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God's Gift of Metaphor
Josh Mayo on George MacDonald & the Christian Imagination
Often we think of figurative speech as something for the poets, a special way of talking or writing. But as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrated in their landmark study, Metaphors We Live By (1980), metaphor pervades our ordinary way of speaking: "My computer isn't running." "I didn't connect with that thought." "It's growing dark." Everyday expressions like these, they say, reveal how ordinary language is often charged with figurative imagery.
The reach of these figures in human cognition is greater than we might first imagine. Lakoff and Johnson treat extensively what they call the "systematicity" of metaphors, arguing that especially powerful figures form "conceptual networks" of related metaphorical expressions that are webbed throughout our ordinary speech. Consider some commonplaces from what they call the "Argument Is War" network of metaphors:
• Your claims are indefensible.
• I demolished his argument.
• He shot down all of my arguments.
And the "Time Is Money" metaphor:
• You're wasting my time.
• You need to budget your time.
• He's living on borrowed time.
The architectural grandeur of this "systematicity" dispels the illusion that metaphor is opposed to reason or even superadded to it. Our everyday deliberation is deeply metaphorical, the authors say, whether we realize it or not.
Two Views of Metaphor
Once made aware of the integral role of figurative thought, we are left with two possible realities. The first is the reigning view today: metaphor is a mistake, a strange, albeit interesting, evolutionary accident. In this view, metaphors are fantasies projected from our minds upon the cold facticity of the world. We get along with them as best we can, testing through experience their practical conceptual efficacy in the day-to-day. So argued the late Stephen Jay Gould:
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature . . . but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.
Because the world in itself is unknowable apart from perception, metaphors relate phenomena but do not reveal anything essentially true. They exist in the mind and shape our perception of just about everything, but they do not tell us anything about the true nature of things.
Or do they? In "The Imagination: Its Function & Its Culture," Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald proposes an audacious alternative to our late-modern subjectivism: metaphor is a gift. For MacDonald, the figurative images we conceive actually do touch upon the Real because "everything of man must have been of God first." MacDonald pictures a poet who perceives some unarticulated thing in his soul, a "new movement within him," and discovers a correspondence in nature:
Gazing about him in pain, he suddenly beholds the material form of his immaterial condition. There stands his thought! God thought it before him, and put its picture there ready for him when he wanted it. Or, to express the thing more prosaically, the man cannot look around him long without perceiving some form, aspect, or movement of nature, some relation between its forms, or between such and himself, which resembles the state or motion within him. This he seizes as the symbol, as the garment or body of his invisible thought, presents it to his friend, and his friend understands him.
In the discovery of a metaphor, spirit wells up inside us—some notion, some motion—and we discover its counterpart in the cosmos, something placed there by God himself to speak to our inner lives. The world mirrors the soul. We say life is like a road, truth like the sun, death like night. According to MacDonald, the Divine Poet gives us those symbolic associations. He thinks of them first and embeds them in the created order for mankind to discover.
A Bold, Old Thought
To many, this view is mere Feuerbachian projection—ascribing to God whatever we happen to find in ourselves. But note that MacDonald doesn't deem every mental correspondence to be of God, only every fitting correspondence. Here we have to return again to MacDon-ald's notion of the givenness of metaphors. Just as any good gift is fitting to its circumstances, so metaphors must be fitting images to do their intended work. Poet-priest and literary scholar Malcolm Guite explains this
distinction:
Analogies make complex or abstract ideas concrete and accessible by embodying their truth in a particular image. But the particular image has to be fit to receive and adequately embody that particular truth. It's a gift, an act of intuitive imagination, to find the right image for the right truth, and when we do find it, we often find it so rich that it has more to give than we first imagined, it embodies more than we first thought of.
Unreason isn't a gift. Impiety isn't a gift. Not every thought we think is a gift, but fitting metaphors are gifts because, though we use our human imaginations to discover them, they reveal truth about the world and about ourselves. They disclose a kinship between all things and a true harmony between the spiritual and the material.
Admittedly, it's an audacious alternative. MacDonald doesn't answer all of our questions, but he gets us thinking and gives us a framework for our intuition: perhaps the world was made for us; perhaps the mind doesn't dance alone. MacDonald's Christian Romanticism re-enchants the world in a way much needed today. It gives us a bold, old thought: perhaps the same Poet who is the Lamb of God, the Rock of Ages, and the Light of the World still speaks through the wind and the trees.
Josh Mayo teaches in the English Department and Writing Program at Grove City College and has written for other publications of Christian thought, including First Things. He and his wife Bethany have two sons, Ezra Wallis and Silas Andrew, and attend Grace Anglican Church in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.
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