The Indelible Presence of the Divine: Eric Voegelin on the Meaning of Symbols

One of the big takeaways of Voegelin’s philosophy is the insight that our symbolizations of divinity emerge not as the affirmation of a fact, but as the expression of an inner movement undertaken in response to the mystery of human existence and suffering. These symbols do not refer to an objective reality exterior to man but are the echoes of the self-realization of a divine-human drama unfolding itself in consciousness. To understand their meaning, therefore, it is necessary to take part in their unfolding. For this reason, the present essay was not written as a systematic exposition of Voegelin’s thought but as an evocative exploration of the existential tension in which philosophy itself is constituted and from which it must continuously draw its living force. “Reality,” “consciousness” and “language,” Voegelin often reminded us, are not independently existing things but terms that refer to different aspects of a dynamic process. To understand how symbols relate to the reality they attempt to convey, we must address the whole process in which man becomes conscious as the reality of his existence becomes luminous to itself in language. The object of the present reflections, therefore, is not something external to them, it is itself a form of participation in the reality it attempts to convey. For if Philosophy can shed light on the structures of existence, it is, on the other hand, only the clarity with which one experiences one’s own existence that can render Philosophy intelligible. Thus, I can only try to penetrate Voegelin’s thought by relying on that which makes my own existence luminous to itself. This paradoxical structure in which Philosophy both illumines and is illuminated by the ever-elusive reality it attempts to convey is precisely the subject matter of the present reflections.

Reality, which is one, is experienced in a multiplicity of manifestations. The “oneness” of reality, however, which underlies the multiplicity of phenomena, is never itself an object of sense perception and, therefore, it can be grasped only indirectly through symbols. We can see flowers, animals, rivers, and so on, but Nature is nowhere an object of experience as such. Terms such as nature, oneness, ground, history, and God, etc. refer to an all-encompassing horizon that, being all-encompassing, cannot be experienced directly i.e., as an object. To designate both our tacit and symbolic awareness of the non-experientiable horizon of conscious experience,^[1] Voegelin used the term “luminosity.”

The luminous horizon of consciousness extends beyond what can be known into an unknown that can be recognized as such: man knows that he does not know all there is to be known. On this point, Voegelin notes, “from the experience of his life in precarious existence within the limits of birth and death there arises the wondering question about the ultimate ground, the aitia [cause] … of all reality and specifically his own.” The question regarding the meaning and origin of existence arises from the tension between man’s precarious, transitory existence, and his longing to transcend the limits of his finitude. This longing for fulfillment marks the awareness of a conspicuous absence, a sort of homesickness for a home not yet known. The known unknown that extends luminously beyond the grasp of the objectifying mind is what ultimately gives direction and purpose to human action. For although it may appear as darkness to the mind, the felt absence of God is a luminous darkness, and is the source of all moral knowing: we do not see the good in itself, but we discover it in the sincerity of our desire to seek it. That is, in the sincerity with which we learn to recognize and respond to the longing that moves us to seek it. Symbolic language “breaks forth” when the order of reality — which is the order of the human heart — becomes luminous in the questioner’s response to the longing that moves him to search for the ultimate ground of his existence.

St. John of the Cross illustrates the process in which one’s tacit awareness of the ground is raised to consciousness by making an analogy to a ray of light, which, while not visible in itself, can be seen in the objects it illuminates: “We observe that a ray of sunlight which enters through the window is the less clearly visible according as it is the purer and freer from specks, and the more of such specks and motes there are in the air, the brighter is the light to the eye. The reason is that it is not the light itself that is seen; the light is but the means whereby the other things that it strikes are seen, and then it is also seen itself, through its reflection in them.” This passage may help to illustrate the ambiguous character of luminosity. Voegelin writes that reality becomes luminous “by letting that man who has consciousness find language-terms to designate what he experiences.” The term experience refers here to the non-experientiable, all-encompassing horizon of conscious experience. In this case, “language terms” are like the specs of dust that light must hit in order to become visible. For just as the light, whose brightness is discernible only through its reflection on an object, remains distinct from the object reflecting it, so is the luminosity of consciousness not reducible to the symbolic expression in which it is revealed. Both of these aspects are intended by Voegelin’s use of the term luminosity: the inner tension that motivates the quest and the clarity that emerges through its symbolization; the questioning unrest, and the questioner’s response.

Although reality is always one and is always fully present in experience, the structure of our conscious awareness of it changes, varying with the different degrees of clarity and articulation achieved at any point. “Consciousness” and “reality,” however, should not be taken as things of which we could know anything apart from their relation to each other. This is what Voegelin has called the double-structure of consciousness: that consciousness is an event in reality at the same time that it is the awareness of this reality in which it emerges as an event. That is, neither reality has a fixed structure, apart from consciousness, of which we could become aware, nor can we talk about consciousness as having such an independent structure. Rather, reality, consciousness, and language form a complex that must be taken as a whole. Thus, we may say that, although reality is always fully present in man’s experience, it is experienced with different degrees of conscious/unconsciousness depending on the level of clarity and articulation achieved at any point. As Voegelin puts it, “the truth of reality is always fully present in man’s experience … what changes are the degrees of differentiation [with which it is experienced].”

So, what are we talking about when we speak about the transcendent God or the divine-human ground? Simply put, we are not speaking about anything. Rather, the language of the ground arises when a human being, who is conscious, “experiences” himself as the manifestation of an unfathomable mystery, at once human and divine, unfolding in him and through him as the mystery of reality itself: “When the paradoxical experience of not-experientiable reality becomes conscious in reflective distance, the questioner’s language reveals itself as the paradoxic event of the ineffable becoming effable … the questioner rather experiences his speech as the divine silence breaking creatively forth in the imaginative word that will illuminate the quest as the questioner’s movement of return to the ineffable silence. The quest, thus, has no external ‘object’ but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.” The “in-between” tension of man’s existence is the symbolic sphere wherein the ineffable becomes ambiguously effable in the questioner’s speech, which is experienced as a participation in God’s creative act, namely, the divine silence breaking creatively forth in the word that the questioner himself speaks. The word, in turn, illuminates the quest’s end as a movement of return to its beginning. The word, therefore, has no external referent but is the luminous unfolding of reality’s self-revelatory movement. The effability of the ineffable is the transparency of the symbol that reveals the structure of the quest as reality becoming luminous in its movement from silence, through the Word, unto silence. “There is no truth of reality other than the reality of the truth manifesting itself in the quest.”

Let me try to illustrate this point with a concrete example. A recent documentary, entitled My Octopus Teacher, follows the story of a filmmaker who feels estranged from himself and longs to reconnect with the natural world. This longing leads him to an underwater kelp forest where he likes to dive. There, he befriends an octopus, and through this unusual relationship, he slowly opens up and becomes aware of his feelings and emotions. After witnessing the octopus being injured following an encounter with a shark, he becomes aware of his own vulnerability. Through these experiences, he begins, little by little, to reconnect with himself. And at one point, he suddenly realizes, “It is a language without words; it is a visual language.” The whole of the natural environment seemed to be communicating to him a deep truth about himself. The events he observed communicated, in a language without words, something he intimately and mysteriously already knew.

At one point, the octopus finds a mating partner. When the female octopus is ready to reproduce, she recluses herself. About a week before the eggs will hatch, releasing hundreds of tiny octopuses into the ocean, she stops eating and slowly starves to death. Tending to her eggs is the last thing she will do; the remainder of her energy will be spent on the nurturing of her offspring. The filmmaker comments on how “blown away” he was, witnessing the tragically beautiful death of his octopus friend.

Now, had he observed the event as something external to him, chances are he would not have been moved by it. Had he not experienced the act as a possibility within himself, it would have been meaningless to him. But in his open receptivity, he took part in the act, and the self-sacrifice of the octopus became a symbol disclosing to him something about his very nature. His amazement is comprehensible only if we consider the event in relation to the longing for fulfillment that we ourselves experience i.e., if we consider it as a response to this inner longing. By witnessing the event and participating imaginatively in its unfolding our longing becomes intelligible as a longing for that which transcends us. The event, which is intelligible only in light of the questioning unrest, becomes intelligible as the light that illuminates the quest as a “movement of return to the ineffable silence.” The event, therefore, has no meaning apart from the reality of the existential tension – i.e., the reality of our own existence – becoming luminous in its unfolding.

As we become aware that the existential question is not a question we ask but a mystery in which we are implicated and to which we must respond, we begin to realize that the raising of the question is itself already an expression of the receptive openness through which the divine mystery presences itself in our lives. Our longing for fulfillment is itself an intimation of the fulfillment we long for. One does not experience the ground apart from the inner movement of giving oneself over to the ground in response to the felt absence that prompts one to search for it. Our symbolizations of the divine are the echoes of this movement.

Abraham Heschel describes the act of praying by saying that although, “At first, words and their meaning seem to lie beyond the horizon of the mind… [by gradually going] out to meet… [their] meaning, we rise to the greatness of prayer. On the way to the word… we purify ourselves into beings who pray.”  That is, initially, the meaning of the prayer is beyond the closed world of our ordinary ways of conceiving things, but as we move towards it, we are transformed. For the ‘object’ of prayer is no other than the devotional sincerity with which it is carried out. The words resonate within; their meaning is revealed in the sincerity with which we utter them. The symbols that convey the divine ground of existence are the maps of an inner transformation, leading to an ever more intimate realization of the unfathomable depths of the mystery that unfolds through us as the very reality of our lives. This mystery cannot be contained in a finite expression: to know it is to take part in its boundless movement from infinity to infinity.

Human action, therefore, is inherently symbolic. As St. Augustine puts it, “Nobody voluntarily does anything that he has not previously uttered as a word in his heart.” Although we always act with purpose, the ultimate end of human action is not the last point in a chain of means and ends, but that which transcends it, i.e., its luminous quality. The symbolic is that which illuminates the tensional structure of man’s existence between the effable and the ineffable. Thus, its meaning cannot be reduced to a finite explanation but is revealed, rather, only when these seemingly contradictory aspects are experienced together: the intelligibility of the movement and its motion.

We say a gesture is symbolic when it stands for an unlimited intention. For instance, if one says, “This is only a symbolic gesture to express my gratitude” what is meant is that the gesture should convey the fullness of one’s gratitude while, at the same time, acknowledging that the full extent of one’s gratitude cannot be contained by any gesture. For gratitude is itself a boundless movement. The gesture becomes symbolic as it becomes the limited expression of participation in a limitless movement. It is precisely this limitation that renders it intelligible.

St. Teresa writes that “the Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our works as at the love with which they are done.” That is because no small work is so small as to be unworthy of the love of God, just as no great work can be so great as to be worthy of it. For love alone is worth anything. Our gestures are mere finite manifestations. But in the truly selfless act, the poverty of our gestures becomes transparent for the infinite love of God, manifested in and through their very poverty. Whenever someone becomes a vehicle for this movement, then her nothingness becomes a symbol of infinity itself, and her poverty becomes transparent media through which the divine Beyond moves through the Cosmos, from silence to silence. Words and actions are the embodiment of this movement.

We can now sum up our exploration: symbols are the embodiment of a spiritual movement in which we participate. The movement is reality itself unfolding as consciousness in the reality of our lives. As the luminosity of this movement, words can awaken in us the not-yet-realized depths of our existence and lead us beyond the boundaries of our tentative understanding of ourselves. Through them, reality becomes luminous, and the inner quality of our conscious experience is transformed. It is this transformation what is ultimately conveyed by the symbol. The divine Word is spoken in us and through us as we take part in its creative unfolding; it breaks forth in the sincerity with which we respond to the suffering unrest of our existence. Through the Word, the questioning search becomes transparent as a movement from God to God. And in the transparency of this unitive movement, we glimpse its meaning bursting forth, not in reference to something other than itself, but as the luminosity arising from the movement itself.

NOTE:

^[1] There is an inherent ambiguity in this use of the term ‘experience’ that lies in that the term is used to designate both an ‘objective’ experience i.e., the experience of something, as well as the all-encompassing, luminous horizon of experience as such, which is never experienced as an object, but always present in all experiences, albeit with different degrees of clarity.

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