Semiotics and the philosophy of language

ion of the Trin i ty idea. But the reconci l iation might have taken p lace on a qui te d i fferent basis provided by the vision i tself and i ts u nearthly [ 1 46] SEMIOTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE actua l i ty much to the d isadvantage of the Christ ian conception of God and no doubt to the sti l l greater disadvan tage of B rother Klaus himself, who would then have become not a sa int but a heretic ( if not a l unatic) . (Ju ng 1 934; Eng. tr. , p. 1 1 ) In the mystical experience , symbols must be tamed exactly because they are exaggeratedly 'open' and thei r force must be controlled . It depends obviously on one's religious and philosophical bel iefs to decide whether this force springs from a Sacred Source , or is nothing other than the way in which an interpreter, id iosyncratically, fi lls up the empty container of the symbolic expression. Fi rth ( 1 973) observes that the mystical symbol is a private one; the mystic is the "detonator" of the symbol, but immediately afterward a public "elaborator," who estab­ lishes certa in collective and understandable meanings of the original expression , is needed. In the story of B rother Klaus, both detonator and elaborator coincided. Firth mentions, in contrast, the case of Saint Mar­ garet Mary Alacoque, who, as detonator, experiences the vision of the Sacred Heart of Jesus , while her Jesuit confessor in terprets and elabo­ rates her symbolic material , providing the Catholic community with a new cult . Incidentally, the case of this vis ion is interesting insofar as the perti­ nence of the so-called analogous properties is concerned : Saint Margaret Mary had her vision when both science and common opinion were defi­ nitely convinced that, physiologically speaking, the heart was not the seat of human feel ings ; nevertheless, in the fi rst half of this century, Pope Pius XII st i l l spoke of the Sacred Heart as a "natural symbol" of the Divine Love . A symbol that was 'natural' only for those who, with an u nconscious semiotic sensitivity , identified nature with encyclopedia . Pius XII knew certainly that the human heart was not the seat of emo­ tions, but he also knew that, according to a nonspecialized competence (such as is expressed and supported by many ready-made syntagms and by love songs) , i t still was considered so. What counts, in the symbolism of the Sacred Heart , is not the weakness of the analogical correlation but the vagueness of the correlated con tent. The content of the expression /Sacred Heart/ (be i t uttered by words or visually represen ted) is not a series of theological propositions but an uncontrollable ensemble of men­ tal and affective associations that every believer can project into the car­ d iac symbol . On the other hand , the symbol is the device by which a given authori ty controls these associations, as well as the profound drives that elicit them in the same way in which the saint herself had prob­ ably projected into the mystical symbol a series of obsessions that, with­ out the symbolic d iscipl ine, could have d riven her to insanity. But this is a positivist interpretation of a mystic experience . Usually,