Analogy school part II

The gift of making meaning for humans who are human

Gentle reader,

In my last letter, here, I introduced the concept of analogical theological language, hoping to share the freedom that comes in recognizing the limits of our abilities to talk about God. In this second piece on the theological gem that is analogy, I dig more deeply into the beautiful fact that our analogical language for God has two aspects: Truth + limits.

Some people worry that the limits of analogy mean that we won’t be able to speak the truth about God or to know God truly, but I’m convinced that those limits mean, instead, that we may know God even more deeply than we might if we thought our ordinary words were adequate for speaking of God.

The limits of analogy help us to know the object of the analogy more fully, and the truthiness of analogy can be a richer kind of human knowing than the truth of simple, propositional statements. And really human knowing goes beyond nodding at true statements. Really human knowing is embodied and relational and imaginative. It makes demands on us and transforms us.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that God is good.

It’s another, deeper and better thing to be in personal relationship with the good God, to know the goodness of God not solely in word but also in flesh, to be drawn toward the goodness of God so that one longs to become good, as God is good.

Let’s return to the analogy between my cat and a roasted marshmallow, which I made last time.

The analogy makes meaning by comparing my cat’s color to the color of a roasted marshmallow.

But the analogy also makes meaning beyond the correspondence of cat color and marshmallow color. The analogy has an aura. It resonates with every night that you and I have sat under the stars before a brilliant blaze, our fronts toasty and our backs freezing. It resonates with the love we may have shared with friends, around those fires, and with the sweetness of the marshmallow goo we’ve licked off our sticky fingers.

None of those resonances has anything literally to do with my cat, but they’re still part of the meaning made when I compare my cat to a marshmallow. The analogy carries the aura of the feel and the sounds and the relationships that we bring to roasted marshmallows. And though that aura is not, literally, about my cat, the analogy takes that aura and hangs it around my cat anyway. And I want that. Just imagine my cat wearing a circlet of marshmallows.

I want you to associate my cat with warmth and friends and sticky sweetness and not the with other possible auras that might hang around other analogies for his cat-colors.

I could have compared my cat’s whiteness to the never-very-white whiteness of a tooth, shading to yellow near the gums. While this might carry similar literal meaning (my cat is whiteish/the tooth is whitish) with the marshmallow analogy, it has a very different aura, and the marshmallow aura is far better for you, should you wish to really know my cat, as I know him.

To continue to explore the richness of the limits and the truthiness of analogical language, I invite you to play with some analogies with me.

Let’s consider one from the book of Proverbs.

Cold waters : thirsty soul :: good news from afar : recipients

First, let’s consider why the analogy works. It trades on our embodied human experiences. What do we know about cold waters? They’re refreshing. They satisfy. Without them, the parched will wither and die. What we know about the refreshing satisfaction of waters is something known in the body. We’ve experienced dry lips and the pressing need for a drink.

But the proverb tucks another layer of meaning into this analogy; it also asks us draw an analogy between body and soul. What does it mean for a soul to be parched, to thirst? While I can’t articulate a literal answer, the analogy still lets me know and feel the answer. It uses the world of the senses to give me knowledge of spiritual territory. I can’t know souls through observation or measurement, but I can know them through analogy. And I can’t use literal language to speak of God, but I can speak of God analogically.

The analogy suggests that good news, like water, soothes, refreshes, and gives life to travelers. But the truthiness of the analogy is even deeper, because the analogy activates my senses and draws on my embodied experience. I can feel the longing for the water and the news, in a way that just saying “soothes” would probably not make happen. And the analogy has an aura that draws on all the times we’ve thirsted and all the times we’ve received good news. It draws on the relationships that we have known in those times.

And, for the reader of the biblical canon, the analogy’s aura includes the story of of Jesus in the gospel of John. While water is needed for the physical life, good news is needed for the spiritual life. “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” but there is, analogically, a wellspring of good news which we may drink of and “never be thirsty,” because it becomes, in Jesus, a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14-15, NRSVUE).

The rest of today’s piece is an exercise in appreciating the meaning making possibilities of analogy. Which is to say, the rest of today’s piece is meant to help us consider how very good and truthy it is that we know God analogically.

From Macbeth, Act V.

This example is so well-known because it does so much good work. It makes so much meaning.

I could skip the analogy and just say that life is short, but I doubt anyone would be quoting me 400 years hence. We’ve seen shadows and short, bad plays. We’ve watched a cloud’s shadow move across a field. We’ve stepped into shadows and felt the chill. The analogy activates our senses; our memories and relationships deepen our knowing of the shadowiness of life.

And, of course, the analogy has limits. They’re obvious, because we come to the analogy with lots of experiences of life and of shadows and we know that the meat of the analogy is not in the grayness of shadows. It’s in their insubstantial nature, their fleetingness, in the fact that “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field,” (Isaiah 40:6, KJV). The analogy resonates with our experiences of grief and loss. And with our longing for the constancy of the word of God which, in contrast to the grasslike flesh, “shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8).

Analogies are far more adequate to sensate, embodied, experiential, and relational truth than plain language could ever be. Knowing through analogy works with the fact that humans know in community and with tradition. Analogies are great for humans, because we are the kind of creatures God has created us to be: sensate, embodied, communal, experiential, and relational.

More briefly, several more meaning-making analogies:

When we read this line from Dickinson, we’re sailing. We’re moving through the salt-spray. The wind is in our faces and the sun at our backs. We know as humans know, as body-soul unities with personal histories.

Despite (or because of?) the obvious limits of the analogy, I have a far better sense of Gatsby’s ceiling than I could have gotten from five pages of more literal description. And the aura of the analogy melds with the aura of weddings, recalling both the joy of celebration and the agony of such a large budget for just one day. That’s just the aura I need, if I want to know what it is to walk through Gatsby’s party.

This one came from my son, commenting on our dog Speckle’s growth over time. If you’ve read the Harry Potter books, you now know a lot about my dog’s personal growth and personality, though you have never met my dog.

An analogical miracle! The sentence is perfect. I know mean faces, and I know broccoli. I know those packed green clusters and that bitter smell. The analogy ignites the imagination.

A scab! Imagine the scabbiness of parents who would look on their daughter as a scab! The analogy is visceral, radical, outrageous. It has me picking a scab in my imagination. I can feel the crust and smell the metallic tang. And it makes so much meaning.

The fact that theological language is analogical is rich and humane. It’s a gift.

We usually emphasize the way analogical language rightly limits what we can say about God, but we can also rejoice in the rich truth about God it opens up for us. I will not be convinced that wedding cake ceilings, broccoli faces, and scabby parenting lack meaning. The meaning these analogies make is deeper and more human than literal meaning can be. And so it is with analogical language for God. More on that, soon, as we move over to analogy school part III, on analogies for God.

Want more? Read Analogy school part III, featuring tigers, queens, and Jesus.

Grace and peace,

BFJ

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p.s. Esther Meek’s book Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology is marked down to $2.99 on kindle at the moment. (I don’t know how long the discount will last!) Meeks has influenced the way I think about human knowing. Link is an associate link.