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Casting the Nets of Symbolism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
A bridging-passage in a piece of music can have several roles. One of them is to make us wish that we might fully appreciate the effect of the music’s ending when it comes. Able to hear the separate musical messages converge. In her great work The Dialogue, a complex meditation, Catherine of Siena speaks of ‘the lovely and glorious bridge’ of Jesus’ presence as having a similar role. Although ‘he was no longer with you’—and here, adding her own reflection to scripture, she adopts a voice as God’s own—‘his teaching remained.’ The reader is addressed as one of the disciples who, on the day of the Ascension, were ‘as good as dead, because their hearts had been lifted up to heaven.’ The bridge himself has ascended, and we, the reader-followers, must ask, ‘Where can I find the way?’ As we shall see, Catherine expects her metaphor of a bridge to play many parts in the dramatic speech patterns of conversion. It can stand for the reliable relationship we have with Christ through all our own difficulties. But it stands also for our vantage point of calmly casting nets to help others in trouble. Theological discourse has not often called on one symbol to be so versatile, although the image of each stone which contributes to a tower in The Shepherd of Hermas is similarly polyvalent. A recent translator of The Dialogue, Suzanne Noffke, suggests that Catherine may have had in mind the kind of walled bridge which was built over the Arno, containing shops. This was a route allowing concealment but could also mean sudden surprise for the traveller herself. It might indicate a suitable direction to evade severe pressures.
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- Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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