YOU’VE probably heard the phrase “You are what you eat” to describe the relationship between food and our physical bodies, but, when it comes to your sense of identity, you become what you behold. The Latin root of imagination is related to the root for imitation, a linguistic relationship that communicates our tendency to copy or model what captures our imagination. We naturally imitate the stories we embrace, the images we consume, the places we inhabit, and the heroes we admire.
That we become what we behold is not a new idea. Even our word “character” reinforces the connection between our identity and image-making. “Character” originates from the Greek kharakter, a stamping tool used to impress an image on a coin. Ancient and medieval thinkers compared the soul to a kind of wax tablet that took on the shape of whatever images were impressed on it.
Early Christians understood that this principle applies to spiritual formation. To become Christian is a question not just of belief but of identity. Consequently, developing a distinctively Christian character requires “stamping” the wax of the soul with distinctively Christian forms. This process of intentionally cultivating the imagination became known as “the art of fashioning the soul”.
With the bread and wine of the eucharist held high, St Augustine reminds us: “Behold what you are and become what you receive.” His words capture the way our eyes, too, “eat” what they see, and how we are therefore called to behold Christ so that we may become like Christ. We are called to fix our gaze on Christ (Hebrews 12.2) and to clothe ourselves with him (Romans 13.14). In Christianity, we stamp our souls with the seal of God.
The development of the Christian imagination was so intertwined with the development of the Christian faith that it even preceded much of what we might call “essential” components to Christianity today. Before the canonical books of scripture were set, before the first ecclesial creeds were formalised, the first generations of Christians began creating a distinctively Christian imagination. The essential truths of Christianity were communicated by intertwining symbols, stories, and beliefs.
The fish symbol, for instance, is a very early profession of faith: ichthys, the Greek word for fish, became an anagram for Jesus (i) Christ (ch), God’s (th) Son (y), Saviour (s). Early Christians also used anchors, phoenixes, palm branches, and other symbols as ways of professing their beliefs, and the faith grew because of the stories of its martyrs and other heroes who inspired others to follow their example.
Indeed, the majority of Christians have relied chiefly on the imagination as the vehicle for encountering the gospel message. Through much of Christian history, low literacy rates, limitations on access to scripture, and Latin-language worship services meant that the average Christian largely relied on works of the imagination — such as stained-glass windows, frescoes, morality plays, mosaics, saints’ stories, and sculptures — to communicate theological truths. For most of the history of the Christian Church, the imagination was not considered extraneous to, or distracting from, spiritual formation. Rather, the imagination was the very heart of spiritual formation.
ONE significant change can be traced to the Reformation. Protestant leaders such as John Calvin and Oliver Cromwell recognised the imagination’s connection with theological belief. When they broke from Catholic doctrine, they also broke artefacts of the Catholic imagination. Church walls were whitewashed, stained-glass windows smashed, and religious images and objects destroyed.
Iconoclastic Protestant leaders were understandably concerned with the excesses at the time of the Reformation, but the swiftness and totality of the break with so much of the Church’s imaginative tradition led to unforeseen consequences that are still with us today. Calvin led a charge for eliminating art in churches in part out of his belief that the human heart is a “factory of idols.” His belief is rightly rooted in our proclivity as humans to fashion our own gods. But eliminating images in worship does not eliminate idol worship, and erasing an imaginative tradition does not erase the formative power of the imagination.
John Kavanaugh calls alternative visions of reality “competing gospels” to the gospel of Christianity, in that they “serve as ultimate and competing ‘forms’ of perception, through which we filter all of our experience”.
Consider the gospel of Christian nationalism. The imagination of Christian nationalism provides a powerful, cohesive sense of identity and purpose by forming people who believe that they are part of a special place blessed by God and have been tasked to protect that relationship.
Christian nationalism may appear to align with Christianity, but it actually counteracts it. Its way of looking at the world — which embraces messages of violence, exceptionalism, exclusivity, success, and power — is often at odds with the gospel of Jesus, which preaches charity, self-sacrifice, and humility. Jesus’s favour is not limited to one country; in fact, his “Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36).
The good news is offered to all people from all nations, and is not meant for a particular place or people alone. Such is the power of the imagination of Christian nationalism on its adherents’ sense of identity and belonging that they often do not see — or do not care about — such contradictions between their positions and scripture, orthodox creeds, or Christian practices.
Competing imaginative frameworks such as Christian nationalism distort the imaginative lens and malform visions of God and reality, meaning that there is often a significant gap between what Christians profess and their everyday, lived realities. Some of the most pressing problems facing the Church today are rooted in a failure of the imagination; yet we often try to fix them as if they were political or intellectual problems for which the solution lies in arriving at the correct theory or stance.
But logic does not work on a diseased imagination. The only way to correct a malformed imagination is by re-forming the imagination. Becoming a people formed in the image of God rather than after the patterns of our age requires a new vision, a new form. It requires us to reorient our gaze and behold distinctively Christian images to become a people distinctively shaped by the gospel.
Looking to the past often helps us diagnose and correct the myopic visions and unhealthy patterns of the present. Ancient and medieval Christians understood the imagination not only as something active and creative but also as something received. The imagination, they believed, belonged to the same part of the soul as the memory. The imagination gives concrete form to abstract notions and thus helps to ensure that we remember what we have learned.
Tradition, too, is a way of remembering what we have learned. Tradition, or “the democracy of the dead”, as G. K. Chesterton calls it, reminds us to look at how the Holy Spirit has worked over time, through a wide variety of people, institutions, and events. It can help us to see beyond the limited perspective of our own time and place.
Consequently, in contrast to our tendency to see identity as something either fixed (“You be you!”) or self-created (“You can be whoever you want to be!”), the art of fashioning the soul first turns to the collective memory of the Christian tradition. The wisdom of the past can help show us not only how to become but who to become.
Happily, Christians of the past have left us with a bountiful inheritance of the imagination. The historic Christian imaginative tradition has bequeathed to us the resources required to establish a distinct identity, rooted not in today’s corrosive, malforming patterns, but in a love, gratitude, and sense of wonder rooted in the good news of the gospel. We simply have to claim it.
This is an edited extract from Becoming by Beholding: The power of the imagination in spiritual formation by Lanta Davis, published on 20 August in the UK by Baker Academic at £21.99 (Church Times Bookshop £19.79); 978-1-5409-6618-6.