Images are intrinsically connected with human discourse. They serve as pointers to concepts that we cannot verbally define. Images tend to be more linked with descriptions than definitions. We resort to them when we want to say much about a subject, thing, event or a person more than our limited human speech permits.
Images colour our intellectual, affective, spiritual and verbal perceptions of reality. An image can embrace the four seasons of life. It can also be a powerful tool through which we can venture in the unknown or express a reality that mere conventional speech fails to unravel. In his book The Christian Sacrament, W.A. Van Roo says that through symbolising we are asserting our human existence and function. “It is only as we are perceiving, remembering, and imagining that we gain insight. Only within the experience of visual and audible images do we grasp relationships, which themselves are not visible or audible. Only by fashioning an inner word do we form a concept. We have no ‘imageless’ concepts, no purely spiritual, disembodied thought and acts of the will’.
Images are symbols. Thus, when talking about images it is pertinent to distinguish between ‘real symbol’ and ‘mere sign’. According to the celebrated German theologian Karl Raher, ‘real symbol’ is the highest and primordial representation through which a reality makes another present, and permits it to be there. For Van Roo there are two kinds of symbols, internal and external. The former are those symbols which remain in us, and therefore
not communicated. These include images, memory, imagination, dreams, conceptions, reasonings, judgments, emotions, acts of the will and motor impulses that are hidden and unexpressed in us. On the contrary, external symbols, be it elementary, like facial expressions, instrumental sound, formed external material; complex or developed symbols, say speech and language, conceptual symbols in science, mathematics, philosophy and theology; and the intuitive symbols, as work of art, all tend to outwardly communicate what they are trying to represent.
Images have different layers of meaning. The world of the perceiver, her/his own culture, personal talents, and experiences all play a crucial role in the process of understanding. Images have not refrained themselves from entering into the world of faith either. Theologically speaking, we speak about God analogically. V.J. Bourke in his book Aquinas’ Search for Wisdom explains how Saint Thomas Aquinas makes use of analogy in the three interconnected phases of theological discourse concerning God: affirmation, negation and eminence. ‘God may be called Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Beauty, Perfect, One, and so on. God is good, of course ‘the initial affirmation’, but not in the limited way that sensible things are good. So, in a second prediction ‘the moment of negation’, one should say that God is not good. Now since both of the preceding judgments have some validity, one should proceed to combine them in a third ‘that of eminence’, saying: God is Super-Good. In other words, God transcends all ordinary modes of human knowing, yet it is possible to speak of Him by using some sort of remote and vague analogy’.
Images remain one of the most creative, overt and elusive ways of human speech. As it stands they enrich our discourse and help us to navigate deeply into the tragedy, fascination and mystery of human life.
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap