John Henry Newman and the Imagination

For John Henry Newman, religion is animated by an imaginative ‘master vision’ which ‘supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace’. All his life, Newman reflected on this ‘master vision’. His reflections on the moral imagination developed out of his understanding of practical wisdom, as characterized by Aristotle - the wisdom that ‘the good man’ has in living a good life. For Newman, the vision at the core of religion completes and perfects the intuitions of the conscience.

John Henry Newman and the Imagination looks at how Newman’s understanding of the moral and visionary imagination developed over the course of his life; and it relates his ideas about the imagination to his portrayals of religious experience, and vision, in his novels and poetry.