1 6 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 following text but am quoting his words only to use them as a basis for asking whether spirituality is a child of the imagination or whether it is independent of it. Despite Spinoza’s rationalistic claim, I believe that spirituality always has something to do with the imagination. Moreover, a cultivated spirituality will be related to a cultivated imagination. After all, even Spinoza’s silent God without his own style of speech is a certain image, and his pantheistic faith has deep roots right in that image. In this study, I will first point out how and why imagination participates in the creation of a referential frame or soil of spiritual experiences which are somehow defined and redefined by these frames. Next, I will discuss selected examples from the history of ideas that will illustrate this interplay between imagery and the individual’s spiritual experience. Finally, I will touch upon the controversial topic of whether a spirituality without imagination is possible, or in the words of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whether a non-theological mysticism is possible at all. At the outset I should explain that by spirituality I mean a cultural and anthropological phenomenon which, although historically closely intertwined with religious experience, has also had a secular form since ancient times. When the pagan philosopher Plotinus said that prayer is the dialogue of the alone with the Alone, “μόνους πρὸς μόνον” (Plotinus 1984, V, 1, 6, 12) [1], he was not thinking here as a religious thinker nor using the religious concepts of prayer and God, but was instead expressing a distinctive spirituality, typical of his philosophical experience. The old distinction, often reflected in the early Christian period, between body (Gr. σάρξ), soul (Gr. ψυχή), and spirit (Gr. πνεῦμα) has indeed had its new secular reinterpretation in the 20th century in Max Scheler [2], but several other attempts to define this concept outside the framework of purely religious thought have also emerged since. Pierre Hadot gives a good answer as to why the term “spiritual” may nowadays be used in a broader sense that encompasses both the religious and the non-religious. He says that notions such as “thought”, “intellectualism” and “ethics” do cover the phenomenon of the spiritual only in a partial way, but these words often forget that imagination and sensibility also play an important role here. Thanks to the spiritual dimension of his personality, the individual, Hadot says, “re-places himself within the perspective of the Whole” (Hadot 1999, 82). 2 Imagination in Spirituality Ignatius of Loyola, in the first meditation of his Spiritual Exercises from 1522–1524, advises his exercitant to begin his contemplation with imagination. If the topic concerns a physical place, he should imagine Christ in a temple or on a mountain. If the subject is an abstract one, such as sin, he should imagine the soul imprisoned in the body or even himself placed in some valley amidst wild beasts. The key phrase for him is “seeing in imagination” (Ignatius 1991, 47). However, is it irrelevant what form the temple seen in my imagination will take, or what mountain Christ will stand on? Is it irrelevant how I imagine the prison that should be my body, or the wilderness in which I find myself threatened by wild animals? And which species of animals? The images I use will modify the referential frame or background of how the figure of Christ, myself or my soul appears on it. And how do I imagine the soul? We could point here to the theory of the figure and the background as elaborated by Gestalt psychology, but we do not have to go that far. It is enough if we realize that our imagination significantly shifts or modifies our attitude towards the imagined. According to Spinoza’s words quoted above, if I am a peasant who has never been to a big city in my life, my temple will look like a wooden church with simple rustic decorations, while if I am a courtier, I will see in my imagination a temple adorned with gold and works of art by the most skilled craftsmen and artists. But Christ amid poor peasants and amongst the well-dressed and rich acquires different characteristics. In either case, a powerful spiritual emotion or experience can arise in the meditator regardless of whether he is poor or rich, ignorant, or educated, lay or cleric. That can profoundly affect his or her personal life, morals, social attitudes, or other beliefs. Moreover, the more temples I have seen in my life (and not only Christian ones), the more my imagined temple will change in my mind and so will the ways or horizons of my spiritual experiences. When French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explored in his Water and Dreams (from 1942) the nature of what he called “the material imagination,” he used the concept of the graft in his description. A graft expresses the insertion of one thing into another. An image stems from one of the four elements. For him, a graft is a human affair, a human trace in a natural environment in which it would not otherwise occur. A graft is in this sense a cultivation of the natural. But Bachelard goes even further, saying that all poetic metaphors we use in our
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