SYMBOLISM AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM

THE WORD 'SYMBOL', in its most general sense, can be applied to every formal expression of a doctrine, whether verbal, visual, or otherwise; a word can have no other function or justification but that of symbolizing an idea, which amounts to saying that it gives, as far as such a thing is possible, a sensible and moreover purely analogical representation of the idea. Taken in this sense, symbolism, which is but the employing of forms or images as signs of ideas or of suprasensible things, is evidently natural to the human mind, and therefore necessary and spontaneous; language provides a simple example of this process. There exists also, in a more special sense, a deliberate, calculated symbolism, that to some extent crystallizes the doctrinal teachings in figurative representations; and indeed, between these two kinds of symbolism there is in truth no precise dividing line, for it is quite certain that writing, at its origin, was everywhere ideographic, that is to say essentially symbolical, even in the more special sense just referred to, though it is only in China that it can be said to have remained in this state always and exclusively. Howbeit, symbolism, as usually understood, is in much more constant use for the expression of Eastern than of Western thought; and this is quite understandable when it is realized that it constitutes a much less narrowly limited means of expression than ordinary language; suggesting as it does far more than it expresses, it provides the support that is best adapted to possibilities of conception that lie beyond the power of words.

Indeed, symbolism, in which conceptual indefinitude in no wise precludes an absolutely mathematical exactness, thus reconciling apparently contradictory qualities, is as it were the natural language of metaphysics; moreover, symbols that were originally metaphysical can become religious symbols as well, by a process of secondary adaptation running parallel to that of the doctrine. All rites, for example, possess a pre-eminently symbolical character, whatever realm they may be attached to, and it is always possible to transpose the meaning of religious rites in a metaphysical sense, as well as that of the theological doctrine to which they are linked; even in purely social rites, if one wishes to discover the deeper reasons for their existence, it is necessary to pass from the sphere of applications, which contains their immediate governing conditions, to the sphere of principles, that is, to their traditional source, which is metaphysical in its essence. We are not trying to suggest, however, that rites are nothing but pure symbols; they are symbolical no doubt, and they cannot but be so, for they would otherwise be quite devoid of meaning, but they must at the same time be conceived of as possessing an efficacy of their own, as means of realization operating in view of the end for which they have been instituted and to which they are subordinated. Here, on the religious plane, may be recognized the Catholic conception of the virtue of the 'sacraments', while from the metaphysical point of view one discovers the principle underlying certain ways of realization to which we shall refer later, and it is this that has enabled us to speak of specifically metaphysical rites. It might be said moreover that every symbol, insofar as it must essentially serve as a support to a conception, is also endowed with a very real efficacy; and the religious sacrament itself, insofar as it is a sensible sign, does indeed play a similar part as support of the 'spiritual influence' that will turn the sacrament into an instrument of immediate or deferred psychical regeneration; just as in the parallel case the intellectual potentialities included in the symbol are able to awaken either an effective or simply a virtual conception, according to the receptive capacity of each individual. From this point of view, a rite is still only a particular kind of symbol: it is, one might say, a symbol 'enacted', but only if the symbol is taken for what it really is and not merely considered in its outward or contingent appearance: here, as in the study of texts, one must learn to look beyond the 'letter' in order to discover the 'spirit.'

This, however, is precisely what Westerners usually fail to do: the faulty interpretations of the orientalists provide us with characteristic examples, for they quite frequently take the form of distorting the symbols which are the objects of study, in the same way that the Western mind in general spontaneously distorts any symbols that it happens to come across. The determining cause of the error in this case is the predominance of the sensible and imaginative faculties: to mistake the symbol itself for what it represents, through an incapacity to rise to its purely intellectual purport, is the fundamental confusion to be found at the root of all 'idolatry', giving to this word its strictest sense such as is brought out with especial clarity by Islam. When nothing of a symbol remains but its outward form, both its justification and its actual virtue have alike disappeared; the symbol has then become nothing but an 'idol', that is to say a vain image, and its preservation amounts to mere 'superstition'—so long, that is, as no one appears who is endowed with an understanding capable of effectively restoring to it, either partially or wholly, whatever it had lost, or at least those elements which it no longer contains save in a state of latent possibility. This applies to the traces left behind by every tradition the real meaning of which has fallen into oblivion, and especially to any religion that has been reduced by the general incomprehension of its votaries to a mere external formalism; we have already mentioned what is perhaps the most striking example of such a degeneration, in the case of Greek religion. It is also among the Greeks that a tendency was to be found in its most extreme form, which appears to be inseparable from 'idolatry' and the materialization of symbols, namely the tendency toward anthropomorphism: they did not look on their gods as representing certain principles, but they pictured them really as beings with human forms, affected by human feelings and acting after the manner of men; and these gods, for the Greeks, no longer possessed anything whereby to distinguish them from the forms in which poetry and art had clothed them, so that they were literally nothing apart from the form itself.

Such complete reduction to a human perspective could alone serve as a pretext for the theory that has been called 'Euhemerism' after the name of its inventor, according to which the gods were originally nothing more than illustrious men; it would indeed be impossible to go further in the direction of gross incomprehension, grosser even than that of certain moderns who refuse to see in the ancient symbols anything more than a figuring or an attempted explanation of various natural phenomena; the all too famous theory of the 'solar myth' is the best known example of the latter kind of interpretation. 'Myths', like 'idols', have never been anything else but symbols misunderstood: the one corresponds in the order of speech to what the other is in the visual order; among the Greeks, poetry gave rise to the first just as art produced the second; but among peoples to whom, as to the Easterners, naturalism and anthropomorphism are equally foreign, neither the one nor the other could arise save in the imagination of Westerners who wished to set themselves up as interpreters of things they quite failed to understand. The naturalistic interpretation really reverses the normal relationships: a natural phenomenon, like anything else belonging to the sensible order, can be taken to symbolize an idea or a principle, and a symbol has no use or justification except in virtue of the fact that it belongs to an order inferior to the thing symbolized. Similarly, there is doubtless a general and natural tendency in man to employ the human form for symbolical purposes; but the practice, which in itself is not open to objection any more than the use of a geometrical figure or any other method of representation, in no wise constitutes anthropomorphism, so long as man does not become a dupe of the figuration he has adopted.

In China and in India there has never been any parallel with what occurred in Greece, and symbols based upon the human figure, though commonly used, were never turned into 'idols'; and in this connection it may also be noted how opposed symbolism is to the Western conception of art: nothing is less symbolical than 'classical' Greek art and nothing is more so than the Eastern arts; but where art is regarded solely as a means of expression to serve as the vehicle of certain intellectual conceptions, it obviously could not be taken for an end in itself, as only happens among peoples of a predominantly sentimental turn of mind. It is to such peoples that anthropomorphism comes naturally, and it should be noticed that these are the peoples among whom, for the same reason, the religious point of view properly so called was able to establish itself; religion, however, has always tried to react against the anthropomorphic tendency and to combat it in principle, even when a more or less garbled conception of religion in the popular mind sometimes helped to develop it in practice. The peoples called Semitic, such as the Jews and Arabs, are in this respect akin to the Western peoples: there is in fact no other reason to account for the prohibition of symbols under a human form, which is common both to Judaism and Islam, but with the exception that in Islam it was never so strictly applied among the Persians, for whom the employment of symbols of this kind offered fewer dangers because, being more completely Eastern than the Arabs, and moreover of quite a different race, they were much less prone to slip into anthropomorphism.

These last remarks provide us with the opportunity to say a few words about the idea of 'creation'. This conception, which is as foreign to the Easterners, the Muslims only excepted, as it was to Greco-Roman antiquity, appears to be specifically Jewish in its origin; the word denoting it is indeed Latin in form, but it did not originally bear the meaning that Christianity gave to it later, since creare at first meant nothing else but 'to make', a sense that the verbal root kri, which is identical with the root of the Latin word, has always preserved in Sanskrit; the change of meaning that took place was a profound one and, as we have pointed out, similar to the alteration undergone by the term 'religion.'

It is clearly from Judaism that this idea passed over into Christianity and Islam; and the reason for this is essentially the same as that which gave rise to the prohibition of anthropomorphic symbols. In practice, a tendency to conceive God as 'a being,' more or less analogous to individual and especially to human beings, wherever it is to be found, is certain to produce as a natural corollary a tendency to attribute to God simply a 'demiurgic' function, that is to say an activity exercised upon a 'matter' which is looked upon as external to him and which is the mode of action proper to individual beings. Under these conditions, in order to safeguard the notion of the divine unity and infinity, it became necessary to declare expressly that God 'made the world from nothing,' which amounts to saying 'from nothing that was external to Himself,' for the other supposition would result in limiting him by giving birth to a radical dualism. In this case the theological heresy amounts to the expression of a metaphysical absurdity, which is moreover usually the case; but this danger, quite non-existent as regards pure metaphysics, became a very real one from the religious point of view, because in this derived form the absurdity was no longer immediately apparent. The theological conception of 'creation' is an appropriate translation of the metaphysical conception of 'universal manifestation', being the one that is best adapted to the mentality of Western peoples; there is however no real equivalence between these two conceptions, given that they must necessarily be separated by the whole difference that separates the points of view to which they respectively refer: this is a further example illustrating the question we were discussing in the preceding chapter.