Let us begin, then, by considering the religious symbol in general. What do we mean by it, if not simply the image or likeness of something?
In responding to this question, we face a very specific problem not widely recognized either by theologians or by the general public. That is the dominance in our modern Western culture of a rival mode of semiotic relationship. (By a semiotic I mean ‘pertaining to the nature of meaning’). For various complex reasons the symbol has been almost entirely displaced in our culture by the metaphor, with the latter increasingly tending to frame our conceptualization of the entire field of semiotic relationships. This development has got to the point that even language which would more correctly be characterized as symbolic (such as religious language) comes to be re-classified by us as metaphorical. It is not just a matter of the symbol ceasing to be widely used or understood; it is also one of metaphor acquiring cultural prestige – becoming ‘cool’. This is a temptation that it has been hard for the theological advocates of religious language to resist.
Nevertheless, there are some reflections on religious language (not necessarily theological ones) that combine an appreciation of the salience and prestige of metaphor in contemporary Western culture with an awareness that this privileging of metaphor has not been a feature of every time and place: even that there exist social and linguistic contexts (for example, non-Western and non-contemporary ones) for which metaphor may not offer the most appropriate framework of interpretation – at least, if our aim is faithfully to understand what is being communicated.
A good instance of such reflection, perhaps familiar to some readers, is a study of the place of metaphor in religious language by the feminist theologian, Sally McFague. Like many advocates of metaphor, she locates the distinctiveness of metaphor as a mode of semiotic relationship in the way it brings into relation terms – or rather, referents of terms (i.e. the realities to which those terms refer) – that it recognizes to be distinct. Take, for example, the metaphor contained in Shakespeare’s famous line from Macbeth: ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave (stet) of care’. The distinctively metaphorical nature of the expression resides in the fact that the referents of the terms ‘sleave’ and ‘care’, brought by Shakespeare into such felicitous union, are ontologically distinct. On the one hand, we have a piece of material; on the other, a mental state. Their fusion by Shakespeare into a single image is a subversive act of the human imagination which produces a temporary shock. Such metaphorical statements involve an equivocation – or as McFague puts it – they ‘whisper’ that such a thing both is and is not so.
Note that it is the distinctiveness of metaphor that McFague defines in this way, and not metaphor itself. This is because McFague also knows that, in everyday language, the term metaphor can refer to figurative language that doesn’t involve equivocation. Consider, for example, the case of the conventionalized ‘dead’ metaphors that pepper our everyday discourse: e.g. ‘the leg of a table’, ‘the head of an organization’, ‘the heart of a problem’, etc.. Everyday speech would be impossible without the faculty exemplified by these expressions to stretch literal language to cover an ever-widening range of objects and situations. Yet, they are, for all intents and purposes, uni-vocal, not equi-vocal, insofar as they constitute the only way to name the things to which they refer. So, in using the term metaphor as she does, McFague is privileging equivocal over univocal metaphor. As indeed we all do in speaking of properly univocal metaphorical language as ‘dead’ – as if such expressions were once innovative juxtapositions, and had since become jaded. There is nothing self-evident about this privileging of equivocal over univocal. It goes along with the cultural prestige of metaphor, mentioned earlier, and points to an underlying cultural bias (actually quite specific to the contemporary West) that places a high value in certain contexts on the mode of semiotic relationship manifested in equivocal, or live, metaphor.
So far, so uncontroversial.
More unusual, and more interesting, is a passage towards the beginning of McFague’s study where, in defining the scope of the phenomenon she is to analyse (i.e. metaphor), she makes a sharp distinction between the metaphorical relationship, on the one hand, characterized as one of ‘creative tension’, and the symbolic relationship, on the other, as one of ‘ontological participation’. In other words, with symbol, it is not so much about a thing ‘being like’ another as about a thing, in some degree, actually being another.
So, what is this other mode of semiotic relationship’?
Essentially, semiotic relationships of ontological participation are relationships inherent in things themselves, not relationships merely attributed to things by the human imagination. In other words, with ontological participation, we are speaking of an inter-connectivity between things that is humanly significant (semiotic relations, being, for present purposes, considered distinctive of humanity). An example of this familiar to many English speakers, is the analogy of humours and planetary influence so prevalent in the poetry of William Shakespeare. Poetically speaking, this language can function like metaphor. Yet, for those who shared Shakespeare’s worldview, the influence of planets on the human temperament constituted a natural phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Symbolic connections like these can be the basis for human intervention in the world – for healing people, for example – not just for poetry.
At stake, then, with the possibility of symbolic relations, as opposed to the total dominance of the metaphorical, is an entire worldview. On the one hand, with the former, we have a world where things outside us, like humours and planetary influences, can relate to each other in ways that implicate us. This McFague describes, rather beautifully, as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’. Or, as the French poet, Baudelaire, puts it:
Nature is a temple where living pillars/Let escape sometimes confused words;/Man traverses it through forests of symbols/That observe him with familiar glances.
On the other hand, the worldview presupposed by the contemporary dominance of metaphorical relations is one in which the interconnectivity between things is evacuated of all human significance, leaving, on the one hand, just things in themselves, on the other, the possibility of a kind of human significance imputed to those things by the imagination of a human subject.
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So much then for McFague’s distinction of the metaphorical and the symbolic. What we now have to determine is this. On which side of the metaphor:symbol does religious language belong – language such as: ‘This is my body’ ?
Many contemporary theologians almost fall over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate such language to be metaphorical. A minority, including the proponents of revisionist theology, of which I spoke earlier, would insist on the essentially univocal character of religious language. However, an important consideration, I would suggest, should be the characterization of religious language we find in social anthropology, and studies of religious language influenced by social anthropology. Admittedly, the cases of religious language in question generally don’t derive from a Christian context. Yet, I would argue that the parallels between the use of language in these contexts, and the use of language in a Christian ritual setting (e.g. the Eucharist), should make us take the characterization of religious language by social anthropologists very seriously.
Symbolic relationships – as I have already indicated in regard to Shakespeare’s language of planetary influence – often form the basis of practical interventions in the world, such as attempts at healing people. When the anthropologist, Victor Turner, famously analyses the symbolism of red, white and black, for example, it is in the context of ritual procedures designed to bring about some humanly significant transformation of the world. Such interventions are not purely verbal (another characteristic some attribute to metaphor) but involve a fusion of word and act. And the effect they seek to bring about generally involves a transformation in human social and political realities. The example discussed by Turner revolves around the initiation of girls into the role of adult members of the clan – a process that involves a collective transformation on the level of the clan as well as a personal transformation for the initiate.
The analogies here with Christian sacramental symbolism are obvious. The symbolism of the Eucharist is no more ‘purely verbal’ than the ritual interventions around the Ndembu initiation ceremonies – and involves just such a fusion of word and act. Furthermore, the Eucharist too effects a transformation of socio-religious realites, producing and reproducing in the assembled worshippers the mystical body of Christ which is the Church. The obvious parallelism of linguistic function here seems to place the language of the Eucharist in the category of the univocal symbol. But a fuller corroboration of this must await my next post where I shall be drawing on an analysis of the symbolic relation by Catherine Bell in a study focussing largely on work in the areas of social anthropology, sociology and religious studies.
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It is almost a theological commonplace nowadays that the Eucharist produces and reproduces the Church as the ‘body of Christ’. Without going further than this, we can already point to the practical and performative aspect of Eucharistic language and its function of social reproduction (i.e. as reproduction of the social body which is the Church). This would already suggest that the Eucharistic language is ‘symbolic’ in the sense in which anthropologists apply the term to religious ritual more generally. Previous posts have argued that the symbol in this sense presupposes a world in which real-world phenomena connect with each other in humanly significant ways (as, in Shakespeare’s world, planetary influences affect human physiology.) Also, that in this respect, the symbol as a mode of relationship is opposed to literary (i.e. equivocal) metaphor which presupposes a world of discrete phenomena in which humanly significant relations cannot exist ‘out there’ but must be imputed by a human subjectivity.
This understanding of the Eucharist as symbol – and its opposition to metaphor – we find very much corroborated by Catherine Bell’s analysis of symbolism in her survey of approaches to ritual by social anthropologists. I do not wholly accept her understanding of the symbol. Like many of the social anthropologists, whose views she summarizes, Bell’s outlook is, as we shall see, rigorously secular. Nevertheless, her analysis gives a very useful account of the structure of the symbolic relationship based on the anthropological writing reviewed by her study. Moreover, this is an account that dove-tails neatly with McFague’s, in that this structure presents an exact mirror image of the relationship of metaphor as we have found it described by McFague.
Bell’s symbolic relationship is characterized by its circular form. Actions, including verbal actions (e.g. ‘this is my body’), project ‘organizing schemes’ on the ‘space-time environment’, and then re-absorb those schemes as the nature of reality itself. The two poles of ritual act and environment – symbol and symbolized – become ‘homologized spheres’, which are ‘orchestrated’ (or ‘confused’ and ‘collapsed’) so as to produce ‘an experience of their basic identity or coherence’.
So, for example, in the case of the Eucharist, the ‘physical and verbal act’ of offering and consecrating the bread projects onto the ‘space-time environment’ of the assembly of a representative crowd of believers the schema of Christ’s offering up of his own life to the Father. The naturalization of that schema comes about with the homologization of the two spheres: the offering of the bread at the Eucharist actually becomes the self-offering of Christ. That we have homologization here, rather than the kind of ‘tension in union’ characteristic of metaphor, is reflected in the conviction participants have that the body Christ is ‘really present’ in the bread, and thus capable of being shared among the communicants. Conversely, there is no sense of a tensive opposition between vehicle and tenor such as might make us re-conceptualize the one in terms of the other. Indeed, the focus is precisely not on the properties of the referents of the terms (body; bread), but on their ritual and socio-religious function (reproducing the body of Christ).
There are two points to make here in relation to our discussion. The first is the extent to which Bell’s understanding of the symbol, based on anthropological analyses, corroborates McFague’s definition of it as a relation involving ontological participation. For both, symbolism is about one thing actually being or becoming another in some degree, rather than just resembling it. The second is the way in which the structure of the symbolic relation as described by Bell appears actually to invert the relational structure that McFague attributes to metaphor. With metaphor, we have a ‘tensive’ relationship which maintains the distinction of the two terms of the relationship, accompanying the assertion that something ‘is’ with the whisper that it ‘is not’; with symbol, we have ‘collapse’, ‘confusion’ or ‘homologization’ of the poles with a view to producing an experience of ‘basic identity’ or ‘coherence’.
These considerations I think clinch our general argument that specifically ‘religious’ language – such as that of the Eucharist – belongs in the category of symbol, not metaphor. In the light of them, it is no surprise that it is the symbol that dominates in discussions of religious language by social anthropologists. In fact, Bell mentions not a few of that tribe who conscientiously eschew the term metaphor, on the grounds that it is inappropriate to the uses of language that constitute the object of their study. These considerations also cast a very helpful light on the kind of phenomenon that confronts us in the shape of the Christian sacrament – and may also account for problems it poses for a contemporary world governed, as we have argued, by the very different philosophical presuppositions involved in the culturally dominant concept and practice of metaphor.
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For all its usefulness, however, Bell’s understanding of symbol, is not one I feel that a Christian can accept as it stands. Its deficiency, from a Christian perspective, has to do with the religious stance of Bell rather than any shortcoming in her analysis. Her talk of ‘projection’ and ‘organizing schemes’ tends to give the impression that what the religious participant sees cannot really be there. Beyond the cultural ‘projections’ we encounter, or so it is implied, lies a world of things in themselves without humanly significant interconnectivity – the same world that confronts humans of any culture prior to their socially and culturally orchestrated attempts to make sense of it.
Here, I think, we are up against a fundamental prejudice common to any comparatively-orientated discipline. Anthropologists are professionally committed to taking equally seriously all the diverse ‘realities’ they encounter through studying human cultures, while effectively bracketing out considerations of relative ‘truth’. This habit of thought is inevitably conducive to the notion of a religiously and culturally neutral object of experience beyond the lived realities of religion and culture – even if it doesn’t logically impose it. After all, how could the ‘truth’ of our space-time environment correspond to all the diverse ‘realites’ of human religions and cultures? In short, this anthropological habit of mind leads us straight back to the worldview presupposed by the contemporary apologists for metaphor.
Contrary to Bell, therefore, we need to insist that symbolism – at least in its Christian manifestation – does not operate on an exclusively ‘subjective’ level. In the case of Christian symbolism, we are speaking of a fundamental real-life interconnectedness of things which is genuinely ‘there’. It is not, therefore, a question of ‘organizing schemes’ in our collective imaginations projected onto reality and re-absorbed as though they were the nature of that reality. For Christians, those projected and reabsorbed projections actually are the nature of reality. The ‘organizing schemes’, in other words, reflect principles already active in the space-time environment prior to our recognition of them, our ‘projections’ reflect the human discernment of those principles, and their ‘reabsorption’ our appropriation of them as the reality of our individual and collective life.
So, with the Eucharist, there is something about the offering of ‘the work of human hands’ that is coextensive with humanity itself and anticipates the redemptive self-offering of Christ, and something about food and drink that already points to human redemption. After all, God so ordered the world in creation that it should be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose in redemption. And the same God who gave us the redemptive offering of Christ gave us the offering of the work of human hands through which it might be symbolized; and the same God who gave us Christ also gave us bread and wine. There is consequently a real-life interconnectedness between human actions such as have always existed at every time and place and the redemptive action of Christ.
Other religions would no doubt claim as much for their own symbolism, of course. But that does not disqualify the claims of Christianity – or oblige Christians to limit their claims, as Christians, to what comparative anthropologists would feel able to assert in their capacity of comparative anthropologists.
But nor does this mean that Christian symbolism differs as regards its semiotic and social function from the symbolism of other religions. Religious symbolism is a mode of semiotic relationship characteristic of all religions. And Christian religious symbolism is no less religious symbolism for being Christian – just as the ‘chosen people’ is no less a ‘people’ for being ‘chosen’, and the text of God’s word no less a text for being ‘God’s word’.