Symbolism: First Principle: A Racial Analogy: A Prophetic Think Tank
Continued from previous page…
Symbolism, God, Man and Morality
The complaint might come to mind of an inevitable blurring of all these cross-disciplinary studies related to symbolism as I suggest, such as linguistics, myth, literature, art if everything is a symbol. After all, if everything is a symbol we have to create a single integrated multi-disciplinary study out of which flows into all the others. We have to abandon the faith to the false promise that all these others at some point are supposed to empty into one unified understanding of all knowledge through time…what the original intention of the university first assumed. Today, the expectation remains unfulfilled, that transcendentally disconnected human “studies” will lead us to illumination. There is no such real and ideal single multi-discipline to be found. Everything is balkanized, and the linkages between one field and another are based mostly upon formal rather than substantive distinctions. Perhaps “integration” should be rethought, again, as something quintessentially to be done with an all-or-nothing attitude for knowledge.
At one time, when the Church was considered dominant as the fount of all ultimate knowledge, it was also supposed that the symbol “God,” as that eternal principle that remained more foreign and mysterious than revealed, was itself this hub of knowledge above all the earthly interests which flowed down into these disciplinary compartments, which would in turn somehow coalesce into God again at the bottom of the flow. However, if the principle “God” autonomously had its own sound internal, authenticating and compelling logic, and itself stronger than the urge of men to make their own, as God himself, we would not be in the shape we are in today where the university is now only a place to get a degree and make money, and no one is even attempting to suggest what would universally be taken as the bigoted assumption that all these fields can be and should be, like they preach of the races, unified into one, much less into God. But after 2400 years, all we have been able to convince ourselves of is that bodies, cultures, religions, and genders should be integrated into a single universal “man” while that man remains sick.
Even if these academic subjects were reconciled with the same passion and logic as we are want to do of race, the trend would still be how we can make them equal only by their most superficial associations, such as the association of one person to each other on the basis of color and the association of one subject to another on the basis of their appearance as a choice in a school course catalog. Our only plan to put the problem away would be only trying to do it by tinkering with the number of bodies, like the various subjects, of diverse kinds that will sit next to each other in a classroom for which we can claim the final and great example of substantive assimilation.
But I do not necessarily propose such an archetype over academia is necessarily a final solution either. That is, there should be no need for us to go to a classroom and learn why a door and a hedgehog and a stop sign or Beowulf should be regarded as symbols to us before we enter them, heed them, dissect them or read them any more than we should have to go around repeating over and over to ourselves that the races are equal. Skin color is worthless to anyone, the most superficial part of true identity, and it should be obvious. If you have to say so, you won’t understand it. So, what am I proposing?
Well, at least that if distinctions are to be made between one very important thing or another, let it be addressed first by countenancing what they fundamentally share before considering the various superficial things that can or should be their point of departure, and remain consistent. Then we build up our true system of the essentially symbolic universe from there. We end up lighting upon the fact that the solution to a race problem is to de-emphasize the importance of race, to dissolve the symbol, but the solution to the symbolic problem, if there is one, is to unify it as everything.
It is of course knowledge that is the most important thing that is a part of the symbol, much like a character at the heart of the individual, not race. It is not the apparent symbolic form. There is nothing that we can lay our eyes on or think about what we could never take as not signifying other, more important things, whether theoretically or practically. The world seems for us to be a clue to the important questions of life that lie dormant until we engage our minds to connect what appears with what does not. What appears, whether by sight or by conviction, is a symbol to it.
My emerging point here is that if most everything if a symbol and most everything denotes or is an opportunity for hidden knowledge of the more important things, the issue of whether our knowledge is right or wrong is found mostly in the how we choose and what we choose for the signification to the visible symbolic form of a belief, or more plainly, how we take evidence in any sense and build up a final view of truth that we trust.
Yes, a view of truth is a symbol to its signified aspect or its evidentiary or presuppositional bases. The creeds of the Church have historically been called its symbolics. Our beliefs are generally the kinds of highest symbols we use.
Ok, then, what basically signifies a proper, ultimate and true belief symbol for man?
First, I assume that our knowledge source and subject of our highest beliefs are most suitable for an ideal transcendent signification by us when, as we being symbols of knowledge, it is so far outside, transcendently outside, the human field of view that it may independently, autonomously qualify as an ultimate signified knowledge type for us to immanently represent, or become an incorrigible basis of an ultimate belief for a ultimate human symbol. A knowledge sharply alien in origin, outside of all possible artificially constructed human symbols to adequately represent, but wherein a symbol that we can construct for it may also be an accepted expression of man’s agreement about it for that Alien who originally gave it benevolently and for such purpose. If that alien knowledge is to be considered a revelation that we could not know on our own but must be given to us from the outside, our method of knowing right or wrong signification is not found in procedural thinking with logical axioms or “evidence” generally, but as that single phenomenon of knowledge as our only rubric for defining what is ultimate, and ultimately worthy of our attention and lives, and what is not.
Most of this section is about how many times I can restate symbolism in relation to our perception of what is ideally right or wrong assumptions about what is truly transcendent. I hope that the reader does not think this is a tedious exercise, especially when I always hold my fire a to complete disclosure of a solution to the problem until the very end, but I think that a leisurely meditation is sometimes the best thing.
But it is very simple: our problem with knowledge has nothing to do with what we know, how we think about it or procedurally present it. It has to do with what we love, which should be in itself expected something that combines human comprehensibility with a sharply “outward” denotation.
What we love and what we are naturally attracted to that is at the end of the signification process. What it all means. To what it all applies. If we are not naturally attracted to something it is unlikely that we will ever find it, and although we may follow perfect logic in justifying why we have some belief that has nothing to do with what we don’t really love, which is good only if it makes no difference if what we love, that logic is not going to help us when the justifying process is finished.
Therefore most of the quest is to convince the reader what our highest love is supposed to be searching for and finding the highest kinds of knowledge which is worthy of the attention of such love, not how and with what are we supposed to do with a kind of knowledge which is presupposed to engender such ultimate love. We have to remind ourselves that, although God is obviously presupposed rightly as the highest love, what we are looking for is not the symbol “God,” but is first God’s’ highest immanent meaning, nor symbol. God’s highest kind of love can’t be the symbol and principle “God” because, since it is constructed, it attracts to it constructed knowledge denotations that will inevitably be Balkanized and argued over. “God,” the symbol is assumed to have one informational and immanent, separate but equal meaning that alone is capable of making “God” the symbol of use to man’s acceptable expressions of love to Him.
To restate this plainly, this is just saying that our assumption is minimal that nothing that we do means anything, and is just idle recreation if a piece of information does not exist available to us which originates outside of our naturally derived symbols and our knowledge and leads us to a life after death. Life after death, of course, brings up all kinds of questions about how this could exist, and what quality of life it could be, if made only by disembodied spirits. Nothing makes sense of course unless the agent of this revelatory information originates in a personal God, but, in our thinking, many things make sense to us about what revelatory information we claim qualifies as pointing to Him in signification that does not in fact quintessentially signify Him.
Therefore our task is to see if there is any revelation of an alien origin available to us which logic and evidence can revelationally engage, to some permanent satisfaction, in connecting what we see with what it means, leading minimally to a high quality of life after death.
Again, to restate our symbolic problem, this might seem easy if we are Christian since it is easy to take up any religious claim and run with it, declaring how this thing or that thing comes from God: Calvinism vs. Arminianism anyone? But our main goal is to engage our love and reason to settle which claim is going to be foreign enough and at the same time connective to a personal God enough to define a quintessentially good religious thought from a bad one.
If we preface our discussion by noting briefly how the idea of the symbol changed through history, we can get a good idea where we are going with how idealism and realism represent bad assumptions about religious knowledge and where we should look elsewhere.
In antiquity, the concept of the symbol was mostly bound up with religion with the word Idol. The Greek eidōlon or “image.” “Idolatry” combines this with the word latreia, which means “adoration.” To the Greeks and the Romans and of all more ancient cultures, the idea was that of a physical representation of a god by which the worshiper used as a means of addressing the god’s real person.
This limited but more rational understanding of the use of religious images did not often work out much in religious practice. Many early Christian apologists pointed out that paganism was commonly practiced by the worshiper assuming that the god was fully manifest in the image.
The Catholic Christian era generally maintained this complaint in making a distinction between original Christianity and the pagan religions but continued to gather itself into the same thing, God into relics, paintings, statues, confessional statements, prelates and the visible church on earth, degenerating into scholastic and mystical hedonism to represent its attempts at advancing spiritual insight, with institutional corruption and malice signifying its corrupt advancement of temporal and administrative ideals within its symbolic paradigm.
The dialectical reasoning and the pagan philosophers that occupied theologians the Middle Ages were no more than an attempt to reconcile the Christian revelation with systems that had grains but few boulders of truth. This dilly-dallying while Rome burned, which the Academics, against all biblical cues, thought defined the heights of intellectual Christian virtue, caused it to feel free to introduce any doctrine it so wished, as symbols of faith, in line with the ancient pagan idea of the idol, regardless of its scriptural support (Mary’s authority, her birth, and death, transubstantiation, relics, prayers to Saints, Papal infallibility) because the religious symbol was the same as its truth and God was manifested in the symbol.
Meanwhile, the administrative stewards of the church felt free to distance themselves, as symbols of God’s knowledge, from any threat of judgment for their actions by believing that most of this knowledge was to be found in them, the symbols themselves functionally representing the final destination for their truth. The implications for their creative understanding of “apostolic succession,” for example, led to atheist popes, murdering popes, and incestual popes. It is still not widely known that, for example, Pope Alexander VI routinely murdered Cardinals in order to confiscate their property and enrich himself.
This religious realist view of the symbol as being a self-contained and chosen privately because it was inadequately revelational at any given time to make themselves responsible for how they handled it, gave way to just another style of the same thing in idealism.
The idealist modern age of religion was of course justifiably offended, inaugurating the Reformation, but did no better with the meaning of universal symbolism. The starting point to them was not an external church authority or autonomous reason. The start was Christ’s works, not Man’s, scripture for doctrine, not some man’s word, and personal faith on scriptural grounds the best expression of its truth, with creeds that can be put in your pocket to that effect. But, although being effective compasses to God’s knowledge and then to any conception of our satisfaction with Him, are these symbols of God’s knowledge really to be taken also as its landfall? If the Catholics unjustifiably circled wagons to protect themselves from within from justifiable verbal insults from without, to their increasing smugness at their success, then the Protestants just wandered off into the desert to be cut down by so many real arrows of doubt from without, such as from Kant and Hume, until no one was left to regret their initial carelessness.
While the religious world tried to make truth a monolithic external reality to contain their faith in God through which they could become obedient, restricting the symbolic concept mainly to material religious devices or ordained persons, the Church of the Enlightenment sought to pound it into various compartments that suited individual academic, religious, artistic and philosophical interests.
The word “symbol” was not used as we use it today until Leibnitz, who used it to refer to mathematical signs to serve science, and Kant who brought it into philosophy and aesthetics. After this, it was primarily used by the German Romantics to make a distinction in art with allegory (“the particular signifying the general, as opposed to the union of the general with the particular”).[1] Today in the non-Catholic Church, “symbol” is not a faith confession as it used to be, and it not necessarily even displays of religious piety or evidence of a personal reformation as a result of a conversion. This is despite the fact that in the non-Catholic church the faith confession is the one first and crucial act of obedience that ushers one into a relationship and presence of God, and works of righteousness the primary means of outwardly confirming to the world that this personal transformation has taken place. Today, in both secular and religious use, “symbol” means practically nothing but a logo or a religious emblem, or it is synonymous with “superficiality.”
It seems clear that we might have been engaging in good thinking over good reasons for what we did, accepting good symbols of the state of our spiritual integrity. But the state of our spiritual integrity was considered to have no prior transcendent referent other than through a religious knowledge traced mainly to historical forces and cultural forces. Never could they be traced directly to this necessary and distinctly un-manipulable foreign, transcendent knowledge that is so powerfully other-worldly that it can never be replaced with another merely human invention of reason without immediate detection. The result is that we lose not only our idea of what constitutes the sublime but the symbol as well, as that that small but ubiquitous thing that carries the sublime into the world and allows us to respond to it morally in the only sense that Transcendence could accept.
Please see part two of this article here.
[1] (Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 1973). This is a very good, comprehensive article on the modern historical development of the concept in literature.
