More Than Discourse: Symbolic Expressions of Naturalistic Faith 1438453760, 9781438453767

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More Than Discourse

More Than Discourse Symbolic Expressions of Naturalistic Faith

Donald A. Crosby

Cover image of brown pelican courtesy of Bigstockphoto.com Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2014 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crosby, Donald A.   More than discourse : symbolic expressions of naturalistic faith / Donald A. Crosby.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-4384-5375-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. Symbolism.  2. Religion.  I. Title.   BL603.C76 2014  203'.7—dc23

2014002034 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Brown Pelicans of the Gulf of Mexico Symbols of the Marvel and Vulnerability of Life

Contents

Preface

xi

Functions

and

Part I Types of Religious Symbols

  1 Symbols of Living Faith Introduction Back to the Pelican Some Types of Religious Symbolization Symbols of Evil Major and Minor Religious Symbols

3 3 5 7 16 17

  2 Works of Art and Religious Symbolism Introduction Artistic Symbolization Similarities and Differences between Aesthetic and   Religious Symbols Interrelations of Aesthetic and Religious Symbolizations

21 21 22

  3 Master Religious Symbols Introduction Symbols of Religious Ultimates Cosmogonic and Cosmological Symbols Symbols of Religious Paths of Life and of   Obstacles Lying in Their Way Symbols of Exemplary Human Lives

39 39 40 44

31 34

48 55

Contents

viii

  4 How Religious Symbols Work Introduction The Necessary Role of Religious Symbols Ways in Which Religious Symbols Function Doctrinal Expositions of Religious Symbols The Error of Literalism

Symbols

of

Part II Religion

of

65 65 67 70 74 76

Nature

  5 Master Symbols of the Ultimacy of Nature and of its Cosmogonic and Cosmological Roles Introduction A Symbol of the Religious Ultimacy of Nature A Cosmogonic and Cosmological Symbol for   Religion of Nature

85 85 87 91

  6 Master Symbols of the Saving Path of Life and of an Exemplary Traveler on the Path Introduction The Path and Its Obstacles and Misdirections An Exemplar of the Saving Path of Religion of Nature

99 99 101 112

  7 The

119 119 121 128

Truth of Religious Symbols Introduction Religious Symbols and Truth Secular Symbols and Truth

  8 Symbols and Symbolic Practices for Religion of Nature Introduction Synecdoches Prayer and Meditation Rituals Symbols of Sacrifice and Self-Giving Other Symbols for Religion of Nature Conclusion

139 139 140 141 147 149 152 159

Contents

ix

Notes

163

Works Cited

173

Index

177

Preface

“It’s interesting, but of course it is not literally true; it’s only a symbol.” This kind of frequently heard comment about religious symbols is half accurate and half misleading. It is accurate because religious symbols of the nondiscursive sort are not meant to be literally true in their essential force and character. They are meant to be symbolically true, and the difference between the two kinds of truth is fundamental and far-reaching, as this book is intended to show. The comment is radically misleading, however, to the extent that it suggests that religious symbols are less important or less informative precisely because they make no claim to being translatable without remainder into perspicuous literal statements. To say of something that it is only a symbol is to make the serious mistake of overlooking and undervaluing everything that religious symbols are by their very nature best suited to express and convey. It is to fail to recognize the vital and lasting contribution that religious symbols can make to apprehension of religious truths that speak to the whole beings of persons—emotional, volitional, valuational, and practical as well as rational—and that function to awaken and sustain a sense of the daunting, alluring, and healing presence of the sacred in the world. Not only are religious symbolizations rightly entitled to be regarded as true—albeit in a manner distinct from the truths of literal statements—they should also be recognized to have at least the potential to be profoundly true. This potential lies in the ability of religious symbols to bring into focus and to speak meaningfully to some of the deepest issues of life, and to address these issues with an evocative quality, range, and power that are beyond the competence of even the most well-articulated and well-argued literal assertions.

xi

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Preface

To be dismissive or even contemptuous of symbolical expressions is to betray a literal mindset that is poorly equipped to deal with the central, most abiding truths and modes of awareness of religious traditions. It is interesting to note that such a literal mindset often characterizes both earnest spokespersons for religious traditions and those who are just as earnestly intent on rejecting religions out of hand on the ground that many of their central features cannot be readily reduced to literal statements or that, when reduced, they turn out to be vexingly paradoxical or literally false. The literal mindset of the former gives abundant ammunition to the literalistic objections of the latter. For religious persons to insist that everything about religion must be rendered into literal discourse or propositional doctrines, and that failure to give unquestioning assent to this discourse and these doctrines (so rendered) amounts to un-negotiable heresy and lack of faith, is fundamentally to misconceive the nature of religious outlooks on the world. These outlooks may admit of literal or more or less literal assertions at many significant points. But they also crucially depend on symbolic modes of thought and conviction which frame vital meanings and truths that cannot be simply stated in literal terms. Endeavoring to reduce these symbolic modes wholly to literal statements is to distort their meanings beyond repair and to lose sight of what may be of most lasting and telling importance in them. My argument throughout this book implies that responsible religious leaders should work constantly to sensitize those whom they lead to the pervasive and underlying symbolic aspects of their traditions and to help their followers to understand why it is so important not to overlook or downplay these crucial aspects in favor of claims that purport to be strictly literal and to call for exclusively literal assent. Development of such sensitivity and attunement to symbolic meanings is no simple task. It requires subtlety and sophistication of a high order, and it should be a basic and intensive aspect of religious education. Discursive religious language, on the one hand, and symbolic expressions and practices of religion, on the other, can be mutually illuminative and informative. But neither can be substituted for the other, and neither is subordinate to the other. Literal discourse, logical inferences, and rationally ordered doctrinal systems have important roles to play in giving expression to religious truths. I do not want for a moment to deny this fact, and I argue for its importance later in this book. I only mean to assert here that the embodiment and communication of religious truth is critically dependent at many points on nondiscursive symbolic modes of expression, and

Preface

xiii

that these modes of expression cannot be reduced without serious loss of meaning to literal statements. To attempt such wholesale reduction can have disastrous effects for the character and significance of religious thought and commitment, for reasons I shall spell out in due course and in some detail. This spelling out will be largely and admittedly discursive in character, but its focus throughout will be on meanings or aspects of meanings of powerful religious symbols that cannot be reduced to literal analysis or description. I cannot emphasize enough how vitally important it is to understand the distinctive, irreducible role of symbolic forms of intuition and expression in our everyday lives and especially in the religious dimensions of our lives. Without this understanding, we are doomed to skate on the surfaces of religion and much of life, and to be oblivious to their depths. As the subtitle of this book indicates, its focus is not only on the roles and functions of religious symbols in general. It also focuses on the sorts of religious symbols that can be brought into play and drawn upon to give symbolic expression to the outlook of religious naturalism and, most particularly, to the perspective of what I call Religion of Nature. In the concluding chapter of an earlier (2002) book entitled A Religion of Nature, I noted that my discussions in the book were incomplete because they did not provide an analysis of types of symbolic expressions and enactments suitable for a naturalistic faith. A religious outlook devoid of such symbolic features is deficient in a fundamental aspect of religious thought and expression. This book represents an attempt at least to begin to make up for that notable deficiency in the earlier book. Other aspects of my elaboration and defense of Religion of Nature have occupied me in two additional books. The first of these, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (2008), explores the manifestations of evil in the world and in human life and how these can be regarded, responded to, and coped with in Religion of Nature—a critical issue, if not the most critical issue, for any adequate and meaningful religious vision. And the second book, The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life (2013) centers on the question of how proponents of Religion of Nature should view and live in relation to the host of nonhuman sentient creatures on earth and the natural environments on which their livelihood and well-being depend. These three books and the present one offer interlinked perspectives on the naturalistic faith of Religion of Nature. These perspectives have important bearings on other versions of religious naturalism as well.

xiv

Preface

This book is divided into two parts, each consisting of four chapters. The first part is devoted to analysis of the functions and types of religious symbols in general, while the second part concentrates on symbols especially appropriate for Religion of Nature and other versions of religious naturalism. The first chapter of Part I lists, analyzes, and discusses numerous types of religious symbol, as illustrated in a variety of religious traditions. Chapter 2 inquires into the nature of artistic symbols, compares and contrasts this kind of symbolization with that of religion, and investigates the relations of artistic and religious symbols. Chapter 3 explicates and illustrates the concept of master religious symbols, comparing such symbols with major and relatively minor ones in the lore of religions. Chapter 4 explores the important question of how religious symbols function in order effectively to play the critical role they do in religious outlooks, enactments, and commitments. The whole of Part I is devoted, then, to exploration of the character and function of religious symbols in general as they figure in recognized and widely influential religions of the world—religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Part II describes in its initial two chapters four kinds of master religious symbol appropriate for Religion of Nature: symbols of the religious ultimate; cosmogonic and cosmological symbols; symbols of the saving path of Religion of Nature and of obstacles lying in the way of this path; and the symbolic or exemplary role of particular travelers on that path. The penultimate chapter of this part takes up the critical issue of the kind of truth (in contrast with discursive truth) that can be associated with religious symbols and proposes criteria for assessing this kind of truth. The criteria are crucial because I do not want to leave the impression that all religious symbols are true or equally true. Some symbols set forth in the name of religion are notoriously false, and there is no reason to think that all religious symbols must be equally true. Among the false ones are those that fail to direct attention and commitment beyond the symbols themselves to the unfathomable depths of the sacred to which appropriate religious symbols make necessary reference, or those which tacitly or explicitly promote cruel and hateful attitudes toward others, including nonhuman others. And religious symbols are not all equally effective in opening up and putting us in touch with profound religious meanings. The proposed criteria help us to judge the extent to which particular symbols achieve this end. This chapter also directs attention to the fundamental role nondiscursive symbols play in secular spheres such as politics, economics, and sports.

Preface

xv

The final chapter of the book is concerned with various kinds of symbols, symbolic activity, and ritualistic practice that can evoke and give expression to the distinctive outlook and commitment of Religion of Nature. The symbols and symbolic actions brought into view in this concluding chapter include such things as attention to aspects of nature that can awaken a sense of the sacredness of nature with its religious assurances, demands, and empowerments, as well as suggestions of prayers, meditations, poems, instrumental music, songs, stories, and rituals of various kinds appropriate for Religion of Nature. The religious symbols talked about in this book are not just routes to personal contemplative awareness or ingredients of symbolic outlooks and practices in explicitly religious settings. They are also ways of framing and inspiring action in the larger world. They point to and motivate ways of being, not just ways of thinking or acting in private devotion or in religious enclaves. These ways of being include ways of responding and relating to others likely to be affected by our attitudes and actions, and of being compassionate and just in our relations to these others. Spirituality and morality are thus conjoined, each informing, refreshing, and critiquing the other from its respective sphere. For this reason, among others, it is keenly important to understand the central importance of religious symbols for awakening and deepening religious awareness not just for its own sake but for what it can equip us to contribute individually and collectively to the betterment of the world. I want to express my thanks to two anonymous readers for the State University of New York Press for their support for this book and for their helpful suggestions for its improvement. My wife Pam has made invaluable critical comments on the book at various stages of its preparation, and I am deeply grateful for her constant encouragement and aid. I am also indebted to Senior Acquisitions Editor Nancy Ellegate and others on the staff of SUNY Press who have provided their usual courteous and capable assistance throughout this book’s production.

Part I

Functions

and

Types

of

Religious Symbols

1

Symbols of Living Faith

. . . [E]ven the highest religious truth must remain attached to sensuous existence, to the world of images as well as things. It must continuously immerse and submerge itself in this existence which its intelligible purpose strives to cast off and reject—because only in this existence does religious truth possess its expressive form and hence its concrete reality and efficacy. —Ernst Cassirer1

Introduction Its great wings outstretched, the brown pelican spirals in the thermal air. Scarcely a flicker of those magnificent wings is required for it to soar further and further aloft. Finally reaching an apogee of the spiral, it gently banks and slowly descends, only to be uplifted again in its circling flight. The pelican’s course through the air, its feet tucked behind its breast and its giant beak thrust boldly before it, seems effortless. It is not seeking to spot a school of fish, for its flight is presently over land, not sea, although near a bay adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico. It exhibits no clear purpose beyond that of sheer enjoyment and play. For me, at that moment, this pelican’s flight is a compelling symbol of the numinous powers, presences, and wonders of the natural order to which we both miraculously belong. The full significance of this haunting symbol cannot be adequately translated or communicated in words, although I use words here as a halting way of pointing to that significance. Experience of it is something felt in the depth of one’s being, something that holds profoundly and undeniably true although its truth cannot be simply asserted as a

3

4

More Than Discourse

kind of propositional fact or reduced to a set of descriptive statements. Its symbolic meaning is nondiscursive but profoundly evocative. Roles of various symbols of this and other types are what I wish to explore in this book, especially as they relate to religious naturalism and the version of it I call Religion of Nature. To date, I have devoted three books, the concluding chapter of another book, and several articles to setting forth, explaining, and defending Religion of Nature and important aspects of it, doing so in a largely discursive, argumentative, and propositional manner.2 But no deeply relevant and meaningful religion can live on explicit doctrines alone. A living faith cries out for nondiscursive, allusive, but richly insightful symbolic modes of expression and enactment. Doctrinal statements have their place, but they cannot substitute for the symbols whose meanings surpass and lie beyond explicit doctrinal exposition and are nevertheless fertile sources of insight and understanding from which the doctrinal expositions may often take their point of departure and back to which they may continue to refer. Doctrinal statements are themselves, of course, an important and indispensable type of symbolic usage, in the broad sense of that term. Like all assertive and argumentative language, they contain words and phrases as symbolic designations of meaning and reference, and they incorporate syntactical and logical rules and forms as ways of relating words and their meanings to one another. But I want to reserve the term symbol in this book for expressions of nondiscursive, nonpropositional, nonassertive types of meaning. This definitional strategy will enable me to avoid repeated and awkward use of these qualifiers or delimiters as I proceed. This book’s readers should keep in mind this stipulated, restricted definition of the term. Specific types and varieties of religious symbols and symbolic meanings will be brought into view as the book unfolds. As philosopher Ernst Cassirer points out in the epigraph to this chapter, there is an ongoing tension in religious thought between the instinctive endeavor to apprehend the “intelligible purpose” of such symbolizations by arriving at adequate doctrinal or propositional statements of their meanings, on the one hand, and the stubbornly embodied forms of those meanings which this endeavor strives to capture and thus to supersede, on the other. But seeking to cast aside the latter in the name of the former is foolish and futile, because this would be to leave behind vital dimensions of meaning which can only be exhibited and contained in the “concrete reality and efficacy” of the sensuous symbolic forms. These concrete forms can have profound cognitive significance, I shall claim

Symbols of Living Faith

5

throughout this book, but it is not the sort of knowledge or awareness that can be adequately conveyed by even the most skillful and precise prosaic exposition. It is a type of significance that is crucial and irreplaceable for religious sensitivity and understanding. To confuse symbolic meaning with literal meaning, moreover, is to make a grave mistake. To do so is not only to lose sight of the kind of meaning which only symbolic expressions can convey, it can also distort that meaning in radically misleading ways. I do not want to disparage the proper employment of discursive interpretations of symbols. Such interpretations can be essential aids to discovering and clarifying aspects of the symbols’ significance. We can speak about religious symbols and their distinctive meanings, as I propose to do throughout this study, but my basic point is that there is no substitute for direct experience of these meanings or for full engagement with the symbols’ sensuous forms. The concrete, nondiscursive character of religious apprehension has a crucial role to play. It clearly has continued to do so for other religious outlooks and commitments, and it can do so for Religion of Nature. Addressing the question of how and in what ways it can do so is my principal task in this book.

Back to the Pelican Let me now return to the soaring flight of the pelican and my response to it as a proponent of Religion of Nature. I can try to explain in the form of verbal statements some ways in which this event is religiously meaningful to me. It is a reminder that I, the pelican, and all other living beings, human and nonhuman, share in a universe that has enabled us to come into being and to live in accordance with the distinctive traits and capabilities nature has conferred on our respective species. The pelican is my fellow creature, and I have both the privilege and responsibility of respecting and reverencing its life and the environmental conditions essential to its life. The pelican’s effortless flight is a telling token of the remarkable fecundity of nature and of the marvel of its multifarious, intricately interdependent creations and manifestations. It brings into vivid awareness the evolutionary processes that have formed this universe over billions of years and that have given rise to the fundamental constituents, constants, and laws of nature and to the multiple forms of inorganic matter, life, and conscious life on this earth. It is a symbol of the wondrous complexity of the material processes that make life and consciousness possible.

6

More Than Discourse

The pelican’s flight bespeaks the exuberance and joy of life. It is an image of hope, aspiration, and freedom. It shows that we do not live by bread alone (since the pelican is not presently looking for fish) but by grateful celebration of the gift of life and all that it makes possible. It tells us that there is not only a place for play in life but that play is an essential part of life if it is to be lived to its fullest. It reminds us that the free play of imagination has given rise to many of our most impressive cultural, theoretical, and technological achievements as human beings. But the pelican’s flight also symbolizes for me a darker, more precarious side of life in general and especially of nonhuman life forms that can be adversely affected by the choices, actions, and enterprises of human beings and human institutions. A striking illustration of this observation is the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 that caused nearly five million barrels of crude oil to flow directly into the Gulf of Mexico, the same Gulf that is this pelican’s immediate environment and source of food. The spill was finally contained after causing the deaths—and often agonizing deaths—of countless forms of sea birds and aquatic life, but the oil source involved continues to the day of this writing to seep from the seabed and to take a destructive toll on sea creatures and their environs in or near the Gulf. The pelican’s flight stirs up feelings of sadness and regret for this and similar anthropogenic encroachments and disasters, and it engenders a mood of apprehension for the future of nonhuman life forms on earth whose continuing well-being is critically dependent on the attitudes and actions of human beings. When I was telling one of my granddaughters about my experience of the pelican’s flight, she reminded me that imagery of the pelican has long been a symbol in Christianity of Christ’s self-sacrifice and shedding of blood in atonement for the sins of the world. This is so because it was believed that in times of famine the mother pelican would pierce her breast with her bill in order to obtain her own blood for the feeding of her hungry chicks. I shall return to this imagery when talking about the entwined roles of minor and major religious symbols later in this chapter. But none of these statements or others I could make in connection with my observation of the pelican’s flight, nor all such statements taken together, can do justice to the firsthand experience itself and all that it meant to me at that time and continues to mean. The experience and what occasioned it are a powerful evocation, expression, and refining of my faith as a religious naturalist, and the meanings, associations, and ramifications of that faith outstrip verbal descriptions. The religious

Symbols of Living Faith

7

meanings are somehow contained in the sensuous image of the soaring bird, encapsulated or summed up in it in ways I am not able with any number of verbal statements fully to elaborate or explain. If you want to know what my faith means to me, one of the most adequate ways in which I can try to make you aware of its meaning is simply to point you to that splendid creature, nonchalantly rising and falling on motionless wings in invisible currents of air. In the last analysis I am only able to say, “There, don’t you see! This is what the sacredness of nature means, all that it bestows on us, invites us to ponder, and requires of us!” Yet the “only” of this sheer linguistic pointing is somehow, in its symbolic, elusive, statement-defying power, everything I want or need to say. What I can be said to know partly by means of this event of nature—a single aspect symbolically representative of nature’s immense whole—I know with every fiber of my being, at the deepest levels of emotion, mind, and will. It is an intensely personal, transformative, revelatory way of knowing, not merely a conceptual one. My words about it are faltering and imprecise. The symbol itself and many other sensuous forms that function in ways akin to it are packed with unspeakable significance. Let us consider some of the types of religious symbols to be found in various traditions.

Some Types of Religious Symbolization Religious symbols and symbolizations can be of many different kinds. They can be aspects or events of nature, whether spectacular or ordinary. For example, the eruption of a volcano, a violent earthquake, an eclipse of the sun, the quiet bubbling of a brook, a vista of stately mountain peaks, the tireless spinning of a spider, the stalwart stance of an ancient oak tree whose gnarled branches are wreathed with resurrection ferns and draped with Spanish moss, or the serene soaring of a pelican can arouse and give expression to religious sensibilities. The sun’s radiance and warmth; cooling, refreshing, and restorative rain; the mysterious depths of the starry night; the cycles of the seasons; the welcome annual floods of a river essential to agriculture; the times of planting and harvesting; the migration patterns of animals; the births, maturations, and deaths affecting all living beings—these and other aspects of nature can function as religious symbols, as can the terrifying lightning and crashing thunder of a severe storm that calls attention to the awesome forces of nature with which human beings and all other life forms must contend.

8

More Than Discourse

The respiration or breath essential to all aerobic forms of life has become a symbol of the inner, life-giving spirit of humans and also of the nature, presence, and influence of the religious ultimate. The term spirit is itself derived from the Latin term spirare, meaning “to breathe.” Prior to the creation of the world, “the spirit [Hebrew: ruach, meaning “breath, wind, or spirit”] of God hovered over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2), and “the breath of life” (Hebrew: naphesh hayya) is breathed into the nostrils of Adam by God after Adam is formed from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). The Greek word pneuma, which literally means breath, is widely used in the New Testament for the Holy Spirit, which came later to be regarded as the third Person of the Divine Trinity. The Chinese term ch’i which figures prominently in Daoism and Confucianism as a term for the active force or energy that pervades the universe and every living thing has as its literal meaning breath, air, or gas. The term inspiration means etymologically a kind of “breathing in” of empowering knowledge and awareness, and the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are regarded by Jews and Christians as divinely inspired. Muslims have a comparable view of the Qur’an.3 The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad of Hinduism contains a passage that responds to the question, “Just how many gods are there?” with the answer, “One,” and then goes on to state that this one is “Breath. . . . They [the sages] call him Brahman, the Yon.”4 Another passage in the same Upanishad speaks of the cosmic Self or Brahman as having “breathed forth” all the wisdom, lore, doctrines, explanations, commentaries, sacred texts, and hymns of Hindu faith.5 Breath is thus, in all the usages cited in this and the preceding paragraph, a fitting symbol of the innermost nature of the human being, the creative power that produces and animates the universe, and the revelatory source of sacred texts. Breath has an intimacy, indispensability, vitality, and pervasive quality that suit it for these roles. Religious symbols can reflect historical settings or ways of life, as when a deity or deities are represented as shepherds, suzerains, judges, or kings, when they are portrayed as mounted on horses or riding in chariots, or when they are accorded distinctive roles related to the practices of warfare, agriculture, manufacturing, homemaking, or hunting of a particular time. Such symbols are often also drawn from family life, as when a deity or deities are represented as mother, father, daughter, or son, or when deceased ancestors are believed to continue to have important relations with and to impose significant obligations on those of their relatives who are presently alive. Shrines to these ancestors and rites of fealty honoring them are then required.

Symbols of Living Faith

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Imagined heroic quests beset by arduous challenges and trials, such as Gilgamesh’s endeavor to find the secret of eternal life, Odysseus’s tenyear journey toward his homeland, Jason and the Argonauts’ pursuit of the Golden Fleece (with the help of Medea), Galahad’s search for the Holy Grail, and Pilgrim’s progress can symbolize the dedication, patience, courage, and hope required for an authentic religious life, together with the trials it must anticipate, confront, and overcome. These traits of character and aspiration are not so much described as dramatically embodied and exemplified in the whole sweep of such narratives. Such quest stories may be first imagined by an individual—perhaps in some cases loosely based on actual persons and events—but they can be subsequently refined by other individuals, elaborated on and progressively expanded by repeated oral recitations, and eventually incorporated into the lives and outlooks of whole communities through time. Historical events such as the Jewish flight from Egypt late in the second millennium BCE or the trial and crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in the first century CE can come to have powerful symbolic significance and to be regularly commemorated and celebrated in rituals such as the annual Passover Meal in Judaism or Good Friday and Easter services and the Eucharist in Christianity. The flight (Hijra) by Mohammed and his followers from persecution in Mecca to Medina in 622 CE is celebrated annually as the first day of the Muslim year, and events relating to Mohammed’s earnest religious quest and announced receipt of the revelations of the Qur’an are similarly reflected upon and celebrated by Muslims. These events are not just regarded as historical occurrences in the three religions I have mentioned, although they do have undeniable importance simply as such. They have come to have pronounced symbolic meaning as well. The resolute faith and commitment of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed is symbolically enshrined in the recounting of these and other events in their lives, in legendary or mythical accretions that may have come to be associated with their lives, and in the subsequent regular celebrations of the events, showing that the lives and missions, ordeals and triumphs of persons, especially of those who serve as major founders or leaders of emerging religious traditions, can be of deep symbolic significance for adherents of the traditions. They serve as iconic exemplifications of the religious life and its ideals. Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh acknowledges the importance to Buddhists or Christians of faith in “the wonderful, universal Buddhas” or in the resurrected Christ and eternity, but he insists that “the

10

More Than Discourse

examples of the actual lives of the Buddha and Jesus are most important, because as human beings, they lived in ways that we can live, too.”6 What the great religious leaders I have mentioned and others like them represent and mean to their followers cannot be adequately captured in verbal statement or analysis. It needs also to be conveyed in story, legend, myth, and ritual, and in the concrete exemplification and symbolization of the course of the great religious leader’s life. Books or writings that come to have the role of sacred texts constitute, not just in their specific contents but in their overall character and importance, a significant type of religious symbol. Torah, New Testament, Qur’an, Upanishads, Analects, Dao De Jing, and other texts are to be reverenced and treated with special care. Each text in its turn helps to symbolize a whole way of life for those who find in it central religious inspiration, guidance, and meaning. The singular, inimitable beauty and revelatory power claimed by pious Muslims for the style of Arabic writing in the holy Qur’an is alleged by them to be outstanding proof of its divine inspiration and origin. Taken as a whole, it and other sacred texts are evocative symbols in their own right.7 Sacred places also have symbolic force and character. Mount Olympus and the oracle at Delphi were sacred for the ancient Greeks. Jerusalem is sacred ground for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with its Jewish Temple Mount, Christian Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and Muslim Dome of the Rock. Saranath, outside the city of Banaras (Varanasi) in India, is where Gautama Buddha first taught his disciples and where the oldest known stupa, the gigantic Dhamek stupa, is located. Banaras itself is a holy city for Hindus. Numerous ritual cremations take place below its ghats that descend to the sacred Ganges River. Mecca, with its Ka’aba shrine, is the destination of pilgrimage for all able Muslims at a special time of the year, at least once in their lifetime. The Vatican in Rome, with its St. Peter’s Cathedral, is a holy site for Roman Catholics and also a pilgrimage destination. Constantinople (or Istanbul), with its Sacred Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) Cathedral8 and Blue Mosque, has served historically as a holy city for Christians and Muslims. To travel toward, to wander about in, and to meditate in such places can mean experiencing a special closeness or presence of the focus of religious commitment, whatever that might be for an individual traveler or group. Experiencing the site at firsthand can be to sense that closeness and presence in an especially powerful manner, but such sites can have symbolic meaning even when at great distances

Symbols of Living Faith

11

from religious adherents. The five daily Islamic prayers, for instance, are oriented toward Mecca, and Jews and Christians sing of Zion. Religious symbols can also take the form of creation stories, expressively noting the origins of all things, the primordial character and subsequent development of these things, and especially the place of humans in the universe. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, the creation account in the Book of Genesis, and the Daoist Chaung Tzu’s depiction of the world’s ongoing creation by K’ung the fish’s transformation into P’ung the bird, “mysteriously moving from darkness to darkness, from north to south, year to year,”9 are examples. Hindu stories of the world’s creation, preservation, and destruction, ceaselessly giving rise to new world cycles, are associated with Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. The dance of Shiva depicted throughout India in sculpture, painting, and architectural ornament as well as in human dance ceremonies is the endless dance of creation and destruction—evil, worn-out, used-up worlds being replaced by better, fresher, more vigorous ones. Shiva’s lingum or phallus is symbolic of the inexhaustible source of all the worlds’ energy and its powers of creation and destruction. Of great symbolic significance in Zoroastrianism are accounts of the creation of an entirely good world by Ohrmazd, and an entirely evil one by Ahriman, these counterworlds to be used by the two deities as respective weapons in their cosmic battle against one another. A more recent example of a religious creation story is the allegation of profound religious meaning in current scientific accounts of the origin of our universe in the Big Bang and its stages of development thereafter, including those that led to our own evolution as a species. A book published in the early 1990s by mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme and cultural historian Thomas Berry sets forth the scientific creation story and explores its mythic significance for contemporary human life.10 Religious symbols can take the form of parables that express important aspects of a particular religious outlook on the world. For example, the parables of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–31), the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3–7), and the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16) in the Christian gospels can be interpreted as emphasizing the unconditional gift of God’s grace, while the parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30) can be interpreted as emphasizing the requirement for appropriate human responses to the workings of that grace or even as stressing the need to earn and be worthy of that grace. A paradoxical relation of unconditional grace and a necessary condition of human effort and a­ccomplishment

12

More Than Discourse

for the appropriation of that grace is thus suggested. Such parables capture in the form of stories aspects of religious outlook and life that are memorably and forcibly—even if sometimes elliptically and puzzlingly— conveyed. They may seem simple on the surface but often contain hidden depths. The Hebrew Bible’s book of Second Samuel (12:1–15) recounts a parable told by the prophet Nathan to David the King of Israel whose import is subsequently made crystal clear. The parable recounts the flagrantly unjust action of a rich man with many flocks and herds against a poor one, namely, his commandeering of the latter’s only ewe lamb in order to slaughter it and serve it as part of a meal for a visitor. David initially reacts to the parable with an upsurge of anger and smug condemnation of the rich man. When he is informed by Nathan that the parable applies to him on account of his taking Bathsheba as his wife after arranging for her husband to be killed in battle, the parable’s application to his own life is suddenly revealed to him. He is stricken with dreadful awareness of the magnitude of his sin and of divine judgment on his sin. The parable has this symbolic effect in a way that a mere literal denunciation of his action would probably not have. It jolts him into stark awareness of the character and consequence of his deed that he had hitherto put at the back of his mind. Paradoxical expressions of various kinds can often have symbolic significance for religious thought even though on a purely literal level they look like contradictions. To dismiss them as mere contradictions, therefore, is to misunderstand their symbolic meaning. The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity, for example, contains in suspension assertions of God’s absolute oneness alongside assertions of God’s triune nature, and the Doctrine of the Two Natures of Christ asserts both the identity of Christ with God and also Christ’s full humanity. These paradoxes of one-in-three and God-man may be literally absurd, but they serve as indications that the radically transcendent character of God, on the one hand, and God’s radically immanent relation to the human being Jesus, on the other. They stubbornly defy, in their incomprehensible mystery, literal human comprehension. Each paradox contains two important things that must be said about God on the basis of belief in God’s self-disclosure in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, where God was somehow able to assume human form and yet to be worshipped and prayed to as Father by that human being Jesus during his earthly life. These notions cannot be resolved into logically consistent conceptions or statements. They are

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symbolically expressive not only despite but precisely because of their literal incoherence and tensional, paradoxical nature. Their meaning is not of a literal kind but of another kind. The essential role of paradox as a way of deepening understanding on one level, while defying it, on the other, is often noted and stressed in the Hindu scriptures. For example, the Isa Upanishad declares of BrahmanAtman that It moves. It moves not. It is far, and It is near. It is within all this, And it is outside of all this. A paradox of transcendence-immanence similar to the Christian one of Christ as God-man is thus posed. And the devout Hindu is told in this same Upanishad that the intuitive awareness to be gained when confronted with such paradoxes is both other than knowledge and other than nonknowledge.11 It lies, this is to say, in a realm much deeper than ordinary modes of rationality or understanding, a realm that can be reached only by disciplined meditation and the direct insight and experience it affords. The paradox has a symbolic character. It suggests and alludes to a profound truth that cannot be consistently stated. A type of paradox prevalent in one form of Zen Buddhism is the koan, which often takes the form of a dialogue between a student and a Zen master. The koan is not so much a puzzle to be solved as an object of meditation, and responses to it which are presented by the student at various times expose the stage of spiritual development of the student. The koan is designed to show that the deepest nature of things cannot be comprehended by reason or literal interpretation but only by years of meditational experience. Here is an example of one such koan, which I take from the Internet site “Zen Koans.”12 Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku. Desiring to show his attainment, he said, “The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.”

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Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry. “If nothing exists,” inquired Dokuon, “where did this anger come from?” The precise sense of the central Buddhist idea of emptiness or s´unyata and its relations to ordinary perceptual experience have been much discussed and debated in the history of Buddhism and within different Buddhist schools. If sheer nonexistence is the final reality, as the student alleges, how can there be a student, the master, the whack of the master’s pipe, and the eruption of the student’s anger? And what sense can be made of the idea that nonexistence, if construed as the meaning of emptiness, exists? The student in the koan was confident that he had the right understanding of this issue, but he was chastised by the master for his cocksure naïveté. The student’s nihilistic interpretation showed that he was far from having an understanding of the matter’s elusive, perplexing quality, and the master’s reaction to his statement was a way of bringing this fact forcibly to his attention. The master does not resolve the conundrum he poses. He leaves it to the student to ponder and meditate upon. The paradox to which he calls attention is a symbolic invitation to continuing reflection and deepening experience, not to conceptual resolution. Rituals are of paramount importance as symbolic enactments of religious outlooks and expressions of religious praise, devotion, obedience, thankfulness, confession, repentance, and petition. The seven sacraments in Roman Catholicism and the two in Protestantism; services marking the liturgical year in Christian churches; enactments of the stations of the cross in Christianity; the practice of Monastic Hours in Christian monasteries and nunneries; festivals of the Jewish year; Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant services of worship; the Muslim five daily prayers; the journey to Mecca and seven circulations of the Ka’aba in the Islamic Hajj; rituals associated with monastic life in Buddhism; the removal of one’s shoes and wearing appropriate garb before entering a Hindu temple; the four-day Hindu Festival of Lights; washing and other purification rites; rain dances; war dances; dances of planting and harvest; dances or other rituals celebrating the rising and setting of the sun or seasons of the year; rituals oriented to the cardinal points of the compass; rituals of the Day of the Dead in Mexican Catholicism; rituals expressing piety toward one’s ancestors in Confucianism; rituals relating to birth, puberty, marriage, and

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death; the tea ceremony in Zen Buddhism; the fire ritual in Zoroastrianism; rites of animal or human sacrifice—all of these are examples of the symbolic force and meaning of ritualistic practices. They are religious symbols in action. A particularly striking ritual expressing the impermanence and transitoriness of all things, including the self—a central precept of Buddhism—is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of sand painting. Grains of sand of different colors are fashioned over days or weeks into a complex and beautiful picture or design. Then the picture or design is dumped with appropriate ceremony into a body of water, where the particles of sand return to their original form. The nature of all experienced entities, including the human self, as constituted of interdependent point instants that maintain a form or character only for limited periods of time (pratityasamutpada) and thus the related central Buddhist concepts of impermanence (anicca) and no-self (anatman) are dramatically symbolized in this way. These fundamental aspects of the Buddhist outlook are shown in the ritual more directly and convincingly than they can be propositionally stated. The process of making and then destroying the sand painting is an enactment of central Buddhist convictions that stir the depths of the adherent’s awareness, expressing, clarifying, and confirming their truth in a powerful manner. The ritual has a vividness and immediacy about it that verbal descriptions, theoretical statements, and injunctions do not. Its meaning is not just contemplated but performed. In the words of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, ritual in this case and in general is an “outer framework which both occasions and identifies an inner event,”13 an inner event of activated religious awareness and devoted participation in religious significance and worth. Many other types of religious symbols deserve mention. Buildings, gardens, paintings, sculpture, music, dramatic productions, myths, novels, poems, emblems, mandalas, and calligraphy can carry significant symbolic meaning for sharers in various kinds of religious outlook and commitment. I shall take particular notice of the close relations of meaning and overlaps of form between works of art and religious symbols in the next chapter. Totemic animals symbolize the character and cohesion of tribal communities, so closely in fact as for the members of those communities to think of themselves as one with the animal, and it with them. Hour glasses, candles, or clocks can symbolize the fleetingness of present moments and the religious need for security in face of the uncertainties, threats, and inevitabilities of the flow of time. Clocks also became

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More Than Discourse

important symbols of the mechanistic view of the universe that came to the fore with Newtonian science and by implication of God as the awesome Mathematician and Designer of the intricate mechanical workings of the universe.

Symbols of Evil I should not fail to take notice of the critical importance of religious symbolizations of the presence and threat of evil in the world. Not all religious symbols are about joyfulness, thankfulness, goodness, and renewal. Many have to do with recognizing and warding off evils of various kinds. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” is a poignant petition of the Pater Noster or Lord’s Prayer in Christian devotion. The goddess Kali in Hinduism, with her horrible grimace, blood-drenched teeth, and garland of skulls is a symbol of destruction and evil in Hinduism, and regular rites of sacrifice are required to avoid the terrifying effects of her actions. Medusa in Greek religion; Satan, evil ghosts, and witches in Christianity; Mara in Buddhism; and Ahriman in Zoroastrianism are personifications of evil, as are the various kinds of demons and the stories of demonic possession in different religions. Satan tempts Jesus, and Mara tempts Gautama Buddha in Christian and Buddhist lore, respectively.14 The serpent in the Garden of Eden in Genesis is usually regarded as a symbol of insidious temptation to evil-doing and disobedience to God. This is so even though he provides accurate, if not entirely complete, information to Eve. In the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation in the New Testament, a snake or dragon is cast from heaven by the angel Michael and his hosts and identified as “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). The symbolism seems natural in a way in view of the fact that snakes slither menacingly across the ground or in brush where they cannot always be seen, hide in crevices, are often deadly poisonous, can sink their fangs with lightning speed, and are generally feared and avoided by humans and nonhuman animals. But the symbolism of the snake happens to be highly ambiguous, functioning as an emblem of evil and good—and even predominately of good—in the religious outlooks of the ancient world, as biblical scholar James H. Charlesworth points out. He also discusses at some length the fact that the imagery of Moses lifting up the bronze serpent in the wil-

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derness in Numbers 21:4–9 is used as a type or analogue to Jesus’s being raised up on the cross in John 3:14–15. The use of this analogy in John’s gospel suggests that the serpent imagery has a positive role to play, and perhaps did so at one time in ancient Israel (cf. II Kings 18:4), despite its usual association in later Jewish and Christian theology with unequivocal evil.15 Bad-smelling, sulfurous fumes emitted by cracks in the ground can betoken the abode of the devil and his minions in the bowels of the earth, where they have been consigned in keeping with the myth of fallen angels. The chilling terror of the devil and his wiles is vividly portrayed in the New Testament when it describes him as prowling “around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour” (I Peter 5:8). Warding off or rendering harmless the temptations and actual or potential devastations of evil beings and forces can be a crucial part of religious observations and symbolizations. After the sacrifice of one goat, a second goat (the scapegoat) is sent off into the wilderness, ritualistically carrying away the sins and evils committed by individuals and the community in the Jewish Yom Kippur or Day of Atonement. The struggle with evil forces, presences, and allurements of many different kinds—both individual and social—is a basic motif running through religions. An incisive way of understanding the nature of religion itself is to view it as a persistent exposure of the destructive menaces and corruptions of evil and as laying out a path and means of deliverance from them. Symbols of evil have a critical role to play in pointing out the direction and goal of this path and the formidable obstacles to be anticipated, encountered, and overcome while traveling on it.16

Major and Minor Religious Symbols Religious symbols are not all of equal importance. They run across a spectrum from symbols of what I term master and then of major importance to those of relatively minor significance. Master, major, and minor symbols are such because of their differences of scope, criticality, and evocative power in the religious traditions involved. I shall focus in this chapter on major and minor religious symbols and devote attention to master ones in Chapters 3, 5, and 6. Even minor religious symbols can call vivid attention, in their own distinctive fashion, to the most fundamental themes of religious outlook and commitment. They can do so because they are part

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of a vast web of interrelated symbols, where attention to one of them can bring to mind associations with many of the rest of them, and especially with the major ones of them. The injunction in the Hebrew Bible to refrain from muzzling the ox that treads the grain (Deuteronomy 25:4) relates on the purely literal level to the treatment of one kind of animal. But it can be a symbolic reminder to practice justice and mercy toward even the lowliest of persons or beasts, and it can recall the justice, mercy, and loving kindness of the God who made a covenant with Abraham on behalf of the future people of Israel and delivered the forerunners of the Jewish nation from the harsh treatments of their servitude in Egypt. The mention of the rainbow as a token of God’s earlier covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:13) and what were to become the people of Israel is a similarly minor symbolization that has an intimate connection with the greater ones in Judaism. Covenant and Exodus are major symbols in Judaism, while the injunctions regarding the ox and the rainbow symbols are not, but the latter have significant symbolic associations with the former in the context of Jewish faith and experience. It is interesting to note that the chapter in Deuteronomy in which the verse concerning the ox is contained concludes with reference to the flight from Egypt and journey toward the Promised Land. I mentioned earlier in this chapter the image of the mother pelican piercing her breast with her beak to obtain her own blood as food for her chicks in a time when regular food is hard to come by. This symbol has become for Christians a relatively minor and yet favorite one calling attention to the far greater one in traditional Christianity of Christ shedding his blood on the cross to atone for the sins of human beings, and of his willing sacrifice of flesh and blood to be regularly enacted and recalled in the eating and drinking ceremony of the Eucharist. This is another example of how minor and major symbols can dovetail in religious traditions, the former bringing into a particular kind of focused attention the pervasive, more important significance of the latter. Another example in this same connection is the relationship of the regular ancient Jewish altar sacrifices to God and the symbolism of God’s sacrificing his only Son as a necessary atonement for all human sin. Here the relatively minor and later outmoded symbolic ritual of sacrificing a pigeon or lamb in the Jewish temple is brought into close relation with the major symbolism of Christ’s crucifixion, the Lamb of God whose blood is shed for the sins of the world. The Sacrificial Theory of the Atonement, which seeks to explicate the salvific consequence of Christ’s death, shows

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how these two types of symbolization have been brought together. Even the relatively minor symbolism of the story of the Widow’s Mite in the gospels (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4) can easily be seen as a token of or pointer to Christ’s own supreme sacrifice. The poor widow gave “all the living she had”; Christ gave everything he had—his entire life. A final example of minor and major symbols and their relationships is the story of the conversation with a roadside skull in the Daoist scripture the Chaung Tzu. The skull is a symbol of death, of course, but it is also a symbol of life, for life is lived in the face of the inevitability of death. The skull is nonchalant, happy, and cheerfully conversational in its death. And Daoism shows us how to be relaxed, joyful, grateful, and fulfilled in our lives even with full awareness of our impending deaths. Every night when we lie down to sleep, we lie down within our skulls, and all our thinking, experiencing, and planning takes place within our skulls. The story of the roadside skull is a relatively minor symbol within the whole of Daoism, but it ties in nicely with the major symbolism of the two cosmic aspects of yin and yang represented in the familiar conjoined teardrop shapes of the Daoist mandala or Taijitu. Life must be lived in the face of death. Yet we can be joyful when “we live as if we were already dead.” The universe as a whole and everything in it exhibits the continuous coming and going of opposites (yin and yang), including the interpenetrating opposites of life and death.17 Thus, religious symbols should not be thought of as standing apart and alone; they frequently make reference to one another. The relatively minor ones can point beyond themselves to the major ones, and all of them together can powerfully allude to the central commitments and lived truths of a religious tradition. In this chapter I have provided examples of various kinds of religious symbolism and discussed their significances. In doing so, I have tried to suggest the great range of the types and roles of such symbols within religious traditions and call attention to their singular importance. In discussing the nondiscursive character of religious symbols, I do not want to imply that reason or rational analysis must be entirely ignored, set aside, or violated in recourse to symbolic meanings. Instead, symbols can complement and enhance thought and awareness, and render them more penetratingly reasonable. By their use, something deeper than or at least significantly different than discursive reasoning can be brought into perspective, a type of understanding whose meaning and truth lie beneath straightforward verbal expression and are more in touch with direct feeling, experience, and awareness. Here something is revealed and

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made known in an immediate, intuitive, alert manner that would not have been so intensely grasped, recognized, or participated in through the use of linguistic abstractions. Perhaps what I have in mind and am seeking to explain is something like suddenly grasping the punch line of a joke. To miss it is not to fail to understand the words or sentences of the joke, but it is to miss the joke’s point. And religious symbols have a point—or better a meaning or complex of meanings—that mere verbal statements are unable to capture or convey. They are essential in religion because religion is primarily concerned with issues of existential significance and value, issues so complex and elusive, so fraught with profound emotional, volitional, personal, and spiritual consequence, that they have to be symbolically encountered or engaged, and not just addressed in a detached, coolly analytical manner. But once again, the relation between discursive and symbolic thought and expression is a complementary one, not an adversarial one. Each can provide essential religious insight and direction from its own perspective, and neither is adequate by itself. This notion will be probed in more depth and detail in the chapters to follow, particularly in its relations to the outlook and practice of Religion of Nature.

2

Works of Art and Religious Symbolism

[A work of art] gives us forms of imagination and forms of feeling, inseparably; that is to say, it clarifies and organizes intuition itself. That is why it has the force of a revelation, and inspires a feeling of deep intellectual satisfaction, though it elicits no conscious intellectual work (reasoning). —Susanne K. Langer1

Introduction There are extremely close connections but also important differences between works of art and religious symbols. The connections help to explain why works of art have figured so regularly in religious symbolization throughout the ages and why religious motifs have figured so profoundly in works of art, while the significant differences call attention to the critical need to understand the respective tasks, functions, or roles of the two types of symbolization and their distinctive types of meaning or import when each is considered in its own right. The purpose of this chapter is to explore these similarities and differences as a way of clarifying the nature of religious symbols and of paving the way for exploration of the roles of such symbols in religious naturalism in general and Religion of Nature in particular. I also want briefly to inquire here into the active relationships of aesthetic and religious modes of symbolization. I begin by discussing the nature, function, and effects of artistic symbolization. I then give attention to some important similarities and differences between artistic and religious symbolization. In doing so, I take note of the important contributions each of these two modes of symbolization can make and have made over the years to the other. My 21

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discussion of artistic symbolization will be guided to a significant extent by the interpretations of art developed in rich detail over many years by the estimable aesthetician Susanne K. Langer. Although I interweave these interpretations with those of others and ideas of my own, I do not purport to offer anything like a full-blown aesthetic theory. What I do offer is at best a sketch, the primary intent of which is to help focus attention on the indispensable role of symbols in framing religious experience, outlook, and commitment.

Artistic Symbolization The intuition of which Langer speaks in the epigraph to this chapter is a combination of imagination and feeling awakened or aroused by a work of art or, more specifically, by the form of the work—that is, by its organizations of pattern and relationship that make it a distinctive qualitative whole. Motion, gesture, sound, rhythm, color, line, shape, texture, subsidiary symbols, various contents, and the like in works of art such as those of dance, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, or film blend together in dynamic contrast and mutual support to constitute a singular creation with the power to evoke a type of intuitive insight, vision, or understanding quite different from, although not opposed to, the operations and effects of logical reasoning and discursive thinking. Artistic vision, while different from logical reasoning, is not opposed to such reasoning because it occupies a realm of meaning that is distinctively its own, a realm that complements and supplements, rather than contends with or substitutes for, the other type of meaning. Moreover, a mode of awareness is framed and elicited by the work of art that is not merely subjective because it focuses outward on the work and recognizes the complex of meanings contained in the work itself. The work of art objectivizes through the power of imagination aspects of subjective feeling and awareness, enabling us to contemplate and comprehend their respective characters and relationships, as woven together in the work, in a manner not accessible to unmediated, unformed introspection. “In the rich fabric of our own subjective experience,” writes Langer, “we make discoveries as we make them in the outer world, by the agency of adequate symbols. Through art we learn the character and range of subjective experience, as through discourse we learn in great detail the ways of the objective world.” It is even the case, as she points out, that

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feelings not experienced at firsthand by an individual artist or contemplator of art can be formed in the imagination by the creation or perception of works of art.2 Insightful and discriminating attention to the felt quality, value, and meaning of significant features of the emotional life of human beings is gained through their embodiment and expression in works of art. The quality, value, and meaning are contained in the work of art, but their registration and recognition are dependent upon aspects of subjective feeling they are able to arouse and bring to light. The focus is on the work, but it must be the focus of an engaged and comprehending subject with a responsive imagination. With the consequent enrichment and refinement of emotional understanding comes keener realization of the essential roles played by emotions and kindred aspects of awareness in the ongoing relations of humans to their natural and social environments. By eliciting and objectifying these emotions and aspects, and exposing them to discriminating observation and reflection, artworks not only give knowledge of the subjective inner life of humans but can also provide invaluable insight into the role of emotions and intuitions in connecting us with the external world and giving us crucial knowledge of it. We do not just sense the world; we feel our ways into it in many different ways. In fact, our sensations are imbued with feeling and more often than not guided by feeling. Artworks can bring to the surface or bring into consciousness for the first time elements of latent feeling in the human self that are often submerged, inchoate, unnoticed, unsorted—or not even previously present—and give them distinctive presence and character as necessary ways of recognizing and attending to the aesthetic meanings contained in those works. Art is a means of discovery and a way of articulating and bringing into conscious awareness what is discovered. Hence, it is not just sheer fabrication or invention. As such, it is not a mere add-on or minor adjunct to an allegedly far more important or adequate discursive understanding. Art’s “function in the building up of human consciousness,” as Langer notes, “is probably just as important and deep” as that of discursive thought. This contention is greatly reinforced by the fact that “art, like discourse, is everywhere the mark” of human life.3 To her term everywhere we can add the no doubt also intended and included idea everywhen, since artistic creations and artistic sensibilities have been fundamental components of human cultures through the ages. Let me now supplement these broad statements about works of art with a delineation of some of their more specific traits and c­ haracteristics,

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and with indications of how such works should be approached and understood.

Works of Art Are Non-Indicative and Entirely Self-Contained By “non-indicative” I mean that works of art do not refer to or indicate something beyond themselves. Their meanings are therefore selfcontained. That is, we do not have to look beyond the work in order to discover its meaning. A work of art achieves this self-containedness largely by means of its framing, a way in which it sets itself off from the world of day-to-day experience and signification, making us aware of its peculiar type of meaning. What would be trivial or even absurd in a poem if it were to be literally construed can become deeply meaningful when interpreted as a poetic and thus non-literal utterance. The peculiar character of the poem as an intended work of art, and not as a prosaic or indicative statement, is marked off or framed by such things as its meter, rhythm, rhyme, peculiarities of language, and richness of metaphor and allusion. Paintings and drama productions are framed and thus set apart as distinct types of meaning by such things as the gilt frame in which the canvas is contained or the proscenium arch within which the play takes place. To look at a painting literally and thus entirely to miss its point would be to note that its flat surface permits only of two-dimensional figures or that it does not capture some person or scene with complete verisimilitude. And to view the action on the stage as something really taking place rather than as dramatically portrayed would make us feel as if we had to act in order to prevent some tragic event being staged. The meter, the gilt frame, the proscenium arch: these serve to remind us that we are in the presence of a work of art and must acknowledge and seek to comprehend the types of meaning peculiar to works of art.4 When we read the statement at the beginning of a moving picture viewed as a work of art that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental,” we are told that the movie is not about anything other than itself and should be so interpreted and regarded. It should not cease to amaze us how quickly and instinctively our imaginations can be activated and enabled to enter directly into the reality of a work of art. The props on the stage of a dramatic production may be humble and few, and the actors dressed and made-up in an obviously artificial manner, but their “life,” “experience,” and “interaction” on the stage can soon become gripping realities for us in the audience. A whole

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other world is brought into being, the feelings and fates of the actors are vividly portrayed, and we are enabled somehow to participate intimately in what is portrayed as taking place. Our participation is not so much in the way of sharing the feelings expressed by the actors as they play their parts, although it may involve that, as it is of witnessing and comprehending dramatically, objectively, and at firsthand the character, quality, and manner of these feelings as they are portrayed. Not even a live performance is required for the magic of dramatic art to have its effect. It can do so on the screen of a television set, where the characters are actually of far less than normal height and everything else on the screen is in similar proportions. But we enter willingly into this world as well and participate in it via our imaginations as though it were normal size, the actors were real persons, and the events taking place were actual events. I mean “real” and “actual” here, not in the sense of referring to specific actors and events in the external world, but in the sense of being vivid aspects of the work itself, aspects brought into focus and perspective through the artistry of the television portrayal. Works of art elicit feelings in subjects, but they do not refer to those feelings. And they do not refer to events in the world external to the works of art. Their meanings are entirely self-contained. Lively imaginative engagement and active emotional receptiveness are needed to grasp those meanings. But could not an exquisite portrait refer to one’s beloved and bring to mind the dear face and expression of the beloved? Could not a fine landscape painting refresh one’s mind and recall to it a place precious to one’s memory? And could not such works stir and deepen one’s emotions as they do so? The obvious answer to these questions is yes. But to the extent that a painting functions in this way or is responded to in this way, it no longer functions as a work of art. It is being put to as different use as would be the case were one to purchase a painting solely for the enhancement it can bring to the color of the walls of a room or to regard it only as long-term economic investment. In the first instance, we misconstrue the work as a work of art if we think its significance lies in its external references. In the second and third cases we misuse the work by treating it as a decorative adjunct or commodity. But in all three cases we overlook or choose to ignore the intrinsic aesthetic value and meaning of the work by putting it to a merely instrumental use. To sum up this first point about works of art, then, they have a reality of their own, a reality quite distinct from the factual reality of everyday life and experience. They enliven the imagination and give form

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and sharp recognizability to emotions of the inner life, but they do not indicate or refer to anything beyond themselves. “Representative art” is thus, by this construal, a contradiction in terms.

Works of Art Must Be Experienced as Wholes, not in Piecemeal Fashion An opera can be taken as an example of the need to experience a work of art as a whole. Watching two out of three acts of an opera is not to comprehend it as a whole and therefore not to grasp the aesthetic meaning of it, which can be properly understood only as a whole. Similarly, to listen to the auditory part of an opera on the radio is not to experience the whole of the opera as created by the composer and thus not to experience the meaning of the opera itself as a work of art. The music and singing by themselves may be ever so captivating and beautiful, but it is not the music of the opera when experienced apart from the opera as a whole. This is even more obviously the case when we listen to the instrumental music apart from the vocal performances. Staging, costuming, singing, instrumental playing, acting, story, plot, and sometimes balletic dancing or acrobatic performance—all of these are parts of the operatic production that give it its richness and depth of aesthetic meaning. Without any of them, it would fail to fulfill its aesthetic purpose and significance. To take three more examples, a metric poem considered as a work of art is that only when all of its stanzas are included, and when they are recited rather than simply read, in order orally to sound its meter. I am not saying merely that a part of the poem is not the whole poem. This is a tautology. I am saying that, when considered outside the context of the whole poem, the part lacks the aesthetic meaning of the poem as such, and it is this meaning which the poem is meant to contain and convey. And a novel is more than its plot and story. The latter can be presented in condensed form and described literally, for example, in an edition of Cliff’s Notes, while the art of the novel can be appreciated and understood only when it is read and entered into with aesthetic sensibility as a whole, and when all of its parts are understood as contributing to the artistic quality of the whole. The case is entirely similar with a painting. Brushstrokes, line, forms, colors, light, shadow, figures, and the like combine to constitute the work of art, and the combination is intricate and indissoluble so far as the meaning of the work of art is concerned. Thus, a work of art cannot be reduced to its parts or experienced as such by means of some but not all of its parts. The parts lack the

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meaning of the whole when they are abstracted from the whole, and the meaning of the whole is not just the sum total or aggregation of its parts. The meaning of the parts is derived from the whole and from the form or organization of the whole, and not vice versa. This whole will typically incorporate aspects of tension and contrast as well as of cooperation or synthesis and thus constitute a dynamic rather than a static whole,5 but the emphasis lies on the whole and not on its constituent, contributory parts. Langer states the matter forcibly, insisting that “the congruence of the [artwork’s] symbolic form and the form of some vital experience must be directly perceived by the force of Gestalt alone.”6

A Work of Art Is Untranslatable and Irreplaceable This third trait of works of art is closely connected with the first and second ones, namely, its non-indicative and its holistic character. We cannot capture the full meanings of such works in prosaic reference, discourse, or description, break down their parts into separate aesthetic meanings that somehow add up by mere aggregation to the meaning of the whole, or substitute one artwork for another with no significant loss of meaning. The statement that “War is hell” hardly begins to do justice to the respective aesthetic meanings of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, Erich Maria Remarque’s captivating work All’s Quiet on the Western Front, or Pablo Picasso’s magnificent painting Guernica. Further prosaic embellishments or elaborations of this statement will fail to do so as well. While it is true that we can talk about such works and seek thereby to call attention to aspects of their meaning, such talk can never substitute for sustained personal engagement with the works. The meanings of prosaic statements and those of artistic symbols are so radically different as to warrant Langer’s persistent line of distinction between what she calls “discursive” and “presentational” meaning. Discursive meaning asserts, describes, analyzes, reasons, draws conclusions, and the like, while presentational meaning exhibits, exemplifies, or embodies its meanings in stubbornly distinctive, incommensurable ways. One discursive statement can often be readily substituted for another. “It’s likely to rain today” can be substituted for “It will probably be inclement at some time during the day.” Or “It is raining now” can just as easily be stated as “Il pleut” or “Es regnet.” And 10 + 6 is equivalent to 16. Works of art, on the other hand, are not intertranslatable or interchangeable. They have no literally stateable meaning or fungible character when responded to aesthetically and as a whole. Langer sums up the difference in character

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and meaning of discursive and presentational modes of symbolization in this passage: The meanings given through language are successively understood and gathered into a whole by the process called discourse; the meanings of all other symbolic elements that compose a larger, articulate symbol are understood only through the meaning of the whole, through their relations within the total structure. Their very functioning as symbols depends on the fact that they are involved in a simultaneous, integral presentation.7 Langer warns us elsewhere of the folly of trying to render the distinctive meaning of a poem in prose: “If . . . a reader of poetry believes that he does not ‘understand’ a poem unless he can paraphrase it in prose, and that the poet’s true or false opinions are what make the poem good or bad, he will read it as a piece of discourse, and his perception of poetic form and poetic feeling are likely to be frustrated.”8 The nondiscursive, presentational symbols of which she speaks in these ways include not only those of art but also those of religion, a point already emphasized in the preceding chapter. It is not only the case that the meanings of works of art cannot be satisfactorily rendered into discursive language; it is also the case that one artwork cannot be substituted for the other without drastic changes in aesthetic meaning. It is not just that their manners of presentation differ; their meanings as whole works of art are radically dissimilar. One dollar bill is as good as another, so far as their respective purchasing powers are concerned. But works of art are not exchangeable. Implied references to the hardships, atrocities, and horrors of actual wars are aspects common to the works of Tolstoy, Remarque, and Picasso mentioned earlier, to be sure, but such references are not their principal purpose or point. The principal point or “idea” of the novels or the painting is to embody and exhibit, make patent and objectively perceptible—but not merely to describe—experiences and emotions undergone or suggested by their respective characters or graphic figures in situations of war portrayed as aspects of the works’ own integral, idiosyncratic creations. Each work expresses its meaning in its own inimitable, irreplaceable, non-fungible way. This radically sui generis character is part of what marks each work as a work of art and, in the three cases cited, an undeniably great work of art. And it should be even more obvious that the meaning of an individual work of art of one genre, say, painting, cannot be translated into that of another genre, say, poetry or sculpture. Different discursive languages

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such as English and French can be translated into one another in a way that works of art cannot. Nuances of meaning may well be lost in the former instance, but basic meanings can generally still be maintained. But cannot particular works of art be compared for their aesthetic qualities? Certainly they can. But such comparisons are evaluations of the success in each work’s ability to realize its own aesthetic objectives, or its own particular point or idea, whatever that might be discerned to be. The evaluation that music score A is superior to music score B does not for a moment imply that A should be or could be substituted for B, or that B should somehow be subsumed under A. Each creation of a genuine work of art, whatever its aesthetic quality or worth, is unique. And any fair evaluation or comparison must take this essential trait of uniqueness or holistic success or failure of artistic symbolization squarely into account. What about a forgery of some work of art? Is it not a duplication of that work, signifying that the work itself is not necessarily unique? My response to this query is to point out that the artistic work in question is the original work that gives expression to an original act of creation. It is the particular aesthetic object in all its fullness and wholeness of form and meaning. The symbolization of the forgery, to the extent that it is successful, is still the integral symbolization of the original work, not a duplication of it. On the other hand, to the extent that it is unsuccessful, the forgery is a different work of art. Copies of an original score, for instance, are not duplications of that score. The score lies in the realm of ideas or imagination, not in the marks on paper. In similar fashion, no two performances of the music written on the score may be the same, but they are still performances of that music, not some other music. A performance is not a replication or duplication. We can of course comparatively evaluate two or more performances of the same music with respect to their distinctive aesthetic qualities, but here we are evaluating not the music itself but performances of it, and these manifest their respective degrees of success or failure in attaining their inherent aesthetic ideals as evaluated by the critical listener in relation to the original composition or score.

Works of Art Put Us in Touch with a Fundamental Kind of Quality and Value that Evidences Itself Throughout Human Life and Human History There are three basic modes of valuative experience open to us as human beings, namely, aesthetic, moral, and religious modes. Artistic creations

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are means of giving expression to aesthetic values. If we accept Langer’s pithy definition of art as “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling” and keep in mind her insistence that an adequate theory of art should focus on the embodiment of various sorts of feeling in the forms of the art object itself,9 then we ought to recognize immediately that prominent among the feelings at issue are feelings of value. Art may not bake bread, power turbines, or solve technical problems, but it enriches and deepens the sensibilities of the human spirit in ways beyond measure. Life would be much poorer without the contributions of artistic creations to human consciousness, culture, and history. And as Langer rightly observes, “Indifference to art is the most serious sign of decay in any institution; nothing bespeaks its old age more eloquently than that art, under its patronage, becomes literal and self-imitating.”10 To be made sensitive to aesthetic value and to have our capacity for experiences of it engaged, expanded, and sustained by embodied and dynamically active forms of works of art is to actualize a fundamental part of our human potential and to experience growth and maturation in an essential dimension of our development and awareness as human beings. Absence of appreciation for art and for the aesthetic values to which it gives form and expression is absence of appreciation for what it means to be fully human. With their types of symbolic form operative in various genres and with ever-evolving freshly introduced individual styles of creativity and expression, works of art open broad avenues to aesthetic values of beauty, sublimity, wonder, imaginative insight, tragic awareness, and unspeakable delight, many of which would otherwise remain inchoate, unarticulated, and inaccessible. These avenues lead to knowledge of qualities of the inner world of feeling as these are made to resonate with the objective qualitative forms of works of art. These are feelings of a special sort, and they put us in touch with values of a particular, inimitable sort. Art that is made subservient to moral or religious values or concerns would soon lose its distinctive aesthetic significance, and such loss would be deeply regrettable. But artistic productions can complement and add their peculiar kind of support to these other two domains of value in a variety of highly effective ways so long as they stick steadily to their own function and task. I develop this point in more detail in the next section by discussing some basic similarities and differences between aesthetic and religious symbolizations of value.

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Similarities and Differences between Aesthetic and Religious Symbols As I have indicated above, the meaning of a work of art lies in its expressive forms, and recognition and comprehension of that meaning lie in subjective feelings and modes of awareness that resonate with those expressive forms. The symbolism of an artwork does not refer to the subjective responses it elicits. It is self-contained and refers only to itself, but as an imaginative device it gives objective, sensuous form to qualities of the inner life that have aesthetic value and significance, thereby giving us access into and understanding and appreciation of those qualities. There are at least four basic respects in which aesthetic and religious symbolizations are similar to one another. First, an adequate religious symbol opens the way to experiences of religious values through sensuous imagery of various kinds. In Chapter 1 we looked at types and examples of such sensuous imagery. Second, we noted there that the full meaning of such symbols cannot be captured in prosaic or literal discourse but can only be conveyed by the symbols themselves. Symbolic understanding is not the same thing as literal understanding. Intuitions, feelings, and nondiscursive modes of apprehension are centrally involved in the responses to religious imagery, and not just acts of ordinary linguistic or logical comprehension. Third, no two or more truly expressive religious symbols can be substituted or exchanged for one another, any more than can two or more aesthetic symbols. Each religious symbol conveys its meaning in its own distinctive, non-fungible manner. Fourth, each effective religious symbol has a holistic, nonreducible meaning, and must be responded to and comprehended as a whole. Like an aesthetic symbol, a religious one is not a mere aggregation of parts whose respective symbolical meanings can be separated out and stand alone, distinct from the meaning of the whole. The parts are so constituted in their closely connected, intimately organized, unitary form and function to constitute an irreducible whole. In all of these respects, artistic and religious symbols are similar to one another. However, a religious symbol, in contrast with an artistic one, is not self-referring, self-contained, or exclusively self-related. This is the first basic difference between it and a work of art. To view it as such would not only be failure to comprehend its specifically religious kind of meaning. Such an approach can also quickly lead to distortions of that meaning that not only bar the way to appropriate religious responses but threaten to

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become dangerously manipulative, self-serving, or idolatrous. The distinctive value and meaning of the religious symbol lie solely in the source or basis of ultimate meaning and value to which it refers. What it properly facilitates, motivates, and helps to make possible is whole-hearted, selfgiving engagement with and devotion to that source. A religious symbol, when properly interpreted and regarded, must be seen to refer forcibly and unmistakably beyond itself to a transcendent meaning.11 It cannot be allowed to focus on itself and allegedly retain its religious significance. To confuse the religious symbol with that to which it refers or to interpret it as an end in itself is a grave mistake. This mistake becomes evident when the religious symbol, whatever it may be, is thought—whether consciously or not—to be a means to some end other than the end of being gripped by, serving, and being loyal to the religious ultimate solely for itself. For instance, we might mistakenly think that the religious symbol is nothing more than a cryptic expression or condensation of insights and truths that can be more adequately rendered in literal language, thus making it subservient to or reducible to such language. To do so is to fail to do justice to its elusive and yet powerful richness and complexity of meaning, a meaning the fullness of which cannot be adequately conveyed in any other way than by its symbolic character and expression. Or, to take another mistaken view of the religious symbol, we might regard it as something to be manipulated or put to use mainly for human ends rather than as a symbolization of the ultimate as the religious end. A ritual performance as a type of symbolic action might therefore be seen as a way of bringing about some desired prudential result other than the outcome of clarifying and enhancing the character, effects, bestowals, and demands of the religious object and inspiring unstinting commitment to it. Such a view betrays a disastrous confusion between religion and magic, that is, interpreting the ritual as something instrumental to human ends rather than as a way of putting humans in touch with the religious ultimate as the sole end and orienting and developing their sensibility and awareness in relation to that end. Unlike the artistic symbol, then, the religious one emphatically refers beyond itself. It makes reference to a religious ultimate not merely conceptually but existentially, in order to help bring the lives of human beings into proper relationship with that ultimate. Rightly viewed, a religious symbol refers to the religious ultimate as the source and focus of religious meaning and value, and it elicits feelings, dispositions, and

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actions appropriate to the religious ultimate to which it makes reference. Religious symbols point the way to assurance of salvation from evil and toward flourishing and fulfilling life, to the stringent demands of a fully dedicated religious life, and to sources of empowerment to live that life in accordance with its demands.12 These symbols can have profound social and communal as well as individual significances and effects. They can help to bind religious communities together with common experiences, outlooks, and purposes, and they can have important implications for religious communities’ outlooks on and actions regarding issues of social and political justice. But their focus is always on the presence and power of the religious ultimate, an ultimate that cannot be manipulated or made subservient to ends that are not explicitly declared by or implicitly contained within the ultimate itself. The second basic difference between a religious symbol and a work of art is that a religious symbol is embedded within and makes tacit, if not explicit, reference to many other religious symbols that help to give it its own character and import. Unlike a work of art, it is not self-sufficient or exclusively self-referring in this second regard. In the first chapter, I called attention to the distinction between major and minor symbols in religious traditions. The minor ones tend to be deeply informed by and deeply dependent on the major ones from which they derive significant aspects of their meaning. The major ones, in their turn, rely on the more minor ones for symbolic exhibitions of particular aspects of their meaning. A religious tradition is in significant measure an interlinked system of mutually related symbols and not a mere loose collection of them. Artworks do not together comprise an interdependent system; religious symbols do. Each individual artwork is a whole in its own right with no need for reference beyond itself to other works of art. It may incorporate features of other artworks as a kind of “quotation” from those other works or appropriation of parts of their content into its own content, but as an aesthetic symbolization it does not refer to those features. Instead, it includes them as ingredients in the self-sufficient whole that is the work of art. Individual religious symbols have this intrinsically holistic character as well, but as indivisible wholes they are also parts of the larger whole of the entire religious outlook and way of life as these are symbolically expressed and conveyed. As an example, let me return to the Christian symbol of the pelican pricking its breast in order to feed its young with its flowing blood. This

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symbol, as I noted in the previous chapter, is tied intimately in Christian lore with the symbolism of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross and with the ritual of the Eucharist. Both in their turn are closely related to the regular symbolic altar sacrifices of the Jewish temple and the special atoning one on Yom Kippur, and to the story of Father Abraham’s nearsacrifice of his only son in the Hebrew Bible, seen by Christians as the Old Testament. Furthermore, Jesus as the Christ or Anointed One recalls the anointing of the kings of Israel, especially David, and the hope of a coming Messiah (Anointed One) who would liberate the Jews from oppression. Finally, the mysterious imagery of the Son of Man in the Hebrew Bible’s late book of Daniel is associated in the Gospels with the life and ministry of the Christ of the cross. Each of these symbols has become part of a much larger suite of symbols—only a few of which I have mentioned here—acting together as closely bound, multifaceted expressions of traditional Christian faith.

Interrelations of Aesthetic and Religious Symbolizations Given these four similarities and two differences of character and function between aesthetic and religious symbolizations, how do the two types of symbolization relate to one another? That they have done so in the past and continue to do so in the present—and in innumerable instances—is undeniable. As philosopher Roger Scruton comments, “[W]e recognize that the beautiful and the sacred are adjacent in our experience, and that our feelings for the one are constantly spilling over into the territory claimed by the other.”13 What he says of the beautiful in its relations to the sacred or religious can be readily claimed for the qualities and imports of aesthetic works in general. These can include not only beauty but such things as sublimity, tragedy, disgust, guilt, ugliness, and horror, as aesthetically configured and evoked. A telling example of close interrelation between an aesthetic and a religious symbol without either being reduced or reducible to the other is the 1938 painting the “White Crucifixion” by the Jewish artist Marc Chagall. A centrally located figure is nailed to a cross. A Jewish prayer shawl is draped around his waist. Nazi soldiers throw sacred objects from a fiercely burning synagogue on one side of the painting, and soldiers bearing red flags lay waste to a village on the other side. Below the feet of the man on the cross is a Jewish seven-branched menorah, and a man is depicted

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fleeing the scene with a Torah scroll grasped tightly in his arms. A figure in green with a bulging sack of belongings crosses the foreground from the left to the right of the painting. It is perhaps the prophet Elijah or the legendary wandering Jew. A mother is portrayed holding her baby in her arms. One man has his arms spread before him as if to question how all of this could be taking place. A boat laden with refugees is shown. Ghostly figures of rabbis and ancestors float above the scene, with gestures and expressions of horror. A Torah scroll unrolls on the ground. Immediate inspiration for the painting is undoubtedly the increasing persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazis and others in the decade preceding World War II, but the broader inspiration is the suffering of the Jews at the hands of various oppressors through the ages. One of these Jews, of course, was Jesus Christ, executed by the Romans and, according to the Christian New Testament, with the acquiescence of Jewish leaders of the first century. In view of the fact that Christians were historically among those who persecuted the Jews and commonly viewed them with contemptuous disdain—even branding them with the monstrous sin of deicide—it is striking that the Jew Chagall chose to use the cross of Christ as the central feature of this painting. Is this an aesthetic symbol or a religious one? The right answer to this question would seem to be that can be both. That is to say, it can function as either, depending on how it is regarded. If viewed as a work of art, the feelings it evokes are those of an aesthetic kind. They are given objective significance by the character and form of the painting, and their reference is entirely to the painting itself and its arrangements of form, color, figure, line, facial expression, bodily attitude, and movement, as well as by subordinate symbols such as menorah, prayer shawl, flags, and the like. The painting as aesthetic symbol stands on its own, apart from any representational content, and its aesthetic significance is wholly self-contained. Its aesthetic qualities can be appreciated by anyone, regardless of his or her religious persuasion. The feelings of suffering, agony, destruction, deprivation, horror, prejudice, hatred, and cruelty it objectifies as a whole are there to be viewed and contemplated purely as such. One can be nonreligious and intentionally secular in one’s outlook and still be deeply moved by these feelings as they are embodied in the work of art. But this remarkable painting can also function as a religious symbol. As such, it testifies to the pervasive presence of evil in the world and to the desperate cry for deliverance from evil through the work of a gracious and loving God. The Christian symbolism of Jesus’s crucifixion is

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appropriated in a Jewish context, although not confined to that context. Jews as well as Christians can derive religious meaning from the painting, given its implicit appeal not only to the redemptive suffering of an innocent and divinely appointed Christ but also to the Jewish people as the suffering servants of God, called to bear witness to him in the midst of their sorrowful history of persecution and pain, baring their souls unto death and carrying on their shoulders the iniquities and sins of the many (Isaiah 53:11–12). Seen in this light, the painting can function as a religious symbol, pointing beyond itself to the mysterious workings of divine love, a love that shows the way to salvation in the midst of the calamitous sufferings brought on by evil-doers of the world. Even more broadly, the painting can give expression to persons of many different persuasions, theistic or otherwise, of the recurring tragedy of human suffering at the hands of cruel oppressors and of the desperate need for insight, strength, and recourse in the face of this suffering. This external reference of the painting, when seen as a religious symbol and not primarily as a work of art, was especially poignant and timely in 1938, when the Kristallnacht occurred and widespread persecution of the Jews was beginning to take place. The aesthetic power of the painting contributes immeasurably to the religious meaning it is also able to evoke, and that religious meaning imparts, in its turn, persistent overtones of quality and significance that are swallowed up, so to speak, into its holistic, nonreferential aesthetic meaning. As art, the painting does not refer to anything beyond itself. As religious symbol, it refers beyond itself, but it does so with the force and impetus of the painting’s aesthetic mastery and vividness of feeling. The aesthetic can thus serve the interests of the religious, and the religious can serve the interests of the aesthetic. Nevertheless, it is extremely important that the aesthetic and religious types of symbolism not be confused with one another. Each has a specific function, and each contributes from its own quarter to the whole of human attitude, feeling, and knowing. Someone might object that strong overtones of actual historical occurrences and religious meanings are present in the painting whether or not we interpret it along purely aesthetic lines. This is certainly true, but there is a difference between having these meanings incorporated into the painting and viewing them as being referred to by the painting. As a work of art, historical and religious meanings pervade the painting and contribute essential qualities to its overall aesthetic significance. But the painting qua work of art should not be interpreted as referring to

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those meanings. Its meanings and values are entirely self-contained when experienced aesthetically. All works of art have contents of some kind, even when the content is nothing more than such things as arrangements of color and line, sound and rhythm, bulk and form, and the like. But they do not refer to such things as something beyond the work itself. Their task is not imitation or representation but expression. The content is integral to the work of art, not something separate from it. Religious symbols, on the other hand, have as their raison d’être reference to and engagement with a religious ultimate beyond themselves. The respective tasks and functions of aesthetic symbols, on the one hand, and religious ones, on the other, can be supplemental and mutually informative and supportive even though the one cannot be simply substituted for the other. Of course, one may choose to reject religion and its symbolizations altogether, as intently secular-minded persons attempt to do, or one may opt for religion and be relatively uninterested in or insensitive to the import of artworks in general. Alternatively, one may determine to forego religion and focus entirely on the inspiration to be found in art. But these responses raise different issues. The more usual case is that of mutual influence and reinforcement of aesthetic and religious types of symbols, the distinctive functions and meanings of the one helping to complement and illumine the functions and meanings of the other. In this chapter, I have commented on the nature of artistic symbolization and shown it to have four major characteristics. I have argued that these four characteristics can also be associated in appropriate ways with the functioning of religious symbols. In addition, I have exhibited two crucial differences between the symbols of art and those of religion, and I have shown through use of the example of Chagall’s painting “White Crucifixion” how the two distinct forms of symbolization can either be experienced as such separately or brought into intimate relation with one another without blurring the critical differences between them. In the latter case, each can contribute in important ways to evocations of the types of meaning, value, attitude, and awareness characteristic of the other. In the next chapter, I want to focus on the central significance of what I term master symbols in religious outlooks and traditions and to discuss the roles of other kinds of symbols in the contexts of these master symbols. After a discussion in Chapter 4 of how religious symbols work, I shall propose in Chapters 5 and 6 examples of appropriate master symbols for Religion of Nature.

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Say (O Mohammed): O Mankind! Lo! I am the messenger of Allah to you all—(the messenger of) Him unto whom belongeth the Sovereignty of the heavens and the earth. There is no God save Him. He quickeneth and He giveth death. So believe in Allah and His messenger, the Prophet who can neither read nor write, who believeth in Allah and in His words and follow him that haply ye may be led aright. —The Qur’an1

Introduction I noted in Chapter 1 the distinction between major religious symbols and minor ones, showing the latter to be subordinate to but helping symbolically to flesh out and convey specific meanings of the former. Major symbols are more comprehensive in their scope than minor ones, but each informs the other. Major ones provide broad contexts for the minor ones, while the minor ones give symbolic expression to nuances or aspects of the major ones. I provided some examples of this distinction in that chapter. In this chapter, I want to focus on the role of master symbols in religious outlook and commitment. Master symbols are the most fundamentally expressive, all-pervading, all-inclusive ones in a religious tradition. Not all major symbols are master ones, but master symbols are the most important symbols among the major ones. They constitute the marrow or gist of the tradition, disclosing in symbolic fashion what the tradition is basically about—its central proclamation and message. The master symbols lie behind and are implicit in the other symbols, whether major or minor. There may be differences of judgment and interpretation

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when it comes to distinguishing master from other symbols in a given tradition, but the distinction is critical and needs to be recognized and taken into account. To search for the master symbols of a religious tradition is to search for its symbolic heart, the concretely embodied essence of its distinctive claims on the human spirit. Thus we witness a spectrum of comprehensiveness, pervasiveness, and importance from minor, through major, to master symbols. This spectrum, taken as a whole, constitutes the symbolic force and significance of a given religious tradition or religious perspective on the world, what might in particular religions be believed to lie beyond the world, and the place of humans in the world. I examine here some types of master symbols in religious outlooks. In Chapters 5 and 6 I shall propose a scheme of master symbols for Religion of Nature. The types of master religious symbols I shall discuss in turn are four in number: symbols of the religious ultimate; cosmogonic and cosmological symbols; symbols bearing on the religious path and obstacles lying in its way; and symbols associated with principal human role models or exemplars of what it means to follow that path and confront and overcome its obstacles. This list of types is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, it is meant to illustrate the nature of master religious symbols. The way will then be opened for later discussion of master symbols of these four types appropriate for Religion of Nature.

Symbols of Religious Ultimates The religious ultimate is the keystone of religious outlooks. It is the hallowed focus of religious commitment and is revered as the root presence, principle, or power underlying everything in the universe. The symbols that allude or point specifically to it qualify as master symbols. Such symbols are required, in the first place, for expression of the all-encompassing, deep-lying significance of the religious ultimate. Such symbols can be more supple, multifarious, and comprehensive than literal forms of discourse, although the latter can be usefully employed to direct attention to aspects of the religious ultimate’s meaning. Religious symbols can suggest meanings and shades of meaning relating to the religious ultimate rather than trying directly to assert or describe its character, and these symbols—involving as they do emotional, volitional, and valuational as well as purely intellectual responses, that is, responses of the

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whole person—are better suited than a bare literal language alone to do the job needed when it comes to articulating and opening the way to the religious ultimate and its bearing on human life. The same is true of gaining an adequate sense of the crucial role of the religious ultimate in relation to the universe as a whole. These notions of the whole person and the whole of reality are themselves finally symbolical and metaphorical in their character. We can give no adequate literal depiction of either of them because, as philosopher John Dewey reminds us, “[T]he whole self is an ideal, an imaginative projection,” and the idea of the universe is itself an “imaginative totality.”2 Religious ultimates are by nature personally and cosmically encompassing and deep-lying, so much so as to require the subtle resources of sensuous imagery and suggestive allusion in order even to begin to approach their adequate framing and expression. Second, and at least in part because of the fundamental, all-encompassing role they are alleged to play in the lives of individuals and in the cosmos, religious ultimates are inherently and deeply mysterious. The symbolic language of paradox to which I called attention in Chapter 1 is often required when speaking of them. Their elusive presence, character, gifts, and demands may be brought into awareness more forcibly and compellingly in parable, story, icon, musical performance, or ritual enactment than in literal discourse or description. The ineluctable, fearsome aura of eeriness and ineffability surrounding them can be focused on and kept in awareness more adequately through symbolic than with literal modes of expression. Literal language has a strong tendency to filter out the mystery and to make religious ultimates seem more perspicuous and readily available to logical thought and analysis—or even to manipulative use—than they actually are or can be for limited human apprehension. In the third place, religious ultimates are sacred. Literal interpretations of religious symbols have their place, but when they are thought to replace symbolic forms of expression, they can soon run the risk of hubris, that is, of attempted arrogant domestication and manipulation of the stupendous majesty and daunting power of the ultimate. The essential contrast between the sacred and the profane would then be broken down, the inviolable sacred becoming reduced to the dimensions of the profane, and the relation of radical dependence of the profane on the sacred presumptuously reversed. The appropriate profound sense of reverence and awe in the presence of the sacred would be radically diminished or left behind.

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It would be difficult in the extreme for any literal description to match the symbolism of the Jewish prophet Isaiah’s account of his ­experience of the Lord’s presence in the temple: I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. Above Him stood the seraphim; each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one called unto another, and said: Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is filled with His glory. And the posts of the door were moved at the voice of them that called, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I: Woe is me! For I am undone; Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, with a glowing stone in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar; and he touched my mouth with it, and said: Lo, this hath touched thy lips; And thine iniquity is taken away, And thy sin expiated.3 The contrast between the sacred and the profane stands out in stark relief in this powerful symbolic portrayal, and the whole passage breathes an air of terrifying, humbling, awesome mystery. Seraphim, high throne, train, shaking building, smoke, fire on the altar, glowing stone, and unclean lips are subordinate symbols accompanying the symbolic epiphany of the holy Lord and King. Isaiah’s vision of God is paralleled by that of Mohammed when the latter is said to have ascended to heaven and been brought into the presence of Allah. Mohammed speaks in one such account of the experience of “the Lord of the Throne” as “a thing too stupendous for the tongue to

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tell of or the imagination to picture. My sight was so dazzled by it that I feared blindness. Therefore I shut my eyes,” he exclaims, “which was by Allah’s good favor. When I thus veiled my sight Allah shifted my sight [from my eyes] to my heart, so with my heart I began to look at what I had been looking at with my eyes. It was a light so bright in its scintillation that I despair of ever describing to you what I saw of His majesty.”4 Mohammed’s assertion that his vision of Allah was “too stupendous for the tongue to tell or the imagination to picture,” his explanation that he had to experience this vision with his heart rather than with ordinary sight, and his despair of ever being able adequately to describe his awesome experience of the holy presence of Allah exhibit the necessity for highly symbolic, and not merely literal, reference and expression. Among the symbolic portrayals of religious ultimates are depictions of it as Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Shepherd, King, Lord, Judge, Savior, One God, Triune God, Divine-Human God, Many Gods,5 CreatorDestroyer, Preserver or Sustainer, Good God as opposed to Evil God, Divine or Cosmic Spirit or Breath, Emptiness, and Dao (or Way). All of these portrayals are indirect, metaphorical, and allusional in character. None of them admits of adequate literal description or construal in its religious role. Each of them is entitled to recognition as a master symbol in the religious outlook and system in which it functions, because each of them refers directly, albeit symbolically, to the religious ultimate of that outlook and system. The nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell speaks perceptively for his religious tradition when he proclaims that nothing so “comprehensively adequate” can be said about Christ as to call him “the metaphor of God; God’s last metaphor,”6 that is, as expressing in the concrete, sensuous form of his life, ministry, and sacrificial death— with its accompanying symbolisms of story, miracle, parable, paradox, and ritual—and in the momentous narrative of his triumphant resurrection from the dead as told in the gospels, the character and purposes of the Christian God. Viewed in this way, Christ is the master symbol of the religious ultimate in Christian faith. He is also, of course, the principal exemplar of the Christian path of life, a point to which I shall return later in this chapter. The same is true of nature when accorded religious ultimacy. As such, nature must be symbolically apprehended and understood, not merely viewed as portrayed in the more literal, logical, and mathematical—although at bottom frequently analogical and metaphorical in its

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own manner7—language of the natural sciences. Christian theologian Gary Dorrien remarks, “The experience of ultimacy is part of ordinary life, yet it requires a different use of language than does the discourse about measurable things spoken of by science.”8 The “different language” of religious symbols can encompass and take into account the most upto-date arguments and allegations of the natural sciences regarding the nature of nature (giving due consideration to the tentativeness, incompleteness, or continuing scientific debates concerning some of them) while supplementing these descriptive and explanatory arguments and claims with symbolic evocations and expressions of the religious ultimacy of nature. I shall have more to say about this matter later. But now I turn to cosmogonic and cosmological religious symbols, the second type of master symbol to be discussed.

Cosmogonic and Cosmological Symbols Cosmogonic religious symbols relate to the origin or ongoing creation of the universe, and cosmological ones relate to its overall character. Both are closely tied to the central role of the religious ultimate, and both typically function as master symbols in religious outlooks and systems. Creation stories can be linear or cyclical. They can narrate an absolute beginning to the cosmos or call attention to an ongoing creative presence and power. They can take the form of emanation of the cosmos from the substance of the religious ultimate or the form of creation of the cosmos by a religious ultimate wholly distinct from it but upon which it radically depends. Such accounts generally assign a special role to the origin, character, and responsibility of human beings in the universe. Thus, in most religious cases, the universe points beyond itself to the religious ultimate that lies at its heart, brings it into being, sustains it in its being and becoming, and grants a significant place to humans within it. An exception to this general rule is Religion of Nature and other forms of religious naturalism in which the universe or nature itself, in its overwhelming immensity and restless fecundity, is regarded as religiously ultimate. In some cases, the religious ultimate alone is thought to be real and all else, including individual human selves, is seen as a misapprehension or less than fully real projection or distortion of this sole reality. Advaita Vedanta’s Brahman without qualities (Nirguna Brahman) and key notion of Brahman-Atman, as well Buddhist Emptiness (s´unyata), fall under this

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heading. A wealth of religious imagery, metaphor, myth, story, paradox, and the like is required to elicit an approximate, if still elusive, sense of all such religious cosmogonic and cosmological visions. I cited examples of such symbolism in Chapter 1, when I talked about creation stories and the symbolisms integral to them in such religious traditions as Daoism, Bhakti Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. These stories could of course be recited in much more detail. The book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible recounts the creation of the world by the sheer fiat, pronouncement, or Word of a majestic God, and the creation of Man from the dust of the ground, with the breath of life infused into his nostrils by the Creator. The six “days” of creation mark out the sequence of creative events and productions, and Adam, the first man, is given the responsibility of naming the beasts and exercising dominion over them. He and his wife Eve, symbolically fashioned by God out of one of Adam’s ribs, are also charged with the grave duty of obedience to their Creator in all that they do. The Psalms sing of the heavens declaring “the Glory of God” and of the firmament that “showeth His Handiwork” (Psalms 19:1).They dwell on the wonder of God’s creation of humans as “little lower than the angels,” with dominion over the creatures of earth, even as they note with amazement the sharp contrast of relatively puny human beings with the magnificent Creator of the moon and the stars “[w]hose majesty is rehearsed above the heavens” and whose name is “glorious . . . in all the earth!” (Psalms 8:2, 6–10). God’s final answer to Job’s importunings in the biblical book by that name is to remind Job of his radical limitations of understanding as a mere human and of his presumption in daring to question the ways of the transcendent God who has laid the foundations of the vast universe and made all of the marvelous creatures that dwell within (Job chapters 38–39). Cosmological and cosmogonic symbols abound in the poetic, richly symbolic musings of these two chapters. They contribute to the master symbolisms of the creative divine Word that brought the world into being and of the magnificent God who continues to sustain it in being. The Prologue to the Gospel of John in the Christian New Testament speaks, in language reminiscent of the creative Word of Genesis, of Christ as the incarnation of the Word and states that “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” This creative Word, the Prologue affirms, was with God “in the beginning” and is itself divine (John 1:1–3).9 Christ is thus proclaimed as embodying

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or symbolizing the creative power of the universe, the very power of God whose spoken Word alone was sufficient to bring all things into being. The symbolism of the creative, sustaining cosmic Christ is brought to expression in the Epistle to the Colossians when it depicts him as “the image of the invisible God¸ the first-born of all creation” and goes on to say, “in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15–17). The master symbol of the creative Word of God is thus brought together in the Christian New Testament with the master symbol of the cosmic Christ as the embodiment, manifestation, or image of this creative, sustaining, integrative divine Word. A marvelous symbolization of Islamic cosmology and of the relation of Allah and his revelation in the Qur’an to humankind is the architecture of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. According to Islamic tradition, the rock is the spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven accompanied by the angel Gabriel, there to pray with Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and others, and thereafter to call others to be converted to Islam. The event is celebrated annually with a festival throughout the Islamic world on the 27th day of the month Rajab.10 The base of this building is a square, its four sides symbolic of the four cardinal directions of earth. The building is topped by a magnificent dome, representative of heaven as the holy place of Allah. The circular shape at the base of the dome is, like Allah, without beginning or end. In between the square base and the hemispherical dome is an octagon, approximating to the circular character of the dome but also suggesting with its angles the square base. The octagon is replete with quotations in Arabic from the holy Qur’an. The myriad details of the calligraphy, with no clear beginnings or endings, can be construed as suggesting the vast multiplicity of earth’s creatures and aspects, but also as pointing to the infinitude of Allah. The words of the Qur’an thus bridge the distance between Allah and his creation, a bridge that comes entirely from Allah’s side but that, once received, illuminates the close connection between Allah and the world he has brought into being. That world, seen in light of the divine Word of the Qur’an and including the world’s human inhabitants, can now be recognized to witness in countless ways to the character, purpose, and reality of its Creator and Sustainer. Something akin to the central role of the divine Word in Judaism and Christianity is suggested in this monumental structure, as is the

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nature of Allah as the originative power and linchpin of Islamic cosmology. The encapsulated, sensuously conveyed cosmogony and cosmology of the Dome of the Rock shows this cosmology to be a master symbol in Islam. The building’s architectural design, with its contributory symbolic components, makes reference to the revelatory Word of Allah as bringing into unmistakable focus for human beings the world’s utter dependence on Allah for its very origin and continuing existence.11 The master symbol of Allah as the religious ultimate of Islam is also, of course, implicit here. Master symbols of creation and cosmology are not only of critical importance in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They also figure prominently in such Eastern religions as Daoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The example of Daoism can be used to make the point. Early Daoist writings posit a pristine Dao whose cosmic movements and breath or wind (qi or chi) give rise to an undifferentiated watery chaos. This cosmogonic fluid or mass then gives rise, in its turn, to the contrastive forces of yin-yang. These two give birth to Heaven, Earth, and the “ten-thousand things” of Earth, including human beings. This process need not be understood as a once-for-all creation of the universe. It can be regarded as an ongoing process of flowing from the Dao, depending on the Dao, and reverting back into the Dao. For both early and later Daoists, comments Thomas Michael, “the world is never seen as a finished product, created once and for all, but on the contrary was envisioned as a work constantly in progress, like the perpetually young child requiring a mother’s nurture.”12 Similar to the modern principle of the conservation of energy, nothing is ever added to or given back to the Dao that is not already there in germ. It is empty and yet it never needs to be filled. It is the boundless source and preserver of all that exists. In this last regard, it is similar to the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim conceptions of God. But the Dao or Way is not regarded as a personal being or even as some kind of entity. Deeply mysterious and inexpressible, it can be symbolically pointed to, as in the cosmogony and cosmology just sketched, but never literally described. The Dao is the master symbol of the religious ultimate, and also of master status and significance are the symbolic cosmogonies and cosmologies associated with the Dao.13 The watery chaos, akin to the face of the waters on which the spirit of God broods in the Genesis creation account, and the contrastive forces of yin and yang, as depicted in the teardrop-shaped Daoist mandala, are contributory symbols to the master symbolic narrative of the origin of all things in the Dao and of their radical dependence on

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it. The importance accorded to yin and yang in Daoist literature marks them as major Daoist symbols, but they remain subordinate features of the master symbolism of Daoist cosmogony and cosmology. Symbolically expressed cosmogonies and cosmologies are of critical importance in religious outlooks and traditions not only because they portray the relation of the religious ultimate to the world, but also because they direct attention to the source and character of the world, disclosing the latter as the context within which human beings—themselves creatures or manifestations of the inexhaustible powers of the ultimate—are called upon to envision and act out the religiously grounded meaning, purpose, and potentialities of their existence. I turn next, then, to master symbols of religious paths of life and of fundamental obstacles that bar the way to progress along these paths.

Symbols of Religious Paths of Life and of Obstacles Lying in Their Way The Jewish and Christian paths of life and journeys toward redemption are similar in many respects. Both are replete with major and minor symbols, and both recount a master narrative with deep symbolic force. The narrative begins with the fall of human beings as recounted in the book of Genesis. At the root of the fall is the deadly sin of pride. Adam and Eve succumb to the sinister temptation of the serpent to ignore an explicit prohibition of God regarding their behavior in the Garden of Eden. By eating of the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they suppose themselves able to “become as God, knowing good and evil.”14 They foolishly imagine themselves capable of acquiring the all-comprehending wisdom of God and thus of usurping the place of God. This prideful overreaching is of course entirely futile, given the vast ontological distinction between God and humans, and the radical dependence of humans on God as the ultimate source of all wisdom and truth. The consequence of this primordial sin is that Adam, Eve, and by implication their descendants are thrust from the garden of innocence and not allowed to return. For both Jews and Christians, the symbolism of this account is indication that every human individual experiences himself or herself to be in a condition of guilt and sin before God, a condition reflected in numerous and ongoing sinful decisions and their resultant actions. Prideful focus on oneself instead of focus on God is the root of

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this condition, and it brings about experience of separation from God—an alienation of the creature from the Creator—the inexorable outcome of which is the misery, cruelty, discord, and destructiveness that pervade human history. How to escape from this plight of universal human sinfulness and to be restored to fellowship and proper relation with God becomes the central problem of human existence. Judaism provides one symbolically portrayed solution to this problem and Christianity another, but the two symbolisms are closely linked. For Judaism, the solution is the covenant God establishes between himself and Abraham. Abraham falls on his face in trembling obedience before the Lord, and the Lord announces the covenant, a sign of which is the circumcision of all males. Abraham shall be the father of a covenanted people whose institutions, laws, and rituals shall provide the way out of the condition of human sinfulness and restore their proper relation to their Maker. Later in the story, descendants of Abraham are sold into slavery in Egypt. But they are led out of their slavery by Moses, whom God has called to this role of leadership from within a bush that brightly burns but is not consumed by its burning. After crossing a divinely parted watercourse or sea, these descendants wander for forty years in the desert and eventually come to occupy the land of the Canaanites, defeating them and other enemies in that region. Then comes the era of Judges and Kings, and the building of the first Temple. The Jews are later carried into exile by the Babylonians, but many of them are returned to their land by the Persians. They build a second Temple to replace the one reduced to rubble by the Babylonian conquerors. Their path of life is defined by the divine Law of the Torah, forcibly reiterated by the prophets, and celebrated and commemorated in ritual practices. In this covenanted community, they find their strength and salvation. And, when deserved, they experience the corrective reminders, chastisements, and inducements of watchful divine judgment. At some point in their history the Jews begin to anticipate the coming of the Messiah as the final affirmation and vindication of their divine mission for the whole of human history. The major symbolic meanings of the serpent, fall, covenant, exodus, law, exile and return, and Messiah— and such relatively minor symbols as the Ten Plagues visited by God on Egypt, the parting of the sea, the manna in the wilderness, the golden calf, the serpent lifted up by Moses, the destruction of Jericho by Joshua’s circumambulations, and the like—are part of the master symbolism or story of God’s way of laying out a path of redemption for the Jews as his covenanted people and making them a light to the nations of the earth.

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Christians endorse and assimilate much of the Jewish story of fall and redemption in their own account of the path of religious life and the obstacles lying in its way. But there are some significant differences indicated with new symbolic expressions, many of them building upon and reconstructing older Jewish symbols. For example, the old covenant between God and Abraham is said now to be supplanted by the new covenant (or New Testament) guiding the thought and practice of the Christian community. New divinely inspired scriptures are added to the ones of the Hebrew Bible, and the latter are seen to prepare the way for and to foretell the former. The physical circumcision of the Jewish people as the sign of their covenant is replaced with the circumcision of the heart or “a circumcision made without hands”15 as the sign of the new covenant. The community of the Christian church takes the place of the Jewish people and is now claimed to include Gentiles as well as former Jews, thus giving it a more universal scope. This universal scope is symbolized in the gospels by such parables as those of the Woman at the Well, the Good Samaritan, and the unusual guests invited to the banquet.16 The inward spirit of the law is emphasized over its external letter, as in the Beatitudes of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and in his emphasis on the Sabbath being made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath now becomes Sunday instead of beginning on Friday evening, as in Judaism. The Passover meal is replaced by the Eucharist, expressing the new form of divine deliverance from slavery, namely, the slavery of sin. The Messiah is said finally to have arrived in the person, mission, miracles, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The church is proclaimed as his body, guided in all things by his spirit. And Jesus is said to be God himself come to earth in human form—a shocking, hubristic, idolatrous notion for traditional Jewish piety. Why did God come to earth? The traditional Christian answer is that this was necessary for the forgiveness of human sin and for setting human beings on a new, divinely guided path of salvation. In making their case for this idea, Christians draw heavily on the Jewish symbolism of sacrifice. Christ is the Lamb of God slain for the sins of the world. Only by making expiation for human sin through the sacrifice of himself in the form of his human Son, according to one version of the Christian story, could God satisfy the demands of his justice while also extending his bountiful forgiveness to a sinful human people. The symbolisms of Incarnation and Atonement are thus central and interlinked symbols of the Christian path of life. The primary emphasis in this path of life is on

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faith in the redemptive work of Christ rather than on human obedience, effort, or accomplishment. The latter, so it is believed, could never even begin to make up for the immense debt of human disobedience to God’s will and purpose throughout human history. As the savior of humankind and as the living symbol of what it means to be completely obedient to God, Christ is regarded as the New Adam, erasing the consequences of sin exemplified in the saga of the old Adam, his spouse, and his descendants expelled from the Garden of Eden. At the center of the path of redemption laid out in Christianity are the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. That the Messiah could be crucified as an outcast rather than coming to lead his people the Jews in triumph over a conquering foreign power such as the Romans was an incomparably strange notion for the Jews. That he could be resurrected from the dead was stranger still. And that his shameful death as a common criminal and claimed resurrection from the dead would have the cosmic consequence of making possible the forgiveness of all peoples, Jews and Gentiles alike, from the burden of their sinful state and innumerable sinful deeds is for pious Jews probably the strangest notion of the three just mentioned. Like Jews, Christians still laid stress on the importance of living a life of obedience to God, but unlike the Jews of the Deuteronomic virtueprosperity equation—if you are obedient to God you will be rewarded, but if you are disobedient you will be punished—Christians refused to regard such obedience as a condition for divine forgiveness and favor. The Book of Job had already poetically and emphatically questioned this equation. To live a life of obedience is for Christians to follow out the implications of an already present divine forgiveness rather than to view obedience as necessary for making that forgiveness possible. Such a view is presaged in the Hebrew Bible’s stress on God’s endless patience, loving-kindness, and mercy, as set forth, for example, in the book of Hosea. According to traditional Christians, Christ has already paid the price of human sin and accepted and endured its consequences in his crucifixion. Humans have only to place their faith in his once-for-all forgiving act and power and live their lives guided and supported by that faith. They are reminded, however, that faith is not itself some kind of human work or accomplishment. When genuinely present, it is a gift of God. The whole story of redemption from sin and newness of life through Christ is a master symbol of the Christian worldview and path of life. It incorporates many other lesser but often major symbols in their own

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right, such as the serpent’s temptation, expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Satan’s temptations of Christ and his continuing harassment of Christians, the altar-symbolism, the symbolism of the new covenant and new Adam, the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and Christ’s sacrificial atonement for all human sin, the church as the body of Christ, and the like. Finally, I want briefly to discuss the symbolically expressed path of liberation or salvation laid out in the sacred texts and teachings of Buddhism. What is it that human beings need to be liberated from in Buddhism? What is their major defect or plight? The Buddhist answer to these questions is inappropriate attachments or cravings and the sufferings that stem from these attachments or cravings. Also centrally involved in this human plight is the illusion of permanence. For the Buddhists, as is well known, nothing is permanent. All things are fleeting and transitory, including the human self.17 To be free of attachments and cravings, of the sufferings they bring in their train, and the illusion of permanence with which they are accompanied and by which they are bolstered, is the goal of the Buddhist path of liberation, awakening, or enlightenment (Bodhi). And to be free is to be liberated from the woes of karmic existence, the cycle of being and becoming, of being born only to die and be ceaselessly reborn. The one who points the way to this liberation is the Buddha himself. I will discuss in the next section of this chapter the role of the Buddha as chief exemplar of the Buddhist path of life and indicate there some of the more specific temptations and obstacles with which he himself had to contend. But for now my focus is on that path itself. If we ask, “Why are the distortions and illusions of attachment and craving so pervasively and persistently present in human life and experience?” an answer frequently given is the interlinked ideas of karma and reincarnation. Karma is the law of necessary consequences flowing from actions, and reincarnation is the idea that present modes of human life and the actions accompanying those modes of life are the consequences of past modes of life. The cravings and attachments of a person in the present, in other words, are expressions of the consequences of actions in an earlier incarnation of that person. There is still the possibility of working to eliminate those cravings and attachments and the misapprehensions accompanying them such as the misapprehension of permanent things in the world and of a permanent self, but the effectiveness of this working, and the achievement of final enlightenment, may require many lifetimes of incremental progress. However, the answer to the question

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at the beginning of this paragraph by means of karma and reincarnation only pushes the question back further into the past. It does not really resolve it. Why was there originally or earlier on such attachment, craving, and misapprehension? Furthermore, how can a no-self (anatman) be reincarnated as a seeming future self, and what must be the state or condition of a no-self following on its final awakening or enlightenment? Buddhists insist that it is at last liberated from samsara or the relentless, sorrowful turnings of the wheel of being and becoming, but what is it liberated for or into? Neither nirvana as the “quenching of the flame” nor s´unyata (“emptiness”) can serve as literal answers to this question. Both are highly symbolic in character, and I noted in Chapter 1 the elusive character of the latter by recounting a Zen koan to that effect. Paradoxes and puzzles such as the ones I have mentioned here have occupied the thought of Buddhist interpreters of their religious tradition for centuries and given rise to different schools of thought. Paradoxes and puzzles of similarly enigmatic kinds also mark all other religious traditions. This fact can be dealt with in one of two ways. Either we dismiss the religious tradition, or perhaps all religions together, because they pose such paradoxes and puzzles as central features of their overall character, or we see the paradoxes and puzzles as both constituting in their own right and as pointing the way to the necessary role of symbolic expressions of the deepest meanings and truths brought at least partially to light in these traditions. Those deepest meanings and truths require imaginative projection. They point to depths of signification that can be plumbed only with symbols, and even then only partially and with their own kinds of admitted inadequacies. Reincarnation is a way of talking symbolically about the enigma of the present un-readiness of so many human beings for the truth of impermanence and for their being trapped in futile, misery-ridden cravings. The notion of double predestination or divine election either to damnation or salvation in theistic religions such as Christianity and Islam has sometimes played a similar role in these religions. The image of karma as stretching over many previous generations is a symbolic way of calling attention to the fact that present actions have consequences for the future, and that this inescapable fact has serious moral and religious significance that needs to be taken fully into account. The paradoxes implicit in the general Buddhist account of the human predicament that cries out poignantly for redress have symbolic force and character. They remind us of

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how little equipped we humans are, and our literal language and logical thought are, for resolving the primal mysteries of human existence. They also give powerful impetus to the need for long meditational practice and active dedication and service in order to realize existentially or in firsthand religious experience truths that cannot be comprehended or communicated in literal fashion. Following on his experience of enlightenment, the Buddha or “Awakened One” provided, both by the example of his own life (to be noted in the next section) and also by his teachings, a course of life toward ultimate liberation from the human sufferings brought about by craving and illusion. That course is the Eightfold Path, contained as one of the Four Noble Truths the Buddha proclaimed. The Eightfold Path is represented in a symbol called the Dharmachakra, the “Wheel of Truth or Law.” In Buddhist mythology, this wheel was given to the Buddha by the god Brahma shortly after the Buddha achieved enlightenment. Brahma had come down from heaven asking the Buddha to teach him the truths he had discovered in his enlightenment. The Buddha sets the wheel in motion by teaching his first five disciples, thus starting the promulgation of his teachings and thereby altering the destiny of the world. The eight spokes of the wheel are said to represent the Eightfold Path, its swirling threefold center the Buddha, Dharma (teaching or law), and Sangha (community of monks and, later, nuns); its hub, discipline; its spokes, wisdom; and its rim, concentration.18 This symbol comes down to us from early Buddhism in India. It stands in graphic opposition to that other wheel, the grinding wheel of relentless deaths and rebirths, from which it promises final release. The Four Noble Truths, with their inclusion of the Eightfold Path, lie at the heart of Buddhist soteriology and point the way to the progress toward enlightenment that Buddhist teachings make possible. The Dharmachakra is a major ancient symbol in Buddhism, one that is contributory to the complex master symbolism of the central defect of human life and its welcome remedy. Let these examples of three master symbols of religious paths of life, and of the obstacles lying in their way, suffice to illustrate this third kind of master symbol. I turn next to the final type of master symbol to be discussed here, that is, the symbolic role of the founders and exemplary figures of particular religions as embodying and expressing in the character of their own lives, as reported in sacred scriptures and revered traditions, the central meanings and assurances of those religions. I say

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“assurances” because the example of the lives of these particular figures can provide compelling evidence for the faithful that the goals and ideals, hopes and promises, of the religion can be realized by other human beings, and realized in the face of all the struggles, uncertainties, temptations, misconceptions, misdirections, and other barriers that may threaten to block the way to their attainment.

Symbols of Exemplary Human Lives Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha are founders and exemplary figures in their religious traditions. The accounts of the lives of each of them have come to have powerful symbolic character, and these accounts, whether in scriptures or written traditions, are accompanied by symbolic elements of birth, trial, revelation, miracle, and story. The same thing could be said of many of the other figures given prominence in these and other religious traditions, for they too are portrayed as having lived exemplary lives. And the portrayals of their lives are often rich in symbolic expression and significance. My focus here, however, for the sake of illustrating this last type of master symbol, will be on these four founders. When the Pharaoh commands that all new male Hebrew children be killed, Moses is floated in a basket made of bulrushes and sealed with pitch by his mother. He is found by a daughter of Pharaoh and adopted into the Pharaoh’s household. When Moses later sees an Egyptian overseer beating and threatening the life of a Jewish worker, he kills the Egyptian and escapes to the north. He tends sheep for forty years and experiences a bush that burns but is not consumed. God speaks to him from this bush and tells Moses his name, Yahweh. He then calls Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt toward the land of Canaan, which he proclaims to be their promised land and their deliverance from slavery. Moses argues that he is not capable of playing such a role, but God commands him to undertake it. Divinely instituted miracles of the Ten Plagues take place, culminating in the killing of the Egyptian first born and the Passover experience of the Hebrews, making possible their escape despite the Pharaoh’s harsh opposition. The Hebrews wander in the wilderness for forty years, during which Moses leads them skillfully in obedience to God and, in the face of their rebellious grumbling and tendency toward idolatry, performs many miracles and receives the Ten Commandments from God atop a mountain.

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Because of the Hebrews’ lapse of trust in God and in Moses’s divinely appointed leadership at the waters of Miribah, however, neither he nor any of the original generation of escapees from Egypt is allowed by God to enter the Promised Land. Moses can only view it longingly from a mountain top prior to his death. For Christians and Muslims as well as Jews, Moses is a man of exemplary character, resolute faith, exceptional leadership skills, and evident closeness to God. Deuteronomy 34:10 describes him this way: [T]here hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face; in all the signs and the wonders, which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, in all the mighty hand, and in all the great terror, which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel. As such, he is a living symbol of one who follows in the path of God, a symbol to be reflected upon and emulated in the lives of the faithful. The central meanings of their faith are framed by the depiction of his life, by who he was and how he lived as a human being. His life and his teachings are inseparably conjoined, and the model of his entire life as sacred symbol must be religiously responded to, experienced, and followed out by the faithful—not just abstractly viewed—in order for it to be properly appropriated and understood. The many miracles Moses is said to have performed in the name of the Lord help to give symbolic weight to his divine calling. The life stories of Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha, as recounted in sacred texts and commentaries, have equally profound symbolic force and significance in their respective religious traditions. These stories function as master symbols within these traditions. Jesus is depicted in the gospels as being born in Bethlehem, the city of David, and thus as being of the house of David, the revered king of the united kingdom of the Jews early in the millennium before the common era. His mother Mary is impregnated by the Holy Spirit. He is born humbly in a manger, proclaimed by the angels of heaven and attended by shepherds and wise men from the East. Jesus shows extraordinary religious insight and acumen in his early years. He spends a period of time meditating in the wilderness and is tempted by Satan to depart from his divine calling and to use his powers for his own benefit and fame. But he unhesitatingly resists Satan’s seductions. He is baptized by John the

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Baptist, who has foretold his coming, and a dove descends from the sky as a symbolic embodiment of the Holy Spirit. He is spoken of on that occasion as God’s own Son with whom God is well pleased. He calls twelve disciples to follow him and assist him in his ministry (these are reminiscent of the twelve tribes of Israel). They are deeply impressed by him but have great difficulty comprehending who he is and the significance of his ministry and time on earth. Jesus performs many miracles such as enabling the blind to see and the lame to walk. He casts out devils. He even raises a man from the dead after the man has been dead for four days. These miracles are said to be “signs” (se¯meia) of the coming of the Kingdom of God, showing them have deep symbolic significance. Jesus associates with the poor, the despised, and the outcasts of society. He is sharply critical of the Jewish religious leaders of his day, accusing them of having lost sight of the central meanings of their religious laws and traditions. Well aware of their wrathful opposition to him and their plotting against him, he earnestly prays in the Garden of Gethsemane that the impending cup of his suffering be taken away. But he vows obedience to God’s will, whatever its consequences. With the complicity of the Jewish leaders, assisted by the perfidy of one of his disciples, he is arrested and sentenced to crucifixion by the Romans. While on the cross, he asks God to forgive all those who have taunted him and determined to crucify him. He even cries out to God, questioning in his agony whether God has forsaken him. The gospels recount Jesus’s resurrection from the dead after the third day of his death. He announces that he will return again and enjoins his disciples to spread the word of his mission, of the meaning of his presence in human history, and of an impending divine judgment of all peoples. He ascends majestically into the clouds of heaven, there to sit on the right hand of God’s throne prior to his return to earth in judgment and glory. The story of his birth, life, death, and resurrection points to the supreme significance of his person for conveying the Christian view of what it means for humans to love and serve God and their fellow human beings, even in the face of grievous opposition, misconception, mistreatment, and suffering. His exemplary life, replete with his forthright rejection of Satan’s temptations, miraculous works and events, memorable parables, and other symbolic features, functions as a master symbol of the Christian faith. Portrayals of Mohammed’s life play a similar symbolic role for Islamic faith. Orphaned at an early age, Mohammed was reared by his paternal

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uncle, who was a merchant. He married a wealthy merchant woman when he was twenty-five years of age and she, nearly forty. Together they ran a prosperous trading business and had six children. Four girls survived, but two boys died in infancy. Mecca, the place of Mohammed’s birth and the center of his business, was mainly run by leaders of a clan named the Quraysh. It was not only a flourishing center of trade but also a place of religious pilgrimage to its polytheistic shrine of the Ka’aba. Mohammed became disturbed by the materialism of the city’s leaders and citizenry and dissatisfied with its polytheistic religion. He set out on an earnest search for religious truth, taking long retreats to a mountain cave and fasting and meditating there. He eventually had visionary dreams and was visited at last by an angel, Gabriel, who held out a silken cloth to him on which words were written in Arabic. He was commanded to recite these words. At first Mohammed thought that he might be delusionary and mad, but his wife and a cousin of hers assured him that these were authentic messages from Allah. He finally accepted his divinely appointed role of prophet, messenger (apostle), and warner, and he began to recite in public what later became verses of the Qur’an. He received these revelations from Allah over a period of time and continued to seek converts to the new religion. He was met, however, with serious criticism of himself and opposition to his message. The message, with its uncompromising monotheism, was regarded as a challenge to the polytheism of Mecca’s peoples. The leaders of the city feared its impact on their polytheistic shrine, which attracted people from all over Arabia and other areas. They were also deeply disturbed by the social-political aspects of Mohammed’s recitations, with their criticisms of usury and other questionable business practices and their call for attendance to the needs of the poor. As for Mohammed himself, he was branded as unbalanced in mind and ridiculed as an imposter. The revelations warned him against any compromises with his detractors and reminded him that genuine prophets before him had been repudiated. The revelations met Mohammed’s intense frustration with having his message generally rejected—despite what for him was its overwhelming and momentous truth—by assurance that it was not him his opponents were rejecting but Allah and Allah’s revelations. He was counseled to be patient and to persist in his divine calling. After thirteen years, the opposition to him became so severe that he and his few converts moved to Medina, a city to the north of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula. They did so at the invitation of leaders of the city to come there, to have

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Mohammed be the city’s political and religious head, and to help bring to an end feuds that were undermining its unity and peace. Mohammed and his followers from Mecca were able to build an Islamic community in Medina, despite the harsh opposition of Medina’s Jewish community. These Jews collaborated with the Meccan leaders in their continuing opposition to Mohammed and Islam. Three wars resulted in which the Muslims were able finally to conquer the Meccan army and occupy Mecca. Mohammed continued to live in Medina, but the Ka’aba and its rites were appropriated by him and the Muslims as a holy shrine to Allah, a place of pilgrimage, and the direction in which the five daily prayers of Islamic peoples everywhere were to be oriented. Almost all of Mecca converted to Islam, and the religion soon spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Mohammed died in the year 632, with his new religion of Islam well underway. The whole of this story is seen by pious Muslims as evidence of the prophet’s being called by Allah as “the seal of the prophets” and of his teachings or recitations as the culmination of a long process of divine revelations ending with the Qur’an but continuing to be explicated by the Hadith or tradition that is believed to point back through a succession of his followers to the prophet himself. Islamic law (sharia) is also believed to have its roots in the teachings and actions of the prophet Mohammed. Mohammed’s message incorporated many elements of Judaism and Christianity, recognizing such figures as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as authentic prophets of Allah who prepared the way through human history for Allah’s final revelation in the Qur’an. The patience of Mohammed through all of the struggles, resistances, and accusations with which he had to contend, and his resolute, unsparing devotion to Allah and determination to carry out his divinely appointed mission in the face of all opposition, are deeply inspirational for Muslims. The attractiveness of his personality, and his kindness, resilience, and resourcefulness are given great stress. Despite the reverence of his followers and the grave importance of the mission and message given to him, Mohammed is portrayed as viewing himself in all humility as simply a warner and messenger sent in the fullness of time to proclaim Allah’s definitive revelation to humankind and the dire consequences of failure to respond in faith and complete submission to it. He saw himself as an instrument only, as a kind of transparent window through whose recitations, administrations, and military leadership the glory of Allah shone clearly for all to see. He would no doubt have sternly resisted the legends

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and folklore of later times that portrayed him as sinless, a miracle-worker, an intercessor with Allah, and even as preexistent and semi-divine. The story of Mohammed’s life and the legends that soon began to embellish it testify to the reverence in which his life is held by Muslims, and to the symbolic power his life has exerted over the faithful in all ages. The Qur’an succinctly states the paradigmatic symbolism of this man and his life when it says, “Verily, in the messenger of Allah ye have a good example for him who looketh unto Allah and the Last Day, and remembereth Allah much.”19 The epigraph to this chapter enjoins Muslims to follow Mohammed’s example and pattern of life as one who believed in Allah and His Words. What does it mean to be a pious Muslim and devoted servant of Allah? Muslims proclaim that we have only to look to Mohammed’s life to find a definitive answer. The story of his life is a master symbol of Islam, comparable in its force and effects to the stories of the lives and works of Moses and Jesus in Judaism and Christianity. Accounts of the life of the Buddha have similar symbolic power and significance for adherents of the Buddhist religion. I shall sketch some main features of these accounts as a final example to be discussed here of this type of master religious symbol. Siddhartha Gautama, later to be the Buddha, was the eldest son of a king or elected chief of a tribal confederacy, and his mother was a princess. His mother died soon after his birth, and he was reared by one of her sisters. He led a sheltered life and was married at age sixteen. His wife gave birth to a son. Gautama remained as a prince until the age of twenty-nine. One day, while riding in his chariot in the city, he encountered what the traditions call the Four Passing Sights. These were an old man, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and a religious ascetic. He was deeply disturbed by these sights, and a longing for understanding, coming to terms with, and finding some kind of resolution for them stirred him to the depths of his being. Gautama decided to leave his former life, his wife, and his child and to set out on a path of rigorous ascetic practices, in the hope of finding the key to human sufferings and the path of release from them. He begged for alms in the street and studied and practiced with two teachers. His asceticism became so severe that he almost starved to death. He realized that extreme asceticism was not giving him the insight and resolution for which he yearned, and he discovered what Buddhists call the Middle Way between asceticism and indulgence. He resolved to meditate until he could find an answer to his searching. He did so for forty-nine days, sitting under a tree, and he finally attained enlightenment. He now had

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to determine whether he should enter directly into nirvana, a state free of ignorance, suffering, greed, hatred, and other afflictions, or whether he should remain in this life in order to teach to others the Dharma he had now experienced and mastered. He decided, in his compassion for the suffering of others, to remain and to teach. He taught five disciples, setting in motion the Wheel of Dharma, and he and his disciples formed the first sangha, the community of Buddhist monks. The sangha soon swelled in membership as the Buddha and its members travelled and taught throughout the Indian subcontinent. After a while women were allowed to become Buddhist nuns. Gautama’s father and son became monks (arhats). At the age of eighty, the Buddha announced that he would soon reach parinirvana or the deathless state and depart his earthly body. He died soon afterward. I have indicated in the previous section some of the major features of Buddhist teachings. But the one of these I have not yet had occasion to bring into view is the reported role of Mara, the Buddhist personification of the forces of seduction and evil in the world. Mara is akin in many ways to the deceiving serpent in the Garden of Eden, the Satan of Job and later Judaism, and the Satan who tempted Jesus in the wilderness and is said by Christians to roam the earth seeking to tempt humans into depravity and sin. Islam also tells of a jinn who defied out of jealousy Allah’s command to fall prostrate toward newly created Man and as a consequence was condemned to hell. But he asked for a temporary reprieve and was allowed by Allah to be the tempter of humankind. Thus personified, the Satan, Evil Jinn, and Mara figures become powerfully concentrated symbols of the evil forces in themselves and in the world with which the faithful must wrestle. Mara’s temptations of the Buddha prior to his enlightenment included such things as seducing him to return to his early life as a prince, cozily back at home with his wife, son, and father and with all of the accoutrements of his princely state; discouraging him from ever finding the path to liberation he so earnestly sought; enticing him with sensual images of such things as food, wealth, and sex; accusing him of weakness in failing to persist in his earlier extremely ascetic discipline and of cravenly compromising with his so-called Middle Way; vexing him and trying to disturb his equanimity; and distracting him in various ways from his meditations and the pursuit of his path. Despite these temptations, Buddha persisted in his search and finally arrived at the enlightened state for which he had so long sought. But Mara is said then to have tempted

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him into thinking that other humans would never understand or be able to practice his Dharma, meaning that he might as well enter directly into nirvana and forsake the world, not seeking to share his profound discoveries with others. The Buddha, of course, resisted this temptation as well, beginning to teach his disciples and to set the Wheel of Dharma going throughout the world.20 The symbolism of the story of the Buddha I have recounted is important for practicing, believing Buddhists because it is an archetype or template of what it means to be a Buddhist and to be set on the demanding path toward final enlightenment. The notion that the Buddha himself could be tempted and discouraged, distracted and confused, vexed and annoyed, in his own path toward liberation is a source of great reassurance to Buddhists who are struggling with precisely such matters in their own search. What he accomplished, all can accomplish at the right junctures of their karmic existence. They must persevere and persist in hope, even as their great teacher did in his own life.21 The story of the Buddha’s life and of his triumphs over temptation is a master symbol of the Buddhist religion. Its suffusive power as a holistic symbol far surpasses anything that can be reduced to discrete elements of mere discourse or literal exposition. The lives of these four religious leaders are different in many ways but similar in others. All struggled with severe obstacles in carrying out their missions. The character of the obstacles varied with their respective worldviews. The focus of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is on overcoming prideful separation from God and wholeheartedly worshipping and serving God, while that of Buddhism is on liberation from the burdens of samsara and karmic existence. All the leaders were dedicated in exemplary and inspiring ways to their respective religious ultimates. The staunch monotheism of Judaism and Islam guarded against Moses or Mohammed being identified with the ultimate, but Jesus as the Christ or anointed one was symbolically depicted as divine or as an aspect of the divine nature not long after his death. In contrast with the role of Christ in Christianity, the teaching of the Buddha is the focus in Buddhism, not the person of the Buddha, except to the extent that his life embodied his teachings and showed how they could be successfully realized in a human life. In all four cases, the life story of the founders in its entirety is a master symbol of the religion’s salvific message and outlook on the world. In this chapter I have discussed four types of master religious symbols, namely, symbols of the religious ultimate, symbols of cosmogony

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and cosmology, symbols of religious paths and of obstacles standing in the way in those paths, and symbols consisting in stories of the lives of exemplary persons in religious traditions. I want later in the book to introduce symbols of various types pertinent to Religion of Nature. In the next chapter, however, I shall take up in a more analytical and sustained fashion than previously in this book the question of how religious symbols work, that is, how they function to exhibit, communicate, motivate, and inspire with their distinctive modes of meaning and affirmations of truth.

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How Religious Symbols Work

Now it is clear that the self is also other, and the other is also self. “That” also is one with assent and rejection, “this” also is one with assent and rejection. Is there now really an other and a self? Is there really no other and no self? Neither other nor self obtains its counterpart: this is the pivot of the Dao. The pivot begins to obtain its middle point and through it responds to either without limit. Assent is also without limit, and rejection is also without limit. Therefore nothing is better than to rely on illumination. —the Chuang Tzu1

Introduction The “illumination” to which the Daoist Sage appeals in the passage that serves as the epigraph to this chapter is a kind of intelligibility or sensibility that lies beyond the articulation or reach of statements, distinctions, and arguments in ordinary discourse. The Sage is noting, despite his frank acknowledgment that the all-encompassing unity of the pristine Dao transcends the contrasts and oppositions pervading everyday speech, that its unbroken unity can be apprehended in another manner, namely, direct experience or what he calls illumination “from Heaven.”2 This other manner, the manner of contemplative openness and awareness, is brought into focus throughout the Chuang Tzu by striking and often even playful stories and allusions. Many of these would seem cryptic and confusing— perhaps even flatly contradictory—when exposed to the critical tools of literal analysis. But when properly appreciated and made use of, these symbolic forms give expression to areas of insight and understanding

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that are of critical importance for the committed Daoist. What may be a conundrum for the literal mind is somehow a delight to the comprehending heart. Another example of this situation is the triumphant declaration in Georg Handel’s great oratorio Messiah, which is an affirmation both of Christian cosmology and soteriology: The kingdom of this world Is become the kingdom of our Lord, And of His Christ, and of His Christ; And He shall reign for ever and ever. . . . The literal mind objects. “Wait, shouldn’t the declaration say that they shall reign? Surely the two, Christ and the high Lord God, cannot be one and the same.” The Christian replies, “It’s not just two; it’s three. Don’t forget the Holy Spirit. All three are one!” The symbolism of the Trinity flies in the face of literal discourse, and yet it has profound meaning for most Christians. A similar case can be found in the following poem by the Medieval Hindu-Muslim mystic and saint of Banaras, India, Kabir: If I say He is one, It is not so; If I say He is two, It is slander; From his own knowledge   Proclaims Kabir: He, the Lord, is    What He is.3 What this poem means, at least in part, is that the true nature of God cannot be described. It can only be alluded to with the symbolism of paradox or with frank admission that God is what God is, and that nothing more can finally be said. Kabir’s poem thus bears a striking resemblance to God’s announcement to Moses that God’s name is Yahweh, the literal translation of which, as stated in Exodus 3:14, is “I am who I am” or simply “I am.” How do such symbols work to illumine topics, ideas, or relationships that defy literal statement and conventional stratagems of logical argument? And once the distinctive functioning and character of such

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symbols is brought into focus, what is their connection, if any, to literal discourse and analysis? Response to these two questions will constitute the substance of this chapter. Once I have proposed answers to them, I can begin to attend to the principle subject of this book, which is the potential role of symbolic expressions and enactments in Religion of Nature. The first topic to which I direct attention in this chapter is the indispensability for religion of concrete symbolism and imagery.

The Necessary Role of Religious Symbols Why are religious symbols required? Why can they not be replaced with discursive language, that is, with more ordinary literal, descriptive, explanatory, and argumentative ways of speaking? Curator, historian, and lecturer Ori Z. Soltes seeks to answer this question by calling our attention to the importance of nonlinguistic modes of expression, including those of the arts, for kindling awareness of the sacred in its relations to the profane: Although words are the instruments that make humans unique—that distinguish us from other species, providing a unique means of shaping questions, answers, doubts, and certainties—they are limited and also limiting instruments. If it is difficult to capture with words the exquisite perfection of a sunset or the love of a mother for her child, how much more will words fall short in trying to articulate God? So in our desperation for entente with the sacer, we have used other instruments—music, dance, the visual arts—whenever words have been insufficient or when the majority of the profanus has lacked access to words or understanding of the written word to represent the sacer and its relationship with us. Art and its transformative symbols are a means of concretizing the absolute abstraction of divinity and its interface with us, helping religious adherents to grasp the ungraspable.4 Admirable as it is, Soltes’s observation is lacking in two respects, so far as a general explanation of the need for symbols in religion is concerned. The first one is that it fails to call attention to linguistic expressions that are symbolic in their character rather than discursive, expressions such as

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those contained in parables, stories, poems, paradoxes, and the like. And the second limitation in his observation is that it is focused exclusively on “God” or “divinity” rather than including other types of the sacred in the religions of the world such as the Dao, Nirguna Brahman, or the Buddha­-Nature. Setting these limitations of his explanation aside, however, Soltes rightly calls attention to the necessary role religious symbols play in transcending the bounds of ordinary discourse, in reducing with concrete imagery and portrayal the daunting gap between the sacred and the profane, and in making us at the same time humbly aware of the momentous and finally unbridgeable character of that gap. Religious symbols, in short, express and communicate with vivid imagery what is inexpressible in ordinary language but what also, by its very nature, must finally defy adequate expression of any kind. In their sensuous concretion they transcend the abstract terminology, concise distinctions, and logical reasonings of discursive language, but they also transcend themselves as mere feeble and profane pointers to the ineliminable mystery of the sacred. Let me use a homely analogy to make this last point. I have a bird feeder in my backyard that attracts wild creatures such as cardinals, finches, chickadees, wrens, and doves. The feeder brings together two different worlds: the world of wild creatures and the world of human habitation and culture. By means of the feeder, the two worlds are brought into relation with one another. The wild birds use the feeder for food, and their presence at it enables me to admire and relate to them from a distance. The gap between us is, therefore, in that way bridged or at least reduced. But in another way, it is made even wider than before, because their presence at the feeder is a constant reminder to me of how strange and distant their world is from my own. They have wings to soar, and I do not. I am wary of heights; they revel in them. They perch and sway on a tiny twig that could not begin to sustain my far greater weight. They lack my hands and opposable thumb. I use language; they do not. I write at a computer keyboard of whose nature and use they have no comprehension. My concerns and their concerns are in many ways vastly different. Whatever thoughts or awareness they have is no doubt different from my own, even though it is also significantly similar in some respects such as the felt impetus to self-preservation and susceptibility to pain. I cannot really know what it is like to be a cardinal or chickadee, nor can these creatures really know what it is like to be me.

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What brings us closer together, the bird feeder, also makes even more apparent all the factors that differentiate and separate us. We are akin in some ways but radically different in others. The same is true of the profane and the sacred. They are brought into closer relation by the medium of religious symbols, analogous to the feeder in my backyard, but by this same means—when properly understood—the radical distance and difference of kind between the sacred and the profane are cast into vivid light and made all the more apparent. Sacred symbols reduce the distance between the sacred and the profane but also radically accentuate this distance and bring it to forcible attention. They are both healing and humbling. Thus the common function of such symbols exposes aspects of unrelievable tension and paradox. They usher us into the healing presence of the holy, but the holy is, as in Isaiah’s vision depicted in the preceding chapter, “high and lifted up,” remote from us and beyond adequate comprehension or description. Appropriately powerful sacred symbols conceal even as they reveal. Philosopher Wesley J. Wildman observes that reality has what he calls “axiological depth”5 and that this includes profound depths of religious meaning and value. He devotes a book and much of his ongoing research interests to exploring the neurological correlates of religious and spiritual experiences, an important subject that is beyond the scope of this book but is one of the ways in which scientific and religious investigations can be brought into a mutually illuminating relationship. Wildman observes that specific structures and functions of the brain related to religious and spiritual experiences can be explored with techniques such as neuroimaging, EEG recordings, study of brain lesions, direct brain stimulation, and phenomenological approaches. These structures and functions, and the experiences they make possible, put us in touch, he argues, with “the valuational dynamics and structures of reality itself, and are thus an indispensable opening for understanding ultimate reality and our place within it.”6 Readers of this book are referred to Wildman’s stimulating and informative book, Religious and Spiritual Experiences, for details of his and his research partner neuroscientist Patrick McNamara’s inquiries into the complex workings of the brain as these relate to religious and spiritual experiences. The emotional intensity, depth, and evocative power of such experiences are given special emphasis by Wildman, and he argues that the role of religious symbols in setting forth these experiences is extremely

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important. “Religious objects,” he writes, “are, at least sometimes, beyond expression in a more or less definitive way. Symbolic discourse is unavoidable in such cases.” Wildman goes on to insist that symbolic vehicles and framings of imagination, thought, and experience are essential for grasping religious objects, forming religious beliefs, inspiring and directing religious practices, and eliciting shared religious understandings.7 I strongly concur with these views.

Ways in Which Religious Symbols Function Ernst Cassirer draws our attention to the “correlation of meaning and image and also that conflict between them which are both deeply rooted in the essence of symbolic expression.”8 In ordinary discourse there is tension between the abstract word and the concrete features of experience to which it often refers. No universal term can succeed in capturing the precise character of a particular item or moment of experience. Symbols of all types—discursive or nondiscursive—give form and meaning, and thus a kind of continuity and connectedness, to various types of fleeting experiences, but in doing so they abstract from and leave behind the immediate particularities of those experiences. The tension between abstract sign and concrete experience can never be completely resolved. Religious symbols serve as imaginative schematizations (to use the Kantian term9) of aspects of religious experience and awareness, giving to them a kind of intelligible form. But the form and that to which it refers remain distinct. The elusive complexity and richness of the experience and awareness exceed the approachability and intelligibility conferred on them by the symbolic forms. This kind of tension is made all the more evident and ineliminable by the profoundly alluring but also dauntingly mysterious character of religious experiences, to say nothing of the religious ultimates to which they directly or indirectly refer. Without the sensuous images or other symbolic forms there can be no enduring comprehension or expression of the meanings of the religious experience and awareness, but the meanings will always overflow what the sensuous images are able to signify and contain. In view of the analogy thus noted between ordinary language and the sensuous images and other symbolic modes of religion, namely, that in both cases there is a gap between signifier and signified that is never completely bridged, why do I continue to insist on the fundamental difference

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between and non-fungibility of the two? Why cannot ordinary language, with its abundant terms, distinctions, syntax, arguments, and explanations do the job as well as, if not better than, nondiscursive religious symbols? Why can it not adequately frame and give intelligibility and meaning to religious experiences and their referents? Is not ordinary language better equipped by virtue of its greater precision of exposition and technique for the task of calling attention to the meanings of religious experiences than are the indirections, imprecisions, and mere suggestiveness of religious symbols? Can we not and ought we not, then, seek to go directly from religious experiences to doctrinal interpretations of their significance? Why must we rely on nondiscursive symbols as intermediaries? One answer to these questions is that religious experiences typically present themselves in the forms of nondiscursive symbols, and it is natural that they do so. It is not the case that these symbols are somehow arbitrarily wedged between the experiences and the forms of discourse. It is these nondiscursive images, paradoxes, parables, rituals, and the like—as the presented forms of the experiences—that are generally the focus of discursive interpretations rather than the bare religious experiences alone. But more basically, religious and artistic symbols are similar to one another in the four ways detailed in Chapter 2 of this book. I also noted in that chapter that religious symbols have two additional characteristics that distinguish them from artistic symbols. It is the combination of these four similarities and two important differences that give religious symbols their inimitable power to frame, express, and communicate the meanings of religious experiences. If we try to bypass that distinctive power with verbal statements, we lose much if not most of what religious symbols are uniquely capable of doing. Discursive language has its appropriate formalizations of meaning, and religious symbolism has its own appropriate forms. The two share in the gap between signifier and signified, but what does the signifying and what is signified by the two are markedly and necessarily different. Some other remarks about this crucial difference are in order, and these remarks can help to explicate the distinctive functioning of religious symbols. First, religious symbols are rich with suggestiveness of their own and are interlocked with the suggestive meanings of many other symbols. They do not stand alone but are, as we saw earlier, part of a vast system of interrelated symbols. Each of them and all of them together have a fullness of meaning that defies precise discursive expression. Their relative vagueness and susceptibility to varying interpretations is the price paid for their inexhaustible wealth of potential meaning.

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Second, religious symbols tap into long-faded memories and the unconscious dimensions of persons’ minds, with their teeming abundance of associations and intimations, in a way that ordinary verbal expositions do not. These unconscious memories and associations are brought to the surface, mingled with elements of the conscious mind, and given objective form in the religious symbols. The symbols thus constitute a kind of twilight zone of apprehension between the clear light of confident statement and the murkiness of indistinct impression and fleeting intuition. They enable us to see through a glass, but only darkly. Yet they enable us to see what otherwise would be beyond apprehension. What religious symbols enable us to see is made possible at least in part by their stirring up of deeply lying, complexly entwined, widely ranging modes of awareness that can put us in touch with elusive aspects of religious meaning and truth. My musings on the soaring flight of the pelican in Chapter 1 give some indication of how this process can work. Third, religious symbols often have a vitality, immediacy, and ability to capture and hold our attention that abstract verbal statements or expositions do not have. The enigmatic, puzzling character of some such symbols can be alluring rather than off-putting for questing spirits, giving promise of depths of meaning as yet unrecognized or unexplored. The concreteness and encapsulating quality of some religious symbols is also part of their appeal. Religious symbols can “say” much more in their sensuous concreteness, seductive elusiveness, and paradoxical character than can be said with clarity by ordinary words. Just as behind the surface humor of a political cartoon may be penetrating insight into a political issue or situation that is not conveyed by pages of discourse, so the religious symbol’s power to convey meaning or direct attention to depths of meaning may far exceed what can be verbally described or expounded upon. That power must be experienced with active engagement and commitment, not just detachedly described. Fourth, it is important to remind ourselves that religious symbols have motivational, practical, and devotional functions, not just informational ones. As I noted in Chapter 2, they speak to and elicit response from the whole person in his or her emotional, valuational, and volitional capacities, not just from the intellect of a person. They inspire to action and they provide resources for meditation on and deepening encounter with profound issues. They give purpose and direction to life. Religious symbols can be of indispensable help in times of tragedy, and they address the central problems of human existence. They are pointers to paths of

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redemption or liberation that persons must traverse with the uniqueness and complexity of their own being. Their principal function is existential rather than informational. And they are peculiarly suited for this function. Fifth, religious symbols, especially the major and master ones, have an extraordinary ability to create and sustain community, even in the face of differing interpretations of their meanings. I made brief mention of this fact in the second chapter. Two persons may share a common firm commitment to the dominant symbols of a religious tradition without being able to concur in the verbal statements they are each inclined to make about what some of those symbols signify. The power of the symbols holds the two of them and others together in community despite their differences in interpreting the symbols’ meanings. Religious symbols cannot by themselves transcend all differences of interpretation, of course, but they do transcend many of them as people strive to live and work together in religious community. The cohesiveness of the symbols is then more important to these people than the differing interpretations to which they may give rise. Moreover, it is possible and desirable for religious people to understand and agree that such interpretations may be complementary rather than mutually contradictory, and that no single discursive interpretation is likely to do justice to all the potential meanings of the symbols in question. Sixth and finally, I want to reemphasize the idea that religious symbols, properly employed and understood, are radically self-transcending. In this regard, they differ from and function differently than the assertions of ordinary discourse. The latter are admittedly mildly self-transcendent in the sense of usually referring to objects beyond themselves, but they are not radically so. It is not generally a mistake to interpret them literally. Were religious symbols not recognized to be radically self-transcendent and nonliteral, however, they could not function to put persons in touch with the religious ultimates that by their very nature lie deeply beneath and yet (paradoxically) far beyond the things of ordinary, day-to-day life and that cannot be reduced to literal statement or depiction. If their necessary self-transcendence is lost sight of, then the essential function of religious symbols as feeble and always inadequate pointers to the ultimate and to its bearing on the whole of life and reality will also be foolishly forgotten or ignored. The ever-threatening religious sin of hubris or idolatry, of confusing the ultimate with the finite and relative, will then rear its ugly head. The profane can point to the sacred and be deeply enriched and informed by it,

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but the two must not be confused. A proper attitude to religious symbols of all kinds keeps firmly in mind the radical distinction between what does the pointing and that to which it points. Furthermore, in illuminating or revealing the awesome majesty of the sacred—and in that very process showing it to be radically beyond the power of religious symbols to literally depict, fully describe, or adequately portray—the symbols can warn against the sin of carelessly desecrating or profaning the sacred. For Religion of Nature, where the ultimate is nature itself, this desecration would include such things as despoiling the earth, polluting its atmosphere and waterways, and mistreating and endangering its creatures.

Doctrinal Expositions of Religious Symbols Treating religious symbols as though their meanings were straightforwardly literal or propositional is, as I have repeatedly contended, a fundamental mistake. But it would be equally mistaken to think that these symbols do not admit of renderings of aspects of their meanings into the discursive languages of doctrinal statements and prescriptions, or of systematic explorations of possible conceptual interrelations of these discursive renderings. The theoretical and practical sides of doctrinal systems, that is, their proposals for belief and action, should be not be regarded as substituting for religious symbols’ own distinctive, nondiscursive kinds of meaning, but the two types of meaning should also not be seen as wholly alien or irrelevant to one another. In his analysis of the stages of religious inquiry, philosopher William A. Christian describes the religious seeker as at first earnestly hoping for and then perhaps finally arriving at an illuminating suggestion in the form of some kind of paradigmatic symbol (or set of symbols), or symbolically conveyed insight or vision that serves to disclose the character or presence of the religious ultimate. Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush would be an example of such an experience and its symbolic expression. The bush need not have been literally burning and unconsumed; it need only have marked the spot where he felt the call of God burning in his soul and to have served as a gripping symbol of that event. This basic suggestion, when arrived at, is rendered into a basic proposal which discursively states and recommends for acceptance the seeker’s perception of the nature of the religious ultimate. The basic proposal is subsequently explored for and delineated into what are thought

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to be its detailed implications for belief and practice. This exploration leads, finally, to a set of interrelated doctrines and prescriptions setting out a religious worldview that centers on the basic proposal. Nondiscursive religious symbols and discursive interpretation of the symbols’ meanings are in this way intricately bound together. “To understand a particular religion and compare it with others,” Christian writes, “we need to study not only the propositions of its doctrinal scheme but also its symbols and particularly those symbols which convey the [basic] suggestion to which that faith is a response.”10 Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, for his part, insists on the need for doctrinal renderings or discursive interpretations of religious experiences, especially of those experiences that have exercised a dominant influence on the exemplary founders and teachers of religious traditions, as the outcome of their intensive private searching, meditation, and reflection. “What is known in secret,” Whitehead says, “must be enjoyed in common, and must be verified in common.” In similar fashion, paradigmatic symbols accompanying or mediating these firsthand experiences, and their possible discursive explications, need to be brought into the public arena for public assessments of their claims to lasting meaning and truth. Whitehead warns, however, that no set of established doctrines can be religiously meaningful which does not speak decisively to each individual’s condition, aspiration, and need, and that all doctrines should be seen as no more than “clarifying modes of external expression” for what must be experienced in the depths of each individual’s own being.11 Discursive doctrines and systems of such doctrines point backward in many cases, then, to the paradigmatic experiences of a religion’s founders and leaders in which they have their origin and root. And if they remain meaningful, they point forward with effective stimulation of similar experiences on the part of the individual adherents of a religious tradition. The doctrines should be kept in close and constant touch with the decisive symbols of the religious perspectives they are intended to explicate, because it is from these that they derive a large measure of their inspirational and motivational force. Such symbols lie at the heart of immediate religious discernment, feeling, and awareness, while doctrines play an important but subsidiary role. The doctrines help to map out the direction and goal of a religious path, while the vital impulse of the religion’s key symbols helps to arouse and sustain the vision, courage, and assurance required to set out upon that path and to confront and overcome the many obstacles that may lie in its way.

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This brief discussion of the necessarily partial but also critically important doctrinal expositions of the meanings of religious symbols leads naturally into the next section, which takes up the topic of literalistic— and to my mind perennially and seductively misleading—interpretations of religious symbols. Symbols do suggest propositional claims to truth, as I have noted in this section, but the overflowing suggestiveness of powerful religious symbols cannot be simply resolved into a literal statement or collection of statements. The meaning and truth of symbols are significantly different from the meaning and truth of propositions, as I have sought to show. The two can be related to one another, as I indicate in this section, but the one cannot be reduced to or be thought to replace the other. They have different functions or roles. I want next, then, to discuss the error of literalism and its regrettable consequences for religious faith.

The Error of Literalism Let us suppose that we are in a meeting where a group of Christians are talking about the experience of Jesus on the cross and its significance for faith. One person in the room remarks in passing that Jesus, being God, could easily have abandoned the cross after hanging there for a while if he had chosen to do so, thus miraculously and unforgettably demonstrating his divine nature. The person is equating the symbolism of Jesus as a manifestation of the divine with his literally being God. And since God is assumed to be able do anything, then Jesus could easily have done what the person in the room claims he could do. What this person fails to recognize is that, by this reading, the real humanity of Jesus in the symbolism of the cross and of what came to be regarded by the time of the Council of Chalcedon (in 451 CE) as the Two Natures of Christ, fully divine and yet fully human, would have to be set aside. The reason is simple: no genuinely human person could have ripped his hands and ankles from the nails on the cross, ignored the agony of the severe spear thrust in his side, overcome the intense shock of the crucifixion process to his whole body, and energetically sprung from the cross. The necessarily paradoxical character of the symbolism of the Two Natures, to say nothing of the symbolic import of the founder of Christianity’s exemplary human life in the face of formidable obstacles and his excruciatingly real suffering and death, are therefore given short shrift and their profound significance lost. Similar to the view called Docetism—dis-

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missed as heretical by the early church—a person inclined to comment in the manner I have described implicitly, though unwittingly, denies that God has somehow become manifest in a real man, and regards the Christ of the cross as the High God just “seeming” (Greek: dokeo) or pretending to be a human being who suffers and dies. Such unconscious literalism destroys the complicated and elusive— and yet deeply meaningful for Christians—suggestiveness of a basic symbol. It converts the seemingly human Jesus into a phantom, a kind of three-dimensional motion picture projection onto the screen of human history. Much more is lost for traditional Christian faith by such literalistic interpretation of the symbolism of Christ on the cross than is gained. It is highly ironic that an interpretive response innocently thought to preserve and be fully in keeping with a central theme of traditional Christianity ends up destroying an essential part of it. Far from capturing the highly charged, multivalent symbolic meaning, such literalism subverts and occludes it. Literalistic renderings of religious symbols fail to understand a basic trait of these symbols when they are properly understood. That trait is that they are in their very nature self-transcending, which is to say that they point radically beyond themselves to meanings that can, in the final analysis, only be symbolically suggested or alluded to. Religious faith and commitment should be reposed, therefore, not in the symbols themselves but in what they symbolize. And what they symbolize lies beyond them. It is not something that could be contained within them, and not something to be confused with what they might be thought literally to state. The distinction is subtle but extremely important. Furthermore, one cannot strictly be said to believe in a symbol. The focus of beliefs is on discursive statements and systems of statements, not directly on meanings symbolically conveyed. As I pointed out earlier, one can believe or disbelieve in attempted propositional (and always only partial) explications of aspects of symbols, but not in the symbols themselves. Such propositions or proposals for belief point back to the symbols but cannot substitute for them, any more than the symbolic expressions can substitute for firsthand engagement with and experience of what they themselves symbolize. Moreover, it is important to take fully into consideration the fact that belief is only an aspect of faith, not the whole meaning of faith. Faith is an act of the whole person, not just the intellectual part of a person. Symbols can frame and bring into focus the character and significance of this act of the

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whole person in a way that mere propositions cannot. Literalism readily invites confusion of the necessarily existential character of genuine faith with mere assent to propositional claims.12 Literalistic interpretations of religious symbols can therefore not only distract from but in many cases destroy the meanings or important aspects of the meanings of the symbols themselves, as illustrated in my discussion of the literalistic response to the symbolism of Jesus’s crucifixion. Literalistic interpretations of religious symbols have at least three other unfortunate and ultimately disastrous effects: they encourage blind, unthinking credulity instead of careful reflection; they drive a wedge between religion and culture, creating in the process a kind of intellectual schizophrenia in a religion’s adherents; and they unwittingly support and encourage those who argue that we should dismiss out of hand particular religions or perhaps even all religions, on the ground that they are nothing more than collections of flatly contradictory assertions or of ones that are too puerile or improbable—if not patently absurd—to invite serious consideration or consent from thoughtful, well-informed persons living in the present century. Let me comment on each of these effects in turn. If persons fail to distinguish what is symbolical and what is literal or discursive in the expressions of a religious tradition and proceed to treat everything in that tradition as though it is either meant literally or should now be understood literally, they end up trying to assert ideas and beliefs that they find it extremely difficult to affirm on reasonable grounds. The difficulty is simply that such ideas and beliefs fly in the face of what is commonly held to be true and shown to be true on a rational basis in their own contemporary culture. And, like it or not, such persons are inhabitants of that culture, surrounded, suffused, and influenced by it on every side. The religious tradition to which such persons belong, and which they assume—or their present leaders insist—must be interpreted literally, calls on them to accept things as true and as essential to religious faith to which they find it extremely odd, if not impossible, to give reasonable assent. In order to be true to their religion in its literal forms, therefore, they must set aside their rational understanding and commit themselves to beliefs solely on the basis of authority, the authority of a scripture, a tradition, or a person or persons other than themselves. “Believe the unbelievable,” becomes the watchword, and this watchword comes close to being identified with what it means to be faithful to the religious tradition as a whole. Blind credulity rather than reasonable belief is then said to be mandatory.

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The consequence that follows from this first effect of religious literalism is a necessary radical alienation from one’s culture even as one must somehow find ways to live within it. One is torn into two separate persons, the person of religious commitment and the person of contemporary culture. One is forced radically to compartmentalize one’s religion and keep it distinct from the outlooks and requirements of everyday life, including the requirements of responsible rationality in that everyday life. Instead of helping to integrate and give integrity to one’s life as a whole, one’s religion, when interpreted literally in its every aspect, sunders one’s life into two parts, neither of which has meaningful relation to the other. Such intellectual schizophrenia can easily become a recipe for fanaticism, for unreflective adherence to the claims of some kind of putative external authority or authorities, no matter how unconvincing or irrational such claims may otherwise appear to be. Some time ago, I came across an example of what I am talking about here. A geologist at a state university had grown up in an extremely conservative church, the leaders of which insisted on interpreting the Bible literally. They refused to accept the contemporary scientific view of the age of the earth, insisting on the basis of a literalistic biblical chronology that it is only a few thousand years old. The geologist went back to the church, stood up in one of its meetings, and offered to take some of its leaders and members into the field, showing them and explaining to them the geological evidences of the great age of the earth, to be accurately calculated in billions of years rather than a few thousand. Not a single one of the leaders or members would agree to go with him even to look at or consider such evidence. Their literalistic approach to religious truth prohibited them from weighing the evidences of the earth’s age and any other kind of outlook or belief of contemporary culture that might run counter to that approach and its commitments. I am not arguing here that there should be no tension between religious traditions and contemporary cultures. To argue in that way would be, for example, to deny to religions their entirely legitimate ethical and prophetic functions. What I am arguing against is not this kind of tension but the tension created by too literalistic interpretations of religious traditions, interpretations that put them at odds with rationality itself or with any kind of rational assessment of the truth or falsity of claims made in the name of religion or in that of any other domain. I am also arguing against the view that religion can have or should have a kind of hegemonic authority or veto power over the findings of contemporary

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science, especially a kind of authority that refuses to examine evidence or engage in logical argument and counterargument. We have to remember that some of the most significant texts of religious traditions were written in ancient times and reflect the now obsolete cosmologies and other no longer plausible or relevant aspects of the outlooks of ancient times. Not everything from those times can be imported wholesale into modern times. Some things must be left behind. If we refuse to leave them behind, we doom religion to being a quaintly outmoded curiosity of contemporary culture rather than a source for it of continuing guidance and inspiration. In trying desperately to save the baby with a strictly literalistic approach, religious adherents succeed only in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Some contemporary critics of religion are all too happy to have baby and bathwater thrown out together. They, too, tend uncritically to assume a literalistic interpretation of the significance of religious traditions and to be oblivious to the fundamental roles played by the pervasive symbolic aspects of these traditions. They are of course greatly influenced and encouraged in making this assumption by the current proponents of religious traditions who insist that the traditions must be interpreted literally. The critic’s solution to the intellectual schizophrenia created by religious literalism is to opt entirely for contemporary culture minus any of its religious aspects, thus getting rid of religion altogether. This is an extreme and entirely unnecessary proposed solution to the extent that it is based solely on an exclusively literalistic approach to religion. It ignores the fundamental role of religious symbols in framing religious outlooks, the role being argued for throughout this book. An appeal to nondiscursive religious symbols should not be allowed to become a smokescreen for implausible or ridiculous religious claims, of course, but the essential place of such symbolisms in giving trenchant and distinctive expression to religious meanings should also not be left out of account. Discarding the distracting, distorting effects of unwarranted literalism can help immeasurably to bring to focused attention the possibility of deep-lying and enduringly relevant meanings and truths resident in particular religious traditions. Getting rid of the literalistic approach to religion as a whole can guard against peremptory dismissal and disregard of the role religion has played and will in all likelihood continue to play as a fundamental dimension of human culture and crucial aspect of human life. It might be objected at this point that sensuous imagery is required for the unsophisticated only, and that more critical and rational persons

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can get along well without it. The philosopher Benedict Spinoza argued for this view in the seventeenth century, claiming that all that is important in such imagery can be more accurately stated and rationally defended in clear, well-reasoned philosophical prose.13 I think that this idea is mistaken. Religious symbols often call for the utmost skill in interpretations of their symbolic meanings, and they continue to outstrip our best attempts at fully adequate interpretations. Religious leaders have to work extremely hard to provide guidance in sensitizing the people of religious communities to the continuing allusive, nonliteral powers of religious symbols and in teaching them how to respond to the symbols’ meaning, relevance, and application to contemporary life as symbols, not just as invitations to attempted prosaic commentary or reduction, or as vague stand-ins for clear-cut literal statements. Religious symbols qua symbols demand much more in the way of acute receptivity, critical intelligence, and discerning awareness than do most literal statements, not less. I should also note the important fact that symbols that may once have served well to convey religious insight and understanding may not always continue to do so. Storied acts such as stopping the sun in its course or casting out demons, for example, may in the context of a later time no longer be meaningful or relevant, in which case they are no longer living symbols but dead ones. As such, they should be put aside. We should not try to resuscitate religious symbols that were once alive in an earlier time but that can no longer speak meaningfully to our culture and our own day. Religious leaders need to point this fact out to their followers even as they help them to respond to and interpret symbols that are still very much alive and that continue to convey relevant meanings and truths for our time. It is also critically important to be aware that new religious symbols may crop up or be born in today’s world. We should be on the lookout for them and responsive to their promise of new ways of gaining religious understanding. But in all cases, we need to keep constantly in mind the crucial difference between symbols and literal statements. As I noted earlier, the two can be brought into important and needed relation with one another, but they should not be confused with one another. They are not the same and cannot be made the same. In this chapter I argued for the necessity of religious symbols for framing the outlooks and commitments of religious persons and communities. I also pointed out six ways in which religious symbols work to accomplish this framing. In addition, I discussed the role of doctrinal expositions of religious symbols, showing why these are needed but also

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why they cannot substitute for the symbols or what the symbols point beyond themselves to express. Finally, I endeavored to expose with four lines of exposition and argument the distorting and destructive effects of literalistic interpretations or renderings of religious symbols. In the three previous chapters I expounded upon and provided numerous examples of the nature of religious symbols and their central function in religious traditions. I examined four close similarities between artistic or aesthetic modes of symbolization and those of religion but also highlighted two vitally important differences between the two types of symbolism. I distinguished minor, major, and master religious symbols and provided examples of each. I gave an extensive account of four kinds of master religious symbols, illustrating these with references to various religious traditions. With the context of the three past chapters and the present one now in place, we are in a position to begin thinking about forms of symbolic expression and enactment that can be appropriate, useful, and illuminating for framing the specific vision of Religion of Nature. The second part of the book is devoted to this task.

Part II

Symbols

of

Religion

of

Nature

5

Master Symbols of the Ultimacy of Nature and of Its Cosmogonic and Cosmological Roles

Miracle is simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant. To me all is miracle. In your sense the inexplicable and strange alone is miracle. The more religious you are, the more miracle would you see everywhere. —Friedrich Schleiermacher1

Introduction Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, in my judgment and in the judgment of many the most insightful and original Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, declares in the epigraph to this chapter that even the most ordinary events of nature are miraculous and freighted with great religious significance when seen through the eye of the perceptive religious observer. He takes strong issue with the “cultured despisers of religion”2 of his time who contend that miracles are by definition extraordinary, inexplicable, and unnatural events, that they have not really occurred as recounted in the past, and that in all probability they do not and cannot exist. On the supposed ground that religion must be based on miracles, and that miracles are highly unlikely if not impossible, these critics are inclined to reject religion out of hand. Schleiermacher contends, on the contrary, that miracles are commonplace since every event of nature can rightly be deemed miraculous for the discerning eye and that due rec85

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ognition of this fact lies at the heart of authentic religious sensibility. In taking this view, Schleiermacher travels a considerable distance in the direction of Religion of Nature, that is, the vision of all forms, aspects, and creatures of nature as sacred, and of nature itself as the religious ultimate. For Religion of Nature, the sacredness of nature is primordial, not derivative. It does not stem from some sacred being, presence, or principle outside of nature but is inherent in nature itself. Nature is the source and basis of all existent things, and it functions and is sustained by its own immanent powers. It is therefore metaphysically ultimate, that is, it is finally, fully, non-derivatively real. Another way I can state this point is that for Religion of Nature all things real are aspects of nature, and there is no realm of being (or becoming) outside of nature or superior to nature. In this vision, nature includes what can be analyzed and understood by the natural sciences, but also much more. It includes all the ways in which nature is apprehended and understood by us humans through the natural and social sciences, for example, as well as through the arts and humanities, and the experiences of everyday life. We should also not fail to recognize as part of an adequate metaphysical view the wide variety of ways in which nature is encountered and experienced by all the sentient creatures of the earth, great and small. Many of these experiences may overlap with and be roughly consistent with our human experiences of the world, but many are no doubt distinctive to the traits, capabilities, and outlooks of particular nonhuman species. We should neither exaggerate the similarities nor the differences between us and the other creatures of the earth. And we certainly need to take into account the fact that the earth, precious and important as it is for us who live here, is but a tiny part of a staggeringly immense universe with unimaginable numbers of galaxies, stars, and planets. In the perspective of Religion of Nature, the natural world should be recognized to be religiously as well as metaphysically ultimate and therefore as richly deserving of the utmost religious reverence and devotion. This means that nothing is religiously more momentous or of greater and more enduring religious value than nature itself. Nature as a whole and in its every particular aspect is sacred and can be judged to be miraculous in the sense of arousing—when rightly reverenced and responded to—a persistent sense of awe and amazement. Schleiermacher is well within his rights in making this claim. Thus, everything is natural, and all that is natural is by virtue of this fact sacred and a compelling focus of religious commitment and concern.

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What about unjust or morally wrong human actions? Are they also to be reverenced? The persons who commit such actions should be reverenced as natural beings, but these actions, as expressive of their natural capability of deliberation and freedom, have gone seriously awry and must be acknowledged to be unjust and morally wrong. There are no guarantees that genuine human freedom, natural gift that it is, will always be used responsibly; and there are abundant historical indications that it often has not. Religion of Nature does not require us to reverence, respect, or sanction all human actions. On the contrary, it impels us to be deeply attentive to and discriminating about the moral quality and consequences of such actions. Nor does it require that we slavishly imitate in our human lives practices or modes of life (e.g., predation, cannibalism, infanticide, ruthless competition) that may be characteristic of some nonhuman creatures of nature. Religion of nature does not endorse Social Darwinism. Humans must develop and live in accordance with their own distinctive and appropriate moral codes. I have discussed the interlinked conceptions of nature’s metaphysical and religious ultimacy elsewhere and shall not labor them further here.3 My purpose in this chapter is twofold. It is first to propose a master symbol that can give effective expression to the religious ultimacy of nature. Then it is to suggest a master symbol that can serve as an appropriate image, disclosure, or depiction of the cosmogonic and cosmological aspects of nature when viewed as religiously ultimate. The chapter that follows this one also has a twofold purpose. It seeks first to propose a master symbolization of Religion of Nature’s path of life and of obstacles threatening to waylay would-be travelers on its path. It then presents an example of a person whose life can function as an impressive symbol of how the path should be traversed, how its obstacles should be met and overcome, and how the outlook and commitment of Religion of Nature can be put into practice.

A Symbol of the Religious Ultimacy of Nature Let us imagine ourselves seated below a cascading waterfall and adjacent to the stream that rushes away from it and finally enters into a quiet lake. I propose that we view this scene, not just as an enticing aspect of nature, but as a symbol of the whole of it. And I further propose that we view the imagined scene as an apt symbol of the religious ultimacy

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of nature. Why do I focus on a waterfall, a swift-flowing stream, and a quiet lake as emblematic of nature’s ultimacy? I do so partly because of the prevalence of water symbolisms in the history of religions and partly because of the lush symbolic suggestiveness of water in its various forms. The symbolism of this imagined scene puts us in mind of the primordial water that figures so prominently in the lore of many religions. In the Babylonian Genesis (Enuma Elish), the goddess Tiamat and her consort Apsu are symbols of the watery chaos out of which the heavens and the earth come to be. The spirit of God broods upon a watery deep (tehom) and fashions the world from it in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. We saw in Chapter 3 how the cosmic movements and breath (or wind) of the pristine Dao give rise to a watery mass that in its turn is the source of the contrastive forces of yin-yang and then of the entire world. Two passages from Homer’s Iliad refer to Okeanos and Tethys, god and goddess of the sea, as the begetters of other gods and of all things in the world.4 And Riane Eisler notes that “in the decorated pottery of Old Europe, the symbolism of water—often in association with the primal egg—is a frequent motif. Here the Great Goddess, sometimes in the form of the bird or snake Goddess, rules over the life-giving force of water. . . . As the Goddess Nut, she is the flowing unity of celestial primordial waters.”5 These references have strong cosmogonic and cosmological implications, of course, but as I shall now proceed to show, they also help to bring to our attention the appropriateness of water as a symbol of the awesome character of nature, the religious ultimate of Religion of Nature. Let me return to the image of the waterfall, stream, and lake. The waterfall is a symbol of the formidable powers of nature, powers of surging creation as well as of precipitous destruction. Its misty effervescence reminds us of the regular cycles of our planet, where water from the oceans and other watercourses is evaporated to become clouds which then shed water back onto the earth in the form of rain, sleet, or snow. The splendor of the waterfall is enigmatic of the dazzlingly beautiful things of earth, from brilliant sunsets and towering mountains, to grassy fields and verdant forests, to strutting peacocks and delicate orchids. The stream that surges from the foot of the waterfall suggests by its turbulent flow the ever-changing face of our present universe, its existence in many different guises over its billions of years of history—plasmas, fields, forces, particles, atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, evolving life-forms, the beginnings of human cultures and civilizations, and the like. The stream is also an image of the passage of time as reflected in our own

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stream of consciousness, flowing from the past, into the present, and then into the future, leaving much behind, retaining some things, and introducing new things all the while. To allude to the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, we can never step twice into the same moment any more than we can step twice into the same river, and the days of our lives and of all lives have finite beginnings and endings. The lake into which the stream flows, unlike the roiling stream, is relatively placid and undisturbed. Here we have a symbol of the peacefulness, rest, and assurance we may often experience in the presence of nature. Just as the Psalmist felt that he was led by his Lord beside still waters that restored his soul (Psalms 23:2–3), so do we often feel a strange calm stealing over us when in the presence of a still lake or placid sea— especially on a misty morning, a sunset evening, or a moonlit night. And if we choose to swim in a lake or sea, we are buoyed in near effortless floating, easily swooping upward and downward, relatively free from the constraints of gravity with its constant need for wary balance and stability. Calm lake and quiet sea can thus function as symbols of nature’s respites, reassurances, and joys in the face of the struggles, conflicts, and confusions of everyday life. There is much more to be said on behalf of water in general and in its various forms as a master symbol of the religious ultimacy of nature. The oceans are claimed by many scientists to have been the place of origin for all of life on earth. It possibly arose, for example, from thermal vents in the depths of the sea. Water is an essential ingredient in the process of photosynthesis whereby plants, algae, and cyanobacteria convert carbon dioxide and water into useable energy from the sun, giving off oxygen as a waste product—the oxygen necessary for the lives of aerobic creatures. These photosynthesizing life-forms are at the bottom of the food chain, all other living creatures relying on them ultimately for their sustenance. Agriculture would not be possible without an abundance of water for crops. It is also obvious that every living being on earth requires regular amounts of water for its survival. Life and water, therefore, go necessarily together. When Jesus in the gospel of John says to the woman at the well that he can provide “a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” and that “whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst” (John 4:14), he is drawing on the symbolism of water and its necessity for life. This symbolism is also exemplified in the Christian sacrament of baptism, seen as the sign of entry into the newness of life of Christian faith. Earthly water does not give promise of eternal life, but

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it is essential for mortal life. As such, it is a fitting symbol of nature as the religious ultimate that endures through all change while all of its creatures, including us humans, come into being and pass out of being. Water is also a primary means of washing and cleansing. Its symbolic and spiritual significance in this regard can be shown in the ritual (wudu) of Muslims being required to wash with pure water their hands, forearms, face, and feet before entering the holy place of the mosque for prayer. Sacredness and cleanliness (or purity) are closely associated in most religions, as are salvation and being cleansed of impurity or sin. Water is a fitting symbol of such cleansing and purity of heart. The prophet Amos drew on the symbolism of water when he declared God’s demand that his justice and righteousness roll down upon Israel like an ever-flowing stream, with its judging, cleansing, and renewing effects (Amos 5:24). Water can also be destructive or deadly, of course, in the form of such things as erosions, freezing frosts or snows, floods, mudslides, and tsunamis. Animals and humans can also drown in bodies of water, just as fish can suffocate outside of the water that is their natural home. In this respect, water can symbolize the moral ambiguity of nature’s creations and destructions, its dreadful aspects as well as its supportive, nurturing, and healing functions. I discussed at length in another book the undeniable moral ambiguity of nature and Religion of Nature’s response to it. I claim there that this ambiguity is unavoidable and that its absence would be extremely undesirable, for a variety of reasons.6 This ambiguity is, nevertheless, a dark and fearful side of the religious ultimacy of nature for which water in its destructive aspects can serve as an apt symbol. Other aspects of nature can serve as powerful symbols of nature’s religious ultimacy. In Zoroastrianism, for example, fire is a fundamental symbol of Ohrmazd, and the fire ceremony is a basic ritual. We saw in an earlier chapter how breath or wind as divine spirit or cosmic force can have a similar function of symbolizing the ultimate in religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, and Daoism. And earth, in the form of the goddess Gaia or in that of chthonic deities such as Persephone, has had an equally prominent symbolic role. Gaia has also become a significant symbolic way today of talking about the self-regulating or self-correcting nature of the planet earth as it maintains such things as a fixed amount of oxygen in the air and a balance of heat and cold.7 So water, fire, air, and earth—the four ancient elements—can be put to use as religious symbols and, in particular, as symbols of nature as the religious ultimate. I shall not endeavor to explore each one of these promising alternative symbols of nature as the religious ultimate or others akin to them.

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I shall let my proposal of water as a master symbol suffice for that purpose here. Each time adherents of Religion of Nature or of other types of religious naturalism lift a glass of water to their lips or imbibe water in any of its forms, they can view this simple but necessary act as a kind of ritual recognition and celebration of the religious ultimacy of the natural world in which we human creatures are privileged to live our lives, give of ourselves in deeds of service to our human and nonhuman others,8 rejoice in the everyday miracles and wonders of nature, and reverence the whole of nature. Waterfall, river, and lake are appropriate manifestations of this master image, as are all the other forms and functions of water on the face of the earth. Water reflects like a mirror, and for the proponent of Religion of Nature, it reflects in its every aspect and role the religious ultimacy of nature.

A Cosmogonic and Cosmological Symbol for Religion of Nature As I noted in Chapter 3, cosmogony seeks to account for the origins of the cosmos, while cosmology inquires into the most general, comprehensive, or fundamental ways of viewing the present character and functioning of the cosmos. What appropriate symbol of these two aspects of nature shall I propose? When talking about the symbolism of water in the previous section, I called attention to Eisler’s association of the Neolithic Goddess with primal water and also with a primal egg. Goddess, water, and egg together suggest a symbol that brings all three together: the Goddess as mother, her water-filled womb, and the fertilized egg developing within the womb. The master symbol I have in mind is the womb itself, a symbol that can allude to the origins of the cosmos, its evolutionary developments, and its present character. Nature, symbolized as womb, can be seen as the endlessly fecund source and sustainer of all that exists, and especially of the wonder and mystery of the cycles of earthly life through life’s astonishingly prolific and varied forms. In one version of the Orphic cosmogony, water is identified as “the origin for the totality of all things.” However, in a subsequent stage of the cosmogony a cosmic egg comes into being that “bursts into two through friction.” The top part of the egg ends up as Ouranos (the heavens), while the bottom part becomes Ge (the earth).9 A more specific employment of the metaphor of the womb, and not just its egg, is contained in the writings of early Daoism, as Thomas Michael points out. A common way in which these writings portray the primal waters, he notes,

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is in terms of biological metaphors of the womb and the placental sac that gives birth when it bursts open. The image of water when applied to the pristine Dao is regularly depicted as an embryonic environment where fluidlike vitalities undergo the process of gestation. The early Daoist writings commonly liken the Dao to a Mother; each new stage of the cosmology is to be understood as the offspring of the preceding in a family lineage that goes back all the way to the pristine Dao. Thus, the Dao is often referred to as the Mother (and also, although rarely, as the Father) as well as the ancestor of all things.10 In both the Orphic and the Daoist contexts, then, the symbolism of water, which I earlier associated with the religious ultimacy of nature, is conjoined with the symbolism of procreative egg and womb. It is the latter two, but especially the womb, that I am proposing as a cosmogonic and cosmological symbol. Its cosmogonic significance is readily apparent, and its cosmological import can be related to the fact that the egg or womb contains in germ all that the child of primordial birth—that is, the universe as we experience it—came eventually to manifest and contain, so far as its physical and bodily (or organic) structures and functions are concerned. The Daoist imagery of a bursting placental sac and the Orphic symbolism of a primordial cosmic egg are suggestive of the current Big Bang theory of the origin of our universe that is widely embraced by contemporary physicists. According to this theory, our universe burst into being and began expanding approximately 13.7 billion years ago. All of the later facts and potentialities of the developing universe stemmed consecutively from that cosmic event, just as this is also the case from the moment of conception with the developing child both within and later outside the womb of the mother. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry eloquently describe the pervasive significance of the “seed” that is said to have produced the Big Bang: All that exists in the universe traces back to this exotic, ungraspable seed event, a microcosmic grain, a reality layered with the power to fling a hundred billion galaxies through vast chasms in a flight that has lasted fifteen billion [sic] years. The nature of the universe today and of every being in existence is integrally related to the nature of this primordial Flaring Forth.

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The universe is a single multiform development in which each event is woven together with all others in the fabric of the space-time continuum.11 Exactly what it was that exploded or burst into being as the developing universe is not clear for physicists. What the universe originated from is often referred to as a “singularity,” that is, a situation in which most of the physical processes with which we are acquainted break down and are unknown, if not unknowable. Or maybe the cosmic explosion resulted from some kind of quantum fluctuation or quantum tunneling about which physicists claim to have some knowledge. At that time (or perhaps beginning of time), or so it is believed, everything that was to become our universe was packed into a nugget, seed, or egg of unimaginably tiny size and immensely hot temperature. To view nature symbolically as cosmic womb, with its embryo of the universe waiting to burst through the watery placental sac, ties in with the imagery of the Big Bang so long as we abstract from the latter’s imagined originally infinitesimal size and intense temperature. It is interesting to note in this connection that both the Greek term we translate as “nature,” physis, and the Latin one, natura, are feminine in gender. And both have the etymological meanings of giving birth, producing, springing forth, growing, and nurturing. Association with a symbolism of motherhood and the womb is thus strongly suggested. The symbolism of nature as womb connotes security, warmth, and protection. We are generally nurtured and sustained by nature, both within the complex systems of our bodies and by the provision of such things as shelter, food, and drink in our natural environments. But the imagery of the universe as womb also symbolizes challenge and responsibility on the part of us humans as progeny of nature. Just as we are inclined to love and honor the mothers who brought us into the world, so we should reverence and honor the intricate laws, principles, and constituents of the natural order that made it possible for us to be born into the world. We should support and work to protect the integrity and well-being of earth to the fullest extent possible, and refrain from injuring or imperiling it and its life-forms as fully as we can. The earth and the whole of nature of which it is a part constitute the common womb of us all, humans and nonhumans alike, and that symbolism, when taken to heart and properly responded to, can inspire us to live peacefully, cooperatively, and productively with all of our fellow creatures.

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Just as the unborn child is critically dependent on the nurture and protection of the mother’s womb, so all of the living creatures of nature are critically dependent on one another and on the nonliving parts of nature for continuing life and fullness of life. Life-forms on earth are not isolated beings but members of a wide-ranging, tightly connected community of creatures. Humans are a humble part of this vast community. The womb symbolism is complex in that it involves not only the image of the earth and other parts of a vast universe being originally ejected from the womb of nature, but also of their continuing to emerge from it. Moreover, every life-form of our world continues to be nurtured and sustained by the immanent laws, principles, and forces of nature as the intricately organized system of the whole. Thus, original creation, continuing creation, and ongoing sustenance and support are each elements of the suggestiveness of nature as womb. The symbolism combines aspects of cosmogony as well as cosmology. The cosmology is a dynamic one, as we can see from the current scientific story of the continuing changes and developments proceeding from a supposed Big Bang up to the present universe, including that story’s chapters on the history of planet earth and the origin of life and evolution of diverse forms of life on earth. There are thick threads of continuity of fundamental laws, constants, and principles running through all the stages of these developments but an enormous overlay of emergent novelty over vast periods of time as well. This fact recalls again the imagery of nature as womb since it is characteristic of fetuses in the womb that they undergo a process of development that combines continuity of basic structures and functions with rapidly emerging changes of form and capacity. It is also impressively true that no two creatures born from the womb are ever exactly the same (excepting clones). The emerging novelty displayed in the dynamic developments and changes of the universe over time, and also evident in the spectacular changes of our earth throughout its approximately 4.6-billion year history, gives testimony to two prominent and essential aspects of nature: nature natured (natura naturata) and nature naturing (natura naturans). The present face of the universe (nature natured) is made possible by the restless drive toward innovation and change (nature naturing) that has given rise to the present face and that will no doubt continue to alter it in significant ways over time. Just as the fetus in the womb undergoes continuing change, combining aspects of continuity with aspects of change until the embryo is fully formed, so does the universe work relentlessly

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to produce vast changes over time. Ours is not a static universe but one with a powerful, deep-lying impetus toward change that is analogous to the urgent developmental impetus affecting the fetus in the womb. According to contemporary physics, for example, there are collisions of galaxies and births and deaths of stars within galaxies. And galaxies do not remain at their earlier distances from one another; the most distant ones are accelerating away from one another at velocities exceeding the speed of light. Future changes in the very structure of the universe that might be produced by this acceleration are matters for speculation at present. A cosmology that failed to give prominent place to this impetus toward change in nature, with its combination of accomplished fact with emergent novelty, would be a radically inadequate cosmology. The symbolism of the ever-developing, ever-changing fetus in the womb calls attention to this fact. Interpreted literally, of course, the notion of the universe as the originating and sustaining womb of all things has little to commend it. As a literal idea it hearkens back to a much earlier time and to that time’s now generally outmoded ways of thinking about cosmogonic and cosmological issues. However, it is quite possible that even then it may have functioned more as a symbolical than as a literal conception. As a symbol, the womb as an image of the origin, present character, ongoing changes, and sheltering providing-ness and protection of the earth and the universe of which the earth is a part, has much to be said in its favor, as I have sought to explain. Another part of the womb symbolism that needs to be noted is that wombs sometimes miscarry, and they sometimes produce deformed progeny. Here is a reminder again of the moral ambiguity of nature. Not all that takes place here on earth is uninterrupted sweetness and light. There is much that is dark, dangerous, and destructive. There is unending struggle for survival in the face of many obstacles and dangers. There are numerous natural disasters. Over the long history of life on earth, up to 99 percent of past species have gone extinct. Nature writer Sue Ellen Campbell describes, for example, how the makeup of ecological communities has shifted with changes of climate and other factors during and after ice ages. Older species of life became extinct, and new ones emerged. “In vast areas of tundra and steppe in the Northern Hemisphere,” she writes, “large mammal populations were quite different from today’s.” These included, she goes on to say, “giant short-faced and spectacled bears, saber-toothed and scimitar cats, mastodons, wooly mammoths, dire

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wolves, steppe bison, cave bears, and North American cheetahs, lions, horses, tapirs, and camels, all now extinct. . . .”12 These species became extinct with the end of the last ice age. Extinctions continue to take place today, many of them accelerated and abetted by the destructive—if not always consciously intended—effects of a burgeoning human population on earth, the hazardous side effects of many of its technologies, and the relative insensitivity if not indifference to date of many humans toward the needs and rights of nonhuman creatures or the integrity of the natural environment on earth as a whole. A grave peril for the future well-being and even survival of the human species itself also lurks within these pervasive effects of the actions and inactions of humans on the organic and inorganic systems of nature on earth, just as the fetus in the womb is critically dependent on the complex systems within the womb that sustain it and support it—systems without which it could neither thrive nor survive. In associating these factors with the womb, I do not intend to personify nature or attribute its origin and support to some kind of personal being or beings. I am convinced that there is no consciously intended purpose of nature or personal creation of nature. There are numerous purposive beings here on earth, nonhuman as well as human, but these have emerged, in my view, from nonliving matter in accordance with the laws and potentialities of nature (combined with chance) and with no kind of originating or original purposive design, guidance, or intent. So the symbolism of nature as womb is not meant to suggest either some kind of literal biological origin of nature, nor some kind of purposive design. When all of this has been said, however, I think that the symbolism can help to give significant meaning to Religion of Nature’s outlook on nature and our place and responsibility as human beings in nature. I have tried to give some indications here of the evocative power and various suggestive meanings of this ancient symbolic form. These meanings are intended to be deeply meditated upon, felt, and experienced, not just literally interpreted and described. Before concluding this section, I want to make brief mention of two other closely linked master cosmogonic and cosmological symbols that can be of use for Religion of Nature. One of these is the by now familiar picture of the blue, cloud-shrouded, sun-bathed half globe of earth taken from orbiting satellites and spaceships and floating in the darkness of outer space. The other is the image of “spaceship earth,” used, for example, as the title of a book published in the mid-1960s by economist and environmentalist Barbara Ward.13 Both of these symbols

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focus on the earth as part of nature rather than on the whole of nature, but each can serve as a master symbol of nature as the natural home of us humans, of the celestial origin of this natural home, of its place in the cosmos, of its myriad interdependent systems, and our reverence for it and responsibilities to it as a species. In this way, the two symbols relate to the broader themes of cosmogony and cosmology and tie directly into many of the central themes and concerns of Religion of Nature. The earth is 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 meters) in circumference at the equator, and it seems immense to us humans. But it is not so immense when measured against the vastness of space or against other planets of our own solar system such as Jupiter and Saturn. And our solar system itself is a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy, which, in its turn, is only one of a hundred billion or more galaxies in the universe as a whole. But the history of the earth is part of the long story of the evolution of the universe, and its history is made possible by the basic laws and principles operative throughout the universe. Its orbiting of the sun is enabled by the balancing forces of gravity and inertia, for example, and its source of energy is fusion processes within the sun that convert hydrogen into helium, processes that make possible the heat and light of all stars. The planet earth came into being as condensation or compression of a nebula flung off from the sun. The sun itself was formed by an interstellar cloud of dust and gas within the Milky Way galaxy. The exact time when life began to emerge on earth is uncertain, but it is estimated to be about 3.5 billion years ago. All forms of life, including our own, are locked in ecological dependency, as can be seen from the interconnections of the food chain that ranges from microorganisms, through plants, plant-eating animals, and animal-eating animals. At the bottom of the chain, bacteria, algae, and plants capture the energy of the sun, and it is transmitted through the food chain to all forms of life on earth (except those nourished by thermal vents in the depths of the sea). Vast numbers of tiny organisms at the bottom of the chain give way to increasingly larger ones further up in the chain, as the sun’s energy is passed along and progressively used up. Earth is like a spaceship in that its life-sustaining systems are complex and self-contained. Basic disturbance, depletion, or danger at any part of the system threatens the system as a whole. Its resources and the stability and availability of those resources are finite and limited. Today’s human beings, with their exponential population growth and rampant technological developments are drawing upon those resources and interfering with their continuing availability to a frightening degree. The

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s­ituation on earth is analogous to a spaceship in which saboteurs are steadily wrecking the mechanisms of the ship, or in which so many babies are being born at such an accelerating rate that the life-support resources of the ship are being severely stressed and rapidly depleted. Our earth is in a similar situation today, which is why the image of spaceship earth is so evocative and profound. As such, it not only has cosmological import as reflective of the intricate laws, systems, and functions of nature here on earth and elsewhere, it also points back to the cosmological processes that, among other things, gave rise to the earth and its evolving forms of life. This symbolism of spaceship earth is fundamental and can serve as a master symbolism for Religion of Nature, given the latter’s deep concern for the well-being of earth and its creatures. In similar fashion, the image of earth from space can remind us that all of us, bacteria, algae, plants, nonhuman animals, and human animals alike, are joined together on the surface of a fragile, delicately balanced ball orbiting and rotating through space. This is our commons, where the actions of one aspect of the population of life-forms affect all the other aspects, and where we must share and share alike if we hope to survive. This means that humans must work and aspire in such a fashion that they contribute positively and not negatively to the community of living beings of which they are an intricate and dependent part. As an aspect of the cosmogony and cosmology of the universe, life on earth nicely accords with the symbolism of the bright blue globe, with its dramatic disclosure of majestic beauty and abundance, but also with its inescapable reminder of co-dependence, finitude, and limits. Like the symbolism of spaceship earth, this too is an apt master cosmogonic and cosmological symbol for Religion of Nature. In this chapter, I have suggested and discussed at some length a master symbol of nature as the religious ultimate of Religion of Nature and another master symbol that fits in with the cosmogonic and cosmological aspects of this religious outlook. In addition, I have made brief suggestion of other possible symbols for filling these two critical roles. In the next chapter, I shall first propose a master symbolization of the salvific path of Religion of Nature and then discuss an example of a particular human being whose life admirably symbolizes what it means to follow that path. This chapter and the next one make no pretense of being exhaustive; they are only suggestive of ways of continuing to reflect on how master symbols of various kinds can help to frame and inform the overall vision of Religion of Nature.

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Master Symbols of the Saving Path of Life and of an Exemplary Traveler on the Path

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail. —John Muir1

Introduction Nature as an unfailing source of refreshment, assurance, and rejuvenation is beautifully and symbolically expressed in this passage from John Muir’s Our National Parks that was published in the first year of the twentieth century. The passage breathes with the irrepressible love for nature and intense dedication to experiencing firsthand and communicating to others the majesty, wonder, saving power—and yet alarming vulnerability—of natural systems and wild creatures within those systems that marked Muir’s entire life. His dedication was profoundly religious, as we shall see later in this chapter. It was close to that of Religion of Nature in many respects, but Muir was not quite a religious naturalist. He continued throughout his life to speak of nature and God in the same breath and of

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nature as God’s grand and glorious creation. But as a recent biographer of Muir, Donald Worster explains, Muir’s “fusion of nature and God was not a static order created by a distant Great Mind. ‘God’ for Muir was a deliberately loose and imprecise term referring to an active, creative force dwelling in, above, and around nature.” Worster goes on to remark that for Muir nature “[a]lways moved toward beauty,” and “[a]lways and everywhere it was holy.”2 Thus, Muir can be characterized as perhaps tending more in the direction of pantheism than of religious naturalism per se, although we should note the highly symbolic flavor of what Worster aptly terms Muir’s “loose and imprecise” conception of God and of his “fusion of nature and God.” I shall discuss at more length later in this chapter Muir’s lifelong reverence for the whole of nature and passionate commitment to its integrity and well-being. As I noted at the end of the previous chapter, in this one I want first to present and discuss a master symbol of the salvific path of Religion of Nature and the obstacles diverting from and standing in the way of that path. This symbol will take the form of a proposed master narrative. Then I shall present a particular person whose course of life engagingly and inspiringly exemplifies what it can mean to travel that path, thus functioning as a living master symbol of the path. The particular person whose life I shall discuss in this connection is John Muir himself. The philosopher Aristotle assigned critical importance in his Nichomachean Ethics to the image of “great-souled” (megalopsychia), “high-minded,” or truly “magnanimous” persons who exemplify in their virtuous characters what it means to live a flourishing ethical life.3 In similar fashion, Religion of Nature can call upon exemplary persons whose lives give powerful symbolic expression to what it means to be dedicated to religious paths closely resembling the path advocated by Religion of Nature. I turn first, then, to the symbolic narrative with which I propose to frame the path of Religion of Nature and to direct attention to the obstacles lying in its way. These obstacles can also be characterized as misdirections, as mistaken forks in the road that lead away from rather than toward a sought destination or goal. There is literal historical information in this story. But it can also serve as a powerful overarching symbol of where and why we as a species have gotten off the religious path envisioned by Religion of Nature and how we can find our way back to its destination or goal. The story incorporates the goal, the fall away from the goal, and the means for restoration of progress toward the goal.

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The Path and Its Obstacles and Misdirections Religious paths all have a fundamental destination or goal. What is the goal of Religion of Nature? It is for human beings to live in as much harmony or balance as possible with the whole of the dynamic natural order of which they are an integral part. It is to disabuse themselves of the illusion that they are the apex of nature or the culmination or final destination of its evolutionary processes. It is to reverence and to treat reverently all of nature’s forms of life, especially those with significant degrees of sentience and capacity for suffering and pain. It is to recognize and act upon the urgent importance of helping to maintain or of refraining from interfering with the integrity of the natural environments on which these life-forms critically depend. It is to avoid overwhelming the nonhuman creatures of earth and the ecosystems and inorganic features of earth with wasteful and destructive effects of human technology and a perilously expanding and encroaching human population. It is to cease playing the role of the arrogant, uncaring, would-be dominators and exploiters of earth and gratefully to accept the role of being and acting like a humble and responsible member of the community of all of earth’s creatures. At present, the distance between us humans and this goal is widely acknowledged to be extreme. We seem to be traveling a different path altogether, radically away from rather than toward this goal. How did this situation arise? How did we come to be in this present predicament? What can save us from it and redirect our path in the right direction? Like most if not all religions, Religion of Nature provides us not only with a fundamental goal appropriate to our lives as human beings but also with recognition and depiction of a tragic flaw lying deep within us that insistently tempts us away from the goal and insidiously urges us in other directions. Religion of Nature also supplies us with a means of deliverance from the flaw, with the guidance and strength needed to recognize it, to deal effectively with it, and to set us upon and keep us on the correct path. In order to be able to overcome the flaw that diverts us from the path, we must comprehend its character. We must know the enemy in order to understand why it lies so deep within us and in order to learn how to be able to face up to it and subdue it. We must know, in short, what it would mean to be saved or to put the point somewhat differently, what it is that we must be saved from. Salvation has a central positive meaning, of course, but it also has this important negative note.

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At this point the symbolism of a master narrative can be brought effectively into play. This narrative enables us to see ourselves in the present in the light of our beginnings as a species and of the significant and in some ways deeply regrettable milestones and changes in our modes of life over long stretches of time. The narrative tells us not only where we have come from but what our capabilities for good are. It also helps us to understand how far we have departed from realization of these capabilities and how desperately in need we are, individually and as a species, for radical redirection and reorientation of our path of life. And it brings forcibly to our attention resources that can be drawn upon for redirection and reorientation. Such symbolism put to service for Religion of Nature is analogous to the story of the creation, fall, and hope for redemption in religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It can even make sadly appropriate the symbolism of perdition or hell in these religions. Unlike them, however, no reference is made in Religion of Nature to God or to anything supernatural. All that is required lies within our capability as natural beings of living appropriately and reverently with other natural beings in our common natural home. The human story is in significant measure the story of invention and discovery. With invention and discovery at every stage of human history has come a steady increase in the population of humans on earth. With invention and discovery have also come increasingly effective means for putting the materials of earth to human uses and for encroaching upon and endangering other species, their ecological relationships, and their natural environments. The inventions of fire and stone tools and weapons enabled Paleolithic peoples to survive in a hostile environment. The mode of life then was hunting and gathering, living in small tribal communities, and existing of necessity in intimate relation to nature. So close was this relation that Paleolithic peoples were wont to identify themselves and their communities with nature or aspects of nature through such things as totemic animal symbols of their tribes and regular nature-centered ritual practices. Humans had at that time a kind of occupational niche of their own, resembling and interacting with the niches of other creatures. They were predators, and they were preyed upon. Their predations on large animals are alleged to have been so effective by some scholars that they or their immediate successors may have contributed to the extinction of a significant number of these animals in the late Pleistocene era. Theirs was a distinctive niche involving the use of fire and the capability of fashioning simple tools and weapons. It was

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also a niche in which humans were able to produce types of symbolization such as paintings, sculptures, and rituals. There are human cultures still existing on earth today whose practices, outlooks, and modes of life resemble these Stone Age peoples, but their number is rapidly decreasing. The introduction of agriculture and discovery of how to domesticate animals (starting around 10,000 BCE) made humans capable of moving into a built-world transcending confinement to a particular niche. They no longer had to forage for food; they could grow it at will, and, over time, they learned how to regulate its quality and make it more abundant and nutritious. The domestication of animals made regular hunting unnecessary. Humans could raise livestock, feed on it, use it for transport and pulling plows, and make use of its products such as milk, eggs, meat, skins, furs, and wools. Agriculture and domestication of animals also made possible for the first time the building of cities and, with a surplus productivity of food, the development of classes of people with special skills not directly focused on the production of food. The administration of the relatively large populations of cities also required complex levels of organization. And these required in their turn the development of written, and not just spoken, languages. With the development of cities also came increasingly complex levels of trade among the inhabitants of different cities; these too required written record keeping. Reliance on trade helped to produce ships for conveying the goods of trade over long distances. Skills in metallurgy and mining were steadily improved and metals were put to such uses as media of exchange and measures of wealth, the blades of plows, other kinds of implements and tools, and various sorts of weapons. Conflicts and wars among cities involving struggles over such things as territorial rule, access to food and minerals, and trade spurred the development of more sophisticated weaponry and means of defense against enemies and invaders. But the relative safety and security and the ready availability of food in cities, resulting from agriculture and domestication of animals, gave impetus to continuing human population growth. Sociologist and ecologist William R. Catton, Jr. states that the world’s human population was about 8 million before the agricultural revolution but that it had reached 350 million by 1500 CE.4 Most importantly for our purposes here, the development of large cities progressively removed humans from the kind of daily, unavoidable, palpable, perilous, and demanding interactions with wild nature that had characterized small tribal cultures. The widening oceanic explorations beginning in the fifteenth century of the modern era, aided by the invention of new navigational instruments and

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lured by trade and the quest for new territories and sources of wealth, opened up vast new lands in the so-called New World of the Western Hemisphere for agricultural development, helping to create a seductive illusion of limitless possibilities for human advancement and mastery of the processes of nature. As a result of these and other developments, the focus of attention moved steadily away from nature as the context of human life and toward human beings and human enterprises, seen now as far less dependent on nature and much more subject to human autonomy, ingenuity, and inventiveness. Humans came to view themselves, not so much as creatures of nature alongside other creatures of nature, all equally and fundamentally dependent on their natural environments, but as standing over against nature and as entitled to exercise dominance over nature. The possibilities of human autonomy and ingenuity were now coming to be seen as limitless and as increasingly independent of the constraints of nature. A combination of irrepressible arrogance, lack of consideration for the livelihoods of other creatures of earth, and baleful ignorance of the actual status of humans as critically dependent on nature was the outcome. Three other factors contributed to this tragic outcome, which constitutes for Religion of Nature the deplorable fall of humans into sin and monstrous evil. The first of these was the monotheistic religions of the West, which gave impetus to the growing tendency to see humans as existing over against and outside of nature and as belonging in their essential being to a supernatural realm beyond the limits and constraints of nature. The second factor was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the modern era. And the third was the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Religions of the West concurrent with the centuries in which Judaism and Christianity emerged had deities, but these deities tended to be multiple personifications of aspects of nature such as Zeus the god of storm and lightning, Poseidon the god of the sea, or Demeter the goddess of grain and the harvest. In contrast, the God of Judaism, Christianity, and, later, Islam came to be viewed as existing entirely outside of nature or as radically transcending nature. This God continued, as in polytheistic conceptions of deity, to be regarded as a personal being analogous in many ways to human beings. But humans were now thought to have been created in the image of the radically transcendent God, and they were believed to have their true home in heaven with God and, like God, to transcend nature and to be independent of nature in their true character

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and essence. Nature, in this monotheistic perspective, is only a transitory theater for the saga of human life, instrumental to and subservient to humans’ needs as creatures made in the image of God and destined for lives of endless bliss (or bane) beyond the grave and beyond the temporary launching platforms of their earthly environments. Care for nature can seem to be much less important when nature is not your true home and when you yourself are not to be thought of fundamentally as a natural being but as a creature of God sharing in the nature-transcending, purely spiritual character attributed to God. God has no need of nature for welfare and continuing existence. God existed as a self-subsistent being even before the creation of the world. We humans are made in the image of God. We are therefore finally and essentially no more crucially dependent on nature than is God, our creator and sustainer. Therefore, we need not pay a lot of attention to the long-term health and vitality of nature or to nature’s nonhuman creatures except to the extent that these are needed for our human use and exploitation. The dream of humankind’s being entitled to lord over nature and exercise mastery and control over it from without, which I shall next associate with the rise of modern science, can also be read into—even if mistakenly—the passages in the book of Genesis where Adam is allowed to name the creatures of earth and God commands him and his progeny to have dominion over them. In this way as well, then, traditional monotheism can be interpreted as giving implicit support to the notion that human beings are not integral parts of nature but are rather outside of it and entitled to use it exclusively for the realization of human purposes and ends. Human-centered arrogance, absence of concern for the nonhuman life-forms of earth, and obliviousness to the stability and integrity of natural environments can all too easily result from this traditional line of outlook and belief and from the symbolizations of God and humanity underlying it. The attitude toward nature and its nonhuman inhabitants and natural environments I have just described is quite different from what Worster describes as Muir’s “fusion of nature and God.” What I am talking about here is not an inevitable outcome of Western monotheism, but it unfortunately has had and can continue to have the kind of effects which I have brought under brief discussion here. Proponents of monotheism need constantly to guard against these outcomes, carefully examining and, when need be, rethinking, reinterpreting, and modifying the traditional symbolisms relating to God and humans accordingly. Religion of Nature

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guards against such outcomes by proposing the vision of a primordial, all-encompassing nature as the religious ultimate and by locating humans squarely, unequivocally, and undeniably within the natural order. Let me now turn to two other main roots of what constitutes for Religion of Nature the fall into radical evil and the urgent need for redemption I am recounting, namely, the scientific and industrial revolutions. The scientific revolution was a major turning point in Western history, and its effects are now evident everywhere on earth. For thinkers of the seventeenth century who were witnesses to it in its earliest stages, it gave hope and promise of the dawn of a new age in which humans could attain mastery of nature, bending it on every hand to human wants and needs. Philosopher René Descartes, for example, spoke with scorn of “that speculative philosophy which is taught in the Schools” of pre-scientific thought. He mused that, with the methods and findings of the newly emerging natural sciences, “we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, the stars, heavens and all other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”5 This dream of dominating and controlling nature was in the forefront of the mind of another seventeenth-century philosopher who was thrilled and inspired by the rise of the natural science of his day: Francis Bacon. Bacon was convinced that learning how to master nature through the methods, technology, and knowledge of modern science was wholly consistent with God’s mandate to Adam that humans be placed in a dominant position over nature. This mandate, Bacon argued, was given to Adam before the biblical fall and was therefore still much in force in his own time. To search for and to achieve complete mastery over nature was not evidence of human arrogance, hubris, or sin but was action in complete accord with the will and purpose of God. Bacon’s emphasis throughout his writings is on human beings and the benefits and uses made possible for them by advances in the sciences—not on nature.6 Bacon gives expression to his instrumentalist view of nature in metaphors that often seem—at least in the perspective of Religion of Nature— to be shockingly harsh, manipulative, and brutal. He speaks of the new natural science and its mechanical inventions as having “the power to conquer and subdue her [nature], to shake her to her foundations.”7 He talks of experiments in the mechanical arts made possible by scientific

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discoveries as dealing with nature “under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and molded.”8 He recommends “searching into the bowels of nature” and “shaping nature as on an anvil.”9 He advises subjecting nature to the “interrogatories” of an “inquisition,” bringing to mind interrogations of accused persons in the dock or even chilling associations with the Roman Catholic inquisitions of persons charged with heresy against God and the Church.10 In responding to this last metaphor, however, we need to keep in mind that Bacon was a juror to whom such judiciary ways of thinking and speaking probably came naturally. “[Y]ou have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings,” he writes, “and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again.”11 These images and other similar ones used by Bacon symbolize nature as being utterly subordinate to, manipulable by, and a helpless prey to humans who are now in a position to chase her to her lair, capture and subdue her, and wrest her secrets from her. The purely mathematical and mechanical character assigned to nature (in contrast to human beings whose minds or souls were not seen as part of nature) by Descartes, among many others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made all the more evident the separation (and alienation) of humans from nature and their attitude of human dominance and control over its every aspect. Nature, including all its nonhuman life-forms now also regarded as mere machines, was viewed as a passive “thing” to be put to any use that might be concocted and desired by human beings. Humans were assumed to stand outside of nature and to be entitled to use it and control it in any way they might see fit. This fall into radical evil, as envisioned by Religion of Nature, is symbolized in thinkers such as Descartes and Bacon and in prevalent attitudes of the modern era to which their fond and unchecked dream of mastering and dominating nature makes reference. I do not want to argue that the rise of modern science entails an attitude of conquest, domination, and manipulation of nature as something wholly instrumental to human uses, but I do want to claim that this attitude has often been unfortunately inspired and undergirded by the growing successes of the sciences in leading the way to a wide variety of techniques for exploiting nature and putting its multiple aspects to human use. Humans have an undeniable right to draw wisely on the resources of nature, just as every other animal species does. We are not separate from nature but are integral parts of it. It is our environment and home,

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and we share it with all of nature’s other species of life. Moreover, the sciences have made fundamental contributions to human well-being and to the well-being of nonhuman creatures of nature as well. Advances in medicine are an excellent example. Who of us would want to return to a time of paltry knowledge of the human body’s functions, of no awareness of the need for sanitation, of the unavailability of anesthesia, or of inability to understand the etiology and means for curing many diseases? But scientific technology and its uses also have limits and can pose palpable dangers, and those limits and dangers are becoming increasingly apparent in today’s world. Our dream should not be one of mastering nature but of reverencing and respecting it, and of acknowledging and emphasizing in every way possible our role as humble members of the community of nature, not as its would-be conquerors, rulers, or masters. The latter attitude points the way to eventual destruction and perdition. Symbols matter deeply and can influence and affect every aspect of our lives, often in ways concerning which we are not fully conscious. The seductive symbol of our being masters of nature needs to be set in sharp contrast with the symbolism of our living appropriately and constrainedly within nature, gratefully accepting its nurture and support on which we in every moment must critically rely, and refusing to exaggerate the relative place to which our species is entitled as but one of nature’s innumerable interdependent creatures. The Romantic reaction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provided some respite from an underlying theme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely, the theme of gaining steadily increasing awareness of and ability to dominate and control the processes of nature. Poetry, painting, music, and other arts of nineteenth-century Romanticism celebrated the wonders of nature and the intimate place of human beings in nature. Their typical theme was not domination of but grateful, reverent, and wondering participation in the natural order. Poems of William Wordsworth such as his “The Prelude” are impressive examples of this outlook, as are Ludwig von Beethoven’s Pastoral (Sixth) Symphony and the landscapes of the American Thomas Cole such as his painting L’Allegro (Italian Sunset). The nineteenth-century English scientist Sir Humphry Davy, himself a Romantic thinker and ardent writer of poetry, believed that an adequate understanding of nature requires, as David Knight states, “an attitude of admiration, love and worship, that is, a personal response.”12 Davy was thus a foe of the mechanistic reductionism of earlier science that had alienated human beings from nature.

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However, the nineteenth century was not only an age of Romanticism. It was also a time that witnessed the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Invention of the steam engine, fired mainly by the fossil fuel coal, set the Industrial Revolution on its path. Factories for the manufacture of a variety of goods were the outcome, soon bringing to a virtual end the need for the works of individual artisans and crafts persons. The mastery of nature by human beings seemed assured as this revolution proceeded on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, bringing in its train all sorts of consumer goods and new technologies, from tractors to cotton picking machines, railroads to automobiles, indoor plumbing to electric lighting and electrically powered household appliances, adding machines to computers, airplanes to space vehicles, coal to atomic energy, horse-drawn and wind-borne travel to rapid, globally circling transport and trade, telegraphs to televisions, and the like. But along with these developments there have gradually come into notice some severely threatening side effects of widespread industrialization. Examples are current warnings of drastic global climate change due in significant measure to greenhouse effects of human factories, power plants, livestock, and means of transportation; pervasive pollution of earth, air, and water; and increasing shortages of available food and water in many areas of the earth. Other examples are a human population explosion that may soon exceed the carrying capacity of the earth (the human population at the date of this writing is in excess of 7 billion people, and it continues to grow at an accelerating rate); and imminent threats to the flourishing and survival of future generations of humans, to say nothing of nonhuman animals and their habitats, resulting from these factors. All of them are portents of an impending frightful outcome. The menace of fierce wars between the haves and the have-nots of humans on earth is also part of this bleak picture as available food, water, and other essential resources dwindle. If we humans continue to be toppled into this precipitous fall into evil, it may soon lead to a hell of unimaginable ferocity and terror for the human species and for many if not most of the earth’s present creatures. So much for the tragic flaw in human relations to nature brought to light over past millennia and becoming increasingly and inescapably evident in the last few centuries. What is Religion of Nature’s proposed remedy for this tragic flaw? How can it help us to reach the goal for it I stated earlier in this chapter? How can it help to put us on and keep us on the right path, the path of salvation for humans and other creatures

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of earth? I have addressed this topic at some length in other writings, but let me briefly recapitulate my view of it here. I do so under three headings: saving assurance vs. painful alienation; responsible demand vs. callous manipulation; and empowering love vs. scornful indifference.

Saving Assurance vs. Painful Alienation We humans are not required to master or conquer nature in order to live meaningful and fulfilling lives. We are not outside of nature but within it. We need feel no alienation from it. Our true home is here, not in some other imagined realm. As creatures of nature, we can live in harmony with nature and with its other creatures. Nature will support us, but only to the extent that we resolve to give our wholehearted cooperation and support to it. We can be assured that we do not need to return to a Stone Age mode of life in order to live in harmony with nature. We need only to continue to search for and resolve to put into practice a human mode of existence that is compatible with our well-being and the well-being of all creatures here on earth. No supernatural miracle of atonement or forgiveness is required. The wonder of nature in all its aspects, and of our being privileged to be conscious and conscientious participants in its processes, is miracle enough.

Responsible Demand vs. Callous Manipulation Among other things, the responsible demand Religion of Nature exhorts from us means such things as radically reducing harmful emissions; finding alternative, non-polluting, renewable fuels and other sources of energy; expanding and preserving wild places; avoiding unnecessary wastes; educating about birth control and helping to advertise and fund its techniques where needed (thus helping to avoid a possible calamitous reduction of human population by brutal wars and mass starvations); putting a stop to commercial over-fishing and radically reducing by-catches from such fishing; eliminating callous treatments of animals in factory farms, rodeos, circuses, zoos, aquariums, and animal experimentation; and above all, educating ourselves and our children around the world about the grave dangers to the earth’s environments and ecosystems posed by irresponsible, uncaring uses of technology. These problems are admittedly complex, and achieving solutions to them is a demanding task that runs against the grain of much current

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thinking and acting, but we need to begin reflecting seriously and intently about them and about ways of resolving them. The general outlook of Religion of Nature, which is one of deep respect and reverence for nature and all of the creatures of nature—including us humans—needs to be increasingly adopted and shared by all of the earth’s peoples. This undertaking is difficult but not overwhelmingly so. What is most needed is concerted will and thoughtful, persistent ameliorative action. These require, in turn, radical reformation and reorientation of our human attitudes toward nature. Religion of Nature’s narrative of the fall or tragic flaw of humans over the centuries, and especially in recent centuries, combined with articulations of and encouragements toward its salvific goal, can give symbolic force and direction to this need.

Empowering Love vs. Scornful Indifference What has come in many quarters to be a kind of scornful indifference to the sanctity and integrity of nature can be replaced by something that is entirely natural and already lies deep within us waiting to find expression: an instinctive love for nature that is responsive to it as the source of our existence and the sustenance and support of our being. All that we require in the way of fullness of life can be provided for us by nature, and we need not exploit it ruthlessly or seek to master and control it in order to draw appropriately upon it for our legitimate needs. To genuinely love a person is to seek and work for the good of that person, not to try to exploit the person or seek ways to dominate and master that person. And such love is at an ocean’s width from indifference to that person. Love is a reciprocal relation of loving and being loved. The Psalmist sang of the earth and its fullness as belonging to the Lord and entitled to be reverenced as the splendid creation of the Lord. In the perspective of Religion of Nature, the earth is nature’s creation and gift and is amply deserving of our utmost honor and love. This kind of love or natural piety, long evinced and celebrated by poets, musicians, dramatists, painters, photographers, and many scientists as they ponder the astounding beauties and intricate mysteries of nature, is inspiring, rejuvenating, and saving. When given with all of our human imagination, ingenuity, and care to nature and the creatures of nature, this love can have a stupendously moving and meaningful saving effect. We need not continue to travel down the destructive path of the tragic flaw. We are entirely capable of thinking and acting differently, of constructively preserving and creating

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rather than progressively undermining and destroying. The imagination, resourcefulness, and resolve that brought about the agricultural, urban, scientific, and industrial revolutions can be devoted to saving ourselves and the earth from needless destruction and restoring our rightful role as loving servants of nature rather than as stern masters attempting to stand outside it and over against it. I sit on my back porch watching a male ruby-throated hummingbird alight in a nearby mulberry tree. His whirring wings are stilled for a while, as he perches and rests on a branch. But then they stir into action again, and he whizzes to the feeder filled by my wife Pam with sugar water. He dips and drinks repeatedly and then darts away to another nearby tree. His body is tiny, but every part of a larger bird is there in miniature. Iridescent in resplendent colors and amazingly swift and agile, he is a marvel of nature. I cannot help but stand in awe of him, and I am filled with feelings of love for him. For all his tiny size, he is a fitting symbol for me of the grandeur of nature. I do not want to do or sanction anything that threatens his livelihood or existence. I know that he may be preyed upon by a larger animal and that nature is pervaded by predations of many different kinds. But for all that, for all of nature’s ambiguity and tragedy, the sight of the hummingbird awakens my sense of wonder and my profound and humble respect and love. I am thankful to be here in the world and I desire for myself and for all of humanity actions that flow directly from and give tangible form to this kind of loving respect. Such actions, and the proper attitudes underlying them, are the hope of our flourishing as a species as well as of the prospering of the earth’s life systems as a whole, to the extent that this prospering is dependent on what we humans do or refrain from doing. For Religion of Nature, evoking and acting upon this deeply empowering feeling of love and respect on behalf of all of earth’s creatures, human and nonhuman alike, constitute the central meaning of our common salvation.

An Exemplar of the Saving Path of Religion of Nature In the final section of this chapter, I want to highlight some aspects of the career of John Muir (1838–1914), whose exemplary life as a whole provides inspiring symbolic expression for what it means to travel Religion of Nature’s saving path. Muir spent his life traveling, hiking, climbing, collecting, gazing on, sketching, and contemplating various aspects of

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wild nature, and learning about, writing about, and lobbying on its behalf. His love for nature and dedication to its pristine majesty and beauty were unsurpassed. In this section, I shall discuss Muir’s outlook on nature, his travels, his writings, his accomplishments, and one frustrating failure in his life as a passionate naturalist. As I noted earlier, he was not exactly a religious naturalist in my sense of the term, because he continued to speak of God and of nature as God’s creation. But he was by no means a traditional theist, despite having been brought up by a father whose religious faith was staunchly conservative and traditionally Christian, following on the teachings of Alexander Campbell, founder of the Disciples of Christ in the new world. Campbell’s preaching on a trip to Scotland, where Muir was born, lured the father and his family to America, where they settled in Wisconsin. Muir’s father’s imposed a heavy patriarchal hand and stern Calvinist warning, reproof, and discipline on his eight children, and especially on his three sons, including John. But John’s faith turned out to be much more open-spirited, generous, and affirming in character than his father’s, and it was to grow and reach its distinctively personal form, not in conventional cloister or in close adherence to the Bible, traditional Christian creeds, or Campbellite teaching, but in the magnificent cathedral of wild nature. Nature was his scripture and tutor, and he was its willing follower and pupil. Taking issue with the Campbellite doctrine of original human depravity and sin, he wrote at the age of twenty-eight, “I take more internal delight from reading the power & goodness of God from the things which are made than from the bible.”13 Muir studied botany, geology, and physics while enrolled in the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He became an avid collector of different species of plant, an occupation that continued throughout his life and wanderings, and he also became keenly interested in the history of geological changes and formations. He did not graduate from the university, attending there for only six terms, but its influence on his naturalistic interests and endeavors was profound, and it helped to awaken within him the curiosity and mind of a scientist. His first major field trip or extensive foray into nature began when he was twenty-nine years old. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s published account of his travels in South America from 1799 to 1804, Muir determined to visit that continent himself. He traveled by train from Indianapolis, Indiana, to the border of Kentucky. From thence he set out by foot from Louisville, Kentucky, to walk the thousand or so miles to Florida. His knapsack contained, among other things, a plant press and a

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blank notebook. He slept outdoors on many occasions, filled his notebook with observations, reflections, and sketches, and collected and pressed numerous varieties of plants as he went. Arriving at Savannah, Georgia, he took a boat from there to Fernandina, Florida, and trekked across the peninsula to Cedar Key on the Gulf shore. He wrote in his notebooks and later in his published work based on them, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, that the rights of wild animals to sustenance and survival should be respected, and he deplored the acts of humans who hunted animals, not for food, but simply for sport and pleasure. He also began to take strong issue with the idea that nature exists solely for the uses of humans. It exists instead, he affirmed, for the life and happiness of all the earth’s creatures, who are “earth-bound companions and our fellow mortals.” “Why,” he asked himself, “should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?”14 In these ways, as well as many others, Muir was to recognize and endorse basic themes and convictions characteristic of Religion of Nature. Along the way of his travels to the south and in his frequent nights of sleeping outdoors, Muir had contracted a serious case of malaria. After taking a ship to Cuba, he realized that he was too weak from the disease to brave the formidable difficulties and dangers of the wilds of South America. He therefore altered his plan and headed by ship to Panama, and thence to California. So taken was he by the natural beauty and enticing wild places of California that he decided to continue his explorations of wild nature there. For the rest of his life he made this state his permanent home, always returning to it after his wanderings and studies in other places. His lifelong dedication to contemplating, learning, and writing about nature was by now certain and secure. Muir spent the summer of 1869 sheep herding in the Sierras, to the north of Yosemite Valley. This was a summer of bliss for him. He exulted in mountains and waterfalls, delighted in the flora and fauna of this wonderful place, and marveled at how interconnected everything in nature seemed to be. In the later published book, My First Summer in the Sierra, he wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” His biographer Donald Worster says of Muir at this time that for him “[n]ature was all one body, beating with a heart like his own, and more intensely than ever before in his life he felt his own heart beating in unison. He experienced, in the fullest sense yet, a profound conversion to the religion of nature.”15 Worster quotes Muir

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as affirming of his experiences in the Sierra country, “Everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.”16 As part of his religious quest, Muir took up explorations in the fields of mountain formation and glaciation. He studied rock striations, boulders, and moraines and identified the remnants of glaciers in Yosemite. He enthusiastically endorsed the idea of an ice age that had helped to sculpt the mountains, rivers, lakes, and valleys of the Sierras. He made extreme and hazardous climbs to high mountain peaks in California, often climbing alone. Throughout these explorations, he gloried in the sublimity of nature and left far behind any sort of biblical chronology for the age and origin of the earth. In the early 1870s he published a series of articles in The Overland Monthly in which he explained his studies and conclusions, and he submitted a nine-page abstract to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that summarized his findings. Muir’s intense interest in glaciation and its effects took him on trips to Alaska where he was to encounter examples of it more stupendous than those of Yosemite. In 1881 he joined the crew of a coal-burning steamship Thomas Corwin as the ship’s naturalist, accompanied by an anthropologist and ornithologist. The ship was bound for the Aleutians, the Bering Strait, and the Arctic Ocean. During the six-month voyage, with its frequent opportunities to study glaciers en route, Muir was able to add to his knowledge of how the ice age had produced a variety of land forms and was continuing to do so afterward. Muir sent frequent letters to the Evening Bulletin, wrote and sketched in his journals, and continued to add to his knowledge and that of interested scientists. An account of this journey was published after Muir’s death, based on his letters and journal entries. It was called The Cruise of the Corwin. In 1890, Yosemite National Park was established by an act of congress signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison. Muir was one of the principal persons who pled for the setting aside of Yosemite as a national park, having over the years celebrated its spectacular beauty in numerous publications. He wrote two highly influential articles in that year, having been urged to do so by the associate editor of The Century, Robert Underwood Johnson. One of the articles contained a map of the proposed park. These articles helped considerably to describe and draw the boundaries of the new park and to encourage the Congress to push it through into law. In 1892 Muir helped to establish the Sierra Club. He was elected its first president and served in that capacity for the rest of his life.

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Muir went on other trips of exploration and collecting that took him to Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Africa. His fame as a naturalist, conservationist, and glacial expert continued to grow, and his writings had a wide influence. He was a man of many impressive accomplishments. But he also experienced one gravely disappointing failure. In spite of Muir’s persistent protests and efforts, congress approved and President Wilson signed a bill in1913 allowing the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite Park to be dammed and made into a 300-foot deep reservoir to supply domestic water to the city of San Francisco. A decade later, the dam was built. Muir died of pneumonia the day before Christmas, 1914. I hope that this brief sketch of Muir’s life conveys some of the flavor of his immense and lasting contribution to a vision of nature as intrinsically valuable and worthwhile, not just a means for human exploitation and use. Muir viewed nature as sacred and as a realm to be revered and loved in its every aspect—flora, fauna, seas, and lands—in and for itself, with unsparing devotion and unfailing gratitude. His life is a striking example and vivid symbol of what it means to travel the saving path of Religion of Nature. He traveled it in his own way, with his own kind of continuing faith in a radically naturalized God or immanent divine presence. But his focus was always on the marvels of nature and on humans as humble creatures of nature whose principal task and privilege is to live in harmony with nature and all of its creatures. I am indebted for my description of events in Muir’s life and of his outlook on nature to Donald Worster’s splendidly detailed and painstakingly researched biography, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, a work that captures in title and content the ardent commitment and symbolic force of his subject’s life. This commitment and its symbolism are deeply relevant to all of us living in today’s world, with its looming environmental crises and growing indictments of an excessively humancentered attitude toward nature and the place of human beings in nature. We cannot all live precisely as Muir did, of course, but the power of his example can inspire us to reverence the inestimable wonders of nature and to make our own contributions in our own ways to the stability, harmony, and sustainability of our natural home. In doing so, we can strive to recognize and respect the rights of all of our fellow creatures to the full and flourishing life to which they are entitled as members of this earthly home.

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Nature is, of course, a dynamic system that continues to undergo changes, some of which can be devastating in the short run. But these devastations, such as raging forest fires or volcanic eruptions—to say nothing of the massive changes brought about by slow moving glaciers— often provide opportunity for renewal and the introduction of new species and new ecosystems. Thus, in nature destruction and creation go handin-hand. So when I speak of the harmony or balance of nature and of our responsibility as humans to respect it and contribute to it, and not to interfere unduly with it as only one of its innumerable natural species, I do not mean to suggest futile attempts to effect or contribute to some sort of static, unchanging state. I want instead to bring into view the dynamic, largely self-balancing processes in which nature will continue do its own thing, and to urge us humans to endeavor to find and act in accord with optimally helping and unhampering roles within these processes. To do so is to act in the spirit of John Muir, emblematic champion and friend of wild nature. And it is to follow the saving path of life laid out and vigorously endorsed and defended by Religion of Nature. In this chapter and the previous one I have suggested and discussed four master symbols for Religion of Nature: symbols bearing on the nature of the religious ultimate, on religious cosmogony and cosmology, on the saving path of religion, and on exemplification of that path in the course of a particular human life. The next chapter is devoted to discussion of the truth of religious symbols and to discussion of the pervasive roles of secular symbols and their suggestions of symbolic truth or falsity.

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The Truth of Religious Symbols

Religious symbols are true if they transform people’s practices so as to embody the religious object, properly qualified; they are true if they effect transformations in devotional life so that the soul becomes more and more conformed to the religious object, properly qualified. They are true if they carry over the values in the religious object so that the intentional understanding of the mind is conformed to them, properly qualified. —Robert Cummings Neville1

Introduction Many philosophers and others have contended that truth is exclusively a property of statements and that the term truth cannot be meaningfully applied to anything other than statements. This view entails that only discursive propositions can be true (or false). Where does that leave nondiscursive symbols? What epistemic or cognitive status, if any, can they have? I argue, as philosopher and theologian Robert Neville does in the epigraph to this chapter and throughout his informative book, The Truth of Broken Symbols, that truth can be a prominent trait of religious symbols or symbolic expressions in their own right, not just when such symbols are interpreted or explicated in the form of statements or doctrinal claims. In the passage quoted above, Neville points to three basic ways in which religious symbols can be said to contain or express truth. They are true to the extent that they transform people’s practices to bring them in line with the religious ultimate; they are true if they work to affect

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persons’ devotional lives in such ways as to conform their innermost beings to the religious ultimate; and they are true when they carry over the values embodied in the religious ultimate so that the mind’s outlook and understanding are brought into conformity with the religious ultimate. Neville inserts the phrase “properly qualified” after these assertions because he wants us to recognize and take into account the conditions that qualify attempts to comprehend a religious ultimate and experience carryover of its values into our thought and life. We are conditioned by our biological systems that determine what sorts of experience are possible for us. We are also conditioned by the contingencies of our cultural settings, our semiotic systems, and our overt or habitual purposive activities. These four qualifications or conditions, Neville remarks, determine “the respects in which signs interpret objects, and hence the respects in which the value of the objects will be carried over.”2 These are important qualifications, and if taken into account they can help considerably to guard against idolatry, hubris, or dogmatic insistence on the final adequacy of any symbolization of the sacred. An implication of Neville’s four conditions, therefore, is that any religious symbols that are assumed or claimed to be finally adequate, thus failing to acknowledge these necessarily limiting conditions, are by virtue of this very assumption or claim shown in this crucial respect to be false. Just as none of us can escape the determinations and limitations of our biology, culture, semiotic systems, or habitual, deeply engrained purposes and patterns of behavior that at any given time instinctively give great prominence and importance to some aspects of experience and less to others, so neither can our forms of religious symbolization. We are finite beings and even our best and most powerful religious symbols reflect this finitude and its restrictions. To assume otherwise is to convert religious symbols into idols. And idols are false representations of religious ultimates in virtue of the fact that they erroneously claim ultimacy for themselves. No true religious symbol can be rightly thought to coincide with or to be identical with what it symbolizes. An additional qualification to the four indicated by Neville is also in order. It is obvious on brief reflection but still well worth noting that not all transformations of life, attunings of outlooks and practices, carryovers of value, or references to putative religious ultimates guided by religious symbolizations are justifiable, commendable, or salutary. Some symbols can be misleading, inadequate, or distortive in an epistemological sense that I will soon bring into focus. They can also be corrupting, destructive,

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and even demonic in a moral sense to which I also want to call attention. To the extent that they are such, these symbols should be regarded as religiously false. Instead of effectively pointing toward the sacred, they point away from it. There are epistemic and moral tests, therefore, of the truth of religious symbols that should be added to the critical warning against an idolatrous and thus false use or interpretation of them implicit in Neville’s four qualifications mentioned above. In this chapter, I intend to spell out these observations about the truth of symbols in more detail. I shall also call attention to some significant and enlightening comparisons between the roles of religious symbols and those of secular ones, by way of strengthening the case for the idea that nondiscursive symbols can not only be highly influential but appropriately evaluated as symbolically true or false.

Religious Symbols and Truth Religious symbols are true or false in ways different from the truth or falsity of statements. It is important to keep this fact constantly in mind as we investigate meanings of the terms true and false when applied to religious symbols. I suggest, therefore, that we make a distinction between TP, the truth of propositions, and TS, the truth of religious symbols. I will not routinely designate the distinction in this way in all of what follows, because it would be too cumbersome to do so. But I hope that readers will keep in mind that I am talking about TS, not TP, in my discussions of the truth or falsity of religious symbols. Truth is a wide-ranging term with more than one legitimate use, and we should not restrict its usage to propositions alone. There is such a thing as a truthful life, for example, and I have cited examples of religiously true or authentic lives—lives that conform to and exemplify in symbolic fashion central aspects of profoundly important and influential religious traditions. Moreover, there are truthful intimations, insights, illuminations, awakenings, or understandings lying beyond the grasp of concise verbal statements that can turn out to have fundamental bearing on the character and development of a person’s life. I have discussed some of these in earlier chapters. This kind of truth is existential, as contrasted with propositional or discursive claims to truth, but it is no less entitled be called true. TS truths are truths to be lived in the wholeness of one’s life, not just truths to be believed or to warrant only intellectual assent

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(TP). It is not as though the latter are unimportant, but that they are significantly different from symbolic truths, and that this difference needs always to be borne in mind. Having said this, however, I want to bring the reader’s attention back to what I said in Chapter 4 about the need in religious traditions to seek to explicate aspects of the meanings of religious symbols into discursive or doctrinal statements and prescriptions, and to explore in systematic fashion interrelations of such statements and prescriptions. This means that TS and TP are not completely separate or isolated from one another. The two can have important connections with one another, and each can help to bring into focus aspects of meaning in the other. A significant test of the truth of symbols, therefore, is their ability to suggest and give support to propositions that can be regarded as true. Belief is an important aspect of religious faith, and if there is nothing to be believed, or nothing that warrants belief, in a religious symbol or set of symbols, the symbol or set of symbols will fall short in that way of being true. It will do so because it fails to speak to the whole of a person’s life, including his or her powers of reasoning. And a fortiori, an approach to religious symbols that requires a person to put his or her mind in neutral or even in reverse gear, either demanding unwavering assent in the absence of any convincing reasons for assent or deliberately enjoining adamant assent against all reason, is shown thereby to be a false approach to religious symbols. As we saw in Chapter 4, such symbolic falsity can arise when one is commanded to believe as literally true something that flies in the face of one’s whole present culture and modes of thinking and believing. In this way, confusion between TS and TP can lead to falsity in regard to both. “Broken” religious symbols can be defined as those recognized to have continuing symbolic significance despite their lack of any enduring literal significance. These symbols should be distinguished from “dead” religious symbols, which can be defined as those that no longer have convincing or meaningful symbolical significance. Symbols may be unbroken and/or alive at one time but broken and/or dead at another. Here contingencies or qualifications of changing historical and cultural circumstances cry out for recognition, as Neville emphasizes. To treat as unbroken a symbol that can have continuing meaning only in its broken form is to make it false, and to treat as alive a symbol that can no longer function as such in the present is also to render it false. Searching for the remnants of Noah’s ark or for evidences of a worldwide flood, in keeping with the

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story in Genesis, is an example of overlooking the broken character of this symbolization, as is insisting on a literal ascent of the risen Jesus into the clouds of heaven in an outmoded three-tiered, earth-centered universe. For Jews or Christians to revert to the ancient practice of sacrificing animals as a way to appease divine wrath and attain divine forgiveness would be an example of trying to resuscitate a now dead symbolic practice, as would insistence on continuing the biblical and, until recently common, practice of regarding God as male. In either case, what may now be false ways of regarding or responding to religious symbols can be confused with acceptably true ones. Another important way to assess the truth or falsity of religious symbols is to ask, “Does a given symbol or set of symbols implicitly or explicitly endorse religious exclusivism and close-mindedness?” If it does, it is of necessity false. Why does this follow? It follows precisely because of the radical difference I continue to point out between the signifier and the signified. Religious symbols signify religious ultimates, and a genuine religious ultimate cannot be completely captured, conveyed, or expressed by any kind of symbolism, whether it be discursive or nondiscursive. True religious symbols will always take fully into account the difference between that to which they refer and themselves as making the reference. Since religious ultimates can only be referred to by fallible symbols, the claim to exclusivity or finality in any symbol or set of symbols is an implicit denial of that fallibility. The comparative adequacy of one set of religious symbols in its relation to another may be legitimately weighed in particular contexts, but to claim total adequacy for any one set as over against all others is to put into graphic relief the falsity of the set on whose behalf the claim is made. It is to assert finality and completeness—and therefore exclusive truth—for what, by its nature, can never be so. There is both epistemic and moral import in this observation. The epistemic import consists in the recognition that it is impossible for religious symbols, no matter how grand, impressive, or relatively truthful they might be, to have an absolute corner on all religious truth and thus to exclude other claimants to such truth except to the extent that the latter might approximate to the truths of the allegedly privileged symbols of one’s own religious outlook. The moral import is that it is a grave mistake to reject totally and out of hand and to insist that others reject all aspects in which other religious traditions and their symbolic expressions might differ from one’s own. Down that road lie fanatical intolerance and endless and often bloody

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conflict, as history so clearly shows. Genuine tolerance for and the continuing search for empathetic insight into the symbolic truths of other traditions are important moral and religious virtues to be ranged alongside the strength of one’s own convictions and to serve as avenues for learning how to enrich, to challenge, and, if need be, to transform these convictions in the direction of more adequate perceptions and experiences of religious truth. Convictional openness is both epistemically and morally far superior to the kind of myopic conviction that closes its heart and mind to other paths of faith. I should note in this connection that a literal mindset when it comes to the interpretation of religious symbols and claims to their truth often contributes to the kind of epistemically untenable and dangerously immoral exclusivism I am describing. The truth of religious symbols can also be correlated with the distinction I drew earlier between minor, major, and master religious symbols. Religious symbols are relatively true to the extent that they communicate, tie together, and evoke major themes of religious traditions or orientations toward religious ultimates. The comprehensiveness of a religious symbol is thus one measure of its degree of truth. Minor symbols are less comprehensive, among other things, than major ones, and the latter are less so than master religious symbols. Given their fallible and finite character, there can be no such thing as the absolute or complete truth of a religious symbol, as I have already indicated. But there can be degrees of partiality or adequacy in what such symbols have the power to evoke in responsive religious adherents. In this sense, there can be degrees of partiality or adequacy in the truths brought into focus by these symbols. A religious symbol can be more or less true in this sense. Another measure of the truth of religious symbols is their power to give rise to, maintain, and continue to strengthen the faith and commitment of religious communities to their respective conceptions of the religious ultimate. This measure also involves the symbols’ effectiveness in giving enduring cohesiveness to such communities in spite of differences of discursive interpretations of the meanings of the symbols that may arise in these communities. It is important to recognize that powerful and richly meaningful religious symbols cannot easily be confined to a single, indisputable line of such interpretation. There can be consensus about the importance of a symbol or set of symbols even when consensus may be lacking in its interpretations. To take this fact into account when responding to such symbols is to acknowledge rather than to disparage their claims to symbolic truth. I discussed this point earlier, but I want

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to call attention to it here as a significant criterion of the truth of religious symbols. Moreover, religious symbols can be judged for their degrees of truth by their ability to bring about transformations of life, incorporating into these lives, as Neville puts it, the values of the religious ultimate itself. Their truths involve states of being and not just the truth or falsity of statements. Weak and therefore relatively less existentially true symbols will lack this power, while those that are strong will possess and exhibit it in impressive measure. This test of the truth of religious symbols should not be allowed to stand alone, however, but kept in mind along with all the others I have indicated so far. The reason for this qualification is that not all putative religious ultimates are necessarily equally worthy of veneration. Some may prove to be distortive or destructive in their effects on persons or communities. In other words, not all transformations of human lives and the values on which they turn are commendable or worthwhile. Tolerance needs to be kept in tension with critical alertness and critical judgment concerning religious symbols and religious claims and prescriptions. There can be transformations toward evil as well as toward good, or toward arrogant close­­­ -mindedness as well as toward humble and receptive—while also appropriately critical—convictional openness. Particular religions, religious adherents, or religious communities are not always constructive; they can sometimes be notoriously destructive. To the extent that they turn out to be such, their symbolizations, their prevalent interpretations of these symbolizations, or the transformations of lives they help to bring about may prove to be ill-directed and false. Still another indication of the truth or falsity of religious symbols is the extent to which they conduce to focusing on the needs and well-being of others, and not just on one’s own well-being. In the context of Religion of Nature, these others should include nonhuman as well as human beings. Symbols directing religious attention only or even principally to oneself or to those close to oneself can easily slide into narcissism. Such symbols can also lead into the domain of manipulative magic, of trying to use a putative religious ultimate for one’s own narrow purposes rather than submitting to a worthy ultimate in commitment and service that accord with the ultimate’s inherent values and evocations of value and are therefore also devoted to the good of others. To the extent that religious symbols might reinforce or be allowed to reinforce exclusive self-centeredness at the expense of others, they show themselves to be false or falsely interpreted.

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As Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel insists, an idol is “any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not you.”3 Symbols that endorse such an idolatrous conception of the religious ultimate are false in that regard. And to the extent that the religious ultimate itself may be symbolized in this way, the symbolization is shown to be false. Both religious and moral values figure prominently in this judgment. To sum up, then, religious symbols can be said to be true, relatively true, false, or relatively false when appraised in accordance with the criteria, tests, or measures of truth indicated in this section. These judgments involve such things as the following:



• Weighing the ability of religious symbols to suggest and give support to propositions that can be regarded as true, and ensuring that their use allows for reasonable thought and reflection concerning this matter;



• Giving due recognition to the fact that symbols that may once have been unbroken or alive are no longer so, and resisting the temptation to ascribe literal meaning or truth to such symbols;



• Being alert to and rejecting or modifying symbols that endorse religious intolerance, close-mindedness, or exclusivism;



• Rejecting any symbol or set of symbols that suggests final and complete adequacy for itself, thus idolatrously confusing itself with the religious ultimate;



• Recognizing that some symbols suggest a greater amount or extent of truth than others, thus appropriately weighing the differences among minor, major, and master symbols;



• Assessing the extent to which symbols themselves can create, sustain, and continue to deepen the sense of community in religious groups, even as discursive interpretations of the meanings of such symbols may vary within those groups;



• Recognizing that the meaning and truth of important religious symbols cannot by their nature be easily confined to a single interpretation or line of interpretation and that

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amenability to different interpretations can be a sign of the rich and even inexhaustible truth of a symbol rather than of its falsity;

• Assessing the power of religious symbols to bring about transformations of lives and inculcations of the values of the religious ultimate into those lives;



• Taking critically into account the fact that not all religious transformations of life are necessarily commendable or worthwhile and that some can have destructive effects;



• Recognizing that not all alleged equally deserving of veneration thus that not all symbolizations lay claim to equal truth or even as symbolically true;



• Acknowledging that religious symbols which focus primarily or exclusively on the wellbeing of oneself or only on that of those close to oneself are narcissistic rather than genuinely religious, that they border on attempts magically and hubristically to manipulate the religious ultimate, and that they fail to symbolize an authentically religious concentration on the religious ultimate itself, on its inherent values and demands, and on the welfare and needs of all the beings it encompasses.

religious ultimates are and commitment, and of such ultimates can to being acknowledged

Lest we be inclined to think, however, that symbols and their evocative power are operative solely in the fields of art and religion, and that we need be concerned with their truth or falsity, value or disvalue,4 only in those domains, it is necessary for us to recognize that symbols of many different kinds also play powerful roles in day-to-day secular affairs. Such recognition can help to cast into bold relief the singular and indispensable character of symbols and symbolic ways of perceiving and apprehending in every aspect of life. I want to call attention in the next section, therefore, to some highly influential secular symbols and secular uses of symbolization. Critical assessment of truth and falsity in the suggestive import of these symbols as well can be a matter of crucial importance. I shall comment on three types of secular symbols in the next section, namely, those in the realms of politics, economics, and sports.

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Secular Symbols and Truth The flags of various countries are symbols of those countries, of their histories, of their involvements in wars past and present, of their accomplishments, of their struggles, of their ideals, and the like. Citizens of those countries can often be deeply inspired and motivated to serve and defend their countries even at the risk of their lives when in the presence of or in memory of these flags. Burning them or allowing them to become frazzled or faded is often regarded as deeply offensive and unpatriotic or even as deserving of legal penalties. National flags are not just pieces of colored bunting waving in the breeze but powerful symbols of the country and all that it means to its citizens. Francis Scott Key’s poem inspired by his vision of the American flag waving triumphantly over Fort McHenry after a battle against the British in the War of 1812 has now become the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” another stimulating political symbol and the national anthem of the United States. It is extremely difficult if not impossible to put into words what these two symbols can mean to devoted citizens of the United States. The case is similar with the flags of other countries, although their meanings may sometimes be primarily negative for citizens who feel oppressed by the current governments of their countries. The fasces symbol of the Italian nation under Mussolini before and during World War II was adopted from an ancient symbol of the Roman Republic. It contains fasces or rods tightly bound together and accompanied by an axe head. The fasces are symbolic of the people of Italy and their various organizations and enterprises. Their being bound tightly together is a symbol of national unity, and the axe head symbolizes the state’s power of life and death over its citizens. The symbol in this instance is one of autocracy, of tight-binding control by the state and its leader, Il Duce, over its people. The symbol e pluribus unum found on the coins of the United States and on its Great Seal is, by contrast, meant to be a symbol of participatory democracy, of the unity that results from the consent of the governed (the many) with their diverse backgrounds rather than being imposed from above. The Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor, with its warm welcoming of immigrants of diverse nationalities and backgrounds, many of them poor or oppressed, is a similar symbol of democracy in the United States. The Nazi swastika and its tri-colored (black, white, and red) flag, once a symbol of renewed national pride, hope, and aspiration for the

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German people, has now become a symbol of demonic oppression and evil, of the virulent racism and ruthless war-mongering of the German nation under Hitler. Both the Nazi and Italian fascists in the first half of the twentieth century were keenly aware of the critical importance and influence of political symbols and used many types of them unsparingly during the time of their ascendancy. Torchlight parades, immense gatherings of people, huge serried ranks of soldiers, emotional speeches, monumental buildings, films, photographs, posters, music, and other kinds of symbolic rites and expressions were widely used to engender national solidarity, aspiration, and pride—along with rabid racism directed particularly at Jews but also against Gypsies, Slavs, and others. Bolsheviks were symbolically demonized in similar fashion. The myth of the destiny of the Aryan peoples to rule was promulgated as justification for the conquest or persecution of so-called non-Aryans. Symbolism reflective of the glory of ancient Rome was appropriated by the Italian fascists, and Nordic runes, tales, and other kinds of symbolism were widely employed by the Nazis to bolster the myth of membership in a triumphant Aryan race. Not just militant repression of dissent by the heavy hand of central authority but clever and highly effective political symbols were used by both fascist governments to weld their peoples into a fervent spirit of national unity and collective commitment. An especially effective use of this latter tactic were the carefully planned ceremonies and rites used to inculcate National Socialist values and loyalties through various stages of the maturation of members of the Hitler Youth organization. The required regular “Heil Hitler” salute, the mystification of Hitler as the anointed der Führer, and the jackbooted uniforms with their cryptic Nordic insignia are other examples of such symbolism. Feelings of national pride and devotion as well as of the dreadful power of the state and its leaders were evoked by such symbols in Nazi Germany. The German minister of propaganda, Paul Joseph Goebbels, became nefariously proficient in directing their design and use. The truth or falsity of all such political symbols turns not only on their ability to evoke sensitivity and dedication to values, but also on the kinds of sensitivities and values they evoke. Here the criteria of appraisal are mainly moral, but they can incorporate aspects of religious judgment and judgments of long-term political effectiveness as well. The intended meanings and uses of symbols in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are now widely and wisely judged to have been grossly immoral and to have lacked long-term effectiveness in sustaining political order and stability, either

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internally or among nations. Of course, these meanings and uses also ran strongly against the grain of the fundamental values of the Jewish and Christian religions, although the latter was often guilty in the past of its own forms of ruthless anti-Semitism and suppressions of diversity and dissent. To the extent that these moral, political, and religious considerations have force, the Italian fascist and Nazi symbols can be said to be false in the TS sense of false. To the extent that the indicated symbols of the United States function as described, they can be characterized as true, although it needs to be acknowledged that they have not always functioned in these ways in particular situations. The symbolism of the American flag, for example, has sometimes been used to bolster imperialism or arrogant claims to dominance, exploitation, and exclusivism (just as, by analogy, the symbolism of the Christian cross has been put to evil use by the Ku Klux Klan). Even at their best, American symbolisms cannot lay claim to being exclusively true. The symbolisms of other nation states can contain considerable TS truth as well, even when they differ in particular ways from the American ones. And they may be superior to American ones in some significant respects. Thus, different kinds of political symbolism can be true in different ways. And the particular forms of democracy in the United States may not be suitable for all nations, given their varied histories and different deeply engrained patterns of culture. Before leaving the topic of political symbols, I want to make brief mention of another sort of symbol that is proving to be particularly important in today’s world. This is the symbolism of the possession of atomic weapons. This possession is not only a touted means of national defense against other nations that possess such weapons. It has also become a powerful symbol of national sovereignty and national pride, as well as of a sort of parity among the nations of the earth. Taking into account this symbolic significance of the possession of atomic weapons is an important consideration when Western nations—especially those already possessing such weapons—deal with Eastern ones that do not possess them but are bent on attaining them. The safety of the world might well depend on the progressive elimination of such weapons from the arsenals of nations rather than steady increases in the number of nations coming into possession of them. But the symbolic significance of these weapons also cries out for recognition, and this recognition can be a crucial factor in their worldwide diminution and possible eventual elimination. All nations are victims, so to speak, of

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this symbolism, not just those nations currently lacking atomic weapons. I submit that political symbols calling for the decrease of such weapons in all nations are superior in TS truth value to those that urge their continuing increase, and competitive procuration, and hoarding. One such symbol is the symbol for worldwide nuclear disarmament, based on the combined semaphore signals for “N” (Nuclear) and “D” (Disarmament), and designed by Gerald Holtom in 1958. This symbol, often known as the peace symbol, has gained some currency among concerned citizens of the world, and we can only hope that the truth it expresses will become more widespread, thought-provoking, and motivating as well. It is truth with profound religious as well as moral significance for all religions, including Religion of Nature. Ignoring the truth expressed by this symbol threatens to bring about a hell of global devastation and destruction for the nations of earth. I turn next to economic symbols. There are many of these, of course, but I want here to focus on two in order to show how important economic symbols can be to the policies and practices of nations and to the outlooks of institutions and individuals within those nations. The two symbols I shall discuss are those of the free market and the gross domestic product. These two are not just straightforward doctrines or resources of economics. They are also potent symbols that reach beyond economics to conjure up for many persons fundamental ideals of national progress, strength, and pride. The idea of an unmixed free market is one in which the laws of supply and demand are allowed to operate unhindered by any kind of government regulation or control. This idea implies untrammeled freedom of individuals and businesses to compete openly in the marketplace, allowance of prices to find their own levels as dictated solely by the market, and adamant resistance to any governmental attempts to mitigate the losses of individuals or businesses in the process. Workers whose jobs might be lost with the failures of businesses that employ them are to be left without governmental aid or recourse in the free market conception. They must fend for themselves and seek other employment on their own without government help. Businesses that fail must be allowed to do so. They have not competed successfully in a market where supply and demand must be allowed to rule. Similarly, nations are subject to the pure demands of the marketplace. Tariffs, tax breaks, subsidies, bail-outs, or government aid of any kind for businesses or industries within those nations are entirely out

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of order. In sum, each individual, business, and nation has to compete entirely on its own without the help of its government. Any suggestion of central government help, monitoring, management, or control must be forcibly resisted. According to free market thinking, such an approach will automatically weed out the weak and unsuccessful and ensure a vibrant, flourishing economy overall. Successful entrepreneurs and prosperous nations, ones that have won out in an intensely competitive and unregulated marketplace, are regarded as effective concrete symbolizations and exemplars of the free market idea. Who is to care for the basic needs such as food, shelter, and health care of individuals who are left without resources as the result of failure in free market competition? The free market answer is that these persons can be helped by private charities and require no help from their governments. Too much help is detrimental anyway, so the free market argument goes, because it encourages laziness and chronic dependency. Taxes should be kept to an absolute minimum and used sparingly only for absolutely necessary infrastructure and defense. There should be no government checks on the growth of monopolies, since the highly successful must be allowed to win out over the less successful. Regulations of business practices are not needed, since these will be automatically controlled in the long run, if not the short run, by businesses themselves as they respond to the rigorous demands of the marketplace. By each person, business, or nation persistently seeking its own profit and advantage, the market will ensure that there is a net outcome of gain for most, if not all. Personal egoism or the pursuit of institutional or national interest in the service of free market good is no vice. The idea of the free market has had strong appeal in some quarters of society in the United States. It symbolizes for the people to whom it appeals values such as freedom, self-reliance, hard work, appropriate rewards, and just deserts. It also symbolizes for them the ideal of a small, nonintrusive central government and a consequent radical reduction of inevitable government corruption and waste. This symbolism is often allowed to triumph over careful, strictly empirical economic investigation, showing that something more is going on than conscientious inquiry into or advocacy of effective economic principles and practices. The latter would need to bring to light what the symbolism tends to slough over. One of these omitted items is that there is not today and never has been a completely free market. All markets are mixed to a significant degree, meaning that there can at best only be approximations to the ideal

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of a completely free market. This fact in itself implies that the ideal in its pure form is flawed and impractical, and therefore in need of qualification and revision. The idea of the free market also fails to take into account the growth of monopolies that effectively eliminate competition and any control competition might exert on the prices of goods and services for the consumer. The idea does not factor in effects of mass advertising on demands and prices. By this means rich minorities or large businesses can affect the views and buying habits of the less wealthy, sometimes very much to their detriment. The real values of or needs for particular goods and services can be skewed in this way. In addition, the idea of the free market fails to take sufficient notice of the externalities of business practices, that is, the effects of such things as pollution, the continuing use and depletion of nonrenewable resources, the destruction of natural environments, and the toll taken on the health of humans and nonhuman species of plant and animal. These are aspects of environmental “capital” for which, in the absence of government regulation, no price is fixed or exacted from the businesses or industries that silently and steadily draw on them. Use of the public infrastructure is another way in which business enterprises are invariably helped by and depend on government. And there is the observation that the staunch individualism implicit in the idea of the free market is called into question by the fact that some individuals are much more endowed at birth with caring parents, financial well-being, safe neighborhoods, educational opportunities, good health, and native ability than others. So these individuals start off in the economic competition with distinct advantages over their less fortunate peers. Government aid of various sorts may well be needed to help the more disadvantaged and to level the playing field. The idea of the free market also fails to take fully into account the historical fact of cycles of boom and bust that occur in economies and the need for government controls and interventions to help even out these cycles and deal with them when they occur. There are also natural disasters that neither individual states nor private businesses have the means or motivation to deal with effectively, and where the resources of central governments are required. Finally, private charities usually do not have sufficient resources or scope to care for the needs of all those who are hurt by the competitiveness of the marketplace or to satisfy their basic needs and those of their families for such things as food, shelter, and medical care. All of these entirely legitimate concerns tend to be overlooked or deliberately ignored in the pure ideal of a free market.

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Why is this so? My answer is that it is partly if not largely due to the fact that the idea is not so much a clear-cut, well thought-out economic theory as a kind of insistent symbolism that exerts its effects on levels below those that are primarily empirical, rational, or even fully conscious. The same thing could be said, by the way, of the idea of an economy completely or overwhelmingly controlled by a central government. Neither extreme position can stand up under empirical or rational scrutiny, meaning that support for either is more likely than not to reflect the vested and veiled interests of the few at the expense of the many, and the necessity, therefore, for the few to find ways to hoodwink the many into acceptance of an idea that works to the advantage of the few but to the detriment of the many. Here, an appeal to logical reasoning is not nearly as attractive as techniques of symbolical persuasion, showing how important it is that influential economic symbols be carefully examined for their truth or falsity. The extent to which governments should care for their peoples is debatable, but that they should plan and act to do so in a variety of ways not encompassed in the ideology of the free market is not. In this connection, I commend the words of the Puritan Father John Winthrop as he led his followers to the new world in the seventeenth century, there to establish “a city on the hill” that could be a light to the nations of the world: We must be willing to abridge ourselves or our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.5 Here a quite different spirit breathes than that of unbridled competition and leaving out of consideration those liable to be wounded by it. Winthrop’s words are spoken in support of community sharing and caring, of taking responsibility for those who may be marginalized or placed in desperate situations without appropriate government intervention and support. The symbolism of the free market needs to be replaced by symbols more adequate to the ideal of a just economy. Civic justice and appropriate care for the weak and needy as well as necessary restraint on the potential tyranny of the strong and well-off are crucial considerations in weighing the truth or falsity of leading economic symbols.

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Like the imagery of the free market, the gross domestic product figures also have a symbolic force and significance that can profoundly affect policies and decisions, and should therefore not be overlooked. How these figures are regarded, publicized, and used are the keys to their symbolic meaning. The gross domestic product (GDP) of a nation is the value of the goods and services produced within its borders in a given time period, usually annually. It includes public and private consumption or spending, government outlays, investments, and exports (minus imports) within that nation.6 The GDP acquires charged symbolic significance when it is used, as it frequently and carelessly is, to determine the welfare of a nation as a whole and to ascertain whether it is developing or declining over time. Thus, as environmental historian Steven Stoll puts the matter, national welfare is reduced “to national income, regardless of the social distribution or ecological effects of wealth.”7 When the GDP is routinely and instinctively interpreted and used as the measure of a nation’s total well-being, its function as a symbol is clearly revealed. It is not the limited literal meaning of the GDP that matters and is carried over into awareness in such customary usage but its more sweeping symbolic significance and effect. For this reason, I refer to the GDP as a pervasively important and influential secular symbol. Stoll is right to point out the misleading or, as he terms it, the “mismeasuring” character of this symbolism. Two of the important factors it overlooks, as he indicates, are the distribution of the national income or wealth and the ecological effects of its production. A nation can continue to grow and look healthy in terms of its overall increase in productivity and income while many if not most of its citizens fail to benefit from it, the bulk of the wealth going to a small minority of its citizens and the actual individual producers of that wealth being paid below subsistence wages, with few if any benefits, in bad working conditions. And a growing GDP by itself does not address, and is by nature blind to, the issue of possible serious and ever-growing environmental damage and depletion of nonrenewable resources resulting from the assumed successes of the businesses and industries to which it refers. As with the symbolism of the free market, the environmental externalities are left out of account in the symbolism of the GDP. The latter’s seeming numerical precision and ready availability mask its inadequacy as the measure of a nation’s economic well-being and that of the full range of its citizens. Contrary to the conviction that growth in a nation’s GDP is always a good thing and an adequate measure of a nation’s progress, Stoll observes concerning such growth in the United States over the past thirty years,

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If we counted up all the damage done in the name of growth— the unions busted when jobs went abroad, the lower wages and depleted benefits workers accepted for the same reason, the foreclosed mortgages sold by lenders in order to boost their earnings for shareholders, if we tally the rainforests cut, the ocean floors raked over, and the drought damage in Texas due to the highest CO2 concentrations in human history—the [GDP] numbers would reveal a falling line.8 Human costs and environmental costs are thus covertly filtered out in the secular symbolism of the GDP. Not to recognize the deceptive character of the way in which the GDP is frequently interpreted and used is to fail to understand its inadequacy and degree of falsity as a sufficient symbolic measure of a nation’s progress or well-being. In making the judgments I have of the symbolic falsity of the goal of an unmixed free market and of the prevalent use of the GDP figures to measure what is purported to be the prosperity and growth of nation states, I am showing myself to be a liberal in the area of economics. Conservative thinkers would be likely to take issue with some of my judgments. But my central point is that these two areas of economic thought function partly as symbols, and that they can and need to be assessed for their symbolic and not just their prosaic or literal significance. Careful attention also needs to be paid to who loses and who gains from the prominent advocacy and use of such symbols. The last type of secular symbolism I want briefly to discuss is that of sports. Symbols are rampant in the area of sports. There are the players’ numbers or team logos on items of clothing such as shirts, jackets, and hats, as well as on flags, stickers, license plates, and stuffed animals. There are the totemic animals symbolic of teams, such as bears, wildcats, fish, birds, tigers, and lions. There is the fact that teams are often regarded as symbols of cities and tokens of urban pride. The success or failure of a team in a given season can contribute significantly to the moods of optimism or depression of an area’s people, especially on mornings after big games. The symbolism of sports often figures prominently in conversations among sports fans, giving them much to discuss and argue about. Rivalries can be created that sometimes break out into violence. Sports can tap deeply into the psyches of individuals, giving them a sense of identity and belonging and activating instincts of conflict, struggle, and competition. The fact that sports reporting pervades the news media, taking up much

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of the time, space, and energy of the media’s discussion and reporting, shows how powerful the symbolism of sports can be. The large amounts of money spent on recruitments, salaries, stadiums, sports advertisements, boostering, and the like also testify to the efficacy of this symbolism. If we ever needed to wonder about the significance of nondiscursive symbols in the lives of individuals or in their collective consciousness and unconsciousness, we need only call to mind the prominence of sports and their symbols around the world and throughout the history of human life in the world. Part of the restored seventeenth-century Franciscan Mission San Luis in Tallahassee, Florida, where I live, is a large field on which Native Americans (Apalachee and Timucuan) would play traditional games with a small ball and do so after elaborate preparatory rituals. The competition was fierce and would involve a large number of players. It was serious business freighted with symbolic meaning. That same ritualistic and communal intensity is carried over into today’s sports, showing their symbolic character. Extremes of time, energy, money, and attention paid to sports and the corrupt practices that sometimes accompany the sports themselves, for example, those of illicit recruiting, game fixing, drugging, and excessive exploitations of the time and energy of student athletes supposedly in college primarily to receive an education, are indications of elements of possible falsity latent in, encouraged by, or brought about by their powerful symbolic effects. The possibility of corruption is especially great when huge amounts of money are involved in television promotions and screenings of college and professional games. Participation in athletic games and enjoyment of spectator sports can contribute importantly to the pleasure and quality of life, but they can also pose dangers for which society needs to be constantly on guard. Herein lie both the possible truth and the possible falsity of the potent symbolic role of sports in society and in individual human lives. Given the quite evident power and convincingness of political, economic, and sports symbols, we should be sure not to underestimate the fundamental significance of symbols in religion, a significance that reaches beyond, and sometimes far beyond, any literal meanings they might suggest or be thought to convey. As I indicated in Chapter 4, ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing the functions of symbols qua symbols is a mistake made by religious literalists and by those who tend to identify all religion with such literalism. Such an approach misses much of the point of religion and of its characteristic modes of expression.

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In this chapter I have tried to bring into focus the nature of symbolic truth and falsity, using examples of both religious and secular symbols to clarify and explain what this truth and falsity are like, in contrast with the truth and falsity of discursive statements. I have made brief excursuses into the central roles played by secular symbols in the domains of politics, economics, and sports in order to help to make evident in this comparative manner the crucial importance of nondiscursive symbols and symbolic expressions in religion. And I have called attention to aspects and indications of symbolic truth and falsity in these domains as well as in the religious one. By doing so in this chapter and by my discussions and arguments elsewhere in this book so far, I am giving strong endorsement to what Henry Samuel Levinson cites as a central theme of philosopher George Santayana’s five-volume work, The Life of Reason: “The institutions of common sense, society, religion, art, and science or learning and reflection involve many patterns of thinking and practice that are affectional, expressive, and visionary as well as cognitive or doctrinal.”9 In the final chapter of this book, I shall offer further examples, in addition to those already indicated, of how nondiscursive symbols can be employed in articulations and celebrations of Religion of Nature.

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. . . [S]ymbols seem to have a life of their own. We do not choose them, they choose us. Symbols seem to emerge from and speak to levels deeper than our conscious awareness. —Darrell J. Fasching, Dell Dechant, David M. Lantigua1

Introduction Are religious symbols matters of choice? Can we invent them at will? Do we find them, or do they find us? Just as we routinely find words to express our thoughts and intentions (as I am doing now), can we not find symbols to express our religious experiences, outlooks, and commitments? The answer to these questions is an equivocal yes and no. Religious symbols do “choose us” in the sense of resonating with something deep inside us and arousing in us recognition of profound insights or truths in ways that ordinary metaphors or other figures of speech do not. This fact, however, does not leave us incapable of exploring various candidates for religious symbolism and testing them for their appropriateness in expressing what we experience religiously and in the depths of our souls. A composer of music, to cite a relevant analogy, may have a profound inspiration welling up from the unconsciousness but will still be required to work arduously to construct the symphony that can give satisfying expression to the inspiration. The inspiration may come to the composer unsought, perhaps at some odd moment, but it is up to him or her to cast it into musical form. Not just musical inspiration, but a musician’s skill is required. 139

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In similar fashion, we do not arbitrarily construct or create the significant meanings that important religious symbols convey, nor can we by sheer acts of will bring about the revelatory insights, breakthroughs, and experiences that give rise to or lie behind these symbols. But we can use our normal intelligence and discretion in evaluating the adequacy of particular symbols and in searching for ones that can be especially fitting or powerful expressions of religious truths. Moreover, the history of religions already provides ample examples of symbols that might be appropriated for use in the context of other religious outlooks, including that of Religion of Nature. We do not need to discover anew, much less try to create from scratch, all symbols to be put to use in new contexts. The point holds true for me as a proponent of Religion of Nature as it does for proponents of other versions of religious naturalism. There is a rich field of already existing religious symbolisms of various kinds. In this chapter I shall propose and discuss symbols and symbolic practices of various kinds, showing their appropriateness, sometimes when reinterpreted, recontextualized, or revised, for Religion of Nature and other types of religious naturalism. I shall do so under several headings, starting with the figure of speech known as a synecdoche.

Synecdoches The type of synecdoche I shall be concerned with in this section uses a part of something to suggest or refer to the whole of it. For example, to say that someone “summited” a high mountain means that he or she climbed the whole mountain and reached its peak or summit. To speak of “Bluebeard” can be to evoke the image of a fictional pirate known by a significant part of his appearance, namely, his dark beard. Similarly, the Quasimodo of fiction was known by the citizens of Paris as the “Hunchback” of Notre Dame. A pasque flower or crocus newly emerged from the snow might be noted as the welcoming sign of a change into a whole new season, or the song of a lark might be cited as signaling the dawn of a glorious new day. The function of a synecdoche is like the tip of an iceberg that gives notice of the bulk of the berg floating in the sea. I made use of something akin to a synecdoche in my musings in earlier chapters on the pelican and the hummingbird, both evocative of the magnificence of the whole of nature. And the epigraph to Chapter 5, in which Friedrich Schleiermacher contends that every particular thing in

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nature is a miracle testifying to the sacredness of nature as a whole, can be read as affirming a kind of synecdoche, calling attention to each part of nature as a sign of the character of it as a whole. I am in firm agreement with Schleiermacher that every part of nature, from cyanobacteria that can only be observed under a microscope or subatomic particles (or wavicles) that can be mathematically described but not directly observed, to gigantic whales or a spiral galaxy, can sing the praises of nature. Each part of nature, properly regarded, is a symbol of the whole and as such can evoke a sense of the sublimity and mystery of the whole. Each proclaims the glory of nature and our privilege as humans to be conscious participants in the processes of nature. We need go no farther than our backyards to find effective symbols for Religion of Nature. Every blade of grass or clump of moss, every grasshopper or butterfly, every flower or tree, every squirrel or chickadee, every setting sun or rising moon, every wafting breeze or hammering rain storm—each in its own right and all together are symbols of the sanctity of nature and of its entitlement to our humble religious respect, gratitude, and praise. If we do not have a backyard but live in an apartment in the city, everything in our apartment and everything of human construction in the city can point to nature as a whole, since all of it is made from materials whose ultimate origin is natural. Every amazingly intricate part and function of our bodies makes tacit reference to the whole of nature that makes it possible. The same is true of every newborn human child with all of its potential for growth and development and of the lives and achievements of particular adult human beings in their specific cultures and historical settings. The human aspects of nature can function as symbolic synecdoches in their turn, pointing to the fascination and splendor of the whole of nature. Wherever they look, the ultimacy of nature can be symbolically referenced and evoked for proponents of Religion of Nature.

Prayer and Meditation Two symbolic acts of great importance in religion are prayer and meditation. Prayer is a common practice in religions devoted to some sort of deity or deities, while meditation is characteristic of religious outlooks that focus on some nonpersonal principle, conception, or goal such as Nirguna Brahman, nirvana, or the Dao. But I am convinced that both

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prayer and meditation can be significant symbolic actions in Religion of Nature, and in this section I shall offer an example of each. There are many different kinds of prayer. These include prayers of praise, confession, thanksgiving, commiseration and empathy, aspiration, and petition. The only one of these inappropriate to Religion of Nature is the prayer of petition because nature as a whole is impersonal and we would not expect it to be responsive to requests to decide to act in certain ways. Instead of petition, there can be prayerful expressions of concern for others and of commiseration and empathy for them in their trials and sufferings. We can certainly express praise for nature (although we cannot meaningfully offer or address praise to it, as though it were personal) for its awesome beauties and wonders and for the nurture and support it regularly affords to us and to all living creatures. We can confess in prayers our repentance for ways in which we fall short of appropriately reverencing nature and working to respect and protect the rights of its creatures, including its human creatures. Does it make sense to express in prayer thankfulness for nature and our place in nature, in view of the fact that nature is impersonal? I believe that it does. In doing so, we are not so much thanking nature in the way we would thank a person (or deity) who has decided to bestow a benefit on us, as expressing our gratitude for being alert and alive and for all the good within and around us as creatures of nature. Included in this thanksgiving can be expressions of gratefulness for family and friends, community and nation. Prayers of thanks for our daily meals are encouraged in Religion of Nature, and the long sanctioned prayers of thanks for a bountiful harvest would certainly be fitting for Religion of Nature. Prayers of aspiration are particularly appropriate in this religious outlook, for they express our determination and resolve to be of use to nature in a wide variety of ways rather than callously using nature for narrow, exclusively human purposes. An example of a prayer with some of these elements is this one, written by my wife Pam and me for use at the beginning of the day: This day is a gift for which we truly give thanks. What shall we do with this fresh new day? How shall we live it as to express our thankfulness for it? Shall we spend it with regrets about the past or worries about the future, about what might have been or what could possibly be?

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Shall we waste it on self-pity or on being critical of others? Or shall we seize it gratefully and live it fully, in helpfulness to one another and to all living beings? The choice is ours; we are free to form ourselves. Whatever paths we take, we take with loving hearts and trusting commitment. For all that is good about this day, let us give thanks. For whatever may seem to be not so good in this new day, Let us acknowledge that it can contribute to the good of another day. To agathon, to agathon! Lines 4 through 6 of this prayer implicitly express awareness of the temptation to be narrowly self-centered and our confession of presently being susceptible to this temptation and of having often succumbed to it in the past. Lines 7 through 10 express our aspiration and resolve to live lives of helpfulness and service to one another and to all living beings. Lines 1 and 11 through 13 are expressions of thankfulness. Lines 12 and 13 give implicit thanks for living in this world despite its trials, uncertainties, and ambiguities and they express confidence and hope in doing so. The Greek exclamations at the end, serving as a kind of “amen,” mean literally “the good, the good!” With these closing words we express both our thankfulness for the good in our lives and in all of nature and our resolve to serve that good. As an advocate of Religion of Nature, I do not propose that nature be worshipped, since nature is not personal and should not be symbolized or treated as personal. Worship is appropriate only for a personal deity or deities. Nature contains persons, of course, but it should not be thought of as having personality or intentionality as a whole. It is entirely fitting that it be reverenced, although it cannot be worshipped. In similar fashion, it would make no sense for a proponent of Religion of Nature to pray to nature. Prayers of thanksgiving, for example, are not to be addressed to nature. Rather, they are expressions of gratitude on our part for such things as our being natural creatures with life and conscious awareness and for having nature as our home, along with all the rest of our fellow natural beings. Prayers of thanksgiving are celebrations, not addresses to nature as personal. It should be noticed that in the example of a prayer I provide above, there is no explicit or implicit reference to nature as personal or as personally responsive to prayer. Adherents of Religion of

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Nature neither worship nature nor pray to nature. Such actions are not part of its symbolic outlook or practice. Meditations partake of the mood of prayer and are closely related to prayer, but they are not quite the same thing as prayer. To meditate religiously is to reflect deeply and in a sustained fashion on some focus of concern, whether it be emptying the mind of distractions that bar the way to deeper awareness of a religious ultimate or strengthening and intensifying in some other directed way awareness of that ultimate. One can meditate on personal or impersonal ultimates, meaning that meditation can be a significant aspect of the devotional practices of Religion of Nature, with its focus on an impersonal nature. And I use the term devotional practice advisedly, since one can be devoted to nature as that in which one has one’s being and all else has its being without regarding it as personal. Sometimes it helps to have a particular object as the focus of one’s religious meditation. I have meditated with great profit and insight on the slow and careful eating of an orange or raisin, savoring all the overtones of their flavors and searching out with my tongue their distinctive shapes and textures. In the process, I have been reminded of the intricate marvels and bountiful gifts of nature. I append here a meditative focus on a candle flame that I experienced several years ago. It took place in a quiet, dark room, seated with others in the presence of a single flickering candle. In what I wrote about the experience a day or so later, I direct attention to the candle’s symbolism of the gift of each person’s fleeting life. This meditation can be set in the context of commitment to the ultimacy of nature. In a meditation class I sat looking intently at a burning candle that had been placed on the floor. It was a stout little candle, and as it burned one could see the pool of melted wax around its wick. It had quite a way to go before it burned away its body and, with that, all of its fuel. It rose, fell, and swayed in the faint breezes that only it could feel. The room was completely dark, except for the tiny bit of light it shed—the light of one candle-power. Yet it made the room seem cozy and cheerful, sending out its little shafts of light and making shadows flit merrily about the room. It seemed confident and assured as it danced and glowed. It was doing what it could to give light to the room. It was not a raging bonfire or a fiery furnace. It

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was not even a hundred-watt bulb. But it brought light into the world. I thought to myself: Our lives are much like that candle. Our bodies too are steadily burning away as we age. We have only a limited time to live before our lives are snuffed out, just as the candle’s flame will be extinguished when its body and fuel are consumed. We may not have the abundant, impressive talents of some others. We may not make a massive contribution to the world, and whatever contribution we do make may soon be forgotten after we are gone. Just as old burnt-out candles are disposed of and new candles put in their place, so our finite lives must give way to those who come after us. But we can shed as much light as possible while we are alive, drawing in community with others on the unique, irreplaceable capabilities of the individual selves bestowed on us as gifts of nature. We can do so with thankfulness for our ability to serve and with a sense of inner confidence and peace. When it is time for the flame of our lives to be snuffed out, we can rejoice in the light that we have been able to bring into the world, even if it has been only a tiny flicker and has lasted for only a brief time. Meditation need not be an emptying of thought, although this kind of meditation can be of great value in helping to clear the mind of trivialities, distractions, and tendencies that clutter up and misdirect one’s life. Meditation can also be a stimulus to reflection, as in this example, and effective actions and deeds of service can be energized by such reflections. Meditation has a fundamental place, therefore, as a symbolic practice for Religion of Nature. It helps to prepare us for service in the world, a world that includes other human beings as well as innumerable creatures of nature different from ourselves, creatures whom we also have grave responsibility to treat with thoughtful affection and care. Before leaving the topic of meditation I want to say something about Religion of Nature’s way of responding to the death of a loved one, since this loss can be a major challenge to our ability to continue to affirm life. There is no promise of an afterlife in Religion of Nature, so what sort of comfort can it provide in the face of such a loss? My mother was a Christian throughout her life, and when she was cared for by a hospice agency in the last days of her life, she exhibited no horror of death. She was “ready,” she said, and looked forward to “seeing Momma and Papa”

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(her parents) in her resurrected afterlife. Those who shared her faith could be confident that her life and consciousness had not been extinguished. But without such confidence, what sort of solace can Religion of Nature offer to someone who is grieving the death of a loved one—a child, spouse, parent, relative, or friend? My response to this searching question is to imagine a symbol of dying and grieving that adherents of Religion of Nature or other types of religious naturalism might find to be helpful and meaningful. The suggested symbol is a leaf that falls from a deciduous tree with the coming of autumn. Other living leaves will come after this one with the reawakening of spring. But this leaf will live no more. It has made a critical contribution, while green and alive, to the ongoing life of the tree. However, its contribution does not end with its death. It also provides food for the numerous microorganisms that feed on it and reduce it finally to part of a humus layer that marks the transition from the organic to the inorganic character of the soil beneath the tree. As humus, various essential elements are recycled into the soil, elements that fertilize the tree. In this manner, the leaf serves to give ongoing life to the tree and other forms of life, but in a different way from when it was alive. Meditating on the symbol of the dead leaf can offer a kind of comfort and reassurance on experiencing the death of a loved one. Such loved ones are truly dead and shall not rise again. But their contributions to our own lives and to the ongoingness of the world do not cease with their deaths. We can continue to reflect on and be influenced by all they have meant to us while alive, thus carrying their past contributions into our present lives. We can translate these contributions into deeds of service to others, either explicitly in their name or in tacit recognition of what their lives meant to us while they lived. My father, before he died, said that he would continue to watch over his children and monitor how we lived after he was gone. He would do so, he informed us, as a “haint” in a tree above our houses and that we should look for him there. My father was a Southerner born and bred, and a haint is evidently a ghost of the departed. For me, his touching image symbolizes the countless ways in which his life continues to haunt mine and to motivate me to build on these ways and carry them forth into the world. We can seek to embody in our own lives, in other words, what our loved ones’ lives have meant to us, even if they died as young children.2 We can aspire to do so, not only for our own sakes, but in order to draw on the inspiration of the loved ones’ lives in ways that enhance the contributions

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of our lives while we live. In the perspective of Religion of Nature, these contributions should definitely include but also extend beyond the community of human beings to the larger community of all natural beings. In this way our lives can be a kind of humus for the world, humus that carries over and recycles, as it were, the enduring influences on us of those whom we have loved who have now sunk into the silence of death. The key to this symbolism of the leaf is, I believe, that it can help to keep us from concentrating exclusively on ourselves and our experience of grief and to direct our attention toward those that presently live—human and nonhuman alike. The grief is inescapably real and must be lived through in its own time, but a significant part of its insight and energy can in the proper time be turned toward the needs of others. In this way, the contributions of those who have died can be transmitted to the lives of these others. Just as the fallen leaf is dead but its effects on microorganisms and the tree go on, so we can seek ways to carry the influence of departed loved ones into the land of the living. The loss of loved ones is agonizingly real, and its pain will never entirely end. But the pain can be accompanied by grateful remembrance of what their lives have given to us and can continue through us to be given in service to the world.

Rituals Rituals of many types are appropriate for Religion of Nature. Examples are celebrations of the morning and evening; rituals orienting to the four points of the compass, suggesting fealty to the whole of the earth and its creatures; rituals recognizing the equinoxes and solstices; rituals bearing on birth, entry into adulthood, marriage, career, child bearing and rearing, advancing age, and death; rituals of rejoicing and those of mourning; rituals of fasting and those of grateful communal eating and drinking; and rituals of confession, penance, and recommitment. All such rituals can evoke and enact a sense of the mystery and wonder of an all-surrounding nature and of our place and responsibility as human beings within it. A ritual that can be particularly meaningful for proponents of Religion of Nature is the ritual of the Cosmic Walk. The earliest version of this ritual was envisioned by Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, of the Sisters of St. Dominic’s Genesis Farm in New Jersey, in the 1980s. Different versions of it have been developed since then, but the basic idea is the same. The idea is celebration of the Epic of Cosmic Evolution, from the time

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of the supposed Big Bang to the present. Sister MacGillis was inspired to create this ritual by the writings of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. A large spiral is laid out on the floor or on the ground. Its central point symbolizes the Big Bang, while the spiral’s end represents the present. Crucial milestones in the evolution of our universe are marked out on the spiral. These include such things as the emergence of galaxies, stars, and supernovae; the explosion of a supernova giving rise to our solar system; the birth of the moon from the impact of a body onto the earth—an event that also tilted the earth, producing the four seasons of the year; the formation of the earth’s atmosphere; the emergence of life on earth; the invention by cells of photosynthesis and the consequent profusion of oxygen into the atmosphere; the emergence of multicellular organisms; the coming of the first amphibian animals; the age of dinosaurs; the proliferation of mammals after the dinosaurs became extinct; the appearance of hominids; the emergence of humans; the origins of spoken and written language; the inventions of agriculture and domestication of animals; the age of classical religions; and the dawn of modern science. One person walks and lights, with a flame from a central fire, a candle at each of the milestones, while another person reads a description of the milestone. When they reach the end of the spiral, others can walk over each of the designated points of the evolution of the universe, finishing their walk at the symbolic point of our own time. This rich symbol traces out in action the current scientific story of our universe, of how we humans came to be a part of it, and how we came to recognize, respond to, and understand it. Carrying a centrally lighted flame in order to light each candle marking a new milestone is deeply symbolic of the cosmic energy erupting from the Big Bang that gave rise to every stage of the evolution of the cosmos and that continues to sustain its processes today. This flame is also symbolic of the creative power of the universe (natura naturans or “nature naturing”3) that has continued to give rise to a profusion of new structures and forms, including the life forms of earth and our own species. The ritual enacts in the form of a symbolic practice aspects of the cosmogonic story endorsed by Religion of Nature and recounted in Chapter 5, bringing it vividly to consciousness. It does so with a series of discrete, well-defined actions accompanied by attention to narrative and involving specific movements of the body. Reenactments of the ritual can plant its meanings ever more deeply in heart and mind. We humans are from the earth and of the earth, and our loyalty should be given to it,

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to all of its creatures, and to the dynamic, fecund system of nature of which we, they, and it are integral parts. The ritual of the Cosmic Walk can arouse not only a mood of grateful celebration but also a spirit of fervent dedication. This last point segues into the topic of the next section, which is symbols of sacrifice and self-giving and their importance for Religion of Nature.

Symbols of Sacrifice and Self-Giving In this section, I shall direct attention to a number of symbols bringing to mind what I referred to in Chapters 2 and 6—the demand aspect of religion in general and Religion of Nature in particular. More specifically, these symbols will suggest the need for humble sacrifice and selfgiving in one’s dedication and service to nature as the religious ultimate. These symbols include cosmic phenomena, animal behaviors, and human actions. I spoke above of the supernova that, by its explosion, gave of itself to produce our solar system. Our sun also continues to deplete its available energy through fusion reactions, thereby giving light and warmth to the earth. A part of the earth was given up in order to form the moon. Hordes of past species of life on earth have become extinct in order that new species can arise and flourish over stretches of time. Without such massive extinctions, we humans would never have arrived on earth. Individual organisms routinely die in order that new ones can take their place. I spoke in Chapter 2 of the imagery of the mother pelican pricking her breast to provide food for her young at times when food is scarce. Vervet monkeys and meerkats will have one animal stand guard as sentinel to give warning of the approach of predators while the others eat, thus endangering the life of that one animal. It sacrifices itself, at least potentially, on behalf of the whole group. The mother killdeer will feign injury and seem to run away in order to distract a predator from her nest, causing it to chase her instead. Walruses have adopted orphans who have lost their parents to predators. Dolphins support sick or wounded animals, swimming under them and pushing them to the surface in order for them to breathe.4 All of these natural phenomena can serve as images of sacrifice and self-giving in nature. Philosopher Eric Steinhart has brought to my attention the idea that much of nature is “a pure gift economy” or “an immense squandering with no reciprocation.”5 There is valuable symbolism in this fact for the living of our human lives.

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The most directly relevant symbolism, however, can be found in the human domain, for example, in the lives of inspirational religious leaders who gave so much of themselves in service to others, some of them even to the point of death. Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa served her Lord by setting up a ministry for the poor, orphaned, sick, and dying in the slums of Calcutta, and she died there in that ministry. Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and Protestant Christian Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated because of their unceasing work on behalf of Indian liberation from British rule, and of racially oppressed peoples in the United States, respectively. Protestant Albert Schweitzer gave up his work in Europe as a noted musician, Christian minister, and scholar in order to travel to Africa to spend the rest of his life caring for the sick there. In Chapter 3 I cited Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha as persons who devoted their lives in sacrificial service to others and to their respective religious ultimates. And in Chapter 4 I described the life of John Muir, who gave of himself tirelessly in service to nature and the wild places of nature. Each of these lives is a gripping and inspiring symbol of sacrifice and self-giving in service to a religious ultimate. We have much to learn from their paths of life. I want to focus here on a symbol of sacrifice that can be put to profitable use for Religion of Nature. This symbol is the Christian cross. The imagery of the cross need not be restricted to the Christian tradition. It has important symbolic meanings for life in general and for Religion of Nature more specifically. In the first place, Jesus announced that he had come not to be served but to serve, and to give his life for the well-being of many. He served in his ministry to the point of his crucifixion, dying in a way that in the Roman world, with its adulation of honor and glory, was regarded as the ultimate symbol of degradation and shame. While dying in agony on the cross, he asked God to forgive those who had treated him in this way. His humiliation was his triumph, the triumph of his consistent message of humble-hearted sacrificial love and of a God of saving love. In a book on this theme, historian John Dickson comments that “as a plain historical statement, humility came to be valued in Western culture as a consequence of Christianity’s dismantling of the all-pervasive honourshame paradigm of the ancient world.”6 Humility is a central virtue for Religion of Nature as well. I have repeatedly stressed the importance of humility in the presence of the magnificence of nature and in deeds of service to humans and other creatures of nature. I have also given great emphasis to the distortions

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of self-seeking idolatry and self-centeredness in religious life. The spirit of self-giving and self-sacrifice on behalf of others, human and nonhuman, as powerfully symbolized in the Christian cross, is readily adaptable to Religion of Nature. This spirit is beautifully described by theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: The humble spirit. I learn the meaning of the humble spirit from the earth. The earth takes into itself the rain, the heat of the sun, and it works with these gifts of life to bring magic out of itself to be used for growth and sustenance of all living things. The earth is good because it takes what life gives, and within itself it uses its gifts to make life abound. It waits for fruition and gathers its fruit unto itself for more life and growing. I shall learn of the earth the meaning of the humble spirit.7 “A pure gift economy,” as Steinhart terms it, surrounds us on every side. The symbolism of the Christian cross, as well as of that latent in countless self-giving aspects of nature, bids us to dedicate ourselves humbly but fervently to the welfare and integrity of nature and its creatures, human and nonhuman alike, here on earth. One way of adapting the symbolism of the Christian cross to Religion of Nature that I have recently imagined is the following. We can consider the cross’s vertical axis as rooted in the earth and pointing toward the sky. The rootedness in earth stands symbolically for our belonging to the earth as one of its creatures. The pointing to the sky reminds us that the earth is a spinoff of the sun that shines above us in the sky, and that the earth is a tiny part of a vast universe spread out into the farthest reaches of space. The vertical axis also symbolizes the energy from the sun that helps to provide food for plants and ultimately for all of the life-forms on earth, that powers the circulations of the winds and the recycling of water, and gives warmth and light to our planet. The horizontal arms of the cross symbolize our responsibility to care for the earth and all of the creatures on the face of the earth, to the extent that they are affected by our attitudes and actions. These arms of the cross are similar to the sheltering wings of the mother bird caring selflessly for her chicks. Instead of being self-centered, or even solely human-centered, we are called upon by Religion of Nature to be humbly and devotedly earth-centered. The Religion of Nature cross is thus, among other things, a cross of sacrifice and self-giving.

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To be a Muslim is to be “one who submits” in all humility to the majestic authority of Allah, and to be an adherent of Religion of Nature is to be one who submits in all humility to dedication to and service of nature. The spirit of the Christian cross and that of Islamic absolute submission to the will of Allah can be carried over into the symbolisms of Religion of Nature. The respective meanings and associations are of course not the same, but there are significant overlaps. Sacrifice and self-giving are central to the three religious outlooks. But the sacrifice is not merely dutiful self-effacment. It is thankful acknowledgment of all that has been given to us and stems from a profound desire to give back. None of us is completely autonomous, separate, or self-made. Most of what we are, we owe to things beyond ourselves, things such as our parents, our loved ones, our friends and acquaintances, our teachers, our institutions, our communities, our cultures, our histories, and our natural environments and the myriad creatures who inhabit and enrich them. Most fundamentally for Religion of Nature, we are what we are as the gift of nature as a whole. Sacrifice or self-giving, properly understood, is a sharing in the sharing, a grateful, humble participation in the allpervading gift economy of the world.

Other Symbols for Religion of Nature In this last section, I want to make mention of some other types of symbols that can be used to express and celebrate Religion of Nature’s vision of the world. Poems about nature can be found in abundance, and many of them can be of inspirational use in this regard. Nature poems can be read silently or aloud, alone or in groups. I am particularly fond of the poems and other writings of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, many of which proclaim the wondrous mystery and bounty of nature. Here is an example from his book entitled Fruit Gathering: O the waves, the sky-devouring waves, glistening with light, dancing with life, the waves of eddying joy, rushing for ever. The stars rock upon them, thoughts of every tint are cast up out of the deep and scattered on the beach of life. Birth and death rise and fall with their rhythm, and the sea-gull of my heart spreads its wings crying in delight.8

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Thankfulness and joy for the gift of life on earth reverberate in this poem. The integral and inevitable relationship of life and death is also acknowledged. A second example, from Tagore’s volume, Thought Relics and Stray Birds, contains these four “stray birds,” numbered 278 to 281: One word keep for me in thy silence, O World, when I am dead, “I have loved.” We live in this world when we love it. Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love. I have seen thee as the half-awakened child sees his mother in the dusk of the dawn and then smiles and sleeps again.9 Here the note of love for the world is sounded, and with that the theme of service and self-giving discussed in the previous section of this chapter. To live authentically in the world is to love it. The last sentence of the poem conveys the sense of awe in the presence of the immensity of nature. We catch only glimpses of its magnificence in our lifetimes, but that is enough to fill our lives with reverence until we join with all creatures in the sleep of death. Songs are poetry set to music. They have an important role to play in the symbolism of Religion of Nature. In the Unitarian/Universalist hymn­ book, Singing the Living Tradition, songs are listed in the topical index under the labels of “Earth,” “Ecology,” and “Nature.” Most of these are quite suitable for Religion of Nature, but there are two in particular to which I want to call attention. “All Creatures of Earth and Sky” is a beautiful hymn whose words are attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, and its music is adapted and harmonized from a Roman Catholic Kirchengesang of 1623 by the English composer Ralph Vaughn Williams. Verse number 5 is not appropriate for Religion of Nature, since it bids us to “worship God in humbleness,” but the other verses, marked by frequent “Alleluias” express joyful thankfulness by the community of all of earth’s creatures for such aspects of nature as the sun, moon, stars, clouds, and wind.10 Two other hymns, “In the Branches of the Forest” and “O Earth, You Are Surpassing Fair,” call on us humans to be conscientious and persistent in respecting and reverencing the earth and its creatures, and in ceasing the practices that endanger its life forms and ecosystems. The first hymn

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has words by David Arkin and music by Waldemar Hille, and the second has words by John Andrew Storey and music by Joseph Parry.11 Two other songs of particular relevance for Religion of Nature I want to mention are by the contemporary composer and singer Peter Meyer. Their titles are “Church of the Earth” and “Blue Boat Home.” The first sings of the “hallowed ground” of the earth and of the “heaven we seek” that is “here at our feet.” The second song rejoices in the “blue boat” of earth plying the “ocean” of the “wide universe.” Its lyrics are sung to music composed by Rowland Hugh Prichard. This song brings to mind the famous photograph from space of the blue, cloud-shrouded earth that I noted in Chapter 5 as a strikingly apt symbol for Religion of Nature. Another kind of music that can serve a symbolic function for Religion of Nature is classical orchestral music. I have in mind examples such as Claude Debussy’s three symphonic sketches for orchestra called La Mer (The Sea) and his Prélude à l’après-medi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). The latter formed the basis for Afternoon of a Faun, a ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. This enabled the enchantment of the music to be accompanied by the exquisite bodily movements of dance. Two other examples are Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé, the lead role of which was first danced by Nijinsky, and Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite in seven movements entitled The Planets. Each movement of the latter is devoted to one of the solar planets. These four works suggest the fascination and wonder of nature in all its guises, and they can inspire an attitude of commitment to nature as the cherished source of all being and as astoundingly beautiful and sublime. The symbolism of musical composition, orchestral performance, and dance, as exemplified in these works, can contribute substantially to the mood, outlook, and resolve of Religion of Nature. The final example of symbolism I want to say something about here is the symbolism of story. Stories of various sorts are universal in their appeal, and they often impart insights and truths in a highly effective manner, more so in many cases than straightforward prosaic description, explanation, or entreaty. This is especially true in the domain of religion. As David Eagleman observes, “successful religious texts are not written as nonfiction arguments or bulleted lists of claims. They are stories. Stories about burning bushes, whales, sons, lovers, betrayals and rivalries.”12 Eagleman also mentions the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the profound effect it had on American opinion regarding the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century. This effect reached into

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the depths of feeling and motivation for many in a way that even the most well-reasoned writings and speeches of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison failed to do. Stories have a mysterious power to move and even to transform hearts and minds. We saw this to be true in Chapter 1 where I recounted the prophet Nathan’s story, or parable, told to King David in the Hebrew Bible, a story that enabled David suddenly to become acutely aware of the magnitude of his sin in ordering Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba’s former husband, to be placed in the forefront of the battle where he was killed. Stories can often have shock effects that are lacking in prosaic statements, injunctions, or warnings. One such story along this line to which I want to allude is contained in Daniel Quinn’s imaginative novel Ishmael.13 This story has intimate bearing on a theme of special significance for Religion of Nature. This theme is the deleterious effects of many human attitudes and practices on the rest of nature, effects that reach back into the scientific and industrial revolutions of the modern era that I briefly discussed in Chapter 6. The attitudinal aspect of these effects can even be traced back to the developments of agriculture, domestication of animals, and urbanization that I talked about in that same chapter. These developments brought about the virtual end, as we saw, of the hunter-gatherer cultures that characterized human life on earth prior to their actualization. The difference between the hunter-gatherer cultures and those owing their character to the introduction of farming, animal domestication, and the founding of cities is the major focus of Quinn’s intriguing novel. It marks the fundamental division between those humans he calls “the Takers” and those he calls “the Leavers.” But before I explain these key terms, let me sketch the outlines of Quinn’s novel. The two principal characters of the novel are a bright but disillusioned student who is searching for someone to teach him genuine wisdom and an extremely thoughtful, knowledgeable, and articulate gorilla whose advertisement the student answers, not knowing that the advertisement is from a gorilla. Needless to say, when the student encounters his prospective teacher, he is considerably taken aback. But he gradually grows accustomed to the gorilla’s presence and persistent questioning, a questioning that stimulates the student to think in unaccustomedly probing ways about the issues raised. The brunt of these issues is whether and how nature on earth might be saved from the human drive to bring it under complete mastery and control. The gorilla, I surmise, is the representative speaker for the whole community of nonhuman life forms

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affected by callous and uncomprehending human attitudes and actions. And I should note that the various species of gorillas are today classified as either “critically endangered” or “endangered.” For a period of time, the student and the gorilla are locked in an intense dialogue, each raising questions to which the other gives responses. For the most part, though, the gorilla urges the student to think through the questions carefully on his own and then to propose tentative answers to them. Slowly, in this way, the student grows more and more cognizant of the gorilla’s point of view. It is a view of widespread depredation and danger to the earth’s life-forms and ecosystems at human hands, and of what might be done to put an end to this situation. What is needed, the student comes to realize, is a radical change in the attitude of humans toward nature and a drastic transformation of their policies and practices with regard to it. At one point in the novel, the student shows up for a meeting with his gorilla tutor, only to find that he has disappeared. With typical human condescension and disregard, he has been captured and caged by a carnival. After considerable searching, the student is able to trace the gorilla to a carnival that had recently been in his city. And he is finally able to persuade the gorilla to continue their conversations. The gorilla has had four previous students, all of whom had failed. He does not want to give up on this fifth student. Their conversations continue, and as they do so, the student’s understanding and awareness undergo a transformation of epic proportions. What the student comes to see is that there are two fundamentally different myths relating to the existence of humans on earth. The prevalent and pervasive myth of modern times is that of the Takers, while the myth that is rapidly losing adherents and representatives around the earth is that of the Leavers. The Leavers use what they need to survive, but no more. They kill only when necessary to eat. They protect their territories but do not encroach on the territories of other human cultures. They believe that their culture is best for them, but not for everybody. They view themselves as belonging to nature, and not nature as belonging to them. They do not seek to master the earth but to live in it as one of its creatures. As we would say today, they see themselves as part of an ecological community involving many other natural beings, and not as an exception to that community. They view themselves, in other words, as creatures of nature.

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The Takers, by contrast, believe that they are entitled to exercise dominion and control over the whole of the earth. They think that they have the right to wipe out any creatures of earth that compete with or interfere with this undertaking, and this includes human beings such as the Leavers who might stand in their way. They want to impose their view of life and their way of life on everyone, believing it to be the only truth about life. They are convinced that the whole process of evolution on earth culminates with their arrival and stops there. They conceive of themselves as somehow outside of nature, now that they have evolved. Their population continues to grow apace, threatening the continuing existence of other species. This fact disturbs them to some extent but they do nothing serious to curtail the accelerating rate of their population growth. They do not allow their population growth to be automatically constrained by competition with other tribes or other species, in the way that the Takers do. Instead, they seek to make way for it to expand through technology and especially by growing increasingly more food in technological ways. As their population expands, more food is needed, and as more food is grown by technological means, the population is thereby allowed to continue to expand, in a kind of ever-widening loop. And the Takers tend to turn a deaf ear to evidence that their technology is polluting the ground, seas, and skies to an alarming degree, threatening all life on earth, including their own. They also tend to be oblivious to the fact that the encroachments of their developments and industries across the globe, on land and sea, pose severe threats to the flourishing and survival of other species. Quinn makes ingenious use of the myth of the Garden of Eden in Genesis. He explains through the character of the gorilla that there are two versions of this story. He contends that the basic myth was originally a protest by the Leavers against the Taker culture that had begun to threaten their way of life. The presumptuous act of eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an attempt to take over a task that only “the gods,”14 that is, nature itself, could successfully carry out, and thus to replace the gods or nature with attempts at human mastery and control. In other words, they attempted to supplant the wisdom of nature with their own putative wisdom. They were contemptuous of the Leavers’ stance of subordination and submission to the ways of nature. They thought of nature as belonging to them, instead of themselves as belonging to nature. They felt entitled to take from the earth whatever they wished, with no accompanying attempt to moderate their demands or

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to replace what was taken. The Takers’ acceptance of this beguiling idea of their entitlement was their fall into evil and expulsion from the Garden, that is, the symbolic Garden of treading lightly on nature as the Leavers do. The consequences can be readily seen in the ecological crises on earth today. Human technology has no prospect of replacing the wisdom of nature, and it is arrogant and hubristic to believe that it has. This was the point of the story of Genesis as originally conceived by the Leavers. The Takers, on the other hand, have co-opted the Genesis account and put it to use for their own purposes. For them, the account implies at most some mysterious flaw in humanity itself rather than in the delusionary story that humanity tells itself about itself and its relations to the rest of nature. The Takers have some vague sense of the doom that this story portends for them and for the creatures of the earth, but their myth of mastery and control is so obviously and transparently true to them that they can imagine no alternative to it. They are caught in the cage of their story so completely that they are not even aware of it as a cage. Present day humans have the capacity, the gorilla believes, to break the bars of the cage and escape, but they are oblivious to their entrapment within it. The biblical story of Cain and Abel is interpreted by the gorilla to mean that Cain, the agriculturist, is bent upon destroying Abel, the nomadic herder, and by implication all the Leavers, in order to eliminate any threat to the alleged universality and final truth of the Takers’ story. The Takers, as agriculturists, see the death of Abel as both warranted and inevitable. It is the story of the march of civilization. It is the story of the progressive distancing of humans from nature and of their coming to see nature as a machine or cluster of resources to be put to exclusively human use. It is the story of themselves as the apex of evolution and the masters of the earth. I provided another version of this story in Chapter 6.15 One has to read the full story of Ishmael to see how the novel brings into trenchant symbolic perspective the arrogance of humans bent upon conquering the earth instead of finding ways to live constructively, cooperatively, and at peace on it. My prosaic condensation of the novel’s plot and message fails dismally to bring this destructive perspective firmly and convincingly into view, but it is a perspective we humans ignore at our peril and at the peril of many other creatures of earth. The musings and conclusions of the gorilla and student in the novel are not meant to imply that humans should seek to return to the Stone Age, but that there are vital lessons of Stone Age cultures that we need to re-learn today. How exactly this can be done is not spelled out in any detail by the novel. It

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makes the problem of our present human way of life dramatically apparent, but the solution is left for us to begin to contemplate and imagine. Posing the problem in the imaginative way it does is ample contribution and provocation from the novel as a symbolic vehicle and work of art. The story of the novel is self-contained and can be read and pondered in its own right, as befits a work of art. But the inspiration and insight derived from it can be put to good use in addressing a pressing problem of the nonfictional world. No problem is more in need of urgent address today than that of the menacing ecological crisis in all of its aspects and dimensions. The reverence for nature and the human responsibility toward it championed by Religion of Nature can draw upon Quinn’s Ishmael as one of its valuable framing symbols. The novel poses in sharp and irresistible form the central issue that proponents of Religion of Nature, in coordination with those of similar commitments and concerns, must exert every effort to make evident, confront, and seek to resolve. Revolutionary changes of attitude and radically different practices will be required. In this chapter, I have discussed synecdoches, prayer and meditation, rituals, symbols of sacrifice and self-giving, poems, songs, classical music and dance, and story as some types of symbols and symbolic practices appropriate for Religion of Nature. I have provided examples of each of these types of symbolization, endeavoring to show how each can help to inform, enrich, and energize the outlook and path of life endorsed by this kind of religious naturalism. I have argued in this chapter and throughout this book that symbols are essential modes of expression and motivation for all meaningful religious perspectives, and that such perspectives cannot be adequately understood if we fail to grasp the fundamental role symbols play in their articulation.

Conclusion Symbols and prosaic discourse are not opposed to one another, as is clearly indicated by the discursive character of much of this book in which I have sought to examine the nature and role of symbols in religion and more particularly in Religion of Nature. But even though the two are not opposed, it is of critical importance that the symbols’ distinctive characters and essential contributions to religious insight and commitment be kept always in mind. The relationship of the two is a complementary one, and neither can be substituted for the other. It is a serious mistake,

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for example, to seek to reduce symbolic expressions to literal ones, even though prosaic interpretations of aspects (but by no means all) of their meanings are entirely in order. We live in a culture deeply informed by the natural sciences, and we are strongly tempted to presume that the only reliable way to think is to think scientifically about all the problems, issues, and topics that confront us. We are inclined to assume that thinking scientifically is thinking in an exclusively literal manner. Whatever is nonliteral in religion, therefore, we have tended to consider as either devoid of cognitive meaning altogether or to have meanings that can be rendered completely and more effectively into prosaic discourse. To reason in this way is to be ignorant of the distinctive and ineliminable role of symbols in all realms of meaningful thought and especially in the realm of religion. I say in all realms because I include the natural sciences. The natural sciences have underlying metaphors, analogies, and models that often figure essentially in their modes of thought. The symbols and images may be unconsciously assumed but they continue to be operative at a fundamental level of reasoning. The views of the universe and its parts as machinery or as a deductive mathematical system are two examples, as are the metaphors, analogies, and models implicit in speaking of the laws of nature, of elementary particles or waves, of the electron cloud, of the spin of particles, of string theory, of the fabric of space-time, of the warping of that fabric to produce gravitational effects, of electric currents, of the Big Bang, of the human mind as a computer, and so on.16 The scientific story of the evolution of the universe from the supposed Big Bang to the present is just that, a story based on the best available evidence to date. It is not just an account of particular events but a sequence of events woven into a story, a story of the creation and development of the universe to our present time that includes among many other things the evolution of human beings. Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Ursula Goodenough, Loyal Rue, and many others regard this account as the “Universe Story,” the “New Story,” the “Epic of Evolution,” or “Everybody’s Story” with symbolic meanings that are appropriate for worldwide religious consideration and contemplation in our day.17 Berry writes: New religious sensitivities emerge as we understand better the story of the universe, which is now available to us through scientific inquiry into the structure of the universe and the

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sequence of transformations that have brought the universe, the planet earth, and all its living creatures into being. The new scientific story of the universe has a mythic, narrative dimension that lifts this story out of a prosaic study of data to a holistic spiritual dimension.18 In Berry’s reckoning, prose and myth are woven together in the scientific story of our origins as human beings and in the origin and development of the universe as a whole. As we saw in Chapter 5, the story has immense value as a cosmogonic symbol or myth for Religion of Nature, but it also has profound and potentially revisionary meaning for all of today’s religious traditions. I believe that Berry is entirely right in asserting that this scientific “journey, the sacred journey of the universe, is the personal journey of each individual. We cannot help but marvel at this amazing sequence of transformations. No other creation story is more fantastic in its account of how things came to be in the beginning, how they came to be as they are, and how each of us received the special characteristics that give us our personal identity.”19 Not only is natural science replete with metaphors, models, and analogies of its own, it can supply religious seekers with powerful stories, myths, and other symbolic ways of thinking that can help to shape and guide their lives. Prosaic investigation and analysis, on the one hand, and varieties of suggestive symbolic expression, on the other, can work together to bring into view ranges of understanding and dimensions of reality that neither is competent to encompass alone. Neither should be disparaged, and both should be accorded their proper roles. A provocative image of these distinctive roles and their essential relationship is suggested by Sue Ellen Campbell’s discussion of Henry David Thoreau’s attitude toward the kettle pond near his cabin in the woods. He systematically and exactly measured the pond’s dimensions and sounded its depths, but he also rejoiced in the symbolic significance of the mysterious depths of the pond, suggesting the infinitude of nature and the boundless depths of the human spirit. Campbell writes, “Each time he moves between these perspectives—wonder and precise observation, imagination and science—Thoreau’s understanding and appreciation deepen, and so, perhaps, do his reader’s.”20 Religious symbols that speak to the whole person and not just to the discursive mind are vitally needed for a rich and full life and an adequate vision of life. The needs of such a life cannot be met by literal analysis,

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argument, and explanation alone, necessary as these modes of thought and articulation undoubtedly are. Religious symbols are necessary food for the spirit; without them we starve. Gruel of strictly literal discourse alone would be too thin to energize and sustain us by itself. This is the central contention of the present book. I have sought to show how my brief for the indispensability of symbols relates to Religion of Nature and other forms of religious naturalism, to nonnaturalistic religious perspectives, to secular outlooks, to an adequate grasp of our relations to nature, and to the prospects and hopes, challenges and uncertainties, demands and responsibilities that confront us humans on every hand as humbly grateful participants in the community of natural beings on earth.

Notes

Chapter 1  1. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythical Thought (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1955), 260.   2.  The books to which I refer are A Religion of Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), and The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013). The chapter mentioned is Chapter 8 of Faith and Reason: Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011).   3.  See, for example, Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall’s Forward to his The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (New York, NY: New American Library, 1953), where he speaks with great reverence of the Qur’an’s “inspiration and its message” (p. vii).  4. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. More, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 86.  5. Ibid., 81.   6.  Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1995), 36–37.   7.  Pickthall exults in the Arabic language of the Qur’an as “that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy” (The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, vi).   8.  This formerly Greek Orthodox Patriarchal cathedral was converted into a mosque in 1453, secularized in 1931, and opened as a museum in 1935. From 1204 until 1261 it served as a Roman Catholic cathedral.  9. Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chaung Tzu (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). The words in the quotation are Wu’s.

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10. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). 11. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. More, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 40. 12. . Accessed May 5, 2012. 13. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London, UK: Routledge, 1970), 16; quoted by Robert E. Innis, “The Tacit Logic of Ritual Embodiments,” in Social Analysis, 48/2 (Summer 2004): 195–212, 212. 14. A fascinating comparative study of Satan and Mara as symbols of evil is James W. Boyd, Satan and Mara: Christian and Buddhist Symbols of Evil (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1975). 15. See James H. Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2010). An example of the serpent as a symbol of protection and goodness is the snake goddess Wadjet—a cobra—who was for many centuries the patron deity of Egypt. There are numerous other examples of snakes as positive symbols of helpfulness and goodness in the history of religions. The fact that snakes regularly shed their skins enables them to be apt symbols of rebirth or resurrection into newness of life, analogous to the symbolism of the chrysalis, where a beautiful butterfly is born from a homely caterpillar. But the repeated shedding of the snake’s skin can also have a pronounced negative connotation in a religion like Hinduism, where the religious goal is to escape the wearisome cycle of births and rebirths called samsara. 16. A rich and revealing exploration of symbols of evil and redemption from evil in religions, particularly of myths concerning the beginning and the end of evil, is the French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969). 17. See Wu’s discussion of the conversation with a skull story in The Butterfly as Companion, 14–18. The quotation from his commentary on the text is on p. 15.

Chapter 2   1.  Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York, NY: Charles Scribner Sons, 1953), 397.  2. Langer, Feeling and Form, 146.  3. Langer, Feeling and Form, 62.   4.  These remarks on the role of framing in works of art follow the thinking of Michael Polanyi in Chapter 5 of his book entitled Meaning. See Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

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 5. Ori Z. Soltes notes as an extreme example of such aesthetic tension a section of Hesiod’s Theogony: “It is a gruesome account of creation out of destruction: the birth of the goddess of love from an act of strife [the castration of Ouranos] symbolizes the paradoxic tension in the universe between love and strife.” He goes on to describe how Botticelli’s painting Birth of Venus suggests that Ouranos willingly undergoes the shock of his dismemberment in order to create the love that will finally bring about creation and eternal life. See Ori Z. Soltes, Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2005), 118.  6. Langer, Feeling and Form, 59.  7. See Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York, NY: The New American Library, 1961), 89; see also 88 and the whole of Chapter 4 of this work.  8. Langer, Feeling and Form, 396.  9. Langer, Feeling and Form, 40; see also 37, 39, 57. 10. Langer, Feeling and Form, 403. 11. By “transcendent” here I mean transcending the symbol, not transcending the world. The basic referent or ultimate of a particular class of religious symbols (for example, the class of traditional forms of theism) may be believed to radically transcend the world, but not all religious ultimates are believed to do so. The distinction some religious naturalists, including myself, draw between natura naturata and natura naturans implies that the latter transcends the former in its character as the ongoing creative force or impetus that continues to energize and transform the world and that may well give rise to faces of the universe other than this present one. But natura naturans is an essential, intrinsic aspect of nature, not something other than nature. 12. I discuss these three aspects of religion as they relate to religious naturalism in “Both Red and Green but Religiously Right: Coping with Evil in a Religion of Nature,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 31/2 (May 2010), 108–123. 13. Roger Scruton, Beauty (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 78.

Chapter 3  1. Surah VII, 158 of the Qur’an, as rendered in Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, 133.  2. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1962), 19.   3.  Isaiah 6:1–5. In The Holy Scriptures: According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1952). All quotes from the Hebrew Bible are from this text.

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 4. Islam: Muhammad and his Religion, ed. Arthur Jeffery (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 43. The quotation is from as-Suyuti’s al-La’ali almasnu’a (Cairo 1317 A. H. = 1899 A. D.), I, 39. There are many versions of this story.   5.  As I am using it here, the term religious ultimate can refer to a class of entities, persons, principles, presences, or powers and not just to something unitary or singular.  6. Horace Bushnell, Building Eras in Religion (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 259.   7.  See Mary B. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970).  8. Gary Dorrien, The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 158.  9. All quotations from the New Testament are contained in The Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1962). 10. See the section “Muhammad’s Ascension” in Islam: Muhammad and his Religion, ed. Arthur Jeffery, 35–42. 11. I am indebted for this example of the Dome of the Rock, and for most of my discussion of it here, to Soltes, Our Sacred Signs, 154–56. 12. Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 48. 13. There are other symbolic cosmologies and cosmogonies in Daoist texts in addition to the one sketched here. See Chapter 2 of Michael’s The Pristine Dao for examples of these. I have drawn on Michael’s book for my description of the cosmogonic and cosmological symbolism of Daoism. See especially pp. 17–19, 30. 14. Genesis 3:5. 15. Colossians 2:11. 16. For the latter, see Luke 13:12–24. 17. The reader will recall in this connection the symbolism of the Tibetan Buddhist sand painting ritual, richly suggestive of the impermanence of all things, discussed in Chapter 1. 18. See . Accessed July 13, 2012. 19. Surah XXXIII, 21 of the Qur’an, as rendered in Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, 303. 20. An extensive and thoroughly researched book on the nature and works of Mara, comparing them with the character and role of Satan in early Christianity, is James W. Boyd, Satan and Mara: Christian and Buddhist Symbols of Evil (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975). 21. In keeping with the doctrine of karma, most Buddhists believe that the Buddha had undergone many previous births and that a spiritual perfection such as he finally achieved could not be the result of just one life. It must therefore

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have matured through many ages. Furthermore, the Buddha nature he made apparent in his own life and accomplishment is, for most Buddhists, “a kind of archetype which manifests itself in the world at different periods, in different personalities. . . .” See Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1959), 34–35. Conze goes on to remark that the “individual particularities” of specific earthly Buddhas “are of no account whatever” to Buddhists. While the Dharma taught by the various Buddhas is thought by Buddhists to be the same throughout the ages, and the primary emphasis is on the Dharma rather than on the personal manifestations of the Buddha, I think that Conze’s remark understates the importance for Buddhists of the accounts of the life of the Buddha of the sixth century BCE.

Chapter 4  1. Zhuangzi. Sibu Beiyao. 2, 1:15a–15b. Middle third century BCE. The quote is contained in Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao, 84–85. In crediting the quote I have retained my earlier transliteration of the title of this Daoist text.  2. Zuangzi, same reference, quoted Michael, The Pristine Dao, 84.  3. Bijak, Sakhi 120, in V. K. Sethi, Kabir: The Weaver of God’s Name (Punjab, India: Radha Soami Satsang Beas, 1984), 543.  4. Soltes, Our Sacred Signs, 10. By profane Soltes here does not mean, nor do I, something opposed to the sacred in principle but rather something distinct from the sacred and not to be identified with it—but also something not rightly understood unless it is seen as pointing beyond itself toward the sacred and as necessarily participating in the sacred.  5. Wesley J. Wildman, Religious and Spiritual Experiences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 262.  6. Wildman, Religious and Spiritual Experiences, 256.  7. Wildman, Religious and Spiritual Experiences, 174–75. While Wildman speaks of “symbolic discourse” I prefer to speak of symbolic expression, so as to keep clear the distinction I am upholding between discursive and nondiscursive modes of perception and articulation.  8. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythical Thought, 260.   9.  The Kantian idea of schematization involves the role of the imagination in connecting the intuitions of sensibility and the categories of the understanding. Cassirer makes use of this notion in developing his concept of significant forms. See Charles W. Hendel’s Introduction to the first volume of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume One: Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 51, 53, 59, 63. 10. William A. Christian, Meaning and Truth in Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 99. Christian gives examples of such basic

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suggestions and of how they occur on pp. 93–96. See pp. 93–112 for his complete discussion of illuminating suggestions and their explications. 11. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1926), 137–38. 12. I explore the existential character of faith and its distinction from mere belief in Faith and Reason: Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life. 13. See Benedict Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, in The Chief Works of Benedict Spinoza, edited and translated by R. H. M. Elwes, 2 volumes (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1951), I, 1–278; see especially 77–79. I discuss Spinoza’s distinction between the learned few, who rely entirely on prosaic reason for their religious outlook, and the unlearned masses, who need sensuous images to inspire them to religious obedience, in Chapter 3 of my Interpretive Theories of Religion (The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton, 1981).

Chapter 5  1. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York, NY: Harper Brothers, 1958), 88.   2.  The subtitle of Schleiermacher’s work, as indicated in the above note, is “Speeches to its [Religion’s] Cultured Despisers,” that is, to self-acclaimed sophisticates or moderns of his own day who believed that religion was outmoded, irrelevant, and defunct.  3. See Crosby, A Religion of Nature. An analysis and defense of the religious ultimacy of nature is presented in Part Three of his book, and especially in Chapter 6.   4.  See G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 13–14.  5. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1998), 21–22  6. Crosby, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil.   7.  See James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth, revised and expanded edition (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1988). “Through Gaia theory,” Lovelock writes, “I see the Earth and the life it bears as a system, a system that has the capacity to regulate the temperature and the composition of the Earth’s surface and to keep it comfortable for living organisms. The selfregulation of the system is an active process driven by the free energy available from sunlight” (30).   8.  I call attention to the rights, preferences, sufferings, and needs of nonhuman creatures of nature as a central concern for Religion of Nature in The Thou of Nature.

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  9.  Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 25. 10. Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao, 29. 11. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, 21. 12. Sue Ellen Campbell, et al., The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 84; see 83–84. 13. Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1966).

Chapter 6  1. John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston, MA and New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 56.  2. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.  3. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985), 1123b–1125a, pp. 97–194.   4.  William R. Catton, Jr., “On the Dire Destiny of Human Lemmings,” in Deep Ecology, ed. Michael Tobias (San Diego, CA: Avant Books, 1984), 74–89: 78–79. Catton bases this estimate on Max Patterson, “Increase of Settlement Size and Population Since the Inception of Agriculture,” in Nature, 186 (June), 870–72: 72.  5. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), I, 81–130: 119.   6.  See Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 1939), 5–23: 12–13.  7. Bacon, Description of the Intellectual Globe, V, 506; Thoughts and Conclusions. Quoted in William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974), 58.  8. Bacon, The Great Instauration, IV, 29; Description of the Intellectual Globe, V, 505–506. Quoted in Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 59.  9. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, IV, 343. Quoted in Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 58. 10. Bacon, Preparative towards a Natural and Experimental History, IV, 263; Preface to The Great Instauration, IV, 20. Quoted in Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 51, 55. 11. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning: Works, IV, 296. Quoted in Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 59. Leiss’s chapter on Bacon in this book is strongly

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recommended, as is the whole book, for gaining insight into the theme stated in its title and under discussion in this section. 12. David Knight, “Romanticism and the Sciences,” in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13–24:15. 13. The passage in a letter to Jeanne Carr is quoted in Worster, A Passion for Nature, 101. 14. Worster, A Passion for Nature, 145. The quote is from Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, contained in The Writings of John Muir, Sierra Edition (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1916–1924), in 10 volumes, I, 356–57. 15. Worster, A Passion for Nature, 160. The quotation of Muir is contained in The Writings of John Muir, II, 157. 16. Worster, A Passion for Nature, 161. The quotation is from The Writings of John Muir, II, 250.

Chapter 7   1.  Robert Cummings Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 243.  2. Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols, 241.   3.  Abraham Joshua Heschel, To Grow in Wisdom: An Anthology of Abraham Joshua Heschel, ed. Jacob Neusner and Noam Neusner (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1990), 166; quoted in Darrell J. Fasching, Dell Dechant, and David M. Lantigua, Comparative Religious Ethics, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 227.   4.  Assessments of truth and falsity in the suggestiveness of religious symbols may also involve, as shown in this list of ways of measuring or weighing their truth and falsity, considerations of value and disvalue. The truth of a symbol will often include and be at least partially dependent upon its effects with regard to value and disvalue.  5. The words attributed to Winthrop in this quotation are taken from a manuscript in the New York Historical Society. The quotation is contained in Ted Widmer’s article, “Who Built This City?” in The New York Times Book Review, September 30, 2012, 31. My use of the quotation is not intended as an endorsement of all of Winthrop’s attitudes toward or policies of governance, however, such as those bearing on slavery, treatment of Native Americans, or religious positions different from Winthrop’s own. These issues would need to be discussed and evaluated in detail.   6.  My source for this definition is .

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  7.  Steven Stoll, “The Mismeasure of All Things,” in Orion Magazine, September/October, 2012. Accessed September 27, 2012, at , 1.   8.  Stoll, “The Mismeasure of All Things,” 2.  9. Henry Samuel Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 146. Santayana’s The Life of Reason: Or, The Phases of Human Progress was first published in 1905–1906.

Chapter 8   1.  Fasching, Dechant, and. Lantigua, Comparative Religious Ethics, 37.  2. One of my mother’s children was a stillborn boy. She continued to reflect on his death and on his potential life through the remainder of her own life. His influence was felt in this way.   3.  See Chapter 2, note 11.   4.  See the Wikipedia article “Altruism in Animals” and the references supporting these claims there.  5. Eric Steinhart, “On Religious Naturalism,” in Y. Nagasawa and A. Buchareff (eds.) On Alternative Conceptions of God. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.  6. The quote is from an extract of Dickson’s book entitled Humilitas: Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011). The extract is entitled “How Christian Humility Upended the World.” It can be accessed at the website . I accessed it on October 8, 2012.  7. Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), 183; quoted in Cynthia Reville Peabody, “The Humble Heart,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Vol. 63, 1 & 2, 187–97: 192.  8. Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit Gathering, LXXI (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1916), 98.  9. Rabindranath Tagore, Thought Relics and Stray Birds (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1924), 79. 10. Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), hymn 203. 11. Singing the Living Tradition, hymns 173 and 174. 12. David Eagleman, “The Moral of the Story,” Review of Jonathan Gottschall, How Stories Make Us Human (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), in The New York Times Book Review, August 5, 2012, 17. 13. Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (New York, NY: Bantam/Turner, 1995). I am grateful to Bryon Ehlmann for bringing this novel to my attention.

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14. In speaking of “the gods,” Quinn may have in mind the fact that in what scholars regard as the earliest stratum of the creation story in Genesis the word for the religious ultimate is Elohim, which in Hebrew is a plural noun. 15. The contrast between Leavers and Takers in Quinn’s novel is overdrawn, if interpreted literally, because it associates everything good with the Leavers and everything bad with the Takers. The situation is more nuanced than that, but the contrast has important and highly provocative symbolic value in the context of the novel’s story. 16. On the essential role of metaphors or of metaphorical redescriptions of explananda in theories in the natural sciences, see the final chapter of Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science. 17. See Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story; Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1990), especially Chapter 10; Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009); Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York, NY: Bell Tower, 1998), especially Chapter 3; Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), especially xvi–xvii and 3–31; and Loyal Rue, Everybody’s Story: Wising up to the Epic of Evolution (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). 18. Berry, The Sacred Universe, 86. 19. Berry, The Sacred Universe, 122. 20. Sue Ellen Campbell, et al., The Face of the Earth, 130.

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Langer, Susanne K. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1961. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. New York, NY: The New American Library. Leiss, William. 1974. The Domination of Nature. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Levinson, Henry Samuel. Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Lovelock, James. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth, revised and expanded edition. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Michael, Thomas. 2005. The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Muir, John. 1901. Our National Parks. Boston, MA and New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London, UK: Routledge. Neville, Robert Cummings. 1996. The Truth of Broken Symbols. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version. 1962. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, eds. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Pickthall, Mohammed Marmaduke. 1953. The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation. New York, NY: New American Library. Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. 1975. Meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Quinn, Daniel. 1995. Ishmael. New York, NY: Bantam/Turner. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, and Charles A. More, eds. 1957. A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1969. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rue, Loyal. 2000. Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1958. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman. New York, NY: Harper Brothers. Scruton, Roger. 2009. Beauty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Sethi, V. K. 1984. Kabir: The Weaver of God’s Name. Punjab, India: Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Singing the Living Tradition. 1993. Boston, MA: Beacon Press and The Unitarian Universalist Association. Soltes, Ori Z. 2005. Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. Spinoza, Benedict. 1951. The Chief Works of Benedict Spinoza, ed. R. H. M. Elwes, 2 vols. New York, NY: Dover Publications. Steinhart, Eric, “On Religious Naturalism,” in Y. Nagasawa and A. Buchareff (eds.) On Alternative Conceptions of God. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

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Index

aesthetic symbolism, different from, but not opposed to discursive thinking, 22; as discovery of meaning, 22–23; occupies a distinctive realm of meaning and value, 22, 29–30; discloses inward emotions and intuitions, and their relations to the external world, 23; essential to human life and experience, 23, 29–30; forgeries of, 29; framing function of, 24; holistic character of, 26–27; interrelations with religious symbols, 34–37; nature, functions, and effects of, 21–30; non-indicative or selfcontained, 24–26, 36–37; religious symbols compared to, xiv, 21–37; similarities and differences in relation to religious symbolism, 31–34; not merely subjective, 22–23; untranslatable and irreplaceable, 27–29; specific values of, 30 agriculture, introduction of, 103 Ahriman, 11 Allah, Mohammed’s vision of, 42–43 Aristotle, 109 Arkin, David, 154 art works, see aesthetic symbolism

atomic weapons, symbolism of, 130–31 axiological depth of reality, 69 Bacon, Francis, 106–107 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 108 Berry, Thomas, 11, 92, 160–61 Big Bang, 148, 160–61; and symbolism of cosmic womb, 92–93 bird feeder as analogous to religious symbols, 69–69 Botticelli, 165n5 Boyd, James W., 164n14, 166n20 brain, structures of in relation to religious experiences, 69 Bushnell, Horace, 43 Campbell, Alexander, 113 Campbell, Sue Ellen, 95–96, 161 Candle, burning, as symbol of life and death, 144–45 Carr, Jeanne, 170n13 Cassirer, Ernst, 3, 4, 70 Catton, William R., Jr., 103, 169n4 Chagall, Marc, 34; his painting “White Crucifixion” and comparison of its aesthetic and religious meanings, 34–37 Charlesworth, James H., 16–17

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Index

chi (or qi), 47 Christian, William A., 74–75, 167–68n10 cities, development of, 103 Cole, Thomas, 108 Convictional openness, 125 Conze, Edward, 166–67n21 Cosmic Walk, ritual of, 147–49 cross, as Christian symbol, 150–52; see also Religion of Nature, cross as symbol of; see also religious symbols, cross as symbol of humility Debussy, Claude, 154 Dickson, John, 150 Dao, 47–48, 65–66, 92 Davy, Humphrey, 108 Dechant, Dell, 139 Descartes, René, 106, 107 Devil (or Satan), 16–17 Dewey, John, 41 Docetism, 76–77 discursive and presentational meaning, 27–28; see also doctrinal statements and systems; see also religious symbols, not reducible to or to be confused with literal statements; see also symbols, secular doctrinal statements and systems, xii– xiii, 74–76; as basic proposal and its explications, 74–75; indispensability of, 4, 122; as proposals for belief and action, must be kept in close touch with religious symbols and religious experiences, 74–75, 77; cannot substitute for religious symbols, 4, 77, 159–60 Dome of the Rock, 46–47 domestication of animals, 103 Dorrien, Gary, 44

Eagleman, David, 154 earth, origin, size, emergence of life on, 97 ecological dependency of life forms on earth, 97–98 Ehlmann, Bryon, 171n13 Eightfold Path in Buddhism, 54; as Dharmachakra, 54 Eisler, Riane, 88, 91 emergent novelty, 94–95 evil, as morally wrong human actions, 87; see also Ahriman; see also Devil; see also religious symbols, expressions of evil; see also serpent; see also sin evolution, biological, 5 evolution, cosmic, 147–49 exemplary symbolic lives, of Jesus, 56–57; of Mohammed, 57–60; of Moses, 55–56; of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), 60–62; see also Muir, John extinctions, biological, 95–96 faith, existential character of, 77–78; requires symbolic expression, 77–78 Fasching, Daniel J., 139 Francis of Assisi, 153 Free Market, see secular symbols freedom, human, 87 Gandhi, Mohandas, 150 Garrison, William Lloyd, 155 God, as Elohim, 172n14; Isaiah’s vision of, 42, 69; as mathematician and designer, 16; as outside of nature, 104–105; creative Word of, 45–46; as Yahweh, 66; see also Allah; see also Ohrmazd Goodenough, Ursula, 160 Gross Domestic Product, see secular symbols

Index Handel, Georg, 66 hell, of environmental desecration, 109 Heraclitus, 89 Heschel, Abraham, 126 Hesiod, 165n5 Hesse, Mary B., 166n7, 172n16 Hille, Waldemar, 155 Hitler, Adolf, 129 Holst, Gustav, 154 Homer, 88 humming bird, 112, 140 image of earth from space, as cosmological symbol for Religion of Nature, 96, 98, 154 Industrial Revolution, 109 Jeffery, Arthur, 166n10 karma, 52, 166–67n21 Key, Francis Scott, 128 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 150 Knight, David, 108 Langer, Susanne, K., 21–23, 27–28, 30 languages, spoken and written development of, 103 Lantigua, David M., 139 Leaf, deciduous, as symbol of dying and grieving, 146–47 Levinson, Henry Samuel, 138 literal mindset, 66, of adherents and opponents of religion, xii, 137 literalism, error of, 76–81; can cause alienation from contemporary culture, 79; can encourage blind credulity, 78; can encourage dismissal of religion altogether, 80 Lovelock, James, 168n7 MacGillis, Miriam Therese, 147–48

179

magic, manipulative, 125–26 Mara, 61–62 master symbols of religion in general 39–63; cosmogonic and cosmological, 44–48; of exemplary human lives, 55–62, see also exemplary symbolic lives; of paths of life and obstacles in their way, 48–55; of religious ultimates, 40–44, see also ultimates, religious master symbols for Religion of Nature, 85–117; cosmogonic and cosmological, 91–98, 148, 161; John Muir as exemplary traveler on its saving path, 112–17; of religious ultimacy of nature, 87–91; as narrative of saving path of life and obstacles in its way, 101–12; see also image of earth from space; see also spaceship earth; see also water; see also womb McNamara, Patrick, 69 Meyer, Peter, 154 Michael, Thomas, 47, 91–92, 166n13 miracles, natural, 85–86 Muir, John, 99–100, 150; as exemplar for Religion of Nature, see master symbols for Religion of Nature Murdoch, Iris, 15 Mussolini, Benito, 128 narcissism, religious, 125–26 natura naturata and natura naturans, 94, 148, 165n11 nature, ambiguity of, 90, 95; beauty and sublimity of, 154; as dynamic system where creation and destruction go hand-in-hand, 117; glory of, 141; no personal creation of, 96; as metaphysical ultimate, 86; no purpose of as a whole, 96; to be reverenced but not

180

Index

nature (continued) worshipped, 143–44; as religious ultimate, 43–44, 86, 141; sacredness of, xi, 7, 86, 141; unfailing source of refreshment, assurance, and rejuvenation, 99 Neville, Robert Cummings, 119–21, 125 Newtonian science, 16 Nirguna Brahman, 68 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 154 Ohrmazd, 11, 90 Paleolithic peoples, 102–103, 158 Peabody, Cynthia Reville, 171n7 pelican, religious symbolism of, 3–4, 5–7, 18, 33–34, 72, 140 Picasso, Pablo, 27, 28 Pickthall, Mohammed Marmaduke, 163n3, 163n7 Polanyi, Michael, 164n4 Prichard, Rowland Hugh, 154 Quinn, Daniel, 155–59 Ravel, Maurice, 154 religious naturalism, xiii, 44 Religion of Nature, xiii, xiv, 4, 5; cross as symbol of, 151; humility a central virtue of, 150–51; meditation in, 144–47; poems, songs, orchestral music, dance, stories in, 152–59, 160; prayer in, 142–44; ritual in, 147–49; symbols of sacrifice and self-giving in, 149– 52; synecdoches for, 140–41; see also master symbols for Religion of Nature religious symbols, aesthetic symbols compared to, xiv, 21–37, interrelations with aesthetic

symbols, 34–37; those appropriate for Religion of Nature, see Religion of Nature, see master symbols for Religion of Nature; as aspects or dimensions of nature, including air or breath, 7–8, 90; as books or writings, 10; broken, 122; choose us, in a way, 159; cognitive significance of, 3–4; complementary relation to literal statements, 19–20; create and sustain community, 73; as creation stories, 11; criteria for assessing truth of, xiv, see also truth, symbolic and religious; cross as symbol of humility, 150–51; dead, 122–23; and deepest issues of life, xi–xii; direct experience of and engagement with, 5, 96; discursive and nondiscursive, xii–xiii; not all equally effective or true, xiv; as expressions of evil, 16–17, 61–62, 101–109, see also evil; see also serpent; existential significance of, 20, 121–22, 161; functions of, xiv; as heroic quests, 9; as historical events, 9–10; as historical settings or ways of life, 8; as illuminating or basic suggestion, 74–75; inspire to action in the world, xv; not mere instruments for human ends, 32; intimate interconnections among, 33–34, 71; as lives of exemplary leaders, 9–10; major, master, minor, xiv, 17–19, 33–34, 124, see also master religious symbols of religion in general, see also master religious symbols for Religion of Nature; necessary role of, 20, 53, 67–70, 159, 160, 161–62; as mechanisms, including clocks, 15–16; motivational, practical, and devotional role of, 72–73;

Index as parables, 11–12; as paradoxes, including koans, 12–14, 65–66, 76–77; not reducible to or to be confused with literal statements, xiii, 5, 32, 41, 65–66, 71, 73, 76–81; refer beyond themselves to ultimate source of meaning and value, 32, 37, 68, 73, 77, 165n11; in religions of the world, xiv; and religious education, xii, 81; require response of the whole person, 40–41, 161; revelatory or illuminative power of, 7, 65–66; as rituals, 14–15; as sacred places, 10–11; salvific role of, 48–55, 72–73, 109–112; as imaginative schematizations, 70; secular symbols compared to, xiv, see also secular symbols; not self-referring or self-contained, 31–33; sensuous, embodied forms of, 4–5; should not be used as a smokescreen for implausible or ridiculous religious claims, 80; similarities and differences in relation to aesthetic symbolization, 31–34; synecdoches as, 140–41; as totemic animals, 15; truth of, 7–20, see also truth, symbolic and religious; types of, 7–16; of the ultimacy of nature, 87–91; and unconscious dimensions of the mind, 72; not just for unsophisticated religious persons, 80–81; require utmost sophistication and skill for their interpretation, 81; how they work, 65–82, see also values of religious symbols; vitality and immediacy of, 72 Remarque, Erich Maria, 27, 28 Ricoeur, Paul, 164n16 Romanticism, 108

181

Rue, Loyal, 160 sacred and profane, 67–69, 73–74, 167n4; see also nature, sacredness of San Luis Mission, 137 Santayana, George, 138 schematization, 167n9 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 85–86, 140–41, 168n2 Schweitzer, Albert, 150 science, natural, frequently metaphorical and analogical in manner, 44; see also Hesse, Mary Scientific Revolution, 106–108 secular symbols, xiv, 127–37; economic, 131–38; in natural sciences, 160–61; political, 128–31; in sports, 136–37 serpent, as symbol of evil and good, 16–17, 164n15 Sierra Club, 115 significant form, 167n9 sin, 48–49, 50–51; in Garden of Eden, 158–59; as hubris and idolatry, 73–74; as desecrating and profaning the sacred, 74; tragic flaw or fall into sin in Religion of Nature 101–109; see also evil, as morally wrong human actions Social Darwinism, 87 Soltes, Ori Z., 67–68, 165n5, 166n11, 167n4 Spaceship earth, as cosmological symbol for Religion of Nature, 96–98 Spinoza, Benedict, 81, 168n13 Steinhart, Eric, 149, 151 Stoll, Steven, 135–36 Storey, John Andrew, 154 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 154 Swimme, Brian, 11, 92, 160

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Tagore, Rabindranath, 152–53 Teresa, Mother, 150 Thoreau, Henry David, 161 Thurman, Howard, 151 Tich Nhat Hanh, 9 tolerance and critical judgment, 125; see also convictional openness Tolstoy, Leo, 27, 28 truth, literal, propositional, or doctrinal, xi, 121–22; see also discursive and presentational meaning; see also doctrinal statements and systems; see also literal mindset truth, symbolic and religious, xi, 119–27; epistemic, moral, and religious tests of, 121–27; see also religious symbols, truth of ultimates, metaphysical, see also nature, as metaphysical ultimate ultimates, religious, 166n5; as Allah, see Allah; and basic proposals, 74; as the Buddha-Nature, 68; as Dao, see Dao; experience of involves different mode of expression than that of science, 44; as God, see God; the keystone of religious outlooks, 40, as Nirguna Brahman, see Nirguna Brahman; as Ohrmazd, see Ohrmazd; deeply sacred and mysterious, requiring sensuous

imagery and allusion for their expression, 41, 70; as Yahweh, see God; see also master symbols for Religion of Nature, of religious ultimacy of nature; see also nature, as religious ultimate; see also religious symbols, of the ultimacy of nature values of religious symbols, 170n4; and conditions for their carryover, 119–20 Ward, Barbara, 96 water, drinking of as religious ritual, 91; as master symbol of religious ultimacy of nature, 87–90 Whitehead, Alfred North, 75 Wildman, Wesley J., 69–70 Williams, Ralph Vaughn, 153 Winthrop, John, 134, 170n5 womb, as master cosmogonic and cosmological symbol for Religion of Nature, 91–96; and Big Bang, 91–92; in Neolithic, Orphic, and Daoist symbolism, 91–92 Wordsworth, William, 108 Worster, Donald, 100, 116 Wu, Kuang-ming, 163n9, 164n17 yin-yang, 47–48, 88 Yosemite National Park, 115