So.
So, since last year, I've received many emails probing the question
of symbolism and its relation to the Christians insistence on the historical existence of Christ
Just last week I was sent something which summed up
much of the issue and so I'd like to read the main parts of this letter that I received last week
and then I'll try to answer some of its concerns
Okay.
So, I'm 20 years old, and I spent all of my grade school years at a fundamentalist evangelical
Christian private school in Forth Worth, Texas.
There, I was educated and immersed in a deeply conservative
theological tradition. However, after I graduated, I began to doubt my faith and progressively adopted a rationalist
positivist worldview and became an atheist. I had been an atheist for a little over a year
when I came across Dr. Peterson's lecture videos and with those, your videos. Dr. Peterson's perspective
opened my eyes to a very different essential conception of religion from the ones that I grew up with
and helped me rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose in my life
after wondering aimlessly as an atheist. I had begun reading other great thinkers
to help further my newly developing understanding of religion and Christianity
like Carl Jung and William James. Here is where my problem begins.
I would now say that I certainly believe in God, an objective morality.
I would also say that I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the source of salvation.
But, I think perhaps that this is true in a symbolic sense rather than in a physical literal historical sense.
More and more I am convinced that the symbolic reality actually points to the truest reality
But this conception is difficult to square with the way that most people interpret Christianity. For example
my peers and teachers from my old school would not consider someone with these ideas a true Christian
Because to them salvation depends on a faith
in the literal life, death and resurrection of Christ.
I noticed that this specific point was also emphasized by one of your fellow speakers
Father Theodore Paraskevopoulus in the Resurrection of Logos talk. All this being said, I'm just trying
to learn and I know that my overall grasp of these things so far is totally minuscule.
This leads me to the questions I have for you, if you're still willing to try to answer them.
One: in your view, what beliefs really make someone a Christian?
Two: how much of the Bible do you think is symbolic truth versus physical fact?
Three: you personally believe that Jesus lived historically and physically
rose from the dead as told in the Gospels?
Four: if you think that the Gospel story is symbolic, how do you get along with your Christian community?
And lastly, five: for what reason do you align with Orthodox Christianity specifically?
So, I've seen similar questions, arise around
I've seen similar questions arise around the type of questions that have been asked to Dr. Peterson
and I've seen on different study groups that people have felt a bit confused and frustrated
by some of the answers, or at least felt like those answers didn't fully
answer their concerns and so I'm going to try to answer
this as much as I can, and I'm going to try to answer those, the questions that were posed all simultaneously.
So, I think that the problem firstly arises because we still hold on to a kind of
simplistic Materialism, kind of 19th century Modernism which thinks that the fullness of everything
exists completely out there exactly as we perceive it, a kind of
neutral range of measurable phenomena, which we can then add meaning to.
So in this view, symbolism is opposed, or at least its divorced, from this truly objective world
and if in it's stories and myths and music or in art we find these patterns of meaning
they're like an abstract layer that we, let's say
subjectively add on to an idiosyncratic and random world. The problem is that that's just not how it works.
The problem of believing we're only, let's say, enumerating physical facts in a story is
problematic because there's constantly an overwhelming
and seemingly unlimited number of facts all the time around us. When we look into the world
there's this field of potential being and so we have
two faculties that help us to deal with that.
The first faculty is attention, it is our capacity to focus on something.
We focus in and limit the world within our purposed activity at any moment
and so we don't hear or see the same things when we're cooking or
marveling at a sunset or shaving, let's say.
The second faculty we have to deal with the unlimited number of facts is memory.
Most of the things we encounter around us just vanish and they're specific, we don't remember them.
Our memory only remembers the things which are important to us for one reason or another.
Our memory will string things together
string events together into coherent hierarchies and narrative structures
these structures, or these stories, they're already patterns.
We often don't perceive the patterns
but the structure of why we remember something or how we then order events for others is
already symbolic. Symbolic in the sense that they are ordered and patterned around things that have meaning.
Then you have to see that there's a kind of positive feedback
a positive feedback loop between attention and memory.
And then, between attention and memory relating to other people. I mean, everybody's aware of this
I mean, you know people and I know people who when they tell you, let's say
how their day went they'll just ramble on and on about
disconnected and irrelevant things that happened to them and when you're listening, I mean
It doesn't take long like ten minutes will do and you just wish you could run away
or you feel like you're going to die of boredom.
So, symbolism is not opposed to a kind of neutral physical reality
rather symbolism is the very manner in which we perceive
and organize the unlimited field of information.
One of the first things that I remember that struck me when I began to attend an orthodox church
I went to a talk that was given after a service.
And one of the parishioners was explaining how the Greek word "symbol"
refers to a place where two things meet.
Where two rivers become one river, for example.
And that symbolism does not come about by adding a kind of metaphoric meaning on top of events
but is the very bringing together of events, the formation of analogies, the process of synthetic
compression of multiple level of events
of patterns, of relationships and it's the bringing of all those things together which constitute symbolism
but also constitutes the very manner in which we engage the world.
So, if some people are interested in pursuing this I put a link in the description of an article that I wrote
which talks about this more in more detail.
So it's seen that there is no reality which is not symbolic
The nature of our existence in the world is symbolic
Events coalesce around centers of meaning through our attention and our memory
We all experience this constantly and if one is attentive
what it does, it makes the world a magical place. I mean, let me give you an example
We learned recently that my wife is pregnant. This was not planned at all. It was a complete surprise
But a few weeks before she became pregnant
three people close to us had dreams of her being pregnant
and then in the day that she did a pregnancy test and found out
she decided not to tell me right away and wait until we had a bit of time together that evening
we went to an event where we ended up discussing with a couple that
we barely knew who had brought their the newly born child and the man
was asking us if we planned to have another child and I was like no, we're done
you know three is enough, and I utterly embarrass myself. It seems. You know
saying that we're not going to have any more children.
And then when we were leaving the event and we went into the car
I started the car and the radio was already on and
then right away as the car started, the song that was playing on the radio was a song about a woman
who was pregnant and going to have a baby and I mentioned that to my wife
I said that's weird, you know, considering the discussion that we just had with that couple
and so this type of synchronicity, this type of events coalescing in a manner
which is not causal in any scientific way is something that happens to everyone.
And it is only maybe the pathological fedora-wearing atheist who would deny this to himself
Now it's easy to look back and say
well, if my wife had not been pregnant
Then all her friends would not have remembered those particular dreams
I mean, we dream all the time, right?
At the same time
if she not found out that she had been pregnant, that event where we discussed having another baby
and then hearing that song on the radio probably would not have stuck in my memory very long
I mean, we had all kinds of discussion that evening with other people.
And so the cynic might say it's only because she is pregnant that all those former events became
important and were noticed by us in forming a pattern.
And the answer to that cynicism is yes, that's right.
And you cannot escape that. The process of putting together important things is how reality works.
Because our existence in the world is symbolic.
Human consciousness orders and gives meaning to an indefinite potential of existence.
The world does not unfold randomly
and if in some ways it does, consciousness
attention and our memory does everything it can to fit things into a pattern, all the random things
vanish the margins of our perception and
if there is something truly random
something which both forces itself on our attention and then pushes itself into our memory
we formulate that thing as into the category of chaos, of tragedy, of suffering
It's a monster and we have to contend with it, so that we can continue
I mean, if I am forced to remember something which is truly random
It's probably a car crash, an accident of some kind or something that completely
disrupts, erupts like a revolution into the regular pattern of my experience.
Now, in terms of remembering events, there is a personal way of remembering events
there's a communal way of remembering events, a broader social way
and I would even contend that there is a cosmic way of
remembering events and all these levels of attention and memory will not appear the same
The more we move away from the idiosyncratic "how my day went?" stories the more
we move towards remembering events which have universal significance
The more this memory will appear symbolic, condensed.
It has to be so that it can be attended to and
remembered by larger and larger groups over larger and larger spans of time.
There are specific idiosyncratic objects or ways of doing things which must disappear which
must be made to fit with a larger and more universal image or universal images
so that they can be remembered.
So, for an example, in the Bible
you can actually see that and the very unfolding of the large story. The more you go back
let's say, towards Genesis, the more the stories appear condensed, symbolic, universal
the forms are compressed through images that reveal more and more meaning.
So, does that mean that what's in the Bible does not describe events?
Of course it describes events. The problem is that we think that all events are the same.
We think that Adam, which means man as such, ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil
becoming self conscious of his mortality
having been tempted by a serpent, is on the same level
the same type of event, than when I'm picking my nose or washing the dishes. That's the problem.
The events in Genesis happened.
They're just being remembered at a cosmic level using
narrative structures and images that compress so much into them that people have written thousands of books
unfolding the implicit meanings contained in those primordial stories.
There will be no one writing thousands of books of how I did the dishes last night.
It's like, if any event in the entire world has definitely happened, it is the story in Genesis II and The Fall.
And just because computer brains like Sam Harris cannot perceive hierarchy and being
hierarchy of events and a hierarchy in the manner in which we describe events
just means that they're forced to discount those stories
to their peril and to our peril, the stories which our ancestors for thousands of years
considered to be the most important and foundational stories
foundational structures of our being
and the underlying origin of what it means to be human
and then you wonder why everyone is so confused and disillusioned.
And so, when the question is asked whether I believe, let's say, that the Resurrection of Christ is
physical fact or symbolic metaphor, I don't know how to deal with that question. I mean, what do you mean?
What do you expect?
Do you expect the telling of the Resurrection to fit some kind of technical description?
Like the kind of description a police officer would give at a crime scene.
How could it and why should it?
The problem with the Resurrection and with miracles in general is that the modern person
thinks that the point of the story is understanding a kind of technical description of what happened
their minds immediately trying to calculate the miracle in terms of something which could be reproduced
through scientific method, and I just want to slap myself when I see this. Obviously, the Resurrection by it's telling
is referring to an event, but why do you think you know what that event is?
Why does that event have to fit the level of analysis you want to impose on it?
Look at the story itself, even the way it is told.
First off, no one witnessed the actual resurrection even in the story.
When the people encountered the risen Christ they don't recognize him at first.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked with Christ and talked with him without even knowing who he was.
I mean, there are numerous details in the story
which are there to tell you that you should not presume to think that you know what the Resurrection is.
Now I believe that the Resurrection is an event. Yes.
But it is obviously an event which is not described directly for a reason
which is told in a matter which should avoid a kind of forensic analysis.
So, does the Christian have to believe that the Gospels describe events? Yes.
Does the Christian have to believe that those descriptions have
the modern journalistic or forensic type of description? No.
Does the Christian have to believe in the resurrection of the body? Yes.
We need to technically describe, like a surveyor would give a
detailed analysis of a terrain, what the resurrection is? No.
The resurrection imposes itself as the culmination of a giant pattern.
A pattern which includes the natural patterns of death and rebirth
the seasons, the rotation of the cosmic bodies.
A pattern which includes all the stories of the escape of the underworld, the crossing of the flood
and all the other tales of life rising out of death found in cosmic stories
we remember and attend to until today.
Even in our movies and in our TV shows, video games comic books
the story of the Resurrection is everywhere if you can see it.
So, that brings me to the final part of the questions that were asked. The reason why I chose orthodoxy.
The reason why I chose orthodoxy has to do with all of this. We believe that the world is symbolic.
Our services, our prayers, the manner in which we remember through the Bible, through the legends
and tales of the saints is because we know how memory and attention have certain forms.
How they lead us to and keep us in the heart.
In the memory of the center, let's say.
We're not bothered by stories which do not fit the rigorous forensic description of a crime scene
because we know that such a description cannot, will not, and should not be remembered
but our stories, as they join the cosmic pattern, as they
participate in the eternal pattern, they will have a memory, eternal.
