Usually the mystic uses old symbols, but fills them up with new senses and, in doing this, always challenges the authority, that is, the thought of the tradition he is supposed to follow and’to reinforce. This kind of nihilistic experience is very well illustrated by the story of Brother Klaus von der Flue, mentioned by Jung. Brother Klaus has the vision of a mandala divided into six parts, within its center the “crowned countenance of God.” His experience was defined as “terrifying,” and the humanist Woelflin (fifteenth century) describes it by saying that “all who came to him were filled with terror at the first glance.” Jung re-marks that visions such as the mandala are the usual and traditional anti-dote for chaotic states of mind.
Brother Klaus has to choose between a free interpretation of the sym-bol and a traditional one. He relies on a devotional booklet by a German mystic and assumes that what he has seen was the image of the Trinity. In this way the mystic ‘tamed’, so to speak, his unbearable experience:
This vision, undoubtedly fearful and highly perturbing, which burst like a volcano upon his religious view of the world, without any dogmatic prelude, and without exegetical comment, naturally needed a long labor of assimila-tion in order to fit it into the total structure of the psyche and thus restore the disturbed psychic balance. Brother Klaus came to terms with his experi-ence on the basis of dogma, then firm as a rock, and the dogma proved his powers of assimilation by turning something horribly alive into the beautiful abstraction of the Trinity idea. But the reconciliation might have taken place on a quite different basis provided by the vision itself and its unearthly actuality — much to the disadvantage of the Christian conception of God and no doubt to the still greater disadvantage of Brother Klaus himself, who would then have become not a saint but a heretic (if not a lunatic). (Jung 1934; Eng. tr., p. n)
In the mystical experience, symbols must be tamed exactly because they are exaggeratedly ‘open’-—and their force must be controlled. It depends obviously on one’s religious and philosophical beliefs to decide whether this force springs from a Sacred Source, or is nothing other than the way in which an interpreter, idiosyncratically, fills up the empty container of the symbolic expression. Firth (1973) observes that the mystical symbol is a private one; the mystic is the “detonator” of the symbol, but immediately afterward a public “elaborator,” who estab-lishes certain collective and understandable meanings of the original expression, is needed. In the story of Brother Klaus, both detonator and elaborator coincided. Firth mentions, in contrast, the case of Saint Mar-garet Mary Alacoque, who, as detonator, experiences the vision of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, while her Jesuit confessor interprets and elabo-rates her symbolic material, providing the Catholic community with a new cult.
Incidentally, the case of this vision is interesting insofar as the perti-nence of the so-called analogous properties is concerned: Saint Margaret Mary had her vision when both science and common opinion were defi-nitely convinced that, physiologically speaking, the heart was not the seat of human feelings; nevertheless, in the first half of this century, Pope Pius XII still spoke of the Sacred Heart as a “natural symbol” of the Divine Love. A symbol that was ‘natural’ only for those who, with an unconscious semiotic sensitivity, identified nature with encyclopedia.
Pius XII knew certainly that the human heart was not the seat of emo-tions, but he also knew that, according to a nonspecialized competence (such as is expressed and supported by many ready-made syntagms and by love songs), it still was considered so. What counts, in the symbolism of the Sacred Heart, is not the weakness of the analogical correlation but the vagueness of the correlated content. The content of the expression /Sacred Heart/ (be it uttered by words or visually represented) is not a series of theological propositions but an uncontrollable ensemble of men-tal and affective associations that every believer can project into the car-diac symbol.
On the other hand, the symbol is the device by which a given authority controls these associations, as well as the profound drives that elicit them — in the same way in which the saint herself had prob-ably projected into the mystical symbol a series of obsessions that, with-out the symbolic discipline, could have driven her to insanity.
But this is a positivist interpretation of a mystic experience. Usually, in the symbolic line of thought, symbols are considered as the vehicle of a transcendent Voice who speaks through them. Such is the perspective of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (1962). Symbols are opaque because they are analogic; they are bound to the diversity of languages and cultures, and their interpretation is always problematic: “There is no myth without exegesis, no exegesis without confrontation,” but, if there are recogniz-able symbols, there must be a Truth that symbols express, and symbols are the voices of Being: “The implicit philosophy of any phenomenology of religion is the renewal of a theory of reminiscence” (1962:22).
Ricoeur knows very well that, along the Freudian line of thought, religious sym-bols do not speak of the Sacred but of what has been removed; but in his hermeneutic perspective these two possibilities remain as complemen-tary, and symbols can be interpreted in either way. They tell us about the unconscious that we were and the Sacred that we ought to become. Freud and Heidegger are reread in a Hegelian mood. The eschatology of human consciousness is a continual creative repetition of its archaeology. In this way, naturally, nobody can assign to symbols a final truth or a coded meaning.
4.4.3. The symbolic interpretation of the Holy Scriptures
The symbolic mode is a recurrent tendency in many cultures and can coexist with other ways of producing or interpreting texts. Since it ap-pears in many historical stages, it would be sufficient to isolate some of its instantiations: one of its characteristics is to reproduce itself in differ-ent epochs with the same features, so that a historical survey need not be exhaustive and can procede through examples.
We can start from one of the most influential instances of the symbolic mode, the one developed by late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, not only because it has represented one of the most impressive and long-lasting cases of the symbolic mind, but also because our civilization is still dependent in many respects on that historical experience.
Pagan poets believed, more or less, in the gods of which they were speaking. But, since the century B.C., Theagenes of Regium tried to read these poets allegorically, and so did the Stoics many centuries afterward.
This allegorical reading had secular purposes: it aimed at dis-covering some ‘natural9 truths beneath the mythical surface. However, once this way of reading was outlined, why not turn the method, and its purposes, the other way around? Thus, while in the first century A.D. Philo of Alexandria was still attempting a secular intepretation of the Old Testament, Clement of Alexandria and Origenes attempted the oppo-site, that is, a nonsecular and, if possible, more mystical reading of reli-gious texts. At the moment in which the newborn Christian theology dared to speak of God, the Church Fathers realized that, in order to speak of Him, they could only rely on what He had told them: the Holy Scriptures.
The Holy Scriptures were two, the Old Testament and the New Tes-tament. At that time the Gnostics assumed that only the New Testament was true. Origenes wanted to keep the continuity between the two Tes-taments, but he had to decide in what way they were saying the same thing, since apparently they were speaking differently. Thus he made the decision of reading them in a parallel way: the Old Testament is the signifier, or the ‘letter’, of which the New Testament is the signified, or the spirit.
At the same time, the New Testament was also speaking of something concerning the Incarnation, salvation, and moral duties. The semiosic process was thus rather complicated: a first book speaking al-legorically of the second one, and the second one speaking—sometimes by parables, sometimes directly—of something else. Moreover, in this beautiful case of unlimited semiosis, there was a curious identification between sender, message as signifier or expression, and signified or con-tent and referent, interpretandum, and interpretant—a puzzling web of identities and differences that can be hardly represented by a bidimen-sional diagram such as in Figure 4.4. (For a splendid discussion on these points, see Compagnon 1979).
Content: Logoi, as the indirect meaning to be interpreted
Interpretants:
Logoi, as the hermeneutic discourses
Sender: Christ, as Logos
Expression:
Logos, as discourse
Referent:
Logos, Christ as the ultimate referent of the Scriptures
4.4
This semiosic web was encouraged by the ambiguous status of the term logos, which is at the same time verbum mentis and verbum vocis, as well as the name and the nature of the second person of the Trinity Moreover, the first interpreter of the ancient law was still Christ as Logos, and every commentary of the Holy Texts was an imitatio Christi, so that in the light of the Logos all faithful interpreters can become Lofftot-To make the web even more inextricable, Christ, insofar as He was the Logos, that is, the knowledge that the Father had of Himself, was the ensemble of all the divine archetypes; therefore he was fundamentally polysemous.
Thus both Testaments speak of their sender and of their own polysemous nature, and their content is the nebula of all the
