Abstract

1. CRITICISM OF THE CATEGORY OF VERTICALITY - Ontology and philosophy of religion. - Rational language about God, in contrast with the apophantic religious language, tends to seize God in the subject-object-relation, identifying Him with an object on which man has a grasp. Speaking to God, however, man breaks through the egologic reduction of reason. In order to be adequate, religious philosophy has to follow a twofold course : first, to recognize the divine (the sacred, the holy) as the Other, the horizon of the world ; then, to reflect on the religious act and its dialogical structure in relation to a personal God. - The process of demyhologisation with regard to verticality - Bultmann intends to purify Christian theology from its mythological perversion, by completely eliminating the vertical scheme in which God and his revelation have been conceived. For to the philosophical, theological and anthropological dualism which, according to him, it induced, he wants to substitute an „existential” hermeneutics. - The God of metaphysics and of religious experience - J. A. T. Robinson denounced the displacement-effect of metaphysical theism ; the concept of transcendence, reintroducing the mythological dualism, puts God out of the real world. Thus religion became non-functional. Religious language, on the contrary, speaks of God in the phenomena, as their depth-dimension. Linking the latter with the categories of the I-Thou-relation, Robinson conceives of God as „beyond in the midst”. - Personalistic philosophy - This current of thought seeks to overcome the problems of theodicy inherent in the use of cosmological or metaphysical categories, by appealing to the existential categories of encounter, love and freedom. But an egologic reduction, as the one accomplished by Husserl, proves that they are unable to maintain the Otherness of God. An ontological elaboration of the inter (the „between”), which separates and links God and man is imperative. This „between” is given by the world as totality, with its time-space-structure. Hence the necessity of examining that structure. 2. THE SYMBOLIC TOPOGRAPHY. 1. Ontological meaning. The world, as totality of beings, is the frame of reference of all factual data and human projects. While being the horizon of data and the open possibility for disclosure and action, it is also the limiting „enclosure”. And as Wittgenstein said : in order to think the meaning of things, one has to think the world as world, and in order to do so, one needs the mystical dimension, that which is the non-world, the Other-thanthe-world. That Other now, in its differentiation from the world, is expressed in mythical language. Myths are neither pseudo-science, nor pseudo-philosophy nor pseudo-religion, but original language : the speaking out of the origins. To put it in philosophical language : manifestation by means of differentiation. Its function is to tell the proceeding of the world out of the non-world. Therefore, it is the matrix of every religious, philosophical and scientific language, and it remains the model of scientific theory. This original language is articulated by the dimension of time (origo) and that of space. Wittgenstein's „out of the world” can only be thought of in terms of verticality. For the horizontal dimension only reveals the world as horizon. By introducing the vertical we are able to think the Other-than-the-world. Returning to the criticism of Bultmann, it can be stated that the „mondanisation” ofthe Other takes place only in an etiological interpretation of myths, when the Other is spoken about in terms of the world, and when the wordly events are linked to a specific influence of the Other. Then the Other is immersed in the world, and becomes a mere part of it. The imaginative original language of myths spontanously provokes such a „mondanisation”. In its profound intuition, however, the vertical symbolic language introduces the epistemological rupture between the world as „world-about” and the Other. In religion the distinction of the sacred and the profane repeats the original ontological differentiation thrown open by mythical language. 2. Anthropological meaning. The same differentiation also constitutes man's being in its existential structure. For the horizontal and the vertical dimensions articulate his being-to-the-world. They make him into the ex-centered being he has to be in order to ex-ist. The horizontality is the realm of human possibilities. By his bodily presence in theworld, man is the moving centre of it and all meaningful directions are related to the totality of his bodily ego. In the horizontal dimension man actualizes himself, by realizing his human projects and by encountering the others. From strangers he makes them his kin in a common world (ethics). But the vertical dimension introduces a dehiscence in man's existence and creates an openness, a new distance to things, to others and to himself, so that he never coincides exhaustively with his wordly being. Freedom has its source in this cleavage. As E. Strauss has shown, this polarity of horizontal and vertical directions is already given with the specific bodily structure of man. L. Binswanger, in his turn, has analysed the verticality as a fundamental psychic dimension. It also is the structuring scheme of ethics, as well as of social and political language. No wonder then that it is fundamental in religious language. Verticality as symbolic direction means man's surpassing of himself, be it in revolt, sublimation, assessment of power or religious intentionality. In every domain of human activity alienation in dream-illusion threatens man's vertical up-surge. Human truth lies in the combination of both meaningful directions : the horizontal and the vertical one. As existential a-priori forms, they constitute a polar tension, not a preclusive opposition. Another vertical dimension is depth. It signifies the hidden origin, the root of existence. In anthropology it designates vital nature in man and density of unconscious memory. Even more, as on the ontological level, it constitutes the ultimate dignity of the person, linked up with his origin beyond the world. 3. The topographic symbolism in religion. The depth of existence, „spark of the soul” of the mystics, evokes a source of beingthat is beyond the productive nature, a divine origin. Owing to the dialectical movement of his anthropological structure, man points the divine as both inward in his depth and outranging the world. The divine presents the radical exteriority that discloses to man his ultimate possibility.As such it limits him, but at the same time it guarantees him an ever open possibility, beyond his own human realm. If man rejects the divine, nihilism performs the same function of breaking open all that is positively given. For in order to be a subject man needs a radical heteronomy. The criticism of theism is twofold and contradictory. According to some critics it presents a danger : theism, they believe, satiates existence by satisfying all desires. But in reality, theism implies a radical splitting of the self-sufficiency of the wordly ego.Others fear theism may bar God from the real world, and they reproach vertical symbolism its dualism, with the „mythical” confusion of God and world as a consequence.Our answer to them is that the proper efficacity of the symbol of verticality is to separate and to link, without blending the world and the divine. The autonomy of the world is guaranteed by it, and so is the heteronomy of the Other. And the world is recognised as the mediation factor between God and man. The symbolic function of the vertical scheme is to realize the classical dialectics between immanence and transcendance. It should be noted however that this symbolic function is only achieved in the proper religious language, which is performative and self-involving : the language of the Thou, in which the Other is not only the divine, but the living God. Thus the religious rite is at the same time recognition and manifestation of the world as world, of the Other as God, and instauration of a covenant between God and man