Sacred Symbology: The Sump and the Cure of the Transcendent Type. Part 4
Sacred Symbology: The Meaning of Revelation
This is one of several disarticulated articles on this subject. Search “Sacred Symbology” from the homepage and you will see them all.
We are discussing the legal basis for religious sentiment and practice through basic symbolic assumptions. Please see this and this and consider them part of the conversation. This last article on the Imago Dei is a closer examination of the thesis that I will present here.
One thing before we fully engage this sentiment and practice, or before this assumed transcendent symbolic paradigm, is “legal” for both God and man, thus making it intelligible and acceptable by God as well as man. We want to describe precisely this carrier, this symbolic object in the world that God placed here in which God expects Man to place his confidence. That which we also use to speak to him. Just as we would a word of language which is the means of communication and also carries the content of the communication.
The traditional approach is that the reason we believe in God is an entirely different thing than the thing we use to communicate with him, but this goes against symbolic logic followed to its end. This only means that when we are talking about symbolism, we are talking it broadly as the basic means of communication to both man and God, not only Man and not only create objects of man. That an honest approach to symbolism is an objective one, as things separate from both man and God that bridge an otherwise impassable gap. That this is the only way to satisfy the overall liberal tendency for a man too close Man-to-God equation and, at the same time, the conservative tendency of impossible ontological separation.
The best way to find this is minimally to use what we know of dimensional reality to figure out how the reality that we know, materiality and immateriality, can be thought to fit transcendence. To fit as a third reality, equally within the same sphere of influence, but not being from that sphere. That is, to be able to identify precisely what this token of transcendent communication as the basis for legal religiosity with God, we are only saying in another way that we are just attempting to identify true, meaningful, purposeful, lawful transcendence within the material and immaterial dimensions in the same way we now find in ourselves as individuals a spiritual/mental immateriality within a bodily materiality.
How do we begin to think about it? We don’t need some fancy philosophical arguments.
To restate, our thoughts, our immateriality, are also found in the outside, physical world in our creative products. The outside world is also found in our thoughts by our imaging conceptual objects and controlling them by rational laws that mimic natural laws. It is not unreasonable to assume that if God exists in the way I describe, we should at least expect to find him in our two-dimensional spheres in a similar way as they appear in each other.
Let us entertain the idea, provisionally for now, as Christians, that the Transcendent purpose sometime after creation, for a specific reason and God’s “benefit,” however you might conceive of it, was to make available to man a miraculous meta-symbol within our material and immaterial media by which God expects us to center our symbolic lives of action and belief, instead of gratuitously holding only to the certainty that it does not exist. Or that it exists somewhere only in and from the closed immaterial/material box, or that we might not possibly have been so careless as to overlook something so important for so long.
Materiality and immateriality are ultimately the products of transcendence. They are together the great meta-symbol of all immanent existence, “material” being objected and “immaterial” being signification or lawful container that controls the presentation of that object if we think of them together as this great symbol of contingent reality. Reality has objectivity and reality also has purely abstract forces controlling it. Man is the perfect hybrid material and immaterial product, himself a symbol lying halfway between the two spheres, giving only him the ability to recognize and contemplate the significance of what is not of the two spheres but lies within them, and what knowledge points outside them to God.
Theoretically, we can imagine that if there was this time when man’s consciousness was at first awakened in an Edenic-type instantaneous appearing, all things of the world are at first so new that Man’s consciousness is continually on fire with new thoughts and sensations. We then have man overpowered by the results of God’s natural, miraculous creation, a creation which is a static symbol of God as His highest insentient symbol. In this state, Man directly experiences this miraculousness as it overpowers him, but to him psychologically, it is miraculous as much because of its own inaccessible, Divine mysteriousness as it is that time has not run long enough to make it seem common. The original experience of the miraculous is minimally the simultaneous knowledge of man’s common indistinguishability from that miraculous objective reality through his body and his indistinguishability in his current uncommon spiritual, mental medium from the ultimate meaning of purpose through the obvious Godly source of the miraculous phenomenon within view. Having equal transformative impact on the entire physical-immaterial nature of man at once, but also a sharply foreign and grounded: physical reality being neither impactful for its prosaism or its otherworldliness alone, but as a result of both streaming into his mind to fully lay bare his own otherwise unknown purpose in a passive but complete revelation.
Sacred Symbology: The Beginning
This state of man in such a new and perfect world also makes it unnecessary or him incapable to imagine a different reality or to build his own, such as an idiosyncratic conception such as “spirit” or “righteousness.” However, as time runs, although that fact of man’s physical likeness to a supra-natural world is easily maintained on sight, phenomena also become history. Therefore new phenomenon becomes common. Emerging is a gradual simultaneous birth and separation of the idea of the ultimate and the common in his spirit slowly. And so his spirit and “truth” come to gradually be seen rather as a moral option of choice as to whether they are truly different but indistinguishable from an ultimate state.
Before we know anything in particular about reality but are dropped fully conscious within it in such a way, everything is of miraculous origin because it is both before us, new and mysterious, not because of any of us. But the narrow part of the miraculous stream that we cross into naturalism after the newness has worn off was not a primitive curse to man’s triumphal religious future. That is because we were not obliged to cross it any more than it is a new insight to religious post-modernism that now recognizes it as a very narrow stream that separates us from God. The fun begins after we cross that stream, not because miracles are not happening or are impossible, but that the stream to religionists and modernists, the Transcendent symbol, once nature, no longer exists spiritually in any form before us as it did in Eden. The fact is that we are in trouble in having to cross that stream only if we are intent on drying ourselves off from the indelible, miraculous water when we get to the other side.
In the figure below, we have the illustration of all reality. Immateriality, Immateriality, and Transcendence.
In the figure to the left, we have the Edenic state, in which transcendence is not abstractly symbolized, but is constantly surrounding and touching Man in a palpable way. This is the original transcendent symbol of nature overpowering Man’s creative will.
In the figure to the right is man’s current condition, when the transcendent water presumably is wiped completely clean. Transcendence is outside looking in and is now a symbolic concept that influences but does not touch man, being sure that he is only a material/immaterial hybrid that must make his way without any present instance of Transcendence.
Now, we ask how we might conceive of God’s non-symbolic physical presence as well as his intellectual or thoughtful presence in this new primitive state of Eden where the miraculous is everywhere but before it breaks down. If it did break down, through time and experience as I have described, leading to the present fallen state, I presume that this would be the template for an abstract symbol of God that he leaves behind to counter that failure, that symbol of regression.
Think for a moment. If God were able to “physically” walk among man, we could say that God is materially influencing man though his transcendent actions among man’s body and immaterially influencing man by his expressed and ultimate thoughts to man’s mind by his transcendent speech. With God’s physical presence powerfully and involuntarily influencing Man’s physical relation with objective reality, God’s intellectual presence also might powerfully and involuntarily influence his spiritual relationship with his subjective reality. God speaks to man, commands him to things, as wells as give explanations and disclose secrets naturally inaccessible to man. Therefore, we have God condescending to act within man’s material and immaterial reality, as a symbol of himself, to a created symbol of himself that he seeks to communicate and share the transcendent that is common between them. This transference of knowledge is free and involuntary, and being ultimate, it negates the need for a moral choice by Man in choosing what ultimate knowledge is and what it is not.
Then, if God were to leave man, man is left with a template for special revelational knowledge from God’s speech but losing the content of that knowledge over time. The template left would be, just as the natural physical template left is a necessity of the automatic obedience to the object and laws of physical reality (and later, God’s commands), also a template for automatic obedience to the objects and laws of spirit. These laws of spirit are, of course, naturally the laws of thought in reason and logic, of a sequence as opposed to discontinuity. But just as the body in obeying natural law would seek a nearer approximation through time to God’s Edenic original, so would the spirit need its own to approximate God’s presence. This is the expectation of true revealed religion, in a progressive revelation to slowly clear the cobwebs out of man’s mind and allows him and all generations to change to see and see the original image (symbol) of God that by reproducing a form of the same body/spirit experience of Eden.
We then ask, if there is a quintessential generic “Transcendent token” that remains in the world from God for man to continually re-orient his spirit to Him, in what form must this symbolic revelation come? Can it leave out either the experience of God’s absent will (law) or his absent person (object)? I assume at least that it must be an object and law in a revelation that can resist man confusing it with those of the natural world and tied only to Eden. He won’t be abe to confuse it with a natural world and have the power to persuade him to identify God as being a product only of that world or even, in time, Man himself?
Some concept and practice of religion is an appropriate progressive result of the first, but how can the second be supplied in the same fashion when the spirit is abstract and volatile, when not everything is necessarily inflexibly real or true, but requires an assent of the mind and will? Physical obedience is not necessarily such assent that what one is doing is so meaningful, but minimally obedience to the spirit since it is a secret act and implies and requires a pure assent. The answer is that the missing voice of God, which is obeyed spiritually in a higher fashion when he is not present can only be an obedience to the promises of God in written form, as well as, his commands, making a necessity for a written revelational religion. But again, obedience or faith in the written promises of God in a scriptural revelation must also come with a re-experience of God’s physical presence for it to be identified with a real God. Just as obedience to the commandments must also be of a character that provides a means of re-experiencing God’s will once expressed in a miraculous natural state, meaning that this written voice of God must also make palpable again God’s connection with it and His continuing presence in the world.
Sacred Symbology: Fighting Against It
This condition also attracts to it man’s manufactured spiritual content of the objects and laws of spirit when God’s original is lacking by his removed personal presence. At some point, Man might theoretically manage his thoughts through his power to produce a replacement inner voice of conscience to fill the loss of meaning in a once exterior, miraculous one. This spiritual bifurcation is due to a splitting of the original palpable symbolic content and container due to God no longer supplying a miraculous state, for which man seeks to supply his own container for “self-actualization.” We can also see the possibility of a growing dysfunctional union of content and container taking place over time instead of separation, due to a loss of this ultimate phenomenal context (the miraculous). Man seeks to supply his own means of reunion to reproduce transcendent meaning. This broadly describes the ever-present historical trends of liberalism and conservatism, which I will discuss shortly.
But as man is artificially making up the loss, we might imagine that God would be making up the loss as well in a progressive revelation to man, if we regarded God as a creator who is also a moral person. God might move, somehow, to supply the lost transcendent token of himself in man’s materiality and immateriality so that man might be given an alternative to obey in the absence of the lost Edenic one. Man can’t go back to the primitive, raw revelational experience with God. That would disengage the effective will of man. Since we are in a place where Man can voluntarily choose to deny God’s knowledge, the only way out is for God voluntarily to choose another symbol of his making. God can supply something of revelational knowledge as a counterweight to man’s increasingly insular and dissolute knowledge to re-reveal the original transcendent revelation that was lost. God expects Man to take it up, securing a relationship between God and man by the thing as well as the means of transcendent communication. The liberal paradigm accepts a natural split in the symbol and acts by seeking a union of the symbol, but seeks rest in reforming the world, or, by the impossible means of getting rid of ultimate meaning and reforming or advancing an opaque worldly symbolic content instead (social programs, technology, feeling, science and medicine, race relations). The conservative accepts a natural union of the symbol and acts by seeking an eternal separation of the symbol but seeks perfection in reforming the spirit by the impossible means of getting rid of the idea of the ultimate immanent symbol and restating better by an opaque spiritual symbolic container instead (law, obligation, morality, good works).
What God’s replacement symbol of the ultimate and miraculous seeks to do is to supply the symbolic split with a truly miraculous union, and provide the fusion of content and container with an immanent, not purely abstract, basis for a truly miraculous distinction between man and God.
We can see that Man, if left entirely alone, would eventually reach, with thousands of years of failed ideas and technological achievement that never did deliver him from the finality of death, an intellectual and behavioral sump, a place where all his accumulated revelational losses collect at the lowest level of consciousness if done apart from this proposed corrective symbolic revelation from God. In this state, man is concerned only with making symbols of his own and making ideas of his own.
At the lowest level is the making only of things that have a practical purpose for his body, instead of those which raise his level of palpable awareness of his place in the universe which is outside the universe, Making ideas that are only for the satisfaction of his ego, emotions and intellect instead of those that clarify his ultimate place in immateriality as God’s presence once did. This sump is man’s natural place of spiritual collection of failed ideas when God is absent by man’s insular focus. The only thing that could stop the collection and dissolution is if God were especially placing himself again within the material and immaterial universe to counter in the form of a new kind of symbol. Then, being more symbol than God, it is a counterweight only for that small percentage of those in the sump that will honestly consider it.
Sacred Symbology: Drawing Man Back
If God was now to specially reveal a transcendent symbol and example of himself in materiality and immateriality with the intent of drawing man back to his previous purity of awareness, but without its ignorance, it would have to be one that took into account the impossibility of rewinding time and the present reality of the necessity of only symbolic communication. To draw Man back, as a competing symbol to those that are emblematic of the condition of the sump, it would have to be specially engineered to be a counter-attractive force to our present works and regressive ideas as a special and miraculous work of God and an ultimate example of a perfect idea.
Our task here to identify that transcendent symbol within our universe placed by God for Man that compensates for and completes his necessary faith in one objective meaning and subjective object, to again overwhelm his body and mind in a miraculous revelation. These bifurcated or illegally fused material and immaterial paradigms that have occurred by its disregard are the primary subjects we use to explain how it is missed or misidentified.
Here is an illustration of where we are going. The top in philosophical terms, the bottom in biblical terms.:
