Personification and play

[robinturner]

Here's a lovely passage from Huizinga's Homo Ludens which ties in nicely with what I was talking about in my last two posts.

In all these cases [of making pagan deities by personifying qualities] we are justified in asking how far this business of personification springs from—or results in—an attitude of faith. We may go further: is not all personification from beginning to end but a playing of the mind? Examples from more recent times lead us to this conclusion. St. Francis of Assisi reveres Poverty, his bride, with holy fervour and pious rapture. But if we ask in sober earnest whether St. Francis actually believed in a spiritual and celestial being whose name was Poverty, who really was the idea of poverty, we begin to waver. Put in cold blood like that the question is too blunt; we are forcing the emotional con­tent of the idea. St. Francis' attitude was one of belief and unbelief mixed. The Church hardly authorized him in an explicit belief of that sort. His conception of Poverty must have vacillated between poetic imagination and dogmatic conviction, although gravitating towards the latter. The most succinct way of putting his state of mind would be to say that St. Francis was playing with the figure of poverty. The saint's whole life is full of pure play-factors and play-figures, and these are not the least attractive part of him.

It strikes me that this seriously playful attitude of "belief and unbelief mixed" is very like that of the more intelligent occultists and neopagans I have known and is possibly the only thing that can rescue more conventional religions from the pit they have dug themselves into, where the pendulum of liberalism and literalism swings ever lower.

Oh, and speaking of play, that last metaphor was just for the hell of it.