On occasion, the great literary critic Harold Bloom has indulged his taste for Tillichian ontology. His reading of French Iranologist Henry Corbin on the multi-faceted religious genius Ibn 'Arabi is a case in point:
"I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human. I return here to ... Henry Corbin's 'suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the sense nor the abstract world of the intellect.' In that intermediate world, images reign, whether of the plays of Shakespeare, the scriptures of religion, our dreams, the presence of angels, or astral-body manifestations ... [I ask] who can establish or prophesy the ultimate relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts?" Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, 11.
The question of the "ultimate" relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts is Tillichian in its flavor; it is also unanswerable, because "ultimacy" eludes clear definition. What independent criteria will allow us to decide that we have arrived at the ultimate relations among sensation, image, and concept? Indeed, what does such an expression even mean?
Bloom's reference to images as markers of a "transcendent frontier" either limiting or pointing beyond human reality is also Tillichian in tenor. But such remarks reflect a failure to consider the phenomenon of linguistic referentiality--how it "works" in ordinary usage.
In an article published in The Philosophical Quarterly, ("The Truth About Fictional Entities", Vol. 24, No. 94, January 1974, pp. 27-36), H. Gene Blocker brought much needed light upon this subject in deft, Wittgensteinian fashion.
Blocker focused his article upon fictional characters such as Tom Sawyer and asked in what sense such a character may be said to exist. He then notes that "our understanding of fictional characters is very much like our understanding of real people. We know that there are no such persons, but we understand the narrative as the revelation of a whole complex person, indicating, for example, general character-traits which nonetheless leave room for speculation as to what he is like in other respects. Through our referential use of language, the character in a work of fiction is treated as a partially disclosed entity about whom more can be learned, who therefore contains more than our description of him, and in that sense, transcends the actual descriptive sentences about him. In short, because of our referring use of language, we treat him as a whole person over and above the sum of properties actually attributed to him in the novel. This is what lies behind, and a better way of putting, the confusing idea that a fictional character is a non-existent object" (p. 32).
My only criticism of Blocker's handling of this issue is the naive realism reflected in his opening statement--that our understanding of fictional characters is "very much like our understanding of real people." I would add that our understanding of "real people" is very much like our understanding of fictional characters; elsewhere in the article, Blocker indicates an awareness of the complexity of this issue: "Many of our attitudes about love, for example, are formed more by novels, plays, and films than by real life. In this sense, nature imitates art, as Wilde noted, and this is the sense in which people live within a cultural framework which allows certain well-defined aspects of reality to be perceived more than others" (p. 35).
I hold, with historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, that "map is not territory, but maps are all we possess." That said, the epistemological processes involved with linguistic reference are, I think, precisely as Blocker described them. No object of enduring interest--factual or fictional--may be exhaustively known or described. Speculation and commentary continue as a consequence of the hermeneutical instability ensured by the complexity of such objects as well as by the passage of time. New historical contexts invite fresh interpretations. I thank God for that--fully aware that God him/her/it-self is likewise an "object" of enduring interest.
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