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Metaphor, The Self, And The Language of Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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In this paper, I am concerned with some of the ways in which religious language resonates with our sense of being a self, and especially a bodily self. At present we often tend to counterpoise language to the biological and we stress the conventional even arbitrary aspects of language. Religion, however, tends to give language a force that is comparable to that of biology. It is not only that words are creative in that flat which makes the world, or the word which Mary hears as the conception of her son. The whole pattern of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a pattern only because similarities of meaning have historical force, as the sacrifice of Isaac is linked to the sacrifice of Christ for instance. Things of similar meaning tend to be taken as linked in actuality, either by historical causality, or by being seen as different manifestations of a basic underlying pattern. In general, religious language tends to give a real dimension to linguistic usage that we would tend to say is ‘only metaphorical’: T was in the seventh heaven’, ‘Christ is present in the Eucharist’. Those religious traditions in which the issue of such language being ‘only metaphorical’ has arisen, have rejected it as a sufficient account of what they mean. There is no question of our being able to translate religious usage into metaphorical or poetic usage in any easy fashion. But attention to meta even if we cannot always take it as comprehensible. Thus consideration of what it means to be ‘lost in thought’ may help us to understand a little more what someone may mean when they say ‘whether I was in the body or out of the body, I know not’.
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- Copyright © 1981 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 I have not commented in the body of this paper on the view that the relation between symbol and symbolized is of an arbitrary nature. This is, I think, a bad misreading of an original point, that the relation between sound and meaning is of an arbitrary nature. The error lies in not specifying, ‘arbitrary for whom?’ Clearly, users of the language could not use the language if they took seriously the arbitrary nature of the sounds they were employing. From outside the language, the connexions are arbitrary. From inside, the conventional links have the over‐riding force of the natural, the taken‐for‐granted. Quite a few of the most serious criticisms of Lévi‐Strauss hinges on this point.
For the purposes of this paper, I quite deliberately do not distinguish symbol and metaphor, for the point I am endeavouring to make rests upon a degree of interchange of visual (‘symbolic’) and oral‐aural (‘metaphoric’) elements.
2 Ananda, K. Coomaraswamy, ‘The Indian Temple: Kandarya Mahadeo’ reprinted in Selected Papers vol 1, R. Lipseyed. New York 1977.Google Scholar
3 An elegant exposure of the Freudian problem here is given in Charles Rycroft's essay in Lewis, I. M. ed. Symbols and Sentiment 1978.Google Scholar
4 The violin example and quotation are taken from Hanna Segal ‘Notes on Symbol Formation International Journal of Psycho-Analysis vol 39, 1957.Google Scholar
5 Erik, H. Erikson, ‘Inner and Outer Space: Reflections on Womanhood’, Daedalus, 93 no 2 1964 pp 582–606.Google Scholar
6 ‘“Behold This Heart!” Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart’, and ‘Some Theses for a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart’, chaps 21 and 22 of Theological Investigations vol 3 1963.Google Scholar
7 Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart trans. Kadloubovsky, E. and Palmer, G. E. H. 1951, p 33. A splendid source of material from Christian and other traditions is provided by Le Coeur, Les Etudes Carmelitaines, 1950.Google Scholar
8 Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality (Penguin 1974) p 60.Google Scholar
9 Paul, W. Pruyser, Between Belief and Unbelief 1974 pp 110–113. 1 am grateful to Wendy Robinson for alerting me to this passage. See also Buber's ‘Distance and Relation Hibbert Journal Jan. 1951.Google Scholar
10 This said, no theory of symbolism can stand on its own. One line of connexion may lie with Rahner's sketch of an ontological basis for the symbol apart frorn all notions of transfer, projection, substitution and identification noted earlier. He argues that since in the long run anything agrees in some way or another with everything else, it would be a false start for a theory of symbolism to start with similarities between different items. A basis is to be sought in the fact that beings are not only identities but also and simultaneously multiplicities, ‘plural moments in the unity of a being’. Thus, it is only by expressing itself that a being can know itself and be known by others. It is the basic principle of an ontology of symbolism that ‘all beings are by their nature symbolic, because they necessarily express themselves in order to attain their own nature.’ A symbol is not then something separate from the symbolized: ‘symbolic reality is the self‐realization of a being in the other, which is constitutive of its essence.’ As he summarizes his position, carefully if complexly.
‘… the symbol is the reality, constituted by the thing symbolized as an inner moment of itself, which reveals and proclaims the thing symbolized, and is itself full of the thing symbolized, being its concrete form of existence.
Chapter 9 of The theology of the Symbol, Theological Investigations vol 4 1966. Cf. ‘Poetry and the Christian’ in vol 4 and ‘Priest and Poet vol 3.