Than Discourse

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 © 2014 State University of New York Press, Albany 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 sym- bolizations 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 © 2014 State University of New York Press, Albany 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 capa- bilities nature has conferred on our respective species. The pelican is my fellow creature, and I have both the privilege and responsibility of respect- ing 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 inter- dependent 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. © 2014 State University of New York Press, Albany 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 precari- ous 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 connec- tion 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.

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