From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Nov 08 2004 - 21:50:34 GMT
DMB et al,
[Campbell:] > "Jesus dies, is resurrected, and goes to heaven. This
metaphor expresses
> something religiously mysterious. Jesus could not literally have gone to
> Heaven becasue there is no geographical place to go. Elijah went up into
the
> heavens in a chariot, we are told, but we are not to take this staemtn as
> description of a literal journey. These are spiritual events described in
> metaphor. There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that
> metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who
> know they are not facts are what we call 'atheists', and those who think
> they are facts are 'religious'. Which group really gets the message?"
But there are also a few who understand that the metaphor/fact distinction,
taken in this absolutist way, is a product of SOM. To the pre-modern
intellect, all reality was as much metaphorical as factual. Here's Owen
Barfield (Saving the Appearances, pp 74-5]
"It is very important to realize that, when it is said that the man of
medieval and earlier times confused the literal and symbolical approach,
what is meant is, that he confused or rather combined the two states of
mind *which we to-day mean by those words*. Indeed, we shall find
throughout that the main difficulty that prevents us from breaking through
the idols to the actuality of history, that is, to the evolution of
consciousness, lies in the fact that we go on using the same words without
realizing how their meanings have shifted. Thus, exceptional men did
sometimes distinguish between the literal and the symbolical use of words
and images before the scientific revolution. On the question of hell, for
instance, John Scotus Erigena distinguished in the ninth century between
the symbol and the symbolized or the representation and the represented,
emphasizing that the sufferings of hell are purely spiritual, and that they
are described physically for the benefit of simple understanding. The point
I am making is that, precisely to those simple understandings, the
'physical' and 'literal' thenselves were not what 'physical' and 'literal'
are to us. Rather, the phenomena themselves carried the sort of multiple
significance which we today only find in symbols. Accordingly, the issue,
in a given case, between a literal and a symbolical interpretation, though
it could be raised, had not the same sharpness of contradictories. Later
[with SOM], as the representation hardened into idols, the distinction
between the two grew sharper and sharper until, in the nineteenth century,
the strain of a 'literal' interpretation became intolerable even to simple
understandings, and the notion of, for instance, a 'physical' hell was
decisively rejected as an impossible superstition. And so indeed it is if
by 'physical' we mean the idols of which our physical world today consists.
'Who now believes,' inquired F.C Conybeare in 1910, 'in a God who has a
right and left hand?'
"When the 'things' of the physical world have become idols, then indeed the
literal interpretation excludes the symbolical, and vice versa. But where
every thing is a representation, at least half-consciously experienced as
such, there is as yet no such contradiction. For a representation
experienced as such is neither literal nor symbolical; or, alternatively,
it is both at the same time. Nothing is easier for us, than to grasp a
purely literal meaning; and if we are capable at all of grasping, in
addition, a symbolical or 'fancy' meaning, as we do in poetry, we are in no
danger of confusing the one with the other. Before the scientific
revolution, on the other hand, it was the concept of the 'merely literal'
that was difficult. And therefore the writer who is referred to as
Dionysius the Areopagite, and Thomas Aquinas and others after him,
emphasized the importance of using the humblest and most banal images, as
symbols for purely spiritual truths or beings. For only in this way could a
representation be safely polarized into symbol and symbolized, into literal
and metaphorical."
[Scott:] Of course, it is those whose religion Berger called deductive
(fundamentalists) and reductive (nineteenth century liberal Protestantism),
who fell for SOM's literal/metaphorical distinction, as did, of course, the
secular world. The inductive religious approach, while not fully immune, is
at least moving in the right direction.
One might note that awareness of the evolution of consciousness is what
Alan Watts and others missed in dismissing Christianity's historicism. To
be sure, in traditional Christianity, this was thought of in terms of sin
and redemption, but Barfield's analysis shows that it can be reconstrued as
the rise of the intellectual level, which results in the fall into SOM
idolatry (where subject and object are radically distinct), to be followed
by "final participation", or the intellect overcoming S/O duality. The MOQ
could use this analysis as well.
- Scott
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