Sacred texts and tales frequently tell of a serpent. The serpentine symbol carries varied understandings for it is the nature of a symbol to stand as portal to an unfathomable well of meaningfulness, the subconscious intimacy with the primal forces of our reality that can only be portrayed, expressed, and enunciated in the sublime artistic superficialities of ritual and myth. Thus we have those great narratives, dramas, poems, songs, dances and gesticulations of sundry sacred traditions and founding sagas.
The serpent with its unblinking eye has been used to portray both the serenity of wisdom and the cold grasp of reason. Its coiled form has allowed it to be used as a symbol of transcendence and immortality: the Ouroboros, the completed and living circle; the world nester, the Ophion incubating the world-egg. Its exuviation has opened it to use as a sign of renewal and healing as we find in the Caduceus of semi-divine Asclepius; the brazen serpent of Moses; and twinned and winged as the herald of new beginnings, the staff of Hermes/Mercury. Its habitude below the surface of the earth has made it pliable as the power of the underworld: the darkness and chaos of Egypt’s Apep who daily tries to swallow the great symbol of order, the Sun; the eternal bad-hair day of Medusa whose visage turns life to dust; India’s catastrophic and voracious Vritra who swallows the world and is vanquished by Indra’s lightning-bolt; and Greece’s similar Python who is in like manner disposed of by Apollo.
Despite the derogatory role the serpent is given to play in the Genesis narrative—the inquisitor, the tempter, and the accursed of God to eat the dust of the earth—both Hebrew and Christian sacred texts are not unambiguous about the serpent symbol. When the Hebrew tribes remonstrated that their wanderings in the desert were inequitable punishment for their disbelief, God sent poisonous serpents as a curse upon them. Never without solution or salvation in hand, God commanded Moses to make an image of a serpent and raise it up upon a pole that all them afflicted by the poisonous bite might, by gazing upon the icon of their condemnation, be healed. The power of this desert narrative is forwarded into Christian imagery with John referencing this incident as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ being raised up upon the cross for us, and Paul relating it as signaling both of the curse and the cure Jesus is made to embody for our sake. Psychology will be more direct than either the Book of Numbers or these apostles, instructing us we need face the ill within that in the confronting of its fearsome potency it be made tame, wholesome, and integrated into the power of life for life.
I have opined the Serpent begins theology by asking Eve what God means by his law. That primal dialogue sets Eve on the path to becoming the world-mother, it breaks open the paradisiac womb of security and uniformity, it sets in motion the discovering of the world—its trials, tribulations, and its transcending promise that a wholeness can once again be found. It is not, thus, a tale of woe; it comes with a salubrious prospect–a surmounting resolution of all the divaricating paths and powers that life in the world will reveal. This hope for, this trust in, this love for a wholeness to encompass the horizons of life–this is the revelation of life’s meaning, the “wholly” life–that which scripture dares in this narrative to personify and name the Holy Living One whose “life” is guarded by flaming sword (at once symbol of ardour and sacrifice) which only the conquering hero will know to wield. Genesis’ insight into the nature of humanity plays itself out as a drama of many masks: man, woman, God, serpent, garden, and sword. Each of these symbols is potent in and by its multifariousness, its capacity for an inexhaustible surplus of meaning, its intimacy with the unspeakable wells of power and the comprehension seminally resident within life.
Knowledge cannot enter these symbols without destroying them, without pinning them to a table, eviscerating them, dissecting them. It is faith alone, the purest trust that can close its eyes to reason and surrender itself into the subliminality of the unitive experience, that can embrace the quintessential being-with-ness, can enter the symbol, allow it to impact and envelop the self, and allow the self to be absorbed by it. It carries the sensations of unity, transcendence, and lost-ness that we often express as the aesthetic experience, but unlike the aesthetic, faith’s swoon is something that resides, haunts, tinges, taunts, and thus, not so much enwraps as centres and empowers. It is an exuberance not of exhilaration but transformation.
In contraindication of faith as the living nexus twixt daily life and the infinite wells of meaningfulness, theology wants to step away from the symbol, to under-stand it, to ex-plain it. This is a human reaction to the un-conceptualized, a part of our psychic physics—the need to take things apart, see their parts, restructure them. But this surgery can be an exercise toward vitality only in so far as it is transitory, only in so far as it is a momentary flexing of reason before that out of which reason arises, only as far as theology knows itself a pre-tense before that which cannot be given a tense, a grammar for a language angels cannot speak. Theology becomes the quizzing serpent. It fails God and man if it does not enclose itself and become the Ouroboros, if it does not humble knowledge to love, if it wontedly swallows the light only an Indra, an Apollo, a Holy One can command.
Contravening my own regulation that I never attend church on Epiphany lest I suffer again an argument for the historicity of magi or star, confident the foursquare Francis would not disappoint, I watched the televised Epiphany Mass from St. Peter’s in Rome. His Holiness preached of the need for all, be it by wonder or science, to be guided forward in openness. It was a most respectable sermon and liturgy. Then, as the papal procession made its way from the Basilica, a commentator spoke over the music of the recessional to inform all that “scholars” do not know the exact number or names of the magi, or whatsoever Mary and Joseph eventually did with the majestic gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh! A papal summons to embrace the authentic worthiness of life fatuously scuttled by pastoral injudiciousness and pseudo-academic lunacy delivered by a doltish beadle. Many—most understandably—give up and walk away when all the parts of the great myths are concretized, disassembled, and laid bare by the analytics of theology or reduced into the trite utterances of unthinking, self-conceited, apostatizing nincompoops who think they have captured God, eternity, and the meaning of life by turning them into historical and irrefutable objects. Many—most understandably–are over-whelmed by such obliquity, and, as if drowning, cannot breathe sufficiently well to remember we need to stop standing under, to stop suffering the weight of the parts, and to again re-enter the icon, the symbolic portal of the whole, renewed in in-sight, yet transcending this parcel of knowing in the freedom of a power greater than the aesthetic. King Hezekiah destroyed the brazen serpent Moses had made precisely because this icon–this sacrament instituted by God for the salvation of sinners–became an object of worship rather than a symbol of mercy. Church teaching and preaching—in word and rite—are about symbols, about profundities of life too great to ever be made literal or concretized. Any attempt to literalize gospel destroys it, and makes of its symbol an idol in need of a Hezekiah.[i]
We can become enwrapped in a song, a story, a painting… and that is their artistry, their truth, good, and beauty, their wondrous “transcending” of reason as ancient philosophers first extrapolated. We can also analyze a song, a story, a painting. Therein and thereby, however, the artistry is lost, the aesthetic allure is dissipated, and it becomes an object of an investigation. After the investigation we can and ought to freely step back “into” the work, and receive it as the rendering of an artist’s magic. In the great mythic symbols, however, because they arise not out the artistry of an individual but the communal psyche, that which confronts us is not merely the allure of an aesthetic but a “thou” transporting us into a transcendental truth. This “thou” by whom we are met is a herald sent from the Self in its ever becoming Self, and in accord with the liberty of our response, delivering us into the very resources of vitality.
The mythic symbol is not grasped by the aesthetic valuation but by faith, by that closing of the eye to reason and seeing with the inner eye, with in-sight. The outer eyes cannot behold the mythic truth because it is not literal, not a concrete, not an historical item. Such truth is something more profoundly true than “of this world”, something words cannot convey, and so something experiential only in inner silence and external action, in the dynamics of the vitality received. Its meaning is life, action. Any attempt to literalize or concretize the mythic symbol demotes it from force to fact, from spirit to thing. It remains the “unspeakable” as its violation, “sacri-lege”, denotes, for any attempt to speak it, to break it open to the understanding, destroys and degrades the sacred, the unfolding whole, the self-revelatory Holy, as the basis of life.
I can and do analyze the stories of holy writ, as I can the songs and anthems that are therein rooted, but I also allow myself the freedom, the spontaneity, to be lost in their freshet, to plunge into their rich waters without feeling any need to decipher either their depths or “chemical” compositions. By investigation and consideration I may know in some part Mary is code for faith and her virginity code for the inexplicable giftedness of trust, but I can take off my lab coat and sink myself into the myth; I can in psyche, in spirit, nakedly and unashamedly enter into the beauty and good and truth of the symbol, and so sing of “Mary ever-virgin” with buoyant and transporting joy. It is not an assent to a literal truth but a descent into the wondrousness of life’s unnameable potencies wherein the picture is the artist and its canvas is man.
Science can take apart the bits and pieces of the world, sort them, categorize them into black or white, good or ill, pleasure or pain, etc. and in so doing attempt to satisfy reason’s questions. Faith and hope, those avatars of love, alone satiate a deeper quizzing—life. The serpent, made by the God who made all things and judged them good, set Eve and her Adam on the quest for both science and faith, and thereby and therein auspicated a divine transfiguration, exalting God from Creator to Redeemer, from Demiurge to Spirit (the all-pervading dynamic), from Judge of good and evil to Grace (the fore-giver), from the Lofty One to Love. In this divine palingenetics we can trace the symbol’s path from the serpentine cold-eye to circle, from reason to faith, for in the flow of time and in the spreading out of light the accursed by God shall become the felix culpa[ii], and Eve, the mother of men, shall in her progeny become the progenitrix of God. No reason can contain such truths, for such truths are foundational to reality, and reason’s role is to navigate the surface, not make the sea. Thus, Mary is made the countering of Eve, and the serpent must ever either slither or bite its own tail, play Python or Ouroboros, Evil One or the Apocatastasicized.
These closing reflections are rational extensions of the symbol resident in the symbol out of whose groundwork reason also arises. Symbol[iii], like space, is curvable; it bends around reason’s mass to enclose itself in a circle. This circling of a symbol, however, yields us merely the “co-incidence” of opposites, not their “transcendence”, not their spiraling into higher or deeper planes. It is an under-standing, a gnosis, a conceptualizing rather than that which the pure symbol arises to provide: the élan for life in its fullness, in its indefectible radiance of being-with-being-for.
[i] My J’accuse
It needs be blazoned that in an age wherein large parts of the world are abandoning church because its proclamation is no longer comprehensible to the modern ear, in the age wherein growth is muchly confined to literalist or some form of fundamentalist understanding that cannot be sustained against the legitimate evolutionary advance of science, technology, psychology and globalization, the church needs to stop not merely preaching to the choir but to stop treating the choir like children in Sunday school, needs to speak to the world not in its beloved tongue of insulated seminary terminologies but in something the world today can understand, needs achingly in its bones to know words can only follow open and loving arms, that the doctrine of the trinity is a vacuous concept unless in its every act the word of God is made ever obedient to the God who is love. The church, both in general and in its leadership, must know, with Paul who put aside childish things to become an adult, that the heart and mind of Christ are not lost if the sentimentalized and fondly held terms and forms garnered in childhood are surrendered. The church must know that many are not either willing or interested, as were their antecessors, to be simply socialized into attending it and its concerns. The church must know that adults deserve to be approached as intelligent and capable adults and not as children in need of a nanny. The church needs to remember that catechisms and catechesis, those watered down versions of faith and tradition, must be followed by the fleshing out of their items in mystagogy, that the milk of infancy be replaced by something more substantive, something more appropriate to growing into spiritual maturity. The church must know its mission is not to indoctrinate but to teach by example, by leadership, mercy, forgiveness, and love. The church must deeply realize its call is not to discipline in unbendable rules of faith and behaviour but to create space for and to inspire true and mature discipleship. The church must know its painful reality is founded in a faith that there is no word, no thing, that cannot be sacrificed for the welfare of this world God so loves, for this sovereign God offered up his own living Word for the well-being of all.
The obstinate insistence by leadership of the church that their beloved and treasured terms and ideograms be kept unchanged and unchangeable is among one of the greatest impediments to the life of Christ this world faces
The church must realize its position in the world is precarious, and one misstep, in word or deed, can, and probably will, devastate good will, openness, and receptivity toward it and its message. The church must realize that as the world swiftly progressed in knowledge and sophistication, it panicked, abandoned the world, and confusing the eternality of truth with the inalterability of its forms and presentations, enisled itself from change, and therein and thereby made itself both un-relatable and irrelevant. If the church is to be a realistic presence, an audible and respectable presence, it must repent the hubris of its triumphalism and self-righteousness insularity, renew itself, and become a humble and loving presence. It must become the servant and humanitarian, and exemplify true care and concern for the body of the world before it can speak to the world of its soul. And when of soul it speaks, it cannot change wine into water, cannot make items spiritual into things material, turn insights into the human heart into historical factoids, or render the symbolic as the objective. It must be true to both world and spirit. It must in all things be true and honest and forthright.
I truly want to be polite, and I acknowledge that I cannot speak of every church, but there are in many places situations wherein people have become insulated in a bubble and it needs be pricked. I know well that many of them upon whom my critiques fall are honest, sincere and of best intention. However, they suffer “old boys’ club” syndrome. They have gone through the same educational regime, been bonded in the same work environment, been instituted and institutionalized by the same institution. They are “company men”, and any contact with the “client”, with the world, is scripted according to their “office”. Sociologically, psychologically, they constitute a sub-culture, a culture sequestered into itself without capacity to see or comprehend other ways and means. Nevertheless, like the royal houses of Europe a century ago, they need be shaken into the new world, the new realities, or sent into exile.
I remember the report of an incident during Vatican II when a well-researched and considered schema was tossed back to the cognoscenti because a respected and ancient bishop broke down weeping for fear his beloved version of the progress of the mass was threatened. As they are wont ever to do, the “boys” simply closed rank around him, protecting his “fond imaginings”. I recall another ancient and doddering priest who refused to change his position at the altar because as a child he had rehearsed the mass in a certain form—facing the kitchen wall with his mother’s apron over his shoulders—and such form was “sacred” to him. One may well wag one’s head at the conceit of these men who want their childish ways ever to endure despite any adversity they may fling before the paths of others. Yet still, too many ministers, priests, bishops and assorted religious decry any change to the “traditions” they hold dear—both the obvious need and the dominical command to address the world comprehensibly be damned. Such doggedness enwraps doctrine (despite most of the items held sacred reside not in scripture but a philosophy), the understanding of man (despite the advances of psychology, anthropology and sociology), and church order (despite obvious historical and patriarchal origins). It is small wonder so many of these “conservers” of truth display such sentiment for “Mother Mary”. She is their identity. From their in-seminal and formative years, Mary has been the icon of humility, obedience, and chastity held up before them. Quietly, however, she has been much more: the one elevated above others, the one both confided in and confined to silence. She is, for all her glorification, alone. Thus, despite whatsoever else they have of the icon absorbed, at their most compassionate they deeply transmit the abandoned mother standing at the door in sorrow, weeping for her children gone off to find a life of their own, brooding for a brood who has refused to be forever children—stoically elevated, alone, and without vision as how to be other.
The church, having squandered centuries blaming poor Galileo for daring to espy the heavens in a manner contrary to the narratives of scripture, has egregiously failed to learn it needs be amiable and open to the progress of psychology and biology on their many fronts. Moral teachings and church order remain grounded in a false sanctification of the psychological and biological understandings of the ancients and the sociology of cultures long gone. Internal disciplines still stand under the code of the “old boys”. Such obstinacy before the beams of knowledge may well, in considerable part, reside in something touching upon the more personal, for while there is no fault in the delight by so many so obviously taken in the rustle of silken soutanes as they skirt along the corridors of church, there is the heinous hypocrisy of denying its existence. The realities of the world and its progress cannot be ignored because they threaten to open something “the boys” consider the un-openable. The church is the proper place for truth in all its forms. More specifically put, the church is the proper place for ambries and tabernacles–not closets. If the church wants to present objective facts, here is a place to start.
While not necessarily conjoined to the last observation, I am of an opinion that, in large part, the patriarchal problem of the church is not the exclusion of the estrogen-oferic but the need for some testosterone–for leaders truly and authentically capable of appreciating and loving adventure and novelty and woman.
[ii] Felix culpa [happy fault] is taken from the Easter Eve hymn, Exultet. It references the vitality seminally enclosed in the primal sin: the need for a saviour, the need for a God-with-us-for-us, Emmanuel, Christ. Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 8, endnote xii (February 2014).
[iii] Tillich reminded modern theology that, unlike a sign which merely points us in a certain direction, the symbol has a dimeric nature, both denoting and sharing in the essence of the mystery, and thus, acting both as bridge and bearer into the mystery.
Etymologically, symbol (most probably) comes from the ancient Greek for a type of counterfoil travel ticket, a two-part instrument of which the first part provided for the transport of goods or persons, and the second acted as reference receipt of the transport. The word still denotes, at heart, something capable of moving us someplace, some definite place, we now are not. By surrendering oneself to and entering into the symbol one passes a threshold, enters a “new place”, a place where novelty and creativity brew.