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Nature naturing ejects worldhood, and thus enables meaning to prevail for the human process. Worldhood, as the enabling condition (access structure) for the human process, empowers all intraworldly meanings, while being bereft of its own meanings. Nature naturing actively overturns all given meanings insofar as they claim any kind of totalization for themselves. The symbol, as a mask of the spirit, lives within the eternal tension between worldhood and nature naturing, and expresses the correlative tension between a general enabling ground of meaning and a self-effacing abyss of meaning. Looked at from the archetypal perspective, a symbol is more concerned with evoking the ultimate ground of all meanings. Looked at from the standpoint of the “not-yet,” a symbol participates in the self-effacing abyss of meaning. Of course, in the actual life of the symbol, both dimensions will prevail, and neither should assume priority. Worldhood becomes most fully what it is when it participates in the preformal potencies of nature. The spirit preserves the creative tension between the ultimate ground of meaning and the self-effacing abyss of meaning.The symbols of religion, insofar as they have matured beyond their local expressions, live out of this eternal tension and provide the human process with its most dramatic sense of this mystery (pp. 157-158). |
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