Kenneth Burke - Theology and Logology

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chapter 8

Theology and Logology

1979

The main purpose of this long essay is to define, illustrate, apply, and defend lo-gology —pretty much against all comers. Theology is used as a comparison andcontrast to logology and is the central concern of the essay, as it was, say, in TheRhetoric of Religion (1961). This essay is probably the most complete on the sub-ject of logology, how it works, what its basic assumptions are, and why it should

be taken seriously as a way of dealing with words (symbolic action) and the humancondition (which includes the realm of motion). It is a summing-up essay, whichmeans that there is quite a lot of repetition of material that appears in other essaysbefore and after this one. Burke had finished this essay by the fall of 1977 when hecame to Chicago for talks at the National Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago, where I was a fellow. The institute typed the essay for him, and he hadmade all of his corrections by the spring of 1978, when he returned to Chicago togive a series of talks at Northwestern University that was arranged by Lee Griffin,and featured Burke’s latest definition of humans as “bodies that learn language.”

Nothing is more basic to late (post 1970) logology than this definition, which

replaces his old one, “symbol-using animals.” As Burke liked to say, you can“spin” everything else from it, and he did. A distinctive human trait now be-comes the intrinsic inherited species trait: the ability to learn a language, any lan-guage from the thousands that are spoken worldwide. All “normal” human be-ings have this ability to understand and speak a language, and, with training, toread and write it. One learns the language of the tribe more or less automaticallyif one is socialized and grows up where the language is spoken. No other livingspecies that we know of has this ability, perhaps because no others have a neu-ral network complex enough to accomplish the feats of memory required tolearn, and learn how to use, thousands upon thousand of words in hearing,

speaking, reading, and writing. Prodigious feats of memory are characteristic of humans in their relationship to language.

Burke is not really so interested in these feats of memory as he is in the factthat the ability to learn and use a language is ubiquitous in humans and that lan-guage (symbolic action) has a logic (logologic?) of its own that affects every partof our lives, the more so since the advent of the age of print technology and, later,of radio, television, and computers. Logology is the study of words, and wordsabout words. Burke likes to point out that even “reality” is not real, rather than,say, nature or some other nonverbal subject until it has been turned into words,and major events (spring, love, marriage) are not complete until we have a songor poem to go with them. We literally see with words and name everything wesee to incorporate it into the verbal realm so that we can refer to it when it is notpresent and make appropriate use of it. The “illiterate” Indians of the Amazonjungle have named and learned how to use hundreds of natural substances for

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medicinal and other purposes. The Eskimos have a huge number of words forevery kind of snow. The Plains Indians had a language more complex thanGreek. Print technology gave us the world of books, which many of us still in-habit. We may yearn for an unmediated experience of the natural world (Burke’srealm of motion) but it is impossible, no matter what the ecocritics and ecolo-gists tell us. We have no images that are not tainted with words. Dogs may smelltheir way through the world, but we talk our way through it—and beyond it.

In these matters, Burke is absolutely correct in his relentless insistence that theway to knowledge and understanding of what it means to be human is throughwords, in all of their many forms and permutations. In and through words; be-yond words he once wrote. But beyond words there is nothing. God after all isnothing but a word in logology. It is hard to imagine what could be beyondwords in logology, except nothing. Maybe a pure, powerful musical experience,

such as Beethoven’s last piano concerto might give us an experience beyondwords, though the second music critics or conductors or players begin to discussit, they have brought it into the realm of words because they have no other wayto get it out of the pure musical state it is in when we hear it.

I seem to be far afield, but I’m not. Burke’s example of the air conditioner inthe movie theater is meant to illustrate how mind affects body, or what therhetorical properties of a film can do. The body that learns language is also thebody that suffers from it—what you see in the theater is nothing but images;what you hear is nothing but words and whatever sound effects and music arepart of the movie. There is nothing real about it except that it is happening to you

as you internalize what is on the screen and what is coming from the speakers.As Burke points out, no one is really being killed, tortured, burned, buried alive,raped, or having an orgasm up there. There are no real bullfights in Hemingway’snovels, nor is there any actual violence in Faulkner’s novels. However, the powerof words (and of images on the screen) is so great, and the connection betweenwords outside the head and words inside the head is so extensive and the neuralnetwork is so complex that the whole body is affected by what it sees and hears.In spite of the fact that we know it is not real, what we read and see on the screencan make us shout, weep, laugh, close our eyes, even leave the theater or TV toavoid any more of that experience. This interactive relationship is the field of lo-

gology: the nature of words (symbolic action), what words can do to us, howwords behave, what we can do to and with words as bodies that learn language.“No mind without body,” Burke says over and over again in discussing the realmof symbolic action. Even inside the head, language is an embodiment and thebrain is a clutter of words. There may be 50,000 to 100,000 in there. The onlyescape seems to occur when we dream, which is often wordless.

This is Burke’s realm. If I go on, I’ll get lost in it, lost in words about words,lost in the logological trap. Once in there (say, in a text) how can you ever getback out except by using more words about words? Artists painted abstract pic-tures and left them untitled to escape the tyranny of words. But even to call it

“Untitled” is to rely on words again.

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foreword

There is the possibility of confusion, in connection with my use of the

term “logology.” Though I shall constantly be encountering occasionswhere theology (as “words about God”) and logology (as “words about

words”) overlap, particularly as when logology was taken literally to

mean “the Doctrine of the Logos” (the reference to Christ as the Word

in the Gospel of John), in my discussion I shall be stressing the secular

meaning of the term.

Technically, each term could treat the other as of narrower scope. For

logology in the secular sense could class all sorts of “isms” and “ologies”

and many other kinds of utterance, including itself, as modes of “verbalbehavior.” And theology would certainly look upon any such theoriz-

ing as far less comprehensive in scope than theology’s concern with the

relations between the human, word-using animal and the realm of the

supernatural.

Professor J. Hillis Miller, most notably in his essay on “The Linguis-

tic Moment in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’” (The New Criticism and

After, edited by Thomas Daniel Young [Charlottesville: University Press

of Virginia, 1976], pp. 47–60), has expertly discussed Hopkins’s way of

fusing a fascination with words in general and a devotion to Christ as the

creative Logos. And when elsewhere he refers to “the peculiarly precar-

ious Feuerbachian pose which says, in effect, ‘All the affirmations of

Christianity are true, but not as the believers believe,’” I thought of the

kabbalists who said that biblical references to God as though he had a

human body are not figurative; they are literal. But only God knows how

to interpret their literal meaning—and the nearest we can come is by un-

derstanding them as figures of speech.

Our bodies are gestated and born in wordlessness—and out of such astate grows the doctrinal (that is, the verbal, the scriptural even). Them-

selves speechless, they help us learn to speak.

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We have heard much talk of a “birth trauma,” the shock of a fetus in be-

ing exiled from an Edenic realm in which it had flourished but which its

own stage of growth had begun to transform from a circle of protectioninto a circle of confinement. With its first outcry after parturition it is

started on its pilgrimage as a separate organism, its sensations, its feel-

ings of pleasure and pain, being immediately its own and none other’s.

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We assume that such immediate experiences of a particular physiologi-

cal organism are like the experiences of similar other organisms. But at

least they are far from identical in the sense that your pleasures and pains

are exclusively yours, and no one else’s.Whether or not the organism’s radical change of condition at birth is

a “trauma,” a wound that leaves a deep scar, we do know that under or-

dinary favorable conditions the organism begins to flourish, and even so

much so that in later life the vague memories of its early years can as-

sume an Edenic quality, presumably the material out of which myths

about a primal Golden Age can take form. And this is the stage of life

during which the infant (that is, literally the “speechless” human organ-

ism) learns the rudiments of an aptitude which, to our knowledge, dis-tinguishes us from all other earthly beings: namely, language (or, more

broadly, familiarity with arbitrary, conventional symbol-systems in gen-

eral—insofar as traditions of dance, music, sculpture, painting, and so

on are also modes of such “symbolic action”).

But the kind of arbitrary conventional symbol-system that infants ac-

quire in learning a tribal language differs from the other media in at least

this notable respect: It is the one best equipped to talk about itself, about

other media, and even about the vast world of motion that is wholly out-

side all symbol-systems, that was going on long before our particular

kind of symbol-using animal ever came into existence, that is the neces-

sary ground of our animal existence, and that can go on eternally with-

out us.

Rousseau tells us that our kind was born free. But that formula can

be misleading in its implications. Every infant emerges from organic in-

fancy (speechlessness) into language during a period of total subjec-

tion—subjection to the ministrations of “higher powers,” the familial

adults with whom it comes to be in what Martin Buber would call an “I-Thou” relationship. Under favorable conditions these powers are be-

nign; sometimes they are malign; or there is an ambiguous area, inas-

much as ministrations that the powers conceive of as well-intentioned

may be interpreted otherwise by the maturing infant, since its condition

does not enable it to clearly recognize the limitations imposed upon the

higher powers which the infant conceives of as all-powerful.

The first cry of the infant had been a purely reflex action. But as the

aptitude for symbolic action develops, the child acquires a way of trans-forming this purely reflex response into the rudiments of communica-

tion. In effect, the cry becomes a call, a way of summoning the higher

powers by supplication. In out-and-out language, it becomes a way of



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saying “Please.” There we see emerging the profound relationship be-

tween religion and prayer. The Wailing Wall is not a cry of despair. The

Wailing Wall is a cry of hope. It is not the cry of Hell, as with Dante’s

line, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The cries of Hell are eter-nally hopeless. But the prayers of religion are in their essence as with the

infant’s cries, which had become transformed from a condition of

sheerly reflex expression into a plea, the very essence of prayer.

I would consider these paragraphs a logological observation about the

“cradle” of theology. Theology is words about God; logology is words

about words. Logology can’t talk about God. It can only talk about

words for “God.” Logology can make no statement at all about the “af-

terlife” and the related concept of the “supernatural.” Logology can’t ei-ther affirm or deny the existence of God. Atheism is as far from the realm

of logology as is the most orthodox of fundamentalist religions. All lo-

gology is equipped to do is discuss human relations in terms of our na-

ture as the typically symbol-using animal. In that regard, without pro-

nouncing about either the truth or falsity of theological doctrine,

logology does lay great emphasis upon the thought that theology, in

purely formal respects, serves as a kind of verbal “grace” that “perfects”

nature. It “rounds things out,” even if such fulfillment happened to be

but the verbal or doctrinal completing of the pattern that the infant “nat-

urally” experiences when first learning language, and its modes of sup-

plication in an “I-Thou” (familial) relationship with “higher powers.”

Logology involves only empirical considerations about our nature as

the symbol-using animal. But for that very reason it is fascinated by the

genius of theology; and all the more so because, through so much of our

past, theologians have been among the profoundest of our inventors in

the ways of symbolic action. Also, everywhere logology turns, it finds

more evidences of the close connection between speech and theologicdoctrine. Saint Paul tells us, for instance, that “faith comes from hearing

[ex auditu],” which in the last analysis amounts to saying that theology

is exactly what it calls itself etymologically, an “ology.” The story of

Creation in Genesis is an account of successive verbal fiats (“and God

said”). And in the New Testament the Gospel of John tells us that in the

beginning was the Logos.

But these issues don’t stop with such obvious cases as that. In my es-

say on “Terministic Screens” (Language as Symbolic Action [Berkeley:University of California Press, 1973], pp. 44–47), after having noted how

the nature of our terms affects the nature of our observations, by direct-

ing our attention in one way rather than another (hence “many of the ‘ob-

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servations’ are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of

which the observations are made” [46]), I turned to the formula which

Anselm had developed at great length from Isaiah 7:9 (nisi credideritis,

non intelligetis): “Believe, that you may understand” (crede,ut intelligas).It is my claim that the injunction “Believe, that you may understand,”

has a fundamental application to the purely secular problem of “ter-

ministic screens.”

The “logological,” or “terministic” counterpart of “Believe” in the

formula would be: “Pick some particular nomenclature, some one ter-

ministic screen.” And for “That you may understand,” the counterpart

would be: “That you may proceed to track down the kinds of observa-

tion implicit in the terminology you have chosen, whether your choice of terms was deliberate or spontaneous.” (47)

Or, in my The Rhetoric of Religion (“On Words and the Word: Sixth

Analogy” [1961; reprint edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 1970], pp. 29ff) I have tried to show how “the rela-

tion between the name and the thing named would be the Power (equals

the Father); the name would be the Wisdom (equals the Son, which the

Father “generates” in the sense that the thing named calls for its name);

and the two together “spirate” Love (equals the Holy Spirit, in the sense

that there is the perfect correspondence between the thing and its name,

and the perfect term for such correspondence or “communion” between

the terms would be Love).

And as for “Perfection” itself, the theological idea of God as the ens

perfectissimum has a striking logological analogue in the astoundingly

many ways in which terminologies set up particular conditions for the

tracking down of implications. The whole Marxist dialectic, for instance,

is so designed as to foretell fulfillment in what logology would class as a

Utopian perfection, a dialectic so “perfect” that it is to inevitably culmi-nate in the abolition of itself (with the “withering away of the state,” a

state of the political state that may be quite dubious, but that can make

claims to inevitability if we substitute for the state of the body politic the

analogous state of the human body).

In more restricted ways, the tracking down of implications towards

various perfections manifests itself in our many technological nomen-

clatures, each of which suggests to its particular votaries further steps

in that same direction. Such expansionist ambitions are near-infinite intheir purely visionary scope; but though they have no inner principle

of self-limitation, their range of ideal development is restricted by the

ways in which they interfere with one another, including academic



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problems to do with the allocation of funds among the various de-

partments.

This logological principle of perfection (which I would call “ent-

elechial,” restricting the Aristotelian concept of the “entelechy” to therealm of nomenclature, “symbolicity”) can also be seen to operate in ar-

eas which we do not ordinarily associate with the idea of perfection, ex-

cept in such loose usages as “perfect fool” or “perfect villain.” But its

powers along that line are terrifying. It showed up repeatedly in theo-

logical charges of heresy, in which the heretics were nearly always sad-

dled with the same list of hateful vices. And in our day the Nazis did the

most outrageous job with “perfection” in that sense by the thoroughness

of their charges against the Jew. It takes very little inducement for us tobegin “perfecting” the characters of our opponents by the gratuitous im-

putation of unseemly motives. Thus, all told, in my logological definition

of humankind, I put a high rating on my clause “rotten with perfection.”

Satan was as perfect an entelechy in one sense as Christ was in another.

Doubtless Machiavelli was thinking along those lines when he told his

prince that, whereas one should be wary of hiring mercenaries, the way

to get the best fighters is make the war a holy war.

Language is one vast menagerie of implications—and with each chan-

nel of such there are the makings of a corresponding fulfillment proper

to its kind, a perfection in germ. For the logological study of dialectic

teaches us that there are two quite different ways of introducing the “en-

telechial principle of perfection,” thus:

1. There is the thing, bread.

2. There is the corresponding word, “bread.”

3. Language being such as it is, with no trouble at all I can make up

the expression, “perfect bread.”

4. We may disagree as to which bread could properly be called

“perfect.”

5. A mean man, or a dyspeptic, or a philosopher might even deny

that in this world there can be such a thing as “perfect bread.”

6. Nevertheless, theologians can speak of God as the ens perfectissi-

mum—and the expression “perfect bread” is a secular counter-

part of such dialectical resources.

7. Nay more. Even if there is no such thing as perfect bread in

actuality, I can consider bread from the standpoint of perfect

bread “in principle.”

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8. “Here is some perfect bread”; or

9. “As compared with perfect bread, this bread I am offering you

is a dismal substitute”; or

10. “I can assure you that, humble as it is, this bread represents

perfect bread in principle.” (It “stands for the spirit of perfect

bread.”) (Kenneth Burke, Dramatism and Development [Barre,

Massachusetts: Clark University Press, 1972], p. 59; appendix

to essay on “Archetype and Entelechy.”)

But the question of the relation between logology and theology also

requires that we look in another direction, namely, the question of the

relation between logology and behaviorism. A handy way to introducethis issue is by reference to a passage in my review of Denis Donoghue’s

recently published admirable collection of essays, The Sovereign Ghost:

Studies in Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976):

On going back over Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, I ran across afootnote in which with regard to the “desynonymizing” of the terms“imagination” and “fancy,” he says: insofar as any such distinctionsbecome accepted, “language itself does as it were think for us.” It is a

chance remark which the structuralists would make much more of thanwould either Coleridge or Donoghue. (“The Sovereign Ghost by DenisDonoghue,” The New Republic 177 [September 10, 1977]: 30–31)

In effect Coleridge is saying that words are doing what the theologian

would say that the “mind” is doing, an interesting twist inasmuch as Co-

leridge, in his day, was known much better for works like his theologi-

cal Aids to Reflexion than as a literary critic, though his works generally

had a theological cast. Yet in passing, Coleridge there hit upon a quite

strategic substitution, since the immediate context of situation in whichwords are learned is the realm of nonsymbolic motion, whereas “mind”

is more readily associated with an ultimate supernatural ground beyond

the realm of physical and physiological motion.

Logology here is in an intermediate position between theology and be-

haviorism (which monistically acknowledges no qualitative difference

between a human organism’s verbal and nonverbal behavior). Logology

is as dualistic in its way as theology is, since the logological distinction

between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion is as “polar” as the-ology’s distinctions between mind and body, or spirit and matter. Lo-

gology holds that “persons” act, whereas “things” but move, or are

moved. And “personality” in the human sense depends upon the ability



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and opportunity to acquire an arbitrary, conventional symbol-system

such as a tribal, familial language.

However, logology need not be driven to a “mentalist” position when

in controversy with a behaviorist. Indeed, seizing upon a behavioristterm, logology needs but point to the empirical distinction between ver-

bal behavior (which logology would call “symbolic action”) and “mo-

lecular” behavior (which logology would call “nonsymbolic physiologic

motion”).

To adapt some comments from Western Speech (summer 1968), I

read somewhere that, when thrillers are shown in movie houses, the air-

conditioning plant must be accelerated, owing to the audience’s in-

creased rate of respiration, and so forth, in response to the excitement of the fiction. The fiction is in the realm of “symbolic action,” with which

the air-conditioning plant has no relation whatever. The air condi-

tioner’s “behavior” is in the realm of nonsymbolic motion, which relates

directly to the physical conditions produced in the theater by the body’s

nonsymbolic molecular motions correlative with the symbol-using or-

ganism’s responses to the story (which as a story is wholly in the realm

of symbolism, though the sights and sounds of the story, in their role as

mere uninterpreted vibrations, are but in the realm of motion). For in the

empirical realm, no symbolic action is possible without a grounding in

motion, as words on the screen can’t even be words unless they can be

seen or heard.

But logology would hold that their symbolic dimension cannot be

monistically reduced to the order of physical motion alone. Whatever the

mutation whereby our prehistoric ancestors acquired their aptitude with

symbolicity, from then on the human animal was a composite organism,

be the duality conceived in theological terms of mind and body, or in lo-

gological terms of symbolic action and nonsymbolic physiological mo-tion. The principle of individuation was in the body, with the immedi-

acy of its sensations. The realm of symbolism, with its many modes of

identification (family relationships, geology, history, politics, religious

doctrine, and so on), shaped the public aspects of human awareness and

personality.

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With Coleridge’s passing remark that, if a new distinction becomes gen-

erally established, in effect the corresponding words think for us, we are

at the very center of logological inquiry: the close but indeterminate re-

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lationship between substitution and duplication. There is obvious dupli-

cation in the very fact that we have verbal parallels for nonverbal things,

processes, and relationships. There is substitution inasmuch as, given the

thing bread and the word “bread,” the person who asked for bread withthe proper symbol (the word for bread in that particular language) might

be given instead another symbol, the money with which to buy it. One

could spend a lifetime doing nothing more than tracking down the in-

tricately interwoven manifestations of these two principles, which are

perhaps more accurately discussed not just as aspects, but as the very

essence, of language. For present purposes, let us cite a few such aspects

at random:

First, there are the extensions of language by analogy, what JeremyBentham called “fictions,” a term that itself is probably a metaphorical

extension of the expression “legal fictions.” Terms that have a quite lit-

eral meaning as applied to physical conditions can be adapted figura-

tively to subject matter that does not admit of such usage. For instance,

if we speak of one object as being at a certain “distance” from another,

our statement can be strictly literal, capable of verification by measuring

the distance. But if we speak of one person’s views as being “distant”

from another’s, we are employing a “fiction” which admits of no such

literal physical test. Or, in saying that a certain leaning object has an “in-

clination” of thirty degrees, we are using the term literally, in contrast

with the statement that a person has an “inclination” to do such-and-

such. In this connection Bentham observes that our entire vocabularies

of psychology and ethics are made up of such “fictive” duplicates, with-

out which we could not talk about such matters at all. Go to the etymo-

logical origins of all such terms, and you will spot the literal images im-

plicit in such ideas.

The relation between our sensory experience as individual speechlessphysical organisms and the vast public context of symbolicity we acquire

as social beings sets up the endlessly complex conditions for such dupli-

cation as is revealed in the spontaneous use of terms for the weather as

a nomenclature for “states of mind,” or “attitudes.” And one can

glimpse how a whole magic world of human relations might develop

from that mode of duplication whereby, as one pious person fearsomely

plants a crop, another (an expert in the lore of mythic counterparts) “col-

laborates” by contributing his skill to the process, in scrupulously per-forming the “necessary” attendant ritual of a planting song (“necessary”

because, man being the symbol-using animal, the realm of nonsymbolic

natural motion is not completely humanized until reduced to terms of



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symbolicity; hence spring calls for a spring song, harvest for a harvest

song; marriage, death, changes of status, and so on similarly attain their

“completion” when thus ritually paralleled).

The resources of duplication and substitution are revealed mostclearly of all in such mathematical operations as the use of the symbol π,

instead of 3.1416, or the internal relationships whereby 2 plus 2 can be

the same as 4 times 1. And surely mathematics began with that primal

substitution whereby, in making three marks to stand for three apples,

one also had a sign that would stand for three of anything, whereupon

one’s symbol had advanced to a “higher level of generalization” whereby

the number itself could be operated on in its own right, without refer-

ence to any particular numbered things.On inspecting more closely this aspect of what we might call the “du-

plication-substitution complex,” we come upon a similar usage that, at

first glance, might seem of a quite different sort. Insofar as some partic-

ular ritual is ceremonially repeated in identical fashion on different oc-

casions (which would also include annual seasonal occurrences, since no

two situations are identical) in effect the ritual acts as a mode of classi-

fication that abstracts from any particular occasion, just as numbers be-

come abstracted from any one particular instance of their use. Thus, a

marriage rite is an institution whereby all sorts of couples are

“processed” in identical fashion. It is not like a situation where John and

Mary are consulting a marriage counselor about their particular prob-

lems. Rather, it is individualized only insofar as there is a blank space to

be filled with whatever proper names are to be included under that head

this time.

The ubiquitous resources of substitution probably attain their pro-

foundest theological embodiment in the doctrines and rites of vicarious

sacrifice. I plan to discuss later the distinctions between theological andlogological concerns with the principle of sacrifice. But let us now con-

sider the astounding thoroughness (even to the edge of paradox) with

which Christian theology developed the logological principle of substi-

tution. Of all victims that were ever offered as redemption for the guilt

of others, surely Christ was conceived as the most perfect such substitute,

even to the extent of being perfectly abhorrent, as bearer of the world’s

sinfulness. Thus Luther said:

All the prophets saw that Christ would be the greatest brigand of all, thegreatest adulterer, thief, profaner of temples, blasphemer, and so on, thatthere would never be a greater in all the world. . . . God sent his onlybegotten Son into the world, and laid all sins upon him, saying: “You are to

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be Peter the denier, Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and wild beast, Davidthe adulterer, you are to be the sinner who ate the apple in the Garden of Eden, you are to be the crucified thief, you are to be the person whocommits all the sins in the world.” (I translate from Leon Chestov,Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle [Paris: Vrin, 1948].)

Thus, in terms of the specifically “Christian logology,” the most per-

fect divine Logos also became the perfect fiend, in serving as the substi-

tute vessel for the guilt of all.

With regard to the vexing issue of the relation between words and

“mind” (whereby some nomenclatures would substitute “words” for

“mind,” as per the tangential remark we have cited from Coleridge), be-

foremoving on toother aspects of our subject we should consider J. HillisMiller’s ingenious and penetrating essay “The Linguistic Moment in ‘The

Wreck of the Deutschland.’ ” This essay is particularly relevant since

Hopkins’s exceptional involvement in strictly logological concerns is so

strikingly interwoven with the most poignant of theological devotions.

Miller here notes “three apparently incompatible theories of poetry . . .

each brilliantly worked out in theory and exemplified in practice”:

Poetry may be the representation of the interlocked chiming of created

things in their relation to the Creation. This chiming makes the pied beautyof nature. Poetry may explore or express the solitary adventures of the self in its wrestles with God or in its fall into the abyss outside God. Poetry mayexplore the intricate relationships among words. These three seeminglydiverse theories of poetry are harmonized by the application to them all of alinguistic model. This model is based on the idea that all words rhymebecause they are ultimately derived from the same Logos. Nature is “words,expression, news of God” (Sermons, 129), and God has inscribed himself innature. The structure of nature in its relation to God is like the structure of language in relation to the Logos, the divine Word; and Christ is the Logos

of nature, as of words. (47–48)

Coleridge, when commenting on how words can think for us, and

noting that the two words “imagination” and “fancy” (the one from the

Latin, the other from the Greek) were often used synonymously, pro-

posed to “desynonymize” them, so that they would have different mean-

ings. But Hopkins proceeded in the other direction; he let the word “Lo-

gos” think for him by refusing to distinguish between its secular meaning

as a word for “word” and its meaning in Christian theology, where theNew Testament word for Christ was the “Word.” Hopkins’s thinking

could not possibly have been as it was had those early sectaries, the “Alo-

gians,” succeeded in their attempts to exclude the Gospel of John and



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Revelations from the Christian canon because in both texts Christ was

referred to as the Logos.

Saint Augustine had in effect desynonymized the two usages by explic-

itly referring to his conversion from his career as a pagan rhetorician (a“peddler of words,” venditor verborum) to a preacher of the Christian

Word. But he had also Christianized the very beginning of the Old Testa-

ment by noting that God’s successive acts of Creation had been done

through the Word (when he had said, “Let there be . . .”)—and thus in

effect the Creation was done by the Father’s Word, which was the Son.

Miller begins his essay: “By linguistic moment I mean the moment

when language as such, the means of representation in literature, be-

comes a matter to be interrogated, explored, thematized in itself” (47).While his engrossing study of what B.F. Skinner might call Hopkins’s

“verbal behavior” is essentially logological, the very fact of Hopkins’s re-

fusal to “desynonymize” the two usages keeps the study of the “linguis-

tic moment” constantly infused with the theological implications of

Hopkins’s poetics.

As might be expected, variations on the theme of “duplication” and

“repetition” are plentiful; even talk of a “primal bifurcation” is a signal

to look for ways of tying the issue in with the distinction between speech-

less nonsymbolic physiological motion (analogous to the traditional

terms, “matter” or “body”) and the publicly infused realm of symbolic

action (analogous to the traditional terms, “spirit” or “mind”). In this

connection Miller has a footnote which succinctly bears upon “polar”

aspects of the human being as a dualistic, “composite” individual, in

contrast with the monistic assumptions of behaviorism, which denies

any qualitative distinction between verbal behavior and nonverbal be-

havior (in brief, it “thinks” by refusing to “desynonymize” the term “be-

havior”). Referring to an “admirable passage in Hopkins’s commentaryon The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius,” Miller quotes:

And this [my isolation] is much more true when we consider the mind;when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself,that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is moredistinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smellof walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means toanother man. (47)

In my view of logological dualism (which Hopkins comes close to re-

placing with a monism exactly the reverse of the behaviorists’, insofar as

Hopkins would reduce everything to terms of the universal Logos) the

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“linguistic moment” proclaimed by that resonant sentence implicitly

pronounces the principle of “inscape” in what are essentially “problem-

atical” terms. The “selfhood” of a Catholic priest must obviously be

grounded in Catholic doctrine, which is necessarily “spiritual,” on theside of what logology would call public “symbolicity.” But he expresses

the sense of his separate identity in terms of immediate sensation, which

is in the realm of the individual’s sheer physiology.

True, poets have traditionally used the terminology of sensation to

give the feel of the internal immediacy that Hopkins aims to suggest. And

there is no good reason for denying poets such a time-honored rhetori-

cal device. I am but pointing out that the essential polarity or duality of

the human condition is not actually bridged (it can’t be) but is stylisti-cally denied. The mode of expression is thus in effect a “linguistic ele-

ment” that represses an explicit statement of the case. Whereupon the

“return of the repressed” reveals itself in the person of Hopkins himself

as the “wreck” with which the poem starts out (significant timing!) by

being explicitly and exclusively concerned.

The first five stanzas are in the form of an “I-Thou” prayer. Forty lines

in all, there are nineteen cognates of the first-person pronoun, fourteen

of the second. The second half of the first part is transitional, in that the

pronouns move farther off (first-person plural and third-person singu-

lar). The second part, two-thirds of the poem, is built explicitly around

the wreck of the Deutschland, a “pied” name if there ever was one (“O

Deutschland, double a desperate name!”—as the home of both the nun

Gertrude, “Christ’s lily,” and the “beast,” Luther). With regard to the

poem as a structure, we could say that it transforms the “pied” nature

of the poet’s personal problems into the grander interwoven ambiva-

lences of sinking and salvation.

At the end of the essay Miller adds a footnote:

Kenneth Burke, in remarks about this paper after its presentation at theRansom Symposium at Kenyon College in April of 1975, argued that Ishould add something about the multiple meaning of the word wreck in thetitle. The poem, he said, is about Hopkins’s wreck. This was a powerful pleato relate the linguistic complexities, or tensions, back to their subjectivecounterparts. Much is at stake here. That the poem is a deeply personaldocument there can be no doubt. Its linguistic tensions are “lived,” not mere“verbal play” in the negative sense. . . . In “The Wreck of the Deutschland”Hopkins is speaking of his own wreck. . . . The danger in Burke’s sugges-tion, however, is, as always, the possibility of a psychologizing reduction,the making of literature into no more than a reflection or representation of something psychic which precedes it and which could exist without it. . . .



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Subjectivity, I am arguing, with all its intensities, is more a result than anorigin. To set it first, to make an explanatory principle of it, is, as Nietzschesays, a metalepsis, putting late before early, effect before cause. (59–60n)

I wrote Miller, calling attention to the closing paragraph of an essay by

me concerning Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Symbolic Action in a

Poem by Keats,” A Grammar of Motives [1945; reprint edition, Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], pp. 447–63). In

that essay I had noted respects in which traces of the symptoms of the dis-

ease he was to die of manifested themselves. But I added this qualification:

We may contrast this discussion with explanations such as a materialist of the Kretschmer school might offer. I refer to accounts of motivation thatmight treat disease as cause and poem as effect. In such accounts, thedisease would not be “passive,” but wholly active; and what we have calledthe mental action would be wholly passive, hardly more than an epiphe-nomenon, a mere symptom of the disease quite as are the fever and the chillthemselves. Such accounts would give us no conception of the essentialmatter here, the intense linguistic activity. (462–68)

In that last paragraph, I wrote Miller, “At least I say I ’m not doing

exactly what you say I am doing.” Then I added: “However, I’ll meet

you halfway. I think the relation between the physiology of disease andthe symbolic action of poetry can be of the ‘vicious circle’ sort. One’s po-

etizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body’s passions,

can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings.” I had in mind

here such a “reflexive” process (I guess current cant would call it “feed-

back”) as the role of “psychogenic” asthma in Proust’s search for essence

by the “remembrance of things past.”1

iii

Let us now list some cases the discussion of which might most directly

help us inquire, by comparison and contrast, into words about the di-

vine, the supernatural (theology), and words about words (logology), in-

cluding words for the divine and supernatural, whether or not there be

such a realm, which theologies have words for.

Since theology in our tradition is so clearly grounded in the relation

between the Old Testament and the New, let’s begin logologically fromthere. The formula of the Christian theologians was stated thus: Novum

Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet. How translate it ex-

actly? “The New Testament was latent in the Old Testament. The Old

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Testament becomes patent in the New Testament.” Or “The implica-

tions of the Old Testament became explicitly manifest in the New Tes-

tament.” It was a way of both letting the Jews in and keeping them out,

unless they became converted or, like an old Testament patriarch, eachhad been an anima naturaliter Christiana; I forget whether Socrates was

adjudged such, but his association with the symbolic action of Platonism

might well include him, for his Hellenic contribution to the cult of Lo-

gos that the early Alogian Christians wanted to rule out.

In any case, the Christian theology, with regard to the relation be-

tween Old Testament and New Testament, would see in the Old Testa-

ment many stories about characters that were conceived as what they

were only insofar as they were “types of Christ.” Indeed, the Jewish tribeitself, in its Exodus from Egypt, was but a type of Christ. Thus its Jew-

ish identity was, in effect (in principle), being viewed not as that of a tribe

in its own right, but as an emergent stage of the Christian future.

Exactly, then, what does logology, as a purely secular cult of the Lo-

gos, do with that particular localization of dialectical resources? Obvi-

ously, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac (telling of how the

father, in obedience to God’s Law, would consent to sacrifice even his

most beloved person, his son) can be conceived of as incipiently, prophet-

ically a type of the New Testament story of an all-powerful Father, the

very soul of justice, who actually does fulfill the pattern, in completing

the sacrifice of his most precious person, his only begotten Son. And lo-

gology looks upon both stories as variations on the theme of sacrifice.

In my early scattered readings among mediaeval texts, I found a sen-

tence that fascinated me. It was probably a rule of some monastic order,

I don’t know which. And though I have lost track of the original, I still

incline to go on repeating my translation, which is as resonant as I could

make it: “If any one have any thing of which he is especially fond, let itbe taken from him.” There is even the ironic possibility that I got the

Latin somewhere from Remy de Gourmont, a nonbeliever if there ever

was one; and he taught me to appreciate, in a kind of twisted nostalgia,

the forlorn fragmentary beauty of such accents. The fantastically “ma-

terialistic” George Santayana’s gallant Realm of Spirit is also in that

groove.

But the main consideration, from the standpoint of logology, is the

fact that, however variously theologians may treat of the relation be-tween the Old Testament and the New Testament, they have in common

the theological stress upon the principle of sacrifice. As viewed from the

standpoint of logology, even the most primitive offering of animals on



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the altar can be equated with the Crucifixion of Christ insofar as any and

all such rites embody the principle of sacrifice (which, given the ubiqui-

tous logological resources of substitution, turns out to be synonymous

with vicarious sacrifice).As viewed logologically, the theological story of the Creation and the

Fall (in the opening chapter of Genesis) would be summed up thus:

The story of Creation, in representing the principle of Order, neces-

sarily introduced a principle of Division, classifying some things as dis-

tinct from other things. In this purely technical sense, Creation itself was

a kind of “Fall,” inasmuch as it divided the principle of Unity into parts,

each of which has a nature of its own, regardless of how they might in

principle be “unified.” (As seen from this point of view, even a projectfor “unification” implies a grammatical gerundive, a “to-be-unified.”)

Thus, viewed from the other side, the orderly principle of Division is seen

to contain implicitly the possibility of Divisiveness.

The possibility of Divisiveness calls for a Law against Divisiveness.

(In a world set up by the creative word, how keep Division from be-

coming Divisive except by a word, a Law, that says, “Don’t do whatever

would disrupt the Order”?) So the story includes a “don’t” that, stories

of that sort being what they are, stands for the sheer principle of Law,

as the negative aspect of Order. But implicit in the idea of “Don’t” there

is the possibility of Disobedience. One says, “Do” or “Don’t” only to

such kinds of entities as can be able to respond (that is, can have the re-

sponsibility) by in effect saying, “Yes” or “No” (that is, being obedient

or disobedient).

But Saint Paul’s theology was quite in keeping with logology when he

said that the Law made sin, as Bentham was to say that the Law makes

crime. However, note that, in introducing, via Law, the possibility of

Disobedience, one has by implication introduced the principle of Temp-tation (the incentive, however originating, to fall afoul of the Law).

Where, then, locate the “origin” of that Temptation, as befits the nature

of narrative (story, myth)?

At this point, the implications of terms for Law and Order surface by

translation into terms of role. These are two kinds of “priority.” There

is logical priority in the sense of first premise, second premise, conclu-

sion. Or in the sense that the name for a class of particulars is “prior” to

any particular included under that head, quite as the term “table” al-ready “anticipates” the inclusion of countless particular objects that

don’t even yet exist. Or there is temporal priority in the sequence

yesterday-today-tomorrow.

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As a result of this doubling, one can state matters of principle (that is,

firsts or beginnings) in terms of either logical or temporal priority.

(Hence in my Rhetoric of Religion I put major emphasis upon the ety-

mological fact that both the Greek and Latin words for “principle”[arché and principium] refer to priority in both the logical and temporal

senses of the term.) I said somewhere (I think in my Grammar of Mo-

tives, but I can’t locate it) that a Spinozistic translation of the first words

in the Vulgate Bible, “In principio Deus creavit,” would be not “in the

beginning God created,” but “in principle God created” For his basic

equation, Deus sive Natura, amounts exactly to that, since he would

never associate the words “God” and “ nature” in terms of a temporal

priority whereby God “came first” in time. Though such equating of God and nature was pantheistic, hence anathema, in its sheer design it

resembled the thinking of those Orthodox Christians who attacked Ar-

ianism by insisting that the “priority” of Father to Son was not in any

sense temporal. We here confront a purely logological kind of “priority,”

as we might well say that the number 1 is “prior” to any other number,

but only “in principle”; for no number in time is “prior” to any other,

since an internal relationship among numbers is nontemporal. “Before

numbers were,” 3 was less than 4 and more than 2, though we can “go

from” one such to another. And logologically we confront an analogous

situation with regard to the narrative or “mythic” translation of “non-

temporal” implications among terms into terms of story, as with the nar-

rative ways of stating the principles of Order in the first three chapters

of Genesis, under “primal” conditions involving an audience for whom

the poetic ways of story came first; however, such expressions were later

to be sophisticated by the “traumatic” step from poetry and mythology

to criticism and critically mature theology.

The Old Testament begins in its way quite as the New TestamentGospel of John begins in its, with pronouncements that overlap upon

these two kinds of priority. Genesis “tells the story” of the divine word’s

informative power. John tells the story of the Logos, a Hellenistic stress

upon the word that a “Judaizing” sect among the emergent Christian

doctrinarians had unsuccessfully attempted to exclude from the canon.

Hence, though the term in English seems to have begun by reference to

the Logos in the Gospel of John (a usage that is ambiguously implicit in

these present shuttlings between theology and logology), both the Bookof Genesis and the Gospel of John present their cases in terms of story.

And we now take on from there.

Logologically, we confront the fact that, given the fluid relation between



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logical and temporal priority, the logical “firstness” of principles, when

stated in the ways of story (mythos), as with the opening chapters of

Genesis, calls for translation into terms of temporal priority. Thus the

narrative way of saying what Saint Paul had in mind when saying thatthe Law made sin and Bentham when he said that the Law made crime

was to say that the first human being sinned against the first Law decreed

by the first and foremost Law-giver.

The principle of the Law, implicit in the principle of Order, is identi-

cal with an astounding seiendes Unding that human language has added

to nature, the negative (a purely linguistic invention unknown to the

world of sheer wordless motion, which can be but what it positively is).

Thus, implicit in the legal negative, the “thou shalt not” of the Law(which, the story of Beginnings tell us, was born with the creation of

worldly order) is the possibility that its negativity can be extended to the

negating of negativity. There is thus the “responsibility” of being able to

say no to a thou-shalt-not.

But the tactics of narrative personalizing (in effect a kind of substitu-

tion that represents a principle in terms of a prince) raise a problem lo-

cal to that particular mode of representation itself. If this kind of “first”

is to represent the possibility of disobedience that is implicit in the de-

creeing of a Law, where did the “temptation” to disobedience “come

from”? Up to this point, we have been trying to show that a logological

analysis of the case would coincide with a theological presentation, in

that theology has said implicitly what logology says explicitly; namely,

the conditions of the Fall were inherent in the conditions of the Creation,

since the Divisiveness of Order was reinforced by the divisive possibility

of saying either Yes or No to the primal Law of that Order.

However, the sheer psychology of personality is such that an act of

disobedience is but the culminating stage of an inclination to disobey, aguilty disobedient attitude. And where did that prior step, the emergent

temptation to disobey, originate? Here theology’s concern with the

sources of such an attitude introduces a causal chain that turns out to in-

volve a quite different provenance.

Eve was the immediate temptress. But she had been tempted by the

serpent. But the serpent was not “entelechially perfect” enough to be the

starting place for so comprehensive, so universal (so “catholic”) a theo-

logical summation. The principle of substitution gets “perfect” embod-iment here in that the serpent becomes in turn the surrogate for Satan,

the supernatural tempter beyond which no further personal source of

temptation need be imagined, since his personality and his role as ulti-

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mate tempter were identical, in such total consistency that this supreme

“light-bearing” angel was the most thorough victim of his own vocation.

iv

In his epic, Paradise Lost, Milton turns that story into a further story. Be-

ginning with theology’s search for the grandest personalized source of

temptation, Milton reverses the mode of derivation as we have traced it

logologically. Thus, whereas logologically the story of the revolt in

Heaven would be derived from motivational ambiguities whereby the

eventuality of the Fall was implicit in the conditions of the Creation, Mil-

ton’s theological route would proceed from the revolt in Heaven to theFall, and consequent expulsion from the Garden.

Although there are many respects in which logology and theology are

analogous (respects in which the two usages, words about words and

words about the Logos, can go along in parallel) there are also the many

occasions when, as we have here been noting, they will unfold a series of

interrelated terms in exactly the reverse order. A good example is a cre-

ation myth that I learned of from Malinowski (compare Language as

Symbolic Action, pp. 364–65n).

According to this myth, the tribe is descended from a race of supernat-

ural ancestors (in this case, subterranean ancestors, since their original an-

cestors were thought to have lived underground). These mythic ancestors

had a social order identical with the social order of the tribe now. When

they came to the surface, they preserved the same social order, which has

been handed down from then to now. In this case, obviously, whereas con-

ditions now are mythologically “derived” from imputed primal conditions

“then,” logologically the mythic imputing of such primal conditions

“then” would be derived from the nature of conditions now. (I hope laterto discuss respects in which we might distinguish between mythology and

theology; but in a case of this sort they are analogous with regard to their

difference from logological derivation. And they have the advantage of

providing much simpler examples, at least as usually reported. Also, their

polytheistic aspect makes them much easier to “rationalize” than the ways

of the single all-powerful personal God of monotheistic theology, who tol-

erates so much that seems to us intolerable. Since logology makes no judg-

ment at all about the truth or falsity of theologic doctrine, its only task isto study how, given the nature of symbolism, such modes of placement are

logologically derivable from the nature of “symbolic action.”)

Logologically considered, the issue may be reduced to the matter of



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the negative, another aspect of the condition that arose in the story of the

Creation when God introduced the “thou shalt not” of the Law. Implicit

in the negative is the possibility of polar terms which bear a timeless re-

lationship to each other. This relationship is “timeless” in the sense thatalthough, with polar terms like “order” and “disorder,” each implies the

other, their relationship doesn’t involve a temporal step from one to the

other. But the supernatural realm of eternity is timeless. And Heaven was

the realm of timeless perfect order. But inasmuch as the genius of the

negative makes such terms as “order” and “perfection” polar, so far as

such terms were concerned they contained the timeless implication of

their contrasting term. Also, there are two kinds of polar negative: the

propositional (“is, isn’t”), the hortatory (“do, don’t”). And they tend tolose their initial distinctness.

Myth, story, narrative makes it possible to transform this timeless re-

lation between polar terms into a temporal sequence. That is, myth can

tell of a step from either one to the other. Thus, with regard to the per-

fection of Heaven outside of time, the resources of narrative made it pos-

sible to carry out the implications of polar terms such as “order” and

“perfection” by such stories as the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven. And the

timeless nature of such polarity is maintained eternally in the unending

establishment of Heaven and Hell, the one all Yes, the other all No.

Polytheistic myths didn’t have the acute problems with this terminis-

tic situation that monistic theology has. Joseph Fontenrose’s volume

Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (New York: Biblo &

Tannen, 1959; which I use as the basis of my essay “Myth, Poetry, and

Philosophy,” reprinted in my Language as Symbolic Action), takes as its

point of departure the myth of the combat between Apollo and Python,

then extends the discussion to two main types in general. There is a late

type, concerning a struggle between an “older” god and a “new” god,with the new god triumphing and founding a cult. But this is said to be

derived from an earlier type, concerning a struggle between a dragon and

a sky-god, with the sky-god triumphing.

In such cases, the principle of negation in polar terms can accommo-

date itself easily to such stories of personal combat. Also, the timeless na-

ture of the negative in such terms can be preserved, since the vanquished

combatant, though “slain,” is yet somehow still surviving, like Typhon

buried by Zeus beneath Sicily and fuming through Aetna, with the con-stant threat that he may again rise in revolt. Or the two may reign in suc-

cession, the vanquished principle taking over periodically, for a season.

Or under certain conditions the opposition can be translated into terms

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more like cooperation, with both powers or principles being necessary

to make a world, whereby the principle becomes itself a species of order,

too. Even the kingdom of Darkness is not just a rebellion against Light,

but has its own modes of organization. Polytheistic mythology couldthus readily accommodate temples to rival gods, for there was general

agreement that all such powers should be propitiated. And the meaner

they were, the more reason there was to appease them with cult.

In transforming these resources of polytheistic myth, monistic theology

encounters many serious embarrassments. And some years back, when I

happened to be dealing with some of my logological speculations in a sem-

inar at Drew University, William Empson’s polemical volume Milton’s

God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965) came along. Obviously, Empsonhad decided to play the role of a very bad boy. But what interested me in

the book was the fact that its quarrels with Milton’s theology would serve

so well to help point up my “neutral” concerns with logology.

As judged from the logological point of view, there is no “combat”

among terms. In my Rhetoric of Religion, the “Cycle of Terms Implicit

in the Idea of ‘Order’” is a set of mutually interrelated terms which sim-

ply imply one another. Though terms can confront each other as anti-

thetically as “reward” and “punishment,” nothing “happens” until they

are given functions in an irreversible, personalized narrative. Terms like

“disorder,” “temptation,” “disobedience” come to life when Adam is

assigned the role of personally representing the principle of sin, and Sa-

tan is assigned the role of ultimate tempter. God has the role of setting

up the Order and giving the critical negative order, so terministically nec-

essary before a Fall can even be possible.

There is no one strict way to select the “cycle of terms” for such a

chart. In general, the ones I suggest are quite characteristic of the theo-

logical tradition for the discussion of which I am offering a pragmaticallydesigned pattern (with, behind it or within it, thoughts on the strategic

interwoven difference between temporal priority and logical priority, the

distinction itself being logological).

The interesting twist involves the way in which “supernatural” time-

lessness parallels logological timelessness, with both becoming “mythol-

ogized” (that is, translated into terms of a temporally irreversible story,

along with an ambiguity whereby history can be viewed as both in time

and in principle, for instance when Christ’s Crucifixion is both said tohave happened historically once, and to be going on still, in principle).

Thus, quite as Orthodox Christian theology would condemn Arianism

because it treated the Son’s coming after the Father in a temporal sequence,



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whereas the Father’s priority was but such in principle, so logology would

point out that there can be no temporal priority between two such terms.

The very relationship that makes a son a son is, by the same token, the

relationship that makes a father a father. Thus, in effect, the Father canbut “generate” the Son in principle.

Looking upon both mythology and theology as involved in the prob-

lem of translating supernatural “timeless” relationships into terms of

temporal sequence, logology tentatively views monotheism as in various

ways struggling to “perfect” the simpler rationales of polytheism while

still deeply involved in the same ultimate motivational quandaries. But

logology approaches the matter this way: If you talk about local or tribal

divinities, you are on the slope of polytheism. If, instead, you talk about“the divine” in general, lo! you are on the slope of monotheism. (On pp.

406–9 of my Language as Symbolic Action, in the article I have men-

tioned on “Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy,” I list several ways in which

polytheism “verbally behaved” in this situation. And I do think that on

page 408, with regard to my point about “the divine,” I stumbled into a

real surprise, though my inadequacies as a scholar make me fear that

something may have gone wrong with my Greek.)

In any case, logology quotes thispassage froma letterofSaint Ambrose:

The devil had reduced the human race to a perpetual captivity, a cruelusury laid on a guilty inheritance whose debt-burdened progenitor hadtransmitted it to his posterity by a succession drained by usury. The Lord Jesus came; He offered His own death as a ransom for the death of all; Heshed His own Blood for the blood of all. (Drawn up by His Eminence PeterCardinal Gasparri, The Catholic Catechism, translated by Reverend HughPope [New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons], p. 291)

Logology tends to see in such statements vestiges of the transitionalstage from polytheism to monotheism when the pagan gods were viewed

not as mere figments of the imagination but as actually existent demons.

You pay such high ransom only to someone who has terrific power over

you, not to someone to whom you needed but to say, “Be gone for

good,” and he’d be gone for good. Logology leaves it for the scruples of

theology to work out exactly why that damned nuisance has to be put

up with, by an all-powerful Ordainer of all Order. Logology’s only con-

tribution to the cause is the reminder that, to our knowledge, the Law,be it Saint Paul’s kind or Bentham’s, is the flowering of that humanly, hu-

manely, humanistically, and brutally inhumanely ingenious addition to

wordless nature, the negative, without which a figure like Satan would

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be logologically impossible, as also it would be impossible to put next to

a live wire a sign saying: “Danger, don’t touch.” Could even Heaven be

possible, if not defined by reference to its polar contradictory, Hell? I

have quoted from Fritz Mauthner’s Wörterbuch der Philosophie: “DieBejahung ist erst die Verneinung einer Verneinung ” (Language as Sym-

bolic Action, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language and Post-

scripts on the Negative,” p. 419). On the same page, from Dictionnaire

des Sciences Philosophiques: “Le néant n’est qu’un mot,” but think what

it has looked like, with “being” grounded in “non-being.”

But let’s sample a few of the problems that turn up with Milton’s the-

ological treatment of some logological situations:

Praise is a basic “freedom of speech.” There is great exhilaration inbeing able to praise, since praise is on the same slope as love. But what

of God, as the august recipient of praise? Is He to be a veritable glutton

for flattery, with jealous signs of a Jehovah complex?

However, the principle of hierarchy so intrinsic to Order, and for-

mally perfected in the orders of Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms,

Virtues, Powers, could work well in one notable respect. For thus Satan’s

revolt could be treated as motivation for the obedient revolt of the an-

gels immediately under him. They were loyal to their local leader.

If God in His omnipotence lets the battle rage indecisively for quite

some time whereas He could have stopped it the moment it began, there

arises the question whether He is as powerful as He is supposed to be,

or is cruel. Yet if Milton disposed of the problem from the start, where

would the epic be? Under the conditions of polytheism the fight can go

on; Fontenrose codifies the stages that can be protracted ad libitum; for

both combatants are mighty powers in conflict. But under monotheism

there is but one power whose word is power in the absolute, except for

the one logological embarrassment that, implicit in polar terms, there isa timeless principle of negativity which not only warns against the wiles

of Satan, but creates the need for Satan. The dragging out of the battle is

not a theological matter. As The Iliad shows, that’s the only way you can

write an epic.

Empson seizes upon the notion of the “Fortunate Fall” as a way of in-

dicting the Father on the ground that it proves Adam’s Fall to have been

in the cards from the start and thus to have involved the collusion of

God. But as regards the logology of the case, Adam’s fall was in the cardsfrom the start in the sense that his task, as the “first” man, was to rep-

resent the principle of disobedience that was implicit in the possibility of

saying no to the first “thou shalt not.” The only way for the story aspect



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of theology to say that the Law made sin is by translating the statement

of such “principles” into temporal terms. Theologically, as a private per-

son, Adam didn’t have to sin. But logologically, if he hadn’t, the whole

rationale of the Bible would have been in ruins. By the logologic of thecase, he had a task to perform that only the first man could be “princi-

pled” enough to perform. Eve couldn’t do it. She could but serve as a

temptress. For it was a patriarchal culture, and such original sin could

only be established through the male line.

There was a Patripassian heresy that thought of the one God as of-

fering himself for the redemption of mankind. But the Trinitarian rela-

tion between Father and Son allows for a divine self-sacrifice without Pa-

tripassianism. Empson considers the same grammar without benefit of logology but in his bad-boy method thus: “What Milton is thinking has

to be: ‘God couldn’t have been satisfied by torturing himself to death, not

if I know God; you could never have bought him off with that money;

he could only have been satisfied by torturing someone else to death.’ ”

There is quite a bit more of such discussion in the pages “Words Anent

Logology” I sent to the members of the class by way of a post mortem

on our seminar, later published in Perspectives in Literary Symbolism,

edited by Joseph Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 1968, pp. 72–82). But this should be enough to indicate the rela-

tion between theology and logology as revealed by Empson’s somewhat

naively nonlogological treatment of Milton’s theological narrative.

v

A somewhat oversimplified pattern might serve best to indicate the drift

of these speculations. Ideally postulate a tribe of pronouncedly homoge-

neous nature. Its cultural identity has developed under relatively au-tonomous conditions. That is, its contacts with other tribes have been

minimal, so that its institutions have taken shape predominantly in re-

sponse to the local material circumstances on which it depends for its

livelihood.

The tribe’s poetry and myths would thus emerge out of situations with

which the members of the tribe had become familiar in their gradual

transformation from wholly dependent speechless organisms, through

successive institutionally influenced stages along the way to maturity anddeath, a major aspect of such institutions being the role of the tribal lan-

guage in shaping the sense of individual and group identity. In this con-

nection I would place great stress upon the notion that, though the tribe’s

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language and myths were largely the work of adult experiences, usages,

and imaginings, they retained the vestiges of their “magical” origins. Im-

portant among these would be the child’s experiences as living among

“higher powers.” The proportion of child to adult would thus be mytho-logically duplicated in the proportion of adult to “supernatural” beings,

in a realm also associated with the idea of death (a frequent synonym for

which, thanks to the genius of the negative, is “immortality”).

The closeness of the relation between poetry and mythology is clearly

attested by the long tradition of Western “literary” interest in myths of

the Greeks. Myths are grounded in beliefs. And beliefs are “myths” to

whoever doesn’t believe them. And the step from poetry to criticism

takes over to the extent that the conditions under which our hypotheti-cal tribe’s body of poetry and mythology took form have become no-

tably altered.

One can imagine various such inducements. The tribe’s internal de-

velopment may have introduced new problems (as with the heightening

of social inequities). Climatic changes or invasion may cause migration.

The tribe may become much more closely associated with some other

tribe (by becoming a colony of some imperial power, for instance, or by

becoming an imperial power itself). And insofar as the voice of criticism

replaces the era of poetry, there is a corresponding step from mythology

to theology. At least such is the obvious case with regard to both Jewish

and Christian theology, which developed controversially (as monothe-

ism versus pagan polytheism), and with tense involvement in problems

of empire that radically modified the possibilities of purely internal

“tribal” development. But theology as I would place it still does tie in

closely with the aspect of mythology that shared the poetic sense of ori-

gins in the experiences of childhood, even to the stage when the speech-

less human organism was but getting the first inklings of the ways withverbal utterance.

Also, it’s quite likely that a development purely internal to the medium

can favor a great stress upon criticism. The incentives to criticism increase

with the invention of writing, and it’s doubtful whether criticism could

ever realize its fullest potentialities without the acutely anatomical kind

of observation that the written version of a work makes possible. At least,

after our long reliance on the written or printed text, our reliance on the

record has probably hobbled our memory to the point that, whereas agrounding in primitive illiteracy is in all likelihood the best condition for

poetry, criticism must write things down, the better to check on all the

subtleties of interrelationships among the parts of a text. Yet, although in



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that respect logology is always much more at home with a text than not,

it must constantly admonish itself regarding the limitations of a text as the

adequate presentation of a symbolic act, and as instructions for the reader

to reenact it. In comparison with a well-edited musical score, for instance,the literary text when considered as instructions for performance is seen

to be quite deficient. And think how impoverished the text of a drama is,

when viewed as instructions for the reader to reenact it in his imagination.

But what then, in sum, is “logology,” in relation to poetry, criticism,

mythology, theology, and the possible relation that they all have to the

realm of nonsymbolic motion in which all such forms of symbolic action

are empirically grounded? (That is to say, regardless of whether theology

is right or wrong, it is propounded by biological organisms that canthemselves propound anything only so long as they are physically alive,

hence capable of motion.) Whatever a theologian may be in some super-

natural realm, empirically he can’t be a theologian except insofar as his

symbolizings are enacted through the medium of a body—and logology

begins (and also necessarily ends) with questions about his nature thus.

Logology relates to all “ologies” in asking, as its first question, “What

all is going on, when someone says or reads a sentence?” There are some

things going on, with relation to the specific subject matter of the sen-

tence. And behind or beyond or within that, there are the kinds of

processes and relationships that are involved in the saying or under-

standing of any sentence. That approach to the subject in general sets up

logology’s first question, which necessarily puts the logologer on the un-

comfortable fringes of all the answers to all specific questions. It must

start from the fact that logology’s first question is a variant of the prime

Socratic question, the questioning of itself, and of its relation to nature

(whereby it becomes the purely technical analogue of the theologians’

“grace” that “perfects” but does not “abolish” the realm of nature’sspeechlessness).

Even at the risk of resorting somewhat to the mythical, let’s end by

surveying the field thus, as it looks in terms of logology:

First, although in many respects the speculations of logology bring us

much closer to behaviorism than is “naturally” the case with inquiries

into the nature of the word, there is one total, unyielding opposition. Be-

haviorism is essentially monistic, in assuming that the difference between

verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (logology would call it a dis-tinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion) is but a man-

ner of degree. But logology is dualistically vowed to the assumption that

we here confront a difference in kind. Hence, it puts primary stress upon

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duplication, polarity, negation (and countless variations of such) as

the very soul of logological inquiry.

And where do such modes of duplication come from? In our nature

as sheerly physiological organisms there is the bisymmetry of the body,there are the modes of reciprocating motion (systole and diastole of the

heart, the rhythm of respiration, the alternations and compensatory bal-

ances of walking). And in a vague way the gist of what Newton summed

up in his third Law of motion, “To every action there is always an equal

and opposite reaction,” is experienced to the extent that an organism

must sense the difference in alterity between pushing a reed and collid-

ing with a stone.

But a whole further realm of duplication arises from the nature of dis-course as a “reflection” of the nonlinguistic situations in which the hu-

man organism’s prowess with language is acquired. This is the kind of

duplication that shows up most obviously in the critical difference be-

tween a physical thing and its corresponding name.

Further, by the nature of language such parallels (“completed” in the

relation between spring and a spring song, or between the physical

process of planting and a ritual designed to accompany such a process)

inevitably give rise to a vast realm of duplication due to the fact that

analogy is implicit in the application of the same terms when referring

to different situations—and all actual situations are different insofar as

no two such situations are identical in their details. Such “idealization,”

at the very roots of the classifying function intrinsic to the repeated ap-

plication of the same terms to different conditions (a property of speech

without which no natural language could take form or be learned), itself

involves an endlessly repeatable act of duplication.

This analogical aspect of language thus sets up possibilities of further

development in its own right, making for the fictive range of identifica-tions and implications and substitutions which add up to the vast com-

plexities of the world as we know it. It becomes a realm in its own right

and essentially anthropocentric, in being verbally amplified by our

“isms” and “ologies” and mathematical reductions (all instances par ex-

cellence of specifically human inventions in the realm of symbolic action).

Such resources can become so highly developed out of themselves, by

analogical extension and the duplication of such analogies in corre-

sponding material implements and techniques, that the process of dupli-cation can become paradoxically reversed, as in Plato’s theory of “imi-

tation.” By this twist things are said to “imitate” the “ideas” (logology

would call them the “class names”) which we apply to them, hence in



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terms of which we can be said to conceive of them. Here stating thoughts

of “essence” in terms of quasi-temporal priority, Platonism concluded

that the “ideas” or “forms” (that is, the class names) for the particular

existent things of our empirical, everyday world must have been experi-enced in a supernatural realm prior to their “imperfect imitation” that

we see all about us.

As viewed logologically, such “forms” are “prior” in the sense that

the name for any class of objects can be viewed as “logically prior” to

the particulars classed under that head. And any particular can be called

an “imperfect” instance of that class name, because such a word (and its

“idea”) is not a thing, but a blank to be filled out by a definition, which

wouldn’t be a thing in that sense. Yet no particular thing could perfectlyrepresent the definition. To take Plato’s example: There is not one bed

which you could point to and say, “That’s bed.” Nor could any of the

countless other beds, variously different in their particulars from one an-

other, and many of them not even made yet, be selected as the bed. You

could say, “That’s a bed, “ but not just “bed” or “the bed.” Incidentally,

though you could thus use an indefinite article, Plato couldn’t; for there

is no such grammatical particle in his Greek.

That impinges upon another realm of speculation in which logology

is properly much interested. Consider the scholastic formula Nihil in in-

tellectu quod non prius in sensu. There is nothing in the realm of under-

standing which did not begin in the realm of the senses. Obviously, we

are there involved in the ambiguous relation between “images” and

“ideas” which directly bears upon the analogical factor operating in the

modes of duplication.

To that formula, Leibniz added, nisi intellectus ipse, “except the un-

derstanding itself.” The strictly logological equivalent of that addition

would be a concern with respects in which the given structure of a lan-guage (such as its particular grammar, or even such sheer accidental

affinities as similarity in sound between particular words in a given id-

iom) sets up conditions intrinsic to the medium whereby we don’t just

think with a language, but the language can in effect think for us. Much

has already been done along those lines, and much can still be done. Ba-

sically, I take it, the study of words as words in context asks us to ask

how they equate with one another, how they imply one another , and

how they become transformed.There are contexts in the sense that a whole text is the context for any

part of the text. There are contexts in the sense of whatever “back-

ground,” historical, geographical, personal, local, or universal, might be

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conceived of as the scene to which the symbolic act of the author as agent

explicitly or implicitly refers, over and above the nature of the text’s

sheerly internal relationships.

But now let us consider again the behaviorist angle. On the issuewhich I am to discuss here, don’t fail to consult a truly admirable arti-

cle, “Explanation, Teleology, and Operant Behaviorism: A Study of the

Experimental Analysis of Purposive Behavior,” by Jon D. Ringen, Phi-

losophy of Science, 43 (1976): 223–53. Thoug

Kenneth Burke - Theology and Logology

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