some attempt to distinguish between the spiritual and unspiritual aspects of sensuous beautyand, although Plato and Aristotle did not mean by ‘matter’ the solid physical stuff that the word now refersto, Ficino used the word in the popular rather than the classical sense and makes this notion the basis of hisdistinction. The pleasures that belong to the body are low; the pleasures the body can give to thecontemplative mind are high:

The beauty of the body does not consist in the shadow that is matter, but in the light and grace of form;not in the obscure mass, but in a sort of luminous harmony; not in inert and stupid downbearing, butin right number and measure. Light, grace, proportion, number and measure which we perceivethrough thought, sight and hearing. This is the goal of the true lover. The desire of the other senseswhich attracts us towards what is material, massive, heavy, without form—the contrary of beauty andlove—is not love, but stupid appetite, oppressive and utterly ugly.

(quoted in Chastel 1954:87)9

Beauty here is perceived by the two ‘noble’ senses, sight and hearing, which Proclus and al-Kindī had allowedto the star-gods. The symbolism of light had a respectable history within Christianity and seemed, no doubt,to be affirmative in the Dionysian sense without much need of negation or danger of distorted spirituality;what was more dubious was the use of the sun as a symbol of God. We noted that Gemisthus Plethonscandalized George of Trebizond by his sun-worship; Ficino did not go as far. But he looked into the sunfor inspiration about the nature of the super-celestial. The sun was, for him, not simply a metaphor to beused to illustrate some idea about God or to awaken some feeling about God; the close description of theattributes of the sun became for Ficino a means of exploring the nature of the super-celestial. The sun waspresented by him not merely as a metaphor, a symbol, a sign, but as a sensible manifestation of the divinity.And he had to ask himself whether this was, for himself, true belief or the feigned belief of poetry(Kristeller 1943:98). It was in connection with his account of the Orphic mystery of the sun that he wrotethe passage quoted earlier:

If we will not admit its truth, let us at least do as if it were true and look upon the sun as a mirrorwherein we might discover the supercelestial sun who has placed his tabernacle in the sun we know asreal.

(quoted in Chastel 1954:46)

There is an ambiguity here between images as perceived in the world and explored for their supernaturalsymbolism, and images perceived or imagined and used to express truths which the mind discovers withinitself, much as the images of dreamers and prophets were traditionally held to body forth or substantiatetruths communicated by a supernatural agent. Poetry as Ficino conceives it seems to work in various ways.The old notion of outside inspiration coexists with the more typically Renaissance view of the mind actingautonomously through its own ingenium, in which imagination has its important part to play. Poetry and music—Ficino has little to say about painting and sculpture— whether they arise from some supernaturalstimulus or from the mind’s own life represent privileged states of consciousness, rising above everyday,superficially rational responses to sensible experience. They are a kind of rapture, which Ficino calls furor.

IMAGINATION 117

Ficino was said to be an impressive performer on the lyre, and to convince his hearers of his own state ofrapture as he played. He no doubt experienced keenly the mental healing that music can bring: ‘Seriousmusic preserves and restores the consonance of the parts of the soul, as Plato and Aristotle say and as wehave experienced frequently’ (quoted in Kristeller 1943:307). Music, Valéry wrote, affects the centralnervous system directly. Ficino said much the same thing in the vocabulary of his day:

Since song and sound come from the thought of the mind, from the impulse of the imagination, andfrom the passion of the heart and, together with the broken and formed air, move the air-like spirit ofthe listener, which is the bond of Soul and body, it easily moves the imagination, affects the heart, andpenetrates the innermost sanctuary of the mind.


If music ‘penetrates the innermost sanctuary of the mind’, poetry is held to be more intellectual and closerto the divine mind. Poetry in fact is the most comprehensive of all the arts and the surest aid to thecontemplative state other than philosophy, which is given pride of place.

Ficino himself brought philosophy nearer to poetry as the Neoplatonists had brought it nearer to religion.He loved the free play of imagination for its own sake, at all levels from witty wordplay to poetictransfiguration, and the symmetries and rhythms of his Latin often convey the throb of his passionateinterest:

No man possessed by furor is content with ordinary speech. But he breaks forth into shouting andsinging and songs. Wherefore any furor, either that of prophecy, or of mysteries, or of love, since itleads to singing and poetry, can rightly be said to find its completion in the poetic furor.

(quoted in Walker 1958:21)10

118 FICINO

9Ideas about poetry and painting in the Italian Renaissance

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Platonists whose main concern was poetry, as writers, theorists orcritics, could find encouragement and some kind of inspiration in the Ficinian doctrine of poetry as furor;but not in Plato’s own writings, nor in what they knew of the Neoplatonists, nor in the expositions andcommentaries of Ficino could they find any direct help for the understanding and practice of poetry as acraft. The rules for good composition were to be found first in Horace, then, more and more as his Poeticsbecame more widely known through sixteenth-century commentaries, in Aristotle.

Only in the sixteenth century did theorizing about an ‘art of poetry’ distinguished from the generalprinciples of rhetoric come back into fashion; rhetoric, that is, considered as the art of organizing languagefor persuasion or ornamenting it for pleasure. Curtius (1953) found, in the Middle Ages, occasional claimsfor the divine inspiration of poetry and for poetry as a kind of imaginatively expressed knowledge akin totheology; it was a medieval commonplace that the great pagan writers such as Homer and Plato, and even Ovidwere among the sages—they had probably derived their wisdom eventually from Moses—and that theirmyths told the same things as Holy Scripture, but in a mysterious manner. Allegorical interpretation, it wascommonly held, could get at the hidden truth. We saw earlier how poorly Aquinas thought of such claims.Dante no doubt thought of himself as creating, under divine inspiration, a new myth to convey the samekind of supernatural truth as Holy Scripture, and his De vulgari eloquentia is a programme for putting newexpressive life into the language of poetry. For him some of the poetic ‘truth’ is in, or by the form, and formis becoming a complex notion involving sound and rhythm as well as figures of rhetoric.1 For the generalrun of medieval rhetoricians poetry, like prose, is first a matter of selecting and organizing the content, thenputting it into due order and expressing it in agreeable and persuasive language; inventio, dispositio,elocutio.

Bernard Silvestris of Tours in the twelfth century appears to have written a treatise on poetry, now lost,from which sprang in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a number of ‘arts of poetry’ or poetriae, as theywere sometimes called—by Matthieu de Vendôme, Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Gervais de Melkley, Evrardl’Allemand and Jean de Garlande. Of these treatises Faral (1962), the only authority to have studied themclosely in their historical context, admits that their interest is merely historical. Their principal sources areCicero’s De inventione, the Rhetorica ad Herennium which was at that time attributed to Cicero, later to oneCornificius, now to an author unknown, and Horace’s Ars poetica. These medieval treatises depend as muchon independent examination of models as on theoretical discourses. Examples from Horace’s verse occur asfrequently as direct adaptations of the precepts of the Ars poetica. The writers are practising teachers with avery practical outlook. Matthieu de Vendôme, for instance (Faral 1962:109–93), is not content to reproduceHorace’s advice about making fictional characters consistent with their circumstances (114–27 and 153–78);he adds seven examples, showing in detail how to describe a priest, a prince, an accomplished orator and soforth. Parity of esteem among the Latin sources is suggested by the fact that Matthieu mistakenly attributes

to Horace a maxim conceived in terms which are actually those of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. As anauthority Horace is important by both example and precept, but hardly more important as a poet than anumber of other auctores included in the medieval curicula, and as a theorist than Latin writers on rhetoric.

It is in the sixteenth century that Horace begins to stand out from the welter of auctores; but at his sideare two companions from the Middle Ages, Donatus and Diomedes. What brings these three together andpromotes them is the Humanist interest in tragedy and epic—the literary forms that seemed to theRenaissance to be of the essence of antiquity; tragedy in particular, since the Middle Ages had almost lostthe concept of it. What notion of tragedy had persisted in the Middle Ages is found in Boethius, Diomedesand Donatus; it was attached by them not only to plays but to any literary work that treated in elevated stylean historical subject concerning people of high rank involved in carnage. Latin authors being moreaccessible than Greek, the first clear notions of tragedy as a dramatic form were derived from Seneca,Horace and the three medieval writers, particularly Diomedes and Donatus.

As for Aristotle, his Poetics was not among the texts of which the medieval Aristotelians had anyknowledge. Their Aristotle had come to them by way of the Arabs; and though the Arab philosophers weresteeped in the subtleties of Greek metaphysics from Plato onwards they showed no interest in Greekliterature and, consequently, no curiosity about the Poetics—not, at least, until the time of Averroes, whowrote a paraphrase in Arabic in which he made some attempt to understand Aristotle’s propositions and totranspose them into the context of Arab poetry. Averroes was, of all the Arab interpreters of Aristotle, theinfluence most cautiously regarded by the Scholastic West; his ideas made more headway in Italy than inthe Sorbonne-regulated conservatism of France. His paraphrase of the Poetics was translated into Latin byHermannus Alemanus in the thirteenth century and first published in Venice in 1481 as Determinatio inpoetria Aristotelis. It was reprinted in 1515 and several times during the century. Giorgio Valla’s Latintranslation of the Poetics appeared in 1498, and the Aldine Greek text in 1508. But the influence of a text sofragmented had to wait for the learned commentaries to become widespread and effectively stimulating;Robortello’s in 1548 and Lombardi and Maggi’s in 1550 were the most famous. The explanations offeredby Lombardi and Maggi were known through lectures from 1541 onwards. Bernardo Segni published hisItalian translation of the text in 1549. In 1570 appeared a commentary on Longinus, but there are few signsof interest in this treatise on the sublime.

In sixteenth-century Italy literary theory and criticism became a flourishing branch of literature itself;Weinberg’s two-volume survey (1961), from which most of the quotations in this chapter are taken, showsthe quantity and variety of the writings, the vividness of the interest and the liveliness of the discussion,with quick-fire exchanges in debates which are often pursued continuously in text after text. If Aristotletended to provide the basis even for theorists Platonically inclined and inspired by Ficino, it was no doubtbecause he, of all the ancient authorities, had most to say about the noble genres of tragedy and epic on thepractical level. By the sixteenth century his philosophy had been more or less disentangled fromScholasticism, first by Averroes and then by the Paduans, so that the earlier tendency of some Humanists topolarize Plato and Aristotle as standing one for the new humanism, the other for Scholastic sclerosis nowhad less motivation. The new thinking about the nature and techniques of poetry acquired momentum anddirection with the advent of Aristotle. It remained syncretist; in general Aristotle seems to have beendominant, and reason seems to have been accepted by most thinkers as the ultimate criterion for poets as wellas philosophers, with mimesis as the main notion to be explored in connection with art. Neverthelessimagination at last has important roles to play in the aesthetic function and begins to acquire some of therich if confused connotations it was to reverberate with from the Romantics onwards.

Some thinkers were confused by the different senses given to mimesis in various contexts by Plato andAristotle; in the Republic, particularly. In Book III Plato makes Socrates distinguish between telling a story

120 IMAGINATION

and creating dramatic dialogue, giving rise to three poetic modes which can be called ‘narrative’, ‘mimetic’and ‘mixed’. If all art is imitative, some is evidently more so than others. In Book X comes the most widelyquoted passage in which poetry and painting are spurned by Socrates because they are imitations. In thePoetics Aristotle lists the arts that are imitations and approves of them for it, and when, at 1448a, hedistinguishes three modes corresponding to Plato’s he uses the term ‘dramatic’ where Plato uses ‘mimetic’.This apparent confusion of terms gave rise to a good many pseudo-problems among the Italians, but also, insome, to careful comparison of texts and clear thinking.

Most of the syncretists were aware of the questions raised by Plato’s banning of poets from the Republic;many of them saw more clearly than some later literary theorists that Plato probably had in mind differentkinds and degrees of mimesis, and a contrast between the extremes of religious poetry ritually used for thepublic good as he approved it, and consumer poetry created to meet popular taste and encourage emotionalself-indulgence. Lodovico Ricchieri in 1516 sees the distinction as between morality and dangerouspleasure:

But with respect to these fables for the young we must note carefully that the poets are not condemnedoutright by Plato; since to the degree in which he holds that they should be rejected when they disturbthe state and invent shameful things, to that same degree he embraces them and kisses them tenderlywhen they exhort to moral improvement, celebrating elegantly and eloquently in their praises ofheroes or their hymns to the gods.

(Weinberg 1961:57)

In 1562 Bernardo Tasso, father of the famous Torquato, saw Plato condemning poets who, through the‘harmony and sweetness of their verses, aroused and inflamed the tender souls of young people tolascivious and voluptuous actions’, making them ‘soft, effeminate, and entirely useless for the good and theimprovement of the republic. Nor is this a fault of poetry but of the poet, who like a wicked doctor givespoison instead of medicine.’ The poet’s proper function is

by imitating human action through the delightfulness of plots, through the sweetness of the wordsarranged in a most beautiful order, through the harmony of the verse, to adorn human souls with goodand gentle characters, and with various virtues.

(Weinberg 1961:282–3)

This is more or less the civilizing use that Plato allowed to poetry in the Laws.As for Plato’s objections to tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics could be seen as offering a valid rebuttal through

the notion of catharsis; if tragedies neutralized violent emotions they were socially desirable and could comeunder the heading of the ‘useful’. Aristotle could be represented as saying much the same things as Horaceabout the need for poets to combine the pleasurable and the useful and some Horatian enthusiasts managedto superimpose Horace on Aristotle and find them saying—or meaning—exactly the same things on everyissue that they could conceivably be interpreted as treating.

Historically fallacious, such eclecticism could give rise to fruitful speculation. Giovanni Fabrici, forinstance, wrote in his commentary on Horace’s Ars poetica, published in 1566, to explain what Horacemeant by the poet’s wisdom:

For example, if one wishes to write about the duties of a prince, he should not set before his eyes anyindividual prince as the example from which he would derive the precepts that a prince should

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 121

observe; for no single prince is so good that he does not have some fault. But Horace wishes that heshould have in mind the example or the Idea of the true prince, and that he should write how a princeought to be according to that Idea or rather that example…his end is to write how a prince should be,even though it is found that no real prince has ever been that way.

(Weinberg 1961:181)

Weinberg’s comment is that ‘there is a strange mixture here of Horace’s ideas on decorum, Aristotle’s ideason the universal, and Plato’s ideas on Ideas as seen, probably, through Cicero’s Orator’ (1961:181). It wasout of such strange mixtures that the new classicism was to be created.

The syncretist tendency of the age was, of course, neither unanimous nor universal and did not excludeparticular prejudices and vehement rejections. There were those whose anxiety to divert the currententhusiasm for the arts into religious channels went with a puritanical fear of the sensuous, so that they notonly opted for Plato against Aristotle but narrowed the former into a moralism which he would not haverecognized. At the opposite extreme there were those who revelled in the sensuousness of pagan poetry andrejected the Platonic strictures however interpreted. And there were moderately religious people not so fardetached from the medieval Church tradition that they did not feel Aristotle’s rationalist outlook to be morein keeping with proper attitudes to life than the heady Neoplatonism of the new Florentine fashion.

Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on the Ars poetica, published in Florence in 1482, shows how anumber of medieval commonplaces about poetry and rhetoric could come together to generate a new aura inthe enthusiastic Renaissance movement for the promotion of the arts. For this member of the FlorentineAcademy poetry was the most important spiritual exercise:

Indeed its matter [is] much more divine than that of other writings; for embracing all of them, andbound together by varied rhythms, and circumscribed by separated measures, and adorned in short byvarious ornaments and various flowers, it embellishes with admirable fictions whatever men haveheretofore done, whatever they have accomplished, whatever they have known and contemplated witha divine genius; and for fear they cannot be understood except through allegories perceived by us, ittransposes completely into things of different kinds. For when it appears to be narrating somethingmost humble and ignoble or to be singing a little fable to delight idle ears, at that very time it iswriting in rather a secret way the most excellent things of all, and which are drawn forth from thefountain of the gods.

(Weinberg 1961:80)

‘Circumscribed by separated measures’ (‘distinctis pedibus circumscripta’) no doubt refers to the regularbeat on which rhythm is based. As for the statement that poetry ‘in diversas omnino species traducit’,translated by Weinberg as ‘transposes completely into things of different kinds’, this surely means that whatthe poet expects us to understand, he translates into images—this is the familiar contention that allegoricalinterpretation by the reader means translating back what is imaginatively represented into intelligiblenotions. But formal elements somehow have a part to play in the transmission of the poet’s wisdom; how, itis not at all clear in Landino’s text.

Ficino had explained the influence of the formal qualities of music and the effects on the mind of variouskinds of natural images in terms of magic, and this kind of speculation went on right through the sixteenthcentury and provided a scheme of reference for the more daring explorers of the nature of aestheticresponses. Some of these no doubt thought of Ficino’s musical theory and sympathetic magic in connectionwith poetry, as D.P. Walker suggests (1958:126 ff.).

122 IMAGINATION

In an intellectual climate where Orpheus might seem to be usurping the place of Christ in some men’simaginations it was natural enough that the spirit of Savonarola should find its way into some disquisitionsabout poetry. The critics who took the extreme moral line set up the Plato of the Republic against theNeoplatonism of the Florentine current. One of the most scrupulous was Tommaso Campanella, who wrotea Poetica towards the end of the sixteenth century. His disparagement of Homer includes all the criticismsmade by Plato and reinforces them; Homer was a charlatan and the specious beauty of his writing is still asnare. Aristotle, says Campanella, followed Homer instead of nature and produced false and useless rules. Thetrue ancients were inspired by God and followed no rules but his and those found in nature, ‘which must beimitated; for in truth these pedantic rules darken and deaden the pure and lucid spirit of the poet…’.

Campanella takes it for granted that the poet who submits to true inspiration will also further the truths oforthodox religion, the purposes of the established political authority and the individual exercise of virtue. Sothat, as always in such attitudes based on a rigid a priori interpretation of inspiration as ‘reason’, thecriterion for the genuineness and purity of the allegedly supernatural inspiration is the compatibility ofpoetic ‘truth’ with the established order. ‘Poetry is therefore an art which imitates, through numbered andfigurative words, things pertaining to our way of life, which it teaches in a pleasant manner.’ The bestpoetry is sacred poetry; then comes philosophical poetry, heroic poetry and—here Campanella partscompany with Plato—tragedy, which can be edifying because it shows that apparent good fortune is not tobe trusted and that even the great can be brought low (Weinberg 1961:791 ff.).

In many ways Campanella seems to be taking up points already made by Bishop Patrizi in the previouscentury. But the Bishop had stayed more uncompromisingly close to Plato in his mistrust of the drama.Tragedy ‘readily changes stupid men into madmen and drives the unstable to frenzy’; comedy leads toeffeminacy, lust and dissipation (Weinberg 1961:253).

So the idea that the true poet is a prophet, a purveyor of supernatural wisdom in imaginative andpleasantly assimilable terms is widespread, though there is perceptible rivalry between the view that thewisdom distilled through allegorical interpretation will accord with orthodox Christian doctrine and themore characteristically Neoplatonist belief that what is being tapped is the pristine fount from which allparticular religions have flowed along their separate streams. There is dialogue, too, between pleasure andprofit; and here the most generally accepted doctrine is that the first is important because it serves thesecond. Aesthetic delight is the means, edification the end. The philosopher, says Ammirato, becomes a poet‘when he condescends to minister to the health of his soul with sweetness’ (Weinberg 1961:279).

Even those critics whose first loyalty is to poetry rather than to religion are put on the defensive by thegrowing force of the Counter-Reformation. Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose, says Antonio Maria de’ Conti,a professor at Milan, were great readers of poetry and cited it constantly. What he does not say is that Jeromehad felt the aesthetic pull of pagan literature as a temptation of the devil. Already in the fifteenth centuryAntonio Mancinelli complained that the poets were ‘wrongfully damned by certain people, especially on thegrounds that they draw away from the Catholic faith those who are unwary’. On the contrary, Mancinellimaintains, the poets uphold the ten commandments and condemn the seven deadly sins (Weinberg 1961:254).

So even the morally dubious elements in the poets were somehow defended; wickedness is said to beportrayed only for adverse judgment. What seems trivial or merely agreeable or even sensually gratifying,properly interpreted, is said to yield some mysterious kind of truth. Allegory thus saves poetry against thebigots as, in ancient Greece and Alexandria, it had defended Homer against Plato. The term ‘allegory’ itselfis a very wide concept. It can refer to the sort of one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signifiedthat we find in medieval moralities—a person standing for a vice—but also to what was later distinguishedas ‘symbolism’, where the correspondence between signifier and signified is indirect. Again, the indirect


correspondence may be held to be logically analysable, as in the case of Pico’s seven-fold commentary onGenesis, or to be mysterious and super-logical, as is sometimes claimed for the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Poetryis often called a ‘first philosophy’, and, more specifically, classified as a branch of moral philosophy.

As the new theories developed more and more on the basis of the Poetics, the vernacular poets of thepresent and the recent past were subjected not only to the religious and ethical scrutiny of the Counter-Reformation but to trial by classical jury; not only dramatists like Sperone and Guarini but poets writing ingenres with little or no correspondence with the classical genres—Dante, Ariosto and Tasso were the mainconcerns. Could the works of these modern poets be justified by the eternal principles of writing laid downby the ancients in the light of reason? Verdicts are often patently influenced by some special interest orprejudice; support for Dante from the theologically orthodox, for Ariosto or Tasso because of personal tiesand local loyalties. But already the battle is engaged between the ancients and the moderns. On the one handthere is admiration for the Greek and Roman classics leading to acceptance of the theoretical rules, andinvestigation— sometimes merely pedantic but often shrewd and perceptive—of their aestheticimplications; on the other hand there is enjoyment at once of the tradition of the medieval romances and ofthe new ways of imagining and feeling opened up by awareness of pagan sensibility less inhibited now bymedieval rigidities. This leads in some poetry lovers to claims for unlimited freedom to explore new waysof expression and new things to express.

A good deal of the discussion now seems futile in itself and interesting only as history. Is the Divine Comedyreally a comedy? Yes, answer some defenders, because it deals with non-noble characters and has a happyending. Others answer that though it is called a comedy it is really a spiritual epic. The poem is not animitation but a fantasy, say some; according to others this fantasy is the imitation of a real-life dream. Thereis too much philosophy’ is countered by ‘poetry is essentially a kind of philosophy’. As for Tasso, OrazioLombardelli in 1585 was able to find sixteen objections which he set out in numbered paragraphs,beginning with the complaint that it is mere history without plot and that it is ‘befouled by filth of carnalvices, of homicides, of passions, and of sins in saintly men and in martyrs’ (Weinberg 1961:1026).

Campanella allows some criticism of Dante in that the poet shows himself insufficiently detached from‘that stinking poetry of Greece’ and from the usages of an alien religion; but in the main, he claims, Dantestands for sound Christian values. The ability Campanella singles out as the cause of Dante’s excellence isthe imaginative gift that Quintilian and Longinus had said to be essential to the orator and the poet; Dantecan enter into the passions of his characters and express them vividly. Campanella defends, on this score,Dante’s use of metaphors which some critics had condemned as vulgar (Weinberg 1961:908). GirolamoZoppio asserted that Dante’s poem was both comedy and epic, and also poetry in the sense that Plato’sdialogues are poetry. ‘Poems moreover are all imitations by means of dialogues, arguments and disputesrelating to human affairs’; and—an interesting notion, foreshadowing later uses of imaginative writingconsciously to explore the interaction of different points of view—tragedies and comedies are said to bemade up of ‘discoursings and dialogues among persons arguing and disputing about things and affairs, usingpropositions and responses in a dialectical form’ (Weinberg 1961:896).

In view of all the cross-currents and competing intellectual interests of the sixteenth century it is notsurprising that the Neoplatonism of the Ficinians was not immediately and widely translated into a theory ofliterature giving to imagination the importance it had acquired in Ficino’s theology. Yet the concept ofimagination does begin to take on positive and firm connotations that were absent or barely implied in theclassical authorities. This was partly, no doubt, because theorists who were philosophically inclined couldnow think in terms of a conventionally firm psychology based on Avicenna and established by theschoolmen, with some well-defined functions for imagination or fantasy. Agnolo Segni, for instance, putspoetry between history and philosophy as a mixed kind of discourse concerned on the one hand with ‘the

124 IMAGINATION

things in our world…the particular sensible things’ but also with ‘their perfect forms which we call Ideas’,the objects of philosophy (Weinberg 1961:31–2). In psychology, this intermediary between the sensible andthe ideal is imagination or fantasy. In other thinkers the relationship between imitation and imagination comesunder scrutiny, and comparison of the various things said by Plato and by Aristotle about mimesis andphantasia leads to some interesting speculations.

In the Sophist, as we saw earlier, Plato distinguished two forms of image-making (235c–6c). TheStranger who plays the part usually given in the dialogues to Socrates defines the ‘making of likenesses’(eikastike) as copying exactly the shape, dimensions and colour of the model. ‘Why’, says Theaetetus, ‘isnot that what all imitators try to do?’ The Stranger explains that sculptors and painters whose works are ofcolossal size have to distort the proportions of the model, otherwise

the upper parts would look too small, and the lower too large, because we see the one at a distance,the other close at hand…. So artists, leaving the truth to take care of itself, do in fact put into theimages they make, not the real proportions, but those that will appear beautiful.

He proposes to call the copy an eikon and the illusion-provoking semblance a phantasma; the art ofproducing phantasmata is called phantastike. Some kinds of artists are fabricators of illusions, and so—thisis the purpose of the demonstration in this dialogue— are all Sophists. The Sophist’s illusory images arecalled eidola. The Renaissance theorists who used the terms of Plato’s distinction sometimes misunderstoodPlato’s own use; but the misunderstanding is partly Plato’s responsibility in implying that the technique ofdistortion is the only technique of illusion and that two-dimensional paintings can ever be exact copies, thatis replicas of what they represent, according to Plato’s own definition of ‘copy’. The sculptor who distortsthe proportions of his colossal statue to make it ‘look right’ is no more deceitful than the painter who usesperspective or its equivalent to convey three dimensions through two.

But those sixteenth-century theorists who accepted that Aristotle had corrected Plato’s mistakencondemnations of mimetic art could profitably work out the implications of Plato’s distinction withoutworrying too much about Plato’s object in making it; and some of them came to write about poetry and paintingas the representation of eidola corresponding to, but distinct from everyday experience. Such a notion wasto play a part later on in the aesthetics of Croce, Collingwood and Sartre, in which a work of art is called an‘analogue’ or ‘analogon’, either of experience in the real world or of a creation of consciousness which isitself imaginary.

Jacopo Mazzoni, writing in defence of Dante about 1585, sets out his own theory of poetry. The poeticart, he says, has two aspects, concerned respectively with the proper use of poetry in the body politic andwith the nature and making of poetry itself. Poetry is a way of giving pleasure. Eventually it has a moralend; but it can be considered

in itself insofar as it is an art having the pleasure of man as its aim, in such wise that by means ofpleasure it restores the energies grown weary in serious occupations; and when so considered it has noother function but to imitate human actions in a way to delight those who listen to them or who readthem.

(Weinberg 1961:26)

From Mazzoni’s long and complicated discussion, with many detailed references to Plato’s dialogues andAristotle’s Poetics, it emerges that poetry is essentially a ‘sophistic’ art, whose business is with the image-making that admits the false as well as the true. Bad poetry, that is bad sophistic, ‘brings disorder to the


appetite through excessive delight’, but the praiseworthy sophistic of good poetry ‘subordinates appetite toreason, and considered as a game authorized by the civil faculty, has utility as its end’. The ‘idol’ (idolo)which is represented by the poem ‘has its origin in our artifice and is born of our fancy [phantasia] and ofour intellect through our choice and our will’ (Weinberg 1961:324 ff.). Mazzoni divides poems into fourkinds: dramatica phantastica, imitating false idoli born of imagination, dramatica icastica imitating idoliwhich are themselves true, and the corresponding narrative pair, raccontativa phantastica and icastica. Heshows a preference for the first of the four kinds: all art is the representation of idoli, not directly of truth,and Mazzoni is not far from the conclusion that the more imagination enters into the idolo to be representedthe better. Gregorio Comanini, in 1591, repeated the icastic/fantastic distinction in Mazzoni’s terms andread it back, mistakenly, into Plato’s Sophist. By ‘icastic’, says Comanini, Plato means imitation of realthings; by ‘fantastic’, imitation of things not existent (‘che finge cose non essistenti’) (Schuhl 1933:5–7).

This particular way of establishing imagination as the essence of poetry, with its paradoxical defence offalsity, seems to have been a minority view—though, as we shall see later, Tasso thought it importantenough to call for rebuttal. There is a majority view which asserts in quite another way the differencebetween the imagined idolo that the poet represents and the factual truth that is the business of the historian.

If Plato’s point about the need to distort for the sake of illusion was put beside Aristotle’s discussion ofthe poet’s need to convince, a number of trains of thought could be set in motion. Aristotle’s distinctionbetween history and poetry could be thought of in parallel with Plato’s ‘icastic’ and ‘fantastic’. How doesplot relate to fact, or to a mere sequence of events? Some Italian theorists bring out clearly whatE.M.Forster was later to emphasize in his essays on the novel—that plot is organized story; and theirmeditation on the Poetics suggested that the poet’s arranging of the elements of his story has a threefold aim;safeguarding the illusion—that is, making the reader imagine vividly and believe what he imagines, ‘live in’what he imagines; bringing out the universal implications of particular events, the universal values they areheld to illustrate; and creating in the reader’s mind the pleasurable sense of the ‘marvellous’. SperoneSperoni made a neat distinction: ‘the annal is true, history is true and worthy, poetry is true and worthy andmarvellous’ (Weinberg 1961:43). Usually—and the point is made by a very great number of critics —history is said to copy, putting events in their natural order, and poetry to imitate, but through an artificialorder.

‘Truth’ in some contexts means what is historically true of happenings in the real world; in others itmeans philosophical truth, rising above the particulars of history. The inventive powers of the poettransform truth in the first sense into verisimilitude, and from the verisimilitude of the fiction comes truth inthe second sense. ‘Imitation’ therefore depends on ‘invention’; and the latter term tends to shift its meaningfrom the traditional rhetorical sense of ‘choosing the matter of discourse’ to a sense nearer the modern ideaof ‘creative imagination’, transforming the chosen matter into the ‘idol’, the ‘fiction’, creating theconvincing illusion that will awaken the reader’s consciousness to universal truth and a sense of themarvellous.

Francesco Lovisini brings these notions together in his commentary on Horace, published in 1554.Remembering Aristotle’s contention in the De anima that imagination is not, as Plato had implied,‘sensation with opinion’, Lovisini writes:

Poets follow the imagination, not opinion, since they call themselves poets not because they write inverse but because of the plot and the fiction, as Aristotle has set it down for us in the Poetics. Andtherefore all those who imitate the image or the appearance of things by means of art, as do manysculptors and painters, are poets, as Plato’s Socrates affirms in the Symposium, through the fact thatthey give pleasure by their invention and imitation of things.

126 IMAGINATION

(Weinberg 1961:453)

Pietro Cresci, lecturing to the Accademia degli Uranici towards the end of the century, spoke of

invention, which is nothing other than an imagination of things which are either true or verisimilar, orwe might say possible, and which is the main pillar of the great structure of imitation, the base andfoundation of the whole poetic art.

(Weinberg 1961:240)

In the many pronouncements about the relations between invention, imitation and imagination one constantis the view that poetry is concerned with universal truth, the truth of ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’ thought of in eitherPlato’s or Aristotle’s terms; and though the ultimate fount of truth is still reason, and the rules for itsimaginative expression are still held to be founded on reason, imagination is given the main and sometimesthe exclusive role in the expression and interpretation of poetic truth. The artist imitates the Platonic forms;and side by side with the view that he begins with something called the ‘idea’ we find the contention that hebegins with the ‘idol’—which is thought of as the idea in the form of images. Francesco Patrizi in his Dellapoetica of 1586 makes the same claim for illumination through fantasy in the poet as the Neoplatonists hadmade for it in the prophet:

enthusiasm is a natural moving of the mind, forced by the fantasies presented to it by the light whichsome god, or genius, or demon infuses into the soul; and it works through the subject who receivedthat light, without the illuminated one’s knowing what is being done or said.

The poet’s talent, says Patrizi, is made up of nature, furor, art and wisdom, and the greatest of these is furor(Weinberg 1961: 771). Andrea Menechini in 1572 writes of inspiration in terms which bring together theassociations of both imagination and intelligence:

Oh holy Poetry! oh highest of divine inspirations! for by purging us of every stain, making us pureand simple, you make our soul shine with its own splendour, and through its proper and naturalstrength, as also through its intelligence which is the chief and pilot of that same soul, you cause it toobtain from the angels in a single moment whatever it desires.

(Weinberg 1961:299)

Other writers take a less transcendental view of furor and put more weight upon thought and judgment.2 Inthe minds of many ‘imitation’ can be said to play the part that ‘imagination’ played in the emanativeschemes of the late Neoplatonists. Weinberg sums up, for instance, Segni’s definition of ‘imitation’ as atransposition of ideas derived from Plato; ‘in a word, the whole Platonic chain of relationships—fromuniversal Ideas to particular concepts or objects to representations of those concepts or objects—isconstituted by a series of imitations’. The terms which Weinberg quotes Segni as using, however, have aNeoplatonist ring:

In its most general meaning [for Segni], to ‘imitate’ is to make one thing resemble another, tofabricate one thing— an ‘idolo’, an ‘Immagine’, a ‘fantasma’—in likeness of another which is its‘essempio’ or ‘essemplare’. The ‘idolo’ gives an appearance, a representation of its object, and poetryis concerned with the making of such images…. Since it uses discourse, its words imitate concepts


just as its concepts imitate things. The general process of imitation is found everywhere in the world:God imitates himself in man (see Scripture), nature imitates the world of ideas, art imitates nature,men imitate each other.

(Weinberg 1961:301)

Notice that for Segni poetic imitation is split into two stages— the making of the idolo and the use oflanguage to express the idolo; ‘words imitate concepts just as its concepts imitate things’. A good deal ofdiscussion went on among critics about the relative importance of plot and poetic language, ‘fable’ and‘verse’. Most accept from Aristotle that the ‘fable’, rather than ‘verse’ is of the essence of poetry; someclaim that prose can be poetic. Even these, though, are often prepared to allow that ‘verse’ brings anadvantage. Verse or no, ‘imitation’ for many thinkers involves a special use of language, a rhetoric. Segni isone of the earliest to make an attempt to distinguish what Mallarmé and Valéry saw as crucial to thedefinition of the essence of poetry as they understood it—meaning conveyed through language and meaningconveyed in language; separable and inseparable content. I.A. Richards was to make great play with ‘thetwo uses of language’, intellectual and emotive. So Segni:

Of these two kinds of language, the true, which narrates the truth of things exactly as they were doneor are done or as they are, does not belong to poetic imitation or to poetry, but it is proper either tohistory or to one or another of the sciences. Hence, the other part remains for poetic imitation and forpoetry: to make images out of false language and out of fable; and consequently poetry is this—falselanguage which makes images [la quale fa idoli], that is, which makes false things and thingsinvented by itself in resemblance to the true, which language is called mythology by the Greeks and‘favola’ by us and by the Latins.

(Weinberg 1961:301)

Separable in theory, the making of the ‘idolo’ and of the language to convey the ‘idolo’ seem to beinseparable in practice; language enters into the very constitution of the ‘favola’.

Rhetoric has its place, of course, in Aristotle’s Poetics; but Weinberg suggests, very plausibly, that someof the sixteenth-century theorists who emphasized the part played by language in imitation were influencedby the Latin translation of Averroes’s paraphrase which was the earliest version of the Poetics to be printed.This begins with the startlingly un-Aristotelian statement that all poems are imaginative: ‘sermones poeticisermones sunt imaginativi’, and according to Weinberg’s account of the rest of the text ‘imaginativi’ meanssomething like ‘figurative’. Instead of listing three kinds of imitation as Aristotle does—different objects,different manner, different means—Averroes speaks of three kinds of metaphorical assimilation. WhereAristotle makes poetry productive of ‘myth’, Averroes writes of the production of verbal imagery. The endof poetry according to Averroes—and against what Aristotle says—is ethical. Poems can convey knowledgeof what is good and bad, true and false, or impel to moral action. The means, according to Weinberg’s analysisof the text, is consistently rhetorical, though Averroes draws a distinction between rhetoric proper, whichtries to persuade, and poetry which works by ‘representation’. Weinberg implies that Averroes’s phrase ‘persermonem representativum’, which he translates as ‘imitative composition’, really means a composition infigurative language. One may doubt, judging from the quotations given, whether Averroes’s notion ofimitation is quite as univocal and limited as Weinberg asserts; but there can be no doubt where the emphasislies, and this accords with what can be read elsewhere, in descriptions of Arab poetry, of the importance inthat tradition of formal conventions and figurative language.

128 IMAGINATION

One way of thinking about the problems of expressive language is in terms of the soul and its incarnationin the body. Plato’s view of soul and body is the basis for this; but there are echoes of Neoplatonisttheosophy too—the doctrine that the soul creates, for its own incarnation, the ‘vehicle’, the ‘astral body’which belongs to the intermediate realm of imagination between the purely intellectual and the grosslyphysical. The notion of expressing meaning is often analogically explored in this way in the Renaissance. Inan heraldic device the emblem is said to be the body and the motto is the soul; in song, music is thebody, the poem the soul. A painting has its subject or its ‘idea’ as its soul. So, when the Italians who tacklethe theory of literary expression make some attempt to analyse the relationship between thought and words,concepts (concetti) and discourse, their thinking is to some extent shaped by the body-soul image; the concettithey have in mind seem often to be images rather than abstract ideas, and what they are trying to shed lighton is the way in which language can speak to the imagination, as distinct from the intellect, even when it isthe instrument of dianoia, discursive thought and dialectic.

There is sometimes a certain ambiguity about the nature of the concetto, as there is about the parallelnotion of disegno in painting. In the philosophical background were the three patterns which, with aminimum of logical blur, could be superimposed—as they were in Ficino’s theology. There are Plato’sscheme of idea-form/mathematical figure/sensible particular; Aristotle’s form/ image/particular; theNeoplatonist-theosophical soul/vehicle/body. The concetto and the disegno hover between the top andmiddle levels. The artist creates, like God, from ideas; but as soon as ideas emerge from the potential to theactual they begin to be ‘perceived’—imagined but not yet sensed—as figures with extension and quasi-sensible qualities. Aristotle was prepared to admit that many people think mainly at this level; Renaissancepoets and painters often seem to envisage creativity taking place at the same level of mental awareness. AsKlein (1956) points out in his essay on the ‘vehicle of the soul’, disegno includes the senses of the Frenchdessein and dessin—the meaning the forms of the painting are intended to convey and the formsthemselves. The notion that, in painting, drawing is the more intellectual element and colour the moreimaginative goes right through to Baudelaire and Claudel. In poetry, the idea-image that is the concettobecomes fully sensible in the structure, rhythm and sound of the words.

The term concetto comes under scrutiny at the end of the sixteenth century in the treatises of GiulioCortese and Camillo Pellegrino. Broadly speaking, the concetto is the meaning in the poet’s mind which hislanguage is to express. Cortese calls it ‘that meditation which the spirit makes upon some object offered toit, of what it means to write about’ (Weinberg 1961:235). For Pellegrino it includes ‘senso, sentimento,sentenza’; he defines it in its broadest sense as ‘a thought formed by the intellect as an image orresemblance of a real thing, being the meaning of that thing’. When Pellegrino defines the concetto as itappears in the mind of the poet it becomes ‘a thought of the intellect, an image or resemblance of true thingsand of things which resemble the truth, formed in the fantasy’ (Weinberg 1961:243, my italics)

What these writers call the ‘marvellous’ is whatever gives poetry its particular interest as poetry—whatever moves the reader to a sense of emergence from the ordinary. It can arise from the miraculous ormagical events narrated in the fiction. It can be admiration aroused by the representation of heroiccharacters. Or it can simply be pleasure in the elevated, ornamental, lyrical, sensuous or witty language. ForFrancesco Bonciani the marvellous is of the essence of imitation; he has a particular admiration for theeffects to be produced through prosopopoeia (Weinberg 1961: 201). Giovanni Talentoni wrote a wholetreatise on the varieties of emotion that literature can produce, the Discorso sopra la maraviglia of 1597.Benedetto Grasso, a Platonist who asserts the power of poetry and deplores its misuse, put the emphasis onbeauty of form and technical skill in the appreciation of poetry (Weinberg 1961:178).

Both the moralists, like Grasso and Campanella, and the defenders of poetry against puritanical stricturesare aware of the part played by sensuous evocation and strong sensations of every kind as guarantees of the


vividness of the poetic experience and the intensity of a certain kind of pleasure—mistrusted by some,cultivated by others. Francesco Panicarola, one of the Jesuit critics who transposed Plato’s criteria for theacceptance or rejection of poets into the terms of the Council of Trent, wanted censorship of painting andsculpture as well as of poetry, and pleaded for the destruction of the obscene and the libidinous; all thesearts, he said, can have a violent effect on the senses. One counterargument echoed what some Byzantineshad urged against the Iconoclasts; it claimed for poetry, and the new vernacular poetry in particular, whathad earlier been claimed for the usefulness of holy images—that direct appeal to the senses and imaginationcan teach ordinary people more effectively than abstract philosophy. Bartolomeo Maranta wrote in 1563–4:

Not only do they [the poets] teach things as do the others [the philosophers], but they make them morepowerful through examples. Indeed, the poets teach them better because more clearly, since, as theymove the passions and display the habits, they place the things themselves before our eyes in such a waythat we seem to see them and to touch them. But the pure philosophers, when they treat a discipline byabstracting it from its matter, weary the mind and the capacity to understand, whence it comes aboutthat they drive their listeners or their readers away from knowledge.

(Weinberg 1961:487)

Here what Plato called the ‘old quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ is resolved in a most un-Platonicand un-Aristotelian way. But Maranta foreshadows the Romantic tendency to go back beyond Plato to whatis claimed to be a more ancient wisdom:

Therefore the ancient sages said that poetry is much more useful for this reason, that by penetrating,through the sweetness of diction, into the soul even of him who does not wish it, it makes itself accessibleto a greater number of men; whereas unadorned philosophy reaches a few men.

(Weinberg 1961:487)

For critics of Maranta’s persuasion sensuous vividness and emotive power are positive virtues, as Nicolòdegli Oddi maintained in his defence of Tasso in 1585–7 (Weinberg 1961:1034). Oddi presents Tasso as apoet inspired at all levels of the soul from intellect to senses, and Tasso himself came to defend thesupernatural states of poetry in corresponding terms. His father, Bernardo, was much more of a Platonistthan an Aristotelian, and as we saw earlier, he pointed out that Plato would have approved of the kind ofpoetry that used beauty in the interest of goodness. The poet, he claimed, is gifted by God. ‘There is nodoubt whatsoever but that the perfection of this science has something divine about it, and that for this samereason it should be placed before all others’ (Weinberg 1961:283).

Torquato Tasso himself had an uneasy conscience about some of the features of his poetry that Oddipraised. He felt his own ‘pagan’ tendencies running counter to the Counter-Reformation and sometimeswent in fear of the Inquisition. He seems to have been more bothered by the Church than by Aristotle, andby fear of condemnation than by his own moral scruples. Plato was, for him, the mediator between classicaland Christian thought, and he did his best to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. But his inspiration came as muchfrom Ariosto as from classical sources, with eroticism and magic as powerful elements in his poetic effects;and in his theorizing Plato seems more and more to have taken precedence over Aristotle, and Neoplatonism—of the Florentine variety—over Plato. In his poetry, the equivalent of the Neoplatonist union with the Onein a perfection of intellectual being is often a more sensuous and homely ideal, as it was to be for some post-Romantic poets. ‘The idyll’, says C.P.Brand, ‘the quest for perfect peace, beauty, comfort, love, is a constantdream of Tasso’s throughout his misfortunes and inspires some of his best verse’ (1965:68). Baudelaire was

130 IMAGINATION

to sing of the ‘luxe, calme et volupté’ of the ideal place of escape from the torments of life. Richard Codyfinds in Tasso’s Aminta—and indeed in the whole pastoral tradition—a ‘Neo-Platonic landscape of themind, mythopoeically conceived’ (1969:82).

Brand shows that, side by side with the conventional moralizing favoured by the Counter-Reformationand with the observances demanded by the Church—confession, prayer, baptism—there is in JerusalemDelivered a religious sense which, says Brand, Tasso interpreted in a ‘broadly Platonic’ way:

On the one hand there is the personal, intimate sense of mystery, loneliness and weakness which seeksfor God as an explanation and consolation; and on the other is the consciousness of the collectiveforce of the Church and the delight in its ceremonial and liturgy.

(1965:96)

The full force of Tasso’s Neoplatonism is felt, as E.H. Gombrich (1972b) pointed out, in his Discourses onthe Heroic Poem, published in 1594. Intent as always on reconciling what he called Platonism with theChurch and with Aristotle, Tasso adjusts his moral tone to the Counter-Reformation and his definitions tothe Poetics, but the spirit is the spirit of, say, Ficino, as developed by Tasso’s contemporary Paolini.

Tasso begins with Aristotle’s definitions and divisions and with the theoretical structures erected by hisItalian contemporaries on the foundations of medieval and classical rhetoric. Poetry is a first philosophy; itsbusiness is to give profit through delight. It differs from history in that it imitates, making verisimilitude outof truth by inventions in some sense false, yet conceived in the interests of universal truth. But Tasso’s mainoriginality is that he struggles valiantly, albeit through confusions, digressions and some blatant self-contradictions, with this notion of poetic truth.

By the end of the second discourse he has claimed for poetry both kinds of noetic virtue as theNeoplatonists had separated them out; dialectic, and pure intuition; discursive thinking and directapprehension. But now imagination, which Neoplatonism had allowed to encroach further and further intothe realm Plato had reserved for intellect, takes over the business of apprehending truth directly andcommunicating it in poetic form. The separation of the notions of beauty and goodness which Leconte deLisle and Baudelaire were to insist on, and the identification of beauty with transcendent truth which wascharacteristic of any number of European Romantics—these are more than adumbrated in Tasso’s Discorsi.

What is however un-Romantic is that Tasso’s poetic truth includes Aristotle’s as well as theNeoplatonists’, with something of Plato’s as well. In the first discourse Tasso posits early on the notion thatbeauty is proper to poetry as the good is proper to philosophy, and that beauty arises out of imitation, whichcan be narrative or dramatic. In the second discourse Tasso gets to grips with the problem of relating poetryto philosophy, and begins with arguments drawn from the common store of contemporary theory. Poetry, ithad been said, can be considered under the heading of logic, because it offers its own kind of proofs ofuniversal principles of morals. Tasso puts forward this claim, while admitting that the logic of poetry is thelogic of the probable rather than of the certain; ‘the poet uses proof less efficiently than the dialectician—indeed, imitation, example, and comparison are the weakest kinds of proof, as Boethius teaches in the Topics’(1973:29). Yet the opinions that Homer attempts to demonstrate are probable—for instance

in the person of Hector that the defence of the fatherland is supremely laudable, and in the person ofAchilles that revenge is supremely laudable, proper to the magnanimous man, consequently just, andfavoured by the gods. Such opinions, unquestionably probable in themselves, are verisimilar; andHomer’s skill made them most probable, or incontrovertible and completely truthlike.

(1973:30)


In his ‘thought’ the poet has, Tasso maintains, the same range as the logician; he uses demonstration, theprobable syllogism, and, more rarely, the paralogism. When he demonstrates he

uses the philosopheme; sometimes he follows the verisimilar and uses the example and theenthymeme, as Homer and Virgil did; and sometimes like the sophist he chooses the apparent-probable and with ambiguities and other kinds of fallacious arguments, consisting in words and things,he holds listeners at his pleasure. Tuscan poets above all have used this sophistic skill in theiramorous poetry, some of them perhaps unwittingly.

(1973:30)

So Tasso takes Robortello to task for conceding too much to the notion that poetry is false. Falsity, as itwere, must not be at the root of invention. Invention is as much imagination for Tasso as for any of hiscontemporaries; but he wants imagination to stay very close to observable truth and to be utterly divorcedfrom the idea of distortion and chimera. So he parts company with Mazzoni and goes to a good deal oftrouble to refute Mazzoni’s thesis that poetry, like sophistry as described by Plato, uses fantasy to makeidoli that are unreal. And in refuting Mazzoni Tasso arrives at a distinction between the sophistic-fantasticand the intellectual-imaginative which derives from the traditional distinction we looked at earlier stemmingfrom the Stoics, between two kinds of imagining, close to or removed from some kind of truth.

Mazzoni is wrong, says Tasso (1973:31–3), in saying that the most perfect poetry is fantastic imitation.Poetry makes idols, yes; but not in the same sense as the Sophist is called a maker of idols. Its ‘idols’ aremainly if not wholly images of the real world seen in ideal terms, and of the world of ideas itself; throughimages poetry leads to the contemplation of divine things. Tasso arrives at a neat inversion of Plato’sobjection to poetry as the copy of a copy. For Plato, the sensible is an imitation of the ideal and poetry ofthe sensible. Imitation introduces distortion. In Tasso’s scheme, such ‘falsity’ as there is in the ‘idol’ createdby the poet is deliberate unfaithfulness to a distorted sensible reality; this corrects the distortion and makesthe ‘idol’ a true copy of the ideal. Poetic imagination to some extent falsifies observable reality in theinterest of higher truth. The theme of art as a rectification of the real world was to give rise to a number ofvariations later on.

Like his father Bernardo, Torquato Tasso pits Plato’s preference for the narrative over the dramaticagainst Aristotle’s particular admiration for tragedy and argues at length the superiority of the epic. He is, ofcourse, promoting his own wares; and he uses some devious reasoning to do so. The epic can be moremorally useful than tragedy, he urges, because it gives more scope for the marvellous, therefore morepleasure, therefore more incitement to yield to the sense of virtue written into the poem. No doubt hisanxiety to write a worthy successor to the Divine Comedy, serving at once religion and literature, wasgenuine enough; but in his theoretical writings Tasso’s mind seems most actively and happily engagedwhen he is talking about the marvellous and the formal and rhetorical means for intensifying it. As far as theplot is concerned, the best kind of wonder is that which reconciles verisimilitude with the extraordinary.The miracles of the Christian religion will do this for the contemporary reader as the interventions of theOlympians did for the pagans. But Tasso wants magic as well. One way of smuggling it into the theory isthrough devils, with the proviso that the magic and its agents must be seen with Christian eyes.

‘Let him [the poet] remember that the power of magic and of nature itself has its laws and limits’; but lethim work up the greatest possible excitement through prodigies, marvels, miracles, tempests, fires, battlesand so forth, attempting to ‘increase the credibility of the marvel without diminishing delight’ (1973:52).

But the best kind of wonder produced by poetry is, for Tasso, the sense of beauty. He announces the themeof the sixth book as ‘the idea of the beautiful, on which more than any other poetry concentrates’. A good

132 IMAGINATION

deal of what he has to say about it follows the same lines as the earlier discourses in which he covers theground laid out according to the topics and conventions of contemporary rhetoric. Beauty is languagemaking us think beautiful thoughts, referring us to beautiful things, embodying in itself pleasant andappropriate sounds and rhythms; ‘beautiful’ means mainly ‘agreeable’. Whatever the sense of beautyeventually meant for Tasso—and the introduction to the sixth discourse sets out the difficulties of definingthe ‘form’ of beauty in the Platonic sense—the way into it is through sensuous pleasure as much as throughmoral admiration.

Yet every now and then his unease about the traditional division into inventio, dispositio, elocutio showsitself in the hesitations of his discussion. It is at least as hard, he suggests, to grasp the relationship betweencontent and form in poetry as it is to understand what the Greek philosophers meant by matter distinct fromform. In the background of his mind there is perhaps more Neoplatonist speculation than he cared to allowto surface. His most characteristic notion of form, for example, arises out of the traditional Neoplatonistanalogy between God creating the sensible world out of the intellectual and the human creator translatingconcepts into images. Aristotle’s principle of unity in diversity becomes the equivalent of the emanative chainof being. The beauty of the poem is said to arise eventually from the apprehension of its total form, and thepoem must not be so long that its form cannot be grasped as a totality. Variety there must be:

Yet the poem that contains so great a variety of matters none the less should be one, one in form andsoul; and all these things should be so combined that each concerns the other, corresponds to theother, and so depends on the other necessarily or verisimilarly that removing any one part or changingits place would destroy the whole. And if that is true, the art of composing a poem resembles the planof the universe, which is composed of contraries, as that of music is. For if it were not multiple itwould not be a whole or a plan, as Plotinus says.

(Tasso 1973:77–8)

If Tasso tried to apply his Neoplatonist theories to the revised version of his epic that he called JerusalemConquered, the attempt was not very successful. Most critics find the later poem less interesting and lessimaginative; it might perhaps be said that intellect is continually looking over the shoulder of imaginationand directing it away from anything suspicious. In particular the erotic scenes and the enchantments that hadstirred him to such forceful expression in Jerusalem Delivered are omitted or curtailed or in some waydiminished; in his posthumous explanation of the revisions he dwells on the new poem’s conformity toreligious, historical and geographical truth and proposes allegorical explanations for the episodes he hadinvented.

More obviously linked to the Neoplatonist theses of the Discorsi are the Dialogues, composed andrevised in the 1570s and 1580s. We saw earlier that Girolamo Zoppio, defending Dante against his critics in1589, claimed that Plato’s dialogues are poetry, since ‘poems…are all imitations by means of dialogues,arguments and disputes relating to human affairs’. Tasso had already come to see Plato’s dialogues asexemplifying the marriage of intellect and imagination that his own Discorsi were to preach. Wisdom andeloquence together; Aristotle’s logic, Plato’s dialectic and the resources of poetry were to blend in Tasso’sinvented conversation among the dottissimi, including an invented Ficino.

Tasso’s Discourses on the Heroic Poem are a signal example of the striving of the Ficinian spirit ofpoetry to nestle within orthodoxy and religious approval while preserving the love of a new conception ofpoetic beauty for its own sake. There is, at the end of the century, a perceptible move towards the re-integration of Neoplatonism into the Christian tradition. But, as far as the Church militant was concerned,


Aristotelian rationalism was a good deal safer and closer to the familiar rhetorical theory of the pre-Renaissance past.

‘With the foundation of the Jesuit order (1540)’, writes C.P. Brand,

and the reopening of the Council of Trent (1562–3) Catholicism prepared itself to meet the Protestantthreat by a more rigorous discipline of its ecclesiastical and lay members. In this campaign literaturewas to contribute, not only by a strict conformity to ecclesiastical doctrine, but by its claim to improveconduct and morals. In the stern struggle against heresy the idle, light-hearted inventions of theromances seemed out of place, and literary theory tended increasingly to the view that the arts shouldserve an educational and moral end. Aristotle was read and often misinterpreted in this light. TheChurch, while condemning profanities… generally accepted a reconciliation with the humanists underthe banner of Aristotle, once the inspirer of scholasticism, now the upholder of reason and disciplinein literature in place of the suspect Platonic and neo-Platonic inspiration of the late Quattrocento.Tasso’s Platonist sympathies were indeed one of the factors that led him to fear Inquisitorial pressure.

(1965:60)

Under the pressures of the Counter-Reformation, then, the mainstream of poetic theory and practice wasdirected towards a classicism based on respect for the ancients, and especially for Aristotle. But theopposition forces were by no means entirely suppressed. The quarrel between the ancients and the modernsis engaged in the sixteenth century; it was to continue for a very long time, changing its terms of referenceas the concept of modernism changed with the development of new ways of thinking about wider issuesthan aesthetics. In seventeenth-century France it was to involve the rationalism combined with empiricismof the new scientific ideas in opposition to a conservative rationalism based on logic; and already insixteenth-century Italy one important forerunner of the new science, Giordano Bruno, is found on the sideof the moderns.

Among the writers whose main concern is literature there are degrees of modernism. As we saw earlier, agood many critics are eager to defend modern forms, like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Ariosto’s OrlandoFurioso, by bending and adapting the classical precepts. Some go a good deal further and refuse theauthority of the rules. The ancient debate between nature and art, natural ability and learned craft, is revivedin new terms. Mazzoni says Dante’s genius lay in inventing an entirely original kind of poem withoutbreaking the rules. Albizzi doubts whether Aristotle need be consulted at all. Giraldi defends the vernaculartradition and recommends imitation of the French, Provençal and Spanish romances from which, he says, itstems. Malatesta objects to the slavish adherence to the rules, stating that we should ask no more of poemsthan that they should ‘give pleasure and move our soul to delectation’ (Weinberg 1961:1061). GiordanoBruno’s De gl’heroici furori is a ‘modernist’ manifesto, in which it is claimed that there are as many kindsof poetry as there are poets. The rules and the conventional genres mean little or nothing, indeed rules arefor versifiers, not poets (Bruno 1964:82–4).

We saw that defenders of poetry against the religious charge of falsity and immorality could use some ofthe arguments put forward by St John Damascene to justify holy images: Bartolomeo Maranta went so faras to prefer poets to philosophers as moral teachers ‘since, as they move the passions and display the habits,they place the things themselves before our eyes in such a way that we seem to see them and to touch them’and because their poetry can penetrate ‘through the sweetness of diction, into the soul even of him who doesnot wish it’ (Weinberg 1961:487, quoted above, p. 214). The religious painters and sculptors of theRenaissance were putting the same principles into operation in the visual arts.

134 IMAGINATION

In Renaissance painting the drama and sweetness of religious life are expressed in parallel with the dramaand sweetness of pagan literature and of life in general as Renaissance sensibility felt these things, and oftenby the same techniques and formal conventions. In painting, as in literature, there is the pull of the pagan,the reaction of the religious and the use of theoretical speculation to explore possibilities and justifypreferences; there is a similar spectrum of attitudes from extreme religious caution to uninhibitedcelebration of the sensuous.

So ut pictura poesis has new overtones, not so much mimetic as kinetic; ut poesis pictura. Painting, saidLeonardo, is visual poetry; and the techniques of perspective, chiaroscuro and colour-light relations—allthe tricks of the new ‘realism’ in painting— were to be used not only—and, as time went on, not primarily—to produce illusory representations of the real world, copies in any strict sense, but to create convincingfictions.3 As the theorists of poetry might say, not truth but verisimilar inventions. Nevertheless, one factorwhich made for a difference of emphasis between theorists of literature and those of painting was theRenaissance painter’s interest and pride in the new techniques for producing quasi-perceptual and thereforeimaginatively gripping visual fictions. Poets, too, wrote about the need for vivid language, and sometimesseemed to prize realism, life-illusion, for its own sake. But central to poetic theory is the distinction betweenhistory which copies and poetry which ‘imitates’, arranging its subject-matter in a significant form. Inpainting there is far more emphasis on the painter’s ability to rival the legendary painters of antiquity whosevisual illusions could deceive birds and men into thinking they were seeing real grapes or real fabrics. Thereis therefore rather more confusion, amounting occasionally to contradiction, between imitation as copyingand imitation as the invention of fictions or the rendering of ideal beauty. Dolce, the sixteenth-centurywriter of a treatise on painting, can say at one point that mastery consists of closeness to nature and atanother that ‘the painter must labour hard not only to imitate but also to surpass nature’ (quoted in Lee 1967:10).

By and large, however, theorists of painting transferred ideas about poetry to their own art the morewillingly because they had no equivalent of Horace or Aristotle in the way of theory and very littleinformation about ancient paintings. Such references as they did find in Aristotle, Horace, Cicero,Quintilian, Pliny, Plutarch and Philostratus rather encouraged than discouraged the coupling of paintingwith poetry.

There was another motive. Although in the Middle Ages, as in the ancient world, all ‘arts’ were also‘crafts’—techne becoming ars—the ‘liberal’ arts had been clearly divided from the rest, and the sevenliberal arts were the means of the continuity of medieval culture. The visual arts were not among them. Paintingand sculpture had nothing of the cultural prestige of literature and music; only in the Renaissance didpainters, as concerned with a ‘manual’ art, begin to rise above the cultural level of the artisan. Theassociation of painting with literature was therefore like the hitching of a trailer to a tractor.

The most obvious difference between poetry and painting can be stated in terms of our themes. The signsused by poetry are words, which may or may not suggest images. The signs used by painting are themselvesimages. Yet theories of painting deal in the concept (or concepts, since the term can mean so many things)of imagination no more and no less than theories of poetry. For both, the vocabulary of traditional rhetoricis made to serve, as far as it will; and the painter’s ability to paint, like the poet’s to write, is said to be amatter not of ‘creative imagination’ but of ingegno—a general ability, sometimes spoken of as practicalcompetence, sometimes as supernaturally endowed genius, which includes imagination as the capacity toinvent new combinations and new sets of relations among elements taken from the sensible world, but alsorational thought and judgments—and even a happy knack of putting things together successfully which ishardly conscious and not to be clearly assigned to imagination, reason or judgment; what Plato, in speakingof the javelin-thrower’s skill, called stochastike.


Dolce set out an enterprising adaptation of the old trio of inventio, dispositio, elocutio to painting.Invention, he says, is part ‘history’ and part ingegno—‘history’ meaning all the potential subject-matteroffered by human actions recorded by historians and poets, ingegno being the painter’s original contributionin the arrangement and decorum of the elements of his picture, from which come ‘the attitudes, the varietyand, so to say, the energy of the figures’. The contribution of ingegno is summed up in the disegno of thepicture. We saw earlier that disegno in painting-theory, like concetto in poetry, can have a meaning whichhovers between the thought of the work to be created as it originates in the creator’s mind and the forms—visual or verbal—in which the thought begins to actualize itself in signs. In Dolce’s treatise, disegno meansclearly the black-and-white sketch between the conception and the finished picture. So ‘invention,disposition and elocution’ become ‘inventione, disegno e colorito’ (quoted in Lee 1967:70). It is interestingto compare this trio of terms, clearly pointing to the painter’s personal contribution to the meaning of thepicture, with the earlier trio of Alberti intent upon the technique of illusion-production; Alberti had listed‘circonscriptione. compositione e receptione di lumi’—outline drawing, establishment of spatial relations,light and shade (quoted in Lee 1967: 70–1). The emphasis here is on fidelity to nature, the ‘copying’element in mimesis.

The object of what Dolce called the ‘attitudes, variety and energy’ of the figures, was generally held to beideal beauty of the kind the Renaissance associated with Greek statues. A painting was to aim at being therendering of a transcendent ‘idea’ in sensible terms. We saw how, in poetic theory, the ‘truth’ of a poemcould be thought of as an ‘idea’, or ‘idol’, conceived in Platonic or Aristotelian terms—truth coming from asupernatural realm or abstracted from empirical instances. In painting-theory, too, there are Platonists,Aristotelians and those who do not ask too pertinently how the ‘idea’ is to be understood;4 philosophicaldefinition is even less important to the painter than to the poet— which does not mean, of course, thatphilosophical ideas, however vague, will not affect his sensibility and artistic purposes in fruitful ways. TheAristotelian principle could be associated with the story about Zeuxis, that he chose the best features of eachof five models to paint the beauty of Helen. Dolce mentions the other method of Apelles and Praxiteles whoused a beautiful courtesan as model for Aphrodite—choosing, as it were, the most perfect sensibleincarnation of beauty known to them. Dolce himself, like Ronsard, finds it safest to imitate ancient modelsin which the ideal is recognized to be enduringly incorporated; ‘the ancient statues’, says Dolce, ‘contain allthe perfection of art’ (quoted in Lee 1967:11).

It is in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci that we find the greatest claims made for painting; for he,instead of defensively hitching painting to poetry, took the offensive and vaunted his own art’ssuperiorities.5 Painting cannot convey thought? It can convey, Leonardo maintains, some kinds of mentalprocesses, some aspects of consciousness far more vividly and realistically than can descriptions in words.Painting cannot put the events of a story in sequence? It can make us feel, instantaneously and immediately,the dramatic experience of a violent and bloody battle, or see the beautiful proportions of a face which, in asequential description, would lose something of the sense of aesthetic relationship. This distinction betweenpoetry as sequential in time and painting as simultaneous in space was to reappear in later theorists. Du Bos,in the eighteenth century, gave it as one reason for promoting tragedy above the other poetic genres,because of its visual impact on the stage. Lessing, later in the eighteenth century, used it to put an end to thewhole idea of ut pictura poesis. Gautier, who had to give up painting for poetry because of his pooreyesight, regretted that the poet, instead of a paint-brush dipped in colours, and recording direct sensations,has only a pen ‘dipped in muddy water’.

There is another interesting distinction between poetry and painting to be found in the Renaissance. Onthe one hand we find both kinds of ‘idea’ associated with both poetry and painting —Plato’s, arising withinthe mind, and Aristotle’s, derived from observation. On the other hand we find painting associated with

136 IMAGINATION

objective reality and poetry with the mind’s inner life. Benedetto Varchi says the poet should imitate ‘il didentro’, the painter ‘il di fuori’; the concern of the one is thoughts and feelings, of the other the forms of thesensible world. Comanini had another way of putting it, using, as we found him doing earlier, a distinctiontaken from the Sophist but in an un-Platonic way; painting, he said, is icastic, that is intent upon accuratecopying, while poetry is fantastic, that is a product of the poet’s freedom to invent and re-arrange (quoted inLee 1967:60 n. 283). What in Plato’s day had been the ‘old quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ nowbecomes competitiveness between poetry and painting. In the early nineteenth century in France thedistinction made by Varchi was to separate two tendencies within Romantic poetry—the ‘intimate school’,wanting poetry to express the inner motions of the soul, and the ‘picturesque school’, intent upon thebeauties of the observable world. Tasso found these two tendencies—what Comanini called the ‘icastic’ andthe ‘fantastic’—within the heroic poem itself; in his preface to Jerusalem Delivered he said his poem unitesimitation of the externals of human action with allegory, which reveals its mysterious supernaturalsignificance.

In the baroque art inspired by the Counter-Reformation all the pleasures that ‘pagan’ sensibility hadopened up for imaginative exploitation were made over into the service of religion. I do not mean, of course,that ‘baroque’ and ‘inspired by the Counter-Reformation’ can be equated. But in the Late Renaissance thereis a ‘baroque’ sensibility which artists in tune with the Counter-Reformation exploited according toChristian terms of reference. This same ‘baroque’ current was harnessed also to Protestant purposes. Thedanger common to Reformation and Counter-Reformation was the ‘paganism’ of the more extremeelements in the Italian Renaissance and the ‘free-thinking’ and ‘rationalism’ developing out of theseextreme elements. In this art of the religious baroque, minds that craved drama, and all kinds of emotionalperturbation, were to be brought to find these things not dangerously, as the kind of pagan excursions to befound within a Christian framework in Jerusalem Delivered, but within the Christian story itself and itstheology and mysteries; with mystical experience allowed more scope and prestige and more frankly eroticexpression than the medieval Church of the West had ever countenanced.

The links between historical or narrative painting and dramatic poetry were conscious and explicit, andthough the parallels between their two distinct sets of technical means are often forced and exaggeratedbeyond sense, the correspondences of effects in terms of dramatic action and expression of emotion, are, inbroad terms, valid enough. But not all paintings were historical or narrative, not all effects were dramatic oremotional, and the implications of ut poesis pictura—putting it that way round—were wider than therhetorics of Horace and Aristotle. Out of the Neoplatonist ways of thinking and feeling rather than from therationalism of the rhetorical tradition came the qualities of paintings that post-Romantic critics would call‘poetic’—a lyricism that is not easily definable as emotion, that varies from context to context and frompainter to painter, that is not reducible to philosophical terms except as the vague claim that its delightcorresponds to the delight of the supernatural world of the ‘ideas’. This is the notion of poetic feeling thatthe Romantics were to distinguish from the epic and the dramatic and to cultivate as the only true poetry. Bythose who felt it at its most intense, it was to be written and spoken of in the terms Plotinus had used todescribe his intuition of the One. Tasso came very near to making this claim for poetry; the theory ofpainting did not perhaps reach so far. But there is a kind of lyricism, of poetic feeling, that went on intopainting after it had disappeared from poetry itself. As Malraux pointed out, there is more of it in Watteauthan in the whole of French poetry of the eighteenth century.

This is not to disparage the literature from which this particular kind of feeling is absent. But its presenceis often attributed, since the Romantics, to ‘imagination’. In the immediacy of its sensuousness or theexoticism of its dreamlike qualities or the novelty of its patterns of feelings the kind of lyricism called‘poetic’ belongs to those features of experience we have seen associated with imagination as half-way


between mind and matter, between the rarefied and the gross. But its generation through form, whether inpoetry or painting is by no means limited to a part of the mind that can be labelled ‘imagination’; and thesame goes for the mental acts involved in responding to the forms. Ingegno is just as vague as fantasia, butit is perhaps less misleading by limitation.

138 IMAGINATION

10The French Renaissance and after1

In Renaissance France there is a good deal less theorizing about literature than in Italy. There are a few artspoétiques, but theoretical writing never became a fashionable literary genre in itself as it did in Italy, andthere is very little of the controversy involving retort and counter-retort that often went on among the Italians.The rhetorical tradition continues as strongly here as in Italy, and its terms take on the same new andsometimes ambiguous colourings, particularly key terms like ‘imitation’ and ‘invention’. But, though thenew speculations about how poetry is made depend on the Italians, and the French explore the implicationsof ideas imported from Italy more than they advance their own, they do so cautiously. In Italy itself theliterary tradition damps down the wilder reverberations of Florentine Neoplatonism; in France even thosewho admire Ficino most are most affected by those parts of his theology which stay closest to the centre oforthodoxy.

The French ignore Plato’s strictures on ‘imitative’ art and make frequent play with his references topoetic enthusiasm. But though they interpret these according to Ficino’s disquisitions about furor, on thewhole they stay closer in spirit to the Christianized Plato of the Augustinian tradition than to the moredaringly pagan Neoplatonism of the Florentines.

The most influential theorists are also practising poets, interested in the new philosophy of poetry, butmuch more in Greek and Latin poetry itself and in the new poetry of Renaissance Italy. There is more interestin the proper way of imitating admired models than in the kind of spontaneous and independent ‘invention’vaunted by the modernists among the Italians. The recommendation to learn from models was found not inAristotle but in Horace; Aristotle’s ideas spread more slowly in France than in Italy and Horace’s prestigewas correspondingly greater and longer-lasting.

The French theorists accepted what can be called the standard Italian verdicts on the importance of furor,the need for both nature and art, innate poetic gifts and skill in the craft of rhetoric, naïveté and judgment.But the recognition of furor can be more a sign of a new sensibility than a new view of how poetry is made,a new purpose for known rhetorical resources rather than a rejection of the craft of rhetoric in favour of somekind of spontaneous utterance such as Ficino’s view of furor, at its most extreme, implied. Sebillet, forinstance, writes eloquently about furor at the beginning of his Art poétique Françoys (1548), then plungesstraight into a discussion of rhetoric in traditional terms (Holyoake 1972:12–57). Sebillet, of course, ishardly typical of the French Renaissance, still less of Pléiade poetics; his sympathies are still with theGrands Rhétoriqueurs, the virtuosi of intricate fixed forms against whom Ronsard and Du Bellay stronglyreacted. But the difference between Sebillet and the Pléiade is mainly a difference of opinion about theworth of different models; the novel elements in the sensibilities of the Pléiade poets, in their subjectmatter, imagery and form are largely owed to these poets’ scrutiny of the modes and means of Greek, Latinand Italian verse. Du Bellay and Ronsard both wrote poems about the decline of poetry from the time of the‘divine’ poets such as Orpheus, Hesiod and Homer to the era of the ‘human’ poets, the Romans being even

more human and less divine than the Greek successors to Homer; but they accepted that they themselvesmust work within the limitations of the human, and must learn from the Romans as well as the Greeks howto use craft to supplement a less direct and complete inspiration than Orpheus enjoyed. From their classicalmodels they aimed to derive both a mediated inspiration and the skill to exploit it. Orpheus needed only‘nature’ and ‘naïveté’; ‘human’ poets need ‘art’ and example as well.

Only occasionally do the more extravagant claims for the human artist as Magus show through. Ficino’ssuggestion that man might be able to create like God if he had the same materials to work with is echoed inRonsard’s wonderment at the painter’s ability to create a convincing illusion, but the painter’s ability isitself said to be a gift from God. In ‘A son Luc’, his earliest ode, Ronsard wrote of the art of painting as acreation ex nihilo like God’s:

C’est un celeste presentTransmis çà bas où nous sommes,Qui règne encor à presentPour lever en haut les hommes:Car ainsi que Dieu a faitDe rien le monde parfait,II veut qu’en petite espaceLe paintre ingenieus face(Alors qu’il est agité)Sans avoir nulle matièreL’aer, la mer, la terre entiere,Instrument de deité.

(It is a celestial gift handed down to us here below which still has power in our time to raise mankind:for just as God made the perfect world out of nothing, he wills that in a little space the painter ofgenius, when he is inspired, makes, without matter, air, sea and the whole world into a means todivinity.)

The artist imitates, then, in the two senses already met with— representing some kind of experience of thesensible world and learning from successful models how to do so in the interests of the ideal. Technique ismade up of invention, disposition and elocution; invention, for the French as well as the Italians, comes toinclude the meanings of ‘hitting upon’ what one is looking for and ‘being struck by’ what spontaneouslypresents itself to consciousness, finding something appropriate among the mind’s stock-in-trade or makingsomething new and original. Invention, wrote Jacques Peletier du Mans in Chapter IV of his Art poétique(1555), ‘is a scheme originating in the imagination of the understanding to further the end in view’(‘invention est un dessein provenant de l’imagination de l’entendement, pour parvenir a notre fin’(Holyoake 1972:144–5)). Invention is said to be the life and soul of the poem; it is not limited to the firststage of composition, for both disposition and elocution call upon invention. But what exactly does Peletiermean by ‘the imagination of the understanding’?

Partly, no doubt, what the Stoics had meant. For them every element of consciousness, every ‘movementof the mind’ was a phantasia of one sort or another, and from the Renaissance onwards we find ‘imagining’used in the general sense of ‘thinking’, often with an overtone of ‘speculating’, searching around for thethought that is right because it is true or appropriate to a purpose. The mind is throwing up ‘fictions’,possible structures of thought, and comparing these with some kind of reality. The ‘fictions’ may be more

140 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

or less abstract; may or may not have wholly or partly the form of ‘images’ in the sense of replicas ofperceptual qualities. But Aristotle saw thinking in images as the simplest kind of thinking; and both Platoand Aristotle recognized that present wish-fulfilments as well as the present forming of future aims canappear in consciousness most readily as image-sequences, which are the mind’s first ‘fictions’. The use of‘imagining’ for ‘creative’ thinking, thinking towards a purpose and not simply from the implications of somelogical sequence, ‘casting around’ for the right thought—this use of ‘imagining’ was natural enough. Butover and beyond all this, Peletier’s ‘invention’ arising out of the ‘imagination of the understanding’ pointspretty unequivocally to a Neoplatonist way of thinking, in which the poet’s meaning finding sensibleexpression is implicitly compared to the divine nous moving down through images to create the sensibleparticulars of our immediate reality.

‘Imitation of nature’ moreover implies vividness, and this implies in turn ‘imagination’ as Quintilian andLonginus used the term; the writer’s ability to ‘live’ the fictitious situation as if it were real. Here images—not necessarily metaphors, but what the French call ‘mots qui font image’, become important—words usedto evoke ideas of sensations which can, in turn, come very near sensations. The aim of vividness can lead toattempts at what the nineteenth century would call ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’. But Renaissance ‘imitation’ isnever simply naturalism, which, for the French as well as the Italians, belongs rather to history than topoetry, as we shall see. Whenever Ronsard preaches the kind of imitation that can be called ‘naturalism’ heemphasizes the vitality that must enter into it. Poets must learn from Homer, he writes in the third preface tothe Franciade (1587): if Homer wants boiling water he describes how the wood for the fire is cut andkindled, how the flame licks around the cauldron, how the heated water foams and gurgles ‘and all othersuch things’. Such imitation of nature is the soul of heroic poetry, says Ronsard, ‘which is but theenthusiasm and furor of a youthful brain’ (Weinberg 1950: 263–4). What matters is the vitality inherent inwhat is described or in the poet’s way of describing it. In ‘L’Hymne de France’ of 1549 he praised paintersfor their imitation:

Noz imagers ont la gloire en tout lieu,Pour figurer soit un homme, ou un Dieu,De si tres pres imitans la nature,Que l’oeil béant se trompe en leur peincture.

(Our painters are everywhere renowned for their depiction of man and God, imitating nature soclosely that the wide-open eye is deceived by their portrayal.)

In the 1554 version of the same poem the variants refer to the delight which is the essence of the spectator’sreaction to the painting: the ‘wide-open eye’ became the ‘rapt eye’ (‘L’oeil ravi’) and ‘so closely’ became‘so vividly’ (‘si vivement’).

Another link, not always explicitly recognized as such, between imagination and the making of poetry isthe topos of the poet as prophet; for, as we have seen, mantic powers had always been more or less closelyassociated with dreams and visions, and thus with images and imagination. How seriously poets took thisnotion of the poet as prophet it is hard to judge. It recurs often enough and widely enough—in the prose ofRabelais, the theory of Sebillet and Peletier, the poetry of the Pléiade; very often indeed in the poems ofRonsard, developed at length in his ‘Ode to Michel de l’Hospital’. But the French are less inclined thanFicino was to compare poetry with the Chaldaean Oracles and the Hermetica, and look for their ancestorseither in the ancient poets or in the prophets of the Bible. In some contexts Ronsard seems to accept that

IMAGINATION 141

such comparisons are more conventional than substantial. And for all the praise of furor and divineinspiration the Platonic suspicion of uninspired fantasy remains.

Like Plato, the Neoplatonists, the Arabs, Maimonides—all who had written of prophecy throughimagination—Ronsard insists in the ‘Ode to Michel de l’Hospital’ that the poet’s soul must be pure to bereceptive to divine inspiration. And for the ‘human’ poet no longer in direct contact with the divine anddependent as much on art as on nature, the offerings of imagination must be subject to judgment. The worthof what imagination reaches out after is guaranteed by something other than imagination itself.

Just as Tasso added his reservations to the praise of fantasy offered by Mazzoni and Comanini, in FrancePontus de Tyard, Peletier du Mans and Ronsard all warn that imagination must be bridled. Pontus, in hisSolitaire premier (Holyoake 1972:128–34), writes that the poet must not give his approval to all of his owninventions but ‘after examining them from all sides with skill of understanding’ he must reject those that arefrivolous and choose only the good and praiseworthy. Peletier in his fourth chapter on composition(Holyoake 1972:144–6) recommends that after writing we must allow our inventive enthusiasm to cool;then, when we are refreshed from our labours, we must go back and criticize. We like what we invent at thetime of inventing it, he says, otherwise we would not write it down. But this is not in itself a guarantee of itsrightness.

All these thinkers and poets realize that to link literary invention too closely with imagination in itsclassical sense is to expose the poet to the kind of teasing that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Theseus—the disquieting thought that the inventions of poets and the heightened consciousness of lovers are notdifferent in kind from the lunatic’s hallucinations. Plato’s distinction between the images of supernaturalrevelation and those of physical impulses in terms of the state of the liver could hardly be of much help inliterary theory; but the French Renaissance follows Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine and Aquinas inasserting that something other than the imagination’s own conviction of its rightness must come into play.Reason must eventually judge.

In Ficino we found this traditional Greco-Christian mistrust of imagination side by side with Neoplatonisttheosophy in which imagination is at least as great an instrument of truth as reason, and is often preferred todiscursive as distinct from intuitive reason. French caution and conservatism filtered out most of thetheosophy and the magic from Ficino. Among French thinkers, even more than among Italians, the need forimagination is coupled with the old mistrust of a mental faculty bound up with sensation and the physical,less worthy than reason and reasoning even if it is reason’s essential handmaid. Even Pontus de Tyard, thepurest Platonist of the Pléiade group and one of its closest links with the Lyons Platonists and, through them,with Florentine Neoplatonism, associates imagination with the physical world and, in the life of the soul,with what Plato called ‘opinion’ rather than ‘truth’.

In the Solitaire premier Pontus writes of two kinds of ‘alienation’ corresponding more or less to Plato’s—madness resulting from disease of the body and furor inspired by a mysterious divine power, ‘throughwhich the reasonable soul is enlightened’ (Holyoake 1972:128)—the last word, in the French of Pontus, isillustrée, suggesting enrichment and picturing as well as an increase of understanding. Whenever Ronsardallows imagination an important part in invention he is careful to add a warning that it may be morbid and getout of hand. One of the advantages of writing in lines shorter than the alexandrine, he says in the thirdpreface to the Franciade (1587), is that these metres make the poet think harder and curb ‘the first headlongrush of the enthusiasms and monstrous imaginings of the mind’ (Weinberg 1950:265). The harder the poetthinks, the more effective will be his inventions; it is not betraying Ronsard’s thought to say that inventioncan be the richer for the curbing of the imagination.

Imagination, then, tends to be thought of as contributing to invention under the guidance of reason. FromPlato comes the notion that imagination is that part of mental activity that affects consciousness


independently of human reason and reasonable control. From Neoplatonism comes the notion thatimagination involves the translation of concepts, reasonable awareness, into discourse in which the qualitiesof experience in the sensible world —sensation, perception, pattern, feeling-judgment (Avicenna’s wahmand the Scholastics’ ‘intention’), and affectivity generally are still present in abstraction. And one functionof imagination in discourse aiming at vividness and vitality is the production of mots qui font image—imagery as literary criticism has come to understand it.

What complicates usage still further is that what is invented is also imagination—in the Stoic sense of‘any kind of mental reality’, ‘any movement of the mind’, and in the sense of ‘imaginary’, ‘fictional’.Imagination thought of as that which affects consciousness independently of human reason and reasonablecontrol may, it is assumed following Plato, have its own direct, supernatural reason embodied in it. Or itmay be the language of the lower self. ‘Human’ poets—the poets of the day who are even further fromOrpheus than the Romans—must rely on human reason to distinguish the good from the bad. Imagination ispart of invention in its ‘creative’ sense; but so is reason, which directs judgment.

Invention in the ‘creative’ sense there must be. For the French as for the Italians invention is whatdistinguishes poetry from history, with their two kinds of truth: that of history is a truth like that of the copy—literal, factual statement of happenings as they happened. Peletier marks the distinction in Aristotelianterms and adds that the historian, like the orator, will abstain from the highly figurative language of the poetand will have no freedom in the arrangement of events. Du Bellay makes the now familiar point in his‘Discours au Roy sur la poésie’ (1560):

Cestuy-là sans user d’aucune fictionRepresente le vray de chascune action,Comme un, qui sans oser s’esgayer davantage,Rapporte apres le vif un naturel visage:Cestuy-cy plus hardy, d’un art non limitéSous mille fictions cache la vérité…

(One, without using any fiction represents the truth of each action, like someone who, without daringto add any adornment of his own, paints an exact portrait from life: the other, more bold, withlimitless art hides truth under a thousand fictions…)

Ronsard, in the first preface to the Franciade (1572), is a little more forthcoming, but the points he makesare those we found repeated by many Italians, based on the distinction between the true and the verisimilar.The poet must be as vivid, as realistic as the historian and must not distort fact or, more pertinently—andthis is where the new classicism shows its concern with what the audience’s or readers’ imaginations willreadily respond to rather than with historical accuracy—must not depart from ‘what is already assumed bygeneral opinion’. But the poet makes a plot out of a story and he does this by ‘feigning’, upsetting thechronology of events if necessary to link the parts of his fiction into a meaningful whole. The Franciadeitself is not history, says Ronsard, but a romance. Yet he sides with the conservatives among the Italiansrather than with the moderns, retreating into Plato’s mistrust of imagination; the poet should not ‘feign afantastic poetry like that of Ariosto, in which the members have a certain beauty but the body is so artificialand monstrous that it is more like the delirium of a long fever than the inventions of a man in soundcondition’ (Holyoake 1972:210). Ronsard is here using Horace against Ariosto; the Ars poetica allowsfreedom of imagination within the limits of the probable and the congruous, but compares the exaggerationsof literary fancy to a sick man’s dreams.

IMAGINATION 143

It is interesting that when Ronsard comes back to the same topic of history and poetry in the third prefaceto the Franciade of 1587 he no longer animadverts from Ariosto. Perhaps by this time he has come to acceptTasso’s view of the imaginative freedom of the poet; at all events he lists ways in which poetry can stir thesense of the marvellous, though he does not use the word merveilleux itself. The poet is to invent dramaticdialogue, dreams, auguries, fantastic visions of gods and demons; but they must be welded together into aunity. He still warns against ‘monstrous dreams’; but he does not mention Ariosto. The sinners are now theSpanish, whose conceptions are said to be ‘monstrous and alambicated’ and utterly unintelligible (Holyoake1972:212).

Like the most typical Italian theorists Ronsard insists that the essence of poetry is not in versification butin the invention of the ‘fable’. Poets who think only of rhymes and metres can be more prosy than writers inprose, says the Abbregé de l’art poëtique françois of 1565 (Holyoake 1972:197).

If the truth of poetry is not the truth of history, what is it? Du Bellay’s answer, in the poem quoted above,reflects the standard Renaissance reading of Aristotle’s Poetics in Neoplatonist terms. The poet’s work is noless enduring than the historian’s,

Pource qu’en imitant l’autheur de 1’univers,Toute essence & idee il comprend en ses vers.

(Because, imitating the author of the universe, he comprehends all essence and idea in his verses.)

Ronsard’s definition of poetic truth is contained in the definition he gives of invention in the Abbregé:

invention is none other than the proper natural working of imagination conceiving the ideas and formsof everything that can be imagined, heavenly as well as earthly, animate or inanimate, in order torepresent, describe and imitate them.

(Holyoake 1972:193–4)

‘The proper natural working of imagination’ (‘le bon naturel d’une imagination’) divides off ‘inspiration’from the propositions of the lower self, with Plato’s dichotomy in mind, and in what follows Ronsard uttershis usual warning against the perils of a disordered imagination representing ‘a thousand monstrous formswithout order or sequence’. ‘Ideas and forms’ as a pair of terms may or may not have been carefullythought by Ronsard, but the two words (idées et formes) suggest not so much alternative names for Platonicconcepts as the two degrees of abstraction corresponding to ‘ideas and mathematicals’ or ‘forms andfigures’, the first referring to the pure concept and the second to an act of mind which is between conceptand percept. ‘Invention’ is a spiritual gift, says Ronsard, so that he can give no rule for it; but he does insistthat the poet’s inventions must be set out in due order and clearly intelligible. The aim of the orator is topersuade; that of the poet is to ‘imitate, invent and represent those things which are, which may be, or whichthe ancients accepted as true’ (Holyoake 1972: 194). Two years later, in the 1567 version of the Abbregé,the last phrase became ‘those things which are, or which may be, verisimilar’.

Coupled with the Neoplatonist claim that poetry reveals the supernatural essence of whatever it dealswith is the claim that it furthers morality—this has become the central defence of poetry against thePlatonic-Christian charge of falsity and depravity. Various explanations are offered of the moral effects ofpoetry. One finds the simple view that poetry shows somehow that virtue is always rewarded and vicepunished, that crime does not pay— problematic with respect to tragedy and epic, irrelevent to some genres.There is the thesis that catharsis is part of moral hygiene. There is the more positive assertion that poetry is


a civilizing influence—Plato’s thesis in the Laws applied to kinds of poetry that he might well have found tobe ‘soft and convivial’ like the Ionian and Lydian modes in music. And the notion that poetry improves themind, that its delights are truly spiritual, shades over into the idea of ‘revelation’, the conviction that poetrymakes us aware of the secret meaning of the world—not only the ‘essences’ of particular things or themoral significance of patterns of human behaviour but the supernatural unity that transcends diversity.

Such notions are sometimes repeated without much apparent thought or penetration, as the shibboleths ofthe new poetics. Peletier, for instance, makes a list of the historical functions of poetry; laws were firstinscribed in verse on the bark of trees; oracles and Sybilline prophecies were uttered in verse; throughpoetry the memorable deeds of men passed to posterity; poetry assures the immortality of the poet. Poets arethe interpreters of divine secrets, which is why they were always honoured by the princes of old (Holyoake1972:137–8). This is a rather mixed bag of claims, without much attempt at philosophical coherence. Pontusde Tyard is much closer to the inwardness of Ficinian aesthetics, grounded in Neoplatonist theology.

In the Solitaire premier, ou Discours des Muses, et de la fureur Poëtique (Holyoake 1972:128–34),Pontus describes the soul’s descent from the One through the four stages of Angelic intellect, intellectualReason, Opinion and Nature. In the last, ‘natural’ stage the soul has settled in the body and almost identifiedwith it. Through furor the soul returns to unity, and furor is of four kinds; poetry, the religious mysteries,prophecy, love. As in Ficino, poetry, though in systematic exposition it represents only one rung in theladder, tends to take over the elevating possibilities of the other kinds of furor. For, as Ficino pointed out,and as Peletier’s list implied, the first sacred texts, oracles and prophecies were transmitted in poetry. Poetryis listed as the first furor, says Pontus, because its rhythms, like the consonances of music, begin to smoothout the perturbations of the soul too deeply involved in the physical world of generation, nutrition andcorruption and to re-awaken it to the sense of harmony and unity. But under the full inflowing of the Musespoetry rises to comprehend the other modes of furor:

The Poetic furor proceeds from the Muses (I say) and is a ravishing of the Soul, which is docile andinvincible; through which [the Soul] is awakened, moved and incited by songs, and other Poetries, tothe instruction of mankind. By this ravishing of the soul I mean that the Soul is occupied, and totallyconverted, and intent upon the holy and sacred Muses, which have found it docile and apt to receivethe form, which they imprint, that is, have found it ready to be overcome by this ravishing, beingmoved by which it becomes invincible, and can not be besmirched, or mastered by anything low andearthly: but on the contrary surmounts and tramples on all such vile things. Furthermore it isawakened from bodily torpor and sleep into intellectual watchfulness, and recalled from the darknessof ignorance to the light of truth, from death to life, from a profound and stupid forgetting to areminiscence of heavenly and divine things: lastly it feels moved, spurred on and incited to express inverse those things that it foresees and contemplates. So let none undertake foolhardily to knock at thegates of Poetry: for in vain he approaches, and makes his wretchedly cold verses, who has not beengraced with their furor by the Muses, and to whom God has not shown himself well-disposed andfavourable.

(Holyoake 1972:133)

Pontus stressed the importance of rhythm and ‘number’ in the unifying power of poetry; Ronsard, like themost typical Italian theorists, insisted that the soul of poetry is the ‘fable’, the ‘invention’. There appears tobe some fluctuation in Renaissance minds between the mathematical emphasis of Platonism, thenumerology of Pythagoreanism and the sensuous and emotive overtones of the Italian Neoplatonists. ForSebillet poetry is marked off from rhetoric in its narrow sense by number: the divine inspiration of poets, he

IMAGINATION 145

says, is shown by ‘the numbers by which Poets measure their lines, and which in their perfection anddivinity sustain and keep in motion the admirable machine of this universe, and all that it includes andcontains’ (Chapter 1 on ‘the antiquity and excellence of poetry’; Holyoake 1972:13). Delaudun, whose Artpoétique français of 1597 is a collection of the century’s ideas with little regard for system, makes numberthe defining characteristic of poetry but carefully marks off ‘inspired’ numbers from the mechanicalapplication of the rules of prosody.

Peletier extends the notion of Pythagorean number beyond rhythm into the overall form of the poem;number becomes the essence of ‘disposition’ according to his work on algebra which was published shortlybefore his Art poétique in 1554. ‘What is there in the World more lovely than order? What profit can begained from confusion? In works of all kinds, what can the workman claim as his own except it be order?’Long before Mallarmé told Degas that poetry is made not out of ideas but out of words, and wrote that thetask of poets is to give new meanings to familiar words, Peletier said that words belong to the people andideas to the common fund of philosophers, and that the art of the rhetorician—orator or poet—lies in theway words and ideas are arranged in a particular order.

Both Pontus de Tyard and Peletier du Mans were in close touch with Maurice Scève and the Lyons groupof poets; Scève’s Délie is set out in 449 ten-line stanzas which are now generally assumed to be arrangedaccording to some numerological symbolism. There seems to be no way of discovering just what thearrangement was supposed to signify; most attempts to interpret numerological patterns end in guesswork.But throughout the century the aesthetic effects of rhythm are ascribed to the mystical properties of numberand linked with mathematical thinking, which is, of all discursive operations of mind, thought to be closestto pure intellect.

The sound of words is obviously important for practising poets, but does not come in for muchtheoretical discussion. Rhythm connects directly with the noetic: sound is part of the ‘incarnation’ of the‘idea’, the sensible manifestation of the ‘invention’ that is the meaning of the poem. Benedetto Varchi nodoubt reflected an association that came naturally to Renaissance minds when he wrote that ‘the harmony ofthe words which are heard…delights properly the body’. Sebillet, when he is writing about the poet’s choiceof the best words implies a distinction between the mellifluous and the harsh but does not pursue the matter.Pleasant sound seems to be an amenity for sixteenth-century French poets, but not, like rhythm, ametaphysically backed conveyor of meaning.

But the sound of poetry was associated with the sound of music and, theory apart, the poets of the Pléiadewere clearly aware of the importance of sound as well as of rhythm in the classical and Italian models theyadmired; their theory was itself perhaps mostly important as a stimulus to interpret and enjoy these modelsin a particular way and to attempt to produce similar effects in their own language. In his Abbregé de l’artpoétique français Ronsard said that invention comes equally from the poet’s natural gift and from what hecan learn from the best of the ancient writers. ‘Imitation of the ancients’ meant different things to differentthinkers and poets. It could mean anything from translation, through paraphrase and partial transcription, toan all-round stimulus to create effects of a particular kind without any sort of slavish copying. Virgil, saysRonsard in the third preface to the Franciade, will stir the poet’s latent sense of his own gifts and reveal hisdestiny to him. Du Bellay wrote an imaginative account of the process in his Défense et illustration de lalangue françoise (1549); the vernacular poet can make his own language comparable to Greek and Latin asan expressive instrument by ‘imitating the best Greek authors, transforming himself into them, devouringthem, and, after digesting them well, converting them into blood and nourishment…’. Imitation of this kindis far removed from any kind of copying, said Du Bellay; it means ‘penetrating to the most secret andinnermost parts’ of the author chosen as the model who best suits the particular poet. In his second prefaceto the Olive he comes remarkably near a more modern critical vocabulary when he distinguishes the


memory-effects of well-assimilated models, operating unconsciously, from the reproductions of consciousmemory:

if through reading good books, I have imprinted certain features in my fantasy, which later, when Icome to set out my little conception as occasion presents itself to me, flow much more easily from mypen than they recur to my memory, must they therefore be called borrowed elements?

(Weinberg 1950:157–8)

‘Fantasy’ here is used primarily in the sense it had in medieval psychology as a particular kind of memorywhich stores images. But Du Bellay seems to be on the way to a recognition that the impression receivedfrom the poets who stir him can modify, through processes which remain unconscious, his own consciousawareness. As far as poets are concerned, modification of sensibility is at least important as transmission oftheory.

When thinkers like Ficino and his followers—including Pontus de Tyard—think in terms of metaphysicalor theological generalities, return to the One is still attributed to transcendent Reason, as it was by the GreekNeoplatonists. When those most interested in poetry concentrate on poetics, ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘furor’, ratherthan ‘reason’, are the key words. Imagination is allowed into the scheme of things by Ficino in much thesame way as it was by the later Greek Neoplatonists such as Proclus; the French theorists, on the whole,acknowledge it but move back towards Plato’s attitude of mistrust and warning. Romantic aesthetics waslater to include under ‘imagination’ all that Neoplatonists among the Greeks, the Arabs and the Italians hadascribed to transcendent Reason, enthusiasm, furor and invention. Had Pontus used the word ‘beauty’instead of ‘instruction des hommes’ as the consequence of poetry, and ‘imagination’ instead of ‘poeticfuror’, his account of inspiration would have come even closer to Baudelaire’s formulations of the ‘theoryof correspondences’. But Baudelaire’s criteria of the beautiful differed from those of the Renaissance inimportant ways; and some of the differences are associated with the later emphasis on imagination and theRomantic promotion of sensation as a means to transcendent experience.

Whether we choose to credit Ronsard’s creative powers to imagination, invention, inspiration, intuitionor whatever, it is a matter of experience that there is enough consistency of attitude and sensibility in his workto justify his reference to ‘the little world of my inventions’ (quoted in Raymond 1927:I.19). This ‘littleworld’ can make his readers live within his particular vision of the universe, which takes its characteristicfocus and colouring from his cultivation of the ancient poets. Guillaume des Autels, Pontus de Tyard’scousin and an admirer both of Scève and of the older French poets, at first found Ronsard difficult and off-putting, but wrote in 1551 that having taken the trouble to ‘follow his imaginations’ and come to feel ‘thestrength and passion he so vividly expresses’ he now put him in the front rank of French poets; Des Autelspraised ‘his ingenious imaginations and apprehensions, divine inventions, apt and poetic descriptions,nobility of style, weight of thought, magnificence of words new and translated, and in all sorts of diverseand varying circumstances’ (quoted in Raymond 1927:I.18).

The Romantics were to use all the powers they credited to imagination to satisfy deep emotional andspiritual needs. The inventions and fables of Renaissance poets were the expression of a new emotional andspiritual surplus rather than attempts to compensate a deficit; such supernaturalism as was associated withliterary creativity radiated from a new breadth and depth of experience and a new confidence in humancapacity to master and enjoy what the world offered. Breadth and depth of experience are reflected in theliterature of the time. What is deep is often not very different from the religious experience of the past,though it may take on new dimensions from Neoplatonism. What is broad is not always very deep; novelty

IMAGINATION 147

is often enjoyed for its own sake, and new ways of manipulating ideas and images, sounds and rhythms canbe exploited in a mood of sheer play—in exuberance or experiment.

At one extreme of poetic theory Christian Humanists stay close to Plato and Horace and limit imaginationto an edifying purpose and thus to the control of reason. At the other extreme Mazzoni and Comanini canmisinterpret Plato to recommend the free play of fantasy in writing. In France the Dictionnaire desPrécieuses had as its fourth maxim that fantasies are morally neutral, that the imagination cannot reallysin.2 The mainstream of French thinking stays nearer the Christian Humanist line. France was already farmore unified and centralized than Italy and the Sorbonne was a more rigidly conservative spiritual forcethan the papacy itself. One way of dealing with a powerful and dangerous current is to stem it; another is tomake it turn the right wheels. French classicism was to do both, with the emphasis on damming andcontrolling. The Jesuit element in the Counter-Reformation was to prove most effective in capturing the newforces for the old religion. In none of the countries that stay within the Roman Catholic tradition doesimagination establish itself as an intellectual rallying cry, a prestigious concept to bring together what arefelt to be the right ways of going about the making of literary artefacts; not, that is, before the onset ofRomanticism, when interest in imagination as the creative part of the mind was reawakened through ideasimported from Neoplatonist-inspired movements in England and Germany.

Which is not to say, of course, that the late Renaissance even in the Catholic countries did not produceliterature falling outside the classical mainstream, with its claims for obedience to reason and moderation.Although imagination is not always cited as justification for independence from rules and restraints, there isplenty of poetry that a modern critical vocabulary calls ‘highly imaginative’ or ‘fanciful’ or ‘fantastic’.Among the Italians we saw signs of the modernist rebellion among the theorists—Malatesta asserting that weneed ask no more of poems than that they should ‘give pleasure and move our soul to delectation’, Brunodefending the freedom of the ‘moderns’ against Humanist pedantry. Their spirit is reflected in the free-thinkingpoets of pre-classical France —Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant and Tristan l’Hermite. Moods, fancies,impressions, daydreams, picturesque observations, decorative metaphorical transmutations, sensuous orsensual notations —all these contribute to a poetry that can ‘give pleasure and move our soul todelectation’, not by coming to grips with the serious things of life but by overlaying them or refusing them—at the extreme, using the mind’s freedom to substitute an entirely artificial world for the one that offersitself to perception. An extreme example is this ‘Ode’ by Théophile:

Ce ruisseau remonte en sa source;Un boeuf gravit sur un clocher; Le sang coule de ce rocher;Un aspic s’accouple d’une ourse;Sur le haut d’une vieille tourUn serpent deschire un vautour;Le feu brusle dedans la glace;Le Soleil est devenu noir;Je voy la Lune qui va cheoir;Cet arbre est sorty de sa place.3

(This stream flows back to its source; an ox climbs a steeple; blood comes out of this rock; an aspmates with a she-bear; at the summit of an ancient tower a snake lacerates a vulture; fire burns in ice;the sun has turned black; I see the moon about to fall; this tree has moved from its place.)


The fancies of Théophile and the French free-thinking poets are not always perverse, of course, and few ofthem could come under the heading of what Ronsard stigmatized as ‘monstrous’ or ‘delirious’. They are notparticularly exciting or sensational, though Théophile’s version of the ‘world upside down’ topos couldwell have been written in deliberate defiance of Horace’s warning about the excesses of fantasy.

In a sense the most pleasure-seeking poems of the libertine poets might have seemed to Christianmoralists less morally perilous than the violent emotions, the spectacular thrills, the sensual and specificallyerotic richness developed by Ariosto out of the tradition of the romance and taken over by Tasso for themost striking passages of Jerusalem Delivered. But of course religious poetry contains its imaginativeindulgence within the walls of morality, as Rousseau was to do in La Nouvelle Héloïse; the unboundedimagination is the most perilous of all. The baroque art inspired by the Jesuits sought to indulge imaginationwithin safe bounds, to exploit le merveilleux chrétien. French classicism sought to exclude le merveilleuxchrétein from art, to formalize le merveilleux païen and to establish that the most legitimate and interesting‘wonderment’ should come from le merveilleux humain —the proper study of mankind—that had beensafely scholasticized by Aristotle. The pagan was to be conventionalized and thereby distanced, and magicof all kinds pushed into the background even more resolutely than it had been in the Middle Ages.

The history of French literature has still not quite escaped from the old text-book pattern based on the twogreat moments of classicism and Romanticism and the contrast between them. According to this, theessence of classicism was to be found in the Art poétique of Boileau, the ‘lawgiver of Parnassus’; reason,rules, and no place for imagination. But the Art poétique bears about the same relation to classical aesthetictheory as the Penny Catechism to St Thomas Aquinas. The greatest French classical writers owed nothing toBoileau, and the only Parnassus of which he might be thought to be the lawgiver—as a matter ofchronology if of nothing else—was that of the pseudo-classicism to which the eighteenth centurysubscribed. The Art poétique is a boldly carved monument in which French classicism becomes petrified,rigid and lifeless. It is a collection of commonplaces expressed with unflagging vigour and a swingingassurance which is not afraid of glimpses of the obvious, tautology or a submission of idea to form whichcan, on occasion, fly in the face of its own theory and produce vagueness and obscurity.

What we can accept is that the essence of French classicism is in Racine, and in this connection the oldtext-book view was that through some kind of natural affinity between Racine’s genius and the trend ofclassicism in his day, he put all the principles into practice without strain. Corneille was hampered andrebellious; Racine’s art was in no way embarrassed or distorted and actually profited from the precepts. ButEugene Vinaver (1951) pointed out that Racine’s greatness depends to some extent on his departures fromthe principles of Aristotle as his contemporaries understood them. In some respects, said Vinaver, Racineunderstood Aristotle more profoundly than they did, having enough Greek to compare the Poetics with thetragedies that Aristotle must have had in mind when writing it. But in some respects also Racine distortedAristotle in the interests of his personal conception of tragedy.

It is true that classical theory in general and Racine in particular had no place for imagination. But somesenses of the word, as we found it used in the Renaissance, and some connotations of imagination in thephilosophical tradition are obviously relevant to the art of Racine. Plot distinguished from history, violentemotion linked with violent sensation contributing to imaginative identification with fictional characters, theimportance of figurative language, characters given a universal significance without becoming abstractedand schematized as ‘types’, formal perfection carried to the point where it may seem to be the onlyprotective barrier between our consciousness of the potential horrors of human life and the nihilism anddespair which might be consequent upon it —all these things have been discussed again and again; andRacine has often been called the most imaginative of classical writers.

IMAGINATION 149

He has even been called the most Romantic of classical writers. But there is one set of connotations ofimagination which is not common to Racine, Renaissance and Romanticism. There is no claim in classicaltheory, Racine’s or the rest, and no implication in classical practice, like Tasso’s claim that poetry istheophany.

The interpretation of the history of literature, as of history proper, is subject to swings of the pendulum.Where features of the picture are found to be false, they tend to be reversed. The distinction between pre-classicism and classicism has been questioned and by many rejected, with the affirmation that all thedefinable characteristics of classicism proper are to be found in Corneille’s contemporaries. On the otherhand un-classical tendencies which, according to the old view, submitted in the long run to classicaltendencies, have been found to persist and to reemerge later. Alongside these classical tendencies historianshave found others which they have labelled baroque. The baroque is defined as shifting and uncertain whereclassicism is stable and positive; it is violent and destructive where classicism is serene and formal: it isrevolutionary instead of traditional, rebellious instead of submissive to authority, individualistic instead ofsocial. Some historians see it as a sort of romantisme avant la lettre, trying to assert itself against the forcesof reaction. Some divide writers into classical and baroque: some see baroque elements in Racine andPascal. What does emerge is that the history of literature is the outcome of a very complicated interaction ofintellectual forces, and that the establishment of classicism in France was not unconnected with the forceswhich established the absolute monarchy and the Counter-Reformation, effectively arresting all that wasmaking for the political and intellectual changes which suddenly burst forth again in the following century.

It is often said still of the development of the drama that the decline of sixteenth-century tragedy and thetemporary loss of interest in Aristotle was due partly to the Wars of Religion, which arrested the progress ofHumanism, and this is true enough. It is misleading only insofar as it separates, by implication, the history ofliterature from history, as if the Wars of Religion were an irrelevant intrusion from outside. But the Wars ofReligion are part of the intellectual history of the time. The naïve view of the Renaissance used to be that itre-discovered the ancients, who were good; it enabled Europeans to see what was wrong with the MiddleAges, which were dark and in many ways bad, and to retain of Christianity only what was good, combiningthis with the wisdom of the ancients to produce Christian humanism, or humane Christianity, or even layhumanism with a bias towards charity. But the Renaissance and the Reformation together had their part inthe Wars of Religion, in many subsequent wars, and in those private mental conflicts which literaturerecords and which later became the mal du siècle and the absurd. Long before Gide, the Renaissance turnedmen’s minds towards the nourritures terrestres which are not highly valued by the Christian tradition, andsimultaneously towards a tragic view of the human situation which is difficult to combine with the idea ofsalvation and eternal life. That idealism which is always present in man to some degree, and which in theRomantic sensibility was to become central: that tendency to imagine a way of life which includes onlywhat is valued and concentrates it to an infinite intensity, could, after the Renaissance, feel torn between theimagination of utter acceptance of the senses or of utter rejection of the senses, a pagan Golden Age or aChristian saintliness: or, having once seen that two radically different conceptions of the good life arepossible, it might go on to imagine others, which might be compromises, or might look forward to somequite different possibility, some as yet undiscovered ideal of the good life. Two ways of looking backwards:the possibility revealed of looking forwards. Sensuality, ascetism, or some new goal such as knowledge andconquest. The intellectual situation is primarily one of potential chaos rather than potential order. Chaosbecame historically objectified in the Wars of Religion. Chaos engenders the desire for order at all costs.The absolute monarchy provided political order, classicism provided intellectual order; both wereprovisional, for both provided the order within which the chaotic tendencies could sort themselves into theirown creative order; and Richelieu had a hand in both.


Classicism established a temporary intellectual stability through a working compromise, as the Counter-Reformation did in religion. Imitation of the ancients in the sixteenth century meant looking backwards.This kind of classicism was almost ousted by a modernism—we can call it baroque if we like—whichresponded spontaneously to contemporary pressures and interests, in all their anarchic complexity. Frenchclassicism in the seventeenth century is a compromise which offers something to everybody. It looksbackwards, to the aesthetic authority of the Greeks, but in the name of a value which is given at least anacceptably modern label, which is reason. The Greeks were right not because they were the Greeks, butbecause they saw what reason dictated. It forbids le merveilleux chrétien in tragedy, yet it reads tragicconflict in moral terms which were foreign to the Greeks and make sense only in the Christian context ofindividual moral responsibility for salvation. It insists that art should express the universal, but is equallyinsistent that this should be expressed in terms which are immediately acceptable in the contemporarycontext - acceptable in the sense of being intelligible, capable of being emotionally responded to andentirely inoffensive to contemporary taste. Classicism was, in fact, a delicate balancing of complexintellectual forces: precarious, all too dependent on a political stability which was artificial and alsoprecarious, but reflecting in its products the delicacy, the complexity, and the insight which comes whenmen are presented with complexity and given the opportunity to explore it. Let us have a look at theprinciples by which it stood.

In the first place, it is interesting to note that at the same time as Aristotle is receding into the backgroundphilosophically he moves into the foreground aesthetically. Theologically he belongs to the Sorbonne and areactionary academicism: aesthetically he is annexed by the avant-garde. The French sixteenth centurydepended for its theory of tragedy more on Horace and Seneca than on Aristotle, hardly known except as hewas filtered through Italian commentators. The seventeenth century bases its theory of tragedy on Aristotle,interpreted in a more scholarly way by the Dutch Humanists, Heinsius and Vossius. Yet over thefundamental question of the aim of art it moves back from Aristotle and the later Greeks to Plato. ForAristotle the aim of art is pleasure, the aim of tragedy is the purging of the passions, which is a contributionto the psychic health of the individual. For Plato, art is subordinated to the interests of the community, ofthe state: it must be morally useful. Artists seem always to be more naturally inclined to please than tofurther morality—in the first place to please themselves. Seventeenth-century artists tended to describe theiraims in terms of Horace’s Ars poetica, which prescribed a mixture of the agreeable and the useful andrecommended that the artist should both please and instruct. But the official doctrine was that art has amoral aim, and it needed the rebellious courage of Corneille to give precedence to pleasure. It has beensuggested that this moral preoccupation was inherited from the Middle Ages through Tasso and theallegorical tradition. It is possible also that this represents one element of the compromise I referred toearlier: a pagan tradition reconciled with the re-Christianizing tendency of the Counter-Reformation bybeing subordinated to a morality which must, in the last analysis, be a Christian morality. It also representedan attitude which suited the absolutism of Richelieu, an absolutism which foreshadows moderntotalitarianisms in which art is far more ruthlessly shackled to social and political aims.

In critical practice, one can say that it acted less as a positive guide than as a kind of potential censorship.No theoretical writer ever explains exactly how art is to manage to be moral; but art which appears in someway dangerous is branded as immoral. The moral aim of art can become the basis for a more or lessvoluntary censorship by public opinion: Corneille was reproached with the immorality of Chimène, Racinewith the immorality of Phèdre.

Corneille, as usual, asks the awkward questions about the aim of art. He himself puts pleasure first: theaim is to please. But he at once defends himself and makes concessions to authority by stating: ‘it isimpossible to please according to the rules without including much that is useful.’4 Then he asks how can a

IMAGINATION 151

dramatist propose to himself the deliberate intention of furthering morality? By inserting moral maxims,sentences, into his plays? Too many would spoil the play. By punishing the wicked and rewarding thegood? This, of course, was what the theoretical writers, La Ménardière and D’Aubignac recommended, butpractising dramatists knew that tragedy could not work in this way, and Corneille, without rejecting it entirelyas we should today, points out that there are tragic situations in which it cannot be done. By catharsisperhaps? But, says Corneille, nobody knows what Aristotle meant by catharsis. By ‘la peinture despassions’? That is, by imitating life? Certainly: but this is exactly what provides the pleasure of tragedy.Usefulness cannot be an aim in itself: it is a consequence of l’agrément.

Consciously, the acceptance of the principle of the morality of art by writers was a symbol of theiracceptance of group solidarity, of the integration of their art into an undefined but loosely and half-consciouslyknown social order. Unconsciously, their work embodies a morality, a set of moral intuitions, as all great artdoes, whether classical or romantic—one that may be almost independent of any of the moral or aestheticprinciples that are consciously accepted by the writer.

So if, in France, classical writing shows features already associated in Renaissance theory withimagination, the triumph of classicism did put a tight rein on fancy. Odette de Mourgues writes of Du BoisHus’s ‘La Nuit des nuits’, which recalls Milton’s ‘Ode on the morning of Christ’s nativity’, as one of the‘last flashes’ of the baroque:

Du Bois Hus is not the only poet who used the loveliness of the baroque landscape for religious purposes:others, like him, belonging to the last group of choristers of devout humanism, rejoiced in the beautyof the external world, and praised God for it. But, little by little, devout humanism was ousted by amore puritanical attitude towards the enjoyment of the external world, probably due to Jansenistinfluence. Religion and lyrical poetry became more and more divorced from each other; laudatoryreligious verse tended to avoid fancy, or the mixture of the pagan and the Christian, as being in badtaste, and general abstract words to designate aspects of nature took the place of landscapes.

(1953:161)

In France, as in Italy, the spread of Ficinian Neoplatonism carried with it a new enthusiasm for the spiritualeffects of music. Protestants as well as Catholics recognized the benefits of music in worship, but theProtestants deplored the laxities of the use of music in Catholic churches. They based their principles for theright use of music on the Church Fathers and Plato rather than on the Italian Neoplatonists, asserting that itspower could be dangerous as well as beneficial and making their judgments of the right and wrong use onmoral grounds. And they not only mistrusted some aspects of the new wave of musical enthusiasm; theydeplored also the concessions made in the Catholic liturgy to pagan customs and to the vulgarities andexcesses of popular taste.

The points made by Calvin about music were exactly those made by the Church Fathers. Singing is thebest way to praise God and a great help in disposing the soul to spiritual fervour. The Psalms of Davidprovide the model. There is no question of a magical effect or of an alchemically or astrologically basedtherapy. The Calvinist emphasis is on intelligence, understanding; and as these are associated primarily withthe words, the music must serve the words and make for clarity of enunciation. Instruments are banned; theinstruments of the Biblical narratives are explained as they were by the Church Fathers, as concessions to thecomparatively undeveloped spiritual state of the Jews at that time. In other words, whatever falls below thelevel of clear understanding of the articles of faith is thought of as primitive and superstitious; yet theprimitive and suspect power of music is tacitly recognized. Plotinus also, we remember, brought out theprimitive, sub-rational aspects of the effects of music. Flutes and drums, said Calvin, were not bad in


themselves, but were always played in a way which excited people beyond the pitch of a moderate anddecorous joy. They should be played only outside the church.

So he condemned the Catholics for misusing music’s exciting effects. Church musicians in the lateMiddle Ages did what the Salvation Army does today—adapted popular songs to religious purposes,substituting new words to well-known tunes. The Calvinists objected that the tunes still carried theassociations of the well-known words, profane and often lascivious. The Catholics allowed the performanceof rituals, including songs and dances, that belonged to obviously pagan festivals in the popular tradition;the Calvinists regarded this practice with horror.

Protestant propaganda made its mark on the Counter-Reformation. Already in 1528 the Council of Sensforbade the performance of anything irrelevant to divine service, and banned mimes and semi-profaneceremonies like the Feast of Fools, with the ‘beating of drums and the sounding of lutes and other musicalinstruments’. Similar prohibitions were repeated by Councils in 1551 and 1557, and in 1562 thereassembled Council of Trent warned against the inclusion of profane irrelevancies in the performance ofthe mass, referring particularly to music. At the Council of Rheims in 1564,

the Cardinal of Lorraine, in submitting his ideas on the cult for deliberation by the Council, declaredthat steps should be taken to ensure that no lascivious or effeminate music was performed in church;what is even more interesting, he went on to propose that the use of musical instruments should bemoderated and that the Apostle’s Creed and such parts of the service as the ‘Gloria in excelsis’ andthe ‘Sanctus’ be sung by the choir alone, without any musical accompaniment whatsoever.

(Clive 1958:101)

The Cardinal of Lorraine was one of the more conciliatory spirits of the Counter-Reformation, anxious tobridge the gaps between the conservative Catholics and the Reformers. In our own day this degree ofmusical puritanism is still found in a few extreme Protestant sects, for instance the Plymouth Brethren.

Outside the properly religious controversies the Humanists’ interest in the marriage of words and musicwas nearer the spirit of Ficino than to that of the Protestants; religious in the sense that Ficino’s ‘theology’was more respectful of the letter and indeed the spirit of orthodoxy than Ficino, interested as he was inexploring the relationship of music and poetry in the ancients. The impulse that encouraged Ronsard tocompose verses to be set to music came partly from the songs and psalms of the school of Marot, from the circlecentred on Marguerite de Navarre in which the Italian Renaissance met and conjoined with the NorthernRenaissance. But in a ‘hymn’ addressed to the Cardinal de Lorraine, Ronsard describes the enchantment ofthe music of Ferabosco, one of the Cardinal’s musicians, in the spirit of Neoplatonism. Ferabosco’s singingto the lyre, with the expressive movement of his hands as he plays, brings together three muses to move thesoul, says the poet; at one moment the listeners die with Dido under Virgil’s spell, at another they arestorming Guînes or Calais with the Cardinal’s brother, the Duc de Guise, ‘just as in the Heavens the Godsswoon under Apollo’s song as he plucks the lyre’. Baïf’s Academy was devoted to this marriage of the twoarts. It was established as a royal institution in November 1570, through the joint efforts of Baïf and JoachimThibault de Courville; they aimed to restore ‘both the kind of poetry and the measure and rule of musicanciently used by the Greeks and Romans’, having already completed ‘some attempts at measured versesset to measured music in accordance, or as near as may be, with the laws of the masters of music in the goodold times’. There were to be two kinds of members, performers and listeners, the money being provided bythe listeners, or ‘Auditors’.5

The preamble to Baïf’s Statutes elaborates his aim:

IMAGINATION 153

In order to bring back into use music in its perfection which is to represent words in singingcompleted by sounds, harmony and melody, consisting in the choice and regulation of voices, sounds,and well harmonised accords, so as to produce the effect which the sense of the words requires, eitherlowering or raising or otherwise influencing the spirits, thus renewing the ancient fashion ofcomposing measured verses to which are accommodated tunes likewise measured in accordance withthe metric art. In order also that by this means the minds of the Auditors, accustomed and trained to musicin all its parts, may be composed so as to become capable of the highest knowledge after being purgedof the remnants of barbarism, under the good pleasure of our sovereign lord the King we have agreedto form an Academy.

(quoted in Yates 1947:23)

To this end Baïf established artificial equivalences in French to the long and short vowels of Latin verse and,following Plato’s precept that the music must follow the words, laid down that the duration of the notesmust correspond to the length of the syllables, or, if more than one note goes with a syllable, that their totalduration must equal the length of the syllable. Baïf worked with the composer Mauduit to this end. Thisinsistence on a strictly definable formal regularity is in the spirit of the new classicism.

At the same time one can see that the impulse to make the language of music, like the language of poetry,more expressive of human feelings, more potentially violent but also more subtly various in its effects, ledthe French musical Humanists of the late Renaissance, like the Italians, to put wealth of technical meansabove archaeological purism. Not, as far as music was concerned, that there was much archaeological loreto turn to; but it was generally assumed that Greek music was mainly monodic. Medieval music haddeveloped polyphony; the new music was experimenting with new harmonic techniques.

The new wave in religious music, like Bardi and the creators of Italian opera, favoured monody or, in itsless ascetic contexts, homophony. Pontus de Tyard remained faithful to the pure Humanist tradition,preferring monody to harmony, which he called ‘figured music’:

For figured music often suggests nothing to the ears but a great noise, from which you feel no livelyefficacity; but one single voice alone gently poured forth and kept within the style of its Mode—which has been chosen in accordance with the character of the verses—has power to ravish you awaywith it. And in this manner of using the single voice alone lay the most ravishing energy of theancient lyric Poets, who, marrying Music and Poetry (for they are born the one for the other) sangthus their verses and often produced the effect which they desired, for this careful simplicity insinging, and observation of the Modes, is endowed with a secret and admirable power.


But the musique mesurée, ‘measured music’, of Baïf’s academy was deliberately modernist and interested inharmony. What they did want to restore from what they took to be the practice of the Greeks was rhythm, towhich they ascribed a great part of the legendary effects of the music of Orpheus and Amphion. The prefaceto Claude le Jeune’s Le Printemps in 1603 put this point of view very clearly:

The ancients who have treated of Music have divided it into two parts, Harmony and Rhythm: the oneconsisting in the proportioned assembling of low and high pitched sounds, the other in short and longtime. Harmony was so little known to them that they only permitted themselves the consonances ofthe octave, the quinte, and the quarte: with which they composed a certain accord on the Lyre, to thesound of which they chanted their verses. Rhythm, on the other hand, was brought by them to such


perfection, that they produced marvellous effects by it: moving thereby the souls of men to suchpassions as they would: and this they have represented to us under the fables of Orpheus and of Amphion,who tamed the courage of the wildest beasts and animated wood and stones, making them move andplace themselves where they wished. Since their time, Rhythm has been so neglected that she hasbeen quite lost, whilst Harmony for the last two hundred years has been so exactly sought out that shehas been made perfect, producing beautiful and grand effects, but not such as those which antiquityrecounts. Which has caused astonishment to many, seeing that the ancients sang with one voice only,whereas we have the melody of several voices together. Some (perhaps) have discovered the cause ofthis: but no one was found to remedy it until Claudin Le Jeune appeared, who was the first to be boldenough to draw poor Rhythm out of the tomb where she had lain so long and to join her to Harmony.Which he has done so happily and with such art that he has brought our music to a perfection which willcause it to be followed by more admirers than imitators, making it not only equal to that of theancients, but much more excellent and more capable of beautiful effects since it makes audible thebody married to the soul, which till then had been separated. For Harmony alone with its agreeableconsonances may well arrest the admiration of the most subtle spirits: but Rhythm coming to animatethese consonances, may also animate, move, and draw whither it wishes by the gentle violence of itsregulated movements all souls, however gross and rude they may be. The proof of which will be seenin the measured songs of this Printemps.

(quoted in Yates 1947:56–7, n.8)

Claude le Jeune was said by some to have rediscovered the musical powers of the ancients. Artus Thomas,in his commentary on a French translation of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, attributes a share ofApollonius’s magic to Le Jeune’s music:

I have sometimes heard it said of the Sieur Claudin Le Jeune (who has far surpassed…the musiciansof former ages in the understanding of these modes) that he composed in parts an air which was sungat the magnificent fêtes which took place on the occasion of the marriage of the late Duc de Joyeuse…and that when this air was rehearsed at a private concert it caused a gentleman who was present to puthis hand to his arms, loudly swearing the while that he could not refrain himself from fightingsomeone, and that when they began to sing another air in the Sub-Phrygian mode he grew tranquil asbefore. I have had this since confirmed by some of those who were present on that occasion. Such isthe force and power over the mind of the modulation and movement of voices joined together.


As in poetry and—we shall soon see—in painting, the new powers of art were to be recognized and used bythe Counter-Reformation. Baïf’s academy tried its techniques on Psalms as well as on secular poetry, andBaïf appealed to the Pope for approval of his French versions, since translations of the Psalms werenormally frowned on within the Church as a mark of Reformism. Perhaps Baïf dreamed, like the followersof Erasmus, of a reconciliation between the Church and the new evangelical spirit; or else he was offeringhis own way of adapting the Psalms as a counterblast.

Mersenne, who was eventually to join the Order of Minims, exhorted musicians to use their music to turnsouls to Christ in a preface to his Harmonie universelle of 1636:

Since all those whom I have named in this preface have the honour to be Christians, and since a trueChristian ought to express in himself the life, the actions, and the sufferings of Jesus Christ…it is

IMAGINATION 155

meet that they should behave themselves like Christian Orpheuses by persuading their hearers to leavetheir unregulated passions in order to follow reason and virtue and to render themselves like unto himupon whom their salvation entirely depends.


‘Measured music’, like the quantitative poetry it was based on, was short-lived, but the French versions ofthe Psalms made by Desportes, who worked very close to Baïf, became very popular in the seventeenthcentury and influenced the mystical revival associated with St François de Sales.

In this, as in so many other contexts, the Jesuits were quick to exploit new fashions, accepting andadapting new tastes and modes of sensibility rather than braking or repressing the new cultural forces. TheCouncil of Trent might warn against diluting the sacred with the profane; the Jesuits carried on the oldcompromises in new terms. Profane pleasures, chief amongst them being music and dancing, were allowedinto religious festivals, the spirit of which seems often to have been not far from that of courtentertainments. The Jesuits were interested in opera and ballet as well as in painting, sculpture and imagesas emblems.

The religious appropriation of the aesthetic means of the baroque can be observed still in the annualperformance of the mystery play of Elche, in southern Spain. Its legend is that in the thirteenth or fourteenthcentury a casket was washed ashore and found to contain a statue of the Virgin and the text of a playcelebrating the Assumption. Since the fourteenth century the action set out in the play has been performedevery year; music is an essential part of the drama, which is made as spectacular as it can possibly be. In1672 the church of Santa Maria was, as it were, built round the sacred spectacle; the dome of the basilicawas designed to house the machinery by which the araceli, or sky-altars, are winched up and down carryingguitar-playing angels and eventually the Virgin herself through the trapdoor into heaven. Crude as some ofthe visual effects are, the spirit of this performance is the spirit of baroque opera transposed into the world ofnaïve religious emotion; every year some three thousand people come to experience it. The eve of the Feastof the Assumption is celebrated with fireworks in the street; secular revelry is inseparable from religiouscelebration as it was in the origins of European drama, the mysteries and miracle-plays. As the Council of Trentwas forced to observe, the emotional forces could play in either of two directions—religion drawing off thepower of popular and sometimes pagan traditions, or the urge to the Dionysian using religious celebrationas a pretext.

The ‘measured music’ of musicians like Mauduit and Le Jeune seems to have been at the origin of courtballets and of the French conception of opera. Whether Baïf tried to marry drama and music to recreate thespirit of Greek tragedy is uncertain; but the ideas of Baïf and his like are the roots of opera as Lully was toconceive it and as Racine was to despise it. French opera, like the Italian, went in for the splendid anddramatic effects produced by complicated stage machinery; and in France ballet added its visual element tothe marriage of words and music.

Dancing had played a part in festivals and court entertainments long before the Renaissance, but in thesixteenth century it became an art of measured movement with Pythagoreanism in the background as it wasfor measured music. The heavenly spheres not only produced musical harmonies; they moved in the balletof the skies. Therefore, said Tuccaro, the famous acrobat who settled in France in 1571, human dancingimitates, consciously or no, the harmonious movements of the heavenly bodies; and ballet became a symbolof the well-ordered state on earth (McGowan 1963: 20–1). The creators of ballet, it was held, shouldunderstand mathematics and astronomy. ‘Horizontal’ or ‘geometric’ dancing, as it was called, must havebeen rather like the patterned marching to be seen nowadays at military tattoos, ideally looked at from ahigh vantage-point; more recently, the moving patterns of light and colour generated on the television


screen by computers, often related to a musical accompaniment, offer the same sort of aesthetic pleasure asa more acute and intense experience.

When ballet became an art in its own right in the France of the late Renaissance it was theoreticallysupported not only by Pythagorean number but by the notion of symbolic or allegorical truth. As theseventeenth-century Jesuit Menestrier put it, ballet is a ‘metaphorical action’. The allegorical sense tendedhowever to become more and more obviously political, either recommending the need for harmony to theroyal power or celebrating the majesty of the royal power itself. Theorists, and in particular the Jesuits,continued to argue the metaphysical significance of the art; in practice ballet seems to have strayed furtherand further from the principles of measured movement and symbolic meaning and to have become more andmore entertainment for its own sake, with a good deal of burlesque and satire in the spirit of Molière’scomedies.

Lully was the first to use trained male ballet dancers in opera; sometimes the King and the nobles tookpart in the dancing. The audience, too, took part in the singing, as Addison reported in the Spectator in 1711:

The Chorus in which that Opera abounds, gives the Parterre frequent Opportunities of joining inConsort with the Stage. This Inclination of the Audience to Sing along with the Actors, so prevailswith them, that I have sometimes known the Performer on the Stage to do no more in a CelebratedSong, than the Clerk of a Parish Church, who serves only to raise the Psalm, and is afterwardsdrown’d in the Musick of the Congregation. Every Actor that comes on the Stage is a Beau. TheQueens and Heroines are so Painted, that they appear as Ruddy and Cherry-cheek’d as Milk-maids.The Shepherds are all Embroider’d, and acquit themselves in a Ball better than our English Dancing-Masters. I have seen a couple of Rivers appear in red stockings; and Alphaeus, instead of having hishead covered with Sedge and Bull-Rushes, making Love in a fair full-bottomed Perriwig, and a Plumeof Feathers; but with a Voice so full of Shakes and Quavers that I should have thought the Murmersof a Country Brook the much more agreeable Musick.

(quoted in Brockway and Weinstock 1962:55)

With this in mind it is interesting to compare Lully’s musical styles in his operas and in his sacred music.His operas are in the full-blown French baroque style, all pomp and fanfare and histrionics, in tune with thedécors of the baroque theatre. His sacred music, stiller waters running deeper, is much nearer the mood andstyle of early Italian opera, in which the profane is still imbued with the sacred respect that Bardi and hislike had for the Greek tragic spirit. Monteverdi used the same set of tricks for his operas and his Churchmusic; Lully had two different styles derived from two successive moments in the evolution of musicaltechniques. But if Racine despised Lully’s operas as a betrayal of the spirit of Greek tragedy, others weremore admiring of the power of the music than concerned with its historical authenticity. Du Bos, early inthe eighteenth century, compared the music of the fifth act of Lully’s Roland, which calms the hero’smadness, with that used by the Pythagoreans to empty their minds of the day’s impressions before settlingto sleep; the prologue to Amadis, he wrote, was like the Pythagoreans’ waking music.6

As in Italy, painting and poetry were often thought of together, and there is some evidence that writersprovided painters with programmes, setting out not only the narrative to be conveyed by the picture butdetailed directions for the arrangement of the pictorial features themselves. Pontus de Tyard drew up such aprogramme for the decorations of the Château d’Anet, the mansion built by Henri II for Diane de Poitiers. HisTwelve Fables of Rivers or Fountains drew on Greek and Egyptian mythology. For each of the twelvesubjects Tyard recounts the fable, gives directions for painting it and adds a poem on the same theme.

IMAGINATION 157

The French show as much interest as the Italians in symbolic images, referred to in poetry, reproduced inpainting and created as emblems and devices. Such images are drawn from a great variety of sources,medieval as well as humanist, since the Middle Ages had carried on the ancient tradition of allegoricalinterpretation of such pagan mythology as had survived, extended it under the influence of the Fathers to thesacred scriptures and then, with reservations, to secular poetry. So Renaissance imagery is derived frommedieval romance, particularly the Romance of the Rose, from Neoplatonist lore, from the rather fantasticEgyptology of the time, particularly the much misunderstood hieroglyphics interpreted on the linessuggested by Ficino and influenced by alchemical symbolism.

The significance of images is well summed up by Frances Yates:

Thus the Renaissance had at its disposal a repertory of images, systematised by learned experts, whichformed a language used by art and literature in all European countries to which the learning of thehumanists had penetrated. The way in which these images were understood linked them vitally to thesymbols of religion. Life flowed into them; from above through the contact with the dynamics of aliving religion; from all sides, through the enriching commerce between poets, artists, architects,musicians, moving about their appointed tasks within a homogeneous culture.

(1947:151)

Menestrier, well aware of the effects of organized sensations outside as well as inside art, sought to set up ascience of imagination for the proper use of such effects. He was particularly learned in heraldry andemblematics and skilful in constructing symbolic devices and planning ceremonial rituals:

Having reflected that our mind acts only through images in most of its operations, and that it has beenable to find sensible signs and figures to express to us its most secret thoughts and purposes, in aningenious way, I resolved, in order to satisfy my inclination and to attach my studies to somethingagreeable and disciplined, to undertake to penetrate the Philosophy of Images, and to seek itsprinciples.7

He planned to divide his great work into four parts. The first was to investigate the use of images intheology to convey the mysteries of religion. The second was to deal with images d’action —court festivals,tournaments, ballets, operas, princely entries, fireworks, funeral celebrations and decorations for specialoccasions. The third part was to consider images in poetry and rhetoric—images de la parole et du,discours. The last part would be images savantes—symbols, hieroglyphics, emblems, devices, heraldry,medals, iconology and enigmas. He never carried this grandiose project beyond his own special spheres ofknowledge, which were the second and fourth parts. In these he tried to use his erudition to formulate somegeneral rules and to work out a method for the use of the various kinds of images to produce sociallydesirable effects. He defends the visionary powers of the mind against the spiritual aridity of his century; buthis interest in the visionary is itself analytical and detached, and his learning provided his readers with atremendous amount of information without perhaps much advancement in the understanding of thepsychology or philosophy of images.

He had a great deal to say about the social functions of opera and ballet, and preferred these art-forms—irregular by pure classical standards—to regular tragedy. Impressively knowledgeable about the history ofmusic, theatre and dance, he tried to work towards a rationale through which the emotive power of operaand ballet could be directed to good ends; his main point of reference seems to have been the Aristoteliannotion of catharsis, adapted to the irregular art-forms. ‘The ability to create great effects, he thought, could


be calculated by experts, so that they might please and instruct; while Jansenists claimed that the impact ofsuch effects could never be assessed in advance.’ Imagination was for Menestrier a means of socialengineering. For the Jansenists it was a snare.

In painting, French classicism had its Racine in Poussin and its Boileau in Lebrun. Literary theory had setup a catechism of aesthetics; the painting theory of the French Academy transposed as many items as possibleinto a set of rules for painters, setting up a visual code as rigid as the official rules supposed to governclassical poetry. The tentative insights of the Renaissance became dogmas; the speculative comparisonsbetween the aims and means of poetry and painting became systematized, producing, as aesthetic theory sooften does, the practically profitable as well as the rationally dubious. In this case the construction ofimages was divorced as far as it could be from the operations of imagination.

The Renaissance notion of ‘idealizing’, based on Aristotle, had tended towards the ‘nobility’ of the actionto be represented in the painting; ‘nobility’ now became explicit and essential. In the interests of unity ofaction Poussin will combine several moments of a story into a single image; in his Fall of the Manna in theWilderness the manna falls by day, not by night, and the hunger of the Jews is represented as extreme and asyet unappeased although in the Biblical story they had fed the night before on quails. Félibien, Poussin’sbiographer and a pillar of the Academy, distinguished ‘copying’, the representation of things in line andcolour, from ‘invention’, and set up a hierarchy of kinds of paintings; still-life at the bottom, thenlandscape, animal painting, portraits; historical painting is the greatest of all. He works in one Neoplatonistcommonplace when he says that the great painter will ‘be skilled to conceal under the veil of fable thevirtues of great men, and the most exalted mysteries’ (quoted in Lee 1967: 19); but this is mere lip-service.

Every part of a painting—content, disposition in space, the delineation of the human figures with posture,gesture and facial expression revealing their emotions, the relations of colours and lights contributing to thegeneral feeling-tone of the picture—all these must not only contribute to the harmony and unity of the totaleffect, but must do so in a way that is logically demonstrable. So Le Brun, having studied Descartes’stheory of the human passions in terms of the mind producing physical effects with mechanical regularityand precision through the movements of the animal spirits, wrote his own treatise on the visual expression ofemotion; he specified every minute change in facial expression corresponding to changes of subjectivefeeling—movement of pupil, eyebrow, nose and mouth.

Poussin did not live to read the more absurd theoretical dogmas of the Academy; but, as Félibien pointsout, he was very much a rationalist himself. When, as he grew older, he found his mechanical skilldiminishing, his hands less obedient to his head, he wrote in a letter that the head would still find means toget done what must be done. He had learned the Renaissance doctrine that gesture and facial expressionmust be carefully planned to correspond with emotion, and took great pride in demonstrating that everyemotion of every human figure in his pictures corresponded with the role of that figure in the total action:

Just as the twenty-four letters of the alphabet are used to form our words and to express our thoughts,so the forms of the human body are used to express the various passions of the soul and to makevisible what is in the mind.

(quoted in Blunt 1967:222)

But he did not try to base his visual alphabet on any systematic psychology, as Lebrun did; he followed theclassical principle of ‘imitation of nature’, and observed for himself.

In a conversation reported by Félibien, Poussin recognized imagination in one of its Renaissance roles. ‘Apainter is not a great painter’, he said,

IMAGINATION 159

if he does no more than imitate what he sees, any more than a poet. Some are born with an instinctlike that of animals which leads them to copy easily what they see. They only differ from the animalsin that they know what they are doing and give some variety to it. But able artists must work withtheir minds, that is, they must think out in advance what they want to do, conceive Alexander in theirimagination as a noble and courteous man, and then, by means of their colours, express his personalityso that one will recognize from the features that it is Alexander and that he has the characteristicswhich are associated with him.

(quoted in Blunt 1967:220)

But ‘imagination’ is not otherwise recognized in Poussin’s theory.Just as Racine despised baroque taste in opera, Poussin reacted against the baroque in painting. Racine’s

Jansenism, which, of all Christian attitudes, was the one most likely to dispose him to fathom the tragicoutlook of the Greeks, helped also to set him against the artistic extravagances which many of the Jesuitswere prepared to countenance; Poussin’s religion was perhaps more traditional and middle-of-the-road. Hisreligion has been labelled under many headings, including Jansenism and Protestantism; he had friendsamong the libertins, free-thinkers not in the sense that they rejected religion but that they refused the narrowauthoritarianism of Scholastic theology. What is certain is that he had no use for the religion of seventeenth-century Italy; that he avoided baroque themes with their violent emotions of ecstasy or suffering; that hepainted subjects connected with the liturgy of the early Church Fathers, and used as his models not so muchcontemporary Italian painters as early Christian art; not so much Hellenistic sculpture as such forms as heknew of the Greek fifth century.

The classicism of his aesthetics matched the Stoicism of his ethics and his general philosophy of life. Thereis a core of Stoicism in Jansenism—partly overlaid by an Augustinianism purer than that of the medievalmainstream; in Poussin, for whom it is the main source of his moral imagination; and in the more learnedamong the libertins, tinctured in them with the critical attitude towards the supernatural and with thecontempt for superstition which had first become apparent in the current of rationalism flowing from Paduaand Pomponazzi. And this core of Stoicism occasions also a correspondence of sensibility between all theseand the Scholastics. The Stoics were the arch-rationalists of the Greek tradition. There are the self and theworld, each firmly posited in the Stoic tradition; its theory of knowledge is less concerned than Plato’s withany ideal world outside nature and bent on ensuring that the things of the world appear in the mind as theyreally are. The self, with its boundless appetites, is set over against a world with its inescapable laws, itsfatalities; Stoicism absorbed the essence of that Greek wisdom which lies in finding out how things objectivelyare and adjusting to the knowledge. Ways of establishing how things objectively are can differ greatlywithin that general sensibility we call rationalism; for the growing scientific outlook, as for the alchemists withtheir cycle of generation and corruption following the occult principles in nature, Greek fatality becomesnature’s laws. But as an attitude Stoicism can be distinguished from the sensibility which seeks to identifyconsciousness with something outside the immediately real.

The distinction is not necessarily stark. But just as Plotinus found it necessary to correct the Stoics intheir identification of beauty with order and proportion, and to insist that these are not beauty, but onlysome of the ways in which beauty makes itself sensible, so in post-Renaissance Europe there can be felt atension in ideas about art between form and feeling, a lyricism of harmony and a lyricism of escape fromdesire. French classicism retreated from the extreme Neoplatonism of the Florentine variety towards therationalism which was part of the permanent core of the Western tradition, and re-established it insomething like its early Greek form. Imagination had no greater part to play in classical aesthetics than inPlato or Aristotle. But the poetic feeling of Poussin’s painting is as obvious to those who have taken the


trouble to adjust to it as the poetic feeling of Racine’s tragedies; and it needs a similar degree of adjustmentin minds not yet attuned to the codes and conventions of French classical art.

More finely sensuous, of course, is the painting of Claude Lorrain, conceived in the spirit of a classicismless literary than Poussin’s; working in the genre, landscape, that literary classicism put far below historicalpainting. Poussin’s exercise of imagination is in the sense of Quintilian and Longinus—projection into theactions and emotions of people—with landscape as an important yet secondary preoccupation. Claude’s is,with few exceptions, an imagination of sensation itself, of fine perceptions of texture, light and atmosphere;of a quiet lyricism undisturbed by the emotions inherent in the human content of Poussin’s compositions.Poussin worked for the cultured French bourgeoisie and painted in the spirit of the new French culture thatwas soon to dominate Europe; Claude was more faithful to the Italian tradition and the new tendenciesderived from it outside France, for instance the landscape techniques of Elsheimer. He was comparativelyunaffected by the rising tide of a specifically French artistic impulse; he was a precursor of Turner and ofthe Impressionists.

The Jansenist mistrust of imagination shows in the Logic of Arnauld and Nicole and in the apologetics ofPascal. For Arnauld and Nicole all reasoning is conceptual and images have no place in it. They move backfrom Aristotle to Plato through Augustine; sensations are the occasions of some ideas, but the origins ofnone. If, they allow, the mind would not form certain of its ideas without the occasions offered by thesenses, others are quite obviously independent of the senses, and therefore of the imagination.

Pascal’s mistrust of imagination is extreme:

It is man’s ruling faculty, queen of lies and error, and all the greater deceiver for that she does notalways deceive; for she would be an infallible touchstone of truth if she were a touchstone offalsehood. But being most often false she leaves no sure mark of her quality, for she sets the samestamp upon truth and falsehood.

I speak not of fools, but of the wisest of mankind among whom imagination exhibits her greatestpower of persuasion. Reason protests to no purpose, she is incompetent to appraise things.

(1950:39)

And there is a great deal more in the same vein.But if Pascal puts reason above imagination, he puts the order of charity above both. Like the Calvinist

poets of the sixteenth century, he transforms Plato’s good imagination, the phantasia of prophecydistinguished by Plato from the illusions created by the lower self, into the working of grace, as Augustinehad done. Simon Goulard in the sixteenth century wrote of an enlightenment above that of reason, and ofreason as a desiccating influence in the soul—as great a spiritual deceiver as imagination was for Pascal:

Quand je permets a ma folle raisonDe dominer sur tout ce que je pense,Incontinent, hautaine, elle dispense,Comme elle veut, de toute ma maison…Mais un ami, qui avec moi demeure,Et qui ne veut qu’ainsi dormant je meure,En m’éveillant me sauve du tombeau.

(quoted in Schmidt 1967:58)

IMAGINATION 161

(When I allow my extravagant reason to hold sway over all my thoughts, straightway it haughtilydisposes as it will of my whole dwelling…but a friend who dwells with me, and who is unwilling thatI should be thus lulled asleep and perish, wakes me and saves me from the tomb.)

In the poetry of Goulard and the apologetics of Pascal the dominant idea is that of conversion. In the mantictradition the right kind of phantasia meant dreaming dreams and seeing visions through which came a kindof knowledge which could then be applied to the problems of living. From the Renaissance onwards theemphasis changes. Pascal’s esprit de finesse, which is a kind of intuition, distinguished by him from espritde géometrie or strictly syllogistic thinking; his Christian grace; the ‘faith’ of the Reformers; many laterkinds of intuition including Bergson’s— these have to do not so much with phantasia as generating its ownimages but with phantasia as it affects perception; the ways in which the whole of the mind’s experience isorganized and invested with meaning. And this becomes an important sense of ‘imagination’ later on; itcomes to have as one of its main meanings ‘the way we constitute our world’, what Sartre was to call the‘totalizing’ habits of our consciousness. ‘Conversion’ for Goulard, Pascal, Bergson and Sartre means thetransformation of these totalizing habits and therefore of our ‘vision’ of the world we live in. The paganworld of Ronsard’s poetry, the tragic world redeemed by grace of the Calvinists and Jansenists, theenjoyable and fascinating world of the Jesuits, both dramatic and disciplined, the animist and magical worldof the Orphics and the alchemists, the marvellous cosmic machine of the Newtonians—out of all these andothers were to be formed the diverse and sometimes chaotic sensibilities of the modern consciousness.


EpilogueThe imagination as messenger: From Plato to Kristeva

My title was suggested by Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, where he says that imagination carriesmessages from the senses to the mind, messages which reason interprets to provide understanding; and thatit also acts as intermediary between the decision to act in a certain way and the practical carrying-out of theaction, making as it were an image of what is to be done, which image or mental picture is then translated intoconcrete action, inserted in the real, sensible world of space and time. And Bacon goes on:

Neither is the imagination simply and only a messenger; but is invested with or at leastwise usurpethno small authority in itself, besides the duty of the message. For it was well said by Aristotle, that themind hath over the body that commandment, which the lord hath over a bondman; but that reason hathover the imagination that commandment which a magistrate hath over a free citizen; who may comealso to rule in his turn.

Here Bacon is summing up definitions of imagination and attitudes towards it which ruled the rationalisttradition in Europe from Aristotle to Kant. In other contexts he is aware of other definitions and attitudesderived not from Aristotle nor from Plato but from Plotinus, from his Neoplatonist successors and from theHermetic philosophy and magic of Ficino and the Italian Renaissance. But if Bacon cannot help showingsome interest in these other views, his attitude is mainly one of suspicion and disapproval. It was out ofthese Neoplatonist and Renaissance views of imagination that there arose the belief in imagination asanother kind of messenger, capable of communicating truths and insights which are irrational—abovereason, alongside reason, or below reason.

So when Wordsworth identified imagination with ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ he was joiningtogether what Plato had put asunder. Plato’s intellectual ecstasies had more to do with mathematicalrelations than with a divinity to be intuited in setting suns, and for him the workings of the imagination wereeither trivial or suspect. Images were either imperfect thoughts or rough correspondences of thoughts, with avague status somewhere between sensation and pure intellect. When he uses the word which later came tomean ‘imagination’—the Greek word is phantasia—it means a ‘presentation’ or ‘appearance’; some kind ofpicture in the mind. Our conscious picture of what we look at in the real world is a phantasia. When wedaydream, or envisage plans for the future, phantasiai arise in consciousness, but they are mereaccompaniments to thought. A scribe in the mind, says Plato, writes the script; and a painter in the mindillustrates it.

But Plato had to recognize that phantasiai sometimes arise spontaneously in the mind, independently, itseems, of directed thought or directed daydreams. Dreaming is the most obvious instance, and somedreamers claimed that their dreams were supernatural revelations. Some went further and claimed to havewaking visions that came unbidden and revealed messages from the Gods. Poets claimed to be inspired, to

be visited by the Muses; and poets not only painted pictures for us, narrative pictures, images—they claimedto know how things came about, they claimed to be able to explain how things happened. Yet poets, saidPlato, unlike philosophers, cannot explain to you exactly how they know what they claim to know.Visionaries and poets, for Plato, belong to the sphere of divination—of the mantic, the irrational. And sincePlato had no concept of the unconscious mind to explain how these images and this knowledge could comeinto consciousness unbidden and without being ‘thought out’ by reason, he accepted the traditional Greekview that they came from the Gods, from a supernatural realm; not without some scepticism and a gooddeal of irony. Moreover, although he had no notion of an unconscious mind, he did realize that some dreamsobviously have a physical origin; later Greeks were particularly fascinated by erotic dreams with theirphysical accompaniments. So Plato warned that dreams and visions must be interpreted by reason, not takenat their face value. He says they may correspond to true knowledge or to bodily states. He gives us awhimsical description of the liver as a smooth, polished, reflecting surface; if the soul is in a good state, theliver will reflect pictures corresponding to the higher parts of the soul and to some kind of truth, ‘somegentle inspiration of the understanding’. Otherwise, the lower appetites will form the images. Interpretationof dreams and visions is therefore all-important, and best undertaken by philosophers.

Aristotle had a good deal more to say about the part played by imagination in thinking. Imagination, hesaid, is below conceptual thought, but essential to it. It comes between the senses and the reason. ForAristotle, as for Plato, a phantasia is the picture in the mind that results from the perception of somethingthat is present to the senses, or from the memory of something that was once present to the senses. Ourmodern usage distinguishes between ‘percept’ and ‘image’. We say ‘percept’ for what is present, ‘image’ forwhat is not. Aristotle and many of his successors did not so distinguish.

Imagination, according to Aristotle, ‘presents’ the messages of the senses to the conscious mind as an‘appearance’, a unified picture, which the reasonable part of the mind can recognize, and to which it canattach a label, a concept. This bundle of sensations, presented as this appearance, is a tree. In theconstruction of the picture in the mind, an important part of imagination is the sensus communis, the‘common sense’ which compares the particular senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and combinesthem into the percept, the aesthesis, or phantasia. Such percepts may be preserved in the memory as images.

But imagination for Aristotle has a second function: it can break up its perceptions of the world into bits,and put the bits together in different ways; Aristotle’s successors cited ad nauseam the examples of thecentaur and the unicorn. A man’s head and a horse’s body make a centaur. An animal’s body with a singlehorn makes a unicorn; where the single horn comes from in the real world is a matter of interpretation, andthe unicorn has been the subject of a great many interpretations, often sexual. So imagination, fromAristotle to Kant, is partly tied and partly free, as Bacon said.

About dreams and visions as messages from the divine Aristotle is even more dismissive than Plato. Theyare caused, he said, not by the Gods but by bodily states. A dream may seem to predict the future for one oftwo reasons; it may convey symptoms of which the dreamer is not consciously aware, and thus predict afuture change in the dreamer’s conscious state of health. Or a dream may suggest to the dreamer the verycourse of action that will bring about what the dream predicted. Dreams are not divine, but they do conveymessages from the body, messages from ‘nature’; they can show some dissatisfaction or imbalance in thephysiological economy. ‘Nature is daemonic’, said Aristotle; a remark later picked up as highly significantby Freud. But about poetry Aristotle differs entirely from Plato. In what Plato called the ‘ancient quarrelbetween philosophy and poetry’ Plato had rated all poetry as inferior. The philosopher can tell you how heknows what he knows. The poet cannot. Moreover the poetry of Plato’s day, instead of expressing religiousfervour, was exciting audiences by the portrayal, the ‘mimesis’, the ‘imitation’ of violent emotions,unhealthy and bad for the commonwealth. So poets— including no doubt Homer and the tragic poets—were

164 EPILOGUE

to be excluded from the Republic. Aristotle defends mimetic poetry, poetry based on verisimilitude, andgives it a useful social function. But he is more concerned with the poet’s art, his techne, than with hisinspiration from some outside source; and it was only with the Renaissance that the poet’s ability to make apoem came to be labelled and discussed as ‘imagination’, often implying some kind of supernaturalinspiration.

Between Plato and the Neoplatonists of the second to the fifth centuries AD we find a growing convictionamong philosophers that the human soul can be in touch with the spiritual world in ways other than the purelyrational. For Plato and Aristotle anything that can be called thought is conscious; any contact with nous,with the logos, with the transcendent intellectual principle of all things, is through knowledge, achieved byPlato’s dialectic or Aristotle’s logic. For Plotinus, the intellectual principle, the logos, can be at work in thehuman soul even when the soul is not conscious of it. With Plotinus, we can say, the unconscious mind comesinto reckoning; but it is not so much the transmitter of the irrational, the ‘daemonic’, as of the rational. Thesage is the man in whom nous is active even when he does not realize it. But phantasia, imagination, can bethe mirror of mind. Peace in the soul makes body reflect mind; then we think consciously and think inimages. ‘Then’, as Plotinus puts it, ‘side by side with the primal knowledge of the activity of the Rationaland the Intellectual-Principles, we have also, as it were a sense-perception of their operation.’

So the inspiration coming from the intellectual-principle, from the level of the divine, may operate as theunconscious springs of thought and action; or it may become conscious in the form of images. Plato hadspoken deprecatingly of the kind of thinking and the kind of acting that could not rationally analyse and explainthemselves in philosophical terms. Even the good statesman or the good general is inferior to thephilosopher because he cannot explain how he knows what he knows. He has learned his capacity to dothings in the right way partly by practical training and partly from his own experience. He works by ‘trueopinion’; only the philosopher can be said to have ‘knowledge’. In the world of the Neoplatonists, fromPlotinus to Plutarch of Athens, ‘true opinion’, practical know-how, is called ‘magic’, is said to belong to thelevel of imagination, and is acknowledged to be the level at which most of us live and work.

‘Magical,’ up to and including the Renaissance, is used of any kind of operation that is believed tohappen, but cannot be rationally explained and described. Practical knowledge of the chemistry of pottery-making and glazing, for instance, was magical for the alchemists who were contemporary with theNeoplatonists. They knew that certain things regularly came to pass in certain circumstances, but couldn’texplain why. Such empirical knowledge was called magic. At one extreme of magic, the farmer knows howcrops behave according to soil, season and weather. At the other extreme, the alchemist has mysterious andsecret knowledge of the processes that can turn lead into gold. With the later Neoplatonists of the fourth andfifth centuries, magic and imagination working together became a favoured means of communication withthe divine. Magic became theurgy—the use of ritual and incantation to compel the presence of divine forms.The Neoplatonist Synesius of Cyrene (378-c. 430), maintained that, when the soul is in a healthy state,phantasia, can be as reliable in its visionary as in its perceptual workings. And by phantasia Synesiusmeant not only dreams and visions, some kind of pictures in the mind, images, but the working of reasonthrough unconscious processes. Phantasia, he said, is the power that solves problems while we are asleep,and is the source of literary inspiration.

In Plotinus, creative power is envisaged as radiating outwards and downwards in waves reaching furtherand further away from the original perfection and creating the hierarchy of substances from pure spirit downto base matter. And in this Neoplatonist cosmos the continual descent, the emanation, is contemporary witha continual ascent, through contemplation. The whole of nature—not just the human soul but the soul of theworld— aspires to return in contemplation towards the One, the origin of all things.

IMAGINATION 165

Plotinus’s view of creation, and the view of imagination represented by Synesius, had a new lease of lifethrough Ficino and the Florentine Academy. But the Renaissance brought back Democritus and the Stoicsas well as Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. And with Democritus came the important distinction between theprimary and secondary qualities of things.

This notion has a complicated history. But briefly, there were many who, like Galileo, held that primaryqualities are materially in things, in their material constitution, and that secondary qualities like colour, taste,warmth and so forth are not part of the constitution of things, but are supplied by the mind of the humanperceiver. The primary qualities were the scientific, quantitative concepts like shapes and mass; the secondaryqualities were the aesthetic concepts of how things appear to the senses, how they feel. The new scientificrationalism was interested in primary qualities; the growing pre-Romantic sensibility in art was interested insecondary qualities; and these belonged, said Addison, to imagination, to the creative part of the mind.

So we can pick out four intellectual tendencies interacting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.There are the scientists who believe that science will eventually understand the primary qualities of thingsand explain how they give rise to the secondary qualities. There are the pre-Romantics like Addison whoinsist on the human importance of the secondary qualities of things, and claim that imagination is asimportant to cultivate as reason. In between there are those who, like Locke, have no interest in imaginativeart, but who insist that science will never penetrate the secret of the primary qualities, because the humanmind is not equipped to do so. Finally there is what can be called the Neoplatonist current, which runsstrongly in the Cambridge Platonists, in Shaftesbury, in Boehme, and eventually finds its outlet in theRomantic Revolution. Imagination was then claimed as direct, personal contact with some kind ofmetaphysical truth by Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Baudelaire and some of the French Symbolists,including Claudel.

Three-quarters of the way through the nineteenth century this notion of imagination as the messenger oftranscendent truth takes a dramatic—even a melodramatic—turn in the philosophy of Nietzsche. ‘I amstrong enough to break the history of man into two bits’, Nietzsche boasted to Strindberg. Not quite,perhaps. What might conceivably be said to break the history of man into two bits was not Nietzsche, butfirst the industrial revolution and then the ideas which helped to inspire Nietzsche’s vision of the world; thegeological undermining of Genesis and, above all, the realization that man is just one of the animals with abigger brain than the rest. These ideas were at least as traumatic for the commonsense assumptions of theordinary man as the displacement of the earth from the centre of the heavens had been at the Renaissance.For some people, the shock brought the feelings expressed in James Thomson’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’ of1874:

The sense that every struggle brings defeatBecause fate holds no prize to crown success;That all the oracles are dumb, or cheatBecause they have no secret to express;That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertainBecause there is no light beyond the curtainThat all is vanity and nothingness.

For others, principally Nietzsche, the dumbness of the oracles was liberating, though even in Nietzsche’scase the fanfares of the liberation had in them an element of bravado. And if Nietzsche was not personallyresponsible for breaking the history of man into two bits, he did do this for the history of imagination. Allthe oracles are dumb, except those of the instinctive life; and the instinctive life is henceforward to be said

166 EPILOGUE

to use imagination as its messenger. As in Aristotle’s theory of dreams, imagination is to be the messengerof daemonic nature.

And the result of this Nietzschean assertion, that all imagination is the equivalent of dream, was tocollapse the distinction between the other two functions of imagination as set out by Aristotle— its servilefunction as messenger between sense and reason, and its creativeness as a free agent. When imaginationmediated between sense and reason, it was thought to be ‘abstracting’, from the objects in the sensibleworld, qualities that were really in those objects; ‘images are like sensuous contents except in that theycontain no matter’, said Aristotle; concepts are not images ‘though they necessarily involve them’.

But Nietzsche totally rejects this view. Concepts are not abstractions of features that really belong tothings. They are not mediated by imagination, but totally created by imagination. Neither our images norour concepts, said Nietzsche, correspond to anything that is objectively in the world around us. There arenot even any separate objects, any things to have qualities until our mind, our imagination, creates theappearances of individual, nameable objects out of nerve-stimuli. Something is going on out there in theworld; but we do not and cannot know what is going on. What is going on affects our nerves, and we inventthe so-called ‘sensible’ world.

Nietzsche’s first, and eventually most influential work was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit ofMusic of 1872. Fourteen years later Nietzsche repudiated the metaphysical framework as ‘so much prattleor rant’; but he stood by what the framework implied with regard to the relations between the human mindand the world. His pattern corresponds in some ways to Plotinus’; but the One, the Primal Unity, is now atthe bottom; what corresponds to Plotinus’ ‘creative emanation’ is the creative imagination of the humanmind. Creativity is not moving down from pure mind towards nature, but moving up from nature towardswhat has traditionally been thought of as pure mind. And the first steps in this upward creativenesscorrespond to Aristotle’s theory of dreams—dreams which, as it were, turn bodily states and appetites intothe pictures we see in sleep. Nietzsche attempts to derive all thinking out of an imaginative production likedreaming.

The archetypal art is music, in which, said Nietzsche, ‘the mystical jubilation of Dionysus…breaks the spellof individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being’. When we listen to music, he asserted, wetend to ‘discharge our impressions in pictorial images’, each listener projecting his own pictures; atransformation, a metaphor. Lyric poetry begins, said Nietzsche quoting Schiller, in a ‘musical disposition ofmind’ which is transformed into a ‘poetical idea’, reflected as ‘simple simile or example’. Again he wrote:‘Metaphor, for the authentic poet, is not a figure of rhetoric but a representative image standing concretelybefore him in lieu of a concept.’

The Birth of Tragedy was an account of how the human appetite for illusion set up structures of images.At about the same time Nietzsche wrote an essay purporting to show how what he called the ‘primal facultyof human phantasy’ was also responsible for setting up structures of concepts, everything he called‘science’, Wissenschaft, everything that a particular culture accepts as knowledge; its philosophical ideas,including, in modern times, natural science; and its ethical values. We begin again at the level of the PrimalUnity with the unknowable ‘thing-in-itself’. The next stage is the neuro-biological; a nerve-stimulus in thehuman apparatus. In this conceptual model ‘metaphor’ creates percepts. Our sensations operate, and wemake them into an object—a ‘tree’ or a ‘serpent’ for instance. Then, another metaphor, and we give thisdistinct object a name, a word which is a sound. This creation of percepts, said Nietzsche, is more or lessarbitrary.

In the early essays, particularly the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche expresses what Plato called ‘the oldquarrel between poetry and philosophy’ in his own terms. The artist is said to be intuitive because he workswith images; the scientist (or philosopher) is said to be rational because he works with concepts. ‘Both

IMAGINATION 167

desire to rule over life,’ he says, ‘the one by knowing how to meet the most important needs with foresight,prudence, regularity; the other as an “over-joyous” hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life only asreal which simulates appearance and beauty.’ The early Nietzsche put the artist above the scientist; after hisso-called ‘positive’ period he put the scientist first. Science, ‘knowledge’ generally so-called, is not reallyknowledge about anything other than itself, but it is what enables man to submit the world to his will topower. On the whole it was the early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy that had the greatest seminalinfluence on the kind of French thought we have now to consider.

And it left an idea that became very powerful in modern French aesthetics; that when ‘knowledge’ goeswrong, ‘art’ can show how and where. The direct intuitions of the artist can, at certain stages in theevolution of a culture when the life has somehow gone out of its thinking, subvert the established way ofthinking and restore the flow of the primal energy. There is something of this in, for instance,D.H.Lawrence and F.R.Leavis. But in France it became the subversion of bourgeois culture by the artist:Marxist sociology is joined with Nietzschean imagination as re-interpreted by Freud and Lacan.

Freud’s model of the psyche, it seems to me, is rather nearer the picture proposed by Plato in thePhaedrus, where the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two horses in tandem, one representing goodand moral impulses, the other fierce appetite. In Freud’s thinking, however much importance he attaches tothe id, the object of psychoanalysis is to help the ego to maintain rational control while giving the life-impulses all that can be given without disruption and anarchy.

The unconscious mind, according to Freud, has a store of images taken from real life. These may havestrong affective as well as congnitive meanings. The id tries to impel certain images into consciousness asincentives to id-satisfying behaviour, the pursuit of pleasure. The ego, under the restraining influence of thesuper-ego, refuses to acknowledge the desires or the images that represent them. When the ego is relaxed insleep, the images may come to the sleeper’s dreaming awareness, but still they may be repressed anddistorted—the refusal to acknowledge may still operate. In that case, if they are allowed to come up at all,they must be transformed into images acceptable to the ego. And at the centre of Freud’s theory is hisaccount of what he called the ‘dream-work’; it is a theory of the standard ways in which the images thrownup by the id are transformed into images acceptable to the ego. Nietzsche would have called the variousways of transforming images ‘metaphors’.

Freudian orthodoxy has since been called in question in many ways. It has been caught in a cross-fire; onthe one hand there are those who criticize it as being unscientific—empirically unverified and unverifiable.On the other hand are those who criticize it for trying to be too scientific in an outmoded nineteenth-centurysense—rooted in biological determinism and Darwinian, or even Hobbesian pessimism, and neglectful ofsocial and cultural factors. So, many neo-Freudians who accept Freud’s basic intuitions about unconsciousimpulses and repressions look for a more flexible application of them to the theory and clinical practice ofpsychiatry. In France, Freud’s influence was resisted and virtually excluded until the last war, with very fewexceptions. The so-called Promethean humanists of the period just after the war— Malraux and the earlySartre, with Camus tagging along, played down or denied the importance of the unconscious. ‘Enfin Lacanvint.’

Lacan was presented by himself, and by some of his followers, as the true heir and interpreter of Freud,the only neo-Freudian who knew what Freud really meant, which sometimes means what Freud would havemeant if he had gone on speculating with the help of Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl and Lévi-Strauss. Others ofhis followers admit that in some ways he departed radically from Freud; one of them called his principalinnovation, the ‘mirror-phase’ in the child’s development, ‘Lacan’s heresy’. And it was for multipleheresies and the suspicion of sheer mystification that he was excluded from the InternationalPsychoanalytical Association. But the chief difference between Freud and Lacan is in the importance

168 EPILOGUE

attached to language. In Freud, the unconscious sometimes expresses itself in words; in Lacan, ‘theunconscious is structured like a language’.

The individual subject is shown as constantly striving to come to terms with its experience in the threemodes shown in Lacan’s basic model; its subjection to the conditions of the Real, its constitution by theSymbolic, and the images it creates of itself or becomes aware of through the eyes of other people, whichare the bases of the Imaginary. The Real corresponds roughly to Nietzsche’s realm of the thing-in-itself,impenetrable to the mind, conceivable only when transmuted into language. It is also the inescapableconditions of the psyche’s life, such as the pattern of the Oedipus triangle and the impossible-to-satisfydesire that, according to Lacan, is its necessary consequence. The Symbolic is the order of language, whichis essentially structure, and which imposes its structure on the subject, on the unconscious, and on thefantasies of the Imaginary sphere. The subject can only find a more or less satisfactory mode of insertioninto the larger Symbolic order made up of the structures of civilized society if he or she breaks, during theOedipal phase, with the image of the mother and identifies with the image of the father, who symbolizes thesymbolic order itself. Any failure to resolve the Oedipal conflict in this way will make the Imaginaryrecalcitrant to the Symbolic and give rise to neurosis or to an artificial and deadening fixation of the subject.Psychic life is mainly a more or less successful interplay between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Lacandoes not name ‘imagination’ or any other supposed faculty of the mind; but images are found in both theImaginary and the Symbolic; they can be, in a sense, either false and deviant or true and straightforward,leading in the latter case from link to link along what Lacan calls the ‘chain of signifiers’. False imagesencourage the subject to identify with elements other than itself, in a sense to ‘lose’ itself; true imagespreserve the subject’s separate identity and autonomy.

Kristeva took over Lacan’s system, but added notions derived from the neo-Marxists. What concerns mehere are her views about the use of language in literature, and the part to be played by literature insubverting the values of a corrupt and moribund bourgeois culture. Her theory of literature depends on thepsychoanalytical theory she adapts from Lacan. At the base, corresponding to the id, we have the chora.This is a Greek word used by Plato in his myth of creation in the Timaeus, to mean the formless ‘space’upon which the demiurge imposes the intellectual ‘forms’. Because it is without form it is difficult toconceive. The chora, in Kristeva’s scheme, is the undifferentiated experience of the newborn; what WilliamJames called ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion’. Out of this there develops the discrimination of pleasure fromunpleasure, first as oral and anal satisfaction. The baby begins to make sounds and bodily movements andrhythmic patterns to express its pleasure and unpleasure. Later it begins to discriminate various aspects ofthe world around it; later still, through what Lacan called the ‘mirror-phase’ in the development of thepsyche, it distinguishes between its own subjective self and the rest of the world, including other subjectiveselves. At that stage the separation from the mother is felt as a ‘lack’; the incestuous urge to return to themother is forbidden by the father; father represents the ‘law’, the Symbolic order; the subject is nowinserted into the social, and the interplay between the Symbolic and the Imaginary begins. As the childenters the Symbolic order his original language of gurgles, cries, muscle-movements, rhythms gives place tothe structured language of dictionary and grammar; the conceptual world is superimposed on the affective,on the language of the chora, on what Nietzsche called the Dionysian.

Kristeva then goes on to apply all this to literature, and offer her own explanation of what since Hobbesand Locke had been seen as the two uses of language. For Hobbes and Locke the conceptual use wasphilosophically utilizable, the imaginative use was not, and was relegated to the trivialities of poetry. Laterwe find Mallarmé, Valéry, I.A.Richards distinguishing the two uses; among the French Symbolists, theimaginative use is privileged as the language of art. Kristeva follows suit, and sees the relation betweenconceptual language and imaginative language much as Nietzsche did. When the norms of society no longer

IMAGINATION 169

work properly, the language of art will subvert them and make way for the creation of new norms. Andwhat do these two uses of language correspond to? It is not too unfair to say that the language of modern artas Kristeva sees it—anti-conceptual, anti-narrative, anti-verisimilitude, refusing to create illusions of a so-called reality, in its extreme forms stringing images together without reference to the normal lexical andsyntactical codes—the language of modern art is the language of the baby, the language of the chora, a re-injection into consciousness of the Dionysian. One of the most important results of the modernist revolutionis to be the rejection of what Kristeva calls the phallocentric male logic of our present stage of culture andthe furthering of an extreme form of feminism. For she has taken us back to the age-old assumption thatmen are logical and women imaginative; though now imagination is to dominate logic instead of the reverse.‘I believe,’ she said in 1977, ‘that the problem of the feminist movement today is that of inventing a form ofanarchism which will express in behaviour and in action the discourse of the historical avant-garde: thedestruction of the (traditional) western subject.’ This is certainly quite a problem for the avant-garde toundertake to solve. And to some of us it may seem that in the kind of thinking inspired by Nietzsche theprimal faculty of human fantasy has finally taken over from the conceptual order. In what Plato called ‘theancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’, Plato’s emphatic vote for philosophy has given way toNietzsche’s conviction that all human thinking is fundamentally poetry. But, from the point of view of thelover and student of literature, and the believer in its humanizing and civilizing influence, what has proveddamaging is the attempt to reject all those aspects of literature which belong to the Aristotelian tradition ofverisimilitude—imitation of life which is also criticism of life; insight into human relations and assessmentof human values-in-action. Imagination is not just messages from beyond, whether that beyond is a super-rational or a sub-rational transmitter. Against the imagination shown by Lacan and Kristeva, we can set theconcrete imagination of the kind of literature Kristeva and her followers despise. Imagination has come tomean, among other things, the freedom of the mind, and this can be exercised in innumerable ways, withoutnecessarily becoming separated from logic and empirical observation. There is a conceptual imagination, amoral imagination, an imagination of the heart; there is, thank God, a ludic imagination, a playfulimagination which helps us to bear the responsibilities of all the rest. There is the imagination of order andform. Al-Fārābī and the medieval Arabs, Dante, Tasso, Matthew Arnold, I.A.Richards were among thosewho recognized that reason, imagination, and all the other aspects of the human mind that have beenisolated and labelled by philosophers, are not always in competition one with another.

Yet surely we must also acknowledge that the freedom of imagination is in itself as morally neutral as thefreedom of the will; that it can corrupt as well as enlighten. Modern advertising, with its often amusing butfundamentally sinister caricatures of the Romantic invitations to Paradises of various kinds is one instanceof imaginative corruption; the propagation of false values through the soap-operas watched by millions ontelevision is another. The risks of bad imaginative persuasion and bad art can never be quite neutralized bycensorship, though there are surely some limits to be set. Thinkers as different as Halliday and Sartre havebeen pointing to the spiritual sickness of modern culture; but we have as yet found no philosopher-kings toshow how to put things right. Apart from the obvious extremes of badness in imaginative persuasion,discriminating better from worse is bound to be a matter of informed and intelligent critical judgment, notof theoretical dogma about the misuse of verisimilitude and of ‘criticism of life’ to transmit unconsciousclass prejudice and bourgeois conventions.

The theorists who aim at ‘demystification’ tend to become themselves mystifiers. They build their literarytheories on the shifting sands of problematic psychoanalytical theory, problematic Marxist theory,problematic linguistic theory. All these theories are interesting and worth exploring but their tendency toharden into dogma and to become a highbrow Inquisition must surely be resisted. Imagination, as Plotinus

170 EPILOGUE

and the Neoplatonists recognized, can mean involvement in human life at all its levels, in a practical, down-to-earth, living way.

Note: This is the text of a lecture given in 1983. See introduction, pp. xiv–xv—Penelope Murray

IMAGINATION 171

Notes

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

1 ‘Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris’, in Geoffrey Keynes (ed.) Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 4th edn, London,1939, p. 818.

2 See e.g. Warnock 1976:26–71; Engell 1981:118–39; Kearney 1988: 155–88.3 See Bundy 1930 and Rossky 1958.4 Translated by W.Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library, London 1927.5 See further W.Rösler, ‘Die Entdeckung der Fiktionalität in der Antike’, in Poetica vol. 12, 1980:283–319.

1THE GREEK RATIONALISTS: PLATO, ARISTOTLE AND THE STOICS

1 The article was originally published in French. Translations from Perls’s French are my own.2 This and all other translations of Plato are from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E.Hamilton and

H.Cairns, Princeton, 1973.3 Dodds’s account of Plato’s attitude accords with both the content and the tone of Plato’s remarks on inspiration:

I should be inclined myself to say three things about it:(a) That Plato perceived what he took to be a real and significant analogy between mediumship, poetic

creation, and certain pathological manifestations of the religious consciousness, all three of which have theappearance of being ‘given’ ab extra;

(b) That the traditional religious explanations of these phenomena were, like much else in theConglomerate [a term taken over by Dodds from Gilbert Murray, who called the traditional deposit left bysuccessive religious movements ‘the Inherited Conglomerate’], accepted by him provisionally, not becausehe thought them finally adequate, but because no other language was available to express that mysterious‘givenness’;

(c) That while he thus accepted (with whatever ironical reservations) the poet, the prophet, and the‘Corybantic’ as being in some sense channels of divine or daemonic grace, he nevertheless rated theiractivities far below those of the rational self, and held that they must be subject to the control and criticismof reason, since reason was for him no passive plaything of hidden forces, but an active manifestation ofdeity in man, a daemon in its own right. I suspect that, had Plato lived today, he would have beenprofoundly interested in the new depth-psychology, but appalled by the tendency to reduce the humanreason to an instrument for rationalizing unconscious impulses.

(Dodds 1951:217–18)

4 On the usage and meaning of the term phantasia see Watson 1988.5 The ‘divided line’ is discussed at length in Raven 1965:131 ff.6 At De anima 428a 9–11 Aristotle seems to credit ants and bees with phantasia, but not grubs. But the exceptions

intended by Aristotle are subject to textual dispute. See further D.Ross (1961) Aristotle De Anima, edited withintroduction and commentary, Oxford, 286–7; Schofield 1979:115 n. 35; Watson 1988:16–17.

7 Some modern ‘constructive’ theories of perception distinguish active and passive elements, and perhaps stages,though their view of the difference between perceiving and imagining might be expressed not as‘reproductive’/‘productive’ but as ‘productive within constraints’/ ‘productive in freedom’. Imagination may be,as it were, voluntarily tied, according to such a theory, for instance in deliberate acts of memory. See, e.g.V.Neisser (1967) Cognitive Psychology, New York, 285: ‘Perception is constructive, but the input informationoften plays the largest single role in determining the constructive process. A very similar role, it seems to me, isplayed by the aggregate of information stored in long-term memory.’ Neisser distinguishes two phases in visualperception—‘preattentive’ and ‘focally attentive’. In the first, ‘only crude properties of the stimuli—movement,general location, brightness etc.—can have any effect on behavior; often there is no effect at all’. In the second,‘figural synthesis produces objects which may have considerable complexity, or be charged with considerableaffect. The course of synthesis is partly determined by stimulus information, but it also depends on such factorsas past experience, expectation, and preference’ (300–1).

8 Translated by W.Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library, London 1927.9 See Schofield 1979 passim; Watson 1988:14–37, and Wedin 1988 passim.

2IMAGINATION BEGINS TO BE RECOGNIZED: LITERARY THEORISTS AND

NEOPYTHAGOREANS IN THE EARLY CENTURIES AD

1 See also Murray 1981.2 Quoted by Bundy 1927:139 n. 35, translating from Procli Diadochi in Platonis Rem. Pub. Comm. edited by

G.Kroll, 2. 107. See also below, p. 66, Whittaker’s paraphrase of this passage in its context.3 As in the image of the divided line in the Republic, which however adds a fourth category of ‘reflections and

shadows’, less ‘real’ than the sensibles themselves. See Raven 1965:155–8 for the orthodox interpretation of thedivided line which identifies the ‘images’ used in ‘lower’ thinking with ‘mathematicals’ as intermediate betweenthe sensible and the intelligible.

4 The earliest texts in which the belief becomes explicit are those of Philo of Alexandria, who translated Jewishtheology into Greek terms in the first century AD. See Henry Chadwick’s account of Philo (CH 1967:142 ff.).

3THE NEOPLATONISTS: IMAGINATION AS THE ‘VEHICLE OF THE SOUL’

1 These problems are clearly discussed by Matthews 1972.2 Dodds 1951:247. Merlan (CH 1967:127), following Zeller, distinguishes the ‘sympathy’ of the Stoics (including

Posidonius) from that of Plotinus:

In the Stoa it means that the universe is one coherent physical whole; in Plotinus it means not only thisbut mainly that every part of the universe is immediately (by distant action) aware of what happens inanother, which explains what we today should call occult phenomena.

3 See Dodds 1951:283–311 on ‘Theurgy’.

IMAGINATION 173

4 Compare Proust’s account of Swann’s reaction to the ‘little phrase’ of Vinteuil (1954: I. 208 ff.). Swann finds itsmusical essence elusive, but keeps in touch through conscious analysis of its rhythm and shape: ‘he had beforehim this thing which is no longer pure music, but design, architecture, thought, and allows one to recall the music.’

5 Cf. A.H.Armstrong who characterizes Plotinus’ imagination thus:

no philosopher has ever used images from the sense-world to express intelligible reality with moreoriginality and force. His language is full of vivid, concrete expressions taken from sense-experience todescribe the activity and interaction of immaterial beings, not only the traditional metaphors of sight andlight, or growth and flow, but expressions of violent contact and vigorous bodily movement, pushing,striking, breaking, throwing, running, leaping. And he has more elaborately presented images ofextraordinary imaginative power…[which seem] to take us right outside the range of the classical Hellenicimagination, into the sort of imaginative world inhabited by the great artists of India.

(CH 1967:220–1)

6 For the history of the ‘vehicle-spirit’ and the astral body see R.C. Kissling (1922) ‘The oxema-pneuma of theNeo-Platonists and the De Insomniis of Synesius of Cyrene’ in American Journal of Philology, XLIII:318 ff.;E.R.Dodds (1933) Proclus: Elements of Theology, 313 ff.; and see Allen 1984:218 n. 28 for further bibliography.

7 Bundy 1927:141 reporting Proclus’ commentary on the Republic. See also Whittaker 1918:266 reporting hiscommentary on the Timaeus and in general Sheppard 1980:162–82.

8 See Annick Charles (1971) ‘L’Imagination, miroir de l’âme selon Proclus’ in Le Néoplatonisme: colloquesinternationaux du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 241, quoting Proclus In Eucl., 141, 4–13, editedby Freidlein. Cf. (1970) Proclus: A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, translated byG.R.Morrow, Princeton, 112–13.

4NEOPLATONISM IN CHRISTIAN GUISE: THE MYSTIC WAY AS THE AFFIRMATION AND

NEGATION OF IMAGES

1 The following discussion includes a good deal of evidence brought together by Bundy 1927:180 ff., but interpretsit differently.

2 Aetius, Placita IV.12=fragment 268 in K.Hulser (1987–8) Die Fragmente zur Dialektik der Stoiker, 4 vols,Stuttgart.

3 Summae de creaturis, in Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, 38 vols, Paris 1890–3, 35.324, quoted and translated byBundy 1927:193.

4 Aion is the temporal dimension in which angels have their being, intermediate between God’s eternity and man’stime.

5HOLY IMAGES

1 On the whole subject see Pelikan 1990.

6IMAGINATION IN ISLAM

1 Mohammed’s revelation from Allah through Gabriel was recorded by his friends and relatives on bones andskins; the fragments were compiled into one book, the Qur’ān, in 651. The Hadīth recorded the traditionalsayings and deeds of Mohammed in the ninth century.

174 NOTES

2 Al-Fārābī follows the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias (florui 200 AD) in his interpretation ofAristotle’s De anima.

3 By ‘arts’ al-Fārābī means what we should call ‘techniques’. They include writing and oratory but also weaving.See his Chapter XXXI: ‘Of the arts and kinds of happiness’.

4 Chapter XXIV: ‘Of the cause of dreams’. Chapter XXV: ‘Of inspiration and the vision of the Angel’.5 Walzer 1962:216, translating from the Arabic, has ‘the man who has that sight comes to enjoy overwhelming and

wonderful pleasures’.6 Walzer 1962:217 takes this sentence to refer only to those who divine in sleep. In the French translation it seems

to refer to all the classes of diviners enumerated in that paragraph.7 See also the discussion of wahm in Morewedge 1973:321–4.8 See Goichon 1969:18. Imagination according to Avicenna ‘abstracts the form of the matter but keeps it dressed in

the condition of sensation, i.e. a measure, a quality, a position etc. Imagination cannot give a form applicable toall individuals of the same species.’

9 Averroes seems here to be influenced by Aristotle’s emphasis on the biological function of imagination at thesub-rational, animal level; without thought, animals generate images of the goals to be pursued.

10 Cf. Averroes 1954:301.11 The ‘indelible tablet’ is mentioned in the Qur’ān and is regarded by Muslims as the depository of all the events

decreed by God. The first thing God created was the pen with which he wrote down all future events. Anallegorical interpretation is that the pen is the active element or First Intellect and the tablet is the Universal Soul.See Averroes 1954:2. 165–6.

12 The medieval translator called it the ‘Destructio Philosophorum’.13 See further Nicholson 1963:160–4.14 The image of the soul lost in a labyrinth, with death as issue, is developed in a medieval interpolation in the

alchemical Hermetica. According to Berthelot and Ruelle 1888:3.41 the emblem of Solomon’s maze has acabalistic origin.

15 Affifi 1939:34 points out that there are many real contradictions in Ibn ‘Arabī’s thinking, and that some of themresult from the attempt to reconcile his pantheism with the orthodox Muslim conception of Allah. Moretheosophical commentators such as Corbin and Nasr assert that incomprehension results from the irrelevantapplication of Western rationalist criteria to an Oriental theosophical doctrine. Imagination is needed to grasp animaginative world-view; as Affifi (1939:45) writes: ‘He is not a pure philosopher, and therefore strict logicalconsistency should not be expected from him.’

16 See e.g. Landau 1959:118–19.

7THE WESTERN MIDDLE AGES

1 Quoted Bundy 1927:201 from Patrologia Latina 177, 287 ff. Bundy explains in a note that ‘fire had just beendescribed allegorically as one of three spiritual forces in the physical being’. Fire, of course, was a traditionalsymbol of gnosis.

2 Averroes himself, it is now often maintained, did not preach the ‘double truth’ doctrine, but held that religioustruth (imperfectly embodied in exoteric religion) and philosophical truth are reconciled in the properlyenlightened mind of the philosopher. He was not always understood in this sense.

3 Quaestiones quodlibetales (1926) edited by P.Mandonnet, Paris VII.14.275, quoted in Gombrich 1972b:14.4 Quoted in Gardner 1913:39 n. 2.5 Epist. Sen. XI.2 quoted in Marcel 1958:74.6 See Took 1984:52–4.

8FICINO

IMAGINATION 175

1 For an account of the so-called Orphic texts see Walker 1972:14 ff.2 On the whole subject of Ficino’s Platonism see Allen 1984.

3 Cf. the discussion of the charioteer myth in Ficino’s commentary on the Phaedrus in Allen 1984:86–112 and 165–84. Baudelaire noted later that in the human soul there are ‘deux postulations simultanées, I’une vers Dieu,l’autre vers Satan’, and that the appetite for evil is a distorted form of the soul’s insatiable desire for God. Thepassages from Ficino quoted in Kristeller’s tenth chapter constantly remind one of Baudelaire’s comments onevil, though I doubt whether Baudelaire knew Ficino’s writings. By the nineteenth century Ficino’s ideas hadbeen absorbed and made use of by innumerable thinkers, and though in Romanticism and after those who wereaffected by Neoplatonist sensibility went back to earlier sources to find more ideas of the kind they liked, theywent back not only to Renaissance writers but to the Neoplatonist alchemical and magical sources of Renaissancethought. Among thinkers who undoubtedly helped to provide Baudelaire with a philosophical grid to ‘decode’ hisown experience was Joseph de Maistre, who attempted a synthesis of occultism with orthodox Catholicism.

4 Cf. the logical ambiguity of Sartre’s later position: we are always in principle free, but our practical freedom islimited by our facticité, by the situation in which we find ourselves; and this situation may alienate our freedomto such an extent that the only possible exercise of freedom is to regain its practical effectiveness by changing thesituation through revolution. For Sartre ‘magic’ is a term to be applied to the ways in which we escape theresponsibility for bringing about the practical change.

5 On Ficino and melancholy see Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl 1964 and Allen 1984:93–4.6 In vacatio the soul is quite separated from the body. This is what happens in dreams, visions and the state of

rapture. In this state the illusion of evil disappears from consciousness; the soul in rapture takes with it all the lowerforces which, in the normal state, are apprehended only as they are imaged in sense experience and fantasy, in theidolum. This notion, which seems to be derived from the more optimistic kind of Gnosticism, is to be echoedlater by Baudelaire. What appears in life as evil can be transmuted by poetry into beauty; into Fleurs du mal.Ficino lists seven kinds of vacatio arrived at through sleep, fainting, melancholy, stable temperament, solitude,amazement, chastity; his examples are respectively Orpheus (hymn to sleep), Hercules, Socrates, Plotinus,Zoroaster, the Pythia or the Corybantes, Orpheus again. See further Allen 1984:59 ff. on vacatio and 219 f. on theidolum.

7 The Enneads (1969) translated by S.Mackenna, 4th edn revised by B.S. Page, London.8 This interpretation of Plotinus’ text is cogently and, to me, convincingly argued in De Keyser 1955.9 See further Allen 1984:185–203.

10 On poetic furor see further Allen 1984:41–67.

9IDEAS ABOUT POETRY AND PAINTING IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

1 See Took 1984:58–76.2 See e.g. Lorenzo Giacomini, Del furor poetico, Weinberg 1961:323.3 On the shift from mimesis to fantasia in the art theory of the Renaissance see Kemp 1977.4 See Panofsky’s classic study, 1968.5 See especially Leonardo 1970:52–68.

10THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

1 Most of the quotations from French theoretical writings in this chapter will be found in the anthologies ofWeinburg (1950) and Holyoake (1972); the translations of these and all other French texts in this chapter are myown.

176 NOTES

2 A.Baudeau de Somaize (1856) Le Dictionnaire des Précieuses, ed. C.M.Livet, Paris, 157, quoted by Odette deMourges 1953:110.

3 Quoted Odette de Mourges 1953:100. Her book is a brilliant and sensitive analysis of late Renaissance poetry,defining and distinguishing ‘metaphysical’, ‘baroque’ and ‘précieux’ in a most lucid and revealing way. Thetopos of ‘the world upside down’ is, of course, an old one; Curtius 1953:94 ff. traces it back to Archilochus andquotes an engaging example from the Carmina Burana, as well as Théophile’s ‘Ode’.

4 Discours de I’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique in Oeuvres Completes (1987) edited by G.Couton,Paris, III.119.

5 The account of Baïf’s academy and the quotations are owed to Yates 1947: Chapter 2.6 Reflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1773, I.454 referred to in Yates 1947:310.7 Les Recherches du Blason, 1673. Information about Menestrier and quotations from his works I owe to Margaret

McGowan.

IMAGINATION 177

Bibliography

Abrams, M.H. (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, New York.Affifi, A.E. (1939) The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid Dín-Ibnul ‘Arabī, Cambridge.Afnan, S.M. (1958) Avicenna: His Life and Work, London.al-Fārābī (1949) Idées des habitants de la cité vertueuse, translated by R.P.Janssen, Youssef Karam and J.Chala, Cairo.Allen, M.J.B. (1984) The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, California.Aquinas, St Thomas (1911–32) The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fathers of the English

Dominican Province, London.Aristotle (1984); unless otherwise stated all quotations are from The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, revised by

J.Barnes, 2 vols, Princeton.Asín Palacios, M. (1926) Islam and the Divine Comedy, translated and abridged by H.Sutherland, London.Atkins, J.W.H. (1934) Literary Criticism in Antiquity, Cambridge.Augustine (1907) Confessions, translated by E.B.Pusey, London.Augustine (1972) Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, translated by H.Bettenson, London.Averroes (1954) Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, translated by S.Van den Bergh, 2 vols, London.Bacon, Francis (1889–92) The Works of Francis Bacon, edited by J.Spedding et al., London.Barrow, R.H. (1967) Plutarch and his Time, London.Baudelaire, C. (1955) The Mirror of Art translated and edited by J.Mayne, London.Bergson, H.L. (1932) Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 7th edn, Paris.Berthelot, M. and Ruelle, C.E. (1888) Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols, Paris.Bett, H. (1925) Johannes Scotus Erigena, Cambridge.Bevan, E. (1940) Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and in Christianity,

London.Blunt, A. (1967) Nicolas Poussin, London and New York.Boas, G. (1950) The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo translated with an introduction, New York.Brand, C.P. (1965) Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature, Cambridge.Brockway, W. and Weinstock, H. (1962) The World of Opera, New York.Bruno, G. (1964) The Heroic Frenzies, translated by P.E.Memmo, Chapel Hill.Brunschvicg, L. (1937) La Rôle du Pythagorisme dans I’évolution des idées, Paris.Bundy, M.W. (1927) The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought, University of Illinois Studies in

Language and Literature XII, Illinois.Bundy, M.W. (1930) ‘Invention and imagination in the Renaissance’, in The Journal of English and Germanic

Philology, XXIX.1.535–45.Butler, C. (1970) Number Symbolism, London.Camus, A. (1965) ‘Métaphysique chrétienne et néoplatonisme’, in Essais, Paris.CH (1967) The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by A.H.Armstrong,

Cambridge.Chastel, A. (1954) Marsile Fricin et l’art, Geneva.Cicero (1939) Orator, translated by H.M.Hubbell, London and Cambridge, Mass.Clive, P. (1958) The Calvinist Attitude to Music, in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance: travaux et documents

20, Geneva.Cocking. J.M. (1973) ‘Imagination as Order and as Adventure’, in E.M. Beaumont, J.M.Cocking and J.Cruikshank

(eds) Order and Adventure in Post-Romantic French Poetry: Essays Presented to C.A.Hackett, Oxford.

Cocking, J.M. (1984) ‘Bacon’s view of imagination’, in M.Fattori (ed.) Francis Bacon: Terminologia e Fortuna nelXVII Secolo, Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, Rome.

Cody, R. (1969) The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso’s Aminta and Shakespeare’sEarly Comedies, Oxford.

Collingwood, R.G. (1925) ‘Plato’s Philosophy of Art’, in Mind vol. XXXIV. 154–72.Collingwood, R.G. (1938) The Principles of Art, Oxford.Copleston, F. (1950–3) A History of Philosophy; vol. II Mediaeval Philosophy: Augustine to Scotus; vol. III Ockham to

Suarez, London.Corbin, H. (1960) Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, translated from the French by Willard R.Trask, London.Curtius, E.R. (1953) European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R.Trask, New York.Dante (1971–5) The Divine Comedy, translated with a commentary by C.S.Singleton, Princeton.Darwin, Charles (1871) The Descent of Man, 2 vols, London.De Keyser, E. (1955) La Signification de l’art dans les Ennéades de Plotin, Louvain.De Mourges, O. (1953) Metaphysical Baroque and Précieux Poetry, Oxford.Dio Chrysostom (1932–51) Works, translated by J.W.Cohoon and H.Lamar Crosby, 5 vols, London and Cambridge,

Mass.Dodds, E.R. (1951) The Greeks and the Irrational, California.Du Bellay, Joachim (1903–13) Oeuvres Completes, ed. L. Séché, 4 vols, Paris.Edelstein, E. (1966) The Meaning of Stoicism, Cambridge, Mass.Engell, J. (1981) The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism, Cambridge, Mass. and London.Faral, E. (1962) Les Arts Poétiques du XIIème et du XIIIème siècle, Paris.Fattori, M. (ed.) (1988) Phantasia—Imaginatio, Lessico Intellettuale Europeo 46, Rome.Fergusson, F. (1966) Dante, London.Festugière, A.J. (1944–54) La Revelation d’Hermès Trismégiste, 4 vols, Paris.Ficino, M. (1964–70) Marsile Ficin: Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes, edited and translated by

R.Marcel, 3 vols, Paris.Gardner, E.G. (1913) Dante and the Mystics, London and New York.Goichon, A.M. and Khan, M.S. (1969) The Philosophy of Avicenna, Delhi.Gombrich, E.H. (1972a) Art and Illusion, 4th edn, London.Gombrich, E.H. (1972b) Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London.Hardman, O. (1937) A History of Christian Worship, Nashville.Harriott, R. (1969) Poetry and Criticism before Plato, London.Henry, P. (1969) Introduction to Plotinus: The Enneads, translated by S.MacKenna, 4th edn revised by B.S.Page,

London.Holyoake, S.J. (1972) An Introduction to French Sixteenth Century Poetic Theory: Texts and Commentary, Manchester

and New York.Hutin, S. (1963) Les Gnostiques, Paris.Iamblichus (1857) Iamblichi de mysteriis liber, ed. G.Parthey, Berlin.Ibn ‘Arabī, (1971) Sufis of Andalusia: The Rūb al-quds and al-Durrat al-fākhirah of Ibn ‘Arabī, translated by

R.W.J.Austin, London.John Damascene, St (1898) On Holy Images, translated by M.H.Allies, London.Kant, Immanuel (1933) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.K. Smith, London.Kearney, R. (1988) The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture, London.Kemp, M. (1977) ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: the quattrocento vocabulary of creation, inspiration and genius in the

visual arts’, in Viator 8:347–98.Klein, R. (1956) ‘L’Imagination comme vêtement de l’âme chez Marsilio Ficin et Giordano Bruno’, in Revue de

métaphysique et de morale, 61. 18–39.Klibansky, R., Panofsky, E. and Saxl, F. (1964) Saturn and Melancholy, London.Kristeller, P.O. (1943) The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 179

Landau, R. (1959) The Philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabī, London.Lee, R.W. (1967) Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting, New York.Leonardo (1970) The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by J.P.Richter, 2 vols, 3rd edn, New York.Limentani, U. (ed.) (1965) The Mind of Dante, Cambridge.Longinus (1960) ‘Longinus’ on the Sublime, translated by W.Hamilton Fyfe, London and Cambridge, Mass.McGowan, M.M. (1963) L’Art du ballet de cour en France, Paris.Maimonides (1904) The Guide of the Perplexed of Maimonides, translated and annotated by M.Friedländer, 3 vols, 2nd

edn, London.Marcel, R. (1958) Marsile Ficin, Paris.Mates, B. (1961) Stoic Logic, Berkeley and Los Angeles.Matthews, G. (1972) Plato’s Epistemology and Related Logical Problems, London.Moran, M. (1973) ‘Metaphysical imagination’, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, III. 208–23, New York.Morewedge, P. (1973) The Metaphysics of Avicenna, London.Murray, P. (1981) ‘Poetic inspiration in early Greece’, in Journal of Hellenic Studies 101:87–100.Murray, P. (ed.) (1989) Genius: The History of an Idea, Oxford.Nardi, B. (1949) Dante e la cultura medievale, 2nd edn, Bari.Nasr, S.H. (1964) Three Muslim Sages, Cambridge, Mass.Nicholson, R.A. (1963) The Mystics of Islam, London.Panofsky, E. (1968) Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, translated by J.J.S.Peake, Columbia.Pascal, B. (1950) Pensées, translated by H.F.Stewart, London.Pelikan, J. (1990) Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons, New Haven and London.Perls, M.H. (1934) ‘Mousa: sur l’esthétique de Platon’, in Revue philosophique, CXVII: 259–84 and 441–71.Philostratus, Flavius (1912) Life of Apollonius of Tyana, translated by F.C.Conybeare, 2 vols, London and Cambridge,

Mass.Philostratus the Younger (1931) Imagines, translated by A.Fairbanks, London and New York.Pico della Mirandola, G. (1890) Life of G.Pico della Mirandola, translated by Sir Thomas More, edited with an

introduction and notes by J.M.Rigg, London.Plato (1973) The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E.Hamilton and H.Cairns, Princeton.Plotinus (1966–88) The Enneads, translated by A.H.Armstrong, 7 vols, Cambridge, Mass.Proust, M. (1954) A la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols, Paris.Pseudo-Dionysius (1845) Oeuvres de Saint-Denys l’Aréopagite, translated by Abbé Darboy, Paris.Quintilian (1921) Institutio Oratoria, translated by H.E.Butler, 4 vols, London and Cambridge, Mass.Rahman, F. (1952) Avicenna’s Psychology, London.Raven, J.E. (1965) Plato’s Thought in the Making: A Study of the Development of his Metaphysics, Cambridge.Raymond, M. (1927) L’Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1550–85), Paris.Reeves, M. and Hirsch-Reich, B. (1972) The ‘Figurae’ of Joachim of Fiore, Oxford.Robertson, C.M. (1975) A History of Greek Art, 2 vols, Cambridge.Ronsard, P. de (1914–75) Oeuvres Completes, edited by P.Laumonier, 20 vols, Paris.Roques, R. (1954) L’Univers dionysien: structure hiérarchique du monde selon le Pseudo-Denys, Aubier.Rossky, W. (1958) ‘Imagination in the English Renaissance’, in Studies in the Renaissance, 5:49–73.Russell, D.A. (1964) ‘Longinus’ on the Sublime, Oxford.Sandbach, F.H. (1975) The Stoics, London.Schmidt, A.-M. (1967) Etudes sur le seizième siècle, 1967.Schofield, M, (1979) ‘Aristotle on the imagination’, in Articles on Aristotle: Psychology and Aesthetics, eds J.Barnes,

M.Schofield and R.Sorabji, London.Schuhl, P.-M. (1933) Platon et l’art de son temps, Paris.Scott, W. (1924) Hermetica vol. 1: Introduction, Texts and Translation, Oxford.Setton, K.M. (1956) ‘The Byzantine background to the Italian Renaissance’, in Proceedings of the American

Philosophical Society 100.1.

180 IMAGINATION

Sheppard, A.D.R. (1980) Studies on the 5th and 6th Essays of Proclus’ Commentary on the Republic, Göttingen.Sidney, Sir Philip (1966) A Defence of Poetry, edited with an introduction and notes by J.A.Van Dorsten, Oxford.Sikes, E.E. (1931) The Greek View of Poetry, London.Solon (1971–2) Iambi et Elegi Graeci, edited by M.West, 2 vols, Oxford.Starobinski, J. (1966) ‘Imagination’, in Proceedings of the IVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature

Association: 952–63, The Hague and Paris.Synesius of Cyrene (1930) The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, translated by A.F.Fitzgerald, London.Tasso, Torquato (1973) Discourses on the Heroic Poem, translated by M.Cavalchini and I.Samuel, Oxford.Taylor, A.E. (1966) Plato: The Man and his Work, London.Thorndike, L. (1923–41) A History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York.Took, J. (1984) ‘L’etterno piacer’: Aesthetic Ideas in Dante, Oxford.Vinaver, E. (1951) Racine et la poésie tragique, 1951.Walker, D.P. (1958) Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, London.Walker, D.P. (1972) The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century,

London.Walzer, R. (1945) ‘Arabic transmission of Greek thought to medieval Europe’, in John Rylands Library Bulletin, 29:

160–83.Walzer, R. (1962) Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy, Oxford.Warnock, M. (1976) Imagination, London.Watson, G. (1988) Phantasia in Classical Thought, Galway.Wedin, M.V. (1988) Mind and Imagination in Aristotle, Yale.Weinberg, B. (1950) Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance, Illinois.Weinberg, B. (1961) A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago and Toronto.White, A.R. (1990) The Language of Imagination, Oxford.Whittaker, T. (1918) The Neo-Platonists: A Study in the History of Hellenism, 2nd edn with a supplement on the

commentaries of Proclus, Cambridge.Winnington-Ingram, R.P. (1954) ‘Greek music’, in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edn, edited by Eric

Blom, London and New York.Yates, F.A. (1947) The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, London.Zaehner, R.C. (1960) Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 181

Index

Alexander of Aphrodisias 106, 118–19al-Fārābī 105–14, 123, 133, 150, 154–5, 180al-Ghazālī 119–20, 126–7, 131, 139, 150al-Kindī 104, 106, 115, 127, 192allegory 63, 65, 88, 147–8, 165–6, 203, 259Aquinas 99–100, 105, 141, 150–6, 167, 170, 181, 184,

188Aristotle xi–xii, 17–27, 36–7, 39–40, 53, 55, 71, 73, 75,

104, 106–10, 114–19, 122–5, 131–2, 138, 149, 153,156, 168–9, 195, 197–9, 201–2, 207–8, 211, 245, 270–1

astral body 180–1;see also vehicle of the soul

Augustine xiii, 70–2, 74–6, 80, 88, 92, 98, 141–2, 153–5,176

Averroes 104, 119–22, 126–7, 131, 150, 156–7, 168–9,197, 211

Avicenna 105–6, 114–20, 122–34, 150–1, 154–6, 180,190

Bacon, Francis viii–ix, 268Basil of Caesarea 78–9, 84, 96–7Baudelaire, Charles viii, xv, 87, 176–7, 192, 241

Campanella, Tommaso 201–2, 204Camus, Albert 60–1Chaldaean oracles 50–1, 62, 171Cicero 39–41, 196Clement of Alexandria I 8, 91, 94Corneille, Pierre 249

Dante 156–88, 195, 203–4Dio Chrysostom 41–3Dionysius see Pseudo-Dionysiusdreams 2, 13, 18, 24–6, 53, 64, 109, 119–20, 122, 136,

180, 232, 269–72, 277Du Bellay, Joachim 229, 235–6, 240–1

emanation 52–3, 67, 76, 104–6, 114, 141–2, 154, 181, 273Erigena 142–5, 148–9, 169, 191

faculty psychology 24, 115–18, 130, 151, 162fancy xiii, 13, 73–4, 117fantasia 162–6, 187, 227fantasy 23, 61, 66, 73, 173–9, 241;

see also fancy, fantasia and phantasiaFicino, Marsilio 105, 168–94, 201, 233, 241, 252, 273furor 64, 108, 193–5, 209, 229, 231–3, 238, 241

Galen 24, 115, 151Gemisthus Plethon 132, 168–9, 170, 192gnosticism 80–5, 103, 114Gregory Nazianzen 78–9, 83–4, 88, 148Gregory of Nyssa 73, 79, 84–5, 88, 96–7

Hermetica 80, 82–3, 103, 105, 114, 171, 181Homer xi, 7, 43, 65, 201, 216–17, 231Horace 195–6, 199–200, 235, 248–9Horapollo 186–7Hugh of St Victor 145–8

Iamblichus 34, 38, 51, 61–2, 65Ibn ‘Arabī 131, 134–40, 180images 2, 13, 18–19, 25, 46, 53–5, 60–2, 67, 70–3, 76–8,

80, 90–100, 110, 117, 136, 152, 154–5, 162, 167, 173,175, 181, 193, 223, 259–60

imaginatio xiii, 24, 72–3, 117imitation 3–5, 7, 11, 44, 66, 98, 109–13, 207–10, 217, 220,

231, 240–1, 263;see also mimesis

ingegno 163–5, 173, 223, 227inspiration 1–2, 4, 10–11, 21, 28, 31–2, 41–2, 61, 64, 111,

120, 123, 125, 137–8, 164, 180, 183, 193, 195, 202,209, 232, 236, 269, 272;see also furor

182

inventio and invention x-xi, 22, 64, 208, 217, 223, 230,234, 236–7, 239–40, 262

Joachim of Fiore 157–9John Damascene 73, 91, 93–7, 134, 221

Landino, Cristoforo 200–1Libri Carolini 97–9Longinus 22, 28–32, 43, 231, 264

magic 6, 50–2, 58, 81, 83, 125–8, 178, 184, 186, 189,201, 272

Maimonides 154–5Maranta, Bartolomeo 213–14, 221Mazzoni, Jacopo 206–7, 242memory 108–10, 117, 119, 130, 151, 162, 241mimesis xi, 7, 21, 27, 31, 33, 40, 44–5, 47, 109, 198, 205;

see also imitationMuses xi, 2, 9–10, 32, 41–2, 66, 164, 238–9, 269music 2–3, 5, 8–9, 11, 58–9, 88–9, 155, 193–4, 201, 250–

9

Nemesius 73–4Neoplatonism 26, 32–3, 49–89, 98, 100, 104–5, 114–15,

123, 125, 156, 169, 173, 176–7, 209, 215–16, 219, 271–3

Neopythagoreanism see Pythagoreanismnous 19–20, 32–3, 54, 61, 64, 76, 87, 103–6, 109, 115,

118, 123, 129, 133, 141, 180, 187, 231, 271

Origen 77, 88, 91, 94

painting 2, 8, 10–11, 20, 31, 139–40, 221–7, 261–4Peletier du Mans 232, 235, 237, 239Petrarch 160, 168Petronius 27–8phantasia xiii, 12–14, 17–26, 29–33, 37, 43–4, 46–8, 50–

4, 61–4, 69, 72–3, 82, 115, 117, 129, 180, 205–6, 230,266, 269–71

Philo 77–8, 105Philostratus, Flavius 43–7Philostratus the Younger 47–8Pico della Mirandola 170, 188Plato xi, 1–29, 36–41, 49, 52, 56, 62, 65, 73, 75–6, 91,

132, 153, 168–9, 171, 176–7, 181, 183, 190, 198–9,205–7, 211, 269–70

Plotinus 33, 50, 53–61, 84, 91, 94, 104, 108, 176, 182,184–6, 271–3

Pontus de Tyard 232–4, 238–9, 241, 253–4, 259

Poussin, Nicolas 261–5Proclus 33, 51–2, 65–7, 85, 104, 149, 171, 192prophecy 25, 53, 61, 74–5, 104, 109–15, 120, 125–8, 154–

5, 183, 232Pseudo-Dionysius 67, 85–7, 94, 96, 134–5, 137, 142–3,

145, 148–9, 151, 167, 171, 187–8, 190–1Pythagoreanism 26, 33–8, 62, 77, 114–15, 176, 183, 189,

239

Quintilian 22, 29–31, 43, 72, 231, 264

Racine, Jean 245–6Richard of St Victor 147–8, 167Ronsard, Pierre de xii, 229–32, 234–6, 240, 242, 252

Segni 209–10sensus communis 20, 109, 112, 117–18, 174, 270Stoics 22–4, 32–3, 50, 56, 61, 73, 115–16Sufism 103, 123, 128–9, 131–33, 138–9, 140Suhrawardī 131–3, 135Synesius 62–4, 180, 272–3

Tasso, Bernardo 199, 214Tasso, Torquato 214–20theurgy 50–1, 62, 81, 86, 94, 188

vehicle of the soul 62–3, 78, 134, 182;see also astral body

verisimilitude xi–xii, 208, 222, 235vis aestimativa 116–18, 151, 174vis imaginativa 140, 178–81vision 2, 21, 25–6, 55, 62, 64, 104, 109–13, 118, 132–3,

155, 162, 180, 187, 232

wahm 116, 118, 174, 190, 234;see also vis aestimativa

Wordsworth, William 50, 54–5, 269

INDEX 183

Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas

Documents

Transcript of Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas