The Edge of Words: God and the habits of language

Rowan williams stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of 2012; 11 months later he delivered the Gifford Lectures that form the substance of this book. Like several of his predecessors as lecturer, he is not totally at ease with Lord Gifford’s call to expound a natural theology. He rejects the kind of natural theology that is an attempt to reach conclusions about the existence and character of God by arguing from features of the world. Instead he proposes a natural theology that is a practice rather than an argument: “a structured thinking through of the universality of dependence so as to open the door to the possibility of freedom from conditioning”.

The conclusions to which such a practice leads will not be literal subject-predicate statements: language about God, for Williams, is fundamentally metaphorical. He devotes much of the book to showing that this should not surprise us: very little of our ordinary speech consists of flat description, and language at every level is shot through with metaphor and paradox. A fine chapter exhibits the incoherence of the idea that language is a system of determined behaviour reducible to patterns of stimulus and response. Another chapter focuses on “excessive” speech, forms of utterance that violate normal canons when under unusual pressure, whether from poetic form or scientific innovation.

The Edge of Words exhibits a detailed knowledge of a prodigious number of books, many of them published between 2002 and 2012. The breadth of reading would do credit to a full-time professor, and is an astonishing achievement for an overworked archbishop. At times, however, Williams seems to practise the academic virtues to excess. Aware that any blunt statement will be open to misunderstanding, he packs his sentences with qualifications designed to pre-empt criticism. Again, anxious to do justice to authors to whom he has a debt, Williams fills his text with paraphrase of other writers, when often a reader would prefer to know more clearly what he thinks himself. One would like, for instance, to follow up the claim that theological language is fundamentally metaphorical. The claim is surely correct, and Williams is right to insist that if a statement is metaphorical that does not mean that it lacks a truth-value. But one wonders how far he would wish to press the claim. Does he think that all statements about God are metaphorical?

The predicates that religious people apply to God can be divided into two classes. There are bodily predicates, and these seem to be almost universally agreed to be metaphorical. God is not literally a rock, or a shepherd; the Father does not literally have a right hand for the Son to sit on. Williams shrewdly remarks that the crudest metaphors for God are often the most successful, just because no one could mistake them for accurate descriptions.

But in addition to bodily predicates there are mentalistic predicates, like “knows” and “loves”, and these would be claimed by many theologians to be literally true of God. But there is a problem here. Mentalistic predicates are used primarily of human beings, and they are ascribed to human beings on the basis of their behaviour. God has no behaviour to resemble human behaviour, and it is difficult to conceive of a personal God who is immaterial, ubiquitous and eternal. It is not just that we cannot know what thoughts are God’s thoughts, but that there does not seem to be anything which would count as ascribing a thought to God in the way that we can ascribe thoughts to individual human thinkers.

A divine mind would be a mind without a history. Williams brings out very well the way in which in the concept of mind that we apply to human beings, time enters in various ways. With God, however, there is no variation or shadow of change. God does not change his mind, nor learn, nor forget, nor imagine, nor desire. With us, time enters into both the acquisition and exercise of knowledge, and the onset and satisfaction of wanting.

The notions of time and change enter into our very concept of intelligence. Intelligence entails speed of acquisition of information, and versatility in adaptation to unforeseen circumstances. In an all-knowing unchanging being there is no scope for intelligence thus understood: no new information is ever acquired, and no circumstances are ever unforeseen. As Williams says, “We cannot represent what God knows/sees/indwells as intelligence.” There is, indeed, an enormous difficulty in applying mentalistic predicates in any literal sense to a being that is infinite and unchanging, and whose field of operation is the entire universe.

Would Williams go so far as to say that all attribution of mentalistic predicates to God must be metaphorical? Is “God knows and loves his creatures” literally true or not? On the one hand, he rejects the idea “that we are somehow being more representationally accurate in calling God the Being of all beings or the Ultimately Significant than when we call God Rock, Shepherd or even (as in the parable) Unjust Judge”. On the other hand, he thinks that the quest involved in his novel version of natural theology will eventually call up the schema “of an unlimited intelligence and love”. In that phrase, are the words “intelligence” and “love” to be taken literally? If not, is there any way of spelling out what is the sense of the metaphor, or is the phrase irreducibly metaphorical?