Preface

What would it mean, in these waning days of modernity, to experience the world through the symbolic mode of consciousness that was once native to all humanity? I recently met with what I regard as such an experience, and I begin this essay with a description of its features, followed by reflections on the kind of symbolic ontology that is indigenous to premodern worldviews, on its dissolution in modernity, on the principal elements of a symbolic ontology, and on the possibility of its retrieval.

The Symbolic Experience of the World

I live within a dense forest of great, ancient oaks on the shores of what once bore the name Bahia del Spiritu Santo but which has now been assigned the prosaic designation of Tampa Bay. Our house is surrounded by an expanse of towering trees, the area’s last remnant of old-growth live oaks, some of them growing there since colonial times. They stand grandly and sovereignly.

Extending from the second story of the house is an elevated wooden porch, jutting into the midst of the oak canopy. From there, nothing is visible except the world as it issues from the hand of its creator. I do most of my reading there, and much of my thinking, and when the night sky is clear, all my stargazing, suspended between heaven and earth.

But when the winds come up from the bay, this Bay of the Holy Spirit, it is hard to concentrate on anything other than the wind and what comes with it. For when encountered from within the forest canopy itself, the wind is something exhilarating and overwhelming and sublime. The first time I experienced this was on an evening in late summer, the wind coming up quite suddenly and taking my breath away—literally in-spiring me, filling me with breath from beyond—an event whose proper phenomenology defies prosaic, nonsymbolic description. For the wind was breath itself—Greek, pneuma—and re-spiration, breath and spirit and the very current of life, brought forth from across the waters (Hebrew ruach, as in Genesis 1:2)—awakening and invigorating the spirit. It was itself spirit at work—Latin, spiritus. In an unanticipated experience, I encountered at once the meanings that ruach-pneuma-spiritus have, since ancient times, gathered together. My inspired inhalation was part of the exuberant exhalation around me. The spirit within me was roused together with the spiritual presence arriving with the wind—or rather, as the wind. Life within me surged at that moment, when the forest itself came alive and life was breathed into it as on the First Day. Breath, wind, inhalation, and exhalation: the swirling symbols merge, evoke, and invoke one another, revealing differing aspects of a selfsame reality!

Something very real had taken place, but something that our modern mindset casually relegates to the status of a marginal, “mystical” sideshow. Now thinking back to that evening, poetic words arise from memory: “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere . . .” Yes, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, I sensed that an “unseen presence” from beyond my reach, from beyond my thought, had indeed all at once drawn near. The “West Wind” was for the poet a powerful symbol, even if its transcendent referent finally eluded him. As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1967, 347–57) famously propounded, “The symbol gives rise to thought.” But at the same time, as Owen Barfield has shown, the symbol in its poetic resonance leads not just to thought but to experience, our own experience as well as the experience of the poet.

During that evening in late summer, thought arose as a response not to remembered texts or to the contemplation of familiar symbolic images, but to a vivid experience of the wind as itself a symbol. The thought to which it “gave rise” was this: Could it be true, as Martin Heidegger long insisted, that before it gives itself to thinking, before it reveals itself within thinking, creation is always already poetic—that it is the world, precisely as itself a symbol, that gives rise to thought—and that the wind in Shelley’s poem can be a (literary) symbol only because the wind itself already is an (ontological) symbol? But of what was the wind a symbol? Captured by a sense that an invisible order had become accessible, I was struck by a second thought: that before there were patriarchs and prophets, before the coming of Christ, it must have been in experiences like this that people first encountered the very God who “soared upon the wings of the wind” (Psalm 18:10; also 2 Samuel 22:11 and Psalm 104:3). Surely they sensed the presence of their Lord in just such a stirring of the wind, and doubtless too they encountered the wind as an animating power, just as Ezekiel in the Vision of Dry Bones was told to invoke the wind itself, saying: “Come from the four winds and vivify these dead men, and let them live” (Ezekiel 37:9). Encountered the divine spirit in a way analogous (if less momentous) to that remarkable day in Jerusalem, when it is said that something on the order of “a mighty rushing wind” came down from heaven and filled the house where the faithful were gathered, the Holy Spirit animating everyone present (Acts 2:1–4). Encountered God in the way that Jesus explains to Nicodemus: “The wind [pneuma] blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit [pneumatos]” (John 3:8).

Premodern Worldviews as Resting upon a Symbolic Ontology

In the woods alongside our oyster-shell-encrusted Spiritu Santo Bay, I had unexpectedly come up against a symbol—not an element of a poem, not something in my mind, not some trope within a text, but something eminently real, something that in a very concrete manner drew together (Greek, sym-bolon) two orders of reality—earth and heaven, visible and invisible. I had gotten a glimpse, if only for a few moments, into what the Russian philosopher and Soviet martyr Fr Pavel Florensky called a “symbolic world-understanding,” which he argued is essential for a living Christian culture. And, we might add, essential for any culture that is able to sustain its religious roots. “For every entity,” Florensky maintains, together with earlier Eastern Fathers such as St Gregory Palamas, “the essence is the side turned toward itself, whereas the energy is the side turned outward.” Moreover, every entity can, in turn, have its own energy “illumined by the energy of another” (Florensky [1921] 2014, 127, 134; emphasis added). “The symbol,” he concluded, is “any reality that contains in its energy the energy of another reality higher in value and hierarchy; the lower reality is a window into the higher reality.” The symbol brings with it higher realities, and only because of this does it evoke the depths of thought. But to see this, Florensky maintains, we must “destroy the hard shell around us, and come to understand that the world is a symbol and full of symbols and that therefore our world-understanding must be symbolic” (Florensky [1921] 2014, 148). Or, to state it even more simply, in the words of St Porphyrios (2005, 107): “Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet.

Of course, St Porphyrios does not mean here that every believer must set out to write some verse, but that they should allow the world to present itself in its own poetic depths, as charged with an expressive core of meaning that draws together visible and invisible realities. And even less does Florensky mean that the symbolic character of the world exists only in our heads. On the contrary, the symbol in this most authentic sense is ontological, a real link between the world and God, a living bridge to the divine that constitutes the very being of creation, and by that same fact it is essential for understanding the world as it truly is. Thus, we could say that Florensky is a “symbolic realist.” For he maintains that far from being unreal, the symbol is the very touchstone of reality, the signature of having made contact with what is most real—with the visible perceptibly infused with the invisible—encountered true being, tō ontos on.

But this is not how we understand the symbol today, nor is it how we experience the world. Since the advent of modernity, we have learned to experience the world in accord with how we understand it, as the object of scientific knowledge. The world is not translucent for us but rather solid and opaque and self-subsistent, an idol projected from modern science and Enlightenment philosophy—with no interior and no other side—possessing a density that repels luminosity, like the dark background of a mirror (Foltz 2004, 330–42). It yields no visage beyond our own projected reflections of ourselves and our conceptual schemata. We approach the world as materialists, or more precisely, as metaphysical naturalists: we believe that the world is ultimately (really) only what the natural sciences say it is, and nothing more.

At the outset, however, it must be emphasized that this is a problem not with science as such but rather with its elevation into a narrow but mandatory worldview that we have unquestioningly, often unknowingly, embraced—a historically exceptional premise we have inherited from a relatively small number of reductionistic philosophers, and above all from Galileo acting not as a scientist but as a metaphysician. The problem, that is, lies not with the positive sciences themselves, but with the scientistic worldview that bases itself upon what Alfred North Whitehead (1966, 132) calls “the grand doctrine of nature as a self-sufficient, meaningless complex of facts,” a dogma that is not itself scientific at all, but meta-scientific, i.e., meta-physical. But this view has now become hegemonic, not merely one perspective among others. As Heidegger (1977, 157ff) noted, for modernity and its peculiar worldview: “Science is the theory of the real.” The depth-dimension of the symbolic, or as Heidegger put it, the poetic, understood ontologically, has been subjectified and thus delegitimized. But before endorsing Heidegger’s claim, we must ask: Is such a flattening of the world in fact unique to modernity? Has it ever been any different? Didn’t people always experience the world in a factual or straightforwardly “empirical” sort of way, adding on values and metaphors and poetic, fanciful, “symbolic” adumbrations only “after the fact”? Isn’t it the experience of unadorned “fact” that delivers the primal datum?

But two centuries’ scholarship on the worldviews of premodern peoples has shown that it is not the “factual” but the poetic experience of the world that has always been held as normative and primary—primary historically, epistemologically, and spiritually as well—and that modernity is itself an outlier, an anomalous modality of consciousness within the collective experience of humanity. And this requires us to ask: What if our primordial experience of the world is itself naturally and inherently symbolic and poetic as well? And what if our reductionistic modification of it results only from training and artifice and societally mandated conventionality? Heidegger maintained something along these lines in his later work, where he holds that the world is most truly encountered within its own poetic fullness (Heidegger 1971; Foltz 1995, ch. 8). And so argued his contemporary Owen Barfield, who provided the guiding vision for the Oxford Inklings Circle, which included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams—writers who perhaps did more than any other recent figures in the West to retrieve a symbolic world-understanding, and who were bound together by a rejection of modernity’s reductionistic, materialistic mindset that they called “positivism.”

Barfield himself had undergone a remarkable and somewhat mystical experience in his early twenties. After reading certain Romantic poets, probably William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he found that nature had become transformed for him, that it was now filled with an intense meaningfulness due to “some magic” that had “enhanced the meanings” of the words he read. Moreover, it seemed to him likely that “those enhanced meanings may reveal hitherto unapprehended parts or aspects of reality” (Barfield 2012, 18). This led him to ask whether the language of lyric poetry effectively transmitted the very kind of experiences he had just had, and which the poet must have previously undergone. That is, he came to suspect that language itself can convey varying modes of experience and to investigate the evolution of both language and the corresponding changes in our consciousness of the world. In the words he studied, first in English and then in other languages, he always found that they had originally held together the rich, poetic meanings that can be found in such ancient words as ruach and pneuma and spiritus (Barfield 1973, 62–65). Figurative and literal, inner and outer, subjective and objective, poetic and practical meanings had at some earlier time all been aspects of a single, concrete experience. Barfield concluded that language always embodies some cultural mode of experience, and his study of word origins suggests that our experience of the world was originally not bare, stripped down and “factual” but rather poetic and evocative, clothed with meanings and symbolic epiphanies. He presented these insights in a book called Poetic Diction, arguing that the modern distinction between physical reality and symbolic meaning was alien to earlier generations: “When the wind blew it was not ‘like’ someone breathing. It was [itself] the breath of a divinity” (Wilson 1990, 125). That the wind was not for them allegorical but rather a living symbol connecting them with other world.

This pivotal insight that the Inklings group adopted from Barfield was once expressed compellingly by Tolkien in a famous conversation with C. S. Lewis, a dialogue that led to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. It unfolded as they walked across the Oxford campus on an early autumn night, reaching its peak just as a sudden breeze rose up to rattle the leaves. Lewis recalled this decisive event vividly: “A rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and set so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath” (Carpenter 2004, 43). Tolkien then reflected upon this unexpected breath of breeze that had brought the sky down to earth:

We speak of “stars” and “trees” as though they were entities which we had mastered in our post-Newtonian, materialist fashion. A tree for us is simply a vegetable organism and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But for those who formed the words star and tree they were very different. For them, stars were a living silver, bursting into flame in answer to an eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. (Wilson 127; Carpenter 2004, 43)

Symbols, then, were not initially projections from an essentially subjective sphere but concrete recognitions and articulations of “what [really] is” (tō ontos on) as it has presented itself within the living experience of our premodern ancestors—and as it still offers itself to our experience today, at least prior to our mental operations upon it. By comparison, then, the conventional language of modernity is impoverished, abstract, and barren.

Correspondingly, and as Gerhart Ladner (1995, 134, 7) recounts, the “rich nature symbolism of early Christianity” derived not from some aboriginal, prescientific attempt to explain the world, but from “an experience of a world pervaded by the divine.” What compels us to believe that these early Jewish and Christian perceptions were merely primitive embellishments of otherwise prosaic realities, better grasped in sober, abstract concepts? On the contrary, Psalm 18 counters this modern (revisionist) perspective, reminding us that God “makes darkness His secret place, round about Him His tabernacle: darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies.” But is this not just a stammering way of stating something more accurately rendered through the more precise lexicon of scientific meteorology? The earliest Christian theologians, themselves erudite and philosophically sophisticated, certainly did not think so. St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Ambrose, for example, all wrote symbolically rich Hexaemerons, abounding with poetic depictions of the cosmos during its earliest beginnings. Far from de-mythologizing the language of Genesis, they celebrate and cultivate the symbolic element, showing us how we may learn from what St. Ambrose calls “the mystery of nature” streaming throughout creation” (St. Ambrose 2004, 110). For, as Ambrose (2004, 110) puts it, God creates the world less like an external agent effecting a cause, than like “a philosopher propounding his best thoughts.” And the philosopher invoked here is not a modern analytic philosopher but a man grown wise, initiated into the same wisdom natively embedded throughout the kosmos. As the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament continually remind us, nature is itself expressive, and so too is it evocative, drawing us beyond itself into a transcendent order. Thus, we are not invited to project thoughts (or symbols) onto nature, as if (in Ambrose’s words) the world indifferently “subsists in itself,” but rather to gather our thoughts from nature, which itself embodies the thoughts of God.

Their fourth-century contemporary, St. Ephrem the Syrian, places the symbolism of creation at the center of his cosmology as well as his soteriology. In St. Ephrem’s teaching, itself largely expressed in poetic form, there is an unbridgeable gap, an ontological chasm between God and creation, for God dwells within a profound hiddenness (kasyuta). Because of this, it is folly and impiety to seek God through what he calls prying and investigation (bsa, aqqeh). For He is cloaked in mystery, forever dwelling in hiddenness. But at the same time, Ephrem designates the hidden God as “the Hidden One who revealed Himself,” because happily for us. God at the same time “bends down” to us through three waves of disclosure that in no way diminish his invincible hiddenness. First, God discloses Himself to us in symbols (raze: mysteries or hidden meanings) present everywhere throughout nature, as well as within Holy Scripture, as “hidden powers” within them. Second, He reveals Himself through the Divine Names, such as Creator, Being, Healer, etc. Finally, and most remarkably, God has “put on a body” and become visible in Christ, this One whom Ephrem calls “the Lord of the Symbols”—for it is Christ who fully reveals the meaning of the symbols already present in nature and scripture, as He first did on the road to Emmaus. So overwhelmed is St. Ephrem (1994, 53) at this feast of the symbolic, he declares: “This Jesus has so multiplied His symbols that I have fallen into their many waves.” And only because God reveals Himself are we able to know Him—not through syllogisms but through the grace of wonder (tehra) at God’s hidden self-revealing throughout creation. “Lord, your symbols are to be found everywhere, yet You are hidden from everywhere,” St Ephrem exclaims. “Blessed is the Hidden One shining out!” (Brock 1985, 55).

A century later, St. Dionysius developed a symbolic ontology, or philosophy of being, within which all creation is itself a theophany—every being precisely is a symbol, revealing the Creator who is Himself beyond being, and who is therefore knowable through these symbols. Like St. Ephrem, Dionysius distinguishes between knowing God in concrete realities and knowing God through the Divine Names; but significantly, he counsels that visible realities are in an important sense better. For the divine theophanies that unfold within perceptible realities (wind, fire, water, and so on) are less readily confused with the transcendent God who is beyond being, while the Divine Names (Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom, Creator, and so on) can be easily misunderstood as identical to God, and thereby they may obscure the divine transcendence itself, their very universality lending itself to idolatrous understandings. Sensible symbols, then, remind us by their spatiotemporal particularity that they are not the God who is made manifest through them. Moreover, the experience of God in the wind must first of all be an experience of the wind itself, in the integrity of its being, not the decoding of some extrinsic cipher or occult sign that serves as its simulacrum; hence, the transcendent God is concealed by the very particularity of the wind as much as He is revealed within it. What is symbolized by the symbol is present in its very hiddenness and indeed as that hiddenness. In the terminology of a contemporary interpreter of Dionysius, Jean-Luc Marion, the experience of God in the wind discovers a saturated phenomenon, a phenomenon that contains more than itself, overflowing with an abundance from beyond.

The symbolic ontology of the Areopagite, in turn, underlies the thought of St. Maximus the Confessor, who maintains that every being articulates an inner logos, elaborating in its own unrepeatable way the Eternal Logos. Here too creatures are symbols of God; the primary reality of all creation rests in its power to manifest its Creator. As Maximus states in his Ambigua (AD 1285), “for our sake [the Logos] ineffably concealed Himself in the logoi of beings” (St. Maximus 2014, 63). Nor was such a symbolic ontology altogether absent in the West. John Scotus Eriugena, who translated both Dionysius and Maximus, maintained in ninth-century Ireland that all creation forms a hierarchy of symbols manifesting the divine reality. All things—natural things, scripture and even artifacts—form a ladder of symbols that, “taking him by the hand,” can lead the individual to the “hidden mysteries” of God.

These thinkers, premodern voices from different times and places, express a world understanding whose profoundly symbolic character was a matter of shared experience. They do not write as if they were innovators introducing new ideas but as if gently reminding their readers of what they already knew, for it was already woven into the depths of their own experience. At a time when the art of rhetoric was taken seriously, none of them betray any sense that their readers might be surprised at what they are stating. Today, in contrast, we have almost entirely lost this symbolic cosmos. The world of modernity is thoroughly de-sacralized, or in the terminology of Max Weber, disenchanted. As Florensky observes, the philosophical naturalism of modernity has caused the “sensuous husk” of the symbol to become hardened and impenetrable, so that the interior spiritual reality has become indiscernible and inaccessible. This is for the religious world understanding nothing less than catastrophic. In a closed world hardened against a symbolic depth-dimension and fortified against transcendence altogether—a world sealed shut within Kantian categories—the Ascension of Christ and the Annunciation brought by the angel Gabriel become unintelligible. Florensky asks how we can descend into such blasphemy as to track within Euclidean coordinates either Gabriel’s arrival (The Annunciation) or Christ’s departure (The Ascension) employing the laws of the conservation of energy and indestructibility of matter and applying the differential equation of motion (Florensky [1921] 2014, 138).

Two questions, then, arise from this recognition of our loss. First, how did the demise of the symbolic world take place? Second, how can we best understand the underlying ontology of the symbol as a visible bridge to the invisible? The remainder of this article outlines several of the many developments leading to the decline of the symbol in our experience of the world and ends with a few notes. It is presented here only as a preview or outline of a much larger project that is already underway, not a self-contained work of intellectual history—a beginning and not an end.

The Eclipse of the Symbolic in Modernity

The eclipse of the symbolic already begins in late antiquity. It was Augustine who inaugurated the Western reduction of the symbol to a psychological datum—no longer an ontological bridge connecting visible and invisible realms. As the great Dominican scholar M. D. Chenu (1968) observes, Augustine set in motion “a certain desacralization” that “denied any mystical content to nature and any native sacredness concealed within it.” He reduced the cosmic symbolism advanced by Dionysius to “the level of his [own] psychology of knowledge,” understanding the symbol as merely a “sign” produced in the mind of the knower and requiring the “intervention” of a human concept. Whereas for Dionysius “it was not the believer who gave signs their meaning; it was objective elements themselves . . . The symbol was the true and proper expression of reality; nay more, it was through such symbolization that reality fulfilled itself [and] it was no more reducible to analysis than the mystery it made present” (Chenu 1968, 125ff). It was this eroded, Augustinian understanding of the symbol as a mental “sign,” mutely awaiting conceptual formation, that ultimately prevailed through scholasticism and into modernity, later to resurface as the “text” beloved of postmodern philosophers.

In the later Middle Ages, and especially in Thomistic expositions, Platonic realism, with its emphasis on the participation of the visible in the invisible realm, recedes behind an Aristotelean emphasis upon individual entities as “what can stand alone,” i.e., as “self-existent beings,” an understanding that both St. Ephrem and St. Ambrose, along with St. Athanasius, saw as the very essence of idolatry (St. Ephrem the Syrian 1994, 67f; Foltz 2014, 215–31). The importance of form still lingers, but eventually the emphasis on self-subsistence gives birth to medieval nominalism, the via moderna, which closes the door on the experience of transcendence within creation. Forms at this stage are no more than logical categories, universals—merely names, signifying nothing more transcendent than our own mental acts of generalization. The self-emergent, expressive cosmos is reduced to an order of abstraction. The foundation is now prepared for what Weber (2011, 120) will call the “disenchantment”—or more literally, the Entzauberung or “de-magification”—of the world.

Drawing upon this nominalist metaphysic, the Protestant Reformers swung open the doors to modernity by waging war against the symbolic order, not only in theology but in cosmology as well. Ritual and sacrament, sacred art, and symbolism as such are excoriated as magical, superstitious, and idolatrous. Like scripture, creation too must only be read “literally,” disdaining any call from symbolic depths. Historian of science Peter Harrison (1998, 116) states this succinctly: “[I]conoclasm with respect to images directly parallels literalism with respect to texts.” Luther, strongly influenced by Ockham’s nominalism, declares that allegory is only for “weak minds” and “idle men,” and John Calvin excoriates all symbolic readings of scripture. The Anglican Francis Bacon joins with them, deriding the traditional understanding that creation reveals things divine as a “heathen opinion,” calling instead for “a new, nonallegorical way of reading the book of nature” (Harrison 2015, 76). In Italy, Galileo was busy filling this prescription in a strident tone.

Nor was this iconoclastic assault upon the symbolic order confined to the writings of an intellectual elite. In the early months of 1522, rioters broke into Wittenberg’s Church of St. Mary, the “Mother Church of the Reformation,” and went about “stripping altars, breaking images and burning the debris” (Koerner 2004). And in the decades that followed, enraged mobs set upon churches throughout Northern Europe, as if declaring war upon the very capacity of the visible world to manifest the invisible. Art historian Joseph Leo Koerner compiles a long list of these degradations, even a small sampling of which is painful to recite: “[I]mages were broken, burned, toppled, beheaded, and hanged. They were spat, pissed and shat upon, tossed into toilets, sewers, fountains, canals, rivers, rubble heaps, garbage dumps, pigsties and charnel houses”—somehow seeking to prove for all time that the material world was, after all, merely base and contemptable and indeed excremental, utterly incapable of serving as a window of transcendence (Koerner 2004, 104f). And as Weber suggested, this turns out to be a most convenient view of nature as well, justifying its unrestricted appropriation for industry and commerce.

Thus, a radical reduction of the highest to the lowest takes shape well before the rise of scientistic ideologies. Koerner summarizes the spirit of these onslaughts: “Protestant iconoclasm sought disenchantment—mere wood and nothing more.” (Koerner 2004). Throughout the era, a starkly disenchanted cosmology and a one-dimensional literalism in theology mirror and compete with one another. As Harrison (1998, 115) states: “If the things of nature, created by God, no longer resonate with symbolic potency, then those human artefacts which had once participated in that universe of meaning . . . will be similarly mute.”

The last traces of a symbolic cosmos are banished by Galileo, whose metaphysical claims far exceeded the scientific needs and concerns of astronomy and physics. Along with Descartes, he founded modern metaphysics, insisting that the very being of space must be regarded as geometrical—transforming a methodology into an ontology, and initiating the reductionistic scientism that has now become our standard. As the French philosopher Jean Borella puts it: “[Galileo] was convinced that what is revealed beneath the scientific gaze is the world’s very reality, such as it is in itself. His confidence in the ontological value of his analysis was total, and hence too its demands” (Borella 2016, 65; emphasis added). If physics alone reveals the reality of nature, then only scientific knowledge is legitimate, and other truth claims are nothing more than fantasy and fraud. But is the world really nothing more than what the natural sciences currently say it is? And if we wish to assert this, would this claim itself be scientific?

The fierce epistemic dogmatism of Galileo may be seen in his appropriation of one of the great guiding images of premodern thought, both East and West: the “Book of Nature.” Originally and for many centuries, the Book of Nature was seen as standing parallel to, and indeed temporally preceding, the Book of Holy Scripture. It served as a source of divine revelation legible even to the illiterate and unlearned. This symbol, this particular bridge between visible and invisible orders, was first employed by St. Anthony the Great in the fourth century, and expressly invoked by such diverse figures as St. Athanasius, Evagrius Ponticus, Origen, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, St. John Cassian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Isaac the Syrian, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Victor, and Dante Alighieri. In The Assayer, however, Galileo appropriates (without acknowledgment) and upends St. Anthony’s eloquent understanding of the Book of Nature. In his dialogue with an unnamed “philosopher” who had asked how he could live without “books,” St. Anthony explains that he needed no books made of paper, because creation as it surrounds him is itself a book that is “present whenever I wish to read the words of God” (Socrates Scholasticus 1999, 107). But Galileo not only appropriates this once-symbolic understanding, he also inverts it, while subtly ridiculing the desert saint for being delusional in his belief. For although Galileo too points to the “grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze,” he cautions that “the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth” (Galileo 1957, 238).

St. Anthony, then, whose spiritual life unfolded at the foot of a great mountain, bathed in the relentless sunlight and stark beauty of the Egyptian desert, in reality dwelt in invincible darkness, a “dark labyrinth,” suffering from the ancient delusion that he could read the book of nature as a great text, one that had been fashioned to everywhere reveal its own author. Rather, insists Galileo, speaking not as a scientist but as a “natural philosopher” and metaphysician, it would have been “humanly impossible” for St. Anthony to have “understand a single word of it.” A book it is indeed, proclaims the Renaissance physicist together with the fourth-century saint. However, it is not a book intended to be read by everyone, but one meant to be made intelligible only to a certain elect. That is, it must have been created as it was, so that those mathematically skilled cosmologists whom God in his omniscience surely knew would come along sooner or later, those highly educated few who could successfully decipher this encoded book of nature, could finally understand the workings of the divine intellect. And lest there be any doubt, Galileo (1957, 238) emphasizes that “nature takes no delight in poetry,” its “fables and fictions” being themselves “abhorrent to nature. That is, in his act of creation, God was not a poet, intent upon investing his creation with meaning of its own, but no more than a mathematician.

But the problem lies not just with the condescending elitism displayed here, nor even with Galileo’s presumption that there is only one legitimate way to read the book of nature, but with his insistence that we must not take seriously the universe as encountered from within our living experience—the sun on our skin or our delight in rush of wind through the forest. Rather, we must read it only while standing upon our heads, submissively abandoning our own experience of the world as having all along been a great lie—understand the world around us by employing only the most abstract concepts of discursive rationality: the “triangles, circles, and other geometric figures” that for Plato were themselves symbols of higher realities, and thus standing far below them. As put by Michel Henry (2014, 82), “With Galileo . . . the encounter with the world is stripped of its essential subjectivity,” its capacity to reveal itself to us as living subjects and inhabitants.”

But now that we all are students of Galileo, we understand our relationship with the created world—with the world that inconspicuously supports and surrounds us, the world that addresses us and calls us into relation—as if “in fact” it were merely an arc across which some one set of perceptive receptors (e.g., our eyeballs or our ears) and some second, corresponding set of perceptible objects conducted some visual or auditory commerce. Thus, the contemporary Greek philosopher Christos Yannaras (2007, 83) maintains, perhaps echoing the “First” of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“Das alles war Auftrag”), that we have shut ourselves off from the possibility of encountering creation as a personal calling, an address or invitation (klēsē) issued by its Author and meant for us each individually. Galileo initiates this tectonic shift of worldviews by projecting geometry onto the visible order, as if it were the essential ground plan of reality, “a true being of the world, a world in itself” (Henry 2012, 7)—and thereby inaugurating what Husserl (1970, 48f; emphasis added) called “the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception . . . i.e. our everyday life-world [Lebenswelt].” By uncritically embracing this one-sided perspective, we succumb to what Whitehead (1967, 51) called The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, a philosophical blunder that takes abstractions to be real and therby falling into the “error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. And the angel in Nazareth is trapped within the nets of the infinitesimal calculus. The Ascension of Christ must be measurable at a certain velocity, following upon a specific rate of acceleration. To the reader with modern sympathies—and this includes most of us— not only mystical depth but meaning itself have become otiose and irrelevant, displaced by the hegemony of scientific analysis.

Descartes adds to this geometric objectification of the world a corresponding subjectification of perception, cognition, and creative imagination. With the visible cosmos now defined by extension alone, physical reality becomes “external” to the non-extended realm of consciousness, making consciousness itself exclusively “internal,” withdrawing its vital moorings within the world it inhabits. Not only are we closed off from the depths of creation, we are now closed up within our own self-consciousness, unsure of whether there really is an external world at all. We now hover outside the world as metaphysical “outsiders,” as what Gilbert Ryle called a “ghost in the machine.” And visible creation itself? Metaphysically drained of meaning through the amputation of its symbolic depth-dimension, the vastness of this mute universe already appears to Descartes’s contemporary Pascal as a malevolent wasteland both alien and “terrifying.” And Pascal (2004, 57) speaks here for modern humanity as a whole: “When I consider the whole silent universe and man left to himself without light, as though lost in this corner of the universe . . . I become frightened, like someone brought in his sleep to a frightening desert island who wakes up with no knowledge of where he is or means of escape.”

Borella (2016) offers an important insight into how this modern, naturalistic (materialistic) understanding and experience of nature, inaugurated by Galileo and Descartes, has left Western modernity with a “divorce and [an] irreparable breach between the order of being and appearance.” For the physical world we encounter in our everyday experience—and to which the very “meanings and sentiments tied to the most profound rhythms of our psycho-corporeal life are attached”— can no longer be regarded as a manifestation of reality but rather becomes a free-floating façade with no organic roots in the order of the real (Borella 2016). Our spontaneous experience of the world now has no perceptible connection to the “triangles, circles, and other geometric figures” of Galileo or to Descartes’s, the backstage reality of a “complex machinery of pulleys, cords, bellows, pipes, wheels, jointed levers, weights, and other devices which always come back to extension and motion” (Borella 2016). The world of our lived experience thus becomes a “an irremediably ‘faked’ universe,’ a ‘fabulous opera’ that a machinist God has constructed, perhaps for our astonishment, and [which only] this ‘new philosophy’ [of Galileo] enables us to pierce through to its secret” (Borella 2016). Finally, as Borella (2016, 75ff) concludes, “such a divorce of being and appearance ends up destroying all symbolism, insofar as the symbol is rightly a mediator between [the] visible and the invisible orders.”

Together with this altered consciousness of the world, the manner of its presentation in the visual arts changes too. The self-constituting ego disclosed to itself within the Cartesian cogito becomes the true sub-jectum underlying the real—its own self-certainty now the foundation for truth generally—with the same certainty that the ego finds in geometry now also structuring space. Rather than being addressed by the world in its ontological truth or un-concealment (a-lētheia), the ego now appoints itself to establish the truth of being.

Thus, as Florensky maintains, the reverse perspective characteristic of both sacred art and the drawings of children in all cultures—with the lines of perspective converging dynamically toward the viewer, symbolically addressing the viewer—gets replaced by the geometrical, optical, “objective” perspective, its lines of perspective converging from it not toward the viewer but into a vanishing point at an infinite distance (Florensky [1920] 2002, 197–271). The abstract grid of Euclidian geometry, which rather than being natural to us must itself be learned, is imposed upon the world, like the planar points of graph paper imposed upon the three-dimensional universe, and then taken to itself be real, as if no forms (from which symbolic modes of address and invitation could arise) already inhered in nature itself. “Everything visible and perceptible is [now] only simple material for filling in some general regulatory schema imposed upon it from without” (Florensky [1920] 2002, 216f, 219, 261f). As Heidegger (1977, 167) remarks: “Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place.” Whereas a profoundly evocative symbolic order had once arisen organically from every dappled niche of creation, we now experience only the abstract order that we ourselves project upon it, rendering it less meaningful, less instructive, and less enchanting, but certainly more malleable and more useful.

Eventually, beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of poets and writers and artists worked to restore to the world its symbolic depth and its capacity to bear the weight of theophany. However, Christianity in Western Europe had by that time become so enervated by assimilating the metaphysics of modernity, that many figures (such as Hölderlin and Goethe, Blake and Yeats) turned instead toward paganism and folk mythology as a viable medium for comprehending the symbolic character of the world. William Blake even resorted to creating his own, visionary, para-Christian mythology. Still others, however—first of all Thomas Traherne, and then Novalis and Coleridge—were able to work productively within a Christian worldview. And toward the end of the nineteenth century, additional figures such as John Ruskin, George MacDonald, and Gerard Manley Hopkins made heroic efforts to retrieve this ever-emerging infusion of nature with transcendence from within a Christian frame of reference. Ruskin, an Evangelical Protestant, showed in detail (with, for example, a lengthy volume devoted solely to the aesthetic theology of clouds) how all the features of nature have at their core an articulation of divine presence and beauty. MacDonald, originally a Calvinist, in his “realistic” novels as well his fantasy novels, explores modes of experiencing the world, and especially nature, which rediscover its depth dimension, encountering far more truth here than in the scientific findings that he had dutifully mastered at the university. And Hopkins, much influenced by Ruskin and appropriating what he understood to be Duns Scotus’s concept of the haecceity or “thisness” creation, anticipated Buber and Yannaras in showing how every epiphany of the holy in nature was unique and unrepeatable, a “calling” or “invitation” (klēsē, as Yannaras put it) addressed uniquely to each person who stood as its witness.

The so-called “sophiology” of Solovyov, Bulgakov, and Florensky was in many ways the highpoint of this retrieval of the symbolic realm, while at the same time (at least, in the case of Solovyov and Bulgakov) one that compromised its own foundations through a tendency to reify the symbolic order into something metaphysically resembling a stratum of Neo-Platonic emanation. Florensky, however, resisted and ultimately marginalized this substantialist undertow, and his work remains a beacon light for understanding and recovering the symbolic ontology of creation.

More recently, the deconstructive, post-structuralist view of the world as “text” fully effaces the very depth-dimension of creation, dissolving the world into nothing more than what we have to say about it. Without roots extending into other realms, the world becomes infinitely malleable, “ours” to do with just as we desire, to deconstruct and reconstruct as we please. In tandem with its postmodern apologists, and as Heidegger saw already in the 1950s, the view of the world deriving from cybernetics and computer technology reduces the cosmos to mere bits of “information,” the latter being only the latest degradation of being itself into what Heidegger calls “stock” or “inventory” (Bestand), where “to be” is to be a resource that is stored and transmitted, processed and consumed. Not only physical reality in general but specifically life itself is disclosed in its very being as nothing more than bundles of “information”: cell-embedded DNA and RNA “codes” to be deciphered and manipulated by the science of genetics. In contrast, for the ancient Greeks, zōē or life was eminently visible, presenting itself as a striking and arresting intensification of physis or self-emergence, i.e., of nature as such (Heidegger 1975, 114).

Meanwhile, the fixation of the contemporary gaze upon the video screens of televisions, smart phones, and computers—surfing nomadically from one hyper-text link to another—passes as a de facto confirmation of this worldview, seducing us with uninhibited transhumanist fantasies, as if nature (including our own nature) were not a book of any kind—neither holy writ nor even a textbook of geometry—but a metaphysical tabula rasa, submissively offering itself to the capricious inscriptions we might wish to impress upon it. The symbolic, ontological roots of creation, in contrast, once served not only to nourish its inherent depth and transcendent moorings but also to anchor its integral resistance to our facile appropriation of it.

Notes Toward a Symbolic Ontology

A comprehensive investigation of the symbolic ontology of creation would want to distinguish between different symbolic modalities. Most critical (but by no means exhaustive) would be distinctions between (1) ontological symbolism, the inherent potential of any entity as such to serve as a symbol in its very being—the ontological power of a being (and of the world as a whole) to serve as an image, making present some other being or order of reality; (2) figuration or representation as such, which may or may not consist of a genuine symbol in one of the following senses; (3) perceptual symbolism, through which a perceptible reality (for example, a shadow, reflection, or echo) serves as a symbol for another but more primary, perceptible reality that becomes present through it; (4) natural symbolism, through which some particular entity or aspect of creation inherently manifests the energy of higher, imperceptible realities (sun and moon and stars, fire and water); (5) poetic symbolism, symbolism that is “made” (poiēsis) by drawing upon the natural or empirical symbolism of a given entity, and which always emerges from within some given cultural framework; (6) visionary symbolism, such as the Tree of Life in Genesis or the Cherubic Throne of God’s Glory seen by the prophet Ezekiel (Florensky ([1920] 2020, 60ff) describes these as noetic unities that are “transcendent in relation to our world and therefore can only be represented symbolically”; and (7) revealed symbolism, in which an existing symbol of one kind or another is anointed and made manifest by the Creator to bear higher energies that are revealed through it. For Christians, the life-giving Cross is the preeminent example of such a revealed symbol, as would also be the abundant typological symbolism throughout scripture and early Christian writing ([1920] 2020, 60f). And of course, these different modes of symbolism often overlap and intersect in a dynamic synergy.

For the retrieval of the symbolic cosmos, a renewed openness to ontological symbolism as such would be critical, i.e., a restored sense for how deeply all creation participates in, and makes manifest, the energies of higher (and lower) realities. The reflection of the moon on the surface of a lake or the tracks of a deer in fallen snow make it evident that the image-original relation is ontologically fundamental to our world, while suggesting that it may be even more deeply essential to being as such. The earliest human drawings found at Altamira and Lescaux show that our species has from the beginning elevated this imaging event into something more, something that reaches out toward the “invisible looks” commended by Plato. But there is still more here. For if we are to learn from the Patristic understanding articulated by Sts Ephrem, Dionysius, and Maximus—and developed more recently by figures such as Fr. Pavel Florensky—we must begin with the premise that the world or kosmos serves, and has been created to serve, in its very being as a symbolic and phenomenal link (not just a coded, mathematical cipher, legible only to an elite few) between the invisible and the visible, God and the world. In the words of St. Ephrem: “Had God not wanted to disclose Himself to us, there would not have been anything in creation able to elucidate anything at all about Him” (Brock 1985, 41). If this is correct, then everything must harbor, however hiddenly, a real translucency through which the divine light may be discerned by those prepared to see it.

By what means, then, can we understand this symbolic being of things, which would constitute their primary character—preceding and indeed enabling their potentiality to be understood by means of scientific induction and discursive rationality? What does it mean for something to be symbolic in its very being? As we have seen with Florensky ([1921] 2014), it means being a “reality that contains in its energy the energy of another reality higher in value and hierarchy; the lower reality is a window into the higher reality.” It therefore presupposes a certain translucency to creation itself, the persistent glow of a light infused from above, an inherent reference to another order of being that attracts and draws us so powerfully that Plato speculated we must have remembered it from some prior lifetime. And at the same time, this transcendent mooring would secure for creation a profound integrity—revealed in every natural “form” that we encounter within our created world—that resists our willful intrusions upon it, for it is always anchored in depths beyond our powers of comprehension.

It would also mean that beings are not impervious to other orders of being. That is, for warm hearts and open eyes, things present themselves as always already more than themselves, as in each case being a threshold or portal to another, higher order of reality, and in a lesser way to lower orders that point toward them, that invoke and anticipate them. Plato understood that visible things have a certain indicant and evocative aspect to them that reveals higher, invisible realities, which he called their “invisible look,” their eidos or “form.” In the Divided Line Analogy of his Republic (509d–510a), he uses as preliminary images of this mode of being—the mode of being that binds together ontological orders—what we have distinguished as empirical symbols, things such as shadows and reflections in water and other shiny surfaces, going on to outline a four-tiered metaphysical hierarchy ascending at each level from image to original. We recognize that these passing phenomena are themselves “images” or symbols, in part because they possess a relatively ephemeral quality, a lack of persistent reality when compared to the more stable, less transitory, and more meaningful realities whose energies they bear—the shadow of a tree, for example, referring us back to the tree itself, maintaining its own being as an image while serving as a mode of being-seen undergone by the tree. They are perceptible images of more enduring and more full-bodied realities. But how can a solid and stable thing, like a tree or a star, a painting or a temple, itself be a symbol? And how can we know that it is such?

A preeminent way this is possible is by means of its beauty. As Plato (1952, 91) believed, it is only in the case of beauty that transcendent realms become discernible, become visible and perceptible and manifest: “[F]or beauty alone it has been ordained, to be most manifest to sense and most lovely of them all.” Of all the eternal wellsprings—the ontological characters of being qua being that medieval philosophers called transcendentals—only beauty “has been ordained” to actually appear to us. We may even agree heartily with Plotinus (1969, 57), while stepping back from his speculations concerning anamnēsis or “recollection,” that beauty precisely is this glow of higher modes of being, a luminosity that it is possible to recognize “at the first glance . . . as from an ancient knowledge.” The beauty that everywhere shines through creation constitutes a metaphysical seal, indelibly attesting that its moorings ultimately lie elsewhere—that its power to attract us and excite us is not a passing pleasure of the moment but is rooted in an eternal order to which we are intimately related—while at the same time the inherent sanctity of beauty cautions us that it is not ours alone to do with as we please.

This is true, of course, for art as well as nature. Great paintings, whether representational works by Turner, Friedrich and Van Gogh, or more abstract work by artists such as Kandinsky or Klee, resonate with other orders of reality. They draw us in through an evocative quality, a certain attraction or pull beyond the visible—we experience them as reaching toward something beyond shape and color, something transcendent. Florensky ([1922] 1996, 66) maintains that “all symbolic work [has] the basic ontological character of seeking to be that which it symbolizes.” And it succeeds when it “evokes in the viewer the reality of the other world (as the pungent scent of seaweed in the air evokes in us the still faraway ocean)” (Florensky [1922] 1996, 66).

And must we not also say that the song of a mockingbird, arising in the sultry air of a summer night, works in the same way, evoking metaphysically distant orders of being? Borrowing a phrase from C. S. Lewis, one that he himself borrowed from the German Romantics, we may say that through this kind of ontological overflow or ekstasis, a particular thing (or a sound, or a smell, or a series of words or notes) evokes in us a certain Sehnsucht or yearning, an undefinable desire for something that transcends the boundaries of ordinary experience, that beckons and draws us in its direction. Lewis (1958, 7f) calls this an “intense longing” for something unknown but somehow discerned, adding that “there is a particular mystery about the object of this Desire.” This spiritual longing arises when what we encounter brings with it “that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead . . . the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves” (Lewis 1958, 9f). Or it may happen less through a sense of longing than a mixture of fascination and apprehension, a sense of the mysterium tremendem et fascinans as Rudolf Otto put it, drawing us toward what appears, while at the same time withdrawing the familiar ground from beneath our feet. Or again, using the language of Jean-Luc Marion, we may regard this pull from beyond as the bearer of a “saturated phenomenon,” whose content and meaning so overwhelm our possibilities of intuition that it becomes elusive and in a certain way inconspicuous, and thus a bearer of what St. Dionysius saw as apophatic truth.

Nor would such a symbolic ontology seek to establish a metaphysical monism, such as the Presocratic philosophers are often (mistakenly) understood to assert. Rather, what is outlined here would unfold as a phenomenological ontology, describing how the world is disclosed to us within our very experience of it, and just as much a hermeneutic ontology, more inclined toward discerning and listening than to speaking, zealous to avoid distorting the word of creation as it is spoken. And this is to say that creation is not best approached as a substance at all, i.e., as something whose “essence” we need to identify and explain, but rather as a dialogue in which we need to engage, an encounter or event, a word requiring both speaker and listener to fully unfold and be spoken. Florensky himself elucidates these features of a symbolic worldview nicely, first by contrasting the explanatory character conventionally attributed to the natural sciences with the “symbolic description” he emphasizes, and then in a passage that even compares symbolic knowledge to conjugal union.

First, he argues that since authentic science is an active expression of love for a given subject matter, it is better to understand science as “descriptive,” as “consciousness-deepening,” and ultimately as symbolic, than it is to see it is as “explanatory” and reductive:

Neither mathematical formulas nor mechanical models [necessarily seek to] appropriate the reality of the phenomenon itself, but [can instead] stand alongside it, with it and for its sake. Explanation wants to appropriate the phenomenon itself, to dissolve its reality into those forces and entities that it substitutes for what is being explained. Our spirit’s [activity of] describing by means of symbols . . . wants to deepen our attention and serve as a consciousness of the reality before us. (Florensky [1918] 1993, 21; emphasis added)

Second, symbolic understanding is a mode of real intimacy between knower and known. Florensky even draws here upon the unitive imagery of the Song of Songs and of the early church, for which Christ is the Eternal Bridegroom, to describe the union between creation and Creator, knower and known:

The Orthodox worldview sees in the world its permeation with the rays of TRUTH, sees another world in this world, looks at creation as a symbol of the higher being . . . We can and do get out of the complex of our own sensations only when we recognize the conjugal encounter of the objective with us. I can say about the act of knowing: “Here I am, knowing the sun, and here is the sun being known.” Therefore, in me there is a union of two energies and, consequently, two beings. The connection of energies is called synergeia, common-energy (the whole process of sanctification is synergistic). The word is a synergy of the knower and the thing known, especially when it comes to knowing GOD. (Florensky [1912] 1993, 294, 300)

But if this theophanic radiance—in the words of Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima, this “glow of other worlds through the reality that one can perceive, see, smell, taste”—if this is always at work everywhere throughout creation by virtue of its very ontological structure, two further questions arise (Dostoevsky 2002, 211, 217). What about produced objects, whose more proximate origin comes not from the Creator, but from created beings themselves? And above all, why do we (who are starved for transcendence) not always (or at least, not usually) yield ecstatically to this enchanted draught toward what is inherently beautiful and holy?

First, from our earliest years we have been taught that the world is only what science discerns it to be, that the rainbow is “really” nothing more than “a multicolored circular arc” that has been “caused by refraction, internal reflection and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a continuous spectrum of light” (Wikipedia 2023). We have been expected to believe that our spontaneous wonder at its beauty, at the sudden and startling and marvelous appearance of these bright and lovely colors at the edge of dark storm clouds, emerging from some unannounced, mysterious source and leading us to see there a revealing of metaphysical depths, a visible theophany, perhaps even the signature of a promise—that all this is childish “fable” superimposed upon the hard, substantial, and indifferent bedrock of scientific fact. It is sad but unsurprising that we (reluctantly, perhaps nostalgically, but habitually) dismiss the former in favor of the latter, and even regard this very dismissal as itself a modern virtue.

Galileo (1957) boasts in The Assayer that those “rare” and “solitary’ souls willing to reduce the rainbow to mathematical models of it are like “eagles,” masters of the sky, whose lofty vision replicates and rivals that of the God who in ancient song was Himself said to “soar upon the wings of the wind.” Whereas those many (hoi polloi) who are natively inclined to understand such wonders more traditionally, more perceptually and experientially and more symbolically, are like “starlings” who “fly in flocks” and “fill the sky with shrieks and cries wherever they settle, and befoul the earth beneath them” (Galileo 1957, 239). Today championed with far greater unanimity, scientific knowledge is everywhere valorized and elevated over modes of knowledge indigenous to inhabitants, to practical people, to poets, to mystics—to all those who are personally, not just theoretically, engaged with the beautiful, breathtaking world of creation that surrounds us. Unsurprising, indeed, that we should aspire to be noble eagles soaring (at least vicariously) upon the hyperborean winds of theoretical physics rather than contemptible starlings, bound through loyalty to our own experience to the terrestrial miasma here below. (Happily, this condescending triumphalism and intolerance is by no means shared by all, or even most, scientists and theorists of science, while the gifts of modern science to human weal require no documentation.)

Second, while it is argued that all creation is symbolic in its being—the walnut tree no more than the wooden bowl crafted from it, and the hand-crafted bowl no more than the manufactured cardboard container in which it was brought home, which also (if less recognizably) came from a tree—the symbolic dynamism is more powerfully and meaningfully and accessibly manifest in the tree than in the bowl, and more truly in the artisan-highlighted wood-grain of the bowl than in the composite material. That is, if nature’s symbolic character is itself instituted by its Creator, it follows that the closer we come to experiencing a thing as it issues from the hand of God, the more this symbolic character will be intact and manifest. Today, in our increasingly fabricated world, this most often takes place when we encounter some aspect of natural creation in its original natural setting.

An important exception emerges, however, with those traditional arts that honor the natural contours of their materials, purposefully eliciting them into view, as well as with the sacred arts and their own symbolism that more powerfully elevate the natural symbolism of their elemental materials, not uncommonly making them more manifest than in their natural state. And as René Dubos has shown, entire landscapes may likewise be fondly and faithfully transformed, such as the English countryside, that “green & pleasant Land” of Blake and Wordsworth; the hills of Tuscany loved by Petrarch and Goethe; or the sunstruck “Apollonian” landscapes in the south of France hymned by Hölderlin during his last travels—lands that have been lovingly courted or “wooed” over centuries by many generations of their respective inhabitants, i.e., by those faithful dwellers whose intimacy with their beauty and elusive mystery has allowed them to cultivate and build and (as Hölderlin himself had put it) to “dwell poetically upon the earth” (Dubos 1980; Hölderlin 2009, 213f; Hölderlin 1968, 200).

A corollary of this principle is that in our increasingly artificial environment, where the inherent symbolism of creation, and thus its ontological integrity, is neither respected nor even recognized but heedlessly trammeled or suppressed altogether —in the chemically sanitized and fluoride-adjusted water we drink or the highly processed, genetically modified food that we eat—it becomes ever more seductive for us to surrender to an uncanny amnesia, somehow forgetting that the cosmos was not made by human beings and that it does not derive its deepest meanings from their interests and intents.

Third and more generally, we no longer inhabit the Edenic world of our earliest origins, where we could immediately, effortlessly encounter the divine energies always and everywhere. In a fallen world, prayer and asceticism are needed to heal and purify the soul to a point at which this disrupted world’s obscured theophanic character can again reveal itself, allowing us to once again see that creation is only secondarily the indifferent, self-standing substance that a naturalistic, positivistic, materialistic metaphysic takes it to be, but rather is first of all, and most essentially, a translucent, evocative, symbolic order poetic, and theophanous realm within which every bush is burning and every tree is a tree of life, and where every breath of breeze carries a still small voice—whispering to us of the mild and gentle winds of Eden while echoing the ancestral voice of the transcendent and unapproachable God somehow still, implausibly and wondrously, walking nearby in the cool of the day.