Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief

Transfiguration

Studies in Religion

Charles H. Long, Editor

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

EDITORIAL BOARD

William A. Clebsch

Stanford University

Giles B. Gunn

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Van A. Harvey

Stanford University

Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

The University of Chicago

Ninian Smart

University of California at Santa Barbara

and the University of Lancaster

Transfiguration

Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief

FRANK BURCH BROWN

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

The publication of this work was made possible in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, media programming, libraries, and museums, in order to bring the results of cultural activities to a broad, general public.

© 1983 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Brown, Frank Burch, 1948–

Transfiguration: poetic metaphor and the languages of religious belief.

(Studies in religion)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Religion and poetry. 2. Metaphor. 3. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965. Four quartets. I. Tide. II. Series: Studies in religion (Chapel Hill, N.C.)

PN1077.B69 1983 801’.951 82-24714

ISBN 0-8078-1560-8

Excerpts from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd., London, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. In a Station of the Metro is reprinted from Personae: Collected Shorter Poems, by Ezra Pound, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. and New Directions Publishing Corporation; copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound.

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

TO CAROL—

Whose art and belief

Are part of my life

And, I hope, of these words.

Contents

Preface

Chapter One

A Prefiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief

Chapter Two

Poetry and Reality: A Critique of Philip Wheelwright

Chapter Three

Poetic Transfiguration: Four Quartets (I)

Chapter Four

The Dynamics of Poetic Structure: Four Quartets (II)

Chapter Five

Poetic Metaphor and Poetic Purpose: Four Quartets (III)

Chapter Six

Poetry and Religious Reflection: Alfred North Whitehead on Metaphysical Thinking

Chapter Seven

Transfiguration: Metaphor, Theology, and the Languages of Religious Belief

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

Given the nature of the argument I have pursued in this book, I have found it necessary to venture across the boundaries of a number of academic disciplines. Such an attempt is not without its hazards. The reader’s fields of interest and expertise are unlikely to coincide exactly with mine. At the same time, my own capacity to do justice to all the areas of scholarship touched on here is undeniably strained to its limit. In an effort to minimize the potential for misunderstanding on the part of the reader and misrepresentation on the part of the author, I have tried in the following chapters to indicate as plainly as I can the crucial points of the overall argument in such a way as to circumvent some of the technical terminology a scholar specializing in any given area might expect to encounter.

In this regard, however, I have met with only partial success. Technical terms remain, and I have had to presume a readership with wide interests and unusual patience. Even though each chapter is intended to be intelligible to the nonspecialist, I have nonetheless felt that each must offer something of substance to the specialist as well. The three chapters analyzing Eliot’s Four Quartets, for instance, assume that the reader already has a degree of familiarity with modern poetry and with this cycle of poems in particular. In any case, most readers will want to consult the complete text of the Quartets, which is less than thirty pages long. Similarly, my exposition in the chapters focusing on Wheelwright and Whitehead will be followed most easily by students of literary theory and philosophy. Finally, I assume that the reader has at least a marginal curiosity about religious issues and religious thought.

It would be difficult to overestimate the value of the help given me over the years by Nathan A. Scott, Jr., David Tracy, and Anthony C. Yu. So I welcome the chance to thank them, knowing that I am only beginning to realize how much their assistance has meant. Likewise, I am especially indebted to Schubert M. Ogden and Paul Ricoeur. In very different ways, both have stimulated my reflections and challenged my unexamined presuppositions every time I have talked with them or read their writing with the care it deserves. Whatever criticisms I here express with regard to some of their ideas should be understood in this light. More recently, Giles B. Gunn has given considerable aid and encouragement that could not have been better timed or more appreciated. This project would never have been completed at all without the personal support provided by my parents and by friends like Larry Bouchard, Michael Kinnamon, Lynn Poland, and Peg Stearn. One such friend and colleague, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, gave invaluable assistance in the final stages of my revisions by reading the entire manuscript and making suggestions that, much to her surprise, I sometimes heeded. My wife Carol also read the manuscript with a critical yet friendly eye, but that is the least of the reasons why this is dedicated to her. For the patience and skills of typists Becky Cox, Janis Pittman, and (especially) Suzie VanKrey, I am truly grateful. I am also grateful indeed for the sensitivity with which the completed manuscript was edited by Sandra Eisdorfer of the University of North Carolina Press.

Earlier versions of parts of chapters 4 and 5 appeared in Papers on Language and Literature (Winter 1982) and the Journal of Modern Literature (March 1983). A portion of chapter 6 was first published in a different form in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December 1982). Parts of chapters 1 and 7 originally appeared in the Journal of Religion (January 1982). Permission to reprint this material has been kindly granted by the editors and publishers involved.

Transfiguration

Chapter One. A Prefiguration

Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief

Human reason has this peculiar fate that. . . it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the nature of reason itself it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer

—Immanuel Kant

Philosophizing leads to frontiers where its own language ceases while art seems still to speak. [Yet] the music that goes beyond all we can say will finally drive us back to words; and the sight of art, to thoughts.

—Karl Jaspers

Much modern and postmodern thought has proceeded from the assumption that the powers and limits of the human mind, whatever they may be, are directly correlated with the powers and limits of human language. Accordingly, inquiries into the nature of rationality and imagination, beauty and the arts, or morality and religion have to a large extent consisted in the study of signs, symbols, and semantic systems.

This book constitutes one such study, the central purpose of which is to examine issues relating the theory of literature and metaphor to the analysis of religious experience and reflection. Specifically, the succeeding chapters are meant to provide extensive support for the claim that the varieties of experience and reflection important to religion have an intrinsic connection with poetry and poetics—a connection best understood when one pays special attention to metaphor (broadly conceived) and to poetic metaphor in particular.

The topics, arguments, and conclusions of this study are variations on themes as old as formal philosophical and religious inquiry. But scholarship in every area touched on here has undergone a period of exceptional fermentation in recent decades. Whole movements in philosophy and in religious studies have flourished, withered, or revived with astonishing and rather disconcerting rapidity.¹ Simultaneously, the fields of literary criticism, semantics, and semiotics have undergone striking transformations, reflecting such influences as structuralist, poststructuralist, and neo-Marxist thought.²

Given the frankly experimental character of some of this recent intellectual activity, one cannot be surprised that the results are often confused and confusing. But more important, if not more surprising, is the fact that previously hidden connections between seemingly disparate fields of inquiry have come to light. As regards the present study, this means we may now be in a position to see more fully the ways in which languages of religious belief are related to metaphoric modes of thought and speech. At the same time, we may be able to gain fresh insight into the still larger question of how it is that human beings, through their many different kinds of language, come to discover and imagine those realities fundamental to the various faiths by which they live: religious faiths or secular, traditional or nontraditional, communal or private.

Because the argument I develop in the following pages moves through a number of stages, each of some complexity, it will be useful at the outset to give a kind of preflguration of what is to come as well as a brief explication of my methods and terminology. As I have already indicated, this inquiry is intentionally bifocal. Whereas the early chapters focus on the theory of metaphor and poetic art, the latter chapters focus on the theory of experience and religious reflection. These two foci merge at a number of points, however—most notably in the study of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which comprises the three middle chapters and is expressly designed to refine and exemplify the theories expounded before and after.

The keen scholarly interest that metaphor has generated for some time now is bound eventually to abate. But at present no one undertaking an examination of the relation between poetry and religion can easily avoid the topic of metaphoric language, nor can he or she expect to cover the topic in the space of a few pages. In a 1958 essay, Paul Henle could still plausibly maintain there was little new to be said on the subject of metaphor. ³ But Warren Shibles’s mammoth bibliography on metaphor, published in 1971, contained a great many entries of recent origin.⁴ Since then the number of publications treating metaphor and related subjects has increased almost beyond belief.

Needless to say, the sheer volume of publications would be smaller if scholars had reached a complete consensus as to the character and function of metaphor. Yet significant areas of agreement do exist. Few contemporary theorists question the thesis that metaphor, far from being a mere ornament, plays a crucial role in language of almost every kind, from the scientific to the aesthetic. Many, following Aristotle’s lead, view metaphor as the central figure of speech and thought. As Jonathan Culler remarks, Today metaphor is no longer one figure among others but the figure of figures, a figure for figurality.⁵ Likewise, the majority of writers agree that the meaning of live metaphoric expressions is so bound to the specific properties of the metaphoric medium that a fully adequate paraphrase or substitute is in principle impossible. Finally, many students of metaphor are convinced, as I am, that its unique semantic properties are correlated with equally unique epistemic and pragmatic potentials. From such a perspective, metaphor is seen as having the capacity to provide highly significant transformations of language, thought, and experience—transformations of a kind not duplicated by other linguistic strategies.

The very recognition of the importance and pervasiveness of metaphor raises difficult questions, however. Is there any discourse that is not metaphoric, at least in origins? Having categorized figurative language as essentially metaphoric, are there no important discriminations left to make among rhetorical tropes? What is the function of dead metaphor? And how does metaphor—live or dead—function in ordinary thought and practice as well as in relation to specialized conceptual enterprises like science, law, metaphysics, and theology? Some of these questions I can address only briefly in a book of this sort, whereas others lie entirely beyond anything I consider explicitly. Certainly I make no attempt to survey the whole range of answers offered by current scholarship. The reader wanting more complete discussions of any of these issues is urged to consult the bibliography, taking special note of recent collections of essays⁶ and of Paul Ricoeur’s comprehensive study La Métaphore vive (the English translation of which bears the misleading title The Rule of Metaphor).⁷

My own goal is not so much to proffer or reject theories of metaphor in general as it is to give a more adequate account than others have of the dynamics and value of specifically poetic metaphor—including whole literary works seen as extended metaphors. From the start, I stress how poetry’s semantic creativity is linked to its essential interdependence with other modes of language and experience. In this way I lay the groundwork for later conclusions concerning the relation of poetic metaphor to religious languages and belief.

In view of the trajectory of my argument, one might expect Paul Ricoeur’s theories to figure most prominently in the discussion. And obviously, having studied with Ricoeur and felt considerable sympathy with his aims, I have both consciously and unconsciously kept his work in mind. Yet my views of metaphor, metaphysics, and theology finally differ from Ricoeur’s at a number of critical points. Furthermore, Ricoeur has never applied his theories to an analysis of the kind of literary art with which I am primarily concerned. I therefore take a different route. Content on the whole to treat the theories of Ricoeur and several other thinkers as reference points, I begin with a critique and extensive reformulation of the ideas of a philosopher intimately acquainted with literature and literary criticism—namely, Philip Wheelwright.

Wheelwright’s overall stature is not, of course, equal to that of Ricoeur—or of Heidegger or various analytic philosophers, for that matter. Some of his most interesting claims are never supported with rigorous argumentation or systematic exposition. In addition, they are often embedded in a polemic against logical and semantic positivism that now seems somewhat dated. Yet Wheelwright’s failures are unusually illuminating, and I believe his insights can be put to better use than anyone has realized.

Wheelwright’s confusions and weaknesses are instructive because they reflect his close but ambivalent association with the so-called New Criticism dominant at mid-century in England and North America. If this kind of literary criticism had by now been replaced by alternatives free of all its defects, then a critique of Wheelwright would be superfluous. But in point of fact many of the typical New Critical dilemmas and confusions, particularly with regard to poetic structure, language, and purpose, repeatedly recur in the often brilliant attempts made in the last two decades to go beyond or to circumvent the New Criticism.⁸ To see where Wheelwright fails in his own effort to transcend the limitations of such criticism is thus also to see how today’s critical theories can be strengthened.

More significant, to the extent that Wheelwright succeeds, his success has neither been duplicated nor fully appreciated. This is not to say his work has been totally misunderstood or neglected. Every student of metaphor is familiar with Wheelwright’s name, and his ideas continue to be discussed with respect even outside literary critical circles, whether in biblical studies of the nature of parable and symbol⁹ or in philosophical studies of language such as those provided by James Edie¹⁰ and Paul Ricoeur.¹¹ Yet no detailed and careful examination of Wheelwright’s semantics of poetry has ever appeared in print. As a consequence, no one has seen or explored some important implications of his theories of poetic assertion, metaphor, and cognition.

My reading of Wheelwright is one I admit he might at points consider a misreading. And the conclusions I draw from his claims are not always ones he would either recognize or welcome. They have been deduced, as a deconstructionist would quickly note, from what Wheelwright leaves unsaid as well as from what he plainly does say, and they sometimes undermine other of his claims. If I myself am glad to accept and build on these subversive conclusions, it is only because I have certain goals in mind that Wheelwright never would have pursued. In the end, however, this is the only way I have seen to reach the more important goals of his and so indeed to move beyond some of the limitations of the New Criticism.

To the extent to which my strategy succeeds, it establishes a standpoint from which to see poetic (that is, literary) wholes as extended metaphoric structures having the capacity to augment, transfigure, and reinterpret meanings already a part of language and experience—meanings vital to the self as it seeks a comprehensive meaning in the patterns of existence as a whole. Whereas Wheelwright sometimes succumbs to the New Critical temptation to see poetry as an autonomous and ineffable object mediating a sense of reality essentially beyond the reach of reason and conceptual discourse, the present theory sees the transfigurations of poetry as semantic creations that, for all their uniqueness, are inevitably taken up into further language and experience, there to be reinterpreted in conceptual modes that can themselves generate further poetic and imaginative exploration. On this view, not only does the symbol (or metaphor) give rise to thought—as Kant, Jaspers, and Ricoeur all insist—but thought in turn gives rise to symbol, which itself returns, transfigured, to thought and life.

This understanding of poetic language and of language as a whole runs counter to the tendency of many modern thinkers to regard our multiple human worlds—linguistic and otherwise—as discrete spheres with distinct and totally autonomous meanings and rules.¹² Similarly, it suggests that Kant’s clear-cut distinctions between the modes of reason and judgment do not completely match the operations of the mind, since in some contexts the claims of reason can apparently qualify, and be qualified by, the claims of taste. The thoughts we reasonably conceive influence the aesthetic metaphors we imagine, with the converse being equally true. Even if such relations seem illicit, they can no longer be ignored.

To envision a dynamic interrelationship between different modes of language and thought is not, however, to deny they are indeed different. I do not take metaphoric and conceptual kinds of discourse to be interchangeable, as though they were identical in semantic shape. Accordingly, I would not suggest that their most significant meanings are to be discovered using identical methods of interpretation. Nor would I argue that metaphoric and conceptual modes of meaning have the same overall purposes, even if it is true that certain basic structural patterns recur in both poetry and science, for example, or in both myth and history. The theory put forward here is therefore incompatible with the ideas of those structuralists who hold that all linguistic phenomena are not only fundamentally but also most importantly permutations of a limited number of structures underlying all the constructions of consciousness and serving essentially equivalent functions (such as the mediation of binary oppositions).¹³ This is not to reject every use of structuralist methods, of course, but merely to oppose a form of structuralist ideology.¹⁴

Finally, my theory of metaphor has implications with regard to the perennial question of the relation of language to reality. Phenomenologists, structuralists, deconstructionists, and analytic philosophers have all stressed, though in different ways, that human experience is linguistic to the core. Without language, they suggest, we would simply have no worlds to ponder, inhabit, or even escape. Some who say this mean merely that no particle of experience as humans know it could so much as exist for us apart from at least rudimentary language, much of it nonverbal. With this I concur. But where the linguisticality of experience is interpreted to mean that language is closed in on itself, so that—in Foucault’s words—it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being,¹⁵ there the so-called postmodern consciousness occupies territory alien to mine. It seems to me more plausible to suppose the dialogue between (or among) languages exists at all only because of an impetus from experience never quite said. I thus agree with Whitehead that there is not simply the clearly sayable and knowable on the one hand and the completely unsayable and unknowable on the other. Contrary to the import of Wittgenstein’s closing aphorisms in the Tractatus,¹⁶ there is also the partially sayable, the partially knowable: the hint half guessed, the gift half understood, as Eliot puts it. And there is the process of coming to say and coming to know. Indeed, because nothing experienced can ever completely be said or known in any or all of the dialects native to the self, it is all the more important to attend to the interplay between various modes of discourse, thought, and experience. Doing so, one never sees around language, but one can see through its many levels to what motivates it and may yet be said more fully and clearly One also comes to realize how interconnected and yet distinctive our symbol systems are and how those systems together extend and enrich our sense of ourselves, of our social world, and of the whole.

This, then, is the thrust behind the theory of metaphor and language elaborated here. But that theory and its ramifications take shape only gradually in the chapters to come. After the groundwork is laid in my critique of Wheelwright, the three subsequent chapters undertake a study of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets intended to flesh out and extend the literary theoretical ideas already considered at an abstract level.

There is ample precedent for approaching the Quartets from a theoretical point of view even while offering an interpretation of the work that can be considered on its own merits. F. R. Leavis, for example, devotes almost half of The Living Principle to a discussion of the Quartets intended to show—among other things—that poetry is genuinely a medium of thought.¹⁷ In a similar way, Paul Hahn utilizes Four Quartets to demonstrate the validity of his reformation of New Criticism.¹⁸ Again, in this connection, it is significant that F. O. Matthiessen’s study of T. S. Eliot bears the subtitle An Essay on the Nature of Poetry.¹⁹ Nor should it pass unnoticed that Hans Osterwald uses other works by Eliot to elaborate a Jakobsonian account of the role of metaphor and metonymy in language and literature.²⁰ And, finally, it is surely pertinent that Philip Wheelwright himself endeavors to support his theories by examining, in the concluding pages of The Burning Fountain, certain features of the Quartets²¹ It would thus seem I am in good company in judging that Four Quartets provides valuable material for either evaluating or formulating a theory of poetry.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. Although Four Quartets is not, in its combination of reflective seriousness and lyrical beauty, entirely typical of modern verse, this cycle of poems nevertheless stands as a major and influential achievement and the crowning work of an important poet. The kinds of poetic qualities it exhibits can, moreover, be shown to be fairly representative of a large number of other poems, including—in the modern period alone—many by major poets like Rilke, Stevens, and Yeats. If Four Quartets is in some ways exceptional (perhaps especially in its balancing of intellectual and affective components), this simply calls attention to traits common to all literature but frequently less conspicuous in other contexts. No work, of course, can exemplify every major characteristic of every kind of literary art. Because of its lyrical nature, for instance, Four Quartets minimizes the dimension of narrative. Yet one can discern in the work something at least analogous to narrative. There is, at any rate, a definite progression and representation of action within each of the Quartets as well as within the work as a whole, and this requires us to respond to the work partly as a temporal and sequential entity.

Still another feature of the Quartets makes it a logical choice for a study such as this. Given the poem’s reliance on mystical, philosophical, and theological sources, one can scarcely avoid confronting one of the questions I have indicated I most want to confront: What is poetry’s relation to religious experience and reflection and to theology in particular? But to deal adequately with this question we must of course look not only at Four Quartets but also at the dynamics of human experience and religious reflection. Accordingly, I next turn from poetry proper to one major way of conceiving the character of experience and its relation to poetic, theological, and metaphysical thinking. It is at this point that the theories of Alfred North Whitehead become relevant.

If Wheelwright’s theories have not been given their due on account of their casual exposition and lack of rigor, Whitehead’s seem to have suffered from the opposite difficulty. The ideas of Whitehead that most interest me here are in fact often deeply enmeshed in a complex and forbidding philosophical system. As a result, they have yet to receive the attention they deserve.

To be sure, it is encouraging that Whitehead’s work appears no longer to be solely the property of logicians, metaphysicians, or even process theologians. Epistemologists and phenomenologists like Calvin Schrag have begun to recognize its significance. And some recent studies begin to meet the need pointed out by Schrag when, in 1969, he wrote: It is unfortunate that the metaphysical scaffolding of [Whitehead’s] speculative cosmology has virtually eclipsed his seminal insights into the dynamics and texture of experience. What is sorely needed in Whitehead scholarship today is a reexamination of his philosophy in light of his theory of experience.²²

Lyman Lundeen’s book Risk and Rhetoric in Religion is one such study. Although it is not intended to satisfy Schrag’s specific desideratum, Lundeen’s is a thoughtful exposition of Whitehead’s broader reflections on experience, language, symbolism, and the nature of metaphysical and religious thinking.²³ Stephen Franklin’s Speaking from the Depth also deals with these and similar topics while analyzing in far greater detail the role Whitehead’s philosophy of language plays in his metaphysical system.²⁴ Both works thus supplement in important respects Bernard Loomer’s The Theological Significance of the Method of Empirical Analysis in the Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (1942), which remains the best discussion of Whitehead’s views on the value of contingent experience for metaphysical reflection.²⁵ Finally, Bernard Meland—among others—has creatively utilized the aspect of Whitehead’s thought concerned with the less clearly conceived elements of life experience and the more poetic elements within language.²⁶

Nevertheless, no writer seems to have given a truly satisfactory account of just how the conceptual language of philosophy and theology is, in Whitehead’s account, related to the language of poetry and how poetry is related both to prior language and to nonlinguistic experience. This deficiency would perhaps be unremarkable were it not for the fact that Whitehead himself was emphatic in stating not only that certain realities enter human consciousness primarily as symbols and as the sort of intermediate representations generally offered by literary art but also that these realities are precisely those whose apprehension forms the basis for religious and metaphysical claims, thereby permitting existing conceptual schemes to be criticized and transcended.

We thus have every reason to examine with care Whitehead’s ideas as to poetry’s relation to reflection, theological as well as metaphysical. In my own effort to do so, however, I deliberately avoid much of Whitehead’s technical jargon, just as he himself often does when setting forth his epistemological and methodological premises or treating topics not explicitly dealt with in his metaphysics. This means that I am necessarily prevented from specifying precisely what Whitehead’s metaphysical justification may be for holding certain views of language and experience, but it also happily means that the validity of those views may no longer be presumed to be contingent on the validity of the particulars of the metaphysical system he espoused.

Despite their intrinsic value, Whitehead’s claims cannot provide a proper terminus for our inquiry. Whitehead, after all, was writing at a time when the basic presuppositions behind the best of the current theories of poetry and metaphor were just being formed. Then, too, Whitehead was obviously more interested in metaphysics than in religious reflection per se; he had no keen awareness of the particular constraints and special ends the theologian must keep in mind. His notion of the languages of religious belief was, furthermore, prejudiced toward intellectual, conceptual discourse. My aim is consequently to reshape Whitehead’s argument and to carry it further than he was able to—partly by reference to such other thinkers as Stephen Toulmin, Paul Ricoeur, and David Tracy.

In the final portion of this study, as elsewhere, I trust my discussion will not be construed as having only to do with traditional religious belief and practice, let alone with a belief and practice that is exclusively Christian. Many of the implications of my arguments can in fact fully be appreciated only if viewed within the larger context of religious and cultural studies as a whole. Nevertheless, I have chosen to conclude by giving special attention to questions of language and belief as they have been posed for contemporary Christian theology. For this I make no apology, because it is this form of religious reflection that has been forced to confront most directly certain thorny linguistic and religious issues endemic to modern Western thought and now springing up in non-Western contexts as well.

Not that Western theologians have devised any all-encompassing solutions. Their theologies at the moment exist in a state of considerable confusion. For one thing, there is no unanimity as to the role theology can and should play among the various languages of religious belief and modes of religious practice. Most theologians would probably still accept Anselm’s venerable description of the theological task as "fides quaerens intellectumr But theological ideas of how faith is to seek understanding differ widely these days, as do ideas concerning the nature of the understanding that faith seeks. There is also considerable dispute as to what medium is most viable for theology. Should theology’s idiom be conceptual, propositional discourse or should it be story? Autobiography or kerygmatic proclamation? Visual embodiment or political action? Thus Thomas Altizer speaks for many when he states: Theology today is most fundamentally in quest of a language and mode whereby it can speak.²⁷ 1 cannot attempt to resolve all these controversies concerning the status and function of theological discourse. But I do ally myself with those who argue that an important place remains for a form of religious language that strives unabashedly to be conceptual and nonpoetic; that is, for a language designed to articulate and support in precise, systematic, and reasonable ways the fundamental affirmations of faith. This kind of language seems to me most distinctively theological, retaining a unique place among the languages of religious belief.

Granting this much, I challenge the claim of those theologians who argue that theology, precisely as a conceptual mode of discourse, can provide the fullest possible understanding of faith—who hold, in other words, that theology itself can constitute faith’s most adequate, appropriate, and understandable expression. Because one of the strongest arguments for such a view of theology is provided by a process theologian (Schubert Ogden), I take pains to dispute the argument partly on the basis of Whitehead’s own process theories. At the same time, I criticize the opposite view, which regards poetry and poetic metaphor as having the final word