Symbols
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
SYMBOLS
[1] and signs, whether verbal, musical, dramatic or plastic, are means of
communication. The references of symbols are to ideas and those of signs to
things. One and the same term may be symbol or sign according to its context:
the cross, for example, is a symbol when it represents the structure of the
universe, but a sign when it stands for crossroads. Symbols and signs may be
either natural (true, by innate propriety) or conventional (arbitrary and
accidental) traditional or private. With the language of signs, employed
indicatively in profane language and in realistic and abstracted art, we shall
have no further concern in the present connection. By “abstracted art” we mean
such modern art as willfully avoids recognisable representation, as
distinguished from “principial art”, the naturally symbolic language of
tradition.
The
language of traditional art—scripture, epic, folklore, ritual, and all the
related crafts—is symbolic; and being a language of natural symbols, neither of
private invention, nor established by conciliar agreement or mere custom, is a
universal language. The symbol is the material embodiment, in sound, shape,
colour or gesture as the case may be, of the imitable form of an idea to be
communicated, which imitable form is the formal cause of the work of art
itself. It is for the sake of the idea, and not for its own sake, that the
symbol exists: an actual form much be either symbolic - of its reference, or
merely an unintelligible shape to be liked or disliked according to taste.
The
greater part of modern aesthetics assumes (as the words “aesthetic” and
“empathy” imply) that art consists or should consist entirely of such
unintelligible shapes, and that the appreciation of art consists or should
consist in appropriate emotional reactions. It is further assumed that whatever
is of permanent value in traditional works of art is of the same kind, and
altogether independent of their iconography and meaning. We have, indeed, a
right to say that we choose to consider only the aesthetic surfaces of
the ancient, oriental, or popular arts; but if we do this, we must not at the
same time deceive ourselves so as to suppose that the history of art, meaning by
“history” an explanation in terms of the four causes, can be known or written
from any such a limited point of view.
In
order to understand composition, for example, i.e. the sequence of a dance or
the arrangement of masses in a cathedral or icon, we much understand the logical
relation of the parts: just as in order to understand a sentence, it is not
enough to admire the mellifluent sounds but necessary to be acquainted with the
meanings of separate words and the logic of their combinations. The mere “lover
of art” is not much better than a magpie, which also decorates its nest with
whatever most pleases its fancy, and is contented with a purely “aesthetic”
experience. So far from this, it must be recognized that although in modern
works of art there may be nothing, or nothing more than the artist’s private
person, behind the aesthetic surfaces, the theory in accordance with which
works of traditional art were produced and enjoyed takes it for granted that
the appeal to beauty is not merely to the senses, but through the senses to the
intellect: here “Beauty has to do with cognition”; and what is to be known and
understood is an “immaterial idea” (Hermes), a “picture that is not in the
colours” (Lankavatara Sutra), “the doctrine that conceals itself behind
the veil of the strange verses” (Dante), “the archetype of the image, and not
the image itself “ (St. Basil). “It is by their ideas that we judge of what
things ought to be like” (
It
is evident that symbols and concepts—works of art are things conceived, as
St. Thomas says, per verbum in intellectu–-can serve no purpose for
those who have not yet, in the Platonic sense, “forgotten”. Neither do Zeus nor
the stars, as Plotinus says, remember or even learn; “memory is for those that
have forgotten”, that is to say, for us, whose “life is a sleep and a
forgetting”. The need of symbols, and of symbolic rites, arises only when man
is expelled from the Garden of Eden; as means, by which a man can be reminded
at later stages of his descent from the intellectual and contemplative to the
physical and practical levels of reference. We assuredly have “forgotten” far
more than those who first had need of symbols, and far more than they need to
infer the immortal by its mortal analogies; and nothing could be greater proof
of this than our own claims to be superior to all ritual operations, and to be
able to approach the truth directly. It was as signposts of the Way, or as a
trace of the Hidden Light, pursued by hunters of a supersensual quarry, that
the motifs of traditional art, which have become our “ornaments”, were
originally employed. In these abstract forms, the farther one traces them
backward, or finds them still extant in popular “superstition”, agricultural
rites, and the motifs of folk-art, the more one recognises in them a polar
balance of perceptible shape and imperceptible information; but, as Andrae says
(Die ionische Saule, Schlusswort), they have been more and more voided
of content on their way down to us, more and more denatured with the progress
of “civilisation”, so as to become what we call “art forms”, as if it had been
an aesthetic need, like that of our magpie, that had brought them into being.
When meaning and purpose have been forgotten, or are remembered only by
initiates, the symbol retains only those decorative values that we associate
with “art”. More than this, we deny that the art form can ever have had any
other than a decorative quality; and before, long we begin to take it for
granted that the art form must have originated in an “observation of nature”,
to criticise it accordingly (“That was before they knew anything about
anatomy”, or “understood perspective”) in terms of progress, and to supply its
deficiencies, as did the Hellenistic Greeks with the lotus palmette when they
made an elegant acanthus of it, or the Renaissance when it imposed an ideal of
“truth to nature” upon an older art of formal typology. We interpret myth and
epic from the same point of view, seeing in the miracles and the Deus ex
machina only a more or less awkward attempt on the part of the poet to
enhance the presentation of the facts; we ask for “history”, and endeavour to
extract an historical nucleus by the apparently simple and really naive process
of eliminating all marvels, never realising that the myth is a whole, of which
the wonders are as much an integral part as are the supposed facts; overlooking
that all these marvels have a strict significance altogether independent of
their possibility or impossibility as historical events.
[1]
A derivative of sumballo (Greek) especially in the senses “to correlate”, “to
treat things different as though they were similar”, and (passive) “to
correspond”, or “tally”.