Creativity and spiritual inspiration: Iain McGilchrist and C.S. Lewis on Reason and Imagination

The surprising connections between McGilchrist's brain science, the origins of Narnia and the idea of Christianity as "myth become fact"

How does creativity work? What’s going on in our brains when we exercise our imaginations? What’s the relationship between the creative imagination and our more deliberative reason?

I’ve been thinking about this from a few different angles. An artist friend, Donna Matthews, was sharing recently some of her thinking with me recently about the similarities between creative flow states and spiritual experience, especially in terms of improvisation and speaking in tongues, which I find fascinating.

I’ve also been editing a book on C. S. Lewis, which has had me revisiting some of his writing on imagination, and on how he came to create the world of Narnia.

And finally, one of the most interesting thinkers I’ve been reading recently is neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, whose wide-ranging work addresses these questions as part of his larger project understanding our minds, society and reality.

Let’s see if I can weave together some of the themes I’ve seen emerging, out of the cauldron of these inspirations…

Brain hemispheres and a new view of reality

Earlier this year, I embarked on McGilchrist’s whopping The Matter With Things (hereafter TMWT), published by Perspectiva Press. I’d been intrigued by his ideas from references to his writings and from online interviews. A central theme of his writing is the importance of the imagination, and how it isn’t about ‘making stuff up’ but integral to perceiving and relating to reality.

What makes McGilchrist particularly interesting is how he combines a depth of scientific understanding of the brain with a philosophical interest in what science can’t tell us. He argues we need more than the analytical left-hemisphere of the brain that works in facts and data, we need the creative right hemisphere that grasps wholes rather than parts, and meaning not just information. Indeed, he says that “imagination is fundamental to all approaches to truth – not least to science” (TMWT, chapter 8, ‘Creativity’, p. 379, according to the electronic version I’m reading in Everand).

According to McGilchrist in his chapter on Creativity, there are different temporal stages to the process of creativity: preparation, incubation and illumination, to which a further step of verification can be added though it’s not strictly creative (p. 381).

Something that struck me in reading his account is how well it resonates with C. S. Lewis’s account of his own creativity and how he came to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Let’s dive in to the ‘cauldron of story’ (to borrow a phrase from Tolkien) and explore the connections…

Preparation

The first of these phases, preparation, is partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly willed and partly serendipitous, and may go on for years. It is generally associated with some pretty hard work, acquiring skills and knowledge, thinking consciously and mulling things over unconsciously, so as to prepare the fertile ground in which the seed can grow. (McGilchrist, TMWT p. 382)

For Lewis, the ‘cauldron of story’ was bubbling from an early age, when he was caught up in myths and legends such as the Norse myths. It was the combination of Lewis’s love of myth and his later Christian faith that gave birth to Narnia.

One story that made a particularly vivid impression of Lewis was George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance, which he read when he was sixteen. Writing in Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes how he was enchanted by a quality that had “already charmed [him] in Malory, Spenser, Morris and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodes. I do now. It was Holiness”.

Part of the power of Phantastes was that it gave Lewis an enchanted view of the world, even while he was still an atheist:

But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged… that night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptised; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest idea what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.

This potent mix of fantasy, imagination and faith was bubbling in Lewis’s mind for years to come…

Incubation

The second phase, incubation, is unconscious, and not under voluntary control: it can only be impeded by conscious effort and introspection, much as it does a plant no good to keep digging it up to see how its roots are growing. (McGilchrist, TMWT)

Inspiration often takes time to grow. The seed might be an image or an idea. But often creativity means giving it space to develop unconsciously, growing in its own time.

Naturally this is a stage that often goes uncommented on; artists and authors don’t tend to have much to say about the slow unconscious growth of their ideas. But Lewis, in his New York Times essay Sometimes Fairy-Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said hinted at it when he talked about images bubbling up as the raw material for story:

In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not.

In another essay, It all began with a picture… Lewis elaborates further:

All my seven Narnian books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’

The seed of Narnia, the first image, was growing from when Lewis was 16 (perhaps not coincidentally the age he first read Phantastes) through to around 40 years’ old. That’s a long time!

So if you’ve got ideas that are bubbling in your head over perhaps years or even decades, don’t be discouraged: perhaps it is just waiting for the right time to bloom.

Illumination

The third phase, illumination, flowers out of the unconscious quite suddenly, again unwilled, and is effortless and accompanied by feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and fulfilment. Insight is effectively this third phase of creativity considered in isolation: the so-called ‘light bulb’ moment. (McGilchrist, TMWT, p. 381)

I love this moment in the creative process where an idea just seems to ‘click’ and flow naturally, especially if it’s from a seed that I’ve been trying to ‘make work’ for a while. Lewis in Sometimes Fairy Stories… describes it this way:

[The story] is now a thing inside [the Author] pawing to get out. He longs to see that bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.

For Lewis, the ‘lightbulb’ moment for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe specifically was the discovery of Aslan:

At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.

Creative states and prayer

I found McGilchrist’s meditation on creativity, linking it to the kind of receptivity cultivated in prayer, to be particularly intriguing and suggestive:

You can’t make the creative act happen. You have to do certain things, otherwise it won’t happen. But it won’t happen while you are doing them. They create the terms on which the thing will arise. It’s a question of how we dispose our consciousness – that is, how we attend. Attention is a creative act, and creation is really about the induction of a highly attentive state. It is like an ear that is listening and receptive, without actually having anything at all clear yet to hear. You’ve got to have some intimation of what it is that’s coming, however, because otherwise it couldn’t come. On the other hand, you can’t actually close down too precisely on what sort of thing it is, because if you do, you will undoubtedly close down on something else. It involves remaining open, and yet being able to receive something which is, in the end, quite specific and particular. (In this, it is somewhat like prayer.) (TMTW, p. 382)

Listening to God, like trying to “catch” creative inspiration, requires the cultivation of a particular kind of attentiveness, a receptivity to the more-than-rational (though not irrational, I’d hasten to add).

While I’d want to distinguish between creative inspiration generally, the inspiration Christians experience as they are led by the Spirit in their personal circumstances, and the foundational inspiration of Scripture as being ‘God-breathed’, there does seem to be a family likeness around attention and openness that connects them all.

Verification

McGilchrist is quite down on this stage, talking about it merely as ‘Quality Control’ and not properly part of creativity.

But as the saying goes, ‘writing is rewriting’ and for my part I think it’s important not to underplay the deliberate, iterative work of refining a creative work, following that initial burst of inspiration. This is creativity too, of a sort; good editing involves both a right-brained appreciation of the whole and its creative affect, and a left-brained attention to detail and manipulation of form to most fully achieve the intended impact. (But then, I would say that, as a freelance editor!)

Lewis, in the essay Sometimes Fairy-Stories… saw an important part for both the writer as ‘the Author’ (the right-brained, creative processes described so far, which makes a creative work ‘pleasing’) and ‘the Man’ – the author as ‘man, citizen or Christian’ (the left-brained, more analytical approach which shapes the creative work and makes it ‘edifying’).

Lewis summed it up like this:

There are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work, which may be called Author’s reason and the Man’s. If only one of these is present, then, so far as I am concerned, the book will not be written. If the first [the Author’s reason] is lacking, it can’t; if the second [the Man’s reason] is lacking, it shouldn’t.

Lewis is clear that for him the Artist’s reason came first. He says that the idea he “drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them” is “pure moonshine”. Rather, “everything began with image”. The Christian element arose as “part of the bubbling”, and “the Man in me began to have his turn” as Lewis realised he could explore Christian ideas “stealing past the watchful dragons” by making them “appear in their real potency” though casting them into an imaginary world.

This hints at a deeper difference between how McGilchrist and Lewis see the relationship between Imagination and Reason, between right-hemispheric creativity and left-hemispheric concern for propositions and factuality. In terms of spiritual truth, Lewis is much more concerned to tether imagination to reason and integrate the two, rather than prioritising the right-brain to the degree that McGilchrist does.

Myth and Fact

I’ve focused in this article on McGilchrist’s insights into creativity, but his project in The Matter With Things is far broader. For a detailed overview of Iain McGilchrist’s worldview, I highly recommend David McIllory’s summary, condensing over 600,000 words into a mere 6,000(!), and Christian engagement with McGilchrist’s thought.

I want to hone in on one further, broader aspect of the relationship between left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere according to McGilchrist, and that’s its implications for religious truth. (If you’re not religious or a Christian, I’m glad you’re reading and hope you’ll be curious to explore this connection with me – think of it in terms of meaning-making, if that’s more your jam!)

In chapter 28 of The Matter With Things, McGilchrist has the following to say:

The way in which one equips oneself to understand religious truths is not – fairly obviously, but I’m afraid it still needs saying – by the scientific method. God is not a force in physics that we have not yet discovered. Propositional beliefs are what science has to offer. Yet propositional belief, while indisputably valuable, is the least that religion has to offer. Indeed we are not dealing primarily with propositions at all, certainly not with a simple body of propositions the truth of which could in principle be determined in the same way that the date of the Big Bang, or the number of bonds in a carbon atom, can be determined. Religion offers deep, imaginative archetypal truths about the human condition that cannot easily be expressed in any other way [emphasis mine], never mind in the sort of prose you might expect in a science text book. And such truths are primarily experiential, although they may have cognitive aspects.

McGilchrist is skeptical of the capacity of “propositional truth” (left-hemisphere) to capture religious truth, seeing religion as offering “imaginative archetypal truths” (right-hemisphere). But in this he is drawing a divide that Lewis would sharply disagree with.

As in creativity, so with religious truth, Lewis emphasises a more balanced integration of the two ways of thinking. Crucial to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was the marriage of myth and fact, reason and imagination, archetypal truth and propositional truth.

Lewis lays out his position in his essay Myth Become Fact, which can be read online. He discusses the problem of abstract intellect in contrast to concrete experience (left hemisphere and right hemisphere, though Lewis does not discuss it in terms of the brain). We can’t think abstractly about something and also experience it fully; something is lost in the process of abstract reasoning. He says “Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”

As far as Christianity goes, Lewis’ key idea is as follows:

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth [like McGilchrist, perhaps?] would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it […]

But Christians also need to be reminded […] that what became fact was a myth, that it carries with it into the world of fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. […]

For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

For Lewis, the Christian myth actually happened; mythos and logos are united; it can satisfy both left and right brain, reason and imagination, in an integrated whole.

For me, I find this a more satisfying account of reality than one in which religious truth is archetypal but not literal.

As far as I’ve come across so far, I’ve not heard McGilchrist engage with Lewis’s idea of “Myth Become Fact” but I’d be fascinated to hear him do so, since Lewis takes seriously many of the distinctions that McGilchrist discusses and sees as important.

I suspect McGilchrist would see Lewis’s approach as giving too much weight to the demands of the left hemisphere in realms that the right hemisphere is best equipped to deal with, but I hope he would understand the appeal of the integration Lewis sees between the two, even if unpersuaded of it. And in the union of reason and imagination that Lewis extols, I think there is a path for Christians to integrate McGilchrist’s many insights with more traditional theological understandings of the Christian faith.

However exactly we put the parts together, we all need both hemispheres. We need intuition and imagination, and we need logic and analytical reasoning. But in the creative process, for both Lewis and McGilchrist, it is the openness to imagination that comes first, which makes us receptive to the wild and mysterious power of inspiration.

Cultivating imaginative attention

What then, are the implications for us as creatives, and perhaps also as spiritual seekers?

An important part of creativity is getting out of the way of these processes, to make space to experience the world around us, apart from the endless bombardment of distractions.

Turn off your mobile; go for a long walk; experience nature; read good books. Give yourself planned unplanned time, not even to think so much as to potter and to let thoughts and creativity come when they may.

At the same time, cultivate habits of regular writing time or other creative practice. Routines don’t guarantee creativity, but they put the nets in the water to catch the fish of inspiration when they come swimming past.

Similarly, as a Christian, I seek to cultivate attentiveness to the world, but particularly grateful attentiveness, seeing in every sunlit moment and every healthy pleasure the gift of God to us in creation. Prayer is a way of cultivating a rhythm of godwardness that makes me ready to hear his still small voice not just in the pages of Scripture, but in the everyday world around me, laden with meaning. As with creativity, habits and routines such as a daily quiet time aren’t themselves spiritual life, but they help us catch hold of what: spiritual habits and disciplines put our sails up, ready for us to catch the Spirit as he blows as he pleases in our lives.

So: slow down. Pay attention. Be ready to receive inspiration, and the breath of the Holy Spirit.

Who knows what you’ll discover? Who knows what seeds of creativity and spiritual insight might bloom?

What is your experience of creativity — do the accounts above resonate with you? What do you see as the connection between artistic and spiritual inspiration, if any?

Let me know your views in the comments, whether you’re coming at it more from a creative perspective as a writer or artist, or from the viewpoint of meaning-making, spirituality or religion.