The Greatness of Metaphor in the Gospel of Christ

“Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.”

“…our positivist tradition, worshipping ‘facts’ and indifferent to laws…”
—Gérard Genette, professor and literary theorist (d. 2018)

I said on Sunday that Christian culture cannot flourish without metaphor. I could make an even stronger statement. I could say that if we consider human life as an eternal rather than earthbound phenomenon, metaphorical thought and expression is superior to—meaning higher in dignity and importance than—the “factual” or “scientific” modes that modernity so diligently cultivates and teaches to children. I might go further again and say that modern society is dangerously confused about what the human mind should be and do: things like metaphor get buried somewhere in “English” class while people assume that high school graduates are well educated if they can apply the quadratic formula, balance chemical equations, and name the organelles in a eukaryotic cell.

The mind, however, is not primarily a calculator, or a mechanistic problem solver, or a repository for raw information. In other words, it is not—does not need to be, should not be, was not designed to be—a computer. If you spend enough time reading old literature, you may even start to wonder about how exactly the minds of the past understood the seemingly objective realities that we call “facts.” This is not to say that they denied factual occurrences, but it would seem that their attitude toward facts was not one of appetition, or reverence, or submission. They weren’t constrained by facts in the way that we are. Rather, facts were a resource for communicating the higher truths, deeper experiences, and general laws of human life. In other words, facts were the stuff of which metaphors—and stories, and images, and allegories—were made.

Christian culture has been weighed down by literalistic, rationalistic, pragmatistic tendencies for a long time. Though some progress (or “regress”?) toward premodern modes of thought has been made, those tendencies, to my great dismay, still permeate Catholic education. Such a state of affairs is, in my view, completely unjustifiable; various arguments against it could be made, but one of the most compelling comes from the divine Teacher Himself. A careful reading of one short Gospel passage shows that the Founder of the Christian religion had a very high opinion of metaphor.