The Unseen World - Part 2: A Falsely-Seeded Imagination

This is the second of a multi-part series. Click here for the first entry.

“Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?' A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!” - J.R.R.Tolkien (from The Two Towers)

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

You live in a world which includes the supernatural. Watching a sunrise in the mountains, or dressing up for a wedding, or playing games on your cellphone while you wait to get a flu shot, there is an unseen component to your surroundings, another aspect to reality which eludes your observation. We have trouble visualizing this, precisely because it is unseen. Each of the scenarios above (sunrise, party, flu shot) can be clearly pictured in your mind, perhaps you even imagined them as you read that sentence. Take a moment and do it now if you haven't. The unseen world, by contrast, cannot be imagined with any realistic help to the mind's eye, as you (99% of you, at least) have no realistic points of reference for it, and your attempts to do so will probably only render it less credible by all being based on fictional/fanciful depictions.

Yet I chose those three scenarios above for a reason: all three are considered liminal occasions in many cultures. The term "liminal" comes from the Latin for "threshold," and refers to a sort of boundary phase, where you are passing from one place or state to another. You are probably more familiar with a related word, subliminal. Subliminal describes something which does not reach the threshold of sensory awareness, like the old idea of subliminal messaging, with images flashed onto the screen during a film too fast for you to notice, but perhaps unconsciously persuading you that you wanted to drink a coke or buy more popcorn. (Which seemingly doesn't work; the original claimed success of increased sales is a hoax, though still floating around the internet)

A great example of liminality in story-telling would be in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Prior to Lucy actually going into the wardrobe (a liminal object which is the threshold between Narnia and our world), there are a whole series of liminal moments. First the long trip into the countryside, leaving behind London and arriving at a mysterious old house. Then the adventure to explore the old house itself, and all the various rooms and series of passages that draw them deeper into the house, past various symbolic objects (suits of armor, harps, huge old books) that take us, with the children, away from the normal world outside and deep into some other kind of realm, the realm which, while still in our world, can have something like a magical wardrobe in it.

A door between worlds.

While we must turn back from that pleasant analogy (I haven't read Narnia in too long, Christmas is the perfect time to start the series again... in order of writing, of course, as is the only proper way, beginning with LWW), hopefully it serves to illustrate the point. There is an invisible passage, a liminal boundary, and once you cross it, things are different on the other side.

Sunrises, weddings, and the administration of medicine are all occasions where an invisible boundary is being crossed; in the case of sunrise, night is turning to day, in the case of a wedding, a mysterious and sacred bond between a man and a woman is being pronounced, and for the case of medical care, in traditional or folk cultures the healing arts are very often considered to cross over the boundary of the purely natural world into the supernatural.

That is our focus for this post and more or less for this whole series of posts: Most people throughout history have always believed in this supernatural threshold which can be crossed in manifold situations. The Bible does not teach us that that other side of reality does not exist (it assumes it, rather), but that God above invaded this corrupted world by not only entering it but crossing the threshold of the supernatural and actually being born in the flesh as a historical person.

Jesus literally crosses the threshold, pun respectfully intended, by his own death on the cross. He is the Door. (Aslan is the Wardrobe!) He is the reverse siege tower from heaven down to earth that mercifully allows travel back up and out from the walls of our exile. Condemned by the visible authorities of His day in order to triumph over the invisible ones, He was the God no one has seen, seen by many witnesses; the perfect completion of love and suffering to reconcile the irreconcilable perpendiculars of immaculate justice and endless mercy.

Even centuries after He returned past the liminal threshold to prepare for our arrival and the final Divine invasion which will overthrow the kingdom of darkness forever, we see and remember Him in the sacrament of holy communion, and observe that the Christian faith has been a topic of conversation between the world's most powerful leaders, from Ancient Rome* to 2017 Russia**.

(*- An interesting letter exchange between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan regarding what to do with Christians, who refused to worship Caesar's image) (**- An investigation of Putin's friendly but nuanced relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church). 

In the Christian faith there is a continual play of seen/unseen going on, then, a dance with an invisible partner, a tension of evidence and faith, impressively answered and distressingly unanswered prayers, which reflects the seen/unseen nature of all reality. So we will understand our faith better, and the Bible will seem more urgent and relevant to us as it should, when we recognize that the world we live in does include this supernatural aspect, whether we see much evidence of it in our daily life or not. You can in Taiwan, if you live here long term or spend much time in certain locales, and Aragorn's answer to Eomer in the opening quote can be a sort of answer to us as well. We do live in a scientific world, but that does not preclude the fact of there being more going on than merely that.

This is because scientific inquiry, an extremely valuable and useful tool when pursued correctly (such an effective one that it's being discarded as a means of antagonizing Christianity because in the end all the evidence is turning out to be on our side), does not describe the entirety of what lies below heaven, merely the material bits.

To be sure, one prevalent modern belief system, what we might call scientism, insists that anything that science cannot explain yet is merely something it will figure out later. This is what I call the science-of-the-gaps defense, the exact analogy of the argument mistakenly used by many Christians in the past and some still today, claiming that the inexplicable is evidence for God. But we do not find our evidence for God hiding in the inexplicable, but clearly seen from what has been made, because we haven't based our observations on the premise that there is no God.

In folk cultural worldviews, on the other hand, we have the opposite problem, where most areas of life are considered to be affected by the supernatural but traditions regarding this are rarely if ever examined critically. (Indeed, people don't even bother artificially reconciling mutually exclusive superstitions with each other).

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Europe was the same way before Christianity and modernity combined forces to condemn the unseen world as spiritually opposed to God, and to disbelieve in it entirely, replacing it with a solely material universe to be measured, explained, and mastered by science. That stance became the default worldview of anyone growing up in the West, and various Western-influenced subcultures around the world, so that now even sincere Christians in Western countries may need a lot of faith to believe in things like angels or demons, or even the miracles of Jesus, because their worldview has no place for what the Bible describes in a relatively straightforward manner.

2. When Art is Unreliable

(Note: as I begin this section I am proud to say that I have multiple Christian friends who use their gifting in art to serve God, and I have been blessed, intrigued, and edified by many of their works. So when I speak of unreliable Christian or Bible-referencing art, I know there are exceptions. Lord willing, there will be many more exceptions in the years to come, and Christian art will rise to glorify its Creator, like "living hymns of stone and light," and not be primarily mass-produced to meet a large niche industry demand)

If you grew up in that kind of rationalist-influenced culture which still describes most of the postmodern West, the moment you try to envision life being lived in the context of a supernatural world unsupervised by science, immediately your imagination may begin to supply imagery of the supernatural from sources with which we have been inundated since childhood. That is often more harmful than helpful for Christians, since such imagery is nearly always misleading.

Much Christian imagery reveals no attempt at scriptural accuracy, relying more on Renaissance-era art or other influences than on what brief depictions we have in the Bible of the world beyond our ken. So whenever you see images of Satan lounging arrogantly on the throne of hell, or cute little chubby baby angels (putti), you can thank whomever it was that began misapplying the work of Milton or Raphael, since the Bible describes Satan as cast from heaven to earth and roaming around the planet, and heaven's angels as intimidating enough that their first words are typically "do not fear." And those are just the ambassador angels with roughly humanish form, not the four-fold keruvim (cherubim, but people confuse the putti with cherubs now, "keruvim" is more like the Hebrew pronunciation), or the mighty six winged seraphim, "the burning ones".

Not to get too far afield, by the way, but the Hebrew word saraph is transliterated (not translated, but given an English spelling) into Seraph/Seraphim in Isaiah 6 when it's talking about angels in the throne room of God, but refers to a "fiery" flying serpent in other Old Testament passages and period literature. (See the entries here) Translating Isaiah 6:2 consistently, then, you'd get "above Him were fiery serpents, each with six wings..." Since prophets describing their visions did the best they could using the knowledge and language they had, we can't say whether the angelic beings simply reminded Isaiah of whatever were the "fiery," snake-like creatures which God sent into the Israelite camp to punish them in the desert further out from Edom, or looked exactly like them, but it seems clear that neither the "shiny person, except with six cool wings," or the more esoteric "pretty much just six conjoined wings" images are what Isaiah was seeing and describing. (And if Satan is a fallen angel, and some angels look like fiery serpents/dragons, it makes sense that he shows up as a snake in the garden and a dragon in revelation. This suggests the possibility that Satan is a fallen seraph, though we will pause with that interesting thought and not stray from scripture into apocryphal speculation. For now we're sticking with this Hebrew note.) 

Not angels. Possibly deciding on where to eat lunch.

But angels are heavenly servants and depictions of heaven are in fact given to us in scripture, so our imagination has some authorized help in that case, even if people choose not to make use of it. How are we to envision ourselves, on the other hand, living on earth, but in the midst of the supernatural? I don't know if we can do it helpfully. The unseen world is precisely that, "unseen". The more you try to visualize it, the more your mind will conjure up Hollywood special effects or folk tale illustrations,
and that will seem fictional and unlike your daily experience of life, and you will doubt reality on the basis of a false characterization, or believe what is not reality, like those people who fall for every
"child goes to heaven" tale which somehow always manage to stray from anything like a scriptural depiction at some point.

As an example of the power of visual suggestion to compete with written information: I am a devoted fan of the Lord of the Rings series and all things Tolkien (as is obvious to anyone not new to my blog), and so I am quite glad that I read the books before I watched the Peter Jackson films. Because that means Frodo, and Sam, and Aragorn, and Gandalf, and all the others, as envisioned in my imagination, will always have the first spot, and the images of the actors who played them are only overlaid on top of this, influential though they be.

But for people who have only ever seen the films, or saw them first before later reading the books, their mental image of Frodo will be more or less synonymous with that of Elijah Wood and his interpretation of the character in the films. Because most people's imagination of a literary character is at least somewhat limited in detail, the image of an actor fills in all the details first, and their imagination, even supplied with details from a book that may slightly go against the film version, can't compete with all the powerful visual information of a modern film. (Feel free to comment if you are an exception to this, and watched the films first yet envision Frodo and/or other characters as looking different)

It would be nice to know exactly how Tolkien envisioned Frodo in his mind, if only for comparison purposes, but it's not a pressing issue because it's a fictional tale. It does not describe our world as it is, nor is it meant to, though it was surely intended to incline us toward those true and beautiful things in this world. But this same problem exists for believers in a more urgent sense. Our imaginations have been "pre-seeded" with the inaccurate Renaissance Art and Hollywood renditions of Biblical and/or spiritual realities, and that's what sticks in the mind, even when it clashes with scripture.

"Not my Frodo.." (but Wood did a good job, all considering)

So if you find things like heaven and hell and angels and demons a bit difficult to swallow, and believe in their factual existence only because scripture assumes and demands that you do, I want to argue that it's much more of a challenge because the depictions of these things you've seen previously are typically fanciful and frequently unscriptural. It's might not be that your faith is weak, it's that your imagination has been supplied with images that are not accurate depictions of spiritual realities, and there is a cognitive dissonance there that is in fact legitimate.

Again from Lewis:

"The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you." (C.S.Lewis, from The Screwtape Letters) 

Lewis was writing in the decades when England was in its modernist rebellion against the faith, something which reportedly began after the horrors of World War I began undermining people's faith in the Church's authority and handle on truth (worth a look in some future post to see if that's really the case or not) and continued in the decades after "winning" World War II at a very high cost, when England spun off influential pop icons on its way down into domestic cultural malaise.

Thus he writes of "devils" (we'd use the term demons now) as being comic figures, and you can perhaps imagine that being the case in an old British comedy, something played for laughs, leaping about in red pajamas, as he mentions. Nowadays, with interest in the supernatural having risen and remained high, and modernism in the rear-view mirror as we head into a new Western era of spiritual darkness (borrowing also from the Eastern spiritual darkness which was never much interrupted by Christendom), they're more of a gothic and sinister or horror/possession film topic. So not so much of a laughing matter, but the principle remains the same: If you ask people to believe in something they saw a version of interpreted in CGI (perhaps poorly), it's going to be easy for their skepticism to creep in, even though what the Bible talks about is not at all like the Hollywood portrayal in the vast majority of cases.

This is true for believers with regards to other matters of faith beyond angels and demons. I have, at times in my life, even caught myself struggling with doubts about the reality of heaven itself, only to realize that I wasn't doubting heaven at all. What I was struggling with was the idea of it being "like" some picture or illustration of it that I'd seen, which seemed nice but very far from an eternal abode with the Creator of all things.

No effort of imagination is sufficient to conceive of that, of course, and Paul references Isaiah 64 in 1 Corinthians 2 in passing as he says that “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” - it is something the Spirit reveals, yet what is revealed is wisdom of God and spiritual truths, not specifics about the accommodations of infinite life, which must necessarily be of a quality that we cannot imagine in our finite, time-bound consciousness. (One reason I don't worry if I can't entirely conceive of the biblical description either--my earth-bound conceptions could never come close)

3. Delete the Spam in your Spiritual Visual Cache

If the prophets were staggered, then, and struggled to use the most beautiful things they could think of on earth to describe the images God showed them of spiritual realities, then at least we can seed our imagination with what they wrote, and not blatantly unbiblical or confused, apocryphal images from pop culture.

So my first suggestion is to clear your spiritual imagination cache a little. Start erasing.

Erase Saint Peter with a quill pen at a little desk in front of baroque gold gates and boring white clouds. Erase a red-caped Satan with a Poseidon trident enthroned over what looks like an interesting Super Mario lava world. Erase the dark images used by Hollywood to depict the evil and demonic, and the often even darker ones used in Asian horror films. Erase the medieval inn Mary and Joseph did not get turned away from in Bethlehem (There were no Prancing Pony style medieval inns in those days, with an apologetic Barliman sticking his head out to inform them that all the rooms are full, even the Hobbit-styled ones. The story may be compelling, but a realistic and not anachronistic understanding of the story will certainly be more compelling). Erase the chubby little putti (or confine them to their rightful place as a feature of art history), and also erase the idea that we will float around like taskless angels with standard-issue harps. We will not be like angels; we are adopted sons and daughters of God--we will judge them.

Then, having erased all the erroneous and contradictory images you picked up along the way, go read scripture. You may notice an interesting contrast... In popular media, the powers of good in any supernatural sense are often portrayed as less compelling, "good because they're good, not because they're impressive," or get less screen time altogether, while the bad guys are cool and powerful and command everyone's attention.
However the Bible does the opposite: you will find fascinatingly detailed descriptions of angels, with eyes and wings and wheels, but little to nothing about what demons look like; detailed yet tough-to-envision descriptions of the celestial city, with its foundations of precious stones and gates that are not described as "pearly" but in fact as being like huge pearls, and beautifully staggering attempts to describe the throne room of God, but only a little about the lake of fire prepared as an eternal punishment for unrepentant rebels against God's authority, and precious little indeed about the "place of the dead," where the unsaved await the final judgment.

It seems that God wanted scripture filled with images of the most transcendent beauty imaginable, contrasted to the stark, sinful reality of the violent ancient world, with as little space given to the dark spiritual side of fallen earth as possible. (What superstitious/folk religions primarily concern themselves with, with frightening tales and intimidating idols.)

In Closing

In the aesthetic sense of scripture, Good is strong and beautiful and compelling, certainly not boring, and Evil is a corrupted parody of or absence of it. Demons are described not as "dark angels" but as "unclean spirits," and they cause disease, self-harm, and disfigurement. The place of the dead (those not in Christ) is described not as Dante's macabre but interesting Inferno, nor as a sort of burning lava world, but as a dark, watery pit, away from light and life.

So don't let your spiritual imagination be populated by unreliable at best (and often outright deceptive, as we'll bring up in the next part of the series) images and conceptions, false lighthouses that guide your ship of faith nearer to the rocks of cognitive dissonance. If the Bible is silent on something, don't fill in the space with human imagination and call that what the Bible asks you to believe. And if the Bible describes unseen realities, let its own words speak louder than the media we are bombarded with in modern life.

If that takes a lot of mental effort... well, most worthwhile things do.