Nick and Sacramentality
[Crossposted from forkni-l. Backdated. In response to a post about Nick and religion.]
... The post brushes up against sacramentality and analogical imagination, a reference poised for analyzing Nick! However, can we go there without further stirring the religion pot, which is always awkward and sometimes painful in public forums? I'd love to, but it's a challenge. I'm going to try...
It's long been a custom that showing respect to a symbol also shows respect to that which is symbolized. In Nick's mortal life, that was so ordinary, deep and wide that it never needed to be explained (was it even possible to explain it, before a certain point in the cumulative progress of human thought?). Anyway, I believe that is Nick's style of knowing. Before religion is doctrine, it is experience, symbol and story -- not holy writings alone, but holidays, games, food, art, community: an experiential bundle -- and that's how mortal Nick grew up, boy and man, in a mostly illiterate world, to absorb knowledge and reproduce it in his actions. I think this is the way his imagination works; that is, I think that Nick's pre-conscious mind still uses the templates of popular (not necessarily scholarly) medieval Christianity, which, like modern Catholicism and some other denominations and religions, was above all sacramental -- by which I mean, it found the divine self-disclosed in the creation.
Nick has had hundreds of years to learn alternative styles of knowing, but from the episodes, I personally think he has not adopted many on that deep level, not even when he arguably should have. ( Read more... )
... The post brushes up against sacramentality and analogical imagination, a reference poised for analyzing Nick! However, can we go there without further stirring the religion pot, which is always awkward and sometimes painful in public forums? I'd love to, but it's a challenge. I'm going to try...
It's long been a custom that showing respect to a symbol also shows respect to that which is symbolized. In Nick's mortal life, that was so ordinary, deep and wide that it never needed to be explained (was it even possible to explain it, before a certain point in the cumulative progress of human thought?). Anyway, I believe that is Nick's style of knowing. Before religion is doctrine, it is experience, symbol and story -- not holy writings alone, but holidays, games, food, art, community: an experiential bundle -- and that's how mortal Nick grew up, boy and man, in a mostly illiterate world, to absorb knowledge and reproduce it in his actions. I think this is the way his imagination works; that is, I think that Nick's pre-conscious mind still uses the templates of popular (not necessarily scholarly) medieval Christianity, which, like modern Catholicism and some other denominations and religions, was above all sacramental -- by which I mean, it found the divine self-disclosed in the creation.
Nick has had hundreds of years to learn alternative styles of knowing, but from the episodes, I personally think he has not adopted many on that deep level, not even when he arguably should have. ( Read more... )