We continue this week our examination of the meaning of the Bible’s form and its implications for Christian artists.  We discovered last week that art and the communication of spiritual Truth are inseparably bound together by the fact that God has constructed Reality in such a way that symbols (whether verbal or visual) must be used for communication between humans.  This is easily seen in the use in Scripture of letters, words, and sentences, all of which are visual symbols which represent the verbal symbols of language (an organization of sounds which symbolize, represent, and stand for the creatures, concepts, ideas, states of being, etc., of Reality as speakers of that language perceive them).

This is not surprising, since God has chosen to reveal Himself through the medium of symbols, both in the Creation generally (Gen 1; Ps 19; Rom 1; etc.) and in the record of His interactions with mankind written in lingual symbols under the special oversight of Himself in Holy Scripture (2 Tim 3:16-18; 2 Peter 1:20-21; etc.).

Since all of Creation (taken together, in each of its discrete parts, and any of the nearly infinite number of combinations of its parts) symbolizes God as well as itself and its function, we know two things about symbols: first, that a symbol communicates knowledge or content, since it represents (i.e., re-presents, presents again) the thing it stands for.  The reason that this confuses people is that the way that this content is communicated is different in many ways from the way that knowledge communication by means of a rigorously outlined presentation of data such as is found in written or spoken didactic, logical modes of information sharing. Didactic knowledge frequently is intended to be addressed primarily to the logical, cognitive centers of the mind (bear in mind, though, that, as we’ve recently seen, no communication, even the most didactic, can be free of artistic expression, since the medium of language requires artistry).

Symbolic (also called metaphorical or analogical) communication is generally much more mysterious, in that it depends more upon intuitive realizations by the recipient of the content.  This is not to say that symbolic knowledge is not logical; it is simply to say that the logic involved is not Aristotelian logic, that those educated in the Western world have been taught to view as the only logic.  The content imparted by symbols is, nonetheless, real and meaningful content (remember, God communicates Himself in this fashion).

The second thing we learn from the symbolic structure of reality is that symbols communicate multiple levels (or layers) of meaning or content simultaneously (i.e., a symbol represents more than one thing at the sametime).  This is easily seen in the fact that God is revealed to all men symbolically through all of Creation, plainly enough that, as St. Paul says in Romans 1:18-20, “men are without excuse,” in terms of knowing that He exists and has created all things, and that He is holy and they are not, and that He holds men accountable.

The way in which this shows the multilayered levels of meaning simultaneously in a symbol is that all things symbolize God on a primary level while also symbolizing other things.  One example of this is the lion.  A lion, because of his innate power and majesty, is called “the king of the beasts.”  The lion therefore can symbolize a human king; indeed, kings in past (and still to this day) are referred to as being lion-like, as with Richard the Lion-Hearted.  Yet the lion can also symbolize the King of Kings, the Lord Christ, as when Jesus is called “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah” (Rev 5:5).  The lion’s ferocity and power, however, can also symbolize evil, even the Devil, as it does in 1 Peter 5:8, where Satan is said to prowl about like a lion “seeking whom he may devour.”  At no point does a lion cease to symbolize all of these things, and our attention is drawn to one layer or another of what a lion symbolizes by the context of the attention being fixed on the creature by the speaker (or writer or singer or painter or dancer) using it as an example.

The principle of multiple symbolic meanings is not limited to animals, but is applicable to any created thing.  The celestial bodies (stars, planets, comets, etc.) are created to give light and mark the passing of time (Gen 1:14-15), yet they can also symbolize men, as when they do so for Jacob, Leah, and eleven of the Patriarchs of Israel in Joseph’s dream in Genesis 37:9.  Once again the star symbolizes Satan (Isa 14:12) and in another context, Christians (Phil 2:15) and the Lord whom Christians serve (2 Peter 1:19; Rev 22:16).

A man simultaneously can symbolize mankind, fathers, sons, the masculine, and the Christ who is the Church’s Bridegroom in marriage (Eph 5:25-33).  A woman can all at the same time symbolize other women, mothers, daughters, and the Church as the Bride who submits to Her Bridegroom (Eph 5:22-24, 33).  Beyond this, it is also always true that all of mankind, male and female, together and separately, are made in the image of God and thus symbolize Him at all times (regardless of the other things they symbolize) (Gen 1:26-27, 5:1-2, etc.).

That all things communicate knowledge and simultaneously communicate multiple layers of meaning (which the medievals called correspondences) is vitally important for Art, because this doctrine is the basis, the basic building block, of all Art, in whatever form it takes.  We will, God willing, take up this theme next week.

Additional teaching about symbol available on Patreon.com/kempercrabb