All this does not mean to insinuate—it would be an untruth—that because the oracle’s infusion of the god-spirit at Delphi had nothing to do with our idea of religion as conscience, Greece was a society that paid no attention to the moral life. We know otherwise, from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle preeminently; we know otherwise from Greek drama, Greek poetry, Greek history, Greek speculation. What else is the story of Antigone if not a story of conscience? What else is tragedy if not moral seriousness? And beyond these, the mind of science, the mind of art, are Greek. There is not one Greece, but a hundred: heroes side by side with slaves, reason side by side with magic, the self-restraint of Epictetus side by side with sensuousness. It is the Greeks, W. H. Auden reminds us, “who have taught us, not to think—that all human beings have always done—but to think about our thinking.” If one nation can be measured as more intelligent than all other nations that ever were, or were to be, that is how we can measure the Greeks. And the priestly interpretations at Delphi were themselves grounded in an immensity of human understanding: ambiguity is psychology; ambiguity is how we sort things out, how we decide. “Nothing in excess” is a Delphic inscription.
Yet what was missing in the glory that was Greece was metaphor. Perhaps this statement shocks with its instant absurdity. You will want to say, What? A nation of myth, and you claim it has no metaphor? Aren’t myths the greatest metaphors of all? And surely the most blatant? Or you will want to listen again to the priestly interpretations at Delphi: aren’t these, in their fertility of implication, exactly what we mean by metaphoric language?
The answer in both instances, I think, is no. Remember that mythology took on the inwardness of poetry only when the gods were no longer efficacious, only after they had ascended out of the reality of their belief-system into the misted charms of enchantment. And even now, when we read that Apollo slew the python, what do we learn? We learn that snakes are dangerous and that the gods are brave and strong. For Apollo’s constituents, the aversion to snakes—and also their strange sacredness—was confirmed; so was the reverence for Apollo. If there is a lesson, it is either that the bravery of the gods ought to be emulated; or else that it is hubris to suppose the bravery of the gods can be emulated. But why, you will say, why speak of “learning,” of “lessons”? Do we go to the gods for schooling, or for self-revelation? Look, you will say, how humanly resplendent: each god represents an aspect of human passion. Here is beauty, here is lust, here is wisdom, here is chance, here is courage, here is mendacity, here is war, and so on and so on. Isn’t that metaphoric enough for you?
Observe: there is no god or goddess who stands for the still small voice of conscience.
As for the Delphic riddles: they were recipes, not standards. They were directions, not principles. Nor was there any consistent social compassion inherent in their readings. The oracle remembered nothing. The voice of conscience did not speak through the god at Delphi, or through any of the gods. Moral seriousness could be found again and again in Greece, especially among the geniuses; it could be found almost anywhere, except in religion, among the people. The reason is plain. Inspiration has no memory. Inspiration is spontaneity; its opposite is memory, which is history as judgment. When conscience flashed out of Greece, as it did again and again, it did so idiosyncratically, individually, without a base in a community model or a collective history. There was no heritage of a common historical experience to universalize ethical feeling. To put it otherwise: there was no will to create a universal moral parable; there was no will to enter and harness metaphor for the sake of a universal conscience.
By turning their religious life into poetry, we have long since universalized the Greeks. They are our psychology. But that is our doing, not theirs. The Greeks, with all their astonishments, and in spite of the serenity of “Nothing in excess,” were brutally parochial. This ravishingly civilized people kept slaves. Greeks enslaved foreigners and other Greeks. Anyone captured in war was dragged back as a slave, even if he was a Greek of a neighboring polis. In Athens, slaves, especially women, were often domestic servants, but of one hundred and fifty thousand adult male slaves, twenty thousand were set to work in the silver mines, in ten-hour shifts, in tunnels three feet high, shackled and lashed; the forehead of a retrieved runaway was branded with a hot iron. Aristotle called slaves “animate tools,” forever indispensable, he thought, unless you were a Utopian who believed in some future invention of automatic machinery. In Athens it was understood that the most efficient administrator of many slaves was someone who had himself been born into slavery and then freed; such a man would know, out of his own oppressive experience with severity, how to bear down hard. A foreigner who was not enslaved lived under prejudice and restriction. Demosthenes tells about the humiliation of a certain Euxitheus, a prosperous Athenian whose citizenship suddenly came under a cloud because his father happened to be overheard speaking with an un-Athenian accent. Euxitheus had to prove that his father had in fact been Athenian-born, or his own status would drop to that of resident alien, stripping him of his property and his rights, and endangering his freedom. That the Greeks called all foreigners “barbarians” is notorious enough; but it was not so much a category as a jeer. It imputed to all foreign languages the animal sound of a grunt or a bark: bar-bar, bar-bar.
So there is much irony in our having universalized Greece through poetizing it. The Greeks were not only not universalists; they scorned the idea. They were proud of despising the stranger. They had no pity for the stranger. They were proud of hating their enemies. As a society they never undertook to imagine what it was to be the Other; the outsider; the alien; the slave; the oppressed; the sufferer; the outcast; the opponent; the barbarian who owns feelings and deserves rights. And that is because they did not, as a society, cultivate memory, or search out any historical metaphor to contain memory.
We come now to a jump. A short jump across the Mediterranean; a long jump to the experience of another people, less lucky than the Greeks, and— perhaps because less lucky—collectively obsessed with the imagination of pity; or call it the imagination of reciprocity. The Jews—they were named Hebrews then—were driven to a preoccupation with history and with memory almost at the start of their hard-pressed desert voyage into civilization. The distinguished Greeks had their complex polity, their stunning cities; in these great cities they nurtured unrivaled sophistications. The Jews began as primitives and nomads, naive shepherds as remote from scientific thinking as any other primitives; in their own culture, when at length they established their simple towns, they had no art or theater or athletics, and never would have. A good case can be made—though not a watertight one—that the Jews did not become students and scholars until they learned how from the Greeks—surely the classroom is a Greek innovation. And, finally, the Jews carried the memory of four hundred years of torment. Unlike the citizen-Greeks, their history did not introduce civics; it introduced bricks without straw, and the Jews who escaped from Rameses’ Egypt were a rough slave rabble, a mixed multitude, a rowdy discontented rebellious ragtag mob. A nation of slaves is different from a nation of philosophers.
Out of that slavery a new thing was made. It should not be called a “philosophy,” because philosophy was Greek, and this was an envisioning the Greeks had always avoided, or else had never wished to invent, or else had been unable to invent. I have all along been calling this new thing “metaphor.” It came about because thirty generations of slavery in Egypt were never forgotten—though not as a form of grudge-holding. A distinction should be drawn between grudge-holding and memory; they are never the same. As for grudge-holding, it was forbidden to the ex-slave rabble. The helping hand, says Exodus, reaches out to your enemy. If you meet your enemy’s donkey or ox going astray, you must bring it back to him. If you happen on your enemy’s donkey collapsed under its burden, you may not pass by; you must help your enemy relieve the animal. The Egyptians were cruel enemies and cruder oppressors; the ex-slaves will not forget—not out of spite for the
wrongdoers, but as a means to understand what it is to be an outcast, a foreigner, an alien of any kind. By turning the concrete memory of slavery into a universalizing metaphor of reciprocity, the ex-slaves discover a way to convert imagination into a serious moral instrument.
Now a fair representation of the Delphic Oracle is not the work of a minute; this we have seen, and it is a paradox. Inspiration, which is as sudden and as transient as an electrical trajectory, takes a long time to delineate, possibly because latency (a hidden prior knowing) and unintelligibility (the mysterious grace that surpasseth understanding) are in its nature. It is in the nature of metaphor to be succinct. Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt, rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment; in a single sentence. What this sentence is, we know; we have built every idea of moral civilization on it. It is a sentence that conceivably sums up at the start every revelation that came afterward. It has given birth and tongue to saints and prophets, early and late. Its first dreamers are not its exclusive owners and operators; it belongs to everyone. That is the point of its having been dreamed into existence at all.
The sentence is easily identified. It follows sixteen verses behind “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but majestic as that is, it is not the most majestic, because its subject is not the most recalcitrant. Our neighbor is usually of our own tribe, and looks like us and talks like us. Our neighbor is usually familiar; our neighbor is usually not foreign, or of another race. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is a glorious, civilizing, unifying sentence, an exhortation of consummate moral beauty, difficult of performance, difficult in performance. And it reveals at once the little seed of parable: the phrase “as thyself.” “Thyself—that universe of feeling—is the model. “As thyself becomes the commanding metaphor. But we are still, with our neighbor, in Our Town. We are still, with the self, in psychology. We have not yet penetrated to history and memory. The more compelling sentence carries us there—Leviticus 19, verse 34, and you will hear in it history as metaphor, memory raised to parable:
The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 24, verse 22, insists further: “You shall have one manner of law, the same for the stranger as for the home-born.” A similar injunction appears in Exodus, and again in Deuteronomy, and again in Numbers. Altogether, this precept of loving the stranger, and treating the stranger as an equal both in emotion and under law, appears thirty-six times in the Pentateuch. It is there because a moral connection has been made with the memory of bondage. Leviticus 24, verse 22, demands memory, and then converts memory into metaphor: “Because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Bondage becomes a metaphor of pity for the outsider; Egypt becomes the great metaphor of reciprocity. “And a stranger shall you not oppress,” says Exodus 23, verse 8, “for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of belonging, one heart to another. Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger’s heart.
In the absence of this metaphoric capability, what are the consequences? The Romans originally had a single word, hostis, to signify both enemy and stranger. Nowhere beyond the reach of the Pentateuch did the alien and the home-born live under the same code; in early Roman law, every alien was classed as an enemy, devoid of rights. In Germanic law the alien was rechtsunfdbig, a pariah with no access to justice. The Greeks made slaves of the stranger and then taunted him with barks. There have been, and still are, religio-political systems that have incorporated the teaching of contempt, turning the closest neighbors into the most despised strangers—a loathing expressed in words like “untouchable,” “dhimmi,” “deicide.” In our own country, slavery thrived under the wing of a freedom-proclaiming Constitution until the middle of the last century. And in 1945, a British camera on a single day in a single German death camp just liberated photographed a bulldozer sweeping into five pits five thousand starved and abused human corpses at a time, a thousand to a pit, all of them having been judged unfit for the right to live.
By now you will have noticed that I have been quoting Scripture—a temptation that is always perilous, not only because it is a famously devilish pastime, but also because it induces the sermonizing tone, which for some reason always seems to settle in the nasal cavities. For this I apologize. My intended subject, after all, has not been national character or ethics or religion or history; it has not even, appearances to the contrary, been Matthew Arnold’s fertile delta: Hebraism and Hellenism. What I have been thinking of is language—explicitly the work of metaphor.
And it is time now to ask what metaphor is. One way to begin is to recognize that metaphor is what inspiration is not. Inspiration is ad hoc and has no history. Metaphor relies on what has been experienced before; it transforms the strange into the familiar. This is the rule even of the simplest metaphor—Homer’s wine-dark sea, for example. If you know wine, says the image, you will know the sea; the sea is for sailors, but wine is what we learn at home. Inspiration calls for possession and increases strangeness. Metaphor uses what we already possess and reduces strangeness. Inspiration belongs to riddle and oracle. Metaphor belongs to clarification and humane conduct. This is the meaning of the contrast between the Oracle at Delphi and the parable of servitude in Egypt. Inspiration attaches to the mysterious temples of anti-language. Metaphor overwhelmingly attaches to the house of language.
Should it, then, seem perplexing that both the oracle and the parable are identically dedicated to interpretation? The chief business of the priests at Delphi is practical interpretation. The incessant allusion to Egyptian bondage is again for the purpose of usable interpretation. And still the differences are total. Because the Delphic priests must begin each time with a fresh-hatched inspiration, with the annihilation of experience, they cannot arrive at any universal principle or precept. Principles and precepts derive from an accumulation of old event. Delphi never has old event; every event in that place is singular; the cry from the tripod is blazingly individual, particular, peculiar unto itself. From the tripod rises the curse of nepenthe; amnesia; forgetting; nor is it the voice of the race of humanity and its continuities we hear. The tragedy of the Delphic priests is not that their interpretations are obliged to start from gibberish. After all, what goes in as raw gibberish comes out as subject to rational decision, and it is more than conceivable that social principles might be extracted from a body of such decisions. But the priests think consciously only of their own moment. Their system is not organized toward the universalizing formulation. The tragedy of the priests is that, cut off from the uses of history, experience, and memory, they are helpless to make the future. They may, in a manner of speaking, “prophesy,” with whatever luck such prophets have,* but they cannot construct a heritage. They have nothing to pass on. They cannot give birth to metaphor; one thing does not suggest another thing; in a place where each heart is meant to rave on in its uniqueness, there is no means for the grief of one heart to implicate the understanding of another heart. In the end, inspiration and its devices turn away from the hope of regeneration.
Metaphor, though never to be found at Delphi, is also a priest of interpretation; but what it interprets is memory. Metaphor is compelled to press hard on language and storytelling; it inhabits language at its most concrete. As the shocking extension of the unknown into our most intimate, most feeling, most private selves, metaphor is the enemy of abstraction. Irony is of course implicit. Think how ironic it would be, declares the parable of Egypt, if you did not take the memory of slavery as your exemplar! Think how ironic your life would be if you passed through it without the power of connection! Novels, those vessels of irony and connection, are nothing if not metaphor
s. The great novels transform experience into idea because it is the way of metaphor to transform memory into a principle of continuity. By “continuity” I mean nothing less than literary seriousness, which is unquestionably a branch of life-seriousness.
Now if all this has persisted in sounding more like a lecture in morals than the meditation on language it professes to be, it may be worth turning to that astonishing comment in T. S. Eliot’s indispensable essay on what he terms “concentration” of experience. “Someone said,” says Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” He is speaking of the transforming effect of memory. The dead writers have turned metaphoric; they contain our experience, and they alter both our being and our becoming. Here we have an exact counterpart of biblical memory: because you were strangers in Egypt. Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us, and we it. Through metaphorical concentration, doctors can imagine what it is to be their patients. Those who have no pain can imagine those who suffer. Those at the center can imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine the weak. Illuminated lives can imagine the dark. Poets in their twilight can imagine the borders of stellar fire. We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers.
The Phi Beta Kappa Oration, Harvard University, Spring 1985. Published as “The Moral Necessity of Metaphor,” Harpers, May 1986
*A term now grown severely stale, but I have been unable to discover a substitute.
*But current anthropology, I am told, has it that human sacrifice was, in fact, never practiced in Greece at all. This view diverges sharply from the scholarship of, say, sixty years ago. The thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, describes the Thargelia festival, an agricultural celebration, as “a purifying and expiatory ceremony. While the people offered the first-fruits of the earth to the god in token of thankfulness, it was at the same time necessary to propitiate him. . . . Two men, . . . the ugliest that could be found, were chosen to die, one for the men, the other (according to some, a woman) for the women. On the day of the sacrifice they were led round with strings of figs on their necks, and whipped on the genitals with rods of figwood and squills. When they reached the place of sacrifice on the shore, they were stoned to death, their bodies burnt, and the ashes thrown into the sea (or over the land, to act as a fertilizing influence). The whipping with squills and figwood was intended to stimulate the reproductive energies of the [sacrificial victim], who represented the god of vegetation, annually slain to be born again. It is agreed that an actual human sacrifice took place on this occasion, replaced in later times by a milder form of expiation.”
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