Polytropy

This is about metaphor.

Perhaps a key point, or discovery in the writing, is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that somebody’s normal mode of speech is metaphorical. At least there is a difference between

• normal speech, whatever somebody else may think of it, and
• the deliberate use of the figure of speech called metaphor.

My analogy is with tmesis, the “cutting” of preposition or prefix from verb. This cannot really have happened if the two words had not been conceived of as joined in the first place.

The last post here,

• “Subjective and Objective” (January 8, 2025),

originated as a comment on the second chapter of The Relevance of Science (1964) by C. F. von Weizsäcker. When I had started studying and annotating the chapter, the terminology of subjective and objective in the second paragraph caught my eye. After my comment on this terminology had grown to a certain size, I removed it to its own file, where it kept growing. I ultimately posted it as “Subjective and Objective.”

The future holds the posting of

• “Machinations” (February 3, 2025) a companion to this one;
• “Order from Chaos” (February 9, 2025), an annotated copy (or “edition”) of Weizsäcker’s whole second chapter, “Cosmogonical Myths.”

These go with the posts of Weizsäcker’s

• third chapter, “Creation in the Old Testament,” as “Biblical Creation” (December 9, 2024) and
• first chapter, “Science and the Modern World,” as “Religious Science” (December 16, 2024).

The present post started as comments on the third and 24th paragraphs of chapter 2, but my subject is something that Weizsäcker does not actually mention by name: metaphor, or removal in Greek.

I am looking at metaphor, because

• Weizsäcker, whom I have been reading, looks at myths;
• Northrop Frye thinks myth and metaphor are “the organizing principles” of literature;
• I have joined a reading of Frye’s 1991 book The Double Vision that was proposed by one of my email friends (who as far as I know does not want to take the time to read this blog).

The third paragraph of chapter 2 of The Relevance of Science is:

The Greek word mythos originally means nothing but word or speech. In a narrower sense it means a story told. At all times people asked: Who were our forefathers? Who gave us bread, tools and weapons? Whence came birth and death? Whence came Heaven and Earth? As an answer they are told a story. This story is a mythos, a myth.

A myth is not just a story, such as might be told for amusement or to deceive, as in a “cover story”; a myth is a traditional story that explains something beyond itself.

In The Double Vision, in the first chapter (of four), called “The Double Vision of Language,” in the last section (of three), called “The Crisis in Language,” Frye says,

For the last fifty years I have been studying literature, where the organizing principles are myth, that is, story or narrative, and metaphor, that is, figured language. Here we are in a completely liberal world, the world of the free movement of the spirit …

I wonder why the author wants to use the terms

• “myth” rather than “story.”
• “metaphor” rather than “figured language” or “figure of speech.”

He seems to be using the figure or trope called synecdoche.

I wonder too whether he means to say that every work of literature can be analyzed into myth and metaphor, as a human being is analyzed into body and soul.

The first section of Frye’s first chapter is called “The Whirligig of Time, 1925–90.” Frye refers there to myth in the special sense. When he was a freshman at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, the stock market crashed, and the expected savior of the world went from being capitalism to socialism, according to the dominant mythology of North America:

it was a generally accepted dogma that capitalism had had its day and was certain to evolve very soon, with or without a revolution, into socialism, socialism being assumed to be both a more efficient and a morally superior system. The persistence of this view helped to consolidate my own growing feeling that myths are the functional units of human society, even when they are absurd myths. The myth in this case was the ancient George and dragon one: fascism was the dragon, democracy the maiden to be rescued, and despite the massacres, the deliberately organized famines, the mass uprooting of peoples, the grabbing of neighbouring territories, and the concentration camps, Stalin simply had to fit into the role of the rescuing knight.

Even though Stalin was from Georgia, I don’t suppose many other people were referring to him as St George. In that case, perhaps Frye is developing his own mythology to explain society.

As for metaphor, was I using it, once or twice, when I said Weizsäcker’s reference to subjectivity and objectivity had caught my eye, and my notes on it had grown? I haven’t got a clear answer.

I didn’t have a clear distinction between the subjective and the objective, when I started writing about them. I could point to what others said, and to the grammatical distinction between the subject and object of a statement with a transitive verb. I noted how Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was based on the construction of a mathematical statement whose meaning was that the statement had no mathematical proof. The statement is thus somehow “subjective”; its meaning, “objective.”

I looked at the argument of some contemporary thinkers that computers do not think. They do not think, because for them, everything is subjective. A program has no awareness of anything beyond itself, whereas thinking is precisely an attempt to reach something that is currently beyond itself.

As I write, I am also making my sourdough einkorn bread – or the bread is making itself, with occasional interventions by me, according to an algorithm that I have learned to follow without much thought. The whole point of an algorithm is to obviate thought, and computers run on algorithms.

It might be said that we run on algorithms, especially those that govern the firing of neurons in our brains. That’s not what it feels like though, and thinking depends on feeling, namely feeling a desire to do the thinking.

That from raw matter, or mass and energy, as subject to certain physical laws, mathematically expressed, humans have evolved a consciousness, which is aware of something beyond itself: I’m not sure this hasn’t become a myth – again, a traditional story used to explain something beyond itself. People accept it and repeat it, without thinking through what it means. Was there really a sequence of genetic mutations that made it possible for us to know things, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, or the efficacy of the Euclidean Algorithm?

Perhaps there is no reason why a computer should not evolve a consciousness; but then there is also no reason for humans to think they had anything to do with it.

Hesiod has an account in Works and Days of how we evolved, starting as follows (lines 109–16; Loeb translation by Glenn W. Most, 2006):

Golden was the race of speech-endowed human beings which the immortals, who have their mansions on Olympus, made first of all. They lived at the time of Cronus, when he was king in the sky; just like gods they spent their lives, with a spirit free from care, entirely apart from toil and distress. Worthless old age did not oppress them, but they were always the same in their feet and hands, and delighted in festivities, lacking in all evils; and they died as if overpowered by sleep.

The myth comes back (along with the Adam-and-Eve one) in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”:

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

There is a natural way to create consciousness: have children and educate them. Perhaps Judit Polgár and her sisters are proof of what their father László said: “Geniuses are made, not born.” Another popular song from my childhood now comes to my mind:

You, who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye

Teach your children well
Their father’s hell did slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick [is] the one you’ll know by

Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

It is interesting to learn from Wikipedia,

The recording features Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar. Garcia taught himself how to play the instrument during his tenure with the New Riders of the Purple Sage … Garcia had made a deal that in return for his playing steel guitar on “Teach Your Children,” CSNY would help members of the Grateful Dead improve their vocal harmony for their upcoming albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

Different people may transcribe differently the lyrics they hear. As an example of “the one they pick,” I can name the song itself, which I have picked out of my memory from among all of the songs that I was fed on as I grew up. I have also picked out the other sources that I quote here to support what I want to say.

It doesn’t seem as if Graham Nash (born 1942) had children when he wrote “Teach Your Children” in 1968. Neither have I ever had them, but I try to teach the children that other people have had, and we were all children once. My sense of Nash’s song seems corroborated by the comment made “10 months ago” (as of January 25, 2025), by somebody called Olimpiada Persistente 68, beneath a YouTube video of a performance by Crosby, Stills, and Nash:

I am a 71 year old Mexican and in 1970 this song reached Mexico City with the other music of the 60’s and 70’s like the Beatles, John Denver, The Byrds, and though I didn’t know the words, it touched my spirit. I heard this song recently and could understand the lyrics. It brought the tears to my eyes. Now that I am a grandfather, this song resonates deeply in my heart. Graham Nash’s lyrics had the wisdom of a much older man.

People who have riches to work with don’t seem to put a lot of faith in teaching children well; or if they once did, they don’t not anymore. Possibly there are exceptions, who include Bill Gates. Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2018 about being asked to speak with “a hundred or so investment bankers … to deliver some insight on the subject of ‘the future of technology.’ ” Their concern was

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

Rushkoff concludes,

For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future … Taking their cue from

• Elon Musk colonizing Mars,
• Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or
• Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers,

they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of

• climate change,
• rising sea levels,
• mass migrations,
• global pandemics,
• nativist panic, and
• resource depletion.

For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

I mentioned Kurzweil in “Resurrection,” which takes up the question: if you want to live forever, why not seek out either

• the virtual state founded by Socrates in the Republic, or else
• the eternal life said to have been won for us by Jesus Christ?

In a letter that made an impression on me as a young adolescent when I read it in Analog for October, 1976, somebody called Christopher DeVito said (and there is more of it and on it now in “Religious Science”),

Under any test you want to use, science works; it employs facts, whereas religion is a group of myths that comfort people who would prefer not to think for themselves.

Are Musk et al. trying to think for themselves, or comfort themselves? Are “transhumanist” schemes more realistic than the philosophical and religious ones? Rushkoff says,

As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

How can an “information-processing object” lack anything that it can perceive? As suggested above, there is nothing “objective” for such an object. It would seem then to have already achieved what Collingwood describes in Speculum Mentis (page 139):

the synthesis of opposites, the breaking-down of the mid-wall of partition between man and God, the subject and the object of the religious consciousness.

That’s in the chapter “Religion,” and specifically §6, “The Task of Religion,” which is also the source of a quote I made in “Subjective and Objective” about how

the self is by the very presuppositions of the religious consciousness alienated from God and in a state of sin. This is the so-called Fall of Man, or original sin.

In mythological terms, the task of religion is to “get ourselves back to the garden,” or rather to reach the New Jerusalem, where, by the account of John of Patmos in Revelation 21:22,

I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.

No temple, no religion – so says Collingwood in a footnote:

The self-transcendence of religion has never been more strikingly asserted than in this plain statement that there will be no religion in heaven.

What then is it that transhumanists need to transcend?

I don’t know if the bankers whom Rushkoff met with should be called transhumanists. One of them wanted to know, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” All of his wealth had not given him what he needed to know about humanity. Rushkoff reports,

I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their

• business practices,
• supply chain management,
• sustainability efforts, and
• wealth distribution,

the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

It all seems obvious. However:

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone.

A number of sites have the story from last October (2024), “Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says we should go all in on building AI data centers because ‘we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway’,” by Kenneth Niemeyer and Lakshmi Varanasi. It seems to have originated at Business Insider:

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt [born 1955] says it’s time for us to fully invest in AI infrastructure because climate goals are too lofty to reach anyway …

Schmidt said … that there are ways to curb the negative effects AI can have on the environment … but he thinks AI growth will eventually outpace these preventive measures.

“All of that will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology,” Schmidt told the crowd. “Because it’s a universal technology, and because it’s the arrival of an alien intelligence … we may make mistakes with respect to how it’s used, but I can assure you that we’re not going to get there through conservation … we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it.”

He can assure us, because – he knows what humans are? If we’re not organized to mitigate climate change, I don’t know how we are organized to “use” an “alien intelligence.” Does Schmidt believe that his own intelligence can be put to use, willy-nilly, by somebody else? Perhaps László Polgár put his daughters’ intelligence to use in playing chess. Eric Schmidt has a daughter, Sophie, who founded Rest of World, “an American nonprofit publication covering technology stories outside western countries.”

Concerning “climate goals,”

“Yes, the needs in this area will be a problem, but I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it and having the problem,” Schmidt said.

Does Schmidt imagine that AI will tell us what to do, and we’ll do it? Robert Wright had a dream of using AI to “adjudicate international disputes”; I talked about this in “Salvation” in February, 2020, after one of the last outings I would make before the Covid-19 Pandemic kept us home.

What exactly is the climate problem that AI might solve? AI may be able to counter anybody’s moves at a game such as chess or go; can it conceivably counter a movement whose slogan is “Drill, baby, drill”?

Briefly, the metaphor of “machine learning” is poorly chosen or misleading.

Having reviewed cosmogonical myths of

• Babylon,
• Greece (from Hesiod), and
• Iceland,

Weizsäcker writes in the 23rd and 24th paragraphs of chapter 2 of The Relevance of Science,

Such are the tales. What is their meaning?

He who asks such a question is no longer a child of the mythical age; else the myths would tell him what they want to tell, without an explanation. Think of their little brothers, the fairy-tales. The youngster who asks what the fairy-tales mean has outgrown the age of fairy-tales. If, then, he should still wish to understand them, he must outgrow that age, too, in which he is proud of not believing in fairy-tales. Our situation with respect to the myths is very similar.

I took up these paragraphs also in “Subjective and Objective.” To ask what myths mean is to pass from religion to science; to understand the myths is to have proceeded to philosophy. Such would seem to be the account of Collingwood, who lays out the general scheme at the head of Speculum Mentis Chapter II, also called “Speculum Mentis” (page 39), where

we beg leave to make certain assumptions, to be tested, and, as far as may be, justified in the course of our inquiry.

• First, we shall distinguish the provinces of
  • art,
  • religion,
  • science,
  • history, and
  • philosophy.
• Secondly, we shall assume that each of these is no mere abstraction but a concrete form of experience …
• Thirdly, because each is a concrete activity it follows that each is in some sense a kind of knowledge, an activity of the cognitive mind.

By Collingwood’s account, religion speaks metaphorically, without knowing it, but I am going to take some issue with this. The following is from Speculum Mentis Chapter IV, “Religion” (pages 128–9):

To distinguish a symbol from its meaning is to put oneself in the way of explaining or translating the symbol. Now it is matter of common observation that religion never explains itself. It states itself in the form of ritual and imagery, and if the catechumen were to ask, ‘What does this language mean?’ he would get no answer, except further imagery of the same kind. In point of fact he does not ask the question. He picks up the meaning as best he can, all embedded as it is in the imagery. Anthropologists who have long forgotten, if they ever knew, what religion really is, inquire of savages what they mean by their ritual and get no answer, and jump to the conclusion that they mean nothing. Such a salto mortale only proves that there are no limits to the possibilities of misunderstanding; for one would have supposed no frame of mind to be more familiar than that in which one repeats an act or phrase in the conviction that one has expressed one’s meaning literally when, in point of fact, one has only uttered a meta­phor. This is the normal way in which primitive and unsophisticated thought expresses itself. It neither explains nor asks for an explanation. To ask for explanations is the mark of extreme sophistication; in other words, it is the mark of the life of explicit thought.

There is something funny about treating metaphors as “normal.” I suggest that one can no more use a metaphor unwittingly than Homer can commit tmesis, the separation of prefixes from verbs. Wikipedia gives an English example, “un-freaking-believable.” I recall a Greek class in college, when I read out what Smyth had written in Greek Grammar (¶ 1650, page 367):

The term ‘tmesis’ is incorrectly applied to the language of Homer, since in the Epic the prep.-adv. was still in the process of joining with the verb.

“Smyth jockey,” I believe the tutor called me in my don rag for that semester.

Tmesis is a return to a manner of speaking that used to come naturally. I take the return to be artificial, in the sense of being deliberate; whether it is also affected depends on the skill of the speaker. I suggest that the same is true of metaphor.

Metaphor is not one of Smyth’s many “grammatical and rhetorical figures,” from anacolūthon to zeugma; the list passes directly from litotes to metonymy. However, metaphor is a figure of speech, by the account of Aristotle in the Poetics XXII.9 (1459^a5):

ἔστιν δὲ

• μέγα μὲν τὸ
  • ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰρημένων πρεπόντως χρῆσθαι, καὶ
  • διπλοῖς ὀνόμασι καὶ
  • γλώτταις,
• πολὺ δὲ μέγιστον τὸ μεταφορικὸν εἶναι.

μόνον γὰρ τοῦτο

• οὔτε παρ᾽ ἄλλου ἔστι λαβεῖν
• εὐφυΐας τε σημεῖόν ἐστι·

τὸ γὰρ εὖ μεταφέρειν τὸ τὸ ὅμοιον θεωρεῖν ἐστιν.

It is

• a great thing to make a proper use of
  • each of the elements mentioned, and of
  • double words and
  • rare words too, but
• by far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor.

That alone

• cannot be learnt; it
• is the token of genius.

For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.

The definition of metaphor comes a bit earlier, in XXI.4 (1457^b7). I am analyzing the text as I did that of the Nicomachean Ethics; the English translations are by W. H. Fyfe, taken from Project Perseus, like the text itself:

ἅπαν δὲ ὄνομά ἐστιν ἢ

• κύριον ἢ
• γλῶττα ἢ
• μεταφορὰ ἢ
• κόσμος ἢ
• πεποιημένον ἢ
• ἐπεκτεταμένον ἢ
• ὑφῃρημένον ἢ
• ἐξηλλαγμένον.

---

Every noun is either

• “ordinary” or
• “rare” or
• “metaphorical” or
• “ornamental” or
• “invented” or
• “lengthened” or
• “curtailed” or
• “altered.”

---

λέγω δὲ

• κύριον μὲν ᾧ χρῶνται ἕκαστοι,
• γλῶτταν δὲ ᾧ ἕτεροι·

ὥστε φανερὸν ὅτι

• καὶ γλῶτταν
• καὶ κύριον

εἶναι δυνατὸν τὸ αὐτό, μὴ τοῖς αὐτοῖς δέ·

---

An

• “ordinary” word is one used by everybody, a
• “rare” word one used by some;

so that a word may obviously be

• both “ordinary”
• and “rare,”

but not in relation to the same people.

---

τὸ γὰρ

σίγυνον

• Κυπρίοις μὲν κύριον,
• ἡμῖν δὲ γλῶττα.

---

σίγυνον,

for instance, is

• to the Cypriots an “ordinary” word but
• to us a “rare” one.

---

μεταφορὰ δέ ἐστιν ὀνόματος ἀλλοτρίου ἐπιφορὰ ἢ

• ἀπὸ τοῦ γένους ἐπὶ εἶδος ἢ
• ἀπὸ τοῦ εἴδους ἐπὶ τὸ γένος ἢ
• ἀπὸ τοῦ εἴδους ἐπὶ εἶδος ἢ
• κατὰ τὸ ἀνάλογον.

---

Metaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred

• from the genus and applied to the species or
• from the species and applied to the genus, or
• from one species to another or else
• by analogy.

---

λέγω δὲ

• ἀπὸ γένους μὲν ἐπὶ εἶδος οἷον

  νηῦς δέ μοι ἥδ᾽ ἕστηκεν·

  τὸ γὰρ ὁρμεῖν ἐστιν ἑστάναι τι.

• ἀπ᾽ εἴδους δὲ ἐπὶ γένος

  ἦ δὴ μυρί᾽ Ὀδυσσεὺς ἐσθλὰ ἔοργεν·

  τὸ γὰρ μυρίον πολύ ἐστιν, ᾧ νῦν ἀντὶ τοῦ πολλοῦ κέχρηται …

---

• An example of a term transferred from genus to species is

  Here stands my ship.

  Riding at anchor is a species of standing.

• An example of transference from species to genus is

  Indeed ten thousand noble things Odysseus did,

  for ten thousand, which is a species of many, is here used instead of the word “many” …

I am curtailing the tedious account of species of metaphor, but the examples are the following.

Drawing off his life with the bronze – severing with the tireless bronze;
Dionysus’s shield – Ares’ cup, wineless cup;
day’s old-age – the evening of life, life’s setting sun;
sowing the god-created fire.

In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler has many examples of bad use of metaphor, some accompanied by the writer’s apology. The apology does not improve the metaphor, any more than a smiley emoticon mitigates an insult.

Fowler suggests that we may examine evidence or sift it, indifferently, because if sifting here is a metaphor, it is a dead one. It is not fully dead though, since (if we are on the ball, at least!) we would be disconcerted to hear, “All the evidence must first be sifted with acid tests, or with the microscope.” The “real stone-dead metaphor” is examine: it is a metaphor, because the Latin verb examino derives from the noun examen for the tongue of a balance.

Fowler’s use of tongue here is itself “metaphorical,” in the sense that the word goes back to Old English only for meaning speech or the organ whereby speech is effected. One might say even here that speech is the “metaphorical” meaning of tongue, but the OED notes, “In many contexts it is impossible to separate the sense of the organ from that of its work or use.” Starting from 1398, the uvula is called “the tongue of the throat”; from 1566, a tongue may be “a tongue-like projecting piece of anything.”

In the second edition (1968) of Fowler’s Dictionary, my own cursory examination suggests that Gowers has kept Fowler’s original article on metaphor unchanged, while adding an introduction, concluding,

our vocabulary is largely built on metaphors; we use them, though perhaps not consciously, whenever we speak or write.

Again, Collingwood said,

one would have supposed no frame of mind to be more familiar than that in which one repeats an act or phrase in the conviction that one has expressed one’s meaning literally when, in point of fact, one has only uttered a meta­phor. This is the normal way in which primitive and unsophisticated thought expresses itself.

In the passage from which I have taken this, Collingwood treats all religion as one thing, whereas Weizsäcker is going to distinguish Judaism as something special. In Speculum Mentis Chapter VII, “Philosophy,” comes the long paragraph that I quoted in full in “Subjective and Objective”:

Art has turned out to be philosophy; and concrete philosophy is therefore art … enriched and deepened into religion in the knowledge that what he was taught in his youth, and in his haste perhaps rejected as fable, is true: that God really lives and is his father, that the voice that speaks in nature is truly the voice of her creator, and that this very God became man to die for him and to atone by a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. And this knowledge is not, for him, in any conflict with the regularity and uniformity of nature …

As for Northrop Frye, in The Double Vision he says such things as,

What concerns me … is a linguistic fallacy, the fallacy that relates to the phrase ‘literally true.’ Ordinarily, we mean by ‘literally true’ what is descriptively accurate … Literalism of this kind in the area of the spiritual instantly becomes what Paul calls the letter that kills. It sets up an imitation of descriptive language, a pseudo-objectivity related to something that isn’t there.

That’s from the first paragraph of “The Crisis in Language,” already quoted from. It would indeed seem to be a fallacy to draw from the Bible such inferences as the age of the universe in years; but then, why should this be any more absurd than inferring the age from astronomical observations? Why should what we see in the world now have anything to do with things that happened billions of years ago? I contemplated such questions in “Abraham and Gideon,” while I was reading the Pensées. If Pascal could derive a general law from personal experience with water pressure, then why not from the Bible?

One cannot just read or hear a story and know what to make of it: this was a theme of “Thinking & Feeling,” specifically concerning the Parables.

Paul talks about the “letter that kills” in his second letter to the Corinthians. In chapter 6 of the first letter, he admonishes the Corinthians, and I suppose they are meant to take him literally:

9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
12 All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

The original of that last verse is,

Πάντα μοι ἔξεστιν,
ἀλλ’ οὐ πάντα συμφέρει·
πάντα μοι ἔξεστιν,
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐγὼ ἐξουσιασθήσομαι ὑπό τινος.

I suppose Paul is dealing with people who believe that, being washed in the blood of the lamb (Rev 7:14), metaphorically, they are free to do anything, literally. They aren’t, and this is why Paul has to distinguish between the lawful and the expedient.

I may be having trouble, myself, with the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical, as I did with the subjective and the objective in the post of that name.

On 1 Cor 6:12, editors Aland et al. of the Greek New Testament refer to Sirach or Ecclesiasticus 37:28, which seems to be 37:31 in the Septuagint:

For all things are not profitable for all men (οὐ γὰρ πάντα πᾶσιν συμφέρει), neither hath every soul pleasure in every thing (καὶ οὐ πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐν παντὶ εὐδοκεῖ).

Meanwhile, Frye’s own specific reference is to 2 Corinthians 3:

4 πεποίθησιν δὲ τοιαύτην ἔχομεν διὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ πρὸς τὸν θεόν.
5 οὐχ ὅτι ἀφ’ ἑαυτῶν ἱκανοί ἐσμεν λογίσασθαί τι ὡς ἐξ ἑαυτῶν, ἀλλ’ ἡ ἱκανότης ἡμῶν ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ,
6 ὃς καὶ ἱκάνωσεν ἡμᾶς διακόνους καινῆς διαθήκης, οὐ γράμματος ἀλλὰ πνεύματος: τὸ γὰρ γράμμα ἀποκτείνει, τὸ δὲ πνεῦμα ζῳοποιεῖ.

4 And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward:
5 Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;
6 Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

In place of “letter” in verse 6, the RSV has “written code” – not exactly Frye’s interpretation, unless for example the Ten Commandments were not intended to be taken literally. In a note on 2 Cor 3:6 in the Oxford World Classics edition of The Bible: Authorized King James Version, editors Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett disagree with Frye:

While it can be misunderstood as differentiating between literal and spiritual (or metaphorical) meanings, it is really a stark contrast between Jewish and Christian codes (the Law versus the Spirit).

Frye says later in his section,

• It would be absurd to see the New Testament as only a work of literature:
• it is all the more important, therefore, to realize that it is written in the language of literature, the language of myth and metaphor.

The Gospels give us the life of Jesus in the form of myth: what they say is, ‘This is what happens when the Messiah comes to the world.’ One thing that happens when the Messiah comes to the world is that he is despised and rejected, and searching in the nooks and crannies of the gospel text for a credibly historical Jesus is merely one more excuse for despising and rejecting him. Myth is

• neither historical
• nor anti-historical: it is
• counter-historical.

I thought the birth of God to a woman, literally, historically, was essential to Christianity. I’m not so sure about her virginity. In “The Miraculous,” I suggested that what was miraculous about the birth of Jesus was that Mary had been accepted as a wife by Joseph, even though she was already pregnant. C. S. Lewis thought Mary’s egg had been fertilized by a “miraculous” sperm; but in that case, we can still ask whose genes were in it, or at least who had the closest genotype.

For Frye, it seems, God was metaphorically human. That sounds like heresy – perhaps Docetism, except this would seem to assume that there really was something, historically, to be called Jesus: it just wasn’t a man who was also God.

Frye does not seem to care what happened, historically, in the first years of the Common Era:

In the early Christian centuries it was widely assumed that the basis of Christian faith was the descriptive accuracy of the historical events recorded in the New Testament and the infallibility of the logical arguments that interconnected them … when words failed, as they usually did, recourse was had to anathematizing those who held divergent views, and from there it was an easy step to the psychosis of heresy-hunting, of regarding all deviation from approved doctrine as a malignant disease that had to be ruthlessly stamped out.

Frye seems to be doing his own anathematizing. Does he mean to accuse Paul himself, who ended 1 Corinthians with chapter 16 as follows?

21 The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand.
22 If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha (εἴ τις οὐ φιλεῖ τὸν κύριον, ἤτω ἀνάθεμα. μαρανα θα).
23 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
24 My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Frye says in his preface, “these lectures were addressed by a member of The United Church of Canada to a largely United Church audience.”

I’m going to stop, while noting that, as usual, there is much more to be contemplated. The first mention of metaphor in Speculum Mentis may be the one that I quoted from pages 128–9, but the Index points only to the following passage on page 130; this is the first use that comes up in a search of a pdf file, presumably because “meta-phor” is broken between lines on page 129. We begin here at the bottom of page 129:

Religion cannot translate itself not because it has no meaning, for it has a very definite meaning, to elicit which is the progressive task of theology and philosophy; but because, although it has a meaning and knows that it has a meaning, it thinks that it has expressed this meaning already. And so it has, but only metaphorically; and this metaphorical self-expression, this fusion of symbol and meaning, requires translation just because it thinks it does not require it. For

• literal language is only language recognizedly metaphorical, and what we call
• metaphorical language is language failing to realize that it is only metaphor.

I dunno, when it is said,

1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake

– when the Psalmist says that in Psalm 23, I imagine he can agree that he is only metaphorically a sheep, particularly since humans are normally more unruly, even though they are accused of being sheeple. Xenophon seems right, near the beginning of the Cyropaedia, when he says,

was it not obvious that flocks and herds were more ready to obey their keepers than men their rulers?

• Watch the cattle wending their way wherever their herdsmen guide them,
• see them grazing in the pastures where they are sent and abstaining from forbidden grounds,
• the fruit of their own bodies they yield to their master to use as he thinks best;

nor have we ever seen one flock among them all combining against their guardian, either

• to disobey him or
• to refuse him the absolute control of their produce.

On the contrary, they are more apt to show hostility against other animals than against the owner who derives advantage from them. But with man the rule is converse; men unite against none so readily as against those whom they see attempting to rule over them.

Apes other than humans may unite against their ruler, according to the Jane Goodall Institute:

The highest-ranking chimpanzee in a group is the alpha-male. These males climb their way to the top of the chimpanzee hierarchy, and the ways they choose to do so can differ with the personality of the individual leader … Below the alpha are several other males with whom the alpha may have complicated relationships … there also maybe be a chimpanzee or a coalition of chimpanzees who want to overthrow the alpha and install a new chimpanzee in his place.

Yuval Noah Harari still seems right in what I quoted in “Truth” (on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics IV.vi–ix) and in the earlier posts there named, that the chimps will not actually overthrow the whole system of having an alpha male. By some accounts, humans tried to do that in the American colonies in 1776, but others are now making a strong effort to restore the old system.