Unfortunately, theories of how religious language in general and talk of God in particular function have mostly been left behind by philosophical theologians since Ian Ramsey (Religious Language [1955]; Models and Mystery [1963]) and Janet Martin Soskice (Metaphor and Religious Language [1985]) plowed these fields. Happily, Robert Masson's decades-long research project proffers a fascinating new theory of how God-talk works.
Fundamental to Masson's view is the oft-neglected truth that literal language is parasitic on figurative language (if you doubt this, reread this review and others in this issue to see how many sentences are both “literally” descriptive and require recognizing metonyms and metaphors to understand). Masson's early work on metaphor (in dialogue especially with George Lakoff, Mary Gerhart, and Allan Russell) receives profound conceptual elaboration in dialogue with cognitive linguistics.
Metaphorical language is an expression of a brain process—that is, cognitive mapping across disparate domains (the metaphoric process) that is “foundational and ubiquitous for [the] embodied mind” (93). “Seeing is touching,” for example, joins two different sense domains. “The dollar is rising against the euro” invokes domains of both money and conflict in the context of a very conventional cognitive move that maps “rising as up,” even though no pieces of currency need move a millimeter for the sentence to be true. Yet this latter sentence not only engages in cross-domain transfers of meanings, but also is usually seen as literally true or false, depending on activity in the currency markets.
“Religious and theological assertions, doctrines, analogies, and symbols can be metaphorical or figurative and at the same time can be semantically proper, logically warranted, and factually the case, in other words, can qualify as ‘literal’ truths” (8). If “everyday” language is littered with metaphor and “everyday” thinking includes imaginative cross-domain transfers of meaning, then a claim that religious and theological thinking is inferior because it does so as well is bogus—a point Masson makes against the New Atheists in particular.
Cross-domain transfers can be “one-way” or “two-way.” Some such shifts in meaning create whole new ways (“tectonic shifts”) of conceptualizing the world. Can we imagine rhumb lines in Flatland? Can we see that “Jesus is Messiah” asserted by his early disciples changes both the significance of “Jesus,” an executed Jewish prophet, and “Messiah,” as expected in the context of Second Temple Judaism, is a tectonic shift (in Mark's Caesarea Philippi scene, Peter fails to make the shift—akin to failing to “get” a joke—and is reviled as a “satan”)?
This theory has some serious practical effects. Cross-domain mapping and tectonic conceptual blending are seen to underlie both Aquinas' practice of analogy and Jüngel's account of metaphor—so “Catholic” and “Protestant” imaginations are not simply antithetical. Controversies and confusions about and in work by Elizabeth Johnson, Roger Haight, and Thomas Sheehan can be illumined by recognizing the differences and similarities in conceptual mapping and conceptual blending ingredient in the varying positions in the controversies. James Cone's title The Cross and the Lynching Tree makes perfect sense as a paradigm of cross-domain transfer.
I hope that it is clear that this is a complex and imaginative book that is difficult to digest, insightful about thinkers from Aquinas to the present, comprehensive in its scope, and worth the struggle for theologians who seek a way to integrate linguistic, conceptual, and theological realms in a nonreductionist manner that also avoids any special pleading for the validity of “logically odd” religious language.
The upshot is this: cognitive linguistics provides a way to understand how we who are embodied minds that evolved naturally in a finite, limited world can speak and write possibly true sentences about its infinite, limitless source; once we recognize that we have evolved profoundly creative and imaginative brains, perhaps we can see that we who talk of God are like Flatlanders who have developed concepts of height and depth. How we assess religious and theological claims as true and useful, of course, is another story.
