All Things Symbolic

Introduction

As a fair warning, this post is abstract. Actually, it is about as abstract as anything can be, because we are going to talk about symbols. And in order to do this, I will need to transcribe my thoughts into the symbols of the English language and package those into bundles of symbols called metaphors. All of this I will do while being an image-bearer of God, which is to say, a symbol. Taken together, this is like using a microscope to look at the parts of a microscope, while being a microscope. It’s kinda hard. Walker Percy summarized this challenge more succinctly: “Our thinking is of its very nature so through and through symbolic because it is by the symbol that we construe the world, that any attempt to see the symbol function for what it is is like trying to look at a mirror.” Is it really possible without, in the end, simply describing your environment and gazing at your own reflection?

All Things Symbolic

At a college retreat many years ago, the speaker handed out blank sheets of paper and instructed us to draw on them a completely unique creature – something that only the wildest imagination could conceive. Pencils scratched paper, and giggles erupted from tables as students peeked at the insane drawings of others. Students stretched their imaginations, pondering the vast encyclopedias of creaturely kitsch to manufacture the truly unique. After the allotted time, the speaker walked around the tables and, one by one, deflated the hopes of the students by pointing out on each drawing how the fantastic creatures were not unique at all. This one had seven legs, that one had bat-like wings or something resembling eyes, mouths, or a proboscis. Legs, wings, hair, and mouths were not original in the least, merely riffing off what is already there. Scrambling the features in a Frankensteinian fashion was the only real novelty. 

Nothing was truly unique because humans are only able to imagine what is within our experience as creatures. The ingredients for our imagination can only be farmed from things that have been created. To anything outside the borders of created things, we are completely blind. Our imagination is bound by what has been made, unable to reconstruct or conceive of even the simplest uncreated truth without the help of creation. Ezekiel the prophet stacked similes and stretched language to describe his heavenly vision of a “form” that was like a man, with a waist like he was on fire, and a torso like molten metal (Ezekiel 8:2). Only through creation can our imaginations gain purchase in visualizing the invisible word of the spirit.

By definition, God is outside the creational experience, self-existent and self-sustaining; He categorically defies categories, utterly ineffable and unreachable though the collective mind of mankind were united in the effort. Because of this, anything that can be known about God – down to the most basic truth about His nature and character – must be filtered and embodied through creation; that is, it must be translated into a form which we can apprehend. These forms, which straddle the unseen and the seen, which link heaven to earth, and communicate to our infant minds eternal truth, are called symbols.

In the poem above, Coleridge perceives all of creation as a symbolic veil, at once protecting us from Heaven’s bright realities that would melt our brains if exposed in their full glory (that we may learn with unwounded ken [mind]), yet teaching us its truths in the simple shadows our infant minds can sound out and read in the vowels and consonants of creation. Here, Coleridge nods to Plato’s allegory of the cave, but veers from Plato’s explanation of the cave as signifying ignorance, to a more gentle, intentional, and necessary medium to train our minds to see truth. It is as much a grace as it is a necessity.

God always and only communicates to His creation through symbols. Whether this is the still small whisper to a lonesome prophet huddled in a cave’s mouth, commandments etched on stone atop a fiery mountain, or the music of stars pouring forth speech into the eyes of upturned faces, all information from Him to us must necessarily come through the medium of written, verbal, or visual symbols. If we are to know God at all, it must be through the familiar. The psalmic declaration that the heavens proclaim God’s glory nightly presupposes the familiarity of the heavens. Mustard seed growth of the kingdom Jesus taught has as a prerequisite the knowledge of mustard seed size. To receive the good news of Christ, one must first be able to understand any news. This is not because of any deficiency in Him, but because of our inability to conceive of anything outside of our creational boundaries. We cannot understand the language of heaven except through the translator of creation.

Romans 1 tells us that God’s attributes are invisible, but He saw to it that His unseen qualities were clearly demonstrated through what has been made. His divine nature and eternal power can be apprehended in the order of creation. “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19-20). So clearly have these qualities been made known that no one will be allowed to use the excuse that it was muddled or equivocal. And as our understanding of creation advances, our excuses become thinner and our objections more foolish, to ignore the divine fingerprint so obvious it borders on the gaudy in structures such as DNA. Any objections that God’s nature was not made as plain as a nose on a face will be rebutted with evidence that God put a nose on each of our faces for this very purpose. 

Thankfully, we have an advantage in this symbolic quest: human beings are walking, talking, breathing symbols themselves. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). We are images, and images are a type of symbol, a representation of an Original through a medium. One way that we represent our Maker is that we, too, use symbols. And every day, all day, humans communicate, interpret, and understand their world through the symbolic. I am a symbol writing to other symbols by means of symbols.

When it comes to human activity, symbols are ubiquitous. Colors, sighs, decisions, shapes, words, pictures, poems, paintings, texts, tattoos, emojis, and middle fingers, how we understand poetry or movies, all scientific discoveries, and the equations that govern the movements of the universe – all of human activity is replete with meaning that we make into symbols. To be human is to be a meaning-maker. As Rumplestiltskin spun straw into gold, humans spin meaning from the rudiments of sound waves, squiggly lines, and body language. All of my thoughts about symbols are carefully crafted using a shared code we call the English language and strung together in such a way that my meaning can be clearly translated by you on the other side of the screen. 

To say that all is symbolic doesn’t mean we are living in a simulation, or that nothing can be taken as true. Symbolic and literal are not mutually exclusive. Young Earth creationists believe the Earth to be about six thousand years old. Asked if the creation account of Genesis is symbolic or literal, they will yawp that Genesis is literal, and crack their knuckles ready to fight any Christian who views the first few chapters as symbolic. This is because we see symbolic and literal as an either/or scenario, and they are not. We need to look no further than our own flesh and blood, as humans are symbols made in God’s image, and literally exist.

What Is A Symbol?

A symbol is a representation of something else. Spoken or written words, images, or objects can be used as symbols— anything that conveys information or evokes associations beyond their literal form. This representation is possible by reason of the relationship between the symbol and the thing it symbolizes, and the intent of the relationship is to disclose the meaning of what is symbolized. This relationship is never haphazard or random, but is always an intentional act of a mind connecting the abstract with the concrete and sharing its understanding with another mind. Symbol use is relational at its core: one mind relating to another mind, using carefully crafted symbols to reveal meaning.

To give our imagination something to work with, let us consider a symbol we are all very familiar with: the Olympic Flag. Every two years, the best athletes from every nation come together to engage in friendly competition, and the Olympic Flag is trotted out at the opening ceremony to preside over all competitions. The symbol on the flag consists of five interlinked, colored rings of equal size, set on a white background. 

Pierre de Coubertin designed this symbol in 1913, desiring to revive the Olympic Games, last held fifteen hundred years prior, to promote peace, cooperation, and character development among the nations of the world. All parts of this symbol were chosen intentionally by de Coubertin and have a specific meaning. Five rings symbolize the five continents participating in the games – Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas (North and South America were considered as a single continent), and all the islands of Oceania (including Australia). Rings are used, not triangles or squares, because rings signify unity, wholeness, and perpetuity; each is identical in size, communicating equality among the nations. The six colors (blue, black, yellow, red, green, and white) were chosen because the flags of all countries shared one or more of these colors without exception. Linking the rings denotes friendly competition, Olympism, and unity, as if the nations of the world were arm in arm, and projects the wistful desire of a future unity higher and greater than mere sport.

Applying the definition of symbols to the Olympic Flag, we see that it is a representation of something else. De Coubertin took his intended meaning for the Games and identified a relationship between his ideas and the colors, shapes, and sizes of the flag. None of the symbolic selections was random or arbitrary, but chosen specifically so that his intended meaning would be transparent through his symbol choice. And we must not miss that the symbol was a flag – a potent symbol in itself, one that represents loyalty and identity, that is visible from a distance, carried in the vanguard, etc. Instead of writing out a treatise on equality, cooperation, and competition, he translated those concepts into a sleek, simple, and intelligible design that would embody his meaning. 

In this way, de Coubertin’s symbol, as are all symbols, is like a check or paper currency exchanged in commerce, a placeholder for the object of value. Before the American dollar had been separated from the gold standard in 1971, the paper bill was a “stand-in” for a certain amount of real gold. Instead of carrying around gold bullion in a satchel, which would have to be weighed out at every purchase and tricky to divide, the paper currency was liquid, divisible, and efficient. But everyone knew the paper money was an abstraction of the concrete yellow metal, and was only a symbol representing that which was truly valuable. Paper bills pointed back to something else; their sole purpose for being was referential. In this way, symbols are not the things themselves, but the currency of meaning that is easily and efficiently exchanged. 

One of the benefits of symbols is that they allow us to carry around in our minds stacks of “paper currency” representing all the things in our experience. The blog you are reading now and the conversations you will have later are nothing but ideas converted into strings of symbols and exchanged with others who use the same currency. But how is it that a symbol becomes attached to the idea that it symbolizes? How is it that we come to identify words with a meaning, as referring to specific things? The means by which an idea comes to be represented by a symbol through the act of naming. 

In the next post, we will consider the strange miracle of naming and its importance in symbolism.