Here are some of the thoughts I’ll be sharing in the talk I’ll be giving today, “Children’s Literature, Catholicism, and the Golden World,” at the 2014 IHM Maryland Homeschool Conference in Mt. Airy, Maryland. These thoughts don’t touch on children’s literature directly; they are rather prefatory remarks on the central importance of the imagination to moral and spiritual formation…

Moral and spiritual formation simply means growing in virtue. St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris: an ordering of our loves or desires. So what are we supposed to order our love to? To truth and to the Truth. But how?

First of all, by using our intellect to know the truth of things conceptually. By studying great works of theology and philosophy.

But even better, by loving the truth as it is embodied in our friends, esp. our friends the saints. Nothing motivates us to act well as much as love for true friends.

Concepts, however important, do not motivate us to act. I can be a world-class scholar on St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the virtues while remaining a moral pygmy. Only love motivates us to do things, to change our lives. Only love forms the will, the emotions, the intellect and the imagination itself. Only love inspires us to imitate.

Because love motivates us, ordered love, or virtue, is more important than knowing all sorts of truths intellectually. In fact, C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man says that “without the aid of trained emotions [i.e. ordered love or virtue] the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”

So: I can learn what humility is conceptually by studying the relevant portions of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. I can learn humility even better by watching my humble Aunt Edna. When it comes to learning how to act humbly in the world, Aunt Edna is more helpful than the Summa. That’s because my love for Aunt Edna and for the goodness of her actions motivates me to imitate her example.

Works of the imagination occupy a middle space between conceptual works (theology, philosophy) and our friendships in the world (Aunt Edna). Enjoyed in a contemplative, as opposed to practical, space, works of the imagination inspire our loves and thus enable us to imagine what it would mean to imitate certain human beings.

The picture of humility that we find in Edmund’s narrative arc of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is closer to the contours of human life as it is lived than the discussion of humility in the Summa. Lewis’s story is more “adequate to” real life.

Works of the imagination enable us to picture how actually to live out the decisions we have to make, the roles we have to play, the culture we have to rebuild. In order to achieve a thriving homeschool, parish, Church, or culture, we first have to imagine it and experience what it would feel like to love it.

Works of the imagination are thus critical exercises in ordering our loves. So if we diminish the role of works of the imagination, we diminish virtue and the bonds of community.

We tear down the walls of Jerusalem.

 

The image above, in the public domain, is entitled “Child Reading” and was painted by George Romney. It is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.