Beholding and Becoming

Why what we pretend to be might make us what we are: imitation, moral formation, and the Christian imagination.

Rembrandt van Rijn (and Workshop?) (Dutch, 1606 - 1669 ), The Apostle Paul, c. 1657, oil on canvas, Widener Collection

This essay is an adaptation of a presentation I gave in October 2024.

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Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. [Romans 12:2 RSV]

In ancient Rome, the status of actors was ambiguous at best. Livy tells us men engaged in something called the ars ludicra were removed from the tribal list of voters and from army service.[1] Cicero would make similar comments in the fourth book of his Republic,[2] and we also learn from Cicero that acting for pay was particularly disgraceful.[3] How long the stigma against acting lasted and its reasons are debated, and the history is unclear, though the fact of the matter is certainly intriguing.

Without trying to make any historical claim, it seems to me that we might have an intuitive sense that acting can be inauthentic. Following Cicero’s praise of the actor that did not take pay, we can see there is something suspicious about someone getting paid to pretend to be something one is not. In this essay, I want to explore the act of imitation—which extends to theater and, in a special way, to music—and the role it plays in moral formation.

First, I will look at and try to summarize part of Iain McGilchrist’s book on the divided brain, The Master and His Emissary, particularly the parts that expound upon imitation and the biological nature of man. Then, I look at some of the more philosophical approaches to the importance of imitation. Next, I look at Christian authors and what they say about poetics and the life of holiness. I conclude that imitation plays an essential preparatory role in the moral development of all persons and that the music, theater, books, and paintings that we keep ought to be closely, if not jealously, guarded to 1) “lead us not into temptation” and 2) inspire the appetite of wonder, that is, ignite our interest in reality.

The overarching thesis of Iain McGilchrist’s neuroscientific work is that our brain, which is divided into a left and right hemisphere, has shaped Western Culture as we know it. The Western World, with its hyper-rationalistic understanding, divorcing the data of the senses from claims of reality, is—as McGilchrist argues—a consequence of the left hemisphere taking over.[4]

According to McGilchrist, it is in the right hemisphere where thought originates, which is then processed for speech by the left hemisphere and finally integrated again by the right. In a study by Goldberg and Costa, we learn that new experiences of any kind—from music to words, real-life objects, and imaginary constructions—it is the right hemisphere that does the engaging. However, as soon as something becomes familiar, it becomes datum and becomes the concern of the left hemisphere only.[5] The right hemisphere is associated with the living and incarnate, whereas the left hemisphere has an affinity for the static and determined.

McGilchrist summarizes this sometimes by saying that if the left hemisphere focuses on the part, the right sees the whole.[6]

In chapter three, McGilchrist spends a significant amount of time discussing the development of language. In particular, he focuses on the concept of music as the proto-language. He claims that “music does not symbolize emotional meaning, which would require that it be interpreted; it metaphorizes it—‘carries it over’ direct to our unconscious minds.”[7]

In other words, music is an imitation of the emotion experienced. It is the outpouring of right hemisphere experience, which, in a way, skips the intermediary of the left hemisphere atomizing and is capable of allowing two or more people to share in an identical experience simultaneously. The British neurologist Oliver Sacks goes so far to say that “In such a situation [such as at a concert or church], there seems to be an actual binding of nervous systems.”[8]

From an evolutionary standpoint, music and the poetic in general are hypothesized to have developed in order to cultivate the characters of the young at a distance and on scale.[9] One of the foundational theories behind this is that thought is not synonymous with language.[10] McGilchrist concludes from this that we can establish that integral concepts—such as goodness, truth, and beauty—are innate rather than culturally imposed; for when we speak of the good, we do not refer to the letters, their combination, or sound but to something considered immaterially.[11]

Such an understanding of language is bound up in metaphor. In fact, “the very words which form the building blocks of explicit thought are themselves all originally metaphors, grounded in the human body and its experience.”[12] A sign of this is what is called the kiki/bouba effect, which shows that those with no knowledge whatsoever of a language will associate “kiki” with a spiky-shaped object and “bouba” with a softly rounded one.[13]

Metaphor, as is most noticeable with music, is a ‘carrying over’ and recognition of resemblances. In language, we identify and develop imitations and resemblances when we attempt to understand the world around us. It is perhaps no surprise then that poetry, something more evidently imitative and metaphorical, developed before prose.

In a philosophical sense, it seems to me that the form of a thing is held in the right hemisphere before being incarnate in this or that particular language. The language, like material, may differ in being English or Greek—just as a statue of a dog may be carved into stone or wood—but the theory, the very form of the idea, if it can be expressed, is the same .[14]

The form of language—that is, the thought before words—which is comprehended by the right hemisphere and incarnated by the left into this or that particular language, is a metaphoric imitation of the world. This imitation in the mind, which of itself admits of no truth or falsehood and might be most closely associated with the act or reasoning known as “conception,” is not a slavish copying. Imitation is an “imaginatively entering into the world of the one [or thing] that is imitated.”[15]

Imitation shapes who we are—it is the way we become what we are. In his Politics, Aristotle says that, “virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions.”[16] He extends this to the music a student learns, and intuitively we might say all Poetics.[17]

In any case, this philosophical discovery of Aristotle’s is confirmed by modern neurology. The act of mental representation—even in the absence of direct visual or other stimulus, i.e., imagining—activates some of the same neurons involved in direct perception.[18] McGilchrist takes this information and concludes that “even when we so much as imagine doing something, never mind actually imitate it, it is, at some level which is far from negligible, as if we are actually doing it ourselves.”[19]

Again, let us look to what Aristotle says in his Politics: “the habituation to feel pain and take delight in their [states of character] likeness comes close to being in the same relation to the original thing.”[20] A little while later, Aristotle tells us that melodies are images of states of character, and clearly, we see that characters are imaged in visual arts (to some degree painting and sculpture), especially in theater and stories (both historical and fictional). Without any doubt, we can conclude with McGilchrist in saying that “what we attend to, and how we attend to it, changes it and changes us. Seeing is not just ‘the most efficient mechanism for acquiring knowledge,’ as scientists tend to see it. It is that, of course, but it is also, and before anything else, the main medium by which we enact our relationship with the world. It is an essentially empathic business.”[21]

The power of imitation, either through music or poetics in general, has no small hold over man and his character development. The word “spell,” etymologically, means both a story told and a formula of power over living men.[22] I do not think this is a coincidence, as we have observed imitation—through such things as music, poetics, and stories—makes a man what he is. The Christian authors understood this as well, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.

For example, the exercises ask the participant to imagine the location of the Gospel story, the sights, the smells, the heat of the day, etc. Ignatius’s contemplation on the Nativity reads, “see in my imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem. I will consider its length and breadth, and whether it is level or winding through valleys and over hills. I will also behold the place of the cave of the Nativity, whether it is large or small, whether high or low, and what it contains… see the persons: our Lady and St. Joseph, the servant girl, and the Child Jesus after his birth… observe, consider, and contemplate what they are saying… what they are doing.”[23]

St. Thomas More, a contemporary of St. Ignatius, takes up the words from Sirach 7:40— “In all thy works, remember the last things and you will never sin”—to write his meditation The Four Last Things. In which Thomas More describes death and dying, sufferings, and against other vices, such as gluttony and pride—all with the aim of making it clear that “fleshly and worldly pleasure is of truth not pleasant but bitter, and the spiritual pleasure is of truth so sweet that the sweetness thereof many times darkeneth and diminisheth the feeling of bodily pain.”[24]

In the same treatise, Thomas More asks us to consider our life as though we were nothing other than actors on a stage. In doing this, we can more easily see that all of our wealth and honor in this life, are really just props, for when we die we cannot take these goods off of the stage: “If thou shouldst perceive that one were earnestly proud of the wearing of the gay golden gown, while the lorel playeth the lord in a stage play, wouldst thou not laugh at his folly, considering that thou art very sure that when the play is done he shall go walk a knave in his old coat?”[25] Does this not call to mind Shakespeare’s All the world’s a stage speech from the mouth of Jaques in As You Like It? St. Augustine, too in his sermon on Titus 1:9, will tell us that theatrum mundus, spectator Deus: “The world is a theater and God is the audience.”[26]

To return to the overarching examination of imitation, we must remember that at the basic level, imitation is not the thing it is imitating. The virtues of characters in novels or the peace of mind portrayed in a symphony by Bach is neither a real virtue nor a real peace—such things only actually exist in this or that particular person.

What these imitations do, however, is help condition us to love and hate rightly, to shape our conscience, and, in doing so, obtain the virtues themselves. The insight is, perhaps, nothing new. It is summarized in the proverb: “you are what you eat,” and it is clear that this extends to what you watch and what you listen to and what you think of. Moving beyond this, the Christian authors might say, “You are what you dwell on and pretend to be” (Philippians 4:8).

Imitation is the means by which we develop characteristics, either as virtues or vices. Because of this, on a practical level, we must be diligent about what we imitate and pay close attention to the music, advertisements, and entertainment that we encounter, and do our best to take the advice of scripture to “set no worthless thing before [our] eyes” (Psalm 101:3).

Thank you for reading.

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[1] Livy, The History of Rome book 7, c. 2, v. 12-13.

[2] Cicero, De Republica, book 4, c. 10.

[3] Frank, Tenney. “The Status of Actors at Rome.” Classical Philology 26, no. 1 (1931): 11–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/264678.

[4] I think this is no where more evidently clear than in the current gender intersectionality movement, where despite biological reality one can sense or feel that one is the opposite sex, and being the opposite sex is limited to sensorial appearances and not genetic realities.

[5] P. 94

[6] P. 96

[7] P. 96

[8] Oliver Sacks, The power of music, Brain, Volume 129, Issue 10, October 2006, P. 2528, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awl234

[9] P. 106

[10] Loradt, J., Analyse de la parole pour server a la theorie de divers cas d’alalie et de paralalie (de mustisme et d’imperfection du parler) que le nosologistes ont mal connus (Analysis of speech as a contribution to a theoretical understanding of different cases of alalia and paralalia (mutism and imperfection of speech) poorly recognized by nosologists’).

[11] Something that may be related to this is how children develop the concept of numbers, see Hartnett, P., & Gelman, R. (1998). Early understandings of numbers: Paths or barriers to the construction of new understandings? Learning and Instruction, 8(4), 341–374. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0959-4752(97)00026-1

[12] P. 118

[13] Aleksandra Ćwiek, The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0390

[14] I say if it can be expressed because some claim that Germans cannot know what pink means, see von Wattenwyl & Zollinger, 1978. “The degree to which the German word rosa might be considered foreign is, of course, open to debate, but the point is made by Heinrich Zollinger: ‘The English term orange but not the term pink has a German counterpart. Many Germans, even those who speak English, do not know what pink means . . .”(1988, p. 159) and the Pirahã have no distinct numbers Everett, D. L., ‘Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: another look at the design features of human language’, Current Anthropology, 2005, 46(4), pp. 621–46

[15] p. 247

[16] Find reference in the Politics book VIII

[17] Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, notes that the Poetics is in many ways an appendix to the Politics, as discusses the means by forming virtuous citizens. Find reference, and Aristotle also eludes to this in the Politics p. 255

[18] Le Bihan D, Turner R, Zeffiro TA, Cuénod CA, Jezzard P, Bonnerot V. Activation of human primary visual cortex during visual recall: a magnetic resonance imaging study. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1993 Dec 15;90(24):11802-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.90.24.11802. PMID: 8265629; PMCID: PMC48072.

[19] P. 250

[20] Politics p. 250 line 1340a 25

[21] P. 167

[22] J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories p. 128 (section before “Children”) and see https://www.etymonline.com/word/spell#etymonline_v_23996

[23] The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, p. 71

[24] The Four Last Things (Part 1—The Remembrance of Death) https://thomasmorestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Four-Last-Things-Part-1.pdf

[25] The Four Last Things (Part 2—Of Pride and Envy) https://thomasmorestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Four-Last-Things-Part-2.pdf

[26] Sermon 178.8 https://wesleyscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Augustine-Sermons-148-183.pdf