Sacred Symbology: A Boat to Comfortable or a Landfall to Austere. Part 3
Sacred Symbology in Relation to Conservatism and Liberalism
This is an article in a series. Please see:
Sacred Symbology part 1: Our Hidden Problem
This is not a stand-alone article. Its a continuation in a series.
The first layer that we have to see through with language as it relates to the dysfunction of belief is anatomical.
For example, the word “content” refers to the statement, such as on the theistic side, “there is a God.” On the surface, this is composed of four language symbols, or words, each of which contains its own conceptual content, or definitions, adding up to the statement. We could also say that each symbol has a container in the sense of something to hold that content, a meaning. But there are deeper foundations to language than this.
What I want is about something that is not subject to change but is also language. The definitions of words or certain phonetic sounds evolve over time. This is the way it should be. It’s like the advantage of autofocus cameras to professional photographers: certain drudgery is through time taken care of for us so that fiddling around with it does not distract us from the main art of photography, which is composition. I am making here the point not that the low level, foundational symbolic grammar that we discursively handle in expressing meaning refers to grammar proper, or to letters, sounds, and vowels and how they are arranged.But what is needed is a language content and container that never changes and does not follow along through the centuries and by place in subject to a substantiate redefinition.
Somewhat like sex. There is a language there, that a male has this anatomy and a female another, and they go together in such a way to make life. This does not have to be expressed by human language to be the case. Its prior to language, and language follows it.
Instead of immediately stating directly what kind of container I am talking about that I believe has overturned and warped the Christian message over the centuries, let me go around the bend and do it by inference.
Although that photographic composition, like a certain meaning or belief that we express, requires only proficiency with and not continual meditation upon the camera and how it works, or the symbol container, the clear and powerful the view through it is still being directed by a more fundamental reality upon which this camera symbol itself is a dependent: the unavoidable and un-manipulable logical implications about the existence of the camera itself, which are what really makes photographs possible. In a very powerful way our belief or compositional meaning is directed by our views of what appropriate and aesthetic photography means by the degree to which we allow it the reality of the camera unmediated influence. With vowels, sounds, and grammar, we have an immediate ”container” to meaning like the camera to the photographic composition, but have a still more distant container in an incorrigible principle, subject or premise about reality, about truth, which should un-meditatively control that output.
This foundational conceptual premise, a container to what the camera produces, is actually beyond the physical body of the camera device itself. If there was a beginning to the universe, there was a time when that camera did not exist or anything for that matter. How can the constituent elements that make up the camera, and therefore the camera itself, come out of nothing if not from willful force above and beyond matter? The problem of photography is then that the more you advance the equipment, and the clearer the pictures become, the more you become convinced that what it is capable of photographing is that only kind of thing worth “photographing” (memorizing, keeping) and that the immediate container of the camera body is the only or primary conception of “body.” Is it no wonder why people grow less convinced of, and less interested in, the existence of God the more technology advances?
Christians have made this argument for a long time. The depth of reality photographed is something different, and far more shallow, than the reality implied by the existence of the camera, but the seduction of the pretty photographs can easily become a replacement for the work of mentally working through those deeper abstract implications, which on the surface just don’t seem as substantive.
What I would like to know is how theology would change by not taking the camera for granted in our language and not allowing it to act without conscious influence over our beliefs as if it had no deeper hermeneutical function. Something like the cosmological argument is unarguable and powerful, yes, but the problem is that it’s too abstract, too generic. It has the power to influence the content and talk to us, but because it does not have a human face we can’t talk to it. It’s not even alive but is more like the sum of an equation. It can cause us to turn toward honestly examining the evidence for God, and be a good container for subsequent belief in God, but there is nothing about it that internally demands that this content is about any specific God with a specific nature, and can really only demand incorrigibly a generic Deity. If this kind of container is as fundamental as we can go, and we allow it alone to silently influence our talk about God, we are going to end up like the atheists because both of us depend upon one abstract principle or another which may be rational or irrational but is still certainly amorphous. Now the Ontological Argument has infinitely better quality, but it’s quantitatively only one dimensional.
I could illustrate this problem in the history of Christianity by looking at any belief, or content, as a destination for a boat in a choppy sea of those pervasive and powerful laws of symbolism.
The boat is products of the mind or its contents of the mind in its beliefs. The captain of the boat is the soul and the engine represents the pressure applied to those laws of the symbolic method to cause them to function in our favor. Our favor is to reach some shore, a better outer environment that better nourishes life in all its aspects, to ride upon those waves. But the degree to which we may be satisfied with what shore we finally find is often going to be largely controlled by the time expended and dangers encountered in the voyage upon that dangerous sea, as well as the apparent self-sufficiency of the boat.
We have to consider whether the content representing the boat and the container representing our conception of “destination” fit each other before setting out. We might come to settle on mediocrity of destination, not due to the nature of the sea but the nature of the vehicle and the limits of our conception of “destination” from the outset. With only oars to propel us and a crummy John boat to sit in, it’s understandable how quickly we might be influenced that any shore we find is the one we were looking for all along when it is not. It’s better to settle here than face all that trouble again, and like it. There may not even exist such a place as we hoped anyway, we might think.
A similar problem that occurs when the vessel is large, comfortable and fast, and the effects of the sea are muted, is that the destination is easier to reach but the destination might just as well become that comfortable boat itself…but a boat that makes no sense without that sea.
This looks a lot like human history. It is a philosophical and theological camp which had long ago taken the voyage through great tribulation found purchase on some beach (a religion) and has ever since tried to preach the adequacy of the scrub and arid soil rather than face the sea again. The other camp has long ago put their faith in the products of human ingenuity (a philosophy) and is ever comfortable with riding the sea to new locations but can never find any place better than the human vehicle for getting them there.
This is because the container of “destination,” as a language symbol, was too amorphously defined before the trip began, and it was, in reality, incompatible with the original exalted goal. If we only know that we need to find a better place to settle, but don’t have any idea what “better” is, it’s easy and quite rational on the surface to allow whatever destination we find define it, and serve as the container for any subsequently reasoned content around that meaning of that symbol. Since it was a generic principle of quality or kind, without a reference to quantity or degree, we are left free to determine what quantity or degree applies to it, and our conversation will invariably be around this, and the truth will appear to be made only by the individual.
What is the alternative to settling upon the shore that is real but at the wrong coordinates, in a rather harsh environment, where we forget completely about the sea and reaching a better place, or man-made at the right coordinates, where we settle down in the boat itself? It’s obvious that we need a better vehicle and a better destination that is not generic from the outset. What would be a vehicle to cross the sea which does not have the power to become a destination, and a destination that does not have the power upon us to forget about the sea as a path to greater, and real, illumination?
That was my goal to find, and through a painful search have found it. Although it leaves us honestly stranded in a harsh environment and honestly with a shattered boat, I found that its the only way of leaving the spirit neither estranged from a present and only good destination nor cut off from our only means of, one day, going to something even greater.
[BKS1]Language (practical) belief (theoretical). The next more basic layer is symbolism vs. reality. Symbolism stands between reality and its receptor, which is Man. It carries information or impressions of reality. Content/Container is most basically not proposition or impression vs. language, but symbolism and truth. This more represents incorrigibility and eternality that is suitable and compatible with spiritual faith. Everything else invites interpretation. There is a basis for a belief that does not manipulability and a basis which is. The top layer is judged by the deeper one.
