Karel Werner - Symbols in Art and Religion: The Indian and the Comparative Perspectives

DURHAM INDOLOGICAL SERIES

SYMBOLS IN ART AND RELIGION

SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

DURHAM INDOLOGICAL SERIES

1. THE YOGI AND THE MYSTIC
Edited by Karel Werner

2. SYMBOLS IN ART AND RELIGION
Edited by Karel Werner

DURHAM INDOLOGICAL SERIES NO. 2

The Indian and the Comparative Perspectives

Edited by
Karel Werner

This edition first published in 1990 by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

First issued in paperback 2013

All rights reserved

Karel Werner 1990

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Symbols in art and religion: the Indian and the
comparative perspectives. (Durham Indological
series, ISSN 0951-7863; V. 2).
1. Indian religious visual arts; Symbolism
I. Werner, Karel II. Series
704.94894
ISBN 0 7007 0215 6

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

ISBN 13: 978-0-700-70215-2 (hardback)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-86154-0 (paperback)

The hope expressed in the Preface to The Yogi and the Mystic, the first collection of papers in this series, namely that the publishers would be able and willing to bring out a second collection, this time dedicated to the theme of symbolism, is being realized by the appearance of this book.

As with the first volume, the contributions included in this one also stem from the harvest of the Symposia on Indian Religions which took place during the ten years of the editor's convenership (1975-84). It was the Seventh Symposium, housed in the Cherwell Centre, Oxford, in 1981, which was concerned with the theme of symbolism in Indian religions and, like the previous one-theme conference on mysticism, attracted much interest which enabled eventually the present publication.

In the case of mysticism, the editor could offer a general framework for the way in which the inquiry into the different varieties of mysticism in Indian religions could be conducted; it was outlined in his introductory paper whose extensive synopsis was made available to the participants invited to contribute, although it was left to them whether they would choose to relate their contributions to the theory outlined in the synopsis or not. In the event, the editor subsequently felt justified in claiming that the structural pattern of mystical doctrine, experience and path as outlined in his introductory paper had a virtually universal applicability and was recognizable even in papers which did not directly relate to his synopsis or, in one or two cases, were written without their authors' knowledge of it.

The editor could make no similar claim to having a generally applicable theory in the case of symbolism. He was therefore delighted to receive the offer of a paper from a colleague with a philosophical back ground who was preoccupied with general methodological problems of symbolism in religions. His paper was used to introduce the theme and some of its general implications to the Symposium and is published in this collection almost unaltered. Other contributors did not have a chance to read it beforehand and wrote their papers independently.

The imagination of one participant in the proceedings of the Symposium was fired enough to ponder over its theme for some time and to prepare a kind of 'footnote' to it for the subsequent year's Symposium. It was later finalized and published in a journal. The author reworked it again for the purposes of this collection after he had read all the other contributions.

Although this last paper tries to find some pattern in the creation, use and meaning of symbols and even suggests a theory which it attempts to illustrate with the materials of some of the other contributions, we can hardly claim to have a comprehensive grasp or clear understanding of the processes in human thought, experience and creative effort which lead to the birth of symbols and to their effectiveness. The assembled papers offer some valid, although only partial, insights into these processes, but their nature or essence is elusive and will require ever more attention and ever fresh attempts to elucidate them, without any guarantee that the problem will eventually be fully understood. This does not mean that effective use and new creation of symbols will not go on. It is as with language. One does not have to understand fully its nature in order to use it effectively and creatively, and the language itself, as well as its employment both in the creative process and in everyday affairs, will remain forever independent of the theories of language and of the contentions of linguistic philosophy.

The first paper, 'Symbols and Religious Language', takes as its starting point two clearly inadequate definitions of symbol, one ascribing the capacity of becoming a symbol to anything that has a meaning and the other one regarding the process by which a symbol comes into existence to be a matter of convention rather than of any intrinsic link between the symbol and the entity which it symbolizes. The author then proceeds to examine, first, the qualities which a symbol may be required to have, such as being 'acceptable' and having an 'innate power' or what is called 'necessary character', and, second, the relation a symbol has to what it symbolizes: whether it represents that entity and somehow participates in it, mediates its deeper meaning or even integrates into human life realities not normally encountered in everyday life, a point particularly relevant to symbols in religions. He then examines symbols as used in religious discourse, the claims Tillich makes for symbolic language as pointing to truth if it adequately expresses man's 'ultimate concern', and Wittgenstein's 'picture' theory of religious language only to conclude that, symbols being the language of religion, we can never know the reality they point to; we can only elucidate the life which symbols have as a form of language.