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The Religious Symbol

Throughout Christianity’s second millennium the Madonna and Child was easily the most popular subject in Christian art. It is said to be the topic of almost one-tenth of all the surviving religious paintings of the great Italian School. But perhaps the most highly venerated of all such works is the Virgin of Vladimir, an early Russian icon in the Byzantine style that now hangs -rather incongruously - in the Tretyakov Gallery Moscow.5 It is one of a group of rather similar icons, some of them now very blackened and much-repainted.

In these beautiful works the Virgin’s face is large, looming, very thoughtful and loving, and intensely sad. Her beloved Child nuzzles close to her cheek, innocently happy in her love, because he is too young to know yet what she already knows about how his life will end.

Gazing at an icon of this kind has given religious consolation to thousands, perhaps millions, of ordinary Russians for about a thousand years. The Mary at whose face one gazes is the eternal Mother: she is not only the Mother of God, she is also Rachel weeping for her children, she is Mother Russia herself, she is ‘the masses’, the anonymous enduring common people, and she is one’s own mother. Standing through the Liturgy for two or three hours every Sunday morning, the peasants are sustained by the vision of a love that eternally understands, suffers and still loves; for this painting of a woman’s face is also a vision of Eternity. It’s a vision of eternity that is a little too deeply nationalist and quietistic for me to share, but it is impossible not to be moved by it. The unifying and reconciling power of this symbol has helped a whole nation to endure some very cold and hard centuries. It has made their life bearable.

What makes a religious symbol such as the Virgin of Vladimir so powerful? Freud held that the relation between a mother and her male child is the most perfect of all human relationships, and also the perfect natural symbol of human solidarity and the continuity of the race. Auguste Comte planned to preserve this image above all others in his ‘religion of humanity’, and understandably so, for what other image could so comprehensively fuse together morality with nature, the most intense love with the earthiest biological factuality, and the individual human with common humanity? But to point this out is to see that a great religious icon does not merely confirm the old platonic binary oppositions (flesh and spirit, time and eternity, humanity and divinity, the individual and the universal, and so forth). On the contrary, it synthesizes them. All of them, to such a degree that it makes the Nietzschean description of Orthodox (and Catholic) worship as ‘Platonism for the masses’ look a good deal too crude. In fact, it would be better to say that the reconciled and blissful Unity into which the Liturgy and the Iconostasis lead the Orthodox peasant is ‘beyond God’; or at least, beyond the God of standard metaphysical theism.

Why? Because in the standard philosophy of God there has to be an unbridgeable gulf between the world and God. The world has to be utterly dependent upon God, and God has to be absolutely independent and self-existent. Thus there is an infinite difference between the created and the Creator, and the same is true in standard theology. The gap between ourselves and God is so wide that God is quite unknown to us and unthinkable by us. Our only way to eternal happiness is by faith in the power and efficacy of the system of mediation, the bridge between ourselves and God, which is offered to us in the Christian revelation. We cannot see the bridge reaching all the way to the other side, but faith is to trust that it does so in the end. And the bridge is Christ, who himself is mediated to us by the Bible, the Church, the clergy and so on.

This official religious ideology was of course drawn up by the professional clergy, and therefore lays great emphasis upon their indispensability They want to tell us that there are no short cuts: we cannot bypass the Church, the clergy and the sacraments. But the official ideology perhaps never appealed very greatly to any but the clergy themselves. Ordinary lay believers and mystics at prayer have always been content with the feeling of religious release and happiness that they get when for a while they step out of ordinary life and contemplate images of patient and enduring human love and suffering.

So it is then that, although official religious orthodoxy is always sharply dualistic and disciplinary, the way religious symbols work and the way mystics write tends always to blur the orthodox distinctions and lead us beyond them into undifferentiated, Empty6 and timeless bliss.

Against this background I can now explain the use to be made of the symbol of the Fountain in the present essay. I have already argued that in the late Modern and Postmodern periods we have become acutely aware of the Empty transience of all existence and of ourselves. We have lost the old belief in a timeless Real World beyond the world of everyday appearances, and it is now very common for people to suffer from severe time-dread and fear of death. For such people, the Fountain may be an efficacious religious symbol. It is nothing but a formless rush of events, pouring out and passing away continuously: but when it is seen from a distance it becomes still, and appears as a soothing symbol of life, healing and repose. So much is this so that in many parts of the world a fountain is the central design feature both of a city square, and of a paradise-garden, whether it be a cemetery or a pleasure-garden.

There is a further, and very great, attraction: the Fountain is a symbol that unexpectedly offers us the chance to reconnect Cosmos and Ethos, Nature and Morality, the way the world goes and the way we would do best to live. Since Newton and Darwin it has been common to experience a sharp split between Is and Ought, between (in Plato’s jargon) Physics and Ethics. The scientific picture of the world is usually said to be completely mechanistic and non-moral. The Universe is very cold, and we cannot look to it for any sort of human warmth, moral guidance and support. It is utterly indifferent to us. But I am suggesting that the Fountain-image can heal this fundamental split in modern culture. It can teach us as individual moral agents to live generously, by pouring ourselves out continuously into expression. We should go with the flow of life. We should try to live purely affirmatively, without any recoiling or revulsion or other ‘reactive’ or negative emotions. We should totally reject the popular spirituality of introversion, by which we spend much of our lives recollecting ourselves, looking within, and seeking to purify our own supposedly immortal souls. I have no soul: I am not a substance, and there is no real me. There is only what I am able, rather uncertainly, to make of myself as I go along, and what you can make of me: that is, I am only a stream of events, a process in time, and all ideas of me are only interpretations of that process, or bits of it.

From this I conclude that we should live by self-giving love. We should live generously. We should live hard. We should burn. And if we live by self-outing, pouring ourselves out and passing away all the time, then we will be living a ‘dying life’ and our death will be the crown of life, its last work and not merely its abrupt and violent cessation.

The range of themes that are all drawn together in the Fountain-image is, as we shall see, very wide. Two further explanatory comments need to be made.

First, in the Bible the developed, gravity-powered ornamental fountain seems not to appear. In hot Middle-Eastern countries a fountain is a fount, or font, or wellspring, or simply a freshwater spring that comes bubbling up out of the ground. It’s ‘the water of life’, and an oasis or a garden may develop around it. The gravity-powered fountain was developed by the Arabs and the Persians, and becomes prominent in Renaissance Europe. The pumped fountain that springs high like a geyser, and then spreads out like an umbrella as it falls back into its bowl cannot (I suppose) be more than two centuries old. It became a familiar feature of public parks in the great nineteenth-century cities. But it is of importance to me, because if there is a way of imagining a fountain which continually recycles its own waters, then it may open up the idea of the Eternal Return. As the waters fall back, they may recoup the energy that initially propelled them upwards. Thus the Fountain may come to be thought of as perpetually recycling its own waters, and a spectator of it will see a world made of nothing but a fleeting stream of contingent events, but which as a whole, and seen from outside, is a timeless, blissful totality. At times in the past, and especially in the 1990s, I have been so haunted by this idea that I have summed up my whole philosophy under the label ‘Energetic Spinozism’.7

The second promised supplementary comment concerns alternatives to the Fountain as a unifying religious symbol. The most important of these is the Sun, with its associated ideas of fire and a lamp. This image came to me very strongly in 1994:

We should live as the Sun does. The process by which it lives and the process by which it dies are one and the same. It hasn’t a care. It simply expends itself gloriously, and in so doing gives life to us all.8

Like the Fountain, the Sun is also energetic, outpouring, self-emptying process. It too may be used in order to reconnect ethics with cosmology, and it is of course also a long-established religious symbol. I pursued the image, and went straight on from the words quoted above to the writing of Solar Ethics (1995). The images of fire and of a lamp that radiates illumination can scarcely be avoided in this present discussion. But for reasons that will become apparent, it is the Fountain that will occupy the central position on this occasion. And notice, by the way, that in garden design the Fountain is always placed at a focal point, where many paths meet.

5 See G. H. Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia (The Pelican History of Art), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954, pp. 70f. and PL.32.

6 When I use the word Empty with a capital E, I intend the Buddhist meaning of the word: ‘Empty of own-being’, insubstantial.

7 Or the Torus. See my After All, London: SCM Press, 1994, pp. 57-61.

8 Ibid., p. 109.