Document Type

Paper

Abstract

According to Paul Avis, the imagination has gone through the ringer in both modernity and post modernity. Modernity “assumes a dichotomy between rational discourse, on the one hand, and imagistic thinking, on the other. It privileges logos over against eidos. The former is hailed as the vehicle of knowledge, mastery and progress; the latter dismissed as the source of ignorance, superstition and illusion.”1 Post modernity, on the other hand, has attacked narrative and “An attack on narrative is an attack on metaphor, symbol and myth…Post modernity is clearly as inhospitable to a realist (reality-referring, truth-bearing) concept of imaginative truth as is the modernity deriving from the Enlightenment.”2 In other words, the imagination has been largely devalued as a cognitive device. Throughout my life, I have felt most prevalently the modern attitude toward the imagination. It has seemed to me that conceptions of the imagination have stopped short of all that the imagination is truly capable of. Authors such as Paul Avis have helped me to begin to articulate what those capabilities are. My interest in the imagination has prompted many further questions particularly in the realm of epistemology. And it is these questions that have lead to this paper, and to considering the Eunomian controversy. It is my belief that the imagination and epistemology are deeply tied together and the Eunomian controversy will allow for an exploration of the way in which the two are connected.

Date Accepted/Awarded

2014

Award/Distinction

Presented at Undergraduate Theology Conference at the University of Northwestern Saint Paul

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