Sacred Symbology. Introduction Part 1: A Prophetic Think Tank
Passing by Nenushtan: A Prophetic Think Tank
I am writing the first articles, if you would call them that, for a very unusual theological website. This is the introduction to a group on sacred symbolism stating here.
This an attempt to set forth the underlying assumptions of the biblical theology of this site. This will be done over the course of about 8 articles, each one disarticulated by the others, but together forming the doctrine. I’m doing things in an asymmetrical way that some would call rambling. I call these, however, mediations on a single, unified theme but written in a manner that seems without continuous, organized thought. The ideas they present are assembled in the correct order by the discretion of the reader for his own application. It’s the truth that comes out, instead of the method, that is crucial, knowing that Truth is capable of independently forming its own methods that are idiosyncratic but always aligned in its immovable view.
Pray for me, if you agree with the message of this website, that it is sent out according to God’s Word and according to His will, and that, as it must be if ordained by God, it does not come back void.
For anyone that wishes to get a handle on the underlying assumptions driving the interpretational method of this site, its epistemology, its systematic theology, deontology, and moral theology, this series on symbolism is the place. It’s not easy to get through, but I think it will be worth your while. This series establishes that the theological position is not chosen arbitrarily, but is grounded at a very low-level on a view of reality established on the nature of the symbol, which here is the fundamental unit both of information and an instrumentality as means of two-way communication between man and God. This view is quite a bit different than has been suggested or treated in the past, but I believe that taking its implications to their logical limit solves many age-old paradoxes of philosophy that it suffered under for millennia.
Sacred Symbology: An Introduction
Three Symbols
The three approaches to symbolism will here be called secular, religious, and sacred. These three also represent the distance and difficulty of the sacred approach to knowledge, which is our particular interest here, from its fundamental and easy starting place. It’s a statement about how far are we are from the Sacred. That the Sacred should be first and grounding, but it is in a fallen world a derived place.
Natural Symbolism
The natural approach to symbolism, which rings so much of the outworking of materialism or idealism, is represented by such books as Symbolism: The Universal Language, by J. C. Cooper. This kind of work represents the “natural approach” in that it only seeks to list the various dominant symbols in use and their meanings across cultures and historical periods. The idea is that the symbol is most importantly a 1 to 1 public convention of creative sign to an arbitrary signification, with no one intrinsically providing a religious or transcendent function. Symbols are creative human products.
This places emphasis on the importance only of tokens to the practical, emotional, or intellectual needs of man.
“Animals symbolize the emotional and instinctual life of man, primitive urges that must be transcended before the spiritual realms can be entered.”
“The black dog, cat or horse is ill-omened; it is funerary, heralds death and symbolized chaos.”
“In China the dog brings good fortune. It was the yang, solar and a bringer of good fortune in the day time as the celestial dog, when it drove off evil spirits, but as a guardian of the night watches it became yin, lunar, and destructive.”
The ancient Greeks, such as Homer, had the dog as “shamelessness.” The Greek term ‘cynic,’ or dog-like, implies impudence.
Other symbols are the centre, the circle, the cross and the square, the body, and its clothes, festivals, and numbers.1
Cooper, of course, speaks of their spiritual and religious significance, but this remains a natural treatment of symbols in that, by not defining what this “spiritual” is, he implies that it is Man who decides, making the symbolic correspondences and use purely voluntary and creative. He does not discuss how the symbol, as a universal concept, might transcend man, but assumes that it begins and ends with man. Symbols are utilitarian things man uses to hold and handle disposable knowledge, which is the important thing, with nothing left to learn from the symbolic itself.
Structuralists will often refer to the beginnings of symbolism being dealing with what they call “natural symbols,” where the sign is a lot like the thing it signifies. For example, “the symbolism of action,” or gestural symbols, which include “gestures, facial movements, and inarticulate accents,” what we call body language. Primitive language then begins where “the original words are the proper names of objects; language is nomenclature.”2 Words exist by themselves, and “naturally” signify by being close to the thing they represent, not belonging to the rigid symbolic system we have today. This is why we see Biblical language laden with metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy, and Biblical names descriptive of a moral quality instead of the aesthetic abstractions. But these are not the natural symbols to which I refer.
Natural symbols here refer to a philosophical view about the ultimate function of all symbols by their early place on the historical chart, particularly in that they function in a purely “natural” or pragmatic way in the transmission of any kind of information. In that sense, the symbol only improves through time as it is able to represent all kinds of meaning.
Conservative scholars, such as John Milbank, will explain the disintegration of theological meaning rightly through the historical phenomena of the growing separation of the sign and the signified in certain key theological word symbols such as “creation,” incarnation” and “Trinity,” but these are in our view conceptual non-transcendent symbols. The issue of disintegration and regression instead of advancement of meaning of which I speak is not internal to any one material or immaterial symbol but external to the relation of all human symbolism to transcendent, Sacred symbolism, which includes natural symbols as a whole. Natural symbols can be said to “advance” only into more nuanced, abstract immaterial symbols, but never into or into being capable of showing the transcendent, Sacred type.
Immaterial and Material Symbols
Immaterial symbols are distinguished from material symbols in that immaterial symbols are concepts and material symbols are artistic expressions, actions, written words and spoken words that transmit these immaterial ideas. Both are either natural, religious or sacred.
Immaterial and material symbols are now pulling apart, and this will help show the distinction within their broader categories.
Natural symbols which are not external and immaterial are the concepts “blue” or “person” or object.” These are only for the normal operation of the mind to orient itself in physical and mental reality for the practical operation.
Religious Symbols
The religious approach to symbolism looks at symbols in a mysterious way, imbued with power from beyond and are efficacious in themselves irrespective of the user’s personal cognitive relationship with its content. In the same way, the religious approach also believes that there is nothing in symbolism itself that teaches anything objective because it is intractably obscured or overshadowed by the importance of its transcendentally imposed meaning.
Again, Ernst Cassirer says that in the earliest reflections upon reality as a whole, there was as yet no separation between the thing and its meaning, language, and being, but they were thought a unity. Especially with language, since it is so crucial to reflection: “the human spirit always finds language present as a given reality, comparable and equal in stature with physical reality.” It has its own “nature and laws, in which there is nothing individual and arbitrary.” It was generally thought that the meaning of words or sensory impressions involved no free activity of the spirit. The word is not a designation of something else but is thought to be most importantly reality itself.
“The mythical view of language which everywhere precedes the philosophical view of it is always characterized by this indifference of word and thing. Here the essence of everything is contained in its name. Magical powers attach directly to the word. He who gains possession of the name and knows how to make use of it, has gained power over the object itself; he has made it his own with all its energies. All word magic and name magic is based on the assumption that the world of things and the world of names form a single undifferentiated chain of causality and hence a single reality.”3
This primitive symbolism gave birth to religious symbolism
As the natural approach connects with idealism, the connection with realism in the religious approach is in the making of all objects, the shadows of the ideal forms, the bearers of all available clues to ideal reality, as that substantially imbued with all necessary knowledge to contain truth, instead of the mind of man. The symbolic method here in the religious approach is in treating symbols as having an organic connection with transcendent reality. Their primary function is not so first about what that transcendent looks like and how we should approach it, but it is about demonstrating the belief that every object is at least in function acting as a word, thought or manifestation of the mouth, mind or power of a causal transcendence, and in that sense is fused with it.
The thought is that if we associate ourselves with the symbolic shapes this will affect a real and personal association with those primary transcendent essences to which they signify. This is called the religious approach because all the religions that have ever been created have assumed that one’s works, belief creeds, motivations, feelings, traditions or some other token which need not have an organic connection to their own essence may be taken up and carried by them to affect their connection to the essence of transcendence nevertheless.
But, again, the religious sense that I use is not about the internal power of a symbol or signification to show meaning. The religious symbol, unlike the natural where the issue is internal to its parts, is an assumption about the extent to which symbolism itself encompasses reality and is a knowledge usable for religion, the bad religious version sharing the view of the natural one in that symbolism is something man-made for mans communication with God, not firstly made by God for his communication with man.
From very early times there has been an assumption, especially in Christian orthodoxy, that since man is separated ontologically from God that fact must remain to control the tendency of flattening ontology and making them equals, which Scotus did in equating God with being, “being” being something that both God and man shared. Man and God must be ontologically incompatible, making our communication and his fundamentally incompatible, making the only contact with him through what is a purely human method of symbolism. But this, although with some truth, also tends to make our theology de-centered of one supreme, divine symbol, and diffuse it instead around an amalgam of facts and philosophical principles. The natural symbol values “truth” but cripples the body of the symbol to make it inaccessible and difficult, and the religious symbol values “God” but cripples symbolism itself to make its author obscure and mysterious.
We then assume the “Sacred” approach to symbolism. Symbols are neither made monolithic by their touted transcendent associations nor ephemeral by human need. They are also not mirages and of no value. The Sacred, meaning “set apart,” is outside the confusion created by personal biases about one of the two aspects of reality as it is far away from being wholesale selloff of all of them as useless. We are not somewhere between the unknown and the known with only ourselves to bridge the gap. We are assumed to be on one side of known reality against the other side of a possible unknown reality with a sacred symbol in between us, this hypothetical “transcendent artifact” which I will describe, that firmly connects the two with a meaning that could not exist without it.
Is not what we are really looking for, if true, the prophetic symbol of a fulfilled Divine Messiah?
Please see the following:
The Meaning of Justification in the Unexpected Insight of James 2
