VISION

Vision is possibly the virtue I find it most difficult to examine, especially in isolation from the other virtues. Many of its characteristics blend with Wisdom, as I mentioned in my treatment of that virtue; Wisdom and Vision seem to go hand-in-hand. Without wisdom, vision is subject to unrealistic expectations and flights of fancy, and because these visions will not be rooted in good soil, they will never be able to manifest. In the absence of vision, wisdom likewise has no roots and cannot draw its sustenance from anything more than the most obvious and basic elements of a person’s surroundings.

I do think the definition given in the Dedicant Program is lacking in one aspect: vision has no purpose if it is not put to use. It is well and good to have a “greater understanding of our place/role in the cosmos” but this knowledge does not contribute to right action if it does not encounter the virtue of Fertility and have its visions manifested in the world. I found it helpful when examining this virtue to write my own definition after examining a number of dictionary definitions as well as the DP’s definition:

Vision: The capacity to discern the inertia of the past and the possibilities of the future to imaginatively create new and better lifeways in the emerging present.

This definition draws on the insights I was given into the Germanic conception of time by the work of Paul Bauschatz. Bauschatz believes that worldview of the ancient Germanic people did not include the separation of time into past, present and future as we see it today, a conception of time inherited from our Hellenic and Roman cultural forebears. From his examination of Germanic literature like the Eddas and Beowulf, he sees their concept of time as being divided into two parts: the past and the non-past. The ancient German faces the past and feels what we consider as “the present” being continually formed out of the creative matrix of past actions and people. This creative matrix mirrors our Well; Bauschatz links it expressly with the Well of Urð in Norse myth, and from that well the actions of ourselves and our Ancestors are drawn the wyrd that is the raw material that creates the non-past—the “present” and “future” conceived of by our modern culture.

By perceiving the currents of the past and imaginatively applying the possibilities those currents make available to accomplish good things for our people, then, a visionary person finds the virtue of Vision to be one more tool with which to cultivate right action.

Reference:
Bauschatz, Paul C. The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.

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