The power of biblical metaphor
I recently came across a fascinating essay by George Orwell from 1946 on 'Politics and the English language.' Orwell was such a remarkable character, with such insight, that annihilation he wrote is worth looking at. One of the most important things I did in my whole time in school was to have to readAnimal Farm equally part of an English language project on 'Eutopias and alternative worlds' as function of English O-level.
In the essay, Orwell laments the decline of political linguistic communication. (If he were alive today, he would be turning in his grave!). He looks a number of poor examples, and offers an analysis, but what is nearly fascinating is the reference signal he goes to for an instance of good, meaty and powerful spoken language—the Bible:
Now that I take made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, allow me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time information technology must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to interpret a passage of good English language into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse fromEcclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sunday, that the race is not to the swift, nor the boxing to the stiff, neither all the same breadstuff to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but fourth dimension and chance happeneth to them all.
Hither information technology is in modernistic English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no trend to be commensurate with innate capacity, just that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably exist taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. … Information technology will exist seen that I accept not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the centre the physical illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to exist and then, because no modernistic writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" — would always tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
At present analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The kickoff contains forty-nine words but merely sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The 2nd contains thirty-eight words of 90 syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and ane from Greek. The get-go sentence contains six vivid images, and only 1 phrase ("fourth dimension and hazard") that could exist called vague. The 2nd contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the significant contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of judgement that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and at that place in the worst-written page. Still, if yous or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come up much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one fromEcclesiastes.
As I have tried to bear witness, modern writing at its worst does non consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in guild to make the meaning clearer. Information technology consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable past sheer braggadocio. The allure of this fashion of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — fifty-fifty quicker, once you accept the addiction — to sayIn my opinion it is non an unjustifiable assumption that than to sayI recollect. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't take to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are by and large and then arranged equally to be more than or less euphonious.
When you are composing in a bustle — when y'all are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags likea consideration which we should do well to carry in mind ora conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will relieve many a judgement from coming downwardly with a crash-land. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, y'all save much mental endeavour, at the toll of leaving your meaning vague, non only for your reader just for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to retrieve a visual image. When these images clash — as inThe Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.
All this is both a wonderful challenge and a wonderful encouragement. The challenge is that, as we read, interpret and proclaim scripture, nosotros demand to appoint seriously with the metaphors. My conviction is that metaphorical voice communication is a distinctively Christian way to use linguistic communication—almost everything that Scripture and Christian theology says most God is cast in metaphors.
But the encouragement matches this. In preaching, we are surely searching for the kind of compelling and engaging speech that Orwell is writing most. And our primary source material—Scripture—is saturated with such compelling linguistic communication. The challenge in preaching, then, is not to turn the metaphors of scripture into deadening propositions, but to jiff new life and vigour into them. Nosotros need to explore them, explain them, understand them in their context—only the aim of all this will be to let the metaphors to alive again, and do their piece of work in remaking the understanding of the hearers.
(If the Academy of Exeter's advice is heeded, we might even see a revival of the use of the Bible in schools…)
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