II. THE DISCOVERY OF METAPHOR
IN RELIGION
Explicit awareness of the distinction between
would-be literal uses of religious language and “meta-
phor,” as we have here broadly defined it, arose in a
significantly different cultural context from the biblical
one. Greek religion, like the Hebrew, was shot through
with vivid imagery, but at least two significant social
differences distinguish their histories. First, Greek reli-
gion from the sixth century B.C. was obliged to coexist
with a lively independent philosophical movement, as
Hebrew religion was not. Second, Greek religion of
this period, unlike the Hebrew, lacked an institu-
tionalized priesthood of specialists in the defense, ex-
position, and transmission of inherited belief. These
two differences doubtless worked together in Greece
to reinforce the rise of critical consciousness of non-
literal religious discourse, both by placing the latter
in a competitive situation with alternative accounts of
ultimate matters and by giving greater freedom of
interpretation to those inclined to amend or reconcile
the inherited imagery of religion with reference to
those alternatives. That such freedom was not absolute
is quite clear from the prosecution of occasional
philosophers on grounds of unorthodoxy, notably in the
cases of Anaxagoras, who was banished by the outraged
citizens of conservative Athens about 432 B.C., and of
Socrates, who took the hemlock in order to teach the
Athenians a lesson (
Apology 38C) after they tried and
condemned him publicly in 399 B.C. on charges of
impiety. Still, such incidents, however noteworthy,
were the exception in a normal context of considerable
latitude of belief and interpretation.
It is probably not wise to lay heavy emphasis on
the famous assertion attributed to Thales, “All things
are full of gods” as marking, in itself, a clear break
with previous religious imagery; but it remains an
instance, from such an ancient philosopher, of reinter-
preted philosophical use of traditional religious dis-
course, inasmuch as Thales was in all likelihood refer-
ring here to the behavior of natural magnets and the
like. He was, even more important, at the start of a
long train of thinkers whose efforts were bent towards
constructing naturalistic explanations of the whole of
things, a universal domain which had hitherto been
the exclusive preserve of mythic images. It would be
false, of course, to suppose that these thinkers dispensed
with imagery—their bold speculations were, on the
contrary, deeply involved in imaginative models of
various sorts—but philosophical accounts of things
after Thales differed in key ways from the religious
imagery of inherited Homeric religion. First, philo-
sophical explanations were constructed rather than
inherited; secondly, and consequently, they relied for
their acceptability on intrinsic plausibility rather than
on extrinsic cultural authority; and thus, thirdly, they
were relevant to evidence and open to argument on
grounds of consistency, inclusiveness, and the like, on
which their plausibility depended. In sum, the aim of
the philosophic movement in Greek culture was to
provide rational and (in intention, at least) literal the-
ory for the understanding of the universe.
Such an aim and such an intention (no matter the
degree of success) is, as we noted earlier, the logical
prerequisite for the discovery of metaphor in religious
discourse. Only when there is a theory about what is
“literally so” can there be explicit recognition of
oblique, allegorical, symbolic—in a word, metaphori-
cal—alternative uses of significant forms. What is taken
to be the case “literally,” of course, is entirely relative
to the theories believed, and in consequence the
specific content covered by the “nonliteral,” or the
metaphorical, shifts with shifting beliefs.
Given an intellectual standing place outside tradi-
tional religious discourse, Greek thinkers divided on
the question of how to assess the inherited Homeric
tapestry of images. Some, for example, Xenophanes,
Heraclitus, and the Pythagoreans, chose to stand un-
compromisingly against the religious tradition. Others,
however, were prepared to give the venerated images
a reinterpretation to bring them—with their “real”
meaning—more into line with what the commentators
variously believed to be the literal truth. The usual
method of interpretation was through “allegory”
(ὑπόνοια), which term (originally derived from Greek
rhetoric) simply meant a series of metaphors or a
sustained metaphor. Perhaps the first to have intro-
duced this metaphorical interpretation of Homer was
a somewhat shadowy figure, Theagenes of Rhegium (fl.
530?), who wrote an “Apology” for Homeric poetry;
following Theagenes, a distinguished list of thinkers
took up the method. The above-mentioned Anaxagoras,
for example, gave a purely ethical metaphorical re-
duction to the orthodoxy of his day, while his pupil,
Metrodorus of Lampsacus (d. 464 B.C.), offered a quasi-
scientific account in which Demeter stands for the
liver, Dionysus for the spleen, Apollo for the gall,
Hector for the moon, Achilles for the sun, and so on.
Likewise, the philosopher Diogenes of Apollonia (fl.
440-430 B.C.), who supported the view that air was
the fundamental substance of the universe, took Zeus
as a metaphor, naturally, for air. Democritus, the great
atomist philosopher, was also an enthusiastic allegor-
izer of Homeric religion.
Plato, on the other hand, was of the opinion that
such allegorizing of the traditional religion is greatly
overgenerous to the poets. He showed Socrates making
delightful nonsense of the attempt to allegorize
etymologies of the names of the gods (Cratylus
406-08); he also had Socrates dismiss the effort as
follows:
Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice,
but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much
labor and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he
has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate Hippo-
centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow
in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and porten-
tous natures. And if he is sceptical about them, and would
fain reduce them one after another to the rules of proba-
bility, this sort of crude philosophy will take up a great
deal of time
(Phaedrus 229C).
But the most profound of Plato's objections to this
attempt to save the imagery of traditional religion by
treating it as metaphorical is that the imagery itself,
if allowed to be taken this seriously by the uncritical,
has the dangerous power to corrupt truth and morals.
Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit
of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest,
should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven,
and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one an-
other, for they are not true.... These tales must not be
admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have
an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person cannot
judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that
he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become
indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important
that the tales which the young first hear should be models
of virtuous thoughts
(Republic II 378D).
Plato, here, is clearly not condemning all use of
allegory, image, or metaphorical discourse. He himself
used such forms of language to excellent effect on a
number of crucial occasions (e.g., Phaedo 107-15;
Phaedrus 246A-247C); he knew and respected the
power of such discourse. Indeed, precisely because of
this great respect for its potency, he wanted to keep
it under firm control of literal truth.
There is no need to continue examining the rise to
explicit consciousness of the literal and its opposite in
religious speech. The distinction is quite clear even
before Plato; and we have further seen that different
evaluations of how the concepts should be deployed
have come to the surface. Metaphor in religious dis-
course having been discovered, what are its conse-
quences?
