Very good, and strongly interacts with a recent interest of mine, namely symbology. Your discussion of the fact that a ritual must be in some way counter-intuitive reminds me of a quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann. (I have searched and failed to find the exact text of the quote online, though were I at home I could find the book on my bookshelf.) Paraphrased: “Modern readers assume that a symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented. But when one examines religious custom in any religious tradition, one finds that the older and more organic the symbol, the less it corresponds in any visible way with the thing that it represents.”
Unless I have completely misremembered, this is from For the Life of the World, which would be an excellent source to add to your readings of Purvamimamsa for an eastern (as in “Eastern Orthodox”), modern-but-traditionalist treatment of similar subjects.
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I do not know anything about this tradition and I would be very happy to learn about it, especially from a perspective that could generate analyses such as the one you paraphrase here.
Your paraphrase from Schmemann resonates a lot with my understanding of Sperber’s argument in Rethinking Symbolism, so you may enjoy that book. He devotes the first fraction of the book deconstructing this assumption that symbolism signifies like a language, i.e. as you put it, that “symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented”. And then he tries to offer an alternative theory which I find elegant.
Very good, and strongly interacts with a recent interest of mine, namely symbology. Your discussion of the fact that a ritual must be in some way counter-intuitive reminds me of a quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann. (I have searched and failed to find the exact text of the quote online, though were I at home I could find the book on my bookshelf.) Paraphrased: “Modern readers assume that a symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented. But when one examines religious custom in any religious tradition, one finds that the older and more organic the symbol, the less it corresponds in any visible way with the thing that it represents.”
Unless I have completely misremembered, this is from For the Life of the World, which would be an excellent source to add to your readings of Purvamimamsa for an eastern (as in “Eastern Orthodox”), modern-but-traditionalist treatment of similar subjects.
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I do not know anything about this tradition and I would be very happy to learn about it, especially from a perspective that could generate analyses such as the one you paraphrase here.
Your paraphrase from Schmemann resonates a lot with my understanding of Sperber’s argument in Rethinking Symbolism, so you may enjoy that book. He devotes the first fraction of the book deconstructing this assumption that symbolism signifies like a language, i.e. as you put it, that “symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented”. And then he tries to offer an alternative theory which I find elegant.