The second event in the series under the ‘Festival Focus’ title ‘Science, Imagination and the Big Questions’ brought together a panel of poets, scientists and musicians to explore the deep connections between the poetic imagination and the scientific imagination.
One of the questions treated in this fascinating discussion, which I was so very privileged to chair, was ‘How can science, poetry and imagination combine to enrich each community’s ideas?’ The expert speakers include poet-priest Malcolm Guite; violinist and composer Anna Phoebe; poet, historian and broadcaster Katrina Porteous; and internationally-recognised expert in interdisciplinary studies, Sam Illingworth of Edinburgh Napier University, who has recently founded Consilience, a new, on-line journal of science and poetry, and of science-poetry.
The panel at the Science and Poetry Event
The discussion was profoundly moving, if only because it represented an act of massive disciplinary reconciliation between the sciences and the humanities, and at the most profoundly incisive and surgical act of language – poetry itself.
The combination of intense imagination and intense observation became a common theme, as the discussion threaded though field theory (Porteous), Shakespeare and Coleridge (Guite), the tension of perfection and imperfection (Illingworth), the roles of science and art in changing perceptions along with emotions (Phoebe), launched a rich discussion of the entanglements between science, poetry and the imagination. Malcolm Guite launched the connections through Shakespeare’s Theseus in A Misummer Night’s Dream:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen 1845 Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name
Anna Phoebe’s space poetry made Malcolm Guite think about the connection between the universe ‘out there’ and the imagination, ethics and reflection ‘in here’ that breaks the sad educational separation between art and science, through a memory of a personal and aesthetic reflection on the colour change of a litmus paper, and the embedded observer. We are, at last, learning that science can no longer pretend to exist through the passive voice – all science depends on the observer, her choices, constructions, imagination and emotions.
Sam Illingworth riffed off my introduction of Goethe, who swam against the divisive tide of the early modern choices around how we conceive of an artless science and a science-free world of art. Goethe recognised that science and poetry had a common origin, and would ‘meet again one day as friends.’
Thanks to the questions from the on-line audience, the discussion moved into intensely important and practical questions of technology, consciousness and the future.
This deeply moving and personal discussion did not take place in isolation: there is a global conversation between science and poetry that is now revived, and developing in very interesting directions. The Madelaine L’Engle seminars are also developing this narrative, for example. There is already a follow-on from this event bringing Coleridge and MacDonald together at the nexus of science and poetry, and developing ideas in the education of early-career scientists in taking care of the development of their imaginations, as well as their scientific techniques.
Here is just one upcoming event.
There is a very exciting future to the discussion of science and poetry!
Image from the Catholic University of America Centre for the Study of Statemanship
Thinking in the modern world is characterised by fragmentation, opposition, split. The ubiquitous Cartesian dualism of mind and body (themselves split off by Descartes from talk about God) is just one of a set of divisions that, over three centuries, have worn themselves so smoothly into the fabric of the modern mind that we take them for granted, as self-evident, normative, obvious. Yet a longer historical, and wider geographical, view of cultural landscapes can put these assumptions into perspective, making it clearer that they are, just that – assumptions that may have served us for a while, but which we must move beyond.
Cover image courtesy of Alexandra Carr
For once mind and body are dislocated, other dualisms follow. The opposition of subject and object, and of the physical and moral universes (Kant), of poetry and science (early Coleridge), of science and religion (Draper and White) – that emblematic late modern conflict, are all examples. But underneath all these fragmented separations lies, paradoxically, a set of connections. They all stem from a deliberate attempt to sever reason from imagination, and to hide the essentially theological foundation that, ultimately, holds them together.
In this short reflection, I want to uncover some of the reconnections of imagination and reason that lay behind the writing of The Poetry and Music of Science, in the company of just a few of the important thinkers from different centuries who have, perhaps, seen further than others. The high medieval polymaths Robert Grosseteste and St. Bonaventure, The Romantics Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George MacDonald, and the late modern philosopher Mary Midgely and contemporary poet Malcolm Guite will help us unpack the deep structure behind Einstein’s celebrated aphorism
Albert Einstein
Knowledge is limited; Imagination circles the world
The early modern renunciation of imagination as a route to knowledge in a complementary partnership with reason, is perhaps the singular most characteristic shift from medieval and renaissance natural philosophy to early modern science. So we find the collective and successive reinvigoration of sense, natural knowledge, imagination, memory and understanding characteristic of the philosophy of science of the 13th century replaced by an insistence that science should draw from fact and reason alone. At best a move to simplify the task of comprehending the world, but at worst the first step on the road to destroying it, it behoves us urgently now to think again.
Medieval Insight into Imagination
We start during an epoch of sophisticated and energetic free thinking before the multiple fragmentations set in. This is the remarkably creative intellectual world of the 13th century Latin West, invigorated by newly-translated science and philosophy from both Ancient Greece and early-medieval Islamic commentary. Contrast this summary of what we might term ‘theological epistemology’ from the early Franciscan thinker St. Bonaventure’s 1259 Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum (the Mind’s Road to God)
Therefore, according to the six stages of ascension into God, there are six stages of the soul’s powers by which we mount from the depths to the heights, from the external to the internal, from the temporal to the eternal–to wit, sense, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and the apex of the mind, the illumination of conscience (“Synteresis”). These stages are implanted in us by nature, deformed by sin, reformed by grace, to be purged by justice, exercised by knowledge, perfected by wisdom.
with a ‘statute of limitation’ from Thomas Sprat, writing what was essentially the manifesto for the Royal Society in 1667, who urged his readers to:
separate the knowledge of Nature from the colours of Rhetoric, the devices of Fancy or the delightful deceits of Fables.
The first knits the imaginative and reasoning aspects of the mind together in a journey towards understanding, the second insists on a reduction in those faculties chosen as recruits to a knowledge of the world. To the modern mind, Bonaventure seems to be making a purely inner, ‘spiritual’, journey. But this is itself a projection of our modern mindset. For the early Franciscans, a discovery of God would always also entail a discovery of the divine mind, in which lies the conception of the world in all its multilayered physical and material polychromy. So Robert Grosseteste can write a generation before Bonaventure of the journey of the informed imagination beneath the surface of the world in his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics:
A 14th century image of Robert Grosseteste as Bishop of Lincoln
Sollertia [the Latin translation of agchinoia, which might also be rendered ‘acumen’], then, is a penetrative power by which the vision of the mind does not rest on the surface of the thing seen, but penetrates it until it reaches a thing naturally linked to itself . In the same way as corporal vision, falling on a coloured object, does not rest there, but penetrates into the internal connectivity and integrity of the coloured object, from which connectivity its colour emerges, and again penetrates this connectivity until it reaches the elementary qualities from which the connectivity proceeds.
Without the ‘penetrative power’ of the ‘vision of the mind’ there can be no conceptualisation of nature’s inner structure. If 21st century science has forgotten this, 13th century science had not.
The advantages of Cartesian division are methodological – a limited focus on experimental method (though that itself is a work of immense theological imagination), hypothesis-testing, clear differentiation of subject and object – got modern science going. But the costs are becoming clearer, for not only are the dehumanising impoverishments of the ‘Two Cultures’ narrative diminishing possibilities in the education of today’s children, and the potentials of the adults they become, but the very framing of science as unimaginative is closing off routes to new discoveries, and placing the social and political framing of science at a dangerously alien distance from most people.
Coleridge and the Source of Imagination
A strong counter-cultural voice at the turn of the 18th to 19th centuries belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although it was Coleridge who insisted that the opposite of ‘poetry’ was not ‘prose’, but ‘science’, by this he meant the dreary assembly of fact and mechanism that science had become under the aegis of its national institutions. A closer look at, for example his long collaboration in both poetry and chemistry with Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution, or his collaboration with William Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads with its strong invocation of science as a potential source of poetic song, indicates that he believed that the opposite could be true. At Davy’s invitation, Coleridge lectured on Poetry and the Imagination at the Royal Institution in 1808, in spite of Davy’s clearly mixed view of the poet’s genius which, though possessing ‘exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart and enlarged mind’, still wanted, in the scientist’s opinion, ‘order, precision and regularity.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Peter Vandyke (source: Wikipedia)
Far less well-known than his early poetry, written at the end of the 18th century with its well-deserved reputation, are Coleridge’s writings that spring from theological and philosophical reflection over the first decades of the 19th. His own experience of the creative imagination, fed as it was both by the. science he loved (he read Newton’s Opticks in its entirety), together with a powerful, even shocking, personal revelation through the contemplation of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush (Exodus chapter 3). He writes in chapter 13 of his Biographia:
The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and primary agent of all creation as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
As Malcolm Guite has pointed out (see below), Coleridge restores the original, and eternal co-existence of subject and object, whose divorce had been codified by Kant, in the theological insight that humans, created in imago Dei are ourselves both created and observed object and living, creating and participating subjects. In a remarkably prescient insight, Coleridge is here writing, not immediately of the imagination that science, or of poetry, requires, of hidden inner structure to nature (that, related, human endeavour is the ‘Secondary Imagination’, but of ‘mere’ sensory perception itself – this is the ‘Primary Imagination’ whose power draws from the projected energies of Creation itself. But once this is understood, the connectivity between the proceeding, and cousinly, secondary imaginations of both science and poetry is laid bare. The greatest of all early modern. astronomers, Johannes Kepler, would have understood – he who contemplated the humble glory of ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.’
George MacDonald and the Power of Imagination
The inventor of ‘fantasy literature’, lauded by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, is himself now not very much read. Yet George MacDonald’s literary production, including fictional works such as Lilith, opened possibilities for the literary creation of worlds than enabled these, and others to call them up into the forms of Narnia and of Middle Earth that have not yet seen an equal. Like Coleridge, MacDonald also wrote in philosophical/theological mode, and unfortunately like the poet, this genre is much less well known than his artistic writing. It is worth quoting a core paragraph from his 1867 essay, The Imagination, its Function and its Culture in full. It starts in an imagined dialogue with a disciple of Thomas Sprat:
Illustration from MacDonald’s The Golden Key
“But the facts of Nature are to be discovered only by observation and experiment.” True. But how does the man of science come to think of his experiments? Does observation reach to the non-present, the possible, the yet unconceived? Even if it showed you the experiments which ought to be made, will observation reveal to you the experiments which might be made? And who can tell of which kind is the one that carries in its bosom the secret of the law you seek? We yield you your facts. The laws we claim for the prophetic imagination. “He hath set the world in man’s heart,” not in his understanding. And the heart must open the door to the understanding. It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: “Try whether that may not be the form of these things;” which beholds or invents a harmonious relation of parts and operations, and sends the intellect to find out whether that be not the harmonious relation of them—that is, the law of the phenomenon it contemplates. Nay, the poetic relations themselves in the phenomenon may suggest to the imagination the law that rules its scientific life. Yea, more than this: we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very nature of things.
The unmistakable resonances with Grosseteste’s sanctified gaze beneath the surface of the world, and the insight from Coleridge that we possess ‘the world in man’s heart’ because we are ‘little I AM’s, combine with the juxtaposition of ‘poetic relations’ with ‘the scientific life’. MacDonald continues, ‘to inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination … The man has but to light the lamp within the form, his imagination is the light, it is not the form.’ This is as close as I have found in existing writing to the reason I gave for writing about the ‘Poetry of Science’. As some readers have complained, the book does not discuss poetry about science, or inspired by science at all. Rather, poetry becomes the metaphor for science because both shape the power, or ‘light’, of imagination by the creative constraints of ‘form’. In poetry the form is literary, in science simply the form provided by the world as we observe it.
Mary Midgley on Science, Poetry and the Imagination
But perhaps as Coleridge and MacDonald hint, there is a closer connection between science and poetry than the merely metaphorical. The North-East of England’s most visionary 20th century philosopher, Mary Midgley chose Science and Poetry as the title of a book which, although like The Poetry and Music of Science does not discuss much poetry, nevertheless sees the poetry-science nexus as the necessary road to bridging the science and arts, imagination and reason, and recovering freedom from determinism.
In particular, Midgley takes as a theme for the book the ‘dependence of detailed thought on entirely non-detailed visions’. This captures precisely the first stage of the ‘creation narrative’ I described in Poetry and Music of Science, as common in artistic creation as in scientific, in which a distant, defocused, half-conceived vision of a poem, picture, composition, theory, hypothesis, novel … is glimpsed, but without at first either a firm structure or a clear pathway to its realisation. It is the imaginative conception of this apparition, and its generation of the desire to discover it in its fullness and entirety, that Midgley terms ‘poetry’ for the sake of her thesis. She continues:
Mary Midgley
What makes theories persuasive in the first place is some other quality in their vision, something in them which answers to a wider need. There is always an imaginative appeal involved as well as an intellectual thirst for understanding.
Science and Poetry also tackles the related dualism of subject and object, noting that there is a right, but also a wrong way of attempting to unite them. The wrong way is to make something called ‘consciousness’ an isolatable, objective puzzle. In this endless self-referential and circular labyrinth, the subject becomes it’s own solipsistic object:
To suppose that we have a problem about the existence of other minds is to be in trouble already because it is to have started in the wrong place – Descarte’s wrong place. If we once sit down in that place we shall never get rid of the problem (Bertrand Russell, who was wedded to this starting point, never did get rid of it). This approach conceives of minds – or consciousness – unrealistically as self-contained, isolated both from each other and from the world around them. It is terminally solipsistic.
Midgley’s vision bursts the Descartian isolationism that insists on suppressing the essentially relational task of all art and science. The task is a healing of a set of broken relationships to each other and to the natural world itself. As George Steiner put it (in Real Presences):
Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the shear inhuman otherness of matter.
But art (and of course, pace Steiner, science – for what else could science be doing?) can never hope to do this if its ‘imagination’ is caught in a solipsistic loop of self-reference. It must be, as Steiner writes elsewhere in his weighty little book, ‘a wager on transcendence.’ Imagination’s source, as Coleridge perceived, is outside us, but, as MacDonald clarified, shines though us illuminating the world, and each other’s consciousness, by reflection.
Malcolm Guite and the Epistemology of Imagination
The poet, scholar and priest Malcolm Guite, who has just completed a term as chaplain to Girton College, Cambridge, has written a glorious book on the topic of ‘re-imagining imagination’. Faith, Hope and Poetry; Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Ashgate 2012). His declared task is to reconceive (which amounts to the rousing from a cultural amnesia) the imagination as a route to knowledge in partnership with reason. Guite has no illusion over the magnitude, nor the essential importance, of this task, and articulates supremely well the challenge of centuries of modernist (and pre-modern too) assumptions that confuse (in Coleridge’s terms) ‘imagination’ with mere ‘fancy’, and so debar it from any efficacy in the acquisition of knowledge. The illumination of Christian theology and experience becomes essential to understand both the problem and the task. From Augustine (if perhaps mis-read) to Bacon, reason is supposed less ‘fallen’ less damaged or prone to mis-shapen perversion than ‘imagination’, yet ‘these two ways of knowing are mutually enfolded and depend on one another.’
The key idea, threading its way through the book (which also picks up on Midgley’ writings and above all those of Coleridge) is that:
Malcolm Guite
If part of the Imago Dei is itself our creative imagination then we should expect the action of the Word, indwelling and redeeming fallen humanity, to begin in, and work outward through, the human imagination. If this is so then we should be able to discern the presence of that Word in the works of art which are the fruit of out imagination.
Furthermore, Guite knows that this must be true of science as well:
I want to support [Mary Midgley’s] thesis that the poetic imagination is fully engaged in scientific endeavour and also that poetry iscapable of refining and expressing the doubt, as well as the faith, that is part of the dynamic of both science and theology.
Where poetry, science and theology combine is in the perspective or the projection of gaze onto and into the world that I also wrote about in Faith and Wisdom in Science. We look upon the world as an image, and with the same imagination of the gaze of love that is bestowed by its first Creator. Our poetry, finding form for expression, and our science, exploring in the imagination of theory the form of observational constraint, are related acts of ‘waking into some measure of communicability, the shear inhuman otherness of matter.’
Commenting on Coleridge’s celebrated long poem The Ancient Mariner, Guite comments on the moment of redemption when the mariner gazes down at a shoal of writhing water-snakes illuminated by reflected moonlight, and realises their happiness and beauty. ‘It is though by seeing these creatures in moonlight he is given, however briefly, some notion of how God sees them. That idea, that we must learn to look upon nature from a Creator’s perspective, turning that into a creator’s perspective, is a very ancient, and poetic notion.
Job and the Wisdom of Imagination
It is, precisely, in the highest and best of all Hebrew poetry in the Bible that we are presented with the same double and patterned vision of divine and human imaginative gaze onto the natural world. For when Yahweh finally answers Job’s anguished demands for an answer to the uncontrolled and unjust world as it appears to him, the righteous suffering human is taken (in Job chapter 38) on a a questioning exploration of the heavenly, watery and earthly structures of that very cosmos:
When all the angels sang for joy Job Ch. 38 Illustrated by William Blake
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail, …
Where is the realm where heat is created, which the sirocco spreads across the earth?Who cuts a channel for the torrent of rain, a path for the thunderbolt? ...
Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose Orion’s belt? Can you bring out Mazzaroth in its season, or guide Aldebaran with its train? Do you determine the laws of the heaven? Can you establish its rule upon earth?
These are the questions, sprung from an imagination confronted by the tensions of nature’s order and chaos that require a reconciliation through deep observation and contemplation. The great poem of the ‘Lord’s Answer’ to Job, from which these verses are selected, is a response to many earlier sections of the text. In some ways it responds to the entire sequence of discourses between Job and his friends, for whom natural objects (rocks, plants, trees, stars, milk, winds, floods …) are a continuous source of metaphors for the human condition. It certainly picks up on the references to Genesis in chapter 3 of the book. But its chief precedent is the equally great poem, the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ of chapter 28. Here the uniquely human potential to explore the hidden structure of the world is portrayed through the underground view of the miner, who sees what no animal eye can see – the jewels, seams of precious metals, and ‘the earth transformed below by fire’. There is a shocking juxtaposition and comparison with the Divine gaze, which at the hymn’s close is revealed:
God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters, when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm,
For Basil the Great, who wrote the first major commentary on Job that we possess, the attribution of this divine perspective on nature was too much to swallow – he assumed that the opening verses on the subterranean vista was also referring to divine sight. But the Hebrew wisdom verse is clear – the mark of the maker that is to perceive the world by measure is also a vocation to humans mandated to make that world fruitful.
The Theological Energy of Scientific Imagination
If Malcolm Guite is correct when he conjectures that poetry is inextricably God-breathed, and so will display signs of transcendence even at the authorial hands of those who deny the divine, and if it is true that the same energies of imagination and divine perspective are present in the poetic form which we call science, then it ought also to be true that science itself cannot help but signify the transcendence of love, reconciliation, hope and resurrection.
I must insist that this is not a ‘natural theology’ of the 19th century sort advanced by Paley and others. That hopeless and watery fancy that we would perceive God through observing nature, as deducing the existence of a watchmaker from the intricacies of a watch, is as far from this idea as night is from day. More precisely, the adoption of the Creatorly gaze by the human creature possesses arguably an exactly opposite orientation. For, rather than looking through nature to a distant, dim and distorted divinity, we are called to look into the world from the same perspective as God. The closer we are to God, and the more faithfully we look with his gaze, then the less directly we see him. The more our perception and attitude towards nature aligns with that of its Creator, the more we look with, rather than towards, him. So the theological import of science is not that it ‘gives evidence for God’ but that by doing science at all we participate in the mystery of a relationship with the rest of creation that holds together both the transcendence of distance and the imminence of our own materiality.
Artwork from Reverend Ally
The glimpses of eternity and hope that Guite finds in the poetry of those who disavow theistic belief are there for those who have eyes to see at every turn of our science. For what is true of the one imaginative energy, whose source is from the Creator himself, must be true of the other. If both poetry and science ‘wake into some measure of communicability the shear inhuman otherness of matter,’ then both must open pathways to such transcendence both ways. A covenant relationship with the material world (another idea from the poetry of Job) is also a covenant relationship with its Maker. One cannot look upon Le Maitre’s mathematical solution of Einstein’s field equations for the universe as a whole without thinking of Julian of Norwich’s vision of the hazelnut in her cupped hands that was revealed as ‘all that is’.
Electron micrograph of a self-assembled lipid vesicle.
A moment’s reflection on the theory of self-assembly of biological cells’ lipid membranes, displaying spontaneous order among a sea of thermal chaos that turns out to be necessary to their formation, parallels perfectly the Joban discourse of how apparently chaotic floods are channeled into water-courses, forming their pathways. The apparently threatening inhuman forces of nature that confront us in our immaturity become understood and reconciled when we build the ‘poetic’ forms of a scientific theory of nature to meet them.
Like the Ancient Mariner turning from the initial strangeness and fear of the roiling underwater snakes and finding symbols of healing, we can face the inhuman materiality of the world through the scientific imagination, and turn from its infinite spaces without horror, but with a redeemed reverence and respect, and an understanding that leads us home.
Faith and Wisdom in Science 