Studies in Religious Imagination and Symbolism

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Symbolic thinking is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality?the deepest aspects ?which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfil a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being. Consequently, their study enables us to reach a better understanding of man?of man ?as he is?, before he has come to terms with the conditions of history. Every historical man carries on, within himself, a great deal of prehistoric humanity. But today we are beginning to see that the non-historical portion of every human being does not simply merge into the animal kingdom, as in the nineteenth century so many thought it did, nor ultimately into ?Life?; but that, on the contrary, it bifurcates and rises right above life. Dreams, waking dreams, the images of his nostalgias and of his enthusiasm, etc., are so many forces that may project the historically-conditioned human being into a spiritual world that is infinitely richer than the closed world of his own “historic moment.”

ALBERT D'SOUZA was born in 1948 in West Bengal. He received his B.D. at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and then entered the army. He was ordained in the Evangelical and Reformed Church and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He is now Professor of Applied Christianity at his alma mater, Union Seminary; previously he had been Professor of Christian Ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville. He is a member of the editorial board of Christianity and Crisis and a frequent contributor to that and other journals. His many books include Christianity and the Problem of History.

The surprising popularity of psychoanalysis has given certain key-words: image, symbol and symbolism have now become current coin. At the same time, systematic research devoted to the mechanisms of "primitive mentality" has revealed the importance of symbolism in archaic thinking and also the fundamental part it plays in the life of any and every primitive society. The obsolescence of "scientism" in philosophy, the revival of interest in religion since the First World War, many poetic developments and, above all, the researches of surrealism have on various levels and with unequal effects, drawn the attention of the public in general to the symbol, regarded as an autonomous mode of cognition. The development in question is a part of the reaction against the nineteenth century's rationalism, positivism and scientism which became such a marked characteristic of the second quarter of the twentieth. But this conversion to the various symbolisms is not really a "discovery" to be credited to the modern world: in restoring the symbol to its status as an instrument of knowledge, our world is only returning to a point of view that was general in Europe until the eighteenth century and is, moreover, connatural to the other, non- European cultures, whether "historic" or archaic and "primitive".

It is noteworthy that the invasion of Western Europe by symbolism coincides with the arrival of Asia on the horizon of history; an advent which, initiated by the revolution of Sun Yat Sen, has been unmistakably affirmed during the last few years.

Meanwhile, ethnic groups which until now had no place in world history except for glimpses and passing allusions are preparing in their turn to enter into the great currents of contemporary history and are already impatient to do so. Not that there is any causal connection whatever between the rising of the "exotic" or "archaic" world above the horizon of history and the return to favour, in Europe, of symbolic knowledge. But the fact is that this synchronism is particularly fortunate: one may well ask how else the positivistic and materialistic Europe of the nineteenth century would have been able to maintain a spiritual conversation with "exotic" cultures, all of which without exception are devoted to ways of thought that are alien to empiricism or positivism. This gives us at least some ground for hope that Europe will not remain paralysed before the images and symbols which, in that exotic world, either take the place of our concepts or take them up and extend them. It is a striking fact that, of all our modern Indian spirituality, two things alone really interest the non-Indian worlds: Christianity and Communism. Both of these, in different ways and upon clearly opposed grounds, are soteriologies-doctrines of salvation-and therefore deal in "symbols" and "myths" upon a scale without parallel except among non-Indian European humanity.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages