I guess I need some help from the theologians/philosophers. See, I am reading this stuff by Jean Borella, and loving it–a collection of essays by Borella, arranged by some guy named Champeaux into The Secret of the Christian Way after the pattern of Itinerarium Mentis In Deum. I guess my question is, who is this Borella guy? At Josh–how legit is he?
Anyway, his essay on the essence of symbol is excellent; Paul McCleary/Boomer directed me towards Borella as someone who has a good grasp of what they are trying to define as poetic inspiration. Borella points toward three aspects of the symbol. There is the “concrete form,” or “vestigial being” of the symbolon, which reveals itself as “the present part of the absent whole” (62). There is the “memorial symbol,” which is the “traditional significance” of the symbol, passed down orally by authority. A symbol doesn’t just have meaning in itself, it also has meaning “for someone else” (64-66). There is also a third aspect of the symbol: it “directs” us towards recognition of reality through “ritual activity” (66). It is this third aspect of the symbol that I think best captures the poetry or the making behind any work of art. I mean, anyone can give us symbols without doing anything special with them (just offhand, I think of A Separate Peace and The Great Gatsby), and the second characteristic has more to do with something received in the symbol itself, not really created by the poet.
Borella concludes that the rainbow (Iris, in Greek mythology), is the ultimate symbol of God’s covenant with man. The rainbow, or rather, the half-completed arch, or the broken circle, is “the revelatory sign of that primordial pact at the foundation of every religion[; it] is also the [symbolon] that signs and seals the restoration of the divine nature in creatures: the nimbus of the Roman gods and Buddhist wisdom, the halo of the Christian saints, the noble turban of Islam, and the radiant war-bonnet of the Native American. In truth the orb of the symbol encircles everything: it is the radiance of Divine Glory” (68-69).
Rain, rain, and sun! A rainbow in the sky;
A young man will be wiser by and by;
An old man’s wit may wander ere he die.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
