A Class Presentation on Symbols of the Sacred

SYMBOLS OF THE SACRED

By Louis Dupré

1. OF HOLY SIGNS

1.1 Symbols and Process of Representation

·         Signs may merely point to the signified but symbols represent it.

·         Symbols are exclusive property of man. It truly presents what it represents.

·         All symbols reveal a reality beyond their sensuous appearance. It also points beyond itself.

·         The fundamental function of the symbol then is to enable this mind to express itself.

·         Symbol is by its very nature self-transcending.

1.2 Religious Symbols

·         All symbols surpass our ordinary perception of the objects they represent; though not in the same way.

·         Aesthetic symbol maintain a tight unity between what appears and what is signified. In religious symbol the signified remains forever beyond our reach; they conceal more than revealing.

·         What we now call religious symbols grew out of our ancestor’s first attempt to articulate reality.

·         Religious symbols remain elusive and polyvalent.

·         The less specific a symbol is the richer its symbolic meaning becomes. Though its function may be negative the imagination contributes to the religious symbolization process positive images.

1.3 Rites

·         First among religious symbols are the ceremonial deeds of worship; rite.

·         The purpose of a ritual act is not to respect the ordinary action which it symbolizes, but to bestow meaning upon it by placing it in a higher perspective; its purpose is to transform life and not to imitate it.

·         Rites are also related to play acting. Rite is not a mere reenactment of historical event it recreates beyond historical limits and gives it a permanent and universal significance.

1.4 Sacraments

·         Mysteries or sacraments are particular rites; not every rite is sacramental.

·         In a sacramental rite a common function of life obtains a salvific effect; Sacrament is distinct from magic rites.

·         The rite partakes in a transcendent reality from which it derives an efficacy surpassing its ordinary power.

·         Sacraments symbolize a reality which can in no way be directly approached. Sacraments are symbolic in their very essence.

·         It must be recognized as intrinsically connected with the sacred.

·         The sacramental word is very important in a sacrament. The “word” is like “form” to sacrament.

1.5 Sacrifice: Communion, Gift and Expiation

·         Sacrifice is almost as common as sacraments. It has always occupied privileged place among ritual ceremonies.

·         Usually sacrifices are considered either as gifts or as communion rites.

·         The essence of sacrifice has itself shifted from archaic to more recent types: to feed the spirits or gods, to connect itself to another non-human group etc.,  

·         Union is considered to be the original objective of sacrifice. Later the notion of property and gift emerged.

·         Offering is the only common characteristic which all sacrifices have.

·         Another important point is expiatory sacrifices/substitution. In a sense every sacrifice is substitutional.

2. THE SYMBOLISM OF WORDS

2.1 Religious Language

·         Language is the symbol par excellence. It is able to embody concepts not only of things but of things in combination. But words have to be in context.

·         All symbols cannot be reduced to language. Language can do everything other symbols do; though less perfectly.

·         Symbols can be religious in many ways but only words can name the sacred directly. Language alone is sufficiently flexible to refer explicitly to a reality other than the one to which its symbols normally refer.

·         The purpose of religious language is to assert the transcendent as real.

·         It is the overflow of the religious person’s most basic belief namely that he/she is speaking about ‘what is,’ for him religious statements not only meaningful but truth.

·         The problem with religious language is whether language is able to deal with reality and most importantly with reality as it transcends the empirical world.

·         Religious language is basically thetic i.e., positing a reality beyond the subjective experience of the speaker and objective reality of the world.

2.2 Oddity of Religious Language

·         Religious language originates in a more intimate relation between the speaker and the spoken than the ordinary language.

·         It refers to this reality as transcendent therefore it differs from aesthetic language.

·         How can religious speech avoid being objective while still doing full justice to God’s transcendence. The oldest way of dealing with it is analogy of predication; the univocal and equivocal terms.

·         God-language takes as its model a familiar situation but then qualifies it in such a way that the familiar suddenly turns highly unfamiliar. Thus, Religious language is an odd language.

·         Divine truth appears only through the inner lines or contradictions of reason. The language of Christian revelation is absolute paradox or the “absurd.”

·         Without the ordinary language the religious language would have no content whatever. The relation between them is unilateral.  

2.3 The Symbolic Nature of Religious Language

·         Religious language and poetry are both symbolic. In typology an event comes to mean more than its actual occurrence directly implied.

·         Later allegorical method of Philo became popular. Some objections to allegory came from renaissance humanists and the Protestants but later on it was realized that scripture itself was symbolic.

·         Only symbols can provide religious language with the two essential conditions- subjective involvement of the religious speaker and the transcendent nature of the referent. The believer cannot despise religious language because of the ability of the symbols to express transcendental.

·         No statement about God is entirely nonsymbolic not even the primary one (God is the Supreme Being) but that all discourse about God contains also a primary nonsymbolic affirmation without the nonsymbolic the mind would be unable affirm God at all.

3. THE SYMBOLISM OF RELIGIOUS ART

3.1 Sacred Art: A Meaningful Concept?

·         For the longest part of human history art was “symbol” of religion. One could not be discussed without the other: art was religious art.

·         Direct link between art and faith was dissolved only in our own secular culture. 

·         Attitude with respect to art differs according to religions; according to the mode of envisioning the infinite in the finite.

·         Art expands the expressive power of religious symbolism.

·         Neither the effect of the art nor the intention of the artist makes the piece of art religious. Thus, no universal rule could determine a form of expression as exclusively religious. The religious experience itself is too polychromatic to be restricted to a single style of expression.

3.2 Symbols of Transcendence

·         Symbols that are by their very nature religious do not exist.

·         Religious art tends to display the inadequacy of the aesthetic form with respect to its transcendent content. Eg. Outsized proportions, fragmentary character of the work, unfinished work.

·         Apart from the negative way (emphasis on the inadequacy of the form), there are also the positive symbols of the divine e.g. light. other devices are like frontal position of figures, immobility and lack of perspective, the absence of individual resemblance etc.,

·         The very idea of absolute transcendence creates a constant tension in the development of religious art. Some religions prefer abstract forms of music and architecture because they are apprehensive of expressing the invisible in visible forms.

·         Symbol of the transcendental are by their very nature obscure therefore, language alone can be clearly metaphorical. All arts are symbolic yet language alone can do justice to the concern for religious purity in the expression.

3.3 New Meaning of Religious Art

·         The secularization of our age makes it very difficult to affirm if art is religious even in the least sense. Modern art is characterized by absence of any reference beyond the artistic image.

·         Only by imposing his own religious attitude on the artist’s work can the viewer perceive contemporary expressionist art as religious.

·         The contemporary artist leaves the initiative to the spectator. The ambiguity of modern art with respect to the sacred is significant for a situation in which many have lost the direct experience of the sacred. Language is indispensible but not sufficient for the creation of religious art.