MacDonald thought deeply about imagination throughout his life. The only lecture he ever published and repeatedly delivered was a shortened version of his seminal essay, “The Imagination: Its Functions & Its Culture.” If you are familiar with Chesterton’s chapter “Ethics in Elfland” in Orthodoxy, Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Lewis’s essay “On Stories,” or even Barfield’s Poetic Diction, reading MacDonald’s essay can be startling. Many of the ideas later developed by these writers appear here first, in this essay and in the companion essay that follows it in A Dish of Orts: “Individual Development.”

MacDonald deeply believed that we are created in the image of an imaginative God. So the more deeply we are re-storied – as Christians are continually called and even commanded to be, from the Shema to Elijah, from Christ on the road to Emmaus to the countless faith-shaped voices who have followed – the healthier, more productive and more Christologically revolutionary our Imaginations will be. We are storied in and through our relationships with other humans, our communities and by the non-human creations of the Creator as well. 

As MacDonald writes:

“But while the imagination of man
has thus the divine function of putting thought into form,
it has a duty altogether human,
which is paramount to that function—
the duty, namely, which springs from his immediate relation to the Father,
that of following and finding out
the divine imagination in whose image it was made.
To do this,
the man must watch its signs, its manifestations.
He must contemplate what the Hebrew poets call
the works of His hands.”

MacDonald pushed back against the polarization of Reason from Imagination. To him, they were two sides of the same holy coin: inseparable, mutually dependent, and diminished when isolated from one another. “Poetry is true as Science, and Science is holy as Poetry,” he wrote as a lover of both. Through his entire work he demonstrates how each depends upon the other, and how an imbalance of either’s voice can be dangerous.

Always he is turning our attention back to the One who imagined both us and all of creation into existence:

“[The imagination is]
made in the image of the imagination of God.
Everything of man must have been of God first;
and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination
and its functions in man
if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God,
in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.”