Coming to Terms

Pressed metaphors and other signposts
at the intersection of positive and negative theology

“ The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
From Michael Donaghy, ‘Machines’

“

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.
The Makers by Howard Nemerov

“ Indeed, this extraordinary fleshly instrument is a rich source of metaphors when we try to express the mystery of the human self, as we see with the word tongue as the natural metaphor for language. The word spirit is from the Latin spirare, to breathe; in Greek, it is pneuma, “breath”; in Hebrew, ruach, “breath”; in Sanskrit and Hindi, atman, “breath.” To “express” is to press out. A “cry” is also a plea, an indictment, a sign of grief. The Chinese radical for “mouth” pervades all the written characters in which the idea of human utterance is important. In the Bible, the world is created by word, breathed forth on the wind of the spirit. Singing is the universal metaphor of free and joyful expression.
Frederick Turner, The Human Voice, American Arts Quarterly
“ In Middle English the words ‘kind’ and ‘kin’ were the same—to say that Christ is ‘our kinde Lord’ is not to say that Christ is tender and gentle, although that may be implied, but to say that he is kin—our kind. This fact, and not emotional disposition, is the rock which is our salvation.

Janet Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language

Now this looks interesting.


“ A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.
Christian Wiman (most recently from here: The truths of Art and Religion - Rod Dreher, via MM)

“ We have to distinguish between referring to God and describing him; this is crucial to a critical-realist stance in theology. It is at this juncture that, in all religions, negative theology and positive, affirmative theology meet. The former (the via negativa) recognizes that, having referred to God, whatever we say will be fallible and revisable and ex hypothesi inadequate; and sometimes goes so far as to say that nothing can positively be said about God. However, this too easily becomes a slippery slope to atheism, so positive theology (the via positiva) affirms that to say nothing about God is more misleading than to say something—and that then we have to speak in metaphors. The metaphors of theological models that explicate religious experience can refer to and can depict reality without at the same time being naively and unrevisably descriptive, and they share this character with scientific models of the natural world. We may reasonably hope to speak realistically of God through revisable metaphor and model.
Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming—Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 15

“ Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
David Brooks, History for Dollars - NYTimes.com