The philosopher Owen Barfield, beginning in 1928 with his book Poetic Diction, explored the common metaphysical roots of both language and consciousness. Possibly influenced by Barfield, Tolkien was a philologist who voyaged “inside language” where words and things converge, as though traveling back in time and consciousness to Eden itself, where Adam gave to things the names that corresponded to their real natures. From his schooldays he had been convinced he had, with others, a mission to transform our materialistic civilization by reintroducing it to the power of poetry, the power to reveal truth in the very act of creating.9
In modern times we have neglected the poetic or musical dimension that was presupposed in the Liberal Arts as originally practised, and infused into the Middle Ages by the Benedictines—the need to educate the heart and the imagination, not just to feel but to know. Can we learn something from the Christian Romantics that would help us recover this lost poetical dimension of the Liberal Arts?
James S. Taylor’s Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education is informed by the experience of the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s and ’80s. In line with the best of the Romantic tradition, Taylor contrasts the mode of “poetic knowledge,” an inward or intuitive grasp of the world, with the “scientific” mode of knowledge based on the gathering of mere facts. The former is emotional, sensory, empathetic, and involves the whole person in the act of knowing. Poetic intuition is knowledge by “connaturality” or participation, that finds within the self something that corresponds to the object, thus leaping over the barrier between self and other. So a person gazing at the stars, even if he cannot measure them in the way demanded by scientific knowledge, may be led to a part of himself in which those great distances and holy fires are felt to exist and possess a meaning.
“This transient motion of a beloved hand,” writes Jacques Maritain, “it exists an instant, and will disappear forever, and only in the memory of angels will it be preserved, above time. Poetic intuition catches it in passing, in a faint attempt to immortalize it in time. But poetic intuition does not stop at this given existent; it goes beyond, and infinitely beyond.” It grasps not merely “the singular existent which resounds in the subjectivity of the poet,” but “all the other realities which echo in this existent, and which it conveys in the manner of a sign.” Poetic intuition is perception by the “integrated powers of the soul.”10
Taylor’s eloquent defense of the poetic mode of knowledge claims for it an inherent superiority over science (and gives pride of place to music as formative of harmony in the soul). But it is not a question here of simply asserting the superiority of the arts. We need to acknowledge the immense value and power of the empirical method. At the same time we must show that empiricism itself need not be reductionistic in its methods or conclusions. C. S. Lewis writes in prophecy of a more holistic science:
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation.11
We have bemoaned the compartmentalization that thrusts the two ways of looking at the world into separate boxes. But the greatest scientists have never ceased to be motivated by the desire to find beauty in their equations, and their breakthroughs are often the result of an intuition, or an imaginative leap. What I want to suggest is that the opposition between the “cultures” of science and the arts can be overcome by teaching science and mathematics themselves at least partly according to the poetic mode. In other words, the best way to teach them is by first awakening the poetic imagination. We need to reestablish—for the sake of science as much as for the arts—a truly humane education that, in Taylor’s words, “begins with the senses, and the discovery and cultivation of harmony and beauty in the soul by way of the sense’s natural affinity for the harmonious, proportionate, and the beautiful in nature and the arts.”12 If children were from an early age exposed to a “musical” training in the Greek sense, if their poetic sensibility was kindled by training in the observation of nature and the learning of poetry, and if mathematics and science were taught historically, with due attention to the symbolic and beautiful properties of numbers and shapes, then we might even begin to see the birth of that “regenerate science” that Lewis prophesied.
The Symbolic Cosmos
The potential reintegration of science with the poetic mode of knowledge is the implicit theme of the next two chapters, where I try to glimpse what was really going on in traditional cosmologies. But we need first to reflect on the nature of symbolism, for without appreciating that we will be unable to find anything worth retrieving in the ancient theories, other than a vague aesthetic appeal.
Poetry and the poetic imagination depend very largely on the interplay of likeness and difference. Simile, metaphor, contrast, analogy, are all used to connect one experience with another. Even the sounds of words are often chosen by the poet to echo the movement or sound of the thing described. In a more subtle sense, images may be chosen to evoke a particular feeling, or even just a quality of attention, as in this famous haiku by Basho:
old pond
a frog jumps
the sound of water
This relies on the fact that the reader and the poet have responded in similar ways to such experiences in the past, so that a likeness can be found between the interior worlds of two very different people. The poetic or imaginative appreciation of similarity and correspondence between different things is fundamental to human consciousness, and lies at the root of language itself, as Barfield saw (most of our words are metaphors).
Within this fundamental poetic tradition, specialized studies have evolved. Theology, for example, relies particularly on the method of analogy. Theologians make statements about God, relying on a similarity between Creator and created, despite the overarching difference in the nature of being. In this case the difference is greater than any similarity, but at least something meaningful can be affirmed. We can say God “wishes” or “intends” a particular outcome (such as the salvation of humanity) because the words as applied to human beings gesture in the direction of some truth about God, and are endorsed by their occurrence in scripture where God reveals something of himself in terms we can understand
A “symbol” is something that, by virtue of its analogous properties, or some other reason, represents something else. It is not just a “sign,” which is made to correspond to something by an arbitrary convention (like a road sign), but has some natural resemblance to what it represents. Traditional cosmologies13 were ways of reading the cosmos itself as a fabric woven of natural symbols. The word symbolon originally meant something “joined together” and referred to a token, such as a broken ring, which, if matched up with the token’s other half, would identify the bearer as a friend. It could therefore mean a code or password used to ensure a message was understood only by those for whom it was intended. It also referred to the articles of faith of a religious community—thus the Nicene Creed is sometimes called “the Symbol of Faith.” By extension we can think of a natural symbol such as a tree or a star or a mountain as the visible half of something that also includes a portion not visible to us (such as, in Platonism, the Idea). Thus reading the symbol is a way of passing from the visible to the invisible. Symbols are bridges, making something present to us that would otherwise be absent. In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor writes of the Romantic recovery of the importance of symbolism:
The creative imagination is the power which we have to attribute to ourselves, once we see art as expression and no longer simply as mimesis. Manifesting reality involves the creation of new forms which give articulation to an inchoate vision, not simply the reproduction of forms already there. That is why the Romantic period developed its particular concept of the symbol. The symbol, unlike allegory, provides the form of langu
age in which something, otherwise beyond our reach, can become visible. Where the allegorical term points to a reality which we can also refer to directly, the symbol allows what is expressed in it to enter our world. It is the locus of a manifestation of what otherwise would remain invisible . . . This concept of the symbol is what underlies the ideal of a complete interpenetration of matter and form in the work of art.14
Hans Urs von Balthasar has made good use of “symbol” and its equivalents in the development of his theological aesthetics. From Romantics such as Goethe he takes the word gestalt, meaning the “figure” that we grasp in knowing a thing—in its highest sense the marriage of the particular and the universal in the eye of the heart.15 More than the sum of its parts, the figure is the appearing-to-us of an infinite depth that cannot be fully revealed in time. Every symbol is a kind of gestalt, in which a universal meaning can be glimpsed. Eventually, every created thing can be seen as a manifestation of its own interior essence, and the world is transformed into a radiant book to be read with eyes sensitive to spiritual light.
To take symbolism seriously is to accept the “analogy of being” between different levels of reality.16 The context is given in medieval thought by the fundamental analogy between the created order and the uncreated mind of God, but within the created order itself there can be many types of difference, across which analogy links one thing with another. To take the examples mentioned earlier, a tree is a natural symbol of the way the visible (trunk and branches) comes from the invisible (roots and seed), linking higher and lower realities into one living pattern. As such, it can function either as a symbol of the world as a whole (Yggdrasil, in the Norse myths), or of tradition, or of the Church, or of Man. A star by its piercing and remote beauty represents the “light” of higher realities, or the angels, or the thoughts of God, and so on. In each case, these associations are not arbitrary but precise and natural, even to a large extent predictable and consistent from one culture to another (though capable of many applications and variations). The symbol and the archetype to which it refers are not separate things, for the symbol is simply the manifestation of the archetype in a particular milieu or plane of existence. It is “meaning made tangible.”17
If . . . the world is the effect of the Divine Word uttered at the beginning of time, then all of nature can be taken as a symbol of a supernatural reality. Everything that exists, in whatever mode, having its principle in the Divine Intellect, translates or represents that principle in its own manner and according to its own order of existence; and thus, from one order to another, all things are linked and correspond with each other so that they join together in a universal and total harmony which is like a reflection of the Divine Unity itself.18
This passage is from a modern author, but it accurately captures the traditional view of the world as intrinsically symbolic. I would add only that the harmony of the world reflects the Divine Trinity as well as the Divine Unity, a point I will return to later.
In order to “see” the archetype in the symbol, or “read” it into the symbol, a poetic consciousness is indispensable, which comes more easily to some people than to others. To some it comes not at all, and this is particularly true in the modern world where our education tends to militate against it. But it seems to me not unreasonable to encourage the development of such a consciousness once more, provided we guard against the excesses to which it has always been prone. A superstitious obsession with magical correspondences, or a fascination with the occult, is a corruption of the symbolic imagination. The symbolic sensibility needs to be balanced and integrated with due attention to empirical evidence and logic. But the “prosaic” consciousness is just as subject to corruption in its own way, leading to a brutality and hedonism with which our civilization is only too familiar.
A Key to the Ancient Mysteries
Given what I have said about the meaning of the word “symbol,” it is easy to see how any civilization can develop a symbolic language, the elements of which may be partly conventional as well as natural. The art of the Middle Ages was intensely symbolic, and indeed heraldry was one of its branches, where the artist was working within a very diverse but very strict set of conventional significances (each vivid color, each animal, each geometrical form on the knight’s coat of arms had a well-understood attribution). But the sculptures and frescoes, mosaics and windows that we find in houses of worship, while freer in some respects than the images of heraldry, are similarly determined by conventional associations, sometimes completely erroneous ones. For instance, the pelican was thought to wash or feed its young with its own blood by piercing its breast, making it an apt symbol for Christ or the Eucharist. But the real-life pelican does no such thing. The lion was thought to sleep with its eyes open, making it a symbol of the eternal vigilance of Christ, and to give birth to pups that lay as if dead until the third day, recalling the resurrection; but again, these ideas were based on travelers’ tales rather than careful observation.
In decoding the medieval or ancient symbolic language, one has to bear these conventions in mind. At the same time, one can appreciate that the intention was nevertheless to read nature herself, seeing the mysteries of the faith reflected in the many wonders of the natural world (animals, flowers, minerals, planets), and that these literary embellishments do not invalidate the method or spirit of the symbolic approach. Modern science has discovered many more natural wonders, but we have lost the ability to relate these—however fancifully—to spiritual truth. Books such as Emile Mâle’s The Gothic Image and Jean Hani’s The Symbolism of the Christian Temple, Guénon’s Symbols of Sacred Science and Charbonneau-Lassay’s The Bestiary of Christ can help us recover this lost language, which is the language of the poetic imagination, condensing multiple meanings into vivid images drawn from nature.
Of all natural symbols, the richest and most eloquent is man himself—the only creature we are told was made “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27), and who is therefore “the only creature on earth which God willed for itself (Gaudium et Spes, 24).19 In medieval terms, which can be traced back at least to Pythagoras through Philo and others, man is not only an image of God, but an image of the ordered cosmos, a “microcosm” or world in miniature, possessing a balance not only of the four elements and humors, but of spirit and matter. Positioned thus between the material world and the angelic, man (male and female) is a natural mediator and vicegerent of the Creator. Adam’s fall displaced him from this position, but in Christ it was restored to him, along with his proper authority over animals and elements—this being displayed miraculously in many of the saints. The animals represent the various human faculties and tendencies, as in a vast external projection, and the True Man is a master over them as he is over himself, being interiorly submitted to God.
Christian symbolic traditions were adapted from those of the ancient world—Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece—and in many cases these traditions needed little or no change. The real difference lay deeper, in the way symbolism functioned in the new religion. For Christians believed not only that the temporal world was an expression of God’s will and wisdom—in something like the way that pagans had believed that it was ruled and shaped by the gods, or that it was a shadow of the world of the Ideas—but that God had entered into that world, using its analogous resemblance to him in order to form it into a vessel for his actual presence.
Jesus Christ was, like Adam, a man who symbolically represented the whole of creation and was an image of God. In fact, since he remained without sin, Jesus was a perfect image of God in a way that fallen Adam could not be. However, he was not merely the perfect image of God; he was God. This mysterious entwining of divine and human natures is called the “hypostatic union.” It means that grace, and the source of grace, are now within creation as well as outside it, that grace and nature interpenetrate. The whole sacramental system stemmed from this; the symbols incorporated into the sacraments of the Church were not mere reminders of eternal truths, or methods of teaching the unini
tiated, but the channels through which grace flowed into the world from Christ.20 For his divinity connected with all other men and things through his humanity. In that sense the Incarnation set a divine seal upon the poetic structure of the cosmos.
I want now to turn to the symbolic cosmos itself in more detail, bearing in mind that for Christianity it had become the vessel of divine presence. We will see that when Western thought lost this sense of the intimate relationship of the natural with the supernatural, it lost even the poetic “pagan” sensitivity to natural symbolism that Christianity had integrated and transformed. Our task today is to recover both.
1. Plato 1892, 5:52, from bk. 2 of The Laws.
2. Taylor 1998, 15 (my emphasis).
3. Newman 2001.
4. The Holy Spirit sent by Christ upon the Church is described in the book of Revelation as sevenfold (e.g., Rev. 3:1 and 4:5), and according to Church tradition based on Isaiah 11:2–3 the gifts of the Spirit are also seven. Since God makes the world in seven “days,” it is only fitting for Christ’s work of redemption and sanctification to repeat this fundamental structure in the New Covenant, which makes the world anew through the institution of the seven sacraments. Benedict echoes this pattern on the authority of Psalm 118[119]:164, referring to seven as a “sacred number” in ch. 16 of his Rule.
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