Become wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
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Based on recent reflections on language, I have put together an analysis of the meaning of talking animals in story telling.
Link below!
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Sympractical retweeted
"The ἐπίσημον symbolizes Christ, who enters the writing of the world and alters the constitution of its oral letters/elements (στοιχεῖα). Clement plays on the ambiguity of στοιχεῖον, treating it primarily as a letter of the alphabet, but also alluding to its alternate meaning as an element of the universe. He regards the inconcinnity between the alphabet and the numbering system to be the key to interpreting the effect of the Incarnation on creation. This same inconcinnity explains the numbers latent in the Transfiguration."
The Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity by Joel Kalvesmaki
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Naming holds a primacy over counting, as you cannot count things which you cannot identify.
David’s sin of taking the census is an attempt to count without naming.
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Sympractical retweeted
The sun and the moon are the same size because we're in the center of the universe. It's what keeps the male and female population the same so that the world is a winnable game. Your body and therefore mind is a Chiasmus. I don't know why everyone keeps forgetting.
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The first episode centers on a broken mill
Last year, several of you pointed me to Over the Garden Wall, Patrick McHale's 2014 Cartoon Network series. It's ten short episodes about two brothers lost in a dark wood on Halloween. It turns out to be one of the most complete explorations of the in-between I've seen in pop culture, closer to the first canto of Dante than you'd expect from a cartoon. In this video (link below) I discuss the symbolism in the show. Please note that it contains spoilers.
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Sympractical retweeted
Last year, several of you pointed me to Over the Garden Wall, Patrick McHale's 2014 Cartoon Network series. It's ten short episodes about two brothers lost in a dark wood on Halloween. It turns out to be one of the most complete explorations of the in-between I've seen in pop culture, closer to the first canto of Dante than you'd expect from a cartoon. In this video (link below) I discuss the symbolism in the show. Please note that it contains spoilers.
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Sympractical retweeted
God finished (synetelesen) his works "on the sixth day." John 19:30, also on the sixth day: "It is finished" (tetelestai). Creation is completed on the Cross.
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Sympractical retweeted
Honeycomb icecream as a christological symbol.
Christological symbolism in the food the Christ-child ate:
"Foods made from butter and milk were exalted in the biblical tradition; Isaiah prophesied that the Savior as a child born of a virgin, would be fed on butter and honey. While the honey symbolized his divine nature, butter in this passage from the Old Testament was interpreted as an indication of Christ's humanity."
- Piero Camporesi (The Anatomy of the Senses, p. 58)
Such a simple and intuitive interpretation of honey and butter when you think about it.
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“The way in which men think about the outer world determines, in the long run, the way in which they perceive it also. Indeed it very largely determines what they perceive.”
- Barfield, Israel and the Michael Impulse
A simple summary of Barfield’s work is that there is a direct relationship between what nameable and what is perceivable. Thus any change in language has a corresponding effect on perception, and vice versa.
Barfield’s definition of poetry is language which produces a “felt change in consciousness.” In other words, it is the use of names, either old or new, which modify the readers or listeners perception. For example, Shakespeare supposedly “invented” or popularized over 1700 English words, thereby producing new percepts, or phenomena.
In Saving the Appearances, Barfield follows Aristotle in splitting the world by into the actually phenomenal and the potentially phenomenal, with perception being the actualization of the potentially phenomenal. The kind of poetry performed by the likes of Shakespeare shifted the domain of the “potentially phenomenal” by providing new names. And with a shift in the potentially phenomenal comes a shift in the actually phenomenal—the perceived. It is by this process that the poet participates in ποίησις (poiesis), or “making.”
The work of the Inklings in general is a self-aware attempt at recovering this kind of ποίησις and protecting it from evil. The imagination lies at the heart of the Inklings due to its relation to the “potentially phenomenal” as opposed to the perceived. Using the imagination, Lewis and Tolkien in particular reshaped the public field of potential phenomena in the modern world, reintroducing angels, demons, and the spiritual world as a whole.
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Sympractical retweeted
“Those who truly practice philosophy practice dying, and death is least of all frightening to them.”
- Plato, Phaedo 67e
οἱ μὲν ὡς ἀληθῶς φιλόσοφοι ἀποθνῄσκειν μελετῶσι καὶ τὸ τεθνάναι ἥκιστα αὐτοῖς ἀνθρώπων φοβερόν
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I can’t watch the first Harry Potter movie without thinking about Jordan Peterson ranting about the golden snitch being a meta-game
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