An Idea that Worked

Last night, I taught a class with a philosophical view of a theological topic. 

I was trying to explain how a word can convey some aspects of reality, but not very fully. A picture is a little more complete in conveying the reality that the word represents (as Bolter has been describing also). The thing itself is the most real, but it is not always available or accessible depending on the form/limitation of the receiver.

Anyway, I found a successful way to explain it. One of the class members recently had a grandson. So I wrote the baby's name on the board. The baby's name represents him - and it's true that that is who he is. Then, I asked the man to show us a picture, which he had on his iPhone. 

If he said, "This is my grandson," what he says is not untrue. Nobody would look at him weird and say, 'No it's not; it's a phone!" But in some sense, what he says is not totally accurate, either. If he were to bring his grandson to the class, we would all have a much more complete understanding of the reality of who the baby is. But he didn't have the baby with him, so the picture was as good as we could get under the circumstances.

So, the picture and the written name are predicated on the actual baby and represent the baby in some sense accurately, but the baby himself is the most real. However, the picture and the name are more accessible.

Signs, symbols and Plato vs. Aristotle on primary knowledge

Here are some further reflecting on the connections between signs, images, words, language and meaning:

There is nothing inherently more true about an alphabetic text compared to a picture-based text; in some ways the pictures are more 'immediate' because they are less abstracted. If I know nothing at all about iconography or religious symbology, I can still "read" a little bit from mosaics, stained glass or painted icons - from pretty much any geographic area or time period.

A mosaic tile from a baptistry in North Africa from the 300s AD, for example, uses the same symbology as a stained glass window or altar hanging in a 21st century church in Texas (if has these kinds of "decorations.")

I was amazed, walking through a museum in Tunisia, to look up on the wall and, among artifacts from more than a millennium before, see images I clearly recognized as part of my own story now. The oral - or even the written - language of people in Carthage at that time would not be intelligible to me at all, probably. But these images were immediately recognizable; I could read most of them pretty well. There were some symbols I didn't recognize, but most were familiar.

In teaching English to speakers of other languages, I rely heavily on pictures, especially with beginners. Images are more immediate, more universal in that way. Images connect to our sense perception rather than our reason, primarily.

Plato and Aristotle had different views of how we acquire knowledge, or what kind of knowledge is more real, more essential or more true. Platonists generally seem to consider the mind as primary, not the senses. The essential forms of things (which can only be apprehended by reason/contemplation) are more "real" than individual instances of them. Aristotelians, on the other hand, didn't see a need to posit 'forms' which no one could actually see or touch; actual things themselves, then, were more primary. 

Platonists (and Western civilization has been more Platonic than Aristotelian since the Enlightenment - that's my theory anyway) focus on knowing things by thinking and abstract reasoning, and words are very good for that, so books have been a big deal.

And, for the same reason, the Protestant Reformation put a big focus on scripture (The WORD) rather than on sacrament (visible expressions of invisible grace, a.k.a. 'transparent signs' - in other words, sensory things like water, bread, wine, oil, icons)

Aristotelians, placing more weight with experience, consider knowledge gained through sense perception to be more primary - so books are not as good for that. Images, sounds, smells, tastes and touch are required for this kind of knowledge. I think this is why folks in the Middle Ages were so keen on categorizing things and sub-categorizing them, and also why they were into illuminating their manuscripts with so much color - and using incense and polyphonic singing and icons and forms of prayer that involved tangibility: prayer beads, walking a labyrinth, going on pilgrimage, etc.

In my opinion, we're swinging back toward a more Aristotelian view, and this is expressed in many aspects of our culture, including the interest expressed in the Internet of compiling all kinds of knowledge and classifying and connecting it and making it all accessible.

Thoughts in response to Bolter Ch 2

Bolter's ideas of new media reinterpreting previous forms are interesting to me in relation to discussions going on now in my church tradition regarding changing forms and expressions of worship. There is some significant tension in this process.

As a relatively young person in the church, and especially now becoming part of the hierarchy, it seems likely I'll need to engage this process, and I would like to do it in a productive way. I found Bolter's thoughts helpful, particularly on how remediating an older form involves both some homage to the old forms and some rivalry with them. It's important to realize this is normal, and conveying that to people involved in the struggle may be a little helpful.

In creating resources related to the diaconate, this is very relevant. The diaconate is itself an aspect of that remediating process. It is taking some from very old forms and some from newer forms and also seeking to re-order some long-standing traditions in the process of reviving what is in some ways an even older form - but placing it in a current context.

Another idea that comes up in this chapter is that of "transparent" media - the idea that people want to look through the media to an objective reality. In this way, the media is simply a window through which people can see something else. It struck me how similar this language is to the way iconography is described. People who write icons (and it's interesting that the word is 'write' and not 'paint' or 'draw') consider them to be windows to the divine. When someone prays using an icon, the idea is not to pray to the person pictured but, looking at the image of this person who lived out some aspects of divine love, perhaps it becomes possible to see, through them, a glimpse of the reality of divine love itself. This type of prayer is contemplative - it doesn't involve asking for things. The purpose is just to look closely to try and learn something about God and thereby know God a little better.

The idea of an icon being a transparent sign is very important in relation to the diaconate as I am coming to understand it. The deacon is supposed to be an icon of Christ's service to the poor - a living image of that aspect of divine love.

The familiarity of the term 'icon' in the sense of an image on a computer screen that represents and gives access to a greater reality (a program, application, file, etc) - can be connected to this older use of the word to help explain a concept (the diaconate) that will be new or at least not very familiar to a lot of people.