124 cosmos
is the use of words denoting one kind of object, action, or idea in place of
another in order to suggest a deeper meaning beneath both. When the Psalmist
says that the Lord will cover you with his feathers and that you shall trust under
his wings (Ps. 91.4), he was not suggesting that you will be a fledgling in a
nest. When Jesus called himself a shepherd, he did not mean that he planned
sermons for ovine creatures. Metaphorical ontology is the use of figures of
speech to go beyond science, and history, to indicate the divine reality deep
down things. Metaphorical ontology, with its sense of contemplation and won-
der, can heal either/or wounds. And restore us to wholeness and cosmos.
The proper language of religion is metaphor, because religious truths are
both more nebulous than scientific ones and also more embracing and tex-
tured, and the Bible is usually best opened out metaphorically. Take the passage
where King David brings the Ark into Jerusalem. What is Jerusalem? It is a
city having geographical coordinates and political boundaries. It has a history;
before David made it his capital, it was a small Jebusite fort; afterwards it was
part of a succession of kingdoms and empires; today it is a source of animosity
between Jews and Muslims. But it is also Zion, the land promised eternally to
the Jews. And it is the place of resurrection for the Jews. And the place where
Jesus died and rose from the dead. And where Muhammad ascended into
heaven. It is seen as the moral center of the earth. It represents heaven, the
soul, the end of the world, and an untellable number of other things. The
meaning of Jerusalem is best not narrowed down to any one thing but rather
opened up and expanded.
The theory of metaphorical ontology is not intended to placate physicalists
by reducing religion to “mere metaphor”; and it is certainly not intended to
yield any ground to deconstructionists, for it takes depth-metaphor as a sign
of reality beyond language. Metaphorical truth is at least as real as scientific
and historical truth. When properly understood through metaphor, religion
and science do not cancel one another out. It is best not to play a zero-sum
game where “We are right and deserve to win” and “They are wrong and
deserve to lose.” There is more than either they or we know. Metaphorical
ontology opens up rather than closing down. Only in this way can cosmos be
healed.
Former Cosmoses cannot be restored: no matter how much we admire
and understand Dante’s cosmos, we cannot ignore the context of all the
thought since Dante. But cosmos can be healed by a whole, and hopeful, con-
struction of a new cosmos. At present the problem of utopias is not that they
are unrealized but that there is none we consider worth striving for. The pri-
mary task of this century—even beyond all concerns about environment, ter-
rorism, starvation, war, and disease—is the creation of a new cosmos. Primary,
because without cosmos there is no coherent goal for humanity, and conse-
quently every step in what seems at the moment to be a “better” direction will