1980 Imagination: aesthetic and religious

Abstract

The philosopher Mary Warnock (1924–2019) first delivered this article in 1980 as an Oxford University sermon when she was a fellow at St Hugh’s College. In it she links aesthetic imagination to her understanding of the Christian ‘story’. For her, ‘no sharp line can be drawn between imagination employed in the religious mode and the aesthetic imagination’. As a philosopher she was an expert on existentialism and, later, medical ethics. She was also a communicant Anglican churchgoer, but she seldom wrote directly about Christian faith, so this article is particularly significant. Editor.