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One very obvious feature of the current theological scene is a divorce between—in Pascal’s celebrated distinction—the God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is to say, the people most interested in religion, mostly members of the ‘counter-culture’, are generally hostile to the intellectual exploration of religion and religious language. Their religion centres on ‘love and consolation’, to use Pascal’s phrase, not upon rational argument or analysis. Another way of putting this is to say that the God of Religion is naturally spoken of in metaphorical language, while the God of the Philosophers can only be spoken of in analogical language. I am concerned to argue that, despite the anti-intellectualism of the ‘counter-culture’, it is still necessary to have a philosophical foundation for religion, and that this involves accepting the validity of analogical language, even if the most significant religious language we have today is to be found in the metaphorical speech of singers, poets and story-tellers. It is important, therefore, to establish the right relationship between analogical and metaphorical language. The following analysis of a sonnet by Hopkins is offered as a brief preface to a discussion of the two-dimensional structure of any language that purports to discuss God.
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- Copyright © 1972 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 532 note 1 Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Third Edition edited by W. H. Gardner, Oxford University Press, London, 1948, p. 70.
page 533 note 1 Letters of G.M.H. to Robert Bridges, London, 1935, pp. 168‐9.
page 533 note 2 W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vol. II (London, 1949), p. 230.
page 533 note 3 Gardner, op. cit., p. 231.
page 533 note 4 Hopkins's simile only just ‘works’ in this sense. Some readers thought that he had in mind the term foil as used in fencing. Luckily the simile made some sense even then, but not the sense Hopkins intended. See Gardner, op. cit., p. 230n.
page 534 note 1 Gardner, loc. cit.
page 534 note 2 Cf. Hopkins's Comments on the Spiritual Exercises in Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Humphry House, London, 1937, p. 342 and note.
page 534 note 3 Or, for that matter, which always terrified James Joyce. Ellmann notes of Joyce that ‘the thunderstorm as a vehicle of divine wrath and power moved Joyce's imagination so profoundly that to the end of his life he trembled at the sound. When a friend asked him why he was so affected, he replied “you were not brought up in Catholic Ireland”’. Cf. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, London, 1966, p. 25.
page 535 note 1 Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 19–22.
page 535 note 2 Jerusalem Bible translationm, London, 1966. Cf. the Editors' note on Genesis I, 2.
page 535 note 3 See Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain, Bloomington, Indiana, 1954, chapter 6 (on ‘Metaphoric Tension’) for an interesting theory as to the relationship between simile and metaphor, and the process by which the one may turn into the other.
page 535 note 4 Creation ex nihilo only becomes explicit in the Bible in 2 maccabees 7, 28.
page 538 note 1 Philip Wheelwright, Poetrym, Myth and Reality in The Language of Poetry, Edited by Allen Tate, Princeton, 1942, p. 11.