Just because I haven't been making entries in this blog does not mean that I haven't been thinking.

A statement by a news commentator got me thinking. The statement went something like this: "Pope Francis has never met a metaphor he didn't like." That statement reminded me of a quote attributed of Max Muller: "Mythology or religion is a disease of language" by which he meant that "words constructed to express abstract ideas...were transformed into imagined personalities." (Wikipedia) The disease (as metaphor) is the failure to acknowledge the limits of a metaphor. A metaphor is not a literal truth or observable fact. It aids in the understanding of that which it is attributed to "like" or "as." The former is typically an observable fact or entity which is intended as an aide in our standing of the latter that is not observable--an abstract reality or belief. Strictly speaking, the presence of "like" or "as" makes it a simile, rather than a metaphor. Please bear with me.

A metaphor may fail on either of two fronts: (1) the expression is not acknowledged as metaphor, and (2) the metaphor is used to convey a truth or bolster a position beyond its scope. Examples of the first are statements such as: The church is the body of Christ. The church is our mother. The church is the bride of Christ. In common speech, metaphorical statements typically contain the word "as" or "like," which can alert the listener. Religious or theological statements most often skip the qualifier, and the metaphor is at risk of creating confusion as the listener interprets the statements literally. An example of extending a metaphor beyond its scope would be describing water polo like ice hockey and proceeding then to use that statement as a rationale to support the use of hockey sticks in water polo. In this example, the metaphor is being "over mined," that is, stretched beyond any reasonable limit resulting in error and confusion--the very things the metaphor was initially employed to counter or avoid. The reasonable limits of a metaphor may be moreorless readily evident when one is comparing observable phenomena, but they are often not clear when one entity is an abstraction, a conceptualization, or a belief.

The starting point in the discussion of the metaphysical and abstract must acknowledge the use of metaphor in the subsequent discussion, be willing to explore the limits and inadequacies of any and all metaphors, and be open to the metaphors of others arising out of valid linguistic and cultural differences. At some level all language and speech is metaphorical.

Returning to Pope Francis, I can sympathize with those who have criticized some of the Pope's statements as contributing to confusion. I think the terminology employed by the Pope speaks of a language of evangelization versus a language of theology. He clearly prefers the former to the latter. Yet both are valid vehicles of communication; each has their own road on which to travel. Co-mingling them or misconstruing or misusing one as the other will result in confused and diseased communication. Or in keeping with the vehicle/road metaphor, such misuse will result in head-on collisions and other fatal and very avoidable accidents.