Christian mothers and fathers, and perhaps non-Christian parents as well, must answer for their children such questions as: ‘Is God older than you?’, ‘Is it true that the Virgin Mary is very beautiful?’, ‘How big are the flames in hell?’. When I was a young boy in my very orthodox Catholic school, such questions were answered literally. We were encouraged to believe that God really exists and that Jesus was His Beloved Son who saved us; also that angels and demons exist, that miracles happen, and so on. As Catholics, we were also asked to believe that during the Eucharist, the bread and the wine are transformed into Christ’s Body and Blood—literally, and not metaphorically. Things are different today, at least in France. There is a strong tendency to tell children that many dogmas must be taken simply as ways of speaking – poetically, and not literally – of miracles, transubstantiation and resurrection. What English-speaking philosophers of religion call ‘religious fictionalism’ –the idea that to engage in religious belief and practice is to engage in a game of make-believe – is now usual. Some form of anti-realistic philosophy of religion, what we in France could call ‘religious deconstructionism’, is now dominant. From this perspective, the Gospel is seen as a kind of mythology, useful from a moral and spiritual point of view, but not to be taken literally.

I think that this situation encourages us to ask about the role of imagination in religious life, or at least in Christian religious life. Christian parents must think about the role of imagination in the formation of religious belief. Concerning the age of God, the Virgin Mary’s beauty and the size of flames in hell, can one really say to a child: ‘We need not try to imagine such things but should think about the concept of God, and to think about beauty, in a transcendantal way; and we should understand that hell is not a place where bad men endure eternal sufferings but rather a metaphor of our bad consciousness, of our sense of Original sin’. Following out this line, one will be tempted to tell one’s children that the stories of Incarnation, of the Virgin Mary and of hell have not really to be believed. Perhaps one will be obliged to explain the nature of myth; and why not seek help from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida, who are the French authorities in these matters? ‘What is finally important’, one will perhaps say, ‘is to do your best to subvert selfishness in yourself and to help to promote justice in this world’. Of course, we know that such answers, even if we think that they are fundamentally right (which I personally doubt), simply sidestep the questions that children mean to ask.

What can we do? We feel guilty in promoting images and use imagination to think about religious matters. We think that such a way of understanding religious thought and practice – the corrupting images of God as an old man, Virgin Mary as a very pretty actress, and hell as a big oven – brings religion close to superstition. But if we reject imagination, don’t we thereby subscribe to fictionalism, or negative theology, or even ineffabilism—the idea that God is beyond the reach, not only of all imagination but of any conceptualization?

My aim here is to indicate a philosophical way to give positive value to religious imagination without lapsing into superstition. I will first indicate why imagination has been thought of so badly by many modern philosophers, especially in religious contexts. I will then try to show how birth and development of modern epistemology provided what has appeared to many to be a fundamental reason for avoiding the application of the imagination in religious thought. And thirdly, I will speak about the place that imagination, especially religious imagination, can have if we take up a different sort of epistemology – virtue epistemology – using as an example, ostentatio genitalium in Renaissance representations of Christ’s humanity.

I want now to place the question of imagination in a broader perspective, both historical and conceptual.

In what may be called classical foundationalism, the imagination is disliked, for it is thought to disturb the rational justification of our beliefs. Descartes explains in the Sixth Meditation that if I try to imagine a chiliogon, I cannot distinguish the confused representation I made in my mind to the representation of a myriogon. I must conceive the chiliogon as a figure with thousand sides, but I cannot distinctly imagine it. The imagination is limited by its relation to the body. If imagination fails in representing a chiliogon, how well could it suffice when what must be thought is the Infinite itself? Pascal says that imagination makes little objects bigger and makes the great souls smaller. Is this not exactly what happens when we try to imagine God? [1]

Speaking about enthusiasm which is, with superstition, one species of false religion, Hume says:

According to Hume, superstition, like enthusiasm, is a product of the power and malevolence of the imagination.

Of course, Descartes, Pascal and Hume do not all give the same account the power of reason or the nature and role of imagination. But they agree that in religious matters imagination is intellectually and practically dangerous.

In Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 20, III, §8, which discusses imagination in religious matters, Thomas Aquinas says something very close to Descartes, Pascal, and Hume. For him, the imagination is strongly connected with bodies and can only form images which in particular ways resemble bodies. It this the reason why we must abandon imagination when meditating on incorporeal realities? Are we to think that Aquinas is a classical foundationalist? No, for Aquinas is not talking here about religious belief , but about religious knowledge. Philosophical theology, which is truly theology and accepts revealed truths, and natural theology, which is philosophy and cannot accept the authority of Revelation, together compose religious Christian knowledge. In the formation of such knowledge, imagination is dangerous. The maxim would be: don’t imagine incorporal things, for imagination is connected with images (or, in Thomistic terms, to phantasmata) and with bodies. In the domain of religious knowledge, imagination would indeed be the ‘mistress of error’ Pascal talks about.

A strong reaction against such religious intellectualism can take the form of anti-rationalism (or even irrationalism). Religious sensibility may be said to transcend rationality, with imagination playing the kind of poetic role Karl Rahner describes here:

I will not discuss this possibility as such. But it would be wrong to think that there is a simple division between rationalists and those who care for the poetic touch in religious matters—the former condemning imagination and the latter reaffirming the rights of warm, sensible experience against cold, dry concepts. For even within the rationalist point of view a place can be made for imagination.

At the very end of his Principes de philosophie, Descartes distinguished metaphysical certainty and moral certainty. Moral certainty is sufficient for the purposes of ordinary life, even if it is not absolute, but relative certainty. We have metaphysical certainty when the things we think about cannot be different from the way we judge them to be. I am not at all sure that such a distinction makes sense in the end, but that is not our problem here. What I want to emphasize is that Descartes doesn’t think that, in ordinary life, we must ask for metaphysical certainty, as is also clear from the third part of the Discours de la méthode. Thus, Descartes doesn’t think that the requirements for belief are everywhere the same: they depend upon the activity in which we are engaged. If our task is that of providing a foundation for knowledge and science, we must ask for metaphysical certainty. But for the conduct of everyday life, moral certainty is sufficient. Perhaps we can apply a parallel distinction to the question of religious imagination. In philosophical or natural theology, imagination has no place. But in everyday religious life, it may be useful and good. The idea is that, with respect to the imagination, we may adapt our epistemic requirements to the kind of intellectual domain we are in.

In his Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences (III, 9, 2, 3), Aquinas says that there are three reasons to introduce images in the Church: first, to give some instruction to the ignorant; to recall the Mystery of Incarnation and examples of the saints by their everyday representation; to nourish feelings of devotion, better excited by vision than by audition. Sometimes, images and art works are excluded from religion. Long before the Reformation, Saint Bernard de Clairvaux asked us to pay attention to the close relation between images and idolatry. Nevertheless, God made himself visible to men and can thus be represented through images. The Cross, an instrument of Redemption, even demands such representation!

What interests me in the Cartesian distinction between two kinds of certainty, and in the use Aquinas asks us to make of religious images, is that until the beginning of modern philosophy we had the idea of something which stood in between superstition or idolatry, on the one side, and natural theology or philosophical theology, on the other. In superstition, idolatry and enthusiasm, imagination is uncontrolled. In natural and philosophical theology, imagination is forbidden. But in Aquinas, and even in Descartes, room is made for a sort of common-sense knowledge—this is not demonstrative, it is true, but it is nevertheless very different from superstition. This is the kind of knowledge that Plato talked about when speaking about true justified belief. Rightly or not, it is supposed to be different from science. It is neither ignorance nor pure science. In this common-sense knowledge, imagination plays a necessary role.

I want now to look at common-sense knowledge in some more detail. I will focus upon the reason for its having been repressed in modern philosophy and will introduce my point by recalling what Elisabeth Anscombe said about moral philosophy in modern times.

Published in 1958, Anscombe’s paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ changed the face of recent ethics, at least in the English-speaking world. Moral philosophy, she said, must be put aside until an adequate philosophy of psychology, including such notions as action, intention, and pleasure, became available. Eventually, she claimed, ‘it might be possible to advance to considering the concept ‘virtue’; with which… we should be beginning some sort of a study of ethics’. [4] The situation is arguably now the same in epistemology. We must put it aside until an adequate philosophy of psychology, including such notions as intellect, intention and imagination became available. Eventually, I think, it might be possible to advance by considering the concept ‘virtue’, through which we could embark upon a study that would look something like modern epistemology but would in reality be fundamentally different. What would be the difference?

Modern epistemology has been mainly concerned with knowledge and the justification of belief. It is deontological in the sense that it is supposed to furnish criteria for justified true belief. What has recently been called ‘virtue epistemology’ is, by contrast, mainly concerned with the reliability (and not justification) of beliefs, the intellectual qualities of knowers, their motivations and the sense they have of their own responsibility in believing what they believe (and not their right to believe something). This kind of epistemology, not obsessed with justification, places the nature and the role of epistemic virtues at the core of any account of understanding and knowledge. Of course, this is nothing new. It was the perspective of Aristotle and Aquinas. But it is difficult to understand, and even more to accept, for modern philosophers educated in the Cartesian, Humean and Kantian traditions. In fact, it is not impossible to see epistemology in the period from Descartes to Husserl as a sort of parenthetical chapter. Before Descartes, philosophers (except perhaps for Sceptics) were not obsessed with epistemological deontology; and I think that we may read Wittgenstein not as a post-modern but a pre-modern (closer to Aquinas than to French deconstructionists) who encourages us to renounce to large aspects of modern epistemology. According to Plantinga:

I would add that this reflection should include Wittgenstein as well. [6]

In this very old – but, for some, very new – way of understanding knowledge, religious belief presents a better face than under what Plantinga calls ‘classical foundationalism’, especially with respect to the question of its rationality. To explain why, we must distinguish two criteria of rationality.

Under the first criterion, we are justified in having whatever beliefs are not prohibited by some specific evidence. I am not justified in believing that Tony Blair is the French Prime Minister, for there is evidence that he is not. According the second criterion, we are justified in having only those beliefs we are authorised by evidence. This means that for each belief we have, we must have foundational reasons to have them. I cannot be justified in believing that Tony Blair is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom unless I have evidence that he is, or unless my belief is founded upon previous beliefs which rest, ultimately, upon evident beliefs. Following the first criterion, one is allowed to believe what it is not prohibited to believe. Following the second, one is allowed to believe only what one is obliged to believe.

Classical foundationalism – what I have presented as modern epistemology – employs the second criterion. This is the reason why it normally arrives at the conclusion that our religious beliefs are in very bad epistemic situation. For example, we are supposed not to believe in God if His existence cannot be proved. From Plantinga’s externalist perspective, religious beliefs are to be condemned only if there are obvious reasons not to have them, and not merely because we lack positive reasons to have them. The burden of proof does not lie with the religious believer but with the atheist. It is rational to have beliefs for which we lack positive reasons; only beliefs ruled out by evidence must be rejected.

What William K. Clifford called the ‘ethics of belief’ represents a sort of rigorism in epistemology. By ‘rigorism’, I mean the kind of doctrine according to which all one’s beliefs must be antecedently examined and authorized only through the application of some relevant rule or rules, for example the rules of evidence. Epistemological rigorism means that beliefs – one’s own and others’ – must be first controlled and secondly authorized. Without such authorization, one is in a sort of illegal epistemic situation. [7]

What can we now say of religious imagination? If the second criterion be adopted, imagination has no place, even in the common-sense knowledge I talked about earlier. The reason is that we have very few controls on the imagination. Classical internalist foundationalism is the thesis that epistemic justification is entirely up to the individual, through the internal examination of his or her beliefs, and is within the power of the individual will, subject to the individual’s decision to believe or not to believe. The distinction between perception or conception and judgement in Descartes’ philosophy is typical of this account: First of all I perceive; and if my perception is clear and distinct, I allow myself to judge that things are as my perception suggests. Internalist foundationalism favours mental autonomy. But imagination supposes mental heteronomy. A person does not master her own imagination; rather, it pushes her mentally, sometimes very heavily. This is the reason why the imagination has been so consistently criticised from the perspective of internalist classical foundationalism, where the control of thought and some sort of epistemic rigorism have been considered to be necessary to a person’s having justified true beliefs.

Classical foundationalist epistemology not only favours mental autonomy or Cartesian isolationism, but also what can be called mental segregation: Your epistemic obligation is to cut one part of your mental life off from the rest, accepting the dictates of reason while refusing the images of imagination. Rationality is the enlighted dictatorial power of pure reason. In virtue epistemology, by contrast, rationality is not confused with reason; rationality is the good epistemic health of the whole person, and not of reason alone. A warranted belief has not to be a pure product of pure reason, without any compromising with the sense, the sensibility, the imagination, and other aspects of a normal human life. [8]

Classical foundationalism favours not only mental segregation but also ‘social segregation’. Since Descartes, it has seemed natural for philosophers to take reason to be complete in each individual human reasoner. Annette Baier asks two questions which, I think, are correlated with the distinction between modern epistemology and virtue epistemology:

The first alternative is characteristic of modern epistemology. The second introduces us to a completely different account of mind, belief and knowledge and has consequences for our understanding of the imagination and its role.

I have already said that Descartes limited the former account – with its vision of the solitary mind and its epistemic rigorism – to the search for metaphysical certainty. As is clear from the third part of the Discours de la méthode, common sense and critical credulity need in no way be rejected for the purposes of religious practice. Post-Cartesians abandoned such limitations and applied the criteria for justified knowledge in all domains. But this is, I think, unrealistic. Our beliefs are not isolated from the community to which we belong. There are no wholly inner mental events. There are, rather, acquired dispositions that relate one person to others.

In classical foundationalism, the imagination is disciplined by reason. If the inner belief-control favored by internalists is nothing but a modern illusion, then a person cannot, in social isolation, take a critical position towards her own thoughts through inner reflection. In virtue epistemology, imagination-laden beliefs are examined not only by the individual who harbours them, but by parents, teachers and (in the case of religious imagination) priests. What makes imagination sane, even in religious contexts, is the beneficial role it can play in the development of a person’s mental life, including his or her religious life For example, the epistemic health of a child is consistent with beliefs that it would not be good for an adult to have. The content of a warranted religious imagination is obviously not the same when a person is ten and when she is twenty. Although it might be too childish a view for an adult, imagining God as a very old good man who cares for all his creatures is not a belief which would be vicious in a child. So it is not vicious to tell children that God can be imagined in this way.

In addition to mental and social segregationism, there is, as we indicated, another trait of classical internalist foundationalism: epistemic voluntarism. We are supposed to decide what to believe. So, we can decide not to believe something and not to imagine it. Virtue epistemology does not to accept this kind of epistemic voluntarism. Rather, a critical attitude, and responsibility about one’s own beliefs, is supported by acquired epistemic virtues and not by the self-conscious examination of one’s own perceptions, which one finally accepts or rejects according a priori rules. This implies that becoming rational depends in part upon a kind of epistemic luck. Rationality is not something you decide and control but something you inherit and which makes up a part of what Wittgenstein called your ‘picture of the world’:

One of the main reasons why the imagination has been rejected in classical foundationalism comes from a segregationist view of the mind. Regarding reason, the understanding, the imagination, and sensibility as separate faculties of mind, rather than as the integrated dispositions of one person belonging to an epistemic and social community, classical foundationalism persuaded modern people that there is at least a potential struggle among our mental faculties, and that this antagonistic relation required regulation by means of a critical survey of one’s beliefs. Philosophers followed Descartes’ Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii in proposing rules for the victory of Reason over prejudice, and fundamentally, over imagination. Imagination can have no place if our epistemological ideal is the dictatorship of pure reason over the mind. Images, and thus imagination, are related to the body. Images are proposed by a community to allow people to understand abstract things by making those things concrete and capable of being grasped by the senses. Thus, according to modern epistemology, imagination must be eliminated.

Unlike classical fundationalism, virtue epistemology is not bound to a negative account of imagination, especially religious imagination. It can even explain how religious imagination can be made virtuous. Generally considered, virtue is a disposition to act or to judge appropriately, according to one’s situation. It is not an a priori rule.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, when he wants to explain the virtue of prudence (both a moral and intellectual virtue), Aristotle tells us that we should investigate prudence by considering those who are called prudent. [11] His idea is evidently that virtue is best understood by describing what a virtuous person does in certain circumstances: the way she finds the best thing to do according her situation and the person she is. In speaking of art, Nelson Goodman says that the right question to ask is not ‘What is art?’ but ‘When is art?’, stressing the functional nature of the artwork. I would say that the right question for us here is not ‘What is virtue?’ but ‘When is virtue?’, for a virtuous person does what is suitable in the circumstances. She finds the right path. Like art, virtue has a functional nature.

In discussing Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum says:

So, moral virtue is the ability to perceive what must be done; intellectual virtue the ability to perceive what is to be thought. About religious imagination we can similarly say that is not good or bad in itself but that its quality is to be measured against the standard of what is appropriate for a certain person in a particular epistemic situation. For Aquinas, it is not when we are trying to explain the nature of incorporeal entities that imaginination is appropriate, but in practical religious life— for instance in recalling episodes from the lives of Jesus or the saints or for the purposes of devotion. At certain junctures in a religious life it would simply go against common sense to reject all appeal to images and the imagination in order to preserve a rigorist dogma about rationality.

Virtue is a kind of perception related to a particular situation. It makes you decide or think what is appropriate. Speaking about Aristotle’s account of phantasia, Martha Nussbaum says:

This necessary relation of abstract thoughts to something concrete is what Aquinas talked in terms of conversio ad phantasmata. [14] Epistemic virtue could be considered as the acquired habit of suiting imagination to the kind of object you are thinking about. This is exactly the kind of ability that leads a teacher to find good examples, appropriate to her audience. Detached from epistemic virtue, religious imagination could, indeed, degenerate into superstition and bigotry. But within the reliabilist perspective of epistemic virtue, imagination may play a wholesome and necessary role. By ‘reliabilist’, I mean that a properly functioning mind directed at the truth finds good ways – possibly employing images that prompt thinking – of making religious affairs intelligible.

Imagination is not a virtue, for it is not by itself an excellence. It cannot be a vice, because it is not a deficiency. But in gaining common-sense knowledge, imagination plays a role which depends upon the objects of thought, the individual thinker, and many other special features of the epistemic situation. The mathematician must disregard the imagined features of a triangle, says Descartes. The theologian has to do the same concerning incorporeal entities says Aquinas. But one cannot disregard the concrete deliverances of imagination when thinking about virtue and goodness, for example, or when thinking about religious affairs. In general, one must link words like ‘God’, ‘Resurrection’, ‘Incarnation’, and so on, to particular and concrete things; and here, imagination has a beneficial role to play in the formation of the mind.

Up to this point, I have been very historical and abstract. But what I want to do now is to get you to you feel the point of my historical and abstract remarks. I want to exemplify my own theory and to demonstrate how imagination prompts religious thinking in a constructive way. How can the right answer to the question of an inquiring child be that God is really older than I, as is clear when we look at Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, for example? May we also say that the Virgin Mary is really very beautiful, offering certain Renaissance paintings as a sort of proof? And may we convince a child that the flames in hell are very huge by showing her the famous painting by Memling that represents naked, horrified human beings pushed by disgusting demons into the abominable flames? Following up my idea of a virtuous imagination, my point is now to show how can imagination introduce us to certain Mysteries of the Faith without degenerating into superstition and bigotry. What has been called ostentatio genitalium seems to be a good exemple of the place imagination can virtuously take in the religious life.

In Christian iconography, ostentatio vulnerum, the presentation of Christ’s wounds, plays a very important role. It is important to visualize these wounds and to imagine how Christ physically suffered for us. Ostentatio vulnerum is not simply illustration of Christ’s sufferings, something that is completely outside our understanding of Christ’s Love for men. It is a way of gaining an understanding of what it means for Christ to be the Redeemer: one who suffered for the sake of us sinners.

Ostentatio genitalium, the presentation of Christ’s genital organs, was also very important from before 1400 until around 1650. [15] Why? The first heresies, agnostic docetism for example, did not deny the divinity of Christ but rather denied His humanity. In modern thought, the divinity of Christ has been denied. For example in the very well-known Life of Jesus, published by Ernest Renan in 1863, Christ is one of the finer examples of humanity, but he is not the Incarnated God. One can say that Renan believed about Jesus Christ exactly what Augustine believed before his conversion: that Christ was simply a very distinguished wise man. [16] Renan reflects the deep tendency that, after Kant, led to a moral interpretation of religion and, eventually, to the de-divinisation of Christ. During the Renaissance, Christianity had been confronted with the converse difficulty, that of understanding the humanity of Christ. In Incarnation, God assumes not only mortality but also sexuality. Ostentatio genitalium permits us to imagine what is for us a Mystery: a true Incarnation through which Jesus is at once completely divine and completely human. Let us recall that the humanity of Christ, signified by his sexuality, is also shown by many painters and sculptors in the images of the Crucifixion and the Descent from the Cross, when, using her veil, Mary intervenes to cover Jesus’ nudity. In the representations of Mary with the newborn Jesus, and in pictures of the crucifixion, Christ’s nudity prompts us to think about the Mystery of Incarnation. We may notice that the representation of Christ’s sexuality virtually disappeared after the Renaissance, in all likelihood because modern thought contested Christ’s divinity but not His humanity.

Ostentatio genitalium provides, I think, a good illustration of the role that imagination can play in a virtuous mind trying to think about the Mystery of Incarnation. The revelation of the Child’s sex belongs to a theology of Incarnation. It would be very difficult to present this theology otherwise to non-theologian than by means of the imagination. There is a conversio ad phantasmata realised by images of the Child with His virgin mother. What might be indecency or vulgarity for a non-virtuous person is indeed a kind of mystagogical vision. The prompted imagination of the virtuous person provides the mind with the phantasmata that it needs in order to understand. In short, imagination permits common-sense knowledge to grasp the Mystery of Incarnation.

Peter Geach says in one place:

The mysteries of faith are not a renunciation of reason. They can serve as an encouragement to our power of imagination to open us, when we are young and even later, to some of the deepest things in our life.