Lecture I. Introduction. 17
recourse to analogies from the world of phenomena, to metaphor
and imagery, to parable and allegory. What is“conception”itself
but a“grasping with both hands,”or“parable”but a“throwing
by the side of”? If we would deal with the spiritual and moral, we
musthave recourse to metaphorical forms of speech. A religion
is necessarily built up on a foundation of metaphor.
To interpret such metaphors in their purely natural sense would
therefore land us in gross error. Unfortunately, modern students
of the religious history of the past have not always been careful to
avoid doing so. Misled by the fact that language often enshrines
old beliefs and customs which have otherwise passed out of
memory, they have forgotten that a metaphor is not necessarily
a survival, or a survival a metaphor. In the hieroglyphic texts
discovered in the Pyramids of the sixth Egyptian dynasty, Sahu [016]
or Orion, the huntsman of the skies, is said to eat the great gods
in the morning, the lesser gods at noon and the smaller ones
at night, roasting their flesh in the vast ovens of the heavens;
and it has been hastily concluded that this points to a time
when the ancestors of the historical Egyptians actually did eat
human flesh. It would be just as reasonable to conclude from
the language of the Eucharistic Office that the members of the
Christian Church were once addicted to cannibalism. Eating
and drinking are very obvious metaphors, and there are even
languages in which the word“to eat”has acquired the meaning
“to exist”.^3 I remember hearing of a tribe who believed that we
worshipped a lamb because of the literal translation into their
language of the phrase,“O Lamb of God.”Theology is full of
instances in which the language it uses has been metaphorical
(^3) For the extraordinary variety of senses in which the verbye,“to eat,”
has come to be used in the African language of Akra, see Pott,Ueber die
Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues von Wilhelm von Humboldt,
ii. pp. 495-498 (1876). Thusye no,“to be master,”is literally“to eat the upper
side”;ye gbî,“to live”or“exist,”is literally“to eat a day”;feî ye,“to be cold,”
is“to eat cold.”