The Collapse of Metaphor
A metaphor is a word or phrase which means something it does not mean. We owe to the metaphor the all the pleasures associated with pushing our elderly over the edge, without the terrors associated with killing them. When, for example, grandchildren and children “push grandpa over the edge”, it only means that they have said or done something irritating enough to exhaust his patients. It does not mean they have tossed him somersaulting over a precipice. Metaphors are not literal.
If we liked we could invent a metaphor for pushing grandpa into the street. We could say that when Johnny pushed grandpa into the street it meant that he taught the old man French as a second language. We could just as well say that it refers to the French street named Grandpa at the cross section of second Johnny. Unfortunately, however, we are left with no such fun. Pushing our elderly into the street remains literal and unexciting.
What has been called inauthentic by our generation emerges no more clearly than when viewing the way American Christians use metaphors. Unlike my attempt at the two metaphors above, our metaphors are often not even attempted. Phrases are regurgitated over and over, or worse still, so poorly conceived that the only credible responses are to roll one’s eyes or roll over in laughter. When i originally noticed the problem, i located its cause in Christianity's over-attachment to medieval phraseology. When our pastors pray, for example, they refer to Jesus as King or Lord, as our strong tower or shepherd. The trouble, of course, is that kings and lords, towers and shepherds, appear in our daily life as often as leprechauns do, and the analogy lacks a concrete association. The image is not immediately accessible.
But this seemed too harsh. After all, if we are to read scripture with any interest, these old analogies will need defending. Nevertheless, the problem, I felt, did not stop here. Christianisms in general seemed to nurture a kind of indefinite blank stare. Every off-handed “to the glory of God” or “I’ll pray for you brother” turned my stomach. Parts of our verbal tradition seemed contrived and half-baked; they derived, i believed, from truisms or overused images. They derived, in a word, from dead metaphors. Either our words were so old their meaning had been muddled or so new and poorly wrought they lacked depth.
I hasten to clarify that i do not believe 'to the glory of God' or 'what a blessing' or phrases as such are in their very essence evil things. Neither objective claims nor universal proclamations concern me just yet. My point is an psychological one.
It is difficult to communicate the seriousness of a cheeseburger to a fat man while he is in the midst of eating one. It is not something he does not already know; it is something he has already accepted. He knows it so intimately that he has forgotten it, like one forgets the route they take to get home. It is so familiar that it is barely happening at the conscious level. He is further along psychologically than any repeated cliché concerning the dangers of overeating can help.
The inauthenticity and shallowness of our metaphors are symptomatic in the same sort of way. The problem is not one particular cheeseburger or any particular cheeseburger, and the problem is not any particular metaphor. The problem is the state of mind which cultivates damaging habits. I myself have traveled the continents of this created earth, and found no greater cuisine than the cheeseburger. Neither Indian curry nor Italian wine hold sway. I can understand with fear and trembling the comforts of eating cheeseburgers until I have amassed the whole lot of them or the whole lot of me is a mass. But somehow American Christianity has avoided the same consternation concerning the degradation of how they speak about their God.
Yet if the changes in 20th century philosophy have illuminated one aspect of Christian doctrine, they have illuminated the verse which says “in the beginning was the Word.” They have been just as revolutionary concerning “and God ‘said’ let there be light.” They have shown us that coming into being and coming into meaning are very nearly the same thing. The first action of the mother with her new born baby is to christen her child with a name. Existence coincides with naming, naming with existence. It is impossible to conceive the one without the other. For example, you were not aware of the existence of the capitol “F” at the beginning of this sentence in the same sense as you will be by the time you finish this sentence. Naming the “F” took it from merely existing to existing as a piece of data within your consciousness. In philosophical terms, it went from the ontological into the phenomenological. Very often, philosophers prefer to talk the other way around.
