Exploring Metaphors: From Machines to Trees

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We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinking—not just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections, philosophical theories and scientific observations, to the most mundane conversations.

Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and we’ll find we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. That last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor KNOWLEDGE is a BUILDING. But navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost (another metaphor: LIFE is a JOURNEY). But to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, we can allow our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward (YOU are a TREE).

Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor. It’s brimming and full of metaphor itself (that one’s KNOWLEDGE is a CONTAINER), but it’s not too meta.

Together we discuss: How we see ourselves as human: Are we trees? Are we machines? The beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and experience. Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and the dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We discuss Julian of Norwich on Jesus as the source of motherhood. J.R.R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark journeys. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.

About Joy Clarkson

Joy Marie Clarkson is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Check out her Substack here.

Show Notes

• Explore the book: Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer
• Joy Clarkson’s Substack
• Metaphor embedded throughout thought and language
• Are you a machine? Are you a tree?
• Hidden negation within metaphors
• Bill Collins poem, “Litany”: “You are the goblet and the wine.”
• Aristotle on metaphor: Carry over the properties of one thing to another.
• Whispering “not really though”
• Metaphors about God and internal or hidden negation
• Complexity of the world
• Posture of humility
• Literal language is a kind of trick to think that “we actually have said the thing finally and completely.”
• Thomas Aquinas, medieval theologians and speaking about God by way of analogy
• “The words we can say about God kind of come from, the perfections we perceive and things in the world.”
• Medieval bestiaries
• “The true panther is Christ.”
• “The sweet breathed, multicolored Christ panther.”
• When language falls short
• Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite
• Unspeakability of things and the radical particularity of language
• Julian of Norwich, Jesus as the source of motherhood: “Jesus our true mother.”
• Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm”
• Metaphors about humanity
• Humanity as machines vs humanity as trees
• Mechanical metaphors for humanity fall short and become dangerous when it implies that we are only as good as our productivity
• Trees are an older and more mysterious metaphor for human beings.
• Security and success—top dog vs underdog
• Metaphor: SUCCESS is UP and climbing the corporate ladder
• “We need each other.”
• The Giving Tree and Treebeard from J.R.R. Tolkein’s, The Lord of the Rings
• *The Two Towers—*Saruman vs the Ents and ecological and technological ethics that provide insight for our humanity and lived environment
• The Christian life as a metaphor
• “You are God’s poem. You are kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery from the goodness of God.”
• Poesis and the imago Dei
• Phenomenological description of things in everyday life
• “Paying attention to those kind of very everyday experiences just filled me personally with a sense of how densely meaningful and poetic our everyday lives are.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Joy Marie Clarkson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give