The study of the Bible or any other ancient text full of myth and ritual in the history-of-religions sense is, at a deep level, a study of symbols, with some reconnaissance of the question of what the symbols refer to.
The study of “symbolisms
of the sacred” comports an ineluctable question, according to Paul Ricoeur. But
we operate from a disadvantaged position. Here is a money quote:
In every way, something has been lost, irremediably
lost: immediacy of belief. But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of
the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern
men, aim at a second naivete in and through criticism. In short, it is by
interpreting that we can hear again . . . [T]he second immediacy that we seek
and the second naivete that we await are no longer accessible to us anywhere
else than in a hermeneutics; we can only believe by interpreting. . . . [Some
interpretation merely means] to display the multiple and inexhaustible
intentions of each symbol, to discover intentional analogies between myths and
rites, to run through the levels of experience and representation that are
unified by the symbol. . . . Our analysis of the symbols and myths of human
evil belongs to that sort of understanding . . . But is has not been possible
to limit ourselves to such understanding of symbols [by way of other] symbols. There
the question of truth is unceasingly eluded. Although the phenomenologist may
give the name of truth to the internal coherence, the systematicity, of the
world of symbols, such truth is truth without belief, truth at a distance, reduced,
from which one has expelled the question: do I believe that? . . . Such is the
wager. Only he can object to this mode of thought who thinks that philosophy, to
begin from itself, must be a philosophy without presuppositions [that is, something
that disconnects cognition from worldhood, something that refuses to recognize
the anthropological]. A philosophy that starts from the fullness of language is
a philosophy with presuppositions [or, with meaningful conditions on its own
subjectivity]. To be honest, it must make its presuppositions explicit, state
them as beliefs, and try to make the wager pay off in understanding. (SE, 1967,
pgs. 352-354, 357)
HT: Russell Arben Fox,
from whose post
the above quote is taken. Those who find the subject interesting will want to read this
post by Fox as well.
It is the case that Ricoeur does not go far enough. Those of us whose self-understanding includes the perception of having had and continuing to have "unmediated" (always a relative term) experiences of God in worship, in dreams, and in the serendipitous intersection of events will seek to attain a third naivete. That is, after achieving critical distance from our own experiences, a final task remains: that of receiving those experiences as a divine gift all over again.
Bibliography
Paul Ricoeur. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1960]
Symbols as so spoken of here are what rescue us from the entrapment of words, our intellectual delusion.
Posted by: Dr. Jim Miller @ Hopelens | April 21, 2009 at 08:20 PM