The Wise Imagination

I’ll admit from the start: I am a little leery of qualifying anything with the word good. In our relativistic age, “good” often feels as empty as saying a building is “strong because it’s strong.” It either means nothing, or it means something entirely different to you than it does to me.

G.K. Chesterton famously used a reductio ad absurdum to illustrate the limits of this kind of moral relativism:

“Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.”

Absurd? Yes. Brilliant? Absolutely. Whether we admit it or not, we move and breathe based on the conclusions we reach. As Chesterton argued, the human brain is a “machine for coming to conclusions,” and in truth, there are only two kinds of people: “those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.”

The Pragmatic Question: Is it Any Good?

This isn’t just a philosophical debate; it’s a pragmatic one. Like you, I am a busy person—teaching, parenting, volunteering, and trying to finish the third season of Sherlock. I don’t have time for poor literature.

A good book is a piece of art. Like all great art, it has the power to change or solidify a worldview—to help us see the world from a new perspective (or, at the very least, give us a good laugh). We all have an internal metric for “good.” When I first met my wife, my idea of a “good” Valentine’s dinner involved Shake ‘n Bake chicken and hard French bread. Through a bit of discussion, I have reached the “conclusion” that this does not, in fact, constitute a good dinner. This realization has likely contributed to a much happier marriage!

The Wise Imagination

Over the next few posts, I want to explain what I see as “Good Fantasy,” using a definition largely borrowed from George MacDonald:

Good fantasy is that which employs the reader’s imagination to recognize the wonder and mystery of our world, drawing us toward a higher law than the one we create for ourselves.

MacDonald refers to this as the “Wise Imagination.” In A Dish of Orts, he writes:

“In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond… have far more influence than any logical sequences.”

Good fantasy, then, is not about the logic of the intellect, but the “vivid visions” of the spirit. It is the “Wise Imagination” that helps us navigate the mystery of existence.