Byron's Babbles

On Saturday, I wrote about Our Gifts & Force Multipliers. Today, as I think about all of us being gifts I consider George MacDonald’s view on imagination. He believed that everything of us humans must have been of God first. MacDonald said, “We discover at once, for instance, that where a man would make a machine, or a picture, or a book, God makes the man that makes the book, or the picture, or the machine. Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespeare.” I love this from from MacDonald’s essay, “The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture,” because it suggests that God created us all as gifts. MacDonald believed God created us in his own image to imagine all the things we do.

“We discover at once, for instance, that where a man would make a machine, or a picture, or a book, God makes the man that makes the book, or the picture, or the machine. Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespeare. Or would he construct a drama more immediately his own? He begins with the building of the stage itself, and that stage is a world–a universe of worlds. He makes the actors, and they do not act,–they are their part. He utters them into the visible to work out their life–his drama. When he would have an epic, he sends a thinking hero into his drama, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet. Instead of writing his lyrics, he sets his birds and his maidens a-singing. All the processes of the ages are God’s science; all the flow of history is his poetry.” “The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture” by George MacDonald first published 1867 in A Dish of Orts

MacDonald asserted “The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.” He suggested that human creativity and imagination reflect a divine quality. MacDonald believed that just as God is the ultimate creator, humans, being made in His image, possess the capacity for creativity and imaginative thought. We are gifts – every one of us! This idea emphasizes the notion that our ability to envision and create—whether through art, literature, or innovation—is a gift from the divine. MacDonald believed that the act of imagining something new is not merely a human endeavor but also a way to connect with the divine nature of creation.

MacDonald described imagination as the faculty that allows humans to give form to their thoughts, creating images and ideas that can be expressed in various ways. MacDonald suggested that our creative power highlights the significance of imagination in our capacity to create and understand the world around us.