Sacred Symbology: Transcendent Strangeness, the Strangeness of Man to it: Part 2
Sacred Symbology: Our Comfort Here is Our Downfall
Before getting to something about the interaction of the symbolic types, it is probably best to start with this thing I call transcendence.
Matter and non-matter are not taken as everything, and “immateriality” is not here transcendence. Aquinas spoke of the immaterial realm as the intellect, thinking of God as immaterial as well, both of which are over against the material realm. Duns Scotus used the word “immanence” to explain the idea of God’s providential presence in the material world, while the Bible never made this sharp distinction, an idea which was innovated continually through the ages into a Christian inspired pantheism. [1]
But here is a lower-level approach. The three conceptual symbolic types that I suggest, material, immaterial and transcendent, are the known media of knowledge to us. They are media in that they are containers or places of control that we conceive are only for the placement of objects of the same type. Media is much like the Law for the kind of symbols we will create to place in them. The symbols we make correspond to their correlative symbolic media, and with the symbol thus set up we are then able to think about the actual objects and their natures that inhabit that media and their distinction from others: object being symbol and nature being its controlling material or immaterial media.
Transcendence as media is that which controls all symbolic objects outside of the two other immediately accessible human ones, the material and immaterial. Transcendence implies that God is neither immaterial not material. It assumes that everything in the transcendent is taken as being beyond them both, but also capable of producing substantial correspondences to them, in the same way that immaterial thought is radically different than materiality but shares materialities fixed and regular aspect and can be transferred into materiality as creative products.
We only are willing to say that transcendence’s substance is unknown, not capable of being comprehensively or even meaningfully known by what it is not, or known by what it must be through either an analogical or univocal argument, but we also assume capable of a kind of metaphysics adequately complimentary and understandable by what is already known.
Saying that God is immaterial, and particularly that transcendence is immaterial, does not say much about what God is unless it is used to say that he is like what we already know: thought and the outer world. But we don’t want an anthropocentric definition of God. God’s meaning is to be found in what we know before Him and not what he can’t be but by where He is found as distinct from his creation. Where he is found is without the mind and matter, immateriality and materiality. If He can’t be described by either of those dimensions, which are human, its a better starting place for his concept than described as being a part of it. Therefore in what he is found inhabiting immateriality and materiality is best a sign and meaning of God when entirely foreign to human experience yet entirely within it.
Transcendence must be as foreign as it is incapable of being known by human effort. If it is known it is only by the effort of Transcnednec itself to make it known. If this is not assumed the case then there is no point in entertaining the concept at all, and certainly no grounds for religion or faith. Transcendence is just an intellectual plaything engineered to be both far too handy or far too abstract. That is, Transcendence is not a symbol, idea or substance, but he is a symbol, idea and objective evidence made by itself for His accessibility to consciousness. He is an alien presence found in close association with the anthropocentric material and immaterial (mental) dimensions by many kinds of unique symbolic communication, and only by thinking of it minimally in this way can it start to have its unique meaning separate from our insular world.
Don’t be weary of this word “symbol,”, as I will use it a lot. You could use sililie, sign, trope, example, representation and a host of others, it does not matter. A symbol, like Man’s mind, is quintessentially a hybrid between an idea and an objective thing, a go-between matter and Transcendence. A perceptible or readily comprehended representation and a concept at the same time. You can confine your coffee table to a physical object and image that coffee table in your mind, and believe that it only exists as a concept or a creative thing of materiality, but you can’t confine the matter which is a coffee table, or its mental image, to materiality and immateriality at the same time. You can’t confine an idea to matter either. But you can do both with a symbol. The symbol easily crosses over into as is substantially the same thing in each immaterial and material realm.
The transcendent media is of course only separated from its only object, God, by the human mind when they are symbolized to become understood. They are actually the same thing. But to us, we symbolize God the person as a symbolic idea and His signification we symbolize as His power and nature, such as his Omni-attributes. This immaterial symbol, this personal idea and this idea of essence allow Man to think God could care about him and to reach him as a created person and fellow creative power. But those immaterial symbols are not complete without also having immanence or demonstration in materiality, or else they just are ideas that could have arisen only within the insular mind. When Transcendence is found in materiality, that material symbol of Transcendence is the same as whatever we find in that materiality which is impossible to ascribe to either the immaterial or material realm and shows such Transcednent intentionality. This then influences and fortifies that conceptual symbol of God with that material objectivity, giving it full power as a real attempt by God of contact and care for man, not an insular conceptual symbol but a Transcendent symbol prepared for man but of which Man is not responsible.
If we think about God only as a media or His place of existence, He is a mere force or deistic creator, or He is more like the Gnostic demiurge, the “craftsman” who created all things but is not necessarily the one and sovereign God. He must be thought of and shown positively as one with His media although distinct from it because this being contemplated by Man in his own material media, and we must symbolize God to some extent as like us so that his idea of Personhood, if He is a person, is not blocked to our acceptance or denial.
Although you might think that there is nothing in a conception of transcendence as a media that demands a personable object of God to reside in a particular nature or be one with it, and these things are totally products of our whim and inventive power, you are right. But, on the other hand, even the casual non-personal consideration of transcendence as something worthy of attention, as a force that is foreign to our world, it just gratuitous if we have already accepted the possibility that this Transcendence is a legitimate consideration for serious thought. We have to start somewhere, and we have no grounds, without having evidence otherwise, of excluding Transcendence than including it without demonstration. It is a demonstration, the appearance of Transcnedncee in materiality and then in immateriality, that is the subject of the debate.
If such a demonstration exists, then Transcendcnece is guaranteed, and a certain kind, of a certain nature at that. You don’t have to presuppose Transcendence is even a possibility to see a Transcendent demonstration or phenomenon and affirm that it does not belong in our world. No presupposition of Transcendence is needed in that case if Transcendcefnce appears to overwhelm our minds and matter. Divine demonstration makes its own case, and if that case fails then we are free to presuppose to our heart’s content without an error of judgment being made.
Neither is it required to presuppose the non-existence of Transcendence in order to ground disbelief if that demonstration is not manifest. If it is not manifest then the non-existence of a Transcendent realm is a guarantee, a least to our moral deliberative and analytical faculties of judgment, that it need not exist.
It is the manifestation of Transcendence that is the issue, not our presuppositions and prejudices.
But if we are willing to entertain the equally finite possibility to the inattention of Transcedencne of it being attentive to us, although it does not make it possible, it makes our passage of demonstration to God easier, since the logic is that a demonstration of the divine would not appear unless it is the case of His attention and care for us. Thinking about Transcendence from the outset that he need not have anything to do with us or is a mere illusion is really only for our emotional support in denying the idea, for the sole purpose of suppressing the prospect of that attention from the outset. There is no harm in entertaining the possibility if a Transcendent realm does not exist, is there? There is no harm in accepting the possibility of benevolence, is there? Until we know for sure, there is no crippling effect of affirming or denying possibilities, but it sure would make it easier if a Demonstration was out there for our exposure, so why not make it easier instead of harder to consider this Argument from the Prophetic Word of Demonstration here described theoretically?
I think that the attention to the great and very human natural attraction to the idea of Transcendence is something easier for mind to ponder than its antithesis when that mind is obviously swimming moment by moment in a spiritual world dominated by billions abstract objects, controlled by billions of rules, most of which run silently and unknown in the background, that we identify as being prior to and apart from the “I”. We exist in a media that thinks about transcendence so naturally and obsessively because to think even the simplest thought is almost by definition a search for and coveting of meaning that is of a kind transcendence to that media.
Symbolizing God in our heads is something that we must rightly do in order to think about Him, but it has all kinds of pitfalls in which we can easily become ensnared and stop our progress to His knowing his reality.
Again, this distinction between God’s media, what is called here Transcnednent media, and God Himself does not exist in reality, God not being Himself a symbol, but being indistinguishable from his sphere of existence. The things which are symbolized by the mind, which is everything, always has a very real “double-minded “nature as well between object, symbol, and its controlling media of meaning, Law or raw data.
A fishing rod is a material object in a media of material Law, the weak and strong forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism, spatial dimension. The belief in the idea “I am the greatest” is a cognitive state object within an accumulated media of Law, its controlling rules and authorities, such as facts, impressions, emotions, motivations, personal historical data, and ego. The media, or container, is of the same type as its object but is different from the belief object and content against its state of reality.
We create mental and material symbols for various containers and content that we find in the material and immaterial worlds that share kinds. But in having this content and container in a symbol, they can be mismatched in the mind or used in a biased fashion, biased for one kind of media or the other, in all manner of ways because a symbol’s content can always be mentally stressed more than its container, and vice-versa. In metaphysics, more emphasis can be laid on the rod or the belief state object than physical law, facts or data which corral them. The result is that we get something like subjective idealism, where the rod exists only in the mind, or that the belief statement exists independently of attributing facts. With transcendence, God is not accessible to direct view and neither is His media, compounding the problem.
The problem with God, or Transcendence (I capitalize on the “T” to imply a Person) the ideas are that they are not immediately accessible to view. That the God content and container exist only as distinct parts through the mind when we think. If it is easy for us to take up a symbol of matter as having no particular content, or objective existence, and only real by a trick of the creative mind, it is easier to do it with Transcendence, or God, that this concept can exist powerfully, happily and comfortably without objective manifestation, in and in many more novel and inventive ways. It is even easier to not even take the first step of bothering to separate God from His media and hold a symbol, or regard, for God at all.
But we assume that each, the material, the immaterial and the transcendent, are at least potentially capable of being present in and giving meaning equally to each other, but lending different sources of knowledge to complete a whole picture of reality when we make symbols of them and by them. We don’t take this in blind faith, we take it as a real, finite possibility that must be considered and tested thoroughly before we reject it, the gratuitous rejection of it instead being a leap of blind faith. They do not cross over each other in the sense of merging, but they do overlap, by design, due to their similarities at least where they can be found, making it possible for us to think about each one by using an analogy from the other.
This does not mean it is sufficient to reduce the “transcendent” or “God” to a mere feeling or to a concept to sufficiently allow its equal part in us and our world. It means that if we assume that if the reality of materiality and immateriality is a symbol of Transcendence as it’s effect, and further as two kinds of, perhaps, worlds of language or knowledge emanations from Transcendence in some fashion, then we place the material, spiritual and transcendent as opposing dimensions but in the same symbolic “word” of existence. When they are then accepted as symbolic media and objects they are only then of equal accessibility. When not, or when using them as incompatible symbolic objects, or when we start by assuming an existence for them that is fundamentally conceived as pure existence before that of a pure symbolic media, they are irreconcilable.
I use the word “transcendence” instead of God, since the mind cannot experience God directly he must do it symbolically, and when he does it symbolically at the most primitive level it is done by the symbolization of a quality or a realm of experience, not an idea that carries already tons of cultural baggage. Likewise, at the low level, our spirits and the world of matter are symbolized as the same before we are able to make this the most primitive symbol the signification, the basic revelatory ground, of the objects that we then place within this media, which then become what we would recognize as conventional symbolic reality.
When we start to make belief symbols about these realms from an assumption of their separation but equal accessibility, one major point of separation emerges as unavoidable about their relative importance and pre-existence, and therefore about what kind of symbols we can accept accurate of it.
First, Transcendence has a presence in everything, not necessarily only in the traditional sense of immanence, but certainly also in respect to its reality being rationally and experientially confirmable and the natural urgency that it instills in consciousness to be accurately symbolized by us for that confirmed existence. But Transcendence is also taken as being before and causative of everything that it is not, which is materiality and immateriality. None of these things are false and neither would we endeavor to change. But because Transcendence is before and formative of everything else but is also thought equally accessible within them, this means that any symbolic conception that we make of it must take into account the means by which Transcendence is made accessible to the material and immaterial worlds as a symbolic media.
That is, the symbol “Transcendence” will stay only a vague theoretical notion if we cannot derive something from it to indicate by what criteria we will be able to distinguish something indisputably transcendent in the immaterial and material. If we can’t do this, it will be forever outside our world and never seen to be embedded within it in any way that speaks authoritatively to man’s moral immaterial and material natures, especially as a incitement to man for the purpose of giving him a precise means of contact with the God that exists in Transcendence. The means of contact of Transcendence into and in the material/immaterial reality, as symbolic media or what I call the symbolic container, are assumed prepared for consciousness to expect and receive a content of the transcendent symbol, which is whatever message it is sending into those realms within that container.
If Transcendence is separate, this at least indicates that it’s means of access into our world is assumed from the outset to be distinguished by its compatible strangeness to what it is not. That is, whatever it is, we create a representation of this transcendence not directly from a product of the intellect (immateriality) or directly from observed phenomena (materiality) alone. It is natural that our representation of the Transcendent must be recognizable to our world’s way, but also as fundamentally alien to them as well.
The contemplative contact between immaterial and material reality is not assumed as negative or positive accessibility by reason, where one idea about transcendence is denied because the opposite is preferred by some principle. These philosophical creations satisfy our need for immaterial/material comprehensibility but do not indicate in themselves an assumed “strangeness” of transcendence or the means of contact with a Transcendence that accounts for its palpable and relatively alien presence. If there is a symbol of Transcendence that has inserted itself into what it is not then we look for a symbol of Transcendence by looking for something that at a minimum should not be here but is anyway. Transcendence as a symbol is then taken as both the alien thing and the alien means by which it appears accessible in our sphere.
This accessibility presents its own problems for us. Since Transcendence is conventionally accepted as being formative, and being equally accessible in some way by and from what it is not, by this strangeness it does not have the same kind of objective or experiential palpability to the material and immaterial, which can render the material and the immaterial in its own insular, inaccurate and dysfunctional relationship against it.
Our two problems as basically positive, in that of accepting the authority of Transcendence over us in spite of its alien origins, and negative, in that this fact makes Transcendence dismissible or invisible to our natural reason and affections.
To that end, we must clearly have a simple way of distinguishing between the symbols that we use of material and immaterial nature and define this Transcendent symbol and how they must work together. Material, immaterial and Transcendent symbols are here taken as different sources of knowledge, of which there are good and bad examples to the extent that they are the knowledge that shows clearly their sources. A symbol is a representation of knowledge that is either given by someone or received by someone, a representation that allows us to build up an accurate view of all these disparate but correspondent levels of reality.
This may be of little use to the naturalistically closed and minded, but it should have a lot of importance for those that accept the possibility of spiritual reality because it will give us insight into what is a true religious symbol and is what is not that is beyond simple faith statements, any theological tradition, logic and syllogism, opinion, the result of autonomous reason, sentiment, and feeling that we may want to use, wrongly, as beginning points and as ultimate belief symbols of God.
If a symbol is to be taken of anything, especially people, and if symbols are given as well as received, then symbols are most meaningful when we think of them as being best exemplified by people in conversation, by language. That conversation between symbols is then one that is transferring good knowledge, that of reality, or is not. If it is not, I assume that the problem fundamentally is because of a potential insularity they share between their narrow and idiosyncratic classes of knowledge used in that conversation, which insularity increasingly becomes more acute when the most important knowledge, assumed to be real knowledge of Transcendence, which symbols are capable of carrying, is no longer sought for itself but for selfish priorities instead.
We want to make the main point of distinction between these major classes of symbols by assuming that all symbols are of ultimate Transcendent origin and purpose but not all classes are directly conversant with the Transcendent source when humans get a hold of them.
I say they are thought to be of Transcendent origin and purpose because I will work on the assumption that there is a real possibility that everything was created with the intention by God to transmit truth to man. Two major classes can converse with Man and themselves directly, the material and immaterial, while the other major class can’t directly talk with the material and immaterial. The material and immaterial can build each other up in various ways, but can’t synthetically build for themselves the other transcendent class because that class is deeply alien to them. They are in such close natural relationship partly because the other Transcendent class, which I propose can’t be absent from any symbol without serious consequences to meaning, can’t be directly approached and used before it is willfully acknowledged for what it is, being naturally outside the organic material/immaterial duality. It must be accepted as a real class by its own phenomenon of manifestation long before any presumptions about the full extent of its approachability are considered and allowed to take its place into the material/immaterial duality as the main object of their conversation, instead of only between them. This is in fulfillment of the true natural configuration of the symbol as being made up of an object (materiality), a law (immateriality), and a revelation (Transcendence).
What happens when this Transcendent class is not recognized for what it is but allowed to be inserted anyway into the human symbolic material/immaterial conversation, can be seen in the symbol of Man’s history: the material/immaterial conversation tries to synthetically produce its own Transcendent class to replace the one that is missing in order to give a false completeness of meaning to itself.
History can best be explained as either a human conversation that tries in its own strength and by its own resources to settle but never does the ultimate questions to an expected satisfaction of the implications of the mind/body paradox. Either because the supreme example of a Transcendent symbol was not available when Man was looking for it or because it was available when man did not care about it.
We like to think that the former applies because it exonerates us for not finding it. But the truth is that the latter applies to history after the Cross. That great Symbol that neither the ancient pagans, monolithic Christendom or the modernists would fully recognize and allow as this Transcendent type. It is, in fact, the most obvious and most accessible supreme example of Transcendence that the world has known of for more than 2000 years, but has been locked out of our secret Material and Immaterial conference.
[1] Scotus pushed a univocal instead of an analogical, Thomistic argument whereby God’s transcendence is always argued by negation or analogy. No descriptions are adequate because God transcends any possible descriptions. It was suspected that this negative theology existed only for the reason of preserving ontological transcendence. The immanence Scotus used, however, in effect described mans being as fundamentally the same as any other creature; a heterodox or, taken to its next logical place, a highly atheistic notion.
The Meaning of Justification in the Unexpected Insight of James 2
