I’m looking for mentions of visual imagery, imagination, daydreaming, and so on. I have a hypothesis that the “visual imagination” was used more often in ancient religious practice. The cognitive difference between receiving a sentence using the imagination and receiving it in a “dictionary-sense” is enormous. An adult today can read through the Book of Jonah using very little imagination, and claim that he has read and understood the book. But we can also imagine a kind of cognition where every descriptive word is imagined in its maximal sense. Consider Job 38-42, when the Lord answers Job. “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?”
Using maximal visual imagination is going to produce an emotional response much different than how today’s students have habitualized the reception of written material, through a cognitively-minimal dictionary-oriented accumulation of factoids (“okay, what will be on the test? Draws Leviathan, presses down on tongue…”). Could it be that the ancients would have read or heard these words and constructed a movie in their mind? I think yes, especially given the experiences of people who have spent time with very low levels of visual or audio stimuli (Oliver Sachs mentions in Musicophilia that when out at sea for a long period, he heard an auditory hallucination of a complete symphony and believed it was real.)
Tertullian, in writing about the superiority of Christianity over spectacles and games, writes “et tamen haec iam quodammodo habemus per fidem spiritu imaginante repraesentata.”
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0303.htm
Consider that my hypothesis may extend further: the “sensory imagination” may have been the primary cognitive faculty of piety. I have not come across anything in the Church Fathers which criticizes the act of imagining Jesus or imagining Christ in worship, and I find this omission telling: when you take away a Pagan’s statue you do not take away his proclivity to use the mind’s eye. Many of the gentile Christians would have been worshipping through visualization, so the omission may be small evidence that this was the ubiquitous style of worship for both Greek and Jew. I also recall reading in the Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century work about “quiet prayer” without any visual imagery, that this particular type of prayer was unique had to be specifically cultivated because the default form of prayer entailed visual imagery which naturally come to the mind.
Using maximal visual imagination is going to produce an emotional response much different than how today’s students have habitualized the reception of written material, through a cognitively-minimal dictionary-oriented accumulation of factoids (“okay, what will be on the test? Draws Leviathan, presses down on tongue…”). Could it be that the ancients would have read or heard these words and constructed a movie in their mind? I think yes, especially given the experiences of people who have spent time with very low levels of visual or audio stimuli (Oliver Sachs mentions in Musicophilia that when out at sea for a long period, he heard an auditory hallucination of a complete symphony and believed it was real.)
Tertullian, in writing about the superiority of Christianity over spectacles and games, writes “et tamen haec iam quodammodo habemus per fidem spiritu imaginante repraesentata.”
.But what a spectacle is that fast-approaching advent of our Lord, now owned by all, now highly exalted, now a triumphant One! What that exultation of the angelic hosts! What the glory of the rising saints! What the kingdom of the just thereafter! What the city New Jerusalem! Yes, and there are other sights: that last day of judgment, with its everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? Which rouses me to exultation? — as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in ought that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more dissolute in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows […] What quæstor or priest in his munificence will bestow on you the favour of seeing and exulting in such things as these? And yet even now we in a measure have them by faith in the picturings of imagination
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0303.htm
Consider that my hypothesis may extend further: the “sensory imagination” may have been the primary cognitive faculty of piety. I have not come across anything in the Church Fathers which criticizes the act of imagining Jesus or imagining Christ in worship, and I find this omission telling: when you take away a Pagan’s statue you do not take away his proclivity to use the mind’s eye. Many of the gentile Christians would have been worshipping through visualization, so the omission may be small evidence that this was the ubiquitous style of worship for both Greek and Jew. I also recall reading in the Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century work about “quiet prayer” without any visual imagery, that this particular type of prayer was unique had to be specifically cultivated because the default form of prayer entailed visual imagery which naturally come to the mind.
Statistics: Posted by allegoria — Thu May 23, 2024 8:44 am