Frye, Northrop. “Language I.” In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, pp. 3-30. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

[In the following excerpt, Frye discusses the linguistic problems inherent in Bible translation, remarking that translated narratives, particularly the English Bibles and Luther's Bible, are texts with rich arrays of new images, idioms, and allusions. According to Frye, these translations in many ways defined modern European culture.]

A sacred book is normally written with at least the concentration of poetry, so that, like poetry, it is closely involved with the conditions of its language. The Koran, for instance, is so interwoven with the special characteristics of the Arabic language that in practice Arabic has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone. Jewish commentary and scholarship, whether Talmudic or Kabbalistic in direction, have always, inevitably, dealt with the purely linguistic features of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. In contrast, while Christian scholarship is naturally no less aware of the importance of language, Christianity as a religion has been from the beginning dependent on translation. The New Testament was written in a koine Greek unlikely to have been the native language of its authors, and, whatever the degree of familiarity of those authors with Hebrew, they tended to make more use of the Septuagint Greek translation in referring to the Old Testament. The Jews, on the evidence of the Letter of Aristeas,¹ at first greeted the Septuagint with great enthusiasm, but the use made of it by Christianity tended to push them back to a renewed emphasis on the Hebrew original.

St. Jerome's Latin, or Vulgate, translation of the Bible, if it did not exactly establish a new text, certainly established a new perspective on the text; and the Vulgate, in Western Europe, was the Bible for a thousand years. The revival of Greek and Hebrew studies at the end of the Middle Ages coincided with the Reformation and the issue of vernacular translations, of which the German and English were the most important from a literary and cultural point of view. From the first Pentecost, when, according to Acts 2, a “gift of tongues” descended on the original disciples, down to the missionary societies of the nineteenth century, with their ideal of eventually translating the Bible into every language spoken, the emphasis on translation has been consistent. Sometimes this activity has created written languages where there were none before, with new alphabets devised for the purpose.

Yet everyone concerned with language is aware of the extent to which reading a translation is a settling for the second best. This is particularly true of major poetry, where translation has to be a miracle of tact, and even then does not claim to replace its original. On the other hand, abstracts of articles in scientific or mathematical journals can easily be translated or even read in the original by those with limited command of the language, because there is a third underlying language of subject matter which is international. The Bible, however, seems much closer to the poetic area than to the scientific-journal area. Clearly, then, one of our first problems is to determine the positive reality of translation, the essential thing or force or process that translation translates.

This question normally starts with a rough-and-ready distinction between sound and sense. The sound-associations within a language cannot usually be translated adequately, although they are of immense importance in building up linguistic responses. This fact has nothing to do with whether philology recognizes the associations as genuine within its own area. The assonances between words of similar reference (e.g., “God” and “good” in English), the standard rhymes, the words of multiple meanings that allow for puns, are all accidents, or, as philologists like to say, “pure” coincidences; yet they make up a texture that enters into the mental processes of all native speakers of the language, whether they are writers or not. Such a texture, extending as it does to a dense mass of idioms that can often be translated only by a complete rephrasing of the original, helps to make language one of the most fragmented of all human phenomena.

What can be translated, we assume, is that particular relation between different signifiers to a common signified that is known as “sense.” To use a convenient French distinction:² there is, in addition to the langue that separates English and French and German, also a langage that makes it possible to express similar things in all three languages. This is true even of poetry or drama. If we enter a Chinese or Japanese theater we are instantly aware, even if we know nothing of the language, that a dramatic experience recognizably like those we are familiar with is being presented. If we take the next step and learn something of the language, we discover that, for all the difference in linguistic and cultural reference, there is still a common sense that can, up to a point, be translated. It is not necessary to invoke any more subtle entities, such as Jung's collective unconscious, to explain the fact that human creative expression all over the world has some degree of mutual intelligibility and communicating power. We note further that Luther's German Bible, and the sequence of English Bibles culminating in the AV [Authorized Version], were powerful generators of imagery, narrative, allusion, and other forms of verbal articulateness in their cultures; the same could be said of many Classical and other translations. What we call langage, then, is a very positive linguistic force. One wonders whether it is substantial enough for there to be such a thing as a history of langage, a sequence of modes of more or less translatable structures in words, cutting across the variety of langues employed, affected and conditioned but not wholly determined by them. Such a possibility, if it could become anything more than that, would provide a historical context for the Bible of a type that I do not think has yet been examined.

This question took me to Vico,³ the first person in the modern world to think seriously about such matters. According to Vico, there are three ages in a cycle of history: a mythical age, or age of gods; a heroic age, or age of an aristocracy; and an age of the people, after which there comes a ricorso or return that starts the whole process over again. Each age produces its own kind of langage, giving us three types of verbal expression that Vico calls, respectively, the poetic, the heroic or noble, and the vulgar, and which I shall call the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic. These terms refer primarily to three modes of writing, because Vico believed that men communicated by signs before they could talk. The hieroglyphic phase, for Vico, is a “poetic” use of language; the hieratic phase is mainly allegorical; and the demotic phase is descriptive. Vico's three terms, apart from their identification with writing, are extremely suggestive as providing a starting point for thinking about the place of the Bible in the history of language as langage, though in what finally emerged for me very little of Vico was left. The sequence of literary modes in my Anatomy of Criticism is much closer to Vico, but that relates to a different set of phenomena, as I shall try to show.

I think we can see in most Greek literature before Plato, more especially in Homer, in the pre-Biblical cultures of the Near East, and in much of the Old Testament itself, a conception of language that is poetic and “hieroglyphic,” not in the sense of sign-writing, but in the sense of using words as particular kinds of signs. In this period there is relatively little emphasis on a clear separation of subject and object: the emphasis falls rather on the feeling that subject and object are linked by a common power or energy. Many “primitive” societies have words expressing this common energy of human personality and natural environment, which are untranslatable into our normal categories of thought but are very pervasive in theirs: the best known is the Melanesian word mana. The articulating of words may bring this common power into being; hence a magic develops in which verbal elements, “spell,” and “charm,” and the like, play a central role. A corollary of this principle is that there may be a potential magic in any use of words. Words in such a context are words of power or dynamic forces.

Thus knowing the name of a god or elemental spirit may give the knower some control over it; puns and popular etymologies involved in the naming of people and places affect the character of whatever thing or person is given the name. Warriors begin battles with boasts that may be words of power for them: boasting is most objectionable to the gods for a corresponding reason: the possibility of man's acquiring through his words the power that he clearly wants. The vow that cannot be broken, including the rash vows that begin so many folktales, as in Jephthah's “I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back” (Judges 11:35), again expresses the sense of quasi-physical power released by the utterance of words. When a sacrosanct myth is read at a religious ritual, as, say, the Babylonian creation myth Enuma elish⁴ was read at the New Year, some kind of magical energy is clearly being released. It would perhaps be overconceptualizing to say that it was thought to encourage the natural cycle to keep turning for another year; but where the subject and the object are not clearly separated, and there are forms of energy common to both, a controlled and articulated expression of words may have repercussions in the natural order.

All words in this phase of language are concrete: there are no true verbal abstractions. Onians' monumental study of Homer's vocabulary, Origins of European Thought,⁵ shows how intensely physical are such conceptions as soul, mind, time, courage, emotion, or thought, in the Homeric poems. They are solidly anchored in physical images connected with bodily processes or with specific objects. Similarly the word kairos, which came to mean a crucial moment in time, originally meant the notch of an arrow. What this means from the critical point of view is that while Homer's conceptions would not have been metaphorical to him (when he uses a figure of speech it is usually a simile), they have to be metaphorical to us. As we think of words, it is only metaphor that can express in language the sense of an energy common to subject and object. The central expression of metaphor is the “god,” the being who, as sun-god, war-god, sea-god, or whatever, identifies a form of personality with an aspect of nature.

The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity. Prose in this phase is discontinuous, a series of gnarled epigrammatic and oracular statements that are not to be argued about but must be accepted and pondered, their power absorbed by a disciple or reader. Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus or Pythagoras seem to have been essentially oral teachers or gurus; and what has survived from them consists mainly of discontinuous aphorisms with a cosmological reference, like the “all things flow” of Heraclitus. We shall return to this feature of discontinuity at the end of the book.

With Plato we enter a different phase of language, one that is “hieratic,” partly in the sense of being produced by an intellectual elite. I am speaking here not of ordinary language but of the culturally ascendant language, a language that, at the time or later, is accorded a special authority by its society. In this second phase language is more individualized, and words become primarily the outward expression of inner thoughts or ideas. Subject and object are becoming more consistently separated, and “reflection,” with its overtones of looking into a mirror, moves into the verbal foreground. The intellectual operations of the mind become distinguishable from the emotional operations; hence abstraction becomes possible, and the sense that there are valid and invalid ways of thinking, a sense which is to a degree independent of our feelings, develops into the conception of logic. What Homeric heroes revolve in their bosoms is an inseparable mixture of thought and feeling; what Socrates demonstrates, more especially in his death, is the superior penetration of thought when it is in command of feeling.

The basis of expression here is moving from the metaphorical, with its sense of identity of life or power or energy between man and nature (“this is that”), to a relationship that is rather metonymic (“this is put for that”). Specifically, words are “put for” thoughts, and are the outward expressions of an inner reality. But this reality is not merely “inside.” Thoughts indicate the existence of a transcendent order “above,” which only thinking can communicate with and which only words can express. Thus metonymic language is, or tends to become, analogical language, a verbal imitation of a reality beyond itself that can be conveyed most directly by words.

The basis of Plato's use of language is the teaching method of Socrates; and Socrates, unlike his predecessors in Greek philosophy, professed not to know anything but only to be looking for something. His celebrated “irony” was a momentous step in transforming the use of language: it implied renouncing the personal possession of wisdom in favor of an ability to observe it. Wisdom so observed emerges from a dialogue or group discussion, typically the symposium, but, with Socrates usually acting as a guide, it seems to take on a direction and purpose of its own, and eventually enters its real home, a world of ideas, where it can be followed only by the intellectual soul within the body of the seeker. Plato is a very great literary artist, but his greatness has much to do with the break that he made from typically literary forms of expression. The first phase of language, being founded on the metaphor, is inherently, as Vico says, “poetic”; the second phase, which is Plato's, retreats from the poetic into the dialectical, a world of thought separate from and in some respects superior to the physical world of nature.

Socrates does not, like Heraclitus, utter discontinuous aphorisms to be pondered and assimilated, though he quotes one or two from oracles, but orders his discussion in a sequacious argument. The argument, like the argument of the epic in a different way, starts in the middle and moves both backward and forward: backward to definitions of the terms used, forward to the consequences and implications of adopting these definitions. Eric Havelock, in A Preface to Plato,⁶ associates the Platonic revolution in language with the development of writing, which was originally confined mainly to commercial transactions but was now extending itself into culturally ascendant areas. For my purposes, however, it will be more useful to associate the Platonic revolution with the development of continuous prose. Continuous prose, though often regarded, with Molière's Jourdain, as the language of ordinary speech, is a late and far from “natural” stylistic development, and is much less direct and primitive than verse, which invariably precedes it in the history of literature. The language of ordinary speech, as I have tried to show elsewhere, has a loose associative rhythm quite different from actual prose.

Plato's interest in mathematics is consistent with his use of language, for there are obvious metonymic features in mathematics. In Euclidean geometry, for example, the drawn line, which necessarily has some breadth, is “put for” the ideal or conceptual line that is length without breadth; similarly with the conception of abstract number apart from a number of things. One feels that some of the pre-Socratics and atomic philosophers, such as Anaxagoras or Democritus, were moving more directly from metaphor toward what we should think of as science, from gods to the operations of nature, and that Plato turns away from this direction, toward a transcendent world rather than an objective one. The Timaeus seems to be involved primarily with the degree to which nature conforms to conceptual models, and in the Phaedo this sense of aesthetic conformity seems to be linked to matters of faith. But what may seem in hindsight to be a retrograde tendency may be less so in the perspective we are trying to attain here.

In Raphael's School of Athens Plato points to heaven and Aristotle to the earth, but as far as his main historical influence goes Aristotle points straight ahead. He worked out the organon of a deductive logic based on a theory of multiple causation, and provided a technique for arranging words to make a conquering march across reality, subjects pursuing objects through all the obstacles of predicates, as the Macedonian phalanxes of his pupil Alexander marched across Asia. But it was a long time before his techniques could really be absorbed by later thinkers. In the later Classical period Plato's sense of a superior order that only language, in both its verbal and mathematical forms, can approach merges with the conception generally identified as logos. This is a conception of a unity of consciousness or reason, suggested by the fact that properly constructed verbal sequences seem to have an inherent power of compelling assent. In Stoicism, and in Christianity in a different way from the beginning, the conception of logos acquires both a religious and a political dimension: it is seen as a possible means of uniting human society both spiritually and temporally.

In metaphorical language the central conception which unifies human thought and imagination is the conception of a plurality of gods, or embodiments of the identity of personality and nature. In metonymic language this unifying conception becomes a monotheistic “God,” a transcendent reality or perfect being that all verbal analogy points to. Such conceptions as the Form of the Good in Plato or the Unmoved Mover in Aristotle are not difficult to absorb into this idea of God, but the Zeus of Homer is more recalcitrant. A monotheism in which one god is supreme over all other gods exists in a different linguistic context from a monotheism in which “other gods” do not and cannot exist at all, at least as fully divine beings. In Homer, however, there is sometimes the suggestion that Zeus is not merely the king of gods but contains all the other gods, as in the passage in the Iliad (viii) where he tells the squabbling subordinate deities that he holds heaven and earth, including them, on a gigantic chain that he can at any time pull up into himself. This form of metaphor, which unites the group and the individual, will be of great importance in our argument later, and the passage is also a portent of the great metonymic conception of the chain of being,⁷ of which also more later. In any case the word “God,” however great its number of referents, is practically a linguistic requisite for metonymic thinking. There is no point in making analogical constructs out of words unless we have something to relate the analogy to.

As Christian theology gained cultural ascendancy, thought began to take on a deductive shape in which everything followed from the perfection of God, because of the need for irrefutable premises. In this process certain tensions were bound to arise with the more metaphorical constructs of earlier ages, when metonymic thinkers were compelled to take them seriously. The tension expresses itself in a moralizing and rationalizing approach to them: if God says or does A, then he cannot also say or do B, if B is inconsistent with A. There are some tendencies in this direction within the Bible itself: compare, for example, II Samuel 24:1 and I Chronicles 21:1. Paganism had similar difficulties, and the metaphorical element in “indecent” or morally paradoxical stories about the gods, found in Homer and elsewhere, had to be deconstructed and assimilated to other linguistic procedures. This was normally done through allegory, which is a special form of analogy, a technique of paralleling metaphorical with conceptual language in which the latter has the primary authority. Allegory smooths out the discrepancies in a metaphorical structure by making it conform to a conceptual standard.

What makes this possible is the development of continuous prose, the main instrument of thought in the metonymic period. In continuous prose, if A and B seem to be inconsistent, one can always insert intermediary verbal formulas, or rephrase them in a commentary, in a way that will “reconcile” them: if only we write enough of such intermediate sentences, any statement whatever can eventually be reconciled with any other statement. Commentary thus becomes one of the leading metonymic genres, and the traditional metaphorical images are used as illustrations of a conceptual argument.

In Christian theology the principle of analogy can readily be invoked without recourse to allegory. In the Summa contra Gentiles (I, 96) we read “That God hates nothing.” In St. Thomas's metonymic context, such a proposition is practically self-evident: no perfect being could hate anyone or anything without ceasing to be a perfect being. Faced with the list of things in the far more metaphorical Bible that God is explicitly said to hate, St. Thomas has to fall back on the general principle of analogy. What is interesting here is that when a metaphorical tradition conflicts with the metonymic need for conceptual and moral models, it is the tradition that has to give way.

Again, the AV represents Jesus as saying to Nicodemus in John 3:8, “The wind bloweth where it listeth … so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.” This is a metonymic translation: “Spirit” is a conception, identified with the Holy Spirit of Christian doctrine, and “wind” is a concrete illustration of it. But in the Greek text the same word, pneuma, is used for both wind and spirit. Hence a purely metaphorical translation is also possible: “The wind blows where it likes … that's what everyone is like who is born of the wind.” We may find this rendering a trifle unsettling, and so, apparently, did Nicodemus, who heard only the word pneuma. But the example shows how deeply the history of language, and of thought in relation to language, is involved in translation.

We spoke of a verbal magic in the metaphorical phase, arising from a sense of an energy common to words and things, though embodied and controlled in words. In the metonymic phase this sense of verbal magic is sublimated into a quasi-magic inherent in sequence or linear ordering. Hence the medieval fascination with the syllogism and the great medieval dream of deducing all knowledge from the premises of revelation. Later we have the “I think, therefore I am” of Descartes, where the operative word is “therefore,” because before we can accept the proposition we must accept the cogency and reality of therefores. The Cartesian formula is close to being a restatement of the old ontological argument for God, which is reducible to “I think, therefore God exists.” Beliefs of this period that may seem to us perverse—about, for example, predestination or the divine right of kings—may be stubbornly clung to because of the strength of the feeling: if you accept this, then you must, etc. During the Christian centuries, too, the fear of “heresy,” or logical deviation from Christian premises, amounted to what was perhaps the deadliest social psychosis in history.

Analogical language thus came to be thought of as sacramental language, a verbal response to God's own verbal revelation. Some form of analogy was essential, otherwise there would be no reality that human language is “put for,” and no one would maintain that human language was fully adequate to conveying such a reality. The other extreme, represented by the tradition that runs through the pseudo-Dionysius, Erigena, and Eckhart, emphasized the inadequacies of analogy. For some of them no word, such as “Being,” is strictly applicable to God, because words are finite and God is not: the real God is “hidden,”⁸ beyond all thought, and a fortiori beyond words. This tendency in thought seems to point in the direction of a non-verbal mysticism, like that of some Oriental religions, notably Tao and Zen, and was also regarded as dangerous.

The rise of a new European culture on the ruins of Roman power, during the early Christian centuries, saw something of a Viconian ricorso in literature. This was mainly because the new vernacular languages, bringing in the new poetic features of rhyme, alliteration, and heavy accentual rhythm, were making themselves felt. When Latin continued as the poetic medium, it was forced into vernacular-dominated patterns very unlike those of Classical Latin. But in the culturally ascendant forms of writing, particularly philosophy and theology, there is no ricorso, but a continuity of metonymic and dialectical language. Its transcendental perspective remained a cultural and political necessity for preserving authority, even after the Renaissance and Reformation. Hence the metonymic phase of language retained a great deal of cultural ascendancy down to the time of Kant and Hegel, after which it became increasingly specialized and academic. One of its culminating points is the metonymic universe of Kant, where the phenomenal world is “put for” the world of things in themselves.

It was much earlier, however, that a third phase of language had begun to develop out of a dissatisfaction with certain elements in second-phase language, two in particular. Syllogistic reasoning, it was felt, led to nothing genuinely new, because its conclusions were already contained within its premises, and so its march across reality seemed increasingly to be a verbal illusion. Then again, an analogical approach to language appeared to have no criteria for distinguishing existents from non-existents. Grammatically, logically, and syntactically, there is no difference between a lion and a unicorn: the question of actual existence does not enter the ordering of words as such. And if it does not, there can be no real difference between reasoning and rationalizing, as both procedures order words in the same way. The difference can be established only by criteria external to words, and the first of these criteria has to be that of “things,” or objects in nature.

This third phase of language begins roughly in the sixteenth century, where it accompanies certain tendencies in the Renaissance and Reformation, and attains cultural ascendancy in the eighteenth. In English literature it begins theoretically with Francis Bacon, and effectively with Locke. Here we start with a clear separation of subject and object, in which the subject exposes itself, in sense experience, to the impact of an objective world. The objective world is the order of nature; thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection. Continuous prose is still employed, but all deductive procedures are increasingly subordinated to a primary inductive and fact-gathering process. The seventeenth-century poet Cowley,⁹ hailing Bacon as the Moses who had led modern thought out of the Egypt of superstition, says:

From words, which are but pictures of the thought,
(Though we our thoughts from them perversely drew)
To things, the mind's right object, he it brought.

Hence this approach treats language as primarily descriptive of an objective natural order. The ideal to be achieved by words is framed on the model of truth by correspondence. A verbal structure is set up beside what it describes, and is called “true” if it seems to provide a satisfactory correspondence to it. The criterion of truth is related to the external source of the description rather than to the inner consistency of the argument. Its controlling figure, then, is a kind of simile: a true verbal structure is one that is like what it describes. In this phase we return to a direct relation between the order of nature and the order of words, as in the metaphorical phase, but with a sharp and consistent distinction between the two. This involves a reaction against the transcendental perspective of the second phase, and extreme forms¹⁰ of third-phase thinking demonstrate the “impossibility of metaphysics,” or declare that all religious questions are unmeaning.

The descriptive phase of language corresponds to Vico's “vulgar” or demotic, which implies that it is close to what had always been accessible and extensively used, but used more particularly in the ordinary language that does not become culturally ascendant. A Sumerian or Egyptian of 3000 b.c., if he were ordering stone for a building, or dickering with his in-laws about the finances of his marriage, or assessing the amount of tax owed by a farmer, would doubtless use much the same demotic categories of true and false, reasonable and fanciful, that we should use now. And in Aristotle, to give one very obvious example, observation continually intertwines with and supplements deductive logic. The central principle of Locke, that nothing exists in the intellect that has not previously existed in the senses, had been an established axiom for many centuries before him. But considerable social changes have to take place before this use of language becomes culturally dominant, and separable from other modes.

One of these changes is the growth of science on a basis of inductive observation. Science assumes two levels of sense perception: a particular accidental level that is largely illusion, and an ideal level that is our real source of knowledge. The notion that the earth is flat, fixed, and at the center of the universe is an illusion of accident. Educated people had known for centuries before Columbus that the earth must be a sphere, but the fact did not become “demotic,” or penetrate the popular consciousness, until the circumnavigations began, which suggested a more comprehensive form of sense perception. The rational arguments that finally convinced people that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way were formulated long before astronauts and spaceships. Nevertheless such arguments contained an implicit appeal to a possible ideal sense perception: if we were in the right place to do so, we could see a spherical earth revolving around the sun. The two questions: What is really there? and What are we really seeing? thus tend to become the same “phenomenological” question.

The problem of illusion and reality therefore becomes a central one in third-phase language. Copernicus is the great symbol for a new realization that such words as “sunrise” and “sunset,” though metaphorically efficient, had become “only” metaphors, and that, so far as they were descriptive, what they described was illusory. Darwin is the great symbol for a new realization that divine creation, as generally conceived, was an illusion projected from the evolutionary operations within nature. Einstein is the great symbol for a new realization that matter, which up to the twentieth century had been the great bastion of the objectivity of the world, was an illusion of energy. With this, however, the sense of the clear separation of subject and object, which was so marked a feature of the scientific attitude up to that point, overreached itself and began to come to an end. It was no longer possible to separate the observer from what he observes: the observer had to become an observed object too.

The thought suggests itself that we may have completed a gigantic cycle of language from Homer's time, where the word evokes the thing, to our own day, where the thing evokes the word, and are now about to go around the cycle again, as we seem now to be confronted once again with an energy common to subject and object which can be expressed verbally only through some form of metaphor. It is true that many metaphorical elements are reappearing in our language, but it is rather the positive aspect of the same process—that we may be entering a new phase altogether in our understanding of language—that has to be kept in mind. Certainly it is interesting and rather reassuring that there should be so heavy an emphasis on language and linguistic models in contemporary thought, apart from whatever embodies the emphasis.

It is primarily to Roman Jakobson¹¹ that we owe the distinction between the metaphorical and the metonymic, and I apologize for adding one more ingredient to what very quickly became a considerably overspiced stew. It seems to me that there are three major senses in which the word “metonymic” can be used. First, it is a figure of speech in which an image is “put for” another image: this is really a species of metaphor. Second, it is a mode of analogical thinking and writing in which the verbal expression is “put for” something that by definition transcends adequate verbal expression: this is roughly the sense in which I use it. Third, it is a mode of thought and speech in which the word is “put for” the object it describes: this corresponds more or less to my “descriptive” phase. There are no rights and wrongs in such matters, but it seems to me useful to separate both the language of immanence, which is founded on metaphor, and the language of transcendence, which is founded on metonymy in my sense, from descriptive language.

In the first, or metaphorical, phase of language, the unifying element of verbal expression is the “god,” or personal nature-spirit. In the second phase the conception of a transcendent “God” moves into the center of the order of words. In the third phase the criterion of reality is the source of sense experience in the order of nature, where “God” is not to be found, and where “gods” are no longer believed in. Hence for the third phase of language the word “God” becomes linguistically unfunctional, except when confined to special areas outside its jurisdiction. Mythological space became separated from scientific space with the new astronomy of the seventeenth century, and mythological time from scientific time with nineteenth-century geology and biology. Both developments helped to push the conception of God out of the world of time and space, even as a hypothesis. The charge of “God-building” is a most damaging one to a third-phase writer, and the subject that used to be called natural theology does not now make much cultural impact, with the remarkable exception of Teilhard de Chardin.¹²

In the nineteenth century there were many thinkers, mainly of the idealistic school, who adhered to the metonymic tradition with its God. But some even of them give an impression of having said to themselves: Here's this word “God”; what am I to do with it? What they did was often ingenious, but frequently confirmed the feeling that the conception of God, like Biblical metaphors in metonymic theology, was becoming, however unconsciously, a cumbersome piece of traditional baggage. In a conception of language where no premises are beyond scrutiny, there is nothing to stop anyone from returning to square one and the question: Is there a God? What is significant about this is that the answer, if it is to remain within the framework of third-phase language, can only be no, because any question beginning with “is there” is, so to speak, already an ungodly question, and “a god” is for all practical purposes no God. Nietzsche's formula “God is dead,” despite the amount of attention it has attracted, was incidental to his more important aim of de-deifying the natural environment, and in particular of removing the metaphor of “law” from ordinary consciousness to describe the operations of nature. There are no laws in nature, Nietzsche says,¹³ only necessities; but the metaphor “law of nature” carries with it a vestigial sense of a personality who commands and other personalities (ourselves) who have the option of obeying or disobeying; and this vestigial metaphor, for Nietzsche, is a superstition in the most exact sense of an inorganic survival of tradition.

The political and psychological aspects of third-phase writing led to similar positions. One of the earliest of third-phase writers, Machiavelli, attempted to distinguish and isolate the tactical use of illusion in the art of ruling. For Rousseau civilization was largely an illusion concealing a society of nature and reason; for Marx the whole second-phase approach to language had become an ideology, or façade of ascendant-class authority; for Freud the language of consciousness was largely a screen concealing other motives for speech. To conservative thinkers, including Burke, the façade of authority in society revealed the real structure of that society. There is no social contract, Burke maintained,¹⁴ except the contract that a society shows it has accepted by its structure. A radical opponent of Burke, such as Paine, would think rather of the façade of authority as concealing its real structure, and would regard the difference between his attitude and Burke's as precisely the difference between a rational attitude and a rationalizing one. And while religious issues are not directly involved here, it is clear that the rational attitude would regard “God” as a symbol of traditional authority, or, as Blake says, the ghost of the priest and king.

What I am concerned with at present is not the question whether God is dead or obsolete, but with the question of what resources of language may be dead or obsolete. The metaphorical and metonymic phases of language have been in large measure outgrown because of the obvious limitations that they imposed on the human mind. But it seems clear that the descriptive phase also has limitations, in a world where its distinction of subject and object so often does not work. There is no question of giving up descriptive language, only of relating it to a broader spectrum of verbal expression. The word “God” is a noun, and so falls into the category of things and objects. For metonymic writing this is not an insuperable problem: what is beyond all things and objects can still be a noun, or at any rate have a name. For most writers of the second phase, God represents an immutable being, set over against the dissolving flow of the world of becoming in which we are; and practically the only grammatical device for conveying this sense of the immutable is the abstract noun. For third-phase writing, founded as it is on a sense-apprehended distinction between objects that are there and objects that are not, “God” can go only into the illusory class. But perhaps this kind of noun-thinking is, at least here, a fallacy of the type that Whitehead calls a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

In Exodus 3:14, though God also gives himself a name, he defines himself (according to the AV) as “I am that I am,” which scholars say is more accurately rendered “I will be what I will be.” That is, we might come closer to what is meant in the Bible by the word “God” if we understood it as a verb, and not a verb of simple asserted existence but a verb implying a process accomplishing itself. This would involve trying to think our way back to a conception of language in which words were words of power, conveying primarily the sense of forces and energies rather than analogues of physical bodies. To some extent this would be a reversion to the metaphorical language of primitive communities, as our earlier references to a cycle of language and the “primitive” word mana suggested. But it would also be oddly contemporary with post-Einsteinian physics, where atoms and electrons are no longer thought of as things but rather as traces of processes. God may have lost his function as the subject or object of a predicate, but may not be so much dead as entombed in a dead language.

The Biblical terms usually rendered “word,” including the logos of the Gospel of John, are solidly rooted in the metaphorical phase of language, where the word was an element of creative power. According to Genesis 1:4, “God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” That is, the word was the creative agent that brought the thing into being. This is usually thought of as characteristically Hebrew in approach, although in Heraclitus the term logos is also essentially metaphorical, and still expresses a unity of human consciousness and physical phenomena. In the metonymic phase logos takes on rather the meaning of an analogical use of words to convey the sense of a rational order. This order is thought of as antecedent to both consciousness and nature. Philo¹⁵ and the author of John combine the two traditions, and John's “In the beginning was the logos” is a New Testament commentary on the opening of Genesis, identifying the original creative word with Christ.

Erasmus,¹⁶ in the Latin translation appended to his edition of the Greek New Testament, renders “In the beginning was the Word” as “In principio erat sermo.” This is a purely metonymic translation: in the beginning, Erasmus assumes, was the infinite mind, with its interlocking thoughts and ideas out of which the creative words emerged. Erasmus is clearly more influenced than Jerome by the later Greek history of the word. It would be cheap parody to say that Erasmus really means “In the beginning was continuous prose,” but the link between his “sermo” and the development of continuous prose is there nonetheless. At the beginning of the third phase we have Goethe's Faust,¹⁷ who claims to have studied theology but seems not to understand it very well, struggling with the same phrase. He rejects “das Wort,” and traverses the whole cycle of language as outlined above, passing through the second-phase “der Sinn,” and emerging finally with “die That,” the event or existential reality that words describe at secondhand. At that point Faust begins to fall into the power of Mephistopheles, the spirit of denial. What significance this has I am not sure, except that while it is not easy to translate “In the beginning was the Word,” there seems to be no future in deliberately mistranslating it. Still, Faust makes us realize how completely we have lost the metaphorical clue to what John means by logos. For John goes on to say “And the logos became flesh.” Evidently he thought of this as an intelligible statement of the type “And the boy became a man,” or “And the ice became water.” But within a descriptive framework of language it can be only an unintelligible statement of the type “And the apple became an orange.” For descriptive language, the word has no power to be anything but a word.

Each of our three phases of language has a characteristic word for the human entity that uses the language. In the metaphorical phase, where the world is held together by a plurality of gods, there is often assumed to be a corresponding plurality of psychic forces that disintegrate or separate at death. Ancient Egypt had a ba and a ka and several other entities, besides the mummified body itself; Homer¹⁸ (or a later editor) speaks of Hercules as existing after death simultaneously as a god in Olympus and a shade in Hades. Even Aristotle's De Anima describes a complex soul. But the nearest to the purely metaphorical conception is perhaps the word “spirit,” which, with its overtones of “breath,” expresses the unifying principle of life that gives man a participating energy with nature.

In proportion as metonymic thinking and its monotheistic God developed, man came to be thought of as a single “soul” and a body, related by the metaphor of “in.” Human consciousness feels that it is inside a body it knows next to nothing about, even such elementary facts as the circulation of the blood being relatively recent discoveries. Hence it cannot feel that the body is identical with consciousness: the body is born of nature and will return to nature, but the soul belongs to the transcendent world and will return to that world. The figures employed to describe their relation include a body in a tomb, a prisoner in a cell, a peasant in a decaying cottage, a bird in a cage, and the like. The separation of body and soul at death is thought of as a vertical one, the soul going “up” and the body “down.”

In the third phase the conception associated with consciousness modulates from “soul” to “mind,” and the relation with the bodily world of nature, including one's own body, becomes more horizontal. By this time the “mind” has become firmly located in the head, and consciousness is in fact often thought of as a function of the brain. The idealistic philosophers of the last century mentioned above sometimes transferred the older arguments for the immortality of the soul to the mind, but the immortality of the mind does not seem so obvious as that of the soul, mainly because the vertical and transcendent associations of “soul” are not built into the word. From Freud's time on we have tended to revert to the original metaphorical or pluralistic view of consciousness, and to think of the “psyche” as a bundle of distinguishable and often conflicting forces.

All the languages relevant to the Bible distinguish between soul and spirit: Hebrew has nephesh and ruach, Greek psyche and pneuma, Latin anima and spiritus; and there are similar distinctions in modern languages. No one would claim that there was a consistent use of either word in the Bible, but neither would anyone speak of the third person of the Trinity as the Holy Soul, and Paul's prayer for his correspondent's “spirit and soul and body” (I Thessalonians 5:23) suggests that the difference between soul and spirit means something. Jesus' resurrection was a bodily one, and Paul explains (I Corinthians 15:44) that what enters the resurrection is not the soul or abstract essence of the body but a “spiritual body.” This spiritual body is contrasted with the natural body, or “flesh and blood,” but the phrase still suggests that immortality must include the body, in however transfigured a form, as it did in Jesus' resurrection. Here again the New Testament adheres to older metaphorical modes of thought rather than to the more up-to-date and rational Greek ones.

Christianity placed the doctrine of the resurrection of the body in its creed, though the addition seems historically to have had little effect on the soul-body dichotomy. The people Dante¹⁹ meets in his visions of hell and purgatory and heaven are souls of the dead: at the Last Judgment, we are told, they go back to pick up their bodies, but what change that will make is very little emphasized, except that clearly it will make hell hurt a lot more. The term “spirit” seems to belong properly only to the Holy Spirit and, in a different context, to the angels: for man, and for discarnate beings like elemental “spirits,” it seems to be a mere doublet of “soul.” Yet Paul, again (I Corinthians 2:14), contrasts the pneumatikos or spiritual with the psychikos, the soul-body. The AV renders this latter term as the “natural” man: the difficulty in translation is that there is no English adjective related to “soul” corresponding to “spiritual.” But Paul seems to be drawing the essential line between spirit and soul, not between soul and body.

Each phase of language has its characteristic virtues as well as its limitations. In the first phase, language can be used with an immediacy and vitality, such as we find in Homer, that later ages never consistently recapture. Yet this use of language is restricted by an identity with nature from which metonymic dialectic has freed itself. The crossing of the bridge from “gods” to “God,” which has already taken place in the Bible, is felt as a release from the tyranny of nature. The limitations of metonymic language, in its turn, have already been mentioned. Descriptive language, and the development of science that has accompanied it, have helped to reveal to us a richness and variety in the objective world far beyond even the imaginations of those who lived before it. Yet there is a curious restiveness about this kind of revelation, some feeling of what Blake²⁰ calls “the same dull round, even of a universe.” What is dull is not the universe but the mental operations prescribed for us in observing it. In bookshops we often find ourselves looking at rows of books about reincarnation, telepathy, astrology, out-of-body flights, unidentified flying objects, revelations through dreams, and the like, which are usually described in the blurbs as utterly shattering to orthodox notions of science. It seems as though, whatever the validity of these interests in themselves, their attraction for the public begins in some sense of imaginative holiday, of getting away to other modes and possibilities of experience not permitted in our normal linguistic classrooms.

This sense of being confined to an objective order, and feeling a constraint in being so confined despite the infinite variety in the order, has been enshrined in the language for a long time. The bigger the objective world becomes, the smaller in range and significance the subjective world seems. The basis of authority in third-phase writing is the social consensus that the writer appeals to. Hence the modern use of language has been driven increasingly to define the objective reality of the world, on the assumption that “objective” means real, because it allows of such a consensus, and that “subjective” means unreal because it does not. The word “subject” in English means the observer of the objective, and it also has the political meaning of an individual subordinated to the authority of his society or its ruler, as in “British subject.” It is not really possible, however, to separate the two meanings. The “subject” is subjected to the objective world, and not only subjected but almost crushed under it, like Atlas. Perhaps something of this sense lurks also in that very curious word “understanding,” along with what the understanding stands under: that is, traditionally, “substance,” which sounds like another form of the same word. Demotic language, and to some extent its predecessor as well, seems to confine us to a level of reality that Paul (I Corinthians 13:12) very aptly compares to a riddle in a mirror.

But, in all this, what is not “objective”? As soon as we realize that observation is affected essentially by the observer, we have to incorporate that observer into the phenomena to be observed, and make him an object too. This fact has transformed the physical sciences, and of course the social sciences are based entirely on the sense of the need to observe the community of observers. That leaves us with nothing genuinely “subjective” except a structure of language, including as said mathematical language, which is the only thing left that can be distinguished from the objective world. Even that structure is objective to each student of it. People are “subjects,” then, not as people, but only to the extent that they form a community within a linguistic structure which records some observation of the objective. In this context the word “subject” incorporates its other meaning of what is treated by language, as when we speak of the subject of a book. These are puns, but puns can give useful clues to the way we relate words to experience. It is not a difficult step from here to the feeling, often expressed in contemporary criticism and philosophy, that it is really language that uses man, and not man that uses language. This does not mean that man is being taken over by one of his own inventions, as in science-fiction stories of malignant computers and self-reproducing robots. It means rather that man is a child of the word as well as a child of nature, and that, just as he is conditioned by nature and finds his conception of necessity in it, so the first thing he finds in the community of the word is the charter of his freedom.

We have so far not spoken of literature. The first phase of language, as Vico indicates, is inherently poetic: it is contemporary with a stage of society in which the main source of culturally inherited knowledge is the poet, as Homer was for Greek culture. It has been recognized from earliest times that the primary social function of the poet is connected with something very ancient and primitive in society and in society's use of words. The Elizabethan critics,²¹ for example, tell us that in pre-Homeric times, the days of the legendary Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus, the poet was the repository of all wisdom and knowledge, the teacher, or, in Shelley's phrase about a later era of history, the “unacknowledged legislator,” of his society. There were technical reasons for this: verse, with its formulaic sound-schemes, is the easiest vehicle for an oral culture in which memory, or the keeping alive of tradition, is of primary importance. As the critics of the god Thoth,²² the inventor of writing, remark in Plato's Phaedrus, the ability to record has a lot more to do with forgetting than with remembering: with keeping the past in the past, instead of continuously recreating it in the present.

Poets and critics of English literature began to revive the sense of affinity between the poetic and the primitive in the later half of the eighteenth century, and in the Romantic period Peacock, in a paradoxical essay, Four Ages of Poetry, remarked that poetry originated in the flattery of barbarian conquerors. In proportion as civilization had developed, Peacock suggested, poetry had fallen behind, an increasingly atavistic survival. Shelley's reply to Peacock, A Defence of Poetry, was not a refutation but an attempt to express the positive side of Peacock's thesis, reversing the fallacy that Peacock pretended to take seriously: the naïve belief in progress which identifies the primitive with the outmoded. This issue, familiar to students of literature, I refer to here for two reasons. One is that the same issue will turn up in the next chapter in connection with myth; the other is that it illustrates the present stage in our argument: that it is the primary function of literature, more particularly of poetry, to keep re-creating the first or metaphorical phase of language during the domination of the later phases, to keep presenting it to us as a mode of language that we must never be allowed to underestimate, much less lose sight of.

We remarked that Homer's language is metaphorical to us, if not necessarily to him. In his poetry the distinction between figured and literal language hardly exists, apart from the special rhetorical showcase of the epic simile already mentioned. With the second phase, metaphor becomes one of the recognized figures of speech; but it is not until the coming of a different conception of language that a tension arises between figurative and what is called “literal” meaning, and poetry begins to become a conscious and deliberate use of figures. In the third phase this tension is often very sharp. A demotic descriptive writer will tend to avoid as many figures of speech as he can, on the ground that they are “merely verbal” and interfere with the transparency of description. Similarly, we speak of metaphors as being “just” or “only” metaphors when we become aware of other possible verbal formulations of what they convey, as with the “sunrise” and “sunset” mentioned above.

This last point is worth more emphasis. We suggested that demotic habits of language have always been with us, and it would be easy to assume that poetry, however ancient, is still a later development out of an original demotic speech. It is very difficult for many twentieth-century minds to believe that poetry is genuinely primitive, and not an artificial way of decorating and distorting ordinary “prose.” Take the opening of the great Psalm 19, with its superb second verse: “Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” The third verse reads, more or less: “No speech nor language; no voice is heard.” It has been suggested (I have no expertise in such matters) that this was originally a sniveling and puling gloss, stuck in by someone who was afraid, like so many of his kind, that some readers would be seduced into idolatry by reading great poetry about the sun's rising like a bridegroom. If so, the AV, by rendering the verse “There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard” has baffled his foolish intention and reversed his meaning, and has therefore translated the verse correctly. But the point goes deeper than this. It is not only that the real meaning is metaphorical and that any superstitious “literal” view of it would have seemed as absurd to the original writer as it does to us. We have to eradicate from our minds the notion of confused earlier anthropomorphic views out of which such metaphors have “developed.” The images are radically metaphorical: this is the only way in which language can convey the sense of the presence of a numinous personality in the world, and that is where we stop.

We notice that in Psalm 19 the Biblical God is to some degree being personated by a god, a sky-god or sun-god. This was presumably what was worrying our glossing editor, if he existed. However impressive the achievement of Christian poets, poets as a whole seem to find it easier to deal with “pagan” gods, because gods are, as explained, ready-made metaphors, and go into poetry with the minimum of adjustment. In, say, sixteenth-century painting or seventeenth-century opera, the preoccupation with Classical gods was a kind of easy-going imaginative game. With some nineteenth-century poets, notably Hölderlin, it becomes much more like a challenge to Christianity. We might express this by saying that in proportion as the God of Christianity began to look metaphorical, the metaphorical gods began to look like objects of worship again. In Blake the Classical and other gods are regarded as projections of aspects of the human imagination, and these he tries to portray, in their unprojected forms, as Orc and Urizen and the rest. In any case the Old Testament Jehovah, like Zeus, has figurative connections with the sky and the thunderbolt, along with associated social functions like the protection of strangers. In Psalm 18:10 he is said to use a “cherub” as a kind of private airplane. Such a figurative god is both God and not God, a metaphorical illustration used as an analogy.

If the first phase of langage is predominantly poetic, the next two are not; and naturally poets will try to adapt to the changed linguistic conditions. In the second phase, poetry normally does this by allegory, as in Dante, where a metaphorical narrative runs parallel with a conceptual one but defers to it. That is, in the metonymic period Dante as a mere poet, even though a very great one, would not be given the authority in religious matters that would be accorded theologians and other sources of the conceptual side of his allegory. In the third phase, literature adapts itself mainly through what is usually called realism, adopting categories of probability and plausibility as rhetorical devices. As a fairly extreme example, Zola wrote novels that have an obvious relation to sociology, novels in which, again, the sociological aspect by definition is a more direct rendering of “truth” than the fictional one. The fictional mode is adopted because it presents a unity to the imagination more intense than the documentary materials: an elementary point we must keep in mind for the Bible as well.

Poetry, then, keeps alive the metaphorical use of language and its habits of thinking in the identity relations suggested by the “this is that” structure of metaphor. In this process the original sense of magic, of the possible forces released by words of power, disappears. The poet's approach to language in itself is hypothetical: in free societies he is allowed to assume anything he likes, but what he says remains detached from faith, power, or truth, as we ordinarily understand those words, even when it expresses them. And yet the release of metaphorical language from magic into poetry is an immense emancipation of that language. Magic demands prescribed formulas that cannot be varied by a syllable, whereas novelty and uniqueness are essential to poetry. Poetry does not really lose its magical power thereby, but merely transfers it from an action on nature to an action on the reader or hearer.

If we ask what form of writing re-creates the second phase of langage in later periods, it is perhaps the kind of writing that is often called “existential.” I am not fond of the word, but I know of no other that conveys the sense of anchoring an interest in the transcendental in the seabed of human concern. The great systematic thinkers are all aware of the analogical nature of their language, but they throw the emphasis on the unifying of their thought. Unity, or rather unification, of language is for them the appropriate way of responding to a transcendental form of being. Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard differ from St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Hegel in stressing the negative aspect of analogy, in showing how experience in time eludes final or definitive unification in thought. “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” as Wallace Stevens says,²³ though the “facts” here are rather elements of experience.

We see the connection in Plato, for example, who in the Phaedo puts Socrates in the limit-situation of martyrdom, which takes place at the end of the dialogue. The quiet progression of Socrates' dialectic remains within a metonymic context, the sense that the argument is being “put for” a reality accessible to experience rather than to discussion. What I am saying, Socrates says, may not be precisely true, but something like this must be true. This is metonymic writing and thinking on its very highest level, where both sides of the analogy are given equal weight. It is a level sometimes reached also by Augustine, whose systematic presentations of doctrine are balanced against the emphasis on experience in the Confessions. In Kant also the two aspects of metonymy are balanced, though in a different way. God's existence disappears from the context of “pure reason,” where rational proofs are needed, but reappears in the context of “practical reason,” where reality in experience is what is appropriate.

Elsewhere there are sharper contrasts and tensions. Kierkegaard, though very Hegelian in his habit of mind, regards the element of synthesis in Hegel's thought as a fortress or prison; and Karl Barth,²⁴ a theologian contemporary with third-phase language, begins his dogmatic exposition by cutting down the great ridgepole of metonymic thought, the analogy of being (analogia entis). The issue seems, once more, to turn on the superiority of what Kierkegaard calls “ethical freedom” to the contemplative values afforded by a synthesis of thought. Most “existential” writing, at least in our day, carries on the transcendental perspective of religion and metaphysics in a phase of language profoundly unsympathetic to any separated realm of immutable being. A great deal of such writing is naturally not religious, but when it is not it is often explicitly antireligious, understanding the relevance of transcendental issues but renouncing them in favor of a greater human freedom. Thus we have two forms of writing descended from earlier periods of linguistic history, and these in their present form are submerged, so to speak, and have in consequence turned revolutionary. …

The origins of the Bible are in the first metaphorical phase of language, but much of the Bible is contemporary with the second-phase separation of the dialectical from the poetic, as its metonymic “God” in particular indicates. Its poetic use of language obviously does not confine it to the literary category, but it never falls wholly into the conventions of the second phase. There are no true rational arguments in the Bible, not even in the New Testament, which despite its late date keeps very close to the Old Testament in its attitude toward language. What may look like rational argument, such as the Epistle to the Hebrews, turns out on closer analysis to be a disguised form of exhortation. Nor is there much functional use of abstraction. Biblical Hebrew is an almost obsessively concrete language, and while there are a few abstract terms like “nature” in the New Testament, they hardly affect what is still a metaphorical structure. Still, the Bible fits rather awkwardly into our cycle of three phases, and we need another conception or two to account for it.

One of the verbal genres that are prominent throughout the second phase of language is rhetoric in the sense of oratory. Oratorical rhetoric is “hieratic” in the sense that it tries to draw its audience together in a closer unity, but is “hieroglyphic” in that it makes extensive use of figuration and devices usually associated with verse, such as antithesis and alliteration. Thus oratorical rhetoric, as we have it in the history of literature, represents a kind of transitional stage of language between first-phase metaphor and second-phase argument. Between Cicero and the Renaissance the orator became the symbol of an educational ideal of versatility and fluency in the use of language, which made the orator to some degree the successor of the poet in the earlier phase as the teacher of his society, the encyclopedic repository of its traditional knowledge. But the predominance of the oratorical ideal was still useful to poets, because the training of the orator was largely a training in the kind of rhetorical and figured language that poets also use. Hence oratory at its best is really a combination of metaphorical or poetic and “existential” idioms: it uses all the figures of speech, but within a context of concern and direct address that poetry as such does not employ.

From the beginning, philosophers and other students of language, including Plato and Aristotle,²⁵ have pointed to the immense force that oratorical rhetoric can exert either for good or for evil, depending on who is in charge of it. In the metonymic period it was assumed that “good” rhetoric was, as Aristotle put it, the antistrophos or answering chorus of dialectic, as in the sermon that expounded true doctrine or the courtroom defense that was on the side of justice. Poetry also was justified, in Sidney's Apology and elsewhere, on the same ground: poetry may support, by the peculiar resonance given it by its rhetorical structure, the truths of morality, persuading the emotions to follow their intellectual guidance. On this basis many confused arguments, trying to distinguish “good” and “bad” rhetoric within literature itself, have been made, asserting that some writers merely portray evil and that others are agents of it, and that censorship should be applied to the latter group. However well meaning, it is usually these arguments themselves that show the pernicious side of rhetoric, rather than what they discuss.

The rise of third-phase writing was signaled by the ideology of humanism, with its cult of plain sense and the use of ordinary language. A genuinely specialized subject cannot avoid technical language, but it is true that clarity and lucidity of style, where the author puts all his evidence before the reader, is a feature of the best and most honestly motivated third-phase writing. Serious writing that does not attempt these qualities generally falls into the existential or the literary category. In our day the appearance of oratorical rhetoric in a genuine form seems to be confined to very exceptional circumstances of social crisis, as in the Gettysburg Address of Lincoln or the 1940 speeches of Churchill. For the most part oratorical figures in our day are a feature of advertising and propaganda. Third-phase writing, we said, is centrally concerned with distinguishing reality from illusion: advertising and propaganda are designed deliberately to create an illusion, hence they constitute for us a kind of anti-language, especially in the speeches by so-called charismatic leaders that set up a form of mass hypnosis. When such oratory pretends to be, or thinks it is, rational, it adopts a highly characteristic shuffle derived from a desire to reach certain conclusions in advance, whatever the evidence suggests. There is a good deal of this kind of anti-language in religious writing also, where it takes the tone that Hegel²⁶ calls edifying, emotional resonance without content. There are also rhetorical features that express the author's social slant or bias: these can be very pervasive when the bias is unconscious.

The essential idiom of the Bible is clearly oratorical, a fact all the more necessary to recognize in an age where there is so well-founded a distrust of the wrong kind of rhetoric. The Bible is often thought to be the wrong kind too: a horrified pre-Revolutionary French lady is said to have remarked, “Quel effroyable ton!” on opening a Bible for the first time. On the other hand, the Bible has traditionally been assumed to be the rhetoric of God, accommodated to human intelligence and coming through human agents. In my diagram it appears chronologically prior to metaphorical language: it is not, and it is partly my own lack of ingenuity in such matters that so represents it. But it has been traditionally believed to come from a time out of time, so the arrangement is not too misleading from that point of view.

Oratory on the highest level of oracle, exhortation, kerygma, or whatever the most appropriate term is, has to be seen from both of its two aspects—metaphor and concern. In ordinary language we think of a real subject and a real object with a more tenuous interaction between them. In figurative language the reality of subject and object is what becomes tenuous, and the interaction comes into the foreground as the reality that identifies the two. In ordinary language, words are simply understood; in concerned address a much more comprehensive response from all aspects of the personality is called for.

The linguistic idiom of the Bible does not really coincide with any of our three phases of language, important as those phases have been in the history of its influence. It is not metaphorical like poetry, though it is full of metaphor, and is as poetic as it can well be without actually being a work of literature. It does not use the transcendental language of abstraction and analogy, and its use of objective and descriptive language is incidental throughout. It is really a fourth form of expression, for which I adopt the now well-established term kerygma, proclamation. In general usage this term is largely restricted to the Gospels, but there is not enough difference between the Gospels and the rest of the Bible in the use of language to avoid extending it to the entire book.

Kerygma is a mode of rhetoric, though it is rhetoric of a special kind. It is, like all rhetoric, a mixture of the metaphorical and the “existential” or concerned but, unlike practically all other forms of rhetoric, it is not an argument disguised by figuration. It is the vehicle of what is traditionally called revelation, a word I use because it is traditional and I can think of no better one. But if we take this word to mean the conveying of information from an objective divine source to a subjective human receptor, we are making it a form of descriptive writing. Perhaps that is not out of the question either, but it cannot be a simple form of descriptive writing, as in the populist view (as we might call it) which speaks of the Bible as literally true. The Bible is far too deeply rooted in all the resources of language for any simplistic approach to its language to be adequate. Then again, the word kerygma is associated mainly with the theology of Bultmann,²⁷ and in Bultmann's view kerygma is to be opposed to myth, which he regards as an obstacle to it. In the next chapter I shall give my reasons for saying that myth is the linguistic vehicle of kerygma, and that to “demythologize” any part of the Bible would be the same thing as to obliterate it.

Notes

1. See Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H. Charles (1912), II, 94 ff. (Hereafter Charles, APOT.)

2. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Eng. tr. 1962).

3. See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, tr. T. G. Bergin and Max Fisch (1968), par. 401 ff. I am replacing Vico's simpler terms to avoid confusion with other contexts.

4. See Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (1950), ed. James B. Pritchard, 60 ff. (Hereafter Pritchard, ANET.)

5. See R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (1954). For kairos see 343 ff.

6. See his Preface to Plato (1963), esp. chap. 7.

7. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936).

8. For the student of English literature the best known work in this tradition is the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS no. 218 (1944).

9. Abraham Cowley, “To the Royal Society,” Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (1905), 449-50.

10. See for example A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1938), chaps. 1 and 6.

11. See Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (1956), pt. II.

12. See especially The Phenomenon of Man (Eng. tr. 1959). Some of the reasons for his being an exception should become clearer in the discussion of typological and evolutionary modes of thought in chapter four, below.

13. Gaya Scienza, par. 109.

14. Most explicitly in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs: “What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast. Any other is not their covenant.” (Edmund Burke, Works, Oxford World's Classics ed. [1907], V, 96.)

15. Note especially the remark “The world discerned only by the intellect is nothing else than the Word of God when He was already engaged in the act of creation” (Philo, tr. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Loeb Library ed. [1929], I, 21).

16. See Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (1969), chap. 6.

17. Faust, pt. I, 1224 ff.

18. Odyssey, xi, 601.

19. Inferno, x, 10 ff.

20. “There is No Natural Religion (b),” Poetry and Prose, 2.

21. See especially the extract from Harington and Chapman in Elizabethan Critical Essay, ed. Gregory Smith, vol. II (1904). See also Millar MacLure, George Chapman (1966), chap. 2.

22. Plato, Phaedrus, 274 ff.

23. “Connoisseur of Chaos,” Collected Poems (1954), 215.

24. Church Dogmatics, vol. I, The Doctrine of the Word of God (Eng. tr. 1975), pt. I, xiii.

25. Rhetoric, bk. i, 1354.

26. From the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Miller and Findlay (1977), 6. Hegel's term (erbaulich) was doubtless a negative inspiration for Kierkegaard's Edifying Discourses.

27. See particularly the symposium Kerygma and Myth, ed. H. W. Bartsch (1953). I think it unfortunate that the term “demythologizing” has been associated with Rudolf Bultmann, whose conception of the New Testament is not really a “demythologizing” one at all. See below, chapter two.