‘Catholicism is heavy in symbolism’ [it is said], esp. as compared to Protestantism. But in another sense it is more accurate to say that Catholicism is heavy in literalism – e.g., the wine and bread literally become flesh and blood. Only Protestantism re-codes these as symbols, forbidding as sacrilegious any premature reconciliation between mundane and divine, reproaching the older religion for its naïve literalism. This observation is indebted to Hegel's Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 324:
In this mystical identity there is nothing purely symbolical, the latter only arises in the reformed doctrine, because here the spiritual is explicitly severed from the sensuous, and the external object is taken in that case as a mere pointing to a meaning differentiated therefrom.
Catholicism, then, knows immediate presence rather than symbolism. And, conversely, does this not entail that we ought to incorporate into our definition the Symbolic a suspension of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some immediate presence has departed; the symbol is always the index of an absence and a departure. Symbols, therefore, are always ‘haunted’.
What Hegel here says about the distinction between Catholicsm and Protestantism in fact runs through the whole first volume of his brilliant (A brilliance which is difficult to overestimate) Aesthetics: the distinction between immediate presence and defered or Symbolic presence. One can also see how Zizek might relate it to Lacan: for in a way it concerns our entrance into the realm of the 'Symbolic'. Children, we might say, start off as 'Catholics' and are forced to renounce this native faith and convert, under the duress of the paternal law, to 'Protestantism'.
The other relevant example here is Hegel's descriptions of (p. 325). of the Zoroastrian religion: Light is not a symbol of the Good; light is the Good:
Without explicitly separating this Divinity from light, as if light were a mere expression and image or symbol.
Not, then, a 'mere' (symbolic) 'expression'. In this sense, such religions do not worship ‘graven images’ since we are precisely not dealing with an image at all. Again, then, the image or symbol is a kind of leftover – it is the surplus remaining when existence (the sensuous immediacy thereof) and meaning are severed. Once the Absolute withdraws into uncategorizable abstraction the symbols are left clattering, only alluding to that which is now forever elsewhere.