We have seen in these essays how several
psychologists and linguists have come to understand language itself expressing
or referring to realms otherwise un-vocalized. This remains true whether the
dark places are the repressed physical drives of Kristeva’s Freudianism or the
untapped Jungian depths of the unconscious in the work of Andres Ortiz-Oses.
Metaphor works in a very similar fashion,
invoking the participation of the holistic human mind. Both Paul Riceour and
Sandra Schneiders have understood this. And, of course, metaphoric language pervades
crucial aspects of Christian scripture: the Pauline imagery of the body of
Christ, the parables of the synoptic Gospels, the institution of the Eucharist,
the poetic imagination of the prophets, the expressive lyrics of the Psalms, even
the quiet tropes of Genesis which themselves once shaped so much Augustinian
theology.
So we remain grateful to Sandra Schneiders and her keen
explication of metaphoric work. For her, and for this study, the salutary
quality of metaphor is its inherent instability, its enduring tension. The
death of a metaphor, she notes, is either in banalization or literalization,
either an erosion of meaning through over-use or an ossification of meaning in
singular fixity.
This is because
a metaphor is actually a phenomenon of predication, of an expansion of meaning.
Taken on a literal level, the level to which a metaphor seems to refer, it is
absurd, forcing the mind to think of something else. And, indeed, when
predicated—that is, referring to—something other than the literal, the metaphor
makes sense. Indeed, it makes more sense
than a literal proposition.
So there is a tension, an instability, between what a
metaphor seems to refer to and what it actually does, an “is” and an “is not”,
to use the Riceourian terminology. The metaphor so pervasive
throughout Scripture presents something that is disclosed and something that is
hidden, forcing our minds, and therefore us, to consider and reconsider what it
means.
The meaning of metaphor in Scripture is never fixed or
vaporous, neither literal nor banal but always and everywhere tensive and
polyvalent. The meaning of metaphor in Scripture is, as it is elsewhere, to use
another Riceourian term, “an event.”
This reconsideration of metaphoric meaning as event
rather than as object or subject elides the difficulty of so much modern and
postmodern thinking. It denies the divide between the two and refuses to sort
reality into subjective and objective categories. And it may have considerable
import for this study, because the same schema may apply to hermeneutical
validity.
One may recall from our introduction that there has
been considerable difficulty defining this term “validity. ” Indeed, there is
sufficient difficulty that one may simply peace together a working definition for oneself without significant
loss of meaning. I did this when I said that a valid interpretation ought to have
both explicatory force over a text and a nature somehow suited to it.
But these can become shifting and somewhat restless
qualities. For example, one could never find, in isolation, the caritas residing in an Augustinian
sermon. Such a valuation of the rightness or wrongness of an interpretation
becomes enmeshed in questions of context, intentionality, and reception.
Under such conditions, validity itself becomes event.
Validity happens inter-subjectively between a text and a reader and an
audience, rather than something that resides anywhere “within” the words of a
given interpretation.
So we join Wilfred Cantwell Smith in considering
Scripture itself as a real, actual and extant event. We have understood Von
Balthasar’s theology of creation as disclosure. More, we know classical
Christianity’s position that creation is ongoing, meaning that revelation, too,
continues, so long as the two books of scripture and creation both hold true.
And we have understood Scripture’s linguistic nature, implying all of
language’s finitude, uncertainty, and partiality.
But most importantly, we have seen Scripture’s
authority and empathy alike. Scripture both understands us better than we
understand ourselves at the same time as it involves us in its symbolic,
imagined world. In other words, we have seen Scripture’s tensive nature, its
refusal to predicate its meaning on a literal level.
We cannot say that Scripture is literally the words of
God, for it comes through all-too-human hands and hearts and minds. And we
Christians cannot say that it is literally human work, for we believe it
fulfills its purpose in disclosing the nature of the divine in Jesus Christ.
So, always with Scripture there is the problem of predication: on what level
does it mean?
Historically, the instability of our answers to this question
seems no less than the instability of literal and figurative in metaphoric
meaning. Could Scripture, then, be considered any less of an event? And if we
may call Scripture an event, why would we expect our interpretations of it to
be any less so, or their validity to occur independently of their effects?
