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Metaphor in Bone

2015; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/moth.12188

1468-0025

Graham Ward,

Empathy and Medical Education

It stands 29.6 cm tall, is 5.6 cm wide, and 5.9 cm thick: the Lion Man (or is it Woman?) of Ice Age art. Reading Rowan Williams's book The Edge of Words I was continually returning to this sculpture (possibly the oldest figurative art ever discovered at 32,000–40,000 years old) and the difficulty (in Williams's sense of interpretative complexity that materialises ‘mystery’) that it embodies. For Williams it provides an entry into the human condition: that we are a symbolic species,1 and his argument that the evolution of the human mind begins with metaphor and imagination (a lion's head and a human body). The difficulty that is communicated to us as we examine the pictures of this sculpture from various angles, pictures of its reconstruction (because it was found in fragments and to date is still not fully pieced together), lies not so much in its antiquity, but in its sheer visceral presence. We have some insight into how it was carved with a flint knife, how it would have taken in excess of 400 hours labour to fashion, and of the possible social organization that would enable its creation in a hunter-gatherer community. But none of these details explain its presence for us, today: the way it installs the uncanny in its strange, free-standing isolation. Adjectives like ‘sacred’ or ‘shamanistic,’ nouns like ‘talisman’, simply open worm-holes of suggestion, star-gates into unknown universes. Its utter physicality bears us towards a complex otherness that speaks. It is not the otherness of a transcending spiritual realm. It is exactly the opposite. It is the otherness of a deep embodiment of feeling and mind, the wielding of stone, the scrapping of bone and the grappling with invisibility. Whatever is ‘holy’ here issues from a tight and intimate web of physical relations between the animal (the lion's head, the mammoth's tusk), the mineral (flint handheld tools themselves shaped, discovered in other petrified materials, the rock shelter), the cosmic (the daylight needed to carve the figure, the darkness that housed the figure, the torches that made it appear in the darkness of the cave) and the embodied consciousness. One further difficulty: this may not be a human creation if the modern human is Homo sapiens sapiens. If the more recent C14 dating (never particularly accurate) of 40,000 years holds, then possibly we are looking at a figure carved by the very earliest Homo sapiens settled in the Swabian Alps in Germany (who used to be called Cro-Magnon), but equally possible is that it is a product of Neanderthal culture.2 We are possibly 35,000 years away from the jackal-headed Egyptian deity, Anubis. Rowan Williams's book is not an essay on evolutionary anthropology as such, but the figure of the Lion Man not only communicates something of the ‘natural’ theology Williams is attempting to explore, but, more importantly, the kind of exploration we are involved in when reading the book. The Edge of Words is a meditation we are invited to participate in. Of course the book foregrounds an argument about language and meaning within an environment that is constantly communicating with us (and we with it), and within the worlds we world in our continual response to being in that environment. At times the argument becomes philosophically technical, with theological, literary, anthropological and scientific turns. But the argument is not what matters, I suggest (taking ‘mattering’ in both its material and its semantic sense). What matters is the writing as a ‘venturing of understanding’ (81) and understanding as a craft to which all of us (with or without faith) have a life-long commitment. What matters is ‘to experience language as a project requiring intelligent discernment, choice and action’ (59). And ‘language as a project’ includes Williams's own. ‘[W]e are always trying to allow what is there to show itself’ (60). That's why I keep returning to the Lion Man: it speaks out of its strangeness and that speaking poses three existential questions. The first question is, What is it [saying]? The second question is, What kind of embodied imagination (with all the manifold, extensive interdependencies of environment and world that this maker inhabited) is speaking? And thirdly, whence comes the communication, the meaning which is being searched in and through this figure, that has called forth this saying? Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists are helping us to answer that second question,3 but no one can give an answer to questions one and three, and that is Williams's point: there is always more to be said, more to understand. Even the scientists are not in full agreement (is it a female figure? Is it a Homo Neanderthalis or a Homo sapiens creation?). Our attempts to answer though, attempts that are demanded by the very existence of this Lion Man and our proximity to it, continue and add to the original speaking that was also a responding to, a doing in response to. Because language ‘implies a deep and provocative trust’ (170) to an intelligibility that is continually emerging; because ‘we live in an environment where intelligible communication is ubiquitous’ (170); because ‘wherever you start thinking from, there is meaning “elsewhere”; and this suggests at the very least an “order” of intelligibility’ (171): then The Edge of Words is both a saying and a doing, an argument and a performance. It is not that one can be separated from the other. The content is not at odds with the form. Both are involved in a ‘showing forth’ that is, perhaps, the nearest we can come to a natural theology. That is the mark of a creative poetic intelligence; a theo-poetic intelligence – where ‘intelligence’ concerns feeling, groping one's way forward. This is, as Williams insists throughout, an embodied activity, as language-use itself is an embodied activity. It makes the book an exercise in binocular seeing and bicameral engagement – which Williams approaches through the work of Iain McGilchrist on the operations of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. How do we respond appropriately (weigh the word) to such a meditation? I suggest by prolonging it and adding to its ‘difficulty’. That is, entering into the longing it articulates and extending, supplementing, protracting it into other directions. My directions. Your directions. We will each prolong it differently. Difference is a gift; it makes the difficult more difficult. We join the circulations of the Hegelian orbit that Williams's writing and thinking draws us into; difference and the work of ‘negation’ which is, decidedly, not negativity (or nihilism). We can be critical while still being attuned, although the attunement is far greater than being in agreement with Williams. The attunement is being in agreement with whatever Williams is himself responding to – a calling written, perhaps, deep into creation; an active, searching communication that demands we too communicate. I am reminded of the wonderful concerto grosso with which Tolkien's Silmarillion opens, the music of Ainur. Melkor wants to disturb and disrupt the rhythm, but the ‘power and profundity’ of Ilúvatar's melody meant that though the sounds Melkor made ‘essayed to drown the other music by violence of its voice … it seemed its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.’4 I am not Melkor in this comparison, and Williams is not Ilúvatar – we're both just part of the chorus line – but what Melkor achieves with his intervention, above and beyond his own willful intentions, is to make Ilúvatar's music more difficult, where ‘difficulty’ bears the resonance of ‘mystery’ in its theological sense (180). Melkor, despite himself, deepened the mystery of Ilúvatar's creation. Arch.: The first time I had a chance to enter the Chauvet caves I had five days. And it was so powerful that every night I was dreaming of lions. And everyday was the same shock for me. It was an emotional shock. I mean I'm a scientist, but a human too. And after five days I decided not to go back in the caves because I needed time just to … relax … and take time to … Inter.: …to absorb it? Arch.: to absorb it. Yeh. Yeh. Inter.: And you dreamt not of paintings of lions but of real lions. Arch.: Of both. Of both definitely. Yeh. Inter.: And you were afraid in your dreams …? Arch.: I was not afraid. No. No. I was not afraid. It was more … a feeling of powerful things … and deep things. A way to understand things which is not a direct way.5 The archaeologist is not encountering the Lion Man but painted depictions of lions in the caves. Nevertheless, what he testifies to is a communication that is ‘more than the speaking mind's “normal” content’; a ‘feeling of powerful things … deep things.’ The Lion Man is a silent, immobilized body. Not a body of blood and flesh, like Christ's body; though his/her body is of bone. It is a represented body (in the manner Williams is arguing for a mode of representation that is not description equating to an object ‘out there’), and the body is not available in the world outside of the imagination. There are no human beings with the heads of lions. But then Christ's body too is a represented body. It is available to us only through the testimonies of others, and the theological reflections upon those testimonies that the Church has always felt driven to make as the Spirit leads us into all truth. The Gospels are no less and no more material artifacts than the Paleolithic sculpture. Furthermore, what was all the debate about hypostatic union and, later, enhupostasis (before, during and after Chalcedon), if not the ‘nature’ of this body that was both ‘fully God and fully human’? Of course the Lion Man does not effect our salvation. The Lion Man is not a depiction of the Second Person of the Trinity. But, I would argue, in responding to it there is a work of ‘dispossession’ that it demands if we are to take its presence seriously. It is not the Revelation of God in Christ or a depiction of it, but it does reveal. It is ‘a vehicle of an ultimate creative energy’ (152); it does ‘offer the possibility of recognition in and through the reality of what at first is felt as strange’ (153). To put this boldly: you might ask if this Lion Man discloses properties of Christ. Well, everything discloses properties of Christ. I'm pushing Williams here, though not illegitimately. Surely this is the ‘natural’ (we're really not sure what this is and the scientific debate is still out on this one) theology? ‘So far from matter being by definition mindless, it seems we have no choice but to talk about it as a linguistic or symbolic reality, whose processes we can only understand by analogy with our own conscious systems of recognition and collaboration … matter itself is inherently symbolic’ (103). If through the work of contemporary scientists this is how we are coming to understand ‘natural’, then this is also, profoundly, theological and explicitly Christian. After all, ‘through Him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him’ (John 1:3) such that, as Paul observes our lives are hidden in Christ, with God (Col. 3:3). All things are in Christ, and therefore must participate in that Christic ‘dispossession’ that characterizes the operations of God in and for our salvation. I have made a leap that will not go unnoticed: from matter being inherently symbolic to Christos Pantokratur as the ‘icon of God’. What is involved in this leap? What is not involved is a dive from reason into faith. One of the important arguments in Williams's book, and one of the most important testimonies the work offers, is that science and religion are not working in two adversive directions. Their relations are not contiguous, but they are not incommensurate either. The thinking and imagining of each – inseparable from emotional involvement with its physiological affects/effects – is a seeking for understanding, where understanding is a venture, a paideia, a craft and a disciplined formation. If in religion this is faith seeking understanding, then in science this is belief seeking understanding. The belief may be that the future of the cosmos will involve ‘[c]osmic cycles of death and rebirth … or a very peculiar end when the vacuum of space suddenly turns into something altogether different. The universe might collapse back in on itself in a big crunch. Or we could be in for an even more violent end called the big rip. Or a weird pixellation – the big snap. Or find our whole universe pouring down a wormhole … . The slow drift into darkness is still a contender.’6 To call these ‘hypotheses’ only demonstrates that they are not simply static, propositional claims but operations in seeking to understand. In each operation of belief or faith seeking understanding there is a move towards a discovering and a disclosing, a learning through a reaching out and a responding to what is showing itself, giving itself to be shown. Both are responsive explorations into the orders of the intelligible, and, for both, the responsive explorations are only possible by representing them through symbols (words, mathematical signs, computer data) and imagining. Intellectual curiosity works in, through and with systems (plural and not without their dissonances with respect to each other) of belief. Faith is a form of believing, and believing, it seems, is a primordial disposition of humankind as we inhabit certain conditions that frame our existence. What are those conditions? They are, at least, threefold. First, an environment, even a cosmos, that solicits the search for, the desire for, meaning. The soliciting is a kind of calling or communication written not only into human beings but also into material existence; a pattern, a rhythm, an order that suggests intelligence. Two recent films, both of which play with Christianity in a very minor key, have explored this human response to a cosmic call: Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014). Prometheus puts a Christian spin on this exploration by having the central character wear a crucifix (given to her by her father) that she is concerned for when it is lost and clutches as she decides not to return to earth but to go forward in her exploration of deep space. Interstellar has one minor character talk about praying and resurrection, another about the search for logics of love, and a plot revolving around a ‘they’ (undefined throughout) who provide the earth with the possibility for its salvation. The second condition is the ongoing human negotiation with the invisible. Merleau-Ponty, in his account of la foi perceptive, states: ‘Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible.’7 The invisible is intrinsic to our view of the world, and our construction of such a view. No one has seen an X-boson, a particle of dark matter, a wave of dark energy or a wormhole. All these ‘objects’ are being pursued at the moment by cosmologists in multibillion-dollar laboratories and observatories. But then no one has seen a thought, an idea, a concept, an emotion, or another person's pain. These things are made to appear and/or their existence is by inference. We negotiate the invisible continually; faith and belief are both woven into that negotiation. The third condition is the imagination. I am not sufficiently expert in the field of neuroscience, but from what I know little has come into the public domain about scientific research on the imagination. That it must have a biological and physiological basis is without question.8 We know there are certain areas of the brain involved in the process of imagining, like the posterior parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex, both of which are recently evolved brain developments. Aristotle announces that to ‘think is to speculate with images’ (De Anima 431a17) but we know imagination is also preverbal (children begin to pretend from 9-14 months), though language and memory play important roles in its operation. But imagination has its roots in much older parts of the brain, deeper than working memory, like the temporal lobes, the limbic area and sub-cortical structures such as the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. Imagination here is related to emotion and various forms of memory often functioning subconsciously and instinctively. ‘Recognition’ is an important aspect of Williams's understanding of representation (as it was for Hegel). This function is more profoundly operative at deeper and older levels of the brain. These three conditions (there are more of course) frame our human experience and its production of belief, faith and representation. But a ‘natural’ theology emerging from the relationship between that embodied condition as it operates within and upon its environment and generates its worlds, has, ultimately, to face the difficulties of the Anthropic principle. There are strong and weak takes on the Anthropic principle (SAP and WAP, consecutively). Scientists have, on the whole, evaded this principle since it was first formulated in 1974. Certain theologians (John Polkinghorne and William Lane Craig, for example) have embraced it with enthusiasm. The weaker version just asserts that we see the world as we do because we have evolved in this way; it has meaning for us (not necessarily in itself) because we cannot but view things this way given our evolution. The stronger version draws towards a revivification of the Design Argument: the world possesses the properties of intelligence such that we might come to understand it. This is Paley redivivus.9 As I read it (but it is not teased out as far as I can see) Williams is not a SAP follower, though he holds to the view that human beings were created such that we might seek understanding of our Creator, and be able to respond in worship and gratitude. We might, in the presence of the Lion Man (and potentially other images and figures), extend ‘human beings’ to Anatomically Modern Humans and even hominids, rather than restricting ourselves to Homo sapiens sapiens. But what saves this thesis from a natural theology based on design is Williams's Thomism. That is, an absolute distinction between first and second causality. God as first cause cannot be known as such. Our knowledge of God as our Creator is only available as we creatures refer all things to Him. ‘Since therefore God is outside the whole and all creatures are ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him [creaturae realiter referuntur ad ipsum]’ (Summa theologiae Ia q.13 a.7).10 This actually implies that ‘natural’ always has to remain in inverted commas for us, since only our Creator knows what nature is. Whatever design we perceive, whatever intelligible order we discover, will raise the question ‘whence comes this?’, but it will not deliver ‘God’ as the necessary answer. That answer is only available on the basis of faith – by our being referred to Him. But then, as I have said, faith is not contrary to reason; it is a form of believing endemic to being human. Back to the Lion Man, that metaphor in bone, which brings together the concept of person and the concept of lion in a way that focuses a presence of something we are unable to grasp. It is certainly ‘the search for connections we cannot directly see’ (123) and a finite phenomenon that ‘is at some level a carrier of divine significance’ (120). Which is perhaps why for me this figure captures so much of what Williams is arguing for in this provocative book. Furthermore, the figure points to one main line for the development of this ‘natural’ theology: evolutionary anthropology.