The Great Code

The Bible and Literature

by Northrop Frye

"The Bible" has traditionally been read as a unity, and has influenced Western imagination as a unity. It exists if only be-
cause it has been compelled to exist. Yet, whatever the external reasons, there has to. be some internal basis even for
a compulsory existence. Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it
has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure. It begins where time begins, with the creation of the
world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it
is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel. There is also a body of concrete images: city, mountain,
river, garden, tree, oil, fountain, bread, wine, bride, sheep, and many others, which recur so often that they clearly indicate
some kind of unifying principle. That unifying principle, for a critic, would have to be one of shape rather than meaning; or,
more accurately, no book can have a coherent meaning unless there is some coherence in its shape.





I am not concerned with the true meaning of such words as episcopos or ecclesza , but, for the most part, with nouns so
concrete that it is practically impossible for any translator to get them wrong.





In this volume such features as the categories of metaphor, the ladder of "polysemous sense," the conception of literal
meaning, and the identification of mythology and literature are presented in what I hope is a new framework.





I am not dispensing with the quality of irony that all teachers from Socrates on have found essential. Not all elusiveness,
however, is merely that. Even the parables of Jesus were ainoi, fables with a riddling quality. In other areas, such as Zen
Buddhism, the teacher is often a man who shows his qualifications to teach by refusing to answer questions, or by brush-
ing them off with a paradox. To answer a question (a point we shall return to later in the book) is to consolidate the men-
tal level on which the question is asked. Unless something is kept in reserve, suggesting the possibility of better and fuller
questions, the student's mental advance is blocked.





I have spoken of my wish to get clear of conventional aesthetic canons, but "unity" is one of those canons, and the Bible's
disregard of unity is quite as impressive as its exhibition of it. Ultimately, as we should expect, the Bible evades all literary
criteria. As Kierkegaard said, an apostle is not a genius--not that I ever found "genius" a very useful word either. My exper-
ience in secular literature had shown me how the formal principles of literature had been contained within literature, as the
formal principles of music, embodied in sonata, fugue, or rondo, have no existence outside music. But here is a book that has
had a continuously fertilizing influence on English literature from Anglo-Saxon writers to poets younger than I, and yet no
one would say that the Bible "is" a work of literature. Even Blake, who went much farther than anyone else in his day in i-
dentifying religion and human creativity, did not call it that: he said "The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,"
a phrase I have used for my title after pondering its implications for many years.





Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and be-
liefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may re-
cognize elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognize.
Practically all that we can see of this body of concern is socially conditioned and culturally inherited Below the cultural in-
heritance there must be a common psychological inheritance, otherwise forms of culture and imagination outside our own
traditions would not be intelligible to us.





Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage like the "great Boyg"
or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it?





In English literature the canons of criticism were established mainly by Samuel Johnson, who followed the normal Protestant
practice of keeping the poetic aspect of the Bible in a separate compartment from secular literature. It was the Romantics
who realized that such a separation was irrational. Coleridge's brilliant insights into Biblical typology make it clear that he
would have made things much easier for his students, and more productive for his influence, if he had provided an intercon-
nected statement of his views on that subject.





A good deal of the Orient is committed to Marxism, which is the direct heir of the revolutionary and socially organized forms
of religion derived from the Bible. Recently a Chinese student, a teacher in own country and about to return there, asked
me how he could explain the cultural importance of Christianity for the West to his students in a way that would be intelli-
gible to them. I suggested that they would have some understanding of Marxism, that Marx's spiritual father was Hegel, and
that therefore his spiritual grandfather was Martin Luther.





Information does have to be conveyed in teaching, of course, but for the teacher the imparting of information is again in a
context of irony, which means that it often looks like a kind of game. When the subject to be taught is literature, this element
of game takes on a special appearance. Literature continues in society the tradition of myth-making, and myth-making has a
quality that Levi-Strauss calls bricolage, a putting together of bits and pieces out of whatever comes to hand. Long before
Levi-Strauss, T. S. Eliot in an essay on Blake used practically the same image, speaking of Blake's resourceful Robinson Cru-
soe method of scrambling together a system of thought out of the odds and ends of his reading.





Seven phases of what is traditionally called revelation: creation, exodus, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. Two
forms of apocalyptic vision are postulated, making eight in all, the eighth bringing us back to the central thesis of the role of
the reader. Then comes an inductive survey of, first, the imagery, and then the narrative structures of the Bible, which is the
point from which the book took its origin. The final chapter makes a second approach to the "rhetoric of religion," and in-
cludes a brief sketch ofa "polysemous" or multileveled conception of meaning as applied to the Bible. The latter attempts to
suggest some answers to questions about the direction in which we go from the "literal" meaning.

I should hope that a further study would bring us closer to commentary in more detail on the text of the Bible. Ruth, the Song
of Songs, and the folktale material in the Apocrypha have a particularly obvious literary reference and yet get very short shrift
here.



　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　THE ORDER OF WORDS

Language I
----------



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 tmake lan-
guage 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: 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.





It is not necessary to invoke any more subtle entities, such as Jung's collective unconscious, to explain the fact that hu-
man creative expression all over the world has some degree of mutual intelligibility and communicating power. We note fur-
ther that Luther's German Bible, and the sequence of English Bibles culminating in the AV, were powerful generators of
imagery, narrative, allusion, and other forms of verbal articulateness in their cultures; the same could be said of many Clas-
sical and other translations. What we call langage, then, is a very positive linguistic force. One wonders whether it is sub-
stantial enough for there to be such a thing as a history of langage, a sequence of modes of more or less translatable struc-
tures 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, 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 pro-
duces 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 think-
ing about the place of the Bible in the history of language as langage, though in what finally emerged for me very little of Vi-
co 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 com-
mon 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 be-
gin 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 elish 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, 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 a-
bout 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 intel-
lectual 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 sep-
arated, and "reflection ," with its overtones of looking into a mirror, moves into the verbal foreground. The intellectual o-
perations 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 too become analogical language, a verbal imitation of a reality beyond it-
self that can be conveyed most directly by words.

The basis of Plato's use of language is the teaching method Socrates; and Socrates, unlike his predecessors in Greek philo-
sophy 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 lan-
guage, 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 dif-
ferent 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, associates the Plat-
onic 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 Moliere's
Jourdain, as the language of ordinary speech, is a late and far from "natural" development, and is much less direct and prim-
itive 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 mathe-
matics. 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 Democ-ritus, were mov-
ing 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 t(rwhich 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 causa-
tion, 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 suggested by the fact that properly con-
structed verbal sequences seem to have an inherent power of compelling assent. In Stoicism, and in Christianity in a diff-
erent 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 plur-
ality of gods, or embodiments of the identity of personality and nature. In metonymic language this unifying conception be-
comes 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 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, 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 follow-
ed 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 ele-
ment 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 per-
iod. In continuous prose, if A and B seem to be inconsistent, one can always insert intermediary verbal formulas, or re-
phrase them in a commentary, in a way that will "reconcile" them: if only we write enough of such intermediate sentence-
s, 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 every-
one 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 Nic-
odemus, 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 Des-
cartes, where the operative word is "therefore," because before we can accept the proposition we must accept the co-
gency 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, there-fore God exists." Beliefs of this period that may seem to us perverse a-
bout, 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.





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 ex-
istents 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 na-
ture.

This third phase of language begins roughly in the sixteenth century, where it accompanies certain tendencies in the Ren-
aissance 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. Con-
tinuous prose is still employed, but all deductive procedures are increasingly subordinated to a primary inductive and fact-
gathering process. The seventeenth-century poet Cowley, 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 des-
cription 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 "impossibility forms of third-phase thinking dem-
onstrate the "impossibility of metaphysics," or declare that all religious questions are unmeaning





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 manbefore him. But considerable social changes have to take place before this use of language be-
comes 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 problem of illusion and reality therefore becomes a central 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 ob-
jectivity 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 e-
vokes 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 lan-
guage and linguistic models in contemporary thought, apart from whatever embodies the emphasis.

It is primarily to Roman Jakobson 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 sepa-
rate 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 unfunc-
tional, 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-cen-
tury 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.

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 atten-
tion it has attracted, was incidental to his more important aim of de-deifying the natural environment, and in particular of re-
moving the metaphor of "law" from ordinary consciousness to describe the operations of nature. There are no laws in nature,
Nietzsche says, only necessities; but the metaphor "law of nature" carries with it a vestigial sense of a personality who com-
mands 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 writ-
ers, 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 facade 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 facade or -authority in society revealed
the real structure of that society. There is no social contract. Burke maintained, except the contract that a society shows it
to accepted by its structure.





What I am concerned with at present is not the question whether God is dead or obsolete, but with the question of what re-
sources of language may be dead or obsolete. The metaphorical and metonymic phases of language have been in large mea-
sure outgrown because of the obvious limitations that they imposed on the human mind. But it seems clear that the descrip-
tive 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.





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 pro-
cess 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 ex-
tent 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 fun-
ction as the subject of 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 express-
es 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 conscious-
ness and nature. Philo 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, 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 begin-
ning was continuous prose," but the link between his "sermo" and the development of continious prose is there nonetheless.
At the beginning of the third phase we have Goethe's Faust, 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 a-
bove, 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 descrip-
tive language, the word
has no power to be anything but aword.

Each of our three phases of language has a characteristic word for the human entity that uses the language. In the metaphor-
ical 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 disin-tegrate or separate at death. Ancient Egypt had a ba and a ka and several other entities, besides
the mummified body itself; Homer (or a later editor) speaks of Hercules as existing after death simultaneously as a god in Ol-
ympus 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.





All the languages relevant to the Bible distinguish between soul and spirit: Hebrew has nephesh and mach, 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 ad-
heres 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 Dante meets in his visions of hell and purgatory and hea-
ven 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 elemen-
tal "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 trans-
lation 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 e-
ven the imaginations of those who lived before it. Yet there is a curious restiveness about this kind of revelation, some
feeling of what Blake calls "the same dull round, even of a universe." What is dull is not the universe but the mental oper-
ations prescribed for us in observing it.

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 pos-
sible, 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 social sciences.



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....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, 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 teach-
er, or, in Shelley's phrase about a later era of history, the "unacknowledged legislator" of his society. There were technical rea-
sons 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 the inventor of 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.



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 oflanguage that we must never be allowed to un-
derestimate, 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 show-case of the epic simile already mentioned. With the sec-
ond 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 des-
cription....

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."



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 lan-
guage where their voice is not heard" has baffled his foolish intention and reversed his meaning, and has therefore translated
the verse correctly. But the metaphorical and that any superstitious "literal" view of point goes deeper than this...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 num-
inous 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 pre-
sumably 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...In Blake the Classical and other gods are regarded as pro-
jections 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.



The fictional mode is adopted because it presents a unity to the imagination more intense than the "truth" of 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 lang-
uage. 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 negative aspect of analogy, in showing how experience in time eludes final or definitive unifi-
cation in thought.The "squirming facts exceed the squamous mind," as Wallace Stevens says...



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 ana-
logy 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.



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,


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.


Third-phase writing, we said, is centrally concerned with distinguishing reality from illusion: advertising and propaganda are de-
signed 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.


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. Ora-
torical 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 edu-
cational 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 encydlopedic repository of its traditional knowledge.


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.


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.


the word kerygma is associated mainly with the theology of Bultmann, 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.



MYTH 1



Anyone who says "the facts speak for themselves" is using another verbal figure of speech, technically known as prosopopoeia.

In our culture, some narratives dealing with personaities run parallel to a sequence of events external to themselves; others are
based on a sequence of events that seems to be constructed for its own sake. This distinction is reflected in the difference be-
tween the words "history" and "story." The word "myth," for reasons we shall come to later, has tended to become attached
only to the latter, and hence to mean "not really true."

for me the two statements "The Bible tells a story" and "The Bible is a myth" are essentially the same statement.


The verbal culture of a pre-discursive society will consist largely of stories, but among those...certain stories seem to have a
peculiar significance: they are the stories that tell a society what is important for it to know, whether about its gods, its history,
its laws, or its class structure..They thus become "sacred" as distinct from "profane" stories, and form part of what the Biblical
tradition calls revelation.


Mythical, in this secondary sense, therefore means the opposite of "not really true": it means being charged with a special ser-
iousness and importance.



But the structural analogues to the Samson saga are in folktales, and
Samson was not a god. Similarly with, say, the story of Odysseus and
Polyphemus, which was mythical for the Greeks in the secondary con-
cerned sense because it was in Homer, but which again has folktale
analogues. After the rise of metonymic language, stories are frequent-
ly used as concrete illustrations of abstract arguments, in other words
as allegories. This is close to the role that myths have in Plato.


First, some sense of a canon relates them to one another: a myth takes
its place in a mythology, an interconnected group of myths, whereas
folktales remain nomadic,


A mythology rooted in a specific society transmits a heritage of shared
allusion and verbal experience in time and so mythology helps to create
a cultural history.


literature, and poetry especially, has the function of re-creating the
metaphorical use of language. Hence the direct de¬scendant of mythology
is literature, if we can in fact speak of it as a descendant at all.


We saw earlier that Copernicus now symbolizes for us the replacing of
mythological by scientific conceptions of space, and Darwin the replac-
ing of mythological by scientific conceptions of time. But the accidents
of a mythological tradition are not real mythology, the central line of
which is re-created in every age by the poets.



A by-product of the same respect for tradition accounts for the endlessly
allusive quality of poetry, the tendency of poets to keep referring to the
same familiar mythical themes, to treat all wars as clones of the siege of
Troy. Because of this, we get a strong sense of "a" myth as something sep-
arate from its verbal embodiments, even though such a separation cannot
really exist.


The stories of Abraham and of the Exodus belong in an area best called
historical reminiscence. That is they doubtless contain a kernel of actual
history, but what historical basis there may be for the narrative we have
is another matter. It seems to be not yet possible, for instance, for E-
gyptologists to fit the exodus of Israel to anything else they know about
Egyptian history.


historical truth has no correlation with spiritual profundity, unless the
relation is inverse. The Book of Job, never seriously regarded as anything
but imaginative drama, is obviously profounder spiritually than the lists
of choir singers and the like in the Book of Chronicles, lists that may
well be or contain genuine historical records.


Trying to extract a credible historical residue from a mass of mythical
accretions" is a futile procedure


In Homeric criticism, scholars may have acquired a considerable and
increasing respect for Homer's sense of fact, in both history and geo-
graphy; but no increasing respect for such matters will make Achilles'
fight with the river-god or the hurling of Hephaistos out of heaven
historical.


Later on, the attitude develops that if we find something incredible
in the Biblical story, so much the better: that enables us to offer up
our intellects as a willing sacrifice; and if we believe it, or believe
that we believe it, we acquire a special virtue by doing so. With the
general acceptance of lernotic and descriptive criteria in language,
such literalism becomes a feature of anti-intellectual Christian pop-
ulism. This attitude says, for example, that the story of Jonah must
describe a real sojourn inside a real whale, otherwise we are making
God, as the ultimate source of the story, into a liar.


Aristotle's principle: History makes particular statements, and is
therefore subject to external criteria of truth and falsehood; poetry
makes no particular statements and is not so subject. Poetry expresses
the universal in the event, the aspect of the event that makes it an
example of the kind of thins that is always happening. In our language,
the universal in the history is what is conveyed by the mythos, the shape
of the historical narrative. A myth is designed not to describe a spec-
ific situation but to contain it in a way that does not restrict its
significance to that one situation. Its truth is inside it structure,
not outside.


trying to reduce the Bible entirely to the hypothetical basis of poetry
clearly will not do. There is no difficulty with Homer or the Gilgamesh
epic, because they are poetic throughout, but large areas of the Bible
are clearly not poetic...we should have no criteria for distinguishing,
say, Jesus from the prodigal son of his own parable, both being equally
characters in fictions,


There are and remain two aspects of myth: one is its story-structure,
which attaches it to literature, the other is its social function as
concerned knowledge, what it is important for a society to know.


Weltgeschichte uses the criteria of ordinary history, and attempts
to answer the question, What should I have seen di had been there
Heilsgeschichte, as we have it for instance in the Gospels, may say
to us rather, "This may not be what you would have seen if you had
been there, but what you would have seen would have missed the whole
point of what was really going on." This distinction is no doubt
sound enough, but leaves us with the question: What is the relation
of fleilsgeschichte to myth, as I have been outlining it, or to poetic
history, as we have it in Aeschylus' The Persians or Shakespeare's
Macbeth?



Myth has two parallel aspects: as a story, it is poetic and is re-
created in literature; as a story with a specific social function,
it is a program of action for a specific society. In both aspects
it relates not to the actual but to the possible. What a man essen-
tially is is revealed in two ways: by the record of what he has
done, and by what he is trying to make of himself at any given moment.
Adopting provisionally the legal metaphor that runs all through the
Bible, and sees man as under a trial and subject to judgment, we may
say that the former is the case for the prosecution, the voice of the
accuser. The accuser is the primary role of Satan in the Bible, and
so Byron is very accurate when he refers to history, the record of
what man has done, as "the devil's scripture." This aspect of history
does not diminish its importance: quite the contrary. It is the func-
tion of literature, however, not to run away from the actual, but to
see the dimension of the possible in the actual.


The Israelites were not black, and nineteenth-century blacks had no
quarrel with ancient Egypt. The point s that When any group of people
feels as strongly about anything as slaves feel about slavery, history
as such is dust and ashes: only myth with its suggestion of an action
that can contain the destinies of those who are contemplating it, can
provide any hope or support at all.

myth redeems history: assigns it to its real place in the human panorama.



All human societies are insulated to some degree by a culture that sur-
rounds them and separates them from nature. There are no noble savages,
in the sense of purely natural men for whom this integument of culture
has disappeared. What we live in says Wallace Stevens, a description
without place. This "description," on its verbal side, is a mythology
or body of sacrosanct stories, rituals, traditions: a social skin that
marks the boundary between ourselves and the natural envirnment.


The primary function of mythology is to face inward toward the concerns
of the society that possesses it--which is why science, which faces out-
ward toward the operations of nature itself, is a late cultural development.


mythology has an encyclopedic quality about it: it tends to cover all the
essential concerns of its society. When we move into the metonymic phase of
langage, tension arises between the growing separate elements of culture
and the unifying mythology of its social concern. At this stage it is quick
ly discovered that a unified mythology is a powerful instrument of social
authority and coercion, and it is accordingly used as such.



But it is hard to see how the centrifugal drift toward cultural pluralism
could be stopped, even if we were agreed that it should be. Sooner or later,
astronomy had to accept a heliocentric view of the solar system even though
social anxieties demanded a geocentric one; sooner or later British history
had to give up King Arthur even though the British imagination clung to him.
That is, historians and scientists found that they had not only a social
function, but a discipline of their own that demanded loyalty to its princi-
ples.

The basis of the problem, once more, is the simultaneous sense of
both the social relevance and the inner integrity of all the elements of
human culture. Without the integrity, we go around the cycle again,
back to a subordination of everything creative and scholarly to the
expediencies and superstitions of authority. Without the sense of
relevance, we fly apart into a chaos of mutually unintelligible elites,


much of the Bible is contemporary with a metaphorical phase of language,
where many aspects of verbal meaning cannot be conveyed except through
metaphorical and poetic means. Not only are large blocks of the Old Test-
ament written in verse, but the prose, with its frequent verse interludes,
shows a strong affinity with the associative and figured speech of verse.


The New Testament continues with the samepatterns. In Matthew 16:18 we
find the celebrated "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock (petra) I will
build my church," a Greek pun which by a curious accident, it that is
what it is, works also in the Aramaic that Jesus was more likely to have
been speaking. Another Aramaic pun is probably involved when John the
Baptist says (Matthew 3:9) that God is able of these "stones" ('ebhanim)
to raise up "children- (banini) to Abraham This also coincides with a
Greek pun, though one that takes us' outside the Bible: in the Hesiodic
myth of the deluge the survivors of the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha,
were told to throw stones ivors of behind them: they did so and people
(laos) sprang up.


We notice too that the Bible is full of explicit metaphors, of the this-
is-that, or A -is-B type. Such metaphors are profoundly illogical, if
not anti-logical: they assert that two things are the same thing while
remaining two different things, which is absurd. Yet we read in Genesis
49: "Issachar is a strong ass"; "Naphtali is a hind let loose"; "Joseph
is a fruitful bough." Ah yes, we say, but these are "just" metapohrs.
But then we notice that Jesus makes a number of metaphorical statements
about himself: "I am the door"; "I am the vine, ye are the branches";
"I am the bread of life"; "I am the way, the truth and the life." How
"seriously" are we to take these? He seems to have meant them rather
seriously.


We clearly have to consider the possibility that metaphor is, not an
incidental ornament of Biblical language, but one of its controlling
modes of thought...We get into a more rarefied area of literary crit-
icism with Jesus' aphorism "The kingdom of God is within you...Those
who feel that psychological metaphors express the profoundest truths
will prefer "within"; those who want a more social gospel--and these
translators clearly have a social conscience--will prefer "among."


The sense in Christianity of a faith beyond reason, which must continue
to affirm even after reason gives up, is closely connected with the lin-
guistic fact that many of the central doctrines of traditional Christian-
ity can be grammatically expressed only in the form o metaphor. Thus:
Christ is God and man; in the Trinity three persons are one; in the Real
Presence the body and blood are the bread and the wine.



In descriptive language, metaphors are something of an obstacle because
of their ambiguity. Accurate and precise definition, so far as words can
convey it is a descriptive ideal, and the descriptive axiom, to mean any
number of things is really to mean nothing," works fairly well in that
context. The situation is somewhat different in metonymic writing, where
the versatility of a single word, such as form, idea, substance, being,
or time, may afford a key to a whole System of thought. And it is totally
different in poetry, where th axiom does not work at all It seems clear
that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is funct-
ional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

Similarly, we are told in the New Testament that the mysteries of faith
have to be "spiritually discerned". This is in a passage where Paul is
contrasting the letter, which he says, "killeth," with the spirit that
"giveth life".


A word, let us say, has its dictionary or conventional meaning, which
exists independently of what we are reading; and it also has its particular
meaning in the context of what we are reading. Our attention as we read
is thus going simultaneously in two directions, outward to the conventional
or remembered meaning, inward to the specific contex¬tual meaning. In some
verbal structures there comes a point at which we realize that the dictio-
nary meanings are forming a second pattern parallel to the words. This is
a sign that what we are reading is descriptive in intention: the verbal
structure reproduces in its terms the body of phenomena it is describing,
and a comparison between the two is implied throughout. At other times
there seems to be no such secondary structure of meaning outside the words,
and this in turn is a sign that what we are reading is "literary," which
means provisionally a verbal structure existing for its own sake.


(p. 52 diagram)

Here A is the verbal structure we are reading and B is the world outside
it where all the things that the words mean are to be found. The letters
uvwxyz are the individual words in the verbal structure A and the letters
UVWXYZ are the things that they individually mean. The circle A represents
the interrelating of words in what we are reading, and the dotted circle
in B represents the corresponding structure in the non-verbal world which
exists only when the verbal structure is descriptive.

If we begin reading Carl Sanburg's poem on the fog:

The fog comes
On little cat feet

it is clear that we are not going to find anything structured outside the
poem about fogs or cats' feet: the suggestion of something silent and furry
comes back into the metaphorical structure of the poem itself.



There are two forms of half-reading that indicate how two processes are
always involved. If we are reading a technical treatise on a subject we know
little about, we can see that the sentences make grammatical sense, but we
do not have enough external referents to complete the operation. Similarly
with reading something in a language we imperfectly know. If, on the other
hand, our reading is lazy and inattentive, we recognize the individual words
but are not making the organized effort, the Gestalt or whatever it is, to
unify them syntactically. One point that is significant here is that this
centripetal organizing effort of the mind is primary. Mere unfamil-iaiity
with the referents, which can be overcome by further study, is secondary.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete read-ing; failure to grasp
centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.

In examining a literary structure in particular, our attention is directed
mainly to the interrelationships among the words them-selves. Figures of
speech thus become one of the chief objects of attention, because all fig-
ures of speech emphasize the centripetal and interrelating aspects of words.
The descriptive phase of language, our demotic or third phase, invokes the
criterion of verifiable truth, or satisfactory correspondence of verbal
structure and things described by it. Expressing such truth normally calls
for a minimal use figures of speech,


The principle of implicit metaphor means among other things that when a
"true" meaning is decided on for a word, it will usually be a choice among
a number of metaphorical possibilities, and those other possibilities will
still be there. This is particularly obvious when the


The Bible means literally just what it says; and in the traditional way of applying this principle, that means that what
it says, in the historical area, for example, is a definitive transcript of actual events.

This view, whatever the obvious difficulties, some of them already dealt with, derives a great deal of strength from the
traditional association of the word "truth" with descriptive verbal structures. In the poetic structure as such there is
no direct criterion of truth as Aristotle explained: the writer of poetry or fiction says only "Let this world be";



The principle involved here applies with considerable force to the Bible because the Bible is so deeply rooted in the
characteristics of words and of language. The centripetal aspect of a verbal structure is its primary aspect, because
the only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in lang-
uage is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away
from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object. The events
the Bible describes are what some scholars call "language events," brought to us only through words; and it is the words
thernselves that have the authority, not the events they describe. The Bible means literally just what it says, but it
can mean it only without primary reference to a correspondence of what it says to something outside what it says.



idolatry is condemned in the Bible, it is often regarded as a "literal" projection into the external world of an image
that might be quite acceptable as a poetic metaphor. Thus Jeremiah (2:27) ridicules those who say "To a stock, Thou art
my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth." But Isaiah (5 1: 1) urges his hearers to "look unto the rock
whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged."



All verbal structures have a centripetal and a centrifugal aspect, and we can call the centripetal aspect their literary
aspect. In this sense all verbal structures whatever have a literary aspect, even though normally we do not speak of
literature unless a pattern of continuous descriptive reference is absent. The primary and literal meaning of the Bible,
then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning. It is only when we are reading as we do when we read poetry that we can take
the word "literal" seriously, accepting every word given us without question. This primary meaning, which arises simply
from the interconnection of the words, is the metaphorical meaning. There are various secondary meanings, derived from
the centrifugal perspective, that may take the form of concepts, predications, propositions, or a sequence of historical
or biographical events, and that are always subordinate to the metaphorical meaning.

With other books we can go on to say: either there is a continuous reference of external meaning which establishes a con-
text for whatever descriptive truth it may have, or there is no such reference and we are dealing with a work of litera-
ture, where the criterion of truth if relevant at all, emerges entirely from the inner verbal consistency. In dealing
with literature we frequently speak of its seif-contained unity as "imaginative- and distinguish as "imaginary" its rela-
tion to actual events. The Bible, however, as we saw, evadves this antithesis: it is neither literary nor non-literary,
or, more positively, it is as literary as it can well be without actually being literature...And yet we cannot do with
the Bible what we can do with Hornet or Dante, and stop with the explicitly poetic utterance as the containing category.



The centripetal context for the Bible extends over the whole of the book usually called "Holy Bible," and might well ex-
tend far beyond that except that we have to stop somewhere. Wherever we stop, the unity of the Bible as a whole is an
assumption underlying the understanding of any part of it. This unity is not primarily, we repeat, a metonymic consist-
ency of doctrine addressed to our faith: it is a unity of narrative and imagery and what we have called metaphor.


Reading words in sequence, however, is the first of two critical operations. Once a verbal structure is read, and reread
often enough to be possessed, it "freezes." It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at once, which we can then
examine like a picture, without regard to the specific movement of the narrative.


The term "structure," which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are
speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time.


A great mass of additional detail that we missed in the sequential reading then becomes relevant, because all the images
are metaphorically linked with all the other images, not merely with those that follow each other in the narrative.


In the study of the Bible it is even more obvious that the two operations have to go on concurrently, because the Bible
does not, like Homer, present an unbroken surface of narrative,


If we "freeze" the Bible into a simultaneous unit, it becomes a single, gigantic, complex metaphor, first by tautology,
in the sense in which all verbal strucure are metaphorical by juxtaposition, and second in a more specific sense of con-
taining a structure of significantly repeated images.



Aristotle's distinction between the poetic universal narrative and the particular historical one



a structure of universalized or poetic meaning that can sustain a number of discursive theological interpretations. When
the Catholic Church achieved temporal power, it was able to confine acceptable discursive renderings of the Bible's mean-
ing to a very narrow orbit, but after the Reformation it became obvious that secondary or discursive meanings of the Bible
could take on many different but internally consistent forms, by no means all of them theological.



Major Classical poets, notably Homer and Virgil, came to be regarded as inexhaustible treasure-troves of metonymic ideas.
Even Francis Bacon wrote a treatise on the "Wisdom of the Ancients," in which most of the standard Classical myths turned
out to be prototypes of the principles of Baconian philosophy.


that mythical thinking is universal or poetic thinking, and is to predicative thought as narrative myth is to history, is
of primary and permanent significance.



It is curious but significant that "gnostic" and agnostic" are both dirty words in the Christian tradition: wisdom is not
identified either with knowledge or with the denial of knowledge. It is an existential wisdom with its center in human
concern, not in the exploration of nature or other worlds.



Local deities--the nymphs, fauns, and satyrs of a later mythology--are part of the sense of natura naturans , the "pagan-
ism" that is the instinctive belief of the paganus or peasant who is closest to such a nature and farthest from the cen-
ters of social development. Here the gods are mysterious beings whose presence is sensed or who may appear unpredictably
in epiphanies. Their background is a nature that is primarily a force of energy (the original sense of the Greek word
physis)...the poets insist on the sense of identity with what Dylan Thomas calls "the force that through the green fuse
drives the flower" as something we ignore at our peril. Wordsworth speaks of the "huge and mighty forms" that seep from
nature into the human soul...


Such an earth-mother is the most easily-understood image of natura naturans cherishing, and she acquires its moral ambi-
valence. As the womb of all forms of life, she has a cherishing and nourishing aspect; as the tomb of all forms of life,
she has a menacing and sinister aspect...birth, death and renewal in time; or heaven, earth and hell in space.


The cycle presided over by the earth-mother of natura naturans is, in Plato's phrase, the cycle of the different, the
life that emerges being always different from the life that gave birth to it. Hence the emphasis on renewal and the
obliterating of the past. Eventually, as society becomes more complex, mythology expands toward the conception of
natura naturata, nature as a structure or system; and the symbolism of cyclical movement shifts to the sky. This is
because the sky illustrates rather the cycle of the same, it being clearly the same sun that comes up the next morning,
the same moon that returns from the dark. Such a cycle suggests planning and intelligence rather than mysterious power,
and as this sense begins to dominate mythology the supreme god comes to be thought of increasingly as a sky-father. He
is a father because he is a deity who does not bear or nurse his children, and hence a god who makes the world rather
than one who brings life into existence by giving it birth.

One Would think that the sky-father would probably be later in cultural development than the earth-mother, a mother
being more appropriate for a farming economy and a father for the tool-using patriarchal, city-dwelling life that is
usually thought to succeed it.


By Stoic times the sky-father who begets has prevailed over the earth-mother who brings to birth


This is part of a social development in which subordinate gods move from local deities of woods and rivers and fields
into an analogy of a human aristocracy like the Olympian gods of Greece. The Olympians treat humanity like the aris-
tocrats do their inferiors.


In this development from natura naturans to natura naturata there is a curious analogy to the shift in the critical
process we have traced from participating in a narrative movement in time to studying a structure that is spread out
before us in space. If we "freeze" a myth, we said, we get a single metaphor-complex; if we "freeze" an entire myth-
ology, we get a cosmology. Paganism, thus frozen, seems to be dominated by the vision of cyclical recurrence. Nature
suggests no beginning or end in itself, because we see it within the mental categories of time and space, and begin-
nings and ends in time and space are not, really thinkable, easy as it may be to talk about them.