ABSTRACT
In the book Symbolism Professor Whitehead gives a definition of that term with which we may start. 'The human mind', he says, is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience. The formulations of the belief in God's being essentially incomprehensible owed a good deal to the Neo-Platonic tradition, which infiltrated into the Church mainly through the Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagites. The belief, of course, as formulated by that writer, finds its most extreme expression in the doctrine of the via negativa, that God can be reached only by stripping off every quality which the human mind has attributed to Him, so that the ultimate and perfect apprehension of God can be described as nescience. The kind of symbols purport to give information about the things they symbolize, to convey knowledge of their nature, which those who see or hear the symbols have not had before or have not otherwise.
