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Such an ambivalence has its own roots in the Greek etymology. Originally a symbol was a token, the present half of a broken table or coin or medal, that performed its social and semiotic function by recalling the absent half to which it potentially could be reconnected. This potentiality was indeed crucial because, since the two halves could be reconnected, it was unnecessary to yearn for the reconnection. So, too, it happens today that, when we enter a theater with our ticket stub, nobody tries to check where its other half is; everyone trusts the semiotic nature of the token, which in this case works on the basis of an established and recognized convention.
But the present half of the broken medal, evoking the ghost of its absent companion and of the original wholeness, encouraged other senses of "symbol." The verb symballein thus meant to meet, to try an interpretation, to make a conjecture, to solve a riddle, to infer from something imprecise, because incomplete, something else that it suggested, evoked, revealed, but did not conventionally say. In this sense a symbol was an ominous sudden experience that announced vague consequences to be tentatively forecast. A symbol was a semeion, but one of an impalpable quality. It was a divine message, and when one speaks in tongues, everybody understands, but nobody can spell aloud what has been understood.
All the senses of "symbol" are thus equally archaic. When the supporters of the "romantic" sense try to trace its profoundly traditional origins, they look for an honorable pedigree but disregard the fact that the distinction between symbol and allegory is not archaic at all.
When in the Stoic milieu the first attempts were made to read the old poets allegorically, so as to find under the cloak of myth the evidence of natural truths, or when Philo of Alexandria started the allegorical reading of the Bible, there was no clear-cut distinction between symbol and allegory. Pépin (1970) and Auerbach (1944) say that the classical world took symbol and allegory as synonymous expressions and also called symbols certain coded images produced for educational purposes. Under such a linguistic usage was the idea that symbols too were rhetorical devices endowed with a precise meaning, obscurely outlined, but to be precisely found. And the same happened with the tradition of the Church Fathers and medieval culture. 1
2. Pansemiotic Metaphysics
There is, in the patristic and medieval tradition, an idea of symbolism as a way of speaking of something unknowable: in the Neoplatonic line of thought, as represented by Pseudo Dionysius, the divine source of all beings, the One, is defined as "the luminous dimness, a silence which

 
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