Summary of a Paradigmatic History of Baptism and Universality of Symbolism Group 3: Andrew, Melissa, and Jonathan

This section is an application of the discussion of Aquatic Symbolism that precedes it. In the largely Christianized world, baptism is one of the first concepts of Aquatic Symbolism that comes to mind. Eliade gives a stage by stage means of understanding the sense of the event of baptism. He starts by giving water its credentials through Tertullian. "Water was the first to produce that which had life, that it might be no wonder in baptism if waters knew how to give life" Tertullian claims. By nature of their pre-existence and their already having a hand in the production of life. There is also death in water. As Aquatic Symbolism works as talked about in the previous section. To come out of water is to come to life, but to go into water is to be diluted back into the formless and so die.
      He uses Chrysostom to further provide the understanding of the Christians, "It represents death and burial, life and resurrection....When we plunge our heads into the water as into a sepulcher (tomb), the old man is immersed (killed, diluted into the formless), buried wholly; when we come out of the water, the new man appears at the same time," He quotes from Chrysostom.
     Baptism valorizes the waters through connection to greater myths alive both in Juedo-Christian tradition and in world Mythology at large. Cyril of Jerusalem is cited as citing Job as attributing the Jordan river to be the resting place of the Behemoth (a common part of the chaotic mythos of the region). Therefore when Jesus went down into the water and bound the beast, he both paralleled the binding of the Behemoth and Leviathan by God at creation and set a precedent power in baptism. He further addresses the concept of Jesus as a New Noah (a concept put forth by Justin). "Christ...emerged victorious from the waters to become the head of another race." Christ is further seen as a parallel with Adam, Christ is the first of New Man and regeneration of the sense in man that precedes his shamefulness. And so in Baptism, especially in the ritual of nude baptism, the old person descends into the depths dies and is buried, mirrors the triumphant act of Jesus, is born into the new race born of Jesus's conquest of the Waters of Death, and is born to a people without shame.
     These mythic roots of baptism, Eliade lays, exist in other traditions as well.  The Noah figure, the danger of death, often enough the deluge, even ritual nudity. Defeat of monsters is a fairly common expectation of initiates in religious groups. He clarifies that the mention of these isn't to discredit baptism and these stories, they didn't need to be borrowed, Judaism is flush with these stories and this past.
     He uses our second section as a transition of sorts from the specific power of aquatic symbolism with the focused application through baptism to the more general approach to nature as a whole. He discusses the Church Fathers' trust in the so-called Book of Nature. "For the Christian apologists," he says "symbols were pregnant with messages." The workings of God were evident through out the cosmos. For religious man he states the natural world is always speaking to things of the divine and of the sacred.