ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which man has related to the fact of death. The cross can also function as a symbol: the person kneeling in front of it in a chapel shares, through it, in the birth and life and death of Christ and through his private and personal emotions he participates in the experience of the attitudes and the mythology of the whole body of Christianity. Philosophers have tried to differentiate the symbol from the sign. Symbols, Ernest Cassirer has suggested, are 'charged with meaning' and are infinitely interpretable. Cassirer ascribes to the symbol the function of transforming a sense image into a metaphor image; and Susanne Langer suggests that in a metaphor the image of the literal meaning acts as the symbol for the figurative meaning. For the symbol links the strange with the familiar and so forms a bridge between what are really separate objects or experiences.
