A serpente e o bezerro. A idolatria como patologia simbólica. Um ponto de vista bíblico

Abstract

The biblical point of view on the epistemological and ethical status of mimetic symbolism and its artistic and religious pertinence – and impertinence – is discussed here on the basis of the crossed analysis of two major narratives of the Pentateuch (adoration of the golden calf [Ex 32, 1‑20; Dt 9,15‑29] and exhibition of the bronze serpent [Nr 21, 4‑10]). By discarding the traditional opposition between Jewish iconoclasm and Christian iconophilism as reductionist, it is highlighted that the biblical taboo of images of the divine is not an absolute refusal of mimesis (as an analogical conversion of the contents of experience in its representation), but a condemnation of its degeneration, both idolatrous (which occurs in the case of fetishistic, pseudo‑denotative mimesis, unable to distinguish between meaning and referent, between semantic content and reality) and mythological (in its assumption as an exclusive and totalizing discourse, substituting the theoretical knowledge of the truth). The paper presents the following fundamental traits of symbolic significance reconstructed by the biblical text, which theological reflection can implement as binding criteria for the scrutiny of religious and artistic symbolism, in a valuable critical‑hermeneutic exercise not only for the experience of faith but also for the self‑understanding of the arts: complementarity of image and rite (semantically binding association of the mimetic representation and its performative effect); articulation of symbolism as a strategy of decentralization of the original experience and critical differentiation of the subject’s place in its finitude; epistemological and ethical inconsistency of idolatry (as infidelity on the part of religious and artistic experience to the ‘sanctity’ of the object itself, to the mutual transcendence of the real and the subject).