Our world today is facing a crisis of meaning that is rooted to a large extent in a crisis of truth. To understand this and to find a way out, we need to expand how we think about and seek truth beyond those offered us by modernity and postmodernity.

Modernity and Postmodernity

The modern world grew out of an increasing emphasis on reason as the best guide to truth. Methodologically, reason includes induction, or drawing conclusions based on empirical observations; deduction, or drawing conclusions based on logical analysis; and abduction, or inference to best explanation. None of these are ironclad guarantees of truth, but, it is argued, they give us the best chance of finding or at least approximating it.

On the other hand, the postmodern world rejects the possibility of knowing objective truth, seeing everything instead in terms of subjectivity or powerplays by the elites. At least that’s what they claim: somehow, they expect you to think of their ideas as objectively true explanations of the way the world works despite rejecting the idea of objective truth.

When someone tells you they don’t believe in objective truth, take them at their word and don’t believe that what they’re telling you is true.

With that in mind, let’s forget postmodernism and go back to modernity. I suspect that most people would agree that reason can lead us to truth, at least within some limits. It is, after all, a faculty given by God to help us understand the world. Christians would add revelation as another source for truth, but even there, we tend to use reason as the vehicle to understand revelation.

But this raises the question of whether reason the only way to find truth. I want to make the case that imagination, another faculty given by God, can also lead us to truth, especially to truths inaccessible to reason.

Reason and Imagination

Let’s start with C.S. Lewis. Lewis wrote that “reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the natural organ of meaning.” When he wrote that, he did so as a self-described rationalist like his Oxford colleagues. He is, in other words, using the word “truth” in a very specific way: truth is what is empirically verifiable or logically necessary. The problem is, though, that this approach to truth only gives us facts. It doesn’t tell us what those facts mean or what their significance is. And further, to even use reason, we need to recognize meaning in the raw material we reason about or all we are left with is literal non-sense. Imagination thus precedes reason. As a result, according to Lewis, imagination is connected to truth even if it isn’t its “natural organ.”

I would go further, however, and argue that Lewis’s definition of truth here is too narrow. Whatever rationalists might argue, meaning is a component of truth and, as Lewis argued, you can’t get to meaning through reason. You need imagination.

Finding Meaning in Stories and Poems

For example, consider Jesus’ parables. To get to the meaning of these, you have to go beyond simple reasoning. You interpret them by looking at the story or at what things like mustard seeds do in the physical world, and by an imaginative leap, draw analogies to human life. If we make the right connections, we find truth or possibly many truths as we draw out the different implications of the story.

Or take poetry—the Psalms, for example. In Psalm 1, the righteous man is described as being like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. To understand what is being said, we need to think about trees, water, fruit, and leaves and once again use our imagination to draw analogies to what those things suggest about someone whose delight is in the law of the Lord, on which he meditates day and night.

But this isn’t limited to Scripture, nor is it a new idea. I believe it was the ancient Greek writer Xenophon who reported on a man whose father told him that knowing Homer would make him a better person. As a result, the man memorized the entire Iliad and Odyssey. Why would knowing the text of these poems make you a better person? Because like all good stories and great works of literature, the meaning of these epics is not found in the plot (and not in the gruesome depictions of deaths in battle), but in what the stories tell us about human nature, about right and wrong, about virtue and vice, and a host of other important ideas that only come to light through applying our imagination and asking questions of the text. The meaning of the stories is different from the plot.

The same principle applies to fairy tales, legends, and myths. Lewis argued that myth bridges the gap between our knowledge of this world, which he called the Shadowlands, and ultimate reality. Lewis’s fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien agreed and saw myth as a way that truth broke into the world. He commented, “After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.” This explains why some patterns in myth and legend are common across the world and why you need to get beyond the simple plot of the stories to get to their deeper significance.

Can We Trust Imagination?

There is much more to be said about Lewis and Tolkien’s ideas about myth and I will explore those more in future posts. But for now, we need to consider the obvious objection to the idea that imagination is a route to truth: I can imagine a lot of things that are not real, that are ridiculous, that are spiritually dangerous. Imagination has drawn people into the occult; people who are mentally ill often cannot distinguish between truth and their imaginings. So what prevents imagination from leading us astray? Isn’t imagination just another word for fiction? After all, when we tell people that something is “just their imagination,” what we mean is that what they are thinking is not true and not founded on anything real.

The potential of imagination to mislead us is a fair point, though the same can be said about reason, which has led people astray and continues to do so.

Synergy

There are several ways to answer this problem. First, what choice do we have? If we want to find meaning, imagination is necessary. Facts alone won’t get us there, and as Lewis points out, even reason depends on a prior act of the imagination. The alternative is already playing itself out in the crisis of meaning in the culture. This comes in part from postmodernism’s rejection of truth, but also from the materialism that underpins much of modernity. If matter and energy are all that exist, we are in a meaningless cosmos since meaning is neither matter nor energy. And if there’s no meaning in the universe, there is no meaning in our lives. The only way out of this is to reject postmodernism, materialism, and rationalism and find room for imagination as a tool for finding Truth.

But an untethered imagination is not likely to lead to truth, though imagination is never truly untethered. It builds on things we have seen, experienced, or heard. And this provides a control for our imagination. We can use reason to help us discern if our imaginings are plausible. By the nature of things, we cannot prove meaning through reason, but if what we imagine genuinely contradicts things that are verifiable, we know that our imaginings are very likely wrong.

Interestingly, it can work both ways. Just as reason can check our imagination, imagination can fuel reason. To pick just one example, Albert Einstein’s work on relativity began with imagining things like what he would experience if he traveled at the speed of light. He also explained relativity using stories about trains. Most if not all scientific advances come from an imaginative “what if” on the part of scientists.

Thus, reason and imagination can and should work together as we seek to find Truth (including meaning). Both are faculties given to us by God that perform different but complementary roles to help us make sense of the world and our place in it. As Lewis points out, reason depends on imagination and so both are always involved in our thinking, but we need to be more aware of this and to pay more attention to the imagination to counterbalance modernity’s overemphasis on reason.