• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 776 0

king as merely physical objects. In earthly thrones and palaces it was the spiritual significance—as we should say, the ‘atmosphere’—that mattered to the ancient mind. As soon as the contrast of ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ was before their minds, they knew God to be ‘spiritual’ and realised that their religion had implied this all along. But at an earlier stage that contrast was not there. To regard that earlier stage as unspiritual because we find there no clear assertion of unembodied spirit, is a real misunderstanding. You might just as well call it spiritual because it contained no clear consciousness of mere matter. Mr Barfield has shown, as regards the history of language, that words did not start by referring merely to physical objects and then get extended by metaphor to refer to emotions, mental states and the like. On the contrary, what we now call the ‘literal and metaphorical’ meanings have both been disengaged by analysis from an ancient unity of meaning which was neither or both. In the same way it is quite erroneous to think that man started with a ‘material’ God or ‘Heaven’ and gradually spiritualised them. He could not have started with something ‘material’ for the ‘material’, as we understand it, comes to be realised only by contrast to the ‘immaterial’, and the two sides of the contrast grow at the same speed. He started with something which was neither and both. As long as we are trying to read back into that ancient unity either the one or the other of the two opposites which have since been analysed out of it, we shall misread all early literature and ignore many states of consciousness which we ourselves still from time to time experience. The point is crucial not only for the present discussion but for any sound literary criticism or philosophy.

The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science. Whatever is positive in the conception of the spiritual has always been contained in them; it is only its negative aspect (immateriality) which has had to wait for recognition until abstract thought was fully developed. The material imagery has never been taken literally by anyone who had reached the stage when he could understand what ‘taking it literally’ meant. And now we come to the difference between ‘explaining’ and ‘explaining away’. It shows itself in two ways, (i) Some people when they say that a thing is meant ‘metaphorically’ conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. They rightly think that Christ spoke metaphorically when he told us to carry the cross: they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell ‘fire’ is a metaphor—and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not literal; and then go on to say (I have heard them myself) that it was really a fall upwards—which is like saying that because ‘My heart is broken’ contains a metaphor, it therefore means ‘I feel very cheerful’. This mode of interpretation I regard, frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are ‘metaphorical’—or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought—mean something which is just as ‘super-natural’ or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to the physical or psycho-physical universe known to the sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be; that this reality has a positive structure or constitution which is usefully, though doubtless not completely, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce; and that this has brought about a change