Nearly all human beings, nearly all the time, think only thoughts which have been thought already within their sphere of knowledge, typically some level and region of a particular culture. Few and far between are the identifiable creative thinkers, though we must remember that creative thinkers are also members of specific communities which provide the raw materials of Platonic metaphysics or Shakespearian comedies. We must also remember that ideas, however vague, emerge in time without any specific originator, but often a poet or philosopher will step forward to bring such ideas into focus. I’ll be ignoring those communal aspects of human thought, conformist and creative, in this article. I’ll also ignore the little creative acts and thoughts which can lead to, for example, changes in the ways in which children are raised. Those sorts of changes can bring about new cultural epochs but such major changes are at least announced by those poets or philosophers, musicians or sometimes a great statesman. Because our age has problems in the foundations of our understandings of individual human natures, the purposes — if any — of Western Civilization, the relationship — if any — between God and man, we have a need for Plato-size thinkers, creative as well as profound.
There are many more good thinkers than creative thinkers. In saying this, I’m referring to those who can apply existing thoughts or even reuse existing thoughts in new ways as being good thinkers. A very crude analogy would be to an erector set where occasionally there is a need for a new structural element or a new sort of connecting device, but that need might be unmet, even strangely unnoticed, until — maybe — the right thinker looks at the problem in a fresh way. Meanwhile, intricate and interesting structures are being built from existing components in that erector set. It seems strange at first to read a history of modern physics and to learn that even so creative and powerful a thinker as Henri Poincare can be looking at something so important as the basic insights that we know as the special theory of relativity, and he doesn’t see what he should see. Creative he was, but not creative enough. An Einstein was needed to do ‘no more’ than make sense of what physicists already knew.
Let me put this in the context of my updated and expanded version of the Thomistic theory on the formation of the mind. Our minds form as we respond to our environments. Men can respond to multiple environments at once because of their abilities to reason abstractly, plan into the future, etc. Some men can even form their minds in response to some current and plausible understanding of the cosmos or universe. A very few, by percentage, might have minds capable of responding in some substantial sense to the entirety of God’s Creation, that is, to God’s Creation as we can currently understand it. Pioneers seem to be relatively few, that is, those who have minds reliable enough to come to coherent understandings but flexible enough to respond to new knowledge or new perceptions.
A literate society can make it possible for some to develop their minds to high levels and some of those with good minds will follow the paths blazed by the creative few and make far more of newly discovered regions of God’s Creation than the creative thinker could have done. Yet, a good mind isn’t always a creative mind. A good mind might move, more or less, in the realm of the known — with a typical mixture of truth and errors, richness and barrenness.
I’m claiming that creativity is a result of the human being moving, intellectually or morally or spiritually, in realms already created by God, realms which remain invisible to most thinkers even when we’ve accumulated a good body of knowledge about those realms. But there are some who are prepared, by nurture or nature or both, to move around in realms not explored or not fully explored. Those movements might be into regions new to the human race, such as the movements of mathematical physicists in recent centuries or the truncated efforts of Beethoven to compose new forms of music near the end of his life. Those movements might be movements that allow a new look at known regions. In any case, the movements should lead to further responses to certain thoughts God has manifested in Creation, responses which change the shape of our minds, of our entire human beings, making God’s thoughts our thoughts to some extent.
Our basic mental skills are variations on the ability to respond to our environments, abstracting to more general levels of understanding at times and nearly always using the abstractions which are built into our words and the contents of our minds. I speak of ‘contents of our minds’ here rather than concepts to make it clear that those contents come from God’s Creation, from the thoughts manifested in Creation by our Maker. Those contents aren’t perfect images of the Creator’s thoughts, perhaps they’re fuzzy or distorted in various ways, but they are some sort of images of those divine thoughts. But those contents change the mind which initially held them uncomfortably. This process leads to the development of more refined mental skills, sometimes erasing our inborn mental skills. In the end, there is no real separation of Einstein’s mind from his mathematical physics. Lest I seem to be dehumanizing the man, I’ll add his love of music and his very high levels of skill on the violin and piano were just as much a part of his being as was his physics.
I’m claiming that our creativity is a response, perhaps inappropriate, to God’s manifested thoughts. Ultimately, our thoughts are imitations of thoughts of God, or perhaps our twisted understanding of those thoughts of God as found in our environments. Am I attempting to eliminate or at least greatly restrict the freedom of a creative man? If such men can only imitate God in His thoughts as manifested in Creation, how can there be freedom for a person living by way of established routines? Am I proposing a form of predestination that reduces mankind to a fraudulently creative race?
No, but I don’t have a definitive explanation. I am motivated to find an optimistic answer by my own experiences and those experiences provide a partial self-understanding of my creative efforts as well as something of an uplifting feeling about my freedom when I try to respond honestly and without fear to Creation and its Creator. Creativity and freedom come from God and we can share in the divine freedom by responding to Creation, or in a more personal way to God, in the way of an apprentice who perhaps does nothing more that sweep his master’s workshop but is, at least in principle, sharing in the experience of being a master craftsman as he watches and tries to learn. I can also say, perhaps at the risk of boasting, that I consider myself to be a creative thinker, one deliberately trying to shape his mind and activities as responses to Creation and the Creator and I don’t feel imprisoned or enchained. I feel as if I am sharing in God’s own freedom during my bursts of creative thoughts, bursts which often follow only after months of frustrations and hard work. I’ll add that my self-understanding indicates that I start proposing answers to a problem, working up a little narrative of sorts and then judge if it seems to be moving with the grain of the universe, to borrow a metaphor from Stanley Hauerwas. I don’t like moving against the grain or even across the grain, perhaps because I suffered too often from slivers when I was young. And so it is that I keep revising my proposed answers or narrative until I detect an okay from my Maker, not necessarily enthusiastic applause. I often get a feeling that God shrugs a little and says, “Well, that’s not too awfully bad, so we can go with it for now.” My feelings aren’t hurt as I realize Creation is an awfully complex place for a bipedal ape and, anyway, God’s standards can be pretty high though He accepts lesser achievements as we’re learning.
We have a desperate need in the West, indeed in all regions of the earth, for creative thought, by parents trying to raise their children in a world where so many seek to deform the minds of the young ones to make them better targets for profitable activities, by local political leaders who don’t yet seem to realize that town and city governments have been enslaved by the central governments, and by novelists and philosophers who might put our entire mess in a good perspective. The last group, my own group, is usually my direct concern but many of my claims are intended for more general application.
The West is living off the gains of past successes and is, more or less, under the control of bureaucrats allied with motley crews of greedy and ambitious men whose major talent is simply grasping and holding on tight to what they seized from others. The West badly needs creative responses rather than simply more gadgets or more wars or more regulation by already bloated government agencies. Most certainly, we have no need for more corporate welfare programs. Unfortunately, such societies as ours has decayed into are the least likely to welcome creativity. Such societies are likely to actively suppress creativity, seeking to make the minds of their youths as rigid as those of the teachers and other bureaucrats. This is to say that a mind formed in response to textbooks and to the methods of modern educators will be about as flexible as a steel cog formed for a specific role in a particular machine.
We should be responding to God’s Creation, not just to our raw perceptions of nature but to the best available past responses and the open-ended responses of the modern research programs. With proper modifications, this statement will be as true of future mothers and future carpenters as it is of future poets or metaphysicians, but I’ll repeat that my current interest is in the realms of creativity in abstract thought.
If my tentative answer is right, then Creation itself must be a manifestation of God’s acts which are somewhat open-ended from any viewpoint inside of Creation, bringing forth possibilities and not always certainties, but they are God’s possibilities and we have to find those possibilities and then respond to them. Then we can share in the creativity and freedom of God.