Reality is a function of matter. Symbols are like empty boxes. There is nothing for them to point toward. The Sacred is a pre-scientific hypothesis which has been falsified by natural science. Unfortunately, the loss of the metaphysical signaled the twilight of faith in the ideal as well as the divine, as Karl Marx was soon to prove.
Symbols are dead.
Philosophy has become an instrument of social change to be wielded like a sword. Symbol died with Marx, and with the loss of symbol, philosophy itself was dead. Propaganda is the successor to knowledge. Sophistry becomes the ruling party having at last bested the Platonists and the Aristotelians. The Exile of Imagination to the East Ibn Arab, with Rumi one of the two great teachers of Sufism, was born in 1165 near Cordova, Spain where Averroes was the dominant philosophical personality.