Sacred Symbology: The Transcendent Symbol: A Prophetic Think Tank
Sacred Symbology: Describing the Transcendent Symbol
Note: This is a part of a continuing discussion of symbolism in theology. There are a number of articles in this series:
Sacred Symbology: The Sump and the Cure of the Transcendent Type. Part 4
Sacred Symbology: Transcendent Strangeness, the Strangeness of Man to it: Part 2
Sacred Symbology. Introduction Part 1: Passing by Nehushtan
Sacred Symbology part 1: Our Hidden Problem
Sacred Symbology part 2. Modern Origins of the Bad Symbol
and others…
The Prophetic Transcendent Symbol
This topic is, so far as I know, my own. None of the works that I have read even float this symbol as a possibility.
In Symbols of the Sacred by Louis K. Dupre, we get this from the second page of his book, which gives you a snapshot of the difference between historical and modern scholarship on this subject and the one expressed here. Instead of going through book and author after another and pointing out the same distinction, let me do it by shorthand and show you one example representative of all of them.
1. Symbols are a reality beyond sensuous appearance. Check. 2. Points out that normally symbols are spoken of as pointing to reality, not ideals. Check. 3. He makes the point that this is “too simplistic.” But, we see, this is gratuitous for the purpose of reality giving way to the ideational reality in view.4. The symbol does not point to “raw data” but “its own articulation, not to the crude material which precedes it.” It ” never refers to a preexisting reality, it opens up a new one.” 5. Makes the point that the difference between sign and symbol is that a “sign leaves the referent which precedes it unchanged.” A symbol transmutes that fundamental referent. 6. The symbol points forward rather than backward.
Here we see how, before the Cross and after the Cross, the divine forms of ultimate reality spoken of by Plato have carried on as the heart of the symbol as if that Cross changed nothing. Plato’s shadows of transcendence remained just that, shadows, fuzzy, empty, without definition and dark, thrown against a wall by a natural fire lit by some man. Symbols are idiomatic, unreal, as moral as pointing to Kronos eating his children as they are to God since they are both in the end referents only of the products of the imagination.
- Why and for what purpose is the distinction between a sign and a symbol necessary except to confuse and limit represented meaning to categories that are only possible within a world assumed without a revelation of the divine? The primitive “sign” of a word or an aural sound, if a transcendent revelation is available for inspection, is no different functionally than a symbol, because in that case there is no competing sign or symbol except that which is in error. There is no instance in which we can speak of “symbol” in this author’s sense as a good thing, but he makes it clear that this symbolism is a good thing.
- The “raw data” is the referent of the trope in view, but it’s an ideal, a construction of man. Its what man wants or imagines. The sign leaves the referent unchanged, which is the primitive point of departure for this higher symbol, not a lower one.
- Original reality is transmuted to an ideational one.
This is very far from where we are going. No matter the symbols human idiomatic function that allows it to move with the changing philosophic forces of history, this is not a substantial change in the “raw data,” the divine and objective phenomenon which inaugurated it. It is a change in culturally influenced human expressions of it by different angles that changing eras find illuminating. The Middle Ages would find this symbol impactful by its implications on Church authority, but the Protestant Reformation would focus on faith. But nothing changes with respect to the raw data. The symbol points backward first and foremost, and then forward. Symbols are not first and foremost made by man, but by God. There is one divine symbol and all others are made by Man either for the elucidation of that divine one or for themselves.
The transcendent reality, if it is manifest, cant be transmuted except in the fevered fancy of a madman. But this is the madness into which we fall when we have it and go on for millennia acting and believing like that reality does not exist. I am sorry if this seems bombastic, but I am being quite serious and accurate.
Of course, I only speak to those that deny, in one way or another, that transcendent reality, that “raw data,” put into the world of creative ideas for their reformation around it. You can deny it, you know, but only under the spell of spiritual madness.
The prophetic transcendent symbol is neither material or immaterial but is found in them and is compatible with them. It points to the unchanging, inflexible “raw data” of the transcendent, of which modern and most ancient scholars do not recognize.
It is also not material because it is abstract and a part of the past, and as such it is knowledge. But it is material in that speaks of a person and accomplishment that is in the recorded past and open for inspection. It is not said to be material because it is a person and event which is supernatural, yet supernatural in and within the common material cultural, linguistic, rational framework of the world.
It is not immaterial because of its sharp supernatural origin, and not naturally found in or describable by the purely subjective phenomenon. It is immaterial because it is designed to act upon the mind and spirit and within its laws. It is not immaterial because it is in exception to and above all known subjective laws, but is immaterial in that it is comprehensible and manipulable by those laws.
Therefore, the symbol comes out of foreign transcendence but is formatted by reception by a creature. But it must be pointed out that it is formatted for a creature that normally operates on a symbolism that is anti-transcendent. This new outside symbol is made to break the perceptual hold the creation of nature and person has on an individual and reorient it toward transcendence. It operates to reverse by a kind of faith the Edenic fall.
The Transcendent Symbol: Man’s Part: The Material Side
Mans anti-revelational, insular symbol is atomized into an infinite nested system of objects and laws that are turned toward Man and not to trans. At the first level of this infinite nesting, there is found the bifurcation of material symbols and immaterial symbols each into subjective and objective categories.
I first note that the description of Man as a material and immaterial creature in one, although accurate, is only useful if man is alone in a material and immaterial world. If we take God as a supernatural or extra-natural phenomena, the appearance of that phenomena before man is similar to being in the act of walking and singing on a sidewalk and a small private plane makes an emergency landing on the street before him, has the effect of stopping both the singing (contemplative, material subjective symbol) and walking (automatic, material objective symbol) in respect of the unusual thing before him.
When a man walks, he is creating a material time symbol. The time aspect is his history of walking and singing in the material, outward act. His linear progress along a material route this involuntary means of travel is also accompanied by his song, as his special creative material product but first a subjective creative product.
The unusual event of the plane landing is suspending man in a kind of state where, for a moment, man’s history, so to speak, is stopped, his creative products become obsolete, so to speak, and all of his progress becomes paused. That is, momentarily there becomes no material and immaterial side of man, his history and creative power becomes unimportant and these two sides momentarily disappear by this alien phenomenon. It overpowers and combines man’s time frame, his creative act and his method of progress and suspended by their alien equivalents. It is only when the non-prosaic event of the plane in the progress of landing touches down safely does he return to singing and walking on one’s way because the previously non-prosaic event then becomes entirely prosaic, like himself and the world.
Therefore, whether we believe in a time when these normal activates and states of man were combined instead of conceptually divided, one cannot deny that they would not exist if a transcendent person were introduced into the world in some fashion. If introduced locally, materially, bodily, then it certainly results in an almost involuntary cessation of man’s activities at least before this person is spoken to and interacted with. If this person was introduced as a transcendent, immaterial non-prosaism instead of a physical one, one of subjective transcendent phenomena, then it commands man by Man’s moral choice in agreement, since this occurs in the place where what is real can be argued. We, however, still must identify the immaterial non-prosaic symbol of God by the same distinguishing attributes as if it were real: it must be a permanent time symbol, alien enough to suspend man’s subjective division of immateriality into law (reason) and object (concept) by a new law and object of its own.
The material symbol for man, the symbol of physical work, is split into an objective, involuntary part (nature) and a subjective voluntary part (creative product). The split is divided in this way physically because without an outside revelation of work that is not-material but objective, the body must produce its own. A world in the absence of God is by definition a world of work of man, where man must make his own way instead of being supported by the works of a transcendent God. Therefore, there is now the absence of a foreign work that was once vital for perfect material life but now, being absent, man must replace it so that he may continue some kind of existence in materiality. There becomes a new focus on Man in the act of materially creating, and now a distinction to be made between things before man and things after Man by evolving creative works which attributed to his power. These distinctions describe a material time symbol of works, giving Man a growing boldness and confidence of action toward successful completion of his journey, by his own physical power to make his way by the ability to compare between works that came before and after. This is facilitated by being alone without the manifest works of God.
What would theoretically make obsolete this material symbol and return Man to the previous condition of being in the presence of God where there is no practical distinction to be made between works before man and things after man, where God is not physically present in any sense by action, would only come from a symbol of God that contains transcendent competitors to these two natural-synthetic parts of the material symbol: a time symbol, one of an empowering indication of God’s, not Man’s, hand over history of a non-prosaic creative work of His own. This is executed by an incorporeal person nevertheless in material reality. This describes the material part of the God-given transcendent symbol that is given to man in a fallen state.
The man would not stop walking after the effect of the plane landing wore off, and not stop singing, and not lose his memory, if the plane is a supernatural work in material reality. It would remain a truly transformative encounter with God, cause a new walk to a different location, start a new kind song, and make a view of Man’s history as a life of a relatively endless stream of compiled failures now flushed out and restarted anew because now we acquire the new perfect replacement.
Man’s Part: The Immaterial Side
The immaterial symbol is the symbol of reflection, of faith, of abstract law, concept, reason. Like the material symbol of works, the immaterial symbol is a time symbol of spiritual works, in that it keeps a memory of where thought, knowledge, and beleif has been, where it should go, and where it is now by comparison to a real past and an ideal future. It is a memory that man depends upon to gauge where he has morally been, where he is and where he should go in his beliefs (singing) by his means of rational and emotional thought (walk).
The immaterial symbol has a part that is objective and involuntary and one which is subjective and voluntary. One is of a faith object, the subjective part, and one made up of the bed of information, facts, laws, quantities and qualities, dualities and monalities, emotional and intuitive abilities and states, the set substructure of the psyche, the objective part.
Faith, or belief, like the song, is an attempt to define the indefinable over a set of known knowledge quantities and qualities controlled by a fixed set of involuntary mental “laws” when these are not given to him by a transcendent power in and over them but which is not from subjective immateriality. Walking is the natural immaterial action. Call it an emotional state that is in needed for satisfaction in the creative, symbolic product of music.
The songs that we know, our ideas and beliefs and feelings, are symbols that express ineffable things but do not resolve them. The song does not produce a final revelation of the indefinable which comprehensively satisfies doubt and ends obscurity in something outside the music and outside the emotion. It is temporary, and we must make other songs in an endless progression though time to keep up with the new doubts and imprecision of emotion. The faith which is not motivated and centered on quality or object that is outside immateriality and materiality is ineffective in itself and must be continually reexamined and remade until it is eventually exhausted as a stopgap between the unknown and complete confidence in the existential truth we have adopted.
If music made by people is were theoretically compared to the music of God, whatever that would be, this would be a previous faith which is swallowed up and made obsolete by an overpowering, sublime creative revelation, ending the need for one kind of faith and beginning another kind based on the superior faith.
If our man walking down the street is singing a kind of faith, and the symbol of the plane landing was replaced by a divine song, or a faith motivator of transcendent origin, we would momentarily stop singing as we would stop our old insular faith and at provisionally replace it with the one before us.
If not singing but reading a book containing some expression of a human worldview as well as having a worldview of our own, and we encounter a foreign worldview of Transcendence, we could not but stop reading our book or stop reading anything altogether until we fully know this supernatural one. Regardless, it would certainly change the way we read any human book or other books thereafter that express a worldview, not to mention change the kinds of books we want to write ourselves.
Furthermore, our old emotion or reason would in such circumstances cease to become our means of spiritual locomotion of our faith, but perhaps start again with a new kind of reason and new kind of emotion in respect only to the new phenomena that have occurred before us.
We then must cease to speak theoretically, because speaking only theoretically we don’t really take anything seriously. Theories are generic and are capable of being interpreted and taking on meaning in a myriad of ways unless a demonstration is provided for us by an authority higher than our own.
The question we then must ask is, returning to our basic laws of communication between people by symbolism, what kind of symbol, quintessentially, does God give man and what kind of symbol will he accept as intelligible and moral on the part of man in response? What is God’s equivalent to the plane which is in the act of landing and has landed?
We know that man must give a faith symbol to God because and meaning and an expression of the ingestion and penetration of meaning are not transmittable without it. Of course, symbols without meanings are but grunts and groans, and perhaps express something, but certainly cannot carry the knowledge God is looking for. Man must give meaning by the instrumentality of symbols, but meaning without a symbol, communicated directly, is an impossible idea.
What is most important now is not what man will give God, but what kind of symbol God gives Man for which Man expects a positive response. God must initially give a symbol to Man that he can understand and respond to in this way because nothing can be known without a symbol. That initial symbol is the first on our list since we cant answer a question that is not asked.
The Transcendent symbol is something visible, at hand, sensible and capable of shifting and transforming our attention to it through time. But, here again, cannot anyone make the claim that their symbol deserves devoted attention? Therefore this symbol must make that claim for itself, without the need for anyone’s participation in providing it a meaning. That means minimally that an objective symbol of God that he requires in the faith of man is at least making the claim of truth by its own internal evidence, instead of being true of as a result of Man’s insular creative or rational faculties. This is at least the Bible as a historical document, and the image of Christ that claims to be the “truth, the way, and the life.” But for these to be true meaningfully they have to self-authenticate as God does.
Claims (symbols) are nothing without proof (meaning). What kind of meaning by symbolism has been set forth by God and requires Man to use in his return symbol of faith to Him?
What is the transcendent Symbolic Type?
The world’s answer to this question illuminating, but not because it gives an answer but because it provides the quintessentially wrong answer by which we can find the right one by contrast.
We can’t find the answer to this Ultimate symbol, so we make our own, which is never Ultimate. We need only ponder for a moment the endless ways this transcendent symbol of Jesus and Messiah and the promise and fulfillment of the biblical oracles are given a rough shove out the door. This Transcendent symbol, the supernatural symbol of meaning in divine knowledge, this foundational and undeniable biblical ground of knowledge, is replaced by something else which we have made without anyone noticing that it is not the original. This is Man trying to evade the passive transpondence requirement of the symbol as given by God, taking out the “trans,” and leaving human communication, response.
The Christ/prophetic knowledge symbol is very, very well known. It is that thing in theology that everyone agrees is integral to the NT revelation but no one wants to write theology directly from its implications. This is because Man is naturally not impressed with it spiritually. Its God landing in His full glory but everyone keeps on walking and singing. So Man takes this original token tries to come up with an alternative symbol so he can continue on his way, first by extracting the symbolic part of the original and offering an alternative. If this is successful, he can then match it with an alternative meaning which is also not in the original but has the appearance of satisfaction by superficial (symbolic, outer) resemblance. The result is a replacement symbol for the original that can now invite discussion, equivocation, dissent, deniability, invigorating theology and all manner of incongruent responses by man, but leaving Man with no relationship with God over knowledge.
We can visualize this process in a carousel-like operation. Alternative symbols are always orbiting the original. Depending upon what kind of Christ we want, or what kind of basic knowledge we like, we choose an alternative symbol that will best stand for a meaning more to our liking.
