the hook of the godhead

Reading about brandlings made me think about the image of the baited hook. And that led me back into the more metaphorical space where religious texts express their conception of things with reference to the dynamics of fishing. In Aion (which has the subtitle, 'researches into the phenomenology of the self') C.G. Jung has much to say about fish as symbols and a little too about the activity of fishing. He talks about the 'primitive totemistic identity between hunter and prey', citing the examples of 'the Babylonian culture-hero Oannes', who 'was himself a fish', and the 'Christian Ichthys', who is 'a fisher of men par excellence'. Then, complicating the picture, he says of Christ-Ichthys, 'Symbologically, he is actually the hook or bait on God's fishing-rod with which the Leviathan - death or the devil - is caught'.

There is a slightly paradoxical quality to this image. Passiontide is a dark time in the Christian calendar but, nevertheless, the death of Christ is seen as needing to take place in order to bring about redemption. And so, in Jung's interpretation, God is characterised as offering Jesus as bait or as a lure to death and the devil so that - when they bite - they will be defeated. In a footnote to the text he cites St Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage:

Like a fish which darts at a baited hook, and not only does not lay hold of the bait along with it, but is itself hauled out of the sea; so he who had the power of death did indeed snatch away the body of Jesus unto death, but did not observe that the hook of the Godhead was concealed therein, until he had devoured it; and thereupon remained fixed thereto.

These kinds of comparisons work with particular aspects of the act of fishing in order to communicate specific points of religious thought. In this case the wisdom of God is seen as, in some sense, 'tricky', exploiting the avaricious, even voracious, quality of evil against itself. (In The Conference of the Birds, conversely, it was the quality of attentive waiting that I think became the figural centre of the teaching.)

I'd like to keep these more metaphorical texts in play, even while we engage with ones that are more 'literal' - more descriptive of fishing as experienced today - because these too work with the actuality of the act to speak about what wisdom is and does. Having looked at a Christian example today, I'll move on tomorrow to think about the meanings of baited hooks in the wisdom literature of Buddhism.

  

St Cyprian at the Water's Edge