Devils and Symbols

“Now understand me well – it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” – Walt Whitman

It’s strange how we can go through life using certain words frequently but rarely taking the trouble to discover their history or their original meaning. Occasionally we stumble across a derivation when we consult a dictionary in order to check a spelling or to confirm a crossword solution, but, for the most part, we pay scant attention to the words we use. This is as true of people like myself who make a living out of words as it is of those who have little time to spend on verbal niceties, and it’s a pity, because sometimes an investigation into a word’s origins, in addition to being intrinsically interesting, can add immeasurably to our understanding of the way our ancestors thought and even their philosophical assumptions. “Language,” writes Aldous Huxley, “is often ‘wiser’, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten.” (The Perennial Philosophy, page 11)

Take the word “trivial” for example. I’ve been using this word, correctly but inadvertently, for decades, but it’s only recently that I’ve become aware of its origin. It’s from the Latin (and pretty elementary Latin at that!) for “three roads” (tri – three, via – road). In former times, where three roads met would be a place of informal, relaxed encounter, where horses would be watered, refreshment taken, gossip exchanged. Hence our word “trivial” – inconsequential, trifling, of little importance, just the sort of verbal transaction that one would expect among casual acquaintances simply passing the time of day at a crossroads.

Even more recently I discovered that the words “symbolic” and “diabolic” are related. Again, these are words that I often use and, knowing a bit of Greek I ought to have noticed the connection, but I didn’t. The root of both is the Greek verb ballein – “to throw”, but whereas “symbolic” describes things that are thrown together, “diabolic” describes things that are thrown apart. The two words are, in fact, antonyms.

“Things that are thrown together” is a perfect description of a symbol. Two (or more) things, which, on the surface, don’t seem to have a connection, are joined together by the mind. So, Robbie Burns’ celebrated line, “My love is like a red, red rose” takes two unrelated ideas – love and roses – and throws them together in a simile so psychologically appropriate that next Thursday (St. Valentine’s Day) millions of red, red roses will be presented to millions of grateful, grateful women as tokens of undying affection.

When we light our chalice at the beginning of a service we are “throwing together” the idea of light with the ideas of wisdom, quest, understanding – “illumination” in fact, which covers both physical and spiritual dimensions. Poetry, with its heavy reliance on metaphor, simile, and personification, constantly seeks to bring things into connection, to perceive the occult links between apparently disparate ideas, to see this in terms of that, sometimes (in the best poetry) with startling appositeness. Religion, too, is heavily symbolic, using ordinary things in extraordinary ways, tangible things – bread, wine, flame, water, incense – to represent the intangible, and this is why religion and poetry are themselves connected (all religious discourse is poetic), and why we religious people should acknowledge and explore the symbol-making propensities of our nature, rather than shying away from them as many Protestants seem to do, “shutting ourselves up in prose” (to paraphrase a line from Emily Dickinson), and ignoring our very human need to create metaphorical connections.

Whereas symbolic activity brings things together, diabolic activity throws them apart: symbolism is centrifugal, drawing things towards the centre; diabolism is centripetal, casting them out into isolated fragments. Symbolism is cosmic, which means united, harmonious, orderly; diabolism is chaotic – lawless, separated, discordant, disordered. We use the word “diabolic” as an adjective to describe the Devil’s work. The Devil, according the Bible and to popular imagination, is the author of confusion, disharmony, disconnection, all of these resulting from the scattering implicit in diabolical activity.

In our second reading today, Henry David Thoreau perceives the symbolic quality of the humble snowflake, each one a unique production of the divine genius, a variation on a theme presented by the number six, participating in, and expressing, the universal sense of order which is as present in the ephemeral as it is in the abiding. And the universe itself announces its unity to us in the stately procession of the planets whose predictable courses among the stars were a source of endless fascination and wonder to the ancient dwellers in Newgrange and to the builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” says the Psalmist (Psalm 19); stars and snowflakes tell us of patterning, order, and hint at comprehensive cosmic laws which govern the entire system, such that Newton’s and Einstein’s theories are as applicable in the Andromeda Nebula as they are in our tiny solar system, and, we can safely predict that snowflakes, “falling faintly through the universe”, will have the same six-pointed formations when they fall on the planets which orbit Alpha Centauri as they do when they faintly fall “upon the dark central plain, on the treeless hills……upon the Bog of Allen…….and into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves.”

The symbolic is everywhere, but so, too, is the diabolic. Pick up any newspaper on any day for evidence of it: murder, mayhem, violence, discrimination, disharmony – and these are just its human expressions; there are also the natural disasters – floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes - which speak of another power in the universe, a capricious, unpredictable, chaotic power, a power over which we have no control, and which seems indifferent to our pain.

In the light of this, is there any wonder that the Bible, while accepting God’s orderly rule in the heavens, calls Satan “the ruler of this world”? And is there any wonder, too, that many of the religious movements of the ancient world – religions like Zoroastrianism, which was to have an enormous influence on Judaism and Christianity - were dualistic, postulating the existence of two equally powerful forces, one good, one evil, locked in eternal combat, neither ever gaining complete mastery over the other? St Paul, while accepting the eventual and inevitable triumph of good over evil, reflects something of this ancient dualism in the fifth chapter of his Letter to the Galatians, where he contrasts the symbolic spirit of God with the diabolical impulses of what he calls “our corrupt human nature”:
It is easy to see what effects proceed from corrupt nature: they are such things as adultery, impurity, incontinence, luxury, idolatry, witchcraft, feuds, quarrels, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, dissensions, factions, spite, murder, drunkenness, and debauchery……….Whereas the spirit yields a harvest of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, forbearance, gentleness, faith, courtesy, temperateness, purity.”

If this were a conventional Christian sermon it would perhaps be appropriate to end here and follow Paul’s admonition to obey the promptings of the spirit and crucify our carnal natures. And then we could all go home and carry on much as before. But following the promptings of the spirit is not so easy, as Paul was well aware, and it certainly does not come about simply by resolving to do it. We may say we desire the symbolic – love, peace, gentleness, and courtesy – but we really don’t desire it enough. Could we honestly live in a world of love and peace? I ask the question seriously. Isn’t there a part of us, which resists the very notion, in the same way that we resist the Sunday-school depiction of heaven as a place of clouds and harps and eternal daylight? For a start, in some curious way, we are often wedded to our own pain; there is a kind of masochism within us whereby we crave the things that will hurt us emotionally. I know people, and so do you, who move from one emotional crisis to the next, constantly proclaiming their desire for harmony and stability, and yet secretly craving the emotional high that only conflict and rejection can bring. Shakespeare’s “sweet sorrow” is a very real experience for all of us at some time or another.

Could we live without the drama provided by disorder? Isn’t there excitement in the diabolic, even when we experience it vicariously in films or television? I am rapidly losing my belief in the liberal idea that violence has sociological causes, which can be eliminated by the provision of good education and fulfilling jobs. As a species we crave danger, and we will fabricate dangerous situations where none exist. Football hooliganism has nothing to do with unemployment (who, among the unemployed, can afford £35 to see a football match?); sectarian violence in the north has little to do with ideology. Both are manifestations of a deep-seated thirst for risk and danger. To use the current vernacular, violence is sexy. People indulge in these things because they enjoy them. Nor is the enjoyment of conflict entirely absent from “respectable” people like us. We may have learned to curb its worst excesses, but we, too, could not bear to live in a world of harmony and peace; it would be insufferably tedious. Where would we be without winners and losers, even in the compass of our own small lives?

What would there be to admire in such a world? What room would there be for daring, for heroism? What growth could there be in human fortitude, endurance, and courage in a world without obstacles? Could we endure to live without the possibility of failure or even of tragedy? The symbolic may attract us, but the diabolical has us in its grip and refuses to let us go.

There is a sense in which these two forces are not so much antagonists as complementaries; they depend upon each other, fuel each other. Nietzsche, who deplored what he considered the simperings of religious preachers calling for an end to strife and disharmony, agreed with the ancient Greek philosopher, Heracleitus, who declared that “strife is the mother of all things.”

Nietzsche believed that all human greatness has grown from our willingness to confront difficulties and to overcome them. He writes: - “When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind; the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was none-the-less necessary, in order that a gentler civilisation might raise its house.

The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.”
In another place he writes: - “The secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fulfilment and the greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously. Build you cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!”

Paradoxically, what we call evil is often the midwife of the good. We may not agree entirely with Nietzsche, but we can admit that he has a point. There is no end to the struggle because deep down we don’t want it to end, and experience teaches us that it can never end. We overcome one problem only to be faced with another. “There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,” writes Walt Whitman. Prosperity, which has been our goal for so long, has brought its own range of problems – hedonism, violent crime, drug-addiction, pollution, materialism; medical advances have unwittingly given us a feeling of invulnerability, and perhaps even of immortality, which have dangerously blurred the realities of life and death for many, and left us all psychologically ill-prepared for inevitable tragedy. We don’t remove our problems, we change them, and while we should obviously fight to overcome the grosser inequities and injustices of our world, we should do so with the clear realisation that we are changing the nature of the struggle not eliminating it.

The symbolic, unitive, and loving power, which we call God is working through the diabolical to fashion a new creation, to turn dross into gold, in an eternal process of development. There will never be a time of complete harmony and serenity, not even in any heavenly life, which might follow this one. But then, the goal of existence is not serenity and passive enjoyment. We live in a “vale of soul-making” (Keats), not a playground. The goal is eternal progression and the price is pain. To live a spiritual life is to enter consciously, freely, and wholeheartedly into the struggle.

Bill Darlison
10th February 2002 Devils and Symbols

“Now understand me well – it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” – Walt Whitman

It’s strange how we can go through life using certain words frequently but rarely taking the trouble to discover their history or their original meaning. Occasionally we stumble across a derivation when we consult a dictionary in order to check a spelling or to confirm a crossword solution, but, for the most part, we pay scant attention to the words we use. This is as true of people like myself who make a living out of words as it is of those who have little time to spend on verbal niceties, and it’s a pity, because sometimes an investigation into a word’s origins, in addition to being intrinsically interesting, can add immeasurably to our understanding of the way our ancestors thought and even their philosophical assumptions. “Language,” writes Aldous Huxley, “is often ‘wiser’, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten.” (The Perennial Philosophy, page 11)

Take the word “trivial” for example. I’ve been using this word, correctly but inadvertently, for decades, but it’s only recently that I’ve become aware of its origin. It’s from the Latin (and pretty elementary Latin at that!) for “three roads” (tri – three, via – road). In former times, where three roads met would be a place of informal, relaxed encounter, where horses would be watered, refreshment taken, gossip exchanged. Hence our word “trivial” – inconsequential, trifling, of little importance, just the sort of verbal transaction that one would expect among casual acquaintances simply passing the time of day at a crossroads.

Even more recently I discovered that the words “symbolic” and “diabolic” are related. Again, these are words that I often use and, knowing a bit of Greek I ought to have noticed the connection, but I didn’t. The root of both is the Greek verb ballein – “to throw”, but whereas “symbolic” describes things that are thrown together, “diabolic” describes things that are thrown apart. The two words are, in fact, antonyms.

“Things that are thrown together” is a perfect description of a symbol. Two (or more) things, which, on the surface, don’t seem to have a connection, are joined together by the mind. So, Robbie Burns’ celebrated line, “My love is like a red, red rose” takes two unrelated ideas – love and roses – and throws them together in a simile so psychologically appropriate that next Thursday (St. Valentine’s Day) millions of red, red roses will be presented to millions of grateful, grateful women as tokens of undying affection.

When we light our chalice at the beginning of a service we are “throwing together” the idea of light with the ideas of wisdom, quest, understanding – “illumination” in fact, which covers both physical and spiritual dimensions. Poetry, with its heavy reliance on metaphor, simile, and personification, constantly seeks to bring things into connection, to perceive the occult links between apparently disparate ideas, to see this in terms of that, sometimes (in the best poetry) with startling appositeness. Religion, too, is heavily symbolic, using ordinary things in extraordinary ways, tangible things – bread, wine, flame, water, incense – to represent the intangible, and this is why religion and poetry are themselves connected (all religious discourse is poetic), and why we religious people should acknowledge and explore the symbol-making propensities of our nature, rather than shying away from them as many Protestants seem to do, “shutting ourselves up in prose” (to paraphrase a line from Emily Dickinson), and ignoring our very human need to create metaphorical connections.

Whereas symbolic activity brings things together, diabolic activity throws them apart: symbolism is centrifugal, drawing things towards the centre; diabolism is centripetal, casting them out into isolated fragments. Symbolism is cosmic, which means united, harmonious, orderly; diabolism is chaotic – lawless, separated, discordant, disordered. We use the word “diabolic” as an adjective to describe the Devil’s work. The Devil, according the Bible and to popular imagination, is the author of confusion, disharmony, disconnection, all of these resulting from the scattering implicit in diabolical activity.

In our second reading today, Henry David Thoreau perceives the symbolic quality of the humble snowflake, each one a unique production of the divine genius, a variation on a theme presented by the number six, participating in, and expressing, the universal sense of order which is as present in the ephemeral as it is in the abiding. And the universe itself announces its unity to us in the stately procession of the planets whose predictable courses among the stars were a source of endless fascination and wonder to the ancient dwellers in Newgrange and to the builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” says the Psalmist (Psalm 19); stars and snowflakes tell us of patterning, order, and hint at comprehensive cosmic laws which govern the entire system, such that Newton’s and Einstein’s theories are as applicable in the Andromeda Nebula as they are in our tiny solar system, and, we can safely predict that snowflakes, “falling faintly through the universe”, will have the same six-pointed formations when they fall on the planets which orbit Alpha Centauri as they do when they faintly fall “upon the dark central plain, on the treeless hills……upon the Bog of Allen…….and into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves.”

The symbolic is everywhere, but so, too, is the diabolic. Pick up any newspaper on any day for evidence of it: murder, mayhem, violence, discrimination, disharmony – and these are just its human expressions; there are also the natural disasters – floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes - which speak of another power in the universe, a capricious, unpredictable, chaotic power, a power over which we have no control, and which seems indifferent to our pain.

In the light of this, is there any wonder that the Bible, while accepting God’s orderly rule in the heavens, calls Satan “the ruler of this world”? And is there any wonder, too, that many of the religious movements of the ancient world – religions like Zoroastrianism, which was to have an enormous influence on Judaism and Christianity - were dualistic, postulating the existence of two equally powerful forces, one good, one evil, locked in eternal combat, neither ever gaining complete mastery over the other? St Paul, while accepting the eventual and inevitable triumph of good over evil, reflects something of this ancient dualism in the fifth chapter of his Letter to the Galatians, where he contrasts the symbolic spirit of God with the diabolical impulses of what he calls “our corrupt human nature”:
It is easy to see what effects proceed from corrupt nature: they are such things as adultery, impurity, incontinence, luxury, idolatry, witchcraft, feuds, quarrels, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, dissensions, factions, spite, murder, drunkenness, and debauchery……….Whereas the spirit yields a harvest of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, forbearance, gentleness, faith, courtesy, temperateness, purity.”

If this were a conventional Christian sermon it would perhaps be appropriate to end here and follow Paul’s admonition to obey the promptings of the spirit and crucify our carnal natures. And then we could all go home and carry on much as before. But following the promptings of the spirit is not so easy, as Paul was well aware, and it certainly does not come about simply by resolving to do it. We may say we desire the symbolic – love, peace, gentleness, and courtesy – but we really don’t desire it enough. Could we honestly live in a world of love and peace? I ask the question seriously. Isn’t there a part of us, which resists the very notion, in the same way that we resist the Sunday-school depiction of heaven as a place of clouds and harps and eternal daylight? For a start, in some curious way, we are often wedded to our own pain; there is a kind of masochism within us whereby we crave the things that will hurt us emotionally. I know people, and so do you, who move from one emotional crisis to the next, constantly proclaiming their desire for harmony and stability, and yet secretly craving the emotional high that only conflict and rejection can bring. Shakespeare’s “sweet sorrow” is a very real experience for all of us at some time or another.

Could we live without the drama provided by disorder? Isn’t there excitement in the diabolic, even when we experience it vicariously in films or television? I am rapidly losing my belief in the liberal idea that violence has sociological causes, which can be eliminated by the provision of good education and fulfilling jobs. As a species we crave danger, and we will fabricate dangerous situations where none exist. Football hooliganism has nothing to do with unemployment (who, among the unemployed, can afford £35 to see a football match?); sectarian violence in the north has little to do with ideology. Both are manifestations of a deep-seated thirst for risk and danger. To use the current vernacular, violence is sexy. People indulge in these things because they enjoy them. Nor is the enjoyment of conflict entirely absent from “respectable” people like us. We may have learned to curb its worst excesses, but we, too, could not bear to live in a world of harmony and peace; it would be insufferably tedious. Where would we be without winners and losers, even in the compass of our own small lives?

What would there be to admire in such a world? What room would there be for daring, for heroism? What growth could there be in human fortitude, endurance, and courage in a world without obstacles? Could we endure to live without the possibility of failure or even of tragedy? The symbolic may attract us, but the diabolical has us in its grip and refuses to let us go.

There is a sense in which these two forces are not so much antagonists as complementaries; they depend upon each other, fuel each other. Nietzsche, who deplored what he considered the simperings of religious preachers calling for an end to strife and disharmony, agreed with the ancient Greek philosopher, Heracleitus, who declared that “strife is the mother of all things.”

Nietzsche believed that all human greatness has grown from our willingness to confront difficulties and to overcome them. He writes: - “When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind; the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was none-the-less necessary, in order that a gentler civilisation might raise its house.

The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.”
In another place he writes: - “The secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fulfilment and the greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously. Build you cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!”

Paradoxically, what we call evil is often the midwife of the good. We may not agree entirely with Nietzsche, but we can admit that he has a point. There is no end to the struggle because deep down we don’t want it to end, and experience teaches us that it can never end. We overcome one problem only to be faced with another. “There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,” writes Walt Whitman. Prosperity, which has been our goal for so long, has brought its own range of problems – hedonism, violent crime, drug-addiction, pollution, materialism; medical advances have unwittingly given us a feeling of invulnerability, and perhaps even of immortality, which have dangerously blurred the realities of life and death for many, and left us all psychologically ill-prepared for inevitable tragedy. We don’t remove our problems, we change them, and while we should obviously fight to overcome the grosser inequities and injustices of our world, we should do so with the clear realisation that we are changing the nature of the struggle not eliminating it.

The symbolic, unitive, and loving power, which we call God is working through the diabolical to fashion a new creation, to turn dross into gold, in an eternal process of development. There will never be a time of complete harmony and serenity, not even in any heavenly life, which might follow this one. But then, the goal of existence is not serenity and passive enjoyment. We live in a “vale of soul-making” (Keats), not a playground. The goal is eternal progression and the price is pain. To live a spiritual life is to enter consciously, freely, and wholeheartedly into the struggle.

Bill Darlison
10th February 2002