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When we speak of a symbolic reading of reality, what do we mean? And what does symbolism have to do with the way in which we read Scripture in relation to the world? All things in Christian doctrine are rooted in their relation to the doctrine of God the Logos. The Logos of God is eternally the Word: He does not become the Word merely in relation to the world, but exists as the Word of the Father within the eternity of the triune life. The world is thus created as a theater or extension of this divine life. We therefore find in Genesis 1 the profound centrality of speech and conversation to the whole story of creation. The creative work of the six days thus begins with the descent of the divine Breath or Spirit over the face of the deep (1:2). Spirit, wind, breath: this is the context within which speech operates and affects reality. If I attempt to speak in deep space, my words will be silent without air to carry them. My words thus remain within myself and affect nothing at all. If I attempt to use sign language to express my intention, my visible expression must be carried in light. It is no accident that the Spirit of God is signified in creation by air and by light: He is the carrier of the Word. This trinitarian reality is the primordial archetype of all reality: the Father makes Himself known to the Son through the Spirit and the Son reciprocates that relation to the Father by the same Spirit.
I call your attention to this image because it underscores the integral unity of symbol and reality. All created existence is an expression and extension of the uncreated life of God. And as a thing only receives its qualities from another who possesses them (coffee only becomes hot when it receives heat from something which already is hot- it cannot be heated by something cold), all creation receives its qualities of existence from the God who possesses them infinitely. Thus, “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of His hands- day to day they pour forth speech, night to night they give forth knowledge” (Psalm 19:1-2). Too often we are accustomed to reading this passage as saying merely that God exists. But the psalmist says something altogether more remarkable: that the creation expresses specific qualities of God in its ordered life. Creation’s beauty reveals the God who is beautiful, but more than that: the mode of its beauty reveals the meaning of divine Beauty. And this is the fundamental meaning of symbolism. To say that a thing is symbolic is to say that it corresponds to another subject. God is called the Rock of Ages because a rock expresses the consistency of God’s character and His power: when a hard object comes into contact with a brittle object, it is the latter which is changed according to the power of the former, not vice verse. As such, the harder an object is, the more consistent that object is. God thus corresponds to a Rock and is signified by that Name. He is not identical with the Rock no more than Mozart is identical with his composition. But as the mind of the Artist is present in the art such that one can know something of the artist by contact with his art, so also is Creation constituted by its interconnected web of symbols as a revelation of the infinite God.
In many portions of the modern world, we are accustomed to thinking of symbol and external reality as fundamentally incompatible. To the extent that a thing is conceived symbolically, it is being conceived as something other than it intrinsically is. If one is to describe the sun, one describes its material composition and pattern of existence. Even many who enthusiastically practice the pattern of symbolic thought are inclined to thinking in this way. This is why it seems so natural to point to the symbolic dimension of a Biblical text and take this as implying its nonhistoricity or lack of concrete referentiality. For example, in 1 Kings 6, the Scriptures tell us that there are precisely 480 years between Israel’s exodus from Egypt and their construction of the Temple of Solomon. For some commentators, this constitutes strong prima facie evidence that the statement lacks a concrete chronological referent. 480 years is twelve periods of forty years, or an “ideal generation.” Hence, the biblical author only wishes to express the symmetry of divine Action rather than conveying chronological information which might form the basis for historical investigations. Yet for Scripture and Christian tradition, it is symbolism which forms the heart of concrete reality. In the logical order of God’s creative acts, God first conceives the idea about Himself He wishes to embed in creation and then shapes out His creature accordingly. The creature is a fitting analogy to the Creator because God made it to be so.
The course of history constitutes the ongoing creative revelation of God in relation to His world. The world is both created and sustained through the Word. In the Book of Revelation, the sovereignty of Jesus Christ over all history is revealed in His ascent to the Heavenly Courtroom from which God reigns over all things and His opening a Book. As He rides as conquering King in Revelation 19, He is Named both “King of Kings” and “Word of God.” A King has his kingship in his capacity to affect and shape the course of his kingdom. God shapes the course of world history through the Word, and world history is God’s discourse concerning Himself. Fr. Matthew Baker once noted the adherence by St. Ephrem the Syrian to the actual idiom and language of the Bible. As St. Maximus teaches, there is an analogy between the Logos and Creation and between the Logos and Scripture. Creation reveals the Word of God because it was shaped through the Word of God and according to the eternal ideas or paradigms inherent in the mind of God. Scripture, likewise, is the Word made human speech. We acquire a rational apprehension of things through language- words are placed in a predictable relation to each other in order that we might apprehend the predictable relation that things themselves have to each other. If I say “my dog is small”, I have placed the idea of a dog, the idea of ownership (“my”) and the idea of smallness in such a relation that three ideas are linked together according to the pattern in which they are truly linked to each other in the world.
It is by immersion in the Scriptures that we come to be immersed in the world as it truly is. It is in the Scripture that God has spoken to us in our language so that we might see the world according to its innate quality as a revelation of God. We find this in the very words of Scripture: on the third creation day, God makes “fruit trees bearing fruit.” On the sixth creation day, God instructs Man to “be fruitful.” That there is a correspondence in word between these two creative acts reveals to us a correspondence in reality. When God created Man, He wove into mankind some of the very same ideas that were woven into trees, but in different modes. A symbol captures a correspondence between two things, and this correspondence means that trees are symbols of human beings in Reality. This correspondence itself is exegetically fruitful. When Jesus wishes to parabolically curse the people of Israel, He curses a fig tree. The fig tree represents a human community because the symbolic correspondence between the two exists intrinsically to the natures of the two. Likewise, in the Book of Judges, different kinds of rulers are signified by different kinds of trees (Judges 9:8ff). Jesus Christ, in giving a new birth to the world, is crucified on a tree. The psalmist tells us that the righteous are like trees planted by streams of water. Abraham plants a tree as He calls on the Name of God (Genesis 21:33) because it is in the Name of God that mankind multiplies and is fruitful. When we read Scripture bear witness to the “seed” who is “Christ”, we must never forget that seeds grow into the very plants which make up the wood of the Cross, which are harvested and baked into Bread, which are squeezed and fermented into wine.
But the symbolic correspondence between things is not merely something which is useful in studying the literary design and meaning of a text. Scripture is the Text which gives us the meaning of the world as it is at its deepest level. Human beings are like trees. Genesis 2 thus reveals to us the planting of a garden as a dwelling place for Adam. Adam himself is taken from the dirt of the ground out of which plants grow. He is called the “generations of” or “offspring of” the “heavens and the earth.” He rises from the ground to stand upright (almost completely unique among animals) because he links together heaven and earth: God’s space and the space of our world. The tree signifies the eschatological unity which God intends to exist between heaven and earth, a unity which is described in Revelation 21 when the city of heaven descends to earth. Indeed, the very language of that unity is cashed out in terms of a great cosmic tree. Revelation 6:13 tells us that the “stars of the sky” fell as fruit falls from a fig tree. If the fruit of the tree is analogized to the stars, then the tree is stretching from earth to heaven. Daniel 5 reveals to Nebuchadnezzar his empire as a tree which stretches upwards and outwards to embrace all nations. Jesus Himself speaks of the kingdom of God as a grand tree which embraces the birds of the heavens (Matthew 13:31) and Jesus later teaches that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to Him (Matthew 28:18-20). Perhaps we should not be surprised that one of the most pervasive and influential images present across world cultures from every continent is that of the world tree. Perhaps we should not be surprised that God willed to communicate His life to Adam in the garden of Eden through the Tree of Life- a tree just as real as the wood of the Cross on which new life was given to the world.
Scripture thus gives us a correspondence- between a tree and a human being. It tells us something of the nature of that correspondence: it expresses the unity between heaven and earth and among the creatures of the world. It stretches upwards and extends outwards. But through the natural sciences, we have discovered a great deal more concrete information about the working of trees. We know that trees are fed through the light they take through their leaves and through the water they take through their roots. We know that the union of this light and water transfigures the quality of the water into sap. This concrete information is of the sort that can be described in botanical textbooks. But I have suggested that the concrete information is itself symbolic. Because trees signify human beings, the more we study about the genuine pattern of a tree’s life, the more lessons we will be able to learn about the pattern of human life. Just consider the remarkable nature of a tree’s sustenance: it reaches into heaven and downwards into the ground. It draws the light downwards and the water upwards. It then integrates them into a single thing: sap which is remarkable for its sweetness. Human beings cannot eat light directly. But the tree takes the light of heaven and transfigures it in relation to the nutrients of the ground to produce something which is edible. In the unification of heaven and earth, a wholeness is produced which is sweet to taste. Scripture itself describes the Word of God as “sweet as honey” in a context which evokes the words of the Eucharistic institution: “Take, and eat.” (Revelation 10:9-10). The Logos of God in Heaven takes on the terrestrial flesh of our world and thus allows us to partake of His life through His participation in our life.
This parable emerges organically out of the innate qualities of the tree, qualities that are partially known to us only in relation to modern empirical investigation. Yet it is grounded in the actual language and imagery of the Bible- the incarnation itself is described in Isaiah as a “word” which enters the earth as a “seed” to bring forth a transfigured world (Isaiah 55:10-11). The messianic, Suffering Servant of the LORD is like a “root out of dry ground” (Isaiah 53:2) who will “see His seed” (Isaiah 53:10). The tree of life showers the world in its fruit so that the redeemed humanity becomes fruitful (compare Isaiah 27:6ff) and a mighty forest (Isaiah 32:15). Symbolism is the grammar of both Scripture and reality- and Scripture is the Rosetta Stone of the world. It is written in God’s language and our language simultaneously. It is woven through the wiring of all creation and through every divine penstroke of history. Scriptural history is allegorical because it discloses the innate meanings in the biblical stories. The story of Abraham’s deliverance from Pharaoh in Genesis 12 anticipates the story of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt in Exodus because the former authentically typifies the latter and establishes the consistency of the God who is the God of Abraham and Israel. But the meaning of this for our life emerges in our recognition of the concrete reality of these stories. Symbolism tells us the meaning of the story: but when we recognize that the story is the true story of the concrete world- the world in which we live from day to day - then the symbols reveal the will of God for our life in Christ.
phenomenal
Reading james jordan's "through new eyes", then this post came up ❤️