Symbols, including liturgical symbols, communicate to us on many levels. This article explores the profound nature of symbolic communication, based on the approach of scholar Paul Ricoeur, and offers suggestions for how liturgical symbols can be made to speak more clearly and profoundly.
The whole program of the liturgical revival may be summed up with the apt phrase used by Robert Hovda in a variety of places: “Let the symbols speak.” We long for our communities to be clear about the great central signs and actions that bear Christianity and speak it authentically to our time. We want to “unshrivel” these symbols and let them stand forth, ample, gracious, and full, occupying the whole time and space of the liturgical assembly’s gathering. We want to see anew that these symbols are the actions of a whole community, not objectified things under the control of a clerical few. And we want to learn anew how to take seriously the rich implications of these symbols as they propose to us new ways to see ourselves, our world, and our cultures held under the great mercy of God.
A growing ecumenical consensus tells us what these authentic symbols of Christianity are: they are a people washed and anointed into common life; they are that people gathered for the reading and interpretation of the ancient Scriptures; they are that people eating and drinking at a table of thanksgiving; and they are the lesser—but still important—signs that link individual or family life to the assembly’s symbolic purpose or reconcile alienated persons into the assembly.
We do not necessarily have such wide agreement on what exactly it would mean to present these symbols in their unshriveled fullness, or to build and to live following their implications. How large shall the pool of washing be? How does the speech of the assembly come to be marked with the same kind of symbolic authenticity we are seeking for the enacted signs? What does the communal character of the action mean for the nature of leadership and authority in the assembly? What are the links between the symbolic vision of the liturgy and social criticism? Just what is it that the symbols are saying?
We are working on these questions, and working hard, but the underlying question is always the same and always the most important: how can we foster this renewal of our symbols and our life? Or to say it again, what exactly shall we do to let the symbols speak?
Ricoeur’s Criteriology
A variety of scholarly analyses exist to assist us in this work by helping us determine how symbols do their “speaking” at all, how they mean. One of the most useful of these is the phenomenology or “criteriology” of symbols found in the introduction to Part 1 of Paul Ricoeur’s classic study, The Symbolism of Evil. The discussion occupies only a few pages, but a reflection on the structures of meaning proposed there may be very helpful for our task of letting the symbols speak.
According to Ricoeur, in every authentic symbol three dimensions are present: the cosmic, the oneiric (of or relating to dreams), and the poetic. A symbol is (a) a thing in the world in which the sacred is manifested to our community; (b) a thing which then figures in our dreams or, more generally, in our own psychic histories; and (c) a thing around which words and songs and names gather powerful meanings. Only on the basis of these dimensions or functions of a symbol ought one proceed to distinguish yet a fourth function or dimension, the reflective. A symbol is also (d) a complex of meanings that may “give rise to thought,” that may feed concept and doctrine.
Thus, to take one example, from earliest times the sun and the moon have presented themselves to some human groups as the basic—indeed, the most primary—manifestations of the sacred. Night and day and the cycles of seasons and tides experienced in relationship to the cycles and positions of the sun and the moon made those heavenly bodies available as symbols of the very cosmic order itself. To encounter the sun (or, in a transposition, the moon) was to encounter that beyond our world which held our world together. Moreover, the burning, blinding fire of the sun was an analog to the human experience that real order always has to do with danger restrained or transformed. The sun rises. The world has a center. And if all is well, in balance with the moon and water, the sun does not burn us up.
Sun and moon rise also in our dreams. the terrify us or they save us. They give us light for hunting or for working or for living. Their duality becomes the focus for our experience of father and mother and so of our own sexual identity. We fly with them. We become the center of meaning and order. But not quite. We hunt with the moon or are hunted. We reign with the sun and are burned up.
So the poets have a great resonance in us when they begin to sing. And their words and epithets and metaphors make even deeper the meaning we see in objects in the sky or the material that is interpreted in our dreams. Their words seem to carry the tribal order and our own psychic history. The word is itself the thing—the symbol—it names. “Great Light,” the poets sing. Or “Father” or “Mother.” They sing the tales of Phaethon or Icarus or Diana. Or they make a day the first day or the second and name it after one of the great lights. Then when the sun or moon rises on the tribe’s horizon or in our dreams, there is the name and the story and the order of the week.
What comes first—cosmos or dream or word? We do not really know, and Ricoeur is not proposing a history. His structure simply proposes that it is useful to see that all three aspects are present in any symbol, and in primary symbols, all three—the cosmic order, the dream power, and the poetic word—are the same. Of course, what is meant by the dream power, the “oneiric,” is not just the functioning of the symbol in our dreams; it is all that the symbol does in our individual psychic lives. For us now the symbol does not even exist as a “thing” apart from the word, but the word interprets and makes available a powerful cosmic and psychic experience.
A New Poetics
But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, at least, the poets speak on: the great lights, they say, and the days and weeks they rule are creatures, made by God. God—a word for that giver of order who is beyond all names and all natural necessities—may fly and burn and reign like the sun, may rise as the sun of righteousness. But God is not the sun. And, for Christians, Sunday is the order-giving first day now, chiefly because it is the day of assembly around the risen Christ, not the risen sun. Still, in this new poetics, the old cosmic and oneiric powers still resonate, bringing the order and the fears suggested by the sun to names we use for God or for the assembly’s day. And classically the positions of the sun and the moon were used to determine the dates of the great feasts on which the story was told of the salvation of God who is beyond the sun. So classic iconography has sun and moon on either side of the image of the crucified.
Surely, among Christians, further discourse on the doctrines of monotheism and of creation will be assisted by including some reflection on the cosmic, oneiric, and poetic functions of the symbolism of sun and moon, as well as on the transformation of this symbolism in the new poetics of the Bible. The symbol, says Ricoeur, gives rise to thought, and the thought is illuminated by rerooting it in its symbolic matrix. What Christians mean by “monotheism” is not so much a philosophical position derived from the experience of one sun in the sky and the suppression of the symbol of the moon, as it is the event that happens, in the conception of God and the world, when the new poetics says: “God made sun and moon!” The “event” that happens in the poetry, this revolutionary and surprising turn, must always be borne in mind in reflection on doctrine, or the doctrine is distorted into philosophy or ideology.
It is interesting, of course, to anyone who cares about symbols, to note that while we are all taught that the universe does not circle around either the earth or the sun, we still so mark our days and seasons with the passages of sun and moon as to bring to them, to quote Ricoeur again, a post-critical “second naiveté.” It is no wonder, then, that homiletic calls to hope for the sun of righteousness are still so moving to us, or that the Christmas and Hanukkah feasts that occur in the dark time of the sun’s return still have such a hold on our culture, quite apart from their Christian or Jewish content, their “new poetics.” Teachers and preachers and liturgists should note that even in this scientific age there is still room for the surprise, the discovery, the joy of the biblical poetics. “This light you long for at Christmas, lighting fires and candles and tree-lights against the darkness, midwinter protest—this light of order and peace already shines in the darkness itself. Christ born, God comes among our darkness and injustice and death—this is the sun. It shines in the bread in your hands, the cup at your lips.”
Basic Christian Symbols
But neither sun nor moon, though they have determined festal dates and given a name to the assembly day and lent imagery to our preaching and our hymns, is the primary symbol of the liturgy. A bath, an assembly-for-the-Word, and a shared meal—these are primary. Can Ricoeur’s schema of “cosmos, dream, word” illuminate these symbols and help us to see what we are doing in letting them “speak?” Or, rather, can we apply to these primary symbols of the assembly the adaptation of Ricoeur’s schema that I have used here: cosmic meaning, psychic power, poetic names and songs; then the new poetics of the Bible and so the symbols as the grounds for concept and doctrine?
Yes.
Take the symbol meal. Many communities of human beings have encountered a cosmic revelation of the sacred in a laden table: the food represents the cooperation of the fruitful land or the giving forest with human culture and work; the food means the survival of the tribe or family, the circle of shared eating, against famine and death. Because of these meanings, the food of a meal comes to signify more than its momentary utilitarian value. It stands for peaceful order and life; indeed, it carries intimations of a larger order than that enjoyed by this circle eating now. The symbol meal is used to integrate others into the community or to give an occasion for the enactment of secondary symbols that also manifest something of what we think to be this universal order: who eats first? who is admitted? what foods are there? what is the order of eating? The power of the symbol is heightened, of course, because it tames and transforms its opposite. We eat to live. But just so death is suggested: without eating we would die, and even now our life depends on the death of plants and animals which the forest or our agriculture have given us. In eating we are at the edge, the limit, of our possibilities. We know ourselves to be contingent, dependent, on that which is outside us—so we are before the sacred.
I also eat and drink in my dreams. I eat the tree or am eaten by the beast. I drink the magic cup or the stream that is the beloved. I come to a room that has been prepared for me or I am embarrassed or terrified at a common meal. Such might be images in anyone’s dreams. Eating or being eaten, slaking thirst or being poisoned, being terrified or richly delighted at a common meal—it is no wonder that there should be such oneiric themes since, generally in my psychic life, I face in hunger my limit, my death. And my earliest knowledge of another, and so of my emergent self, was at eating, was looking up across the breast at one who responded to my hunger. Eating, then, has always been communal. At the same time, it has always been powerfully, personally intimate. My contingency says: perhaps in that food there is order and peace for me.
And the poet sings. There are songs at the meal, telling what the tribe or community knows to be most true and using the order suggested by the meal as the occasion to tell it. There are histories and tales and stories of other meals—stories of fears and hopes and necessary labor—which thereby become part of what is eaten. Words are said to interpret the course of the meal, and names are created for the food and for the meal itself, as the singers broaden and complicate the reference of the cosmic symbol and deepen the material of my dreams. The words, the eating and the dreaming are one “thing,” one powerful symbol.
God’s Surprise
That “thing” is material for the biblical poetics; indeed, says the faith, it is material for the very grace of God to speak to us an unexpected mercy. So, for Jews and Christians, God is the source of food, and the principal words of the meal are words of thanksgiving. Such thanksgiving witnesses to an order of the world—“dominion of God” is one major metaphor in the meal prayers that transcends the security of the tribe or family or nation. Eating and the words are one “thing”: they are thanksgiving. And there are stories and songs at the meals, stories of God’s great mercy for poor people, and mercy making this people free. The meals themselves become witnesses to the covenant with this God. The people do not die; they eat and drink with God. These are covenant meals and sacrificial meals and festal meals and the Passover meal and the promise of the final, great, nation-feeding meal on the holy mountain.
The old cosmic, oneiric, and poetic resonances are all still around—the hope for land and culture to be united in order, the longing for life-giving food, the inclusion of references to death. But now they are surprised: God is the giver of land and culture and hope and life; the gift is to all peoples, and the real order is not given by our too early, foreclosing, frequently murderous “order.”
Still, the biblical surprise goes on. Jesus eats meals of the dominion of God and eats them with outsiders and excluded ones. Jesus’ own death is interpreted by a meal. Finally, the community’s meal, whereby it means to gather its gathering of many lost and poor ones into an assembly to witness to God’s order, receives Jesus’ witness, his death and risen life, as its principal food. And already in the letters of Paul and James, Christians begin the long critical process continuing until today, which asks whether the meal sufficiently represents the new order and justice of God. Eating and drinking, words of thanksgiving, Jesus’ witness, his body and blood, a community of outsiders made the people of God—these, by God’s grace, are all one thing.
The old cosmic, oneiric, and poetic references have been received and broken and reshaped. There is no salvation, finally, in our dreams or in our ancient symbols, no hope beyond our own necessities and projections. But in surprising grace, God saves all that we are—our hopes and our fears and even our dreams and symbols and stories.
Much of the same sketch could be made of water or of the symbolic complex word-in-assembly. So, for example, water is met as the cosmic order, as chaos tamed, as the source of fruitfulness. It is dreamt about as drowning or birth, as washing or sex. And stories are told of the community that lives by the water, defeats the water, survives the water, finds and drinks the water. Such water is received in the biblical poetics and then in Jewish and Christian rituals. But now, for Christians, its full force is broken open at a new thing—order and birth and the slaking of thirst where we thought there was only death, in the midst of human life in this world. God comes among us to share our lot and our death, and that sharing is washed over us to make us a new people, witnesses to God’s order, alive with God’s life.
And so word-in-assembly has been, as with the ancient reading of Enuma elish at the new year, the creation of the world each year afresh: people gathered around ritual word was a symbol of the cosmos. It has been oracle and the hope for a word for me. And it has been stories and songs of a people gathered to hear proclaimed the great charter or the fearful royal decree. In biblical poetics, it is the assembly of Israel to hear God’s word, God’s law; it is the people being in the covenant; it is the final assembly of all the nations. And then it has become, in the great surprise, the assembly of this collection of folk today to hear the word, to hear Jesus Christ risen, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets.”
Implications
Such reflections as these might follow from Ricoeur’s criteriology. And, indeed, much more could be said for each of the levels of meaning and each of the primary symbols of the Christian assembly. But this much is enough to suggest some answers to the questions we posed in the beginning. The pool should be very large, so large as to evoke the cosmic and oneiric references. The speech of the assembly, taught by the biblical poetics, should function symbolically more than didactically so that it keeps alive cosmic, oneiric, and poetic resonances while bringing them into a new crisis. The critique of order at the meal must continue with a new emphasis on the breaking of false authority and the welcoming of outsiders to the center. These must become part of what the symbols are saying.
Finally, this schema of symbolic meaning itself proposes three theses that can guide our thinking about renewal:
- The primary symbols in the assembly need to be recovered as full signs that readily evoke the cosmic, oneiric, and poetic. In such a fuller presence these symbols will be better able to evoke ourselves and our hopes for the world, our sense of humanity located in a cosmos, our fears, and failures.
- But we are not about a new paganism; there is no great hope in our symbols and dreams, but rather in these greatly evoked and greatly broken in the poetics and grace of God. The recovery of the symbols needs to be accompanied by a profound recovery of biblical catechesis and preaching, of mystagogy into the surprise of Jesus Christ. He is the bread and the water and the Word.
- This twofold recovery will protect us from a continuation of the use of symbols as mere illustrations of doctrine or as proposals of ideology. Such renewal will instead urge that doctrine is a reflection on the crisis of full symbols when they are used of Christ. And when the symbols are allowed to speak they propose a new world order greater than our justice, already present in God’s gift and forming us to lives of witness.