Soaring on the Wings of the Wind: Prolegomenon to a Symbolic Ontology of Creation

Traditionally, the world was itself both understood and experienced as being “a symbol and full of symbols” (Pavel Florensky)—as an “enchanted” cosmos (Max Weber) comprising realms of visible realities, each manifesting invisible orders, each aglow with divine radiance. By valorizing modern science as the only legitimate “theory of the real” (Martin Heidegger), modernity has violently broken with humanity’s shared experience of the world as a deeply meaningful symbolic order, progressively delegitimizing the symbolic world-understanding that had long illumined our living relation to our now-disenchanted world. This article first outlines modes of experience embodying this symbolic ontology from Sts Dionysius, Ephrem, and Maximus to Owen Barfield and Florensky. Second, it traces the erosion of this symbolic realism from Augustine’s psychological theory of the “sign” through the Protestant Reformation, Galileo’s dismissal of extra-scientific knowledge, and postmodern and cybernetic ontologies of “text” and “information.” Third, it distinguishes seven symbolic modalities, lending special attention to the role of beauty in mediating between visible and invisible orders.