Sacred Symbology part 3. Symbols and Revelation
This dualism of object and law is loaded with religious meaning. It represents one thing sitting inside and being controlled by an invisible other, but not necessarily the imprisonment of the object within that invisible container of law. The concept is one of the equality of disparate functions: the object’s (symbol) appearance and outward presentation is paramount but, just as much in the whole scene is the aspect of those things about the object which are not accounted for in the object itself: its movement, orientation, elevation, clarity, mobility, usefulness (law). Object and Law evoke the image of satisfaction, a reconciliation of opposites.
The object/law duality, when considered as a whole, can very reasonably be said to be both the ultimate archetypical dual concept and the basic moral concept. This is a moral concept not only because its obvious allusion to man, the object, being consciously and unconsciously under God’s or natures law, but to the extent that it combines the idea of objective reality with the idea of a “hidden,” imbedded, lawful statement of how the person approaching it should regard that reality, which is incumbent upon man to search out and obey. The other, amoral one is then dominated by a one-sided hermeneutic that object or law alone is capable of giving us.
To illustrate this anti-revelationalism and revelationalism in symbolism as a result of a feud or an agreement between object and Law, in a sentence the subject is what the sentence is about. This is object, the symbol. The predicate conveys thought about the subject and is a noun phrase consisting of a verb and everything that qualifies it. This is its law. The predicate generally comes after the subject. A simple example would be:
Bruce (subject) drinks coffee at Panera Bakery (predicate).
(The subject is what the sentence is about and the predicate tells something about the subject.)
Bruce (subject) is thinking (predicate).
There are rules to this basic setup. For example, the subject and the verb here must agree in number. If one is singular, the other must be singular. Also, if the sentence is a command, the subject is contained in the predicate, as in “drop that coffee!”
The subject, which is object, is self-evident, but the idea of predicate, which I say more aligns with the idea of law, has all kinds of implications that are rarely applied.
First, it is interesting that predicate has its root in the Latin word praedicatus, which means to preach or proclaim.
Webster’s has the following definitions for predicate:
1 . To assert to belong to something; to affirm (one thing of another) as to predicate the whiteness of snow
2. To found; to base. [U.S.].
3. The word or words in a proposition which expresses what is affirmed of the subject.
4. Affirmation; declaration[2]
What we are really saying is that the function of the predicate is to support, to uphold, to control, to affirm or to enable the fulfillment of the subject as a substantial reality. This is quite like the idea of law.
The most important thing is that you need both subject and predicate together in a sentence to have meaning. If I said “Bruce” without “drinks coffee,” it is the same kind of absurdity as uttering “drinks coffee” without being followed by “Bruce.” We might say that either the subject or the predicate alone is not a revelation, but both together provides such a revelation, the revelation being not the object or the law of the expression, but something else entirely which is produced from their union.
We need and expect to get more out of the sentence than the subject and predicate. The revelation that occurs between the subject and predicate is what is really sought. To say “Bruce” or “drinks coffee” is a completely different thought than “Bruce drinks coffee,” which is knowledge of a fact of what a person is doing, where both the fact and the person is presumed to objectively exist independently of us. It is a small revelation of something that is occurring. What is occurring is a result of but is independent of the subject and the predicate.
Now, you might think these rules are embarrassingly obvious about language, so much so that it is hardly even worth mentioning. It is just as obvious that a symbol has to have a subject and predicate, outer aspect and inner signification to be a good symbol; otherwise, you have a symbol that has no signification and means nothing or a predicating force which has no outward expression. But this is not so obvious for secular or religious conceptions of symbolism and revelation, which routinely violates these simple rules.
Content and Container
The aspect of subject and predicate, object and law, is what may be called the content and container, and are the main parts of a symbol, but they should both eventually go into a single revelatory object as they meet in the middle, in which place emerges the final revelatory spiritual token that satisfies their relationship for the purpose of bringing transcendent knowledge into the world or heart.
To take one example of the way we don’t want to go with this, it must be remarked that this simple idea is violently opposed to the dominant symbolic theory of such post-moderns as Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure is an example of symbolism both with bad rules governing it as it is symbolism without the symbol, as a result bearing no revelation or meaning beyond its parts and linguistic science.
Saussure’s Semiology is the study of linguistic sign processes, or how meaning is understood through signs, which Saussure preferred to symbols because of the symbol, rightly in my view, implied motivation. It deals with anything that involves communication and applies to many fields: literature, body language, sociology, animal behavior, architecture, and so on. His Structuralism was his attempt to make linguistics into a science, which refers to the system of signs as opposed to a single sign, such as a word. Any word, or sign, gets is main meaning from its being embedded in a larger sign system, and has no meaning on its own. This is of course linguistics, and there is no problem with any of it remaining there. But it may occur to you the presuppositional problem here with limiting the symbol to a sign, or that no one sign is intelligible without being set in a larger system of signs if this idea is taken out of linguistics and applied to theology.
In Saussure’s sign or keyword, the signifier is a concept, such as that for “frog.” The “signified” is an acoustic image of a word, such as the sound of “frog.” The “word sign” is the result of a union between them. There is no incorrigible connection between any of these parts. None of them forces the other, or commands and controls the other. Time and culture can change them at will.
First, a biblical symbol should not be treated as Saussure’s sign, and this means getting rid of conventional and traditional theological approaches.
Biblical, true revelatory symbols are symbols, not signs. Symbols have a substantive relation to what they signify and participate in it, ala Tillich in that particular aspect. Signs are arbitrary.
First, revelation in theology, coming as a result of object and law, content and container, subject and predicate in God’s communication, is knowledge and its result on the mind received from outside the world that would naturally be out of the reach of humans. A sign, however, is a revelation only in the sense of it being a new of people and within a larger insular human system of communication.
Then, sign, signifier and signified is not like Revelation, Law, and Object linguistically. Revelation, object, and law imply that the object is restrained within an inflexible law, and law must be revealed in a certain action, object or movement. It is quite un-arbitrary.
The transcendent symbol of the Cross, for example, implies motivation, is taught a historical fact, as well as believed not to have an arbitrary relation between the idea and the thing resulting. The Cross must be as it appears in order to convey the concept it eternally stands for from God. But the keyword “Cross” is not assumed to be a culturally convenient, revelatory biblical word that gets its meaning only within a matrix of other’s like it, or world religious signs from other scriptures either, but has a lot of autonomy as something quite unique.
Such is not the case in liberal scholarship, however. Christ could have died on anything; its meaning is also up for negotiation. But there is a Law of the Cross which is not like Saussure’s, signifier, or concept. It is more like a predicate, promise, or container in a revelatory sentence from God. For conservatives, it also occurs to us that, for the Cross, its shape, its historicity, is not like Saussure’s arbitrary signified, or acoustic image, it is more like a certain subject, or content, reality, fulfillment, history controlled by that specific intention, command, prediction of God in the same divine sentence. To be otherwise would mean that the Cross in time will both mean nothing universal and will stand for nothing particularly Divine.
Revelation, as I use it, is quite like the meaning that occurs through Saussure’s signification, revelation coming from both symbolic parts, but being a unique piece of information and having implications outside them both: being primarily moral, invoking thought about its overall importance pertaining to that meaning itself and the moral condition of the person using it. Saussure’s system produces nothing new, only restates the low moral condition of man as building up revelatory knowledge only by what other people have said and done.
The two poles of the symbol that pushes against each other and creates an opportunity for a real revelational moment, and what should be the heart of religious experience, is what I will define as content and container. I like to use these terms for object and law because they force the issue of substantial agreement between them in a revelational product.
This idea of content and container must be carefully defined, but, since they are symbols themselves, this is not so easy to do. It can be confusing. They both evoke divergent meaning depending upon whether we look at this relationship as one of object to controlling force or outer form to inner reality. Whether this applies chiefly to an objective perspective or a subjective perspective of the viewer. Whether the symbol is being given or whether it is being received.
This is important, but this distinction is not so important for now. Container and Content in a symbolic sense signify the part which, again, is invisible and abstract, which controls, substantiates and commands, and the part which is visible, accessible, being representationally obedient to that abstract force.
When philosophers talk about symbolic content they often refer to the symbols meaning as the symbolized part. The “symbol,” on the other hand, is the word or symbolic form presented to the eye or the ear. This is a semantic mistake in my view that has the first appearance of being trivial but has far-reaching consequences, not the least of which is causing us to keep looking for a more narrow definition of the same thing to arrive at that revelation.
The way I think of the word “symbol,” as opposed to the way I am using it, covers not only the presentational form of the symbol but its underlying predicate of thought that establishes and requires that form, which I call the container. The usual formula Symbol/Substance or Signification is then wrongly making “symbol” to be understood as something exclusively visible or audible, to be understood as substantially separate from its inner signification, when the real emphasis is on the representation of meaning, not the accessibility of meaning. This opens up symbolism to statements of belief, and therefore opens their moral character to evaluation by the degree to which object and law agree. The bad formula can cause us to think twice as much about symbolic content, or the symbolic form, than a real symbol requires, often making that part of the symbol which would substantiate, objectify and control the content an optional and forever relative consideration to symbolism.
[1] (Todorov 1977)
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