“Some Certain Significance Lurks in All Things”

The four classical elements in medieval symbolism

Poetry possesses this marvellous faculty of turning all things into something else.
—Mindele Anne Treip

Our discussion of symbolism in medieval life, and in our lives, continues. We began with the role of symbols in literature and in the human experience more generally: “There Is No Feast without Symbol.” The two guiding principles that I proposed in that essay are as follows:

1. Symbols don’t belong only, or even primarily, in books. The truest realm and richest treasury of symbols is the place where you are right now: the material world.

2. Symbolism is not something that makes a fictional story less “real.” Rather, symbolism makes the factual world more real.

Next, we explored an especially thought-provoking and mysterious domain within the symbolic world of the Middle Ages: “When Numbers Were Poetry.”

Our focus this week will be symbolism in nature; today we’ll study fundamental symbolic relationships that united medieval communities to material Creation, and on Tuesday, we will explore the meanings of flowers in medieval culture.

First, though, let’s reflect briefly on the word “symbol.” It derives from Greek sumbolon, which had for its basic meaning something rather prosaic. When two parties entered into a contract of some kind, they would break an object into two pieces, and each party would take a sumbolon, i.e., one of the halves. These corresponding halves could later be presented as proof of identity, and thus they acquired special value when they were brought together, which is more or less what the verb sunballein means: “to place or throw together.” From there, the word branches out into other identifying objects and even into the generic notion of signs as signals, indications, and omens.

Bird, different type of bird, mole, and fish representing air, fire, earth, and water.

If your understanding of symbolism began, as mine did, with high school English classes, try to reimagine symbols with Greek sumbolon in mind: Those identity tokens were visible, tangible, purposeful objects integrated naturally into daily life. They signified the presence of something. They were, furthermore, proof of that presence. This is how we should think of symbolism: a symbol is an object—understood broadly as something we perceive with our senses—that “says” to us, in the poetic language spoken natively by the human soul, something else is here. And as we know from books and paintings, and from the Greek identity tokens, this “something else” is usually more meaningful or consequential, more profound or spiritual or transcendent, than the object itself—which may even be so commonplace as to escape our notice.

And “something else” cannot really be the end of the symbolic story, for what is there in the mind of man that has not some deep and resonant relation with a living, thinking being, whether human or divine? If a symbol declares something else, and something greater, is here, it also declares, or at least implies, someone else, and someone greater, is here—rather like that time when a Poet both human and divine said behold a greater than Solomon here.