05/08/2024 – What Happens When Religious Symbols No Longer Work?

What happens when religious symbols no longer work? This is a really important question. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com and new episodes are posted about every two weeks at noon, U.S. Pacific time, so drop me some views.

So, what happens when religious symbols no longer work? What we mean by this is that things that used to make sense in one’s belief system have lost some or all of their meaning and/or authority in framing how one lives one’s life. Like when a Jewish person does some research on Moses and learns that it’s much more of a narrative composed during the Babylonian Exile than a real person. Or a Christian learns that the gospel accounts are narratives composed 40-65 years after Jesus lived and authored by people who weren’t even in Palestine. Or when a Muslim studies the history of early Islam and learns that it was much more of a political movement than a religious one. Or when one realizes that the Bible is really a group of documents with a large time frame of centuries separating when they were written from when they were decided to be included in the collection. And the list goes on. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a religious crisis moment like so many people make it out to be on various social media outlets. It’s all about construction, deconstruction, and then reconstruction. Let’s get started.

We’re going to talk about two different figures who address this very question, Raimon Panikkar and Paul Ricoeur. First Panikkar. Panikkar died in 2010 at the age of 91 but there are still a group of people, some of whom are his former students, who remain hugely dedicated to his ideas. One of his more interesting ideas is how he uses the word “myth.” A myth is not something that is untrue. In fact, it’s just the opposite. A myth is what one takes for granted and is something that one is unaware of, some sort of unseen aspect of one’s understanding of how the physical, moral, and religious worlds combine to create our reality. This includes science, economics, religion, politics, and a whole host of other things. In the case of religion, when myths transform into something entirely rational, they lose their mythic quality and become demythicized, or reduced to simple moral statements. The interesting thing about this is that myths often just don’t go away. They get replaced. This is reconstruction. Without realizing it, in the process of myth deconstruction, people birth other myths out of the former myth’s ashes. Old myths transform into new myths, which then become transparent with the old myth often remaining unrecognizable within. When the old myth is explained, it is explained away, in the same way that innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The myth then searches for a new innocence.

So, when we ask the question what happens when religious symbols no longer work for us, we are communicating that we are experiencing a certain feeling of spiritual disequilibrium resulting from cognitive dissonance. Moses might not have been a real person. The Jesus of history and the Jesus of the gospels might not be the same portrayal and so on. Moses, Jesus, and many other figures and ideas are very important religious symbols. What do we mean by religious symbols? Religious symbols are the external manifestation of myths. Religious symbols represent a relationship. This relational character, however, does not mean it devolves into a total relativism, which is marked by a lack of any criteria for discernment. Rather, the best way to describe the relationship between religion and symbol is to use the word “relativity.” The relationship which religious symbols possess is a particular relationship with a particular myth. Each particular understanding of a religious symbol can understand the symbol in slightly different ways than others because symbols possess the feature of multivalence, more than one connecting point, rather than univocality, or a single representational meaning.

Panikkar says that when religious symbols lose their meaning for whatever reason, they have lost their innocence and that innocence can never be recovered. It can only be made new again. This first begins with what Panikkar calls an intrareligious dialogue, an internal dialogue. And second, with an interreligious dialogue, a dialogical dialogue with another. This “other” represents a new source of understanding whereby I am not telling you, nor are you telling me, but we are sharing and creating our own myth together. For Panikkar, this is the new state of innocence, a new way of understanding. This new innocence can emerge by a changing of the old myth resulting in a new reinterpretation of the symbol. This is not a demythicization, or deconstruction, which Panikkar believes does not really exist, but a transmythicization, or reconstruction. The myth can be positively transformed into another myth and the religious symbol can regain meaning and be alive once again.

So, that’s Panikkar’s take on this question. Now let’s turn to Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur was a French philosopher who died in 2005 and taught for quite a while at the University of Chicago. His answer to our question has to do with what he called the “second naiveté.” Let’s set this up so we can understand what he meant by this term. One of the central issues in Ricoeur’s thought was the symbolic function of language. Symbols have a double-intention with both a literal meaning with reference to the world and a second intention, or a deeper meaning. This can be seen in many religious symbols, for example, those which reenact the religious consciousness of human fault, guilt, and other similar boundary situations which had huge implications for the construction of whole societies past and present. Ricoeur was an anti-author-intentionalist, especially when it came to religious texts. For Ricoeur, it didn’t matter what the intentions of the authors of religious texts were, the authority of such religious texts was still important. The overall messages are universal messages that go far beyond the original authors. The reader interpreting the message as a present-sense event always goes beyond the finite context of the author which means that religious texts be decontextualized, that is, detached and abstracted from their original contexts, and then recontextualized so that their messages remain alive. Every new generation must discern and find answers within religious texts to the questions they are asking within the contexts and challenges of their own era since we don’t live within the context of the original author’s time and era.

So, let’s get into it. The first naiveté is accepting the story at face value within the context of our time. But this doesn’t work because the way people viewed the world back then was very different. This temporal gap also implies other conceptual gaps, such as a cultural gap, different categories of thinking, and different ways of understanding divinity and even the universe. We then enter into what Ricoeur calls the critical stage, or what many people today call deconstruction. We use research to expose these gaps. This sends us into what Ricoeur calls the “desert of criticism.” We no longer see the point of it all. Religion seems like it’s some kind of a sham. But, Ricoeur says the only way to understand religion as living, is to go beyond the desert to a post-critical stage.

The post-critical stage, or reconstruction, is what Ricoeur calls the “second naiveté” whereby one accepts the criticism but still continues on. One must come to a point of realization that texts functioning as symbols shows us what the world was like in a way that history or science cannot. Ricoeur described something to be a symbol when a direct, primary and literal meaning designates another meaning which is indirect, secondary and figurative, and which can be apprehended only through the first. Similar to Panikkar, the symbol is the reality. The catch is, symbols are transparent. One shouldn’t see the symbol, but see through the symbol in the same way that one doesn’t look at glasses but one looks through glasses. If one looks only at the symbol and criticizes it, it often loses its power. Our premodern relation (the first naiveté) to the sacred is impossible because we don’t understand the universe the same way as ancient religious writers did. Only through interpretation can they be heard again. Restoration of meaning occurs through the interpretation of symbols. It is a creative solution which takes into account both the seriousness of the original hearers and readers as well as the desire to maintain a genuine faith in the heart of the present adherent.

The answer again involves a dialogue. One asks, who am I and who are you (as in, the text)? Or better yet, who am I in light of this text? In this stage, one must be willing to have one’s own understanding and consciousness critiqued because it may be the result of an unidentified ideology of which one is not aware. One’s self-understanding must be willing to change through the process. One uses the creative tension between the past and the present to give birth to a new understanding related to the questions the reader is asking today. Mature religious adherents are post-critical, accepting and understanding the criticism while choosing to take the step beyond the criticism to find out what is truly meaningful in the story. As Ricoeur wrote, “Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.”

So, what do you think about Panikkar’s and Ricoeur’s answers to the question, what happens when religious symbols no longer work? Do you like Panikkar’s explanation of myth and the new innocence? Or do you prefer Ricoeur’s explanation of going beyond the desert of criticism to the second naiveté? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

“Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.” The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969) p. 349.