Aboriginal - Christian
symbols and the Polyphony of Consciousness
My brother Barry looked after that Magnolia shrub for
years, he watered it, dug around the soil. Nothing came to
flower. After his funeral at Coonabarabran we drove home.
And there it was, the Magnolia was infull bloom. We knew Barry
was safely on the journey. Barbara Asplet, director of the
Aboriginal Women's Healing House, Picton NSW, member of the
National Indigenous Arts Council.
The splendour of the world is a cipher, a revelation,
an unveiling, the presence of one who is not seen, touched,
grasped, yet is present.
Bernard Lonergan, theologian, writing on symbols.
We Aborigines are a people of Ceremony Maisie Cavanagh,
author and lecturer.
A few years after World War II, I came across a book written
by an English woman during that war. It was entitled This
War is the Passion. Living through the bombing the author,
Caryll Houselander, was a sensitive witness not only to the
bodily suffering inflicted but also to the hatred that was
aroused. Yet, without denying any of its evil reality, that
war and all the people within it were taken up inside the
living passion of Chtist. The war was symbolically transformed.
How does such a transforming symbol rise in a person's consciousness
That is not the core question of this chapter, but it is a
question that needs to be answered right at the beginning.
It gives us an understanding which we will draw upon throughout
the discussion. The question highlights the symbol as transforming
that is, as the person finding his/her world understood anew
within the symbol This overturns whatever outlook had been
taken for granted.
We tend to believe that what everyone thinks to be the case
must be so. Our thinking is a great gift, but we cannot live
our lives only at the level of intellectual consciousness.
The intellect is not up to the task. We are not pure spirits
or pure reason. On the contrary, we live (and we need to live)
within a polyphony of consciousness. Polyphony is choral music
in which there are a number of quite independent waves of
melody but an harmonising. Theologian Bernard Lonergan characterises
human consciousness as a polyphony because of its variety
of distinct levels and 'voices'. Yet in the concreteness of
our living all are inter-related. He speaks of our consciousness
as moving in an elemental flow: our senses and feeling, our
understanding and loving; choosing, acting responsibly or
irresponsibly. All have their moments, flowing into one another,
a polyphony of differing functions.
Yet there comes a moment when the elemental flow slows and
stops: the stillness of contemplation. In this stillness what
has been happening in the flow of the polyphony begins to
be revealed: patterns become manifest the confinements of
our thinking are shaken, images take shape. We find ourselves
anew within symbolic images.
How does the religious symbol originate? Contemplation shakes
the confinements of our everyday thinking. Sometimes it does
more than shake, sometimes the walls of the confinement in
the everyday world are broken. A weakness has been found in
the ego's defence of the everyday world. This break allows
the Mystery (which we have always experienced without giving
it the attention it requires) to transform our way of putting
the world together. A new transforming melody is heard in
the polyphony-. we are We are within a symbol of Mystery.
St John of the Cross, an acknowledged leader in mystical
theology, speaks of this transforming breakthrough as an experience
of dissolution. It causes Anxiety that is accompanied by a
move away from ego-centeredness. A symbol of Mystery brings
us inside community and attracts us towards self- transcendence.
Such, in outline, is the origin and the transforming function
of authentic religious symbols. As I noted earlier, we need
to bear this in mind for our core question, which will relate
to those religious symbols which are Aboriginal in origin,
whilst Christian in context. This Aboriginal question will
unfold for us as we proceed.
For us westerners any question regarding Aboriginal-Christian
symbols raises the issue of the present state of religious
symbols in the west. The west is stony ground for symbols.
We will keep bouncing from the stony ground for Christian
symbols in the west to the indigenous traditions with their
mystical and aesthetic attraction to spirit symbols.
On the superficiality of religious symbols in the west,
I am finding particularly of some contemporary paintings of
Jesus Christ: in them little mystical depth breaks through.
One painting comes to mind: it portrays a blonde Jesus, glowing
and fresh-faced. He looks as if he is about to play baseball
The health and humanness are appealing. But the face is complacent,
very first world. No hint of the divine Mystery that longs
to overcome evil and suffering.
From the north of Western Australia, the Kimberley region,
comes a quite opposite Christ image. The Aboriginal artist
has drawn a set of frames on the passion and death of Christ
that is in accord with the symbolic consciousness of the people.
In each frame Christ is depicted as a brolga bird: the brolga
is beset by the boomerangs of hunters, wounded and killed.
Years ago, when copies of this set of drawings were printed,
there was an outcry from fundamentalist inclined Christians.
Jesus, they said, must be portrayed as a man, naturalistically,
as he literally was. (In fact western devotional art has commonly
depicted Christ as a tall white European which is unlikely
to be as he actually was.) It is not hard to see why the Aboriginal
artist has blended an Aboriginal symbol within a Christian
symbol. Going back to the origin of religious symbols, we
saw that a people find their world, their community, understood
in a transformed way inside the symbol. The brolga is a notable
creature within the strongly symbolic spiritual world of the
Aborigines. With its long crane legs the brolga is well known
for its dance which resembles a ritual. It is hardly rising
that this Aboriginal Symbol, which occurs in a number of th
' mythic stories', offered itself to the artist's contemplation
of the suffering and death of Christ. The brolga would connect
the spiritual world within which the community dwelt, with
the great ritual story of Christ Jesus.
However, there is an objection which needs to be considered.
It runs: there is a difference between Christian and traditional
Aboriginal symbols. The latter arise from inside nature, hence
the brolga. The Christian symbols arise from the divine redeeming
act which took place, speaking broadly, inside history. The
two kinds of symbols, being distinct should not be mixed together
as the brolga drawings do. This objection brings us to formulate
the core question of this chapter are Aboriginal symbols able,
authentically, to become part of Christian symbolism? This
issue is important for the continuation of the bridge between
primal religion and the Christian Mystery. The rest of the
chapter will build towards making the answer to this question
more understandable. There are a number of related issues
which need to be untangled.
One such tangle is literalism: that brolga is not Jesus
and therefore cannot be Jesus! That literalism is a rejection
of the possibility of symbolism. It would have told Carol
Houselander that the war is not Jesus' suffering. We are not
suffering as the body of Christ. What lurks behind this emphatic
literalism is the story of the western suspicion regarding
symbolism.
The Cognitive and Symbolic in Western Culture
In the primal and immediately post-primal eras, myth was the
main means of explaining the origin of world processes. Then,
in the west came the Greek discovery of mind. Of course this
did not mean that there had been no human intelligence before
that. The discovery was the realisation that myth was not
the same as reason. By distinguishing reason from myth the
dynamism of reason was unleashed. From this appreciation of
the rational the philosopher Aristotle (364-322BC) went on
to advocate a discourse that would be. as far as possible,
free from images and symbols, for they were not rational and
precise enough for the scientific discourse he desired. Such
discourse would seek to state in a systematic manner how things
actually are. This discourse became the basis for theory.
In the middle ages St Thomas Aquinas followed this turn
to theory, adapting Aristotle's cognitive discourse in his
systematic treatment of philosophy and theology. The cognitive
went on to become a methodological tool for modem science.
The benefits brought by the cognitive developments, especially
in modem times must be acknowledged. Their achievements however,
are not decried if we also admit the limits of the rational.
As we live in the flow of existence within our polyphonic
consciousness we are (and we need to be) more than rational
beings.
Those who sent the First Fleet of soldiers, settlers and
convicts to Australia and those who led this motley community
were people who believed in rationality as the core of civilisation.
Their minds were formed by the Enlightenment period in Europe.
Thus it came about that the rational servants of the British
Crown met a culture that was profoundly mythic-symbolic. The
two have still not understood each other.
In the present time there is a re-discovery of the symbolic.
So let us look again at the western turn away from symbolism.
Aristotle's rationally purified discourse, with its pursuit
of how things actually are, focussed upon the everyday material
world. It derided the mythic 'explanations' of material processes.
Thus it not only diminished the mythic symbols but also the
contemplation from which they arose. Aristotle, it was said,
took away the people's gods.
Regarding the medieval part of the story, we should notice
also that Aquinas,' whilst he adapted the cognitive discourse
of Aristotle in order to treat systematically the world of
natural beings, he also appreciated that St Augustine had
opened the heart to contemplation of the divine Mystery in
Christ. As stressed in the previous chapter, Augustine's key
contemplative word was participation. In the stillness of
contemplation the human mind and heart participates in the
light and love of the Divine. From this mystical participation
the Christian symbols are illuminated. It is said that there
is not a page of Aquinas that does not contain the word participation,
at least once.
Modem scientists with their stress on the adequate collection
of data, have presumed a literal form of objectivity for all
levels of meaning. In that dominant outlook, the symbols of
the scriptures and of ritual along with the mystical-mythic
stories and rituals of the indigenous, have appeared irrational
and superstitious. It is striking, in this climate, that the
indigenous have persisted in retaining what they have of their
symbolic heritage. Striking, too, that their confidence regarding
the symbolic is based upon something distinctive in their
subjectivity as Aboriginal. They believe that there is a mystical
disposition within them which enables them to perceive symbolic
realities, which few westerners seem able to do. We must recognise
this mystical disposition if we are to understand their mentality.
Even many urban people retain a sense of living within a communion
of beings, visible and invisible. Thus totems, birds, dreams,
when they make unexpected entry into their lives, are not
merely events in the everyday world but may be mystical indicators
of encouragement or of warning.
* * * * * * * * * *
From these two versions of the story, I believe we can draw
a conclusion relevant to our investigation, namely, that in
the polyphony of consciousness there are two ways of attaining
meaning which are quite distinct They are: the cognitive,
which arises from a profound desire in the human mind to understand;
and the symbolic which arises spontaneously from contemplation.
I would assert also that these two ways of attaining meaning
are complementary to each other, each is a necessary corrective
to the other. These later assertions will be considered further
at the conclusion of the chapter. Meantime let us examine
the distinct but inter-related roles of the cognitive and
the mystical symbolic in Christian Mystery.
Cognitive and symbolic in Christian mystery
Cognitive: There is a cognitive backbone to Christian
faith. Jesus was an historical person who preached, healed
and exorcized evil spirits mainly around Galilee and its environs
and also in Jerusalem. He was crucified by the Roman authorities
as a subversive. Soon after his death his followers proclaimed
that he had appeared to them. They honored and worshiped him
as the Christ of Jewish prophecy and as Son of God In succeeding
centuries his followers became a community of communities
living mainly in the Greco-Roman culture and so open to cognitive
questioning. The main question that the communities had to
struggle with was the relationship of Christ Jesus to the
One God. This question was not able to be resolved by recourse
to the symbolic discourse of the scriptures. A series of Church
councils (from 4th 6th century AD) found it necessary to use
cognitive non-scriptural terms to attain the precise formulae
needed. Resort to the cognitive for resolving similar doctrinal
disputes has continued in the Church.
Symbolic: In spite of the cognitive dominance in western
thought, symbols are needed if we are to respond to the depths
and mysteries of existence. I will back up this position by
quotations, firstly from two leading theologians, one Protestant
(Paul Ricoeur) and one Catholic (Bernard Lonergan); secondly
by two quotations from Christian Scriptures.
Paul Ricoeur. symbols 'are the manifestation in the sensible-in
imagination, gestures and feeling - of a further reality,
the expression of a depth which both shows and hides itself.
Ricoeur is speaking both of the depth of the human and of
the deepest depth, the Mystery in which we live and move and
have our being.
The cognitive does not directly experience these depths,
we are not purely intellectual spirits. The cognitive, as
pointed out, only reaches to raising and answering questions
about the depths. The deepest or sacred depth resonates in
our being as a whole, that is, in our bodily-spirit as woven
intricately within the material cosmos. Therefore it stirs
our senses, gestures and ritual, imagination and feeling.
Through the conjunction of this stirring with intelligence,
symbols arise.
Paul Ricoeur 'The symbol opens up and discloses a dimension
of experience that without it would remain closed and hidden.'
Only contemplation evokes perception of the depth dimension
and only the symbol can make it visible. Only mystical contemplation
evokes perception of the sacred depth in all things and only
religious symbolism can make that visible. Thus Caryll Houselander's
mystical contemplation allowed World War II to be transformed
into a symbol which disclosed the sacred dimension, the suffering
of the crucified as a living event.
Bernard Lonergan indicates another aspect of symbols 'Symbols...are
inner and outer events, or a combination of both, that intimate
to us at once the kind of being we are to be and the kind
of world in which we become our true selves.' 3
Ricoeur linked human depths to the sacred depth. Lonergan
illuminates this further by heading us off from considering
the symbol as a kind of thing. On the cont~y the occurrence
of a symbol is a transforming event in the life of a person
or of a community, an event in which we are caught up within
the event. Lonergan's distinguishing between the inner and
outer event helps us grasp how the symbol 'happens' for us.
In Caryll Houselander's case the outer event would initially
have been her effort to cope with the bombing, the threat
of invasion etc. The inner event would have begun with her
prayerful contemplation of these horrors. This contemplation
would have proceeded to the mystical moment when the war was
transformed into a symbol of the higher event hidden within
it At that moment the symbolic event would have intimated
to her that she was to proclaim this mystical dimension and
that she collaborate with Christ in his embracing and overcoming
of evil with love.
Following up these reflections, which I have derived from
the writings of Lonergan and Ricoeur, I offer two short quotations
from the New Testament Letters. These make clear the mystically
symbolic character of Christian faith:
'There is only Christ he is everything and he is in everything.'
The Letter to the Church at Colossae, chapter 3 vs.11.
To the merely cognitive mind this statement is an affront
to reason. However, primal symbols, as in the Dreaming, disclose
that everything in the environment is bound together in a
hidden drama. Christian contemplation builds on this disclosure.
It states: the hidden drama is Christ's overcoming of evil
through the cross; evil is what seeks to pull everything apart;
his loving embrace of the cross is what attracts everything
into harmony. So we can rightly say that Christ is everything
in its harmony and that he is in the mysterious depth of every
thing.
The second quotation is from The Letter of Paul the Apostle
to the Galatians, chapter 2 vs 20. I have been crucified with
Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me.
Paul's apostleship among varied regions of the Greco-Roman
world had brought him much suffering and betrayal As with
Caryll Houselander, Paul found that his sufferings were a
sharing in the hidden but living passion of Christ As we noted
from the Lonergan quotation, Christ's passion is not merely
an historical event, an 'it', but also a mystical we-event
It follows that 'it is no longer just I who live, but the
crucified lives in me.'
In the sentence, I have been crucified with Christ', the
'with' emphasizes also that the we-event is happening now.
So Paul's sufferings were mystically contemporaneous with
Christ's. Here there is a similarity with the Dreaming. The
events of the Dreaming as celebrated by traditional people,
were regarded as contemporaneous. Professor Stanner spoke
of the Dreaming events as happening at Jerusalem.
The Christian Churches, in a similar way, celebrate the
mysteries of Christ's life, death and resurrection as living
events in a pattern of year-round celebrations called the
liturgy. Liturgy means the communal work of the people. The
people refers to the community of Christian communities throughout
the world, the dead as well as the living. The work of the
people is their sharing in the crucified's healing and forgiving
transformation of the dysfunctional world. Yet we must admit
that in the western church the liturgy is not participated
in deeply enough as the we-event of Christ's healing and forgiving.
For the renewal of liturgy that is necessary I am attracted
to the approach of an English theologian and monk Sebastian
Moore.4 His specialty is the theology of the spiritual life.
Wrestling with the issue of the externalism and 'deadness'
in much western liturgy, Moore suggests that entering into
the we-event of liturgy must mean people reaching beyond a
merely external saying of set prayers. He recalls that St
John of the Cross insisted that, when a person is no longer
satisfied by the mere saying of prayers, it is a call to cross
the threshold to contemplation.
I see this opening to contemplation as fitting in with what
we have been considering about religious symbols which come
alive through contemplation. The weakness in western liturgy
is surely linked with the diminished feeling for symbolic
ritual. Life is not felt to be rooted in hidden spiritual
realities. To put it another way, western culture has become
more and more alienated from religion in its symbolic form.
For younger adult and youth generations religion appears to
be of the past, not touching the present cultural mood. Moore's
direction turns us toward mystical contemplation with its
contemporaneity, its primal every-when.
Against those who insist that contemplation is reserved
only for spiritual high-flyers, Moore quotes a number of authorities
including a prince among 20~ century theologians, Karl Rahner.
Rahner, writing around mid-century, declared that a merely
cultura1 Christianity was at an end. The Christian of the
future (a future that has arrived) will have to be something
of a mystic in order to stay a Christian.5 Rahner could see
the alienation between western culture and religious symbolism
growing. Religion was being understood from a materialist
viewpoint
Here again we can note a comparison between the indigenous
and the west It is interesting that for decades the materialist
opinion of sociologist Emil Durkheim (1858-1917) held sway
which said that religion was invented by primal people as
a support for their social structures. The indigenous people
themselves disputed this. It called the authenticity of their
spirituality into doubt. Lately anthropologists have come
to realize that the indigenous are right Durkheim had things
back to front The shape of primal society was directed by
their culture which was rooted in their mystical symbolic
experience.
Pope John Paul II confirmed to the Aboriginal people the
mystical contemplative foundations of their culture when speaking
to them at Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia in
1986:
You have lived your lives in spiritua1 closeness to the
land...through your closeness to the land you touched the
sacredness of man's relationship with God. The silence of
the bush taught you a quietness of soul that put you in touch
with another world, the world of God's Spirit.
This mystical disposition applies not only to the traditional
people but in some measure to the de-tribalised urban people
also. I quoted Maisie Cavanagh's statement at the beginning
that hers are a ceremonial people- in spite of grave cultural
loss. Ceremony is built on religious symbols come alive.
Symbolic and Cognitive as Complementary
The western Church liturgy in need of a renewal of its
symbols through contemplation provides perhaps the best context
for considering the relationship between the symbolic and
the cognitive. The secularist culture does not offer a suitable
context because it brackets out from life the dimension of
sacred Mystery. Church ]iturgy, on the other hand, provides
a ritual symbolic context which is emphatically that of believers,
but, at the same time, human understanding with its doubts
and questions is given its place. Indeed, liturgy should offer
the polyphony of human response to sacred Mystery. Believing
and understanding (cognitive) carry distinctly different melodies
but they have a unity in their response to the Mystery. At
the same time they are different yet they need one another.
Thus, human understanding (cognitive) raises questions about
our believing in the Mystery event, and it can indicate answers.
However, human understanding does not experience its~lf as
caught up in the we-event.
Likewise believing cannot answer precisely, through its
symbols, questions about the Mystery, yet through its symbols
people are caught up in the event And the symbolic does need
to be questioned: has its believing helped individuals and
the community toward genuine self-transcendence, especially
at a time when fundamentalism and fanaticism are rampant.
Also the cognitive has to depend upon the believing which,
through symbols, brings to understanding an awareness of the
Mystery.
Aboriginal-Christian Symbols
At last we come to the core question: 'Are Aboriginal
symbols (such as the brolga) able, authentically, to become
part of Christian symbolism?' The objection, you recall, was
that they are distinctly different forms of symbolizing, the
Aboriginal symbols coming from inside nature, the Christian
from the divine redeeming grace inside history; they should
not be mixed. Is this argument correct?
A key theological dictum of the Christian tradition is that
grace is distinct but not separate from nature. The objection
has overlooked this. It suggests that there is the grace of
Christ's redeeming act in history but no grace in the Aboriginal
perception of the spiritual in creation. Nonsense. This is
an old bias against primal people and their religion. Creation
is a primordial revelation. It reflects the beauty and wonder
of the divine. As the Pope said, through their contemplative
closeness to the land the Aborigines have touched the sacredness
of the human relationship to God Creation, therefore, is a
grace. Creation and Christ's redeeming act are not separate
but interrelated. The redeeming is a healing and fulfilling
of creation; creation looks to its fulfilment through the
cross. Aboriginal art emphasizes the mystical depth of creation.
Its symbolism is abstract and non-naturalistic. This is because
the spiritual vision behind it is mystically entranced by
the Otherness of the sacred Aboriginal Christians, like the
Brolga artist, are able to interpret their own symbols as
entering into the mystical depth of the redeeming symbols
of Christian faith. Indeed, their coming together symbolically
can justly be interpreted as part of the 'new heaven and the
new earth,' (Book of Revelation, Chapter 21, vs 1-2). Quoting
from the Pope's Alice Springs address once more, It is wonderful
to see how people, as they accept the Gospel of Jesus, find
points of agreement between their own traditions and those
of Jesus and his people.'
The brolga tradition and the passion of Christ have a point
of agreement and they have come together for the artist. Letting
the two symbolisms play together makes a polyphony of primal
and redeeming voices.
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