In the nearly 40 years that I have taught English, the comprehension of literal and figurative has been one of the most problematic elements of language understanding and use. In most cases, literal is used as an antonym to figurative, which implies the use of some sort of comparison or language device to convey or evoke a meaning that cannot be otherwise derived from the word in isolation. All language, literal or figurative, has ‘intent’, so the point of ‘dictionary’ definitions is not to distill the ‘correct’ semantic content of a word, but to reflect on usage.
To speak ‘plainly’ is to remove any figurative element in what you say or explicitly exclude context. This is important if the audience does not share the experience that makes the ‘figure’, ‘image’ or comparison effective. However, it is also difficult. Our propensity in language understanding is to scan for the context that seems ‘implicit’ in the usage. To say, “She flew down the stairs” will work only if we are privy to the information that she does not have wings, cannot fly and that she is hurrying. If we do not have the associated knowledge, the metaphorical ‘flew’ is not effective and we revert to the default understanding of flight as ‘conveyed on the wing’.
But the more isolated the utterance, the more difficult it becomes to actually glean an understanding. Even if “she” is a bird and flying is unremarkable, the notion of “down” is relative and context-dependent and “down the stairs” implies that the stairs have significance to the vector that the bird has chosen – the stairs define some of the space in which the bird flies, but the literal involvement of the stairs is hard to resolve in any other way than as a context for the direction. Imagine if the statement were “across the stairs” – we are already adding meaning to the distance traveled from our knowledge of stairs.
In teaching reading, an inability to make connections with experience or context or follow implications is considered as the ‘literal’ level of understanding. The literal reader pictures a bird, motion characteristic of flying and stereotypical stairs. Without trying to be too pedantic about the meaning of literal, teachers are able to identify this level and start to create opportunities for students to recognise figurative language that they are already using. For the most autistic of students, this progression is really difficult.
Those who take literal meaning from the Bible demonstrate an unwillingness to become conversant with all of the possible elements that might make the meaning other than what is ‘plainly’ obvious. This is their mistake – as simple as a foreigner mistaking your meaning while listening to you use colloquialisms. Likewise, those who take a convenient meaning and layer it onto the text, ignoring the experience that might be required to understand it properly, are just as mistaken. Of course, regenerating the experience or context that gave rise to the utterance is problematic and this is why a text must be studied, analysed and taken as a whole before we can adequately derive any meaning.
An obvious example of this is the fantasy created around Jesus and his commission to his disciples as expressed in the ‘sacraments’. A literal translation of “This is my body …” etc would suggest Jesus is urging cannibalism. Catholics superimpose trans-substantiation as an attempt to resolve the ‘problem’ of figurative meaning, which requires suspension of physics and prior acceptance of a supernatural ‘capability’.
This promotes a ‘magic’ view of Jesus in an attempt to elevate Jesus to have super powers. Superpowers are engaging and exciting, as Marvel ably illustrates, but, in the view of us all, reside in fantasy. No-one is convinced that a Marvel character ever lived or did anything the movie might depict.
There is no good precedent for super-powers in Judaism – Moses doesn’t fly, David doesn’t use a laser gun instead of a rock. Abraham does not give birth to a dinosaur. All the plagues fall within the safe boundaries of physics and common biology. There is no plague of 2 headed fish that speak French. Magic for Judaism is bullshit.
Other religious abominations superimposed on the Biblical texts simply convert Jesus’s commission to some mumbo-jumbo spiritual realm, a quasi-material world with one-to-one correspondence with our world but with ethereal and arbitrary ‘physics’. No clear explanation is given as to why the physics of light operates to allow visual identification, but the characteristics of rigid bodies in collisions is suspended. ‘Physics’ in the ‘spiritual realm’ is fickle and arbitrary.
Returning to the sacraments. It is quite obvious that Jesus was aware of the trouble he was causing and how those gathered were also implicated. Disintegration was a very likely outcome. If the reported events and words even occurred, at an immediate level, the meaning of “This is my body …” is “We’re all in this together. The body will be fragmented. Stick together guys.”
At a more universal level, it can be recognised that sustenance of the group is vital despite fragmentation caused by the death of a leader. If the leadership is all about the individual and their ‘greatness’ and not predicted on more universal propensities, then the ‘movement’ is fucked. Bread no longer having the emergent quality of a ‘loaf’ is no less surely bread, fragmented or otherwise. It provides sustenance. It provides a point around which people can gather. The challenge is to find the “bread” of life – that archetype, that motif, that principle, that insight, that empathy that will drive people together in mutual service.
How, then, can we be sure of the meaning? These latter notions can admit science, especially the objective processes of science. If I ‘triangulate’ the meanings of this text with other historical elements present in other texts or cultural practices, I arrive at the true meaning, rather than a superimposed fantasy. The sacraments DID persist, their symbolism was not lost and they still have some relevance, despite 2 millennia. We still make bread and eat it. We still get together and commune over meals. The emergent qualities of bread that create a notion of a loaf still operate in a broad way for many of the common victuals of life, as well as for self-sustaining groupings of people with a common mission.
Science also applies the purifying furnace to the simplistic ‘literal’ meanings by insisting on physics when dullards fervently postulate its suspension. If there really is some kind of translation of my ‘soul’ into an ethereal Jesus or others, why on earth would that need to occur more than once? I share my soul with Jesus and you. Mission accomplished (albeit meaningless). Commission utterly unnecessary. Surely now the poor will feel satiated by being ‘filled’ by me, Jesus, the Spirit, whoever.
In the age of confusion about what religion and science actually are and how language operates to expose truth, dispensing with narrow understandings is now more critical than ever. Pushing back on those who believe they own the meanings of the Bible could be a step towards reining in the excesses dealt out in its name.