The Lilies of the Field

Flowers as symbols in medieval art and spirituality

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream

We’ve been travelling through medieval symbolism for over a week now, and our destination is nothing less than a fundamentally transformed perception of reality (we like ambitious goals here at Via Mediaevalis). We began the journey with general reflections on the nature and importance of symbols, in medieval life and in our lives, and we continued with medieval symbolism of numbers and of the four classical elements. Today we will continue with the symbolic energies of the natural world, and more specifically, of flowers.

To prepare for the flowers, let’s return to sumbolon, the Greek word from which “symbol” derives. In the previous post, we used the meanings of sumbolon to rediscover 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…. 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.”

Sumbolon has another meaning that we have not yet considered. If you’ve ever seen the Nicene Creed described as the “symbol of faith,” you already know this meaning. In the Christian era, Greek sumbolon was used in the way that we use “creed” in English. And yet, English “creed” and English “symbol” seem to be two very different things.

Rufinus of Aquileia, a theologian and priest who died in the early fifth century, explained that the Apostles’ Creed was called the Sumbolon in part because a sumbolon was a sign or token, and “the Apostles therefore prescribed this formulary as a sign or token by which he who preached Christ truly, according to Apostolic rule, might be recognized.” Rufinus continues:

They say that in civil wars, since the armor of both sides is alike, and the language the same, and the custom and mode of warfare the same, each general, to guard against treachery, is wont to deliver to his soldiers a distinct symbol or watchword, … so that if one is met with, … he may disclose whether he is friend or foe…. The Creed is not written on paper or parchment, but is retained in the hearts of the faithful, that it may be certain that no one has learned it by reading, as is sometimes the case with unbelievers, but by tradition from the Apostles.

We see again, then, the power of the symbol to signify the presence of something or someone greater than itself. The creed was “symbolic” because its sacred words were a sign that God and His Truth were present in someone’s mind and heart. Rufinus also reminds us that symbolism, in its fullest and most elevating sense, is inseparable from tradition. The symbols that we find in modern novels are disconcertingly arbitrary: authors have great liberty to create symbolic objects and fashion their meanings from the raw materials of the imagination. Deeply cultural symbols, on the other hand, are not the fruit of individual creativity. Symbols such as these—transcendent, psychologically potent, life-changing symbols that inhabit and spiritualize daily life—are drawn from a shared treasury of religion, history, mythology, and folklore. They cannot be invented; they must be received.