Sacred Symbology pt. 5. The Imago Dei: A Prophetic Think Tank
Personhood requires a few things in addition to the attribute of immateriality/Transcendence.
- Personhood requires freedom, but his freedom is understood through symbolism.
This type of freedom arises as a necessity of making what is usually called a “free moral agent.” But this familiar phrase does not suit our purposes and is almost meaningless because for Man freedom is only defined relative to the limits of his working environment bot objectively and subjectively.
The degree and kind of compulsion define the extent and nature of freedom. Man, as a symbol that represents not only the existence and power of God but His moral nature. This means that his freedom, and his burden, arises from a consequence not of his existence alone, in which his limits would more define his nature than his freedom, but mainly as a consequence of his symbolic function to show without restraint the goodness of God’s free nature in his own limited but free nature. Thus, real freedom primarily assumes an openness, not a mysterious opacity, to that goodness of God that is informationally carried and openly present in the world for anyone to examine and accept.
Freedom is defined through our living in a world dripping and overflowing with everything we need to understand who God is and what he wants us to look at and righteously consider, without any prejudicial empirical misgivings about its possible availability. The enabler of true freedom in man’s limited-free space is that particular imago that God made abundantly available for us to consider and love Him through and become one with. As a person, we are compelled to assume that if God is reaching out to us as another person he would do so through the semantics and syntax of a certain symbolic language object (not the concept of language) that we can both understand and use for contact and the transfer of knowledge.
- Personhood requires freedom and a moral potentiality to be fulfilled.
The keyword is fulfillment. Transcendent fulfillment in history is the mark of God’s personhood, and fulfillment is also the man that legally knows and believes that knowledge. The Imago of knowledge must be capable of being moral and so must a person by it, but in this, it is not so obvious to Man how he can unconsciously upend this. What he can choose that negates the necessity of the engagement of freedom in his acknowledgment of it as a moral symbol and interferes with the true meaning of the imago and prevents his fulfillment of it. To ensure that this does not happen and fulfillment takes place, man uses his freedom only to recognize the imago’s overarching importance and seek to reveal it as it was intended, it’s revealing defined as a fulfillment of the vision. This fulfillment and uncovering of the imago’s image is the definition of morality expressed by the “free moral agent” of a person and a personal God. Freedom is then not free to do anything but free only to recognize, engage and resolve a moral imago of God, by which man then come to God’s expectations.
- Personhood requires the ability to, therefore, communicate with God, which because of their incompatible ontologies implies through a transcendently engineered imago. This is not only the ability as an unfulfilled symbol to freely transmit his nature to another to the extent of his existence, but requires the ability of a fulfilled symbol to act as a transponder of his nature to another by conscious communication through a transcendent image, thereby becoming the imago of God.
In respect to man as a transponder, other than the ability to act as a good steward of power, and reflect God, a person has the freedom to respond to another the extent of his moral fulfillment of a symbol of God. This is not only in his actions but most importantly in the abstract environs of thought, where true freedom is living within a space that God has been allowed to enter and claim by the free moral will of its previous owner who has the choice of denying Him there. The symbolic, frontal aspect of existence (matter, works) through which the inner, signified aspect of (moral) nature is carried is a description, respectively, of man, a description of God, and then combined a description of the Imago Dei. This, in turn, is a description of how its transpondent communication works in which man gives up all noetic space to God after unifying the two dimensions which are otherwise entirely incompatible.
Now, I don’t want to gratuitously make a fancy pseudonym for the act of speaking to God when it is already so covered by a common word, such as “communication.” My fancy word would be mere gloss. I use this word “transponder” because I think that real communication between man and God is something inadequately and too broadly represented by the common linguistic genera. It’s not just communication, but a communication that is all altogether simpler, automatic, more informative, consequential, spiritual and over infinitely greater distances than human to human communication.
The word “respond” in transpond means response in reply to communication directed toward us. The part “trans” in “transpond” means beyond, across, through and over. The word means a response over distances, difficulty, over the horizon. Communication with a being who is separate from us ontologically and far away realms that we cannot go. This kind of communication is quite different than that human to human.
This is implied but not stated in our theology, such as here in the Sacramentum Mundi on the subject of the person:
The infinite transcendent God and finite, possible man are partners. This partnership of unconditional and contingent freedom constitutes man as such and thereby unites him to others who share a common destiny. And partnership with the infinite God does not eliminate the peril which is intrinsic to man’s situation as a finite creature. Rather, it is only in the light of this partnership that mans situation is clearly seen. He is challenged but he cannot but respond, and his free decision itself determines its final reality. And thus finite man,, as an individual, is still of absolute value and significance, so much so that God himself became a man for the sake of his salvation, that is, the realization of his freedom.1
This general language does not determine an author’s subsequent treatment, but it can predict it, usually quite accurately. What secures this partnership? How did this common destiny come about? How is man challenged? How does he respond to God, and respond to what? Over what is he making a decision? It is obvious that if the specifics of the case are not fundamental to it then it is implied that they may be whatever we wish, and this is, therefore, an anthropocentric description of the situation if the person is speaking to God.
If Man is engaging something particular of transcendence which is not God (some revelation) a description of what is going on, then it a description of God engaging man on the basis of exactly what man knows and values which is transcendent and not God (an imago). It also can’t be lost that the end of this conversation is one about the nature and mission of Christ who joins man and God as a man/God in an ultimate initial example of the Imago, and if so then it is about what about Christ specifically, informationally, scripturally signifies him, and over which man and God come together over an agreement. Catholics, such as above, invariably make these specifics the objects and qualities of the Church that are religious and are manipulated by a physical body, such as the Eucharist, the priest, Holy Orders, Mary, and, of course, if manipulated by a spirit, the “doctrines,” where protestants eschew the former and settle exclusively on the latter.
Person. (1968). In Sacramentum Mundi. New York, NY: Burns and Oates. ↩
