Neoplatonists understood that the transcendent principle of
the universe, the One, radiated out from itself the whole of
the universe, with each successive layer of reality imitating
what had come immediately before it. This view made the
cosmos a kind of cascading theophany. Yet they also tried
to comprehend Plato’s famous conundrum that representa-
tion is always and everywhere a movement away from, rather
than closer to, the truth. The Neoplatonists had to work
within two views: that the material world is a theophany and
that it is a shadow world of hopelessly decayed imitation.
More often than his predecessors, Proclus uses the “symbol”
precisely to resolve this tension. In his theory, most clearly
articulated in his Commentary on the Republic, symbolic figu-
ration does not involve imitation based on resemblance—in
other words, Plato’s objections do not apply to it. Instead,
the symbol reproduces the real presence of its referent; it op-
erates according to invocation and not according to imita-
tion. Drawing on an apothegm he knew from the Chaldean
Oracles, a text of dubious provenance that became a holy
book for the Neoplatonists, Proclus stated that as the higher
orders create the cosmos through imitation, they sow “sym-
bols” throughout it. Proclus thought these symbols were
nodes of divine radiance nestled within our tragically de-
cayed world of imitations. These secret symbols can be har-
nessed by the knowledgeable poet, philosopher, or ritual
practitioner, in order to render the divine in a suitable mate-
rial form. This theory allows him to construct a defense of
Homer, construct a metaphysics that mediates between the
divine source and its mundane effluxions, and develop an ex-
planation for how the divine might actually be made present
in ritual praxis.
While Proclus is not particularly well known in the
wider contemporary history of ideas, his thought regarding
the symbol has had a long-standing and definitive influence.
Certain key Romantic philosophers recovered his corpus in
the eighteenth century, and their theories will be discussed
below. Proclus’s ideas also greatly influenced a person who
became the single most important authority on figuration of
the divine for medieval readers of the Bible. Shortly after
Proclus’s death, a body of work emerged that came to be at-
tributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s convert men-
tioned in Acts 17:34. This pseudepigraphical collection of
texts reinvented Proclus’s theories of symbolism to help the
early Christians understand the representation of the divine
in cult, in texts, and in Dionysius’ emanationist metaphysics.
Dionysius reworked Proclus’s theories for an understanding
of the Christian sacraments (in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy),
hierarchical tiers of beings (in the Celestial Hierarchy) and the
places in Scripture where the divine is figured in physical and
sometimes even entirely corporeal form (in the Divine
Names). Dionysius’s mystical hermeneutics applied to all as-
pects of the divinely infused world, from scripture to church
to cosmos. When his corpus was translated by John Scotus
Eriugena in the ninth century, it quickly became the authori-
tative guide for medieval clergy trying to understand how the
Scriptures could assign tangible qualities to the transcendent
godhead. (The corpus also served as a guide for Christian
mysticisms of many varieties across medieval Europe, both
in the east and the west.) In his Summa theologica, Thomas
Aquinas cites Dionysius some seventeen hundred times,
more often than any other writer except Augustine of Hippo.
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. The turning point for contem-
porary interest in symbolic theory, and the most convenient
point at which to begin a brief account of its modern life,
occurred around the middle of the eighteenth century,
among a group of thinkers and literary figures who have
come to be known collectively as the Romantic movement.
Their concern with symbols—charged by their reading of
the late-antique Neoplatonists, but less the outcome of any
single current of symbolic theory than a constellation of ideas
scattered throughout the disciplines of Western academia—
was one aspect of their general spirit of resistance against
what they perceived as the dangerous excesses of eighteenth-
century rationalism. With the Romantics, the “symbol” grew
in importance and became the most prominent vehicle for
the view that figuration, now considered in its most general
terms, is a root process defining the human being and, im-
portantly, that figuration, considered as a mental process, re-
sides in a position of priority over even rational thought
itself.
One of these Romantics, Johann Georg Hamann
(1730–1788) reflected the general mood, though not the ac-
ademic rigor of the times, in arguing the merits of poetic dis-
course as the “mother tongue of humanity.” In protest
against Kant, this most difficult and oracular of Romantic
authors saw the perfection of knowledge not in abstraction
but in symbols, since symbols enable one to view all the phe-
nomena of nature and history as revelations of a divine com-
munication. His contemporary, Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744–1803), who was taught by both Kant and Hamann,
was more balanced in his approach to the Enlightenment and
its representatives. For Herder, the task of aesthetics lay in
the search for a universal logic of artistic symbolization; to
this end, he developed his own theory of the evolution of lan-
guage, giving a central role to folk poetry. His use of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–1778) model of human growth as
an analogy for the course of history and its progress away
from the childlike innocence of the “noble savage” was wide-
spread in the Romantic movement. Similarly, Novalis (Frie-
drich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) also defended the pri-
macy of imagination and poetry as a means to produce the
symbolism of a higher reality, and he drew special attention
to the “magical” power of symbolic words. Among theorists
of literature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), influ-
enced by F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) and the late-
antique Neoplatonists, found the symbol to be a powerful
representational tool that had the unique capacity to grasp
the transcendent in physical, palpable form. The symbol, he
thought, becomes “consubstantial” with its referent.Together with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–
1799), a physicist with a mystical bent who was actually anti-8908 SYMBOL AND SYMBOLISM