"But now you will ask me "How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?" and I cannot answer you except to say "I do not know!" For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!"
The Cloud of Unknowing
I’m sorry, but I had to blog again. I had to write!
The Cloud:
I had a brief encounter with Christian mysticism that kept me from continuing my study of metaphor. But it could be relevant. I had been doing my usual rounds at Barnes & Noble and, by chance, my eye landed on the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. I’ve read bits and pieces and every time I read I'm affected. But already being in the frame of mind to study metaphor, I thought of this metaphor of the Cloud that a mystic chose more than 6 centuries ago.
The author’s main point is that love is more important than knowledge, for not only does love take us straight through the Cloud of Unknowing and into divine love, love (agape) - by nature - humbles, whereas knowledge often leads to conceit. Not only that, but knowledge actually leads us to a chimera. The intellect takes us to the land of concepts; but God’s deeper essence is beyond concepts. This is the subject of Rudolph Otto’s main thesis in The Idea of the Holy, a study into the relationship between that part of God’s essence which concepts cannot capture and the arousing in us of Numinous awe, which spawns in the pagans a particularly religious consciousness: the kind that leads to fear and worship of the dead, a belief in spirits, animism, sacrifice, magic, ghosts, and so on.
The intellectual route seems to land us in images, for, after all, the main role for concepts is to stimulate the mind to understanding, and understanding is almost always escorted by the imagination. The images should always be viewed as a substitute, a footstool, a ladder, a means to an end. To get past the Cloud of Unknowing we almost have to put everything discoverable about God by the discursive intellect into what he calls the Cloud of Forgetting. This forgetting is the ‘dart’ that punctures through the Cloud of Unknowing and into God’s love.
I think that a cloud is a good metaphor to use. Perhaps the Cloud of Unknowing is what is called a ‘high cloud’, and the Cloud of Forgetting a ‘low cloud’. In love, we rise above a mesocyclone of doubt and tornados are the brief fits of passion that befall times of doubt and anxiety. Through perhaps a thick layer of Mammatus clouds we rise a little higher! Love carries us above the darkness and into the edges of what is called ‘cloud iridescence’, rainbow colored clouds of feathery silk. The sun is close.
The Ladder:
We are like purchased slaves, like servants under contract to the unholy passions. And because this is so, we know a little of their deceits, ways, impositions and wiles. We know of their evil despotism in our wretched souls. But there are others who fully understand the tricks of these spirits, and they do so because of the working of the Holy Spirit and because of the freedom they themselves have managed to achieve. - The Ladder of Divine Ascent
I’ve also bumped into the metaphor of a ladder. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who was based on a real person, a monk from Greece, an abbot who authored a book called The Ladder of Paradise, or sometimes called The Ladder of Divine Ascent. I thought it was interesting that the greek word for ladder is ‘klimax’, which is similar to ‘climax’: the ladder could be where we get the concept of growing suspense until a climax. The interesting thing is that the book was the first to be published in the New World, published in Spanish in Mexico. The name Johannes Climicas can be translated into either John the Ladder or John the Climber: I prefer John the Climber. His ladder had thirty rungs and his main point was that the key to the monastic life (which was his immediate audience) was trouncing the passions. Their proposed reward?: the Heavenly vision, a state not unlike nirvana, a mystical union with God. This is why the treatise is popular in the East; in fact, as far as devotions go, it is in the East what The Imitation of Christ (Thomas a Kempis) is in the West.
Climicas claims that we can climb to God via the 30 rungs with the Holy Spirit’s aid. It should ring a bell where Climicas himself borrowed his metaphor: Jacob’s ladder. In Jacob’s vision, he saw a ladder leading to Heaven. Climicas’ ladder has 30 steps (steps vary in other cases), because Christ lived 30 years just prior to his earthly ministry. The first 23 steps deal with overcoming the vices, the last 7 steps deal with attainment of the virtues. Kierkegaard used this pseudonym because the author was supposed to be hunting for God, climbing for Him, perhaps through The Cloud of Unknowing, and has not yet found him: the main point is that - again - the discursive intellect is impotent to bring one union with the divine. Faith and love alone give us those wings. As far as the book itself goes, it is very readable with very practical advice, both clear and profound, with topics as diverse as the vices of Talkativeness and Silence, Slander, Despondency, and Exile (even Meekness), and the virtues of Stillness, Faith, and Humility. To give a sneak peak - on the vice of Unmanly Fears: “Cowardice is childish behavior within a soul advanced in years and vainglory. It is a lapse from faith that comes from anticipating the unexpected.”
I think the metaphors of the ladder and the cloud are good ones and they’ve helped a ton. I’ll keep these in mind as I study more on metaphor in general.
Showing posts with label metaphor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metaphor. Show all posts
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Language and Metaphor
I want to talk about metaphors. They’re everywhere and indispensable to thinking or saying or writing about anything. There are many theories of metaphor, but I want to seize on one. According to this theory, metaphors are initially created by poetry. Owen Barfield thought that it was poetry which was responsible for the creation of new metaphors. Now, why would we want to create new metaphors? Well, metaphors are the chief birthplace of meaning. Just as Socrates called himself a midwife for knowledge and ideas, poets are midwives for meaning.
It is the job of the poets (or those blessed with a cutting edge imagination) to probe for pristine metaphors. When this happens, new meaning is breathed into an idea or a word, and language is refined. To Barfield, what makes poetry (or prose verging on the poetic) distinct from prose is the metaphors it uses. Poetry (or, good poetry) will be using live metaphors (and striving after new ones), and prose will be using dead metaphors. Ordinary prose, in the opinion of Barfield, is a sea of dead metaphors which were once alive.
We might see the point better if we looked at an example. In a certain poem, Wordsworth called a woman a red, red rose. Not just a red rose: but a red, red one. In prose, the words are meant to denote, to point to an object out there. In this case, that is impossible because a rose is not a woman and a woman is not a rose. That is why it is a metaphor. But if it doesn’t denote, how is it meaningful? It is still meaningful because it was never meant to point to an object. If it is meant to point at anything, it is meant to point at meaning, and we can’t talk about a metaphor doing that without being metaphorical again.
The role of the metaphor is to appeal to your imagination. When you imagine a red, red rose, what do you think of, what associations arise? A rose is beautiful. A rose is full of life. In grasping a rose you risk getting pricked. The rose has been a symbol for secrecy (Rome), for love. The color red has been a symbol for guilt, pain, passion. And you can plumb the depths as far as you want. What associations arise with beauty, life, secrecy, love: the tree keeps branching out. No matter when your adventure ends, your understanding of a woman (or, at least the woman Wordsworth had in mind) snowballs.
We can do the same thing in any metaphor (or, similes). We can meet a true genius in Homer and feed off his metaphors for a lifetime: “He fell upon them like flames of fire from every quarter. As when a wave, raised mountain high by wind and storm, breaks over a ship and covers it deep in foam, the fierce winds roar against the mast, the hearts of the sailors fail them for fear, and they are saved but by a very little from destruction--even so were the hearts of the Achaeans fainting within them. Or as a savage lion attacking a herd of cows while they are feeding by thousands in the low-lying meadows by some wide-watered shore--the herdsman is at his wit's end how to protect his herd and keeps going about now in the van and now in the rear of his cattle, while the lion springs into the thick of them and fastens on a cow so that they all tremble for fear--even so were the Achaeans utterly panic-stricken by Hector and father Jove.”
Knowing that this is the office of metaphors can mushroom your appreciation of Scripture. Dead-ends in proper exegesis happen when we mistake the metaphors for ordinary prose, and so mistake appeals to our imagination to probe for more and more meaning with appeals to look at whatever object we thought the word was denoting, or pointing at. The Psalmist, instead of telling us that Nature worships God, tells us that the trees clap for joy. Instead of telling us that God is holy and just, the writer of Hebrews tells us that God is a consuming fire. He is the father of lights, a shepherd, a gate, a vine, a father, a husband, a son, a rock, a refuge, a fortress, a hiding place. Hell is darkness, an unquenchable fire. Heaven is bespangled with gold, other precious medals, gems, pearls, emeralds, gates, foundations, and so on. Jude on godless men: “They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.”
Metaphor is at the root of all language. The remarkable philosopher Wittgenstein was guided by it when he changed the climate of philosophy: twice. At the beginning, his blueprint was that of a picture, and just as a picture represents the pictured, so language represents the world. Feeling dissatisfied with that, he exchanged the metaphor of a picture with that of a tool: words aren’t any longer things that represent, but things we use - learning a language becomes learning how to do and fix things with words. At first, the meaning of a word is found in what it denotes; then, the meaning of a word is found in how it is used in a particular language-game.
Lets try to look at the most prosaic sentence we can think of. Say: the book is on the table. Is that metaphorical? It’s used literally, but it contains dead metaphors. The word ‘book’ comes from the Old English ‘boc’, meaning to document or charter! This leads us to the realm of documenting and chartering. ‘Charter’ (related to sailing out on a voyage) comes from the Latin ‘charta’, meaning ‘paper’. And ‘paper’ comes from the Latin ‘papyrus’, which means ‘paper-reed’. And what is a reed?: a plant, tall and slender. Do you see how buried beneath the word ‘book’, we discover its lineage, and how 'book' itself is a distant metaphor, a dead one.
Or, let’s look at: The animal is sleeping. That seems literal enough. The animal denotes an object (as did the book), but the word ‘animal’ comes from the Latin ‘animalis’, meaning ‘having breath’: another metaphor! And ‘sleep’ comes from the Old English ‘slaepan’, meaning ‘to be weak’. ‘Weak’ comes from the Old Norse ‘wikanan’, meaning ‘to bend’. It’s amazing! It’s everywhere. As C.S. Lewis explains: “It is a serious mistake to think metaphor is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as decoration and plain speakers can do without.”
There is much more to this subject, but I’ll stop here and write more on it later.
It is the job of the poets (or those blessed with a cutting edge imagination) to probe for pristine metaphors. When this happens, new meaning is breathed into an idea or a word, and language is refined. To Barfield, what makes poetry (or prose verging on the poetic) distinct from prose is the metaphors it uses. Poetry (or, good poetry) will be using live metaphors (and striving after new ones), and prose will be using dead metaphors. Ordinary prose, in the opinion of Barfield, is a sea of dead metaphors which were once alive.
We might see the point better if we looked at an example. In a certain poem, Wordsworth called a woman a red, red rose. Not just a red rose: but a red, red one. In prose, the words are meant to denote, to point to an object out there. In this case, that is impossible because a rose is not a woman and a woman is not a rose. That is why it is a metaphor. But if it doesn’t denote, how is it meaningful? It is still meaningful because it was never meant to point to an object. If it is meant to point at anything, it is meant to point at meaning, and we can’t talk about a metaphor doing that without being metaphorical again.
The role of the metaphor is to appeal to your imagination. When you imagine a red, red rose, what do you think of, what associations arise? A rose is beautiful. A rose is full of life. In grasping a rose you risk getting pricked. The rose has been a symbol for secrecy (Rome), for love. The color red has been a symbol for guilt, pain, passion. And you can plumb the depths as far as you want. What associations arise with beauty, life, secrecy, love: the tree keeps branching out. No matter when your adventure ends, your understanding of a woman (or, at least the woman Wordsworth had in mind) snowballs.
We can do the same thing in any metaphor (or, similes). We can meet a true genius in Homer and feed off his metaphors for a lifetime: “He fell upon them like flames of fire from every quarter. As when a wave, raised mountain high by wind and storm, breaks over a ship and covers it deep in foam, the fierce winds roar against the mast, the hearts of the sailors fail them for fear, and they are saved but by a very little from destruction--even so were the hearts of the Achaeans fainting within them. Or as a savage lion attacking a herd of cows while they are feeding by thousands in the low-lying meadows by some wide-watered shore--the herdsman is at his wit's end how to protect his herd and keeps going about now in the van and now in the rear of his cattle, while the lion springs into the thick of them and fastens on a cow so that they all tremble for fear--even so were the Achaeans utterly panic-stricken by Hector and father Jove.”
Knowing that this is the office of metaphors can mushroom your appreciation of Scripture. Dead-ends in proper exegesis happen when we mistake the metaphors for ordinary prose, and so mistake appeals to our imagination to probe for more and more meaning with appeals to look at whatever object we thought the word was denoting, or pointing at. The Psalmist, instead of telling us that Nature worships God, tells us that the trees clap for joy. Instead of telling us that God is holy and just, the writer of Hebrews tells us that God is a consuming fire. He is the father of lights, a shepherd, a gate, a vine, a father, a husband, a son, a rock, a refuge, a fortress, a hiding place. Hell is darkness, an unquenchable fire. Heaven is bespangled with gold, other precious medals, gems, pearls, emeralds, gates, foundations, and so on. Jude on godless men: “They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.”
Metaphor is at the root of all language. The remarkable philosopher Wittgenstein was guided by it when he changed the climate of philosophy: twice. At the beginning, his blueprint was that of a picture, and just as a picture represents the pictured, so language represents the world. Feeling dissatisfied with that, he exchanged the metaphor of a picture with that of a tool: words aren’t any longer things that represent, but things we use - learning a language becomes learning how to do and fix things with words. At first, the meaning of a word is found in what it denotes; then, the meaning of a word is found in how it is used in a particular language-game.
Lets try to look at the most prosaic sentence we can think of. Say: the book is on the table. Is that metaphorical? It’s used literally, but it contains dead metaphors. The word ‘book’ comes from the Old English ‘boc’, meaning to document or charter! This leads us to the realm of documenting and chartering. ‘Charter’ (related to sailing out on a voyage) comes from the Latin ‘charta’, meaning ‘paper’. And ‘paper’ comes from the Latin ‘papyrus’, which means ‘paper-reed’. And what is a reed?: a plant, tall and slender. Do you see how buried beneath the word ‘book’, we discover its lineage, and how 'book' itself is a distant metaphor, a dead one.
Or, let’s look at: The animal is sleeping. That seems literal enough. The animal denotes an object (as did the book), but the word ‘animal’ comes from the Latin ‘animalis’, meaning ‘having breath’: another metaphor! And ‘sleep’ comes from the Old English ‘slaepan’, meaning ‘to be weak’. ‘Weak’ comes from the Old Norse ‘wikanan’, meaning ‘to bend’. It’s amazing! It’s everywhere. As C.S. Lewis explains: “It is a serious mistake to think metaphor is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as decoration and plain speakers can do without.”
There is much more to this subject, but I’ll stop here and write more on it later.
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