Definitions

Symbol, from the Greek σύμβολον symbolon, from a verb meaning ‘throw together, put together’

Symbolism is not about abstraction. “what makes a symbol is the naturality of the signifier. The symbol is a thing, a being, or an event endowed with a semantic property, a reality of the world of common experience in which is presentified a transcendent intelligible. It is that, or it is nothing.” ¹

²

The Symbol of symbols

“The ‘Son of Man’ designates the quintessence of human reality, the manifestation of what is most interior and most real in it, that is to say its deiformity, its quality as God-symbol. And therefore the Son of Man is the symbol of symbols” ³

Ephesians 1

v9

making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him

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v10

to an administration of the fullness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth, in him.

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St. Irenaeus

Christ unites in himself all that is earthly and all that is spiritual (heavenly). He unites humanity to Spirit and places the Spirit in humanity

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Footnotes

1. Borella, Jean (2016). The Crisis of Religious Symbolism. p385 ↩

2. Pageau, Matthieu (2018). The Language of Creation. ch7 ↩

3. Borella, Jean (2016). The Crisis of Religious Symbolism. p404 ↩