Thinking and speaking
We need now to take a firm grasp of a connection that has been hovering on the edges of the argument throughout the connection between imaginative insight and its articulation in words. The effect is actually reciprocal. Insight needs verbal expression both to reflect it back to the subject, so clarifying the experience, as well as to communicate it to others in order that they may share in it and verify it for themselves or not, as the case may be . But the words that are available to us...
Christian doctrine
My second claim is that Christian doctrines though ultimately derived from divine revelation are the high expression of human imaginative insight. Because God is a poet, as Augustine suggests, and communicates with us in the imaginative mode, our most appropriate response is also in that mode. Theology does its work in the realm of analogy. Doctrines as the authoritative ultimate outcome of theology privileged theology, we might say are equally stated by means of analogy. There is no escape...
Nietzsche
The prophet of postmodernity is Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900 , with his deeply cynical, mordantly suspicious view of language. Language and especially the figurative is a veil concealing the true nature of the universe as hostile to humanity. As far as Nietzsche is concerned, language is one big lie. In his early work 'On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense', Nietzsche asks 'What is a word The expression of a nervestimulus in sounds' Nietzsche, 1873, p.177 . The nearest we come to...