More on the importance of language. Metaphor is one of the foundations of language, in indeed, part of our special place as image bearers of the creator. Reading Owen Barfield and Rene Girard ths past year has driven home that point. When you try to “disentangle words”, as Sayers describes below, you are dehumanizing your discipline. It leads to death, not life.
This difficulty which confronts the scientists and has compelled their flight into formulae is the result of a failure to understand or accept the analogical nature of language. Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations; the attempt is bound to prove vain since it runs counter to the law of humanity.
Speaking of metaphor and meaing and science… Alright, so I’m a few years behind pop culture, have been listening to Coldplay lately.
I was just guessing, at numbers and figures
Pulling the puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Don’t speak as loud as my heart-The Scientist
Good stuff.
Back to Sayers. To go on a bit further, she gives an example:
The confusion and difficulty are increased by the modern world’s preoccupation with the concept of progress. This concept–now rapidly becoming as precarious as those others quoted by Huizinga-imposes upon the human mind two (in the hypnotic sense) “suggestions”. The first is that any invention or creative act will necessarily tend to supersede an act of earlier date. This may be true of mechanical inventions and scientific formulae: we may say, for example, that the power-loom has superseded the hand-loom, or that Einsteinian physics has superseded Newtonian physics, and mean something by saying so. But there is no sense whatever in which we can say that Hamlet has “superseded” the Agamemnon, or that
“you who were with me in the ships at Mylae”
has superseded
en la sua voluntade a nostra pace
or
tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
The later in date leaves the earlier achievement unconquered and unchanged; that which was at the summit remains at the summit until the end of time.
-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.4
I mention this mostly to see if I’ve learned ANYTHING about classic literature in the past two years. I wasn’t immediately familiar with any of the phrases she quotes there at the end. Nonetheless, I was able to successfully place (without looking) the 2nd one as Dante and the 3rd one as Virgil. The first turned out to be T.S. Eliot (a contemporary). Oops. Two out of three ain’t bad, considering I would have gotten a zero two years ago.