"Even Homer Sometimes .... Nods?"
I mentioned earlier that I have begun to wonder whether my mind has grown too Lewisian. I was therefore refreshed to find myself, momentarily at least, disagreeing with something Lewis tossed into an essay on Edmund Spenser (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature). He wrote, referencing Jung and Freud, "We now know that symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words" (137).
Nego! I cried. "Oh come now, dear Lewis, let us reason together. Surely you, the author of Studies in Words, the great 20th-century Defender of the Faith, are not going to fall prey to Jung and Freud!"
Then I began to wonder "Have I simply misunderstood the passage? Is Lewis mocking, or being wry, or meaning something else?" I read it again. No, he was not joking. He did say that psychology understood the matter differently than a Christian would (some comfort there). But in the end, I was staring squarely in the face of something troubling.
Lewis wrote that symbols, not words, are the "natural speech of the soul."
"I'll think about it later," I said to myself, and went on with Spenser. But this morning the topic came back to haunt me. I was drifting through my morning routine; in fact, I had just finished dressing. I happened to look down and noticed a blue-and-silver anklet on my right ankle.
"Now it is summer," I thought, spontaneously. "It is truly summer when I put that anklet on, because in the summer I never take it off. That bit of azure beading and silver wire is summer."
A symbol.
A symbol that was the natural expression of... my soul? The natural speech, even?
Did Lewis nod in this matter of the soul and symbols? Or was he right? And if he was right, what in the world are the implications? For, you know, Jesus is the Word, not the Symbol....
Nego! I cried. "Oh come now, dear Lewis, let us reason together. Surely you, the author of Studies in Words, the great 20th-century Defender of the Faith, are not going to fall prey to Jung and Freud!"
Then I began to wonder "Have I simply misunderstood the passage? Is Lewis mocking, or being wry, or meaning something else?" I read it again. No, he was not joking. He did say that psychology understood the matter differently than a Christian would (some comfort there). But in the end, I was staring squarely in the face of something troubling.
Lewis wrote that symbols, not words, are the "natural speech of the soul."
"I'll think about it later," I said to myself, and went on with Spenser. But this morning the topic came back to haunt me. I was drifting through my morning routine; in fact, I had just finished dressing. I happened to look down and noticed a blue-and-silver anklet on my right ankle.
"Now it is summer," I thought, spontaneously. "It is truly summer when I put that anklet on, because in the summer I never take it off. That bit of azure beading and silver wire is summer."
A symbol.
A symbol that was the natural expression of... my soul? The natural speech, even?
Did Lewis nod in this matter of the soul and symbols? Or was he right? And if he was right, what in the world are the implications? For, you know, Jesus is the Word, not the Symbol....
posted by Praelucor at 10:09 AM
5 Comments:
But the question is, is Jesus literally a Word, as in, a spoken or written sound? "Word" is just a translation of "logos," after all. What does logos really mean?
You can communicate with anyone via signs and symbols, even if you do not know their language.
Couldn't it be argued that a word is a symbol (or a set of symbols - letters) standing in for something else? And as your friend points out, logos may not map on precisely to our understanding of "word" in English.
I'm rather inclined to agree with Lewis on this ;)
Well, here is comfort of another kind. It would appear that my friends are even more Lewisian than I am... ;-) But seriously, don't you guys think that a word is different from a symbol? A symbol is like the skull-and-crossbones on a can of wasp poison. It communicates a whole thought or message in itself. A word, on the other hand, is like a name--it has meaning, but it's not a whole message.
Thoughts?
1. On Lewis: If Lewis thought that it was about words, not symbols, he wouldn't have thought up Aslan.
now...
Jesus is not just a Word, not just the Word, not even just The Word.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
He is creator even of words. He is far too wonderful, far to unbounded to fit into the scope of a single signifier or even medium. He is the Christ of the scriptures, but he is also the maker of worlds and the one who treasures unutterable groans. That's one reason John is so keen to remind us the multivariate nature of Christ (and his testomony) in I John...
In the beginning of the book we get...
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.
This description, which is similar to the intro to John, is distinct in its mention of Christ's physical reality. Here, in the face of Gnostic teaching which questions the physicality of Christ, John seems to be dealing with the the doctrinal ambiguity found in the intro to his gospel. This intro presents Christ as creator and Word but less as person, which he develops later in the book. Here too, Jesus is the Word -- but He is the word of life. He has been heard, he has been seen, he has been touched. He is not just Jesus the word, not just Jesus the person, not just anything by which we might try to understand to master, but he is also not just a master, not just a teacher, not just a friend, not just a judge, not just a groom, etc... He is not known solely by appearance, actions, position, or abstract characteristics.
By being the image of the invisible God, Jesus is what idols and art can never be-- He could walk, and he walked to heal, to spread a message of repentance and hope. He could see, and he looked with piercing eyes and full of compassion. He heard and hears, and he brings our prayers before the godhead. Like works of wood, bronze, and stone, he was weak, could be worn, and was broken. But unlike them, he is eternally the possessor and giver of true life. Unlike them, he can and does love us. He is not made in the image of man but rather shows us who we ought to be and makes us who we shall become. We purify ourselves even as he is pure.
Digression: Words aren't really symbols in the sense of "standing for something else". They're more like referents in computer memory-- like triggers which bring a set of associations and/to objects[whatever that means] in contact with other sets of associations and/to objects. Christ is very different from that sense of words.
One must be careful about creating a theology of language from a few statements in scriptures, no matter how tempting the idea may be.
p.s. were Plato and Aristotle *that great* that you would actually put them above Lewis? Interesting. As you know, I'm no particular Lewisite.
** * **
Symbol is such a messy word. Word is such a messy word. Of course they're different. Of course they're similar. This is obvious. Skull and Crossbones is actually a good example. Like a word, it can mean many things depending on context. It never communicates a whole thought message in itself. If it's on a can of wasp, on a flag, or on a band jacket, it communicates very different things, just like a word.
This much is obvious. The key element is in the details, and when you look at details, you realize that definitions of word, context get blurred with issues of the aural and visual. But David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language is a good start.
** * * **
Symbols and the soul: Lewis was being silly or at least uncareful when he said that " symbols are the natural speech of the soul". I'm guessing uncareful, if he truly prefaced it with "We now know that"
To make that statement is to suggest a subset of a boatload of unverifiable things:
* The soul has a natural speech.
* The soul, separate from a body, has a natural state.
* The soul, separate from a body can speak
* The soul, separate from a body, is able to communicate using symbols, despite a presumed lack of physical sensory apprehension
* Replace "separate" with "distinct" in previous statements
* [human?] Souls have existed far longer than human bodies. [or]
* Within to the evolution of homo sapiens and the development of human relations, pictographs and other symbols were the original communication [ this is wretched reasoning - there is no reason to assume that pictographs existed before spoken language, although it is probably possible to theorize that symbols may have operated within individuals even in times before the development of spoken language, if such times existed]
* The soul is inherently more universal than the body. This is weird. I don't know what he means by universal.
I give up. I don't see how anyone could in good conscience write that sentence. I don't think it's even a Jung and Freud thing. The symbols idea makes sense from an evolutionary-anthropological perspective, since symbols need not be visual -- even animals communicate by touch, smell, and sounds that seem to be something other than what we call words. But souls? We don't even know what they really are, let alone their means of communication, if they have any.
But it sounds lovely.
Or I'm overthinking a plate of beans. He probably just means, "images are very meaningful to us in a deep way".
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