But the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus tell us nothing in the abstract about human dereliction or human hope - they are not motifs of a tragic wisdom or goads to an existential resolve - but concern first what happened to Jesus of Nazareth, to whose particular truth and radiance all the general "truths" of human experience must defer. The "symbol," extracted from the
complexities of its many contexts, is pure transparency, the paralysis of beauty, yielding before the figureless glare of an abstraction.
